COVID
The major cities in Australia are still in lockdown, can’t go more than 5km from your door.
My local Indian place has gone out of business. Can’t wait to go back into the city and find out which businesses we have lost this time. Since lockdown started in March 2020, we have lost Sushi Monger, Curry Laksa place, Shark Fin House Yum Cha, Dragon Boat yum cha, the Metropolitan hotel. I’m sure a few others that don’t immediately come to mind.
There is 6,634 active cases in NSW, and 185 in Victoria! Anyone notice that the more NSW locks down, the more cases they get?
It’s interesting that there is a high correlation between those places that are in heavy lockdown due to high number of COVID cases and those areas in mortgage and rental stress. Mortgage stress defined by income is less than outgoing expenses. The reasoning could be that people in those areas are low economic areas, so people are struggling to make ends meet because of lock down as they work multiple jobs, so they are going to work despite having COVID symptoms.
Can I just point out how uninformative news reporting is. It’s saying an infant/baby is counted in the new cases and that this infant is a sibling of a child in hospital. Here is my issue, it doesn’t tell us what the sibling is in hospital for, could be anything from falling in the playground to cancer. It also doesn’t tell us if said infant with COVID is fine and being their usual infant self (as we know COVID doesn’t affect kids, they continue running around being their crazy self) or if this infant had severe symptoms. One can only assume parents got tested for COVID, and COVID tester wanted to test the kid also, and then they found some virus fragments in the kid’s nose. So we can’t really draw any conclusion from such incomplete news reporting.
11 more reports of blood clot last week from the latest TGA report . Pfizer is up to 149 cases of heart inflammation. Does the vaccine affect menstrual cycle or fertility? Apparently some people noticed changes to their menstrual cycle. Hard for me to draw a conclusion, I’ve seen people on twitter say they will only consider it safe when Alice and Bob has a child Cathy, and then Cathy goes on to have a child.
In NSW anyone over 18 can walk into a vaccination centre to get the vaccine. In Victoria, it’s a little more complicated. The guidelines states the following people can get the vaccine: Anyone aged 40-59 is currently able to book a Pfizer COVID vaccine in Victoria. People aged 18 to 39 can get the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine at participating medical clinics or certain vaccination centres. Those aged over 60 can book an AstraZeneca vaccination. People aged 12 and over who have an underlying medical condition.
Employers can now ask if you’ve been vaccinated, but can employers make COVID vaccination mandatory? The fair work ombudsman has opened the door for that, however it would depend on the job people are doing. Also to note that you need to take responsibility for your choice, if you have adverse effect you cannot blame the doctor or employer.
Moderna flagged in their latest financial report that Australian babies as young as 6 months to 12 years will be experimented on in Australia with their vaccine. Not my kids thanks.
The PM shuts down any criticism as being crazy conspiracy theory. Which doesn’t allow the healthy public discussion. And then we have the ex-Pfizer Chief Science Officer from 2011 who has come out saying that the vaccine is unsafe. But he has also been dismissed as crazy anti-vaxxer by the internet.
The world is at 17,141,840 active cases, and 4,371,950 deaths (2%). The police in Paris are checking people vaccination passes. People are still protesting about this everywhere, here’s some images from Montreal, Canada. They are not vaccination passports any more, they are movement licenses.
Airport staff in the UK forced an autistic 12 year old boy to have a COVID test even though he has an exception letter. The staff were also shown the government guidance that people with an medical exemption don’t need to get the test.
Here are the Australian work places offering the best perks. WFH is now a expectation rather than a privilege. Cisco named the best place to work in Australia for 2 years in a row says their policy is to let people decide where they can be most productive and successful. Canva is another place frequently named best in the country. Their CEO philosophy is that “what works for you works for us”. They had 160,000 job application in the past 12 months, creating 800 new jobs. If you never used Canva try it out! I use it for everything including power point slides, and creating social media ads.
State of the world
It is an interesting thought and observation that we are essentially witnessing the point where democracy (elections based on representation) has failed or is failing, as we slide further into authoritarianism (as we seek people in authority position to make decisions). However a few decades from now the generations will wonder what were we doing, why did we give power to a few people to make decisions in fields which they have no expertise in, and they will think:
- Of course it didn’t work, you put someone who came from the marketing department in charge of making decision relating to health and economics.
- Of course you didn’t work, you voted in people based on popularity instead of merit and expertise.
- Of course it didn’t work you allowed a doctor to make economic decision, why else do you think the economy failed.
- Of course it didn’t work, you didn’t allow free flow of information and public discourse so that the truth and best idea were able to bubble to the surface.
But if we just let experts run things we also have an issue with the expertise paradox. The example being when there were a high level of mortality rate when expert doctors were treating people, and lower mortality rate when less experienced nurses were treating people. And the doctors were arrogant about this and saying they were the experts and couldn’t be related to them. Turns out the difference was bacteria – the doctors were also dealing with corpse and the nurses were washing their hands out of habit.
I know what you are thinking, but there’s a health crisis, it’s temporary. And to that I say “2 weeks in March 2020 is temporary, 1.5 years later is not temporary!”
Until someone has a plan on how money in the bank will earn interest again (i.e you receive a yield on your money), then the world is in no way going back to “normal”. Right now, no one has any idea on how we do that.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
I get the feeling we have moved further away from this statement. Go onto Google and search for the term “white couple”, the image search results gives you black couples and and mixed races couples, and a large majority of the search result. When you do the same search for black couple, you get only black couples. So in effect our desire to be less racist has made race even more prominent and resulted in strange things leaking into automated search algorithms.
Here is the problem with applying an extra tax for the top 1% of rich people. JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter, and made billions from it, each person around the world choosing to give up 10 dollars to buy a book. What you do when you tax the top 1% is go JK Rowling, Harry Potter was too successful, please give us some of your money so that we can mismanage it. Which also disincentives people from creating stuff, there is no free market, no freedom if someone wants to come in and take a cut. What you end up doing then is driving creativity and innovation out of your country.
We no longer believe in transparency in Australia with new laws passed that require shareholder to prove that when companies don’t disclose something it was done with knowledge,recklessness or negligence. Also if the government is given COVID advice, they also don’t want to release that to the public. We also don’t believe in climate change in Australia.
Chinese government: Everyone should have exactly 3 babies
People: Get stuffed, and stop telling me what to do with my body.
Wear a mask, school shut down. But what’s the difference if we do it in the name of real science, and they do in in the name of fake religion?
Finance and Economics
50 years ago, yesterday, Richard Nixon suspended the convertibility of USD dollars to gold, bringing about the current fiat money we have today. Money based on the faith and good will in the government.
Why bitcoin is not a ponzi scheme.
Bitcoin up ~$10,000 AUD since last week.
Tech
This is a very good balance opinion on there’s no need to be alarmist about the Apple implementation of on the phone scanning, but it is a slippery slope where once you let the cat out of the bag, a Chinese government could ask for scanning for pictures relating to tank man or Winnie the pooh for instance.
Here’s where the Tesla autopilot has automatically avoided accidents. Including automatically accelerate to avoid getting hit behind even though the car is at a stop, swerving to another lane to avoid a careless truck from changing lanes, and stopping when it senses an accident about to happen 2 cars ahead. I also found out something interesting, if you have an electric car, and you run out of power, then you may need someone sitting in the driver seat for you to be able to push it, otherwise the motor lock up. Additionally, since the wheels are connected to the motor it really shouldn’t be pushed or towed in the first place. It will damage the motor. Interestingly the Tesla has a tow mode. Imagine running out of power and then asking the local pub for an extension cable.
For those slightly technically inclined please tighten up your home network security. No open ports, firewall on, Alexa and all the smart light globes moved onto its own network. You can go an extra step and route all traffic through a VPN at the router level, all DNS requests goes through a Pi-Hole DNS server. Pi-Hole is set up to be recursive so that it doesn’t go through google or your ISP DNS servers.
Stop turning your phone into a hotspot! It may be convenient but it’s a privacy leak.
Other stuff
This was an interesting chat about finances in couples. Small difference in perception of spending at Target now, will result in divorce citing money as the issue later. It means you are not aligned with your significant other on the topic of money.
Article says women are slower at getting treatment at getting heart attack, so if you are experiencing chest pains, maybe call ambulance.
Hilarious video of those two guys walking into a bubble tea shop in Vietnam and one of the customers proceeds to say out loud “if these two foreigners have COVID we’re all going to die”. Family is important, and if you don’t believe that, then watch this lady who hasn’t seen her family in 43 years finally reunited with them in Vietnam as she walks in and her mother who has been bed ridden for 6 years from a stroke reaches out as she recognises her daughter.
Lastly if you enjoyed reading me, feel free to share all or any part with others. And also when the time comes and it’s no longer interesting, please unsubscribe. I spent some time recently unsubscribing from crap I no longer look at. I don’t do any research, it’s just links I run across during the week, and also I’m very biased so obviously I only pick stuff to read that fits in with my biases!! I do try to hold the opinion on both sides when I’m trying to work out the facts.
Have a great week all!