COVID
“DON’T ACT LIKE A HUMAN. DON’T TALK TO YOUR FRIENDS, EVEN WHEN MASKED. DON’T BE FRIENDLY. THIS IS NOT THE TIME.” – Sydney’s CHO.
Sydney is going to be in lockdown forever, but this thought is a bit of a stretch. Humans tends to look at what’s happening and draw a straight line into the future as a predictor of what is going to happen. However it wouldn’t be fun to be working in the building industry in Sydney and not know when they can work again with deadlines looming.
Here’s the current Australia stats
Looking at a graph of Victoria’s active numbers, it doesn’t look like we coming out of lockdown any time soon
“Let’s deny masks work, then mandate masks, then never differentiate between medical grade n95 masks & pieces of cloth, then mask only children for a bit, then reimpose universal mask mandates on vaccinated people and then ask why trust in institutions is crumbling.”
We are going to start blaming protestors for the spread of COVID, look at the huge crowd in Sydney. South Australia government is checking people’s bank statement to enforce lockdown.
There are also protests happening in France (where a majority of adults are actually vaccinated), Italy, Britain, Greece. The issues the Europeans have with using threats to force people to vaccinate is that “It overturns 120 years of vaccination legislation and policy which has been built on trust, medical confidentiality and informed consent.“. This French business owners will only hire non vaccinated people. The English are implementing a segregation caste system, negative results won’t be good enough to go to venues where large crowds gather. World wide there is currently 13,811,192 active cases, and 4,171,983 deaths (2%).
Remember that COVIDSafe app that we spent $10mil tax payers money on? Well the report on how it performed has been highly redacted. Which is to say that the government wasted money building an app that doesn’t work and no one uses. Ask yourself, do you still turn the COVIDSafe App on to alert you when you’ve been to close to a COVID case? Probably not a good idea to do contact tracing with a spreadsheet like in England, and then lose 16,000 rows. Whoops.
It’s still not clear what causes long COVID, where you still have symptoms month after. There is currently Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID-19, as in there’s a drug that’s used to treat heart worm and could prove effective at treating COVID.
A 38 year old accounting student in Sydney dies after contracting COVID, she had no known underlying health issues. On the other side of the coin the latest vaccine safety report from the TGA is out indicating that a 44 year old man from Tasmania died from the vaccine, and a 48 year old woman from Victoria also died from the vaccine, both would be AstraZenca. Also 4 new cases of blood clots from the AstraZenca vaccine. It will be interesting to see once more data for Pfizer comes in as it looks like it’s too early to assess what the result of getting a second dose is. The government has already signed a deal with Pfizer to deliver 85 million booster shots next year. Shares is Pfizer have almost doubled from their low of $26 USD in 2020 to currently $41 USD.
There is an increasing number of people in hospital in Sydney.
At the end of the day each individual needs to make their own decision. Look at the data, weight the risk. The large majority of family here in Australia and France are vaccinated. Please don’t confuse two different issues – first being over reach of government to track its citizen and their inconsistent health advice and lockdowns. The second being vaccine are the best way we currently have to protect.
Finance and Economics
No government has ever successfully wound back QE. It’s being used as the answer to everything, when there’s no evidence it has resulted in money flowing into the economy apart from increasing asset prices.
Check this time-lapse of how the reserve currencies have changed over the last 120 years. The federal reserve balance sheet has crossed $8.24 trillion, and some people are bearish bitcoin.
I’m going to include the below table in future editions of this weekly post. It’s the current price of bitcoin in the 3 currencies I care about, and how much $1 in each currency is worth in satoshi. A satoshi being the smallest unit of bitcoin which is 0.00000001 of a bitcoin. ie, 100,000,000 sats = 1 bitcoin.
“Money doesn’t change the world, ideas do.” – Naval
Other Stuff
It’s important to recognize when people hit you with straw man arguments.
Did you know you can check the price history of items that you find on Amazon on a site called Camel camel camel! It basically tracks the price of every product and you can see if you are paying the lowest price or not, and when the lowest price was.
When someone says “we are collecting metadata”, you should always replace the word metadata with “Activity record”, it makes it easier for everyone to understand what’s being collected. Signal is still the easiest to use of all the privacy focused messaging apps.
Your goal as a parent of a small child is to make sure people like them. Being likeable opens up a world of opportunities in the future for them.
Do you know someone who is colour blind? Then get them a pair of the EnChroma glasses and watch their life change as they see colour for the first time. And if you don’t know anyone who is colour blind then let the video be a reminder to appreciate the things we often take for granted in the world.
Have a good week all!