#14 - Podcast Première and EP #2 - Sir Attenborough, MOSAiC Exped. and Boy Plunger

Notes about some subjects I am planning on talking about in the podcast premiere. The podcast will be in Portuguese however most notes are in English below. This podcast will also be posted at my youtube channel and is expect to go on air by the end of the month. Subjects not met in this episode will be saved for the next ones.

See the podcast index here (currently at the blog portal).

Podcast première

General notices

About youtube and podcast content frequency.

BBC's podcast 'What Planet Are We On' with David Attenborough

The interviewer tried to start the conversation with hope but I am not sure Sir Attenborough managed to to inspire her very much. Also noteworthy how other people on the beginning of the podcasts already forecast grievance only.

Prince William and Sir David Attenborough join forces on 'Earthshot' prize

Grants worth £50m until 2030, which is about R$360.7m total.

The best and most innovative ideas to help:

• Protect and restore nature
• Clean our air
• Revive our oceans
• Build a waste-free world
• •Fix our climate

Attenborough: 'Curb excess capitalism' to save nature

Sir Attenborough says he is not an economist, which is fine IMHO, however nothing stands in the way of his learning some of that. When he says we need to curb capitalism, what does that really mean? That does not mean anything. Beware of vague expressions.

Netflix is accused of 'eco-tragedy porn' in Attenborough documentary (2019)

Usage of drones instead of narrow-angle lenses to film walruses made them afraid and led them to falling off a cliff. Note that the polar bear which was at the scene is only partly to blame for the tragedy. If no drones were around, probably walruses would not just fall off the cliff.

UN World Food Programme wins 2020 Nobel Peace Prize, as hunger mounts

Hunger is really worrying. Perhaps total world production of food is enough for all human beings, however there is a big problem with distributions systems. There are not enough distribution. We need more roads to take food (and fuel and technology) to those who live in very difficult places to access and cheap fuel.

Nobel Peace Prize: UN World Food Programme wins for efforts to combat hunger

Número de famintos vai quase dobrar este ano, preveem ganhadores do Nobel

World Food Program Awarded 2020 Nobel Peace Prize

Mosaic expedition logs from Polarstern

Comments on the almost year-long transpolar-turned-peripolar expedition of Mosaic on the German ice breaker Polarstern. A copy of the forum thread in plain formatted txt can be found here. The Mosaic expedition tried to follow the steps of the Nansen's Fram expedition (1893–1896), which aimed to reaching the geographical North Pole.
This article says Mosaic Polarstern reached geographical North Pole, however the forum logs say closest approach to North Pole was 166.3 km, information from post on February 26th from young ice. After the originally planned floe was abandoned during the covid pandemics, in search for a new floe they crossed the North Pole on August 19th, but that was a detour and not in the original plans of the expedition.
A lot of public money was spent in this expedition, however the scientific groups released little data and there was not a centralised data or information supplier other than the kindergarten-like portal (entering deprecation as soon as the expedition was over last month). Most available info is spread across blog and social media posts. Official scientific papers with data from Mosaic expedition are planned to be released by 2023! IMHO, data should have been streamed live from the ship and everyone should be able to get that and do their won research, why not?!

BR do Mar e o desenvolvimento do agro

Brazilian legislation makes it hard for cabotage type of navigation. Cabotage navigation would allow transporting a lot more resources along the very extensive coast of Brazil. Railroad development has been stagnant for decades in Brazil. Cabotage is not the silver bullet for the transport problems but would greatly help and reduce road transport.

Governo lança "banco nacional de genomas"

Governo pretende investir R$ 600 mi para criar 'banco nacional de genomas'

The Brazilian govt says Brazil is lagging 8 years behind in genomic research. Thus, now they want to sequence 100 thousand Brazilian genomes (who must have some sort of rare disease) in the next four years with spending of R$600mi (US$~107mi) and be the leading country in that field of research. Does that make sense? Some ethical and financial problems arise. For example, the project first aim is to generate a said 'reference' genome of the Brazilian people. Perhaps they could generate a reference genome for peoples from Iceland, Norway and Japan, but hardly Brazil due to its great population miscegenation. There are lots of gene sequences or genome assemblies from people with rare diseases available in publicly accessible data banks and I reckon a research group could obtain more whole genomes from specific public-restricted banks. If Brazil groups cannot advance in genomics with data already available, they will hardly advance with 100 thousand more genomes because data is not automatic information!

Jesse Livermore’s $100 Million

Jesse Livermore book, that is not very longa nd should be fun and productive to read.

Reminscences of a Stock Operator, Edwin Lefèvre

An account of the early life of Jesse Livermore, the Boy Plunger, as a stock operator. In this book, Livermore character wears the pseudonym Livingstone.

How to trade in stocks, Jesse Livermore

Ugly Old Goat - BitMEX targetted by the regulators (CFTC etc), also check his medium blog.

Ugly talks about the risk US regulatory entities present for Bitfinex and thus blocking US citizens (and many more) from dealing with them, see also Americans Trading on BitMEX/Bitfinex. The problem with the BitMEX case is the US govt has not got jurisdiction power over BitMEX however the US govt wants everybody under their dirty thumbs. Tip from Ugly: evading taxes is illegal, however avoiding them is legal. Dica do Ugly: sonegação de impostos é ilegal, porém evitá-los (elisão fiscal) é legal.

BRL Bitcoin has broken highs from 2017

On the 17^th of December 2017, bitcoin reached BRL 65,952 (almost 66K Brazilian Reais). On the 17^th of August 2020, a new all time high reached BRL 68,695.

Episode #2 - Arch Linux updates and privy key management

Arch Linux update notes on sync'ing with Arch Linux Archive (ALA)

I sync Arch Linux with the monthly repo (snapshot of the 1^st of a month) from ALA. However, sometimes even the monthly repo snapshot (which is used to generate the official Arch Linux install iso image) is not 100% stable for my specific hardware and thus I need to try and sync again some days later.. For example, what I do when there is news such as nvidia 455.28 is incompatible with linux = 5.9 recently? I do not agree a rolling release distribution requires the user to update constantly as a rule.

Working with bitcoin private keys

How to set up a computer with a safe digital environment and how to try and leave no records.

• use a dedicated computer with a free operating system, such as Linux distributions or BSD clones; there is no need to keep it up-to-date, one may use a snapshot of os and download a full copy of the official repos (usually below 50GB), for eg. wget -r -np -e robots=off "http://manjaro.c3sl.ufpr.br/stable/"
• avoid connecting to the internet while working with privy keys
• (i) use an encrypted disk, (ii) an encrypted user account or at the very minimum (iii) do encrypt files holding the privy keys with eg. gpg -c --personal-cipher-preferences CAMELLIA192 [FILE..] . List cypher algos with gpg --version. Do make a backup of original files as some gpg versions may overwrite them!
• remove automatic unencrypted backups made by text editors
• avoid automatic backups by text editors (also swap and undoes), for example, add a modeline to files opened by vi(m): # vim:nobackup noundofile (maybe leave noswapfile out)
• overwrite and remove temporary or old files with shred -n1 -uv [FILE..]
• make backups of your encrypted files
• tip from bitconheiros, user may use Tails operating system, but personally I reckon that is not necessary if you pay attention to my tips above

US Govt wants everyone under its thumb

More comments on the same track of last podcast episode Ugly Old Goat's (Greatest Of All Times) explanation about BitMEX 'Attempted to Evade' US Regulations, CFTC Charges and CFTC charges BitMex with illegally operating derivatives exchange. See also Ripple CEO Threatens to Relocate Company Overseas Due to Unfavorable US Regulation and an older news (2000) Microsoft ordered to split into two companies. Perhaps I will comment on some wide-range implications.

Bitcoin price in Brazil

Bitcoin price in BRL is at new All Time Highs. On 25^th Sep 2020 it broke to 75,216 BRL, going above 17^th Dec 2017 66,066 BRL/BTC price.

Saved for next episodes (?)

Vacinação compulsória (Fhoer)

"Quem decide não tomar vacinas não deveria poder frequentar espaços públicos"

Compulsory vaccination: is reinforcement of a covid vaccine feasible? While OMS says SARS-CoV2 vaccine will be widely available only in 2022, is that fair that whoever is not able to get vaccinated until then should stay at home, isolated? There are many bad points about compulsory vaccination:

• SARS-CoV2 vaccines are still under testing, nobody know if they are effective
• As for all vaccines however small there is a chance of collateral effects; that is a risk a person must decide to take or not
• Universality passes through the self first; in Japan, use of masks is to protect one self, the extended benefit of protecting others is only secondary and not as powerful as self protection
• The person may not even get into contact with the virus in her lifetime
• If a person is not able to get a vaccine, should he be discriminated?

I reckon that when a person is diagnosed with covid or any other contagious disease, he should stay at home but we cannot make people stay at home or discriminate them when they are not infected. The fears they are trying to mitigate with mandatory vaccination cannot be universal rule itself: imagine now that we must get a shot of vaccine for every possible disease because we must protect "others"?

Update on 03-nov-2020

If youtube analytics is saying the truth to me, most listeners of the podcast drop before the 40min mark. That does not mean I should dumb down the content or shorten it for the sake of what most users do. However that was already a plan to make 40min podcasts so that is the goal next time. Maybe I will aim at 35min so I am sure to never run out of content!

I plan on recording another podcast episode only just before New Year's day or Christmas. Let's see.