Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

It's here

So things aren’t going well at all in San Francisco, as the coronavirus have finally reach this tiny peninsula of ours. As of current count there’s nine total cases, and if trends are to go by in other countries (Italy’s Lombardy region went from outbreak to complete lockdown in the span of a week), things are going to get worst before any corner is turned.

Meanwhile, I still have to go to school today, even though one of the guidances for preventing coronavirus contraction is social distancing. I guess packed lecture halls filled with students are quite okay. Hey, you only die once, am I right?

And I’m not saying we should shut down schools for a few weeks just because I would benefit from not having to physically go to work. Taking all classes online is no easy task, and I happen to work at the department that would be in charge of sorting it out and troubleshooting any potential issues. Should the campus close down, I’m not going to be chilling at home watching car videos on Youtube or taking the GT3 out for a spin - there will still be plenty of work to do remotely.

I did take the 911 out this past weekend for its weekly exercise, after performing a quick repair of a small plastic piece on the front underside. It’s been over two weeks since I took the car out for an extended drive, so on Sunday I had a fun and glorious four-hour stint covering nearly 200 miles in and around the San Mateo mountains. As I’ve said before: these high performance sports cars tend to be more reliable when they are driven regularly, getting the internals and oily bits up to operating temperature. It’s the ones that sit for months on end that skew towards having problems.

The long stint in the GT3 left me surprisingly exhausted, which is a reminder that my fitness is not what it used to be and needs to be. I think more cardio and going back to running is needed to gain back some of the lost endurance. That’s going to be tough to do in the interim with the coronavirus going around. It’s probably best for the rest of this month to stay home as much as possible.

Let’s see how the rest of this week develops.

The 200,000+ miles Type R

As I was browsing the daily Bring a Trailer newsletter yesterday, I noticed a 2001 Acura Integra Type R got sold for a relatively measly $16,000. My first thought was the car must’ve got some miles on it, because clean samples of the legendary Type R machine have ranged from the $30,000s all the way to $70,000s for the absolute best example. Interested, I clicked on the auction, and turns out that particular car has over 200,000 miles on it. That means someone has put that many miles on an Integra Type R, a car more famous for its tendency to get stolen than its fabulous FWD handling prowess.

What an inspiration, and it does bring a smile to my face.

I’ve always advocated for putting miles on our fun cars: they are effectively useless being sat in garages. It’s sad that some people see sports cars as investments, that the best way to preserve a car’s value is to store it and keep it shiny. Therefore I take some schadenfreude glee in seeing the recent trend of Porsche GT cars dipping in value: lots of super low miles, practically brand-nw GT3 and GT2s are being sold on Bring a Trailer for $15,000 to $20,000 in depreciation, instead of the well above MSRP levels they were trading just one year ago.

You thought you were going to make some money on that Cayman GT4, didn’t you Squidward?

Porsche really cratered the secondary market by upping production of GT cars tremendously in recent years, because the brilliant engineers at Weissach want these cars to be driven and used, rather than treated as gold bars to be traded for gains. I have to give the same kudos to McLaren: the company seems bent on making great cars, with zero regard for the resale value of its pass models. Let’s leave the wiping with baby diapers and haggling over the value of options to Ferrari owners. The rest of us will keep on driving.

My own 991 GT3 is about to cross the 30,000 mile mark soon, and I only hope I’ll get to take it through 100,000 miles and beyond.

There might truly be a (coronavirus) emergency soon.

We're being surrounded!

You know, you stop paying attention for a few days and then all of a sudden the coronavirus is knocking on our doorsteps here in San Francisco. There’s confirmed cases now in Santa Clara, Alameda, and just yesterday, Berkeley. It’s as if this tiny seven by seven mile peninsula of ours is being besieged and taken hostage. Soon it’ll be our turn to face the consequences.

At least the citizenry is ready if the shelves of the local Costco is anything to go by. This past weekend the Costco our family goes to was at its busiest I’ve ever seen, as people clamor to stock up on the essentials before disaster strikes. Cart after cart of toilet paper and bottled water can be seen coming out of the store in perfect procession just as we were entering, merely looking to buy our usual week of groceries. Kudos to the power of Asians, as the rice section was completely emptied of product.

Earlier in the week I was at a Lucky’s and the entire stock of hand sanitizers was gone, though curiously there were plenty of antibacterial soap left. I guess people can’t be bothered to wash their hands even in the face of a world-wide pandemic.

I can understand stocking up on toiletries and non perishable food items, but why bottled water? What does a viral disease have to do with the water supply? This isn’t a Ra's al Ghul situation in Batman Begins: tap water will still run and be fine to drink should there be a home quarantine order. Maybe Bay Area citizens got it mixed up with earthquake preparedness and bought bottled water on instinct, which I guess isn’t a bad thing because they’ll be ready when the next ‘big one’ hits.

To prevent contracting the coronavirus, we’re being told to wash our hands frequently and to not touch our faces. I’ve no problems with the former because I’m an avid hand-washer; the first thing I do after getting to work is wash my hands, because public transportation is full of germs. However, not touching my face is proving to be difficult, because it turns out I do it frequently: a rub of the eyes, a scratch of an itch. I’ve made a conscious effort to use the sleeve of my shirt instead, but habits are really tough to break.

Stay healthy, my friends.

You think this is enough hand sanitizer?

Xmas is cancelled

The U.S. stock markets saw a 3% drop in each of the past two trading days and everyone is of course going nuts. After hovering at all-time highs for the past few weeks, the ever expanding threat of the coronavirus has finally spooked the markets into a mild drawdown. As I written about it briefly last week, the economic impact of the coronavirus is a huge lagging indicator, and we’re just starting the see the beginning signs that everything is not going to business as usual.

Being a relatively young person, I am immensely long on the stock market, so the past few day’s drops don’t materially affect me at all. I can’t even pull money out or put more money into my ROTH IRA: the former is restricted by definition, and the latter is restricted under the federal guidelines of $5,500 per year maximum. But it’s fun to watch, isn’t it? I certainly had a good laugh commiserating with workmates about how much money we pseudo hypothetically lost in the past 48 hours. That is, unless you have individual positions in Zoom or Campbell Soup: you’re actually up!

It’ll be interesting to see how President Trump reacts to this slump in the market, especially if it continues on (as of writing we are on pace for a third consecutive day of red). Trump sees the stock market as a de-facto referendum on his presidency, so any significant decline - like the ones we saw in the 4th quarter of 2018 - triggers him into irrational action. I’m sure Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is already hearing from our President to do something about this latest contraction; to continue lowering the borrowing rate and increase the Fed’s balance sheet.

Meanwhile, more so than fears of losses in the market, the coronavirus issue seems to still be proliferating, with bad news continuing to come out day after day. A friend of a friend has cancelled his wedding in South Korea because of the travel issues for attendees, and surely they’re just one of many couples in Asia that had their wedding dates affected, through no fault of their own. Yesterday, San Francisco Mayor declared a local emergency so the city can allocate resources in preparation should the virus spreads to our area. It appears we - the United States - are steeling ourselves for that eventuality, and not for a matter of if.

No Porsche until the weekend

The problem with having your weekend car stored many miles from where you live is that you can’t do anything to it during the work week. Even as parts arrive and you’re eager to slap them on or make repairs, you’re prevented from doing so because getting to the car itself is supremely time-consuming (could easily become a two-hour round trip, in my case). So you have to be patient and wait for the weekend to arrive, which is easier said than done no matter how much you love your job.

It’s just another part of the car enthusiast disease.

I don’t really pine for much these days - trying to be anti-materialistic and all, but a place to live with proper garage space to park the 911 is low-key at the very top of the goals list. Indeed there are days I feel frustrated I can’t even lay eyes my car because it’s stored so far away, especially one I paid so much money for. What it must be like for people to take their morning coffee in the garage while starring at their beloved machine and studying the lines. That’s a feeling I rather like to find out for myself in this lifetime.

However, to bring up housing in San Francisco is to invite despair; buying property anywhere near the city would mean I’d have to sell the 911 - I can’t have both. There may come a time I will have to make that decision, but as of right now I’m keen to hold onto the car for as long as possible. Because selling it means I’d be forsaking amortizing the value of the taxes paid when I bought the car - you don’t recoup that on a sale. I can stomach regular depreciation that any vehicle has, but a five-figure tax bill? I’d like to draw quite a bit more utility out of that than a mere few years of ownership.

I’ve bought my dream car, though it seems I did it backwards because usually you’d want an appropriate living situation first. That said, following the typical is so boring; that’s the story I’m telling myself, anyways.

I don’t often go downtown, but when I do…

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

One thing I’ve learn as I grow older is try not to commit yourself to something many, many months from now. It’s rather easy to throw away your time like that because whatever the thing you’ve just committed to seem so far away in the future. Surely you have time for it, right? If anything, you’re being responsible for actually planning it out in advance!

This past weekend’s showing of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Curran Theatre snuck up on me unsuspectingly because the tickets for it was bought nearly a year ago. It was quite surprising then to find out that one, the tickets had cost me $210 (I could use that money now for something else, honestly), and two, the production is two shows, and our group is watching both parts back to back, with a two and a half hour break in between. The thought of sitting for seven hours seemed dreadful; had the tickets been purchased more recently, I don’t think I would have opted for such an arrangement.

So that was my whole Saturday, dedicated to watching a play about wizards and magic.

And I’m happy I did. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a fantastic play, replete with a story that’s deserving of following up the main books and movies. The acting is superb, and the practical effects used to show the various magic and spells are done really well. About halfway into part one, I was already glad we chose to watch both parts on the same day, because the story is that grippingly good. It would be slightly unbearable to have to wait another day to find out the conclusion, never mind that getting to San Francisco downtown where the theatre is isn’t the easier of tasks.

Anyways, I highly recommend the play to anyone who is a fan of the Harry Potter books and movies. I would bet good money they’ll make a movie out of this story with original movie cast some time in the future. That is when I shall see The Cursed Child again, because I’m too old to sit for another seven hours to watch the play a second time, no matter how great and entertaining it is.

Chinese winter is coming

At this point, I would not be surprised if the Tokyo Olympics gets delayed.

As we head into the third month of the coronavirus disaster, I think we’re starting to see the economic ramifications from the global supply chain being effectively shut down. China is such an integral part to practically everything the world runs on that sooner or later the consequences of the country-wide lock down will start showing up. Apple have already served caution for its next quarter’s revenue due to production delays and lack of demand in China. The world’s largest mobile phone show - Mobile World Congress - is cancelled, probably because the huge contingent from China is unable to travel to Barcelona. The Formula One grand prix in Shanghai is heading towards cancellation.

My brother, who works at a Toyota dealership, tells me there’s currently a huge shortage of hybrid models, presumably due to disrupted raw material supply in China for the batteries. The situation is not ideal for him and Toyota because the company’s hybrid cars are some of its best sellers.

The stock market in the States is still at all-time highs, though I suspect with the looming cliff of quarterly reports from companies since the coronavirus outbreak, the markets might not look so rosy in a few months’ time (I’m not a professional advisor; please do your own research).

I think we take for granted how crucial China is to the smooth running of the rest of the world, so quick and easy it is to hate on China because of its communist one-party rule, that we don’t think of what can happen when that gets taken away. Unfortunately, we’re all about to find out soon enough. Personally I’ve already eliminated any thoughts of traveling abroad this year; until the corner is turned on the coronavirus, going to Asia is effectively impossible.

I suspect holding the Tokyo Olympics on-time will largely hinge on this.