Unless you’ve been living in a cave the last week, you would know the major focus in Australia has been Victoria’s numbers. We are now at 560 active cases in Australia, and of those 543 is in Victoria!! That’s more than double the 233 active Victorian cases from last week. The next highest is NSW with 6 (most likely half of those are exports of Melbourne). To be honest, if we don’t get close to 800 next week in Victoria I’d be very surprised.
You can see it tick up
All these blue bars belong to the Victorians
Here’s the trend of the major hotspots
Also some public housing towers have been put into hard lock down where people can’t even leave anymore. It’s being guarded by 500 police officers spread across every floor
How’s the rest of the world doing? 4,509,670 active cases world wide. 536,487 dead. I really like this visualsation on Global Deaths due to various causes and compared to COVID-19. At some point in May it overtook suicide for total death. I was surprised how high globally suicide was in the first place. So I hope everyone is giving some priority to their own mental health!
The comment the PM made about the contact tracing app being like applying sunscreen has not been helpful. It has made people complacent, and they start to think if they install the app then they are safe. It’s probably partly responsible for the increase in cases.
Some people in the US are just insane when it comes to mask. Just a warning if you watch this you might be a few percentage points dumber afterwards, but it was enjoyable entertainment. It’s also funny to LOL at Trump.
Here it is, if you wanted more information about the saliva COVID test
Europe is easing restrictions with Australia But good luck getting out. Here is the official page from the department of Home Affairs. If you are an Australian citizen or permanent resident, you are forbidden to leave Australia unless you have an exception. So you’re trapped! No holidays overseas.
Parts of Mongolia have gone into lockdown because an ancient form of the bubonic plague has surfaced. Also a newly identified swine flu could become the next pandemic. I haven’t digged into it enough to determine if it’s all hype (aka fake news) or not, but just something to be aware of.
Did you know Apple has been closing stores in the US because they have been seeing less foot traffic around some cities – because they collect that data. You can view that data on an aggregated level here.
Despite lock downs, the Tour de France has started! However it’s virtual! How does that work? The first stage was the professional women’s riders, competing on the virtual stage, each rider is at home on a bike connected to a trainer connected to the virtual version. And it’s almost exactly like the real thing, you see the riders on their trainers, there’s interviews, there’s the real commentators and everything. Watch it here if you have a VPN. I believe it’s also on the Tour de France Facebook page with English commentators, but i haven’t watched English commentary since SBS cut Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen from the commentary team, which is something we will never get back now.
Markets and Economics
Tim Wilson the chair of the House of Representative Economics Committee has said that if you don’t like that law allows the bank to take your money if the bank fails then you should take it out. That’s a little worrying. Also get your popcorn ready, I can see the possibility of public backlash coming for financial institution holding/trading any vanilla derivatives on their books.
I love it when an angry guy calls Warren Buffet an IDIOT in the first 8 minutes of an interview, and he actually makes sense in his arguments.
WTF Is going on in the Markets? This one was a panel discussing what’s going on in the markets and my favorite conversation of the week. We’re headed for major currency volatility in the world.
The people who didn’t qualify for early super withdrawal are facing penalty because the ATO did not verify any claims, anyone who tried to get super out were granted automatic access. Also the APRA heatmaps are out. You can download an excel spreadsheet that compares the returns and fees across different super funds. You can basically analyses the numbers yourself to form your own narrative.
State of the World
France’s prime minister has handed in the resignation of his government to the president. So we now have a new prime minister. – Jean Castex. Here they are together (The president is the 42 year old sharply dressed guy)
After watching Kyle Bass – founder and CIO of Hayman Capital talk about Hong Kong. I’ve become even more bearish on the future of Hong Kong.
Did you see all that defense spending news last week in mainstream media? Turns out they are actually spending less than they had originally committed to. Don’t believe the spin that the media gives you, or Scotty from Marketing.
When fireworks become illegal in California, what do people do?!
Yes We Kanye!
President West Future Cabinet:
VP: Jay Z
Treasury Secretary: 50 Cent
Secretary of State: Nicki Minaj
Defense Secretary: Mike Tyson
Attorney General: Meek Mill
Agriculture Sec: Snoop Dogg
Health Sec: Dr Dre
Commerce Sec: Elon Musk
Fed Chair: Ty Dolla $ign
Other Stuff
In case you are wondering, I have better than 20/20 vision. But I just got a pair of Blueblox from a Perth company, it reduces digital eye strain, headaches, and stress level by cutting a certain wavelength of blue light. I use a program called F.lux on my desktop, which when the sun goes down it changes the blue-ish white light from the computer to a warmer orange-ish light. You have a similar setting natively on windows 10 called Night Light, and I believe it’s called night shift on your iPhone. It makes it easier on the eyes along with going to a dark mode theme.
Just finished reading “Indistractable” by Nir Eyal. The premise that he starts with is the situation where he’s with his daughter and asks her a question and while she is answering, he goes to attend to something on his phone, and by the time he looks up she has left the room. It is the follow up to his first book “Hooked”, which is basically the guide that tech people use to hack your psychology and get you addicted to the products we built. Hooked is one of the best books to read if you’re interested in product development. Both books highly recommended.
Enjoy your week