Chinese stocks have historically done poorly due to poor governance and auditing failures.

You could say that about the Chinese stock market in general. Neither the SSE Composite nor the Hang Seng correlate all that well with Chinese GDP growth.

A valuable exercise, I think, would be to figure out what parts of a social network you could make monetizable without ads. Facebook et al have everything under the sun but not all of those features are monetizable (arguably some of them probably aren't worth the squeeze)

I think a great example of a part of a social network that would be good is event organizing. Partiful I believe is attempting to make money in that particular space by offering paid super-user features for higher-volume party promoters and the like.

The behavior with a lot of commercial real estate loans atm is literally called “extend and pretend”

Commercial loans are not like residential mortgages and often the loan is based on a minimum rent. If you go below that then you are in default.

How do they make mortgage payments without rent?

* own a portfolio of real estate, so losses in one area can be offset

* own a mixed use building, so an empty ground floor retail space can be offset by multiple floors of apartments

also, if the rise in equity outpaces the losses in rents it can still be net positive

If you have a two letter last name you need a three letter first name to make five. Joe, Bob, Sam, etc.

UW and Washington University are two totally different, unrelated institutions.

Tunnels are actually pretty safe in earthquakes, Japan for example is criss crossed with them.

A tunnel is actually the least likely to shake; if you shake a jello with fruit inside it, the surface moves a lot but the interior fruit won’t move all that much.

Houston doesn't have zoning laws, but it does have private deed covenants enforced by the city which effectively work as zoning laws. https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/Neighborhood/deed_restr.h...

These allegedly cover only ~25% of residential lots in HTX (mostly the wealthy ones). So sure that's a similar tool and probably distorts things, but I would be very shocked to hear this is anywhere near as important as the infinite supply of ultra-cheap land on the outskirts of town plus public subsidized roads (which will eventually bankrupt the city).

Houston has these, parking requirements, etc. I would argue if anything that mandatory parking requirements have a larger impact than zoning. Parking lots themselves push things farther apart and make not driving unpleasant.

I agree with you but I don't believe the marketplace does. If you get rid of parking requirements in Houston I doubt you'd see a significantly different development pattern because ultimately people there actually do need to park their cars.

If you remove parking requirements then the marketplace can discover the right amount of parking. Parking minimums keep the amount of parking artificially high.

That's kind of eliding the whole point of parking minimums (which I also hate, by the way). Parking is a classic tragedy of the commons issue where each individual developer would prefer not to build any parking and externalize that cost onto nearby lots/public streets/following developers.

In fact developers did do this, and "the market" responded by creating regulations that prevent it. Which are obviously causing their own set of serious problems.

Bundling a real product with a financial institution is a time tested strategy.

Airlines with their credit cards are basically banks that happen to fly planes. Starbucks' mobile app is a bank that happens to sell coffee. Auto companies have long had financing arms; if anything, providing insurance on top of a lease is the natural extension of that.

> Auto companies have long had financing arms

I have in fact heard it said that VW group is a financing company with a automobile arm. From some points of view, that seems correct.

Auto companies, yes. As I understand it, airline credit cards are mostly just co-branded cards with existing banks like Chase.

Frequent flyer programs are basically banks if you consider miles/points are currency.

That's different from the credit cards themselves--given the points degrade in value. (And which I should really start to use more.)