Replies to post #106522 on Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[Babylon]

Hey Zeev, or anyone else. Can someone buy and short the same stock at the same time with equal dollars with a decent yield, and essentially take no principal risk while capturing the yield? Is it common, legal, any drawbacks?

[TJ Parker]

> SARS is for instance more benign than AIDS

hmm. this seems like apples and oranges here.

aids is hard to acquire, but when you do have the virus, you usually won't know it for a long period of time and can infect many people. the death rate within the first months of infection is pretty low, but the overall cost of caring for a patient over the lifetime of the illness can be high.

sars is as easy to catch and spread as a cold. while maybe the economic impact on the healthcare system is higher for aids, over a long period of time, the cost of stamping out an epidemic is different in both cases: the behaviorial changes you need to prevent spread of aids (intimate contact) don't have the same impact on an economy as large scale quarantine, closing of schools and plants, and general fear of casual contact.

[brainlessone]

5% of population in malaysia has aids. info from local doc

[Richard63]

Zeev,

You can sit in an airplane or metro seat and not contact AIDS, but conversely most people fear that they would not be protected in those same scenarios from contacting SARS.

The restricted movement of people over time could eventually have an impact on an economy. Do you feel comfortable about world wide travel? I candidly must admit that I don't right now.