I made that post a while ago. But it’s worth mentioning again after watching Chris’s latest video (as well as the disaster news coming out of Italy).
The numbers are simply too large to not affect somebody you know. And yes, i do mean you as in every single person reading this. With how infectious this is and how little the west does to spread it, it is guaranteed a lot of people will be infected by this.
80% might be mild but that means 20% is not and is going to have a very bad experience. This will affect them as a person, which in turn, affects your relationship with these people. I’m noticing that myself… i’ve got such extreme anger now to those who won’t believe me, simply as a defense mechanism. Attack any threats.
I was prepared for the virus… but i wasn’t prepared to be left on the street to die because of disbelief. I wasn’t prepared for how stubborn people i love so much would be, essentially barreling towards their own demise, and seemingly speeding up the more i protest.
The time to prepare for the virus is over. It’s here. The time to prepare what the virus will do is now.
In case you where wondering. The preparing never stops. There’s only one silver lining to all of this; preparing for loss is the worst stage. Once we arrive at it, we prepare for things to get back to normal again. After all being prepared means you suffer the bad before everybody else… but it also means you get to see the light at the end of the tunnel before everybody else. Which’ll help those who can’t pull through.
have all person’s over 65 voluntarily remove themselves from all outside activities for a period of 30 days. Then allow the rest of the population go about their normal schedules. The ones that get really sick get treated, the rest deal with their runny noses, small fevers, aches and pains but work. Everyone wears a mask, home made is better than nothing. Wash hands a lot and have a anti bacterial bottle hand sanitizer on our person. Eyewear is worn also, especially at work. Productivity stays relatively high, supply chains are basically uninterrupted, and eventually virus hits those by chance and then the Virus just burns itself out. For those secondary reinfections we just take extreme cautions to Not get it the second time. My goodness, everyone usually goes to work when having the flu and for just a couple of days does the flu really hit us and we can’t work. It sounds like this Coronavirus is a mild case of the flu (I know it is worse than the flu). The reason I even write this is because nothing has been done properly except for Singapore. We know it isn’t a killer Virus where you catch it, are bleeding out of every oraface and are dead within 12 hours as was the case with the Spanish Flu. This Virus is a mild strain of the flu, it doesn’t seem to kill extreme numbers of people and it seems when you get it, it isn’t so bad that most could still just work. Instead, we don’t test, haven’t been ahead of the Virus at all and are reacting like if we don’t adopt a strict daily exercise that the entire population will die. I say lets just stay at work, avoid close contact and monitor our safety precautions while at work. Why not!!! This Virus seems to be a game of chance, and we have no control over it except to try not and catch it by mask, eyewear and washing hands. Why are we ready to ruin everything when it isn’t a true monster like the Spanish Flu. Why not???
My understanding is that you need to use the 99% isopropyl alcohol. The end product needs to have 60-70% alcohol content so you would mix 2/3 alcohol with 1/3 aloe vera to bring the alcohol down to 66%. You cannot use standard 70% isopropyl alcohol because mixing it with the aloe vera will bring the alcohol below the effective range.This is absolutely correct. If all you've got is 70% isopropyl, then use it full strength. Anything below 61% and the protein denaturing activity drops off a cliff.
First, thank you to Chris and his entire team for their heroic efforts to educate and inform all of us! Simply amazing work and an unbridled commitment to clarity and truth!
Second, those of you paying attention will have noticed the change in tone and format that has ocurred in Chris and Adam’s presentations in the last few days.
I’m going to hypothesize that PP has been warned to reduce the truth being told here and to stick to their business of advising on wealth building. They are most likely also being held to a gag order about the control being imposed on them.
No one from PP will be able to comment honestly on this post, but I believe we are seeing direct infringement of their 1st Amendment Rights. Every American is at risk of being denied our Constitutional rights. The erosion of our rights will be very difficult to reverse! Beware!!! Beyond the clinical and economic impact of this pandemic may lie a much more sinister and ultimately fatal blow to our fundamental Constitutional guarantees.
We are all in danger.
I’ve inadvertently caused too many cases of writers cramp as people scribbled down the URLs of the links I provided in my videos.
I will start posting them with the videos.
For now, here’s the last two days worth (feel free to copy paste to other forum areas where they might be requested/needed so people can see them):
March 10 Links:
https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-dshs-announce-statewide-testing-capabilities-for-coronavirus
https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-coronaviruses
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-09/travel-companies-pull-forecasts-italy-extends-ban-virus-update
March 9 Links:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0060343
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/09/people-shed-high-levels-of-coronavirus-study-finds-but-most-are-likely-not-infectious-after-recovery-begins/
https://www.corriere.it/cronache/20_marzo_07/coronavirus-stiamo-creando-terapie-intensive-anche-corridoi-cb01190a-60be-11ea-8d61-438e0a276fc4.shtml
https://www.kmov.com/news/st-louis-county-coronavirus-family-attends-villa-duchesne-dance/article_41ec34a4-6179-11ea-b3e3-6fbf809e7778.html
https://twitter.com/PalliThordarson/status/1236549305189597189
https://www.redbubble.com/people/jakestollery/works/45647401-case-case-case?asc=u
I’m creating a narrative based on Italy. Italy is clearly in overwhelm. Here is the data:
Note that 75% of cases were diagnosed since March 3.
Note that the death rate is 6.2% (631/10149). Also notice the surge in deaths starting March 8.
Now to the twitter thread I linked to last night that clearly indicates hospital overwhelm and strongly points to the likelihood that that surge in deaths is due to triage of respirators: denying respirators to the old and already sick who are least likely to be helped so that all of those with the best chance of being helped receive one.
Finally to a paper that explores the impact of ICU bed and respirator availability on pandemic deaths in the US. Their worst case scenario is at least a bit conservative for coronavirus.
Finally, a link to number of hospital beds per 1000 people in the US and Italy. 13% fewer beds per thousand in the US.
I did convince a nonprofit board of mostly older folks to host our monthly meeting online tonight instead of in person. There is actually discussion about go vs. no go for our summer programs (250 kids a week for 15 hours a week for 6 weeks all outside). It was easy. I just brought it up and mentioned the higher death rates for those over 60.
I’ve also written my school superintendent (no response although we had a productive conversation on Friday - calling him in a few minutes) and an organizer of the indoor track sports banquet (no response).
Published rates for US: 100 per 100,000 people per year - a bit higher in Europe. In Italy’s Lombardy region with about 10 million people, that’s 10,000 per year or 30/day. How many of them are dying right now? How many other people with medical emergencies are dying?
You missed my point. So I will try to explain it. BTW clearly there are people here who jump to attack any criticism of this site. Unfortunately that is a rather immature reaction. Valid criticism is actually necessary to ensure that whatever is being criticized is being capable of not only maintaining a high standard but actually getting better.
It is irrelevant to me whether the society at large is consumed with the climate narrative to the exclusion of other environmental issues. My point is that it would seem logical that one would apply the principles of the all three E’s when discussing any one of them. After all they are supposed to be interrelated.
It was clear to me that Rubino did not consider the interrelatedness of the three E’s and I don’t even know if he is aware of that premise or cares. Being focused solely on precious metals he suggested investing in mining companies. Now for you that might be on the top of your list of dirty industries to invest in, or even in your top ten worst. That is irrelevant. It is a very dirty industry nonetheless even if it is not as dirty as some others. I don’t think it belongs in an ethical (green) portfolio. At some point it is necessary to examine closely our actions and their effects on the environment. Thus while owning pm’s is prudent from an economic point of view (as well as owning stock in a mining company) it comes at a steep environmental cost. A more socially responsible investment might be investing in Fungi Perfect. The fact that in this entire thread I am the only one raising the issue only makes my point more apt.
Here is a link you and others may or may not find of interest.
https://earthworks.org/campaigns/no-dirty-gold/impacts/
Fyi it would be a mistake to judge anyone’s ability or right to criticize anything here based on how long it might appear from the date they joined the site. Many myself included have lurked here for many years and only joined to engage in the conversations. See you on the other side hopefully
https://flightaware.com/live/findflight?origin=LIMC&destination=ZNY
There are currently 3 flights that should have departed already, but are still listed as “scheduled”.
Yesterday, only the Emirates flight actually landed in New York. Maybe it too will be cancelled today? Two weeks too late is better than nothing, but not by much.
I’ve done nothing but talk online to people via computers for 20 years now. So if anybody is looking to continue lessons or contact or whatever via the PC, i’ve got a few ideas on how to.
Currently, the most popular app is Discord. It allows you to make a server (for free) and then share a link with people (for free). You can make channels, assign permissions/roles, chat with people over voice or via one of the text channels, you can even stream your desktop to people in the server these days, though that does require a good connection to yknow, stream your desktop. It’s a good place to have a “live” community. It’s taken over the desktop voice market quite rapidly and is now the most used app for communication for gamers (especially world of warcraft, haven’t connected to a teamspeak for a while). Especially to keep schools going during long periods of lockdown i’d take a look at that one first.
For a more dedicated talking program that focuses on speech online, both Teamspeak and Ventrillo are the old guard here. Mumble is a freeware alternative that i’ve used with a World of Warcraft raiding guild for a long time. Obviously, no extra frills here, just voice chat. But a very well done voice chat even with options to set up a cross channel talk/command structure (i used Teamspeak in a militarized gaming tournament a decade and a half ago called 21st century warfare).
Ofcourse there’s Skype for person to person video calling, that’d be the known one. Though programs like Line might be more popular these days amongst the mobile phone crowd. Which program is used varies highly per country in that area.
Then there’s streaming, via Twitch (amazon), Mixer (microsoft) or Youtube (google) streaming. This would be more useful for trying to reach larger audiences, as streaming via Discord puts a very heavy strain on your connection while doing it via the streaming services means you just upload to them, everybody else watches it from the site’s connection. Even if 10 teachers are sick, as long as they all teach the same subject, one is enough to reach hundreds.
While streaming might’ve started for just gamers, Twitch has many many catagories now that are seperate from gaming. Just Chatting (or IRL) is the most famous example (actually 3rd highest watched catagory on twitch right now), but also for example the Art catagory (6k+ viewers) or Podcasts(5k plus). Music got split up into multiple catagories not too long ago. Yes, you can earn money via the platform, many try, but that is not a requirement. You can stream for free just as well. If you’re interested in streaming yourself as a past time a good place to start is Streamlabs and their streamlabs OBS client. It’s the least amount of hassle to set up and get going (and you can always “upgrade” to normal OBS with plugins later).
Don’t expect any additional income. Building a community takes ages. However if you already have a community to carry over (virtually all the succesful streamers are that way cause they carry over a community from other social media) it’s a good way to do like a weekly podcast or whatever and earn a bit of income on the side from that. Hell if Chris where to do a livestream AMA on youtube live streaming to just awnser questions live that might’ve been posed 15 videos ago and nobody got time to watch all of that (as well as situations that might’ve changed since then); one stream could probably fund this site for a month. Me, i tried for 11 months, never missed a day, got an average of 5 viewers. Not very economical. Not to mention don’t expect donations considering everybody’s going to tighten the ol’ belt in a depression. But, it is still a past time to do when there’s nothing left to do.
As far as entertainment goes; While there’s many online stores, Steam remains king of digital distribution. Obviously, many games, but there’s software and movies on the platform as well (though the offering is still mediocre). Their service is the best, having many features such as the recently revised Remote Play, allowing you to play couch co-op games across the internet! Though if you wanna support good devs as well as play some nostalgic older games, GOG is a very good alternative. Their new galaxy 2.0 client certainly gives steam a run for it’s money.
Of course there are many streaming services now such as Netflix, Amazon prime video and Disney+, so watching stuff isn’t going to be much of an issue.
That’s pretty much it for the digital illiterate 
There is so much digital entertainment on here you could be in lockdown for a decade and not even come close to running out of everything that’s been produced so far.
I went to exactly the same place in my mind as you did Mohammed when Rubino mentioned miners. From a short term and personal perspective, investing in miners might be a responsible thing to do. But it is absolutely unjustified from a whole systems perspective. We are just a part of this hugely complex global biosphere. There are millions of other species and not one of them cares about gold other than that it stays in the ground in order to preserve the intact, clean ecosystems they need to survive. We humans and our games are not so important.
Two locally tested and yet to be CDC confirmed cases of COVID-19 have been reported in two of the counties that comprise the metropolitan Detroit, Michigan area. Both are middle aged, one (Oakland County woman) had recent international travel and the other (Wayne County man) had recent domestic travel. They are both currently hospitalized and their exact condition is not being shared.
Well, locally my red line is really close to being triggered. More so if they eventually release their city of residency. I have upped my anti-oxidant game from my daily winter base to what I would normally take for a cold/flu. And will up again if anything makes me think I have it or someone in close proximity has COVID-19. Unfortunately, I doubt I will be able to work remotely. Hardass old school management that doesn’t think your working unless they see you working even though they see emails from all of the heavy hitters from 6 AM to 10PM everyday.
Still taking my upcoming vacation. Was going to Florida but cancelled due to my Father in Law’s cancer situation, actually thankful for that, I hope his hospice care allows him to go peacefully and not need to deal with this virus in his final days. We have already decided to not have a funeral gathering immediately and will do so when it is more appropriate for a gathering. More like a delayed wake.
I will use the vacation time to get my spring garden starts going (I love Spring), other projects, make a trip to farm to upgrade preps there as well (Not Base Preps but contingency preps to existing preps, I always try to make incremental improvements where I can). Hopefully, in a couple weeks remote work may be a possibility from home or the farm.
I love your post Mohammed Mast. Not only the importance of green investing and consideration of environmental impacts, but also for pointing out the tendency of some on this site to jump on people for not being frequent posters. I too have commented and immediately been labeled a troll even though a long time paying member. It’s OK to lurk and only occasionally post. For me, I recognize that I’m not a great writer but I still can gain a lot of insight from reading posts from the generally intelligent and eloquent posters.
Some people say only gold is “real money”, or that silver isn’t because now it’s an “Industrial metal”. Don’t be fooled. The LONGEST running system of currency, and thus the most successful, is wood.
Simple sticks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick
Turns out all you really need for something to be money, is verification. Nothing else seems to really matter that much. Really the paper you carry doesn’t matter, it’s just something material to grab hold onto and paper’s reeeaalllly cheap. What matters is the Serial Number printed on that paper so that paper can be verified as being legitimate. Same thing for coins; ever wondered why they have the shape that they do?
Can gold also be not-money? Why yes it can! When the government says it isn’t. That’s all it takes; ban all transactions in gold and ban private ownership of gold. Then it ceases to be currency immediately. Note that Money/Currency and Store of Value are not the same things.
Now it’s still a good store of value. But that only comes from people appreciating something shiny, equally, over a very long period of time (AKA, humans don’t really change that much). Right now in Australia, toilet paper is actually functioning as a currency. If you really want a stable currency (only verification is needed for a currency, but for a >stable< currency, you need a few more rules), for something to be money it simply needs:
- To be verifiable by authority (yes, we could see counterfit/serialized toiletpaper, called the US dollar (OH SNAP)),
- To be plentiful to offer liquidity yet scarce enough to offer a store of value (while new batches are made and stocks are resupplied, toilet paper fits this bill).
- To be desired by the populace (check on that one)
- To have an external use aside from currency (to tie the currency to the real world economy, where production and use help determine value)(100% check on that one).
Note the dollar fails that last test after it’s seperation from gold and thus, hasn’t been a stable currency since then. While sticks do pass that test funnily enough.
Video games offer us a good insight in this. Maaaaany papers have been written about ingame economies and events that happened in various games that changed our understanding of economics in general, because each game is it’s own microcosm. For any would be economist that’s worth a good afternoon of looking into at the very least.
I have personal experience in this when i was playing a game called Redmoon, an MMO released in South Korea in 1998 (played it for 3 years on US servers). It had a top level of 1000 and just 6 quests, everything else was a grind (ah the good ol’ days) in a Diablo-esque game that had a tick-rate (so the positions of all monsters would update) of 1 per second. Needless to say, it was quite comical to see everything move. You also always made sure you could survive at least 1 hit of the strongest monster in an area of the map because of the lag
In any case, because the top level was so high, and of course monsters dropped gold, gold had become pretty useless pretty quick. You could always find some high level dropping millions around the starting area. Didn’t help that the concept of gold sinks wasn’t really invented yet. There was player to player trade, but it hardly ever involved gold. If it did, somebody would ask 2-4 billion for a crap legendary to supply his food costs for a while (pretty much the only thing that cost gold, was food/drinks which instantly restored health/mana).
However, somewhere down the line they decided to add these items called -Dynes. These things had names such as AdrenelDyne or something silly, and they would give you a 10 minutes (i think) or 1 hour stat boost, significantly so. Due to the design of the game, that ended up not doing that much; however, there was 1 particular Dyne of interest: The QuickyDyne, or quickys as they where called by us.
That one doubled all your actions. Double movement speed, double action speed. So moving twice as fast and attacking twice as fast, basically meant you could grind twice as fast and level up twice as fast. Which, for a game that consisted entirely of grinding out levels, was veeeeeery desirable.
These things had a chance to drop. Pretty good chance, but they where used up at a similar rate to what they dropped. So some times you really had to either farm for them, or buy them off farmers with other drops you’d gotten while using quickies.
As a result, Quickys became the default currency in the game. 90% of all trade was done in Fat quickies (the hour long version had a “fatter” version as it’s graphic of the “thin” one which resembled a testing tube) while those never inflated. Really expensive stuff could run for a few thousand at most. The price was remarkably stable, because both supply and demand remained remarkably stable. Even as more people leveled up higher and got access to mobs with higher drop rates, they also needed more and more experience, so more and more time between levels, which scaled up their consumption of quickies as fast as their access to new resources unlocked.
I can honestly say that was my first introduction to real world economics, the inability of central planners to control an economy. None of the above was planned because MMO’s where such a new thing (that game was released 6 years before world of warcraft) that many systems where still developing or even being invented as they went along. Of course higher level monsters dropped more gold, that’s what they did in Diablo. Nobody thought about what would happen if you scaled Diablo up to level 1000 until it was tried.
Game economies are a bit more stable these days; but even the best of em still have the same problems. A really Epic mount used to cost 500 gold in World of Warcraft. Now they have vendor mounts that sell for 5+ million. Silver and Copper have been useless in that game since 2007, even though the level 1-2 quests still give you <1 silver for your troubles.
So while i’ve got physical gold and silver stored in a safe and i would advocate some allocation in both as a backup plan to everybody, i always keep in the back of my mind: It’s only money cause people say it’s money. Once the situation changes and another good becomes far more desirable; i should change my analysis with it. We could very well end back up with sticks.
I also have a stack of toilet paper in my bathroom at the moment Cause ya never know.
I live in Kalamazoo. Continuing our preps. Wife is making a supplies run today. Will be making another one tonight.
We also have a fence going in next week to keep animals out of the yard and out of the raised garden beds we will be building.
Dear Chris, I wrote my own letter to President Trump and here it is:
Dear President Trump: Have not written in a while, but felt compelled to write this morning after seeing the Leader of the US Corona Virus Task Force walk off without answering the question: Can the uninsured get testing?
From where I’m sitting, I would expect that some of that emergency funding for the corona virus would be set aside for free testing. South Korea is testing for free. Taiwan is testing for free.
Don’t you know that we live in a country where people don’t want an ambulance called for fear of the bill?
It appears the US government is making the same mistake Philadelphia made during the Spanish Flu outbreak. Government officials did not balance the health of the public against the government’s fiscal obligations (the need to sell war bonds via a parade) and the Flu ravaged the city - in short order.
The narrative of “face masks are dangerous” presently roiling through the airwaves is pathetically hilarious. If the US did not know about this virus the first of January, then all of military/pysop budgets are for naught. If the US did know about this virus by the beginning of January, then the facemask shortage is a royal clusterfuck of incompetence and heads should fucking roll.
How bloody hard is it to manufacture facemasks? Billions and billions of dollars sunk into the CDC and they don’t have enough fucking facemasks when the Pandemic rolls around?
We want to hear those idiots are FIRED!
One other comment about all that money being put aside for the Corona Virus Emergency. Is there money set aside for the public to pay bills? Hong Kong gave out $10,000 HK dollars to all legal residents. Of course they are under quarantine, but what happens to the public under quarantine? How will Main Street Joe and Jane pay bills if they don’t go to work? Half the country lives paycheck to paycheck - thanks to Piss Poor Public Policy.
Is there gonna be money for Main Street during this crisis? Price controls? What’s the plan?
BTW, I write pretty frequently and most of the time I’m complaining bitterly.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-coronavirus-cases-pass-1000-national-guard-arrives-new-york-washington-bans-large
Along with the article about the national guard ZH notes that there’s a 2nd outbreak happening in South Korea, in the middle of a transit hub in Seoul this time. That’s caused an uptick in the overnight korean numbers.
It looks like despite heroic efforts that South Korea might fail in containing this after all. Which doesn’t bode well for us in the west.
I completely agree with you Mohammed Mast. I have made similar comments over the years (to howls of derision from the gold nuts) when I point out the idiocy of open pit mining when all those guys do after their big purchase is find ways to hide the stuff and then go online and brag about their ownership. They call themselves “stackers” but I have choicer words for them.
But gold mining is a big activity and it employs tens of thousands of people around the world. And because there is always more demand for jewelry, bars, coins and a few industrial processes we just keep digging up more even though its well known that virtually all the gold ever mined in all history can still be accounted for in various vaults around the world. Because it never goes rotten and very little is wasted to industrial activities.
But look what they do to the planet by digging it up. Here is a video of the worlds biggest open pit mine and I am not trying to single out Barrick or anyone else because they all do this the same way, but this is truly an idiotic activity beyond the pale.
Kalgoorie open pit mine is the biggest of them all. It can be seen from space its so big. The hole is more than five square kilometers in size and 600 meters deep and you want to know what they pull out of that hole every year? They get a grand total of 700,000 thousand ounces of gold which measures about 1.2 cubic meters in size. That is what they get. And in exchange they process the hell out of the stuff with cyanide mostly plus mercury and really make a hell of an environmental mess just so the gold bugs can oooooh and ahhhhh about how its going to be the last damned thing standing after paper money is gone. lol
They don’t even stop to consider they wrecked the bloody environment on every continent except Antarctica and innumerable countries in between just to fix money that actually works just fine without gold to start with. But Zimbabwe they shout! And hey what about Weimar and the wheelbarrows of cash to buy bread?!!
And then I shout back “Hey, what about my green grass and the birds and bugs and fish that if you didn’t notice are going extinct faster than at any time in world history outside the last big meteor impact that wiped out the dinosaurs”!! And a lot of it has to do with the total disrespect of the environment caused by gold mining and widespread contamination of the environment due to all the heavy chemicals that get used for extraction. That’s why we don’t need any more of it.
Nobody wants to hear it. It’s the same thing every day with the bugs. No brains. They think gold is their salvation for Gods sake and none of them even consider the real costs. Surely we can come up with something better. The sooner the Central Banks can start minting digital currency the better for everyone. And we can leave gold exactly where we found it. In the ground.
https://youtu.be/tzaJA7xpSOQ
I certainly can’t argue that Gold mining is environmentally friendly… so I won’t. What I will say is that Debt-based Fiat, especially in the hands of our Western central bank cartel, will tend to drive those of a thinking bent toward forms of (savings) capital which have real scarcity integrity. If our money system were not so flawed and corrupt, we might not need Gold as much.