owbc

Most people who rent don't live by themselves - they have roommates - thus the unemployment claims would need to be cut in half in order to be compared to the total number of rental units. And many people in those industries hardest hit do own homes, particularly if they are in management. Bartenders and waitresses at nice restaurants make a good living. One of my friends who is a bartender is married to a chef and they own two homes - one in Chicago, and a vacation home in WI. Or they have spouses in a different industry and have two incomes, able to buy a home. And heaven forbid that (some) millennials feel entitled, but that's for a different thread. If "entitlement" means having the ability to pay for basic needs like rent, groceries, and medical care, then yes, some people feel entitled. It seems like you have the privilege of being quite disconnected from the lives of people struggling to make ends meet. One only needs to look at the lines at food banks to see there is a serious crisis unfolding. Sure, maybe some people didn't pay their rent when they could have. Who really cares? They are going to have to pay it eventually or get evicted when things return to normal. It's not like there are no consequences here. All I'm saying is that for those of us interested in investing it is going to take a long time for all of this to ripple through the economy, which is why I predict the DOW will not get back to its previous high until late in the decade if at all. As for the comments about lockdown state...what a freaking joke. There's no martial law, virtually no enforcement. And the protestors are mostly in their cars! Why not get out and protest in a crowd? Nobody is stopping them! Are they afraid of a virus or something?

Do you think people are just going to start voluntarily shopping, going to restaurants, or traveling after the restrictions are lifted? Especially if they see the case counts start to go up again?

Why is the rent number surprising? Most Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and almost everyone who lost their job was renting. They don’t have any savings. They need to hold onto their remaining money to spend on essentials. The unemployment claims amount to over 1/3 of the total number of rental units in the US so the numbers work out.

Playoffs in front of no fans has minimal appeal to me. The whole fun of the Bucks making a deep playoff run would be the crowds, people gathering outside the arena to watch on a big screen, and a celebration parade if they won the championship. None of that is happening. The question is whether they can at least replicate some sort of playoffs that feels semi-legitimate. I'm glad they are trying but whatever comes out of it is going to have a huge asterisk.

Just wait for the effects of this to cascade through the economy. Currently everything is being held together by short-term fixes and the assumption that things can return to normal quickly. Air travel is down 96%. How long is it going to be before travel even gets back to 50% of normal? They just announced a record drop in retail. 31% of Americans didn't pay rent at the start of April...how many will be able to afford rent in May? June? What will landlords do without rental income? Virtually everyone is preparing for massive budget cuts. This is happening at my university, it is happening behind the scenes at every corporation in America. Most of us lucky enough to be employed are going to see pay cuts at some point later in 2020 or 2021. Which will then further ripple through retail, travel, etc.

Absolutely would not go to any restaurant or public gathering and will not until I am vaccinated or they have widespread testing in place confirming that the virus is essentially gone. Why risk it? All of our favorite restaurants have home delivery figured out now and it has been great. The first thing we are phasing back in is in-person contact with friends. Already had some over to the backyard in a somewhat social distancing-safe manner (yes, not recommended, but whatever, we've all been at home for a month). I assume it will go back to the < 10 people rule at some point in May and we will take advantage. Also hoping that the trailheads open up by late spring. Next vacation booked is a family gathering at an AirBNB rental in late June which I fully expect will go on, although we might be replacing some family that were going to fly in with local friends.

Acquiring Sogard was a brilliant move by Stearns. I still suspect he’ll be DFA’d by the all star break but ride that wave for now!

Why risk spreading the virus more than you have to? Series should be longer, not shorter.

They know who patient zero is in the Seattle area, he came back from Wuhan on January 15 and went to the hospital on January 19. It sounds like the NY cases can be genetically traced back to Europe for the most part. My wife and I had the flu over the New Year's holiday--it was a nasty respiratory infection and I'm sure if we had gotten it a couple weeks later we would have thought it was COVID. I can see how the two could be mixed up.

I don't understand why they would have to quarantine. The assumption is built in that this would be done with frequent testing and removing anyone that gets infected. Obviously they would have to be smart about social distancing and avoid any rapid spreading of the virus, but I don't think the idea is that there would be some sort of quarantined group of MLB players and support staff.

As has been noted many times, massive randomized testing is the only way to open more things up while the virus is still going around. For many reasons that currently isn't possible but it probably will be in a month or two. There are statistics on non-COVID deaths, they are at a record low which is kind of ironic, less accidental deaths due to staying inside. On average about 7,500 people die per day in the US (~130 of them are suicides) so the current COVID count of 2,000 dead per day is a BIG number. There is no evidence that coronavirus spread is significantly slowed by warm weather, other than the fact that cold weather tends to result in people spending more time in close quarters.

This came up on NPR the other day, the expert opinion was that the particles will disperse quickly in the open air, so it would be highly unlikely that you catch it from someone while doing outdoor activities at a safe distance (like passing on the sidewalk). But as someone who has studied pesticide spray drift a bit I can say that under certain weather conditions aerosols can linger for quite a while without dispersing. So the risk is not zero, hence why congregating in parks or other outdoor spaces is a bad idea. But if you are passing someone from the opposite sidewalk I wouldn't worry.

Then we all better be prepared to be in quarantine until Christmas. It will probably take that long for a vaccine to be developed and deemed safe to dispense to the public. And I doubt a vaccine will actually cure it. These kinds of viruses, once they appear, really don't go away. And they often mutate. I fear our lives will never be normal again and the upcoming depression will be disastrous for this country. Be prepared for worse unemployment than we saw in the 1930s. It's easy to feel discouraged and fearful in this time but the technology we have to combat viruses is incredible and scientists from around the world have dropped everything they were doing to work on COVID. It's not the first pandemic and it won't be the last but we'll get through this! And given what a tough time it is, it would be especially nice to have baseball back. That's why it is great to know that MLB is trying to make it happen in some form or another.

Further expanding on this... 1) MLB is split into two leagues: East and West. East plays in the morning, West plays in the evening. No interleague play. Universal DH. 2) Scheduling is based on limiting mixing between teams. Series are 7 games against the same team, mixed home/away. Then trade opponents with another team. 3) Roster rules similar to playoffs--set prior to 7-game series and can't make changes until after unless a player tests positive. Everyone in the league gets tested for COVID each week when opponents switch. 4) The AM games will have to start really early to avoid the heat, they can't be ending at noon. Or they have to have a set end time. 5) Lots of rules to speed up play. Pitch clock implemented. No extra innings (or start extra innings with the bases loaded). Or just do all 7-inning games. 6) Several fixed date opportunities to move to regular ballparks--July 1, Aug 1, Sept 1. This will be easier with 7-game series--less travel.

You called??? It really is quite similar to a weather model--both are initial value problems and both have a ton of assumptions built into the initial conditions. So in that case you obviously want to use an ensemble--and the more information you get, the more you can narrow the ensemble envelope. Personally I feel like the COVID models have been most useful for figuring out the worst case scenarios. Those exponential growth curves really inspired a bias to action.

How do you plan the schedule using this method? Do they just write the whole schedule like usual and just pick a day when they switch back to regular ballparks? I doubt things are going to be fair/balanced so I hope they are planning an expanded postseason to make up for that. I'm all for doing this and I hope they experiment like crazy with the rules since they can get away with it.

They have to do something like this if there are going to be any live sports this year. They have no choice. I like that they are thinking ahead here, public sentiment will be completely different in a few weeks when the case count is on the decline. My main concern is how hot it is in Arizona. These have to be night games. Or let the east coast teams play early in the morning.

My buddy is an EMT in Seattle and I spoke with him last night. He said Washington is probably the best place to be in the US right now because everyone is actually following the guidelines. FWIW, he basically scolded one of our other friends via videochat for not taking this as seriously as he thought he should. The best thing that happened here was the voluntary work-from-home suggestion from companies going out the week of March 9, over a week ahead of any government orders. The last time I was at work in person was March 14 and even by that point there was almost nobody there. I really think it was a matter of 2-3 days where we were about to hit the exponential explosion, an employee at one of the busiest Starbucks downtown tested positive and could have potentially exposed thousands of people. That said, the positive tests are still coming in at a steady pace. Not much decline. So not quite there yet.

Fortunately Hiura is on a hot streak in the other simulation

Washington and CA governors Inslee and Newsom are the ones who have the biggest say over how we're going to come out of this since those are the first two states to have successfully slowed this thing down. It's a tricky proposition because everyone is desperate to go do stuff. I don't know a single person in my social circles in Seattle who got a confirmed case of coronavirus (although likely some were asymptomatic and others thought they might have had it in February). So it will just spread like wildfire again if they open stuff up too soon. You have to start by reopening parks and outdoor spaces, maybe open some restaurants for outdoor seating while keeping people 6 ft apart at tables. And they really need to open nonessential businesses with the same social distancing restrictions that grocery stores have. Do that around mid-April and wait another month until mid-May to make sure the case count doesn't start going up too much again. And anyone who comes through the airport will have to quarantine for 2 weeks. For opening larger gatherings like weddings, etc, they are going to have to be taking people's temperature and doing randomize testing to isolate the positives. There's no way around that.

Why would you think something like an oil supply crisis would happen? Trump filled the US oil reserves to the absolute tops couple weeks back or so when the oil prices were thought to be a great discount...one even better today. Here's where the economy will take a freefall, supply and demand with ongoing employment. I seen a Meier post early today letting customers be aware prices for many goods will be noticeably higher as we stay shut down. The last example which I remember was given eggs will have higher pricing. The millions of people that are or will be collecting unemployment, a reduced income that will end up purchasing less than what you could purchase with that same amount a week ago. It'll be a rippling effect. Food or clothing. Answer Food. Effect-say good bye to Kohl's in WI. Effect-jobs Lost. Effect-Unemployment increase. Effect-Market worsens. You get where this is trending. It'll only get worse when the money people get during this isn't saved and used for bills and rent. When that happens the housing market will take a bigger hit when mortgages are falling behind. But we'll see, what does the gov't do to slow that scenario? How long do we choose flattening the curve vs an economy slowly in ruins? The oil industry is about to crash. There's nowhere to store what's coming out of the ground. You can't just turn off a well and turn it back on again. Companies will fail and the drilling capacity will plunge. When demand eventually increases prices will skyrocket.

What isn't baked into the stock prices is the reverberations of this initial shock wave. When those dominoes start to fall it will get really, really ugly and the government will have already exhausted any means of stopping it. And if the economy does try and get back on track, other problems will emerge such as an oil supply crisis. It might take the entire decade to get out of this.

There was no getting around an economic disaster. The economic disaster was locked in when we didn't do the proper pandemic preparations or have a sufficient plan in place. Once you fail at prevention as the US did, the only choice is do you want 1) the panic/disorder/chaos of not flattening the curve or 2) the more gradual but safer lockdown. Either way the economy is screwed. When you do the math on how many people would have died without flattening the curve, it would have been very costly. And people would have quarantined anyway out of fear without official orders. And you can't just reopen the economy. There has to be a plan. Which I've heard nothing about.

They also will need to be checking the temperature of fans when they go through the gates into the stadium. In fact they should probably be doing that permanently. If you have a fever you shouldn't be at a sporting event. Asian countries are already doing this, even to get into places like a mall.

They are reporting that we got the R0 down from 2.7 to 1.4 in Seattle. Remote work has been going on for 3 weeks now, 2 weeks of social distancing, and 1 week of the really strong restrictions. As this point I'm thinking we will successfully fight off the worst case scenario. But who knows how we are going to phase things back in without it spreading like wildfire again. When it gets a little warmer maybe coffee shops and restaurants with outdoor seating can reopen or something.