June 22, 2o2o

As many as 25,000 hotel rooms, or roughly 20% of the New York total, may not reopen. For perspective, the number of closing rooms is equivalent to the entire hotel market of Jacksonville, Florida. The Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2020

“The best thing for us to do in our present situation would be to leave the city. We should go and stay on one of our various country estates, having as much fun as possible. There we will have a clearer view of the heavens, which are so much more attractive to look at than the walls of our empty city.” “The Decameron” by Giovanni Boccaccio, written in 1351 after the Black Death

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” John F. Kennedy

Because of the stay-at-home order, California highway police say that overall traffic levels are down 35% from last year.  However, the number of speeding tickets for driving faster than 100 mph has increased 87%, with one motorist caught doing 165 mph. Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2020

Colleges in the United States earn roughly $600 billion per year- equivalent to the combined annual revenue of the tech firms Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, and Twitter. The Wall Street Journal, June 18, 2020 

Shuttered jewelry stores mean the five biggest diamond producers are sitting on roughly $3.5 billion in excess inventory. A diamond auction in May yielded just $35 million for DeBeers, $381 million less than the firm sold the same time last year. Complex.com, June 8, 2020

“One of the difficulties of being alive today is that everything is absurd but fewer and fewer things are funny.” Alexander Petri

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