Taiwan's Current Situation: Low Rent, High Housing Prices
Looking back at Taiwan, it also faces the issue of misallocation of real estate funds. According to the Ministry of the Interior's statistics, Taiwan's average housing price-to-income ratio has reached 10.7 times (over 15 times in Taipei), far exceeding the international reasonable level (2 to 3 times), indicating an extremely high housing purchase threshold for young people.
Moreover, the rental yield is only about 1.5% to 2%. In other words, renters only need to pay less than 2% of the housing price to enjoy the same space and living conditions.
Furthermore, government housing regulation policies are becoming increasingly unfavorable to buyers. With the implementation of real estate capital gains tax, housing hoarding tax, and vacant house tax, the high transaction costs and lack of cash flow for self-occupied properties will become apparent:
For young people sensitive to capital efficiency, renting not only reduces financial pressure but also allows funds to be flexibly invested in markets with higher returns, such as the stock market or crypto.
Under the current situation of high housing prices and low returns, buying a house is no longer a financial goal for many, but a high-cost consumption behavior.
Viewing the Housing Market from a Crypto Perspective: Is Buying a House Equivalent to Debt?
For crypto investors, asset liquidity, yield, and risk management are far more important than "sense of security" or traditional values. From this perspective, real estate is indeed gradually losing its "investment" attributes and becoming a high-cost, low-return debt allocation.
The author believes that whether to buy a house should never be based solely on life stages, but first requires understanding the purpose, definition, and life pursuits behind buying a house.
Risk Warning
Cryptocurrency investment carries high risks, and prices may fluctuate dramatically. You may lose all your principal. Please carefully assess the risks.
From internet entrepreneurship to space exploration to neural connections, Elon Musk points out that humans are standing at the beginning of a digital superintelligence explosion. He encourages the younger generation to pursue a "useful" rather than "great" life, and to approach entrepreneurial challenges from "first principles", creating the best solutions for obstacles.
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ToggleFrom Internet to Finance: Adhering to a "Useful" Rather Than "Great" Entrepreneurial Mindset
Going back to 1995, Musk faced the choice between pursuing a Stanford doctoral degree or diving into the emerging internet wave, ultimately choosing the latter, and revealing his thoughts at the time:
I didn't think about creating something great, I just wanted to try to build something useful, but I didn't feel I would do anything particularly great.
He recalled the arduous process of founding the software company Zip2, from financial constraints to eventually selling it for $300 million four years later. However, due to traditional investors' control, Zip2 could not realize Musk's vision of "directly serving consumers".
He described himself as being "somewhat constrained by Zip2", and therefore invested almost the entire $20 million proceeds into the financial services website X.com, eager to create an opportunity to directly face consumers. That company eventually became PayPal, opening up a broader consumer market.
Why is "First Principles" Important? Pursuing Truth and Efficient Action Philosophy
Musk attributes his achievements to his adherence to the "First Principles" concept, explaining:
Some physics tools are very useful, and first principles involve breaking things down to their most basic constituent elements, then clearly deriving solutions step by step, rather than reasoning by analogy or historical experience.
Using rocket costs as an example, he pointed out that the raw material cost of rockets only accounts for 1% or 2% of the total rocket cost, and by analyzing the weight and price of constituent materials, he revealed the enormous inefficiencies in the manufacturing process, pointing the direction for cost optimization.
The same thinking was applied to the equipment for xAI's supercomputing center. Faced with the 18 to 24 months needed to build 100,000 H100 training facilities, he broke it down into basic elements such as construction, power, and cooling. Ultimately, by renting old factories, generators, mobile cooling equipment, and modifying Tesla energy storage equipment to stabilize voltage, he achieved the goal in just six months:
If you want to build a rocket or a car, or you want software to compile and run reliably, you must pursue the truth to the greatest extent possible, otherwise your software will not function smoothly.
Looking Forward to a Superintelligent Future: The Path to Safe Coexistence of Humans and AI
Musk further emphasized that digital superintelligences are just around the corner, and he believes people should gradually accelerate this technology. If it doesn't happen this year, it will definitely happen next year, by which time people will ultimately see an economy thousands or even millions of times larger than the current one.
He also predicted that the number of humanoid robots will far exceed the total of all other robots, presenting an order of magnitude difference.
Facing external concerns about AI development, he candidly stated:
I'm a bit hesitant because I don't want to make "Terminator" a reality. But I realize this will happen whether I do it or not. So you have two choices: "bystander" or "participant". I choose to be a participant.
(Can AI secretly execute malicious tasks? Anthropic Test: Success rate is still low, but mostly able to deceive monitoring)
Musk stated that adhering to the truth is extremely important when building AI, even if that truth is politically incorrect. His intuition is: "Forcing AI to believe untrue things could make it very dangerous." Overall, he maintains an optimistic attitude towards AI's future.
There might be a 10% to 20% chance of destruction, but from a positive perspective, there's an 80% to 90% chance of a good outcome.
Neural Links: Expanding Human-Machine Input/Output Efficiency, Redefining Intelligence
Although Neuralink is not a necessary condition for achieving digital superintelligence, Musk believes the technology can significantly improve human data input and output efficiency, solving the current limitation of humans outputting less than 1 bit of information per second.
Currently, Neuralink has successfully helped ALS patients communicate with computers and phones as if they had fully normal bodily functions:
Within the next 6 to 12 months, we will conduct the first visual implant, which will help blind people see again, and even provide humans with sensory capabilities beyond the human body, such as infrared or ultraviolet vision if necessary.
(First Neuralink chip implant patient's human-machine integration revealed: Playing chess with mind)
Musk expects that over time, future human-machine implants will no longer just correct errors, but greatly enhance human capabilities, including intelligence, sensory perception, and reaction speed, and even redefine the nature of intelligence.
His ultimate advice to young engineers is: "Do things that are useful to your colleagues as much as possible" and "focus on super-real AI", because this is the most important guarantee of AI safety. He emphasized that humans' proportion in all intelligence will become insignificant, and future human intelligence might be less than one billionth of digital intelligence.
Risk Warning
Crypto investment carries high risk, with prices potentially fluctuating dramatically, and you may lose all your principal. Please carefully assess the risks.
