dtcwee: The Value of Nothing

What if it's actually the houses? I spent the last six months in Australia without a car, looking to do some travel, home repairs, and a little blogging about life without a car. That's all come to an end.

Westerners hearing of Japan's declining population often comment, "Gee, that must be nice." Let's just stop immigration for a bit, they say, until infrastructure, housing, and services catch up. If immigration is inseperable from progress, so be it. If Japan's being stuck in the year 2000 since 1980 hasn't been disastrous, then stopping time in 2025 should provide ample comfort. As much as that sentiment comes from a place of contentment with the way things are (if not discontent with the way they are heading), it misses something important.

Cheap labour may no longer come to you.  Rich western nations may be souring on immigration . Longer term, the global supply of working-age people will shrink . Services inflation outstrips goods inflation , particularly in areas which are hard to automate.

Arnhem Land, Australia, 1650: expat Makassans run trepang processing plants with their local joint venture partners. Even after white settlement, during Australia's supposedly 'pure' settler period, you had Chinese on the gold fields and in veggie gardens, and blackbirded Islanders on sugar plantations. Even the most remote societies have always been multicultural, to varying degrees. Tribes since the dawn of humanity have bumped and mingled. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Steppe people, no! The notion that multiculturalism erodes social cohesion is therefore false. So what actually does?

As if you needed another measure to tell you Australian house prices are out of whack. The Price-to-Earnings (P/E) ratio tells you how much people are willing to pay for an asset compared to how much it earns. Currently, the P/E for the world's 100 largest companies is 26.68 . A suburban Adelaide home worth $1.2M bringing in $750 a week rent and costing $12,000 per year (council rates, insurance, maintenance) has a P/E of 44 . [1.2M / ((750*52)-12,000)] via GIPHY

A piece I wrote on HoyoLab for Genshin Impact characters.

What is Private Equity? Private equity refers to investments made in companies that are not publicly traded . The goal is to achieve high returns by improving the company’s operations and then selling it for a profit. Think of diamond-in-the-rough companies in which value is difficult to see, (but which you are assured is there).  What is the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH)? The EMH states that share prices reflect all available information. It posits that stocks always trade at their fair market value , making it impossible to consistently o...

Fix. No tweaks required. YouTube videos would start OK then start stuttering after about a minute, with CPU in Task Manager spiking to 100%. What I didn't realise is that how you play videos affects resource intensity.

What would an Orca look like as a car? You can use images as a prompt , and combine them with text.

Mixing image generators, image prompts, and weird problems. Google's Gemini does a pretty good job of imagining Mt Fuji as Vincent Van Gogh ... ... and Caspar David Friedrich ... but it flat out refuses to imagine them on display in a museum. I tried both inputting the image, as well as rewriting the prompt. Nope. Can't do it. So I use Fooocus, a Stable Diffusion-based generator to get around these restrictions. Straight-up using these images as prompts causes a re-imagining of the painting. Not what I want. Easiest is just to outpaint and expand the borders. Hmm. A bit too modern-art-gallery. After some fiddling, I could get exhibit label ... ... or a fancy period frame ... ... but somehow, not both. Anyway, not a bad result after 1 hour fiddling, including generation time.

What if Hokusai toured America? What if a master of luminism, like Bierstadt, went to China?

What better time to try out AI art than Lunar/Chinese New Year (LNY)? A lot of LNY art is understandably done in Asian art styles. Nothing against that, but it can be overbearingly chipper ...

Economic justice is so last season. The late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez called the International Monetary Fund ("IMF") a tool of US imperialism. Tanzania's president John Magufuli, accused the World Bank of interfering in his country's affairs. That's a novel way to treat one's creditors. Applicants for home loans don't call their banks neo-colonial oppressors as a matter of course.

Capitalism as a response to Humanism. Representative democracy promised ... representation. Neo-Confucianism promised stability through progress. Both seem to have stalled. Gloom now surrounds these humanist ideologies from the East and the West. Capital markets are like, "number go up". What gives?