Richard Chen

I’ll stick my neck out a little here and make a call Barring major injuries, Reed Sheppard will make an all star team before his second contract ends

@ABlinken I will confess that i struggle reading anything you write without the thought of 20,000 dead Palestinian children in my head.

Traffic visible in the Strait of Hormuz via MarineTraffic.com over the last 24 hours remains steady, with all transits, both inbound and outbound, observed utilizing the Iranian traffic separation scheme.

Warsh went hawkish to see if Trump would give him $300b🤣

@EvanFeigenbaum Isn’t there a good case to be made that not only are their hoards of unserious people on all sides but that in many cases they start to influence the decisions to various degrees?

Weird take. If anyone in Washington thought India was going to be America's proxy against China, they were delusional from the start. And if anyone in India thought the U.S. was just going to walk away from a relationship with China wholesale, that was pretty bad analysis too. But I don't know any serious folks on either side who believed either of those two propositions.

Every Republican who ever said anything against the JCPOA, myself included, looks very silly today.

Grasping the sheer scale and intensity of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) - history’s largest and last pre-industrial war - is so hard. ​The best analogy I can come up with: ​Imagine if Mormon prophet Joseph Smith had stayed on the Erie Canal. His followers, armed mostly with spears and swords, rise up and capture the entire US Midwest, seizing the nation's agricultural breadbasket. They systematically slaughter anyone from New York City and starve out huge towns like Chicago. The war kills 5% to 7.5% of the population, double the actual US Civil War. ​Then, right as the Federal government completely collapses, the British Empire sails steam-powered gunboats up the Hudson River. They arm a ruthless mercenary force with state-of-the-art rifles to crush the uprising: not to save the US, but to keep Wall Street and the Atlantic trade routes open. ​Meanwhile, in a completely separate conflict(!), official British and French armies sail up the Potomac and loot and burn the Smithsonian, the Capitol and Mount Vernon. ​The Taiping Rebellion killed 20 to 30 million people, more than WW1. It was World War China.

Extraordinary how much of the US commentariat doesn't understand that you have to take a "bad deal" after you lose a war

What if we just see the document? It’s a short diplomatic agreement that has been signed. It’s weird that it’s not available.

Men who use ipads with a goofy little keyboard instead of a laptop are weak and easily dominated

@RadioFreeTom Tom, he's convinced me you're right wing Nazi scum like.... Hasan Piker and Mamdani.

Le Chaton Fat 🤝 Chinese caste theory Nonsense cluttering up my FYP today

@joequant That said, China consumption numbers being under estimate due to the deflation is real

There has always been a gap between Western coverage of the Chinese economy and what is happening on the ground as I am seeing it, but it's never been this bad. It's not just a China thing, the gap between the financial press and the daily lives of ordinary people seems unreal.

@joequant I can’t say I am working in China, but certainly close enough and it does seem at least there are serious under employment crisis in the mainland, and rumors of severe delays in payments and salaries in construction

things i’ve learned from going back and forth to China: - a lot (most) new cars on the U.S. market are actually really fucking awful

Iran was on its last legs and ready to collapse until the U.S. came along and gave it a life-line in the form of the Iran Deal: $150 billion

(One thing you’ll almost never see from a Chinese parent handwringing like this is lateral thinking about how to prepare their kids for life if they’re not stellar at academics, because they default assume a decent life is impossible without an ideal academic progression).

The reality was that even had Chiang won the Civil War, China would have looked much the same in our timeline except with a different flag and the US would be just as hostile towards a KMT China as a communist one. Any American who believes otherwise is just wishcasting his desires and not based in reality.

they lost two games to cj mccollum and one to donald trump. we’ll never see a run like this ever again.

The BBC mournfully notes that only 30% of Brits now trust the news, the day after it told us Russia hired a couple of young Ukrainian male prostitutes to torch the PM's motor.