Thursday night.

Just spent almost four hours filling out a very long questionnaire about my taxes while also looking up all sorts of numbers. Life was easier once… With luck, this will be it. It’s extra painful since I know I’ll end up paying a lot in taxes, so it’s not like there’s a pot of gold at the end of this particular twisted rainbow. Heh.

Today was the much-awaited congressional hearing with the big wigs from hedge funds that started the Gamestop affair, as well as Keith Gill, the average guy who taught himself stock analysis and was among the first to notice how undervalued that stock was. I listened to some of it in the background while working: some congress-critters were ruthless and insightful, while others accused redditors of being Russian and/or Chinese robots. That right there makes me suspect that the main outcome of this whole saga will only make regular investors’ lives more complicated.

It was pretty funny to watch the congress-critters fumble with their technology: the hearing was held remotely, and there were so many issues with their microphones, the feedback echo, random people screaming “WHO ARE YOU AND WHY ARE YOU HERE?!” in the background, etc. Didn’t help that quite a few of them had crappy Internet connection and no microphones. At the risk of sounding like a complete tech bro, if someone at work had that many easily preventable issues, they’d never live it down. In the US, that’s just another day in the federal government. Heh. It’s quite telling that the person with the best microphone and camera setup was Keith Gill, who (until just now) made less money than anyone else on that call, and who also happened to be the youngest person at that hearing. I’m sure Millennials will be terrible with new technology 50 years from now, too, but come on – at least ask your local IT people to show you which buttons to push, eh?

In covid news, Pfizer has begun the first-ever study of covid vaccines on 4,000 pregnant women – in the US and all over the world. It’ll take them even longer than usual to get all the data from the study, make sure the babies are fine, etc, but if all goes well, hopefully that’ll be enough to dissuade some of the least rabid anti-vaxxers.

I hope y’all have a bit more fun with your taxes than I did, eh.