Magox

Looks like Twitter has made their decision and are ready to pick this battle. The city is literally burning down and the mayor and governor has completely abdicated any sense of rule and law for their city and community. It's a disgrace.

Looks like that Lancet study was poorly conducted. And this is from an HCQ skeptic

Better across the board

Our team has got SEO guys always working on it. It's complicated as hell, there is no real rhyme or reason. But, certain kinds of traffic is weighted more than others, the volume of traffic, backlinking, referral/direct users etc etc.

I'm largely in agreement with what you are saying, my views over the years have moderated and changed some. I'm no longer a believer in net national debt being nearly as much of an issue as the countries ability to repay the servicing costs of the debt that satisfies the bond markets. And let's face it, as long as the dollar is king, there is no better game in town. And there is nothing remotely on the horizon that will replace it's status. With that said, just like the Roman empire, there will be a day of reckoning. But, even the Roman empire lasted 1500 years before it's reign ended. I may quibble with some of your policy prescriptions but in spirit we are on similar tracks. Just to be clear, I don't believe it will be a V recovery, I think it will be more like a Nike Swoosh. There will be quite a few small businesses that will permanently shudder and those aren't replaced overnight. Provided that confidence continues and that the media doesn't scare the ***** out of people with inklings of a "second wave" and that a vaccine is in place by the end of the year, I see strong growth beginning in the 3rd and continuing on through for a few quarters. I think there is a decent chance we could get back down to 7-8% unemployment by the end of next summer. That will be the low hanging fruit, getting it down from 8-5% could take years. Which is why I am a big proponent of borrowing the crap out of money right now while interest rates are near 0%, with a federal reserve that will purchase up the growing junk bonds that could present a problem but won't because of the Fed. And if there could be more targeted stimulus that gets small businesses back to whole with some infrastructure, maybe we could get back to 5% unemployment in 2 years as opposed to maybe 3-4 without the added stimulus. I just alluded to this in my previous post. Corporate bond market is gonna get awfully hairy in the next 3-18 months. Luckily for them, the federal reserve will backstop it.

Personally, I'd rather not have it regulated. That is provided of course that they stay out of the censorship, fact checking business. I alluded to this earlier, but Google/Bing - search engines and social media platforms should be open to examination on how their algorithms prioritize what is shown. Sometimes I look up things and it's impossible to find it, you have to go through 2-3 pages of left wing views on something before a right leaning view is presented. I don't think it's a conspiracy per se, but I do think they weight mainstream media outlets over others, which of course drives even more traffic to those sights which then gives it higher prioritization and it just snowballs. To me, this is something that is even more impacting and doesn't get nearly the attention that it should.

That's my personal view. But if Big Tech is going to get in the business of censorship, fact checking and algorithmic prioritizations of how content is displayed, then there has to be oversight.

For added perspective

No guarantee’s but at least there would be oversight. And a more conscience entity that could lead to a better product. And if not congress, then who? Congress represents the people (Am I gonna get fact checked by One of the resident libertarians?) And I think it’s appropriate that Congress is involved in the oversight because that would mean there would be accountability via the ballot box.

Win win?

Laughable. The guy is not just a lefty, he's a left wing nut job. The guy shouldn't have any responsibility that involves objectivity.

I don't expect the Executive order to have real teeth to it. We'll soon find out. But it should be a clarion call for the Republican Senate to take this matter up. For me, this is a priority. A few months ago there may have been bipartisan desire for this, but now that Trump is in the middle of it, I wouldn't bet on it.

I wouldn't trust them to do it on their own. If they could have a regulated entity that is approved by congress to conduct the fact checks, details on what is and isn't censored and how the algorithmic search and display functionalities are conducted (which I would argue is even more important than the fact checking/censoring), then I'd be ok with it. I don't trust the media nor big tech to conduct this. While we are at it, I think the media needs to be regulated. I read a really good article the other day in the WSJ from ex CBS chief Van Gordon Sauter which I highly recommend that people read. He goes on to make the case not just that the media has made a huge leftward lurch especially now in the age of "resistance journalism" under Trump, where the mask has completely been taken off, but that the journalistic model is driven by finances as opposed to just giving straight news. I've lamented over this for years on this board, that today's news is driven by affirmation bias. People want to get their news where it comports with their pre existing held views. If news organizations begin to start moving away from this, they will lose viewers, at least that's their calculation. So the financial motive is to continue to keep providing what their base viewers want to digest. And now in the age of Twitter, these so-called journalists want to become Twitter rock stars and the more gotcha moments they can provide for their followers, the larger their followings, likes and retweets they will get. Which helps their careers out. At least so they believe. Dan Abrams had a novel idea in that article: For all publicly regulated news companies, they should have to list themselves as left, center and right leaning organizations. That should be made clear and it should be regulated by congress to provide metrics to somehow prove this. I'm tired of the media pretending to be objective when they are not and the public should be made very aware of where their leanings stand. The way they could do this is not just on HOW they report the news but what stories they determine to cover, that is how their soft bias shows, at least that was the old school way. It's possible that doing something like this could get you a better overall product that may actually report just the news.

No one claimed it would.

This is an interesting factoid from the CEO of BOA Wow! This certainly suggests that there is a lot fuel for the pent-up-demand argument. It's one thing if a wealthy person has 30-40% higher balance in his account, as they aren't as likely to spend the money as someone who has less than $5,000. And then there is this; This strongly suggests that the rebound is well on it's way and that the stimulus checks and emergency unemployment benefits have been effective at staving off human financial catastrophe. Now, they got to get them back to work.

Yesterday would have been the first day of more normalized reporting, I would expect today and tomorrow’s report to follow through with that post holiday. Also expect to see some higher confirmed infections coming down the pike as testing dumps will be piled on. But make no mistake, the trend is looking good. The question is when and where does it bottom out? There are supposed converging forces at play with more re openings on one hand which theoretically puts more people at risk (there are counter arguments to this) and the fact that hotter, more humid sunny days which are hostile components for viral transmission. Plus there MAY be a cyclical component as well and elements of herd immunity of communities within cities at play.

You’re awfully naive of the power of politics and competing interests.

This is the third report that I have read that the Lancet study that is being used to discredit Hydroxychloroquine used faulty data. This is beginning to look like it was conducted in a manner where they were looking for a predetermined outcome. I’m not saying it works but how could there be so many data reporting flaws? The power of TDS is a global phenomenon

Another sign the economy is opening up. Still a ways off but improving...I would expect to see this sort of incremental improvement to accelerate over the coming months. I wouldn't be surprised if by September we are at 75%+ of last year's numbers.

Yep, I made a suggestion but if I'm understanding you correctly I think we are in spirit thinking of something similar. They went down this path, they can either pull back from it or allow an independent body that can be trusted by the public to oversee this decision making process. This 100% They spent less than $30,000 on "electing" Trump. This was all a practice in sowing social discord. The DNC establishment and media played right into it. That is exactly what happened.

I'm all for the free market. The problem Gene is that most people get their information online, whether it's Google, Youtube, Twitter, FB etc. And when content is being controlled via Fact checks, censorship, algorithmic searches and display functionalities by these mediums then there has to be some oversight. Did you read Twitter's explanation? It was fact checked by CNN and WAPO. And did you see who provided the explanation? It was some left wing nut job. The fact checkers are just as egregious because not only do they often time use sources that support a verdict that has an inherent bias to justify their decisions it's the things they decide to fact check. Right wing views are fact checked much more often than left wing ones. They need to have an independent body that is made up of some sort of non partisan makeup, people from left and right where people can actually trust who censors and fact checks the content. To allow a company which clearly has employees that have a particular worldview to determine outcomes that are very impacting without hardly any oversight is crazy. They either just become a platform provider and allow the "free market" of speech to go on, or if they insist on getting into the editorial business of becoming the arbiter of truth, then there has to be checks and balances so that the integrity of this decision making process can be trusted by it's users.

Terrible decision by Twitter. They just went down that slippery slope. The day of reckoning for social media is quickly approaching. They wield too much power to go left unchecked. Once they decided to move from being simply a social media platform provider to then move into the editorial business of becoming the arbiter of what is true or not, then the ball game changed. They should be treated as a public utility.

It depends on how deep the hole gets and the confidence of the American public to get back to a more normalized society. If you look at airline travel, hotel booking and google metrics, people are getting out. A lot more so than anticipated at this juncture. If there are no other media driven scares that play into the pscyhe of consumers from increased infections etc. Then I happen to think that the recovery has a lot of low hanging fruit to recoup. I could see the economy easily getting to 8% unemployment by next summer, provided the aforementioned happens. And if we do get a vaccine that is available for over 100 million people in the US to use by the end of the year, then I fully expect that to happen. The problem from my view isn't getting to 8%, it's what will happen afterwards. This is where I think it gets a lot more difficult. This is the recouping of those small businesses that permanently shuddered. Those don't come back overnight. Hopefully some additional lending legislation with some of it being forgivable can provide those that lost their businesses a second bite at the apple to attempt to make themselves whole again.

Possibly. Makes sense. I do think that there will be more companies employing work-at-home models. I know our company, we made the decision to have more of our employees work from home. We had the luxury to first have seasonal 1099 contracted workers sort of show their mettle first and it gave us the chance to observe their habits, ethics and results to give us an opportunity to pick the cream of the crop. That's helped us greatly. The thing about work-at-home jobs is that there are trade offs. If you can only go by a resume and some referrals and you have a newly hired employee there are logistical challenges to getting the employee up-to-speed and you truly don't know their work habits in a somewhat unsupervised environment. Clearly working in an office you have more control of these issues. But the on the positive side of the ledger, it's less costly, you can attract better nationwide talent as opposed to being stuck with what is available in the region where the company resides and now with these sort of virus disaster issues you are less affected. We actually opened up a call center this past year and now they are all working from home for now. We are about to open up another office in Savannah GA. and Boca. Florida, but most of our team works from home. There are advantages and disadvantages to both models.