COVID-19
We are down to 399 active cases in Victoria, down from 743.
81 active cases in NSW.
The new COVID restrictions in Victoria are out. After reading it, I get the feeling we are a nanny state with the government trying to dictate how every aspect of how you interact. Curfew has ended to avoid a legal challenge in the courts. Childcare, kinder, and primary school is back to face to face learning. You can go groceries with someone from your household (I’ve seen heaps of couples in the supermarket, don’t think anyone even followed that one). Outdoor pools are open. Dentist reopened. Public gathering of up to 5 people from two households (must not include the playgrounds because it feels like there were hundreds of people there yesterday). Also you can’t use a face shield, scarf and also you cannot wear your mask like the following anymore.
I still don’t know why we need amendment to legislation to allow all this increase power in Victoria. Maybe we should be focused on spending more to boost healthcare.
No one seems to know whose decision it was to use security guards for hotel quarantine in Victoria
Some people seem to think that mask gives you COVID-19 immunity
The world is at 7,706,939 active cases, with 999,455 deceased. How did Vietnam halt the spread of COVID? It’s basically lessons learned from dealing with infectious disease for the past 20 years and a rapid and well organised response. The song from the health department is catchy, but it made me realise that I don’t understand Vietnamese when it’s sung.
France had record numbers again. 16,096 new cases in 1 day!
Here is the latest of where some COVID vaccines are at. None have finished stage 3 trials yet.
Paul Graham computer scientist and co founder of Y Combinator, says 4/11 people that he knows who got COVID are still feeling the effects 5 months later.
The international students who are still here in Melbourne have been struggling. However there’s hope for humankind, with people offering help and their electric bike. Probably don’t eat at this restaurant, it has a questionable name…
Best face mask for exercise? Which is the code for the best face mask for walking outside and breathing fresh air. The under armor one looks cool, it’s makes you kind of look the shredder (picture of the shredder in case you never seen TMNT)
Stick to a n95 mask when going to the supermarket or for things indoors in a high risk environment as this nurse points out.
There are probably people in the world who go to offices, and sit there and work with other people without any personal protection….like a psychopath!! Cities over time are probably going to go back to their historical norm of being centers of commerce and people won’t actually live there anymore, and only come to meet and do business.
Markets and Economics
Michael Saylor has been making the rounds on a few podcasts and videos since he announced MicroStrategy had converted his 500mil treasury into bitcoin. The guy is a rocket scientist, he’s been CEO since 1989. I found it interesting the story of building a tool using DB2 for maccas. And his views on inflation – basically stop focusing on CPI. And on going back to first principles (worth a read if you’ve never learnt to reason in first principles in uni).
But most interesting was how he convinced the board and executive team that buying bitcoin was the way to go. Basically, he sent everyone of his executive team a task of watching 3 videos, and then they got together to discuss. In the same spirit I’ve pulled together what I thought those videos would have been that he sent so you can watch it too. It’s something that I’ve watched before.
- Peter Schiff vs. Erik Voorhees – In case you don’t know either of these names, Peter is a well known gold bug, and Erik is founder and CEO of shapeshift, a well known crypto exchange.
- Popular Pomp summary
- Intro to bitcoin from Andreas
So now consider that Blackrock and Vanguard own bitcoin, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund owns bitcoin. Israel wants to recognise it as currency.
Central banks cannot raise rates ever again, because a bunch of money has been lent out to help businesses, and if rates rise, it will blow all those people/businesses who borrowed money at this low rate. The monthly meetings are basically now a dead spectator sport.
Understanding the credit and repo market with Bill Holter.
Closer to home in Australia. Businesses will be allowed to trade insolvent….
Lots of shops might close if landlords don’t lower rent. Responsible lending laws are getting watered down. The bank will no longer question your life choices of getting a Netflix subscription. Also I’ve personally noted quite a few shops and cafe (which weren’t that great), are now closed and have For lease signs.
Top 10 of super funds over 5 years. Consistent names in all categories seem to be AusSuper, Unisuper, and IOOF from my brief scan. Also on the super, some Australian banks plan on asking customers to withdraw from super to make repayments.
Show this picture to anyone in 2019, and they would have said that Powell is robbing a bank. Turns out he’s just robbing the bottom 90%
Money is not everything, take this guy for example…
Someone is getting their car towed.
Going on the theme of transport. I thought this was funny
BTC Explained.
How does bitcoin mining work?
So take my spreadsheet example from last time where everyone has to record every transaction in a spreadsheet they have open, now let’s expand that example. When I make a payment to Carol, everyone notes it down on a little post-it note. They also note down all other transactions that happen in the last 10 mins down on a post it note (this is what is called the mem pool). They are not allowed to record it down onto their spreadsheet (aka blockchain) until someone has solved a sudoku problem (aka mining) first.
Say that Bob solves that sudoku problem, he gets to allocate himself some bitcoin, 6.25 bitcoin currently out of thin air (this is called the coinbase transaction). The 6.25 bitcoin is the rate at which bitcoin gets created. Bob also get to take a small amount from the payment I made to Carol as the mining fee, and also a small amount from every other postit note he has in front of him.
Everyone validates the sudoku problem that Bob did, since Bob is sometimes prone to cheating, and once they validate the sudoku problem, they will also note all the transactions down in their spreadsheet, including the ones that Bob allocated to himself. All those transactions form part of the latest block.
The sudoku example is used because it’s a problem that’s easy to validate but hard to solve. The more people there are in the room with us, the harder the problem becomes, the less people, the easier the problem.
If Bob cheats on the sudoku, we all ignore him by stop talking to him and kick him out of the room. If someone spreads a fake transaction that doesn’t meet the rules, or trying to spend money that doesn’t exist, that person spreading this fake rumor also gets ignored and kicked out of the room.
And so I will point out some obvious things. Everyone is validating everything, they are validating the problem that Bob solved, they are validating he allocated himself the right amount which is currently 6.25 bitcoin, everyone is also validating every single transaction, so that means that I had money to be able to send to Carol. And so with this, we are removing the intermediaries of banks, but we are also removing the need to have a central bank to control the money supply, since new money of 6.25 bitcoin is minted every 10 mins, and every 4 years we cut that coinbase transaction in half. This makes it easy to predict what the money supply is going to be out into the future since everything is programmatic. And these form the rules that everyone agrees to play by.
What is the lightning network?
Lightning network is a second layer scaling solution on top of the bitcoin network. What does this mean in layman’s terms? Well think of it, you have Australian dollars that’s in your bank account that you access with a bank card, however when you go to a pub, an option you have instead of paying for every drink is that you can open a tab with the guy behind the bar, he doesn’t charge you for every drink, he just keeps track of it, and then at the end of the night he will charge your card in one go. Now suppose your friend Bob also has a tab with the guy at the bar, and he’s also been buying drinks. Now suppose you decide to play a game of pool against your friend Bob, and the loser will pay the winner 10 dollars. Now suppose you lose, but you don’t have money, so you just tell the bartender to pay Bob, by increasing your tab by 10, and reducing his tab by 10. And so now we can do other transactions this way also by increasing and decreasing our tab at the bar without it ever hitting the back account. Now suppose that all the bars are connected to each other, and have tabs in between each bar and now you can do this type of payment transfer across different bars, where if you needed to pay your friend Bob, but he’s at another bar, and you played virtual pool, then everything still works. So you can make payment without it actually hitting your credit card. That is in essence how I have learnt to think of lightning network.
Why am I picking on Bob and Carol?
The classic examples in bitcoin use names such as Alice, Bob, Carol. I use these names for consistency in case you go read other examples, but also because I know a Bob and a Carol who might be reading this, so it’s also fun to pick on them.
State of the world.
This reporter’s 14 year old daughter was threatened by the Chinese government. The story is pretty chilling.
Good short explanation of the Tiktok & WeChat ban that was announced by Trump.
Some protesters were hit by a car in a protest in Hollywood. WARNING very disturbing video.
I get the impression you can now ride your horse on the highway in Chicago?
Other Stuff.
Transient luminous events (TLE) are red lightning above the clouds which you can only see if you are some distance away from the storm to see above it. It’s on my bucket list to one day witness the Aurora. The most exciting things I’ve seen in the sky was a huge fireball slowly travelling horizontal in broad daylight, probably some space junk burning up on re-entry. Quick streak of fire from a meteor in the night.
NBN is going to get an upgrade, and you will have a chance at super fast internet speed. Fiber optic direct to your home. 10x faster than what I’m getting. The key is you will only get it if you ASK FOR IT. So keep a look out, once it opens to the public, move quickly and tell them to upgrade you, working from home is here to stay. In the meantime if you are having slow internet, it’s probably worth going down to Telstra and getting a mobile router – 5G if possible.
VS Code my favourite code editor is becoming the dominant player in the space, and for good reason.
Someone wrote out a plan on how to maximise your holiday leave in 2021 to get the max amount of days off for the smallest amount of annual leave use.
Here are some unexpected food combos to try out. Chocolate and avocado is the only one I’ve had, you can turn that combo into a vegan mousse. But they missed my childhood favourite, peanut butter and ham sandwich, or avocado and condensed milk.
This article about personal moat made me think of what my own personal moat is. The basic premise of personal moat is “What’s something that’s easy for me to do but hard for others? What’s a skill or asset I have that’s very difficult for people to reverse engineer?”. My moat is that I’m a system thinker, I like to look at entire system (IT, macro-economics, complex processes, etc) and find the right thread to pull to understand what’s going on, so that I can problem solve and understand the right questions to ask, how to simplify, fix or hack around. Also my other moat is actually this blog, the things I’m interested in, the things I’m looking at, reading about, writing about, and the toilet sense of humor that people seem to think I have.
Let’s talk about my favorite French movies, because…why not. I’ve included a trailer.
Le placard (The closet) – It’s a comedy. Basically the guy works in an office environment of a condom company, and he’s quite the introverted guy. At some point he finds out that he’s going to be fired, and so he’s neighbor hears this, and they come up with the idea that he should come out of the closet as a gay man by circulating some Photoshop-ed photos, but he should continue acting as normal.
Incendies. – It’s Canadian French. Basically this woman dies, and as part of her will her twin children get two letters, one to give to their father whom they have never known, and one to give to their lost brother whom they didn’t know she had. And their journey takes them to Lebanon, and they discover the dark history of their mother that they never knew.
Intouchables – This one is about a disable man who hires someone to be his personal carer. It’s very funny, touching and based on a true story. There’s an american remake of it called “The Upside” which i thought was a faithful remake, it got Kevin Hart and Nicole Kidman in it.
La Famille Bélier – This is about a family who is deaf except for a daughter who is not, but also she has a talent for singing. It’s touching and heartwarming.
Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain – You can’t forget this movie. It’s a classic romance comedy that’s become iconic. It features Audrey Tautou whom you might recognise from The Da Vinci Code. Also I’ve eaten at the Cafe des Deux Moulins where everyone orders the famous crème brûlée that’s mentioned in the movie.
What am I reading at the moment?
Just finished “How will you measure your life” by Clayton M Christensen. I really enjoyed this one, it wasn’t what I thought it would be. There was a lot about raising children in there. Values are something that is worked on from the moment they are born, not something you deal with later when they are older. At also talks about paying attention to all the important relationships in your life; if you don’t allocate time for these on a daily basis, you will find yourself very unhappy in the years ahead.
Charlie Munger said, “In my whole life, I have known no wise people — over a broad subject matter area — who didn’t read all the time. None. Zero.“
Useful Websites
I’m not sure everyone knows this but a lot of Australians check Ozbargain regularly for bargains online, however make sure you control yourself to not buy things you don’t need. There’s also a Kiwi version for the Kiwis I know.
Please feel free to share all or part of anything you read here. The more informed everyone is, the better the world will be. “Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.“
Enjoy your week. Here’s some Donnie Yen vs Mike Tyson.
