moth dreamer

In between inflation and hyperinflation is superinflation. Superinflation is here.

@Bluebearmonkey 4) Conquer the neighbours (again)

German choices (you can pick more than one): 1) Become a sweat shop. 2) Sell off assets. 3) Stagnate.

@Bluebearmonkey The Triffin dilemma, in practice, results in deindustrialization. (Un)ironically, the upstream vulnerability is the greatest strength: the reserve currency. That's why nothing will change voluntarily.

Nobody… NOBODY!!! … dares point out the vulnerability at the heart of the U.S. economy more profound that stoopid minerals and pharmaceutical ingredients. It’s upstream of everything… Wypipos can’t do mafs. If that is not fixed, everything will die on the vine.

@Bluebearmonkey Yes, But it's been talking about reindustrialization for at least 10+ years (45's 1st term). Since nothing has really changed, one assumes that they're not serious about that at all.

@mothdreamer If the US wants to reindustrialise and eliminate critical dependency on China, then wypipos need to learn mafs.

@Bluebearmonkey and yet it's roughly commensurate to the amount of real jobs that need top level maf skills Why should a given society produce so many kid math whizzes when its job market doesn't need that many?

@mothdreamer No. It’s a couple standard deviations deficient.

@lukeliao1 @Bluebearmonkey Urban housing, like most physical things e.g. because of entropy, should be *depreciating* assets in urbanised, mature cities with stable population but increasing supply of housing. That the opposite is idealised leads to all kinds of evils. x.com/mothdreamer/st…

@Bluebearmonkey @mothdreamer Houses are also not assets to begin with. 😉

In terms of HH consumption, between 2000 and 2025, real growth: China 24.1% US 12.6% EU 7.7% Japan -4.4% Who’s stagnating?

@ChefMiew @alreadydawn People outside underestimate how much national-level politics in the US is treated as entertainment, as a type of mass spectator sport with the tribal affinity

@ChefMiew @alreadydawn >50% of it is the ingrained 'vote the other party when the last party really messed up in the past 4-8 years'

A white MAGA acquaintance from Ohio recently complained to me about Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, how a dark chocolate Kenyan actress took on the role of Helen of Troy. A ridiculous situation that has received plenty of ire on X. I get the frustration. Hollywood has been doing that to Asian stories for ages. I raised an example - Scarlett Johansson taking Major Kusanagi's role in live-action Ghost in the Shell. "Well, it's Scarlett Johansson.. I mean.." He smiled and strugged. No other comment on the parallel situation. It dawned on me then, that these complaints about Nolan's movie isn't really about the desire for Hollywood to respect the source material when doing film adaptions. This is about their own tribe winning and staying on top. They don't care when the same thing happens to other groups. How is this relevant to Kristina Wong and Iris Tao glazing Donald Trump? They desperately want to paint the picture that American conservatives/rightwingers care about Asians/Asian-Americans. They do not. Neither do most liberals, by the way. Never get fooled into believing either side of the American political aisle have your interests in mind. You are not, and never will, be on their teams. In the instances where they make you feel you are, you are almost guaranteed to be set up to serve the role of a useful idiot, whether you are conscious of it or not. We can zoom out and look beyond just Asian-Americans. The Orange Man doesn’t give a shit about Heritage White Americans™️ either. He only cares about serving the people from and related to that one little rogue nation in the Middle East, and keeping the boat floating juuuust long enough so his family and buddies can loot America to their hearts' content. Again, the American political parties and their elites don’t give a flying fuck about *any of you*. Never give your time and energy to them. Never put your hopes in them. I cannot stress all of this enough. Kanye’s infamous “George Bush doesn’t care about black people" can be scaled up to a much broader generalization: "Neither Democrats nor Republicans care about Americans." Perhaps not as memorable, but every bit as true.

@ChefMiew @wassielawyer Half the economic angst in 'developed' countries by the youth is the difficulty to face up to the fact that the parents/grandparents' generations basically are exploiting them 2/2

@ChefMiew @wassielawyer He misses the main reason. Once the social compact changed from 'cheap housing for all' to 'your housing assets will keep appreciating', aka financialisation as in many developed countries, the older generations have set themselves up to consume the younger's blood. 1/2

@alreadydawn > white MAGA >It dawned on me then...this is about their own tribe winning and staying on top Better late than never, lmao.

Young people in Singapore are broken because social, cultural and economic factors decades in the making broke them. The Singapore TFR crisis is easily explainable by biology. Females of a species reproduce when resources are available to support population growth. They reproduce less under stress when resources are scarce. The current crop of 25-35 year olds have been psyoped into a permanent scarcity complex, notwithstanding the country’s apparent relative wealth vis other countries. To understand how this happened, we have to study the generations above us, and the prevailing social and economic narrative of the time. In the 90s, Singapore experienced an economic boom. Our parents - the 30 year olds of the time, were sold the narrative that opportunities were aplenty and to elevate your family, you simply needed to have kids and educate them to seize the opportunities. In typical Nanyang / Confucianist fashion, children became the tool of an Asian family’s ascension. My vintage (I’m 32) was certainly brought up that way. Children of white collar workers were min maxed to ascend towards becoming lawyers, doctors, bankers etc. Children of blue collar workers were min maxed to ascend towards white collar workers. Your life isn’t your own - you are simply a conduit for ascension. So rmb you have piano at 4pm, math tuition at 7pm and tennis tomorrow at noon to try for DSA to RI. And thanks to the beauty of the great bell curve grading, it’s not about how well you do. It’s how well you do relative to your peers. Tis unironically insufficient that you succeed, others must fail. In short, it was PvP in an environment where it appeared that there were still significant spoils to the winners. And indeed, the generation before us suffered too at the hands of those before. But as their opportunities for ascension got squeezed, the second pillar of our trauma was introduced. Working mothers. Sure it became harder for one breadwinner to elevate his bloodline but with two breadwinners, they could together achieve an imitation of the Merdeka Dream. The cost? Only the children’s upbringing. Child rearing became commoditised. Mummy was replaced by some combination of Yati, Ahma and an alleged ex-SAP school teacher that guarantees straight As even to the most retarded child. "Sorry - it’s the only way we could achieve the 5Cs. But we do all this so you can live a better life, as long as you study hard." But when it became the children’s turn - our turn, what levers are there left to pull? There are none for all the levers have been pulled to generate our up only economy and real estate, which had the side effect of pulling the ladder up behind the previous generations. To the victors, the spoils were promised but even after the grueling PvP, there were barely any spoils left for the winners. The PvP was all for naught. And so Singaporeans live a relatively good life by global standards - tis true. But not the life they were promised. And so they have difficulty imagining a route to a better life for their children. The people in power fundamentally misunderstand this, as they live in their 8000 square foot GCBs built atop 15,000 square feet of land. You do not need that much space to have sex and raise kids in absolute terms - tis true. But biologically you cannot convince the 30 year old dual income couple paying 50% of their income towards a mortgage for a 700 square foot two bedder that they are 'doing well' and should have more children. Our parents could live in a HDB (1400 sq ft btw they stopped making those), point at a GCB and in good conscience tell themselves and their kids that if their kids follow the golden path, they could live there one day. Today - they cannot. And so because zeitgeist of young Singapore has shifted from optimism to pessimism, the average young woman refuses to reproduce. Social media is a contributor sure - but tis simply biology at work, reproduction happens when the female feels like there is abundance. The anecdotal observation I have made that supports this? Every woman I know in their 20s and 30s that married into money has children and want at least 2. 3 if they live in landed. They have no retarded girl-boss ambitions (even though they might have the capability to) and put the upbringing of their children first. It also explains why female hypergamy in Singapore is in full swing. Marrying a wagecuck, even a high-earning wagecuck, simply allows you to live a glamorous DINK life. If you want to be a mother - which your biology urges you towards - you simply must marry into money. And the only way for a man to have real money is to be born into it, or gamble and win. This has significant knock-on effects for the men which I could rant about another time, but it largely stems from the dual issues of feeling perpetually financially inadequate and the first order distaste of the blatant hypergamy at play. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk, back to my vacation with my wife and very expensive kids.

@Bluebearmonkey That guy has his ideological commitments. But yeah, it was dumb. He originally said that house prices cratering means CN people are devastated financially. When shown that net assets has stayed the same, he switched to 'stagnation bad' 🤷‍♂️ x.com/mothdreamer/st…

@mothdreamer My statement applies to economies as a whole, not individual households.

@Bluebearmonkey Old doggy is well-off and no longer in the west. For the younger generations in the 'first world', to keep up the hope of a 'first world' lifestyle amidst rampant price increases, they need the prices of their assets to keep increasing too

@mothdreamer Stagnation by tracking assets prices is dumdum.

@Bluebearmonkey He's just prevaricating, that a housing bubble is bad but that also collapsing the bubble is bad. Yes, it would be better not to have a bubble in the first place. But CN managed to prick it with a skill that astonishes everyone

@Bluebearmonkey Kremlin watchers failed to foresee the breakup of the USSR 🤷‍♂️ Even the best equivalents for CN would likely have limited understanding

All of those are absolute rubbish. I have met exactly one wypipos who spoke native level Mandarin. And he spent 16 years in Chinese prison. Chinese who speak native level English are a dime a dozen.