Thursday, March 19, 2020

Small businesses vs coronavirus

I feel sorry for the small cafes, kiosks, local pizzas, and so on. With people stay and work from home, many stop getting their coffee or sandwiches at the shops around the corner. Hope they can all cope up.

Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Queing for...

As noted, there have been queues for toilet rolls in Australia amidst the coronavirus outbreak. Woolies and Coles now dedicate special hour for elderly and people with disability.

But in the Amsterdam, people panic buy ... marijuana

And in the US, people panic buy ... guns

Crazy.

Toilet paper

Our toilet paper is running low. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 crisis brought panic buying with it. Now it is very hard to find toilet papers in stores. And I heard there are excess demands for other goods too: hand sanitizers, pasta, rice, flour, and maybe more soon.

There are signs on store shelves saying that each customer can only buy once package of toilet rolls (each pax has four rolls). No doubt such sign will extend to the other essentials.

As usual, there are opoositions to price gouging. Just go check your face social media. Chances are, you would come across people condemning shops that increase their prices amidst thsi crisis era.

Didn't history tell us: the best rationing system is price?

Monday, March 16, 2020

Covid-19

I spent my weekend learning about Covid-19. In this era of information overload, we just need to be picky. There's so much junk out there. Yet, there are some useful stuff. Twitter can be useful - if you follow the right persons. Some experts are kind enough to provide helpful information, and there are nice services in Twitter that compile the tweets into a thread. Please lookup: @drjenndwod, @davidsinclair, @aikhwaja, @NAChristakis - and many others, you just have to judge yourself. From podcasts, I've been listening to CNN's Sanjay Gupta and ABC's Coronacast. Two latest podcasts from Sam Harris are also great, especially the one with Nicholas Christakis. For economists, VoxEU has published an ebook, edited by Richard Baldwin and Beatrice di Mauro. 

I might also rewatch Contagion.