Su Zhu

(hype, lit) will continue to benefit from the persistent rotation from nonproductive to productive crypto. I think of the majors, only eth is really investible, but barely so.

Taiwan stock market is bigger than India now.

Enhanced Games might be the most effective “don’t do drugs” campaign ever.

I feel like a human taxi is still better than a robotaxi because a human can tell you that the restaurant you picked is a tourist trap or you can ask him about local politics and sports. It is kind of the last bastion of civilisation when you really think about it.

Fun fact about Zhongnanhai that maga should love is that the only recent American presidents to have not been allowed to visit it are Bill Clinton and Joe Biden.

The reason why Trump is insanely popular in Beijing specifically is because the air quality becomes Swiss-like for a month going into each time he comes.

Hangul is the most sublime form of writing system ever invented. Imagine otherwise memorising thousands of pictographs like an ancient Sumerian. Or imagine having to memorise the pronunciation of words instead of just knowing from the written form. Absolute disgrace that the Foreign Service Institute in the US thinks Korean is the hardest language, while random European girls are learning it in six months from watching kdrama and kpop.

Skateboarding scene is now insanely poor kids from inner cities in the west and insanely wealthy kids from inner cities in china and japan.

(EWY, EWT) is probably the macro trade of the next couple years.

The biggest bull case for Beijing real estate at this point is Koreans need to buy villas for their kids to live in while studying there.

This is pretty cool

Going into Trump Beijing visit I think you’re gonna wanna be long everything but esp baba

Attended a niche semiconductor conference in Taipei for fun a few months ago and it is basically a giant room of SMEs that make arcane precision parts or processes. The family offices that invest in this stuff are third generation galaxy autist brains. Their grandparents, parents, all do factories. Precision manufacturing requires such a unique combination of soft sales (explaining why others above or below you in the supply chain should use you) and engineering innovation. It really only works if you have a culture that radically rejects focusing on financialisation, consumer market, branding, etc.

There are some interesting parallels between humanoid robotics manufacturers and smart contract chains. The firms making the robots are offering them at discounted prices to app developers whether startups or schools. They fly out technicians to fix your robots when they break. They need teams to submit data and test the product. This subsidisation in theory will allow projects to try out specific use cases for relatively low capex. This is all similar to what happened on layer1 protocols in crypto. It is probably a year away but something like a defi summer of consumer robotics built on infra like unitree is coming.

Where’s India and China here?

The subtle problem with locales catering to tourism is that eventually a new generation grows up believing that the only way to make money is to earn it from people visiting their hometown for a short period of time. If the tides change, it can render a decade of work obsolete. It also leads, ironically, to mediocre tourist experiences. Over-development creates artificial stuff and destroys existing natural attractions.

White people will flick through 10 pages of a menu in Thailand and then order a pad thai with a tom yum goong and a coconut.

Spent some time in Dalian recently. Absolutely gorgeous and magnetic place. Parts feel like St Petersburg. The walking area of the city feels like San Francisco, with plenty of preserved Japan-era buildings. The newer parks are spacious and Soviet-sized. This is some of the cleanest air of any major Chinese city. Cost of living is maybe 20% of Beijing. Most young people are working at SOEs. Main economic drivers are precision manufacturing for shipyards and industrials. SK Hynix just bought out Intel’s flash memory fab. Not that many Koreans on the streets but you can feel yourself becoming maybe 1% more Korean as you roam around. This area…

South Korea and Taiwan economies are both insanely well positioned for the new paradigm. Full western supply chain integration, full access to mainland manufacturing, low birth rate and immigration so no welfare burden, self-referential pop culture so no pressure to go overseas, no dependence on tourism.

The bodybuilder barters labor for free room and board, gym, peptides. This type of arrangement is common at ski resorts. Instructors accept low wages in return for room and board, free lift passes, and free instruction from better instructors.

Is anyone working on peptide vending machines?

If you look at how nowadays Milken is maybe 10x more known for Milken Institute than Drexel, it probably stands to reason that in twenty years SBF will be mainly known for seed investing in Anthropic and working at Jane Street.

I think abg has taken on a different meaning among fobs in the bay area for a couple main reasons. Fobs are unaware of the etymology and poorly educated on the aesthetics. What they’ve done is broken down the term piecewise: e.g. asking themselves, am I asian? Am I baby? Am I girl? Secondly, fobs think possibly all Asian American women can become abgs. They think going to the beach without an umbrella makes them an abg, or drinking boba, or playing LoL. Being social as opposed to studying, is abg. Listening to English music is abg. Saying hi to strangers is abg. Using instagram is abg. The idea of the abg ai cmo, however, is actually a nov…

The biggest bull case for humanoid robotics is anti-immigration. These robots will end up doing things that humans can do too, but even if they do them worse, many people would still prefer them over immigrants. China loves robotics for this very reason. If you combine classical Han eugenics (namely the impulse to not have kids until 7 figs liquid) with general purpose humanoid robots, then you end up with zero need for unskilled immigration.

Solid thoughts. SF mids are trying to identify as ABGs while having little in common with them. Here are some basic litmus tests: 1) have you dated multiple asian guys in the same friend group 2) have you dyed your hair 3) do you have tattoos 4) can you pass as viet 5) do ppl suggest you become a stripper You need 3 of 5 here minimum.

Met a Taiwanese guy once who actually lives in Eswatini as a royal photographer. Seemed like he was really enjoying it.

Had a Jane Street Tokyo/HK interview in Dec 2008. My friend worked in Tokyo for them. He had an architecture phd from Todai and then somehow switched into quant trading. After the second interview, I realised I should’ve learned to code instead of recording Excel macros.

The people taking the most actual drugs one year ago are taking the most peptides now.

Problem with this poll is it is in English and the colours map to America’s polarised left-right politics. Run it again with orange and brown buttons and the results would be different.

Semiconductor supply chains are mostly self financed now. The top of the chain (nvidia, tsmc) are so flush with cash that they just bankroll their own precision manufacturers. In the future they should probably just get into general merchant and sme banking, have venture arms for embodied AI, etc.