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

  1. I would love to see Peter on Joe Rogan or Lex and have a good 2 hour talk.
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  2. Why would you be excited about something that will take 60 years to play out. There are things that are much closer to be excited about such as mini fission reactors, natural gas, clean coal, robotics, ai, nanotechnology, biotechnology and computer interfaces such as VR.
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  3. It is all a fantasy.
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  4. Tesla being a success does not mean that all cars can be electric in 10 years time. There simply is not enough copper on earth to have every car as electric and to have renewable. For electric cars to be a reality it will need better battery energy storage and charging, development of a new alloy to replace copper and then a national scale build out of charging power points and so on. That is not a 10 year development.
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  5. Probably never unless they feel there is an advantage to it.
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  6. The real question is can the US actually do anything about it.
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  7. It will be a slow withdrawal but it will happen.
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  8. US economic machine is the trust.
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  9. Every country needs to be focused on its own culture.
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  10. You simply do not understand the US dollar then. The USD is based on the internal trade of the US economy that then means new currency is created. The reason they use QE is because they allow so much money to go abroad to other economies for trade so they have to make up the shortage of currency in US banking transactions. Several large banks in the US ran out of cash that could be used for trade even though they had very healthy balances of reserves but not the cash in clearing to be sent. So when you hear QE it has nothing to do with government needing money.
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  11. Scottish oil as in UK oil is important but on its own it would never sustain Scotland as an economy. Scotland had a point economically where it could have went independent but that is now long past.
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  12.  @metablue4454  The CIA as a whole is an intelligence organisation that does research and presents it to the presidency. I think people think of the CIA as in the movie version of the agent in the field or those analysts scheming in politics. 99% of the CIA is nothing more than a bureaucracy of intelligence and report writing. You will find that the politics of Washington is doing most of the scheming not the CIA. I am not saying there are not officers in the CIA, FBI or military that are not using their position of division for political means.
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  13.  @b.griffin317  Have you no headphones?
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  14. US is the world's largest oil producer and gas producer. The US imports very little energy and what it goes import is really used as part of energy training. The vast majority of US electricity is Coal, Gas and Nuclear and there is no threat to that at all. Do not confuse shutdown economics with natural abilities and production.
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  15.  @giovanni-ed7zq  Lottering munitions would probably be more effective as they would provide data of enemy positions but also lead to more accurate targeting. In a large scale offensive the ability to target accurately with information is key. Drones can start to make artillery warfare as accurate as missile warfare.
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  16. High taxes on lower workers is one way of destroying the birth rate. Most young people in such a system realize that they cannot afford to have children and will leave it off until they feel they have a better economic situation but if you study the field you will realize that it never gets better economically. Many will be in their thirties paying rent with no ability to buy a home or start a family. They tend to work unusual hours and more hours to just break even and it is happening to both men and women at the exact same time. Every European country has gone through this exact same transition and the results are predictable every time. Yet when you point it out to people that are in power they will just not care.
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  17.  @thomasherrin6798  None of the regions of the UK or Ireland has that sort of time or luxury to settle their problems. Ireland has no natural resources of significance that would allow it to function independently. Ireland only produces about 20% of its energy which is nowhere near where it needs to be. So what is more than likely to happen to the UK and Ireland is that the world will pass them by before they realize what they should have done. Irish culture is also so heavily invested into the EU project that it will be collapsing and they will still be out selling its virtues of a gone by era.
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  18. The Canadian system focuses on skilled workers that have college degrees and 10 to 15 years of post qualified experience. Most will not own a home until they are in Canada several years. I know this may not seem important but it will most certainly have an impact on the birth rate. For Canada to survive it really needs to now start having several children per birth age women which is impossible at this point. Canadian immigration is also too small to deal with the scale of the demographics trap that Canada is in. I will ask you a question do you think that Canada is capable of doing it right which means lowering the skills requirements for immigrants so that the numbers coming in would be focused on young people?
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  19. Canada is a much better destination than Germany. Peter is not saying that Canada will become a deadzone overnight. Would you not consider Australia as a destination as well. What is your professional field?
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  20. It is not a banking problem. Companies are getting caught out with having all their eggs in the low interest basket. Now that interest rates are risking many are finding them self below interest water level.
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  21. That reads like some school academic project there. A lot of wishful thinking.
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  22. That is complete nonsense. Who are you trying to kid?
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  23. China is going to collapse and so are several other cotton producers so be lucky that he was not talking about India. His point was not about how great those cotton producing countries are but how they are going to fall out of the global supply chain.
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  24. His point was that a small high output plant could complete with large plants in Asia. Now when that is applied to the whole of the southern cotton industry it will be enormous. He is not literally saying to set up a micro plant with just two software engineers. He is saying it will take a lot less staff than an Asian plant and have far higher outputs. It is the reason why a US worker has about 20 times more productive output than a Chinese worker. To staff the machines in a asian plant takes about 250 workers and that is just production staff not maintenance or technical staff. US plant production will be automated.
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  25. That Texas industry is going to creep up into border states but also make its way across into areas like Florida. It is not too hard to imagine that the southern states are about to become the main economic hubs of America.
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  26. There has always been challenges with the water levels.
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  27.  @atkkeqnfr  It is the only tool Russia has because its weapons and military culture is not as advanced as the west. They will be using a large volume of bodies in the form of conscripts and auxiliary units to form the mass of the front line offensive. That is exactly what Peter is also saying in the video. Everybody knows it is coming even Ukraine with its demands for tanks and more artillery systems. Ukraine has the advantage of fixed defensive systems and a large mobile cohort that can try and move behind and around Russian lines. Be under no other impression about what the next phase of the war is.
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  28. That may be fine and dandy but what Ukraine will also need is loiter munitions that can be used in the field by their troops. Hopefully that is what the new Stryker's will be used for.
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  29.  @ivancho5854  It is far easier technologically to do carbon and waste scrubbing at coal energy plants than it is to build out a complete renewable system. i am not that worried about climate change but what does bother me is local and regional pollution that will work its way into local soil, food supplies, air quality and so on.
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  30. When the latte sipping green hippies are living in a brutal new world their views may change.
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  31. American still retained most of its manufacturing and industry and most US trade is internal. Other countries especially Europeans have not done as well.
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  32. Narrow ai tools still need to be developed to make it to the next stage of general ai. There is a lot to be gained from narrow ai before we get anywhere near the super complex developments. In 20 years time ai will look a lot different from today but not in the next 2 years.
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  33. If you are near a farm that supplies them you may get a good price.
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  34. That is all fantasy.
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  35.  @karlcx  Still better than the European "free" colleges.
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  36. Trades and technical college qualifications are going to star to come back into fab. What will happen is that many companies that do not have the labor market will start to create that training. Companies with a small investment can easily fund a local trade college.
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  37.  @gausselim1474  There is several different combinations of overseas outsourcings. From simply buying of products made by factories based in an Asian countries through to full plant build out in an asian country and lots of different options in between that as well. There are medium sized companies that would have revenues in the hundreds of millions that have invested into Asian countries because for many that was the environment they functioned in. I for years had my businesses undercut by businesses that were outsourced and I had whole firms of consultants trying to advise me to outsource to bring down costs. There was lot of pressure out there on small and medium sized enterprises. The good to come out of this is that new competitors will pop up in the US hence why a market economy has all the advantages.
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  38. I do not think they can fix it. Germany will have an energy cost increase at the same time it has a population decrease. That could end up with their products cost much more than it does. A VW golf at £25000 is a lot more attractive than one at £45000.
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  39. Germany industrial energy has been cheap. That cost basis is not going to go up several fold.
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  40.  @klowen7778  Automation still requires employees to run the businesses. Some of the most automated business organisations on the planet are the web tech companies but they still require thousands of people to oversee all of that. Google has 100,000 employees, Microsoft has 200,000 and Apple has 300,000. No matter what people tell you about automation it still requires humans to operate it. What are you going to see is small companies in the US outputting like a large company and having a few hundred employees and this will be replicated throughout every county in America.
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  41. What the US footed for many years was a price worth paying as it meant there was no major conflicts in the world.
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  42. The European CAP system is going to cost trillions, common fishing policies has meant that countries that have no right to be fishing have all of a sudden got a fishing industry where they go and take fish from places like Ireland and the UK.
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  43.  @NickSteffen  Producing lots of cheap plastic products for western markets does not make the Chinese economy the worlds largest manufacturer. Neither does importing most of its food and pretending that it has manufactured that food.
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  44. The new systems are upgraded so who knows what variant the Ukrainians have. It could be PAC-3 or maybe even 4.
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  45. Cry cry cry all you want but the facts are the facts.
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  46.  @mcinnisj100  Those countries can choose to be poverty stricken if they want to by playing with their own currencies. OPEC countries have been claiming that they would have their own currency from the foundations of the group. For all that money that they earned from Oil they have not built one value added economy. Every production centre within the OPEC economic space has been built by the western US dollar economy.
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  47.  @maciejzwolinski2381  The reason we do not have an economic model comparable is that we have not seen a country since the era of the Roman Empire that imported the majority of its raw materials and then export the majority of its productivity. We do not have a modern world example that would allow us to compute such a situation. During the era of the black death or even industrial revolution there is no comparable system to that of China. Take Japan for example it is an export driven country and imports most of its raw materials and has a falling population but has built out its industrial base over the last 40 years to be heavily automated and now requires less of a workforce than it did 25 years ago. It literally cannot be compared to China even though they have the same problem.
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  48.  @Withnail1969  You are correct most US oil cannot be used for efficient diesel production but how does that qualify your opening statement "it's not true though". The US does not need most of its oil for petrochemicals.
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  49. If Germany had of planned out their nuclear and clean coal plants they would not be facing the same level of issues right now. But they would not have had the manufacturing advantage they had over the last 3 decades.
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  50. No advantage at all. Solar is not realistic for individual because the moment everybody would want it the price would shoot up and the availability simply would not b viable.
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