nsx5200

1430 bottles of beers on the wall 1430 bottles of beer. Take one down and pass it around, 1429 bottles of beer on the wall.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/zelenskyy-tells-aides-reject-trump-pitch-ukraine-mineral-reserves-rcna192426 "Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has told his aides to reject Trump administration officials' proposal that would grant the United States significant access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals...[as] a form of repayment for the support Washington has provided Kyiv since its war with Russia began" "proposed the draft agreement, which would have granted the United States 50% ownership of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals...[,] titanium and iron ore, both of which are used to make a variety of technology products. Many of the minerals, however, are in areas now controlled by Russian troops, according to U.S. officials." It looks like Zelenskyy's found Ukraine's version of the silicon shield as a bargaining chip. I hope Trump makes Russia give up at least those regions that are rich in the minerals that the US is interested in. It'll give US some vested interest in keeping those region away from Russia's control, especially now that Russia is some form of China proxy.

Watching the video at even 1.5x wasn't fast enough for me. Here's the transcript for those that wants to digest it quicker. Given the past history of Trump's interaction with the media and his attempts to void the results of a past election. All I can think of is the deployment of this technique, and loyalty litmus tests in questioning the true motivation behind that speech. If there are valid counter arguments, using the same three upper levels, I'd be glad to hear it.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/trump-hesgeth-ukraine-russia-peace-nato-b2697001.html "Pete Hegseth told Nato defence ministers the US won’t support Nato membership for Ukraine - or most of its peace talk platform - leaving Zelensky little room to negotiate," Unless Hegseth has gone off the rails already, then we can assume this direction is coming from Trump. IMHO, there's nothing Trump wants from Ukraine, so they're being thrown under the bus. Maybe Ukraine can try to offer land/subsidies for Trump companies to build his hotels at? Note that The Independent leans left. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/independent-media-bias

China to boost residents' income to spur spending | Reuters Looks like they're finally trying to juice Chinese consumer into more spending.

It means that in the mature economies, and class mobility is slowing down to the point where even the middle class is starting to become out of reach. Many of the younger generations do not see a trend that will change that system, so they would rather vote for somebody who's advocating for tearing it all down, and embracing many of the systems that's outside the traditional systems (i.e. crypto). https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1099882160 "Homer's son Bart embraces the American dream - that ideal that we can follow in our parents' footsteps and do just a little better or even a lot better than the last generation did" "And then it takes this crazy turn where Bart is informed via a musical number that that may not be possible anymore." "In fact, when we crunched the numbers on "The Simpsons" household last year, we worked out that Homer would earn about the equivalent of $50,000 a year in today[2022]'s dollars. HIRSCH: Tough to send a kid to college on that kind of money, let alone get them an advanced degree..." "CARTWRIGHT: (As Bart Simpson, singing) I'll buy and sell bitcoin, build a new app, do pranks on YouTube. I'm great at that crap. Film TikTok tricks on my sick motorbike. ROBERT REICH: (As self) Your chances are slim." "REICH: (As self) The decline of unions, rampant corporate greed, Wall Street malfeasance and the rise of short-sighted politics all contributed to increased economic inequality, widespread real unemployment" With AI on the rise, along with the continuing trend towards automation that further amplify winner-take-all, no wonder all the tech companies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars(collectively) to be those few winners.

If you really want to be more of a contrarian, you would flip from somewhere in the middle, as the A's have probably been picked through first, and second order thinking would have the Z's to be picked through, leaving you with.. somewhere in the middle. Unless you do a 3rd order thinking, leaving you with... random order. Whatever you pick, enjoy your treasure hunt! It is a real luxury to sit down with your favorite drink, and some reading to keep your mind occupied and fed.

Taiwan/TSM's have to keep the most advanced chip process in Taiwan due to the effort & skill it takes to develop new chip process. The capabilities that allows TSM to produce those advanced chips is in encapsulated in its labor force, which is predominately in Taiwan. We saw that to actually get a working US-based fab, they had to transfer that knowledge to the US by actually moving the Taiwanese people. The tech bros would probably not like to pay for the tariff premium. Their best options are: push back against the tariff(aka less regulation), or move/build the AI centric data centers outside of the U.S long term. They will most likely pursue the first option as Trump is fickle and can be more easily manipulated/bribed, especially once Trump realizes the Taiwanese workers are an important part of chip making process. Buying out Taiwan might be an option, but that is essentially declaring war on China. The US's best bet is to arm Taiwan to the teeth by supporting arm sales and at least announcing very loudly the arms sales/transfer in order to signal its commitment to defending Taiwan (whether US will actually follow through with defending Taiwan is another beast). The US arms industry will also benefit from the additional revenue, which will feed Trump's base. It's a win-win scenario for Trump. IMHO, DeepSeek is just noise as no matter what happens, they have to integrate the new techniques from DeepSeek just to keep up their competitive edge with their peers. It ups the ante, but isn't a long-term advantage or disadvantage similar to the effects of ATM to banks, so it's not really relevant to the long-term chip production discussion. Disclosure: I'm have significant vested interested in Taiwan, but also hold China-centric assets. Caveat emptor.

I'll bite when it can perform "Get me Taylor Swift tickets for under $2k", or if I feel a bit more devious, "Get me a hit person with success rate of >90% on Putin for under a mil". Edit: Add Youtube demo from OpenAI

Despite my respect and gratitude for Mohnish's business analysis, it does seem like the long-term fund performance warrants some retrospective analysis in his reports, even if it's a David Einhorn style of "value investing's not working". Some mea culpas or place where more patience is needed would provide a bit more transparency to the investment style that his investors are really paying for. It's possible that this is already done, but in my brief search, it doesn't seem to be in the few public reports that I quickly pulled up. If that's already done, I apologize in advance and would appreciate a link. TIA.

Yes. That is built-in biology at work, and it's pretty fair to want that. The issue is with the multi part of the multi generational wealth transfer. I would claim that past the grand-kids, they're pretty much strangers to you. I can see why Buffet treats his more distant offspring as completely stranger when it comes to inheritances. I actually think the current thresholds before estate tax kicks in are pretty reasonable, but it's the loop-holes that bypass those thresholds that I think should be fixed. Why should the ultra-rich play by a different set of rules? The accumulated capabilities that's been built up over time is largely encapsulated in our government or in framework established by the government. It is the caretaker of last resort, and despite all the inefficiencies in the system, IMHO, the US government, unlike some other governments in the world, have at least no ulterior motive other than to serve the people(although there are plenty of scenarios where it's self serving). Many have chosen to leave it to philanthropies instead of letting the government take it at the end, and so the choice is really whether to trust the government to decide the excessive resource allocation, or for the philanthropies to decide. If you trust your kids enough to handle it, you can let them decide as well by leaving it to them.

They just need to tokenize them, and at some point, de-couple the tokens from the apartments. A new currency is born.

I find it amusingly ironic that the ones that advocate for the support of multi-generation wealth transfer would think of themselves as type B people.

Thanks for that book recommendation. I'll have to add that to my queue. It's not a popular opinion to have, but it's from a view point of "how do we create the incentive in society such that everybody, regardless of their natural ability, is able and encouraged to grow and contribute to that society in the end goal of advancing human kind?" It would be a real shame to have an Einstein-caliber offspring born in a multi-generation wealth family in a system that actively shields that offspring from having to contribute to society.

Agreed that the DEI policies are wonky and anti-merit based. When you have colored people pushing out better-performing Asians in the name of DEI, the system is broken. Never mind all holes about unequal starting point when you see many of the first or second generation Asians climbing to the top of the economic ladders when the blacks are still complaining about slavery that are 4-5+ generations ago. I'll disagree with your thinking about multi-generation wealth. It's also not right that generation wealth can be passed down, even if their future generation have not earned it. Born Rich is a interesting documentary that exemplifies that. Just because most recent rich blows it in a few generation doesn't mean in the long-run, it's a good policy for society.

Seems like the Chinese government doesn't have an uniform policy philosophy. They seems to operating using two competing philosophies: the western Keynesian one with modern economy theory, and the old Maoist, everything to feed the central entity. The modern camp wants to use modern economic tools (lower rates, increase money supply, etc) and leverage the free-market to address the issue whereas the Maoist want to address the problem by making short-term but eventually ineffective actions like issuing edicts to stop buying bonds. They advertise free market, but acts Maoist at the end. No wonder their citizen and business rationally behave by continue to hoard cash in savings. They don't believe their government will allow a free-market to operate, so why invest in it?

There are two(probably more) forces to the value of currency, and you're focused on just one. The ones that I can think of, inflation and productivity gain play significant roles. Things that improves with productivity does come down over time. I remember when the availability of sub $1000 computer was a big deal. Productivity gain and the availability of new manufacturing capabilities from China influence the price of many thing when China started coming on-line to the global market 10-20 years ago. Now that we're starting to decouple from that manufacturing machine, as well as China plateauing on their productivity, price of things are getting influenced by inflation more now. This is probably the dominate factor causes the perception that inflation is rising so much faster than the past decade or so. I saw his YT videos, and his theory makes a lot of sense. I don't see a solution that would fix the system. There's not enough political will power to implement what he's proposing: tax the rich, and tax wealth, not income. The best that we can muster is to at least lessen generational wealth transfer by closing the estate tax loopholes so there can be no infinite generation wealth transfer. Having infinite generation wealth transfer turns merit-based society into ovarian lottery based society.

I really enjoy That Built Series from the history channel. It provides a lot of the origin stories for many brands and things we commonly see and use every day.

If there ever was a game that's super-competitive(hard), and has a significant luck component to it, it would be poker. I would recommend reading The Biggest Bluff to gain an understanding of the psychology of winning the right way vs the wrong way in the face of randomness like in poker (and of course, the stock market).

The $50 sign up fee may be a significant hurdle for those on the younger side. It's probably a good thing to keep out the spammers and the crowd from sites like WallStreetBets. I know I'm in good company here. "We find it’s difficult to teach a new dog old tricks. We like the people who have been around a while." - WEB

I don't know about you, but if it keeps my mind and fingers from wandering around the "buy" or "sell" button, it's a win in my book. According to Charlie Munger, that's when the money is made.

I would claim that the Dem leans too much on the side of idealistic than practical, and that is the real reason for the Dems losing, not because they're incompetent.

Thank you for those detail answers, and I'm going to poke at your responses a bit more: The growth in stablecoin is immaterial to valuation. In fact, knowing that stablecoin's not as well adopted to the traditional system is a negative for stablecoin in my book. The cost to send and receive stablecoin seems to be more than wire-transfer. In fact, I would claim that if you have enough asset, you can get wire transfer fee down to zero. The only places that I can see where tokenized dollar has advantage is where the banking infrastructure for processing the dollar is inefficient for various reasons. The part about earning high yield is interesting. If the promise of those high yield means loaning out the stablecoin, then it's a different beast. Then you're looking at debt valuation, and the default rate becomes a concern. Even with the dollar, you used to be able to make individual loans through proper.com, and get higher yield at the cost of higher default rates. I did a quick search and found that you pretty get close to the t-bill rates on the USDC without the t-bill default rate, which is not a win in my book for USDC. I didn't DD on airdrop, but my quick search seems to indicate some form of lottery or at some form of promotion for holding other assets. If we're going to label/bin lottery or promotion as high yield, then dollar can, in a really stretched way, have infinite yield as well. Let me know if this is not the case, and high yield can obtained reliably, safely(low default rate) and can be scaled. So a real quick summary of the stuff you listed is that tokenized whatever just provides liquidity in the virtual space to whatever asset it backs, but to cross into the physical, there still requires infrastructure in place to bridge the two. This is, IMHO, not that different than me loading money into a google or apple wallet and sending it to other people fee free. Other type of services/functions that ETH provide seem to exist already, albeit with different fee structure. Maybe there's a real killer app for ETH, but I don't see it. Let me know if I missed anything, if not, this would be my last post on this topic.

So here are my skeptical questions: Why would you tokenize equity when there's already pretty dynamic and low friction system in-place? What about all the support services, like customer service, account maintenance, tax reporting, etc., that already exist? How will tokenization compete against the existing non-token system? Even if we do some first principle analysis and take USDC, essentially a tokenized dollar, IMHO, there doesn't seem to be that big of a compelling reason to hold USDC vs dollar, based on the various reasons given here. Let me know if I missed something.

Lots of great insights from Li Liu. I will probably need to go through it a couple times to fully digest it and think about the implications of some of those ideas. Here are some of the translated quotes that IMHO, are notable, as well as some of my commentaries: "The first example is about the concept of "land". In the 2.0 agricultural civilization era, land and population are the most important indicators for determining the size of an economy, and the sum of the two basically constitutes the total volume of an economy.[...] Many people who have left their names in history are often related to land expansion or defending land from invasion." "However, in the 3.0 era of technological civilization, as the economy enters a sustainable, compound growth stage, the reason and driving force for economic growth is no longer land and population." Looking at the actions of the 'strongmen' of the worlds, it seems like their thinking is stuck in the past, and they're trying to leave their mark the old way via conquering land & people. IMHO, I think it's a pretty good measuring stick for valuing some of the proposals from the incoming U.S. administration. "The most important event was that after World War II, the United States became the first country in human history to return all the territories it had acquired to the original country free of charge after victory in the war." "The United States bears about 80% of the world's military spending." IMHO, these magnanimous goodwill allows the US to have such a strong influence in the world stage, which in turn, allows the US dollar to be the currency of the world. It allows the US to borrow and spend that can not be matched by any other country while the rest of the world pays for it. By holding and using US dollar, other countries are implicitly paying for this world order. Although the incoming administration got elected on MAGA, the current line-up for their advisors seems to want to maintain a strong US presence on the world stage. At least that's my hope...