COVID
There are 21 active cases in Victoria, 14 of those are in hotel quarantine. Restriction are back in place in Victoria, the justification being the state gov @#$5ed up hotel quarantine yet again, and we can justify this by saying there’s a new variant of the virus out. If the state gov doesn’t turns this around in the next few days, it only their policy to blame, not some escaped traveler.
There’s border restrictions with Victoria.
In case you need a border pass to move across states, there’s a table that puts it all in 1 place on the COVID data page. Here are some interesting charts from that site.
Nationally most cases are overseas acquired but if you look at where all the local community transmission is….
…They are ALL in Victoria!
We are back to remote working.
We are also back to remote learning for the kids. Not the first time this has happened.
I saw what could have been the beginning of supermarket shelves being emptied again, even though there are restrictions on buying in place.
Gyms are now closed. I’m a bit gutted that I didn’t go to last week’s rock climbing session. Also I was lifting weights at close to 10pm on Friday just before lockdown closure and that was the most amount of people I’ve ever seen on a Friday night. Usually it’s just me and 1 or 2 other people on a Friday night.
We all know this will last longer than 5 days right…??
The world’s active cases moves lower again, we are now at 25,640,984 active cases with 2,405,463 total deceased. You get 10 years jail in the UK and they will fine the crap out of you for hotel quarantine rule breakers.
If you don’t have work place flexibility at your company, over the long run you will lose talented staff. The gold standard is Atlassian model of TEAM Anywhere – work anywhere any time. After that it’s a sliding scale until you reach industrial era factory thinking. The way to make sure that no one gets left out in a hybrid working model is that all conversations should happen online FIRST if even one person that should be part of that discussion is remote. There should never be a situation where something is discussed in person by those in the office and then the information passed on to the ones working remotely – that creates disconnect.
Here’s a tread if you are looking for ideas for fun team events remotely.
Finance & Economics
Elon Musk said too many MBA running companies. Stop spending time on meeting, presentation, and Excel. Just make your product better if you want to be innovative.
Elon has been talking about dogecoin on twitter as a diversionary tactic of what’s really happening.
According to a SEC filing, Tesla has brought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin and will begin accepting bitcoin as payment soon. And we not even talking about SpaceX since it’s not a public company, they don’t need to disclose it. Don’t be surprised if more businesses start moving part of their Treasury into bitcoin. It gives the share price a good boost. Rumor has it we are expecting Oracle next.
The normal people have had their opportunity to front run big businesses but unfortunately most people suffer from emotions, inaction and excuses of “I don’t understand this bitcoin thing”. You didn’t understand how to drive until you were at least 16 years old and you learnt that. Officially if you get into bitcoin now, you are getting in AFTER the world’s richest man did. Ask yourself what confirmation are you waiting for before you start looking into it? Bitcoin to hit $10,000, $50,000, $100,000? The world’s richest man to get in? Your next door neighbor to get in? The message has always been just put what you can afford to lose into it. If you had $1,000 in the bank, then 1% of that is $10. Now since COVID hit, there been more and more adoption. Bitcoin is now trading at $63,800 AUD, or $49,100 USD
Don’t be this professor, he is basically about to cry cause he’s arguing that the markets are wrong. “Science advances one funeral at a time“, old school experts are unable to accept new ideas despite overwhelming evidence.
If you didn’t spend money on crap, then this is how much it would be worth now. (Just keep pressing the button!)
Jay-Z and Jack Dorsey announced a $24million dollar fund to help develop bitcoin. What? You didn’t know Jay-Z into bitcoin!? That’s cause you are probably educated in traditional finance and can’t see what’s happening. We have a saying in bitcoin – “Have fun staying poor.”
Master card announced that crypto is coming to it’s payment rails this year.
Amazon has been advertising for crypto jobs. BNY Mellon is opening a digital asset business. Miami is now in bitcoin, employees can be paid in BTC, residents can pay fee in BTC. Taxes can be paid in BTC, the city can hold it’s treasury in BTC. If you have been thinking government are going to ban it, then you have to think again with all these entities now lobbying for it. Adoption happens slowly, then all at once.
If you want to hear Naval Ravikant’s opinion on why cryptocurrencies are one of the greatest inventions of our time.
All of this is happening basically because government is printing money, and they call it a number of things – quantitative easing, asset purchasing, etc. According to the book “The Price of Tomorrow” by Jeff Booth, the central banks are fighting a losing battle trying to get the world back to inflation. The world is inherently deflationary because of technology, because of automation. Something that cost X amount years ago to produce now cost a fraction of that today because of advances in technology. Farming that once required a huge amount of labor now that role is augmented by machines, allowing us to produce more. Even though you get double the power on the new iPhone, it cost around the same or less compared to previous generations.
I’m currently about half way through reading “America’s Great Depression” By Murray Rothbard, whom is considered one of the great Austrian economist. And everything that central banks and governments did during that era that lead to the great depression is almost exactly the playbook of what is happening right now. Easy credit, laws to relax lending standards, encouraging more debt and more spending, reduction in the amount of capital that banks have to hold in reserve, trying to stop people from saving. More money printing is coming in the US as they try to get everyone their “stimmy”. At the end of the days it’s all the money printing and government intervention that will cause the economy to blow up.
And all that leads to this week’s must watch video – The Great Reset has already started. Bitcoin is the life boat, that is to say bitcoin has no top, because fiat currency has no bottom.
Tech
I wouldn’t trust anything that requires a SMS confirmation. This makes banks especially vulnerable, because they all use SMS confirmation, and this is subject to SIM swap attacks.
I’ve kind of sorted out my cable management, after watching this video. This is what it looks like from behind and at the front with the new CableMod cables. I like the results, but it was actually a huge amount of pain to put in.
The commander pro in the bottom left of the case has wires coming at strange angles out of it because those wires are temperature probes that I wanted to reach specific parts of the case.
And I don’t have a fancy PC, I have an up to date computer. This is what a fancy PC looks like!
Maybe free upgrade to fiber coming soon to NBNco if you are in Australia.
Hacking using Excel with Outlook. Of course you can actually do this type of hacking in any language, but there’s some interesting concepts to take away to improve your macros you have at work to make them better integrated with Outlook. Also if you get stuck with a password on an Excel Sheet and want to remove it without knowing the password, here is the hack. Everyone should know how to do this. There is also an easy way to remove VBA password from an Excel workbook as well that you can look up. Everything is breakable, and no dictator can keep that knowledge from you in the Internet age.
Checking out this guys gaming and studio setup. What am I playing at the moment? Divinity Original Sin 2 – Definitive Edition on computer. Lots of planing and working out strategy and hardly any time in game yet! Monster Hunter Stories on the phone – I missed my train stop the other week cause of this! Both games were on sale when I got them.
Other Stuff
How Does Gravity Warp the Flow of Time? You are held down in your chair because the clock in your butt is ticking faster than the clock in your head! Also I very much enjoyed this Q&A episode of Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. What if the gravity and dark matter that we think exist is coming from another universe?
Have a browse of this 10 terapixel image of the universe it contains more than 1 billion galaxies. And realise when you zoom into a galaxy, you are not even at the level of 1 of the stars yet, and realise how small we really are. Counting and cataloging of galaxies is not trivial task, according the scientific paper, it’s a problem that requires supercomputers. Are we just a bunch of ants in our small little ant hill?
Hong Kong is not the place it once was.
It is Chinese new year. We are now in the year of the Ox. You can find your animal zodiac, and look up your prospects for the year. It’s like horoscope but Asian style. And since government lock down has destroyed Sushi Monger and Laksa Bar in Melbourne, here’s some other Asian place to look into out in the suburbs. Otherwise try my recommendations – Roasted Pork bread roll from Bun Bun Bakery in Springvale. Roasted Pork bread roll from Fresh Chili Deli in St Albans. Sliced beef and meatball Pho from Pho Hung Vuong Saigon in Footscray.
I’ll leave you with this disturbing fact. Did you know that that every human being has mites living in their eyelashes and on their face?!? They are so small that you require a microscope to see, and you cannot get rid of them.
Have a great week!