Why Communities changed everything for Google+

A month ago, Google+ was a site left untouched, apart from sharing some family photos with family members. Today, I spend 5 times more time on Google+ compared to Facebook. And here's why.

Communities.

Google+ introduced Communities a short while ago, and it changed everything. Before, as a G+ user, I roamed in a white void of nothingness. There was no "friends" to share stuff with, because heck, no one but real geeks paid any attention to G+ after the initial "invite-only" fad. I knew there're people out there, but without an initiative, I had no reason to reach out to any of them. Communities changed all this. I was able to search on topics that interest me, from the uninspiring tech topics such as Android to actual interests such as coffee and primal diet. I was able to post on each communities different threads, and I would be getting constructive responses because the people reading them would have the same interest as me.

Here's an example, I posted a photo of a box of disposable drip coffee on both Facebook and G+'s Coffee community. On Facebook, I got the usual "cool", "what's this?" from friends and maybe friends of friends. On G+, I invoked fellow coffee lovers who provided me with actual useful insights as to how to best use this box of coffee. 

Another example, I joined this Vibram Five Fingers community, which was very new and got all but 6 members. Even with very limited action in this community, I was able to discover an online store that was doing some big discounts on VFFs. 

I think to sum it up, G+ Communities provided a channel for much deeper discussions whereas Facebook comments are either all too shallow or flame wars. 

I spend a lot of time on G+ everyday now that I have joined a good dozen or so communities. I have learned a lot in topics that interests me, and I strongly believe this is a much better use of time than browsing people's pet photos or commenting on their status of how life sucks.

I urge all of you who have given up on Google+ to give it another shot, purely in playing around with Communities. I promise that you'll be pleasantly surprised in how much an addition of one simple feature can help you learn so much more. 

(btw I don't work for Google and I get nothing for promoting their service. But I do get great gratification by knowing more people are taking advantage of this and therefore getting to learn more about stuff that they care to learn about.)

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.