2021 in Review or “We live in wonderful times”
What a year 2021 has been! Exciting in spite of covid (waves after waves). Let us do a quick review of some salient events that took place during 2021.
1. The cost of a PhD in virology, immunology and molecular biology has dropped to the price of an Internet connection. You can say all you want about covid, it had / has its good points. For instance, if you have access to an Internet connection and an account on Facebook, it now is absolutely trivial to acquire, in a few minutes, the knowledge (and research depth) in arcane fields like molecular biology, immunology or virology. Launch Google, type “vaccines do not work”…et voila! 153,000,000 articles to choose from. Then you can spread your newly acquired knowledge throughout the Internet. Like the tens of millions of newly graduated from the Facebook academy of medicine. Progress cannot be stopped! Want to be an MD: same stuff. Google “how to treat covid with horse deworming medication” and you are ready to prescribe to the masses.
2. Science is dead. Ah yes, we need to mention an unfortunate consequence of the mass democratization of scientific knowledge: science is dead. And the profession of “scientist” is now ranked below, in terms of reputation, that of used car salesperson [gender neutral…hope you noticed]. [Note: I absolutely respect sellers of used cars and I have no idea why they got such a bad rap. They can take solace in the fact that PhDs who have contracted 100s of thousands of dollars in debt to get a college education, and beyond, are now considered the scum of the earth]. Same sad fate for peer reviewed publications! When a statement like “I read it in Nature” is ranked well below than “my friend posted in on Facebook”, you know science is in trouble. Now imagine all the scientists who worked on the covid 19 vaccine! They really did something remarkable, especially for the speed of obtaining a product that works in a record time. And what do you know: close to half of the US population consider them as witches that should be burned at the stake. Fabulous!
3. Vaccines now incorporate GPS locators. This is one of the greatest accomplishments by the sorry bunch of scientists I just mentioned: incorporating GPS locators in vaccines so the government can track your every movement. That is also the greatest waste of taxpayers’ money I have ever seen. Why? Simple: look at your “smart” phone [always makes me laugh that I should use the qualifier “smart” for my cell phone] — anyway, look at it: it tells the entire universe, in real time, where you are. Not only that, but in most cases, apps running inside said phone can tell exactly what you are doing! And if that is not enough, if those apps cannot determine what you are doing, most of us will run to Facebook, Instagram or other “social” [where did that label come from?] networks to spill the beans on our latest exploits. So, spending gazillions of $ to incorporate a GPS tracker in a vaccine, though quite impressive, is a waste of money. And if that was not enough, with my three doses of vaccines, I am so magnetic that every single appliance in the house is going crazy when I walk by.
4. “History” is made in 11 minutes. Well, some kind of “history”. 11 MINUTES is the total time for the flight of the Blue Origin capsule that hosted Master of the Universe Jeff Bezos’s trip to “almost space”. When you consider the ascent and descent phases, JB (as I like to call him in private) spent 3 minutes (180 seconds) in low gravity in “almost space” [I say almost because REAL space is a little beyond the 100km JB’s capsule reached..”almost” as 60km beyond]. Let us contrast that with the 437 DAYS Valerie Poliyakov spent in REAL space (orbit 😊) between 1994 and 1995 [most of you will have noticed that 437 is more than a year! And he did not have “social” media to tell the tale]. So, I have been trying to figure our what part of JB’s little adventure was “historic”. See, I have worked in the space program, and I would say I know a thing or two about the historic moments. Like the first manned space flight (1961). The moon landing (1969). One of my favorites “historic” moments is the repair, in space, of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993. Anyway, you catch my drift. I just cannot quite get myself to call “historic” the process of sending a few people at the edge of space (the “almost space”) and back for about 11 minutes since we have actually sent a whole bunch of folks in real space [and I’d consider moon “real space”] and back since 1961. Same goes for Space X which is making “history” by ferrying folks to the space station…something we have done since 2000. I guess when you are super rich, you can call stuff whatever you want, historic being one of the words you buy. Ah I get it: what was historic was JB’s thanks to the thousands of low wage workers busting their a..s every day so he could take his multi-$B hop: to be THAT CLUELESS, that is HISTORIC!
5. Musk wants more babies so he can send them to Mars. I kid you not. The EM (as I like to call him) is very depressed that civilization is not “producing” more babies, one reason being that he will not have enough people to send to Mars. [You can’t make this stuff up]. I (and a bunch of others) believe that 7.8 billion people is plenty, especially in light of the huge destruction of planet earth resulting from having that many humans to house, feed, move around and entertain. Granted, lots of older folks [like myself] whose life tends to get longer but eventually die. Not sure that making more babies is such a great idea when you consider that all our resources (food, water, energy) are getting scarcer. Anyway, when you are the “almost” trillion $ man, you can ask for just about whatever you want [though common sense is not something you can buy]. As for Mars, well, I do hope he gets to build his BFR, board it, travel to Mars…never to return 😊
6. Climate change is still not real. What do you know? Oceans are rising, the ice cap is melting, we get more severe weather events per year, and they tend to be more extreme, hot places are getting hotter, etc etc. But, for some, it amounts to nothing or almost nothing. “The weather is always changing”: hum, not talking about the weather but the CLIMATE. “The climate is changing but we (humans) have zero responsibility in the process”. I guess these folks have not gone to Shanghai or Delhi on a very bad smog day. So bad you cannot see across the street. Or travel by train from Beijing to Shanghai and not see once blue sky though it is a day without cloud! However, I send you back to my #2 above: science is dead!
7. There is a new unit of time: the FSD. The FSD (for Tesla’s Full Self Driving feature) is equivalent to “next year”. Simply because Musk (or EM) has announced the FSD availability “next year” for the past five year. And counting. So, if you say “I think I will travel to Europe in about one FSD”, it is the same as saying “I will go to Europe next year [may be if all goes well and the stars are aligned].
8. You can do an IPO that will value your company almost like long established market players without having sold a single product. Isn’t the world of corporate finance wonderful these days? In November, a “startup” [so to speak] called Rivian [which makes EV pick-up trucks] went public, raising $12B and achieving a market cap of 66$B. The company has zero sales and losses between $1.2 to $1.2B a year [but who is counting!]. Rivian tells prospective customers they will have to wait until 2023 (in other words, one FSD) to get a truck. For reference: GM’s market cap is $77B, Ford is $82B. While both GM and Ford struggle every day with delivering real vehicles, Rivian is content to deliver promises and achieve just as much financial success. This is the new business model. Fantastic. Why bother with real thing when you can just sell pipe dreams. It used to be that losses for a business were bad. Now they are a badge of honor!
9. Speaking of unreal stuff, let’s talk about the Metaverse. Some tech folks believe it is not enough for all of us to screw up our real universe, they want to create more “virtual” universes so we can exercise the same level of insanity in these spaces than we do with our real world. I guess that in a metaverse [how many are there going to be? And if there are lots of metaverse, how do you keep track of who you are in each verse?] I can be really charming and smart and rich and living the good life. It would be amazing if I could elect to spend the rest of my days and nights in that lovely verse but I have to eat, sleep and do a bunch of other things (like work). Let alone the fact that my real body is getting older every second of every day. I read that some people a buying “properties” [real estate] in these metaverse. So, they trade REAL money for something that is extremely VIRTUAL. [how do you move into a virtual house?]. At any rate, it’s supposed to be the next big thing [Web 3.0 they call it]. Now, if you are like me, you consider that Web2.0 is OK. Not great. Just OK. When I see how difficult it is to order something on-line on some retail web sites, I would settle for Web 2.1 or 2.2 before jumping to 3.0. The other thing is “identify theft”. If I have several “self” in a number of these virtaverse (personally I like that name better), I have a few questions: 1 — will there be some tools so I can track my multiple personalities in the multiple verses and 2 — what if someone hacks into a virtaverse and steals my identify…so many questions and so little time.
10. WFH is not what it used to be. Covid shut down the entire (real) world. And a lot of people were told to Work From Home. At first, it was all peachy. You get up at the time you want, you don’t have to interact in person with obnoxious coworkers, you build your ow schedule and your boss has very little option to be on your back (literally speaking). So, you bought one of those nifty Peloton bikes and organized your schedule, so that “work-life balance” took a priority. Except that being on a Zoom/Team/Google/”pick your favorite video conf tool here” got to be a little old 8 hours per day. Then no “water cooler discussions of the latest sport events”, no lunch with colleagues to bad mouth management, etc. is something that you miss. In addition, since you are home, the male work force realized that cooking dinner takes time [because you are now very much part of the cooking crew], you also need to walk the dog, take care of the kids, wash the dishes, clean the place, etc. And doing video calls while helping your children do their homework is a challenge [the female population did not have to adapt to anything because they have done that kind of juggling around for decades]. We are now seeing a “I’d like to go back to the office” trend. Commute? [I can work on the train/metro/bus]. Work life balance. “Well, working in the office is really balancing my life with my work”. And then the big corporations started to say: “You moved from New York City to some unknown place in Montana…so we are going to pay you Montana wages”. That was punch #1. And: “Since you have successfully demonstrated that your job can be done from any place in the world, we are outsourcing your job to India”. Punch #2. If you want to understand the future of WFH, look at the trajectory of Zoom’s stock in 2021. Very telling.
11. Supply chain. What’s that? “That” is what brings goods from all over the world to the shelves of stores near you. And “that” slowed down to a crawl because of the pandemic. “That” made people realize that your favorite food or dress or toy does not materialize by magic at your shopping center. “That” is a carefully integrated network of transportation links (sea, air, rail, road) manned by lots of people and if you mess with it (as covid did), pretty soon shelves are empty. “That” does not necessarily involve overseas shipment. Anything involving transportation (and pretty much everything does these days) is subject to severe disturbance when a pandemic strikes (or a ship clogs the Suez canal). And “that” is easily broken but takes a while to fix and restore.
12. UFOs are real (sort of), aliens are not (but we are not sure). That’s basically the “conclusion” of a report from the mighty US DoD (Department of Defense). And that report was requested by none other than the US Senate. I don’t know how much taxpayers $$ was allocated to this “project” but I want my share back, every single penny of it. Of course, aliens do exist, everybody knows that; I just read it on Facebook. My guess is that those aliens have been observing us for a while and have concluded that we are “mucho” bad news and that an invasion of earth would turn into the US invading Iraq: the invading part is easy but then you have to deal with the “locals” and that’s where the nightmare starts. My other guess is that the DoD lied to us (as always). They know aliens are real, but they want to keep us in the dark. I also read that they have something called Area 57–4-AS (AS for Alien Site). Actually, how can we be sure us that the covid virus is not some form of alien entity. It all sounds suspiciously plausible. I would not be surprised if we found out our governments are in cahoots with the aliens and they have asked the vaccines to be equipped with GPS locators.
That sounds like good place to stop this review, and, at any rate, I need to visit my palace in the metaverse to inspect the renovations. Let us see what other wonderful news 2022 brings us!
Cheers,
Philippe
