My way of eating less meat

Lots of people talk about eating less meat, be it for a healthier life, religious reasons, or simply trying to reduce animal cruelty. But it's very hard to actually do it for someone who lives in a metropolitan, especially Hong Kong. (Hey did you know that HK ranks *drumroll* FIRST in the world in per capita meat consumption, and is 33% higher than the great US of A?) There's this whole Green Monday movement which is obviously great in trying to reduce total meat consumption by 1/7. But the problem for me is, being a guy with a family, it's very hard to go home and expect everyone else to eat veggie with me. So here's what I think is an alternative, except it's an alternative that's even better:

No meat until sunset.

My rationale is this: it's normally not very hard for a person to go meatless during breakfast. Cereals, yogurts, or just a plain coffee is a great morning starter. For someone like me, who also does intermittent fasting (no food for 16 hours intervals), this is a non issue (since I don't eat anything with calories for breakfast anyways). For lunch, a working person would either eat alone or with friends. The hard part is to find the food, and ample online resources can cater for that. If that's sorted out, eating vegetarian for lunch is pretty easy. At most cuisines there're vegetarian dishes and unless it's Chinese, most have very little sharing going on so there's no issue with causing disturbance for others. I've never had anyone question my food of choice because a four-cheese pizza or a mushroom risotto are perfectly normal food in a meat-eater's eyes.

And for dinner, meat is allowed. That'll dodge a lot of inevitable debates during family dinners. It'll also make dining out easier.

So to wrap it up, this method is clearly not as good as going 100% vegetarian but it's a good middle point, and I see it an improvement versus Green Monday since mathematically I'm getting 3.5 days meat-free (or 2.5 days even if I only do Mondays to Fridays)!

Apple Inc, from an investment perspective

Short Apple. That's my short of the decade. This ain't gonna pay off in 3 months or even a year, but given that Blogger doesn't go down in 10 years, I'm pretty sure this post will look very good by then.

Which is crazy. AAPL trades at $587 today, and the company is posting a $44 eps, making its PE2012 13.3x. Given that it's usually a bad bad idea to short anything 13x historical PE, let alone a tech stock, this is a pretty whacked trade. Let's say Apple posts zero growth in the upcoming year, it's still trading at forward PE2013E 13.3x. fuck. looks like shorting it is dumb. 

But what about in 10 years? Given my firm belief that Apple has seen its peak and its innovation died with Steve Jobs, I'd say this company is going down the shithole and it's just a matter of time. It has its huge cash pile now, but one day it'll burn out. When iPad 10 looks exactly like the 9.7" brick we see today, and when iPhone 10 continues to play behind the curve, that cash will burn out. 

Going back to the short trade, and why it's dumb. It's only dumb if a short squeeze is in the coming, meaning the short will incur huge fucking loss before seeing the light of day, and meaning that there will be a better time to short in the future. But what exactly is gonna push this company forward from this point on? Tim Cook is great at doing what he does which is pennypinching, which is great for the bottomline today, but he's made all the possible wrong decisions in terms of innovation. (yes taking the DVD off the iMac to make it slimmer is one of them. The man clearly doesn't know Blurays still sells pretty well.) My belief is that Apple has lost it, and if I am right, then there's nothing on earth that can push its stock price higher, from this point on. 

So, maybe the time is now and maybe one just needs to bite the bullet and short a 13x PE tech stock. But hey, at least borrow will cost you next to nothing.

Footnote: i'm not even gonna promote this post on Twitter or Facebook cuz I don't need to start a flame war. If you somehow came across it and read it, thank you. If you want to comment, please make it constructive. 

The Dark Knight Rises: John Blake

SPOILER ALERT: pls stop reading if you haven't seen Batman: The Dark Knight Rises.



Now that you've been warned, we can start. Just to put it out there, this isn't a movie review. I just want to write to hopefully start a discussion on Joseph Gordon-Lewitt's character. His name is John Blake, and by the end of the movie we would learn that he has a middle name "Robin". It's natural to assume he's Christopher Nolan's version of Batman's unpopular sidekick, even though his name is not Tim Drake or Dick Grayson. My real question is, will Nolan take this any further? Nolan has said he won't be doing more Batman movies, and Christian Bale also said this is his last time acting as the Dark Knight. But what about a movie centered around Robin? (Guys, don't roll your eyes just yet.) Nolan has been able to develop a solid backstory on John Blake, and JGL's acting in The Dark Knight Rises has shown he's up for the task of leading a movie. Can this be the one time for Robin? Can he actually be both cool and the center of attention? I would love to hear what the internet has to say about this.

From a business angle, this also makes a lot of sense. It will be hard for Warner Bros to just let such a profit-making franchise die. To reboot it in even the distant future will be suicidal as the Nolan trilogy has impacted so much on the franchise and Nolan has put such a large footprint on Batman as a character. The only way to continue raking in the money is to develop a side-story, and Robin seems like a natural fit.

On a slightly longer shot, maybe Nolan will let John Blake be Nightwing, which is obviously ultra-cool. Except I think Nightwing isn't as well known by the mass public and it may not be as good a fit for Warner Bros business wise.

What do you think? Discuss!