zlatiah

zlatiah, 9 months ago

ELI5 about the Chinese real estate market in general? This is how they got to where they are today:

• Investing in China sucks. The stock market is extremely volatile and there seem to be a lot of shady activities, banks get bank runs so you couldn't even put too much money in banks, etc
• In contrast, real estate is heavily subsidized by China's state capitalistic approach, so it became a really "stable" investment... because government subsidized it
• Because of this, everyone buys or want to buy real estate in China. In fact, people are willing to buy places that would almost never be lived in, because of possibility of appreciation... so we're approaching NFT-level bullshit here
• Additional point: because of the above point, Chinese investors would buy real estate even when abroad & the RE market is not nearly as favorable. Obviously this causes some frictions... like a good chunk of Canadian citizen blaming Chinese ppl on raising home prices
• Chinese economy is now facing hardship, so the real estate bubble is finally showing signs of leakage in the past few years

I am not an economist and cannot offer insight as to whether this would turn into an 2008 moment... Nevertheless, I am aware that Soho is an extremely well-known developer, and that the Chinese economy is to a large extent built on top of real estate. And despite how much I dislike China, it is one of the world's largest economies, and large economies don't just go belly-up without inflicting heavy damage on the whole world... So this is not good news by any means.

zlatiah, 9 months ago

Oh boy it's my time to shine!

I'm working in aging right now. Heard of Dr. David Sinclair since he was the corresponding author on a paper I was curious about... So this is what his lab is doing.

Two important disclaimers:

• Success in cellular research rarely translates to something viable in the clinic. A lot of chemicals don't behave the same way in cells as in actual animals or humans. Heck, a good number of phase 2 drugs even fail, and these haven't even made it into phase 1... so I wouldn't be too optimistic about them.
• The journal Aging is not the most prestigious journal especially for someone working at Harvard Medical School (HMS) to be honest. I'd be more excited if this was published in Nature Aging or Nature Communications or something. If this ever gets published in New England Journal of Medicine (a very prestigious journal only for clinical studies) then we have some news.

The link between cell senescence and aging is something actively being studied tho.

And, if anyone is curious about this topic: I'm also very actively following Dr. Vadim Gladyshev who is also from HMS and is working in aging, I believe he is doing some wet lab-biology on a similar area as well. Feels like his research is sometimes a bit ahead of his time but I think his work has great potential.

zlatiah, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Thanks! Wowzers I've never heard of Nature Food, didn't realize this journal had such a high impact factor. A few things of interest to me from the article...

• Vegans are one standard deviation younger than heavy-meat-eaters and eat fewer calories... although they should have adjusted for the difference
• This didn't show on the fancy Monte Carlo simulation they did, but vegans emit much, MUCH less methane than any other group
• Literally any group is significantly better than heavy meat-eaters, especially low meat-eaters or below

The questionnaire they used to determine categories:

• Do you eat any meat (including bacon, ham, poultry, game, meat pies, sausages)? (Vegans, vegetarians and fish-eaters respond ‘No’.)
• Do you eat any fish? (Vegans and vegetarians respond ‘No’.)
• Do you eat any eggs (including eggs in cakes or other baked goods)? (Vegans respond ‘No’.)
• Do you eat any dairy products (including milk, cheese, butter, yoghurt)? (Vegans respond ‘No’.)
  And meat-eaters are divided by grams of meat eaten per day: <50 g/d, 50-100 g/d, >100 g/d. Apparently one patty from McDonald's (Big Mac has two) is like 45 grams of beef so...

I mean the conclusions aren't anything surprising, cows are literally one of the major sources of environmental damage... But it does provide some way moving forward I suppose. I suspect banning steakhouses would have a much better impact than forcing everyone to be vegan lol

zlatiah, 10 months ago

Second this!

Phones give out a lot of personal information on their own lol. On top of the phone, don't forget that social media apps like Threads also require you to login... with credentials stored at FB/Meta... that they can derive all the aforementioned information on, as well as other type of things (Amazon purchases? Stuff you watch on youtube.com? Google queries?...) by using some creative tracking technology. You basically gave them a dog tag to identify you whenever you sign up for services after all

For shittier apps like Thread, apparently they also do some weird stuff like forcing the app to be on once the OS boots, so... yeah.

zlatiah, 10 months ago

Oh god don't even mention it... I was already afraid it would break down last year (when we didn't have this extreme heat). I'm planning to leave Texas as early as possibly can partly because of all this craziness, meanwhile some of my coworkers don't even notice what kinds of nightmarish scenario is happening down here

zlatiah, 10 months ago

... wait am I the only one who conscientiously not want to upvote my own posts because of that?

zlatiah, 10 months ago

So having all the mods quit is actually a viable way to protest? (writes down notes)

zlatiah, 10 months ago

For that sweet sweet ad revenue from my understanding

Since... It's significantly more difficult to avoid ads/data harvesting from an in-house-designed app than, say, a 3rd party browser with adblockers, or 3rd party apps that don't run ads at all

zlatiah, 10 months ago

Not sure how much of it is "predatory" behavior and how much of it is just a combination of being a masterful salesman + being really, really dumb, "drinking his own Kool-aid"... The dude was piloting the sub on every expedition after all