What smart people already know about the Meta-verse

1. The quality of product delivered so-far, is on-par with products delivered at much lower costs by much smaller teams, over a decade ago.

2. The nominal investment is opaque, and you can't see how it was used in detail.

3. If the current product is a scarecrow, and they do a sudden upgrade to a much better product, everyone will see it as a well-executed stealth strategy.

4. If (3.) never happens, then it would seem that the product is a bait-switch scenario, and the real expenses are not related - unless the product really has its apparently horrible capital efficiency.

Car Economics Review

Gas is cheap in Malaysia at 205 sen/l. 

So I get at worst 0.09 l/km or 18.45 sen/km in gas costs now, on 38.66 sen/km total cost of ownership and operation, excluding parking and toll, driving about 16,800 km/y. (Purchased 3,500 RM.)

The most efficient new cars get down to 0.036 l/km or 7.38 sen/km. 

At current gas prices I would need to drive 180,000 km to make the gas savings earn back the cost of a magical second-hand 0.036 l/km car costing 20,000 RM, with 0 maintenance and insurance. At 410 sen/l I'd "only" need to do 90,000 km to earn 20,000 RM.

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While this ignores the environmental damage of operating an old car (carburettor!), it's quite a bit of math to figure out if this is worse than producing a new car, depending on the amortised years.

Also my old car has zero safety features, and would definitely maim or kill me if I got squashed between two trucks, for example. I'm nominally okay with that - but it's certainly not the lifestyle for everyone.

Table Talk

Sunday meditations :

10 years since my last sabbatical, and 8 since I took more than a few months off from managing people. Perhaps it's time to take a break from management, and switch to being an independent contributor again. However, that will depend on market forces somewhat.

Doing a napkin : I started work in 2005, and started avoiding large employers in 2007, recovering to a run-rate of 0.18 million/y in 2011. I remained on-track, swapping higher cashflows for learning experiences. From 2015 to 2020 I swapped out a cashflow of 0.9-1.4 million Ringgit for the business experience of operating an SME, first-hand. Few people I know manage their lives this way. I suppose, it's a small town ... and so people are used to simpler ways of life. As to what one can learn from this sort of approach, that is a longer story than this.

I think the guiding principle of my entire commercial career, has always been that this is training for BOD jobs. All other jobs are temporary inconveniences.

By the way, do you know how "board and lodging," are related to BODs? I guess tables are a recurring theme in my career. haha.