Grigory Lukin.com

Wednesday night.

In late December, I plundered a bunch of “best of” lists on Goodreads for new book recommendations. Being a frugal bastard (never pay if you can get it for free later), I put a bunch of those ebooks on hold at my local library. Not sure how or why, exactly, but a whole lot of them suddenly became available in rapid succession. It’ll take a while for them to become available again, and in-demand e-books can’t be renewed after the three weeks are up, so I guess I volunteered myself for a lot more reading and a bit less gaming. Heh.

I’ve just finished devouring Anxious People by Fredrik Backman, and it was quite good. Beautiful writing, multiple LOL (literally LOL) moments, fun characterizations. In a nutshell, it’s a book about a failed heist, an accidental hostage situation at an apartment viewing, and idiots. Lots of idiots. (But mostly lovable ones, which is how you can tell it’s fiction and not reality.) The book takes a weird U-turn towards sentimentality somewhere in the middle, changing the tone and seriously cutting down on the levity, but it’s still quite good. It’s rather moving, if nothing else. Solid 4.5 stars, and recommended if you’re looking for something fun and moving to read in this long lockdown. (Just check out the first few pages of the e-book preview – you’ll like it.)

Next up: Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller about the world’s most stubborn taxonomist. (Because it’s good to balance outlandish fiction with almost-as-outlandish non-fiction once in a while.)

The stock I wrote about yesterday, ADS, has finally closed that tiny gap – my online broker sold it at the exact price I’d requested: 5% below its highest pre-pandemic price. That made for a fine 77% profit, especially considering I’d bought it on November 12th, 2020. Just a bit less than four months, basically. (I’d swing-traded it twice before, starting in June.) I never post the dollar figures from my portfolio but it crossed a rather significant point today. I’m trying to be a bit more conscious about my health, so instead of celebrating with a whole bottle of champagne, I’ll just treat myself to a Tim Hortons lunch tomorrow by way of celebrating. (Besides, an entire bottle of champagne holds five glasses, which is entirely too much for one person, and those miniature bottles they sell hold only two glasses, which is just one too few. No justice in this world.)

It’s funny… The first time I researched ADS and added it to the “risky bets” section of my portfolio, in early June, it was trading at a 52.7% discount from its pre-pandemic high, just a few months earlier in 2020. And now, just nine months later, it’s come within 5% of reaching that high price again. (And, therefore, sold as per my standing order.) At the time, it seemed theoretically possible but unimaginable that all those beaten-down stocks would soar again, or that the world would get back on its feet (or at least start to), and especially in less than a year. That’s a weird finance allegory for the fight against covid, but hey, I deal with dollar signs and wild stratagems all day every day at work, so a lot of that carries over. I own 19 different stocks. One has doubled and sold, and I’ll use that cash to pay some of my 2020 taxes. (My company-provided accountant should send the grand total aaaany day now.) There are 18 to go. I sure as hell hope we’re more than 1/19th of the way to eradicating this damn pandemic, not only in the first world but everywhere, but still, this is a real-life proof of concept that at least some things can return to normalcy.

In covid news, there’s more drama in Canada, eh. Someone leaked a draft of the letter from Canada’s top scientists to the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI). The scientists, who include some of the most senior bigwigs at multiple institutions, are really not enthusiastic about NACI’s decision to turn all of Canada into guinea pigs by extending the gap between the vaccines to four whole months. In their own words, “What will the impact be on the variants of concern and potential others? This will remain a guessing game without being able to transfer knowledge from properly performed trials,”

The whole decision behind the four-month gap is a huge bioethical dilemma: try to vaccinate everyone fast in the name of the greater good but take a gamble due to unknown effects of just one dose over four months? Or follow the standard procedure that had been used in clinical trials (three weeks apart) and vaccinate only half as many people, but properly? You already know which side I’m on… The only course I ever failed in my life was Advanced Bioethics. I have a feeling that my professor (he wasn’t nearly as much of a relativist as he’d claimed he was, especially after the rest of the class laughed to the point of tears as he and I debated) would’ve sided with NACI. One big side effect here: I really hope they’re right about this, but if they’re wrong, if this backfires, then it will fuel anti-vaxxers everywhere for the rest of the century and beyond: “here are a bunch of scientists who broke their own rules, didn’t give Canada enough immunity, and made a mess of things when another new variant spread like wildfire among the partially vaccinated.”

Again, I hope it never comes to that, but the cost/benefit analysis here is absolutely bonkers.

And meanwhile, British Columbia has only now started booking vaccine appointments for folks over 85 years old. That’s good news on the balance, but the fact that it’s taken them this long… Oof. Oof, I say.

Stay safe, folks. Pick up a book or something, eh?

Tuesday night.

I’m ending this day with less blood than I started it with, and with the uncanny sensation of knowing what my blood-brain barrier feels like. In other words, I had my initial screening for the vaccine trial. The blood filled multiple vials, and the nasal test was apparently mandatory, to reassure them that their newest guinea pig does not, in fact, already have covid. Heh. And here I thought I’d go the entire pandemic without having the edge of my brain scraped… If you never experienced that sensation, good for you – I hope you never do. If you did experience it – how weird is it, huh? Why the hell would we even have receptors that far up? Ye gods, that was such an unsettling sensation – and there’s nothing you can do to take your mind off it. Logically, I knew that I wasn’t harmed, and definitely wasn’t harmed permanently, but it just felt so… wrong.

Anyhow, I’ll get the first of this experimental vaccine in 10 days, next Friday. They’ll keep me around for an entire hour just to watch out for any side effects and/or superpowers. Should be fun. It was also equal parts sad and pathetic how excited I was to have a tiny short conversation with the receptionist dude and the doctor dude. It’s been so long… On my drive back, when the sun was fully up, I had my window down and my mask off. It seemed safe – a way to enjoy some fresh air at long last. Next thing I knew, a maskless construction worker got right in my (equally maskless) face to tell me I had to make a U-turn due to some construction. That was the first time I actually came face to face (with no masks) with another human being since I left my landlords behind almost two months ago. It sure would be ironic if after all these precautions, all these months, I catch covid due to a random encounter with a maskless worker. Heh. I know I talk a lot about my zombie video game, but come on, that was a classic zombie scare jump-scene right there.

The world is starting to recover a little… S&P-500 is about 20% higher than its highest point just before the pandemic. I think a lot of that is driven by the overvalued tech sector. Almost a year ago, I sold all of my Amazon stock and invested the proceeds into the most covid-battered stocks out there. I set my sell price for each stock using the same formula: their highest point in Q1 2020, just before the pandemic, minus 5%. (No need to be greedy, eh?) The rationale was that once they get that high up, the economy will have recovered. Most of them aren’t there yet, but they’re getting there. ADS (Alliance Data Systems) is a company specializing in loyalty cards, among other things. Today, the ADS stock price missed my target by just eight cents. That was pretty funny – I’m sure it’ll get there soon.

Speaking of stops, that mad legion at r/wallstreetbets finally succeeded in getting Gamestop’s stock price back up again. It rose up past $100 last week, briefly kissed $200, bounced up and down, and closed at $246.90 today. Gotta say, that’s impressive and I didn’t see that resurgence coming. Good for them, eh. As for me, I’ll have to start stockpiling cash for what I expect to be a pretty high tax bill in the coming weeks. (And it’ll be higher yet next year, once I have to pay taxes on my Gamestop earnings.)

In covid news, a very macabre success story from the US: for the first time since late November, the daily covid death toll is below 1,000. According to this article, 749 Americans died over the course of 24 hours. Once upon a time, that would’ve been a tragedy. Now, just a year after the virus appeared in the US, it’s good news. Who knows, maybe someday the States will celebrate fewer than 100 daily covid fatalities.

In other covid news, there’s a vaccine war between Italy and Australia. (If you had that on your 2021 bingo card… Well, you got a very weird bingo card, what can I say.) As near as I can tell, the sequence is this. Australia ordered AstraZeneca vaccines. Australia defeated covid. Italy did not defeat covid. AZ vaccines got approved. AZ’s facility in Belgium had manufacturing issues. The EU didn’t get all the AZ doses they ordered due to manufacturing issues. AZ decided to send the ordered vaccines to Australia, as per prior agreement. Italy blocked the shipment, got the European commission to back it up, and caused an international scandal. (One of Italy’s arguments basically comes down to “we need it more than they do.”) Australia is being a good sport about it, saying the block won’t impact their vaccine rollout. However, Germany is warning Italy and the rest of the EU that their decision to “tear up the rulebook” could have serious and wide-ranging consequences down the road. When even Germany tells you that your foreign policy might be a little bit too aggressive, you know you probably made several bad decisions. Heh.

And now, time to catch up on all the sleep… Good night, y’all.

Sunday night.

I am trying to declutter my mind. Today’s experiment on myself was a pretty productive one. It felt weird, absolutely weird to go so long without social media. (I cheated a bit and checked it first thing in the morning, but only to see if I had any replies.) Social media is a cobweb for the modern brain: all those apps – Reddit, Twitter, Facebook – are specifically designed to get you engaged, entrapped, hooked on the dopamine hits of receiving “likes” or reputation points. The conversations on those apps rarely bring joy. I couldn’t completely detach myself from my computer, so after I finished reading “The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)” by Dr. Katie Mack, I went back to playing 7 Days to Die. (My new character is an office drone guy turned survivor. Heh.) Perhaps it’s because of my social media fast, but today was nice and tranquil.

I’ve also quit (or I hope I’ve quit) a certain political blog I’ve been part of for several years. If you’ve been following my blog for any amount of time, you might have noticed that I’m, ahem, a bit more passionate about politics than most people. The blog I used to hang out on is mostly left-leaning (as am I), and has a diverse group of people engaging in mostly engaging discussions in the comment section. Last night, I made what I thought was a reasonable point (Democrats took 45 whole days to pass the stimulus bill in the senate, and lost the caucus unity while doing so), and today I woke up to see about 10 downvotes. Heh. That place really is an echo chamber… It’s all for the best.

This, here, now, is the seed of the kind of person I’ll be in the future. This isolation, this overabundance of time with virtually zero human contact is an involuntary experiment, a chance to rearrange my priorities. I don’t want to eventually turn into an angry old man who yells at a news channel or spends days on end getting angrier and angrier about social media strangers who have different opinions. It’s futile, and it changes nothing. Quitting all of this cold turkey (at least the political blog; social media can stay, in very limited capacity) will not be easy, but I think it’s the right move.

Incidentally, and before I forget, Katie Mack’s book was all sorts of amazing. I like to think I’m smart, and there were whole sections of that book that made me feel rather stupid. Not all of the material was easy to digest, but Mack is a great storyteller with a fun sense of humour: she turned what could have been a mind-bogglingly dry book into a rather fun romp across the universe. Next up: Anxious People by Fredrik Backman. I like the premise, and the opening is quite engaging.

I measure life in bottles of vitamins… Today was the last gummy from the bottle I started 141 days ago, all the way on day 217, in mid-October. I guess I missed 16 days or so, because it’s definitely been longer than 125. Oh well. A fair bit has changed since I started that bottle. Multiple vaccines got approved. Trump lost the election and organized an attempted coup. I made more money on the stock market than I’d ever dared to imagine in my wildest dreams. (Thanks, Gamestop!) I got my own little studio even though I’d thought I’d stay with my Vietnamese landlords forever. (If not for their strange free-for-all dinner parties 10 days in a row in December… Incidentally, the landlady got invited to apply for permanent residency, so her family will be able to stay in Canada now. Hooray!) I discovered new frontiers of solitude. I signed up for a covid vaccine trial. That’s quite a lot for less than five months, eh?

The new bottle has 150 gummies. Two a day, every day, ideally without skipping. Seventy-five days. I’ll run out in late May. How different will the world be by then, I wonder?

In covid news, there was an anti-mask protest in the US. Again. This time it was different, though. In Idaho, approximately 100 protestors started a fire in a barrel and set masks on fire. There are videos of children throwing masks into the fire while their parents cheer them on. Idaho doesn’t have a state-level mask mandate, though some cities and counties require folks to wear masks. I know that idiocy isn’t representative of the entire United States. I know it’s just a surprisingly large group of militant morons. But still – that could be the first of many such events. Idiocy catches on really easily. I don’t so much care about the way this impacts the US image abroad (there is nothing left to impact) – I’m concerned about empowered yahoos escalating things even further and going after businesses, elected officials, or their fellow citizens who are just trying to get through this pandemic. We’ll see, I guess.

Here is to a sunnier week.

Saturday night.

I just got eaten by zombies. To be more specific, my avatar in the 7 Days to Die game took one wrong step, fell off the roof during the seventh-day feeding frenzy, and got devoured by zombies after the famous last stand. (Alas, zombies respawn faster than I can reload.) I play the game by my own rules, and even though the main character gets resurrected, for me one death is final and the game is effectively over. (Can you tell that I’m training for a real-world zombocalypse? Heh.) That was 31.5 hours well spent, eh.

I’m going to try something new tomorrow: zero social media and zero gaming. Those are fine ways to waste time, but they’re like fast-food: technically food, but the least nutritious kind. I feel like after discovering a low-key announcement about a vaccine trial on Reddit (it doesn’t seem to be advertised elsewhere online), I’ve officially reached the highest level of social media addiction. Who knows, I might finally catch up on my reading or other stuff.

Lessons in laziness: I found out the hard way that doing a dumbbell chest press while lying down on a very soft mattress will just make sink deeper into the mattress, and won’t result in a very efficient workout. (It must have looked hilarious, though.) Or, to spin this the other way, I’ve conducted a brilliantly simple science experiment that showed how the fabric of time and space (and/or my mattress) gets affected by increased gravity. Yeah. It was definitely a science experiment and not a case of laziness gone hilariously wrong.

In covid news, after a great deal of confusion about Canada’s unilateral and unique decision to extend the gap between two vaccine shots to four months, there’s a PR piece in the news. To summarize, a maverick scientist (Dr. Danuta Skowronski) claims that she could “correct” Pfizer’s raw data where no one else in the world could. She claims she deduced the effectiveness of just a single dose (92%, not 52% as Pfizer claims), and that’s now being touted as the newest explanation for this weird, weird decision. I would’ve been a lot more comfortable with (and accepting of) this explanation had Dr. Skowronski not used the word “art” when describing her allegedly scientific approach. In her response to Dr. Mona Nemer (who called this a “population level experiment”), Skowronski said “The comment from the chief science adviser was most unfortunate,” said Skowronski. “It did not reflect the careful risk-benefit analysis that went into this decision, and frankly, that is a science and an art to be able to do that.” 

Call me old-fashioned, or cynical, or too bitter to live, but when you a) claim that you alone saw something that literally every other scientist in the world missed, and b) say there’s “a science and an art” to your methodology, that seems like a bit of a red flag. It’s entirely possible that I’m completely wrong and Dr. Skowronski is completely right – but when the entire country’s vaccination strategy hinges on this… It’s a bit lie the uncomfortable sensation you might get if your pilot starts saying flat-earth gibberish over the intercom in the middle of a flight: maybe it’ll have zero effect on his plane-flying (and more importantly, landing) expertise, or maybe that’s a sign of something pretty damn bad.

In other Canadian news, this article explains why Toronto still hasn’t vaccinated everyone over the age of 80. (If you recall, my mom, who is 67 years old and lives near Seattle, got her first shot a couple of weeks ago.) In a nutshell, there was some really bad distribution modeling: vaccines got spread evenly across the province, even though some regions had far lower covid cases, and some places (such as Toronto) have a much higher concentration of elderly and other high-risk groups. That attempt at perfectly fair distribution may have made sense on paper but it didn’t account for reality. (See also: Robert McNamara and his disastrous planning during the Vietnam War.) Toronto has over 120,000 folks who are over 80: we’re six days into March, and that cohort is still not fully vaccinated… I really, really want to believe that this is a small hiccup, an exception in the long series of other, completely unrelated exceptions, and that the rest of the vaccine rollout will go without a hitch. Time will tell.

Have a good second half of your weekend, y’all.

Friday night, for what it’s worth.

Today was incredibly hectic, work-wise, but at least I managed to find some time to call the covid vaccine trial people. I’m in! This will be a phase-1 trial for an eVLP-based (enveloped virus-like particles) vaccine. The trial will run for a year, and there’s a 66% chance I will get the real deal and not the placebo. (Then there’s a 50-50 chance that I get two shots of the experimental vaccine, or one shot of the vaccine and one placebo.) They’ll actually pay me for participation, too, which is something I hadn’t even considered. I passed the phone screening: the initial screening at their office will be at 7am on Tuesday. (The best way to make that align with my work schedule.) This is exciting!

I won’t know whether I got the real deal or the placebo until much later on, and there’ll be no way to find out exactly how efficient this thing is until maybe a year from now. Still, though: I spent 10 years of my life in Nevada, and I know all about stacking the odds in my favour. There’ll be a 66% chance that I’ll receive some protection against covid, if only minimal. That beats the 0% protection I have here and now.

At work, there’s an email thread where folks describe the things they’ve learned and done during the pandemic. A couple of guys made some wooden furniture. Someone else turned the basement in his new house into a maker-space, 3D printers and all. Someone else learned to make amazing pies. Someone else taught himself all about glazing and started creating beautiful glazed vases in his furnace. (Most of Amazon’s tech employees can afford a hobby if they get really into it. Heh.) Someone else ran through almost every street in West Seattle. The winner of that informal contest is the guy who fulfilled his old dream and got his Bachelor of Science degree by taking a ton of online courses over the course of six months. That right there is impressive. That email thread was filled with self-reported examples, and chances are the other 95% watched it but didn’t contribute. (I don’t have much to add aside from my broken Spanish and French, as well as buckets of minerals I collected.) I’m trying to convince myself that I haven’t wasted this almost-year of lockdown, since the main objective was to stay alive and not spread the virus. That self-mantra is mostly working.

In covid news, today was filled with some remarkably great news for Canada, eh. Canada has approved its fourth vaccine, the one-shot Johnson&Johnson, adding it to Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca. On top of that, Trudeau announced that Pfizer will move up its delivery of 3.5 million doses: they were originally scheduled for this summer, but they’ll get here within three months. An extra 1.5 million of Pfizer doses will get here in March.

With all this happening at once, the official timeline has improved: now the promise is to get every Canadian their first shot by June 20th. The announcement rollout got a bit waffled, and it’s not altogether clear if that’ll be for absolutely everyone or just for every high-risk individual out there. (BIPOC folks, the elderly, those who are immunocompromised, etc.) Hopefully it’s the former. The real question now is whether provinces will be able to distribute all these doses quickly and efficiently. Ontario is still 10 days away from launching a site to sign up for vaccinations… I’m trying to adjust to this burst of optimistic news after a remarkably sad February. (You’ve probably noticed the change in tone over the past few weeks as bad news kept coming.) I’m trying not to get too hopeful because Ontario’s government, led by the college dropout Doug Ford, has shown remarkable tendency to sabotage itself. But if the June 20th promise holds… Huh. On top of the 66% likelihood of some kind of immunity from the vaccine trial, I might also get my first shot in just over 100 days. That’s still so very, very far, and yet much closer than September.

In the US, another state has decided to throw caution to the wind and open up everything: this time it’s Arizona. It’s following Texas and Mississippi in their bizarre mission to trade their own people’s health for extra revenue. I recently saw a great analogy: this is a real-life large-scale marshmallow experiment. They can reopen now and get some fun and entertainment, but if they wait just a few more months and reopen once enough people have been vaccinated, they’ll get to have so much more fun – and far fewer covid deaths. I’m well aware that not everyone thinks like me or shares my priorities, but still… It’s baffling, absolutely baffling that governors of three large states, with all the doctors and scientists to advise them, would do something so catastrophically stupid. I think other states will join them soon, if only because their people will demand it. And the neighbouring states might see spikes in infections as folks cross the state lines to fill their need for maskless entertainment. Not for the first time and certainly not the last – WTF, USA?

Enjoy your weekend, y’all.

Tuesday night.

This is the kind of busy, work-jammed week where you have to stop and check to see what day this is. It is, in fact, Tuesday.

…it will never cease to amaze me that if you want to buy a six-pack of cider after a particularly stressful day here in Canada, you have to get to the nearest government-run alcohol distribution centre (closed at night and on holidays) instead of, say, just walking up to the nearest convenience store. Heh.

I might have discovered a fun new hobby. Last night, I saw someone on social media mention a US consulate, and it hit me. I’m a US citizen, I still pay my US taxes, so maybe the consulate can help me, right? (Spoiler alert: wrong.) The good news is that they replied to my email (“covid-19 vaccinations for US citizens in Toronto?”) in record time: I emailed them at night and got the reply at 8am. The bad news is that they told me to get lost. Officially, what they told me was “The United States Government does not plan to provide COVID-19 vaccinations to private U.S. citizens overseas. Please follow Canadian developments and guidelines for COVID-19 vaccination.” Unofficially, they may as well have told me to stop bothering them.

According to this federal report, as of 2018 there were over 860,000 Americans living in Canada. That’s more than the population of Wyoming. And because America is such an odd animal, all American expats must pay US taxes forevermore unless they surrender their citizenship. Can you imagine the sheer outrage if the White House told Wyoming that it wouldn’t get any vaccines? Yeah, me neither.

So, righteously pissed off and all, I decided to do something I’ve never, ever done before: contact my elected representatives. I sent out requests for help to my congresswoman, to both of my senators (I still pay property taxes on my condo near Seattle, damn it), and tweeted at the US embassy in Canada. (The US is currently in between ambassadors.) The embassy itself doesn’t stay open 24/7, apparently, so I’ll call them again tomorrow. I really, really don’t want to turn into a male version of Karen (albeit one with a poli-sci degree), but I’m not proud, and I’ll take any option I can think of when the main stratagem fails. And once those options fail, I’ll think of some more. To be fair, I think there’s a low chance of this working out – but this chance is greater than zero. I don’t want to have to wait until September to get my first dose, followed by four more months for the second dose in goddamn January – and that’s assuming their logistical desperation doesn’t spawn any more brilliant ideas. I can just imagine them trying to keep a straight face while telling the cameras that actually, one year between two shots is the optimal way to go.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe Canada will get it together and get everyone vaccinated by June, just barely behind the US. So far, though, there hasn’t been a single logistical success. All the current official timelines say either September or “don’t you worry your pretty little head about that” when folks ask general Hillier when Ontarians under 60 might get vaccinated. I’m tired of complacency.

In covid news, a fun two-fer development from the US. First, Dr Fauci very politely said that there’s no way the US is jumping aboard the crazy train with the four-month vaccine gap suggestion. He politely but strongly rebuked that suggestion and said, “What we have right now, and what we must go with, is the scientific data that we’ve accumulated. And it’s really solid.” Meanwhile, Biden announced that the US would have enough Covid-19 vaccine doses for every adult American by the end of May. (That’s just the supply, though. It’ll take longer to distribute them.) He also said that Merck would help manufacture Johnson&Johnson’s vaccine to help make as many doses as possible. I don’t know much about pharmaceutical companies, but that sounds like a very rare kind of partnership. Good for them, eh.

And almost forgot – Texas keeps fighting Florida for the title of the stupidest state in the union. Texas governor Greg Abbott signed an executive order that would do away with masks entirely (can’t penalize anti-maskers, so it’s basically free for all) and would open up all businesses. The sole tiny concession to sanity is that local authorities can still limit business capacity if their county has a lot of covid hospitalizations, but even then they can’t limit a business’s capacity by more than 50%. This is madness. All of this is because Texas has managed to vaccinate 20% of its population. A karaoke bar that’s half-full can still generate new covid clusters. People will almost certainly die because of this, because he couldn’t wait just a couple more months. Abbott’s reelection will be next November, which is no time at all in political terms. Does he really think people will remember his so-called leadership positively? Hell, maybe he’s right. Maybe they’ll only remember that he let them out to party months ahead of schedule (woo, spring break!) while also ignoring the fact that their grandma died two weeks later.

Stay safe and out of Texas, y’all, eh?