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

  1. 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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  2. Romney infamously won Independents in 2012 and lost the election…
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  3. 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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  4. 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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  5. 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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  6. 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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  7.  @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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  8. But WSJ commenters assure me China is just outcompeting the US, and it doesn’t have overcapacity problems! 😂
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  9.  @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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  10. That’s not the problem here, they tried that, and it still didn’t work.
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  11. 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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  12.  @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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  13.  @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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  14. 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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  15.  @RishTheMan Polling showed that the majority of Independents would not change their vote based on the verdict.
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  16. 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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  17. 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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  18.  @peirithoosian  I keep a decent amount of cash under my mattress for that reason, so thanks, I guess?
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  19.  @pauldennison1757 that doesn’t make sense, poor people lean GOP overall.
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  20. Well, if you get off Twitter, that might help. ;)
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  21. 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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  22. 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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  23.  @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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  24. 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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  25.  @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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  26.  @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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  27.  @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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  28.  @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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  29. Look up the Gatez 8.
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  30.  @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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  31.  @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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  32. 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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  33. Guys, they recorded a 3%GDP increase.😂
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  34.  @SenorJuan2023  ‘Pay for Play’ is not trivial. The Indictment only ever accuses Trump of using Classified documents as a trophy, not selling them.
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  35. Martyrdom.
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  36. Russia’s demography is only ‘terminal’ compared to a more sustainable birth rate. However, basically all of Eastern Europe has worse demographic situations (with the exception of Poland and Hungary, you also have to add emigration to the mix). Russia has lost many people, but it’s nothing compared to the EU-aligned nations, which have lost people to Western Europe as workers, or Ukraine, which has lost them as refugees.
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  37. Makes me wonder if we should stop having public pensions so that people will have kids. Children used to be an ‘insurance’ in case the parent got sick or retired. Not anymore.
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  38.  @tim211292  Trump never locked Hillary up, though. Which is important.
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  39. Well yeah, but Inflation can very easily become toxic, and is difficult to stop once it gets out of hand… The 70s-80s stagflation period was not fun. There is a reason Reagan won in 1980. Also, the Federal government pays interest to the Federal Reserve (still don’t get why, but it does), so interest can become a serious burden later on.
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  40.  @cwx8  I live in BC as well. ‘America’ describes the US, or the continents called the Americas. Indigenous or Aboriginals are used more here, but I don’t use them, partially because I feel like it’s more accurate (Indigenous or Aboriginals can be confused with other groups, like Indigenous Australians.) I don’t see how this term matters that much, they describe the same thing. Maybe political correctness, but eh.
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  41.  @markiic Maybe the solution is actually on the other end. Stop paying out pensions so that people are forced to have kids as an insurance policy when they get old.
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  42.  @thomascbartlett5106  It's never going to happen. Remember that they have to dig through a thousand km of plateau. Also, the empty cities are mostly actually satellite cities for places like Shenzhen, Chongching, Beijing, etc. It's also not going to be built any time within the next 5 years, by which it's too late to stop China from suffering from disputes with the other powers.
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  43.  @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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  44. What would be a viable solution then? Raising interest rates while dumping money into QE? Raising taxes on consumption and austerity on social welfare to lower demand so supply could catch up?
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  45. Also, ethanol requires more oil to produce than is gotten out.
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  46. There are more Democrats than Republicans…because states like California and Maryland, and New York have automatic voter registration and closed primaries, while Republican states generally don’t. Voter registration numbers barely matter when there’s a fragmented system like in the USA. —- Also, the GOP has won 2 Presidential elections despite losing the popular vote. This has gotten worse over time due to state and rural/urban polarization. Democrats abandoning the working class and rural puts them at a geographic disadvantage. Trump nearly won the electoral college by a tie (would have won with AZ, GA, and WI) despite losing the popular vote by 4.5 points.
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  47.  @RishTheMan The polls were actually mostly right in 2016 except in the Blue Wall states, where they missed the WWC turnout for Trump. Also, Trump is polling outside the margin of Error in NV, GA, and AZ.
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  48.  @joecojones  You know that California is way wetter than Arizona and Nevada? They could easily fill their own water needs if they actually had enough storage capacity to catch the rainfall that comes during the wet season.
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  49.  @dragonhero14 They won’t come on fast enough…
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  50.  @johnpombrio  Yeah, getting a hold of him costs like $1000+.
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