surprisingly fun place to visit as a tourist (east coaster here) — it’s a real metropolis, unlike anything else in CA, and the range of enclaves ethnic or otherwise make it a great place to explore. chinese food is excellent (Chengdu Taste, Savoy Kitchen, the Cantonese seafood and dim sum places); the bakeries/coffee can be very good (and there are unusual places w.r.t. rest of country, like Portos); good modern American/Italian too. The museums are large and differentiated, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills are beautiful, LAX is no fun but Long Beach is a very pleasant airport, etc.

Buffett very strongly preferred good businesses with already good managements, rather than turnarounds. The shift from Graham-style cigar butt investing happened early (pre-1970s) in his investing career.

Add one more data point

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/13/books/review-susan-faludi-in-the-darkroom.html

(I know it’s Jennifer Senior, but this is early 2016, and the madness hasn’t fully set in yet; it reads as a fair and accurate review).

Reading through the Substack content rules (https://substack.com/content), it doesn’t sound like there’s anything preventing an author from posting the exact same content from their blog onto their Substack (there’s a question as to whether Takimag is OK with you parallel-posting, but I don’t know what the terms are there).

One might ask why anyone would pay to get exactly the same content as exists on a free website, but stranger things have happened on the Internet. But to be more serious – I do think the lower friction (ease of payment, especially for people who already have other subscriptions) coupled with functionality like email feeds, as well as not risking raising the ire of their HR/IT departments by visiting Unz etc., likely create some incremental demand for you.

Steve – might you monetize better by having a parallel site on Substack? It doesn’t seem as if they have obvious restrictions to starting a newsletter (granted, that may change once Jason Stanley or Vox or whoever decides to make a fuss about you); it’s an elegant experience that likely introduces you to incremental readership; most importantly, it tremendously reduces the friction of getting readers to pay.

It just feels weirdly easy and normal to sign up for a Substack at $100-300/yr.

east asian sentiment towards politics has a whole bunch of interesting dimensions/cleavages — recent immigrants from china give no effs about standard US political politesse and act very much in their own self-interest (c.f. actually decent organizing against de blasio and carranza’s attempt to get rid of the specialized tests for Stuy etc.; participating in the sffa lawsuit against harvard; making as much noise as they can about these atrocious attacks in SF/Oakland/NYC). the chinese from hong kong who’ve been here a couple of generations, and 2nd/3rd generation taiwanese immigrants, tend to be hyper-assimilationist (hong kong men and taiwanese women the worst, for reasons not entirely obvious to me), and try extremely hard to fit into what they think is their place in the coalition of the krazies, even though the coalition sees them as pointless sub-junior members unworthy of inclusion. the japanese are too small in number to matter, though they’ve been here long enough and don’t really get impacted by policies that impinge on asians, so they are comfortably old democrat. koreans are extremely conformist, and the women doubly so, so they are a natural part of the woke vanguard, but there are probably some nuances given the korean experience in LA / military experience, among the men.

i for one am excited about the demographics of the chinese population quickly shifting over to the wechat types who have come from china in the past 20 years. no more of this assimilation-to-junior-partner nonsense.

Signed up for the book club but can’t seem to get access to the full podcast :\

seems doubtful that carlson needs to be on the down low about it. dude has courage.

Through its head, lol.

Wouldn’t be surprised if there was some cheating in the Asian crowd (more? perhaps, but one might also want to consider fairly ridiculous practices like extra time for various supposed disabilities, which disproportionately shows up in the schools where the students least need it); still, i’m skeptical that this is the major driver: it seems to me that cheating would show up in a narrowing of the asian math-verbal gap. presumably if you’re going to cheat, there’s no reason to do it on both tests [and arguably you want to spend more time cheating on the thing that you are worse at and that is more valued/scarce on the admissions front].

my sense is that selectivity for asian immigrants has been monotonically increasing from the 60s at least up till the time the current generation of SAT-takers was born. in more recent years you’ve had a larger number (not sure about proportion) of wastrel-types who go to NYU/various state colleges and drive around fancy cars — not quite the same caliber as the sorts who populate engineering/biology/CS/math departments.

Hm — my appreciation for the position of the Malays has improved after many years in the US, and having a better appreciation for the fact that it makes eminent sense for a less talented majority to maintain tight political control of the commanding heights of politics and the economy, efficiency be damned (in contrast to the American majority happily encouraging the growth of an overclass whose interests don’t perfectly align with their own [while simultaneously encouraging the even faster growth of an underclass].

That said, your impression of the Malays is rather more favorable than my own: I found their insularity and general listlessness hard to work with/around. Also, political Islam is an ugly beast.

OT. in the ongoing series of the decline and fall of good old H:

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/9/24/rephairations/

When I ask Sipho Mangcu, Yvonne M. Adams, and Heidi F. Bailey what prompted them to open Arlington’s first Black hair shop, the co-owners of “RepHAIRations” flash me three exasperated smiles that seem to say, Where to begin?

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/9/28/kane-to-temporarily-stop-lecturing/

In their Saturday message to students, Gov 50 teaching fellows proposed to meet with students privately instead of in lectures to encourage the administration to identify a replacement for Kane.

“The teaching staff and I want to do what’s best for you, our students,” the teaching fellows wrote to their students Saturday. “None of us want to continue with DK. At the same time, we want to make sure you don’t feel that we are abandoning you.”

“We propose the following: We, the teaching staff, will continue meeting with you in private recitations,” the email continues. “We, the teaching staff, and you, the students, will collectively not be present for any lectures taught by DK. We hope this will put pressure on the administration who will be forced to find a replacement for him.”

Kind Hearts and Coronets is woefully underappreciated. Kudos to Steve for highlighting it!

Just realized I was paying more for my NYT subscription (urgh) than I was donating to iSteve. Tried to do a little bit to rectify that today. Thanks for all you do, Steve.

To say nothing of Johnny von Neumann!

Man, nail, meet head.

NYT starting to set up world war P:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/fashion/weddings/a-look-at-open-marriage-weddings.html

Daley South had six bridesmaids in her 2016 wedding to Logan South; one of them was her husband’s girlfriend.

The Souths are in an open and polyamorous relationship and have been since they started dating seven years ago. “We were actually all dating at first,” Ms. South said of her bridesmaid, Ilona Westenra. “I really enjoyed having her be a part of our big day.”

People who choose to be in non-monogamous relationships are often perceived as anti-commitment, said Cathy Keen, 39, the community manager of alternative dating app Feeld and who is one-third of her relationship.

But that’s just wrong, said Ms. Keen, who was also asked “what the point was” when she married her non-monogamous partner. “The thing I think a lot of people presume about a relationship that’s not traditional, monogamous or heteronormative is that commitment is not valued. It’s based upon sex and being able to move quickly, and that’s just wrong,” she said.

OT, though relevant to the Scramble for Europe posts:

What’s Behind the Deadly Violence in South Africa?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/opinion/south-africa-xenophobia-attacks.html

This is not irrational violence or a spontaneous popular revolt. Nor is it simply “criminality,” as South Africa’s political leaders repeatedly claim. Rather, it is an act rooted in the failures of South Africa’s transformation. Continuing white privilege, world-leading levels of inequality and unemployment play a role. So too do erratic policing, cowardly political leaders and a disillusioned population.

(i) this is … rational violence? irrational non-violence?
(ii) south africans, mozambicans, and nigerians fighting each other … because of white privilege?

South Africa has taught the world many lessons about forgiveness and reconciliation. As violent anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies ripple through Europe, the United States and elsewhere, perhaps it can teach the world another lesson — about how local hatreds emerge, and how they can be stopped.

yeah … no.

The funny thing about the Trump quote in the original NYMag article on Epstein is that it’s probably the most honest description of the guy, with a none-too-subtle nod to the man’s predilections.

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/n_7912/

You’d almost think it would be highly productive for an enterprising journalist to track down all the people praising Epstein’s financial acumen in the article to figure out what exactly they had in mind …

OT: following up on the hilarious Detroit event that charged $20 more for people who think they happen to inhabit non-black/brown bodies (or whatever the term of art is this week) …

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/07/us/afrofuture-fest-tiny-jag.html

Some of the more precious quotes, which oddly enough all sound like Jussie Smollett said them:

“For safety, not anything else but that, the new ticket structure will be a standard set price across the board of $20,” Ms. Ayers said Sunday afternoon. “However, there will be a suggested donation for non-people of color.”

(non-people!)

The old pricing structure was “discriminatory” and could have resulted in lawsuits, said Tiffany Ellis, a Detroit-based civil rights lawyer. But, she said, private organizations have some leeway to choose who they are going to do business with and how they do that business.

“We have constitutional rights as an individual, and the 14th Amendment provides that we cannot be discriminated against because all people are created equal,” Ms. Ellis said Sunday. “When it’s a private actor, those protections are different.”

I’m sorry, this didn’t get garbled enough. Would you mind repeating that?

“The farm Feedom Freedom is in full support,” Ms. Ayers said. “Our supporters are all here. I want to make it clear that a lot of people in the city of Detroit, especially the Detroit art scene, are supportive of what we’re doing.”

Good to know!

OT: Widely off-topic, but I’m hoping Zach Goldberg (yeoman’s work!) reads iSteve enough to pick up on this. I wonder if he has replicated the wokeness-word-count analysis on the WSJ — I imagine it would show some sort of increase over time, but at nowhere near the rates shown by the NYT. It would be useful to have some measure of the absolute shift in the WSJ, and the relative shift between the two outlets. In addition, it might offer some evidence for / against the idea (canard, trope, joke) that the political shift in the US has been about the right moving further right, and the left staying in place.

More of the same, but hey, why not add a race twist to it (though, granted, she is smart enough not to dig too deeply into the sub-categories of whiteness in Hollywood):

https://www.variety.com/2019/tv/news/cbs-has-a-white-problem-whitney-davis-explains-decision-1203194484/amp/

The company has a white problem across the board. Did you know that there’s not one black creative executive working at CBS Television Network or CBS Television Studios? Of the network’s 36 creative executives — all upper management roles that deal with content development, casting, current production, daytime and alternative programming — there are only three women of color, none black. There is not one executive of color working in casting at CBS. The one Latinx executive hired in casting last year lasted eight months. He works at Netflix now.

For the next year, I excelled, covering every breaking news story west of the Mississippi, confident that my work mattered and that I was making a meaningful contribution to CBS News. I soon learned that I was being considered for the L.A.-based weekend-edition producer role. A colleague with insight into the process told me that I had been deemed “not ready.” Although I couldn’t confirm that my career had been sabotaged, I felt as though I had hit a glass ceiling working in news.

At the completion of the program, I was promoted to manager of CBS Entertainment Diversity and Inclusion — an important department that creates opportunity for emerging talent in front of and behind the camera, but a non-creative role. During my time in Diversity and Inclusion, my boss and I were the only black CBS Entertainment executives, period. Just as when I began my career, white colleagues continued to confuse our names. In 2015, I attended a colleague’s baby shower, where a high-level executive in comedy development called me by my boss’s name three times — even after I corrected her mistake the first time. The following Monday, several of my colleagues apologized on her behalf.

Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism will probably be getting a food critic corollary sometime soon …

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.eater.com/platform/amp/2019/2/20/18226478/the-grill-restaurant-critics

As a student of food criticism and restaurant goer, I’ve often thought about how being a black woman impacts my dining experience, and wished that more critics understood that experience.

From being asked for a drink by white patrons to being told a different wait time for a table (or told there are none at all), restaurant dining rooms too often act in accordance with the same racial hierarchy as the rest of the world. I’ve been cut in front of as if I didn’t exist and been grabbed by a diner who thought I was ignoring her when she wanted another drink, or whatever she felt she needed at the moment. I’ve been handed the dessert wine menu at a bar because the bartender assumed I liked sweet wines, and been asked, “Have you had a Negroni before?” when ordering one — and even after assuring them that yes, I had, still suffered through a lecture explaining the concept of bitter flavor profiles. Experiences like these are constant reminders to people of color that they’re an “other” in dining spaces.

…

As a student of food criticism and restaurant goer, I’ve often thought about how being a black woman impacts my dining experience, and wished that more critics understood that experience.

From being asked for a drink by white patrons to being told a different wait time for a table (or told there are none at all), restaurant dining rooms too often act in accordance with the same racial hierarchy as the rest of the world. I’ve been cut in front of as if I didn’t exist and been grabbed by a diner who thought I was ignoring her when she wanted another drink, or whatever she felt she needed at the moment. I’ve been handed the dessert wine menu at a bar because the bartender assumed I liked sweet wines, and been asked, “Have you had a Negroni before?” when ordering one — and even after assuring them that yes, I had, still suffered through a lecture explaining the concept of bitter flavor profiles. Experiences like these are constant reminders to people of color that they’re an “other” in dining spaces.

Awesome article — this and the NYT Week In Hate analyses are simply brilliant. Kudos Steve!

Just one quick note: Les Wexner’s fortune is from L Brands (Bath and Body Works and Victoria’s Secret). The Gap fortune belongs to the Fisher family.

hahaha thanks that was awesome

OT: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/arts/music/21-savage-ice-atlanta-rapper.html

Is 21 Savage American? By any measurement other than citizenship, yes.

That 21 Savage is in fact a British national is, ultimately, not particularly revelatory, or even meaningful. Foreign-born residents made up 13.7 percent of the United States population in 2017, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, published last year (which includes those in the country legally and illegally).

His success, however, is especially American. Growing up in some of Atlanta’s poorest communities, 21 Savage had a troubled childhood. He’s said that he dropped out of school to sell drugs, and has spoken in interviews of a youth marked by violence and crime. But after losing a close friend and a brother to gun violence, he turned to rapping. [indeed, definitely the sort of American we need more of!]

He has also been maturing in the public eye … even walking alongside then-girlfriend Amber Rose in 2017 at her SlutWalk, a women’s empowerment event, carrying a sign that read “I’m a Hoe Too.”

Would be quite the troll if Trump came out said “if I had a son, he’d look like Nick Sandmann …”

Fortunately for SG, there’s still a bit of Chinese cream to skim from the rest of its benighted Southeast Asian neighbors (scholarships, better jobs, less majoritarian discrimination, lower crime, etc.) who are easier to integrate than the PRCs, though granted, there’s less than before.

OT LOL: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/nyregion/is-a-planned-monument-to-womens-rights-racist.html

In effect, the monument, a maquette of which is on display in Albany, manages to recapitulate the marginalization black women experienced during the suffrage movement to begin with, when, to cite but one example, they were forced by white organizers to congregate in the back during a famous women’s march, in Washington, in 1913, coinciding with Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration.

More literally, the inclusion of the scroll and the way that the women are positioned toward it suggests they are writing the history of suffrage, which is in itself problematic because Anthony and Stanton coedited a six volume compendium — “The History of Women’s Suffrage’’ — that gave them ownership of a narrative that erased the participation of black women in the movement.

The women behind the Statue Fund are white, well-intentioned feminists of a certain vintage.

In the words of Kissinger, it’s a pity they can’t both lose.

Total wild card, but what are the odds Bezos is thinking of pulling a Martine Rothblatt?

OT: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/23/kearney-constant-reminder/

Nearly two years ago, Donald Trump was — to my utter disbelief — elected president. My boyfriend at the time and I cried in bed in Dunster House as we watched Florida go red. It was a horrific, earth-shattering, almost supernatural moment. We were blindsided. We were blind.

… I can and can’t explain what was so alluring about leaving the country. For obvious reasons, traveling abroad is thrilling and fulfilling. The excitement of going somewhere geographically and culturally foreign to your daily sensibilities never loses its luster. I wanted to be as far away from where I was, and New Zealand was as distant as I could fathom. I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was leaving from the U.S. more than going to New Zealand. The sitting president and the political crises he caused, in addition to my battles with mental health, contributed to a decision to get out and start over.

… ut comparatively, for whatever reason, I have felt there is more hope for social progress in Auckland than back home. With a renewed sense of hope, I found I had improving mental health. After a year, I decided to apply for a work visa to stay in Auckland indefinitely. Immigration, however, had other plans.

… Last week, it all came to a head. For one, Immigration New Zealand rejected my initial application, forcing me to acknowledge that I may be asked to leave the country. What was supposed to be the destination of a gap year had become home. Aside from missing my family terribly, nothing about America called to me. After all, I had intentionally run away from a toxic political climate that had daily left me hopeless and hurt. Being able to virtually shut out the daily barrage of so-called fake news was intoxicating. Seeing Trump’s snarling face made me ill, and I had medicated my ailments with the move. To be reminded that the president and many of his supporters fundamentally disregard or even deny my humanity was deeply traumatic, and so I treated myself by leaving.

[irony of ironies – NZ’s restrictive immigration policies are a-ok despite kicking out deeply deserving asylum seekers from hellholes like the US]

… Watching footage of Kavanaugh whine, sputter, and evade questions personally and deeply offended me in a way that was almost irrationally visceral. Much like the Trump effect, seeing, reading about, and discussing Kavanaugh had such tangibly negative effects on me. Their faces and names alone evoked such disgust. It occurred to me — I know these men

[“almost”] … and yes, [“irrationally visceral”]

Funny thing about South Africa’s stock exchange is that its most valuable company by far is Naspers, the vast majority of whose value (so much so that that the other parts of the business implicitly trade at negative value, even though they are pretty good businesses) is a 30+% stake in China’s Tencent. Naspers is >10% of SA’s total stock market capitalization, which might reduce the ratio of stock market value / GDP slightly (though OP’s point is excellent!)

Re: reverse utilitarianism, which I think gets to an essential point, I might take it a step further — what liberalism seems to be trying to achieve is the greatest harm to the greatest number. It doesn’t matter quite so much if liberal policies have the intended positive effect on their ostensible targets (affirmative action, welfare, encouragement of diagnoses of gender dysphoria) as long as they impose real and visible costs on majorities.

Disappointing that East Asians are glomming on to the idea of being victims in the US despite (i) overachieving on most social metrics of well-being (ii) how obvious it is that they are last in line for any racial preferences over which the left is in charge.

My sense is that the fuss (stemming in no small part from some poorly-articulated sense of resentment that God Forbid Asians be underrepresented in anything) over Crazy Rich Asians is orders of magnitude greater among Asians today than it was for Joy Luck Club twenty years ago; the irony, of course, is that JLC was actually about Asian-Americans, whereas CRA is about Southeast Asian Chinese, who couldn’t care less about (and find befuddling) the insecurities of American-born Chinese.

The inordinate pride Asian-Americans are having over CRA (an airport book!) is, alas, a sign of shallowness of their sense of ethnic identity. LKY made a deep point about how the Chinese-educated in Singapore had an intrinsic sense of amour-propre that the deracinated English-educated just did not. The dynamic applies to Asian-Americans, except even more so.

Fortunately, Asians in Asia still think sort of solipsism is utterly ridiculous, and Google Trends suggest the movie won’t do particularly well outside the US. OT, surprising how well a movie about an imaginary prehistoric shark travels.

Agree re: Mexican in Japan, which was part of the reason for the partial disclaimer (cuisines worth doing) in my post.

I’ll concede that for some reason, Chinese in Japan really isn’t as good as it is in most of Southeast Asia, or London, which is curious since they are clearly able to do French/Italian better. My somewhat heretical opinion is that good Chinese is actually more complex/finicky/precise/ingredient-driven than both (certainly Italian).

Separately, a frequent contributor to the Travel column who can’t get his Mayfair/Mayfield straight is a somewhat dubious source, albeit probably about the right level for the NYT. Not that the dead horse needed any more beating.

Weird how Japan manages to do just about every cuisine in the world worth doing almost perfectly with barely any immigration.

what a great leap forward!

OT: ‘Reparations Happy Hour’ Invites White People to Pay for Drinks

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/us/reparations-happy-hour-portland.html?action=click&module=Trending&pgtype=Article&region=Footer&contentCollection=Trending

odd that he misspelled berkeley