Monday night. It’s curious how most of the covid news now comes exclusively from the US. Earlier on during the pandemic, there was no shortage of scary headlines from around the world. Now it’s just Americans doing crazy American things. Yes, there was the case in France where angry bus passengers attacked the driver, who ended up brain-dead, and then had his life support turned off. For that single case, though, there are at least 10 in the US with angry savages brandishing weapons, threatening, or outright attacking service industry employees: servers, cashiers, etc…

There’s a SpongeBob meme going around of the US watching sadly as other countries have fun. Parts of the country are starting to backtrack again: a huge chunk of California, including Los Angeles, just shut down again. No more public spaces. If the US had just shut down for a couple of months in March, all of this could’ve been avoided. It would’ve been cheaper, easier, and would’ve saved countless lives. Instead, there’s a terrifying mess that makes the rest of the world look on in horror.

Maybe it’s the rapidly unfolding epidemiological disaster, maybe it’s too many people sitting at home daytrading, maybe it’s something else – but the stock market has gotten more irrational than it had been in quite a while. Both Amazon and Tesla set all-time-high records with their stock prices, in lieu of absolutely nothing. Both of them have Q2 earning releases scheduled for late July, but there’s no reason to expect them to be phenomenal. Knowing nothing else about this situation, this looks like a pump&dump. Then again, both of those stocks have really bizarre valuations. They could double just as easily as crash by 60%. Time will tell.

As with so many things – the pandemic, the stock market, my permanent residence application – just gotta be patient, and sit still, and not do anything rash. It’s funny how deliberately doing nothing can feel harder than most things I’ve done before. Heh.