> idli-dosa-pav-bhaji butteerr-chicken

Is this actually a thing? (Translating to American, it's the culinary equivalent of crepe-pizza-burger-clam chowder.)

All in on the next grift, of course. My money is on quantum computing.

I'm familiar with Japan and find it quite believable.

You may be familiar with the "akiya" phenomenon, where empty houses in the Japanese countryside are sold for a song. The same applies not just to residential homes, but to other buildings as well, and their price tag is very low for the same reason: the property has serious issues and/or has been vacant for years, and will require far more than the initial investment to make habitable.

Here's a fascinating blog post by someone who went poking around the ruins of one hot spring town (Kinugawa) that went through a particularly dramatic boom and bust cycle: https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/983/

This particular hotel at least appears to have been open until fairly recently, but Google reviews describe the "Showa-era" furnishings (read: 1980s at best), and it's on the fairly grim slate grey Kujukurihama beach 3.5 hours from Tokyo by train: https://maps.app.goo.gl/G53KWyCsmeUy8JyR9

I get that there is undesirable real estate in Japan that gets sold "for a song".

But then how does it quickly get resold at 40x?

> But then how does it quickly get resold at 40x?

Because the new "owners" are buying the Business Manager visa, not the actual property.

Suckers who don't realize it's not worth what they're paying.

Performing 40 songs in exchange for a property does seem like serious effort...

This really is a great blogpost, I'm really glad you shared it.

We are not taking about akiya here but actual businesses. A thriving business would never sell for one million yen.

What makes you think these businesses are thriving? It's scams upon scams: the Japanese mastermind buys failing businesses on the cheap, pumps up the price and sells them to Chinese people, who then proceed to use them to essentially scam residence visas from the Japanese government.

Not bankrupt doesn’t mean the company is actually worth anything. A large number of tiny business are still in operation because the owner is willing to work at below market rates to keep it operating.

Re the spikejapan blog: The author’s About page includes this line which describes my experience of the article very accurately, having bailed after a couple of minutes:

“It's a species of anti-blog, as there is no way that you'll get through a post if you suffer from any kind of attention-deficit disorder; even then, you may need a strong cup of coffee and an hour to kill.”

Yeesh - interesting blog post, but terribly sophomoric prose, distracting and clumsy. The author is at least 40 and should know better.

I respect the attempt at belletristic writing, even if it falls a bit short. If they had an editor to rein in some of the thesaurus usage it’d be fine. Not everyone appreciates the style, though.

If this happened in a traditional taxi or even Uber, you'd call the driver or the company's dispatch line, and they'd send the cabbie back with your stuff. But it would also be mostly your own fault and you'd tip the driver for doing this.

It's a continuum, not binary. The same robot that doesn't financially "work" for replacing a manual scavenger sorting garbage in an African slum might be quite cost-effective sorting recycling in Switzerland, and would likely have a niche regardless of price if used to (say) sort biohazardous or radioactive materials. And there are already millions of robots out there assembling cars etc.

Try Kagi, it implements them quite well.

> Maoist china certainly and famously murdered many rich people.

Not sure this is quite aligned with the CCP party line?

Eswatini (fka Swaziland) is the only African country that officially recognizes Taiwan. But it's also a tiny little place fully surrounded by South Africa.

Eswatini is also an absolute monarchy which bans the formation of political parties, does not allow women to own property, and has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS infection of any country in the world. So, probably not a great place to hold a conference.

It's not though, is it? That's Lesotho, Eswatini borders Mozambique.

You are correct (source: I was a volunteer in Lesotho many moons ago).

Still no sign of Waymo in Other Bets revenue, which fell from $450M to $411M.

But they're presumably investing more in it, since Other Bets income fell from $-1,226M to $-2,100M, meaning expenditure went up $800M YoY. (Obviously not all of this was Waymo though.)

They recently claimed 500k weekly rides, at an average cost of $20 (seems low) would be $500mm run rate.

I've been wondering when we'll see it unambiguously showing up in there. I suspect this time next year it'll be visible for sure, maybe Q4 of this year?

People overestimate the rate of change in the short run and underestimate the impact of change in the long run.