Hi forum,

since 1999 I run a german car forum and tend to give it up in the next years. Things came together that I needed to catch a mouse and thought "tanstaafl" and some thoughts later I remembered the good old times on the EmpegBBS and also my first price for "the worst install in 2002" (which happened in 2003, iirc). Time flies, so I checked if the empegbbs.com domain would still be reachable. Yes!! And even the users I remeber are still there! So happy to see that you are still active here. Please never let this forum down and keep on living healthy for the next decades, even if some of you are already retired... Oh, I just checked my own website http://empeg.rowi.net is also still there, but it is untouched since 2003.

All the best,
Rolf

Welcome back. It will be here as long as I can keep it running, though I do really look into getting the code updated.

I really much appreciate this! Thank you for keeping it up.

It's still one of my favorite go-to places on the interwebs!

+1

It's pretty quiet at the moment, but for some reason it's still one of the four tabs that load with my browser

It's in my morning routine. Things definitely quieted down once political discussions disappeared. Hooboy... I can just imagine the threads going on now.

Oh, that’s a horrible thought.

I still keep the tab open.

Honestly checking this BBS has fallen off my daily routine, but I do miss it, the signal-to-noise ratio is fantastic, just there is not much signal these days.
I always know that any question will get a constructive answer, and not an "OP is a <explative>" or a "FIRST!"

Same for me. I've never been an active member, but I visit the bbs every morning.

I don’t keep a browser tab open nor do I check for new posts here every day, but during the week I may find myself here once or twice, sometimes more if there is an active Off Topic thread of interest.

I keep the tab open too. I can't believe I've been doing so for so long.

This site is one of the very first I check each day, and through the day most of the time.

Not as much traffic now as in the past, but still a lot of interesting and intelligent people lurking about!

I haven't checked in a while, as I haven't driven the empeg holder in a while either. Looking for some entertainment during a quarantine, glad to see it's still alive.

The bay area has its quarantine starting at midnight. It's already surreal, I feel it's going to get a lot more surreal in the next couple of weeks.

Stay as safe as possible, everyone!

I'll say! It's been at least a year or two since we last heard from you. Welcome back.

tanstaafl.

I'm in the centre of London. It is just...weird. I'd say every office-type role is now work-from-home. Entertainment venues are closed. Shops and transport are open, for now. People are still out and about and construction is still happening.

What is not at all clear is the end goal. It's been intimated that the purpose of the quarantine is to cut new transmissions by avoiding contact for 14 days and letting all the live cases work through. OK great, I see that, but then what ? Start all over again as soon as an undetected case flies in from a poorly managed environment ?

There are already cancellations announced for events in June and July, so clearly there is some intent to quarantine for much longer periods than 14 days. Again, not clear what the goal of that is.

The buzz-word is "Flatten the Curve". Assume that a large percentage of the population (~80%) is going to get the virus. The objective is to spread that out over as long a period of time as possible to avoid overwhelming the medical resources.

Also assume that once you have the virus, you will be immune to further infection from it. This assumption is not yet proven.

tanstaafl.

I am not convinced that the cost and difficulty of managing that medical demand surge is greater than the economic carnage and mass unemployment that the quarantine measures have brought upon us in just six short weeks.

There is a limit to what throwing money at the problem of limited numbers of ventilators and intensive care trained nursing staff can achieve in a short time.

Indeed. Saving money isn't the point.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/who-gets-hospital-bed/607807/

I think this link (below) is more fun!
It enables one to interactively see the predicted effects of varying degrees of "social distancing" upon the spread and fatalities from the disease:

https://ahurford.shinyapps.io/flatten-the-curve/

Cool!

This one is even more fun, make sure to scroll down to see the simulations that show a "cloud" of moving dots:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-simulator/

Meanwhile, everybody is studiously avoiding the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

If you ever wanted to see an example of the butterfly effect as a spinoff of chaos theory, consider this: A man in China ate a bat and crashed the stock market. But that's not the gorilla.

The corona virus was not the cause of the crash, it was only the trigger. People are running to gold in an effort to protect their wealth, while the gorilla just stands there and smiles. We are facing an imminent global economic collapse that in all likelihood will be worse than 1929.

Did you know that the average household debt in the U.S., excluding mortgage debt, is $40,000? Did you know that in China the average is even higher? Did you know that globally, counting all forms of indebtedness, there is $275,000,000,000,000 hanging out there? That's 275 Trillion dollars (or equivalent) that cannot possibly be handled other than by massively devaluing global currencies.

Retirement pensions will be gone. Thousands [millions?] of businesses are closing their doors. Banks are tottering -- look for Deutschebank to be the black swan that takes down the global banking system. There will be a massive housing collapse as people with no income look at the $300,000 mortgages on their homes that are now valued at less than half the price. In the U.S., think of the ramifications of a country where there are more handguns than people.

Breadlines, tent cities, food riots, violence in the streets. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, I hope so. But I'm 75 years old, I have seen a lot in my time, and just as I said in a post on this BBS in late 2007, I am scared shitless. I saw it coming in 2007 when apparently only I and Peter Schiff believed it, and I see it coming again now.

So what am I doing about it? Not a damned thing I can do but sit and watch the train wreck and hope the gorilla overlooks me. I am better off than 95% of the people on this planet: I have absolutely zero debt, I own my own home where property taxes on a half-million dollar property come to less than $400 USD per year, I make my own electricity (solar panels), I live in an agricultural village where guns are a rarity and community spirit is high. If even one of the three retirement income sources we have in the family survives, we will have enough to get by, but I don't know what we'll do if, as is likely, all our retirement income fails.

Finally, remember the traditional method of ending a depression that has generally worked well in the past. Likely I'll be dead before this all gets sorted out, and I take some solace in that.

tanstaafl.

Jane was saying the same kind of things (long before this virus) when she happily passed away last October: all of those nasty things she didn't have to hang around for!

But we're not there yet, and Costco has yet to run out of TP!

The nice thing about it is that we are (just about) all in the same boat, which means we'll find a way to keep things going.

Cheers

I think the shock will be deep and last for a couple of years at least. Not sure whether it'll be good or bad for society overall.

I'd feel a lot better about all of it if the world hadn't gone crazy over the past few years already and elected a slew of the worst and most inept leaders in the history of the planet.

Using the U.S. stock market as a metric, the 1929 crash took 27 years and a world war to recover.

tanstaafl.

Hard to judge what the societal impact will be. Agree with Matt that the world over we're led by donkeys at the moment, and the poor are really going to suffer.

Will this lead to social unrest? Will sentiment towards offshoreing everything change? Definitely lots of pain for years to come, unless you're sitting on big piles of cash.

If those piles of cash are U.S. dollars, there may be some unhappily surprised cash holders.

By pumping trillions of made-up dollars into the stock market the Trump-controlled Fed is trying to delay the inevitable market crash, making it worse in the long run and as a byproduct massively devaluing the dollar.

The U.S. dollar is about to lose its standing as the world's default currency. Its current value is supported only by faith in its integrity, and when the rest of the world notices the emperor's lack of attire... God help us all.

I'm debt-free, 95% of my assets are tangible goods. I'm hoping to weather this storm in my safe haven but it's not looking good.

There, that's my Henny Penny the Sky Is Falling rant for today. I feel better now.

tanstaafl.

...right, and... who would be in better shape, remind me?

I speak as a European, in a friendly, non argumentative way.

I don't even mean to compete with who has the worst economic system, or whatever. Really, I'm just saying: do not worry.