The Moyo Diaries: 7
What I’m Reading
As I said in installment 6, please follow me on Twitter to keep up with the stories I’m reading and sharing. There’s too much to post here in any sort of definitive way.
Turkey worries me… I discussed this Tweet in installment 6 — it has been my most viral ever, by a long shot. Since then it’s continued to gain traction:
To put that in context, nearly 20% of Turkey’s estimated 11.8 million Twitter users might have seen it, and around 8% engaged in some way. Clearly, Turks are desperate for news about the pandemic that their government isn’t giving them.
Disney Plus Hits 50 Million Subscribers — As I always tell young entrepreneurs embarking in their first startup, until it becomes profitable it’s just a dream bankrolled by your investors’ desire to get rich. On their last earnings call in early February, the company revealed that Disney+ is hemorrhaging money — $693 million in that quarter alone. The worldwide rollout that led to the jump in subscribers over the past two months likely led to additional losses. Still, it’s the only bright spot in an otherwise dreary outlook for the company.
Study suggests humans transported badgers to Ireland from Britain— not an animal I would have guessed humans traveled with, but to each his own…
With large enough numbers, probabilistic becomes deterministic — Like quantum mechanics, things that are stochastic at a micro level are deterministic at a macro level. With hundreds of thousands of data points from around the world, on everything from confirmed cases to social behavior, I think we have a pretty clear picture of how the pandemic will play out now in the US, Europe, and east Asia. My worries now are the Middle East (especially Syria), India and Indonesia (the world’s fourth largest country by population) — the ‘great unknowns.’
Financial Hits Pile Up for Colleges as Some Fight to Survive — American higher education is in serious trouble.
Looking into the Coronavirus Crystal Ball — an episode I did on my friend John O’Connor’s Gene Food podcast. Pretty good, I think.
Malaccamax — never knew about this, though when Holly and I visited Panama last year we saw the recently enlarged canal entrance built to accommodate larger ships. Given that we’re now living in a house that overlooks the Lombok Strait, it’s interesting to see these megaships making the transit.
Moyo Life
Everything changes. After many discussions with the corporate bosses of the Aman resorts, we decided that it made the most sense to shut down the Amanwana and for us to come to Lombok, where our Indonesian family lives when they’re not on Moyo. Ellen, Frankie’s wife, was able to get us a fantastic deal on a wonderful house (the tour video is below), and we’re very happy here. The blog will remain The Moyo Diaries, though — that’s where it was conceived.
Our last night on Moyo Island we had a long discussion with Frankie, Francisca, Melanie and the staff about the ‘ghosts’ everyone there has seen. Apparently there is an old graveyard under the staff quarters, and they regularly have encounters with the ghosts of the people buried there. I’m a skeptical scientist, of course, but what was chilling to me was hearing that there was a PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) killing field in dried-up riverbed near the Amanwana. When Suharto seized control in 1965, between 500k–1 million people were killed for belonging to the PKI, or just being opponents of the government. Frightening indeed.
The following morning we set out, taking the fast boat from the resort, cars and a ferry from Sumbawa to Lombok. Here’s a time-lapse video of the trip:
We adopted a stray cat that came wandering in a few nights ago. We’ve named her Shiva, after the Hindu god of creative destruction, because she’s a ray of sunlight in our currently darkened world. Ellen’s sister is a vet, and she came to the house to give Shiva her shots and deworm her. Shiva’s 12 weeks old, and very healthy…so Max is going to have a new friend when we make it back to Austin!
Finally, it was my birthday on April 6th. I’m 51, and loving my 50s now after a bit of a rough start last year (long story). Frankie, Ellen and Holly organized an awesome party for me that included dancing, a cake, and a floating happy birthday sign in the pool. Really fun — I’m so lucky to have such wonderful people in my life.
Random Thoughts
I’m working on an article for MIT Technology Review on how we can start to re-engage intelligently post-lockdown. Will hopefully be out by early next week, and I’ll post it here as well.
