Alan Watts [3]

聽咗差唔多十個鐘 Alan Watts，感覺係大部份嘅 theme 都熟口熟面。頭幾個鐘嗰啲識九成，而家偶然要寫下筆記，不過都係啲細節嘢嚟。

令我有少少奇怪感覺嘅係⋯ 唔通啲嘢真係識晒？ 識晒真係冇咩好，等於面前嘅無形高牆比想像中更加硬。

That said, 課本同教程嘅作用唔係傳授人哋本身唔知嘅嘢，而係俾人確認佢哋本身知道嘅嘢。大概係咁。

Art

The relationship of art with mysticism is very very interesting.

All *forms* of art seems to have some kind of parallel in spiritual-psychic experiences.

Written poetry <-> auto-writing

Oral poetry, dance, theatre <-> channelling

Painting -> records of astral experiences / visions

Music / dance <-> traditional methods of entering trance state

Modern society "rationalized" the art form for so called purely human aesthetic tastes (which if you stare at it long enough you might convince yourself that it's almost spiritual in nature), but even if totally severed from spiritual traditions, it seems that (or at least I hypothesize that), when one pours sufficient emotion and "energy" into a piece of artwork, those energies are in fact imbued in the work, and can serve as a medium for communication between spirits, even if the human cannot directly see them through reductionist means. Also note that great art is by definition created directly from a person's "life" in the form of attentive time, and that provides the source of magical power for things to manifest.

Fortunately, I cannot in fact "see" those energies, but the secondary effects can often be noticed. One vector that I do notice it happening is how intentions can be carried by words even if the words themselves don't necessarily reflect those meanings. People assume they can "lie" but somehow their intentions often "leak". It can often be explained through reductionist means, but sometimes the effect is greater than expected from a reductionist reading.

That said, it might take some time to compile a list of "evidence" sufficient to convince myself that the hypothesized mechanisms are really as stated.

Expensive Search

So, given the AI push from Google in search products...

This means greater costs and possibly less revenue (at least in the short term), due to all those GPUs and tensor units running customized inferences.

So yeah, layoffs.

The conclusion? Google employees are laid off because they need to make way for AI.

Alan Watts [2]

I recently bought Alan Watts' collection of lectures for US$360.

And using whisper (OpenAI) to transcribe them to text (just because it's such a huge collection).

And as I'm doing this, I start wondering, whether I'm even capable of reaching any insight that's truly beyond these texts.

In case anyone (here) wants to read the text I can send them to you. The mp3 files are 4.2GB, which I estimate to be at least 100+ hours of listening time.  This is really insane.

MBS

同上司吹開水先留意到，原來 MBS 係美國發明嘅玩法，好多地方都唔係咁興。所以香港好少 fixed rate mortgage。某程度上咁樣係令香港啲銀行少咗啲 interest rate risk (因為係用戶自負)

然後發現個「香港按揭證券有限公司」(由香港外匯基金擁有嘅公司) 2021 年開始搞香港MBS。雖然 MBS 喺 2023 唔係主角，但啲定息按揭將利息風險轉咗去銀行度，都係美國銀行易咗爆煲嘅主因。

望落貌似英國係興 ~2-5 年 fixed rate 然後 variable rate。

歐洲就一半半 (https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/mb200411_focus01.en.pdf)

The available estimates for 2004 suggest that the share of mortgages where the interest rate is

fixed for at least ten years is around 50% of the total outstanding mortgage debt in the euro area.

By contrast, the share of mortgages which are exposed to a change in interest rates in the year

ahead is estimated to be around one-third of the outstanding stock. However, it should be borne

in mind that, due to the underlying caveats regarding the data, these euro area-wide estimates

can only be considered as benchmark indicators and should be interpreted with caution.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2023/03/18/european-real-estate-caught-in-the-variable-interest-rates-trap_6019810_19.html :

In this context, Europe is divided in two. France, Germany and the Netherlands, which operate mainly with fixed rates, are relatively spared. This is not the case in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy, where "households are facing higher interest rates and therefore higher repayments and a higher cost of living," explained Alessandro Pighi, an analyst at the rating agency Fitch.

咁真係難怪美國啲銀行會爆先。(至於 Credit Suisse 就真係咁啱喺瀕死嗰陣遇上呢個風暴⋯)

The meaning of life through real estate

I used to think HK (and Asia) in general put too much focus on real estate property.

But after reading 30+ annual reports in a couple weeks... I realize the wealth actually has to end up somewhere.

Either the companies return the money to investors as dividends -- but there are reasons to retain the profits, either as expectation management or retaining monies for future operations -- and in fact it's natural that the management wants to grow the company instead of maintaining a boring operation for life.

Alternatively, the companies invest in some stuff.

32 (Cross Harbour Holdings) actually randomly fling their money in private funds and screwed up royally in recent years ("Multicoin Capital Offshore"?? LOL), so I guess that's unwise.

But what else? People need to hold onto something, and eventually that ends up being real estate.

In a sense this is the natural state of things, when daily necessities are cheap due to economic prosperity and abundance, the only thing that doesn't have elastic(?) supply is land. The situation in the US is a bit different, where the economy is relatively more fueled by debt and consumption.

In this sense, in times of economic prosperity, the inflation of our currency is truly only just correlated to property prices. The only way around this isn't really to do anything about the property market per-se (that helps though), but to encourage "wasteful" spending and encouraging people to buy up other expensive stuff (or, worse, buy crap and throw them away), instead of buying properties. The efficiency the economy has to be offset by inefficiencies of consumption, otherwise all costs tend to zero and only things with inelastic supply remains expensive.

What are better ways to "store wealth"? Ultimately money, stocks, bonds, etc. are all tokens of ownership of some "real life" (not necessarily tangible) stuff since they don't have value themselves. In societies of non-wasteful spending, this ends up being real estate.

散步

尋晚自己一個走咗去散步散心

行咗去陸佑堂前面嘅樓梯，坐低飲埋杯麥記coke zero

諗諗下，原來咁就二十年

痴線。