nsx5200

All those examples you gave reminded me of reading annual reports/sec filings. These days, I dump them into notebooklm and query it for summary and answers. I heard that investment houses were experimenting with AI to try to gain an edge. If they're successful, we may start to see the edge from deep diving on SEC filings shrink, forcing some of us to evolve. Or we all can just buy bitcoin and call it done.

Meditation and exercise has passed the test of time (thousands of years), unlike many modern (within last hundred years) dietary recommendations, which is where you'll see a lot of the junk sciences. We humans evolve very slowly (on the order of tens of thousands of years, if not longer) to make such practices obsolete. I would claim that science is just starting to catch up to the these ancient practices.

Some more China news, for those that care... https://www.wsj.com/world/china-xi-jinping-latin-america-acf6dbc1?mod=hp_lead_pos7 "[...] in a region [South America] where China has replaced the U.S. as the dominant trading partner for most big economies[...]Beijing has signed up most of Latin America and the Caribbean to an infrastructure program that excludes the U.S" "China is a voracious buyer of Argentina’s lithium, crude oil from Venezuela and Brazilian iron ore and soybeans" "The region’s nations are generally sincere in their desire for warm relations with the U.S., but they are often seen as a secondary priority in Washington. Beijing’s diplomats and executives, meanwhile, actively engage with local and national governments almost regardless of their political leanings." "The U.S., Feeley [U.S. ambassador, early 2016] said, “looks at Latin America as a problem not an opportunity.”" "China is crowding in with manufactured exports[...]Already some countries are raising tariffs on Chinese goods" It looks like China's making inroad into accessing South America's natural resources while providing additional export outlet. The in-article video also provided more details on the deep-water port that China's invested in via their BRI, as well as the ramp-down of BRI investments due to China's internal financial troubles. With Trump in office, I suspect Latin America will continue to be seen as a problem.

Just more evidence that exercise has all sorts of benefits: https://neurosciencenews.com/fitness-neuroscience-23228/ "Aerobic Exercise and Brain Volume: Regular aerobic exercise like running can increase the size of the hippocampus and preserve vital brain matter, improving spatial memory and cognitive function"

https://news.mit.edu/2024/when-muscles-work-out-they-help-neurons-grow-1112 "Now, MIT engineers have found that exercise can also have benefits at the level of individual neurons. They observed that when muscles contract during exercise, they release a soup of biochemical signals called myokines. In the presence of these muscle-generated signals, neurons grew four times farther compared to neurons that were not exposed to myokines. These cellular-level experiments suggest that exercise can have a significant biochemical effect on nerve growth." I guess this also serve as a reminder to keep up with your exercise routine, or if you don't have one, start one.

There's a trade-off between security and practical usability. Ideally, you have a separate machine that you do important transactions on, and don't do your everyday browsing on, but it's probably not very practical. I've heard about browser attacks where browser cookies have been acquired, and 2FA bypassed that way. Some techniques to mitigate that is to always force 2FA during login (similar to what the US TreasuryDirect does), and uncheck those "remember login/don't ask for extra verification" boxes. That avoids saving those authenticated logins in the cookies. Using a separate browser profile for the important stuff adds more task-level segregation protection as well.

https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/luxury-designer-increasing-costs-quality-34263746: "Has Luxury Lost Its Shine?" "For the last two decades, they have increased sales by “democratizing” access to luxury. By pushing into cheaper categories such as cosmetics, sunglasses and small handbags, they have intentionally drawn in millions of new middle-class consumers" "The ultrarich, on the other hand, don’t tend to shout about their wealth as much. [...] One study found that for every $5,000 increase in the price of luxury goods, the brand’s logo shrinks by a centimeter" "But social media is making it harder for luxury brands to maintain exclusivity." Classic trade-off. Short-term gain at the cost of exclusivity. It seems like to do well long-term in this space, you have to be the most exclusive like Ferrari and be okay with growing slowly.

https://news.mit.edu/2024/generative-ai-lacks-coherent-world-understanding-1105 "Despite its impressive output, generative AI doesn’t have a coherent understanding of the world" https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/30/24283516/waymo-google-gemini-llm-ai-robotaxi "Waymo explores using Google’s Gemini to train its robotaxis" It looks like Google/Waymo is trying to improve FSD by bolting different AI systems together when none of the AI systems seems to understand the underlying models yet. FSD still seems a bit more of a science project than something that's production ready.

https://www.scmp.com/economy/economic-indicators/article/3285238/chinas-stimulus-seems-be-trickling-through-it-too-early-tell "Indices of sentiment in China’s manufacturing sector both returned to expansion in October, while non-manufacturing also improved" "The Caixin/S&P Global manufacturing PMI echoed the official survey, beating projections with a rise to 50.3 in October from 49.3 the previous month." Don't know how much to trust these numbers given that it's from SCMP. Will need to keep an eye out for more independent reports to see if it's true. https://www.australianmanufacturing.com.au/jp-morgan-global-manufacturing-decline-persists-as-new-orders-shrink-for-fourth-month/ "The moderation in the PMI score, however, suggested a slight easing in the rate of contraction. Notably, China showed signs of improved operating conditions, while declines in the US and the euro area slowed." "Major manufacturing regions, including China, the US, the euro area, Japan, and the UK, all reported declining export volumes, pointing to faltering global trade dynamics." "Employment levels declined across various regions, including China, the U.S., and the euro area, marking the steepest rate of job losses since August 2020" Note that the PMI that JP Morgan appears the same as the PMI from Caixin/S&P Global manufacturing PMI. So it looks like the decoupling is continuing, and the slow down in China might be moderating. Trump will play the role of Chaos Monkey to stress both the U.S. and Chinese systems.

Don't know about crazy tariff, but I would expect some increased tariff, and reduced trade. Don't know how much it would impact Europe, but China will have to find new places for those exports. This will challenge the Chinese government's policy of offsetting their reduced consumer demand by increasing export manufacturing capability. It'll probably impact Xi's timeline to take over the world, just not sure if it speeds it up, or if it slows it down. If the House goes to the GOP as well, then IMHO, we'll see a lot more challenge to Chinese-centric companies in the U.S. with a lot more questionable laws passed to restrict that. Maybe if they grease the Trump world, they can get away with it, just like in an autocrat system.

My apologies if I sounded too harsh. I still appreciated reading about new breakthroughs/changes from China, even if it might be at the detriment of Western world's interest. Adding the brain power of 1.5b people to the world does, in the long-run, benefit humanity as a whole, and that's always a plus. A little bit(or a lot) of competition also pushes the incumbents to evolve, and that is also a plus, whether in business or in governing style.

My limited understanding is that to do well in China, you must have buy-in from the people of power (government/party official). This leads to well known secret to have to grease the wheel(bribes). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi matters a lot more in China than in other systems like in the U.S. I was under the impression that non-Asians actually don't need grease the wheel as much since it would discourage FDI. I guess based on your experience, that might not be the case anymore. Thanks for your sharing your experience.

Yes I have. My minor criticism is not with you posting, but rather what you post has been posted in the past, with, IMHO, no real additional new viewpoints or ideas. Every time new ideas/review/criticism is brought into this forum that might be somewhat critical of China, it bring about a boilerplate-storm that denigrate those posts without actually providing any constructive feedback. I don't know about others, but that type of behavior lead me to be more hesitant to post anything that might seem critical of China, even though I'd be interested in gaining more perspective or feedback outside of the "that's all wrong, China is awesome". Again, I value the freely given viewpoints given in the forums, and my minor ask is to reduce the boilerplate storms. If not, that's okay with me too, as on the grand scheme of things, it's a nothing-burger. Would it be more acceptable if I created a different thread outside of this thread that's titled something along the lines of "China Criticisms" to avoid the type of boilerplate posts? Let me know. TIA.

Have you even been in China, Luke? Even travelling to autocractic or places where the rule of law is weak can give you a sense of the forces at play, and lets you better understand the type of decisions common people make. Combine that with economic data, and you would have a fairer presentation of those places. "Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have travelled" - prophet Muhammed

Thanks for the article. Here's the NotebookLM summary of it: The article hits many of the points that Luke's been saying. The biggest criticism that I have with that article is that it's looking at mainly the Chinese advancements that was built on the past period where China was more free market based and ignore the systemic change with Xi, which changes the trend. We do see some rollback of those changes, such as the tact that the Chinese government took recently to try to resolve the Chinese Indian border dispute (https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/22/asia/india-china-border-agreement-intl-hnk/index.html). Like what the article quote from Munger: "show me the incentives, and I will tell you the outcome.” If the Chinese people feel like they can not benefit from the labor of their hard work, they will simply be less productive, which we see from hard economic numbers, and not from simple news reporting or blog postings. At the end of the day, the hard numbers speaks a lot more than word in articles...

You lost me. What lead you to believe that somebody's arguing that China's turning over a new leaf? If I was not explicit enough regarding my comment, then it's my fault. I was pointing out that even in a heavily top-down system, there are feedback pathways, one of which is the collective power of the personal purse mentioned in the article. A weak pathway, but nevertheless one that can grow to be more influential . Your observation regarding China is applicable to all history. East and West. Dark ages, Russian/Ukraine, Israel/Gaza... most people are just trying to survive. We see it in the U.S. as well, with tons of people barely getting by, leading to the rise of the demagogues.

Steering consumer spending through currency manipulation has its own set of systemic risks, which the Chinese government might not want to go down. The Chinese digital currency that expires, was a promotional thing to jump start the adoption as well as running trials. https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/07/15/a-2024-overview-of-the-e-cny-chinas-digital-yuan/

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/why-china-wont-give-failing-economic-model "Rather, his[Xi's] top-down approach to governance privileges ideological unity over populist concessions and favors state-led investment over individual fiscal support." "Although ordinary Chinese citizens may have limited agency, collectively they can exert economic pressure on Beijing. By tightening their wallets and prioritizing savings, they effectively express a quiet but potent vote of no confidence in the country’s direction." The power of the people is stronger than it seems in that top-down system.

Like biology, diversity in governance style leads to more competition and more resilience in the overall system. One style may work better for certain problem, but other style may work better for other problems. It's better that there are multiple parties trying different systems and let the competition decide the winners. We're starting to see some of the limits /defects of capitalism, as well as seeing the old limits of autocratic style of governance. I've seen organizations at the company level work well when it can learn quickly and translate that into action. The ones that don't learn, or can't translate that into action will eventually die off... some just takes a really really long time to do so (ex. North Korea).

All Berkshire need to do, post Buffet, is, in Charlie's words, not do stupid stuff. Big bets like Japan/Apple will be harder to come buy but we've seen how even during the recent few years, Buffet's been buying back Berkshire, implying that in Buffet's mind, Berkshire was still undervalued. Assuming Buffet didn't price in a Buffet premium during the buy back periods, there was no Buffet premium. I don't remember seeing the exact criteria for buy back, but looking at when the buy backs occurred, I would guesstimate it around P/E of 10. I imagine immediately post-Buffet, there would be some immediate sell pressure, due to fear, that opens up opportunities for buy backs. So assuming Buffet's ego didn't price in a Buffet premium for Berkshire price during the buy backs(and there's no indication that was so, otherwise Charlie would've given Buffet a good spanking when he was still around), the remaining thing to do for us investors, is to better narrow down his criteria for the buy back, and practice what Buffet would do in those scenarios: buy Berkshire. So I've put in my initial guess of P/E of 10 into the hat. If you have more data points indicating that there's a better criteria, then please contribute. TIA.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/betting-election-pro-trump-ad74aa71 https://archive.ph/Gat8z "A Mystery $30 Million Wave of Pro-Trump Bets Has Moved a Popular Prediction Market: Four Polymarket accounts have systematically placed frequent wagers on a Trump election victory" If there are agents to distort the betting market in order to influence the election, isn't the best way to profit from it is to bet the on the 'real odds'?

You live long enough, you'll get the chance. The hardest part is probably living long enough (and long enough to enjoy the outcome as well), which reminds me to keep up with my weekly exercises...

https://25iq.com/2015/10/24/a-dozen-things-ive-learned-from-charlie-munger-about-ethics/ “Once you start doing something bad, then it’s easy to take the next step – and in the end, you’re a moral sewer.” After chewing on it for a bit, the right thing to do is to disclose no matter what amount. In law, they(judges?) purposely go out of their way to avoid even the appearance of bias (at least they're suppose to). The difference between $1 and $1m can be explained away like a slow boiling frog, so if it might appear wrong, why do it? If it's really an exception, disclose it at the minimum to the board, and let the board decide if it's really worthy of an exception. Just merely putting up some roadblock (disclosure) to avoid such behaviour is a win in my book. A small price to pay.

I haven't looked into it because I haven't had the need, but IMHO, I would look at the policies at Berkshire corporate office, and Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP as a starting point. They've put in the work to have the 'correct' policies in place, so unless you can find flaws in their policies, you should just adopt them.

Those quants should spend a few millions to fund people like RoaringKittie to keep the funnel wide open. Think of it as their marketing budget.