Did you know COVID-19 is basically SARS-version 2. Now consider that we currently don’t even have the antiviral drug for the original SARS yet, so basically it ends in 3 ways, vaccine, highly effective treatment for the disease, or herd immunity. In South Korea, at least 163 people who had the virus have tested positive a second time to it, meaning it might not be like chicken pox.
In case you were wondering how the no-lockdown experiment is going in Sweden
In Australia, the important thing to note is that the number of active cases have dropped off, recoveries have risen, and new cases appear to be fairly stable.
My overseas friends message me and say they can’t work if Australian’s contact tracing app is unusually bad, or if Australian politicians are unusually stupid. …However don’t forget to install it when it comes out, we need everybody and organisation to collect data so that we can know what you are all doing and then later feed them into machine learning algorithms to build slaughterbots!
I don’t know about anyone else, but i love outrage. Also on the topic of the US, they are using taxpayers money to fill in skate parks with sand.
Markets / Economics
People who don’t understand the complexity of markets imagine that an economy is like a video game that can be paused and resumed at will. Stay home for 3 inconvenient months then life gets back to normal. But markets are not a simulation, they’re more like a living ecosystem. And as I keep saying we’re only at the start, we’ve only had a liquidity crisis.
I found the following conversation between Raoul Pal and Dan Tapiero very enlightening.
Not sure if anyone has noticed a disconnect between markets and the underlying economy. Unemployment at all time high (you have to count the JobKeeper package as part of unemployment, because the moment that gov money stops and no clients are coming through the door i guarantee you that business will drop those staff), no economic output, no one is buying anything….and yet markets have gone UP.
Pomp’s conversation with Robert Kiyosaki was awesome. However do not click on the link if you are easily offended.
ASX 200
Trading around 5487.5 Just crossed the 38.2 percentile fibonacci retracement, probably a bit more upside ahead to 5800 before we drop again if we use the 2008 as a model.
AUDUSD
Recovered a little, back at 0.63. Good opportunity to convert some of that AUD into good old fashion US Dollars. (but i have US dollar expenses, so don’t take my advice on that)
Oil
Anyone else noticed that petrol can now be had at below a dollar in Melbourne? I would to looking for close to that mark at the moment since oil is at 18.44 USD
Bitcoin.
Trading at around 7100. Still another 3300 blocks till the halving event, estimated to be May 12, 2020 of the current 3rd subsidy epoch. Security of the network is sitting at around 113.1 Exahashes per second. Mempool is not looking that busy, average transaction fee is about 13 stat/vb if you want to get your transaction in the next block or two, but you can get away with 1 stat/vb if your transaction is not urgent.
Privacy
Back on the topic of privacy, privacy is a fundamental human right. The Europeans recognise that, which is why we have GDPR laws, which is why you might see lots of websites now showing their privacy policy everywhere and what data they are collecting. Because breaking the GDPR laws will result in massive fines even if you are not a European company. You might hear some people say I don’t care about privacy because i have nothing to hide, but that’s like saying i don’t care about freedom of speech because i have nothing to say.
So I thought I’d share some things I use:
I obviously run a VPN on all my devices, from the desktop, to the laptops, to the iPad, to the all the phones (I have more than 1 mobile number). All web traffic runs through a VPN, usually to a server in France to allow us bypass geolocation restrictions and watch French TV. I currently use NordVPN, and it’s been working well. If you don’t know how a VPN works, here’s a non-technical diagram
My main browser that i use is Brave, it’s got built in ad blocking, wayback machine and Tor!! It’s very much the same as Chrome without all the creepiness of Google spying on you. Only downside is that it doesn’t sync bookmarks between devices at the moment. You can also turn off the Brave Rewards if that annoys you.
Forgoing that I still also use Mozilla Firefox, esp on the work computer which you can install with Software Centre. I then add the following extension to my browser no matter which one it is.
Adblock Plus – it blocks the ads on youtube.
uBlock Origin – ad blocking
DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials – more privacy blocking features
Decentraleyes – Protects against tracking through CDN
Ghostery – More privacy ad block
Privacy Badger – even more privacy blocking. (I’m not sure i need so many and it’s probably doubling up but they have never clashed …so oh well, go hard or go home)
Bookmarks clean up – to clean up any dead bookmarks or dups that i have put in.
Pixel Block and Ugly Email – blocks the tracking in email, specifically gmail.
Evernote Web Clipper – I use evernote as my online notebook where i clip different useful information that i come across into.
Bitwarden – my password manager if i own the computer.
My preferred search engine is duckduckgo. It pretty much gives you the same results as google, without all the personalisation. It’s pretty rare that I don’t find something and need to fire up google.
I have also set all my DNS to cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS. Instructions here. It basically means you don’t resolve your domain address through your ISP, so your ISP is less likely to know what website you are visiting. It also speeds up your internet, since cloudflare is faster, and it bypasses the Australian government website ban.
If you haven’t read it, Permanent Record by Edward Snowden, I finished it during the European winter.
Anyway enjoy your week and don’t forget to dob in the people who break quarantine and social distancing rules