trey

#FloridaMan, lifelong educator, lapsed scholar (HKU PhD). 20 years in the Pearl River Delta.

writing about systems, AI, infrastructure, history, and theory

[trey @Comparativist]

I hate that China discourse is either Evil Empire 2.0 or Panda Hugger but tbh the discursive space for ppl living under its rule who could provide nuance only allows for Panda Hugger or [bad things happen to you] if you have anything worthwhile to say at all to add nuance.

[Nate Lorenzen @anatelorenzen]

To understand why we have “performative partying”, read Byung Chul Han.

[trey @Comparativist]

as a kid who grew up in He Man, it was an embarrassing show to have liked by like age 10. I have zero interest in the movie. Zero nostalgia.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Mattel took the wrong lesson from Barbie and just spent nearly $200 million proving it.

Barbie did $1.44 billion, so Mattel raided the toy closet and greenlit films for Polly Pocket, Barney, Uno, Hot Wheels, and Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots. The thesis was simple: own the IP, print the franchise. Masters of the Universe was the first real swing at it. Nearly $200M to produce, plus a marketing budget that on a film this size usually adds $100M+ on top.

It opened to $29.3M domestic, $54.3M worldwide. A movie at this budget needs around $425M globally just to break even, so He-Man has to nearly 8x his opening weekend across the entire run. And theaters keep about half the gross, so the studio actually pocketed roughly $15M of that debut.

The gross is bad. The audience breakdown is worse. Only 5% of opening weekend was under 12. Only 6% was 13 to 17. The single biggest block, 29%, was aged 45 to 54. The people who bought tickets are the people who played with the toy in 1985.

That one data point is the whole problem with the strategy. Mattel sells toys to children. The movie built to mint a new generation of He-Man fans instead drew a reunion of the old one. Nostalgia converts once. Then those buyers age out and there's nobody standing behind them.

Barbie worked because Greta Gerwig made a movie about what the doll means, and it hit a cultural moment no release slate can manufacture on command. Mattel read that result as "the toy is the asset." The toy was never the asset.

This is also the second time He-Man has died on screen. The 1987 version grossed $17.3M on a $22M budget. Four decades and an extra $180 million later, the result rhymes.

[Jon Hartley @Jon_Hartley_]

Huge new finding providing further evidence for the smartphone/technology hypothesis for fertility decline: “Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44.” https://t.co/wsY98uyGix

[trey @Comparativist]

I feel like there’s a weird thing in US domestic politics where Trump TACOing on Iran War is good and what everyone wants, but it’s also his biggest defeat but no one can call him out on it lest he persue Stupid Thing again more recklessly with fervor

[David Wallace-Wells @dwallacewells]

“The real surprise from the OECD’s subsidy numbers is that it cost China less than $18bn in sectoral support over 15 years to build an industry that can now provide more clean power than the world can readily absorb.”

[dandelion georgism 🔰🏗 @DolphinMossad]

Mormonism, Scientology, and the Nation of Islam are the only genuinely American religions.

[John F Sullivan @JohnF_Sullivan]

Counterpoint:

Xi Jinping (2012): “We differ completely from Western countries in social system, ideology & other aspects. This determines that our struggle and contest with Western countries is irreconcilable and therefore inevitably long-term, complex, and sometimes very acute”

[trey @Comparativist]

when I was 16 years old I found his Green Book on the UCLA BURN Archive and was a staunch Qaddafi’ist for about a week

[The New Statesman @NewStatesman]

In August 2010, 40 years into his reign as Libya’s dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi travelled to Rome. He disembarked the plane flanked by his team of female bodyguards, all dressed in camouflage uniforms. Also travelling with him were 30 Berber horses, which he hoped would take part in an Italian equestrian show, and the Bedouin tent he intended to pitch in a Roman park. He was in town to commemorate the second anniversary of an Italian-Libyan “friendship” treaty. But, while in Rome, he staged a lecture on the virtues of Islam to a crowd of more than 500 Italian models who were paid to attend the talk. As copies of the Koran and Gaddafi’s political philosophy were passed out, the Libyan dictator urged them to convert to Islam. The Italians were not pleased.

The quintessential Colonel Gaddafi, by @MeganJGibson

https://t.co/oUb8pVN0Y4

[Robin 🐛 @Undue_Risk]

I find the Bent Pyramid so charming, what’s more relatable than a miscalculation

[//ɍØᵽɇx @null_ropex]

apophenia, the perception of meaningful patterns in unrelated data, is considered a symptom when it produces incorrect connections and genius when it produces correct ones, and the cognitive process running underneath both outcomes is identical, which means pattern recognition at high sensitivity is the same instrument that produced every scientific breakthrough and every conspiracy theory, and what separates them is not the cognitive style but the quality of the reality-testing protocol running alongside it

[trey @Comparativist]

@mkwitzke You can take it again. Guangdong is officially no limits and there’s a restaurant owner in Sichaun famous for taking it every year and he’s line 65

[Paul Hundred, GED @paul_hundred]

In Çatalhöyük, “Daughters probably stayed connected to the house more often. Adult sons may have left.”

Marvin Harris hypothesized that matrilocality could haved been a vanishing mediator in primitive state formation, by compelling larger scale and longer distance warfare.

[DA Wei @Tsinghua 达巍 @mawangcun1]

Today is the first day of the 2026 Gaokao. In Beijing, the number of students sitting for the Gaokao this year has risen to 79,000, up from 54,000 in 2022. The nationwide total is 12.9 million. and it is expected to reach a peak of 15 million in 2030.

[加美财经caus.com @CausMoney]

经济学人：为什么中国的足球这么烂？

成功的足球文化通常并非如此，往往是混乱的、本地化的、自然生长的，依赖孩子们在街头自由踢球，依赖社区俱乐部扎根成长，也依赖年轻球员沿着层层联赛体系逐步成长。

而中国治理体系的本能，是标准化、监管和规模化复制成功。

足球却往往恰恰在权力放松控制的地方蓬勃发展，在那些制度本身并不天然容纳的社区环境中成长。

👉 阅读全文： https://t.co/eIztlD00Iv

[Terry Finisterre @terryfinisterre]

Pre colonial names for Caribbean territories, compiled by French missionary Fr Raymond Breton c 1650. Noted Caribbean historian Lennox Honeychurch says he finds this list "most reliable."

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

.@tylercowen has the best take I've seen on AI and education:

[Jack @tracewoodgrains]

Fascinating bit of theological history here.

[John Sailer @JohnDSailer]

Per the report, political goals overtake the pursuit of knowledge in a few ways.

First, scholars sometimes simply assert that what they're doing is political (which is more rare). E.g., this statement from the president the American Anthropological Association ⬇️⬇️⬇️

[Xiao Ma @maxiaoalex]

Key takeaways: China's EV success isn't a top-down planning triumph you can replicate with "industrial policy." It's the emergent product of decentralized competition, regulatory arbitrage, and local-private alliances—messy, risky, and very hard to copy.

[Xiao Ma @maxiaoalex]

🚗🔋 Many think Beijing masterfully planned China's EV takeover. Fengming Lu (@ANUBellSchool ) and I spent 3 years and 60+ interviews finding out what actually happened in our latest article @TheChinaJournal. A thread 🧵