Well.. there were requests from poorer nations, made to the pharma giants such as Pfizer and Moderna to forfeit their IP for the CoVID 19 vaccine, but these corporations refused to do so. Now I am aware of the huge investment they have put in order to develop these vaccines. So the UN or some other global body should have reached a mutually beneficial deal with both the sides, to make sure that everyone receives the vaccines on time. Right now, everyone is left to fend for themselves.

Being a shopkeeper might be really tough in Venezuela. With the currency devaluing every day, I don't know how they are managing the situation. Maybe they are taking an additional margin while accepting payments in the local currency. I really don't know why the government is not allowing USD as a legal tender. So many people are using it, and it makes no sense to ban it's usage (although the ban is not enforced). If they make it legal, at least it would reduce the suffering of ordinary people to some extent.

Don't you think that there is something strange with this? China is where the virus first originated. And yet, they have reported less than 5,000 deaths. On the other hand, the United States has reported close to 600,000 deaths. Can anyone explain the reason for this difference? Is anyone going to argue that the healthcare system in China is much better when compared to that in the United States? Or is someone going to claim that the population density in the US is more than that in China?

LOL.. do you really think that the United Arab Emirates, and the Emirate of Dubai in particular needs to attract tourists to boost up their GDP?  There are only around 1 million Emirati citizens and the UAE produce 3.8 million barrels of crude oil per day. That is 3.8 barrel of oil for every citizen per day!!! And they own some of the world's most valuable sovereign wealth funds. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority alone holds assets worth $710 billion. Still think they need tourism to survive? 

Moderna has completely failed as far as mass production is concerned. They have produced far below their own estimates and have shipped most of the vaccine vials to the United States. Obviously the Moderna vaccine doesn't need deep freezing at -70 degrees Celsius, but they have produced less vials when compared to Pfizer. Even in the US (where Moderna shipped almost all of their doses), Pfizer outnumber Moderna by 40 million doses or so.

I don't think that you should blame the people of Venezuela. They had two options in 2013 (after the death of Hugo Chávez). The first choice was Nicolás Maduro of the Socialist party and the second choice was Henrique Capriles Radonski (who represented the Primero Justicia party). A lot of people were scared by the religious extremism of Capriles and additionally the death of Chávez created some sort of a sympathy wave in favor of Maduro. The people voted for the least poisonous option, and that turned out to be Maduro. If Capriles was elected, then he would have destroyed what remains of the Venezuelan portion of the Amazon forest (similar to what his friend Bolsonaro did in Brazil) and exterminated the indigenous groups.

He's just jealous that others are becoming rich. It took a long time for him to become a billionaire. He spent his entire life working hard, wasting his youth. Now in front of his eyes, he is witnessing youngsters in their 20s and 30s who have become millionaires from their investment in cryptocurrency and these people are enjoying their life (unlike Buffet). And it is natural for these 90 plus people to feel jealous about the younger Bitcoiners. Also, wealth is sometimes measured in a relative sense. If there are a lot of wealthy people, then the importance of wealth goes down. Buffet definitely doesn't want that.

ROFL.. this is a purely politically motivated poll. I am not a big fan of Western pharmaceutical companies, but from the available data it is clear that the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna have the highest efficacy (>95%). The OP hasn't included them in the poll, probably to favor his pick. On the other hand, the Sinovac vaccine has a single-dose efficiency of just 3%, according to a study performed by Universidad de Chile.

Why you are promoting the Chinese vaccine? I have already posted about this in the Politics sub-section of this forum. Chinese vaccines have a single-dose efficiency of only 3%, when compared to 73% for the Sputnik V vaccine. A lot of countries trusted the Sinovac vaccine and spent billions of $$$ in purchasing them. Morocco, Turkey, Hungary, Serbia and Chile are among them and all of them are now regretting their decision. The 3% efficacy hardly makes any difference and people who once got this vaccine can't be inoculated with another more effective vaccine.

What to say?

All they had to do was to survive another 40-50 overs and the weather would have done the rest. But they couldn't even survive the first session of the 5th day. All the five wickets gone in just 23 overs. And look who got the wickets. The inexperienced spinners Ramesh Mendis and Praveen Jayawickrama shared 9 wickets between them (the remaining wicket went to Dhananjaya de Silva). If Bangladesh perform like this, then soon they will end up like Zimbabwe.

From what I have seen during the last few months, Biden's health condition doesn't look very good. Sooner or later, Harris will step in (either formally or informally). I don't know about how the Democrats are planning to do this, but my guess is that the initial two years will be given to Biden (at least nominally), before Harris take charge as the president. So in case you want to make a bid in favor of Harris, do it before she becomes the president. Once she becomes the president, the odds are going to be more biased.

The situation may improve by October. You may be right. But I am afraid that it may not improve to a degree so that biosecure bubbles won't be required. Also, I don't think that fans will be allowed in to the stadiums. Under these circumstances, it will be better to move the tournament to the United Arab Emirates, because I heard that a majority of the population there have been vaccinated against CoVID 19. And the ICC will benefit from low tax rate as well (actually zero taxes).

I was expecting something like this. They can't just lockup 2,000 people and then do 24x7 surveillance. At least one or two individuals will get tired of the isolation inside the bubble and go out for some adventure. The same thing happened with the PSL as well. And members from multiple franchises have now tested positive for CoVID 19 (CSK and KKR), which means that the infection is spreading inside the bubble. I don't think that the BCCI now has any option other than to postpone the tournament.

Well.. if you check my previous posts, then you can see that just one and half months back, the BTC dominance was above 60% level. There has been a massive surge in altcoin market cap since then. Now don't ask me whether this is sustainable or not. I have been here since 2012, and I have seen similar rallies in 2013 and 2017 as well. On both the occasions, towards the end of the bull run altcoins went up much more than Bitcoin. And on the second occasion (in 2017), the hype was so prevalent that useless shitcoins managed multi-billion market capitalizations.

I am just getting tired of the propaganda here. I clicked the link and it says that the video shows a lady being forcibly vaccinated against her will. I checked with my friends in India and they are saying that the incident involved a CoVID positive person, who refused home isolation and was therefore forcibly detained by the health workers. 3,000-4,000 people are dying in India every day, and you want these infectious people to roam around further spreading the virus? A massive propaganda campaign is going on in the Twitter and other social media platforms. These criminals are playing with people's lives and should be prosecuted.

From what I heard, the government has started to import Sputnik V vaccines from Russia. And this vaccine has been proven to be of much higher efficacy when compared to the Chinese vaccines. According to Lancet, Sputnik V is having a single dose efficacy of 73.1% versus the single dose efficacy of 3% for the Sinovac vaccine. Double dose efficacy is 91.6% for Sputnik V versus 50.4% for Sinovac. For Sinovac, the double dose efficacy is not that bad, but for the Indian government there is not enough time to fully vaccinate everyone. So they are hoping to vaccinate as much people as possible with a single dose of either Sputnik V/ Covishield (AstraZeneca) / CoVaxin and reduce the incidence of new infections. With just 3% efficacy, Sinovac is unsuitable for this purpose.

https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n969

I was literally shocked to see SRH bidding for Kedar Jadhav, and that too for such a huge amount. During the last season he was like a curse to the Chennai Super Kings, and played a large part in many of their defeats. This time around SRH seems to be cursed with his presence. So far he has made a grand total of 40 runs from 4 matches. I don't understand the point in including players such as Jadhav and Vijay Shankar in the playing XI. It is not going to hurt them, in case they include Jason Roy in place of Nabi and Priyam Garg for Jadhav.

Can anyone tell me why Anrich Nortje is still not playing for Delhi Capitals? The last time I heard, he was embroiled in some quarantine formality and was supposed to be available from the 4th match onwards. What happened after that? Punjab has started very slowly, probably due to the absence of KL Rahul. His replacement (Prabhsimran Singh) failed and therefore the burden to stabilize the innings fell on Mayank Agarwal. But at this point, their run rate is below 6 runs per over.

Here are the latest stats from 2nd May 2021.

Total market cap: $2,204,986,949,848 (+17.53%)

Bitcoin: $1,058,174,616,878 (47.990%)
Bitcoin forks: $26,517,738,001 (1.203%)
Stablecoins: $80,988,963,447 (3.673%)
Altcoins: $1,030,083,463,652 (46.716%)
WBTC: $9,222,167,870 (0.418%)

This is the change compared to my last post:

Bitcoin: -2.056%
Bitcoin forks: +0.061%
Stablecoins: -0.356%
Altcoins: +2.355%
WBTC: -0.003%

I heard that Biden is gearing up for a $6 trillion additional spending plan, which is conveniently named as the "American Families Plan". Obviously not all of this amount can be sourced from printing banknotes alone. Some of it needs to come from taxing successful people. The long term capital gains tax for the highest slab is about to touch 60% in cities such as LA and Portland. I don't understand why the successful people still want to remain in the United States. Is it that hard to renounce your citizenship and move to some Caribbean country?