News COVID-19 pandemic

[fort]

Storing oils shouldn't be a problem. Just dig a big hole in the ground...

To dig ? :facepalm:But the holes already exist. Those from which oil comes...

 

[Urwumpe]

To dig ? :facepalm:But the holes already exist. Those from which oil comes...

I think that is the joke. :lol:


It is really noticable how much traffic reduced here in Germany and that means a MUCH lower fuel consumption in the second quartal than during the regular year, when we used to have much more fuel consumption in this quartal than in the other three.



Of course, the very low prices for the futures are not a good sign, since it documents a high level of speculation. But: In a few years, we will likely observe the opposite. And with such amounts of speculation, it will become much more risky on the financial side to drill new more difficult oil fields.

 

[jedidia]

most of the people trying to sell are speculators with no actual storage capacity.

Aaaaaahaha! This is gonna be fun! I'm not going to have a shred of pitty for those no-value-producers whatsoever! :lol:

 

[Linguofreak]

Aaaaaahaha! This is gonna be fun! I'm not going to have a shred of pitty for those no-value-producers whatsoever! :lol:

I used to think the same way, but speculators *do* provide value:

1) They assume risk for more risk-averse parties.
2) To manage that risk, they do analysis and research that other parties might not have the time or resources to do.
3) They connect buyers and sellers that might need to buy and sell at different times.

Through all of the above, they flatten out variations in prices.

So when the world is predictable, they do the research on where the economy is going and make a profit by guessing better than all the people who are too busy or too lazy to do that research. When things go haywire, they take a huge hit that would otherwise have made things even worse for the rest of us, and listen to us snicker about what horrible people they are and how they got what they deserved. I think that's a fairly good deal.

Where speculation causes problems for the rest of us is:

1) When lots of people who aren't career speculators with an actual economic education think that they can make a quick buck in boom times by buying low and selling high without putting in the effort to research actual trends. This is effectively gambling, and when it leads to a bubble that collapses and a whole bunch of people end up bankrupt at once, this can give a shock to the economy.
2) When banks perform a degree of speculation with depositors' money that isn't justified by the interest rates the bank is offering (or don't explain to customers that they're funding the high interest rates they are offering by taking significant risks), and then collapse.
2a) When banks make investments that appear safe, but don't do the research and end up depending too much on investments with speculators that they don't know are speculators, or when bank employees perform unauthorized speculation with company funds in order to inflate their performance, and aren't caught by internal checks.
2b) When governments try to cushion the blow of an economic downturn by bailing out failing banks, thus removing the consequences for over-speculation and increasing the chances of similar behavior in the future.

 

[Notebook]

I would point you toward a comedian called

Al Murray How Global Finance Really Works

As a Google search.

I can't though as its full of bad language.

 

[Urwumpe]

I also think any profitable investment should have a more or less big risk. Many things we do in business are speculations. Even just a time estimate for an agile software project is a speculation, since I am always in the conflict between estimating low for winning the bidding process at the customer and still estimating realistic enough to make a profit.

 

[jedidia]

I used to think the same way, but speculators *do* provide value:

1) They assume risk for more risk-averse parties.
2) To manage that risk, they do analysis and research that other parties might not have the time or resources to do.
3) They connect buyers and sellers that might need to buy and sell at different times.

Through all of the above, they flatten out variations in prices.

Interesting. I know the concept you describe, but I have never considered them speculators. To me, that kind of job always went under the classification "broker". Who's job involves a lot of speculation, true, but they mitigate that, as you said, by analysis and a whole lot of networking, which *is* a valuable service. Somehow I always classified the term speculator purely as people that buy stocks or futures that they think are going to go up, sit on them a bit and try to guess the best moment to sell them again.
I guess I'm having a language issue here, since in german a "Spekulant" is pretty much the second, while the first is called a "Makler", and they're usually not lumped together...

 

[4throck]

The oil price is a nice indicator for the actual world economy.
On this case meaning a major decrease in global trade (and production). On the TV an "expert" talked about a 2/3 decrease...

 

[Linguofreak]

Interesting. I know the concept you describe, but I have never considered them speculators. To me, that kind of job always went under the classification "broker". Who's job involves a lot of speculation, true, but they mitigate that, as you said, by analysis and a whole lot of networking, which *is* a valuable service. Somehow I always classified the term speculator purely as people that buy stocks or futures that they think are going to go up, sit on them a bit and try to guess the best moment to sell them again.
I guess I'm having a language issue here, since in german a "Spekulant" is pretty much the second, while the first is called a "Makler", and they're usually not lumped together...

The thing is, the difference is a matter of degree, parameterized by:

1) Knowing what you're doing.

And

2) Responsibility, one aspect of which is:
2a) The degree to which you take out debt to finance trades (even if you're doing everything else reasonably, you'll probably be considered as unreasonably speculative if you operate in the red as a matter of course and depend on the success of your trades to pay off the debt you take out to make them, which was where a lot of people got into trouble in the crash of '29).

As far as the term "broker" goes, if you say that someone "acts as a broker" it tends to imply a more or less responsible degree of speculation, where they perform a middleman job where they buy without necessarily having secured a seller and vice versa, without necessarily having any official ties to the people they transact with. When you say someone "is a broker", it tends to imply that they have "broker" as a job title and do some sort of work where they officially act as an agent for other parties. The second often has job responsibilities of the first kind, but also tends to manage a lot of trades where the transaction is directly between parties that they put in contact, where they just take a commission off the top.

In any case, both the responsible and irresponsible sorts of oil speculators are taking hits on oil futures right now and trying to get rid of their May delivery futures.

 

[richfororbit]

Another video. Ignorant or Evil.

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3wCnEDGczg"]Ignorant Or Evil...What's Really Behind The Shutdown Madness? - YouTube[/ame]

There appears to be an account by the name McAdams, so I guess it is the co host, he posted this link.

Medicinenet full of ads.

https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=208914

 

[Urwumpe]

Alone for calling a scientifically evaluated method to effectively lower the reproduction number to manageable levels like social distancing "madness" suggests, that the madness is not the shutdown, but the reactions by some idiots to it.

Here are people around who compare the mild German shutdown to the GDR dictatorship - interestingly people connected to the protesters in the USA as part of the same network of nutjobs.

Still, it is much less idiotic as the usual stuff. Dresden has again allowed neonazi protesters to march on Hitlers Birthday, despite COVID-19. The only good news, the allowed number of participants was later reduced from 80 to 15. They put a lot of 1s (A) and 8s (H) into their protest.

 

[Notebook]

With coronavirus putting households around the world in lockdown, can the English "plague village" of Eyam, which quarantined itself for more than a year, offer us lessons on how to fight back?
As a nightmare tale from history, Eyam's ordeal takes some surpassing.
When plague arrived in September 1665, rather than flee this wild corner of Derbyshire - and risk spreading the infection - villagers locked themselves away to suffer in isolation. And suffer they did.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-51904810

 

[Urwumpe]

New fun with SARS-CoV-2: The virus is causing also a Endothelitis in multiple organs, which is contributing to many COVID-19 deaths. It looks like the virus is directly infecting the cells of the Endothelium, the cells the line the inner surface of the blood vessels, since the virus is also observed reproducing in cell cultures.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30937-5/fulltext

https://www.aerztezeitung.de/Nachri...ne-systemische-Gefaessentzuendung-408778.html

 

[4throck]

:goodposting:

This is very important. The virus needs to be studied, because we still don't know exactly how it works.

 

[Urwumpe]

And the next fun with COVID-19: The recommended medicine by Dr. Trump seems like it does not work at all, it might even increase the lethality.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920v1

 

[jedidia]

And the next fun with COVID-19: The recommended medicine by Dr. Trump seems like it does not work at all, it might even increase the lethality.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920v1

If I interpret that statement correctly:

An association of increased overall mortality was identified in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone.

It wouldn't mean that the drug actively increases mortality, but "merely" that it does jack all to reduce it. Hence, patients treated with *only* that drug, have a higher mortality than patients that received other treatment.

 

[Urwumpe]

It wouldn't mean that the drug actively increases mortality, but "merely" that it does jack all to reduce it. Hence, patients treated with *only* that drug, have a higher mortality than patients that received other treatment.

Exactly that is also possible - but it still means that treating people with it is harmful especially in the presence of better treatments.



It does not mean that it actively kills people by comparison to no treatment at all (which is also killing people)

 

[insanity]

And the next fun with COVID-19: The recommended medicine by Dr. Trump seems like it does not work at all, it might even increase the lethality.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920v1

ARE YOU TELLING ME THAT OUR PRESIDENT ISN'T A MEDICAL SAVANT?
:jawdrops:

I really, really wished it worked but we're still in early days with this virus and there are going to be many other drugs that look good in small studies and fall apart completely in trials. I think it's important that we have leaders who are honest with people and set expectations for there being no quick-fix.

I, myself, remain optimistic that any one of the 70 candidate vaccines will be proven effective but even if we cut corners and do things like human challenge studies, we are still (optimistically) months away from data and ~year+ away from production. And there is still the significant chance that this virus is hard to neutralize with vaccine. False hope leads people to bad calculations of risk.

 

[N_Molson]

Yes I think its unreasonable to hope a vaccine to be available before 1 or 2 years. And yes that's very long.

In France, the restaurant industry is slowly dying. In other places too, but in France well... its a symbol. Of course the state is helping a lot but the future remains very dark : social distancing is IMHO incompatible with the mere concept of the "small french restaurant" which is what attract people. Also those restaurants typically have one small room, make little margin and they simply won't be profitable with an half-empty room (and more likely three-quarters empty). Also summer is obviously the time of the year where they make profit, and it is now more and more obvious that tourism will be extremely reduced. International tourism will be almost non-existent, and even within the country there will be restrictions. Add to that that most people won't be in a mood to go out and spend money. So yes it really looks grim. Will the state be able to support the industry for 1 or 2 years ? If yes, the cost will be enormous, if not the cost will also be very high as a significant part of the economy will just stop to exist and unemployment will skyrocket. :shrug:

 

[Linguofreak]

Yes I think its unreasonable to hope a vaccine to be available before 1 or 2 years. And yes that's very long.

In France, the restaurant industry is slowly dying. In other places too, but in France well... its a symbol. Of course the state is helping a lot but the future remains very dark : social distancing is IMHO incompatible with the mere concept of the "small french restaurant" which is what attract people. Also those restaurants typically have one small room, make little margin and they simply won't be profitable with an half-empty room (and more likely three-quarters empty). Also summer is obviously the time of the year where they make profit, and it is now more and more obvious that tourism will be extremely reduced. International tourism will be almost non-existent, and even within the country there will be restrictions. Add to that that most people won't be in a mood to go out and spend money. So yes it really looks grim. Will the state be able to support the industry for 1 or 2 years ? If yes, the cost will be enormous, if not the cost will also be very high as a significant part of the economy will just stop to exist and unemployment will skyrocket. :shrug:

We may well not have a vaccine or cure within a year or two, but I'm very skeptical that social distancing measures will remain in place for that long. I figure around July or August, if full lockdown measures are still in place, we'll be on the verge of the economy breaking in ways that have a significant cost in lives, and at that point either society will back down and take the excess disease casualties, or things actually will break and at that point governments will be dealing with so many crises that they will no longer be able to enforce quarantine.

But if asymptomatic rates are really as high as some studies are indicating, then we'll probably hit the herd immunity point well before then, and lockdowns will likely have been relaxed.