Raymond Tseng

@clharrington024 Pensions aren’t that paygo oriented or reliant entirely on salary/city contributions They have huge chunk of investments. S&P has about 12-13% returns annually in last decade

Where is the money for pensions going to come from in these states where there is significant declining enrollment AND you have rich pensions? Yikes.

@dalibali2 I find it wild how long some of these substacks are even. All my finance ones; I have to click on the read entire message thing in gmail

Guys how do you read more than 10 pages and not fall asleep? Is there a secret or am I just retardmaxxing too well ?

That’s wishful thinking. I see a constant stream of Xi psychoanalyses from both low and high brow accounts who all don’t know Chinese or any Chinese history. Kotkin is a “kremlinologist” I guess or people like Sarah Paine, but they honestly read as totally deranged fanatics to me

I guess in my experience, the closest analogy to learning Mandarin and 漢字 is brute-force memorizing facts about glomerulonephritides (a branch of kidney diseases). Most non-kidney doctors will rarely see these things in their career. I’ve seen them all of 3 times after residency. But every doctor will still remember basic facts about them. I think something similar is true for being a China Hand. Perhaps skill in Kremlinology and historical methods is more important and much more useful than knowing Mandarin. But you should still know Mandarin at a B1-B2 level.

There are a lot of brilliant China Hands out there, but it seems the bar to be *a* China Hand is on the floor.

@maiamindel I think Ben Thompson has also mentioned this. It’s similar to Twitter and the end users mental state. It’s really hard to get Twitter users to click on ads when they are actively reading tweets

@maiamindel I don’t think that is actually the case. Destiny does a pod with some business guy about how to monetize. He says the main source is Youtube and that no one clicks through on TikTok or short form. None of his rev or followers comes through that channel

the real market isn't on the streams but on the second hand content farming ecosystem for short-form video clips. literally every single livestreamed content i've seen was one of these clips. it's how nick fuentes reaches people - posting his stuff on here

@Merridew__ The SOE Intel is up 9%

@HMBrough_ Your writing is getting better.

Update and observations, 6 weeks into learning Mandarin: 1) Paul Noble’s Mandarin course has its pros and cons. The course is aimed at low-investment learners who tend to quit languages.* In an effort to keep them interested in Mandarin, it avoids frontloading pronunciation drills and tells you to “copy the native speakers.” It does slowly teach the consonants and tones of words, but the effect is that you have to relearn things you did earlier, or seek out other resources like… 2) Feyd Rautha on YouTube (“Mandarin Blueprint”). This man is invaluable to any Mandarin learner. Many native speakers are very good at telling you “something is wrong” (or just shuddering when you make a mistake), but are not good at telling you how to fix it. This Englishman tells you exactly where to position your tongue. 3) Apparently Mandarin has “accents” like English does, according to my partner. Eg the southern regions (and 🇹🇼) speak with less retroflexed consonants than the northern ones do. This makes the southern variants a bit easier for an Anglophone. And fortunately, I will only ever go to 🇹🇼. 4) The characters are tough to learn, but they have an odd beauty and mystique to them. People on here talk a lot about Bronze Age Mindsets, but learning characters is as close as it gets to experiencing a Bronze Age society (the Minoans and Hittites gradually abandoned logograms in the 2nd millennium BC, I’m still wondering why Chinese kept at it). —- *This is probably the correct approach to teaching Korean. People get into Korean from KPop and KDramas, and tend to be low-investment learners. But IMO it’s the wrong approach to teaching Mandarin. You’re not going to attempt Mandarin unless it’s a do-or-die thing, so the people doing it tend to be medium or high-investment learners. Since you made it this far, you get to see my character practice and a picture from my recent sojourn in Austin!

@Halalcoholism This is often to the detriment to the chinese nationals who live and work in America because they are just unawares of how people perceive them.

@Halalcoholism I think Asian nationals tend to take these ideas too far and have underlying resentments against asian americans. For example, LKY often sounds just like AsAms on race on other margins whereas my chinese national friends don’t think about race at all.

Many Asian-Americans are weird about Uncle Roger, partly due to a chip on their shoulder other Asians don’t have, but also there just aren’t many Malaysians in the US. So they hear a wildly over-the-top Chinese accent, rather than a slightly exaggerated Malaysian uncle voice.

@emeriticus Thanks for your service to the cause. People on the left or center don’t realize the necessity of like discourse street brawlers that you and other former right wing guys serve. The only other ones we got are like Ganz or Bruenig; Hanania is good but still has ideas for 6yr olds

Yarvin, Land, etc were all promoted as "Dark Reactionary Thinkers You Must Read To Understand The Moment." And then you take a look and it's just guys with Fox News politics suffering protracted mental breakdowns in public.

@christopherrufo It's called CANCEL CULTURE

Guys who talk like this should absolutely be gatekept out of conservative institutions. It’s almost always indicative of a deeper psychological problem and they will eventually implode. The fence around your home is there for a reason.

@souljagoyteller You are being way too generous

I have to say, seeing America remember in slow motion why it didn’t vote for Trump for a second term in 2020 is incredibly frustrating

what happened in the early 90s

@tolstoybb We deserve it

@LinkofSunshine It’s cause of 9/11. There was some national story that gripped the news also during that time where the country thought a congressman murdered his intern. 9/11 disappeared that story even though they aolved it; Chondra Levy

@fitzr1122 I enjoy Marko Papic's takes on it. I don't know if he's optimistic; I think he thinks Trump will declare victory in a few days or something. I don't think you can get his whole line of thinking unless you listen to the pod he does with jacob shapiro; they worked with p. zeihan

All of my feed is pessimistic about this war. Who are good follows who are optimistic and knowledgable? (Not insane partisans)

@NAccount32629 @phl43 If you do the conversion, W177600 is about $120. The percentages it tracks may be close

@rayisonit @phl43 In what sense reflected? The charts look pretty much the same.

Can someone explain to me what the hell is happening with the stock market in South Korea?

@policytensor His main thesis is that Japanese savers drive much more of the market than people realize

@policytensor I don’t know if that is accurate Nikkei is crashing too. Korea is just more concentrated in two companies: samsung & hynix are like 43% of the market as of today and are both down 10+% Weston Nakamura had thoughts but i dont know how much to believe

Why are Korean markets screaming so much more than others?