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I got my second Moderna booster on Thursday, five months after the first booster. I asked the CVS pharmacist where I could get the QR code so I would have digital proof of the vaccination. He said, “What is a QR code?” Healthcare has a long way to go when it comes to IT. CVS was out to lunch on this. My Plan B worked great. I sent the CVS receipt to Yale New Haven and they put it in my MyChart electronic health record. Ten minutes later I visited my MyChart and clicked on QR codes. The QR code immediately appeared on the screen. I scanned the QR code with my iPhone. The iPhone recognized it as a vaccination record and automatically put it in the Health app and it is now also in my iPhone Wallet, nicely showing all four shots with the details.
The WHO dashboard shows what is going on country by country. Globally, as of February 11, 2022, there have been 402 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 5.8 million deaths. In the U.S. there have been 79 million cases with 938 thousand deaths. The cases are in decline but deaths are still growing because of the time lag. We are at 10.1 billion vaccine doses administered. The unvaccinated continue to dominate hospitalizations and deaths.
SpaceX continues on a roll. They launched Falcon 9s three times last week, and they have recovered the first stage for the 106th time. One of the launches this week used fairings recovered from the 4th and 6th time. The savings from recovering boosters and fairings in part explains the $100 billion valuation of SpaceX and making Elon Musk the richest person on Earth. Visit the “Where is Webb?” page and see a snapshot of the current status. Webb team members saw the first photons of starlight that traveled through the entire telescope and were detected by the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument. This milestone marks the first of many steps to capture images that are at first unfocused and use them to slowly fine-tune the telescope. On Friday, Elon Musk gave his two-year update on the Starship project. Including Q&A he talked for 97 minutes with no notes. He explained in great detail why humans should go to Mars and how they will get there. I still marvel at the Starship sitting on top of the booster which has 33 gigantic rocket engines. The combined height is 400 feet.
I am making progress with book #7. This week, I completed the Climate chapter for Reflection Attitude.
Friday was blue sky in Florida and not pretty picture on Wall Street. The 10 year t-note yield closed at 2.03%. Fears of a Russian invasion are growing. Inflation is at 40-year high and wreaking havoc with no relief in site. Some pundits are saying the market is still oversold while others say this is the beginning of a big correction to the downside. I remain bullish but will have to be more patient.
Pundits are forecasting Bitcoin to soon be somewhere between $10,000 and $200,000. Crypto market cap is up to $2 trillion and 16% of gold. I believe regulation and competition from a Fed-based crypto of its own will be a positive. NFTs, DeFi, DAOs, and Web3 are becoming real but a not of maturing to go. Many of the startups focused on these will fail, probably most of them, but the concepts will survive and thrive, imho.
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