Now at stage four lockdown. Curfew 8pm-5am if found outside you will be shot (or at the very least given dirty looks by people who see you from their window). Did you notice it was very quiet outside at night. Try to do your groceries before 8pm (mainly a reminder for me as I’ve arrived at 7:50pm before), organise your takeaway before 8pm (unless you want an unexpected dinner of cereal).
Make sure you don’t travel 5km away from home or you’ll hit an invisible glass barrier. Don’t exercise for more than 1 hour, or more than once per day. Umm not sure how you would enforce that it’s not like parking where a parking inspector comes around to check if you’ve been parked more than 1 hour. But basically means the morning hell ride on beach rd is off, as is any marathon training. I estimate you could run 10-15kms in an hour, or ride 30kms around your 5km bubble.
Really the only difference personally is no more childcare, and no more kinder, which we will need to work through to ensure our kids stay ahead of the learning curve. Ran into a COVID researcher on our walk yesterday and she’s worried about having to cut hours because she might not be classified as an essential worker. We have similar aged kids. I’m not sure that makes sense.
We are at 6322 active cases in Victoria, which in percentage terms is similar to the increase last week, but in real numbers terms it’s more than last week. So overall there’s more zombies walking around which can infect you. Here’s a table I knocked up on the fly.
|
Active Cases |
Weekly # Increase |
Weekly % Increase |
|
233 |
– |
– |
|
543 |
310 |
133.00% |
|
1484 |
941 |
173.30% |
|
2837 |
1353 |
91.20% |
|
4233 |
1396 |
49.20% |
|
6322 |
2089 |
49.35% |
This is useful to find out how many active cases there are in your suburb. Here it is visualised on the map for you
Here’s the usual chart
NSW is still ticking up, they were at 151 last week, now at 240.
Some people in Melbourne have the whole family with corona, all 3 generations who live under 1 roof. That must be tough. We have a large amount of the medical profession testing positive to COVID, even a 30 year old doctor is in ICU. However information is incomplete about this doctor, if they are fit, if they have an existing condition, if they smoke and all that.
Workers at Loy Yang power plant tested positive and now in quarantine. Remember that time many years ago when we didn’t have gas in Victoria, so no gas stoves or hot water. Hopefully we don’t have a situation where we have no power, it seems like anything is possible in the current environment. But in any case, I just checked my stock of candles and don’t forget food that doesn’t need a fridge.
Face mask doesn’t infringe on human rights. But don’t judge if you see someone without or not wearing them correctly, they might have a good reason. Unless they come up and cough in your face, then I suggest roundhouse to the head. Where can I buy the following mask?!
Long term symptoms of COVID and what we know so far. Here a summary of some of the vaccines in development.
The world is at 6,117,914 cases, 691,736 deceased.
How does Vietnam deal with COVID and have zero deaths? They reacted quickly after learning the lessons of bird flu and SARS. They locked down early, the community pitched to help one another out, people who tested positive were locked down in a military complex, which is something you can do in a 1 party system. (which also to say that we take the numbers with a grain of salt)
Singapore had a second wave originating from migrant workers. They locked it all down, guaranteed wages would be paid (some people are still waiting for their money), gave them food, free health care, and internet access. Now they are looking to prevent a third wave.
With a shutdown of all the cyber cafes in Tokyo, Japan. I’m concerned about what happen to these people. It’s a pretty depressing life, and also a pretty depressing mind set that they have. It’s also a fact that living in a big city, we’ve lost that feeling of community. It’s something that you don’t realise till you’ve spent significant time in a small French village and a trip to the supermarket involves chatting with random people. And also everyday of december leading up to xmas the town gets out at night to dance in the square.
Champagne producers suffered more than the great depression. 100 million bottles are expected to sit in cellars unsold. I think we still have quite a few excess bottles from our last xmas gathering.
Australia has returned to its grass roots as a prison island. This dual citizen lady couldn’t leave to be with her dying father, and now has to go through a bureaucratic process to go to the funeral in Germany. As the meme goes – watching the government deal with COVID is like watching the ministry of magic deal with the return of Voldemort.
Markets and Economics.
Why are we targeting inflation of 2-3%? Why?? No one seems to have a good reason. Really you should be measuring your own personal inflation. Track how much you are paying for food and expenses one year compared to the next, and you will also come to the conclusion that the system is broken.
Money printing is through the roof (i feel like i keep coming back to this M2 chart)
US banks have basically been given the ok to custody crypto, this is a big deal in the grand scheme of things. And here’s an article I found interesting on wall street’s crypto cold war, where Paul Tudor Jones has gone one way, and others the other way.
Watch this short doco to learn about Hard Money. Also here’s a recommended watch for your own education.
Gold All time high. EVER. China Banks Bar Clients from buying precious metals. Here’s the chart going back to 1970’s.
Kodak is up a bazillion percent. All because Trump is giving them hundreds of millions of dollars to develop ingredients for generic drugs. Wait…. are we talking about Kodak, the camera company that went bankrupt? Yup that same Kodak…up 2100% at the peak during the last 4 days of trading from 2 dollars to 60 dollars.
Onto a less volatile asset, that’s not up 2100%. BTC is now trading at around 1100 USD
Most profitable investments of the decade:
Bitcoin: +62,500%
Ethereum: +17,900%
Tesla: +9,000%
Netflix: +4,280%
Shopify: +3,450%
Domino’s: +3,000%
Abiomed: +2,000%
lululemon: +1,300%
Amazon: +1,250%
State of the World
Welcome to San Francisco.
Zucks at the recent hearing. What’s wrong with this picture? 🙂
Other Stuff
Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier which has been 100% remote has their guide on working remotely free to access, but i think more interesting is the panel discussion with some people from well known companies like Trello, MeetEdgar, and HubSpot
Have you hacked level 4 of career conversations?
Let’s finish with What’s the point of wearing pants?