Grigory Lukin.com

Friday night. I blinked, and it was Friday night once more…

My landlords surprised me today by setting up an artificial Christmas tree with some lights and decorations in the living room. It’s cute. Thinking back, I honestly can’t recall the last time there was any sort of Christmas tree under my roof. It’s possible that never actually happened even once since I left Russia in 2003. Huh.

Speaking of my landlords: they’ve just discovered a get-rich-quick scheme: somehow, it’s taken them this long to find out about cryptocurrencies. (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc) When I ventured downstairs to make a dinner snack, they very excitedly told me that crypto is the future of money, and that it’s an unstoppable investment that can’t possibly lose. Heh. I politely tried to walk them back from the edge of that particular cliff, but I doubt it worked. A few months earlier, I successfully convinced them not to hand over several thousand dollars in exchange for some sketchy course that would teach Mr.Landlord how to use Excel and set him up with a relevant job. (Or so they promised.) The thing sounded as scammy as you might imagine. Oh well, I just hope they don’t get a second mortgage for their newfound crypto dream.

And speaking of pyramid schemes, an online acquaintance mentioned a podcast that sounds absolutely riveting. “The Dream” explores MLMs and pyramid schemes by interviewing the organizers, the regular people who got scammed, the outside experts who study these things, etc. I typically don’t have the time to listen to podcasts, since that requires a big chunk of my attention, and doing little else, but I gave this one a try. The very first episode got me hooked. I look forward to sitting in one place and absentmindedly browsing Twitter for about 16 hours while I listen to everything they ever recorded. I’m relatively good at catching these scams myself, but the more you learn about your enemy, the better off you will be: there is no such thing as too much information when there’s an army of highly charismatic scammers out there.

…a long time ago, shortly after college, when Nevada’s economy was still in god-awful shape, I almost got involved with an MLM scheme. (They were selling sports drinks, I think.) I quickly gathered that my wannabe-recruiters (a young good-looking couple) were broke as a joke when we met at Starbucks, and they ordered plain hot water and made lemonade with their mystery powder. Heh. Or there was the time in Vegas, when I almost joined a little company that was selling some unorthodox type of retirement account investment. (“It never fails 95% of the time! Don’t ask us about the other 5%!”) It was a pretty exciting and interesting day, shadowing a guy who looked just like Nathan Lane in The Producers, until they had a big huddle with all their salespeople later that night. There were about 20 of them, with approximately 200 years of sales experience between them, and only one of them scored a sale over the previous two weeks. I’m not the wisest person out there, nor am I blessed with a lot of common sense, but I knew enough to skedaddle and never return their phone calls. I get a feeling I’ll fall in love that podcast.

In covid news, things are getting ugly with the vaccine prioritization. The American Bankers Association is lobbying the CDC to designate financial workers as essential workers, aka those who would get the vaccine right after the medical personnel and folks over 65. That essential category is not defined, and the process of defining will get messy. For now, the ABA’s proposal is to designate bank tellers and rural bank workers as essential. Given my innate cynicism, I’m positive that a lot of Wall Street traders will suddenly procure paperwork showing they volunteer at a random rural bank in their spare time. I’m curious how this will play out: will they actually go through with this? And if so, will people actually riot, or just accept that as yet another unavoidable humiliation? (Not sure if you know this, but not a single banker spent even a day in jail in the aftermath of the 2008 housing bubble.) Or maybe, just maybe, the ABA will withdraw their request and return to the back of the line. Low odds of that, but who knows. That’s unlikely but not impossible.

As the vaccine rollout gets closer, we’ll see a whole lot more of this. The upside is that future generations of sociologists and anthropologists will get plenty of research fodder on group dynamics, greed, and possibly the origins of riots. The downside is that we’ll all live through this mess here and now, without any chance to fast-forward, nor the luxury of distancing ourselves the way we always do when a historical event from decades past makes us feel just a little bit too uncomfortable.

Stay safe, folks, and enjoy your weekend, eh.

Wednesday night. And just like that, 60% done with the workweek.

The big exciting thing today was me filibustering about my two cool (and huge) projects to my 20 coworkers for a solid 30 minutes. That went quite well, if only because I’d prepared the presentation script in advance and spent the entire half-hour just reading it off my phone. (Can you tell that I’m a prepper? Heh.)

More of that white crap outside. I can conceivably hold out a few more days until I’m all out of vegetables for my instapot rice, but meh, that’d just be sad. Gonna brave the elements (and god-awful drivers) tomorrow evening. (Isn’t lockdown life exciting?)

My love affair with comics is proceeding well: I’m slowly but surely gobbling up more and more old issues of The Walking Dead comic. That issue #48… Wow. The room was really dusty when I read it. Reading these things on my laptop through Comixology isn’t anywhere as fun as having the actual comic in your hands but, you know, plague. All the local libraries are closed, and will stay that way for quite a while. (I’m trying not to hoard things at this point in my life, so buying physical trade paperbacks of different comic books is not an option: they start to take up a lot of space sooner rather than later.)

Another fine day for the stock market today, and for my covid-battered portfolio in particular. …I’ve stopped tracking at what precise point my growing stocks started making me more money than my day job. That momentum will not last, of course: 2020 was just filled with opportunities for a certain risk-tolerant, bargain-seeking, analysis-loving type of investor. 2021 will likely be a lot smoother. Until then, though, at least the financial aspect of my life is pretty good.

In covid news, the UK made history – they’re the first country to grant emergency use approval for a covid vaccine. In this case, it’s the Pfizer vaccine, which needs to be stored at -70C (-94F). On the upside, it’s 95% efficient, and that’s worth the logistical headache. The UK will get their first shipment of 800,000 doses within days, and will start vaccinating folks next week. The first vaccines will go to people over 80, nursing home residents, and healthcare workers. When that happens, it’ll be a truly historic moment: from start to finish, it’ll have taken less than a year. Nothing like that has ever been done before, and if that doesn’t feel you with genuine awe at humanity’s capabilities – well, just take my word for it. That was pretty damn amazing.

Good night, y’all.

Tuesday evening. Yay tacos.

The single most exciting thing to happen to me today was finding an old package of hard taco shells in the back of my little pantry. Seeing as I’m running low on produce, this resulted in some mighty sad tacos (beef and shells), but hey, that’s what imagination is for.

It snowed again today. A lot. I’m not risking a grocery run until this melts down a bit. One interesting thing about Toronto is that almost half of the city’s residents were born abroad. (Including moi.) That makes for a fun and multicultural city with great diners, cultural festivals, etc. That also means a lot of drivers have different driving styles (too slow, too fast, ignoring the stop signs, etc), and a lot have no experience with driving in the snow. Even the locals can take too long to install their winter tires, which leads to completely preventable car accidents. As the most risk-avoidant person out there, I keep my snow tires on all year round – I don’t really notice the difference in the summer. So, yeah, gonna give this snow stuff a couple more days to make it marginally safer to drive while everyone tries to adjust to slippery roads and what not.

In covid news, the governor of Oklahoma has declared this Thursday to be the day of fasting and prayer as cases in his state continued to climb. (There are over 200,000 total cases in Oklahoma by now.) That’s pretty blatantly unconstitutional – not merely stupid and anti-science, but also the equivalent of dancing around in a “screw the separation of church and state” T-shirt. Louisiana and Ohio did something similar earlier this year, as did Trump back in March. Do you want to end up in a theocracy? Because that’s how you end up in a theocracy. (Incidentally, Oklahoma was the state that held a giant maskless Trump rally five months ago, the one that started a new covid cluster and ended up killing Herman Cain, who hasn’t stopped tweeting from beyond the grave. Yay prayer. Boo science.)

At some point, several years from now, someone will make a movie set in 2020, during this pandemic, in the US. Even if they reenact everything just as it happened, without any dramatization or artistic license, they’ll still probably get called out for making their movie too unbelievable. Heh.

Sunday night. Weekends sure feel longer when you wake up at 7am without an alarm.

You know that expression, “life is what happens when you make other plans”? Well, there’s just not much happening right now. Leaving the house only once every 10 days for a grocery run, working from home, and with dating not really being an option right now, there isn’t much of anything going. So might as well make plans, eh? I’m sketching out a mental model of what my 2021 will look like. A lot will happen next year, contingent on getting my Canadian PR and covid vaccine. And after that… well, there will be some interesting life decisions to make. A year from now, I expect to be someplace much more fun, tropical, and entertaining than this strange, cold-but-snowless suburb of Toronto, with landlords who break lockdown regulations (four guests this time) and keep bringing over that fun but incessantly barking Corgie.

Just to give y’all some idea of the sheer levels of boredom at work here: during my big roadtrip to Ottawa last month, I was listening to some podcasts and learned about exciting advances in the CRISPR gene-editing field. (It really is exciting: they managed to completely eliminate someone’s sickle-cell anemia!) Afterwards, I found out that the University of Toronto has the best Molecular Genetics in Canada, and learned all about their admission process. The deadline for 2021 was three weeks ago… In the end, I decided against it, if only because I’d have to get a whole new undergrad degree, and wouldn’t get my Masters degree (and join the gene-editing party) until six years from now, at age 40. I know, I’ll turn 40 one way or another, and yes, I know, Julia Child didn’t roll in culinary school till she was 37. One fun thing about CRISPR, though, is that anyone can join that party if they really, really wanted to – and even if not, cheering on from the sidelines is still a fun potential future.

So yeah… Chilling, staying healthy, planning, plotting, waiting. So much waiting. I’ve started something new to keep ye olde grey matter active: one of the huge gaps in my education is classical music. To remedy that, I’ve started streaming the greatest hits of the greatest composers while doing other things. (Literally just started that today.) First impressions so far: Bach is pretty good, and his Badinerie (especially this flute performance) is brilliant. I figure it’ll take me at least a week to get through all the biggest classics, at which point I’ll be able to sagely nod and say pretentious stuff like “ahh, yes, just like Beethoven’s 42nd!” at cheese&wine parties. Or, barring that, become the classiest ex-Russian out there. (Or the most interesting Russian-American-Canadian in the world! Heh.)

In covid news, there is a fascinating study by Kate Petrova of Harvard that links negative reviews for scented candles with the rise of covid. This is my favourite kind of research: the kind that looks at publicly available information through an entirely different lens to find a striking conclusion. (Not unlike the very recent discovery that platypuses glow under the UV light: it took them that long to shine a UV flashlight on one of them. But I digress…) Petrova’s data suggests that the 2020 spike in negative reviews for the hitherto bestselling scented candles was caused by the covid-induced loss of smell. Online, there are anecdotes from Starbucks baristas who claim their customers don’t like the taste of their liquid candybars anymore, which ties in nicely with the scented candle issue.

That makes one wonder just how far the virus has spread, and how many got infected but not tested. It’s pretty obvious the actual number of cases in the US is far higher than the official 13.4 million. Two days ago, an online friend of mine in New York couldn’t get a covid test without a doctor’s note – at least not until she refused to leave the testing center. Even now, in late November, and in New York, of all places, not everyone can get a test. By now, tens of millions of Americans have most likely been infected. The true number may even be in the 100 million range. We’ll simply never know, but strange developments like the decline of scented candles will keep popping up. Someday, we’ll be able to paint the full picture, if only by focusing on the negative space.

Stay safe and sane, folks.

Saturday night live blogging, whoop-whoop.

Another quiet weekend day. It’s curious that the pharmacy store across the street was pretty packed today, even though they have only one aisle of food and frozen food. (I ran out of hair pomade for my video meetings, and had a hankering for a frozen pizza.) That’s not the worst logic, since all the major stores are probably even more full than ever before. On the upside, I got a lot more proficient with using a self-checkout machine. (The machines have big plastic barriers between them now; that’s relatively new.)

Red Dead Redemption (2010 vintage) continues to amuse and amaze. Seth, the Gorlum-like character who loots cadavers for a living, is a fascinating character the likes of which I haven’t seen a lot in fiction. Kudos to the game’s writers and voice actors.

It feels so damn good to do nothing at all, just leisure with a side of self-guided education. (About 167 days in a row on DuoLingo thus far. C’est magnifique!)

In covid news, San Francisco is joining the rest of California in its curfew after a 265% increase in covid cases over the past month. Their curfew will go from November 30th through December 21st, and will be between 10pm-5am. It’ll be accompanied by all the other strict restrictions on businesses, gatherings, etc.

…I’ve been thinking about the Aztecs lately. I remember being a kid, reading about their culture, and wondering how on earth their society could function, logistically and morally, when they’d sacrifice hundreds or even thousands of their own people at a time? (Hey, what can I say, I was a weird kid.) The whole concept of slaughtering an entire town’s worth of people just to placate some god was inconceivable to me. Well, I think I got it now… Covid has been in the US less than a year. At this point, it kills over a thousand Americans per day. Sometimes over two thousand. At some point this winter, maybe even over three thousand per day. And people are fine with it. It has become normalized. There is no stimulus package, no coordinated federal response, no sense of urgency and unity – nothing of the sort. There are many others like myself who take this very seriously, and then there are those who actively and maliciously oppose and protest any protective measures. And there are those who are ambivalent: they’ll wear a mask to get inside a store, but still travel to their elderly parents or go clubbing.

If you’re reading this in the future, if you haven’t lived through 2020, this may not make sense. Hell, this barely even makes sense to me now, and I’m actually here. (Unfortunately.) But this is what the proudest country in the world has come to in less than a year: de facto large-scale human sacrifices, with many more to come. The Aztecs weren’t incomprehensible weirdos, they were just like us: human, corruptible, adaptable, and capable of rationalizing even the most gruesome atrocities. Gene Rodenberry was wrong: at its core, the fundamental human nature doesn’t change.

Stay safe, folks.

Black Friday night.

My landlords decided to celebrate the end of the first lockdown week by inviting some friends, who are very definitely not part of their household. Smooth, guys. Real smooth. Judging by the noise, it was about three people, probably the same ones that come over every other week. It’s reasonable to assume that the guests are still staying safe and careful, but these are not reasonable times. Human nature being what it is, just about everyone else is probably doing something similar, even though the public health authorities specifically asked not to socialize with people from other households. Oh well, gotta feed that pandemic somehow, eh? Most people never think something bad would happen to them: only to some abstract “others.”

If foresight and strategic thinking are gifts, I’d like to return mine, please and thank you.

There wasn’t a whole lot of interesting stuff on sale this Black Friday. In terms of physical stuff, the only thing I got was a Fire TV stick from Amazon. In terms of non-physical stuff… I got a bit carried away and got 71 ebooks. The upside is that they cost me just $68 altogether. The secret is this page over here. It lists every Kindle ebook on Amazon, and at any given moment, thousands of them are free. (Authors run temporary giveaways sometimes; even if 5% of authors do that at any given time, that’s still a lot of ebooks.) The link already has two filters: four stars or higher, and ranked by price, starting with $0.00. Just click on your favourite genre on the left, et voila! – hundreds of free books to choose from. You can thank me later.

Some of the ebooks I downloaded are pure brain candy (science fiction… so much science fiction), some of them are entrepreneurial, but most are reference books. After all the exorbitantly expensive textbooks back in college, the best way to feel like a millionaire was to enter a thrift store and browse their fine selection of used textbooks, knowing that none of them cost more than $5. See it, like it, buy it. With that collection of free ebooks I discovered… That’s really rather remarkable: an entire shelf of college into textbooks available for free. I look forward to eventually devouring all of them.

I might end my health experiment a week from today, and get back to (moderate) consumption of cider and what not. Over the past few weeks, there were some significant positive milestones I passed but didn’t properly celebrate like I’d promised myself I would. To remedy that, I’ve acquired six bottles of champagne earlier today – to celebrate the past successes, as well as those that will happen soon. I know this is a plague year. Is celebrating macabre? Maybe, a little. But it’s a small and much-needed island of normality amid this crazy storm. There always must be something to look forward to: the light at the end of the tunnel, a promise of glory, or just a small treat to celebrate a milestone.

Speaking of which: the more I think of it, the more I’m convinced there’s no future for the cruise industry. I know, I know, I wrote that I invest in them. That is no longer the case. Even if vaccines get distributed to all the oldest (and most cruise-loving) people out there sometime around December-March, it’s more or less guaranteed that the hundreds (thousands?) of cruise ship workers won’t get theirs. Ditto for those, like myself, who won’t get their vaccine until much later. A single cough, and… If you also consider that a lot of normally cruise-friendly countries would not like to get potential plague ships docking at their shores anymore… Well, things will be pretty dicey. I don’t think they’ll get back to normal at any point in the first half of 2021, or maybe at any point in 2021 at all. Some of those companies might survive, but they’ll make for shitty investments. Their stocks will likely rise a bit, but I expect them to inevitably crash once the implications of the new reality sink in. As always, I admit I might be completely wrong about everything. Meanwhile, I’ve rerouted the money from my cruise stocks into five underpriced S&P-500 companies in the energy sector. They have some doubling potential, or at the very least 20% within five months. (The entire energy sector hit the rock bottom in March when the world shut down.) We’ll see.

Huh. Didn’t mean to babble quite so much.

In covid news, now that mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna are awaiting emergency approval, logistics is the name of the game. There’s a lot of speculation as to how the rollout will work, when, how, and who will run it. In Canada, the effort will be spearheaded by Major-General Dany Fortin, apparently a highly experienced leader with excellent track record. In the US, their military and shippers like FedEx will distribute vaccines to all 50 days the day after FDA signs off. From what I understand, the local distribution will be run by individual states. Given how North and South Dakota have the highest covid infection and death rates in the entire world (and led by anti-science governors), I wonder if those two states will just burn their vaccine allocation in a great big bonfire simply to own the libs. There’ll definitely be a lot of variation in how different states execute the distribution: we’ll see examples of great efficiency and bureaucratic nightmares, likely at the same time.

The end is not yet here, but we can almost see it. Stay safe, folks.

Thursday night. Another day, another loonie, eh?

I’m trying not to be a full-on consumer with all the upcoming (and early) Black Friday sales, especially since I still haven’t quite unpacked all of my purchases from Prime Day six weeks ago. That said, the selection of heavily discounted e-books on Amazon is downright amazing, and I might have bought about a dozen. Some people have a huge collection of Steam games that they’ll never fully get through. I have a bunch of e-books that I might get around to reading someday in my early retirement.

Did you know you can beat caffeine headaches by adding more caffeine into your life? Stay tuned for this and more exciting nuggets of wisdom! A cup of black tea with breakfast did the trick: the headaches are gone, and I still moderately tired toward the end of the day. That really, really makes me wonder just how battered my nervous system was from all the coffee I’d been drinking… Ho hum.

It’s Thanksgiving in the US today. Some projections say that almost 47.8 million of them have traveled for this occasion. That’s a lot of new clusters… My hat goes off to everyone who sat this one out.

Playing Red Dead Redemption for the third night in a row has me quite nostalgic about the scenery (but not much else) of Fort Worth, Texas, where I spent a year of my life about seven years ago. Their downtown still has genuine old-timey buildings, there’s all sorts of folksy Wild West stuff in the tiny thrift stores, and there isn’t a single coffeeshop open after 3pm within 10-mile radius. (Or at least there wasn’t back in 2013.) The game is honest enough to show some of the racism, intolerance, and strange religion in that region – all among the reasons I left. (When I first moved there, there was an outbreak of measles at an anti-vaxx megachurch just a few miles away. Heh.)

In covid news, the US Supreme Court ruled that capacity restrictions on churches, temples, etc violate their First Amendment rights. It’s interesting that the deciding vote belonged to Justice Barrett, who got the job in the middle of the pandemic from the same senators who refused to pass a covid relief bill. (And who subsequently took a break for Thanksgiving.) I suppose the freedom of religion outweighs the freedom not to get infected by the religious in the US. One final ironic note: the Supreme Court meets remotely. They teleconference and avoid in-person gatherings because of the pandemic, all the while fighting local restrictions on public gatherings. Heh.

Here in Toronto, the BBQ saga continues. The diner’s owner got arrested earlier today. That was after the police locked the diner’s doors but let him get in through the back “in good faith,” which ended with him smashing through the internal partition and getting into the establishment. A pretty large crowd of protesters and counter-protesters yelled things like “Shame! Shame!” and “This is Canada, not North Korea!” thus confirming that we do, in fact, live in a South Park episode. The guy shouting about North Korea has no idea how good and privileged his life is: a month-long break from consumerism (while drivethroughs and take-out are available) is not quite the same as living in a shitty communist dictatorship. (Pardon the triple redundancy.)

To make things even more entertaining: a crowd of over 100 protesters marched to Doug Ford’s (the Ontario premier) home to express their displeasure with the state of things. There are lots of videos showing them in a big group, maskless, spreading their spit and possible viral loads all over the place, while the police stand by and do not give out the $750 CAD fines that are supposed to be part and parcel of the whole lockdown business. And this is only the first week… Things will get pretty fun – even more fun than Ford’s own former supporters turning on him.

Oh, and there were some irregularities in the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, so they’re embarking on a new global trial. It’s not very good optics when an Oxford professor has to state “We weren’t cooking this up as we went along” for the record. This will probably diminish the recent wave of optimism, both in the news and in the stock market, and will give anti-vaxxers more ammo.

Crazy world out there. Stay safe, folks.

Wednesday night. Halfway through the workweek already?

It seems as if this self-imposed lockdown is a metaphor for my previous workaholism. Nowadays, I’m a complete shut-in, venturing outside only once every 10 days, and doing very little aside from work and mindless media consumption. In the preceding years… Well, I’d make an effort to go to a meet-up or a party a few times a month, but it was mostly similar to this, with an occasional fun interlude. The real question is whether I can break this routine now that I’ve become aware of it after doing little else for most of the year.

The caffeine headaches took a day off yesterday but came back with a vengeance today. Well, so much for my little science experiment: I can survive without caffeine, but it’s not a whole lot of fun. (No way to tell how long the withdrawal would last.) I’m going to take things slow and treat myself to a cup of black tea in the morning, then play it by the ear.

With a whole lot of nothing going, and with the life becoming just a prolonged waiting game (let’s be honest, it’ll be more of the same until I finally get my vaccine in the spring), I wonder if I should start tinkering with my sci-fi novel again… This “Plague diaries” series alone is more or less book-sized now, and all it took was 20 minutes of writing every evening. I’m using my lockdown time more productively than some people, but let’s see if I can do even more with it.

In covid news, now that Toronto is locked down for 28 days, some local entrepreneurs are testing the limits. The big local scandal is the incalcitrant entrepreneur who reopened his BBQ restaurant for indoor dining two days in a row. (After announcing that on social media, no less.) Despite a pretty big crowd of BBQ enthusiasts, the local police didn’t give out any fines ($750 CAD per person, in theory) or take any names. They did a whole lot of nothing yesterday, and more of the same today. Local authorities charged the restaurant for operating without a license (a sizable fine of up to $75K CAD altogether) but, once again, not for breaking the lockdown rules. Both the mayor and the premier criticized the restaurant’s owner but, again, did a whole lot of nothing.

Laws that don’t get enforced becomes guidelines. Guidelines that don’t get enforced become jokes. More will do the same now, and the divide between those who follow the health guidelines and those who mock them will grow ever wider. I doubt this is a purely Canadian phenomenon. Human nature, eh?