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Please take a minute to do the surveymonkey. You can find it here. Survey responses are still trickling in, so I will let the survey run for another week. If you did not take the survey yet, it only takes a couple of minutes. I will share the results later.
I am thankful for Telegram. I hope a lot of Russians are reading it. There are now 162,000 subscribers to the English channel Ukraine NOW [English]. I also follow President Zelensky’s personal channel on Telegram. He is an outstanding communicator. While Putin shows how one man can screw up the world, Zelensky is showing how one man can get almost the entire world to get behind him. What a great leader! A leader. Today, he said, “We will gain independence. And it will be in our history the same as in other countries that fought for independence and won. Countries that ceased to be beggars and became subjects. The real masters of their lives and their future.”
This week finished reading Premonitions by Michael Lewis. He goes deep into how badly the United States botched preparing for and managing the pandemic. I want to give credit to what it is going on now at the CDC. I think Dr. Wallensky is doing a good job, especially in the area of communications. She inherited an organization of 15,000 personnel. Like other major government organizations, it likely has outdated information systems and built-in bureaucracy. Moving with speed and communicating timely is challenging. I give her the benefit of the doubt she can pull it off. Meanwhile, the virus is spreading rapidly. It appears to be less severe than earlier variants but people are dying from it. We should still be cautious and get vaxxed to the max.
After years of delays, NASA’s Boeing Orbital Flight Test 2 (OFT-2) mission finally got off the ground and into orbit Thursday on an Atlas V rocket. OFT-2 is an uncrewed demonstration mission to the International Space Station (ISS) under a public/private partnership between NASA and Boeing. The primary objective for OFT-2 is to demonstrate Boeing’s CST-100 “Starliner” crew capsule’s ability to autonomously rendezvous and dock with ISS then undock a week later and return to Earth for a parachute-assisted, airbag-cushioned touchdown in New Mexico.
Starliner is an Apollo-style capsule designed to ferry up to seven astronauts to and from ISS. The capsule is heavily instrumented and has a dummy astronaut named Rosie the Rocketeer, which is outfitted with 15 sensors to collect data on what a human astronaut would experience during the flight. OFT-1 launched successfully in 2019 but failed to reach ISS due to software problems on Starliner though the capsule was recovered. Pending the successful completion of OFT-2 and subsequent certification for operational flights, NASA would then have a redundant capability to launch astronauts to ISS. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule has been providing crew transport since 2020.
– Aaron J. Patrick
A lot more progress on Reflection Attitude this week. Hoping to distribute a first draft to reviewers and blurbers before end of the month.
The market reflects investors are not sure what to do. Most are selling. I started a little bit of averaging down last week. Nobody knows if this is the bottom. Except for Google, all GAMMAT stocks were down. The total is just below $8 trillion. I believe the high since I started reporting this was above $11 trillion. I know I sound like a broken record but I still remain bullish on tech, large and small. Many of the world’s problems, like supply chain and labor shortages, will be solved by tech. It is going to be a long wait.
As of Friday, there are 19,509 cryptocurrencies. It is really easy for anyone to create a new one. Total market cap of all the crypto is $1.3 trillion. Bitcoin represents 45% of the total and Ethereum 19%. The rest are 36%. There are a lot of great ideas among the rest, but many are fraudulent or what I would call overly creative. Terra and its LUNA coin tanked so badly they had to shut it down. It had the idea of a stablecoin which was tied to an algorithm. Interesting theory that did not pan out. That doesn’t help develop trust. Crypto is much more than cryptocurrencies. NFTs and Web3 have a lot to offer. I will be writing more about these. I am especially enthused about NFTs. This week I purchased one called “Fractal World 71″. I’ll display it here at some point.
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