Life with Rona — Day 10
Two workouts done — one with Ping, the other with Isabel and Marcus. Both great.
Stimulus announced for Malaysia. Started with RM250 billion. The reality is it is maybe a tenth of that that is cash. The B40 group got the most. M40’s get a little. Everything is very one-off (which is great for an announcement, but really, terrible for being effective). Grab drivers get a stimulus. Reality is, this seems like an election stimulus. It is not a real stimulus. Even the RM600 wage if the company can prove a 50% decline for a few months is weak. Of course, the T20’s only got the last 2 paragraphs in English…. so I think overall, an underwhelming stimulus, but not a trivial one. I wasn’t going to link to stuff (I guess Life with Rona is getting a marked change from today), but the T20 got nothing, besides this tweet.
Ended up getting GrabFood delivery today; you can now tip RM2,4,6,8,10,12. Pick the maximum, it is worth it.
World over, the Covid-19 scare is getting more real. Hong Kong does not want you to gather in groups of 4 or more. Singapore has something similar (with the stick of the law waved at you). Boris Johnson has tested positive and is self-isolating at 10 Downing Street. I think this is a good thing, because as he gets better, people will start to realise that maybe the scare isn’t all too bad; become a bit more rational, because let’s never forget that panic is dumb.
Malaysian’s got the last laugh maybe over Mont Kiara… over a 2 hour span, the police arrested 11 folk, for jogging. 4 of the 11 were Japanese. The Japanese are known to be obedient but does Malaysia make anyone with a shred of decency, corruptible? I feel we are terrible at social capital, and I don’t see it improving anytime soon. Overall all this exercise bans I think are 100% a mistake, and social media just has people who are experiencing schadenfreude.
In the end, one has to ask, do you trust the government that has implemented such rules? Are the rules right, to begin with? Here’s an example that I’m not personally affected by, but I think is important: porn sites blocked via IP address instead of the usual DNS hijacking. CDNs help. And the VPN is the only way out. Now think about this for a moment. First they come for your outdoor activities. Then they come for your porn. What could be next? Parts of this government has blocked access to Medium.com in the past…
The way I see it is that we need to build capacity for people to have easy workarounds and store this information everywhere. On GitHub. On the Ethereum blockchain. On services that they’d find hard blocking. I mean it would have been unfathomable to block Medium before… but I might be in a tech bubble clearly. I still remember when my father showed me that he installed the Tor Browser to read The Sarawak Report. All I can say is that we need to think ahead. Think a little like Chinese activists: #MeToo activists in China are turning to the blockchain to dodge censorship. Go on, take a look see: Etherscan transaction hash 0x2d6a7b0f6adeff38423d4c62cd8b6ccb708ddad85da5d3d06756ad4d8a04a6a2; go to Input Data, View Input as UTF-8 and see a message in both English and Chinese. My thinking is we better get the workarounds in the hands of people now, long before they’ll need it when the political situation eventually does take a turn for more censorship and control.
