This morning, I came across an FT article talking about how mainland Chinese people are right now flocking to Macau to receive western mRNA vaccines. Apparently the Special Administrative Region has a single hospital offering the western varietals to “tourists”, and lots of people now want them and presumably think they are more efficacious than the Chinese alternatives. This is not surprising.

So what actually stood out to me was the photo that FT chose for the article. It’s of the half-scale Eiffel Tower replica that was built as part of a $2.5 billion casino resort in Macau known as The Parisian Macao (pictured above). There’s even a faux Louvre-like building behind it and a “Jardin” in front of it so you can get that axial view of the tower. Welcome to Paris!

Of course, this is not the sort of thing that excites me in the least. I understand why it is done and that there is clearly a market for it, but I don’t get it. It feels totally empty. Have we really run out of new ideas? So I decided to tweet something out to this effect and, in it, I included the fun fact that Macau is a former Portuguese colony and currently a Special Administrative Region of China, just like Hong Kong.

But it turns out that you can’t say this on Twitter. I don’t know why, but my tweet was immediately filtered out of my feed — twice. Instead what you can say is “Macau is a SAR of a country that starts with C and ends with A.” Apparently, this is acceptable Twitter language. Hmm. This has never happened to me before.

Thankfully, I have my own domain (which you are now reading from) where things are much freer. And collectively, we have things like the Ethereum Name Service, which is trying to create an even more censorship-resistant version of the internet. So today I decided that it was time to cancel my Twitter Blue account and put some more money into ENS tokens. This feels more like the future.