Comments by "Fredinno" (@innosam123) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics" channel.

  1. The depth of the lack of understanding of trade from Trump is greater than you think. He considers the GST (a VAT) a tariff… a consumer tax ALL products must be paid.
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  2. The problem Peter misses is that Trump didn’t challenge the CO state because he wanted to, he did it because he had to. This is also a federal constitutional issue, so it can apply to SCOTUS, not state courts.
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  3. Romney infamously won Independents in 2012 and lost the election…
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  4. Since some people are going to bring this up, Impoundment (or the executive withholding funds) is technically allowed by the Constitution, but has been de-facto barred since the 1970s after the Impoundment Control Act, as well as Train vs City of New York, both by wide bipartisan majorities (all agreed with Train vs City except 1, who concurred- and the roll call vote for the Impoundment Control Act was **386-90**.)
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  5. Trump has been polling above Biden in the polling aggregate for months at this point, and independents are currently treating this indictment the same as the one by Bragg over Hush money. (GOP gains support, Democrats support case against Trump, Independents are divided but overall don’t change their opinion much in the long run.)
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  6. Trump is allowed to fire people… just through Congress. Which is Zeihan’s point. Trump is trying to bypass Congress, which is not allowed. All you’re showing is that you didn’t watch the video all the way through.
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  7.  @history_repeats8201  You may have forgotten that Governments don’t operate on the same rules as companies.
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  8. So you’re expecting a coup? Because that’s the only way you accomplish this.
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  9. Nowhere near enough, and even if they did, the area is so arid they largely rely on the Israelis for water.
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  10. My worry is that this would basically kill the remaining rainforests in Earth outside mountainous areas. If you can grow wheat everywhere, that makes tropical agriculture much easier - but tropical agriculture is also much easier, so the pressure on rainforests will grow even more.
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  11. Why should people be forced to vote? The act of not voting is sometimes a political statement in and of itself.
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  12. My opinion? Vance is the Dick Cheney of this administration. Other Conservatives baffled by Trump 2 also appear to be coming to this conclusion after the Zelenskyy freakout meeting.
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  13.  @jasontroy3911 And the same thing will happen. Even being sent to prison may not really matter - indicting a presidential front runner was already unprecedented, and had only limited effects in the end. The problem with Trump is that he is so polarizing that people have already more or less made up their mind on him. Also, the constant cases against him have the effect of desensitization - basically, ‘the boy who cried wolf’.
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  14. But WSJ commenters assure me China is just outcompeting the US, and it doesn’t have overcapacity problems! 😂
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  15. Considering Trump’s obsession over the Southern Border, Panama makes sense. Greenland less so, but Denmark’s involvement only lasts as long as they’re not independent… and Greenland has been pushing hard for independence.
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  16.  @commenter5469 They do not, and the Russians had the city in the ‘pincer’ for months. The problem is that Bakhmut is easy to defend, so the Russians can still give Ukraine a pretty nasty punch. Bakhmut also appears to have taken so long because of the Russian high command refusing to give supplies to Wagner during the offensive.
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  17. The Panama Canal is the only part that would really add much occupation cost, and only because the US would have to deal with the drug cartels from there. For Trump, that seems to be a *feature*, not a bug. Republicans have been clamouring for a security intervention in Mexico.
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  18. Because Trump literally said he wasn’t going to use military force, which means he’s not serious.
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  19. Will the Turks turn against Russia, or are they effectively out of the coalition at this point? Seems like there are good arguments on both sides.
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  20. That’s not the problem here, they tried that, and it still didn’t work.
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  21.  @WhyteHorse2023 Yes, with FEDNOW, the process will lose all of the middlemen slowing down the process of debanking you have to go through. Now the Fed can debank people at will, without all those middlemen, meaning the scope and scale can get even faster. There’s a reason the CCP keeps pushing CBDC.
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  22. The fact that the Chinese Navy lacks range is not a secret and is basically open knowledge if you do a little research: https://www.rand.org/paf/projects/us-china-scorecard.html https://fas.org/irp/agency/oni/pla-navy.pdf Chinese Naval and Air Force projection capability declines massively as you get further from the mainland. Gordon Chiang basically cried wolf too many times that even when he has real points, he isn't taken seriously: https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/12/29/the-coming-collapse-of-china-2012-edition/ There's nothing particularly wrong in this analysis. If anything, it's come true, but he didn't account for the mass increase in debt following the 2008 crisis. Zeihan has been consistent that the collapse of China would be the result of financial, demographic, and trade stress. He also has said 'collapse' could mean either literal breakup of China or Maoist tyranny- both would be the 'collapse' of China as a major power. Maybe a bit sensationalist, but dictatorships look strong on the outside, but are really brittle on the inside. The Iranian Revolution comes to mind.
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  23.  @renaissance17  The Petrodollar is a myth. The US is not propped up by oil- otherwise, they’d have done to war with Venezuela and would not increase domestic production (doing so makes it easier to keep oil traded in USD, as the main market is in USD.) Also, Russia is using Chinese Financial service companies to overcome Western Sanctions on payment services. Also, even if it IS a gold standard, Switzerland had a gold standard until 1999. The Soviet Bloc was also not using the dollar system during the Cold War, so there is precedent for competing currency systems. This is more just a fracturing of the world order than anything else.
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  24.  @peirithoosian  I keep a decent amount of cash under my mattress for that reason, so thanks, I guess?
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  25. Well, if you get off Twitter, that might help. ;)
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  26.  @RishTheMan Polling showed that the majority of Independents would not change their vote based on the verdict.
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  27.  @danielc196  The issue is that if the US doesn’t have any real reason to maintain strong allies in a deglobalized world, there’s no strong incentive to stop naked US imperialism. We saw the flip side of the coin of that with the Iraq War.
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  28. And? He never said the waste can’t be recycled, it can be, but the US doesn’t have any reprocessing facilities.
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  29. Peter Zeihan’s fatal flaw is that he still has trust in the institutions that they won’t overstep their boundaries and that they are generally right… Apparently COVID wasn’t a big enough wake-up call.
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  30.  @pauldennison1757 that doesn’t make sense, poor people lean GOP overall.
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  31. It’s also important to note the Arctic Ocean is the shallowest sea in the world.
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  32. Considering that the Dnieper is relatively defensible, if Russia takes everything east of the Dnieper (and maybe Mykolaiv and Kherson), would it feel safe enough to be satisfied with that? Especially considering taking all the gaps doesn’t seem possible now.
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  33.  @tiananman Unless the debt is owed to the Central Bank, which also pays its profits back to the Treasury. All you’re doing at that point is printing money and moving it around, pretending to owe it to someone when it’s really just printed currency. 😂
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  34.  @rudysmith1552 Chinese TFR stats (and stats in general) are ‘suggestions’ only. They’re not reliable. Also, 1.12 would still mean China would have ~500mil by the end of the decade- something that would put the likely workforce at smaller than the US’. —- Country collapses are like stock prices. Things go well, until they don’t. —- Internationalism/Globalism pre-WW1 existed, but it paled in comparison to the modern day. Britain wasn’t as brutal as most empires, but still contributed to several Indian Famines.
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  35.  @johanhagner2341  It can still be overruled by the courts later on (which is how Roe died- Amendment 9 is simply not a strong case for upholding something), which is why the fact that it’s law is a big deal.
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  36.  @sunspot42  Thing is that building pipelines for refined product is also difficult. In some cases, building the refinery in BC (for example) is preferred so that BC would actually benefit from the oil and gas going through their province more than just being a transit state.
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  37. Thing is that Russia isn’t in the top 5 producers for most of the metals at 1:05. New Caledonia and Greenland could be able to ramp up nickel production. The biggest issue is that China produces the majority of the world’s Zinc and a huge amount of the world’s copper. So new Wind turbines may be off the table soon. Solar and Nuclear look like the way future, with maybe deep geothermal if the technology gets good enough.
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  38. No, they just think immigration is a bigger immediate issue than Ukraine, especially when there’s no likelihood of immediate breakthroughs on that front.
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  39. Look up the Gatez 8.
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  40. Guys, they recorded a 3%GDP increase.😂
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  41.  @AuAdventures  3 problems happened. Gold is heavy and is inconvenient for transactions. Therefore, paper currencies were made to represent the gold. Gold-backed currencies are based on trust, like fiat currencies. Thus, they eventually failed when more paper (either for justified or unjustified reasons) were printed than the gold in existence. Gold supply growth tends to be lower than the economic growth rate of the world (also, half of gold is used for jewelry or industrial applications.) Therefore, to prevent deflation, problem 2 may become inevitable (or require costly outwards expansion to try to get more gold supply- eg. Boer War, Opium War.)
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  42.  @Withnail1969 Silver and Fiber Optics are better replacements for copper in some applications. Copper is still the generalist king though. It’s unlikely there’s no ability to increase supply though, esp. due to recycling and new technology.
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  43.  @OldGuyAdventure Manitoba has only a very tiny sliver of the Bakken field. Literally every other Western Canadian province has more of the stuff. So them banning fracking isn’t a huge deal. The biggest untapped shale fields in Canada are the stuff in Southern Ontario. Partially, that’s because of Toronto being on top of them, but still. —- And Churchill is not viable because it’s too far up in the permafrost, resulting in high maintenance costs for infrastructure and regular shutdowns when the permafrost melts. The proposal is currently to move the port to Port Nelson, which has much less permafrost. —- Manitoba has historically been the more liberal-friendly province in Western Canada (more so than B.C., which has the hippies in Vancouver City and Vancouver Island to deal with.) It’s not likely to change policies to favour growth.
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  44.  @scottnunan4927  To be fair, the American Missile and nuke arsenal is also very old, as the US deprioritized nukes after the Cold War. Russia has prioritized nukes first and foremost as their primary survival mechanism. I wouldn’t count on the nukes not working.
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  45.  @questchain1115  Bad infrastructure and crime compared to the best developed parts of Europe and East Asia. Compared to most countries, it’s fine. Not great, but viable. Everything still gets to everywhere they need to without causing economic collapse or famine. Note that gov. Debt to DGP in Euro Area is around ~20% lower than in US. Note that EU cannot just print money to lower debt in a desperate situation , as shown during the Euro Debt crisis.
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  46. It’s very debatable to call the Dempster highway ‘all season navigable’. The entire road is gravel, not paved, and permafrost melt means massive potholes. It’s recommended to carry a spare set of tires due to how hard it is on the vehicles on the road during Summer.
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  47. Note that the reason the railroads from Russia and Central Asia are at max capacity is due to covid shutting down port capacity. In theory, the ports can be reopened; the railroads were rarely used before COVID.
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  48.  @warhorse03826  No, because she massively underperformed in the ‘Blue Wall’ she never bothered to campaign in. It was bad strategy that lost her the election.
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  49. Zeihan is right about Greenland- until it declares independence. And that looks more and more likely. Denmark is trustworthy, but is an Independent Greenland? Or will they sell themselves to the highest bidder? (China?)
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  50. Mead has been in drought conditions for decades. Vegas is actually pretty conservative with water- with the water being recycled and/or re-entering the reservoir due to the fact the Vegas Basin drains into Mead.
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