COVID
Victoria is still at zero active cases. It doesn’t feel like things are back to normal yet. Maybe that’s why it’s called the “new normal”. IMAX had only 5 people that attended a session. Christmas light show has been cancelled this year because of the zero cases of COVID in Victoria, the council has deemed it too much of a risk. The last active case in Victoria was a man in his 90’s who was in hospital and he LIVED! “Lived” reminds me of the early bird gets the worm saying. If anyone ever tells you about the early bird, remind them to look at it from the worm’s perspective cause the late worm LIVED! But I digress…
WA is now in the lead with 24 active cases, followed by South Australia, with 17, Queensland with 13, and NSW with 6. So pretty much nothing compared to the 2 million active cases in France, and the 18,237,674 active cases world wide. 1,460,588 people are in deceased in the world from COVID. Keep in mind the important questions are not how many active cases, how many new cases or how many people died. The important questions are “Is the hospital overwhelmed?”, “Are there long term health consequences for everyone who gets COVID or just some people”, “Did more people die overall compared to previous flu seasons?”. The number by itself means nothing.
Don’t forget to give your personal details to restaurants when you visit them, so that they can then sell it to offshore advertising companies and make a profit.
Some vaccine questions updated. Vaccine efficacy – it means you don’t show symptoms, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t spread the disease anymore. We don’t know if you take the vaccine and you become an asymptomatic spreader. We also don’t know what type of long term immunity is generated.
Instead of the no-jab no play policy, it’s no-jab no-holiday policy. You might need a vaccination passport to travel in the future. The current vaccine is not approved for children, I wonder how they will reconcile that. Our government’s model seems to be – conduct a study on what other places in the world have gotten away with and use that as an excuse.
The approach many companies are taking is to go slow and leave it up to employees when they want to come into the office. Sid Sijbrandij CEO of Gitlab has been running a 160 person company located in 160 locations pretty much since the company’s inception. They’ve also been using zoom for years before zoom become cool. And each week they have a team call where people talk about their private lives (ie whatever they want). Where when you join a company you’re forced to have 10 Virtual coffee break, which I think is a good thing when joining a new company.
Markets, Finance and Economics
This was my favourite talk of the week, it brings lots of new perspective to things. Such as governments are working in a CYA (cover your arse) framework. Also talks about socialism with capital which is basically allocating capital to the largest player and it causes the world to be less innovative.
Here’s a good impartial summary of the great reset that you may have been hearing about. I am however not so impartial, every one of us as individual should be protecting ourselves from this kind of future for the sake of our children and all future generations. And don’t be complacent just because you live in Australia or France, cause the policy that they are advertising for are filtering through to our governments. Not sure how the Australian will react, we seem to have a culture of not shaking the boat. But the French would most likely be on the street shouting “Liberté! Liberté! Liberté“, even American would most likely take to the street.
Former RBA governor says withdrawing super for first home is a good idea. Probably will see the super industry shrinking a bit more if this goes ahead, we need to support house prices at all cost after all.
Cash ban has been quietly shelved. We’re still fighting bail-in in Australia. It looks like the Labor party is outraged that people are calling them. I don’t think they coming back in power anytime soon with that kind of attitude.
Bitcoin is getting mentioned in the AFR. I’m not a big fan on a AFR, it gives useless information most of the time.
BTC is trading at $18,067 USD or $23,024 AUD
This is kinda money related.. Did anyone manage to pick up anything interesting during the Black Friday sales? If not here’s a 2020 themed gift idea for you. (Made in Australia too!)
Science
Areogel – the lightest solid material in the world you can insulate yourself from heat or make your impervious to water. You can also survive 900 degree heat from Elon Musk’s boring not a flamethrower.
Left cutter ants have strong rocky armor which I found interesting.
Jupiter and Saturn will appear together in the western sky from about 17th December this year. I checked on Stellarium and on the 21st December it should look like this through my telescope with the 14mm eyepiece – both planets at once!
I found this about gravitational waves interesting. It goes into blackholes, orthogonal lasers beams and quantum squeezing devices.
Tech
Double check your invoices, in case you’ve been hacked.
What deliveries in the future could look like.
Have you been getting emails from Microsoft MyAnalytics. It’s basically employee productivity monitoring tool that Microsoft has built into MS Office. A 2 second google tells you how to turn that sh!t off, just not sure if it’s still generating data in the background.
This guy went from dual 27 inch monitors to ultra wide to using a TV in his desk setup.
What the inside of a google data center looks like.
This doctor says typing faster will improve your life, and gives his tips on how to do that. Including practicing at least 10 mins a week, and learning the keyboard shortcut for everything so that you are no longer using the mouse. Also using CTRL + Backspace to delete whole words! Note the guy is a doctor in a hospital and has time to maintain a YouTube channel. What’s your excuse for not getting more out of life?
So anyway I’ve been practicing my touch typing at 10fastfingers on the advance typing test. I’m currently only doing that at around 59 WPM, still awhile to go to reach 100 WPM.
Did you know that those crazy poms have a different keyboard to the rest of the English speaking world?! The double quotes are in the wrong place, the “/” is in the wrong place. It just makes touch typing impossible! Meanwhile on the other side of the pond..
Tony Hsieh passed away last week at the age of 46 from a house fire. He was an Internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist, but he was best known as former CEO of Zappos and for his generosity in life (and more stories here) Here’s his top 10 rules for success. Here’s some other nuggets of wisdom from him.
It’s a reminder that we here to play this game called “life” for a limited amount of time. So..
- Spend an extra moment being present with the people you love.
- Do the things you love instead of watching other people do the things they love (on TV).
- Be generous to the people around with you with your time and your knowledge.
- Change things up.
- Take the road less traveled.
- Stop giving a damn about what other people think.
And have a great week! Thanks for reading.