Stock Market Collapse
Fashionable tech stocks sold off. Zoom, an analyst favourite was down 5 % on the day to $147.66. That’s nothing. It’s 52 week high was $451.77. Why would anyone be surprised? Many people have used Zoom. I have. But I have never paid Zoom a dime.
Netflix raised prices this month. Subscribers cancelled.
Netflix stock lost 21% on the day to $397. Its 52 week high: $701.
Canada’s tech darling was hammered. (Prices in Canadian dollars.)
Shopify. It’s a successful e-commerce company.
But its stock price was perhaps too successful. It hit a high of $2,228.73 on November 21, 2021; in the 61 days to the close of trading on Friday, the stock has lost $1,118, or 50%
For a short time Shopify was the most valuable company on the Toronto Stock Exchange, eclipsing the mighty Royal Bank of Canada. The Royal is back.
Market Cap* 52 Week High Close Friday January 21, 2022
Royal Bank $204.5-billion $149.52 $144
Shopify $138-billion $2,228.73 $1,110
*Market capitalization, or Market Cap, is the current stock price multiplied by the total number of shares outstanding.
Guns and Butter
Russia and Canada are the two biggest countries in the world. They are both the same— cold and resource rich — and very different. One armed to the teeth, the other military adverse bordering on pacifist.
Their economies are about the same size: Russian GDP: $1.48-trillion (US$) Per capita GDP: $10,126. Population: 142-million. Military spending: $62-billion.
Canada’s GDP is $1.64-trillion (US$). Population: 38-million. Per capita GDP: $46,000. Military spending $23.3-billion.
Want to understand the Ukraine crisis?
Tired of CNN where the announcers have more simple opinions than the people they are interviewing. Listen to this woman, Fiona Hill, the Durham coal miner’s daughter who went to Harvard and became a foreign affairs adviser to, among others, President Trump. Many will remember her from her testifying before Congress.
She gets to the point after a long preamble. Click here. Be patient.
The Alphabet Soup of Rockets from V2 to N1.
Electric plane speed record confirmed
The Spirit of Aviation hit 555.9 kilometres an hour (345 mph) over a test course in the English county of Wiltshire. The Rolls Royce battery powered plane actually did that in September of last year but had to wait until this week until it was certified by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, which has been certifying aviation speed records since 1905, two years after the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The first commercial flight took off on January 1, 1914: Tampa to St. Petersburg, Florida. Can it be long before commercial airlines start flying electric planes, at first on short haul routes.
The Spirit of Innovation is stuffed with a giant electric battery front, 400 kilowatt hours (four times the power of the Tesla 100D) making 500 horsepower. If you are a wartime aviation buff you will notice it looks a lot like light fighter planes with huge engines upfront such as the British Spitfire— inline V-12 and the German Focke-Wulf FW 190 - a 14-cylinder radial engine.
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Lopsided Justice
Two failed start-up artists; two different outcomes.
This from professor Scott Galloway of New York University Stern School of Business:
“Elizabeth Holmes cost her investors less than a billion dollars, didn’t make any real money herself, and is going to prison. Adam Neumann cost his investors $11 billion, received a 10% commission on those losses, and is going to Coachella. Note: Ms. Holmes’s vision progressed to the exaggeration/fabrication of contracts and clients, whereas Mr. Neumann’s “only” went so far as accounting irregularities.”
World’s Rudest Tennis Fans
The Australians by far. Zero manners, very unsportsmanlike for a country that paints itself as a land of sports lovers. Only if their side is winning. At the Australian open fans have a chant that sounds like boos. No Excuse. Here’s hoping they don’t have an Australian player to cheer for soon.
Daniil Medvedev slams Aussie crowd after they boo him for beating their boy
It took a lot of men to put out a magazine in 1920
And there is not one woman that I can see in this photo of the typesetting room of Country Life, the British weekly magazine. I counted 30 people in this wonderful photo in the attic of 110 Southwark Street in London. Today, all that work could be done by a couple of people on a computer. Two women do it at Tempo Lac-Brome, the monthly newspaper where I am the volunteer editor.
Essay of the Week
MRI machines as Diagnostic Tools.
Last year MRI machines were used about 2-million times in Canada. The acronym MRI is familiar to almost everyone, though most people are unaware it stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging. In simple terms, an MRI machine is a circular tube surrounded by magnets. It uses a magnetic field and computer-generated radio waves to create high-resolution images of the organs and tissues of the person being examined in the machine. There is no radiation involved, but an MRI can do things an ordinary x-ray machine or PET or C scan could never do.
An MRI can examine any part of the body, but it is ideal for looking at the brain.
"If you want to look for something in the brain, an MRI is the choice," says a Canadian professor of radiation oncology who wishes to remain anonymous.
There are 378 MRI machines in Canada, according to the latest statistics from the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health (CADTH). Each MRI machine in Canada gets used an average of 87 hours a week.
Almost all MRI machines are in hospitals; there are only a handful in private clinics. One of those private machines is at ReGen Scientific's clinic in Toronto, where it is used exclusively for brain health.
MRI machines in hospitals are used when physicians know or suspect something is wrong. ReGen Scientific's use of its MRI machine is unique: finding something in the brain before there are symptoms.
"We want to see if the brain is functioning as it should be," says Dr. Robert Francis, Executive Chairman and co-founder of ReGen Scientific. "Usually, when someone has a brain MRI, it's because that person had a stroke or had something else the hospital is looking. We use an MRI as a diagnostic tool."
ReGen's MRI is on the 16th floor of its clinic on University Avenue in the heart of downtown Toronto. The MRI is used exclusively for the brain. It produces images of blood flow to certain areas of the brain and can be used to examine the brain's anatomy and determine which parts of the brain are handling critical functions.
This helps identify important language and movement control areas in the brains of people being considered for brain surgery. Functional MRI can also be used to assess damage from a head injury or from disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.
Brain health is one of the key markers Dr. Francis and his associates are focused on. There are personal as well as clinical reasons. Dr. Francis's late wife Sharon had early-onset Alzheimer's Disease. She stayed at home with him until the end. During that long period, he researched the disease, its causes and ways to slow its progress.
There is no cure for Alzheimer’s Disease. However, ReGen Scientific works closely with Dr. Shai Efrati, a professor of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University in Israel. He uses an MRI machine in combination with a hyperbaric chamber—where a person breathes pure oxygen—to improve brain health and perhaps slow the aging process.
In addition to the special brain MRI machine, ReGen Scientific uses other advanced techniques, unknown at other private medical clinics. It does a DNA test and a blood test that is analysed in an in-house lab that that looks for 80 different markers, while the average general practitioner looks for just four markers.
“The idea is to live better longer,” says Dr. Francis, who founded the most successful private medical clinic in Canada 30 years ago and is now focusing on brain health and longevity.