I’m not sure if anyone here is a big Nassim Taleb fan, he is a leading figure in the world of risk and probability. If you follow his Twitter account you will get a sense of how serious he sees the Covid-19 problem. The “herd immunity” idea that is being proposed in the UK, they say could result in deaths of over 1m people if they choose to let the virus pass through the community…..
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1238549442258763776
Anyway, I hope there is an opportunity in it. Anyone on here see themselves walking up to their favourite boutique hotel with 150k and saying yes I’d like half of it, please?
We sold three 172’s and the Navajo in the last week. Still buying stock but being careful and trying to line up likely end-users before committing fully. Next batch of customers are guys looking to do scenic flights over Chernobyl bizarrely 
If it gets really shitty there will still be a demand for brokerage as people choose to exit the game. I think people will see the merit in personal air transportation that has hygiene advantages. I’ve seen some of the in-house memos being circulated to airline pilots, and there will be a lot of guys on unpaid leave soon.
kwlf wrote:
I suppose I am at risk of being labelled a socialist or a communist, but I don’t think I fall into any clear category in terms of my political beliefs. What I am getting at is the recognition that on personal, local, national and international levels we are all interdependent. In recent years our politics and economics has become more cut-throat ‘winner take all’, and life for those at the bottom or even the middle of the pile, has become pretty grim. It will be up to us how we reshape the world, and I hope that we will opt for a model that is more public spirited.
Macron expressed it quite eloquently (he is French, after all):
My dear compatriots, tomorrow we will have to learn the lessons of the moment we are going through, question the development model to which our world has been committed for decades and which is revealing its flaws in broad daylight, and question the weaknesses of our democracies. What this pandemic is already revealing is that free health care, regardless of income, background or profession, and our welfare state are not costs or burdens but precious goods, indispensable assets when fate strikes. What this pandemic reveals is that there are goods and services that must be placed outside the laws of the market. Delegating our food, our protection, our ability to look after our living environment to others is madness. We must regain control of it, build even more than we already do a France, a sovereign Europe, a France and a Europe that firmly hold their destiny in their hands. The coming weeks and months will require decisions to break with this. I will take them.
(Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator)
Good grief, AI translation is getting good.
kwlf wrote:
we’re seeing the denouement of conmen and a resurgence of respect for experts and public institutions.
That would be the rock we would perish on. Herd mentality listening to ’’experts’’. Look where that has got us in recent times.
Not my world i am afraid.
I would go off grid.
Beware the authority of experts. They know not what they do…..and in most cases are agenda driven.
Just 3 weeks ago the maintenance guy from the service center called me and said, they now have people available to work on my plane again and let’s try to get it fixed and out of there. I said, good timing, my finances are finally starting to turn around and let’s do this. Yesterday I sent this email: “finish whatever was just started and do the bare minimum to get her ferryable, so I can pick her up”. I see where this is going to go financially and I don’t have great confidence there will be a quick resolution. Plane will have to sit in my hangar until the world changes back.
Because, who’s gonna go to restaurants, cinemas, high streets shops, butchers, take trains, buses, boats or airplanes in the next 3 months? Not a lot of people. These are all industries with very low margins and employing workers that often have no savings. These people will not have the capacity to ride out more than maybe a months worth. All these smaller or low-margin businesses are at grave risk of going out of business with any disruption, and that will domino to every other business eventually. If nurseries and schools close on top of this, who exactly are all these employees that can afford to be home and not work looking after children, and still make all their mortgage and car payments for maybe 3-6 months? Very few. Could you afford to?
I don’t want to be a doomsdayer, but we’re looking at the perfect shitstorm, as they say here.
Airborne_Again wrote:
Delegating our food, our protection, our ability to look after our living environment to others is madness. We must regain control of it, build even more than we already do a France, a sovereign Europe, a France and a Europe that firmly hold their destiny in their hands.
Wow this is surprisingly nationalist for a committed open borders, free movement of people and goods europhile.
I would hope there’s a long term change in relying on a communist country for important items, especially medicines.
Beware the authority of experts. They know not what they do…..and in most cases are agenda driven.
I once heard a government scientific adviser discussing Foot and Mouth disease. He had been in a meeting with Blair and Co. and they had shown the projections as to how that would spread. They gave a range of options for dealing with the outbreak, and projections as to what would happen in each case.
Lo and behold the outbreak spread in a way very similar to the initial projections. They made their choice as to its management (the experts didn’t make the choice; they just set out some options) and the outbreak receded in a manner that matched the predictions closely. Epidemiology is a reasonably hard science.
He said that it was a real turning point in the Blair government’s relationship with science/scientists and they had a lot more input into decisionmaking from that point on.
Unfortunately we knew more about Foot and Mouth disease then than we now know about COVID-19. There are still pretty basic questions that remain unanswered such as how long immunity lasts, hence the breathing room for different approaches to it.
I agree that everyone has their own agenda, but that is also true of people who haven’t studied what they are talking about – and I think also less true for people with a background in hard sciences and engineering who are used to pitting their hypotheses against reality. Richard Feynman and Isaac Asimov have both written eloquently on uncertainty and the importance of integrity in science. A good scientist should aim to be aware of their biases and keep a good handle on what they know, what they don’t know, and what they think they know but aren’t certain of. I bet Boeing wish they’d accorded more respect to their engineers.
Peter wrote:
It would be ironic that the UK let FlyBe go bust because – until 31 Dec 2020 – a govt subsidy would be illegal under EU lawI don’t normally support taxpayer propping-up of failing businesses but FlyBe were running a regional service which other airlines would not run because the routes didn’t make enough money, but they were important to the local communities.
Such subsidies aren’t illegal under EU law. Many governments subsidise loss making routes for the benefit of the communities. What you can’t do is say “We’re going to give the subsidy to this airline”. What happens elsewhere is that the route with the subsidy is put up for tender which is open to all EU airlines to tender for.
Whoever wins the tender gets to do the route and gets the government subsidy.
What you can’t do is arbitrarily prop up a home based airline by giving them a subsidy which gives them an advantage over other (perhaps better run) airlines.
Hasn’t the EU just fined Italy 7million Euros for subsidising hotels or something similar? Not ideal timing for them.
It’s one of the downsides of our interconnected world that fake news and conspiracy theories are so easy to spread but at the same time so hard to disprove and eliminate.
I see absolutely no reason why one would believe that there has been any deliberate, man-made action in the creation and spread of this virus. This is a fifth human-pathogen strain of a well known “family” of RNA virus, Coronaviridae, and from what I’ve read so far it came from bats who infected pangolins who in turn where eaten by humans in China. Which is all quite plausible.
A pandemic of this sort was “overdue” in medical terms and this one will probably still play out much less deadly than the 1918 “Spanish Flu” where 50 million people perished (even if 50 million people died from SARS2-CoV, it would be a much smaller percentage of the world population than 100 years ago…)
The socioeconomic effects seem harder to predict though.
