CTC

Do not look at Nikkei futures

• be Torakusu Yamaha • the son of a low-ranking samurai astronomer in 19th-century Japan • obsessed with Western machines, you make a living repairing watches and medical equipment • 1887: a local elementary school has a broken American reed organ. Nobody in the small town knows how to fix it. • you take it apart, realize it’s just two broken springs, and easily repair it • but instead of just handing it back, you realize: "If I can fix this, I can build it." • you draw a blueprint of the inside of the organ and build the very first Japanese-made reed organ from scratch • you show it off. People tell you it sounds terrible. • most people would quit. You sling the heavy wooden organ over your shoulder on a bamboo carrying pole. • you physically carry it 160 miles (250 km) on foot, trekking over the brutal Hakone mountains just to reach the Tokyo Music Institute to get real feedback from experts • the professors play it. They tell you the mechanics are brilliant, but the tuning is completely wrong. • you don't get defensive. You stay in Tokyo for a month, sitting in on university music theory lectures, holding a single tuning fork to your ear until you completely master the mathematics of sound frequencies • you walk 160 miles back home • you build a second organ. The professors test it and declare it "as good as those from abroad." • you found Nippon Gakki Co. (which later becomes Yamaha Corporation) • you decide to make your company logo three interlocking tuning forks to remember the pain and discipline of learning music theory from scratch • decades later, your company uses its piano woodworking expertise to build wooden airplane propellers in WWII • after the war, the company uses its new metallurgical expertise from the airplane engines to build motorcycles • you accidentally create a timeline where repairing a broken elementary school organ directly leads to the creation of the Yamaha YZF-R1 superbike • absolute, relentless horizontal integration based purely on figuring out how things work The ultimate testament to reverse-engineering reality.

Twitter turns 20. What is your favorite tweet of all time?

Professor Jiang Xueqin on how this war is likely to go and what happens to the world. (0:00) How Will the Iran War Be Resolved? (7:33) The 3 Major Trends We Will See Due to This War (11:28) Will Japan Become a Nuclear-Armed Power? (16:06) The Future of South Korea (20:12) The Energy Crisis (25:23) The Future of the GCC and Iran (29:57) The Greater Israel Project (35:11) How US Ground Troops Will Change the War (36:46) Prof. Xueqin’s Advice to Donald Trump (38:49) Is It Possible for the US to Get Israel Under Control? (45:03) What Role Does Trump Play in All This? (48:21) The Future of North America (54:59) Are We Seeing the End of Europe? (1:00:58) How Many Americans Truly Understand What’s Happening in the World? (1:03:50) The Effort to Destroy Western Civilization

If you never saw Chuck Norris in Sidekicks, you haven't lived.

After all the apprehension, looks like Takaichi nailed her first White House visit. Iran wasn’t an issue, relations were top-notch, and if the worst thing that happened was a distasteful joke about about Pearl Harbor, the Japanese won’t care one bit. Mission accomplished.

Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi's reaction as Trump says "Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Habour?" Undoubtedly the worst American diplomatic gaffe in post-war US-Japan history.