Still in lockdown in Melbourne with 77 active community acquired cases. Victoria represents all the new cases, except for 1 in WA. Here’s a few select charts from covid19data.com.au
Here’s what it looks like if we include international arrivals
Are we going to go for zero cases for 2 weeks again? If so don’t expect lockdown to be lifted later this week.
How does VIC compare to NSW?
Here’s a thing to consider if you are leaving Melbourne – a flight arrived in Darwin 15 mins after midnight when lockdown started, so everyone on that flight was forced into 2 week quarantine. If you go to Queensland, you could have your privacy violated. As police demand you to unlock your phone to check your google maps and bank statements to see where you’ve been. The government MUST be able to keep to track where you are going.
A panel of heath experts, chaired by the Chief Medical Officer has advised for a second time AGAINST making the vaccine compulsory, however Scotty is ignoring that advice. Instead he is lobbying state leaders to overrule medical experts. It’s feeling like an election is close. Is it considered discrimination if you are stood down because you work in aged care and have medical issues that means you should be more cautious? The department of health then released new guidelines to say that vaccination is voluntary and also it is voluntary to disclose if you been vaccinated or not.
According to Australia’s Department of Health latest vaccine safety report. There have been 22,031 reports in Australia of people who have had side effects from the vaccine. Side effects include headache, muscle pain, lethargy, fever and injection site reaction. Also note that in Australia, 210 people have died as a result of getting the COVID vaccine, which is more people dying from the vaccine than from COVID itself in that period. 109 from Pfizer, and 94 from AstraZeneca. They were all old and frail people, and many of them were in fact elderly aged care resident.
Never let a plague go to waste as government and thousands of unelected bureaucrats use the opportunity to assume enough powers not usually accorded to them. Powers like which business are allowed to stay open without much rationale, deciding the rules for prosecuting for those to violate sheltering in place and freedom of movement. I was fortunate enough to attend a talk a few weeks ago from a holocaust survivor at a synagogue. And I look at everything that is happening in the world from the lens of the stories he was telling us. He is part of a group that go around the schools in Victoria to tell their stories to the kids so that it won’t be forgotten by future generations.
I’ll try recount the key parts of his story that I got. He was around 6 y.o. and living with his parents when the Nazi came. He was lucky enough to not live in the center of the city so they had avoided the initial round up which most likely would have ended them in the gas chambers. He and the family had to move from stranger house to stranger house, People were helping them to hid from authorities. Eventually he ended up with a family on a farm out in the country side. However they couldn’t live in the actual house to avoid suspicion. It was middle of European winter (where it snows) and he and his parents lived in a hole in the fields no larger than a grave with some foliage covering to the top. The family that was looking after them would bring them food in the middle of the night. They would spend the day and night sitting on a plank to avoid touching the melted icy water under them. Eventually he got sick with fever, so his parents had no choice but to go report themselves into the local police station to try and get him some medical help. The police were annoyed to see them, they weren’t Nazi but because of the rules they needed to question them to see who was helping them (could have been a family member they knew!). Eventually he ended up on a train to a concentration camp with his mum (standing room only on the train in the cart usually used for cattle), and his dad ended up being put on a train to a different concentration camp. He talks about life in the camp (I recommend the book Man Seach for meaning by Viktor Frankl if you don’t know about life in the camps). Eventually the camp was liberated and he was allowed to go home. His mum survived and the family home was largely untouched. He only found out his dad was still alive when he walked in a few months later. They then migrated to Australia, and he was lucky enough to be able to go back to Europe with his kids and visit the people who had helped his family hide. He asked them why they did it, and they just said it was because ‘it was the right thing to do’. It was not just one man who decided that genocide was a good idea, it was a whole nation that gave the government more power than what they should have had. Sometimes it’s important to be this guy.
Freedom of movement and association should be a fundamental human right. The history of the passport came out of WW1, as a need to control people’s movement to avoid the US getting overwhelmed with people arriving. Supporting a Vaccine Passport/App is a path to identify and then segregate people in a society for the sole purpose of treating them as lower class citizens. History usually rhymes, this time it straight up repeats.
The world moves lower again to 13,370,223 active cases, and 3,737,818 deaths according to worldometers. Lots of people are leaving Paris to move to the countryside and to other major cities where it’s not as busy.
The good news is that some people (in tech) are getting 6 figure pay raises in Australia because with border closure it’s creating a skill shortage so unfortunately it creates a battle for talent. Apple employees are rejecting the push to return to the office. Here’s nine tips for interviewing over zoom. My own personal experience is to have a good microphone, be looking at the camera, and make sure the internet is stable.
Finance and Economics
Beware of narratives.
The housing market is a ponzi scheme and if you don’t own a house, you will never own a house until the market is smashed apart.
El Salvador has become the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. Bitcoin is trading at the bottom of a consolidation range. Current at $35,600 USD or $46,100 AUD.
Other Stuff
China is introducing a 3 child policy. Demographics has always been an issue with China, and it’s not going to resolve itself just like that. 1 child policy has decimated a generation.
How to make deep fried milk.
How to fold a world record paper airplane.
Chair review by the Tech Lead is hilarious. (He is a former engineer at google and facebook)
The first case of drones hunting down human targets without being told what to do. Every company need to collect more data so we can appease our new robot overlords.
Use more keyboard shortcuts, when you find yourself making a mistake, instead of using backspace backspace backspace, just delete the whole word with ctrl + backspace. You can also of course use Ctrl + Delete to delete all letters in the current word this word forwards. You should also stop using your mouse to navigate around your documents. Try the Ctrl + Arrow key to move faster around your document. To move even faster to the very top or very bottom of your document, you can use Ctrl + Home to go to the top, or Ctrl + End to go to the bottom. You can also add a shift key to highlight at the same time. So you can press Ctrl + shift + Arrow key to highlight a word for instance. These things work in Excel as well usually. So try things out, and you will be more productive if you use more shortcuts and less mouse!
I’ll leave you with something to think about. Contemplate both the sadness and beauty of this 84 year old playing piano in the street of Melbourne. It brings about so many questions in my head of how does someone end up in a life on the streets? What brings us happiness? What decision can we make today to avoid a similar fate? Is the way to avoid this in the strength of the connections we make to other people in this interdependent world.
Have a good week!