I think this is already the case per the terms of the contract as posted in the OP. Per the contract, it is a draw if there is no election in 2020 or if the electoral college doesn’t meet by Jan 31, 2021.

Your thread discusses several topics, and I will try to address each of them.

Government control (of resources)
The Chinese coronavirus pandemic is highlighting the government's ability to control resources, including food, supplies, medical care, and travel. I don't think the pandemic has given the government any additional abilities in this regard. If you live in a democracy, this should highlight the importance of voting and to vote for someone you can trust will not abuse this power. In the US for example, Trump's political opponents have been pressuring him to invoke additional powers to have a stronger grip on US citizens (it is possible they are doing this to set a precedent for when they get in power).

Throughout the world, people have been calling for things such as national lockdowns and additional restrictions in order to stop the spread of the coronavirus. These calls are very widespread and do not represent a minority of people.

Some governments already have effective control over communications, while the coronavirus will not give governments additional control over the ability to communicate.

When restrictions were first being put in place, almost everyone was supporting more restrictions. After several days, some people are saying the initial knee-jerk reaction was too strong. I don't think these people are being called conspiracy nuts. These people are generally saying that restrictions should be in place for a period of time, but not until the virus is eradicated.

Government restrictions on freedom become permanent
We will see if this happens. As mentioned above, there are large numbers of populations calling for these restrictions to be put in place. With this in mind, I don't think there is anything that could remove this (new) status quo. If there were free and fair elections with these restrictions in place, one would presume the electorate would vote for these restrictions to remain.

Vaccines
Even if the average life expectancy of those who make it through childhood has remained constant, advances in medicine have resulted in a higher percentage of people making through childhood. A strong immune system does not help against many of the diseases that children are vaccinated for. Prior to vaccines for many diseases, survival was not necessarily Darwinism but could be better described as a matter of luck as to who contracted a disease.

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I won't ask you to confirm/deny this, but I have suspected you reside somewhere in Europe. When I read this about a week ago, my thought was that you are an older person, but I don't see what caused me to come to this conclusion. If you are in Europe, I think there is a good chance you will catch coronavirus, unfortunately. Europe's healthcare system is largely overwhelmed, specifically in Italy, but this will probably also be the case in other European countries.

Coronavirus is very contagious. If you have coronavirus, you will possibly have it for weeks before you start showing symptoms, and you may be contagious for days before you show symptoms. It is estimated that coronavirus will kill between 1 and 3% of people who contract it, however between 15 and 20% of people will require critical medical care, including those that will die from it. If you need critical medical care, but do not receive it, the chances you will die from coronavirus is almost certain. This is why it is so important that the coronavirus not spread quickly.

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I am sorry to hear your relative has contracted the coronavirus. Hopefully, she will make a quick recovery. Good luck and Godspeed.

My understanding is the payments to taxpayers will be sent based on their 2018 tax year payments, but the actual amount will be based on their 2020 (or maybe 2019) tax year income. So at tax time, you may end up owing some of the money back, or you may receive a credit if your income went down.

I don't think more testing is the answer to any coronavirus related problem.

There is no cure to coronavirus, so if you test positive, doctors cannot start any kind of treatment for you. Likewise, if your symptoms are not serious, you should not be admitted to a hospital, and the question of if you should be admitted to a hospital does not change depending on if you have tested positive for coronavirus or not. Testing positive for coronavirus also does not change the direction to stay at home and use best practices period, but especially if you have symptoms.

There is also the issue of the F1 score of tests. The F1 score is, in simple terms, how accurate the test is. If the test is accurate 90% of the time, but only 0.5% of the population who is tested actually has coronavirus, the majority of people who test positive will not actually have coronavirus. This is important for two reasons, 1) it will skew the mortality and fatality rate down, which may cause some people to not take precautions against catching coronavirus and 2) it will give everyone a false sense of security that all cases have been identified and these people are in isolation, but 10% of cases would have been missed and it is unknown how long someone can be infected with coronavirus, test negative but still be contagious. Both of these problems could cause the virus to spread faster than it might otherwise.

Testing capacity in the US is increasing, so naturally identified cases will also increase. I don't have sufficient domain knowledge of pandemics to estimate the percentage of cases identified, or the rate the actual number of cases (identified and unidentified) is growing.

I do agree that South Korea has done a good job of keeping cases under control, although I do understand some new clusters are popping up; this may be due to the problems with a lot of testing I described above. I don't think any other countries have approached the problem in a way that resulted in the same success.

Trump was the first to ban travel from China and Iran and did so in January. After Trump closed the border with Europe, nearly every other border in the world was closed or restricted almost overnight.


It would generally be good advice to let the professionals do their job, and speak to the details as to what is happening.

What did any other country do, except for China?

Most countries didn’t even ban travel from China. Most countries only monitored the temperature of travelers coming in from certain countries. Most of Europe/the west did not even do that.

I am not sure this is fake.

See https://unfoundation.org/what-we-do/issues/global-health/covid-19-response-fund-faq/  which links to the website listed in the OP. The whois for UNFOUNDATION.ORG shows it was registered in 1998.

edit:
This is definitely not fake. There is a tweet from a verified twitter account for the UN foundation that directs people to covid19responsefund.org

It looks like they are expanding the revenue streams they are using to repay lenders who lost coin.

An OAN reporter asked Trump about the left wing media outlets repeating the Chinese government propaganda and what he thought about that in his press conference today.

Most of the media was referring to the coronavirus as being originated and/or associated with China until it became a serious problem in most of the world and started overwhelming European health care systems. Having the coronavirus be associated with China has the potential to upend their role in the global economy and community.

A lot of Western companies were willing to look the other way with regards to the theft of IP, and human rights violations because it meant short term profits and lots of money for high level executives. The coronavirus should change that because it will have more than erased those short term profits and in a lot of cases, caused death to many that are close to business executives.

In Italy, in terms of percentage of their population, they are basically going through a 9/11 every day with how many of their people are dying. I think the Chinese realize that no amount of propaganda can account for this and are sending hundreds of doctors and lots of medical equipment to try to mitigate the damage.

There is not actually a membership fee to join the forum. The Copper Membership is something that allows new users to unlock certain features that are normally reserved for more experienced members, such as posting pictures and having shorter wait times between posts. The cost has historically been kept consistent over time in terms of USD.

If the forum does see an uptick in actual new users (not necessarily new registrations), I would encourage the mods to create a new, lower-cost paid membership that decreases the wait time between posts that would make it easier for actual new members to learn about and discuss bitcoin in these uncertain times. The cost would need to be high enough to make spamming expensive.

The goal of this would be to lower the barriers for intelligent discussion among people who have an actual interest in learning about and discussing bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. This should get potential new users to choose to use bitcointalk over competitor forums that promote altcoins to be bitcoin (falsely).

I have seen the OP post a lot of dis/misinformation about the coronavirus. I would take anything he says with a grain of salt.

I updated the output so that previous spaces is now replaced with "_"

Ultimately, the keys are strings, regardless of spaces.

I updated the DB.

I am pondering a more robust way to automatically update the DB. I updated the script that pulls the merit data (that I did not commit) that drops then (re)creates the table, and loops through each row. (thinking out loud) I think a better approach would be to query the number of rows my DB currently has, and start adding rows at the appropriate index. Once my script to update the DB is better, I can create a function that will update the DB if it was last updated more than 7.25 days ago using a global variable that keeps track of when it was last updated. I am short on time now, and will probably spend some time updating the code more this weekend or later this week.

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Thanks for your input DroomieChikito and Initscri

This is fake new. You should remove this post to stop the spread of misinformation.

My guess is that most customers of this size are leaving platforms rather than joining/getting on border onto platforms since the last bubble burst. A potentially nine figure customer is something that would generate confidence for other customers to create accounts and trade on Bitfinex. 

Italy is rationing their medical care and prioritizing based on their chances of survival. If there is an otherwise healthy person and a person with other health issues, the person who has other health issues will not receive medical care because the Italian medical system is at capacity. Both need medical care to survive so the otherwise healthy person has a chance of survival while the person with other health issues is almost certain to die, even though their chances would be much better had they received care.

This is why there cannot be too many people sick at once. The health system has a limited capacity and can prevent most deaths of those who it is caring for.

While we are fighting the coronavirus, the travel/entertainment/tourism industries will be near non-existent, and long term the world economy will likely look different than it does today.

In his press conference today, I noticed a few subtle things that Trump said. He referred to the coronavirus as an "enemy". Also, when being asked about airline bailouts, he mentioned it is not the airlines fault there is such a large decline in travel demand, then he said that the effects of the coronavirus is not anyone's fault except where it came from, or something along the lines.

Trump also referred to the coronavirus as the "Chinese Virus" in a tweet a few hours ago. This has caused both "Chinese Virus" and "American Virus" to trend on Twitter. The latter is either social media manipulation by the Chinese government, or people on Twitter are so triggered by anything Trump says, they will blame him for something America's chief adversary is responsible for.

You left out details such as why there wasn’t anyone infected in the US for months after the outbreak started in China, and why the outbreak started months after the base you cited closed.

Your post sounds a lot like Chinese Communist Party propaganda to me.

That would be in very bad taste.

Jack Ma, Chinese businessman (who is a proponent of free markets) tweeted (his only tweet ever) that he is shipping masks and coronavirus test kits to the US. His foundation has said he is sending a million masks and a half million test kits.

40 days sounds extreme for the length of a lockdown.

In a worst-case scenario involving a Chinese type lockdown...

It takes a maximum of 14 days to show symptoms of coronavirus, but most people will start showing symptoms after 2-5 days.

If the lockdown starts on day "1", after a week the military can go door to door to check for symptoms, those that show symptoms can be quarantined, the process takes about a week and is repeated after 14 days. This would mean that no additional spreading would happen after day "1" and all cases would be identified (and the lockdown could be lifted) on day 21.

I believe this is basically what China did in Wuhan. There are some videos on twitter of empty highways, and videos of pretty brutal police actions against Chinese citizens.

I don't know if this is something western (civilized) countries would be willing to do.  It would involve removing ~all freedoms from citizens for three weeks.

BitMEX does not use trading prices on its platform to make liquidation decisions. BitMEX uses an index price derived from multiple, reputable exchanges to decide to liquidate a trader. This is not to say that traders will not take advantage of arbitrage opportunities if the price on BitMEX is lower than the price on other exchanges.