Most people know the news that Google has bought Fitbit.  It is clearly their way of taking on Apple, in particular, taking on the Apple Watch.

The Apple Watch is superb in terms of being able to make phone calls to people, monitoring your heart and ECG rate, etc, but it is not as great when it comes to automatically tracking steps and your sleep patterns, not to mention the fact that you need to charge it a lot more than you would have to charge a Fitbit.  I am not sure what Google will be able to do, but I do think that we will see Fitbit come out with some dramatically different products in about a year’s time.  It will obviously take time to implement and get whatever it is they plan running, but it will be exciting to see some competition for the Apple Watch because as we always learn in life, competition inspires companies to make better products and to improve existing products, so at the end of the day we all win from competition and we don’t win when two companies largely have the market to themselves.  In that respect, I am talking about Vodacom and MTN with Cell C running a very distant third. 

Four years ago, at this time, Hillary Clinton had to attend the inauguration of Donald Trump. She just lost an election to him, but in the interest of democracy and in the usual sign of leadership, she turned up for what is essentially the party of the winner.  I think you know where I am going with this. 

Joe Biden and Barack Obama also attended that inauguration and so it is quite stunning, after some 150 years of this tradition, that Donald Trump, a man who loses frequently, but does not like to admit it, could not turn up for his opponent’s inauguration.  Instead, he demanded a send-off at a near air force base where thousands of people received an e-mail asking them to come and to “bring 5 friends with” – and they were so desperate that the invites were even sent to his critics and  people he had fired.  In other words, on the same day that an inauguration for the new President was being held in the same city, he was begging people to turn up at his event rather.

I think that Donald Trump ultimately, if we leave aside everything else, personifies exactly the thing he hates the most – losers.  The problem is, unlike those of us in golf, horseracing and in litigation, who have to learn to lose sometimes and do so gracefully, he is not only a loser, but he is a poor loser. 

I wrote a blog article early last year about the statistics we would see about Covid.  In that article I said that we will discover one day that the deaths from Covid were far higher than whatever we would be told and that the statistics in South Africa would be hopelessly out.  I said the only way we would know how many people actually died from Covid would be to compare it to the normal deaths in a year and see how many extra deaths there are. 

That blog of mine has now been confirmed.  The government has reported that just during a December period the excess deaths, not attributed to Covid, but higher than normal, were 130% higher than the normal deaths during that period.

That means, with there currently being allegedly 35,000 deaths from Covid in SA that figure is hopelessly wrong.  Is it double that number, is it treble that number – we will not know until all those excess deaths last year and still to come this year are calculated by experts in future.