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It’s a nickname of the Guardian https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graun

Do you drink wine? The best analogy for the difference between Moutai vs Moutai Prince is the difference between a $100+ bottle of fruit forward Napa Cab vs a supermarket red that tastes like it had sugar injected into it. A beginner might call both a “sweet” wine, but the depth of the flavor is night and day for anyone who’s had any experience. Or the difference between a structured Bordeaux vs an astringent mess of a red blend. Both would taste acidic to a new wine drinker.

The expensive vs cheap baijius are the same way. Try some Wuliangye or Fenjiu for a couple of different taste categories to see what you like. Avoid the cheap stuff as your subconscious will tell you it’s terrible even if you’re not tasting the difference upfront.

As is true for many hard alcohols, you typically get what you pay for when it comes to Baijiu. Moutai Prince is terrible compared to Moutai but the difference is not in the immediate flavor. It’s mostly in the after taste.

Baijiu has many different taste categories. Moutai and the like are known as “Jiang Xiang” which roughly translates to Soy flavor. That’s the umami you’re referring to and it’s an acquired taste.

I find Wuliangye to be more approachable to beginners because it sits in the “Nong Xiang” category and tastes more floral. It’s not cheap but that’s where I recommend newer Baijiu drinkers to start.

We can build housing very well. It’s a matter of cost. Labor is not cheap. Have you tried to price out construction recently? You don’t need to take it from a random comment on HN. Price the market and see what it tells you. If you happen upon a magical reserve of cheap labor though, please share with the group, as we’d love nothing more than to pitch in and make our housing problems melt away for everyone.

Since this comment has been downvoted, I’ll add more math.

Building housing takes anywhere from 3 to 4 years for any significant development that can make a dent. When the average investor can get 7% with minimal risk in the S&P500, you’re looking at rewarding investors a lot more than that in returns over this time period. People would rather invest elsewhere.

Once you factor that in, you’re looking at a large % required return factoring risks like lawsuits, construction mishaps, etc.

There is a reason every new development looks like luxury housing or luxury apartments. The economics don’t favor Levittown style massive buildouts anymore.

The market will reward those who can bring efficiency to something that’s clearly an opportunity to be more efficient. That’s not where we are with housing right now.

Then you should do it. The market will clearly reward you for it right?

this ignores the basic economics which is that it’s too expensive to build housing. Labor is expensive, materials are expensive, and permitting is expensive.

Tangential to the topic: articles like this one often talk about “waiting lists” for luxury items like Hermes bags and Rolex watches. To be clear, there is no waiting list, or at least not the type that is counted down with wall clock time.

Your ability to buy the item is solely a function of spend on buying the less popular items. If you’re a big spender, sometimes the “rare” item magically appears the same day for purchase.

This matters for R&D tax credits as well. Only new feature development is considered eligible.

I’ve recently started research construction costs due to a desire to build a custom house. Not sure what it’s like in other areas of the country, but in California, everything is negligible compared to labor costs. You would figure that means we get to use all sorts of cool materials and techniques here because the costs of materials are marginal, but no, in fact it’s the other way around. Unless you’re willing to put up with the cheapest and lowest common denominator combination of materials and techniques, people look at you funny and assume you’re okay with your costs blowing up by 10x because now the labor involved is not standard. With the million dollar (and easily higher) house construction costs, instead of the best, we get the absolute worst. That includes using the bare minimum amount of concrete in our shallow foundations that would be a laughing stock anywhere else in the world.

It would be like if every programmer only does 90s style PHP because software developers are expensive enough already and you asking for the latest Python or JavaScript is a desire to pay space rocket numbers.

I suspect what is happening is that the affordability crunch is causing a noticeable drop in demand in the HCOL areas (hence the pronounced decrease in prices in the Bay Area I noted in the original comment).

The availability of remote work and the retreat of the HCOL population to other areas in the US is likely causing an increase in demand elsewhere, as we have seen as a macro trend since the beginning of the pandemic. This demand will keep supplies low in LCOL areas.

Housing prices are dropping, as would be expected with the interest rate hikes.

House prices are set at the margins, just like any asset. Even if the folks with 3% mortgage rates sit tight and don’t sell, there will still be downward pressure on prices because prices are not determined by non-transactions. There are plenty of listings for those who need to exit the market and liquidate, driving inventory up.

Just a quick glance at Zillow and Redfin will show that Bay Area prices have already retreated 10-15% and in some cases back to 2019 levels. Every other listing has 100k+ price cuts or more.

There’s a lot of negativity towards capitalism here in this thread which is hard for me to understand when the average Hacker News user is upper middle class chatting away on social media in the middle of a work day. It seems like capitalism has done exactly a great job in lifting people out of poverty and continues to do so.

A lot of the negativity simply comes from being detached from real problems, in my opinion.

Influenza B is thought to have been made extinct recently due to the pressures introduced by SARS-CoV-2

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20211025/covid-pandemic-may-...

There are 2 things happening at once that seem to be causing a rift in online discussions:

1. It seems like people are severely underrating the flu and always have been. Remember when we closed all restaurants and bars and suspended all sports events when the flu killed an estimated 1 million people in 1968-1969? No you don’t because society seemed to have shrugged that one off. Ditto for many years when the flu kills upwards of 600k worldwide [1] 2. The reported CFR (Case Fatality Rates) across different countries is all over the place causing a lot of panic and overstated mortality rates. Countries like Italy report almost 7% whereas in Germany and South Korea, the CFR makes Covid-19 look like no big deal (Closer to 0.1%). I suspect that’s because Italy is well under counting the true denominator, while countries like SK have tested thousands of people per day making their data much more comprehensive.

There’s something unique about this year’s outbreak that seems to resonate deeply with more people. Ultimately it’s definitely not “just the flu” but it’s closer to that then a guaranteed death sentence.

We may see more damage from the secondary effects (people losing jobs, runs on medicine and supplies causing people to die) than from the virus itself.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H3... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:2019%E2%80%9320_cor...

I know a lot of folks are walking away from the puzzling aesthetic but I think that’s the point. Existing Tesla owners with a taste for existing design cues won’t push Tesla sales any further. They’ve got to expand the demographic and this design has a chance to do this.

Think of all the wrangler, hummer, truck buyers who want a militaristic, rough, unpolished steel look and this is that flavor taken to an extreme.

Other buyers still have the S3XYs to choose from so we can all have our favorite toys from the same company. No cannibalization.

This doesn’t include the fact that all foreign enterprises in China are actually 51% owned domestically. Tariffs, while severe, are no where close to this extreme protectionism.

The US finally decided to bring a knife to a gun fight.

The real problem is that there hasn’t been any attempt at policy changes to correct this. In order to do so, society needs to chip away at the problem in steps.

Right now, real estate is simply a good investment regardless of everything else because of the tax benefits of transferring properties to heirs. Depreciation and tax bases are reset, essentially making real estate a double whammy of tax benefits for the current owners as well as their heirs. Depreciation means tens of thousands of dollars saved in taxes per year per property. Transfer benefits means never having to pay that back due to generational reset. Take away the transfer and estate benefits first.

Once that first dent is made, the wealthy/NIMBYs will naturally vote for the next correct move, which is to take away policies that make housing unaffordable to their own children. As the law is right now, there is no incentive for land owners to be altruistic to society because their children are sheltered from affordability problems due to transfer benefits.

My wager is that all it would take is removing transfer benefits on commercial properties (e.g. like kind exchange, or enforcing depreciation recapture upon transfers, including 1031) to see the first domino fall on the way to an eventual partial rollback of laws like prop 13 and more property development due to fewer NIMBY incentives. That’s a very small bite to chew that leads to much greater changes down the road because it realigns incentives tremendously.

I say this as someone who has Bay Area real-estate. The strategy to reverse things doesn’t exist at the moment.

Random Conjecture: the most efficient way to build a new intelligent entity is through the process that we’ve been familiar with all this time — natural birth.

Intuition: to truly achieve all of the functions of the human brain and neurons, the most efficient structure is one that is biological or simulates our biological composition. There is likely no process (energy and material-wise) to produce human cells at the same fidelity as simply having sex and giving birth.

The grandparent post means that the customer hostnsmes also work without any API calls if configured properly.

That's a great idea. We should call them States.

A more "common" Patek like a Calatrava would be a different story and you've changed the goalpost in the discussion. So we're no longer talking about the highest levels of horological achievement -- that's fine, but the answer is still not what you're looking for.

As a software dev, you're aware of diminishing returns. Fine watchmaking is an extreme case of this. The reason it costs what it costs is because everything is done to an extreme, by hand. Engraving, finishing are all unique on each piece. Quality assurance makes sure that it's passed a variety of brutal tests (and if it doesn't, you're on the hook for fixing it for free under warranty). That's not even getting to the raw material costs, which of course is precious metal 18K for the casing and silicons and alloys and synthetic lubricants for the movement. All of these pieces are proprietary and uniquely fit for the watch, so the Chinese sweatshop would need to reach a certain scale before they could produce it at profit. Just take a look at the extreme lengths Rolex goes to manufacture these watches with automation (linked in the original comment post). Patek has to do most of that by hand to keep each piece unique.

Is there a high margin in the business when done right? Absolutely. Should the Chinese all give up the counterfeit industry and move in high quality watches instead? No, because the pricing would be within the same order of magnitude (though no longer out of reach like the earlier example with the highest levels of watch making) with large gains on labor and marketing cost but minus the heritage and history to actually sell the pieces.

I think you're inaccurately making some assumptions about watchmaking that's fundamentally cutting your estimates down significantly to state that a Patek could be manufactured at 1/100th the price by a sweatshop or even 1/10th. It can't be done for the same reason why there isn't a Chinese Bugatti Veyron. The product is that good and true expertise and industry is backing that product.

At the end of the day, we don't need to argue hypotheticals. If this were possible, it would already be done. In the wild, there are plenty of cheap counterfeit watches with Patek written on the dial but there are no "fake" Patek level watches that a person familiar with watches wouldn't immediately spot as a fake.

And ultimately it's disengenuous to make any argument using "image" or marketing as a basis when it's done with fanfare plenty in our industry (a la Apple)

Anyone who buys a watch for the status is going to be disappointed. A $200,000 car will get you laid quick. A $200,000 watch wouldn't get noticed except by geeks you wouldn't want to bed down anyway. Fortunately, in 10 years, at least the latter will still be worth roughly just as much if not more while the former would be depreciated to less than half the value if that.

I have some interesting pieces from the 1950s that are still running with no repair to date (but these were well kept).

I'm fortunate enough that my grandparents had some of their really old watches sitting in a drawer. For most of them, I just picked it up and it worked. They had no need for them, so they're in my care now. Got lucky :)

You really can't say with anything else over 60 years old. Heck I'd be ecstatic if any of my code even runs/compiles in 30 years from now, let alone 60. But I'm pretty certain the same old watches will still be ticking when it's time for my grandchildren to rummage through my drawer and find them happily awaiting another windup. Timelessness in a timekeeping device is part of the appeal.

I noticed that the commentary in this thread seems to be full of untruthful statements being thrown around as facts. This probably betrays the fact that the audience here is not very knowledgeable about mechanical watches, which was part of the curiousity mentioned in the original post.

No, a run of the mill mechanical Seiko (say a Seiko 5 or even a SARB) will not run as accurately as a modern Patek. That's silly. Patek have their own Seal of quality guaranteeing a certain range of drift per day and performs well beyond COSC requirements. The typical Seiko wouldn't come close unless you're starting to get into Grand Seiko territory or Spring Drive movements which is a different league.

Rolex vs PP on a typical 3 handed watch will have similar performance, with the Rolex probably fairing better due to the typical Rolex being designed (and QAed) for more extreme conditions. However, the most complicated Rolex is an annual calendar and this is where PP shine.

I know you're asking this question as a rhetorical but the answer is not what you think it is.

The answer is "yes" of course a Chinese made Patek Philippe would be an object of appreciation. But there isn't one.

There's actually a rich history of Chinese watch making and it's worth reading up on if you're into mechanical watches at all: http://chinesewatchwiki.net/History_of_Chinese_watchmaking

In fact the project 304 chronograph is still considered collectible, even the reissues: http://forums.watchuseek.com/f71/review-ed1963-chinese-milit...

However, back to answer your question precisely, China simply doesn't have an industry or heritage or history that can support a Patek, which is why it doesn't exist. Even with the history I've linked to above, the Swiss industry is light years ahead and it's not even close.

I don't think you should let your bias, if any, of the very inferior counterfeit movements and counterfeit casing industry color your opinion of watches. Anyone in the know would trivially identify the differences. To your analogy it would be like producing a cheap engine and simply calling it an F1 engine. That's not how it works.

Furthermore, if you asked this theoretical Chinese sweatshop to build a modern highly complicated Patek Philippe, it wouldn't cost 1/100 the price, it would cost 100x the price if not more. They'd have to start by sourcing synthetic materials, reinventing tools, or recreating components that a theoretical sweatshop wouldn't even have access to. Part of why counterfeits are so cheap is because they source really cheap Japanese or local Chinese movements that have had decades of build up to scale to the current counterfeit prices. Meanwhile, the real deal modern watch movements are decades more advanced.

You won't find many manufacturers (if any) that use jewels in the movement for anything other than efficiency purposes. Rubies are actually one of the most low friction natural materials known to man, so watchmakers have been using them in movements for a long time.

Only recently have we started seeing more advanced materials/alloys being used in lieu of Rubies.

I think you may be referring and responding negatively to decorative watches found in fashion stores typically sold for a few hundred dollars. The mechanical watches discussed here and in the original article are in a different universe.

Nowadays, there is very little functional purpose. But historically, they were used widely and the robustness of the watch mattered a lot. There's a very good reason the Omega Speedmaster was sent to space.

Today's mechanical watches are a celebration of that tradition. You have to have an appreciation for that as well as the historical significance in timekeeping as part of civilization's endeavors into transoceanic navigation, extreme mountaineering and ultimately into space as a prerequisite for truly appreciating mechanical watches.

The best manufactures today, like Rolex, uphold that tradition in their professional line. You can read about the history of the GMT, the Explorer and the Subminariner (in particular the Milsub) to get a glimpse of the historical significance.

In some way, a mechanical watch is a miniature museum and houses some very significant advancements. Modern watchmakers continue to push mechanical and material boundaries. This is to be appreciated if only as an art, even if outdated.