Syrmax

BREAKING: USO Exchange traded ETF may be in process of blowing up right now. Much like the Inverse Volatility ETF (XIV) did a year or so ago. Trading Halted in USO. More to follow but looks like institutions can't deliver/create new shares in derivatives.

The May WTI Futures contract expires today, so if you are dumb enough to have NOT sold the contract (and there are a few), you have to take physical delivery. Today. Cushing, Oklahoma. 1,000 barrel contracts. So...at 42 gals/barrel, I say we "buy" a May contract today (actually you would get paid to buy the oil at negative prices), rent about five 8,000 gallon tanker trucks (and drivers) and road trip it to Cushing! We all are going to have unused vacation, right? We get paid to take the oil. #cantlose. Just have to find a market to sell that oil into...and of course keep the tanker trucks and drivers available as temporary storage.

Other than NYC area...there aren't many COVID cases actually in hospitals, relative to capacity. And since many hospitals are now going broke due to deferral of non-COVID cases, we probably won't need new MD's. Its perfect!

I can believe NYC and environs may need to stay with existing restrictions into June but here in CNY and many other counties...not so much. As of this past weekend, Oswego county had something like 54 cases and a population of ~ 117,000. The lockdown is now officially absurd there. Even my county, Onondaga, has 263 active cases as of yesterday and a total population of 450,000. Even if active cases are undercounted by a factor of 2 or 3 its still statistically almost round off error.

I would def pass on the Cruise ship.

I'm in the same boat. I actually "bought" an extra week of vacation this year but not only have i had to cancel an Orlando golf trip in March, and 2 week Italy trip (starting tommorrow - not)...no idea what int'l travel will be available. I'd like to get over to Germany and catch some of my soccer team if possible (did that last fall). Plus, doing some travelling post-covid has got to be less crowded as i don't think everyone will immediately feel up to int'l travel right away. i've been thinking of something out in western US or Western Canada for "domestic" alternatives.

I don't know if it was a protest...but yesterday, returning home from dodging the virus at Home Depot, i spotted a guy sort of jogging alongside the road, on his own. Seemed a bit oddly dressed for jogging (compared to what you usually see) but what was really odd was that he was holding up a decent sized American Flag on a pole as he jogged. It was also raining. I wonder if this was some sort of protest thing or just a guy feeling super patriotic.

Bl*w me!

One thing that i haven't run across a good explanation for...is that Fauci, etal have been saying a vaccine is usually a 12-18 month effort to get it developed, tested, approved, deployed. Which i get. However, and i could be off here a bit, the 2009 H1N1 vaccine was apparently developed within about 4-6 months. What gives? Is there something special about corona virus vaccines? In fact, even with what i believe was a shorter vaccine timeline, by the time it was rolled out in Nov 2009, the virus had pretty much run its course and the mass quantities of vaccine weren't needed (or wanted by that point...$$).

Those are vanishingly small numbers of cases. Probably in line with seasonal flu caseloads. The one size fits all responses have been excessive IMO. Hotspot areas downstate, makes sense. Not in the boonies. Cuomo should significantly relax requirements in places like Oswego County.

Will the asteroid be required to wear a mask also?

Well, Onondaga County (Syracuse area) now has more recovered cases then active (301 vs 271, respectively)...so that's a step in the right direction. Thus far 17 deaths in the County attributed to covid-19. I'm seeing more and more "out there" stuff from my Trumpist contacts. Its like conspiracy season on steroids. I just learned this morning that coronavirus testing is a Democrat plot! Who knew? I'm a fairly constant observer of politics and current events...and i have to say that I had "sympathy" for the Trumpist complaints about various Democrat conspiracies to get Trump, mainly because there was credibility to them (Russia , Ukraine nonsense, a thousand other ones played out by the MSM daily). However, I've long since passed the point of having any sympathy for them after the complete whitewash the Rumpists are perpetrating over the Feb-Mid March "Rumplestilskin" period and now questioning whether "lockdowns" were ever needed, anywhere. It's uneducated idiocy. And now, there's the Liberate the States nonsense, the cozying up to quacks like Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, Dr. Drew, while Dr. Fauci gets roasted (they hate that he was involved with and a major advocate in Public Health in the AIDS research and cure...herd immunity was the solution for the gays per the Rumpist loons...). Sigh.

That's a rhetorical question, right?

I'm just gonna leave THIS here. I like Zerohedge but you have to be careful on some of it. Of course I say the same about the mainstream media also... Enjoy and tighten down your tin foil hats!

Looks like (Draft) Dodgin Donnie has hit the crack pipe a lil early for the weekend?

I don't think I'd trust any # Beijing comes up with at this point. It's just a Blizzard of Bullshit.

The White House Perhaps you found it conspicuous that the US presidency and Donald Trump didn’t show up until the end of this list. The White House is here in part because many of the institutional failures and mistakes described above are also effectively the institutional failures and mistakes of the White House. The FDA and CDC are both part of President Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services. So, too, are the Surgeon General and the United States Public Health Service, which we have so far let off the hook for their brazen participation in the nudging state behavior surrounding the use of masks by citizens. Perhaps you also found it conspicuous that this example isn’t getting the same clever little device that the others did. You know, where we would say that the White House told us a story about who it was, but then a lot of people died and now that story is dead? I didn’t say that…because the story isn’t dead. The narrative of the US Presidency is alive and well. And that’s a problem...

Congress Today, everybody knows that everybody knows that Congress can’t even pass an historic, once-in-a-lifetime emergency bill for a global pandemic without inserting into it every possible personal cause, special interest or political ambition. Frankly, in context of most government actions, you could even make the argument that the CARES Act is a decent bill. Relatively speaking, anyway. It contains a lot of direct aid to Americans, through direct payments, unemployment extensions, small business lending and temporary (he said, tentatively) expansions of various social safety net programs. Along with a bunch of other ridiculous shit. There’s $17 billion for “businesses critical to maintaining national security”, which is regulation-speak for bailing out Boeing shareholders for management’s disastrous execution of the 737 Max, and pretending it had anything to do with the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s a provision that prohibits use of funding for a wall with Mexico. There’s a provision that prevents recipients of loans to take actions in response to labor union formation. There’s a provision that squeezed in shortened approval processes for drugs that have nothing to do with COVID-19. Oh, and also sunscreen. The FDA is now required from congress not to review a particular sunscreen ingredient. It was important to the nation’s healing from COVID-19 to permit the use of HSA funds to purchase menstrual care products. There’s the usual ag stuff, because no bill from US Congress is complete and no congressman from Iowa electable without it. Oh, and nothing says, “Let’s urgently help businesses and families recover from this pandemic” like a fully funded abstinence program. Or a rousing performance at the newly funded Kennedy Center, which responded to its windfall by proceeding to furlough just about everybody left on staff. That’s just the nonsense that got into the bill.

...The Fed’s actions represent a gross inequity, the rough equivalent of dropping a trillion dollars from a blimp into a stadium full of billionaires, and then saying, “Well, how else are we going to get money into the hands of store owners and workers?” ...Whatever we decide tomorrow will look like, we must not forget how Wall Street has not represented our interests.

Its super long...but a lot of Shibboleths are slain. And yeah, the WHO are a pile of sh*t. Just one of many...

This is a Long Read but IMO thought provoking reading for thinking people. Fear not, the failures are institutional, not solely a matter of Left or Right politics. ...Snip.... First, the people die; then, the stories. The human toll of COVID-19 is unlikely to approach even a mean fraction of the pain visited on humanity in the first quarter of the 20th century. But what about the stories we tell about our global institutions, our shared values, and our own orthodoxies and authorities? Those stories are dying. They are dying because the institutions built on those stories failed us all, and all at once. First, the people die; then, the stories. The failures of these institutions were not simple mistakes, evidence of wrongness of one kind or another. The failures of these institutions were failures of narrative, devastating revelations of each institution’s fundamental inability to do what they said they would do. Revelations that their purpose was something other than the story they told about themselves. In various ways they each held power over us through those stories, told using the language of our needs and values and beliefs. In a single event, the world proved those stories false on their faces. ...Snip... Today, America is moving quickly on a path to frame COVID-19 as a domestic political matter, the result of failures that will be solved in the voting booth. This is a mistake. If we would not yield our birthright, we must first choose never to forget the full scope of our betrayal. ...End Snip...

Sort of same here, although a bar/restaurant that I used to frequent (a bit too often frankly), has been offering takeout meals 2x a week so I have been getting a Friday fish fry each week to support them... but that's been it for buying prepared food. I've actually taken up learning how to cook while on lockdown. I'm kind if enjoying it!

Probably not.. R&D one of the first things to go with most companies. GOOGL and AMZN have been exceptions to those rules as they had huge finance underpinning them while they spent years bleeding out cash. Not saying some companies or Govt labs won't be working on automation but...i'll bet it goes slower than present pace...

I've thought that this is a very real possibility that has to have been gamed out before somewhere within their Defense/Political establishments. A perhaps less conspiratorial version would be that the virus was accidentally released, or even was just totally zoonotic, and they just seized on the opportunity to help along the scenario by simply playing dumb and allowing internal and external population movements to occur (Chinese New Year travel) before they started to lockdown Hubei Province. The delay and obfuscation ensure the virus escapes out and then you just sit back and watch the carnage unfold...

Lulz...