Conoravirus ...

[BeauV]

OH, houses in very short supply, like waterfront in Syndey or Sausalito, are always going to be priced through the roof. In chatting with folks about investments I try to stick to the national average returns. We have similar crazy returns on houses every time another Facebook or Twitter or Uber goes public. A small residential community near Facebook as only 1,200 homes, it's name Atherton. When Facebook went public house prices went up about 20%. The public offering put over 350 folks into the market with over $10m in their pocket, and those were just the employees. This makes for nutty markets, but it's not the average.

Our home in Santa Cruz has gone up about 10% per year since we bought it, but he estimates ignore the improvements we've made. We would probably realize a 60% price increase if we sold now, but to be accurate we'd have to subtract about half of that for the cost of improvements. A lot of folks I talk to just talk about the sticker price and not the costs of improvements, maintenance, etc.... By rights, you'd have to compare all those costs vs just renting a place or a room in a hotel. When I was single, I just moved into a hotel for about a year as I sorted myself out. I enjoyed that a lot. Great gym, four restaurants, great view of SF Bay, dry cleaners, room cleaners, I didn't have to do a thing and a suite was less than what I'd been paying to operate my house.

[SemiSalt]

From what I hear, the housing market is pretty hot in Stamford at the moment due to people moving out of NYC for Covid-19 reasons.
Story here: https://www.courant.com/coronavirus/hc- ... story.html.

"More than 16,000 New Yorkers have left the state for suburban Connecticut since March, according to new data from the U.S. Postal Service."

[Panope]

Housing market is hot here in Port Townsend also. City folks have long been retiring here - now they have even more incentive. Even though it is good for my finances (my nest egg is wrapped up in the house I just built), I would much prefer that Port Townsend remain a stable, affordable, and DIVERSE community.

In contrast, I read an article about home prices in Rural japan. Apparently, there are some 10 million empty homes that can be had for extremely low prices or sometimes free. Shrinking population. Young people want city life. Small towns are desperate for people to move in for fear of collapse.

[BeauV]

Some good news is flowing out of Moderna. They tested 45 people and got a good antibody response without negative effects, they're starting a 30,000 person double-blind trial before the end of the year that will complete in 2022. Preliminary results will flow during 2021, and if there's good news there might be emergency use of this sooner.

It's looking like the guess of a vaccine in the middle of 2021 (at least for some folks) might just happen. Now to figure out how long the immunity lasts and see if the darn thing actually works outside of a test-tube (metaphorical comment, I know it isn't tested in a test tube. )

Link HERE

[Benno von Humpback]

Janell has started calling her partners and telling them that she's retiring effective 31 Oct. COVID was the main precipitating factor.

[BeauV]

...snip...

In contrast, I read an article about home prices in Rural japan. Apparently, there are some 10 million empty homes that can be had for extremely low prices or sometimes free. Shrinking population. Young people want city life. Small towns are desperate for people to move in for fear of collapse.

Steve, the population of the US would also be declining rapidly if it weren't for our taking in emigrants. What many folks really don't understand about our economy is that it has been fueled by emigrants from top to bottom. Literally from the CEO of Microsoft and Google to the folks picking strawberries, there is a massive group of migrants who are contributing a tremendous amount to our economy. If we ever succeeded in closing our borders, there would clearly be a massive drop in GDP simply because our population would start shrinking quickly and our curent population doesn't want to have more kids.

This is a place where the expectations of the far-right anti-immigration folks are utterly and completely out of whack with reality. Closing the borders would bring a stop to the growth in our economy, almost immediately.

[Tim Ford]

That's fine Beau, I actually agree to some extent.

But there are extenuating circumstances to the phenomenon. There are certainly places on the planet where unfettered immigration has been a nightmare, due to unprepared populations, (socially, culturally, economically) having suffered dire consequences.

Some folks are wealthy enough to insulate themselves from being affected. Good for them! Point is, there are plenty of folks, folks who aren't wealthy enough, who have definitely NOT benefitted by the sudden onset of an immigrant population and the sociopolitical conditions imposed on an unprepared population. That has happened right here in the good old Estados Unidos, and countless places internationally.

You'd have to be pretty, if not COMPLETELY, naive not acknowledge this ^

I've lived, worked and been shot at in anger, in places as described above. Multiculturalism makes a great platitude, but not always the most comfortable living situation for them-there folks already living in the area.

[Ajax]

Janell has started calling her partners and telling them that she's retiring effective 31 Oct. COVID was the main precipitating factor.

Wow, that's certainly big news. I sense that it wasn't totally willingly. I wish her happiness and purpose in retirement.

[Benno von Humpback]

Janell has started calling her partners and telling them that she's retiring effective 31 Oct. COVID was the main precipitating factor.

Wow, that's certainly big news. I sense that it wasn't totally willingly. I wish her happiness and purpose in retirement.

She’d been thinking about it for a couple of years and the time seemed right. She’ll be happy. She wants to go sailing when there’s wind.

[Ajax]

Janell has started calling her partners and telling them that she's retiring effective 31 Oct. COVID was the main precipitating factor.

Wow, that's certainly big news. I sense that it wasn't totally willingly. I wish her happiness and purpose in retirement.

She’d been thinking about it for a couple of years and the time seemed right. She’ll be happy. She wants to go sailing when there’s wind.

I hope we can raft up a few times in the river this fall. Our boats are large enough that we can visit and maintain a healthful distance.

[Benno von Humpback]

Janell has started calling her partners and telling them that she's retiring effective 31 Oct. COVID was the main precipitating factor.

Wow, that's certainly big news. I sense that it wasn't totally willingly. I wish her happiness and purpose in retirement.

She’d been thinking about it for a couple of years and the time seemed right. She’ll be happy. She wants to go sailing when there’s wind.

I hope we can raft up a few times in the river this fall. Our boats are large enough that we can visit and maintain a healthful distance.

Yes and mnyeh, I don’t worry much outdoors with small numbers of people. We won’t play Twister.

[Ajax]

Damn, I have the mat and spinner on the boat already! I can hear "J" now- "Is that your hand on my bottom or...?"
"

[BeauV]

Tim,

I agree with you completely. Immigration makes folks uncomfortable.

But, that doesn't change the simple fact that without it, our country gets smaller and that in many cases these folks are doing jobs for which there have been literally no other applicants or for which they are clearly the best qualified. I live around a lot of those jobs. I also live in an area that is more than about 40% immigrant folks or immediately children of immigrants. (That number could be 35% or it could be 45%, but I'm approximately correct) It's obvious that without them, vast sections of our economy wouldn't work.

We tend to focus on the manual labor end of the scale, farmworkers, and meatpackers in the Mid-west for example. But, it's pretty clear when folks discovered that over 80% of graduate school researchers in tech disciplines were immigrants. Source: HERE amongst many others.

I'm not saying that it will be comfortable for Americans. I also didn't say either way if I like it or not. What I did say is, to truly close our borders will undoubtedly have a profound immediate and long term negative effect on our country economically. Japan is an extreme but clear example of this. I wasn't trying to moralize, just state an economic reality which most folks who favor closed borders simply don't accept. To quote you:

"You'd have to be pretty, if not COMPLETELY, naive not acknowledge this ^"

I was simply pointing out the naivete.

[LarryHoward]

Janell has started calling her partners and telling them that she's retiring effective 31 Oct. COVID was the main precipitating factor.

That’s big news. We’ll expect to see More of you guys in this part of the Bay. I’ve been thinking a lot about retiring but am so invested in the growth of the division I’ve founded, I’m not ready to walk away. Maybe in another couple of years.

[Jamie]

That's fine Beau, I actually agree to some extent.

But there are extenuating circumstances to the phenomenon. There are certainly places on the planet where unfettered immigration has been a nightmare, due to unprepared populations, (socially, culturally, economically) having suffered dire consequences.

Some folks are wealthy enough to insulate themselves from being affected. Good for them! Point is, there are plenty of folks, folks who aren't wealthy enough, who have definitely NOT benefitted by the sudden onset of an immigrant population and the sociopolitical conditions imposed on an unprepared population. That has happened right here in the good old Estados Unidos, and countless places internationally.

You'd have to be pretty, if not COMPLETELY, naive not acknowledge this ^

I've lived, worked and been shot at in anger, in places as described above. Multiculturalism makes a great platitude, but not always the most comfortable living situation for them-there folks already living in the area.

You mean like when all those Germans and Irish (and later Italians) that suddenly showed up in the US? - mostly uneducated Catholic refugees of civil war and famine? It's a myth these immigrants went out and, "opened the West".

Immigration during the first five years of the 1850s reached a level five times greater than a decade earlier. Most of the new arrivals were poor Catholic peasants or laborers from Ireland and Germany who crowded into the tenements of large cities. Crime and welfare costs soared. Cincinnati's crime rate, for example, tripled between 1846 and 1853 and its murder rate increased sevenfold. Boston's expenditures for poor relief rose threefold during the same period.

You might be right though - The Trumps, and a good part of his cabinet came as a part of that cesspool. The irony, right?

Looking at Japan again: I turns out that a big driver of the "lost decade", now lost two decades, was because of a reduction in the work force due to demographics. China, the EU Big-5, Korea, Taiwan all face this issue.

The reason to bet long on the US is: we have energy, are self sufficient in food and resources and we generally have a sensible system of government and have a population that grows at about 2% a year largely from immigration and first generation immigrants. Unlike a Japan, or even the EU, the US actually has some capability to assimilate economically significant groups of immigrants.

I would argue that the US has made the legal route to immigration so painful, expensive, and humiliating that only the desperate would ever attempt it. If you have any abilities at all, you have better alternatives.

[SemiSalt]

We've seen this story: Trump Administration Strips C.D.C. of Control of Coronavirus Data. Does anyone know if this affects the flow of data to all the sites doing projections of # of cases, deaths, etc?

Up through the end of June, the website I use, which is maintained by the State of Connecticut, was pretty reliable about posting new information every day. True, though, that there were issues about delayed data being dumped in on the day there were received, and corrections to back data were not put on the site. However, starting with the Fourth of July weekend, there have been several days with no new information. I think maybe they are starting to take the weekend off. This annoys me because I have to do some dorky interpolation.

Our local paper reported this morning that, at present, there are no Covid-19 patients in our local hospital. Hospitalizations in Fairfield County are 22.

[Benno von Humpback]

Janell has started calling her partners and telling them that she's retiring effective 31 Oct. COVID was the main precipitating factor.

That’s big news. We’ll expect to see More of you guys in this part of the Bay. I’ve been thinking a lot about retiring but am so invested in the growth of the division I’ve founded, I’m not ready to walk away. Maybe in another couple of years.

Sailing more and farther was a major motivation.

I'm also committed to a new postdoc for at least two years and if another brilliant one shows up, it may be hard to say no.

[TheOffice]

Benno,

I missed the big news. Congrats!!

Another post-doc? In sail trim or diesel maintenance or something else useful I hope!
Joel

[Benno von Humpback]

Benno,

I missed the big news. Congrats!!

Another post-doc? In sail trim or diesel maintenance or something else useful I hope!
Joel

Ah. No, a postdoc in my lab whom I need to launch before I can call it quits.

[BeauV]

Benno,

I missed the big news. Congrats!!

Another post-doc? In sail trim or diesel maintenance or something else useful I hope!
Joel

Ah. No, a postdoc in my lab whom I need to launch before I can call it quits.

Benno,

Good for you!!

You just articulated why I returned to an operating role about 6 years ago. One of my best, who I had mentored-my-ass-off-for, was in trouble and asked me to help. It was one of the most emotionally rewarding things I've ever done.

I'm sure you will enjoy seeing your postdoc succeed!!

[JoeP]

Congratulations Benno! The coronavirus economy has shrunk the workforce and as such my job was eliminated (last in, first out) a few weeks ago. Since then I have considered myself as semi retired, since I am collecting unemployment. Boy, did i time that perfectly or what? When it runs out I will be fully retired.

[Benno von Humpback]

Congratulations Benno! The coronavirus economy has shrunk the workforce and as such my job was eliminated (last in, first out) a few weeks ago. Since then I have considered myself as semi retired, since I am collecting unemployment. Boy, did i time that perfectly or what? When it runs out I will be fully retired.

Thanks, Joe. I'm glad you were able to work it out.

[SemiSalt]

2020-07-25_09-46-03.png

OMG! What's going on in Stamford? Explanation from the Gov.

2020-07-25_09-48-01.png

Long time ago, maybe two or three months, I saw a comment by a "researcher" here in Connecticut that the State does create "corrected" versions of the files which presumably put data that's reported late into the proper frames, but that those series are not available to the public. We have to make do with stuff like this.

[Olaf Hart]

So much for contact tracing...

[SemiSalt]

So much for contact tracing...

We're in good enough shape here in CT that infections at a single graduation party caused a noticeable bump on the graph.

[LarryHoward]

I think any attempt to draw strong conclusions from positive test results is doomed, given the changes is test availability over time and as numbers rise. Both Florida and NY have reported approximately 415K cases but NY shows 32,000 deaths compared to Florida’s 5,800 deaths. Is NY subject to 5 times the mortality Rate of Florida? While testing is now stressed in FL, NY was only testing hospital admissions at the peak so obvious positive cases were not tested or recorded. More recent antibody screening does show a very significant NY population that test positive for antibodies but we never tested as positive cases.

Despite the focus on “positivity rate”, unless testing is readily available and broadly used, it’s not a good metric.

In Maryland, we are testing roughly 20,000 people per day from a population of 6.1M with a positivity rate of 4.5%. That’s a number that would reflect decent control. However, the number of tests means we are seeing 12-13 positive cases per 100K population daily and overall, hospitalizations are rising. Is that because we are quicker to hospitalize Covid patients when the hospitals are not full and are we seeing more positives just because we do have accessible and affordable (and free to those without insurance) testing? Similarly, as hospitals start doing non critical procedures, in thIs region, a negative Covid test is required within 5 days preceding the procedure. That asymptomatic population with no known exposure is largely testing negative.

Basically, I think trying to draw any decent conclusions from poorly structured data is not worth a lot.

[Jamie]

Right now it’s very difficult to get a test in Florida and the state-by-state collection of data means there are many inconsistencies. You’d think this would be perfect for a national organization to step in and help harmonize.

Deaths are a lagging indicator, so Florida has time to catch up. Hopefully things have been learned about care to reduce the death rate.

[BeauV]

Larry, I agree at the National and state level. But, in various cities, like SF, there is abundant free testing. The data from that area is useful. But shouldn’t be compared with other areas with restricted testing.

I think it’s appalling that testing isn’t free and abundant everywhere.

[SemiSalt]

Larry, I agree at the National and state level. But, in various cities, like SF, there is abundant free testing. The data from that area is useful. But shouldn’t be compared with other areas with restricted testing.

I think it’s appalling that testing isn’t free and abundant everywhere.

My doc explained to me that if I were to go to the state testing center, the test would be processed at one of the big labs, and results could take about a week, maybe more, because those labs are saturated by demand from other states. OTOH, if I were to need a test, she could write a script for me to be tested in the hospital and have the result in a few hours. Circumstances vary.

I suppose % positive rates have some utility in seeing if conditions are improving in a given area, but I agree it's not useful for comparing one area with another.

[LarryHoward]

Right now it’s very difficult to get a test in Florida and the state-by-state collection of data means there are many inconsistencies. You’d think this would be perfect for a national organization to step in and help harmonize.

Deaths are a lagging indicator, so Florida has time to catch up. Hopefully things have been learned about care to reduce the death rate.

Jamie,

Agree deaths are a lagging indicator but other states have similar mortality statistics to Fl. Either NY dramatically undercounted cases through rationing tests or New Yorkers are dramatically more likely to die from Covid than the rest of the country. As my company is headquartered in NY and my principal deputy’s daughter lives in Manhattan (and got the symptoms but not badly enough for her doctor to send her to the ER). Generally New Yorkers were told “if you can walk across your living room without stopping to catch your breath, don’t go to the ER.” Those who weren’t sick enough to go to the ER were never tested. I think that and the dramatically high death rate points to a significant undercount of the cases.

My point is there is so much variability in testing around the country that the metrics other than hospitalizations and deaths are almost useless. Positive test percentage has some merit and lower numbers imply broader testing. Unfortunately, metrics taken from bad data are leading headlines on every news program.

Certainly with the lack of available testing in hot spots nationwide it’s safe to say that positive cases are being undercounted in those areas.