Sunday, May 23, 2021

Last few weeks have had some interesting events. The weather sure is warming up real fast. A lot of people are prepping for summer and we are definitely turning the corner for the the year and also in fighting the pandemic events. The funny albeit sad thing is that as the pandemic restrictions are coming to an end in many places across the States that normalcy is returning. As soon as the year passed into 2021 there was news again of violence, wars, and crimes back in the news. Have we survived a worldwide pandemic and restrictions and fears only to descend back into our past chaos? Really humans haven’t learned much. The talk of “us being in this together” and fighting a war on germs just delayed the inevitable. Human nature seems to always degrade into fears, conspiracy and dissent and fighting. Hopefully this is not the case. But it very well seems like it. Hopefully as a species we can look to inspiration and coming together for the greater good. But as we have seen there are people that can’t even agree on cures, masking, and certain nationwide health policies. Perhaps a bit of dissent and going-your-own-way philosophy is a survival mechanism to ensure at least some variation whether ideologically or even genetically we are predisposed to differ just enough to survive various scenarios come-what-may. In nature for instance there are so many different plant species or even in a family we sometimes have siblings that we can’t believe are in the same immediate family. With cicadas erupting in various parts of the country also you can see there’s a survival mechanism and differences and variations as well.

But what are the weekly take aways?

The pipeline hacking
On the news they talked about the oil pipeline hacking. And some people were worried about gas and shortages and runs similar to toilet paper runs that occurred at the start of the pandemic. People were advised not to hoard gasoline which is good to not drive up prices and cause supply runs and price gouging. It is a good idea to have a few gallons. But don’t go nuts and start your own depot. For one, having so much gasoline is dangerous. And two, there’s going to be more supplies on the way and they are going to reactivate the systems in place. The key thing to take away is that hacking big systems are becoming more mainstream and frequent. It’s not a matter of if but when your system will get hacked.

Now apparently there was a ransom taken as a result of systems being taken offline. People and city systems need to upgrade their firmware and systems and keep back ups and not be so ready to pay up. It will only encourage more attacks to incentivize the attacks. Also noteworthy is that the ransom was paid with pseudo-anonymous digital currency. With digital currency taking the world by storm and reaching peak levels before pulling back a good 30% almost back to 30K for the biggest known of the coins, there is definite volatility.

Crypto & more
Big name players, banks, and social media accounts and CEO’s of companies are drawing a lot of attention to this. Apparently even the collectors that want a piece of the pie and skim off the top are coming for this technology. Regulators really want to make known that they want to enforce collection of these currencies and doling out part of currency out. They see it as income and want a cut. It will be interesting to see the new tech innovation curve strive to keep these anonymous and decentralized while other entities and firms try to track and trace every single transaction and backtrack through the ledger. Hopefully the currency technology will be able to continue to stay online in a way to be eventually fully anonymous for those that need it while still maintaining the integrity of the ledger. TSLA for instance is no longer taking some of the currency in exchange for its company’s automobiles. It claimed the digital currency used too much energy and fossil fuel technologies that the electric vehicle company was trying to get away from. From taxation to Cardano to other meme coins, this is a very fast moving sector and sure to pique many people and corporation’s interests.

Reopening the economy / Big money, big moves
Lastly, in what we deem as an ingenious idea (or ploy or tactic or incentive etc) Ohio decided to reopen the economy and get rid of upcoming masking restrictions as early as June 2nd and many states around the country are doing similar due to a sudden about face with CDC guidelines to coincide with increased vaccinations. Historically there have been good and bad events associate with vaccinations. Some countries were worried of fake vaccinations politically during secret & covert war operations, but many times vaccinations have helped drive down disease rates like measles and mumps, and polio and chicken pox around the world. These are diseases that a person can more readily see, while Covid has been interesting in that there has been so much misinformation and suspicion surrounding things and fear. Many people had been reluctant or reticent to get vaccines or waiting for full FDA approval and more testing as many vaccines were still under emergency use authorizations. And there have been questions about the effectiveness of the new mRNA vaccines and how they work and the technology. Although the use of this new technology for this particular viral vaccine purpose hasn’t been used before for Covid, the technology has been researched for two to three decades is what the word is on the street.

The neat thing is that although Ohio’s efforts to reopen was spurred by people in the state that didn’t want perpetual masking and less future potentially dictatorial or misuse of health orders the legislature or leaders saw that opening the state too fast was detrimental. And thus to reward or spur people on it came out with some incentives to get people to get their health shots. Face it, no one likes shots or needles and with so much misinformation and worry about what medicines and new science and technology might do, of course people are worried. But with big incentives for young up and coming college students to get entered in a drawing for the full cost of tuition for 4 years in exchange for a vaccination, the state is moving in a big way to encourage people to not fear the shot and needles. Also as a relative had also been worried about getting the shot and even with work incentive bonuses and the idea of reopening, they were still reluctant or hesitant to get the shot. What would it take to get a shot, how much money? Well apparently money talks and it just so happened that they said they would get a shot if it was large enough incentive. Ohio offered a large enough incentive potential reward and time to at least get people up and taking notice in the next two weeks to at least take the first steps to get protected and vaccinated. It wasn’t necessarily to protect others or family or themselves. In the end it was about all things being equal and many factors. But sometimes just a little extra push and incentive goes a long way to getting someone off their bum and into the walk-in clinic and getting a protective vaccine in the arms. Ingenious. Sometimes all it takes is a little money to accelerate behavior.