COVID
In Australia there are 1,092 active community cases in NSW. 59 in Victoria, 13 in Queensland and 2 in NT. Active cases in the world has increased to 12,951,115, total death worldwide is still around 2% of cases at 4,102,543.
Massive lockdown in Sydney, unfortunately if you are in an affected area of Sydney and work in a profession that is not authorized, then you are not allowed to go earn money to feed yourself. The supermarkets are empty again in Melbourne, this time of fresh fruit and veg. Don’t bother making a menu for the week, just see what’s in stock and improvise.
You are no longer allowed visitors.
Cafe and Restaurants are back to take away only.
Home schooling has returned.
5 day work in the office is now dead in Australia. There’s a list of major companies and their hybrid work policy for those who are looking to move jobs. Here’s a preview of what an incoming passenger card will look like for those arriving overseas. A Perth Man who was suppose to be in self-quarantine was jailed for 7 months for having tradies come over.
Here is the latest Australian COVID-19 vaccine weekly safety report from the TGA. A further 7 reported blood clot issues last week, which brings the total number of major issues with vaccine up to 83 (38 men, 45 women). A 72 year old South Australian women died as a result of getting the first dose of AstraZencca vaccine.
Why is someone from the NSW government calling it a “new world order“? It feels like there is a narrative being filtered down. The Philippines will let children go outdoors for the first time after 1 year of it being illegal for children to be outdoors. Plans to vaccinate teenagers in Greece have sparked huge protest. The Japanese have prepared anti-sex bed for the athletes at the Olympics. Chinese are leading the way by banning unvaccinated people from public spaces.
On December 27, 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron said vaccines would never be mandatory. Now his narrative is “The unvaccinated will bear the brunt of the restrictions rather than everyone“. The people of France are out in protest over the plans to implement a vaccine passport. France is in a state of tyranny. There is so many people marching in Marseilles, in Paris, even in the small town. A French priest tells the people to have courage to defend their freedom. “Vaccine or not, I am not a QR code”
Is it a contravention of the Nuremberg code (1947)?
Look at the narrative and what is being reported by mainstream media with a critical eye. Here is a video of them pretending to clean so as to take pictures. And often they are looking for people to write a news article to push a particular narrative, and get clicks.
Finance and Economics
GDP is an antiquated way of measuring productivity from last century. Let me explain, there’s a phrase coined by Andreessen Horowitz. “Software is eating the world“, which for those of a finance background is called “Dematerialization“. Over time things are removed from ‘productivity’ because we no longer physically produce it, but society and the world has moved forward despite those things no longer being produced (or the production of those items are so small it’s negligible), and because they are no longer produced they are naturally removed from the GDP measurement. Here are some examples. CD, video tapes, VCR player, large majority of consumer cameras, and to certain extent books with Amazon Kindle. We need new ways of measuring productivity. I say this because there’s articles about how major cities face years to the road to recovery, when in fact it may never return to those levels we seen pre-COVID, and cities will return to the historical norm of just being meeting place for commerce, instead of a place you go to work.
What is an inflationary system and what is a deflationary system (Funny explanation)? Once upon a time, the meaning of inflation was how much money was being printed. If the central banks prints 45% more money, then the inflation rate is 45%. Whether prices subsequently rise or fall depends on many factors and should be given its own name.
It’s interesting to see what people’s net worth is at various age from people volunteering this information on whirlpool. It also makes me question why people don’t factor in the washing machine when looking at one’s own net worth if you are factoring in the PPOR (principal place of residence). Because you live there, you aren’t going to sell it. Which also makes me think about what is the best way of keeping score should be a combination of how much easily liquid asset you have and how much liquid asset is coming in.
APRA expects all the banks to be able to implement negative interest rates by 30 April 2022 in a letter addressed to the banks. The regulator is not there for your protection of your savings, but for the protection of the financial system. “Hunting the wolves is no an option, the only option you have is to armor the sheep“.
Is our money safer in AU or NZ banks (after all they are the same bank)? If you are in New Zealand, you have a public bank (called the kiwi bank) that is owned by the government that you can put your money in. The theory is that because it is owned by the government, it is less likely to fail so you are less likely to have your money bailed in. In Australia, we still need to close the loophole that allows your money to be taken and converted to shares in the bank should the bank have liquidity issues. We also need AusPost to become a public bank.
A 29 year old crypto billionaire has refused to rule out buying Goldman Sachs in the future. It feels like the Netflix / Blockbuster moment will be coming in the future. If you don’t know at some point in the past- Netflix had presented to the board at Blockbuster, hoping to be acquired by Blockbuster video. However blockbuster saw no value in Netflix, and well the rest is history basically. Many times in the past, people ignored or were warned about the dangers of new technology.
Or government have tried to regulated it by fitting it into the existing view of the world. For example – you couldn’t have a car without a horse pulling it.
If you are interesting in an overview of how bitcoin’s lightning network works, this chat was very helpful, especially the role play half way into that video. Bitcoin is trading at $31,711 USD, $42,998 AUD or 27,175 EUR. In other words 1 USD is worth 3153 sats, 1 AUD = 2326 sats, 1 EUR = 3680 sats.
Science
Here are two things I’ve been pondering.
Sense of Self – If every single one of the atoms in your body are replaced naturally over your life time, then how can you point to where your physical self starts and ends. Are we all interconnected with every single thing around us? We only really exist at a certain level of zoom. If you zoom out to somewhere in space, you essentially don’t exist anymore, if you zoom to the cellular level, you once again no longer exist.
Probability might not exist – There is no such thing as probability, when there’s a probability of an event happening, the probability of that event not happening *might* have also occurred in another version of the universe. The thing that makes me contemplate this is the double slit experiment, when you fire an atom through these barrier with two slits, however when you try to measure it going through 1 slit, something strange happens. Which kind of says “the observer” matters when an experiment is performed.
Have a good week all. Nothing is funnier than Frosty the snowman, Jess is looking at me in horror cause I spent the large majority of the day watching it and “laughing like a whale” apparently.