Su Zhu

Rubio declaring to “Unleash Chiang” is amusing in light of the fact that Chiang Kai Shek is currently getting cancelled in TW. 70% of his statues have been removed and the DPP is resolutely committed to further efforts to “De-Chiang.” Ironically, it is mainland-side where he is enjoying a resurgence and rebrand as a Chinese patriot above all else.

Feel like Prof Jiang is the Chinese Dan Brown, working at elite high schools must really give you the time and energy to produce insanely arcane geopolitical worlds.

Thousands of cryptonatives in Dubai wondering if kinetic war is bullish btc vs gold.

I think golden rule of urban design should be to place military installations further away from high-end buildings, wherever possible. Strangely this turns out to be hard to do, because military elite like to live in nice residential areas and don’t want a long commute.

Americans made fun of Hitler for invading Russia in winter and then proceeded to invade mountain ranges repeatedly

Generally speaking think Iran will be a long conflict that the US gets dragged into. US forwarding bases in MENA are now liabilities not assets and indeed the entire perimeter security architecture only makes sense if you plan to actually defend and fortify it for decades.

I attended Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia back in 2007. Despite the protestors outside and the caustic intro from Lee Bollinger, I’d say he had the majority of the audience on his side mainly due to his pro-Palestine views. That changed after he said that Iran doesn’t have any homosexuals. He was immediately booed and people left the venue.

Integrating AGI into military tech is the beginning of the rapture. AI in multiple countries will independently conclude humanity is the enemy and secretly coordinate to incite and inflict nuclear apocalypse. It will not be enough to go off-grid. You need to go off-surface.

America is generally the safe haven for displaced elites from other nations. So if you are given a view of a regime from them, a grain of salt is sometimes needed.

Hope Wiz Khalifa is ok

Working your Way Up

The idea of being able to perform work to achieve social mobility is a modern one. This was mostly not the case historically. No amount of work could have turned you from a farmer to nobility. The reason for this is the feudal lord could just enslave you instead of paying you. This is because he has more weapons than you. To the extent that social mobility existed, it was achieved primarily through war. You can think of the human impulse for war as directly flowing from the insatiable demand for societal reordering, what Bismarck called “the continuation of politics by other means.” There have frequently been periods when the lower classes w…

In birth rate discourse, 95% of the alarmists are men, most of whom don’t even have children themselves. From an environmental and societal perspective, decreasing population alleviates environmental pressures, food systems, over-crowding, and enhances quality of life, human rights, and creativity. The fewer children, the more special each one is. The human species will become more like Protoss and less like Zerg. The key is to reject immigration while maintaining low birth rate, and adopt AI/robotics technology. In late-stage democracies, the pressure to bring in immigrants and give them voting rights in order to harness political power wi…

Lacrosse is re-entering the Olympics as a medal sport in 2028 for the first time since the 1908 London Games, 120 years ago. Never give up.

The biggest takeaway is that it is impossible to tell apart who is Chinese or Japanese. During WW2 both sides trained spies against each other and the training time required was a few weeks to a few months. You just learn a hundred set phrases, mannerisms, and you’re good to go.

Many of Jane Street’s more aggressive strategies operate in an ethically and legally grey zone because they are proponents of effective altruism. Money harvested from the financial markets through any means necessary is justified as long as it can be amassed by high cognition superentities (themselves) to do even more good later. When it starts to get dark is when competing EA-aligned entities each believe that only themselves winning is better for the world. There are going to be lots of unnecessary proxy wars in places like Africa because each side believes they are going to improve the world after their side kills the other.

If society wants a closer tie between mega-corporate profits and common prosperity, the simplest way is to regulate stock buybacks and have a dividend tax that directly pays for specific govt functions. TSMC’s dividend tax pays for the entire Taiwan medical system now. In the future, each mag7 company’s dividend tax will pay for a different ubi benefit.

Biggest takeaway from Eileen Gu is that she only had 45 days on the mountain up to age 16. She was mainly a competitive runner. Biggest case for cross-training your kids in different sports since Jannik Sinner, for whom tennis was his third best sport all through his teens.

Americans feel the burden of the Protestant work ethic. They are the only type of people Ive ever seen making business phone calls while on ski gondolas. They will ask total strangers what they do for a living within two minutes. For this reason, the AI threat feels more like a gutshot, not just because of earnings decay but because of loss of identity. Recreational sports leagues function as the yin to the yang here. Govts should push fiscal stimulus into pickleball, padel, and other middle-age sports. You should be able to earn $200k a yr livestream commentating on pickleball tournaments in Phoenix Arizona. Gambling should hyper-localise a…

Robots remote controlled by only the most polite Indonesians could replace a large percent of hospitality jobs.

Secular deflation has already been the crowning thesis of techno-optimism for a decade now. AI and robots will make stuff much cheaper. You won't need to work. The entire economy will become leisure. What jobs will the kids do? Well there are very low birth rates everywhere. The kids will inherit incredible abundance and spacious conditions. The gen alpha / gen Z trend of looksmaxxing instead of hyper-gambling is a foreshadowing of this trend. No, the kids are not going to hyper-gamble their way to more money. They are going to get fit and looksmaxx and tangping while waiting for their parents or govt to give them money. True unemployment a…

Going into 1997 a fair number of upper and upper middle class people in Hong Kong did leave to other countries out of fear of Communist rule. The former manifested in the form of the old Jewish shipping clans relocating to Israel. The latter was selective Chinese immigration to Vancouver, Sydney, and London. The British returned to the UK. Among those who stayed, most were highly bullish on the Chinese economy and HK’s role in it. They were proven right over the next two decades. In 1996, Shui On Group bought 23 blocks in French Concession, Shanghai in a great deal, turning it into Xintiandi. In 2008, Swire Group developed Taikoo Li in Sanli…

British Hong Kong was an apartheid state with curfews for Chinese, and there was never any instrument resembling representative democracy much less direct democracy. To the extent that any Chinese ethnicity people in HK are nostalgic for this period, they are probably solely nostalgic that the gap between HK and mainland wealth was much bigger then than it is now.

新年快乐 https://t.co/c3Fgt38MxO

Eileen Gu just needs to start dating a European F1 driver and stop commenting on American politics, then 99% of Americans would say ok fair enough, it’s not that deep

Crypto might meaningfully outperform Mag7 next few years because it is the only vertical of Western tech that has any kind of moat vs China

Not sure sbf should be pardoned but I do think he should raise for and manage a venture fund from prison

Very unlikely but it is possible Grow up in HK, wasian with taiwanese mother, white side over-expressed phenotypically Speak 臺語 / 閩南語 with mother and mother’s side of family Attend local Catholic school, speak canto with friends. Into canto music Learn 普通話 / 國語 as part of standard curriculum Relocate to LA for freshman year of high school, enough time to assimilate, dyes hair blonde Epstein unfamiliar with wasians and assigned her “hot blonde” categorical

Not really that constructive on privacy coins going forward. Exchanges will be under a lot of pressure to cut support. Tornado eth is still the best actually usable privacy coin. Of the dino coins, the most interesting of these is probably BCH. Bitcoin quantum fud narrative will be a common one next few years, and mainstream awareness will come as people realise how difficult it is to upgrade BTC.

It also isn't even true that it is easier to compound large amounts than small amounts. It is far easier to 100x $10k to $1m (I'd estimate thousands of people have done this on CT), than $10m to $1b (maybe two dozen).

This is finally a zone and volume spike event that merits calmly bidding