Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

it's asymmetric trade warfare.

That a pretty interesting idea. Can you elaborate?

[jk]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

That a pretty interesting idea. Can you elaborate?

not much to add. asymmetric warfare is usually conventional troops fighting guerrillas.
conventional trade war is tit for tat tariffs.
asymmetric trade war responds to tariffs with e.g. withholding essential rare earths, regulatory interventions, and so on, instead of head on tariffs. i think trump's team is not considering these possibilities. they just look at the exports and imports and see we can have more tariffs than they can.

actually, i think the biggest asymmetric move to date is having kim jong-un change his mind re nuclear weapons. i think china is pulling the strings there.

[shiny!]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

I use google very, very rarely. 99.99999% of the time I use ixquick or startpage for search. Startpage gives me google results with the trackable data stripped away. ixquick is owned by the same company as startpage and offers the same privacy. IIRC, ixquick uses up to 10 search engines to generate its results.

https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-ixquick-and-vs-duckduckgo-and-vs-startpage/

[touchring]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

e.g. withholding essential rare earths, regulatory interventions, and so on, instead of head on tariffs. i think trump's team is not considering these possibilities.

No need trade war for this. I've already said there are a hundred ways to do this.

Last year, a Chinese company once wanted to buy from me, but they required a Chinese official receipt. The Chinese official receipt is printed on paper issued by the Chinese government, if I'm not wrong, only Chinese companies can purchase this receipt. So no deal as I don't have a company in China.

they just look at the exports and imports and see we can have more tariffs than they can.

If I haven't guessed wrongly, Trump doesn't even care about the trade deficit. The trade deficit is only an excuse. The real objective is to force companies (not just American companies) to create an alternative supply chain.

It doesn't matter this will worsen the trade deficit in the short term, because the benefit of having an alternative supply more than offsets the increase in cost.

For example, if China blocks rare earths to gain political mileage, but American companies are able to supply the same rare earth at double or triple the cost, it's still better than having whole factories in America shutting down due to shortage of rare earth. The damage from shutting down whole industries exceeds the cost of the rare earths by a hundred times.

[seobook]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

Search: Duck Duck Go

• Ecosia - plants trees for your searches
• Yandex - rarely mentioned because of Russian roots
• Gigablast - sort of old school and smaller index
• StartPage - reskinned Google sans knowledge graph, instant answers & inline QnA

Email/cloud storage: Yahoo/Dropbox

If you do not mind paying for email there are a lot of options out there
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar...mail_providers
Tutanota is based in Germany, ProtonMail is based in Switzerland, Mailfence is based in Belgium, Runbox is based in Norway.
I believe Mailfence also has calendar, document support, etc.
If you don't care about all the encryption stuff but just want to be off the borg then there's also Fastmail, GMX, and a number of others.
There are also third party bolt on solutions like securemyemail.com which could encrypt emails hosted by third parties.

Browser: Opera

They are apparently going public once again
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/02/br...-to-go-public/
a couple other lesser known third party browsers are

• https://www.brave.com/
• https://cliqz.com/
• https://vivaldi.com/ (created by the team that originally created Opera)

Started playing around with other names from the program, and places etc. It was trying to autocomplete all of them. At that point I was pretty certain it knew what I was watching. Now, there's a few ways maybe it figured that out.

They can map entities / concepts & look at query chains. If you search for the Bluejays then search for a Jose they might autocomplete to Canseco or Bautista rather easily. And the more recently tied the concepts are the easier it is to bleed the data across with a high degree of confidence, as they can use both data sources like Wikipedia & IMDB along with other user search query chains.

Maybe my news feed will start pushing up stories about pizza around 6pm on a day of the week I was known to be ordering it in the past, but haven't done recently for diet or whatever reason. Maybe I'll get more Dunkin Ads the month I'm most consistently making coffee at home and avoiding it in the afternoon. My real fear is that they know my habbits, and they have a real financial incentive to nudge me into them.

On this front I am perhaps more cynical than you are. Rather than thinking they'll actively nudge you to aggressively change your routines, they'll more likely be aware of your routines & then start using their "all knowing" AI to start charging advertisers for the actions you were already doing and suggest they drove incremental demand.

So I'm pretty sure that somewhere there's a Google record of what I've watched. This has only started happening in the few months to a year, insofar as I can tell.

They've been using query chains & search autocomplete far longer than that. Perhaps over time they scale it up more as they gain more confidence, but it could also be easier to recognize the pattern after you start looking for it. Most people probably don't think to look for it.

Economists platitudes about positive sum games aside, relative power is really important in the end of the day. As in, it might well be worth taking a hit in economic growth if it causes your competitor to take a bigger hit.

This is the lens which I have viewed the online monopoly platforms through. They will certainly cost themselves a bit of revenue if it means hurting the rest of the ecosystem more in order to make the prospective partners more desperate for a deal & willing to negotiate worse terms.

However, that being said, Trump is not interested in tech toys like iPhones or Windows (or any consumer stuff). He is targetting at infrastructure and security stuff like electron microscopes, industrial lasers, nuclear power plants, telco infrastructure, etc.

I think security is an easy vector for unilateral action. He may care significantly about the other areas, but have a far harder time addressing Chinese piracy, so he hits them where he quickly has deep leverage.

Trump is trying to enrage China, because you make mistakes if you become angry.

The quiet Chinese response to the latest announced $200 billion round of tariffs tells you they are in no rush to make moves.
The melt up in US equities since tariffs were implemented on Friday tells the story of the trade war concerns being an overblown nothingburger.
Whereas the performance of the Chinese stock market over the last 3 or 4 months tells an entirely different story. But moves there might have more noise in them due to the preference for real estate speculation combined with the freshness of their 2015 crisis where they had to burn through a trillion in reserves & push for tighter capital controls to stablize the stock market.

Jim Chanos (who's been short China real estate since at least 2010) mentioned a few times over the past year that Chinese real estate is the single most important asset class in the world, as their real estate speculation beyond the amount needed for usage amounts to 3% of global GDP. A recent WSJ article put it this way: "One reason is that investors are more confident in Beijing’s ability to defend the currency, thanks to tough capital controls put in place after the 2015 debacle. A more compelling reason: The most important yuan-denominated asset, Chinese real estate, is still doing rather well. ... As long as Chinese investors can make money gambling on housing—and companies can make money building or selling them—weakness in the stock and bond markets may not be enough to trigger a full-scale stampede out of the yuan."

actually, i think the biggest asymmetric move to date is having kim jong-un change his mind re nuclear weapons. i think china is pulling the strings there.

Absolutely. That change of heart was announced within a day of tariffs going into effect.

If I haven't guessed wrongly, Trump doesn't even care about the trade deficit. The trade deficit is only an excuse. The real objective is to force companies (not just American companies) to create an alternative supply chain.
It doesn't matter this will worsen the trade deficit in the short term, because the benefit of having an alternative supply more than offsets the increase in cost.

If he can guarantee negative returns on Chinese state subsidized investments while pushing some share of manufacturing back to the U.S. he wins. And he'll need to get a lot of production fully onshored because the alternative is a Rube Goldberg set of byzantine rules as China hops markets
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/econ...amid-trade-row
"Last month, demonstrators set fire to police vehicles, defaced government buildings and brought Chinese-owned factories to a standstill across Vietnam. It was the worst flare-up of anti-Chinese sentiment since 2014, as workers protested over the government’s plan to set up three new special economic zones where investors will be able to lease land for up to 99 years. Demonstrators fear they will be dominated by Chinese interests."

[dcarrigg]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

I am working on this project over the weekend. I just wanted to say thank you for this. I'll let you know how it works out. Hopefully resistance is not futile.

• Ecosia - plants trees for your searches
• Yandex - rarely mentioned because of Russian roots
• Gigablast - sort of old school and smaller index
• StartPage - reskinned Google sans knowledge graph, instant answers & inline QnA

If you do not mind paying for email there are a lot of options out there
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar...mail_providers
Tutanota is based in Germany, ProtonMail is based in Switzerland, Mailfence is based in Belgium, Runbox is based in Norway.
I believe Mailfence also has calendar, document support, etc.
If you don't care about all the encryption stuff but just want to be off the borg then there's also Fastmail, GMX, and a number of others.
There are also third party bolt on solutions like securemyemail.com which could encrypt emails hosted by third parties.

They are apparently going public once again
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/02/br...-to-go-public/
a couple other lesser known third party browsers are

• https://www.brave.com/
• https://cliqz.com/
• https://vivaldi.com/ (created by the team that originally created Opera)

They can map entities / concepts & look at query chains. If you search for the Bluejays then search for a Jose they might autocomplete to Canseco or Bautista rather easily. And the more recently tied the concepts are the easier it is to bleed the data across with a high degree of confidence, as they can use both data sources like Wikipedia & IMDB along with other user search query chains.


On this front I am perhaps more cynical than you are. Rather than thinking they'll actively nudge you to aggressively change your routines, they'll more likely be aware of your routines & then start using their "all knowing" AI to start charging advertisers for the actions you were already doing and suggest they drove incremental demand.


They've been using query chains & search autocomplete far longer than that. Perhaps over time they scale it up more as they gain more confidence, but it could also be easier to recognize the pattern after you start looking for it. Most people probably don't think to look for it.


This is the lens which I have viewed the online monopoly platforms through. They will certainly cost themselves a bit of revenue if it means hurting the rest of the ecosystem more in order to make the prospective partners more desperate for a deal & willing to negotiate worse terms.


I think security is an easy vector for unilateral action. He may care significantly about the other areas, but have a far harder time addressing Chinese piracy, so he hits them where he quickly has deep leverage.


The quiet Chinese response to the latest announced $200 billion round of tariffs tells you they are in no rush to make moves.
The melt up in US equities since tariffs were implemented on Friday tells the story of the trade war concerns being an overblown nothingburger.
Whereas the performance of the Chinese stock market over the last 3 or 4 months tells an entirely different story. But moves there might have more noise in them due to the preference for real estate speculation combined with the freshness of their 2015 crisis where they had to burn through a trillion in reserves & push for tighter capital controls to stablize the stock market.

Jim Chanos (who's been short China real estate since at least 2010) mentioned a few times over the past year that Chinese real estate is the single most important asset class in the world, as their real estate speculation beyond the amount needed for usage amounts to 3% of global GDP. A recent WSJ article put it this way: "One reason is that investors are more confident in Beijing’s ability to defend the currency, thanks to tough capital controls put in place after the 2015 debacle. A more compelling reason: The most important yuan-denominated asset, Chinese real estate, is still doing rather well. ... As long as Chinese investors can make money gambling on housing—and companies can make money building or selling them—weakness in the stock and bond markets may not be enough to trigger a full-scale stampede out of the yuan."


Absolutely. That change of heart was announced within a day of tariffs going into effect.


If he can guarantee negative returns on Chinese state subsidized investments while pushing some share of manufacturing back to the U.S. he wins. And he'll need to get a lot of production fully onshored because the alternative is a Rube Goldberg set of byzantine rules as China hops markets
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/econ...amid-trade-row
"Last month, demonstrators set fire to police vehicles, defaced government buildings and brought Chinese-owned factories to a standstill across Vietnam. It was the worst flare-up of anti-Chinese sentiment since 2014, as workers protested over the government’s plan to set up three new special economic zones where investors will be able to lease land for up to 99 years. Demonstrators fear they will be dominated by Chinese interests."

[jk]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

a different theory of the trump-xi negotiation.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

a different theory of the trump-xi negotiation.

This doesn't cut at the core point, but this quote:

Personally, I’m always going to throw my trust behind the British authorities. I just can’t imagine the circumstances under which they would make something up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mass_Appeal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries

[touchring]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

This doesn't cut at the core point, but this quote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mass_Appeal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries

She has a company in the UK, what would you expect her to say?

http://hrobotics.co.uk/

I think her points on the settlement of trade wars are a possibility.

I mean anything could happen. But it doesn't deny the fact that with rising interest rates, the stock market, especially tech stocks are overvalued, and the bubble is becoming unsustainable.

"She served as Special Assistant to the President of the United States, George W Bush, for Economic Policy on the National Economic Council "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pippa_Malmgren

Isn't George W Bush the guy the cause for all the chaos in the Middle East and the deficits? No doubt that Obama made matters worst, but he started it all?

[GRG55]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

...Isn't George W Bush the guy the cause for all the chaos in the Middle East and the deficits? No doubt that Obama made matters worst, but he started it all?

Chaos in the Middle East dates back many, many decades and many generations. It was a Great Power playground before the USA became a Great Power.

[Woodsman]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

This doesn't cut at the core point, but this quote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mass_Appeal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries

Long before yellowcake and the "Dodgy Dossier" - and to far better effect than any imaginary Russian interference - the American political system has been a target of British manipulation operations.

"The SECRET HISTORY of British intelligence operations in America during World War II reveals that Britain was engaged in a far broader -- and more cynical -- attempt to manipulate the United States in the two years before Pearl Harbor than has previously been revealed. The British planted propaganda in American newspapers, covertly manipulated radio stations and wire services, harassed their political enemies in Congress and the labor movement and plotted against American corporations that were unfriendly to British interests, according to the secret history. They also pushed for creation of an American intelligence agency and helped install William J. Donovan -- whom the British referred to as "our man" -- at its head."

- David Ignatius. "HOW CHURCHILL'S AGENTS SECRETLY MANIPULATED THE U.S. BEFORE PEARL HARBOR."

and...

"In order to win the war, Britain needed the support of the United States as a fighting ally. But, if the Republicans ran a strong noninterventionist campaign, not even the machinations of Franklin Roosevelt would suffice to accomplish this. "The first peacetime draft law in American history, Burke-Wadsworth, and the Destroyer Deal would not have received Roosevelt's endorsement had a genuine opposition candidate stood ready to make it a political issue in the 1940 election" (p. 164).

To secure the British goal, then, the Republican candidate had to be solidly in the interventionist camp. How could this be achieved? Mr. Mahl answers his question by pointing to an anomaly: the unexpected surge of support for Wendell Willkie in the months before the Republican convention, and at the convention itself.

The stampede toward Willkie, the quintessential dark horse candidate, puzzled informed contemporaries. H.L. Mencken "wrote, after watching the nomination: `I am thoroughly convinced that the nomination of Willkie was managed by the Holy Ghost in person'" (p. 156). The boom for Willkie was contrived with heavy British support; the banker Thomas W. Lamont played a key role in the endeavor.

In any event, once nominated Willkie enabled the British strategy to proceed apace. In this connection a telling remark of Walter Lippmann, himself an ally of British intelligence, speaks volumes: "Second only to the Battle of Britain, the sudden rise and nomination of Wendell Willkie was the decisive event, perhaps providential, which made it possible to rally the free world when it was almost conquered" (p. 164). Willkie was if anything more interventionist than Roosevelt; non-interventionist voters in 1940 were in effect shut out of the presidential election."

- Thomas Mahl. "Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States."

When it comes to interfering with American politics, it's a neck and neck race between the Brits and the Israelis. Although to my knowledge, the Brits only killed our soldiers and sailors when we were at war.

"Friends like these, huh Gary."

[dcarrigg]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

The other thing that bothers me is I've noticed some "creepy things" happening for lack of a better term.

First time I noticed it, I was watching an episode of The Jinx on HBO through the Roku app on the smart TV. I went to search for Robert Durst on the phone, got 3 letters in, and it suggested his full name as an autocomplete. Now there are a lot of Robs out there. So how did it know I wanted that one? Started playing around with other names from the program, and places etc. It was trying to autocomplete all of them. At that point I was pretty certain it knew what I was watching. Now, there's a few ways maybe it figured that out. It's on the same router. Roku app and my google account are probably connected through the youtube app on the Roku at least, so maybe Roku and Google share data. I also put the Roku app on the phone to act as a remote control one day the damned thing went missing, and so maybe the phone is putting 2 and 2 together that way. There's an outside chance any one of the mic'd devices could be listening from time to time and have picked up what was playing on the television, although that's much less likely because the processing power required should matter and I've never had it happen when watching something sent through a cable box rather than off smart TV / streaming devices.

I honestly don't know exactly how the phone knew what I was watching, but it clearly seemed to. And the fact I don't know what's happening is actually kind of what bothers me. I can think of 20 ways that the google search bar would have live access to know what I'm watching and autocomplete the search field accordingly, and whichever method it's using, I know that I never asked it to start doing it. This sort of thing has happened a few times since. So I'm pretty sure that somewhere there's a Google record of what I've watched. This has only started happening in the few months to a year, insofar as I can tell. Like I said, it's not one thing that has me looking to migrate away for a while and see how it goes. It's just a lot of little things adding up to a direction I'm not totally comfortable with anymore. I'm already letting them know more about me than probably a lot of family members know and letting them use and sell that data and advertise to me for free in exchange for access to their services. If they want me to pay them monthly subscriptions on top of that, the deal's starting to feel more and more lopsided in terms of the value I perceive that I give away vs. the value I perceive that I get.

So after that Facebook story yesterday where they were violating FTC consent decrees in secretly letting Netflix and Spotify (among others) not only read private messages, but also write and delete them on your behalf, I'm more than ever convinced that not only were my tinfoil anecdotes from the past year or two right, but that Google's almost certainly knee deep in this stuff (and probably many others too).

What cracks me up is how I said on the other thread everyone could wake up one day and realize the emperor has no clothes in tech. And today, with no special news whatsoever that I can tell, Twitter took a 12%+ hit. That's bigger than Johnson & Johnson did the other day for getting caught hiding asbestos in baby powder.

Tech better watch the hell out. Nasdaq headed for bear market. Long way down from the top floor with bloated market caps like these.

[touchring]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

China has other measures if it becomes enraged and wants a real fight. It's a fully formed dictatorship under central control, so the pain of the average Chinese citizen is pretty easy to overcome. If China wanted to they could decide to openly and explicitly steal US intellectual property and disregard all patents and copyrights. Start cloning iPhones and openly copying Microsoft Windows and sell them for pennies on the dollar. They could suddenly deny the U.S. rare earth elements, stainless steel, and all manner of critical materials now only available from China. They could nationalize factories built as joint ventures with U.S. companies, parading the U.S. staff through the streets in handcuffs for deportation.

I hope cooler heads prevail.

Is this what a cool headed person will do?

Even a 10 year old kid can tell you this is a very bad move. In the real world, if the wife or hubby starts to behave like this, the outcome is often a divorce.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...=.deb40d878332

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

You are completely correct touchring.
In that previous post from last July I was indulging in some doomer-style speculation about worst-case scenarios.
Pure fiction written by me for entertainment purposes, not a prediction.
I agree entirely, childish tit-for-tat with escalation is dumb.

[touchring]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

You are completely correct touchring.
In that previous post from last July I was indulging in some doomer-style speculation about worst-case scenarios.
Pure fiction written by me for entertainment purposes, not a prediction.
I agree entirely, childish tit-for-tat with escalation is dumb.

From the way things are being handled in the recent days, your worst case scenarios may longer be just "doomer-style speculation". The Donald Trump administration knows this and the "trade war" maybe nothing more than a cold turkey treatment to prepare the world for the new world order. Note I said the world because it's no longer just a US-China issue.

The sooner the world finds a new equlibrium and diversified supply chain, the lower the chance of a real conflict.