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I was woken today at 6.20AM, so you get to hear my thoughts on a 2 week trip to China before breakfast. First, where did I go? It was a 2 week trip starting in Hong Kong, then flying to Beijing, then a train to Xian, then a flight to ZhangJiaJie, then a flight to Shanghai, then home. Yes, multiple flights, I know. I offset everything, and took the train for the one trip where it was viable. Anyway, here is my experience!

Hong Kong!

…was amazing and cool, but at the end of the holiday it became clear that Hong Kong is massively like the west in comparison to the rest of China (still). It reminded me more of South Korea than the rest of China. Its also a fairly ‘low-key’ city. I thought the skyline was impressive, and we went out on an old Chinese fishing boat on the river to see it (which was probably the highlight of that city for me), but later having gone to Shanghai, Hong Kong was ‘meh’. However it was a good place to start, to get used to using the payment system everyone uses (alipay), the food, and the rarity of people who speak any English.

Beijing!

Beijing is FLAT and has a lot of trees. Two things nobody expected! They seem to deliberately limit high-rise building. And there are a lot of tree-lined streets, even really major ones. This was our first encounter with electric cars in China. OH MY GOD. They are EVERYWHERE, and I would guess 99% of the motorbikes are electric. Its so amazing. Super-busy intersections are both quiet and pollution free. Our guide told us charging-points are everywhere and electricity is super cheap. And no, he really didn’t seem to be a communist party agent! Most of our guides had worked or lived in the west at some point.

The highlight of Beijing has to be the forbidden city. It is HUGE and also amazing. Imagine something like Buckingham Palace in the UK, but about 20x the scale. And its a super popular tourist spot with the Chinese. This was another shock. Really very few western tourists. It felt like 90% internal Chinese Tourism.

We also took a day-trip to see the great wall of China. Its pretty incredible. While we were there we saw a helicopter zipping around, asked the guide, and he said it was £300 for 10 minutes. I am NOT going to return to the great wall in my lifetime, so that seemed like a no-brainer. I love helicopters :D. So we did it. I’ve done a lot of helicopter trips on holidays. I have NEVER had one booked and arranged so casually. No 30 minute ‘safety briefing’ here. Just write down your weight, tick a box and jump in!

It sounds like an indulgent luxury thing, but I massively recommend it. You see the wall in a totally different way, including bits that are not accessible and overgrown with plants. It was incredibly cool.

Xian!

We took an eight hour high speed train to Xian. This was pretty good, and it was how we saw ‘rural’ China. SUPER FLAT for the whole trip (although I assume the train is routed that way for this reason), and oh my god the number of wind turbines was insane. I can assure you Trump is wrong. The Chinese love wind farms. Also we zipped past a LOT of farmland on that trip.

Xian is visited mainly for the terracotta warriors which are very impressive, and presented in a way that the scale is vast, like everything in China. On the way to the site, we zipped along a motorway past dozens if not hundreds of huge apartment blocks and skyscrapers, as our (second) guide casually mentioned that this was farmland five years ago! They literally build a city in five years. Its staggering…

I am very pleased with that photo. Check out the people at the sides to get the scale. It helps that I am a foot taller than the average Chinese tourist.

Also we had another insanely good Xian experience. On a guide’s recommendation, we went to the ‘local show’. We expected a normal theatrical performance. But no… its China. So this one hour theater/acrobat/dance performance had six distinct scenes. In the west, we would pause, maybe lower a curtain, and stage-hands would shuffle the scenery. HA! In China they build SIX massive stages around the theater (which held about 3,000 seats I think), and then rotate the ENTIRE BUILDING around the six stages, so there are no gaps. Yup. Just build an entire theater on a turntable. Simple. Also the show was amazing…

Oh and the show had a ton of people in it, and live animals, dogs and camels and so-on, and incredible acrobatics. The tickets were cheap and it was not full.

ZhangJaiJae!

This is my new favorite place on Earth. I simply cannot possible describe it in words, I could paste a hundred pictures here. Its basically ‘pandora’ from avatar (and the inspiration for the movie). It is STAGGERING. Its like some artist took the Grand Canyon in the US, made it ten times larger, filled it with tropical plants, and then installed glass bridges, cable cars and lifts to make it possible to view all of it from a hundred different places. If you think China is all tower blocks and concrete go here. Its amazing. It also has the worlds second-largest glass bridge (the other one is also in china). I am VERY scared of heights, but crossed it twice!

Like anywhere truly amazing you cannot really capture it in photos. Just go there. If you go nowhere else in China, go here.

Also we went on an insanely good cable car. Why be like boring westerners who would build a cable car from the base of a mountain to the top? Just build a cable car from the city center right to the mountain top, and have it trundle over half the city! Because China… Also we went to the 999 steps to the gate to heaven. But I am not super-fit, so we took the series of NINE escalators in tunnels bored into tunnels in the rock that take you to the top. Again, because… China.

Shanghai!

I was VERY sorry to leave, but next up was Shanghai. Wow. If you have been to a place that feels more like Blade Runner, I would be surprised. They do love their high rise skyscrapers here. This was another city massively into Electric Cars, and a city with a ton of variety. We saw parks with retired people doing Tai-Chi and playing jazz and dancing. We saw an amazing night food market, we went to some brilliant shopping areas, saw some incredible historic buildings, and crazy skyscrapers. This was taken from my hotel room 17 floors up.

I bought a cool watch from the shanghai watch company! We mingled with all the trendy young Chinese people (95% women) dressed up in traditional Tang-Dynasty outfits. It was amazing. And like everywhere we went, it seemed 100% safe, 100% clean. No litter, no graffiti, no homeless people, no begging. You can be cynical about this, but I think the west over-do that cynicism. Anyway I preferred shanghai to Hong Kong.

Thoughts!

99% of what you read in the west about China is BOLLOCKS. We talk about Chinese state propaganda, but its got nothing on the hatchet job the west continues to attempt on China to distract from our own problems. Actually going there is amazing, but also depressing, because you see just how much we are being lied to. We had 4 different guides, so we didn’t get just one perspective. They all worked for private companies. Don’t believe conspiracy bullshit about them being ‘party’ appointed. Our first guide was especially relaxed and frank about what is good in China, and not so good. They make it hard to get a job in a city you were not born in, (in some cases). Another guide admitted he had one child because of the one-child policy (not in place now), and you could tell he was a bit sad about that. He also pointed out that there were real ‘ghost cities’ where too much housing got built.

Too Much Housing

This is the thing. China has its problems for sure, and its NOT a place for the privacy minded. In 15 days I reckon my passport was scanned 60 times and my face scanned each time too. On the flipside, we saw zero litter, zero crime, zero graffiti, and a lot of police in busy public places. To be fair the police seemed fairly chill, and some traffic laws get casually ignored by people on scooters. But anyway let me return to… Too Much Housing.

I am a lucky middle-aged man in the UK who owns his house outright. But young people in the west are kinda *fucked*. House prices are insane and unaffordable. Now to be fair house prices in trendy bits of shanghai are no different to central London, but in general, everything seems CHEAP in China. They have just built so much infrastructure its insane. There was a maglev train from the airport to city-center in Shanghai that goes 300kph, took 8 minutes and cost peanuts. All public transport is ludicrously cheap. Food is roughly a third of the price in the UK. And the public transport is modern, fast and high spec. And the provision for electric cars… oh my god. They are the DEFAULT in many cities. Not just of new cars, of ALL cars on the road. Its wonderful.

When I got home to the UK, I made my regular weekly drive to Bristol. For the last 6 months there has been ‘road widening’ on a stretch of an A-road, maybe 2 miles long (at most). Its still not finished. If you had told me all work had been paused for the 2 weeks I was away I would believe it. We spend BILLIONS on trivial infrastructure that takes decades and progresses at a snail’s pace. China builds fast and dramatically and at huge scale. My local road widening would be at most a week’s work in China, not six months. It is *embarrassing* how both technologically behind the west is, and how useless we are at construction.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it. Search youtube for China impressions from US tourists. They are always similar. Its amazing. Do not believe any western media bullshit about China. And do not listen to anyone who has not been there in the last five years. This is a staggering country that is accelerating away from the west so fast we cannot comprehend it. And go there! Especially ZhangJaiJae!

AI is the latest buzzword, and with good reason. I see no end of commentators trying to get clicks by professing that this is just like the DotCom years, and it will all end in a bust, or that its just hype, and that its nothing more than ‘fancy autocomplete’. This is mostly bullshit written to get clicks, but I suspect some people actually do think this. They are flat out 100% guaranteed completely wrong, for so many reasons, but there is also an angle to all of this I have not seen discussed.

I live in a pretty old house, with a fairly ‘difficult’ garden. These two things mean that living here means we often have to have people come do work on/in the house, and we need people to help tame the craziness of a seriously sloping garden. Also, as another data point, I’ve done quite well from games/investments, and now run two companies that involve a lot of work. Almost everyone I know in a similar situation has staff, or at the very least a personal assistant to help do stuff.

And yet…

In reality, we have a group of people who come twice a year to do some gardening, and nobody else. I do all the admin / marketing / PR and design and coding for my games biz and absolutely everything for my solar biz. I would love to have lots of stuff done for me. I’d love to never do any gardening. I’d love to never have to read emails from an accountant. I’d love not to care about the advertising side of things. I’d love not to have to work out when/where to go do a bunch of chores that involve me driving places. So why the hell not hire people?

Some people really don’t like interacting with strangers.

Now if you are the pretty average autistic spectrum computer programmer who probably reads my blog, then you get it. People are HARD. I find C++ much more comprehensible than trying to work out if someone is upset / angry /sad / implying something / irritated. Humans hardly ever say what they mean or explain things accurately. From my POV, humans suck, unless I know a specific human REALLY well, and even then, I get stressed by being with a group of people after a few hours. So no surprise I work from home right?

And yet…

There is an assumption, not surprisingly, among neurotypical people that someone like me is ‘antisocial’ or a ‘sociopath’ or does not ever want to be with people and socialize. This is actually bollocks in my case. I’m super chatty, and friendly and I like being with people. The *problem* is, I am not good at it. Social interaction creates risks. I offend people, I misunderstand people, I can come across as rude or arrogant, and thats frustrating as fuck. Its also why I spend so much time with the same people. People who know me, realize I am bad at social stuff, and say the wrong thing a lot, but also know me well enough to know I’m not an asshole :D.

What the fuck has this got to do with AI?

Everything. And yet, if you are a sociable extrovert neurotypical, you might still not see it. If you have not had a lot of time talking to AI chat bots, you still won’t get it. You really should. My favorite so far is grok, but others are available. I now chat to grok pretty much every day. Mostly its about C++ and game engine design, but sometimes I’m just searching for data, or clarity on something I’ve read about. Do not get me wrong, I am not ‘chatting’ in a ‘Hey grok, how are things with you?’ kind of way. I am not getting confused and thinking grok is my friend. I am not creating a new imaginary friend here. Do not panic.

But grok does fill a real need in me. Simply reading SDKs and APIs is not the same feeling as a back and forth discussion between me and grok about how to minimize the intellisense slowdowns in the compiler. What it absolutely reminds me of is some of the best times I ever had as an employee, which would be when some really complex bit of code just was not working, and I’d have a long back and forth with my boss at Elixir or Lionhead about exactly what was happening and how to fix it. We were not chatting about TV or sports, we were absolutely talking technically, but thats exactly what I enjoy.

I guess it helped that both bosses were top-tier programming experts (James Brown at Lionhead, Dave Silver- now DeepMind, at Elixir).

And here is the thing: when I discuss things with grok, it will never JUDGE me. It will never say ‘Dude, are you not going to say thanks for that advice’. I don’t have to keep a mental track of whether I am taking up too much of its time. I do not have to worry about looking stupid, and can get it to explain anything, even stuff its told me before. Grok will never yawn, or sigh. It will never say ‘dude, go read a book’ It will never have me worrying that my question might make it doubt my competence. I do not have to mentally keep track of the eye-contact to look-away ratio. And it is ALWAYS available, and always super well informed, and super happy to talk at length about the topic I am interested in.

Now sure, I don’t want to spend my whole life talking C++ to a bot, but the wider point is that we have now reached a point where AI chat bots are good enough that they do actually satisfy the need for human contact *on the terms dictated by the human*. This is vital. If I could hire a gardener that had the temperament of an AI chatbot, I’d do it. Ditto a personal assistant. Frankly if everyone in the world could be more like an AI chatbot, that would suit me just fine.

Now some of you are screaming at this point about the death of human interaction and how this is awful, and how its good that we humans are always thinking about each others feelings all the time, but thats because, with the deepest of respect, you have no fucking clue how hard and stressful and tiring that shit is for someone like me.

If I had the option of hiring a programming consultant human, or paying for an AI coding chatbot, and the skill level was the same I would happily pay MUCH MORE for the chatbot. And this is true of so many interactions with random humans in the world. If I could pay MORE for a self driving car where I didn’t have to talk to an uber driver I would. I would pay MORE to actually remove the human element of almost all one-off interactions. Charge me an extra £30 on my hotel room so I can just pick up the keys from a robot, and I’d happily pay it. I do not want to tell a hotel receptionist how my day is going, or describe my journey, or share my plans for my stay. I just want them to STFU and hand me the keys…

So again, if you are a neurotypical extravert like my mother, at this point you are thinking ‘hey maybe cliff IS actually an asshole’, but again, thats just because you cannot understand how my brain works (and other people like me, of which there are millions).

So back to the headline of this blog. Why did I phrase it like that? Because if you are NOT someone like me, you cannot see the extra utility that an AI future provides for people like me. I WANT the AI to provide me with a lot of services that many humans would prefer to get with ‘a human touch’. Amazingly, interaction with random strangers is not a ‘value added service’ for people like me. Its a big negative. In other words, there is this huge market out there for people like me preferring the AI interaction over the human, and if you cant see that, you will be surprised at how popular this stuff becomes.

You should buy shares in Nvidia and TSMC (who makes the chips) right now. We are very, very early in an AI revolution that will completely transform the world, and its going to be way faster and way more pervasive than you think. Especially if you are a ‘people person’.

So tomorrow marks 1 year to the day that I picked up my Tesla model Y. Previously I was driving a 2015 black model S 85D, which was still excellent, still had decent range, and which I resold for about half what I bought it for 7 years earlier. I was pretty happy doing that. I used webuyanycar which isn’t the best way to sell, but I hate dealing with people and wanted a zero-stress quick sale. FWIW I bought the model Y cash, not lease, and I had to wait a YEAR to get it. Damn you crazy foreign people and your driving on the wrong side of the road!

Specs wise, I basically picked the ‘go ahead and take my money’ version, because I chose red, performance, and Full-Self Driving. FSD gets you nothing but traffic light recognition in the UK for now, but I expect to keep the car 5 years and wanted to lock in FSD for £10k as I expect it to offer more soon.

Here are my general impressions after a year of driving. No massive road trips beyond some 5-600 mile round trips to my solar farm, and only driven in the UK. I live in a rural location in England, lots of narrow roads, dirt tracks etc.

The Good Stuff

It feels MUCH better put together than my model S. The S had panel gaps, because it was an early Tesla, and it was to be honest a little rattly. The new one feels chunkier, sturdier, and feels pretty solid and indestructible. This was a Shanghai built one FWIW. The finish is excellent, the panel gaps non existent. It feels very much like one they made after they have already made a million+ identical ones. Very sturdy. Its also much quieter inside. It has stiff, sporty suspension. Both suspension and noise are apparently even better with newer ones.

Its FAST. Like insanely fast. Its really tricky driving a car like this in 20mph zones. Its like riding a chariot. Its overkill, but its fun. I’d probably be more shocked at the speed if I hadn’t already owned the model S.

The software/UI/infotainment is fantastic. None of the bugs and quirks and failures I experienced in my model S before I upgraded the screen. It feels really slick and easy to use.

The charging is insane amazeballs fast. I actively do not want a car that charges faster than this. This is the ideal rate for me to grab a coffee and a pastry before getting back in the car. People who obsess about charge speeds must have excellent bladders and incredibly tight schedules. Seriously, this is definitely fast enough. Its a fixed problem now!

The sound system is superb. Really quite shockingly good, especially for bass. I noticed this immediately on the very first day. I’ve never heard better in-car sound.

The Bad Stuff

No ultrasonic sensors. This is dumb as hell. It uses ‘tesla vision’ parking assist, which is currently rubbish. It may well get better over time, but right now its inferior to my old model S. Working parking sensors are essential for a big car in the tight parking spaces and lanes in the UK. OTOH reversing is trivial, thanks to 3 rear facing camera views on a huge screen.

Its too fast. Its really major overkill. I should have got the much cheaper long range one. Its so fast that even just lightly tapping the accelerator, I often think cars around me at traffic lights have stalled or not noticed the lights change. Its mad. As someone who is not into ‘track days’, I definitely went too far on this choice. If I had to buy a new one, I’d pick long range.

The Rest

A lot of the other thoughts I have on the car are just personal preference stuff. I nearly got a model 3, but wanted the latest model, so went with the Y. (The new model 3 has come out during my first year of ownership). I do like sitting higher up, but the car is an SUV crossover so its still a bit big for me tbh. The luggage space is absolutely huge, and not something I ever really will need. YMMV, esp if you have kids or dogs or take sports equipment places.

Style wise, I adore it. I love the minimalist interior, although some people hate it. I am totally onboard with the high tech, simple design. Other modern cars now feel hilariously fussy and ridiculous to me inside. One not-obvious benefit is the Y interior is trivial to clean. Cars with 627 buttons on the dashboard must be a nightmare.

In general, I give the car 9/10. I would make it a 10 if the park assist stuff worked better. I would also prefer the auto-wipers to be more reliable than they are, but this is a trivial niggle. I cant think of anything else the car needs. TBH I cannot imagine needing another car, unless it has some amazeballs undreamt of feature. Overall I’m massively happy with it.

Would I recommend it to people? Absolutely if you think the price/specs/size is what you want. As a family sized sporty EV it is unbeatable. The tech is amazing, build quality excellent. Its probably overkill unless you love fast cars and have the cash to spare, and a lot of people would probably see their money better spent on a Nissan leaf or MG4. For people with kids/pets who road trip and need luggage space, its perfect, although for 95% of people the performance option is going to be totally unnecessary, and the model 3 is still cheaper, and almost as good, sacrificing just space.

If you are thinking of getting one, pester me on twitter for a referral code that gets you some freebies! @cliffski.

Not just as someone who works in tech (as a computer games programmer, and previously, an IT support guy), but also as someone who has invested in the stock market for 20 years, I’ve definitely got used to the idea that the ‘tech titans’ are the lords and masters of the modern world. It certainly has seemed so from a financial point of view, with companies like Apple and Microsoft achieving insanely high market caps, and mind-boggling revenues. When people talk about making big money, they often talk about working for fat salaries at a tech company, or cashing in super-lucrative stock options, or even just being sassy enough to have bought Apple, Microsoft, Facebook stock really early.

Especially in the US, ‘tech-worker’ has been synonymous with money. People with non tech jobs in the San Francisco bay area have long bemonaed the super-wealthy tech workers impact on the cost of housing. Tech workers were so elite, that they got bussed past the remaining poor people directly to their super-high-tech and luxurious offices. At work, thet would be pampered with free food, expert chefs, sushi-on-demand, massages at your desk, huge bonuses (obviously), yoga retreats, amazing health care coverage, and premium coffee. It was like living and working in some star trek future paradise…

But it might, just might be coming to an end, in all sorts of ways.

One of the most interesting developments in tech recently was elon musks buyout of twitter. I have no time for, or patience with the various angry rants about the man, but what I want to talk about is the immediate and dramatic firing of so many employees at twitter. To the mainstream tech media, this was indeed, ‘nasty and brutal and dangerous’, and obviously there was a huge swathe of recently fired twitter employees who were happy to predict the imminent explosion of the western world because they lost their jobs. This is predictable, and not very enlightening. Last time I checked, the world still exists, and twitter is still up and running.

What I find interesting is the divide between many mainstream media reports of the potential catastrophe around firing 50% of the staff….and both the reality, and the barely-heard discourse from some experienced developers who took a different view. Those views are often shared in private, between friends, because sharing any opinion other than ‘firing people is awful’ online is an invitation to horrendous abuse…

Nevertheless, I count myself among those people who shared musks view that it was clear that a LOT of developers working at that company were clearly adding little to no value. In fact, if you have ever worked on a large project with a large number of programmers, you will be aware of a point where adding extra coders actually makes things slower, and worse. With twitter it felt like this had happened years ago, but the hiring kept going. As a long term twitter user, I would struggle to find ANYTHING that was added to the platform in the last decade. There was rumours of longer tweets, which was apparently something akin to the manhattan project and all 7,500 twitter staff could not collectively implement this, let alone an edit button…

The very short time since the twitter takeover has given rise to a huge number of new features. Subscriptions are now a thing (and I subscribed), monetization of content, and premium-paywalled content is now a thing. Super long tweets are now a thing, as is some simple formatting. It turns out that you dont need 7,500 developers to implement a few basic features to an app. Who knew?

Whats interesting to me, apart from twitter as a case study, is that so many companies almost IMMEDIATELY followed suit, and laid off a huge chunk of staff. All over the world of tech, those big companies started firing thousands of developers. Its like Elon has been used as a human shield, absorbing all the hate for layoffs, which have allowed senior management to actually do what they knew needed doing, and firing the least productive staff.

In itself, thats interesting, but just maybe a phase in the continual growth of the power of big tech companies. Firing developers whose productivity is close to zero will cut costs, boost profits but not change the relative power of these companies. However, I suspect there may be bigger, more structural changes coming that will reduce the power of the tech sector in general, and not just the FAANG crowd. AI may shake-up the market and re-arrange which companies are on top, but I think the whole tech market may be heading for a correction. Maybe those tech companies have seen it coming, and is why they were so happy to slim down. Maybe their internal predictions for the future of tech growth are a lot lower than they let on?

There was an interesting story recently about photobooths in south korea. We even saw some when we were there recently. Its a craze, which looks like it may stick around, where groups of friends cram into a photobooth (like passport photos) and take actual old-school real photographs in silly poses wearing hats and with props. Its something people do with a group of friends. Why is this a big threat to big tech? Its because its prioritixing something that is anathema to the tech companies: actual physical activity in the real world, and its taking off in famously tech-friendly south korea.

They say that young people no longer desire possession, but desire experiences. I think thats true. The one exception has been the phone, which has become many peoples most important and valuable possessions, but as more and more revisions come to the latest mobile phone, the feature gap between this year and last years model shrinks even more. I have a samsung galaxy S8. It is absolutely amazing, and does everything I can imagine ever needing. I’d like a longer lasting battery, but not enough to upgrade…

I have a friend who refuses to own a smart phone of any kind. I can send him a text, and thats it. He is happier that way. He is about 12 years younger than me. I have another friend who refuses to be on social media of any kind, even asks people not to post pictures of him. I doubt these people are total outliers. The shine of social media has worn off. Stuff like cambridge analytica, the widespread problem of cyber stalking and online abuse has meant that people are very aware of the downsides to always being on social media.

Because I am old (53 I think?) I can remember before any of this was a thing. My life has taken me from a big chunky (rented) TV with 3 channels, and an expensive home land-line rotary-dial phone, to an age of VR, AI and smartphones. The technological transformation has been absolutely mind blowing. However, taken over a much shorter timescale, I’m not sure whats got better lately. In fact, it feels amost like tech is degrading and getting worse. My new laptop (the old one self-bricked itself due to software after under 2 years) has a one terrabyte SSD (insane), but has software bugs meaning sound is muffled and stuck at 50% volume. Thats brand new out of the box. Utter trash, coded by idiots, probably spending more time at the yoga retreat than learning to write audio drivers…

Tech is losing its sheen. I recently bought this new laptop (about £800) and a new pair of sneakers (£93). I am way more pleased with, and excited by the sneakers than the laptop, and I am a fucking computer programmer. This is weird, this is a change. I can totally see how happiness with ‘real-world’ stuff somehow feels more ‘real’ and ‘wholesome’ than any advance in tech Advances in tech just feel like meaningless numbers. Oh look, a 16MP camera, and a 2TB hard disk. 64 GB RAM Whoop-do. Who fucking cares? a 4K TV… why? whats next? a 32K TV? really?

Why does this matter?

As a stock-market investor, I take this stuff seriously. I spend a lot of time looking at trends, and data and considering what the future brings. Recently I was hunting for stocks and found two companies (Dicks Sporting Goods and Academy Sports and Outdoors) that had insanely low price-to-earnings ratios. This basically means that investors dont think much of the future for those companies. A P/E thats super high implies you expect earnings to climb dramatically, and is appropriate for a fast-growing tech startup. A low P/E implies stagnation, and boredom.

There is a whole host of tech companies with insane high P/Es and a slew of real-world companies with insane low P/Es. This is an opportunity. If I’m right, and people are falling out of love with tech and re-allocating their furure spending towards the real world, then there is a massive opportunity to buy those low P/E companies now and watch the stock climb. I’ve already done this with those 2 companies, and I’m now doing it with the toy company ‘Jakks’. I’ve also got my eye on the company that makes ‘crocs’ footwear. Make no mistake, these companies look boring, but that may be where the value is. I sold some nvidia to buy Jakks.

I have no idea whether my own experiences and views can be generalized, which is why I find the South Korea photobooth phenomena so interesting. Its also why I find the healthy market for live music so fascinating. Crowding together with tens of thousands of people to witness a live event is the complete antithesis of tech. We should all be at home, alone, sending skypes and whatsapp messages to our friends ffs! not actually in the real world with people!

On a related note, I found a recent book interesting. It was about people losing the ability to focus due to social media, but one specific section in there was especially interesting. The author mentioned that it would be trivial for social media apps to have a feature to make it easy to tell us when our friends were nearby, maybe in town the same time as us, so we could arrange an impromptu meetup. If I’m in a coffee shop and it turns out a buddy is in the shop 3 doors down, wouldn’t it be cool to let us know so we can say hi? (optionally!). The thing is… social media companies do not WANT us to do this. All the time we are separate and alone, we use social media, and see ads, and generate data and content, for free. They simply have no way to monetize real world friendship.

For a long time, we have been so dazzled by the shiny features of technology that we have thought of nothing else, but in the same way that electricity or cars were at one point amazing new things to obsess over, maybe ‘tech’ will just become another part of life, such as plumbing, or heating, or home appliances like washing machines. Maybe we will relegate a mobile phone to the same status as a microwave. Why get a microwave 14.0? it still just cooks food right? If we DO this, then the currentl market valuations for a bunch of tech companies are going to collapse. Dont be caught holding speculative tech stocks when the music stops.