COVID
There are still 11 community cases in Victoria, and that’s pretty much wraps it up for the whole Australia. The rest are all overseas acquired. Interestingly the 11 overseas acquired in Queensland are all in hospital. Must be pretty depressing to have traveled and now be in hospital.
Overall mortality rates decreased last year. How do we interpret that? People locked down so they stopped dying from heart disease and cancer? That doesn’t sound right, people stop dying from traffic accidents, wait so that means that there was more traffic accidents in a given year than COVID deaths?
The world is now at 21,913,121 active cases. It’s interesting to note that 99.6% of those world wide cases are mild condition (21,822,653), while 0.4% is serious or critical. The number of decased is at 2,538,814, which is 3% all closed cases (92,536,932). Meaning your chance of dying is 3%, but given the majority of people who read my blog are not in the old and decrepit age range, the chance of dying is probably a lot lower. So with that kind of stats, it kind of makes sense to give the old folks a vaccine, the rest of us should be optional, and you should probably get it if you are not fit and healthy. Also it would draw the conclusion that locking down an economy doesn’t make any sense, as it resulted in unnecessary suffering. But that’s just my armchair view of things.
Auckland enters lockdown again. It’s pretty funny if you are sitting from the Chinese perspective and wanted to spread authorization to the world, it was the perfect strategy to make the type of government found in China acceptable to the rest of the world.
Interesting questions were ask about the future of WFH on this harvard talk. No need to listen, the majority of the talk was rubbish, and it gives no meaningful insights. Basically people will need to find time to get together. It’s not going to be a binary thing of 100% office or 100% WFH, but it will be about getting that mix right, and also setting the culture of making the hybird model work.
Markets and Economics
Bitcoin will death spiral to $0 and is worth nothing, and has no value. Even Charlie Munger thinks it’s too volatile to be a medium of exchange, and his thoughts on Elon Musk buying bitcoin is – “I can’t decide the order of precedency between a flea and a louse.”. I’m trying very hard to hold on to both side of the arguments.
Essentially the arguments from a no-coiner are:
- People don’t transact with bitcoin. – Because money starts off as a store of value before it becomes a medium of exchange.
- It uses electricity. – The reality is so does the current financial system, this is often use as a criticism because of how transparent it is. But to properly compare, you would have to add up all the computers at banks, data centers, gold mines, ATMs, armored cars, printing presses, tanks and fighter jets energy cost. In reality for a mining farm to be profitable, they have to go to where energy is cheap. Such as where there is a large hydro electric dam, that needs to let excess water flow through anyway, so they might as well turn the turbines on to generate some money. Or newly built power plants that have too much excess and can sell of some of that excess cheaply to recoup the cost of building that power plant.
- It is too volatile. – Tell that to people like this millennial in Brazil who has already seen 5 currencies in his country in his life time. The interesting thing was his story about his dad who when to work and at the end of the day he would have to spend it all the money because it would be worth less the next day. Most of us have not seen that scenario yet.
- It is used for drugs and terrorist funding and other dark web activities. – This narrative is now dead since listed companies are now holding treasury in Bitcoin. Last I checked terrorist were funded in USD. And you don’t go exchanging bitcoin for drugs at your local street corner.
- It can’t complete with Visa payment network. – This argument is over indexing on how important consumerism is to a currency when it is not. And it is ignoring human ingenuity, and saying it will never compete with the Visa network. Technology continues to advances and you probably are discounting second layer solutions like the Lightning network that are being developed..
- Governments will eventually ban it and make it illegal. – It’s saying that western government will eventually follow governments like China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Algeria in banning it multiple times without any effect what so ever. And when you ban something in a country all it does is makes it more expensive in your country, it doesn’t actually stop it in your country. Just like when Soviet Union banned USD, guess what you can bribe officials with? ….USD.
- It’s used by criminals, so we need to make it illegal. – Fact check, criminals will use something if you make it illegal or not, that’s why they are criminals in the first place. Criminals also cars to run over people, shall we make that illegal also?
- It needs a currency board to issue it. – It’s saying we need a privileged group of old men who weren’t voted in by anyone to decide how much money to issue and when. Unfortunately – power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Bitcoin has crashed to a price of $45,314 USD, or $59,160 AUD. This girl was explaining bitcoin when it was $20, why oh why didn’t we all listen to her?! If you enjoyed my MCG analogy last week, maybe you will enjoy the Life boats are controlled by Pirates.
The PDF version of Cryptoeconomics is currently free on the author’s website. Haven’t read it but might be worth a flick through.
Gamestop last traded at $101.74. Listing to one of the guys from the reddit forum talk about Game Stop at the House committee. He’s just a normal guy from a poor background who say an opportunity and invested and also discussed it in a public forum. Poor man makes money, and rich man says “But that’s not fair”. Also I loved how he starts off his speech by saying “I’m not a cat” with a straight face. That’s how all video presentation should start off. Anyone who can pull that off is definitely a cat using a human filter.
Tech
On the topic of cats, this is creepy flat cat, probably taking robot too far.
Some coding stuff that I found interesting.
- How to break PDF Security.
- Git for solo developers.
- Here’s is Shamir’s Secret Sharing implemented in React, which I find it helpful to understand the concept. The Python code is on Wikipedia.What could it be useful for? Breaking up a mnemonic seed of course.
Other Stuff
I found this lecture from MIT about airplane aerodynamics extremely interesting. It’s an exciting time to be alive when you can now jump online and learn things you are curious about without needing to go get formal education. Michael Saylor had an interesting point of view in that education needs to be democratised, allowing everyone access regardless if they have money or not. And that the best teachers should be teaching their content online, and everyone should learn from them. We will get much faster advancement in society. And if you are anything like me, I watch and listen to everything at 1.75x – 2.20x speed because humans tend to talk very very slowly. Try it out next time you watch or listen to something, turn it up to 1.5x time speed.
I was watching Ashima Shiraishi breaking the beta on some climbs. And I was thinking – We always feel that our children are inadequate in one area or another, but the message that just came to my head was don’t worry, everything will work out fine. As we are all found short in some aspect of our lives but that’s ok, there’s always room to grow and improve or just accept that that’s who we all are.
Julia Chanourdie sending a climb at the base of Mont Ventoux. (Possible interview candidate Jessica?)
Epic Safety video from Air NZ. I should find the time to sort the pics from our NZ trip.
Anyway, enjoy your week!