COVID
If you go to China, you will be anally swabbed. YES ANALLY. It takes 10 whole seconds cause they need to twirl it around. Check out the demo at a Chinese airport!
The world is at 26,100,210 active cases, and 2,231,202 total deceased. In Australia, 1 hotel guard got COVID in WA and that put the state into lock down and caused panic buying at the supermarket, even though there’s 12 active cases that are all in hotel quarantine. NSW is the only state with 22 active cases that is not overseas acquired.
I’m not sure it would be worth it to vaccinate someone under 15 years old. I would still consider it prudent to wait for all the long term side effects to be discovered before taking any vaccine. Not enough time has passed.
Some work places have learned nothing from the remote work period and will not allow flexibility. Seems like that lady in the article is now looking for a new job because of the inflexibility.
Finance and Economics
The biggest and most entertaining news to come out of the finance world is the GameStop / “Wall Street bets” event. This event is significant because it is people power saying a big F#@$ you to the establishments. You must listen to this chat about it, it was delicious and really informative. And also listen to Chamath talk about it on CNBC. And Max Keiser talk abt GameStop.
To sum it up – in 2008 the criminal enterprise known as “wall street”, “crimed so hard” that the regulators had to step in and say that you cannot naked short sell anymore. However there are loopholes to the law, and short sell continue to this day. There are funds out there that use short selling to force down the price of listed companies who are not doing well to accelerate their demise. People on this 2 million members sub-reddit group known as” Wall Street Bets” found out that this stock called GameStop was being shorted for 140% of it’s float (ie 40% more stock than what exist on the market). Which points to naked short selling. Short selling usually means you borrow stock from a lender, and then sell it to the market, expecting to buy it back at a lower price. Eg, you borrow $10,000 worth of stock, sell it on the market, get $10,000 in your bank account, buy back the stock at a later time when it is at $5,000, and then give back the stock to the lender, meaning you keep the $5,000 difference that’s in your bank account. Naked short selling is where you don’t borrow the stock first. Anyway these people on this sub-reddit forum noticed this and started piling into the stock on an app called robinhood, creating a short squeeze. Which means they force the stock to rise, which forces the hedge fund that held the short position to need to cover their position and go to the market to buy stock to cover their losses, which drives the prices up, forcing more people to buy the stock. This eventually forced the stock up from $15 to $350, resulting in the hedge fund losing over $800mil and on they are on the verge of bankruptcy, requiring them to raise capital from other hedge funds (in this case was Citadel and one other). These people on reddit didn’t care about losing money as they said they can just go back to working at Walmart. The stock last closed at $325. In the aftermath of this normal people are being prevented from trading the stock (well they can’t buy, but they can sell – which can be considered market manipulation) on retail platforms such as robinhood cause of artificial restriction to allow the hedge fund to “re-calibrate their positions”. Facebook shutting stock trading groups. Google deleted 100,000 1 star reviews of the robinhood app. Chairman of Interactive broker admitted they are manipulating the markets on camera. In essence – The game has changed.
It is important to understand what is “the great reset” is. The world leaders have recently met to discuss this in Davos in Switzerland. Almost everyone from world leaders to bitcoiners understand that after 2008 financial crisis there has been an issue with the financial system. Some are even pissed.
Is this the AOL moment for bitcoin? GaryVee is learning about bitcoin. If you want to understand some of the acronyms we use in the crypto world. Bitcoin is currently trading at around $33,000 USD or $44,000 AUD
Tech
Here’s a collection of YouTube tech tabs I had open before I moved to my new desktop! I’m more book marking them for myself, but you can see if there’s something interesting for you in there.
- Software engineering is a learning process, working code is a side effect.
- Strategy Pattern – Design Patterns.
- Python Threading Tutorial.
- Introduction to hash tables and dictionaries.
- Guide to open source and how to contribute.
- Microservice events and docker.
The new desktop is now up and running, but more on that next time when I get more time.
Upgraded the wheels on my chair, got something similar to this off ebay for about 20 bux and they’ve worked out great. Rolls so smoothly.
Other Stuff
Growing up I use to build things. I had a handful blocks of Lego blocks that I built and rebuilt into different spaceship. They also had a Lego technic kit at school that you could build into 20 different moving things that we use to p lay with on a Friday afternoon during free time. So I enjoyed this video is taking that to the extreme.
Learn to suffer article.
Every life is important. I thought of the end of this piece is beautifully expressed on the importance of older generation in society even though they are not productive.
I’ll leave you with some random things I thought was funny. Have a good week.