Andreas Wacker

There was a virus. Then there were protests over George Floyd. The cases rise now again. I wondered why Trumpists didn’t PR the connection between spread and protests more. I think they will, once the case surge condensates in death counts. Timing matters and you can wield a story only ones in a meme driven public. It has to be always new new new. So in two weeks we will hear allot how the protests caused the deaths.

158 years ago Congress signed the Pacific Railroad Act. Less than 7 years later the ‘golden spike’ marked the completion of the project. Around 20,000 immigrant laborers had flattened a strip of earth between the Atlantic and the Pacific enough so that steam locomotives could drag wagons over two continuous parallel iron strips. 90 years after some agricultural colonies had seceded from their homeland the United States should become the industrial nation par excellence. The people building the railroad came from China in the west and from Europe in the east.

The tech industry in 2020 uses foreign labor too. Around 350,000 workers on an H1B visa are stuck outside of the US. That is allot of coders. There are smart people everywhere. Actual intelligence is distributed as a gaussian curve. (if you ask people about their own intelligence you’ll find a strange peak ‘above average’). India has a good education system. So lots of actual coders are from India. Code is the wrought iron of our age. If you would print the code that runs on your phone, then paper would fill a gym. Somebody had to write all that code. Most like she was born in Chhindwara and not in Chesapeake.

How much these people will be missed has to be seen. I think it will be allot. While all the code got written nobody cared how it came into being. That will change.

Farming is not the first technology, but is the one that put mankind on a development trajectory with a speed that had never existed before. To know where you are on the planet has been a challenge that got solved relatively late. The cockpit of 747 still hat a hole in its cockpit so that the navigator could shoot the stars to get a location.

Right now there are a couple of systems:

• Navstar, USA, 1993
• Glonass, Russia, 2005
• Galileo, EU, 2016
• NavIC, India, 2018, regional
• Michibki, Japan, 2018, regional
• BeiDou, China, 2020

Precision is anywhere from millimeters (claims by China), to cm (EU, if it finally works and encrypted) to meters (everybody).

Combining GPS with farming makes total sense. Interesting that the savings can be so substantial high once the equipment gets guided by math, not a farmers.

Comparing Israel and Germany one can see the difference of dynamics between an outbreak and a wave. Germany found more than 1000 infected workers in a animal slaughter factory. It locked everything down in that area. While it is too early to finally say it seems that this worked.

Ideally incidences get treated like a localized outbreak. One that can be dealt with via isolation. If you have a ‘wave’ at hand you need to adjust the behavior of everybody. Thats expensive, and after a while will grow old for countries.

• Algeria
• Australia
• Canada
• Georgia
• Japan
• Montenegro
• Morocco
• New Zealand
• Rwanda
• Serbia
• South Korea
• Thailand
• Tunisia
• Uruguay

are the countries from where citizens can enter the European Union starting tomorrow, July 1st. The list does not contain the UK since till the end of the year they are technically a member.

The list does not contain the USA. Since, well , the numbers are not good enough.

The list does not contain China since the EU wants first that its citizens can go there as well.

For the longest time Trump boasted that Corona was handled so well by him since he shut down travel from China and then Europe so early. Nobody asked how that would be enough, since Italy shut down travel from China days before the US. And so I guess nobody will ask him about the US not being allowed into Europe when he brings this up the next time.

We might think that we can imagine stuff that is not outlandish enough. Looking at what kind of things people come up with I think that that is not the real limit. The real limit is that we fail to understand how little of the total possibilities we covered with our thoughts. As an individual as much as a species.

2020 being half done it is fair to say that there could be anybody who could claim that it was going according to his plans so far. And it wont return to normal by the time its over either.

The realization of not having the faintest clue about the future elicits fear in most people. Actually it should not: The stuff we can’t imagine is not inherently bad, neither is it is inherently good. As much as good and stuff happened in the past it will in the future. Just that what will happen does not need to be the same than that that already did.

As 2020 approaches its middle point there is ample reason to worry: China is looking at Taiwan, the US has 3 carriers in the area. India and China deploy more hardware in Ladakh. Russia intercepts US planes over the black see and posts videos off it on the Internet.

The backdrop of the global economic implosion that could happen any minute in the next six month, together with an ongoing Covid-19 situation that only a few countries have under control, and the fact that the former global super power is being run by an imbecile and is as usual pre-occupied with its own internal perceived and real problems is not one that I would long for. Would I have a choice …

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I knew my numbers would be high, just how high was shocking.

Then I calculated how much AMZN stock I would have needed to buy when I signed up so that I could have paid for all of it today. That number was ridiculous small.