Day D10: The Power Hour

February 14, 2025

After sleeping in nearly all day it was time to wrap up one more fitness class then assess progress. Much to my amazement, I torched an entire kilogram of body fat in a week. This pace will obviously slow down in the coming months, but it was that needed kickstart to obliterate the fat from the toxic job environment. Sure enough I'll face more of that going forward but I already gave my notice so it's not going to eat me up.

On that note, I had a long exhaustive chat about the root causes for why all this job toxicity is happening and why they are burying us teachers in all this admin and bureaucratic busywork. The conclusion was shocking: over 90% of my job could in fact be replaced by AI. But if that's the case, then it's quite revealing: not much of my job actually involves teaching. That's the extent to which they've buried us with busywork that AI can and should be doing anyway. We then brainstormed all these ways in which AI could do this. Perhaps the craziest part of the chat was, "Use AI to do this first, then attend the meetings, play along and pretend that you're not using AI. Pretend that you're checking marks, catching errors, and doing this busywork for the sake of maintaining appearances."

I had to ask the question, "Are we teachers the only ones caught up in this contradiction where they want personalized human approaches on a mass scale but where they really operate like a factory? If so, why can't we just use AI to do the busywork and keep the humans for the human work?" The answer was that teachers are definitely not the only ones caught up in this crap. At least 10 other industries came up. Most telling was immigration officers. That job could be replaced by AI also. We pointed out that Dubai is in fact doing this, and they have a small human team in case the system flags any risks or there is assistance needed. Most travelers are all low risk anyway. I then asked, "OK, so why isn't this being done in the US or Canada? Those officers are experts in human communication but it's all done with the intent to treat us like criminals or to catch us lying."

The conclusion was again shocking: it's all for security theatre. they won't be using AI at immigration for decades despite it already being used in Dubai and Singapore right now. And the worst part about it: those immigration officers at the airport and borders are unionized.

These chatGPT topics would later come to make for memorable in-person chats at social events later that night. Everyone loves to talk about AI and why paying taxes sucks. So naturally I had a few of these 'conversation cards' to be deployed at the right time and sure enough people had a lot to say about these topics.

Unfortunately the traffic was totally messed up on the way. I missed another fitness class (yes two in a row potentially) but they helpfully rescheduled. Then I found a random place to eat that served this most delicous lemon-flavored lamb and non-alcoholic beer. While at the restaurant I saw the market start to go gangbusters bullish and realized it would be a wicked night for trading. I had my eye on 5 contracts of Moderna options that was a super risky play, but if done right, I could scale out and make profits. The catch was that I would have to monitor this stock periodically during a party with alcohol.

So at the event, I met up with a woman from Norway who was the previous event. We were both scouring around all over to find some pre-drinks but it proved impossible. Dubai was quite a challenge to find alchohol, despite it being one of the more liberal Islasmic emirates. In the end we resolved it would have to be at the social event. Thankfully the drink prices were nowhere near as crazy as the last one, and we managed to split a bottle of wine for 100 dirhams each, i.e. making sure to carefully read the entire menu backwards and forwards to find the cheapest one. But if you weren't careful and just went with their recommendations, you would be seeing 500 dirhams or more vanish into thin air.

We ended up meeting a lot of other people including a very interesting Russian Brazilian woman. She explained that her husband lets her do whatever she wants. I thought this was a healthy arrangement. They are sometimes together, sometimes not. The love was seen even when he wasn't there, she kept talking about him and what they do. I realized this is the same with my wife. I love her when we're together or when we're not and I'm off doing whatever shit in Dubai. It's very clear I'm married and the Norweigan woman said, "There's guys hitting on me every day here but sometimes I just want to relax and chat with no pressure, so I'll do that with a married man". Fair enough.

Interpersed with all this chat, I kept an eye on the options positions and realized I could close them all and make $900 on the spot so I did that. Total profit potential might have been over $2000 but not getting greedy proved to be the best move. At the end of the power hour (30 minutes before market close) the position would have moved against me and I would have lost $2k or more. Worse yet the broker would have certainly liquidated the position. So this was a huge win.

Later on it was a long bus ride back to the Airbnb and a great sleep. This trip was rapidly winding down to a close. The worst part about it is just when I'm starting to make repeated contacts and get invited to future events, and also start getting traction in general for future jobs etc... it's time to leave. This makes me super frustrated and a sense of dread because going back to Shanghai is not what I want to do at all. Friends are showing me the cold and overcast weather that will last for months. On the other hand, the fact that this trip proves I have the potential to make it here motivates me greatly.

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