All those people who say that one person can’t change the world, well obviously they have never eaten an under cooked bat.
The world continues to track higher, with 4,131,034 confirmed cases worldwide, 2,396,831 still active, and of those 281,014 have died.
Number of new cases is still low in Australia. Active cases across the country has trended lower.
Number of active cases in Victoria is up, now at 125, compared to the 88 last time.
Consider the hypothetical scenario extrapolating on the current thinking of trying to fit life back into how it used to be. We are allowed to work. In the lift one morning while doing the new 10-6pm working hours to avoid peak hour lifts, we did the random lotto draw of whole team A in office and team B at home. Others in the building are also doing the staggered work time. In the lift one morning you encounter an ex-colleague, who is unaware he has COVID but is asymptomatic (or has recently bumped into someone else who has it on public transport but has yet to display symptoms.) Being the very friendly guy that he is, you start talking to him about how the footy, what everyone has been working on etc. And during the course of the conversation he steps a little too close in the enclosed space. You then go on your merry way, and go on to have encounters with others at your company. Suddenly half the people in the office have symptoms and you have to shut it down (Gordon Ramsey style), taking out a ¼ of our colleagues and we go back to where we are now. And then your company makes the press like Cedar Meat. Oh common, that’s a very low probability scenario. Happened recently in South Korea, Seoul.
One COVID-19 positive man walks into a bar, 1900 people now need to get traced and tested. 40 positives already found. 2000 venues were shut, all 1 week after being allowed to re-open.
What does life look like coming out of COVID-19? What does the future look like? So let’s start with the world has changed, we’re never going back to exactly how the world was before COVID-19.
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Online learning becomes more commonplace, and degrees become less important. You graduated from Harvard? What a coincidence, I also graduated from Zoom University. It is no longer a piece of paper that gets you through the door, it is how well you can execute.
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Supply chains and manufacturing come into focus, something that is laid bare with borders close. Do we need to outsource so many things to China? I’m embarrassed to talk to people in France and they ask what cars we produce here in Australia… ummm none.
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Do you need to be in the office? Are you more productive in the office? That will depend on the individual. Not everyone is an extrovert or thrives in that environment. A reminder of the benefits of remote working that some people seem to have discovered
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Society becomes more decentralised, there’s already talks of Rethinking the future of work in Queensland. When you consider the average Australian is 38 year working women with 2 kids why do we still accept an antiquated system built in the industrial revolution of coming to be seated in a communal work space from 9-5 to be productive workers. If you remove that, housing incidentally becomes more affordable, as you can now live further out near the best mountain bike riding trails, nature walks or rock climbs. All as long as you have a stable connection to the internet. You no longer need to live in a capital city. If your colleague had been sitting in another country this whole time and didn’t tell the rest of us. No one here would be any wiser. There is a term for this movement, it’s called “Digital Nomads”, when you no longer rely on one source for all your income and can generate all your income online and no longer need to live in one place, one country. I know a few people who live this way for many years. Developers, copy writers, marketing people, content creators, e-sports gamers.
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The 20 something who don’t have kids suddenly realise they no longer need to work in an Office and they are more productive when doing so, and so we lose access to tap into the most talented of that pool of people without an extremely flexible workplace.
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The whole 9-5 will go through a rethink. (Those are not my most productive hours. I’m productive early in the morning to mid morning, and then late at night, which is fine as that’s when I work on other creative projects)
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Social interaction becomes an online first. It’s something younger people (and also people in tech) do naturally. I’ve gone from the late 1990 of communicating in ICQ and mIRC to MSN Messenger to now Steam chat, telegram groups, slack channels, discord, whatsapp, signal, snapchat, zoom, twitter DM. In a previous life I use to arrive at work and greet everyone online first in group chats. And since you’re working remotely, written communication is more important than ever. Here’s some tips.
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Food security becomes vitally important, as it could be seen when there was restrictions at the supermarket in Australia (didn’t happen in France). Maybe Permaculture garden become more commonplace. Like the Plummery in Melbourne from Kat Lavers. (watch the video)
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Longrain and Red Spice Road is dead. Restaurants and cafes concept will need a rethink, how do they survive if dining re-opens but they can’t have as many covers as they used to due to social distancing. But you are under pressure from minimum wage, and rent. I have some flyers in my letterbox from former chefs who lost their job so they produce meals from their home kitchen and deliver it to you. Also I went to an interesting restaurant in Le Mans, France. There was one guy working there, he was the waiter, the cook, the cleaner, the cashier. It was a home cooked meal in the style of his grandmother with not much of a menu. Best meal I had ever had in Le Mans. Otherwise I’m sure quite a number of the population just cook at home now, i know that’s what we’ve done. Fresh pasta, bread, french patisseries.
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Kids’ education in general will eventually get a rethink. Why learn geography from your shotty teacher when david attenborough is teaching it now. How does going through school to prepare you for the workplace work when the world will have a preference for remote work? Finland is taking those steps to evolve it. The concept of remote learning is not new, I have some friends who moved over from France, and lived in Bourke, NSW (it’s literally out in the middle of nowhere), so their both their kids had to be educated remotely. Super nice calm and smart kids. From my perspective for my kids education is the family responsibility first. My 4 year old speaks 3 language fluently, reads in 2 of them, is learning the write, interest in science, learning to add and subtract, can make cake herself, is learning to program, learning piano, manages her own finance with her 3 jam jars – spending money, saving money (for a yellow car apparently), and donating money (to help animals apparently). I’m not sure what she’s going to do at school.
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Car ownership will go down eventually. If people don’t drive that much anymore, they will think what do I need a car for? It will mean less pollution, but maybe a few years away till when we get more autonomous driving vehicles. In 20 years, I don’t even think my kids will need to learn to drive, one day they will ask me “Dad, you used to drive cars?! Millions of people must have died”.
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Remember that last overseas trip that you had? Savor that memory as we’re not going back to that in a hurry. Not even NZ wants to open the border to us just yet.
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More robots in our lives, such as the Singapore released robots to tell people to social distance. Pretty soon the robots will probably want revenge.
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Automation of processes will become more important than ever. No one wants to handle a big clunky system like a bank in the year 2000, especially in a remote work environment. That just sets up the competition to eat our lunch. And since programming is being taught in high school now, it will only be a few years when all in the workforce have that skill. We have all become centaurs. Half man, half machine. The machine does the calculation, the human checks. With advancements in neural networks and machine learning techniques, it comes to a point where having a monkey in the mix just adds noise to the process. Just look at the advancement Deep Mind has made in Starcraft 2, and Open AI in Dota 2. In this fast moving world, I’m not worried about being made redundant, I’m worried about being made irrelevant.
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At the moment, people’s work area probably looks like this. Probably will need a rethink on hot desking. Here’s some ideas on how offices in companies will look like coming out of Covid-19. One way hallways. I’d hate to be in charge of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole to get us back to the office. My planning would probably look like this.
Short of that I wouldn’t mind an ergonomic dinosaur….
Maybe I’m wrong and nothing will change. Who knows, and who cares. I control the parts that I can control.
Anyway a great book that I’m almost finished is Utopia for Realist by Rutger Bregman. Making the case for UBI, how GDP is a stupid measure of growth (even it’s inventor said it), automation, case for 15 hour work week, allowing free and open borders without restrictions.
As i previously said, contact tracing doesn’t work. The protocol that allows apple phone and android phone to communicate together hasn’t been released yet. And without that protocol you have to leave your iphone with the screen on, and the app on for it to work at all. With that protocol, contract-tracing app can communicate across different OS, but apple and google bans the use of GPS location tracking, which is what some government want.
Does it feel like this when you go out of your home??
Markets and Economics.
Why is QE (aka printing money) bad? Here’s a picture from monopoly illustrating what QE looks like in monopoly. Who wants to play with me if i play like this? On another note if you like boardgames get a hold of Pandemic. It’s cooperative and we’ve played it many times till the early morning with friends.
Alarm bells should be ringing the velocity of M2 money stock has been decreasing even before the COVID-19 event?
While the supply that’s out there has ticked up significantly.
Lesson of the ME Bank redraw facility issue – Read your T&C
Interesting conversation with Mark Yusk, CEO of Morgan Creek Capital Management. The bit towards the end comparing boomer asset allocation to millennial asset allocation is so true. “I don’t have a broker, what are you talking about”
Paul Tudor Jones buys bitcoin as a hedge against inflation. From the first time I started sending these emails to now, bitcoin has gone up from 10300 AUD to 15300 AUD, an increase of 48%. Arb opportunity over the weekend. BTCUSD dropped > 8%. BTCAUD went up 1%. It’s now literally a day till the halving event, when the block redward drops from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens if anything at all.
The below is important from the Global Macro Investor newsletter. Go here if you want to read the whole newsletter. The bit comparing it to the 1930’s from page 64 is a good read. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Also I like the page 79 free thoughts, esp the comment about Australia. We seem to be the laughing stock of the world.
ASX 200
We haven’t even retracted 50% of the loss from all time high yet. It’s just been going sideways.
Don’t forget your working from home tax deductions. Obviously consult your own accountant as my situation is different to yours.
As you go about your week and wonder when we will be going back to the office, take a moment to enjoy right now as if this is the last time.
If you made it past the bat soup picture congratulations and thanks for reading.
