Mind Blossom

@nobordersreq it always fn bbq season! if you haven't fired up the bbq after shoveling feet of snow to make a path from the front door to the bbq, you are not serious. lol

It’s bbq season 👌

@marketplunger1 he has aged very poorly.

This has to be the top for precious metals, man. I love Uncle Eric but geez.

@calvinfroedge the worst thing to happen to jews since the zionist funded holocaust is...wait...zionists again!

Of the Jews I've known in real life, the vast majority have been honest, a few have been friends. A few have been scamming s**t bags. More or less representative of the population as a whole. I simply cannot group them together with Israel or blame them for Israel's actions.

Just remember that while Israel is a Jewish nation, it does not represent all Jews, and speaking for myself, I can oppose Israeli influence in our elections, media, and economy without allowing myself to develop a general hatred for Jews Many American Jews are loyal Americans

@Goeun_6121 I've never seen a Ssanyong car outside of Korea [I've seen some trucks though]. Have you? Shame to lose a legendary car brand.

SsangYong used to be the kind of name that fed a city. Cement. Construction. Shipping. Cars. A proper Korean conglomerate. At one point, it was one of the country’s largest business groups. Now you can find the name on a quiet monument along a walking path. That is one strange part of Korean industrial history. The companies that survived became brands foreigners know. Samsung. Hyundai. LG. The companies that disappeared became geography. Old factory sites. Apartment complexes. Gyms. Local roads. Small plaques that say this is where something once started. SsangYong is that kind of ghost. It expanded from basic industry into cars, finance, trading, and heavy assets. Then the Asian Financial Crisis arrived, leverage stopped being patient, and the group was broken apart. The car brand survived in pieces. The conglomerate did not. Korea usually remembers its industrial rise through the winners. But the street remembers the balance sheet differently. Some companies become global brands. Some become bankruptcy case studies. Some become a metal silhouette in a park. SsangYong is uncomfortable because it was all three. That is the uncomfortable part of industrial cycles. Every era thinks its winners are permanent. Cement had its moment. Cars had theirs. Shipyards, memory, batteries, AI infrastructure. Each cycle creates names that feel too important to disappear. Then the balance sheet changes. The logo still feels familiar. The group is gone. The monument is what remains when a city outlives the company that once powered it.

@Goeun_6121 man that shit is good!!

Spicy jukkumi for lunch because why not? Look at that setup. Getting ready to fire up the grill.😝

@BowTiedGlobe BINGO. And Santa Cruz, outside of one neighborhood, is absolute trash, not to mention hotter than hell for 10 months a year.

These accounts are getting absurd Bolivia is having an armed militia insurrection from a left wing president who just left power Their residence requires you to live there 9 months a year In what sense is it possibly a Dubai besides low tax 😂

@Goeun_6121 i understand its a money mill. it still absolute trash regardless. to call it music is a stretch. 😂

@mindblossom you don’t have to like it. but pretending it’s just bad music misses the whole business.

K-pop isn't really a music genre. Its a content production system that happens to make music. Once you see it that way the rest of it makes sense. The scale of the rosters tells you everything. HYBE manages 17 artists. SM Entertainment 18. JYP 14. YG 7. Universal Music Group manages over 1,000. K-pop companies run on volume per artist, not volume of artists. Every group is engineered to monetize across albums, world tours, merchandise, brand deals, variety shows, lightsticks, photocards, and a proprietary fan platform that HYBE alone has 100 million users on. The path to debut takes 2 to 5 years. Trainees clock in at 9am, hand in their phones, study foreign languages in the morning, vocals and dance in the afternoon, until 10pm. 6 days a week. Total cost to push one group from audition to debut now sits around $7.5 million, and most trainees never debut at all. A Korean American songwriter named EJAE trained at SM for 12 years and never made it onto a debut roster. Her song "Golden" became a global hit this year. She wrote it for someone else's group. Contracts ran 13 years until regulators capped them at 7. Early career revenue splits land around 80 to 90 percent to the company. Bonuses kick in once trainee debt is repaid. The math is venture capital. Lots of failures funded by the few unicorns that print real money. BTS at their peak added an estimated $4.65 billion to Korean GDP annually, and that single group made HYBE one of the largest entertainment companies in Asia. The most recent move is the most telling. HYBE built a group called KATSEYE using American and European girls trained under the Korean system. Multiracial, English-language, K-pop methodology without the K. That's the actual product they were selling all along. The training system was always more exportable than the music.

@Goeun_6121 it was the mcdonalization of korea. deep frying food in toxic veg oil was NEVER part of traditional korean cuisine. shame! (altough KoreanFC is fucking delicious and the original KFC doesn't even come close).

Korea has around 40,000 fried chicken shops for a population of 51 million. Roughly one shop per 1,250 people. Starbucks runs about 1,900 stores in Korea. McDonald's runs about 400. Chicken shops outnumber both combined by a factor of about 17. The biggest franchise brands. BBQ at 2,316 outlets. BHC at 2,228. Kyochon at 1,361. Cheogajip 1,254. Goobne 1,154. The franchise count alone crossed 30,000 last year for the first time. Here's the part that explains everything. Average store has 2.1 employees. Most of them are a married couple. Average store revenue is 280 million won a year. After rent, supplies, franchise fees, and the original capital outlay, the math gets thin. The Korean retirement system has a known exit route. White-collar job until your early 50s, lump-sum severance, then open a chicken shop. Its the unofficial safety net for a country with one of the OECD's lowest public pension payouts. About 1,000 new franchise outlets opened every year for the last 6 years. Which is also why total shops peaked in 2020 at 42,743 and have fallen 3 years in a row. The franchise count keeps growing because big brands push expansion. Independent shops are closing. Same industry, two opposite trends. When Jensen Huang visited Seoul last October he ate chicken and beer with Lee Jae-yong and Chung Eui-sun at a Gangnam fried chicken place. The most powerful chip CEO in the world picked the most ordinary Korean meal there is. That part wasnt staged. That part was the country.

@ParvizMalakouti @patienceisalpha @VexillumGlobal @ckid541 @DavidBindelTX are you still planning to post these on youtube?

Thanks to @patienceisalpha for co-hosting today and great conversation from @VexillumGlobal @ckid541 and @DavidBindelTX. Next week's Mobility Space topic be announced tonight.

@2suns2moons @BowTiedGlobe restated: sometimes you have to accept more government theft to enjoy a place you like more.

@BowTiedGlobe Agreed. I know it's unpopular to say on this side of X, but sometimes it's better to just pay a bit more in taxes and live where you like the most

Going to Argentina 🇦🇷 ruined Uruguay 🇺🇾 for me I quite enjoyed my first visit to Montevideo After visiting Buenos Aires, I‘ve come to the conclusion: If i had to choose one to base up in, I‘d rather live in Argentina with taxes than in Uruguay without them

@Goeun_6121 the fresher kimchi served at kamjatang restaurants is still top dog imo. good luck finding that version outside korea.

kimchi is fermented napa cabbage with chili, garlic, ginger, fish sauce. koreans eat it daily. takes weeks to age. gets better as it sours. so heres the funny part. for 25 years the UN's food rulebook called the cabbage in kimchi "chinese cabbage." the actual cabbage. in actual korean kimchi. under someone else's name. in november the codex finally added "kimchi cabbage." korea also got elected to chair the processed vegetables division. now writing the rules for the foods other people kept claiming. in january the US dietary guidelines added kimchi for the first time. official american nutrition advice. with the word kimchi in it. korea was exporting kimchi to 80 countries while the paperwork still called the cabbage chinese. the food never waited for anyone to catch up.

@Goeun_6121 when return of the jonsei system? Works under the higher rates coming and post crash of the KOSPI.

korea's 10-year bond yield crossed 4% this week. first time since november 2023. eight months ago the market was pricing one more BOK cut. now goldman calls two hikes this year. hana calls one. the BOK deputy said its time to consider hiking. that's the language regulators use when they're getting ready. bond short positions hit 223 trillion won. an all-time high. one year ago that number was 137 trillion. nobody bets that hard against a curve they expect to fall. the trigger stack is familiar. hormuz still closed. oil at 104. Q1 korea GDP printed 1.7% versus 0.9% expected. inflation already at 2.6%. JPMorgan moved its korea inflation call from 1.7 to 2.7 in one month. that doesnt happen for soft moves. the ministry of finance called an emergency meeting friday. they say theyll cut bond issuance next month to relieve supply pressure. they tried the same thing in february, normalized by april after WGBI inclusion brought foreign flows in, and now they're back to the same playbook six weeks later. the corporate bond market is the part nobody is talking about. issuance is down 30% YoY. companies are routing to CP and bank loans instead. march short-term debt alone topped 200 trillion. the funding plumbing is rewiring while everyone watches the headline yield. the bigger picture. japan 30Y broke 4. US 30Y broke 5. korea 10Y broke 4 in the same week. central banks didnt coordinate this. the market did. duration is being repriced everywhere at once. the MOF can slow the issuance. it cant slow the regime change.

@calvinfroedge governments are the enemy of free humanity full stop.

Be Thomas Massie Grow up in dirt poor Appalachia Go to MIT Sell your first company Retire in your home town and build a house with your own hands hewn from locally harvested materials Get begged by locals to help them with government The solitary America Only Congressman

@Goeun_6121 "OECD's number one for population concentration. nobody else is close." this is not something to be proud of. A modern industrial economy should strive to be decentralized like Germany ,which is at the opposite spectrum of population spread.

koreans have a phrase for it. seoul republic. 12% of the land. 50.8% of the people. OECD's number one for population concentration. nobody else is close. 138 out of 229 local districts are now classified as at-risk for extinction. half the map is dying on paper. the story isnt that people are getting old. its which people moved. of everyone who came to the seoul metro from 2015 to 2021, 78.5% were between 15 and 34. of all the population leaving honam, 87.8% were young. the rest of the country is losing its 20s and 30s on a one-way ticket. i grew up hearing my mother say go to seoul, study in seoul, find work in seoul. she meant it kindly. multiply that by a generation and you get the map we have now. the real problem isnt birthrate. its concentration risk. one country, one functioning city, and a generation that already chose.

@BULLReturns indeed meaningless. but you cherry picking a 30 year bottom after the Asian financial crisis is as well.

.....meaningless comment when the actual move from 1998 lows is < 20% through to now.

@DaBao_ do you have an expectation on when the crash in taiwan will begin, roughly? IBKR opens access near the top (as always). can't stomach buying at these ridiculous valuations. and babies will be thrown out with the bathwater when it happens so buying cheap stuff now won't work.

@mindblossom and you already know who's going to pump the hell out of it

very relevent. my personal observations: 1. massive ETF and IPO boom 2. people getting HELOC to invest 3. Lombard lending is up 4. huge volume 5. random new thread/X accounts popping up 6. people talk about it in social gatherings

@Goeun_6121 what do you use to generate your beautiful images?

new image.🥰

@Goeun_6121 i cant tell you how many times i observed young koreans sharing a meal and talking to each other through their phones while at the same table. and that was 7 years ago! absolutely horrific.

korea banned phones in classrooms starting march. 43% of korean teens are in the smartphone over-dependence risk group. the law is trying to do something. but the phone isnt just the problem. its also how kids reach friends after school, parents during the commute, help when something happens. the thing built to connect them is what isolates them. im a heavy AI user. i live on these devices. still underestimated what putting a slot machine in every 13-year-old's pocket would do. the law starts with classrooms. fine. the harder question is what fills the space the phone used to fill. silence isnt always healing. sometimes its just silence.