Comments by "buddermonger2000" (@buddermonger2000) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics" channel.

  1. Zeihan has officially transitioned to an actual video presentation. The most basic form of it, but one nonetheless.
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  2. Worth noting that it isn't just culturally a derivation of Romanian. That's an understatement. It's been Romanian for about as long as Romania has existed as a country up until roughly 1940 where the soviets demanded it with the two options given being cede it or be invaded. For anyone who plays Hearts of Iron 4, Moldova is Bessarabia.
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  3. ​ @thebeautifulones1978 they're relocating to the USA
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  4. ​@u2beuser714 It's fundamentally perception. However, the corruption is relatively well documented
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  5. Though I'd say the lesson of industrial war consuming a lot of resources was learned long ago, it seems to keep being forgotten somehow. However, your statement overall does seem fairly insightful and I do think it's important to highlight how incredibly important it is to have the capacity to ramp up and down the production of munitions given how quickly consumables are depleted in war.
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  6. Russia being saved by winter here also has no merit given that for all intents and purposes...it applies to both sides. For historical analysis about Russian winter, Ukraine is just as Russian. Not to mention they're in the south around the black sea where it's comparatively warmer anyway. So... not really much of a consideration here. In real terms it's like saying winter is on the side of the Russians while they fight the Swedes or Finns.
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  7. I have to wonder if in any capacity this is a sign of a deal with the current leaders of Afghanistan. That would be interesting if they basically traded that location in order for the US to just kind of get off their backs.
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  8. I think this one is a bit obvious: in the US domestic air travel is still the go-to way of getting around. And internationally people have always traveled to far off places. Before it was by ship. Now it's by plane. May see a decrease in travel but planes are still likely to take people places. What other nations realistically COULD gang up on the US? Only two countries share a land border with the US (both of which are under de-facto American control) and the US has the largest navy in the world. Can't really do anything to it. Another book of his outlines the coming wars of disorder with the current Russo-Ukranian war simply being one of many.
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  9.  @repo445-d4h  The good thing is that the American industrial base is actively being increased and fairly rapidly as industry is currently flowing back to the USA (largely due to automation). However the expense of re-training the skilled workers seems to overall be a very low bar so long as it is able to be brought in. Also while the missiles are largely private entities, the munitions plants are all government owned meaning wage in this case is less of an issue
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  10.  @djohnston6214  Specifically in the category of "leading by tweet" however for Wilson it would be "leading by Oration". Though there may be a good deal flawed there upon further review.
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  11.  @NoHairMan  Great actually. The French are having issues because they started switching them off lol
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  12. @CraigPerry  First off: you're incredibly dense and lack some basic reading comprehension. Secondly: The pension systems would be adequately paid for if the pot wasn't often used as a source of extra funding and simply allowed to be a system that you pay into and then receive your money back. Thirdly: Yes you're right you can tax more to run a surplus obviously. However, the tax lever is not the most effective. The most effective long term is to dismantle the budget in order to run a surplus. Simply taxing your citizens more reduces their ability to pay for goods and services and hurts long term growth. Which, also means your tax budget stays stagnant while it would be growing with faster economic and wage growth, even with the same tax policy.
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  13. That sounds a lot like how Florida functions currently where it's one of the demographically unhealthiest states on paper, but the retirement communities really shift the balance there. What's weirder is that a lot of northerners move south in the US for similar reasons, and they're still more demographically stable than the north.
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  14. I understand, and reading that I'm similarly concerned, but if you're looking at a geographic map, it does work but only with a larger Hungary. Really what you can do is trace a map of the old Austrian empire by the mountains in the region
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  15. 0 hour lol
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  16. Well in the coming decades the stagnation is going to stop and wages are going to inflate dramatically as much of that stagnation was from globalization and the huge population that was the boomers which is ending. Lots of costs will likely go down due to energy availability of the USA as well. On top of that, it's known that the US has it probably more expensive than most of these other places which have much more government intervention to depress those costs. However, the US still had their kids while the rest of the world did not. Frankly the idea that it's the cost of living which depresses the birth rate doesn't stand up to scrutiny unless it's REALLY hard times which occur such as famines or things like locking down your entire population.
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  17. Perun went over this is one of his videos. Wars are very long and expensive affairs. So you have to have the necessary production to survive but algal the necessary stockpiles to survive until you can spin up industry since industry doesn't just turn on or off. But industry also doesn't stay on unless stuff is being bought. The only ones who seem to have taken this into account were the Americans.
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  18.  @k0zzu21  Russia has been and up until now was the largest supplier. Kazakhstan is also in the Russian sphere. Australia also doesn't output very much so there's an open question to how much that can be scaled.
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  19. Well no the Bronze Age collapse involved a number of factors such as invasions into the civilizations present by "Sea Peoples" as well as a number of other factors. The reason why we wonder how it happened is because the main writings we're able to gather and translate are so sparse with the details and so we're left with bits and pieces. This really has no analogy.
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  20. Not necessarily. They might be able to false flag but losing this badly as the aggressor I'm not sure he has the political capacity to actually properly escalate. And the war will not get any easier on Russia this way as the longer the war lasts the more time the west has to ramp up production and give material. On top of this, single largest transfer of equipment more than that which has been transferred over 6 months turns a military which has been running almost exclusively on manpower into one that's suddenly injected with the equipment they actually need to conduct a war. Remember the Ukrainian military is a RUSSIAN military. Equipment, tactics, etc. They're post Soviet but they were part of the core of the Soviet Union. So they did inherit that style of fighting. They've basically been mixing in western things as needed to comply with their equipment use or what's just seen as more useful doctrinally but they're primarily a Russian army. It's also worth noting that the mobilization will still favor the Ukrainians due to the time it takes. I highly doubt with the state of its military at the start of the invasion that it really does have the capacity to mobilize millions of men in a few weeks. And even if they do, they still need to occupy Ukraine. It really doesn't look good.
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  21. they did inherit that after all
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  22. @CraigPerry  It is the deficit, yes. That deficit requires payment via debt. So that's how you increase the debt. In order to decrease the debt, you have to still shrink the government budget (but don't change taxes), so that you can run a surplus and pay down some of the principal. Btw our current interest is greater than the military budget.
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  23.  @u2beuser714  The problem is that it's based on survey data. And it's based on what they think of. If you don't deal with the government often, you won't really see it.
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  24. Ah yes. Industrial wars consume resources incredibly quickly. This lesson was not an insight of this war but instead one forgotten from basically every other industrial conflict. It has always been costly but the ability to shift industry and men has been something industrial nations have always grappled with. The trick of today's wars is that the mobilization systems which existed prior to the world wars have largely degraded into nonexistence and thus in essence no country now truly goes into war prepared (the USA experienced this roughly every time it declared war of not being ready for war).
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  25. THEY'RE ALIVE!
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  26. I really can't see how this is at all American exceptionalism. Problems are thus: Russia is DECIDEDLY losing right now. Russia is requiring the pulling back of all troop commitments regionally and globally. This clearly has consequences with regards to the quiet alliance structures which has made up the world post 1991. And most importantly, he didn't even start with the American consequences but those closest to the area in question. And then moved on to what the US cared about. There's nothing here about the US being the greatest. In fact the US was mostly out of it except for a leash on Isreal which may no longer be held and the ability to probably clear the western hemisphere of that influence.
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  27. No that would require him to actually win first. If he's still at war where he's trying to win and can't even use troops from that border anyway then it really isn't something he can do anything about.
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  28.  @Danishpolice-potatogod  Not necessarily. In real terms the Lukashenko regime is not that of the Russian regime. They are a significant loss but they're not one that either can be defended right now or one which actually endangers the Russian state.
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  29. this sounds like HOI4 type ambitions lol
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  30.  @wolfsblutgraumond7530  lol just look up HOI4 Turan
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  31. 0:14 No no only the Anglophones. The rest of the Europeans are great at it
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  32. Irony is always funny. Though honestly I only have one question and that is: if suburbs are the reason the birth rate is still okay why did Canada suffer a bust and France maintain itself?
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  33. Nah he's doing a pretty good post-mortem here. Also he's originally Midwest i think from like Iowa or Missouri.
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  34. 2:15 Way to name basically everything that's not the western rocky mountain states
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  35.  @djohnston6214  nah I doubt it given that he's effectively what was described here with Trump
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  36. That's not what defines a superpower and the term came into being in roughly 1950 when the soviets had only been 1 year into the bomb.
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  37. Everyone claims low income but the people who have the most kids have the lowest incomes on average. In fact, it's the highest incomes with the lowest Level of children. Combine that with living in apartments instead of houses and you have low birth rates. In real terms the only way bad economics depress birth rates are when they're so bad you have things like famines.
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  38. Good on the cotton being removed because frankly growing cotton in Arizona was effectively the same impact as the soviets diverting water from the two rivers of limited capacity into thy desert in Central Asia.
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  39. The assumption here is that there likely won't be much more migration to the US. Demographics mean that the younger people (the ones with the least ties and largest likelihood of migration) are probably not going to be very much anymore because they'll have all aged out. So can't rely on immigration anymore.
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  40. I don't think that's quite the correct direction that's going to be taking. Dog like robots would be at best logistics carriers or perhaps for certain breaching operations since those will be operated by humans. True AI controlled systems are frowned upon and not really used. They have to have orders carried out by humans. Not to mention, there are all kinds of disruption tools to interrupt links, shut down advances, or otherwise defend against that technology. So it's not going to be one to one. Not to mention, there's the time tested tactic of DIGGING protects from 99% of all attacks and even robot dog infiltrations doesn't exactly work when facing a minefield, machine guns, and heavy artillery, which I hope you've caught on to, are tactics and equipment straight out of WW1. While I think you do have a point regarding the utility of drones, I don't think they will purely become the tip of the spear. In fact, much like the tank, a probable integral part of both offensive and defensive actions. Their current utility is primarily with reconnaissance, but also with lower level fire support. I don't see them escaping from that role because they're VERY good at those and other systems are better at long range roles (though if you give a missile wings, is it now a drone?), and payloads simply reach limits in terms of weight due to the requirement to becoming airborne without a large rocket or jet engine which just makes them missiles. The true question is going to be this: will the mobile protected firepower role still be an optimal way to break through enemy units? I'd suggest, that much like the cavalry it replaced, that role is far better suited to being the tip of the spear, than local limited firepower. The way to use drones is to not create an independent drone force. That completely defeats the purpose. No. What you want is complete integration of this equipment throughout all combat arms from Land, Sea, Air, and Space at even the individual soldier level.
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  41. ​@jamsbean4383 Drones do not act autonomously. We've half banned the concept already. Basically, everyone recognizes the danger in that and has an incentive to prevent that vector of use. Not to mention that it's just that much more vulnerable to fratricidal engagement than simple remote controlled measures.
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  42. ​@blackcatdungeonmastersfami5311 This is basically entirely false. Lancets neither roam nor are Ukrainian drones completely jammed. Drones, as they currently work, are slow movers incredibly vulnerable to air defense, making larger drones simply not viable in the current conflict. What's far more useful of a concept is using them for artillery spotting, making them incredibly huge headaches and priority targets whenever seen for both sides. Also, the Ukrainians have had more success with those small drones than the Russians have due to just having more experience with off the shelf options. That's how you get the grenade drop videos, with most FPV videos being Ukrainian. The battlefield is littered with drones from both sides.
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  43. At the very least if he can explain why it didn't happen according to the events there's a decent credibility there. With the Russia thing he at least explained that Russia has just turned off the warmer oil wells and not the ones under the permafrost. We'll see what happens with China. Also, unfortunately, you don't get huge surges in credibility for being NEAR a date. I watched a talk in which a dude said he'd predicted war in Ukraine by Russia in 2020. 2 years earlier than when it did clearly. Whoops. Also kind of silly how probably the only reason Russia didn't invade in 2020 thinking back is because of the pandemic. If everyone's sick it's not a great time to launch a war.
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  44.  @EasyEight3674  Yeah I don't think too many realize that they really aren't special. Times are good in retrospect not during in most instances.
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  45. Incredibly hard to ship natural gas. Unlikely to really ship. Probably stay in US markets.
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  46. Well, to be fair, you predicted Biden would win. Kamala isn't Biden.
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  47. He's done the second in other times but yeah part of this is contributing to the jobs
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  48. 6:31 What about the 1921 Soviet-Ukrainian war?
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  49. At this point the South is more industrialized and arguably more populous than the north. So we'll see how things go
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  50.  @markpukey8  Another one is known as NEET. But yeah Japan has that as a problem.
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  51. Political position and reform which is what he avoids deliberately
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  52. @CraigPerry  Yeah no not quite. It's literally part 2. It's Government Budget - Tax Revenue. Lower the former or raise the latter you get the same effect.
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  53.  @davidcoverdale722  Over medium and long tbh
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  54. Yes boycott the USA in favor of the slave driven economy who wants to invade one of our greatest producers of modern tech.
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  55. I kind of doubt it's just tanks. As of September 7th Ukraine had captured 1500 pieces of vehicles (range of MBTs and SPGs to Supply Trucks). Btw those were visually confirmed so that's a floor. And that was near the start. We're another week in and the logs are starting to catch up. On top of this I can't actually find anything that says 350 tanks were transferred over. 230+ T-72 variants were sent by Poland and other allies along with a batch of PT-91 Twarty which hadn't been disclosed. So it seems highly unlikely that it's gotten to even 300 tanks. Thus, 350 captured tanks is very much higher than 6 months of shipments.
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  56. great power conflict time
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  57. I mean, first off, this is 4 months old so, start with that.
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  58. I mean first off, this is a year and a half old so, let's start with that
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  59. They're already wealthy. But the stagnation has definitely taken its toll
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  60. Can you point the other things?
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  61.  @logman72  A: No it actually wasn't. We've gotten numbers of 1500 vehicles visually reported as captured. And around 350 tanks captured. And the offensives aren't even done yet with the forces across the Dniepro about to be encircled. B: They were not "militarized police" and even if they WERE, it does not matter since they still had all of the equipment and stockpiles from the troops who were meant to be only temporarily reinforcing the South and on top of that the Units who were still there and meant to defend against what was meant to be a decently thin line and not a buildup for an offensive. C: He's not "happy" about it beyond the idea of what was considered a threat to the USA starting to no longer be such. And the things which demonstrate that. Unrelated but I'm a libertarian who's realistic about things. War is necessary. War is important. The idea of there being no war is idealistic nonsense that appeals to the idea that we're post-history and thus it's unnecessary bloodshed. It's a state of mind that is the childlike default of "killing bad thus war bad" as well as the cultural trauma from the world wars that the west is still dealing with. Some bloodshed now can prevent more later. Because a lot of times bloodshed cannot be avoided. And the best way to avoid it is to avoid total war with more limited warfare. It's going to become the norm very soon as well. Make sure to watch.
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  62. 1:20 Yeah this has never worked as even in other countries with very strong pro-natalist it just doesn't work. It's there, but it's not a cause unfortunately.
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  63. It's in the thousands and while that's several orders of magnitude difference, these videos are very off the cuff and just from his head and so I can think of him saying "millions of people to throw" (which Russia does have), and confusing that for the statement with thousands of vehicles. Or even millions of tons of equipment. While there's genuinely a chance he really does believe that, the statement is so absurd and there are contexts where millions applies and so I'll give benefit of the doubt for now.
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  64. I know it's funny, but he's unironically correct here. At least about the groups that broke. I'm even inclined to believe him regarding the independents who still didn't vote for Trump because there were seriously slim margins and the margins he's breaking down by demographics are honestly pretty large by election standards. Thus completely offsetting the gains by the independents.
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  65. @LRRPFco52  Ultimately, he's looking from a factional point of view. While I'm inclined to believe you, I'm not entirely sure it's true. I think it's not quite the truth. I'm willing to believe unaffiliated voters did swing to Trump because of the conditions on the ground. However, first is that you're actually getting it wrong, and you're discussing the same group as he is. Peter mentioned that the majority of independents are leaning in one direction or another (and there are no registered independents, btw). So he was discussing the group who really doesn't have leanings because they're normies who get buyers remorse without having any real political leanings because they just don't care. They did break for Trump, but i can't tell you how much either direction. Their concentrations could absolutely matter in this case. However, I'd say that the 5 million vote difference between Trump and Kamala isn't actually from them. I think it'd be a much closer race if it was (and it still was a relatively close race). Though of course, the Amish are in fact indicative of the movement of unaffiliated voters. See, Peter's factional analysis is still correct in that most of the factions that traditionally voted Democrat did, in fact, break. Their traditional bases, often lifelong democrats, did all break for Trump in massive numbers. Even the black belt broke for Trump in certain areas. Thus, I'm more inclined to believe that the deciding vote in this election aren't actually from the purely politically unaffiliated, but more likely to be the breaking of the Democrat coalition, which is represented in spirit by Tulsi Gabbard and RFK. That's the group of previously "unaffiliated" voters who I suspect really swung this election.
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  66. @Brian Miller  Actually, it kind of is. It's a primarily Russian speaking part of the country, and do remember that the last time Ukraine was independent for longer than 5 years was when it was the Kievan Rus. The Russian empire would eventually take control of the now Western and Central Ukraine back in 1772-1793. From that point on, there was basically a continuum from the western edge of Russia of Ukrainian and Belarusian into Russia proper. Donbass is on the edge of historically western Russia just before the edge of the former Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth at its greatest extent.
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  67. @Brian Miller  Actually, all of those are legitimately historical excuses for conquest. Belgium and Canada are also possibly the worst ones to give since Canada is basically America and many areas have identities which align more with the states across the border than a Canadian identity (Canadian national identity is very muted outside of Ontario). Canada is American except Quebec, really. Belgium is also a fake country created as a buffer state between the Dutch and French, which only still exists because of the current norms, basically highlighted by the fact that Brussels governs the EU. Btw the word you're looking for is conquest, not colonization. Colonization implies you're sending your own people into that area. Taking the land from others is conquest. Also, no on Russian borderlands such as the Far East (sparsely populated by anyone at all), it's actually still majority Russian speaking on that borderland because that's the Russian wheat belt. Those who are not Russian speaking are minorities even in the regions where they're most prevalent except in places like the Turkic Republic and the Caucasus. Most of the truly non-Russian populations split off from the Soviet Union but still have Russian speaking populations right around the border area. Now to address the elephant in the room, you have completely missed the very obvious use case which I initially distributed when saying that. They are ethnic Russians. Russian is an ethnicity, and the Russian speaking populations are ethnic Russians. I don't know how I really need to specify that. And of course the Russian state is ideally supposed to be representing the Russian ethnicity. What's worse is that you've accused me as providing justification for the Kremlin despite utter nonsense because I said something ostensibly true and attempted to put things in historical context for you. Of which, I very much need to add, the Soviet borders were not made with ethnicities in mind and were explicitly drawn to screw over any resulting states, which is why there are Russian populations in literally every single succeeding states. And I'm going to reiterate how stupid it is that you didn't realize that it's not just the language, but the ethnicity.
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  68. I understand the issue but frankly they're starting to be tallied the stockpiles and they're really big
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