Snippets Of Travel To Macau/HK

First time ever taking Air asia as its the only airline flying to Macau. Thought I would take that route as I have not been there since the big casinos were built. Will then take the ferry to HK. First thing first, the LCCT was efficient, sort of like a cleaner (for now) Puduraya ... but somebody should really do something about the flies.

Caught up on some business reads, came across some interesting factoids:

- Did you know that for every 100 hardcover / softcover book that Amazon sells, they sold 180 e-books of the same version. That is an amazing adoption rate (e-reader, iPad, Kindle, etc.) despite the fact that many still prefer to hold a book in their hands, flip the pages, dogear them and stack on their shelves to project the "learned reader image" ... sigh ...

- Despite the casinos, Macau is still a pretty dead town.

- When will the shoe drop??? ... According to media statistics in CHINA, they found that there are 64.5m urban electricity meters registering ZERO consumption. That is a masterful way of determining the number of finished property units without occupancy. Sixty four million homes in urban centers that are unoccupied!!! Everybody is holding on for capital gains or flipping them because you cannot seriously entertain even seeing 20% of them being rented out over the next 2 years. Something has to give soon. Property bubbles are harder to prick ... you probably need a couple of major property developers being over extended or running into trouble for a start.

The general rule of thumb is that vacancy rates in major cities in China is as high as 50%. The lack of a Shiller price index or reliable occupancy rates has led independent researchers to think of new ways to keep track of these statistics. The electricity meter thing is smart indeed.

- Fortune magazine has a nice article highlighting on current possible bubbles in the financial markets. I have rated them on the frothiness (10 being most frothy):

a) China's economy 7/10

b) China's urban property 9.9/10

c) US Treasury bonds 9/10

d) Shale stocks (rock formations below ground thought to have massive gas deposits) 6/10

e) Gold 7/10

f) Cotton 7/10

- In the meantime, do check out khanacademy.org or view some of his selfless lectures (freebie) on various subjects for all to learn. Go to you tube and search for khan academy, learn in brilliantly simple exacting ways about calculus, physics, algebra etc... he has over 1,600 tutorials reaching hundreds of thousands of students. Its not going to replace the classroom or university but an exciting way to leverage on open-university-learning to supplement the teachings. Save tons on tuition class people. Bill gates and a number of other philantropists are going to be backing him in a big way.