support of swiss-style direct democracy & Zauberformel
Oct 25 • 8 tweets • 1 min read
#deepthought: increasing Chinese civic nationalism probably reflects a secular decline in the importance of gaokao as the country becomes more developed
i think this is the "upstream cause" of both a) strong nationalism of (generally affluent) upper-middle class Chinese who studied abroad, such as in the US; and b) the rise in civic nationalism generally
Oct 21 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I would put it differently: Japan is not accustomed to dealing with the West on a permanently hostile footing, so it has the tendency to buckle at the slightest pressure (Plaza Accord, 1985) in a way hugely disadvantageous to itself
Whereas China has seen what happens when you give in to the West (Opium Wars, foreign concessions, Boxer Indemnity, Liaodong Peninsula, etc.) so it has the atavistic instinct to push back if the West tries to push it around, because it's not a thing that ends at first compromise
i think china will take a long time (perhaps an eternity) to reach the living standards of the west; i think china is very bad in many respects; I think despite having a superior consumer culture china is extremely bad on certain aspects of business + professional culture
Aug 26 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
@CoKeynesian i feel like the great lesson from the brit. empire is actually that liberal imperialism - at high noon of empire - was the undoing of empire
UK basically provoked the Kaiser *in just the general driving up of tensions like USA is doing now with China* into a general war (1914)
@CoKeynesian from 1905 to 1914, UK was basically constantly scaremongering about the German threat, doubling navy estimates, the usual nonsense of how an imperial incumbent tries to and loop a rising opponent into a war of its choosing
Aug 23 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
@Prominent_Bryan Partly he has good instincts about what the average Canadian will tolerate (a kabuki tariff fight with the USA) and will not tolerate (airline strike)
@Prominent_Bryan But by any objective measure he has "won" on tariffs, basically keeping USMC (as it appears) while giving almost no concessions
Aug 22 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
im hardly a marketing whiz but i think the rebranding should have leaned into the whole sydney sweeney "jeans / genes" thing and be like:
m&zillennials, cracker barrel is your chance to "reconnect with middle america" but in a cool, lindy, yet Democrat-friendly way
there's a scene in Inception (2010) where the protagonist (played by DiCap) asks, "how do we plant the idea in the heir's head that he should break up his dad's business empire"
and tom hardy goes, look, this is too complicated. what you want to focus on is relationship with Dad
Aug 17 • 10 tweets • 1 min read
why do big tech SWE's make some much 💰💰💵? simples.
except for b2b saas (where engineers notably do not make that much), there's near zero distribution cost, even less than finance lol
@MattBruenig made this point but if you have near infinite economies of scale (finance sorta, tech absolutely) then even if your TAM is small you could still pay the peeps making your product a *ton* of $$$
Aug 9 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
@priorconfirmed 1. No supply mechanism on planet Earth would have caught up with covid level migration 2. One thing you noticed during pandemic is int'l students using housing more intensively (4-6 to a 2-bed flat) driving costs beyond point of affordability for locals
@priorconfirmed 3. At current construction / development cost, wage is a binding constraint. More labour supply for slackening labour demand is non-positive (and I choose this word deliberately) for productivity and wages.
Jul 19 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
One reason countries like Argentina and Brazil did so much better in the 19th century than in 20c is not that their institutions became weaker, but that the objective background changed: instead of a gold-backed imt'l system that you could easily plug into (if you had resources)
It now required a complex web of monetary, economic, social and political linkages - primarily with the developed world, especially the reserve currency hegemon (USA)
Argentina was quite far from both Europe and North America (ie 90% of the developed world)
Jul 15 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
@CoKeynesian @DIorioNathaniel It used to be a multilateral thing but I think given crypto / especially real world assets (RWA's) there's a scenario in which USD hegemony recedes without anyone intervening
@CoKeynesian @DIorioNathaniel if there's an entire offshore system (like the Swiss banking system before US Treasury systematically disemboweled it) which functions more or less entirely independent of USD, the hegemony...becomes pretty notional
May 16, 2024 • 25 tweets • 6 min read
this thread has been circling the drains of my mind-palace for a while but here goes: the ways we think about post-80's evolution in Chinese communist governance ("reform", "conservative", left/right, etc.) are wrong
the basic Q has to do with the nature of authority: assuming* you agree that a single nation-state should occupy what was formerly (most of) the Qing empire, what should that state look like?
Oct 29, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
the ProPublica report is iffy (I've actually read the Chinese language extracts they're quoting) but the real surprise is that they're so short-staffed that they couldn't get someone who's fluent in Chinese to read over the report
they had Reid, who obviously had an axe to grind (he's a Dalai Lama guy who's seconded to Marco Rubio, c'mon now) and more importantly *doesn't seem to be fluent in Chinese* despite what the article claims (his reading of the "pishi" is wrong, for example)
Oct 29, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
One of the paradoxes of US anti-Huawei policy is that it has succeeded where it's unnecessary - in the West, where there's end to end encryption - and not in the developing world, where Western vendors provide backdoors accessible by Western intelligence agencies
The great advantage the United States enjoyed during the Cold War was that all the communications equipment provided by Western vendors essentially had a CIA master key
Esau is possibly the first historical treatment of the strong but lazy aristocrat archetype - Esau, strong of body but not particularly calculating, unambitious, first born, honour minded
Oct 28, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I think you could reasonably argue that development as a vocation, the idea of assembling land and capital and labour - to envision crate and complete projects - is done in the era of SB9
The mark of a great developer has always been the ability to rally the neighborhood in support of a project that otherwise wouldn't get done
Oct 27, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
the situation in iran can't end well - either the protests will get crushed (likely) or the government gets overthrown and replaced by an explicitly secular, pro-western government in a country where 70% of the population are rural peasantry (which will quickly collapse)
situation #2 was basically the kerensky government and look where that got us
Nov 7, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
As an industry insider, it amuses me no end that profeesional-class Yimbys seem to think their saviour is the Bosas, Aquilinis, and Wesiks of the world.
Lemme tell ya something: it's UBS and Ontario Teachers. The local developers don't do jack shit. They're merely the middlemen.
Given the actual incentive structure of City Hall planners (approve builldings that are as inoffensive as possible) the best bet is a bank or pension fund who is discreet, doesn't need their name on the building, and doesn't care what it looks like.
Nov 5, 2021 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
the original error of not asking for a bigger multi-trillion-dollar stimulus in 2009-2010, during the Obama era, was real, but you can't get it back by asking thru BBB in a hot economy with supply issues ten years later.
inflation is gonna stabilize around 7%, growth maybe 2-3% maybe more on a good day, so it's negative -4% wage growth for the average wage-earner but it's *far* from average: the nature of inflationary destruction of demand is uneven and chaotic
Mar 21, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
this is why I don't blame geopolitics or even Covid for the rise in anti-Asian violence. "model minority" - this myth converts life's necessities (life, liberty and pursuit of happiness) into at-will rewards doled out in a supposed "meritocracy"
don't be surprised if they take these things away from you, if you insist on their being rewards, rather than life's necessities, in the first place.
(yes, I am Asian)
Mar 20, 2021 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Vancouver zoning thread: I don't think people appreciate how fucked it is that the traditional financing model for developers is build one, pocket the money, build another.
With the City's preferred policy it's long term (30-year) 20% investment unless you can sell it off.
The City's preferred policy being market rentals, of course.
You can also sell off the 20% equity stake to investors. But here creates its own problems: this transfers control.
