Daily Ramble
It took me a long time to realize that bravery had nothing to do with the ability to ignore fear but to accept and take action despite it. Bravery is an ideal I aspire to, but like all virtues, they’re aspirational at best and ignored at worst. But when writing my daily Rambles, it’s something that I keep in mind. Because, like it or not, a lot of what I write about often makes me uncomfortable. “How are friends and family reading this going to think about me?” is a thought that’s frequently crossed my mind. Social shame is a legitimate fear. Heck, in bygone eras, the Chinese used tattoos as shaming devices instead of prisons for criminals.
So my writing unabashedly about the stupidity of the COVID response and the dangers of the vaccine takes a measure of bravery on my end. It’s a highly polarizing topic, and I’ve got friends and family on both sides. But when I come across articles like this one from The Guardian, it lights my righteous indignation fuse. Here are the first two paragraphs:
MailOnline headline on 13 June read: “Study shows 29% of the 42 people who have died after catching the new strain had BOTH vaccinations.” In Public Health England’s technical briefing on 25 June, that figure had risen to 43% (50 of 117), with the majority (60%) having received at least one dose.
It could sound worrying that the majority of people dying in England with the now-dominant Delta (B.1.617.2) variant have been vaccinated. Does this mean the vaccines are ineffective? Far from it, it’s what we would expect from an effective but imperfect vaccine, a risk profile that varies hugely by age and the way the vaccines have been rolled out.
Why do I find this maddening? Because humanity is operating under the hubris that we can vaccinate against a variant of the cold virus. If you didn’t get the memo: the COVID virus is in the same family as the common cold! That sucker has plagued us since we were picking nits and swinging branch to branch. When a .36% fatal version of it shows up on our doorstep, within months, we suddenly think we’ve found a vaccine that’ll slam the door on one of humanity’s longest-running nemesis? Really?
If you’re surprised that there are multiple variants of the virus, don’t be. That’s exactly what the common cold virus does. It plays cat and mouse with us. Most of us deal with it a couple of times a year. Keeping the immune system up and staying healthy has always been the best cure, and the data shows that it’s no different today, even with a more fatal version of the virus. Look no further than the mortality rates in Sweden where little was done to combat COVID’s spread.
What worries me is that we have no, nada, zilch long-term data on the COVID-19 vaccine. None. We don’t know if it actually makes people MORE susceptible to variants. That’s one logical read of the paragraphs quoted above. I hope to the high heavens that’s not true — I have many friends and family that have gotten vaccinated. But here is my biggest fear of this entire sh*t show: that we start seeing vaccinated people dying of COVID variants while the unvaccinated become the scapegoats.
That fear is what juiced me to a low-level act of bravery in the face of social shame. If the media condemns unvaccinated people for vaccinated people’s deaths, look at the bloody data. Are unvaccinated dying at the same rate from these variants? Or is the vaccine making people more susceptible to death from variants? I don’t know, but the Guardian Article has me questioning the logic of vaccination even more. It sure sounds like the author is spitting in our faces and telling us it’s raining.
Things Not to Do on the Interwebs
Bitcoin Price Prediction
Yesterday: $32.8k - $36.5k
Today: $33.2k - $38k
Tomorrow: $33.2k - $38k
The price of Bitcoin has not moved much since yesterday, but the underlying strength in price shows the bulls are in charge. We are midway between the highs and the lows of the range, so this is a challenging area to get a feel for, but if we close over $36.5k, then a run to $40k is likely. A close below $34.5k today would show the bears taking charge, and a test of $31k region becomes likely. Although the bulls are showing strength here, it is not a given that they are in charge since there are many mixed signals at the moment.
Bitcoin Q & A
Q: Is Bitcoin’s security threatened by the changes in China?
A: No.
At present, the hashrate on the Bitcoin network has dropped by almost 50% as China has ordered the larger Bitcoin mining operations to cease operations. As a result, transactions are taking longer to confirm. Instead of taking 10 minutes to find a new block, mining is now taking 23 minutes. On Friday, the network automatically adjusts the difficulty rate, and because the block time is longer than 10 minutes, the difficulty will be adjusted down. Reducing the difficulty makes it more profitable for new miners to enter the space and for blocks to be mined more quickly.
The hashrate is still higher than it was in 2020, meaning the network is still more secure than last year. I anticipate hashrate will start increasing again in the next 2-4 weeks. Most importantly, as the market becomes aware of the resilience of the Bitcoin network and how hashrate distributed globally, the conviction in Bitcoin’s technology will grow.
Thanks for reading,
Kent
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Brave, indeed!!