BREAKING: Boeing Whistleblower FOUND DEAD After Stunning Testimony - YouTube
62-year-old Boeing whistleblower John Barnett found dead in his truck after he didn't show up for a legal interview linked to a case against Boeing. Barnett worked for Boeing for 32 years and retired in 2017. After retiring, Barnett spoke out about how Boeing was cutting corners on their airplanes. : StrangeEarth/
'If anything happens, it's not suicide': Boeing whistleblower's prediction to family before death - YouTube

How The Shadowy World Of Organized Retail Crime Works - YouTube
Boosters get a list from the boss, fencers list them on Amazon at discounts.
People trust Amazon to check these things, but then when you consider it you think How can Amazon check this kind of thing? Would Amazon even want to? when they're undercutting the price of TJMax where the goods were stolen from. Online marketplaces profit from this. In the video, the theft ring had been operated on Amazon for over 10 years, reportedly. Amazon, commenting on the story, said they had not received signals the company was dealing in stolen goods, and that Amazon doesn't profit from stolen goods.
This development is on the rise.

The closest to a science fiction government is Singapore. Large investments coupled with technocratic, technological literacy. UK in the 1940s, with radar and computers, speed of breakthroughs. Rest of nations, scientific spending is by consensus, cutting a check for superconventional non-obejectional things built in China.
#China

Anti-Airbnb vandals hit Montreal building as advocates push for crackdown - YouTube
Anti-AirBNB grafitti. Protests want total ban. ‘This new building could have been used for housing but instead it was used for tourists.’

The rush in the door for ETFs such as the new Bitcoin spot ETFs is probably not stable long-term holders, but people wanting to make a profit. Bianco.

If it is people putting in 1% and who have their money mostly in a mutual fund, they will be more tolerant of drawdowns.

International Threat Actors are Targeting Children to Steal Money from Banks & Major Corporations - YouTube
Because ‘automatic scanning doesn’t work.'

If you could teleport gold from Tokyo to NY in a couple minutes, people would like it.
#Crypto
It's not digital currency. It's digital property. It's capital preservation for everyone.

Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money | Lex Fridman Podcast #276 - YouTube #Saylor
Inflation CPI understates the suffering inflicted upon the working class and on companies by the political class. It's a massive shift of wealth from working class to propertied class. Shift of power from freemarket to the centrally governed or controlled market, from people to government. Saylor
In an environment where you're infating the money supply and keeping assets constant, assets will appreciate in proportion to money supply, and the scarce desireable quality will determine value of inflation. Money supply expands 7% per year on average. Many houses have gone up in price more than 300x in 100 years, or around 6.5% per year. You're sucking 6% of the energy of the fluid that the economy is using to function. Currency moves economic energy around.
All government policy is inflamatory and inflationary. Any policy. It interferes with free market and prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper, more efficient way.
Wars (and other policies) are never paid for with taxes. It's too transparent. If people understood the true cost, you will lose 95% of everything, you might reconsider a policy and vote for a politician. A lack of humility. People overestimate what they can accomplish. Experience causes you to reevaluate that. Our mistakes are our good ideas that I enthusiastically pursued, to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150% of my attention to propser. People pursue to many good ideas. There's a limit to what you can accomplish. Everyone underestimates the challenges of implementing, overestimate the benefits of the pursuit. Overexuberance. As the exuberance of the government expands, so must the currency supply.
Inflation is completely misunderstood. Inflation is a vector tracking price change in every good and service.
You can't blame them, because economists don't even understand economics. If they did, they would measure every price of housing, the full array of foods and the full array of assets, and they'd publish this every month.
The primary problem is ‘The government will try to do good.’ It will do more harm than good. They will try to pay for it by expanding the monetary supply. They won't realize this. They'll collapse their own currencies, and mismeasure how badly they're doing that. They'll say the dollar lost 95% over 100 years. Actually it lost 99.7% over 80 years. They'll overestimage their budget and means to pay for it. They're oblivious to the damage they do to civilization. The mental model they're taught, it's Ok we can print lots of money, is defective. ... Other countries lost 99.9% or all (currency failed).
If house prices are going up 20% per year and I say this is great for the American public because most people are home owners, I'm misrepresenting it because it's really a negative.
Look at the ship next to us. What if I told you your ship leaked 2% every year. It's rotting 2% per year.

MIT costs hundreds of years of many families earnings. Inefficient. The seats are uncomfortable, too. Now we have the same teachers you watch on your chair at home. You need PHDs. A PHD is $1m. There's 10m in the world. How many people COULD get a PHD if it were affordable?
If you try to solve this by throwing money at it, you can throw a trillion dollars. $10t, you still don't get there. Harvard can't educate that many.
Education can be infinite and for everyone.

Open, permissionless, not censorable. Non-sovereign bearer instrument. Property. Irregardless of anyone else or government. Twitter stock will never be property in China. It will never be trusted. Property is low-frequency money. If you wanna hold it for a decade, maybe you buy a house, maybe in a decade you sell the house and buy the property again.
What makes bitcoin ethical (to endorse) is no person can change it (well, but they can if they have influence or power). No one can do what they could if it were a security, print 1000 more copies tomorrow.
Bitcoin is the first time we created a digital property. Everything else is securities. Sending money digitally is an IOU.
An armed society is a polite society. If you disagree, you can always withdraw your resources from it.
You can promote a property to the extent that you don't control it, ethically. There's an interest still, but that's different from a conflict of interest.

8b people with mobile phones serviced by 100m companies doing billions of transactions per hour. The companies are settlings on the base level, and the companies are dealing with the consumers on proprietary layers like layer 3, and on occasion people are shuffling assets on layer 2 (moving $50 or something).

You can't trade with a company in Nigeria. No amount of money or time. You get shut down at the banking level (you can't link a bank there with a bank in the US). At the credit card level (because they don't have the credit cards so they won't clear). At the compliance/FCP level your system is from a different political jurisdiction and it can't interface with theirs. You can do it with crypto, fast, cheap, with anyone.

Bitcoin's a universal trust protocol. So is English. No one's payment system works everywhere. US payment systems in Russia? But bitcoin also can't be done easily in these places.

No security can be a currency for the internet. Only a property can be.

If bitcoin goes up, because of how much he owns, Saylor could become the wealthiest person.

The Canadian trucker protest educated millions of people and made them start questioning their property rights and their banks. War in Ukraine was the second shock, Russian sanctions. Hyperinflation in the rest of the world a fouth shock and persistent inflation in the US a fifth.

Bitcoin's volatility attracts all the attention, massive gains and losses, which sucks money into it. Also, it results in massive gains for traders, and that attracts capital.

Temu spent $1.7b in 2023 to advertise and got, in a year or two, 161m users, nearing what Amazon has. It might spend $3b in 2024 on Facebook, Insta, Tiktok, Suprebowl. Temu replicates what Ali did. In 2023 sold products at a loss of about $7 per order. But others say it isn't really losing money.
Temu connects factories with customers, cutting the middle man.
Temu gamifies shopping with games on the app to win prizes. They have countdown timers running on each product to show when a sale ends.
Temu shows that consumers are willing to wait (not fast shipping) as long as the price is cheap.
Morgan Stanley reported they think their growth is cresting.
The quality is low. Safety is a question.
There is a data risk.

China considering liberalizing household registration program. Currently migrant workers in cities can't access any social benefits because their household is registered back in their village. If they change this, they can buy apartments etc in the city.

China is buying ETFs, stimulating their market similar to US did.

If China changes just a smidge in the right thing, they'll attract tons of foreign investment.

China government has the money to spend.

China continues to clash with Philippines fishing boats etc. Some concern it could go too far.

There are hundreds of millions invested in Bytedance out of the US, which represents billions in value.

This week lots more headlines on China, not negative, some modestly positive.

China growth more in lower-tier cities. Tier 1 and 2 are 20 or 30% of economy, 6 or 7% of population.

China the companies that have outperformed have been doing outside markets. Growing rapidly overseas markets. Appliances and durable goods benefit from this trend, maybe.

Some China sectors in bull market of 20% off low. Materials, renewables, smaller cap tech.

Miniso CFO discusses company's plans to add about 1,000 stores a year over the next 5 years - YouTube
#Retail #China

In some countries (Nigeria currency) it's ‘staggering how much wealth was preserved.’ 'Until you get countries that run more credible fiscal policies, people are gonna wanna buy that story, and it's a story that's spreading.'
The monetary policy for this ecosystem was set in code by Satoshi whitepaper.

Chinese space company founders are coming in significant part from Finance (like America). Samo thinks maybe they're coping it from America, but that they don't have an Elon-tier person so it won't happen. But even if they did it would be, internationally, so controlled, similar to exporting nuclear reactors, where you better be on good terms from US or a similar Western country if you want to buy these instead of making them yourself.

Jack Ma may have been an example of the highwater mark of how much impact on Chinese society can a purely commercial or technocratic actor that's not aligned with the CCP have. The ceiling is pretty low. Not even critiquing their policy.

China is not like Singapore, which will use a sovereign wealth fund that will try to develop a totally new product, a novel solution to a problem. (Singapore working on insect protein, which is kind of what you need for a tiny city state to feed its population.) When China says they're going to invest in AI, it probably means close the AI gap by copying the US. What makes the individual threatening to the CCP is their popularity. If they offer something Chinese people want or like, they'll be liked too much.

Might be a spot ETF for bitcoin in HK, and there's a lot of interest.
To do this, you need a bunch of financial institutions working together. The stock exchange, regulated asset managers who can manage the product, licenced brokers called participating brokers, and depository services who support the running of the fund. In HK also asset custodians in cash and crypto sides. And good quality market makers to support a product after it starts trading on an exchange.
They've seen how the US did it and can use that roadmap.
The HK might have an advantage over the US product because you can actually pull Bitcoin out from the funds.
The HK fees have to compete so be as low as what they US ones were set at.
They can't launch too fast because they think most important is to have a product people like, a quality product.

Eth etf race. US hasn't approved any product yet, so there's a more global race for that. Being first to market is critical for players investing in that space.

China, reportedly the young are really spending, and it's their income that is limiting their spending.

S&P large cap around 15x the mag 7. While the Russel2000, looking at the profitable companies, around 12x. ... When rates cut there will be multiple expansion plus risk appetite growing, perhaps. Tom Lee

‘The fallacy of a 2% inflation target by the Fed’ - Bookvar
Because of technology, 'prices usually fall. Tech prices are keeping a lid on goods prices, and that's 0, then something else has to rise by 4% to get to the 2. So J Powell is actually rerouting for higher other prices to offset that natural decline in prices from technology, and that makes no sense.'
The reason why there’s a 2% inflation target is not for the best thing for the economy. ‘If the inflation is at 2, ideally we would have a Fed funds rate of maybe 4, and if we go into recessoin we’ll have 400 basis points to cut in a downturn.' ‘It’s right for their own policy.'
But they do also think 2% is good for the economy. It greases the wheels of the economy. You want a steady modest rise in inflation so people go out and spend. ... But there are a lot of people who would say the right level of inflation is 0.'

Restaurants don't have a lot of productivity levels to raise to offset higher wages. You only have one and that's to raise your menu prices.

VISA sees everything, every type of consumer. If the consumer is trading away from Macdonalds and going to Taco Bell, VISA sees the spend.
They see basically no weakness anywhere on last call.

There's also a shift in how people spend and pay. They pay with cards and don't even carry cash. They buy less for stuff around the house and go out to eat more.

BofA says there are still excess savings. The lowest savings accounts still have a few thousand in there. They have 4x than what they had saved pre-covid.

Cruise lines said they've seen no slowing in spending. Home restoration supplies are a little soft, because they've been booming for several years and that's already done.

Fed might have been suprised by QT not having an impact. Then the AI boom in 2023 and earnings recovery animal spirits. Fed might have been thinking they were sailing into a deflated direction but AI boomed, and tech companies buying from each other meant high revenues.

Nvidia's biggest customers today are trying to be its competitors. They're all trying to make their own chips.

When a stock goes vertical (on good news or whatever) you're pulling forward a lot of future returns. It matters what you pay. A stock parabolic move can pull earnings forward 25 years.

There's a pro-shareholder thing going on in hottest stock market Japan and hottest EM India. Whether they're actually doing this for the stock market not sure. Whether they're looking at US and saying Hey maybe there's something there not sure.

China's middle class, over the next 5-10 years, will go from 400m to 800m (add the size of US population). Chinese love to travel to Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, India. Middle class stories. Chinese travellers sprinkled $250b around the world in 2019. Shopping luxury, eat out, experience things. The more they make the more they wanna buy.

China, even if grows 3% per year for 10 years, in terms of dollars that's still a lot of dollars.

Apple needs another China, but the whole (asia) region will be that. But they have to compete against $10 Chinese phones.

Netflix et all used to be like How do we get these movies to open big in China? Now it's all India.

India printed an 8.4% GDP number for Q4.

Tesla, multiple is still so fat. No margin of safety when fundamentals turned to the downside. Has to reach a bottoming in sales numbers for dip buyers to return, maybe. Hybrids are so hot, and that wasn't assumed years ago, they thought it was EV or not. The hybrid bridge. Toyota was in it, no one else.

Compact Disks make Comeback: Memory could Exceed Petabytes - YouTube
Not yet. It's from research in China. Writing on hundreds of layers on a disk. Lasers can focus and write at specific depths of the disk. Another laser will target the writes and cause them to emit light.
They didn't write about how slow writing is, nor how much energy it takes, nor where you get the laser to write like this.
#China #Technology

Story coins. jj

Private credit bubble. Chairman of UBS.
PIKs. We prefer less transparency, we want them to lie to us. Huge forward risk. Things are not being priced appropriately.

Streaming isn't profitable, people are saying.

Alibaba to Invest in China AI Firm MiniMax at $2.5 Billion Valuation - YouTube
Government regulator website featured(endorsed) Eddy Woo. Endorsing in what Alibaba seems to be doing (for now), which is investing in one of Xi's key initiatives, AI and cutting edge scientific innovation.

China looking to lift all foreign restrictions in manufacturing sector, they said, it's reported.

Investors Beware: US farmland to see historic price crash, amid soaring global ag productivity - YouTube
US paying much more for machinery than rest of wrld. EPA is part.
#China

Wall Street investment funds lose billions on Evergrande bonds gamble - YouTube
People outside China don't understand China. These things (property speculation gaming, Evergrande failure) aren't problems, they're solutions.
China wants 100s of m to move to cities.

We can't learn very much from China other than that the system/structure is very different, they're starting from a very different place. They can just build roads and infrastructure, but that can't be done in the West because you can't just kick people out of their homes. The West prefers our structure, so the things achieved in China can't even be considered in the West (to be done in the same way as China). Clifford Coonan

China's government doesn't have disputes. It just gets rid of oppositions.

Live: How China plans to resuscitate its economy | DW News - YouTube

You can't subsidize EVs or solar panels in Germany to the extent of China, where the company's DNA has the state in it. Theoretically the subsidies on Chinese imports to Germany ‘should be massive’ to protect an industry that will otherwise disappear, like Nokia, whose tech was absorbed and more cheaply produced and sold to into the market. Germany used to have solar panel companies but China subsidized theirs and they exported to Germany. Germany didn't combat this with subsidies/tariffs, and now German solar panel companies sell Chinese panels.

On the other side of things, China could theoretically grow in lots of areas but it's limited by the structure of control by the Party. Internet, journalism, communicaitons, privatization (insurance), tech companies. All are part of the broader picture of economic well-being. The West can do these things. The internet in China is just buying and selling goods.

And the Party can't really reform. It can't make a lot of these reforms. They would be fundamental reforms. It would require levels of freedom that it cannot tolerate.

Cash for clunkers policy in China. They buy your old car or home appliances, and want you to buy a new one. In the past people would just save the money to pay for education etc. Now the money goes straight to their phones and they have to spend it. (Smallish effect.)

China big focus on exports. State subsidies, loans for EVs, probably will be for chips.

China has no green party, so climate change is not an issue in that way.

China, because lockdown was so severe, is perhaps still reeling from that. Could this mean growth for another year just from continued unfreezing (they did 5% last year in whatever part because of this)?

China has deflation. You won't buy a big ticket item if you think price will go down.

Making difficult decisions to protect national brands, not shortterm sales.

China property markets represents savings for a lot of Chinese. Is destruction of these savings a tacit goal?

A porsche, a lakehouse, first class.

China will export components, parts of manufacture, in their move to circumvent tarifs and sanctions in export, relocating manufacture to other places.

2017 China started cracking down on unsustainable growth in banks. Depositors have become cautious in investing in high-risk products. Leverage.
State owned banks lend to domestic businesses. State funded.
Insuring project completion. Banks will be selective in property development. Safeguard asset quality. Not just affordability but confidence the projects will be delivered on time.

China mainland stocks. Fundamental investing is not quite working because there's a lot of structural outflow. Policy and regulatory uncertainty, people are just giving up. Low return on effort. But the reset might be largely done.
Look for companies that can help themselves, reinvent themselves, improve operating efficiency, find new markets, be winners of industry consolidation.
China macro is quite unpredictable.

Musk Vs OpenAI. If people can form a company as a nonprofit (lower tax) and then make it public and make profits, why wouldn't everyone do this?
Microsoft bought 49% (estimated Microsoft invested $10b in OpenAI). Microsoft has gone up $63b since OpenAI, putting Microsoft at $3t, the largest company in the world now.
It appears OpenAI started opensource, with the stated concern that one company (then Google but now Microsoft appears the same thing) would get all the benefits of AI. Elon was a big investor, the biggest investor, on tihs goal. They got other investors, on the idea it was opensource and would benefit everyone. Then it was closed. (Did they also remove all the opensource people?) Then they raised money on the idea of profits and employees sold a couple billion of stock into their pockets. If it had been opensource, Microsoft could have just used the models for free and not had to pay OpenAI.
There's also consideration Altman may have used the openAI name to do other deals not for OpenAI which might be in the region of taking the corporation's opportunities. (Alman may be getting corporate opportunities as a form of compensation when perhaps he should just be getting compensation in the corporation and the corporation should own all its opportunities. He can monetize the ecosystem. He ‘famously’ doesn't get compensated at OpenAI directly.)
Musk put in the first $40m, most of the money. Elon would own half the company if it had been initially private, maybe. So maybe you could give him 20% to make him whole (but Elon doesn't want money it seems)?

You would think it was more valuable in 2020, nonsovereign, decentralized, the fundamentals seem good but the product wasn't valued. ... 98% doesn't understand it, it's a bit too complicated, they're afraid of it. Saylor bought Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. ... Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's not true. ... Then, in 2020, 20-somethings know they should buy Amazon, every Uber driver knows that. Get off the mobile wave, get on the crypto wave and think that through. It wasn't without risk but the alternative was throw in the towel pretty much.

Companies forget what it means to make great products.

Rebecca Patterson says China is biggest factor driving gold prices higher - YouTube
From 2k to 2200. China government has been buying reserves 16 months straight, not expected to stop. Chinese people putting money in gold because where else?
Gold's not a story until it is.
I haven't seen gold in economics news for months, not even one headline.

The Downfall Of Amazon Has Started - YouTube
New fees (which theoretically should have been there before but Amazon bore them itself to win over sellers). Fees for carrying low inventory (so Amazon can't easily store it everywhere and deliver it in a day like they want to to maintain their value proposition of fast delivery). Fees for returns if a product gets a lot of returns. Cost subsidy. (This reminds me of what we might expect from Uber at some point, because other than removing number-of-cars limits for cities, it's basically taxis, which was already a long-settled cost/profit system.
This particularly affects low-margin sellers.
Anectodally, some shipment costs rise from $10 to $100. 20-30% cost increases.
These fees are to use Amazon's own shipping, Amazon Prime. Sellers can use FDM if they want, and this is expensive.
Twitter spoke up, then reddit, then MSM.
FTC now probing Amazon. Chain Lina Khan has been writing about the Amazon ‘antitrust paradox’ since college. Now there are public complaints, whereas before going after Amazon would have provoked large criticism (from market entrants not from established businesses which were put out of business by Amazon, Walmart, etc).
All of Amaon's profit since 2017, presumably, is from AWS, Carlson said. Amazon has actually been losing money on retail for years.
Amazon still offers customers their (?artificially) cheap shipping, fast shipping, trust (this is under question), consistency. Amazon customers are considered wealthier than average, and sticky, not likely to switch to a third party to save money.

For regional banks, once they reach $100b, they get extra regulations without the benefits of scale. Marketing, technology, regulating ability to spread across banking market. More mergers? Even if smaller banks have billions on the books and appear safe, compared with what JPM has, just scale makes them look less secure.

It's been 30 years since law allowed interstate banking in the US. Diversification.

Big Tech has been deteriorating in relative standing for 6, 8 months.

China is world leader in EVs, low-cost photovoltaics, wind turbines, fast rail, 5G.
A lot of these are global directional trends. Low cost supplier to core infrastructure.
Europe and US protectionist fighting against import of Chinese EVs, but rest of the world wants them bad. ... American business is not in line with American politics. American business people applaud Chinese when they visit.

China's Crackdown on ‘Hedonistic’ Bankers Fuels Industry Brain Drain - YouTube
Where are they going though? Some to Hong Kong, some from banking to crypto, to digital banking. 78% of banks have reduced personnel or something. Some big jobs pay have been cut in half.
People don't want this many people in the sector, they want the sector to serve the people rather than lavish lifestyles. Government wants other sectors, like manufacturing. They want sectors to be self-regulated, so China doesn't have the corruption (which they have now).
#China

This P.E.I. senior has no fixed address. He says there aren't enough services for people like him - YouTube
#Canada #Technology

Has AI made it ok to say the economy is sort of stagnating (considering inflation)?

If you look at the point in the past 50 years where America had the most challenges, the weakest leadership, 2024 might be one of China's strike points.

"It's An INVASION" - Immigation Is Officially The #1 Issue For Voters - YouTube
About 15 or 20 years after it because the obvious issue to the substantial minority of thinkers.

Arizona GOP chairman Jeff DeWit resigns amid bribe allegations involving Kari Lake - YouTube

'These [Five Eyes, or US Canada Aus NZ UK) are not separate governments. They are one government.' - Tucker. What defines the boundaries of a government?

China may in the future be ruled by lawyers (like the US now) instead of peasants fairly ruthless politicians plus some educated engineers, because of where virtued classes are coming from (it's valued as virtue siganalling coming from Harvard or MIT). Samo. Educated in universities rather than political circles.
Both China and US are gerontocratic. A generation war aspect. But China is homogenous.
If you have econ conditions where a college degree is most valuable, and women do better at college, and the default idiology of the college is somewhat feminist, you can have diverging politics then between men and women. Samo. So if China had woke, it would probably be gender-focussed rather than race. ‘The rise of Chinese feminism’. ‘Actually low fertility rates are the fault of patriarchy because they violated the autonomy of womens bodies by forcing abortions on them during the one-child policy’ could be a 10 years from now slogan. ‘As a result there are not enough of us women.’ China doesn't have many women top government officials or CEOs. They do have, like Iran has, many women in STEM, women do well in hard sciences. Lots are educated as engineers.
Along pathological lines like in SKorea, could happen in China?
#China

Might see greater respect for laywers in China. Maybe even for journalists, who also work with words.
Shift from tech founders (who are bootstrap peasants) to more educated people, a possible negative for the country.
Chinese Harvard will dominate. When universities as such are empowered.
The difference between the American student and the Chinese student won't be so great. Chinese universities prestige is currently rising. Less of the brightest students will go to USA.
China's schools may also then degrade, hardening into disfunction, where credentials are divorced from real competance, and the government will become incompetent.
#China

Cash Stuffing Envelopes Money Trend is Going Viral - Should You Do it? - YouTube 

 

 

 

 

A couple destroyers in the Indian Ocean basin would be enough to end China's energy imports.

 

 

 

 

#China #IR

 

 

 

 

 

#China
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

#China #Brazil #LatAm #InternationalRelations #Diplomacy