Day 2 in Hong Kong started with an excellent buffet breakfast. For lunch in the Club Lounge, the feature was, of all the things. Spaghetti Bolognese. Not the standard SB, but good enough.   Decided then to look around the environs of the Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong hotel, which is an anchor tenant with the newish Kowloon Station in West Kowloon, linked to a sprawling and grandiose shopping mall.  Hard to find total costs, but perhaps $10 billion has been spent, and another $10 billion will probably be needed to complete the development.  The International Commerce Center, which was built in 2010 with the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at the top, paved the way for this all.  There is the old Hong Kong around the Peninsula and Sheraton hotels, but the West Kowloon Cultural District, with the tallest building and Kowloon Station, which opened in 2018, is already the Hong Kong of the future. A stroll around the outside. As we were about to leave, we noticed a free tram that took yo...

We are a few days away from our exciting adventure to the Orient.  One stop will be Taiwan.  However, Japan-China relations just deteriorated. Japan's first female Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi met with Chinese President Xi Jinping on 31October2025.  All went well. But on November 7, Takaichi veered from Japan's policy of " strategic ambiguity " about Taiwan, suggesting that an attack on Taiwan could amount to a "survival-threatening situation" that would permit Japan to exercise collective self-defense. This drew the ire of China, which has maintained that Taiwan is part of China, and that they will someday, by force, if necessary, regain total control,  as was done with Hong Kong.  We also will visit that city, twice on this trip. Takaichi refused to retract her remarks. Usually, most of what happens is just tense talk, but this time, China urged their citizens to hold off on any trip to Japan this year. If the Chinese take this seriously, Japan will be si...

 I get a bit into bitcoin today to reflect how volatile it can be. Yesterday,  President Donald Trump threatened new 100% tariffs on China. The  U.S. stock market tumbled , with the Dow Jones Industrial dropping 879 points, or 1.9%.  The broader S&P dropped 2.71%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite slid 3.56%. Gold rose 1.5%.   Read my posting of yesterday on how just this commodity could trigger a collapse of the USA and World . In particular,  cryptocurrencies Bitcoin ( almost a 10% decline ), Ether ( 14.2% ) and Solana ( 20% ) led the sinking , bringing total liquidations to $14.28 billion, the largest in crypto history.  One of Trump's executive order to allow digital assets to be included in 401(k) plans led to  Bitcoin  soaring to a record high of $124,000 last week.   When to capitalize (b)itcoin?  When referring to the protocol, technology or network.  But lowercase bitcoin is used as a unit of currency....