adrianb

Volvo cars was sold to Geely but Volvo Buses (+ trucks) is still a Swedish company.

She was entitled to a refund or vouchers.

Is this true? Many (most?) airlines offered vouchers en masse when they had to cancel most flights during COVID, with no option for full refunds.

At least Air Canada was forced by the Canadian government to pay back vouchers to people who asked for them, as part of a deal for financing.

I was able to claim the full value of the flight I had to cancel in April 2020.

Interestingly, even the initial vouchers took many months to be delivered to my email (6 months or more I think). But the refund was very quickly paid. The power of government coercion...

It's widely accepted that the Huanan market cases are an early super-spreader event and not the first human infections. Basically we don't know who and where the first infected humans were. We do know lots of people got infected at the market and that became the first time a new pneumonia was noticed in hospitals.

Trillions and trillions of mutations and still the most dangerous H5N1 viruses were created a decade ago by Fouchier and Kawaoka. And how did that help us prepare for the inevitable natural evolution of the same virus?

I found it suspicious that it mentions "sleeping in cars" which shouldn't be needed for day trips as most places in the country are at most 3 hours drive from Amsterdam and places in Belgium and Germany can be reached that fast as well.

Day trip means people return home at night, not that they sleep in the cars.

Seems to cover more than that, things we should be ignorant of could simply be labeled as False. Malinformation seems to be about how facts should only be interpreted in a certain way. So for example a factual statistic but it can only mean what the government decided it means (i.e. supports the government's policy).

Actually controlling inflation means slowing it down. So the gallon of milk will be only 7 cents more expensive than last month, not 70 cents.

But a public company has higher public transparency obligations than a private one. Why do you think being afraid of Elon will make them more transparent than being afraid of the SEC?

For 2021, national tourist board Visit Britain has forecast that visitor numbers will be lower even than in 2020, when travel restrictions were at their highest.

Not sure how they evaluated the travel restrictions, but in 2020 there were travel corridors between many European countries including the UK, while for most of 2021 to enter the UK there were required PCR tests (usually 3) and home quarantine. 2021 restrictions definitely felt more strict, at least in the summer.

Restrictions for arrivals were only lifted for the vaccinated in the autumn.

The point is that she gets called because of buzzwords such as Blockchain and AI and what have you.

If the education and job experience is made up, how do you know you're not getting calls because you sent a fake CV mentioning great education and relevant past jobs?

How so?

If these days a house listed for x gets offers at x+10%, after average wages increase it will receive offers at x+20%. Is there any historical precedent of house prices not rising faster than inflation, absent external factors?

I think a major correction of house prices can happen in two ways:

- economic catastrophe (everyone's unemployed) / war / natural disaster / ... - we wouldn't want to buy a house anyway in that case;

- major increase of interest rates or minimum deposit required - we wouldn't be able to afford the mortgage in that case.

I agree, religion offers simple ways to classify actions as good or bad. Following the church teachings or priest's guidance was enough to make an individual confident they are a good person, doing good things.

Meanwhile, in real life, everything is complex, few things are clearly good or bad, everything has advantages and disadvantages. People need a simple compass to distinguish good and bad. It seems the "political beliefs" are taking up that space in a secular society.

Also it seems the agreement is that 7 countries agree that all countries in the world need to have that minimum rate? How would they convince the rest of 180+ countries? Especially, how do you convince the ones who would lose a lot of tax income by closing their tax heaven loopholes.

The same was true of Yahoo in its last days as an independent company. Their holdings in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan (an independent, successful company) were worth more than Yahoo's market cap.

Selling Yahoo to Verizon meant splitting the web properties out from the company, leaving it as a shell for its holdings.

Wearing masks when sick is a good hygiene practice in general. But in COVID context with significant asymptomatic spread it won't help as much as it does for colds and flu.

Could be. But one thing that was pointed out to me is that once our generation gets closer to retirement age, the governments will be more willing to address our concerns. Probably at the price of making the next generation's retirement plans even more dubious.

The change in attitude is due to the fact that older people are more likely to vote and that politicians and their friends also tend to be in the past-middle age-but-not-retired-yet age bracket.

Infected animals were found in the market where the outbreak began 4 months after it started. We have nothing comparable a year and a half after COVID.

Wikipedia [1] seems to include sources:

In late May 2003, studies were conducted using samples of wild animals sold as food in the local market in Guangdong, China. The results found that the SARS coronavirus could be isolated from masked palm civets (Paguma sp.), even if the animals did not show clinical signs of the virus. The preliminary conclusion was the SARS virus crossed the xenographic barrier from Asian palm civets to humans, and more than 10,000 masked palm civets were killed in Guangdong Province. The virus was also later found in raccoon dogs (Nyctereuteus sp.), ferret badgers (Melogale spp.), and domestic cats. In 2005, two studies identified a number of SARS-like coronaviruses in Chinese bats.[60][61]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

if you made statements like "this started in Wuhan, in the lab there, not in the animal market next to it," you were called racist, even though race had nothing to do with it.

Honestly I always felt like "a scientist working with dangerous pathogens had an accident" is way less racist than "someone ate a weird animal from a wet market"... And yet the backlash was stronger for the lab leak scenario, almost as if the opinions were influenced by someone.

One reason this theory is becoming more mainstream lately is the lack of results looking for the natural reservoir of the virus after more than 1 year of searching and an amazing number of animals tested all over China.

It's been written everywhere that the horseshoe bats most likely to carry coronaviruses live in Yunnan province, more than 1000 km away. It's where the closest COVID relative was found as well.

Also while there are other species of bats near Wuhan, they are in hibernation in winter.

I read it's because he only wants the most absolutely committed investors owning shares, not superficial speculators. You would overthink if you had to spend that much on a single share.

Although modern platforms with their fractional shares might negate the advantage a bit.

And the ones you mentioned have major regulatory hurdles to expand internationally. In industries where a single player can dominate multiple markets we are down to 2-3 major competitors, worldwide. See airplane or train manufacturers, beer companies, computer chips...

This has all been financed by more than a decade of low interest rates which fuelled the M&A.

Rewind 2017 must be worse?

EDIT: Verified, it's not. But it must've been at some point.

Except the safety protocols would apply to similar labs worldwide. It's just a coincidence this started in China, a leak could happen anywhere.

Do you trust Boeing to revise their airplane safety systems after a crash? They surely will do an internal review and make changes.

Or do you appoint an independent investigator that issues mandatory changes and evaluates how they're implemented?

Was it a natural origin? We need to understand how bats came into contact with an intermediary species, how that came into contact with humans, how to minimize risks in the future.

Was it a lab leak? We need to know if safety protocols were followed and to develop better protocols if needed.

By your logic, we would never investigate any accident. Why look into the cause of a fire, it won't help bring back the victims or restore the damage. We should only look into how the response of the firefighters could've been better? No. We should look into both.

We even investigate every single airplane incident even if there were no victims and develop new safety protocols around them.

home owners are chained to their property

As someone who moved across 4 countries in 10 years, I had the same opinion. Then I noticed that people who moved as often as me had no trouble to move out, rent their mortgaged apartment for more than monthly payments or sell it at a profit.

The entire Test & Trace costed about 37 billion (at the latest estimate) and ministers admitted it has only a marginal impact on limiting spread:

https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/03/19/covid-19-test-and-trace...