Friday night.

Another week flew by, but that’s also one week closer to my goals. (Non-vaccination goals, that is.) After months of waiting, it’s almost here…

Yesterday, I was cataloging some of my successes at work to beef up my ever-growing (and at this point suspiciously large) promo document. (If you don’t catalog your own successes, no one will.) I came across something interesting… Just over two years ago, when I was still in Seattle, I uncovered a huge and ongoing fraud pattern that cost the company millions of dollars per year. I came up with a short and efficient SQL query to find the bad guys, gathered all the data to show what they were doing, and wrote a one-page document explaining everything and proposing the creation of a new department to deal with that sort of fraud. Nothing much happened at the time. Yesterday I found out that they took my proposal, hired six full-time employees to execute it, and saved $41 million USD just last year alone – and I didn’t get so much as a thank-you card… (All of that stemmed from one evening’s worth of research by yours truly, on my own time and dime.) Ho hum. If I could only get a 0.1% finder’s fee for all the value I delivered…

That’s partly why I’m currently doing my starfish impression in bed, with my laptop on my belly (which technically makes it a bellytop), playing some Stardew Valley and typing this up. That’s what a hero looks like in this pandemic – staying put and not partying on Friday nights. Heh.

In other news, if y’all aren’t following the r/wallstreetbets drama, aka The Army of Reddit (as some have called it), you’re missing out. They have two million subscribers who do stupid things with stocks. Recently, they joined forces to manipulate the price of Gamestop (GME) stock, which had been shorted to hell earlier. Short-sellers ended up losing a ton of money as they had to buy back at higher and higher prices. The stock went up by as much as 78% today, and finally closed up by 51%. It’s quite likely that it’ll keep going up next week as well. A lot of Millennials and Zoomers made a lot of money today.

This is huge not only because regular people – for once – screwed over a bunch of Wall Street traders, but also because it proves once and for all that the Efficient Market Theory is nonsense, and that the market can – and will be – manipulated. (But this time by us peasants.) I’m sorry to say I hadn’t taken that community seriously, but I plan to join them in their next raid against the rich. Join me, eh. Some of the bigwigs (such as Bill Clinton’s former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers) have already reacted with outrage, calling for some sort of regulation for Reddit. That’s pretty rich (no pun intended) since senators can get away with blatant insider trading without so much as a slap on the wrist, but a few million friends doing something together and in the open? Yeah, right, that definitely calls for reform and new laws. What a bunch of hypocrites.

In covid news, President Biden hit the ground running and signed a big pile of executive orders, many of which deal with covid. The big plan is to give out 100 million vaccine shots within the first 100 days. (Note that this doesn’t mean 100 million Americans will get fully vaccinated with two shots.) One of Biden’s orders makes masks mandatory in airports, on planes, ships, intercity buses, trains, and public transportation. That’s the most the federal government can do given the US government structure. The rest is up to individual states. It also looks like the Trump administration didn’t leave behind any vaccine rollout plan at all. That was to be expected by a cynic like myself but still – kind of horrifying, even compared to everything else we’ve all lived through.

Another week closer to getting our old lives back, so let’s focus on that, eh?