Zhu Su

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.

@Jackhon_hk Yeah, winter there sucks.

@zhusu Maybe I went during winter, it was a little depressing and the food was disappointing. Even the local guys were saying the farmed abalone was not as good as in the past. We went to this famous market street and it was deserted and abandoned.

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 was the og manufacturing hub of China, benefitting from the earliest industrial infrastructure on the mainland. People are excited about Dalian becoming the top hydrogen pipeline port, the other competitor being Qingdao. Seafood is another large driver, although to be frank the umi is much better in Japan still. Property market is weak but condos are full. The market has a number of 40year leasehold offerings that are maybe 5 years in and down maybe 50%+. Construction quality is surprisingly high all around.

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.

Prob not a bad time and level to enter $RBLX. It is getting to levels that an ai firm would just buy it out for the install base and data.

Is anyone working on peptide vending machines?