Comments by "bighand69" (@bighands69) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics" channel.

  1. That is pure fantasy at best.
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  2. Every country in the EU barring Ireland and UK were part of Schengen. In mainland Europe Schengen is layered with the policy of free movement of people.
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  3. It is not that Russia has no nuclear weapons or that they have no systems that work it is a question of Russia have enough nuclear weapons for full intercontinental exchange with the US. It is one thing to fire a nuclear weapon and an entirely different thing to actually win a war with them.
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  4. The commies that want to ban cars will come after bikes next. And if they get their way completely they will ban walking as well. The Green Movement is really just a watermelon in that it is green on the outside but very red in the middle.
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  5. You can get used to it but it takes time.
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  6. The US is Germany's biggest export market and they will have to decide what they value most.
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  7. The US literally had no other option after 911. Iraq sponsored terrorism including the original trade tower attacks. Saddam was getting older and more dangerous, Ba'ath party was becoming more bloodthirsty and America had to send out a message after the 911 attacks. You may not like what happened but there was very few options after 911 to deal with what had happened. The world of dictators was watching closely and a message had to be sent out. They were under the impression that they could clean those places up by offering them what the west had but the blood feuds and culture runs so deep in those places that it was not an easy task.
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  8. Russia is going to fail as a culture and as a state which could mean that they throw everything on the table. You are trying to view this rationally when these sorts of things are never rational. We do not know how weak the Russian military is because they have only sent an expeditionary force to Ukraine. Russia has been doing this for the last 30 years but no body has been paying attention until now.
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  9. If Russia things it is about to collapse it will just start lobbing nuclear weapons. In their mind it will not matter if they use them or not if they are going to die.
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  10. Nothing but conspiracy theories. Same sort of nonsense republicans peddled about Obama, democrats about Trump and now republicans about Biden.
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  11. No country can save it's from its demographic problems with immigration.
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  12. Nope. Automation is a myth spread by those that want to introduce government welfare handouts. Most of the jobs lost in the west in manufacturing were done so by outsourcing to other places. The amount of companies that have moved their production to markets that use traditional labour is astonishing.
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  13.  @greg2502  You are just fantasising. Trump will never be president again. He lost last time and his actions with Jan 6th has totally destroyed his image and independents will never vote for him again. You can claim wilting all you want but DeSantis is more stable than Trump and will stand good chance against Biden.
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  14. I suspect before then we are going to see clean coal plants, gas plants, geothermal and a host of other solutions pop up.
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  15. China and India are not buying that much and they cannot make up for the European consumer demand. Russia is trying to put on a brave face of it.
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  16. Tesla will be fine as it makes a product that people want and there are no realistic alternatives. Elon sometimes just needs to not speak and say things.
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  17. If Germany, France, Italy and UK got together 15 years ago and decided to develop the European energy generation system they probably would have succeeded. Instead they all pontificated and virtue signalled about "Green Tech" and even today they will still harp on about it.
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  18. Robotics requires technicians, fitters, electricians and so on to operate. A CNC which can do some extraordinary things requires an operator who is trained in the system who can then output very high levels in quantity but also in quality. It will take 20 years for ai and robotics to create a world were no workers are needed. But there is the thing the large companies that will use these technologies will be under competition from small companies and the general population with the exact same technologies.
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  19.  @QuizmasterLaw  When the global order breaks down and it is about a series of countries and their agreements this on the high sea will be messy.
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  20. China cannot avoid the economic instability from a lower population level. For it to remain stable it has to have a replacement rate but that only would have worked 30 years ago not today. For China to have tried to remain stable it would have needed 15 years ago to have a birth rate of about 3.
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  21. Science is based on evidence and you can only make a claim when you have the data to back it up. Many people for example claiming it is an engineered virus simply have no proof. There are abuses of data gathering but that does not mean there cannot be clean data analysis carried out.
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  22.  @QuizmasterLaw  Let me guess Putin would be in charge of that harmonious economic community that would be the new Russian Empire. So how did that all work out if you do not mind me asking?
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  23. I think he may be wrong about the republican primaries but we will need to wait and see how that works out. I think DeSantos will have far more based republicans votes than Trump has. And the problem with Trumps campaigns is that it has no ground game.
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  24.  @mr.factoid105  He is not a political expert and does not pretend to be that but his point would not be unreasonable really. I just have a feeling that DeSantis is building momentum at a base level. Most republicans like what Trump has to say about many things and they lent him their vote in the party but it is not a given that they will do that again.
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  25. War is more than just the military assets that a country has right now. It is the ability for its industrial economy to produce. If WW3 was to begin the US would out manufacture both China and Russia combined by a factor of 20 and the US would be capable of creating a force of about 40 million men. In WW2 that force size for the US was about 16 million men.
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  26.  @teresamccartney1309  Women will not be serving on the front lines. No matter what people try to pretend. War is brutal and there is no space for compassion or ideology. Carrying 50 pounds of weight into battle under very extreme stress is not something that can be done by ideology. Women will play their part no doubt about that but it will be based on reality.
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  27. Renewable energy at present does not power a whole national grid. That alone should really show you the level of mentality on display.
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  28.  @stygian4011  That has no bearing on national energy.
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  29. China does not produce any of the chips that are used in Apple phones. I will go one further they do not produce any of the complex components in the phones and are really the factory base were the phones are assembled.
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  30. US debt is not real debt and is something else entirely. There is real debt built into it but not as much as people think.
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  31. If they get paid sick leave it will mean that the cost increases and it also means that employees that are not sick will have to pay for those that are off. In Europe where sick leave is enforced by law there is a proportion of the workforce that will take advantage of that and use it as a holiday system. So instead of taking a holiday they will just phone in sick. At first the cost will not be that high but after a few years it will increase the cost of an employee's overall earnings by a few percent per year and over 40 years of working that employee will be $400,000 less well off. If Unions members want sick leave their solution is simple they can start an insurance system to cover those that fall into these hard times. Such a system will not be open to the same level of abuses and it could also have company contributions.
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  32. I assume you are joking.
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  33. The US does not have a singular critical infrastructure it has a series of regional, state and county systems. There is no country on earth that could take the whole of that system out and if they attack one part of the system the US will respond with a big large hammer of some sort.
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  34.  @attilaann2458  That is pure fantasy.
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  35. The US never lost in Vietnam. People confuse the war that occurred their with the US decision to pull out.
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  36.  @frivolousarguments8578  The US killed 2.5 million Vietcong and got them to surrender with the peace accords. The US congress then like Joe Biden just decided to pull out. The US did not wage total war in Vietnam as it was not a war for the US.
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  37. More than likely the US will be building out its own steel industry from ground to foundry.
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  38.  @deborahhebblethwaite1865  I assume you are talking about the US? The US has a solution for those immigrants and that is to deregulate the market and allow a new cycle of development like happened in America before. There has been various waves of this happening before and opening up the market solves the problem. It is the reason why people flocked to new york and then went out to other parts of the US to form new economic engines.
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  39. US clothing made out of cotton is an important industry and will be more so in the future. Would you rather buy an american shirt of one made by child slave labour.
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  40. Depends on how the missile would operate.
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  41. They cannot sell that is the thing.
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  42. Will not make up for the massive loss of China.
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  43. Japan did not hit the US due to sanctions. Japan hit the US so as to try and dominate the pacific. They were under the impression if they took out the US fleet in Pearl Harbour that it would enable to to conquer all of the pacific.
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  44.  @DouglasDavis  It had nothing to do with sanctions. The US carried out sanctions because the japanese were not acting out of trade interests. Sanctions were more about trying to hem them in and was really a weak response at that stage. They hoped sanctions would avoid war but that was weak thinking because the japanese were already trying to conquer asia greater.
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  45.  @urubissoldat5452  And those documents will be even better than the previous lot.
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  46.  @TheHigherVoltage  Batteries are the only meaningful way of storing photovoltaic solar energy
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  47.  @TheHigherVoltage  Converting electrical energy to mechanical is extremely in efficient. Batteries are the only meaningful mechanism that can be used. Hence why batteries are being used. You can live in a fantasy world and pretend that is not he case. Hydrogen is not realistic due to the storage issues and the fact that the process is not efficient.
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  48.  @zibbitybibbitybop  I think nuclear weapons have a mythological scale to them that is not matched by the physics. China does not have enough nuclear weapons for full exchange with Russia.
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  49.  @manishm9478  US business debt is low over all.
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  50.  @joey199412  Most of those developing nations that rely on that cheap capital from the US are very corrupt and are not market economies. No matter what happens they were always going to fail. Many of them used that capital to fund their military forces so as to stay in power.
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