Youtube comments of Louis Giokas (@louisgiokas2206).

  1. Many years ago I was working on a US Army program. Part of it was buying desktop computers. The cost per unit was much higher than what the two star general saw in the ads in the newspaper for similar units. So, we put together a little booklet for him. The cost for the Army included everything from network equipment to printers to maintenance for three years (required for all government contracts, and many commercial ones as well). So, the story is very similar to what you are laying out here, but in a much simpler case.
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  2. Actually, green can be quite nauseating. Once worked on a simulator. In testing the displays, we had people sit in front of a display as it was cycled through all the color combinations. Green actually made people feel nauseous. Now, in nature, we tend to like green. This is an interesting situation. Perhaps the green on the display was more intense and "pure". Don't really know.
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  3. Interesting. My experience as a professional in the US is quite similar. This is especially true as you move up the corporate ladder. In my 40s I would work a full day, then go home. After the kids were put to bed I would get on my computer, often quite late, and answer emails. Now, email is a store and forward system. I expected to get answers back the next day or so. In most cases I got answers back immediately. My colleagues were on the same schedule. I also have had many experiences where I was on vacation, but still took part in meetings and answered emails. In many cases the connectivity was not good, so I had many problems on these vacations, and often got grief for it.
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  4. India, because of the reasons stated, is a much better economic partner than China. In addition, India does not have the problems, like demographic decline, that China does.
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  5. These people, like De Niro are just plain ignorant. They are not artists making art for art's sake. They are in a business. A mass market business. Shoving your politics in the face of your customers is just plain dumb. The stupidity of these people is off the charts.
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  6. My father worked for an US Army weapons lab. I remember, in my early teens, him telling me that he was able to access computers all over the country. He didn't talk much about work because it was, of course, classified. He did expose me to a lot of the electronics with manuals and parts that were commercial. It was only years later, when I was working on massively networked systems (I actually worked on the GE system you mentioned), that I recalled his comments.
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  7. I find the characterization of many US weapons as "outdated surplus". It is only "outdated" because the US continues to develop these systems, and there is indeed newer stuff. Having been in the mil-aero business, I can confidentially say that the engineering never stops. On the other hand, most of this "outdated surplus" is actually more advanced than almost anything Russia has, or that most other countries have.
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  8. Texas has always been like this. When the oil shocks of the 1970s hit and the Federal government would not do anything about it militarily, there was talks about letting Texas secede. Then they would be free to go over there and take over Saudi Arabia. This was said somewhat in jest, but the sentiment was there. Nothing unusual here.
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  9. There is a big miss in this video. The analysis does not take into account one of the key drivers, outside of raw urbanization. This is the use of property as investment. In the West, most people invest in stocks and bonds. In China the populace has little or no understanding of this. Thus, you see people buying multiple properties, mostly apartments, as investments. With rising prices, this made sense to them, and it was something they understood. One of the outcomes of this is the empty cities one sees only in China. Some of these are massive. The sector is massive for another reason. Much of the income for local government comes from selling land. Thus, they encouraged this massive amount of property development.
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  10. Kayleigh is having entirely too much fun with this. Great to see!
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  11. In the US we bring such lawsuits all the time, especially in reference to violations of our Bill of Rights. It is good to see this being done in Canada, and Mr. Peckford is a unique resource in this action. Wish him well.
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  12. I cut out all processed food, and especially sugar (or any kind of sweetener) and lost lots of weight (about 25%). I was not obese, but overweight. I am in my md-sixties now and am getting back to where I was in my mid-twenties. I have a friend, same age as me, who had type 2 diabetes and was overweight. He changed his diet a little and started exercising (dead lifting). He lost over 70 pounds, and his diabetes went away. Obesity is truly a massive health problem. Many people who died of COVID had obesity as a comorbidity.
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  13. There is an index of developing economies that includes China. It is used by managers of funds that invest in these markets. It is heavily weighted toward China (I think it between 30 to 40%). My financial advisor told me that there is a new version of the index which does not include China. This is so investors who want to avoid China can still do the same type of investing.
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  14. This being June and the anniversary of D-Day was only a couple of days ago, it is worth expanding on something Artur points out. In WWII, D-Day was delayed much beyond what the Soviets wanted. This was because the troops building up in the UK were being trained and equipped. They were going up against the enemy's strongest point (unlike Africa and Italy) and needed to be sure they were ready. The Soviets, on the other hand, were in a different situation, and their way of doing things did not value their troops at all. In the current war, we see the Ukrainians doing precisely what the allies did in WWII, preparing their troops. The Russians are fighting a Soviet (and Russian Empire) type of war. The biggest difference for the Russians is that they do not have the material support of allies. This will crush them.
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  15. In general, I agree with you. One nuance in Israel is that they do not have a written constitution comparable to the US (or much of Europe). That being the case, it is not always clear what standard the courts in Israel are adhering to. They are thus seen as political as well. From what I have heard and read, there is actually widespread recognition that some sort of reform is needed in Israel. It seems that it is just not what was proposed.
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  16. It is good to see India having so much success. India is a complex, vibrant democracy. They are a good partner in so many ways. i hope to see them take the place of China in economic relations over the coming years. It is cleat they bring much to the table on the military front. After the US they have one of the most experienced militaries in world. This is important and India is an important ally for any country.
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  17. The dispersion issue is funny to me. Even in the Boy Scouts we were taught to keep distance between scouts when hiking along a road.
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  18. I had a business at a closed US military base that was a primary Army ammunition storage site. The site was almost 100 years old when it was decommissioned. It was also involved in reloading artillery shells, and it made its own explosives. The nitrate pit was 12 acres and about 15 feet deep (it was a concrete structure). The site covered about 13,000 acres. There were hundreds of ammunition storage bunkers. They were of reinforced concrete, covered with earth and separated so that when one blew up it would not affect the others. In fact, one (and only one) did blow up once due to an accident while handling ammunition. The exact cause was never determined as no one survived. None of the other bunkers were affected. It was properly planned and constructed. From the first days of this war through to this event Soviet/Russian incompetence has become very clear. It is stunning in its scope.
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  19. To conflate trans with black and Jewish is a total affront to those groups.
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  20. Interesting point that Bret makes at the end. Either one of those senators could become Republicans. That happened in the South in the Regan era. The conservative wing of the Democrat party stymied much of JFKs agenda (he was not very successful legislatively) and helped Nixon an Regan. The parties are really splitting along ideological lines. In the past each had a liberal and conservative wing. They did not completely overlap, but on balance represented the country and their constituents. Now they have really split. What is really interesting is that, under Trump, the Republicans have come to represent labor more.
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  21. In the US, when buying a new construction home, one puts down a deposit, but the mortgage does not start until the home is completed. Another difference is that the lender and purchaser both have liabilities. Typically, whether new construction or existing home, if you can no longer pay the mortgage, the lender takes possession of the home. You may lose the equity you have built up, but you then have no further liability. The lender then sells the home to recover the loss. You may, if you have sufficient resources, sell the home before you run out of money to pay the mortgage. As long as you get enough to cover the loan, you may be better off. The system in China is so skewed against the purchaser that I wonder why it was set up that way. Both in terms of the initial purchase and the loss of income scenario, the Chinese citizen is the one who is adversely impacted. The crazy thing is that you don't permanently own the home. In the US you do. My brother is in the home my mother grew up in. It has been in the family over 100 years. I feel very sorry for the Chinese people. The reality the real estate sector will never com back. The country is already overbuilt, and the population is shrinking.
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  22. Who was saying or thinking that sanctions would immediately tank the Russian economy? Sanctions are a long game. Look at Iran. Their economy is down by something like 70%, and yet the regime is still in power. They have fewer resources to cause troubles externally, but they still do. It is a matter of degree. They are also becoming more unstable, but that is also a long game. Heck, look at Cuba. So, Artur, who were these analysts?
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  23. One of the best opening monologues I have heard in a long time.
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  24. I am responding having watched to the 8:30 mark. This is deliberate. US trade with Russia? Frankly, having Russia out of the oil and gas trade with the EU is a great boost to the US economy. Russia's economy overall is relatively small. Russia's economy is about the size of Canada, Mexico or Italy. All in the $2T range. To put it in another context, the two-way trade between Russia and China grew to $200B recently. For further context, Apple's sales worldwide were $383B in 2023. Apple's reserves, cash and investments are over $165B. One other way to look at it is that the major companies affected by the sanctions and divestments were not materially impacted. Russia is not, outside of oil and gas, a big player. In fact, for the US in those markets they are a competitor. I really don't see why resuming trade with Russia is in anyone's long term interests.
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  25. Great analysis. There may be factors that accelerate this breakup. I am specifically thinking of China. They are pushing hard to control the central Asian republics (the Stans) and wean them from Russia. This mostly for their natural resources. In the east, they still lay claim to Vladivostok. They have conducted live fire military drills in their north that could only mimic an invasion of Siberia. They also have the population to control exploit the area. Add to this the fact that, with the natural resources they would acquire, European Russia would be irrelevant to them. Russia's economy and market are small.
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  26. I went there in 1974 with a German girl I met on an island in Greece (my teenage years were lots of fun). When we were in Ljubljana we were in a shop. I picked up a package of cookies and declared "communist cookies", which at the time I thought very funny (please forgive me). My girlfriend did not. It was an interesting experience for me and caused me issues in getting security clearances in the years after. I was born in Washington, DC and my father worked for an Army weapons lab. So, finding myself in a communist country at that time was quite an experience. It was also interesting since I had just left a right-wing dictatorship in Greece. By the time we got to Trieste the junta in Greece had fallen.
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  27. The utter stupidity of the Democrats policy on fossil fuels in North America is astounding. If you want the resources to transition to low carbon energy and transportation, then you want fossil fuel production in the US. It will take decades to replace the ICE vehicles in the US. I have written on this. We have over 250M light vehicles in the US. About 18M new ones are sold a year. Do the math. Our current vehicles will last for at least 200K miles. The average vehicle age is increasing because they are much more reliable. EVs are still only about 3%, at most, of new vehicles sold. They are also much more expensive than ICE vehicles, and over five years, are more expensive than ICE vehicles in cost over at least five years. Gasoline prices are rising, but so are electricity rates.
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  28. I had a colleague named Charles Murray, who wrote for an electronics design magazine, who got lots of hate because people thought he was the "other" Charles Murray. This continued years after the book was published.
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  29. I recently upgraded from an iPhone 7 to an iPhone 15. I know, a long time. I was in a phase of upgrading all my tech. The 7 was working fine, but the battery was finally starting to go. I realize I could have had the battery replaced, but I figured it was time for a change. As for Huawei "leading the way", I hope people in China realize that they are one of the biggest thieves of other people's intellectual property.
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  30. Decoupling from the Chinese economy is the prudent thing to do. All indications are that China is headed for a fall. Those that do not find other markets will be badly affected.
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  31. I have a friend who is a high level macro economic advisor. He always said that he hoped that Xi would get a third term, because he would then destroy the Chinese economy. This friend would not invest in funds that have any direct exposure to China in Asia. From close observation over the last few years, and echoed in your reports, this is happening very quickly under our very eyes.
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  32. Rubio was a fantastic pick for Secretary of State. Every time I see him speak I am impressed. He is articulate, on message and has the right approach toward foreign policy.
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  33. At about 11:00 Boris talks about impressions of western people being pampered and weak. This is the same formulation used my Imperial Japan prior to attacking Pearl Harbor. For some reason, this is a common misconception of dictators everywhere. They ignore history.
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  34. A long way off? Are you kidding me. The war has been going on for about a year and a half, and look where Ukraine is. People throw out these figures of months or years to do something. What has been accomplished in just the last year is incredible. Provide the long-range missiles and jets and it will all change in what will seem like no time.
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  35. Don't forget Merkel grew up in East Germany. She is a commie at heart.
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  36. I am led to believe that Russia announced the termination of the grain deal prior to the attack on the bridge.
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  37. I was in Greece in 1974 when the Turks invaded Cyprus. I had just gone back to Athens from an island in the Cyclades with a German girl I had met. The Greek government was slow to mobilize, and when they did, I had a front row seat. The next few days were very strange. We then took a train to Trieste and started a long journey through Europe. I mention this because back in the US my parents were seeing articles on the front page of the Washington Post about Greek American youths being conscripted into the Army. If I had been living in Greece with my relatives I would have been registered and would have been conscripted. Fortunately, the junta that ruled Greece at the time collapsed about the time I got to Trieste. They had been robbing the treasury and there was no money left. Sound familiar? So, this situation is real, and somewhat common.
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  38. Most of the countries she says she is talking to have voter ID requirements.
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  39. What strikes me is that Labor spent years winging about the Conservatives' austerity measures, and here they are doing precisely the same thing.
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  40. France was not building nuclear subs for Australia. They were taking a nuclear design and converting it to diesel. That was one of the many problems with the program. The issue was that France would not transfer enough of their nuclear know how to allow Australia to maintain nuclear technology in Australia. The AUKUS deal does allow that. Big difference.
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  41. No, they won't get back the Golan Heights. Israel has annexed them, And Syria is in a much weaker position than they were in 1973.
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  42. I love how Greg cast aspersions on some of the "straightest" and nicest people on Fox. My favorites are "the evil Sahnnon Bream" and Dana Perino. Of course, he probably has it right for Kilmeade and Heraldo. This is one of the best programs on TV.
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  43. Our governmental medical institutions have failed us for decades. One great example is in food recommendations. Another is in the massive prescription of medications for chronic disease. The medical field has proven itself inept except in treating trauma. General health in this country has decreased in the past several decades, while we spend more and more on it. I have family and personal experience of that. Doctors, in general practice are not scientists. They are technicians. That is the tragedy. They are looked on as something they are not.
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  44. I love this. It is the same thing that happened with the Japanese in the 1980s. Flush with cash in a semi-closed economy, the Japanese bought properties at a high price, and several years later sold at a loss.
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  45. "Cash flow positive" as opposed to profitable. When I hear company execs talk that way my instinct is to run away. I once worked for a Silicon Valley firm, and at a company retreat (at a very ritzy resort on the East Coast) I remember one of the top execs talking to us at dinner about "cash flow" and how that was the important thing. This company had a specialized product and had been invested in by some big players. And yet, in ten years or so of operation, they had made a profit in only one year, if I recall correctly. Soon after this retreat I was looking at my options, even though it would mean abandoning options I had received on joining. Many years later the company was bought by one of its big investors and has really not been a success. So, when Musk talks this way, you know X is screwed.
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  46. I drink lemon water every day. A good bit. I use an organic bottled pure lemon juice. I only drink water, brewed coffee and brewed tea (with no milk or sweeteners). In fact, I don't use sugar or honey, or any other sweetener, at all. I am pescatarian, but will occasionally eat meat when I am out. Most days I eat vegetarian. I also cut out all wheat and other gluten containing foods. I sometimes eat lentils. I also eat no processed foods. I lost weight (from 200lbs to 155lbs). I didn't track how long it took me. I was not long, though. I do not follow the intermittent fasting, but only eat two meals a day and one snack (usually feta cheese and olives). I don't eat the snack every day. As a result, my blood pressure is down, my joints don't crack and my poops are good. This has lasted about six years now. I am in my late 60s and my body is back to where I was in my late 20s. I did all this before discovering your channel. I like the detailed information you give, and it helps me pick foods that contribute to my well being. Thanks.
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  47. Your pronouncements on China have been spot on. I follow a number of news and analysis sources on China, and it is like watching your predictions come true in real-time. It is at least the beginning of the end, but I think it might be more advanced. There is nothing that works in China, and no way to fix it in the current system.
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  48. The comment about buying guns in California is poignant. When my oldest son lived in Texas, having moved from Illinois where he grew up, he decided to buy his own pistol. He wanted a Beretta M9A3. It is expensive and hard to find in stock. He called around and found one at the Cabella's in Waco. He was in San Antonio, a 2.5-hour drive. This was three hours before closing. So, he high tailed it up there. Then, after doing the paperwork, they just handed him the gun. He was very surprised. They asked him where you from boy? He said Illinois. Their reply was, welcome to the United States.
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  49. The French are so entertaining. They really know how to protest.
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  50. China lies about everything! That is no exaggeration. One good example I researched, which is not political, serves as a good example. My wife at the time was concerned about rice, especially about arsenic in rice. There is always some picked up from the environment naturally. The WHO has a limit. China set their limit, by statute, at half that. So, when the wife expressed concern, I looked into it. At the time there was a study in China of over 60 rice growing regions All but two were well above the WHO limits. Even the two were above the "official" limits set by the Chinese government. Chinese government standards are bogus, and never enforced. They exist only to fool the rest of the world. I used to buy a ramen from China which included brown rice and millet. It was quite tasty but considering what I have learned about Chinese food safety standards, I threw the last package I bought away.
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  51. A country under attack or with unstable borders cannot join NATO. The Ukrainians understood that. Their policy is to move toward NATO membership. Even without this war, they would have to resolve the pre-existing conflicts over Crimea and the Donbas.
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  52. I am in the suburbs of Chicago and couldn't agree more. The time is ripe for the Republicans to flip the state, but it will take real leadership, and that is where I have a concern.
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  53. It seems that many companies are moving to the US, among other places. I recently bought three pieces of battery powered lawn tools of a Chinese company. Two of the three were made in Vietnam. I looked at the company website and found they were also opening up a factory in the US. The US has cheaper energy than Europe, so many energy and hydrocarbon-based industries from countries like Germany are relocating plants to the US. Industrial plant construction in the US is off the charts. Add to that the advantage that the US has in natural resources and agriculture, and China is toast. Another way that China hurts itself is in not allowing foreign companies to create wholly owned subsidiaries in China. This is madness and is typical of developing countries. By the way, India does this too, and it that holds them back. The only things in their favor are a large potential market and inexpensive labor. This is very much like China was. Their big advantage is that they do have a democratic rule of law-based society, so they will do better. Back to China, this restriction on foreign ownership makes it easier for foreign companies to move out. They only have half ownership (actually only up to 49%, I believe) and thus when they move, they only have half the exposure. The local Chinse company is left holding the bag. China created this mess for themselves. Add to that Xi's inconsistency in policy and his aggressiveness towards the west, his best market, and you set the stage for disaster.
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  54. You leave out one important factor about the two state solution. The Oslo Accords were a major step in achieving this. While the Palestinian leadership was behind them, the people were not. This resulted in the Second Intifada. In the Oslo Accords, the PLA recognized Israel's right to exist. Today, Hamas does not. It is not even clear if the PA in the West Bank does, That is the reason the Arab states do not care anymore. Israel has a lot to offer. Palestine has nothing to offer the Arab states but more terrorism.
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  55. Actually, the ban against baggy clothes extends to men. My understanding is that you cannot wear baggy swim trunks, as a male, on French beaches. So, why should Muslim women be allowed to. As long as the law is applied equally it is valid.
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  56. I notice that in your report, the US companies mentioned cashing out of China are selling to hedge funds outside of China. Thus, they can be paid outside of China and actually get their money out. Any company selling to a Chinese company risks not being able to take the proceeds of the sale out of China. This further depresses the value of these holdings.
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  57. Either Gov, Noem or Gov. DeSantis should be the presidential candidate for the Republicans in 2024. Maybe both should be on the ticket.
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  58. A humanities major. She is doomed from the start. The same thing happens in the US.
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  59. Don't hold back now.
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  60. I love listening to Mr. Hicks. He is brilliant, especially on this topic. I grew up at a time when reading widely in philosophy was a thing. By the time I got to university, I had read a lot of these books and of course continued to be exposed to more. My field of study and professional life, by the way, is not in these areas. I studied first physics then computer science. When I started high school, if the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, our education was broad and deep in both STEM fields as well as liberal arts. I actually dropped out of university, got a job making what university graduates were making (because of skills picked up working at school) and later went back to school. I ended up going to school while working at GE Aerospace. The company paid for it (I was very lucky). I went to Villanova University. They still had (have) a good emphasis on the liberal arts across the board. I had to take two courses in western civilization, three in philosophy, three in religious studies (it is, after all, a Catholic university), four in English literature and a foreign language. Rather than looking at all this as an imposition I reveled in it. I bring all this up not to toot my own horn, but to contrast that with what is happening in many universities today. Many of the courses I had to take are being eliminated at present. This is a disaster! Our young people are coming out of university more indoctrinated than enriched. We proceed along this path at our peril.
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  61. This mania for laying off older workers is suicide for the Chinese economy. These people (especially 45 and above) are at the peak of their skills. This is even true for industrial workers in skilled positions. They are also important for capital formation. They make good money and invest for their retirement in more productive assets. Once they retire, they convert their investments into instruments like bonds. Of course, this applies to "normal" economies around the world. It is cleat that China is not a "normal" economy. Just to give an example, in the 1990s, in the US, many big companies offered their employees 55 and older early retirement. They topped up their retirement accounts. They did this to lower their retirement liabilities. Then, they discovered that they needed these experienced employees and hired them back as consultants, at a much higher compensation.
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  62. You are correct about Muslims and Christians having more in common. It is a matter of being religious and being anti-religious. At a large Catholic school in the Midwest, I noticed a lot of Muslim students. In fact, they had a nice facility in the student union. When I asked why so many Muslim families would send their kids to a Catholic school, the answer I got echoed what you are saying. They like the Catholic schools because they are more socially conservative than secular schools. This just fits in better with them culturally.
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  63. To put it mildly, BRICS is a joke as a political or economic issue. BRICS was originally the idea of a Wall Streer investment analyst. It represented a set of countries with somewhat similar development and investment prospects. On top of this, the move by India makes total sense. Just look at who is in BRICS and their relationship to each other. India has a border dispute with China that may well soon turn into a full-scale conflict. India has been aligned with Russia but is moving away from them. On the other hand, there are a lot of Russophiles in India for historical reasons, especially among their military. China "supports" Russia, but also has long standing territorial issues them. Xi has pointed this out many times. Russia is fast becoming the junior partner to Russia. On top of that, Putin's "alliance" with North Korea is a real problem for China. Brazil and China have a lot of trade, but Brazil, like a lot of the world, has opened up dumping investigations against China. South Africa is an economic basket case and is not really sure of what it wants or needs. Don't fear the BRICS.
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  64. This is a very good exposition of the real situation in Russia backed up reason and data. Getting a little more into the weeds, to show how bad it is getting. one could look at auto manufacturing. Of course, they cannot continue to build the foreign cars whose companies have pulled out. The one indigenous manufacturer is now putting out vehicles with no air bags and without anti-lock brakes, among other deficiencies. Many of the commentaries by standard pundits just seem to ignore details and take the line Russia big, Russia win. I have seen Mr. Sonnenfeld interviewed about this report on other channels.
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  65. Good insights into the metaverse. It reminds me of Second Life (SL). I used that early on, just a little bit, for remote meetings. It was not really something that useful. Zoom and MS Teams is more than fine for that purpose, with no extra hardware required. One of the things Meta touts is augmented reality. That can be useful for industrial companies but is not something a consumer would need. The spending by tech companies that rely in advertising, on everything, is just out of control. They have more employees than the companies that were involved in aerospace and defense. Believe me, their actual products are much simpler. I come from the A&D world. I will make a prediction. The metaverse, if they improve their graphics, will become a porn site, a lot like SL.
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  66. That's strange. When I hear Wolfram talk, he makes it clear that there are multiple people working on the details of the project. He almost never uses the phraseology "I figured this detail out" or anything like that. He has been on your friend Brian Keating's channel several times discussing his concept and always talks about others who are working out a lot of the details. I have also seen him elsewhere. It is true he rarely mentions names. But, in the article on his website titled " How We Got Here: The Backstory of the Wolfram Physics Project" he mentions Gorard, among others. He also has a bio on his website where he has the following to say about what Gorard is doing on the physics project (that is not his only role at Wolfram, evidentially): "He is also one of the principal researchers on the Wolfram Physics Project, having made several key contributions to the mathematical formalism of the Wolfram model (particularly in regards to the derivations of general relativity and quantum mechanics and its connections to quantum information theory);" You may want to dig a little deeper.
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  67. I was on Loch Ness with my sons. We on a boat that had had sonar and we saw the monster in the deep. At least that is what we told my sons, who were primary school students.
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  68. This is good. Instead of diplomatic niceties we see real discussion. It may be uncomfortable to some, but we need it.
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  69. On the second item, about the Chinese Coast Guard vessel ramming a Japanese ship, I think the Chinese should rethink their stance. The last time China and Japan clashed, the Chinese came out badly. I don't think it advisable for them to clash with Japan again.
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  70. China's agricultural land is far less productive than that of the US and many other countries. It requires far more inputs. Actually, Brazil is in a similar situation, only potentially worse. Disruptions in world trade will affect both China and Brazil greatly. One must not forget why the one child policy was implemented. The fear of the CCP was that their growing population would be a detriment to their rule because of their inability to feed it. Opening up and allowing massive food imports helped. The one child policy has condemned China to demographic collapse. That is not a strong position from which to threaten the world. A country that imports a large amount of food and industrial inputs from far away is in no position to take over the world. China's navy is in no position to guarantee these inputs will flow freely. That also assumes that other countries will still want to send them.
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  71. Greg had way too much fun with this topic. Epic!
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  72. Thinking that Putin's grip on power will be strengthened is probably a delusion. Putin looked pathetic. Stalin didn't leave Moscow when the Germans attacked. People will remember that. Also, I don't think Prigozhin would have done what he did without some support. This was a test. Putin failed that test, whatever happens to Prigozhin.
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  73. Not only is Cuba an agricultural society, but it is a primitive one. My father-in-law was in Cuba when Castro died. He even brought me back some cigars including a Cohiba that was the type that Castro himself smoked. He also brought back some Monte Christos in a wooden box embossed with a likeness of Che Guevara as well as a newspaper with the announcement of Castro's death. For old anti-communists like us it was quite amusing. But I digress. The reason I mention my father-in-law's trip was that he took tours of the countryside. His wife is from a farm in the Midwest. Her father started out with 40 acres, a mule and a plow in the opening decades of the last century of the last millennium. To this day the family has an aversion to mules and horses. They are also very mechanized. So, when my father-in-law saw farmers in Cuba using mules and plows, he was amazed.
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  74. Trump wanting to see Hollywood do well again is just another example of how he is for ALL Americans. There are numerous examples from his first term and from the recent campaign. In his first term I recall that he would have black activists who supported reforms he was making in the Oval Office for events. In the campaign he went to Chicago to address a meeting of black journalists, for example. He is not for leaving anyone out. MAGA does not discriminate against anyone. It is a movement for ALL Americans.
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  75. I truly feel for the average Chinese person. I have often held that in northeast Asia the Chinese people were the closest in temperament to the US, and a natural ally. That is, of course, before 1949. On the other hand, the horrible things done by the peasants to other Chinese people, both during the revolution and during episodes like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, have shaken my attitude. The fact that the two biggest Marxist revolutions took place in countries with a large rural peasant population would have surprised Marx. His assumption was that the revolution would start in industrialized societies with a large proletariat. He was thinking of Germany, the US and UK. There were attempts in these places, but they did not go that far. There are lots of reasons he was wrong, but the main reason was his understanding of people. Considering his personality, this is to be expected. Life in an industrial society, in cities, is far better than life in the country, especially in the period we are talking about. Actually, it is basically true today as well. So, while the proletariat was not living the high life, it was waaay better than being a peasant farmer, or even a small holder. So, what was done in Russia and China was to appeal to the peasant masses' basest instincts. They would band together and take from the "rich". It was really nothing other than organized theft in which everyone participated. Of course, all this was done under the direction of the Party. Given all this it is no wonder that in both the Soviet Union (and now the Russian Federation) and Communist China that corruption is rampant, and that morality is dead. It is a sad end to a long lived civilization.
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  76. The average European is socialist. I was living and working in Europe early in this millennium for a large US company with large operations in Europe. I remember being at a bar with a bunch of my German colleagues. One woman was going on about their boss. He was ambitious. To her that meant that he was too American. She actually put it that way. Now, I am American. All my grandparents came from Greece with a 4th grade education. They did well, their kids did better, and their grandchildren did better still. A typical American story. I mention this because there I was, an American and this woman was saying this to me. I lived in the UK and bought my clothes there and really blended in well, except for my accent. I heard a lot about Americans and about how people from one country in Europe felt about other Europeans. It was wild and really illuminating. Along the same lines I have run into plenty of Germans who want to move to the US. Some were tech entrepreneurs. One was a relative (in-law) who was an executive at a German manufacturer with operations in the US. He had done a foreign assignment at their plant in the US. One day, on my deck, after dinner he surprised me by saying he wanted to move to the US. His family is an old one (they traced their line back to at least 1700) and his father was an official in the German government (a political appointee). They were well off and well connected. If those people want to move to the US, what hope does Europe have.
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  77. Putin is beginning to remind me of the last czar of Russia, Nicholas II.
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  78. A few years ago, when my older son started at university, he had a girlfriend who was ethnic Chinese Malaysian. She experienced the discrimination in education. She had the top scores in her village but was not given a scholarship to go to high school. So, her mother moved with her to the US. They lived in Chicago and went to the top selective school in the city. She then went on to university in Chicago with significant scholarships.
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  79. Great analysis. One thing in Milei's favor is that the system is so messed up that he could hardly make it worse. I fully expect him to make it better.
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  80. It should also be noted that the India was the one foreign partner Russia had for the SU-57 and they pulled out in 2018 because of concerns that the jet would not meet requirements,.
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  81. The Korean War started in late June 1950. The North crushed the south initially. Both the South Koreans and their American allis were unprepared. Just four months later the North Korean capital fell. The Chinese and Soviets had to step in to save the North Korean regime (with over 1M troops) and they were only able to get back to the situation ante. The North Korean regular units actually had lots of experience at the beginning having fought the Japanese and in the Chinese civil war. They were gone in those first four months. Sound familiar? Don't fear the North Koreans.
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  82. The comparison with Lehman Brothers is bogus. Lehman's debt was twice as large. Lehman was an investment bank, with connection to almost every other investment bank in the world. Evergrande's debt is mostly in China. Since China is not an open economy, its banks are not tightly connected with those of other nations. The amount of its debt in foreign currency is not that large a percentage and in terms of those overseas markets is not significant. One thing it does have in common is the rating agencies. They failed to downgrade the debt in time for people to take corrective action. This also happened with Lehman Brothers.
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  83. Vashon is totally correct about why people tend to vote Democratic. My father was from a factory town in Massachusetts and his sisters voted Democratic. He had moved away, to Washington, DC and worked at an Army research lab. One time the younger one was visiting, and I mentioned that I supported Ronald Regan. She was taken aback and said, "our family has always voted Democrat". I am pretty sure that is why, when my father was asked how he voted he declined to answer and stressed that the ballot was secret. Actually, I now live in the Chicago suburbs. Perhaps with people in Chicago waking up, there is hope yet.
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  84. Interesting to hear the sales target for autos in China. With almost four times the population they are projecting selling about 1.5 times the number of cars currently in sold in the US within 77 years.
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  85. Always impressed with Gov. Huckabee. I really like what he said about Fetterman. Maybe the Senator will change parties. It has been done before.
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  86. You can come to the US legally and work. The people he is talking about are illegal migrants. Another problem is that of credentials. To be an engineer you need credentials. That is true of native-born Americans as well. Anyone can say they are an engineer or a doctor or whatever, but how do you know? This whole situation is a mess.
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  87. Wonderful story. This was a time when people in Europe were looking for opportunities elsewhere. Many found it. I have in-laws who have a farm in central Illinois in a county bordering the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. I used to hunt in an area near the Berlyn (I think that's how you spell it) where there were also the foundations of a house. This was the first homestead of this family, many of whose decedents still live in the area. The family was from the lower classes in England and in the early 1800s were convinced in the opportunities in the US. They sold everything, left their two oldest children back in England and set sail for New Orleans. Their ticket was for a location on the Illinois. When they arrived there by barge they were let of at a flat spot on the bank. There was nothing but forest around. After being helped by some locals they were able to establish themselves. After a time, they had a good amount of land they had homesteaded. They were actually able to rent some of this land out to others. The mother journeyed back to England to visit here grown children, one of whom was an English teacher and author. He wrote a book with her describing the family's experience. They had gone from the landless lower class to landowners with productive farmland in a fairly short period of time. I tell this story partly because of my connection to it, but also because it illustrates something important in the MacGregor tale. People at that time were becoming successful migrating to far off places in other countries. So, his tall tales would not be considered outrageous.
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  88. Back in the 1970s, when I was at university, I had a 1967 Austin Healey Sprite. I was the fourth owner. The first owner raced it. It cost me all of $375. Insurance cost me $400 for a year. Well, the slave cylinder went bad. I was studying physics and we had a cyclotron at the school. There was a high-end machine shop to maintain that and make parts for all the other exotic machinery needed for various experiments. Well, I mention all this because instead of buying a new slave cylinder the guys in the machine shop made me a new one out of titanium. Talk about special tooling and machining. It was wild.
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  89. The statistic of the high-speed rail in Spain is mind boggling to me. I first traveled to Spain (and most of Europe) as a teenager. The trains in southern Europe traveled at about 40MPH. As student travelers, and all of my co-travelers were European, we would take overnight trains and sleep in the compartments and aisleways of the trains. Heck, we were young and flexible.
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  90. Back in the early 2000s I was working in the UK. I had a woman working for me who was from South Africa (she married an Englishman and became a citizen of the UK). She described for me that when she worked at a bank in South Africa, they had lockers for their handguns. Everyone carried one. Actually, I was an exec for a US based company covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa. There were three places I was advised not to go: Northern Ireland (kidnappings), Israel (terrorism) and South Africa (massive crime).
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  91. On the Chasiv Yar situation, I think you are being a bit disingenuous regarding Ukraine's situation. Recall that in WWII, in a lot of cases on the same ground, when Hitler allowed his troops to pull back to better defensive positions, they often did well. When Hitler had them hold positions that were untenable, they often got slaughtered. Another way to look at the situation is that the Ukrainians attrited the Russians as much as they were going to do without major losses themselves and are now moving to better defensive positions. Frankly, I think there are situations, like Bakhmut, where the Ukrainians stayed in positions a bit too long.
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  92. Mao's economy. How did that work out? How did the planned economy work out for the Soviets? One issue that the Soviets and the CCP fail to understand, or deal with, is military and internal security spending. For the Soviets I have seen estimates that they spent between 20% and 40% of their GDP on the military. Of course, to maintain CCP control you will also have to bring back the Cultural Revolution. I am not joking about that. The Cultural Revolution was a way to maintain party control on the cheap. Both the Soviets and the CCP had ambitions that did not align with their actual economic resources. The Soviets were trying to hold on to an empire. The CCP is trying to build one. One reason the British were withdrawing from their empire even prior to WWII was the cost relative to the benefits. The other madness in China's case vis-a-vis its military is that it does not really need much of one if one considers protection of the homeland. Who is going to invade China today? Who would want to? China's farmland is poor, it is not rich in mineral resources and there are all those Chinese. What are they defending against? We know that the answer is two -fold. One is their own people; the other is that the military is actually offensive in nature. The reality is that all this shows that the CCP is toast, and so is China in its current form.
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  93. Another reason the Russians might have blown up Nordstream is contractual. They had contracts to supply the gas, and as long as it was their choice not to they could be sued. With the pipeline out of commission, through no fault of their own (they would claim) the contracts were no longer valid.
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  94. All this talk about Trump actually talking to members of Congress reminds me of LBJ. I recall from reading a biography of LBJ that he did this routinely to lobby for legislation. Now, I am not a fan of LBJ, but I really feel this is the way it should be. The President interacting with members directly is a great sign.
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  95. A European army? That has been talked about for a couple of decades now. Zalenski is grasping at straws.
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  96. I expect that the Chinese will be hoping that Xi's visit to Europe will be more successful than his last trip to the US. Recall that after listening to Xi at an exclusive dinner on that trip many US based investors began withdrawing from China and FDI in general tanked.
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  97. The contrarian "voices" on US/Australia security cooperation are either ignorant of history, or current affairs or both. One has to wonder, given China's stance on Australia in the past few years, what the motivation for questioning the US/Australia relationship. There is potentially something sinister involved.
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  98. Good analysis. The latest I heard out of India is that they were planning to buy 1,000 US Stryker IFVs to replace Russian BMPs. In the recent past they have been pulling away from Russian arms. It will take time. For example, they dropped out of the SU-57 program. They bought French Rafale fighters. They are also buying other US equipment and, in many cases, planning on co-producing the systems (as seems to be the case with the Stryker). They are also beefing up their own defense industry. I often joke that the Ukrainians should charge their western backers a marketing fee. Western weapons are more in demand than ever. What they have done to the Russian defense industry in terms of foreign sales is epic. By extension, the Chinese defense industry struggles with foreign sales. After all, their stuff is a low-quality copy of Soviet/Russian stuff and the corruption there is at least as bad.
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  99. Many good points made in this report. China is on the decline economically. India is on the rise. India has a more professional military. China's military is very inexperienced. As India opens more to the west, it will get more advanced weapons, as well as developing their own. There are some credible geopolitical analysts that predict China breaking up by the end of the decade. India has only to wait and perhaps they will be able to take territory within China. Who knows.
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  100. So, if French society is hostile to Muslim norms, then why do the Muslims go there? Have you asked that question? Does a country not have the right to have their own norms? Why must they accept the norms of a minority. Especially a minority that does not share their cultural norms. Should Muslims a Sikhs in India be allowed to flout the majority Hindu (80%) population? Your anit-Westen bias is stunning.
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  101. I am glad to see the role of organized crime in China spoken about more openly. The CCP is a kleptocratic regime. It is only natural that organized crime would flourish under the regime. This is one of the reasons that my prognosis for China is not a democratic future but for a warlord period like that obtaining after the fall of the Qing dynasty. Such situations are actually common in Chinese history.
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  102. To believe that the housing market will ever recover based on "policy actions" is madness. I just heard about one small city in China that has a population of 100,000 people and housing for 1,000,000 people. There are also reports of people buying apartments to store funerary urns because it is cheaper than buying cemetery plots. This is not about interest rates or local housing policy. It about the largest mismatch in supply and demand in history. There is no economic theory or approach that solves this. The sector is in the midst of a total meltdown, and it is taking the wealth of many people in China with it.
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  103. WOW! I have read all Zeihan's books (starting from the last one), and you have presented his arguments well. I happen to agree with his assessment and have even tried to make him aware of your channel through comments on relevant videos. I have been watching your, and other, channels regarding China for a while now, and it always seemed like his predictions were coming true in real-time. Great work.
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  104. ATACMS is a ballistic missile. Storm Shadow is a cruise missile. They are not rough equivalents except that they deliver explosives and are guided. The differences are important. They are especially important in how one defends against them, and in their use cases. They are long range ordnance, for sure. On the other hand, ATACMS is already being replaced in the US arsenal. The range of ATACMS was intentionally limited because of treaties. The new replacements have done away with these limits because the treaties are no longer in force. The new version is already being deployed in the Pacific. I mention this because I see many "experts" making the claim of equivalence. This bothers me because it glosses over the differences which are actually important in deployment. It also calls into question the people making such claims.
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  105. The insanity of the CCP system never ceases to amaze me. In most economies, the workers above 35 are the most productive. The Chinese companies are throwing these resources away. In addition, from a capital formation point of view, this cohort is at the peak of their investment years. In real economies they are the ones taking risks and investing for their futures. Almost everything the CCP and Chinese society has done in the past several years has been detrimental to their own people and prosperity and is making China a pariah on the world stage. China needs to decide. Become an open, capitalist society, or sink back into communism and isolation. It is clear that Xi and the CCP want the later. It is a disaster for the Chinese people.
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  106. The casualty rates you quote on the Russian side seem low. This is especially true considering what Prigozhin has said. He has stated outright that the Russian MoD has grossly underreported casualties. I expect that the western intelligence estimates are mostly obtained using indirect methods and by being skeptical of Ukranian reporting, not based on any solid reporting from the ground.
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  107. Well, it is good to see at least some people in China beginning to understand that there is no "rule of law" in China. As I am fond of saying, the Chinese people are not citizens but subjects.
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  108. David is completely right about the people who turn up at these events. Once, when my sons were young, we went into the city (we live in the suburbs) to enjoy the waterfront. We were unaware of that a pride event was going on. Frankly, the way people were dressed and handled themselves was quite disturbing, especially with young children in tow. Another couple of important points were made. First, the whole idea of gay or black rights has been decided in their favor. They are now mainstream. To then have such events such a pride month or black history month pulls these groups out of the mainstream and highlights the differences. This is destructive of a goal of total integration and acceptance. Second, these are minority groups. To force the majority to celebrate something that they may not be a part of or totally support risks a backlash. Just look at what is happening to Budweiser and Target in the US. By catering to a small minority they have alienated their main customer base. I am saddened to say this, but I think the backlash is coming and many of the gains made by minority groups could be undone.
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  109. I am so encouraged by Marco Rubio and his take on foreign policy. Fantastic pick. Trump is assembling the A-Team.
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  110. About the family angle, it is still the case. In WWII, my father fought in the Pacific and his brother was in Europe. I had a neighbor who was a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War. He was on a one-year tour. It was rough. His brother arrived in country and my neighbor got a letter that he would not have to fight for the last month of his tour. Whenever someone asked him to fly into combat, he would wave the letter in their face and refuse. This guy was gung ho. His father was a colonel. He volunteered and figured he would come home either a live hero or a dead hero. He hadn't figured on the maimed possibility.
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  111. Actually not "unprecedented" winds. When I lived in southern England earlier in the century, it was pointed out that some large trees in the garden of the house I was renting were blown down by similar winds. The alarmist wording in the title is really beneath you.
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  112. I have a 94 in .44 Rem Mag. It is late US production, and a wonderful gun. It is a Trapper model with a 16" barrel and a saddle ring. I just love it.
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  113. I grew up at the height of the Cold War. I was born in Georgetown in Washington, DC. My father worked for an Army weapons lab. We expected that a nuclear war would result in something like 60M casualties. This was when the US population was about 200M. That was acceptable for our survivable. We were all taught to duck and cover. This was, of course, horrific. Now we are facing a Russian tyrant who threatens nuclear retaliation, I have a lot of experience with the strategic and tactical military. In the 1970s and 1980s the military who were stationed in Germany used to measure distances in kilotons. This referred to the yield of nuclear artillery shells. A 1.5 kiloton distance would mean that when aiming at a city or town, the effects would be felt at a particular distance in the next town. This was the thinking our military had in those times.
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  114. This is also the case in the rest of the world. Earlier in the Millennium I was living in England. I was in the south and it was a corporate executive job. That means I had my housing paid for me. I found a nice house within my allowance. Frankly, it was comparable to the one I had just sold in the US (to upgrade) and it cost well over twice as much. I live in a top tier city in the US. What I am saying is that housing prices in the south of England were outrageous. At the same time, I had a guy working for me who was located in the old industrial and coal mining north. He told me about a program where you could buy a house (a multistory townhome) for 50 pence. So, we joked. Should I buy a candy bar or a house?
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  115. The repair shop segment is interesting. I did analysis a few years ago for an engineering publication comparing EVs to ICEs. The purchase cost difference between the two types made the EV still more expensive with gasoline at $4 per gallon. The battery replacement issue and quality issues were not even a factor. Add the cost of battery repair or replacement, and the EV is not a viable option. Compare refueling an ICE with charging an EV, and the ICE comes out even better. Also, consider that with an ICE, if I run out of fuel, I can carry enough fuel, if I have to, in a simple can, to go 25 miles or more. Try that in an EV. I am pretty sure that spontaneous combustion is not an issue as well.
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  116. The Belt and Road is a stupid project. One of its main thrusts is to create alternative transportation routes. The reason this is stupid is that the existing routes are the most efficient. Moving more of the transport overland and creating routes with multiple mode changes is always going to be more expensive. The existing routes were not chosen with any political motive in mind. On the other hand, the Belt and Road is primarily politically motivated. That, along with poor quality of Chinese construction, is why the project is already in big trouble. The biggest problem is that China has wasted billions that it really needs now to invest in its own economy.
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  117. The EU a beacon of democracy? As President Joe liked to say, "C'mon, man!"
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  118. Breathtaking! The reaction to the G7 statement is like something that could have been written by an angry college freshman, not a serious diplomat.
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  119. The General makes a lot of great points. I was especially interested in the point about Bobby Kennedy and his push for Americans to become healthier. I think Kennedy is definitely on the right track. I went through a life change (not health related) and changed my diet. I am in my late 60s, and my body is back to where it was in my 20s, mostly through a change in diet. Actually, in my 20s I had a very different diet (vegetarian). Today I am pescatarian and don't eat any highly processed foods. I won't go into detail, but the difference is just amazing. I am also very excited to see what Kennedy can accomplish.
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  120. The vast majority of the Chinese illegal migrants are clearly economic migrants. This is different from asylum seekers. That category is reserved for people clearly singled out for persecution in their own countries. Actually, the asylum process requires that a person apply for asylum in the first "safe" country the come to. This is even true if they plan of applying for asylum in the US or any other country. Don't get me wrong. I have known a lot of Chinese people, some born in China, some ethnically Chinese born elsewhere. I even worked with one woman whose family had been in the US at least two generations longer than my family. The issue is that, with the rampant corruption in China, people who are willing to circumvent the law to get into the US may not be the best types of people to let in. There is also the possibility that the CCP will insert spies into the mix.
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  121. Glad to hear someone say publicly that there won't be a winter pause. The Soviet Union is a great example of this. In WWII they consistently attacked in winter. Two good examples are the Winter War against Finland and the counterattack against Stalingrad (November to December). There are others. This part of the world has always been used to winter war. They have to be because that is their geography. The US has always routinely tested their weapons in winter conditions, down to small arms. This is not medieval times.
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  122. What is all this silliness about rare earths? They are not rare. Deposits have been found in lots of places. In fact, large scale rare earth processing started in the US to feed the semiconductor industry. At that time, I expect most Chinese hadn't heard about semiconductors. The thing is, processing these materials is an environmentally dirty process. That has always been known. Environmental standards are applied by country. So, it is often convenient to move dirty processes somewhere where standards are lower or nonexistent. That is the secret to China's growth in materials processing. We just export the pollution. So, all this drivel about rare earths is just like the tantrum of a toddler.
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  123. Emily is the best. Love Greg, but if Emily took over, I would not be sad.
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  124. I am disappointed that the show has been cut back to 30 minutes. I think it should be 90 minutes.
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  125. Jake, the layoffs in the tech industry are not as significant as is made out. The big tech players hired massively during COVID. The announced layoffs are just a percentage of what they hired during that time. So, they will come out of it with more employees than they had in 2019, in many cases. These tech companies make lots of money. They are not very careful with their hiring when things are going well. They also often invest in businesses and projects that don't make much sense. One company that is an exception is Apple. They have lots of room to cut back. This might actually be a good thing for the economy. The tech giants sucked up a lot of talent that could benefit lots of other companies.
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  126. I seem to recall the Labor Party going on and on and on about "austerity" in social programs when the Tories were in power and trying to rein in spending. Now they are doing the same thing. The term "uniparty" comes to mind. Of course, the solution is easy. Stop or limit foreign aid, scrap the green policy madness and deregulate industry. Problem solved. They need to bring in Trump.
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  127. Your husband is correct. During the Cold War it was in our interest to do what we did (not that it was always perfect). Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have been coasting along with the old assumptions. We need to have the debate on what our new assumptions should be.
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  128. Look at the Korean War. The North Koreans were initially successful because of surprise. They were then defeated in the territory of South Korea and the South Koreans and their allies pushed all the way up to the Yalu River. It was only the introduction of well over 1M Chinese troops that pushed the South Koreans back to the starting line. Military analysts tend to put a lot of stock in counting numbers of things, as opposed to training, leadership and quality of both men and materiel. The Ukraine War is just one more example of how misguided this is.
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  129. The US has officially stopped providing worldwide protection for shipping on the high seas. The US Navy is not configured for that task. To do that would take ten times the number of destroyers that we currently have. The US Navy is configured for power projection. Period. Sal, you should know that. The US populace is no longer interested in being the world's policeman. The last US president who even wanted to have the discussion about world governance and security was George H. W. Bush. He was our last president who had the experience, knowledge and interest to actually deal with international issues. He was voted out of office. The presidents we have had since have been progressively more populist. Even Bush's son, George W. Bush, ran on a platform of reduced international involvement and an end to "nation building". Then 9/11 happened. The GWT was a detour, not a change in direction. It costs a lot of money to patrol the oceans. Unless the US can tax other nations to pay for it, that burden falls squarely in the shoulders of the US taxpayer. Guess what? That is not going to happen, nor should it. The world is changing. The dynamics for the US have changed. This is especially true of oil. The future will be very different. I am afraid that many people, especially those associated with diplomacy and the military, do not see that. They want to keep things the same. That is not going to happen.
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  130. China has never been that powerful, and it has not been technologically advanced for several centuries. Over the last two hundred years or so, China's external trade was effectively controlled by small European countries and Japan. The last time China projected power was in the 15th century. They are also totally dependent on foreign inputs for their industries and food production. If the west is forced to isolate China, they will starve in short order. They will also deindustrialize. As a market, China is a joke, and is in rapid decline. So, yes, they need to show some humility.
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  131. Paul, this is a cannon, as opposed to a machinegun firing bullets. That means the rounds have explosive in them. It is not the kinetic energy that gives the effect you observe. They are also capable of firing sabot rounds for anti-armor purposes.
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  132. Sowell is the GOAT! He is correct at the beginning when he said many conservatives were socialists/Marxists, etc. In the UK you have Peter Hitchens was a literal card-carrying Trotskyist. When I went to university (the first time) in the last quarter of the last century of the last millennium I was a physics student. We had to take some humanities classes so a bunch of us took Ethics in the Philosophy Department. The professor was wildly popular. It was a large state university, and his class was always in one of those large theatre style classrooms. Back then we often partied with our professors, if you get my drift. This professor was a Marxist-Leninist. He gave each of us a book by Marx or Lenin to read during the semester. We worked in the physics department and were often there late. We went so far as to talk to the janitorial staff, who were mostly black, about what we read. They thought we were nuts. They weren't even on board with welfare, much less communism.
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  133. I lived and worked abroad on a work visa. If I had committed a crime or lost my job, I would have been deported. I don't understand not building camps for these people and keeping them separate from the general population. They are in the country illegally. Even those that are granted asylum, if they come in illegally, they should be treated differently. The asylum laws are clear. Except in exceptional situations, you are required to apply for asylum either in your home country or in the first safe country you come to. The US is running a deficit. Why are we spending money, Federal and local, on non-citizens?
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  134. If you follow news from anywhere else, you will know that India has enough surplus and stored wheat to replace the affected production. They are already in talks with Egypt. The biggest issue is not the availability of food but getting it to where it is needed. This has been the issue as long as I have been aware of this issue, about half a century. For India, they will have to invest in transport infrastructure to move the grain, but they have the ability to do so. The fertilizer issue can be solved. There are resources elsewhere. Just like with the wheat, it is a matter of shifting sources. This can be done and will be done.
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  135. Well, I could have told you that China is not converting enough of its research to viable products 15 years ago. I ran into a situation at a US technology university with a lot of Chinese students that pointed out the real reason. That reason is IP protection. If you look at the traditional top tech hot spots in the US, Silicon Valley and Boston (tech has since branched out) the top universities allowed, and encouraged, professors to patent their inventions. I am familiar with MIT's patent policy where the university splits patent revenue with the inventor. About 15 years ago I was participating in seminars at a high-performance computing lab. The director of the lab was a US citizen from China. He had survived the Cultural Revolution. Many of the students were mainland Chinese. They did some great research. I once queried the professor about why they weren't rushing out to patent their ideas and get them into devices. There were some really great ideas. His response is that they were Chinese and had no real idea about intellectual property protection, so didn't bother. By the way, this is why most of the efforts by governments around the world to create their own Silicon Valleys fail. Frankly, if they followed the US model some people would become very rich off of their ideas. That is not something that would be acceptable in most countries where higher educational institutions are mostly government owned. That is the crux of the matter and why China will fail.
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  136. Tony, the new thumbnails are a real hoot. I read a while back an article in the US based Wall Street Journal about GE Appliances that was very interesting. By shortening their supply chains, they can respond more quickly to market demand. They are using data and automation to remain competitive. They are, by all reports, doing quite well. By the way, they are actually owned by a Chinese company. Back in the 1980s I worked for GE as an engineer (in the spacecraft business) and we had a very active engineering and manufacturing community. At that time "design for manufacturability" was all the rage. Integration of engineering and manufacturing was seen as key. Then, the lure of a large potential market and cheap labor broke that line of development. The MBAs took over. Quality has suffered ever since. Since those times I have seen the results, which were not good, in many businesses I have consulted for and others I have followed through inside contacts. I have also noticed a marked drop in quality in products I have purchased myself.
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  137. At the beginning remarks about how Cuomo was the one Americans were turning to I lost interest. I am an American, and I can tell you that is not true.
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  138. On this topic I see a lot of college grads with degrees in "soft" fields in the reporting from China. This surprises me. I was taking some graduate classes in statistics a few years back and there were lots of Chinese students. Some would admit they would prefer to be studying something else, like marketing, but their parents insisted that they go into a STEM field. Sound advice, actually. The issues these Chinese grads are facing are the same as in the US, but the job market here is in much better shape than in China. So, while they may not get a job in their major, they can get a job. Frankly, there are too many people with these non-core majors that, as the second girl in the video found out, just about anyone can do without the degree. Many of these fields have no place in a university curriculum. Copywriting, entrepreneurship and similar are really only valid in a vocational business school. What the universities, in China and the US, have done is to offer these inappropriate subjects to expand their market. That is all. They dupe people like the woman in the video.
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  139. They broke the law by entering illegally. If the immigration judge finds they don't have a valid claim for asylum, then it is a clear-cut case. Get them out. We need to be clear also about what this idea of "fear" in their home country means as well. It is meant to apply only to fear from the authorities in their country of origin. Just because there is a war going on or even a famine, that is not what international asylum law was meant to address. If conditions are bad compared to the US, which applies to most of the world, then just about anyone could get in. That is not what we want.
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  140. The "global south"? China and Russia speaking for the "global south"? Has anyone noticed that both China and Russia are in the north. Frankly, as the current rules-based world order is withdrawn with a pull-back by the US, the global south will suffer greatly, and China and Russia do not have the wherewithal to step in and fill the void. Don't forget what multilateralism meant in the past. It was colonialism and empire. A lot of that was driven by the quest of Europeans for raw materials. The most likely outcome is a return to that state of affairs, with many of the same players. This does not include China and Russia. In fact, the most likely outcome for China and Russia is dissolution. By the way, there is no such thing as "global governance".
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  141. The UK is one of the worst places for solar panels. It has the wrong weather. Wind maybe, but that has the same problem as the solar panels. The other thing to understand is that both are not viable without massive battery installations. Same problem. Oh, my.
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  142. The Chinese are finally starting to understand that real estate, like all other forms of investment, exists in a market. The price can go up, and down. They are also seeing that the demand is tightly connected to employment. When I first moved from the east coast of the US to the Midwest, some 30 years ago, it was during a recession. I looked at 200 homes in a generally booming suburban city. Over half of these were empty. I took notes on about sixty I thought interesting. This is how things work. The expectation that house prices always go up is unrealistic, especially in inflation adjusted terms or compared to average income. In the last 25 years, the price of my current home has fluctuated wildly. From the initial purchase price it rose by about 40% in about eight years. Then it fell by about a third. Now it is back to its high-water mark. This is how things work. The Chinese expectation that housing would always go up was always unrealistic. If the CCP would allow a real market, the prices would be much lower.
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  143. Listing all these ties and accomplishments between China and Argentina might be the best reason for decoupling. With all that has happened between the two countries, for Argentina to be in the shape it's in means that the relationship between them has not really brought great benefits to Argentina. This is actually true of many of China's trading partners. I know people will say that Argentina's problems are not all China's fault, but perhaps Argentina should look elsewhere for partnerships. Many nations and companies have done so and prospered.
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  144. Very good show. I am glad you have gone back to the longer format.
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  145. Tesla has the correct approach. Just look at it this way, humans, who can be very good at driving, use just their eyes as a sensor. The potential problem with humans has nothing to do with their ability to drive or any deficiency with their sensors. Problems generally arise when the human is distracted, takes attention away from the road (my car, an ICE vehicle, actually has a sensor that warns me if I am doing that), or just does something dumb (not an unusual occurrence). The idea of a self-driving car is to avoid these shortcomings. Huawei's approach requires the fusion of many sensors. I have worked with this in the aerospace environment and have taught it in technical courses. I know how difficult it can be. Considering the level of technology in China vs. the west, I doubt they can do a credible job.
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  146. Ron Palul is substantially correct! There may be a very few cases where foreign aid is effective and in the US interest, but these are limited. A total bottom-up review is what is needed.
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  147. Tyrus is so wise. The explanation of dumbing down of race is right on the money. It is sound bite journalism. This show is so good, even with Gutfeld.
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  148. Peter, you missed a big one. South and Southeast Asia. China is building dams that affect many of the rivers that originate in the Tibetan Plateau. This affects rivers like the Mekong, Indus and Ganges among others. Maybe you could look at that.
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  149. The Russian tank design is just crazy. It is all to save space and to remove one crew member. This allows the tank to be lower, but that does not seem to prevent them from being hit. I remember when the M1 Abrams first came out. There was a big deal made out of how the ammunition is stored, and that if it is hit the crew will be safe.
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  150. You mention the young man who jumped to his demise. In the US, in the early 1990s, something similar happened in the US as day trading took off. At that time, people would take "classes" on how to day trade and there were firms that facilitated the trading. I remember many instances where people lost everything day trading. There were many cases where these people then went to the people had trained them and killed them. I don't recall what the suicide rate was. In China today, individual retail traders are suffering massive losses. Of course, the Chinese stock markets are run by the government and wealthy people connected to the government. The individual traders are of referred to as "leeks", the vegetable. It can be cut down easily and always grows back. So, while social media influencers are a new phenomenon, the real issue is individuals trading with insufficient resources and knowledge.
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  151. Barrier troops go back to at least WWI. I am reading a book about the Russian Revolution and Civil War and came across this fact. It was stated that in one action, the battle to retake Kazan, Trotsky had barrier troops set up. He modeled this after the actions during Kerensky offensive. Actually, reading that book, it seems that the Russian army of today is no different from the Russian army of over a century ago. Same problems among the Red Army with drunkenness. They recruited prisoners, including POWs back then. The killing of officers was commonplace. It was brutal. I find the book difficult to read.
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  152. Tim Scott is my favorite. He is a real man. He is also showing that the Republicans are really the party of the workers of this country. Unions are obsolete. Many decades ago, when I was in the aerospace industry, there was a local competitor which was unionized. This was on the East Coast. The competitors engineers were unionized. The only advantage was if you had massive seniority. There was also limited mobility. The company I worked for was the opposite. Mobility was encouraged. Seniority was not the key. Talent was. We eventually bought the competitor. Wow! When we saw what the situation from a personnel lever, it was epic. I could also go on and on about unions, and it is not favorable. Unions once had a place, but now they are politicized and don't really represent the rank-and-file members. I had a friend, very liberal (I am not) who went back to work as a teacher. One time we were talking, and she went on and on about a teacher in her school who had done something horrific. It took at least two years to get him removed. She was disgusted. This is not an isolated incident.
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  153. These people won't know what hit them. Canada is already struggling with issues from high end migrants from China, who come in and inflate the property market. These migrants will also have to deal with the "attitudes" of many long-term Canadian citizens toward "migrants". I have done a lot of work there over the years and have seen some disturbing things. I also wonder what Quebec will think of this influx. The independence referenda failed partly because there were so many non-French people moving there. It will be interesting to see what you are reporting from Canada in a year or so.
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  154. I really am glad you mentioned the idea of Prizoghan as a warlord. Many analysts predict that Russia would break up. It is the last real Imprerial empire out there. Putin has just moved that forward by a decade or so. What will come after could well be a warlord period. China has had such situations as a large part of their history. It too may also go into such a period. Don't forget, Mao was a warlord from the last Chinese warlord period.
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  155. It is interesting that you mention Prigozhin turning Wagner into a private "army". Reportedly Shoigu has his own as well. Then, of course, there are the internal security forces. These could become private armies associated with various oligarchs. I have been predicting for a while that Russia will devolve into a period of warlordism. Interestingly, I also think China will as well. They have a long history of this. With all the factions in the CCP, this could happen soon, especially as the economy falls apart. Don't forget that before 1949, China was in one of these periods. Mao was just one warlord among many.
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  156. Nadia, the appeal process is not a rerun of a trial. One can only appeal on procedural grounds.
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  157.  @jeffryphillipsburns  Well, that is how he put it. I expect that the real situation is that his blood sugar levels are normal, and no treatment is required. The effect is the same.
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  158. I remember watching Ron's impeachment trial in the Illinois State Senate. A friend of mine, who was a state senator, when it was time to cast his vote, gave a thumbs down gesture in a bit of a dramatic display. On the other hand, many of these prosecutions are politicized. I look forward to more Democrats moving over to the Republican side. Maybe Fetterman is next. Just look at the videos on this channel about the Chicago City Council meetings. Black voters wearing "Chicago Turns Red" tee-shirts and MAGA hats. During the campaign Trump went to the black journalists meeting in Chicago. He was/is a president for the whole country and does not ignore anyone. Just look at how minorities did during his first term. Change it is a coming.
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  159. The interplay between Dawn and Kevin is priceless. Love this show.
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  160. Heatwave? What heatwave? Chicago temperatures are right in line with long term averages and have been so far this summer. You look at Spain and Italy. The Med has always been hot. In the early 1970s when I first went to southern Europe, I remember being on an island in the Cyclades where temperatures were 110 degrees F in the shade at the beach restaurant. On some islands they had wooden walkways from the beach restaurant to the water because the sand was too hot to walk on. You really can't tell what will happen until the end of the summer and all the measurements are tabulated. You also understand that we are in an El Nino cycle. You don't need climate change to explain the heat. Adding an unrelated effect to a known effect is scientifically invalid.
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  161. This guy is great. He understands science and has a rational reason for doing and saying things. One interesting point on CO2 and our cars is that they put out more CO2 than before because that is much less destructive than what they put out before. One example is N2O. And, as he says, CO2 is food for the planet.
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  162. Viva la revolución!
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  163. I love the absolute ignorance of the taxi driver (but I don't disparage him) starting about 2:50. He talks about the People's Daily and how it should be the voice for the people. Like most people in communist countries, he is totally brainwashed and ignorant of history. The CCP does not care about "the people". They never have. If they had, there would never have been a Great Leap Forward or a Cultural Revolution with their massive death tolls. Compared to what the CCP has done to the Chinese people in their reign, the genocides in the west are as nothing (and I don't minimize those, they were horrendous). So, here we are in the 21st century and this poor Chinese man, living the life he does, has an expectation that the propaganda organ of the CCP should be "for the people". That is the saddest thing of all.
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  164. You know, the people who say this is a unique time, are just full of crap. When I started at university, in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, we were all commies. I mean that. My ethics professor, who we often got high with (actually that was lots of our professors) had us reading Marx and Lenin on the side. We would discuss these ideas with the janitorial staff (who worked second shift), who were mostly African American, and they through we were nuts. Don't forget that even Robert Bork was writing socialist screeds in his high school newspaper. What you are, and what you think, is not set in stone in your college years. All the companies bowing down to the leftist orthodoxy will find themselves hurting very soon. We have a very dynamic society, and things will change.
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  165. I have read "Lost in Math" and watched some of your videos. A thought just popped into my head when you said "More importantly, one shouldn't mistake maths for reality." Those physicists that really pushed physics forward, such as Einstein, Planck, Bohr, etc. were not coming at it with a mathematical approach. They were starting with physical observations. The maths were not the primary thing. Nima (and I have watched some of his videos as well) comes at all this more as a mathematician. Mathematics are essential for precisely describing physical phenomena, but they are not the phenomena themselves.
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  166. What people who mention these WWI style trench networks seem to forget is that tanks were first developed specifically to defeat such obstacles. They do a great job when used properly. Don't also forget that the Iraqis, in both wars there, had massive trench and tank trap networks with minefields. How long did it take the US to defeat those? I also think that this is a relevant comparison. Although in one case you had desert and in Ukraine you have mostly farmland, they share one important feature. They are both terrains that are flat (not a lot of high points).
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  167. Yep. Start with the criminals and then deal with the those that entered illegally. What pisses me off is that every time I went to start a new job over the last few decades, I had to show proof that I was a citizen. Who's hiring these people? Think about that.
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  168. I think everyone underplays the Turkey factor. Erdogan would love to recreate the Ottoman Empire, at least in part, especially going into the oil producing regions. Actually, Turkey becoming a regional power is something I got from Peter. I think that Syria is just a first step. The HTS militants in the street are shouting (paraphrasing), "On the Jerusalem, on to Mecca". It is really up to the Europeans to deal with this. I think they might be more interested in dealing with the Turks than the various Arab groups.
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  169. The whole issue with demographics is that the effects, good and bad, are based on the current economic models that were created in an environment of rising population. As mentioned, you don't even have to innovate to grow. But this was never going to last. Automation and innovation tend to lower the need for raw human input. Take farming in the US. When I moved to the American Midwest, I got more acquainted with it through relatives. Over thirty years I have been here, the percentage of the population involved in agriculture has shrunk from 10% to 3%. Similar things happen in other fields. New ideas have to be embraced, with goals clearly set out. That is going to take some very serious conversations at a societal level. As for India, they are on a perilous path If they try to follow China. They will fail. One of China's biggest problems is poverty. China has 600 million people living on about $140 per month. If India does not solve the poverty problem, all the space missions and nuclear weapons in the world will not matter. The US has been successful in technology, including things like space and military technology because they were already a rich country. A space program, for example, does not make a country rich. For a poor country it is just an expense. The US economy is seven times India's with less than one quarter of the population. India needs to make some serious changes.
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  170. You said it at the end. The Kurdish YPG is a Marxist revolutionary group. This should have been stated up front. It explains the attitude of many of the world leaders involved.
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  171. Dyson came up with the idea in 1960. That explains a lot. I think it is a silly idea. A civilization that could build such a structure could find lots of other ways to harvest energy. These would probably not require such a building project.
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  172. These are all "first world problems". Worrying about trans people, who represent a miniscule part of the population, is something you do when there are no other problems to worry about. Just look at energy. We in the developed West were tearing ourselves apart trying to deal with "climate change" (by the way, it always changes). Now with the disruptions caused by the Ukraine war, things are changing. In the US, climate change is at the bottom of list of concerns. With rising inflation, to a large extent caused by rising energy prices, there are growing calls for increasing production here, for example. Even Elon Musk has called for this.
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  173. The protests in Bazhou, and some of the comments attributed to the villagers, just highlight the appropriateness of my favorite saying. It is that to the CCP the Chinese people are not citizens but subjects. When will people see that communism is no different from feudalism?
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  174. The stock market intervention is one of the most worrying things I have heard about the Chinese economy, among a lot of worrying things. It first shows that the CCP has no idea of how markets work and why they exist. What is worrying to an outsider is that the real goal is to draw in outside capital under false pretenses. With the rules that China has about ownership, currency controls and many other financial and economic distortions, it is actually not a safe place for outsiders to invest. In fact, I could see shareholders in foreign funds having grounds for some sort of action against the investment firms.
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  175. What a lot of people forget is that when there were Israelis in Gaza, they had greenhouses and were growing food. I don't know what percentage of their needs they could grow, but I believe some of the food was for export. Whatever the case, when the Israelis withdrew the Palestinians smashed up all the greenhouses. This brings to mind another situation. Earlier in the Syrian civil war I was watching a conference with an anti-Assad group of refugees who were in Washington, DC at a think tank. The problem of water "insecurity" came up. Someone in the audience mentioned Israeli technology that could help. The Syrians basically discounted that because it was Jewish technology. That says it all.
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  176. The rant at the beginning of the video is quite true of other companies as well. One of the worst offenders is Walmart. Many quality US manufacturers moved their production to China because Walmart pressured them to lower prices. Quality suffered greatly and it adversely affected many brands. Believe me, I have seen it up close.
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  177. If I remember correctly, Jack Ma got into trouble precisely because he pointed out the inadequate nature of regulation of the financial system, including shadow banking.
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  178. That was going to be my line. I fully agree with you, well put. I would love to see him run for President, perhaps not in 2024, but in 2028. He should at least be a VP candidate.
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  179. Siver Fox, please don't hold back. Tell us what you really think.
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  180. Starkey is great. I don't always agree with him, but I still listen to what he says. That he says there is no such thing as "international law" is fantastic. The use of that term "international law" always irks me. It is one of my pet peeves. In commenting I often rail against it.
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  181. What Professor Lucas seems to forget is that wars, especially modern ones, are between populations, not armies. The use of the phrase "indiscriminate killings" in Gaza is a bit disgusting to me. What did Hamas do in their attack on Israel? Did they target the Israeli military? Did the population of Gaza come out against those indiscriminate killings? As President Joe would say, C'mon man. This equivalence is a cancer that has infected academia.
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  182. Great video! The idea of China building such a large army, and military in general, is really rather silly. NO ONE is going to invade China. China has no capability to project its army over water. Their only use would be against enemies along its land borders. You mention the Indian army, but it is much more capable than the Chinese army and has lots more experience. Now that it is receiving western equipment, the Chinese will be at a distinct disadvantage. As I like to say, China is toast.
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  183. I just have to say, another fantastic interview/discussion by Jordan Peterson. Ms. Valdary is fantastic in her views and thoughts. I am really glad she has this opportunity to air her views.
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  184. Putin thinking that time is on his side, which a lot of analysts keep repeating is ludicrous. Let's just look at the facts. It took Russia 20 years to build up the military they attacked with. Much of that, in equipment and personnel, has been destroyed in a year. They are starting to deploy 70-year-old tanks. As for their ability to train forces, that is non-existent. Thei ability to lead forces is even worse. Oh, and by the way, that build up took place at a time when Russia had access to western technology, which they do not. Finally, on the fiscal front, they are running out of money. The percentage of GDP being spent on their military is reaching peak Cold War levels. This was one of the major contributing factors leading to the dissolution of the USSR. That is likely going to happen again to the Russian Federation. Putin does not have time.
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  185. Actually, on the Computerphile channel, there was a video about six months ago, about this issue of diminishing returns that went into some detail about why.
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  186. The idea of educating people is to improve the society. If you are encouraging people to do manual labor with a college degree, then you are lost. Not only were lots of resources spent to educate the person, but then their contribution is minimal.
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  187. The superlatives one hears about conflicts are really starting to rankle. Like a scene from the "last days on earth"? Come on man. What about Hamburg and Dresden in Germany? What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How about Nanking in China in WWII? How about Mariupol in Ukraine in the present day? Have you seen the cities and towns in Ukraine that the Russians have "liberated"? How about the Syrian civil war? Don't get me wrong, I feel for the suffering of innocent people. What I am reacting to is the way this is presented.
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  188. I lived in the UK earlier in this century. The NHS is crap. That is putting it nicely. Just two examples will illustrate. One is of a neighbor that got bad double vision. She went to the local NHS hospital. What she needed was a CT scan to determine if it was a tumor, or a virus. These were the two possibilities. After waiting all night, she was told in the morning to come back later. Her husband worked for a US company, as did I. We were on the NHS and had private insurance from our US employment. They realized that, went to a local private clinic, and had their answer that day. It was not a tumor, the virus was dealt with, and things turned out alright. If it had been a tumor, well you can imagine. The other was a relative of one of my neighbors. He was older, and badly needed a hip replacement. He had already waited for two years and did not know when it would be available. He was in pain the whole time. He still supported the NHS, but had already spent two years in pain. Say what you will about the US, but he would have gotten that operation in weeks, at most.
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  189. The reaction to Moody's ratings should signal something to investors. The CCP officials are acting like teenage girls having a tiff over a perceived slight from a rival. It signals a level of immaturity in the leadership that should not be ignored. For investors, this is a risk factor that should be considered when analyzing China as an investment destination. What it reminds me of, again, is something one would see in high school or college. A bunch of students (and some professors) with no real experience of the world sitting around, getting high and planning out how the world should work. That is Marxism in a nutshell, and Xi has gone full Marxist.
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  190. Tofu dreg weapons? Why not? Fits in with the whole ethos of the CCP.
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  191. This may seem harsh, but during the Cold War, in order to get security clearances, one had to answer a question: Are you, or HAvE YOU EVER BEEN, a member of the Communist Party. I have severe trepidation about letting current or even former party members into the US.
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  192. Ukraine has done brilliantly in the diplomatic sphere. They are a powerhouse. Considering where Ukraine was before the full-scale invasion, their diplomacy is nothing short of amazing. I say this as one who knows diplomats and is not that much of a fan of diplomacy (long story). Zalenski is, I believe, the main driver of this. He is a "stud".
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  193. You ignore history, and the "scientific" studies are not necessarily conclusive. When I was a teen, many people had guns in their homes, and none were locked up. There were no such shooting incidents. There were also no video games, unless you include Pong. Something has changed. This needs much more study. I have little respect for the psychiatric community at this point. We need solid statistical analysis, not some psychiatric drivel.
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  194. The decentralization of power plants and the use of smaller modular power sources does two very important things. First, it enhances resilience. Second, it allows for a much quicker transition to new power sources in the future. The cost of massive power stations means that they must be utilized for a much longer term to make them economically viable. So, even if new technologies come along, it may not be economically viable to adopt them. Also, having smaller generation units means that you can mix and match types, We have the control systems to manage this. I worked on a project utilizing such methods and have seen the potential benefits. So, by necessity, Ukraine will have great experience in these areas. The power industry is very conservative. They have to be, to some extent, in normal times. The cost is one factor. Reliability is another. Don't forget, it is not the generation of the energy that a consumer pays for. It is the reliable delivery of that energy to the point of use. That is not trivial.
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  195. The US is already working on 6th generation fighters and heavily upgrading their 5th generation fighters. If it came to a war between Russia and NATO, the Russian air force would be eliminated in the first couple of days. Refer to the two Iraq wars fought by the US and its NATO allies.
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  196. I used to do a lot of business in Bristol, in the early part of this millennium. I also took my family there in my Alfa Romeo GTV. The boys were small and did not mind the back seats. What one must remember is that the triangular trade was quite legal at the time. Another thing to consider, something I have just heard, is that there are more people in slavery today than in those times.
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  197. I was listening to the diary of a German soldier from WWII recently, and one of the battles he participated in was the capture of Kiev. The salient points of the diary were the artillery on both sides and mines. The Soviets used massive numbers of mines back then as well. It all sounds like a repeat. By the way, the Germans took massive casualties, but were successful in breaking through.
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  198. Many years ago I was working on a project with some early high-resolution displays with a large color range. We wrote a program to ramp through the color pallet and gauged our reactions. Indeed, when we got to the greens there was a palpable queasiness.
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  199.  Johnson Li  You are ignorant of history. Truly, it is breathtaking. China spends more on internal security than it does on its military. In the US, that activity is very small. In addition, the US military is bared from operating on US soil in dealing with US citizens. This is the Posse Comitatus law. The US had the Civil War, one incident. That was not a warlord period. My understanding is that China has had warlords for all but about 300 years of its history. Mao was a warlord. Remember that Chnia was in a major warlord period before WWII. After WWII Mao won out over the other warlords. They are due for another such period.
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  200. Just halfway through this, and I have also seen and read lots of other materials, and my gut feeling is that the investors, especially the larger hedge funds, deserve what they got. They did not do due diligence. In fact. one admitted as much and said to their investors that they will do better next time. Is this real? Are these firms so out of control that they would act in this way? Disgusting realy.
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  201. Russia is actually running out of men. These people are necessary not only for the front lines, but for production in Russia. As we are seeing now, the civilian infrastructure is falling apart. This even includes Moscow. This may be a more significant issue for Putin. If the Russians weren't such serfs it would already have broken down. But there is only so much they can take.
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  202. Your explanation of genesis of the First Opium War glosses over the causes of the conflict. One big part was the large trade deficit and the strain on silver reserves that the Chinese mandated must be used for such trade. Opium was a commodity that the British had in some of its colonies in abundance. So, in the end it was a balance of payments issue caused by restrictions laid on trade by the Qing dynasty. I do find amusing the characterization of the British being the biggest drug dealer of all. Funny, but true.
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  203. How can there be labor strife in the "workers' paradise"?
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  204. Wow! Rahm is correct in all he says. At times he sounds like Trump. Actually, Trump's actions on China trade reflected opinion in the US that predated his presidency. Don't minimize Emanuel's influence in the Democratic party and, by extension, in the administration. He has been a major influence for a long time.
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  205. Well said. I think people in Europe are starting to wake up to the fact.
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  206. I have always maintained that, of East Asian peoples, the Chinese are the closest to the west. I mean here the people, not the government. Just look at Taiwan. Japan and Korea rely on government intervention and tend to have large conglomerates. The Chinese have always seemed to have a more entrepreneurial spirit. China, free from the CCP and working within the rules based international system, could be a great contributor. Let's hope it happens soon. Otherwise the world may well become used to not dealing with China, which would mean dire things for the Chinese people.
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  207. Actually, it has been worse. It should not be as it is today, but this is not the worse it has been. When I lived in Washington, DC (where I was born, at Georgetown University Hospital) I would see helicopters patrolling with the artificial daylight. This was in the 1970s. Why, you might ask. Well, it was because previously patrol cars would go down the alleys and the criminals would throw grenades under the patrol cars and blow them up. I believe that the current state of affairs is horrendous. On the other hand, I have lived through worse. We need a real dialog about where the country is heading. Under Trump that was possible, Trump did a lot to help groups that did not vote for him. He was for Americans, all Americans, no matter how you voted, as a group. He got unemployment down to historic lows among ALL groups, He pushed for empowerment for minority groups. Those that voted for Biden from minority communities are reaping the whirlwind. They are proving themselves as stupid and uneducated.
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  208. Frankly, New York (city and state) is getting what it deserves and wanted, at least according to the electorate. Look, these politicians have not hidden their policies. Your citizens keep voting for this.
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  209. Vita, I do really enjoy your videos. It is good to see the resilience of the Ukranian people. I enjoy your wry sense of humor and the snippets of your struggle with village life. Actually, you are doing quite well. Keep up your spirits (I know it is hard) and I pray for Ukraine daily.
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  210. I was a paying member when I lived in the UK. If they do not get this turned around at the AGM, the the only thing people can do, supporters and volunteers, is to abandon it. If you stay with an organization like this, you are complicit.
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  211. Yes, Trump is brilliant at this stuff. Of course, with Starmer, it doesn't take much, does it.
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  212. This whole thing about divorce at the time in the UK utterly amazes me. Has anyone heard of Henry VIII? That is why the Church of England (of which I was once a member) exists.
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  213. The Chinese can and do throw money at industries. What is not much talked about is the level of corruption. They have, at least twice, created massive state-owned funds to develop chip technology. Each time they do this there is no result, and a lot of the fund managers get arrested and jailed.
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  214. Good points about the flood control infrastructure in the cities. Looking at all these floods it has always seemed like there was something wrong with this infrastructure.
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  215. First, the EU is militarily weak. It has neglected its obligations under the NATO treaty and relies on the US for its protection from Russia. Second, Ukraine is neither an EU nor a NATO member. So, why should Russia talk to the EU?
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  216. Did the presenter listen to the words she is spouting? The first role of the government is protection of the citizens. You just have to look at France, and many other places around the world, to understand how correct these policies are.
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  217. It's been 69 for me, and I have no problem with it. I like not floating away into the vacuum.
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  218. Why do all these politicians say "we"? It is the individual who is indicted, not some amorphous "we". Is this the "royal" we?
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  219. Great interview, and great coverage. Palki did a great job by letting the interviewees do the talking. She brought on experts and let them pass on their knowledge. Even if you don't agree with them 100% it is important to hear what they say.
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  220. Scotland is a "nation", not just a territory. Why is this guy even in the running? Scotland is not like the US which was built by representatives of many nations. Very odd. Your last statement brings back comments by my financial advisor. He was hoping that Xi would be successful in getting a third term. His reasoning was that Xi would tank the Chinese economy. This is proving to be correct. The same is true of Yousef. What the UK should be doing is to decrease support to Scotland. This will show the populace how dependent they have become on England.
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  221.  @clickytheblicky9895  Boy Scouts anywhere. Actually, I was in a Sea Explorer crew during the Vietnam War. Our adult leaders were all already veterans of the conflict. We would go on "survival" campouts. We had OD Green uniforms. The adults all had camo. We took with us a tarp, sleeping bag, a machete, a knife and a M1903 Springfield rifle. These were provided by the VFW Post that sponsored us. They had lots. Going into the bar to talk to the Vets drinking there was a trip. This was 1970 and 1971. When I would tell my sons about this, they were amazed. They were in Scouts as well, but now you could NEVER do anything like that.
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  222. Why don't you talk about Stacey Abram. She denies she lost the election for governor in Georgia, twice.
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  223. The message quoted at about 15:38 shows total ignorance of economics and finance. Since the Chinese economy depends on foreign investment, much of it from the US, Americans do need to "tell the Chinese" if the economy is good or not. People around the world pay attention to the US economy and make comments about it because it may well affect them. This happened in 1929 and 2008 and lots of other times in between. If you are going to be a part of the world economy, then you need to understand that the world will pay attention to you and comment on your situation. What I have seen and read about the Chinese, from their foreign relations to comments like this on the economy shows a real level of immaturity. China, both the CCP and the people, are not ready for the adult table.
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  224. There are also large deposits in Nevada. I also just saw an ad for nickel mines in Alaska. The deposits are huge. The US also has plenty of "rare earth" metals. In the past many US companies have concentrated on exploitation overseas. Two reasons were often given. One has to do with environmental restrictions. Of course, the result is that pollution is just exported. The second, often given for oil drilling, is that we should exhaust the external sources before draining our own. This was often given as a justification during the oil price shocks of the 1970s. This is always short sighted. The pollution will always come back to bite us. Imports of raw and processed materials adds to the trade deficit. This is a result of the unrestricted free trade mindset, which is, of course, the editorial stance of the WSJ. Security is often ignored. Security has costs, both explicit and implicit.
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  225. I eat little or no processed food. I put a little salt in my oatmeal at breakfast, and about the same in my dinner (I usually have two meals). I only drink water and brewed coffee and tea (with nothing added). Salt is essential, and I consume only sea salt, which has much less sodium. It is possible to eat healthier without giving up taste or convenience.
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  226. A college degree in "tourism management"? This is madness. This is not a topic for a traditional bachelor's degree. This is the type of subject that should be taught in a business vocational school. We would put this in a junior college. It is at most an associate's degree level. This is a problem in the US as well. A lot of the people with student debt in the US have such "useless" degrees. They take on debt that will result in careers that would rarely allow them to pay it back. Even for those that can pay, or did not take out loans, the percentage of people working in fields that had nothing to do with their degree is, I believe, at about the 50% level. Add, on top of that, the issue of needing connections in China and you have a perfect storm of hopelessness.
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  227. I live in Illinois and my sons went to public school. I live in the suburbs. Our school facilities are second to none. Attainment is very good. Last I checked, 20% of high school students took AP classes. My sons took almost all of them. I mention all this because these suburban school districts spend 2/3 of what those in the city of Chicago do. We also get minimal Federal funding. It's not money they need.
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  228. State buying of stocks increasing confidence? As a foreign investor, I would think that this would be the signal to get out. The state has no business propping up a stock market. Get out now!!!
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  229. Being this far off (24 points) is either an indication of poor work or something more sinister.
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  230. The UK is well and truly buggered. Time to cut ties.
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  231. There are a lot of comments about the Europeans paying more, and that's important. The thing that is not often mentioned is that "common value base". That is important. The American electorate will not continue to support a Europe that does not share our values. Why should we. They are welcome to their own "values", but they are moving so far away from traditional western values that we supposedly share that they may no longer enjoy support in America. I believe that is what Vance was trying to say without be as blunt as I would be.
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  232. WOW! I personally am quite interested in geopolitics as well as economics, so this is a great video and analysis as far as I am concerned. No need to apologize. Of course, I am a good bit older than you and participated in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. I always say that I miss the Cold War. I am only half joking in that. My reason is that I got to do a lot of very interesting research with unlimited funding. A few things have to be said here about China and its aspirations. Just listen to the words. They are doing the same thing they accuse the US of doing. Any thinking person will see that, and it blunts any ideological points they are trying to make, at least in the west. Another thing to consider is that the world did just fine when the Soviet Union and China were completely isolated. In the 1960s and 1970s I remember seeing a satirical magazine called Mad Magazine. In some of their cartoons there were maps of the world. China was listed as the "great big empty spot". The US opening to China was, initially, a geopolitical move to counter the Soviet Union. Nothing more. As for trying to challenge the US militarily, well Japan tried that. China is not, in relative terms, in the position that Japan was in prior to WWII. Like all northeast Asian countries, their geography and demographics cannot rival the US. As for being factory to the world, that is a non-issue. In the first half of the 20th century, it was the US that had that role. In fact, the US was producing, so I have read, 50% of the world's manufacturing by the early 20th century. Then it was Japan. Now, in the early 21st century it has been China. Don't forget that in Japan and the US manufacturing did not go away. It is already shifting to Southeast Asia and India, and to some extent the US and the rest of North America. China, as a communist country, is trying to compete with international capital. They will never win that battle. They failed prior to communism to keep the small European powers from controlling their foreign trade. What historical precedent can they point to? In the battle of systems, communism has already lost. It is built into the ideology. Again, thanks for the update.
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  233. One the best videos I have seen on this issue. Lawarence is a great spokesman on this issue.
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  234. What you forget is that Hong Kong had special status in the US. That contributed a lot to its success. By going back on the one China, two systems policy, the CCP put that status in jeopardy. The US has every right to decide who it wants to deal with, just as China does. That's a little something called sovereignty.
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  235. How can we have cold weather in the NE? I thought that global warming was going to change all that.
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  236. Sir Tony gives Putin all too much credit. Putin's speech was pathetic. Prigozhin would not have moved if he did not have some support among the oligarchs. His efforts are not over.
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  237. Don't forget that the tank was originally created during WWI to defeat the trenches. In WWII, trenches and "dragons teeth" were used by the Nazis. They too were overcome. As for Crimea, there was the Crimean War (19th century) and both the Nazis and Soviets took Crimea during WWII. In the Gulf War and Operation Iraqi Freedom the Iraqis also built trenches, anti-tank ditches and laid minefields. In the Gulf War, which lasted all of three days, these obstacles were overcome by tanks, infantry and engineers as well as air power. Ukraine is getting all of these.
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  238. This is insanity. This guy says the elements of the plan are wildly popular. NO, they are not. This is just the same situation as the Labor manifesto in the UK at the end of 2019. They kept insisting that the individual elements were polling well. The whole thing was a lot like the Democrats' plan now. One of the big issues was the cost. Why can't these leftists understand this? The net result for Labor was the biggest loss in decades. Even if this does not pass in the US there may still be losses because of the threat of such massive spending.
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  239. The unemployment issue is the thing that could bring down the CCP. I once saw an interview with George W. Bush. He was asked about China. He mentioned that, when he would first meet a foreign leader he would always ask, what is the one thing that keeps you up at night. The Chinese leader he talked to was Hu Jintao. Hu's response was: finding jobs for several million people per year. It was the provision of jobs that kept the CCP in power.
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  240. Satan 2 is not a new capability. We have had MIRVs, as had the Soviets, since the 1980s. Missiles with MIRVs, on both sides, also carried decoys. The typical US ICBM and SLBM carried 14 warheads plus decoys. This is a capability that is at least 40 years old, and I am wondering what the Russians think that they are doing by claiming it is something new.
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  241. Don't forget where the CCP came from. The CCP is a Marxist-Leninist party. The funny thing about where Marxist socialism, or communism, or whatever you want to call it, has been successful is that Marx did not predict it (he was wrong about so much). The main countries were Russia and China. Both were mostly peasant societies. He assumed that the revolution would come in advanced industrial societies with a developed industrial proletariat. He was thinking about countries like Germany, the UK and US. Those countries with a peasant economy would have to go through stages of development to bring them into the conditions for revolution. So, why did Russia, then China, become the first major communist countries? Because the revolutionary leaders promised the peasants free stuff. That stuff was, of course, taken from the bourgeoise. They played on the greed of the people. These are the people of China. I say all this because the society of China, as well as its leaders, are thoroughly corrupt. Does the CCP organize the massive counterfeiting in China? The CCP is involved in a lot of the IP theft, but not all of it. How about all the poor-quality goods and outright poisoning of the environment? The man who starts speaking at about 1:45 is correct in what he says, but he leaves out that these private business owners as well as all the CCP officials they have to deal with, are probably corrupt. Also, the people protesting at the beginning of the video are dreaming. They fled. They are in the US where they can say those things. They are kidding themselves if they think China can become like the US. Just look at what happened in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That is China's fate, with competing warlords. That is Chinese history.
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  242. The show is getting funnier and more enjoyable now that the news isn't all about the woke bull crap.
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  243.  @RememberNineEleven  Exactly! History is not exactly repeating itself. A lot of the same elements, just distributed in a different way.
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  244. Your comments about warlords arising in Russia are very relevant, and most probably indicate what will happen. This is also the most likely fate for China as well. I have heard/read that China, in its long history, has only had about 300 years of truly unified central government. In fact, prior to WWII they were in another warlord period. Mao and the Communists were just one warlord faction of many. It will be interesting to see how this develops. Whatever happens it will be in this decade for both.
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  245. Talk TV needs to make this program longer. It one of the best.
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  246. Hey, I bought $600 shoes when I lived in the UK (Church's). That was the sale price. What you overlook is that the UK has had two female PMs, neither of whom went to Eaton. Truss is the same. The Labor party has never had a female PM or leader. Sunak is by all accounts a good guy. In the current circumstance his wealth seems to be a detriment. In another time he would have a better chance.
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  247. We need to see prosecutions. Pronto. If some of what has been revealed about how the money was dispersed is true then the bureaucrats involved should all be fired, at the very least.
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  248. This tendency for Chinese companies to branch out into businesses where they have no background is a bad thing for the Chinese economy. We call such companies conglomerates. They were once fashionable in the west, but have become, rightly, unfashionable.
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  249. Lots of good responses. Don't forget the USSR pushing the idea of the "new Soviet man". This is what it turns into.
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  250. What all these professional "analysts" fail to realize is that the same situation exists in other countries in the former Soviet bloc. Allow Russia to peel off parts of countries with Russian speaking populations puts many of these countries at risk. Remember the run up to WWII?
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  251. I felt the same way. I also felt that when Hillary lost in 2016.
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  252. The ineffectiveness and corruption in the Chinese semiconductor industry is one of the best arguments for the superiority of the free-market capitalist system over state capitalism. There are lots of others. Ever wonder why the Soviet Union or the Soviet bloc never developed this industry? Same reason as in China today. Considering that Xi is moving the country to a fully state controlled economy, the outlook for China is grim.
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  253. Excellent analysis and list. What bothers me is that the economic experts and pundits ignore the fundamentals of markets. I am talking about the types of things that you point out, not "policy pronouncements". The only one I am hearing say anything about these issues is the guy from Nomura. The big thing is that the most outsiders and investors within China are assuming, again, that the Chinese system works like a classical western system. The utter stupidity of that assumption is staggering.
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  254. The Chinese are finding out how markets and supply and demand work. I have been in a house for 25 years. From my original purchase price, it eventually rose about 75%. Then, it fell by 35% from that peak. It is currently back up to the peak. This is in nominal terms. That's just how it is with housing. A lot depends on external macroeconomic factors and financial factors such as interest rates. The issue in China is that the market was manipulated by the government for so long that many people will be adversely affected. In addition, the government provided few alternative investment avenues to the average person. This also distorted the market.
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  255. The CCP policy of foreign companies needing to have joint venture partners is coming back to bite them. This policy actually makes it less costly for companies to exit China as the capital lost is less than if it were a fully owned venture. In the US, companies like Honda actually can own the factories without local partners. The plants they are building in the US with partners are not driven by policy. Those plants are being built to service a particular company in the US or Canada.
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  256. Warlords! I have been talking about this for a long time. I really got the idea from reading Peter Zeihan's books. I think he was the one that pointed out that China, over its long history, has only had about 300 years of effective central control. After the Qing dynasty fell there was a warlord period with no central government at all. Mao and Chiang were both warlords and there were many others. In fact, the KMT never controlled the largest territorial bloc. I saw a speculation that some of the coastal cities and regions were contemplating breaking away from the CCP and aligning with Taiwan. The channel was taken down not long after these speculations. They were just that, speculations, but the fact that people were even talking about that is in itself significant.
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  257. "I was supposed to make a profit..." I don't know if it the translation, but that is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard. This is the same type of thing I hear when we see all those people who invested and lost their money protesting. Even in the US, the only things that are "safe" are government bonds and savings accounts. In all the advertising for investment products, the caveat that a total loss of principle is possible. The only place you don't see that is in the YouTube videos hawking stocks (especially Tesla). It is probably the result of a population that lived under communism for so long. When exposed to capitalism and markets they seem to be deluded, and frankly, ignorant. This also happened in Russia. The only way people made real money was through corruption and gangsterism.
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  258. As Belinda says, it is the mostly white liberal democracies that people of color are fleeing to. They don't go to China, Japan won't let them in. The countries who have the most people trying to get in illegally are the US and UK. How can you say they are racist? Something must be done.
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  259. I still think, based on my experience, that moving supply chains away from China will not be as difficult or costly as everyone makes out. There are two sides to this. One is the initial move of those supply chains to China. The companies that made that move did so without government help and were not significantly disrupted. The other is the nature of industrial processes. These are ever changing, adapting and improving. We have seen within the US that it is often more cost effective to build a new plant than upgrade an old one. It happens ALL THE TIME! Sometimes this is driven by technical considerations. Sometimes it is political and labor relations considerations. Whatever the case, it is something that companies do and are structured to do. Financial, geopolitical and economic analysts are often poorly equipped to understand or analyze this. Finally, the two pillars of investment in China, a large (but not skilled) workforce and a large market are collapsing at the same time.
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  260. The quote at 14:00 sums things up well. This is the best I have seen as a summary of the plight of the Chinese people under communism. I often criticize China and the Chinese, but what I really mean is China under the CCP, not the people themselves. As with many other peoples who move to the US they thrive in a free society. Even in reference to the property debacle the people are dealing with a system that they did not set up. From my western point of view, it is utter madness. It is, but that is the system they have to live with. Now it is falling apart.
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  261.  @partofme100  I assume you are German. Let us know. As for his experience, it fits in with a lot of what I have experienced (I lived and worked in Europe and did a lot of business in Germany) and knowledge I have through in-laws in Germany. One of those in-laws surprised me one day. He had done what I did (a foreign assignment) in opposite direction. He was also a high-level exec in a German auto parts manufacturer. One day, standing on my deck in the US, he expressed a strong desire to move to the US. We could go on for a while about why that is. You have to understand that his family is an old established one. They have even traced their family back to 1700 (I saw the document). My sons studied German in high school at the AP level and considered studying in Germany (at least for a semester) and considered going to Germany to work after university. They decided not to. That is actually a typical decision. One the non-family front I have met German entrepreneurs in high tech who wanted to move to the US. I have met none who wanted to go the other way. The loser in all this is Germany.
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  262. One thing I find interesting in the US is that in surveys about issues people are concerned about, I have not seen climate change even register.
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  263. Shekhar, I was fascinated just listening to the first two minutes. It is as if you are finding out something for the first time which has been happening for a while now. I know you follow the US so I am not sure what the deal is. Are you surprised at what is happening? Yes, things are changing fast. Trump ran on that. Biden did a lot to change direction from Trump's first term, just as Trump did following Obama. That is par for the course. Why the surprise? As for the geopolitics, I am very surprised at your surprise and disappointed. You need a history lesson. First, the world order that Trump is "upending" has only been around for about three decades. To some extent we (the world) fell into it. At the end of the Cold War the then president, George H. W. Bush, who was running for reelection, wanted to have the conversation about how the world would run going forward. He was the most qualified president the US has ever had in terms of foreign policy. He was a Navy aviator in WWII. He was a congressman, an ambassador (UN, China), Director of the CIA and Vice President for eight years before becoming President. Frankly, few world leaders ever have such a background. He was voted out of office in favor of the populist governor of a smaller state. The tag line for his campaign was "It's the economy, stupid." So, just at the time we needed to have the conversation it was ignored. All US presidents since them have become progressively less globalist. Some use the phraseology "more populist". The American electorate has no interest in policing the world. There is also no need. This is not the world prior to WWII. Nuclear weapons really changed everything. As an Indian you should understand that. There is also no economic need. Second, the history of the world has never included a unitary power worldwide prior to the last three decades. Historically there were some very large empires, but due to the nature of technology, etc., never had there been just one superpower with ability to project power unchallenged worldwide. Even at the height of Great Britan's power, there were other significant players as was revealed with WWI and WWII. So, we went from multipolarity, to bipolarity during the Cold War, to unipolarity and are now "officially" returning to multipolarity. That bipolar situation lasted longer than the current unipolar period, but that was only about 45 years. The blink of an eye in historical terms. Third, and it is quite stunning that an Indian who follows geopolitics does not see this, several major countries have been calling for multipolarity for years now. The list includes China, Russia and India among others. Even the EU has been calling for it. In many cases officials have used the phrase "multipolar world order". Getting back to US politics, issues like foreign affairs and "global warming" or "climate change" have always polled at the bottom of concerns for the electorate. This is consistent over American history. The US, prior to the end of WWII, has been intentionally isolationist. George Washington, our first President, warned against any permanent foreign alliances. Later, the Monroe Doctrine was articulated. The goal was to keep the US out of foreign wars and to keep those wars out of the Western Hemisphere. One only has to look at the history of the Americas prior to the American Revolution to see why. So, catch your breath. This has been coming for a long time.
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  264. I don't always agree with Peter on the details of things like supply chains and military matters, but I do on the macro trends. I have read all his books, and now have seen lots of videos. When I mention him while commenting elsewhere, I get a whole range of retorts. On the China situation, and the global trade situation, he is so right on with his prognostications it is almost scary. With China specifically I feel I am watching it in real-time. I just read that 100 Japanese companies have withdrawn from China in the last three years. Apple, with their contract manufacturer Foxconn, has been moving their production to Vietnam and India.
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  265. IBM's revenue last year was over $60 billion. I used to work for a software brand within IBM which had revenue of over $2 billion at the beginning of the millennium. It's gross profit margin was about 80%. So, HNA is not massive. Large, but not massive.
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  266. The tractor is funny. Probably ten years ago I was on a cousin's farm. He had two new tractors. Diesel powered, but fully capable of autonomous operation. In fact, the cousin said that the operator cab was only necessary for liability reasons. Of course, he did not use it in automatic mode. I see this with a lot of Tesla cars as well. I was in an Uber which was a Tesla Model 3 and asked the driver if he ever used the autonomous feature. He said plainly NO. By the way, I was at an event down on the farm where there was a parade of old tractors. There was one very old one which was LP gas powered. Don't see many (any?) of those either.
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  267. On the Hebdo issue I totally disagree. Look at the number of anti-Christian items that are often published. The Muslim community is overly sensitive. They can certainly criticize members of their own community who transgress, but not others.
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  268. Alexandria, like many other places, is not suited to sustain their population. Early in the video the statement is made that ground water intrusion was already a problem before the effects of climate change and sea water rise. This rise has not happened, and predictions about it are questionable.
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  269. I remember talking to my wife about the choices in the election in 2000. We were actually living in England at the time. One thing I specifically remember is that Bush was against regime change wars and foreign entanglements. That resonated with both of us, and we voted for him. Then 9/11 happened (we were still in England). As for the technological advances with the military, I can attest to that. We had both worked in the aerospace and defense industry. One funny, but semi-serious, proposal that I heard while working in a highly classified area is instructive. Some thought that we should let the Soviets get a hold of the code, not including the documentation, of one of the major systems. They would then have to put a large number of people on it. It would significantly slow down work on their own systems. By the time they figured it out, we would be a generation or two ahead of them. Never happened, but it might have been interesting.
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  270. Thanks for this video. Great concept and information. The numbers you cite for attacking vs defending forces works here in Ukraine because both sides are somewhat evenly matched in equipment and technology. In fact, they are both drawing from the same original pool of equipment. This breaks down when there are technological advantages. Iraq is a great example. In their war with Iran, in the 1980s, that turned into a stalemate. Both sides had a similar number of forces. It was long and bloody, with no real strategic result in the end. The Gulf War was totally different. The west never did have an overwhelming number of troops. It was air power, intelligence and superiority of equipment that decided the issue. In the Iraq War of 2003, the US force that invaded and destroyed the Iraqi army and state was actually much smaller. Again, it was air power and technology that made the difference. The term often used is "force multiplier". This is actually possible to calculate. In both cases Iraq had plenty of time to create defensive obstacles and fortifications, which they did, in depth. The US side had plans and methods to overcome these, which it did. In Ukraine the Ukrainians do not have this capability. The missing element is air power to suppress the opposing forces while breaking through the defenses. This is the problem Ukraine has in the south. It is also the problem the Russians have in the Kharkiv assault. That said, if Ukraine finally gets F-16s into operation and is able to use long range fires to attack Russian troop concentrations in Russia itself, then the situation totally changes. This is starting to happen, and it changes the details of the equation, not the concept itself.
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  271. The population level situation is really an important issue. There are several people out there who analyze that the population is much lower than the CCP reports. These are mostly analysts in the west. I just recently saw, on a channel that often presents interviews with ordinary citizens in China, a similar opinion. The consensus seems to be that the current population is under 1B. The people in China point out that the number of people in rural and older, distressed industrial areas is shrinking drastically. The thing is that the number of jobs in the big cities is also shrinking. So, if the migrant workers are having to go back "home" and there are fewer and fewer people there it implies that things are much worse than is being reported by official channels. The plain fact is that officials in China should be freaking out. Listening to the Xi speed you quote brings to mind terms like doublespeak and gobbledygook.
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  272. It is good to see that people are starting to pay attention to the treatment of labor in China. Between that and the pollution issue, what companies have done is to export practices that they would not accept at home. It is true that the Chinese are directly responsible for the abuses, but this is facilitated by western investors and companies. I actually ran into an example that melds both of these problems. I was at a meeting where a Chinese industrialist, a family firm, was in the US soliciting business. One American who wanted a product made in China was asked if he wanted air filtration in the plant to protect the workers. If he said yes that would increase the cost. He said no.
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  273. Mr. Fox is the most informed commentator I have heard yet on this subject. Some of the people who I have watched, especially on this channel, just don't seem to know what they are talking about. They often seem to just be repeating what is trending on social media. Kudos!
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  274. I missed this program in the last couple of weeks. Glad to see it back. It is always good to see the Indian perspective. I also look at many others from various countries. Agree or not, it is important to know how others see things. Great job.
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  275. China does not export coal. In fact, it imports coal. As for rare earths, they are not rare. Before China became involved in processing them, the US had its own source and processing. The thing about this process is that it is environmentally "dirty". Thus, as with much other materials processing, the pollution was simply shifted to China, which does not enforce standards, thus lowering the cost. These are not advantages for China. In a real war scenario, it would be trivial to strangle China of resources. China imports massive amounts of oil and food, as well as many other commodities. China would be back to the state they were in around the time of the Great Leap Forward, including the starvation.
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  276. The Russian Empire/Soviet/Russian Federation military has never been all that great. In fact, they have always been inferior to the Western European and Japanese military. Just look at the Crimean War, in the md-19th century. Then look at the Russo-Japanese War in the early 20rh century, In WWI, Russia completely collapsed. This would have happened even without the revolution. In WWII the Soviets only prevailed by taking MASSIVE casualties, through ineptitude, and by massive material support from the Western Allies. In Finland, at the beginning of WWII, they were mauled by a much smaller, but better motivated adversary (sound familiar). That campaign actually contributed to Hitler's decision to invade.They have never had a superior army or air force. Just look at the performance of Soviet equipped and trained militaries against the Israelis. Add to that Iraq, in both the war against Iran (US supplied) and the Gulf War and OIF, and you see what paper tigers they are. Their second biggest export sector is military equipment. The war in Ukraine may tank that market.
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  277. Glad you and the others have been remonetized. I look forward to your videos. The best thing that could happen for Ukraine is that Russia sends masses of conscripts to the front line. They have little training (to be competent in modern warfare takes a year) and little motivation, in many cases. They will be a massive strain on Russian logistics. Russia cannot supply what they have there now. So, these troops will either simply be demoralized, will defect or will be killed. This is disaster for Russia.
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  278. Good to see you. Yes, the price of freedom is indeed high.
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  279. What come to mind when I hear President Trump, his cabinet or senior Republican legislators is "the adults are back in the room".
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  280. The cost of the drone is not the relevant cost when calculating how much should be so spent taking them down. The cost of the target is the relevant cost.
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  281. Strikes in the "workers' paradise"? How can this be?
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  282. The first story points out something I have been harping on for years. The Chinese economy is NOT a western economy, and yet financial institutions in the west have been treating it as such. Financial analysts and economists have failed to model both the central control (and its capricious nature) and corruption aspects of the Chinese economy. This amounts to malpractice.
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  283. I love the example of the combines. My farmer relatives had a friend who had a bunch of combines, all of one manufacturer, scattered about their farm. I think they mostly used them for parts. We used to hunt deer on that farm a lot and often used the old combines for cover. I remember about 30 years ago when my relatives got a "new" (they bought it used with a small number of hours on it) John Deere combine. It harvested at twice the speed of their old one. It also had a laptop computer in the cab and a real-time yield monitor. They could take the data to the local John Deere dealer and get a detailed map of the productivity of their property. This allowed them to apply fertilizer in a more efficient manner. They are truly magnificent machines.
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  284. Protests are, in this day and age, so artificial. One of my colleagues told me about his daughter, who was protesting a nuclear power plant. It turns out she, and many others, were being hosted by some rich people who had homes on the water near to where the plant was going to be located. They were provided with food, lodging and some money. During the Vietnam War there were large protests. I can attest, from personal experience, that many people involved were there mostly for the sex and drugs. Another way to look at it is to consider Richard Nixon's second election in 1972. He was not a "dove" on the war by any means. He also won by one of the biggest landslides in US presidential history. In an example from the recent protests, I saw an older woman who was a gay rights activist. Gays for Palestine. It may have been on this channel. She was interviewed and asked about Hamas' stance on gays. She had no clue. Frankly, if she had shown up in Gaza with her rainbow flag, they might well have thrown her off a high building.
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  285. You mention it obliquely, but the real result of the sanctions, especially concerning oil, is that the price they are getting is, at best, break even. So, they are getting money for their oil, but there is no profit left over to apply to the war. It is as if they had not sold any. Also, to bolster the federal budget in Russia, the oil companies are paying tax on the benchmark prices (e.g., Brent) not their actual sale price. Oil is no longer a real factor in the Russian economy.
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  286. The US opened up to China as a part of its Cold War with the Soviet Union. In case you hadn't noticed. that war ended 30 years ago. Next the US saw China as a massive market. Well, official CCP doctrine is to make China more domestically focused (made in China initiatives). China has also become an unreliable partner in supply chains. Finally, China has become a way to sidestep environmental and labor regulations in the west. So, relations cooling with China is not looking so bad.
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  287. You have to understand that average income in the US is $56K and housing as a multiple of income is lower than in China. In fact, in the US the bank will typically approve loans for up to 4.5 times annual income. In China, using the figures above that multiple is 23 times annual income at the low end. I also understand that many people borrow from friends and family to come up with the down payment. I hate to put it this way, but the Chinese are royally screwed.
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  288.  @silentwatcher1455  You have no idea of what you are talking about. At you a troll?
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  289. I have seen it all through decades. We have this war on drugs, and the people prosecuting it are either inept or incompetent. People will do what they want. I did these things in the fourth quintile of the last century of the last millennium. Today I have whiskey, and that is enough for me. But I do not presume to tell others what to do. Look at the ways we die. Drug overdoses have overtaken automobile deaths, but only recently. Think about that. Getting from point A to point B used to be more deadly. People are going to do these things, like it or not. It is not even a majority. Perhaps that is why we treat it like we do, Weed is now legal where I am. Would I start doing it again. NO way. I have no interest in that. But that is my choice. Others may decide differently. As long as they do not impact me, I don't care. That is the whole basis on which this republic was founded. Do what you want, but don't harm me or stop me from doing what I want. American individualism! That is why so many people want to come here.
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  290. While I am not a Biden fan, his executive order makes sense and follows what I understand as the international rules on asylum. One of the keys is that one should apply for asylum in the first safe country one enters. This is true even if you plan to apply for asylum in a different country. This comes up a lot in the UK where asylum seekers in France illegally cross the English Channel to get to England. It also applies for those that reach Mexico who want to get into the US. Don't forget, just because one claims to be a refugee from conflict does not mean that one is. That is why there is a vetting process. The mention of those people fleeing Syria is a case in point. Was that really the bulk of asylum seekers? I would not be so sure. The other issue is the cost, both monetary and social. It should be up to the people of each country if they want to bear that cost. The "international" community and courts do not have taxing power. They don't pay for it. Therefore, they legally have no say in it. No taxation without representation. That is the bedrock of western liberal democracy since at least the Magna Carta. The big problem, cost wise, is that the advanced western societies have generous welfare benefits. Many of the refugees are looking for a handout when the get to the west. This is not right.
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  291. Can we get MAHA hats to go with our MAGA hats?
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  292. In general, I agree with Peter, with the caveat that I do not believe his assertion that we will be able to do it if Taiwan were taken. What will happen is that the industry will adapt. The whole foundry industry, which I have followed from its inception, grew organically. It was more of a business-driven process than a technological one. Some types of chips may go up in price for a while, but the system will reconfigure itself. The value of this industry is such that it will attract the capital necessary to do this and competition will drive the prices back down.
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  293. The common people of China are not citizens, but subjects.
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  294. She is great! She understands what is going on, cares, and acts. Truly an inspiration.
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  295. Now it all makes sense.
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  296. The mismatch in university graduates with the jobs that really drive the economy (engineering, finance and manufacturing) is also evident in the US. A lot of the student loan debt that is problematic is owed by people with useless degrees. These degrees are fine for people whose families are already wealthy enough to pay for education, but borrowing to get such degrees is madness on a societal level. Years ago I met Chinese students in graduate programs in the US in fields such as statistics or engineering who really wanted to do something else. At least someone was smart enough to pressure them to get a useful degree. That seems to have gone by the wayside.
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  297. Peter's description of US action after WWII in setting up the security order is correct but lacks some context. Don't forget that the US has always been wary of foreign wars (seems hard to believe now). From the Monroe Doctrine to the isolationism prior to both world wars, the attitude of the US populace has been decidedly against intervention. Until the aftermath of WWII, the US was also protectionist, as was most of the world. This helps explain both what Peter points out today with trade generally, and with support for Ukraine for example.
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  298. The Kinzhal is not a "hypersonic glide missile". I thought that was a well known fact. Hypersonic glide missiles typically work by being launched into space. From there they reenter the atmosphere at high speed and maneuver. That last feature is the key to their potential lethality. So, Kinzhal is just a fast missile of a rather conventional design. As we can see from what happened here and what Ukraine has been able to do with Stormshadow, that the stealth sub-sonic cruise missile can be much more effective. As for intercepting ICBMs, that is possible. I worked on SDI in the 1980s. The problem with the system was the mission. It was designed to stop a massive ICBM attack. There are two problems with this. One is the sheer number of weapons involved, and thus the cost. The other is the testing. There was a real move to field something less ambitious to allow for the defeat of a second or third tier nuclear power, like Pakistan or Iran. I expect that the technologies were continued to be developed and incorporated into current systems.
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  299. A new order dominated by China and Russia? These are two countries that may well not exist in their current forms by the end of this decade. Between demographic collapse and political instability, they both are looking into the abyss. So, good luck with that. As for Europe having strategic autonomy from the US, dream on. In fact, it is Putin who is driving the US and Europe closer together. This includes tighter economic integration as well. There are lots of alternatives to Russia and China in terms of both raw materials and manufacturing. The shift away from Russia and China is already underway.
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  300. I recently bought three battery powered lawn tools from a company that was started in China. Two of the three were made i Vietnam. Looking at the company website, they are also starting to manufacture in the US. This is real. This is happening.
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  301. You have to realize that these elements were mined in the US before the opening to China. What has happened with that opening is that we (the whole West) have just exported this to China, where standards are not enforced (ever). A good, but unrelated example is cyanide in rice. My ex-wife had a concern about this, so we stopped eating rice. I looked into it. The studies I saw showed that China was not enforcing their own standards. Their standards were half of what the WHO said was acceptable. And yet, when they looked at levels in, I believe was 62 or so regions, almost all (probably 60) exceeded the WHO levels by a large amount. I just use this as an example. There were sites in California in the US where most of the rare earths were mined before the opening to China. Because of the cost of complying with environmental regulation, these sites could not compete with China. If we applied our standards to foreign suppliers, the US would be the major producer, and the environment would be better off. The costs would be higher, but would reflect the environmental factors. China is a sh*t show as far as the environment is concerned. We need to stop buying from China.
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  302. The US was having a massive problem with recruitment and retention under Biden. When Trump got in, that has reversed totally. So, makes sense what you say about the people in charge in the UK having an impact.
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  303. Distinguishing between different wars is a fool's game. Frankly, by these criteria, the Korean and Vietnam Wars were a continuation of WWII. Even at the beginning of the video, they consider the casualty counts and distribution (civilian vs military). The profile was different. These were different wars.
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  304. WOW! A very thought-provoking video. Well done! One more thought on communism in China, and generally. Marx assumed that the revolution would be driven by the urban, industrial proletariat. He assumed that it would start in countries like Germany, the UK and the US. Instead, it started in countries that were industrially underdeveloped with large peasant populations. Specifically, Russia and China. This is what allowed them to control the populations. They were used to being controlled. Of course, Marx's reasoning was all wrong. The people of Russia and China were offered free stuff, taken from the middle and upper classes. They were not really ideological. In the countries where Marx expected the revolution the people aspired to create wealth. Many of the wealthy in the US these days, and historically, did not come from highly privileged backgrounds. Even the average factory worker has it fairly good. Frankly, having traveled a bit, I have concluded (and I am not alone in this) that our lower classes would be considered middle class in most of the world.
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  305.  @Thrill_Hou  True. But it was the norm throughout ALL of human history. If we project our current morals on the past, then we will have little or no past to contemplate according to your judgement. And this becomes a never-ending descent into ignorance.
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  306.  @misterbaker9728  I have never seen that stated anywhere. Do you have a reference or is that just your opinion. Ike was insistent that allied troops stop at the Elbe. Considering how many troops the Soviets lost in taking Berlin, this was obviously a good decision. I have heard that Patton wanted to rearm the German troops and then to turn around and attack the Soviets with them fighting alongside the western powers. In hindsight, that might have been the best course of action. Without western material support the Soviets most likely could not have withstood such an attack.
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  307. You are too kind to the Chinese people. This is not just "irresponsible policies & practices". It is total corruption. At every level. This is a feature, not a bug.
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  308. The railroad situation in the past in the US is a great example. I used to go to a private supper club where the bathroom walls were papered with stock certificates from defunct railroads.
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  309. I have to disagree that massive population is a source of power and strength. First, the actual data from current economic performance and second from historical events completely contradict this. Just look at per capita and total GDP for countries around the world. China and India have a third of the world's population, but only 20% of world GDP. The US generates 25% of world GDP but has about a tenth of the population of China and India combined. The growth rates that China and India would have to sustain to catch up in per capita terms is astronomical. It certainly won't happen this century. Both countries are also putting lots of their resources into the military and space exploration. At their levels of societal development this is a poor use of resources. Both countries have hundreds of millions of people in poverty and these activities will not help change that. From the historical point of view the data is even more striking. Neither China nor India have spent most of their long history as fully unified states under strong central control. Much smaller European countries dominated China and India over the last many centuries. The last time China built a strong fleet and projected power was in the 15th century. India was completely taken over and ruled by the UK, a country with a fraction of the population. Japan invaded China in the 1930s with a much smaller population and took over massive amounts of territory. The actual history and current data show that rather than an asset, massive populations are a detriment.
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  310. I love it when Senator Blackburn talks about moving government agencies out of DC. Full disclosure, I was born in DC. What this reminds me of is similar talk from the 1960s or early 1970s. My father worked for what is now the Army Research Laboratory. I remember, when I was a kid, him talking about being moved to someplace like St. Louis. I don't think he was happy about the prospect. He was from Massachusetts then moved to DC after the war. I don't think he liked the idea of the Midwest. The funny thing is that I am now in the Midwest (have been for over 30 years). I like it.
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  311. I agree that it is India's choice to make. They must look after their own interests. Europe will find other sources for energy. On the other hand, the world order, and the ability to trade freely and participate in any supply chain is solely guaranteed by the US. That was put in place to resist the Soviet Union. It has been thirty years since the Soviet Union fell. The US is backing off on its commitments. Some of the countries most effected by this are Russia and China. The US will come out of this alright. Russia and China will collapse.
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  312. The BRI was always a stupid idea. Why do you think the original Silk Road disappeared? Just look at the many "alternative" routes. Often the cargo needs to be moved between transport modes. This is expensive, especially when trying to avoid sea routes. Water transport is the most efficient possible. The current world trade transport system evolved organically driven by private companies using the most efficient, and profitable means. The other thing is that the BRI is NOT being built with large participation of indigenous peoples. China uses Chinese workers on most of the projects. They also bring their typical quality control with them, resulting in many "tofu dreg" projects, some of which had to be shut down.
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  313. I lived in the UK, in southern England, at the time of devolution. I think that if the vote on Scottish independence had been taken in England, then Scotland would now be independent. On of my colleagues said that they should build a trench across the border and that, if they were lucky, the whole thing would float out to sea. Interestingly, the votes in Quebec were around this time. They had two, and both failed. I got the same type of reaction from people in the rest of Canada. They would have voted for Quebec independence. Perhaps there is something to this phenomenon.
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  314. First, the residents of Chicago elected her. This is on them. Second, if you have hire private security, then you should not have to pay the proportion of taxes that go to the police.
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  315. Energy prices in the US area not, as far as I can tell, from the data, increasing. Following the futures market, I see from Thursday's report that WTI prices are down. In fact, as of yesterday, they were about $5 per barrel down from their recent peak, which was not a particularly high level. Natural gas prices are similarly moderate with no upward pressure I can see. Gasoline prices are about where they were a year ago.
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  316. Great work! The only saving grace is that China's banking system is not integrated into the global system.
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  317. I have been seeing lots of articles and videos about this. All I can say is, not another one. How many industrialists, over the last couple of centuries, have tried to do something like this? Look it up. There is a long, and often sordid, history of these efforts. Even in the 20th century we have seen such efforts. I remember, as a kid, Columbia, Maryland. My father took us there when it was in the planning stage, and they had all their mockups and models. It was going to be a "new city" organized in a new way. It is now just another suburb. At least Columbia was built on desirable land. This is just scrubland. I remember my first visit to Silicon Valley, and that was my first thought, coming from the East Coast. Scrubland. And I was told that I had come during the nicest period, in the spring.
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  318. I was an exec with a large US company starting a group with EMEA wide footprint. Hiring, and firing, was so much harder in the EU that we at one point planned to hire in the UK exclusively and have the people travel as needed. Regulation in the EU is also a big issue, and I do believe that you will see more investment in the UK.
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  319. Fascinating! Perhaps this is the only thing China is really capable of producing. This story aligns with all the other reports of embezzlement in China's state owned and funded chip manufacturing initiatives.
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  320. The combined GDP of Serbia and Hungary is $0,3T. Not really significant for China.
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  321. When I was a kid, one of my uncles had a first-generation Beetle. It was, I think, the family's third car (rare for the time). He lived in Springfield, MA. He had a small machine factory. So, this was just a novelty for him. He took my brother and I and one of my cousins out on the Mass Turnpike. The speed limit was 75 MPH back then. The top speed of the Beetle at the time was, from the specs I have seen, 71 MPH. So, we spent the whole time in the right lane. With all of us in the car I am not sure we actually got up to that top speed. It was small, loud and scarry.
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  322.  @YDKim-cr1yx  What the heck are you saying? Please clarify. If you cannot, then don't reply in English.
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  323. Steve starts out his first comments by just totally ignoring the question. It was not a question about the general issues of Twitter and the FBI, it was about these specific actions. Disappointing.
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  324. Even YouTube owes its existence to cats. It was originally created to show cat videos. In fact, I am surprised that there is not a requirement to have at least one cat in every video.
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  325. US GDP is not slowing down. It has been positive since Q2 2022. In Q3 2023 it was 4.9%. Trade with China is slowing, but trade with Mexico and Canada are growing. In other words, it is not slowing, but shifting.
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  326. Very interesting. I knew a lot of it, but you filled in lots of important details for me. Thank you for sharing.
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  327. What I don't hear from any of the pundits is why Trump is moving so fast. The reason is obvious. By getting his policies in place early they will have time to have an effect on the economy, thereby ensuring Trump will have Congress with him in the second half of his term. He has figured it out.
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  328. It's good to see Tyrus on so many different shows on Fox. He is a different and refreshing voice.
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  329. I lived in the UK when mad cow disease was rife. We ate beef while there. I, and my family were barred from donating blood. I don't know if this is still in effect. I only have mild symptoms that come about randomly (kidding). Do you remember the TV show Boston Legal? In it, one of the main characters, played by William Shatner used to act erratically in court when it suited him. He would always blame it on the mad cow disease. It was a joke, but people understood what it meant. In the US, most deaths from HIV have been among gay men. In some other countries, this is not the case. It is still a concern, as there have been instances of HIV infection in the US from HIV tainted blood. It is a real concern.
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  330.  @dongxuzhou4661  It was not the real estate companies. It was the banks. In the US mortgages are pooled and sold as securities. This was the problem. The 2008 crash was a crash of the banking system, primarily. That is why it was so bad, and why it went around the world. Another issue in China is that much more of their economy is tied up in real estate. Thus, it has a larger impact. I just saw that the government in China is starting a $2.54T infrastructure investment program to try to "save" Chan's economy. This is more of the same. Government spending in China is rife with corruption. Also, infrastructure is often not as effective in growing the economy long term. Just look at China's high speed rail. Many of the lines lose money. That means they will be a drain on the treasury for decades to come, negating short term stimulus from their construction.
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  331. I find it interesting about the wonderful things the Israelis did with the land. Not long after the civil war in Syria started, I saw a conference with Syrians at a think tank in Washington, DC. One of the issues they brought up was "water insecurity". One of the American participants brought up Israeli technology that could help with the issue. The Syrians rejected it because it was Israeli.
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  332. Prigozhin has become my favorite entertainer on YouTube.
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  333. Russia is likely to collapse. There are two axes to this. One is demographic. The Russian ethnicity is going to no longer be the majority in the country. This is a long-term trend which the war has accelerated. The second is the nature of the Russian state as a kleptocracy. There is no ideology in Russia, and there is open gangsterism. If the central government cannot provide these forces with what they need, they will, in all likelihood, split off. Some will be ethnically based while others based on power elites. Add to that the Chinese pressure in the east, where they have historical claims, and I don't see the state holding together.
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  334. What people don't consider is that Russia is not making the net profit on oil that they were. Russian oil is expensive to extract compared to Saudi, or even US, oil. It has also become more expensive to transport. Everyone talks about the top line price, but for Putin's war machine what matters is the net profit. Russia is still selling at a discount, by the way.
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  335. On diplomacy, it is very odd that China supports Russia at this time. I have seen geopolitical analysis that contends that China is just waiting for the Russian Army to be decisively defeated in Ukraine (which I expect to be the case). At that point they would make their claims on the eastern part of Russia, taking it by force. I expect the breakup of the Russian Federation at some point. Putin has just pushed that date up considerably. On the economy, I have never heard it said so succulently and well. Pettis obviously knows what he is talking about. I see on an almost daily basis reports on infrastructure investment in China that does not perform.
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  336. The decoupling moves faster and faster. I just saw an article in the WSJ about the factory boom in the US, which you have been talking about. I would love to see a western hemisphere centered supply chain/economy.
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  337. That's what competition is all about.
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  338. The North Koreans failed in the Korean War. Because of surprise and unpreparedness on the US and South Korean side they were initially successful. In a matter of months, however, the combined US and South Korean force had mostly overrun North Korea reaching the Yalu River. I took 1.5M Chinese soldiers to push the South Koreans and their allies back to the borders that had existed at the beginning of the war. That took them another 2.5 years or so, with very high casualties. The thing to note is that the North Koreans in the Korean War actually had combat experience fighting the Japanese and in the Chinese Civil War. Today's North Korean soldiers have none of that.
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  339. The idea of the former Soviet republics keeping their nuclear weapons is a chimera. When the Soviet Union broke up, all the military equipment and forces that were located in each republic became theirs. In the case of Ukraine, they became the third largest nuclear power in the world. They had one of the largest and best equipped armies and air forces. The only problem was that they could not afford them. You see, these had all been paid for by the central Soviet government. They did not get this money anymore. In this environment, the real fear was that these former Soviet republics would be tempted to sell their arsenals to generate cash. In the event, the West gave financial support to them to take this step. There is no way Ukraine could have funded such a large arsenal.
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  340. I like that Senator Scott (one of the great ones) mentions Lincoln's cabinet. I have a book on that which I was given and haven't read yet. It is now at the top of my list.
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  341. Mahyar, love your work, but sometimes you and all the media get it wrong. At 3:15 you say that Hamas needs to brief their soldiers better. I assume that is because the story told by the spokesman doesn't align with what was done, and that everyone can see. Well, duh! These people don't care what the BBC or anyone else thinks. Just look at Afghanistan or Iran or China. Their program is so anti-civilizational that it is hard for westerners to understand. They just have spokesmen as a facade. They say stupid things because if they said what they really think they probably could be arrested in Europe for some sort of hate crime.
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  342. On the post office thing, an old saying from the computer industry comes to mind. To err is human, to really screw up requires a computer.
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  343. You talk about countries where the US intervened in the 21st century. Don't ever forget what these countries did, allowing and building terror networks and taking over other countries. That they cannot now defend themselves is the real problem. Look at Afghanistan and Iraq. Especially Iraq which fought a long war with Iran and took over Kuwait. The US spent massive amounts of money and spent time training the armies of Iraq and Afghanistan. If these countries cannot defend themselves from the terrorists, then what would you have the US do?
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  344. I read Gogol's novel "Dead Souls" at the suggestion of Vlad Vexler. It was very interesting. It seems the main character was from the region of Kherson. I would not have known about Kherson except for this war. That reminds of a song by Enya, I think it was Orinoco Flow. She rattles off a number of names of bodies of water, most of which I knew of through reading histories of WWII. I really enjoy Anna's channel, as I do this one. Thanks for having her on again.
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  345. Even the investment banks and hedge funds are starting to sour on China. This is, of course, a very recent development. I have an investment advisor who is very data driven. For a long time, he has refused to invest in his client's funds in China. He also was a supporter of Xi getting a third term. He is NOT a supporter of Xi. His reasoning is that Xi would tank the economy. Very smart man. Knowing that the statistics are manipulated, I have to wonder if the fund managers that push China investments are failing in their fiduciary duty. I would not be surprised if there are not legal actions in their future. Just a thought.
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  346. Why would the workers need labor unions in the "worker's paradise"? Such a silly idea.
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  347. At about 15:30, your characterization of the conflict with Vietnam in 1979 is, at best, problematic. I have nowhere heard that this was a "win" for China. In fact, it is always characterized as a defeat for China.
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  348. Thank you for sharing.
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  349. The statement by the former FBI agent and the title of the video is insulting and stupid. Should the President elect choose someone "disloyal" to him? This is garbage.
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  350. As an example of unproductive infrastructure just look at China's high speed rail (HSR) system. The initial lines between top tier cities were profitable. Then they decided to connect everything. Now the HSR system is loses almost $1T per year. There are plenty of other examples. Ah, the joy of central planning.
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  351. Pastor Brooks is an inspiration! Fox News is great in bringing his message out! God, I hope he is successful.
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  352. Very interesting report. There is lots of good information here. The idea of Taiwan turning things around and leading a struggle against the CCP seems far fetched at first. Then, if you think about it, it makes sense. Don't ever forget that after the Qing dynasty fell China went into one its warlord periods (of which there have been many) and that Mao was just one of the warlords. Taiwan is much more successful that China in the world economy and for its people. Another thing I saw that tends to support the idea is an item I saw on a channel that has since disappeared. The claim was that there were people in Shanghai that wanted to leave the clutches of the CCP and ally with Taiwan. This type of thing is not unprecedented in history. There has always been tension between the wealthy cities in the coastal south and the central authority. As for the statements made at about 9:30 all I can say is balderdash. This whole idea of maintaining themselves with land routes through the Eurasia is the biggest load of propaganda that one can imagine. Remember the original Silk Road? It was long, dangerous, limited and costly. That is what spurred the European powers to develop their sea power and economy and eventually to dominate Asia. Just look at the size and population of the European peninsula and east and south Asia. Look at it. For hundreds of years this small landmass has dominated not just Asia, but much of the world. The important thing to remember is that transport by sea is very cheap compared to land transport and very easy to set up. Pipelines are good only for a couple of commodities by take huge amounts of capital and lots of time to develop. Before China could even negotiate contracts they would be deindustrialized and starving. The primacy of trade by sea is not some sort of western plot to dominate, but is a natural outgrowth of its advantages.
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  353. Right on! I have followed Peter for a while now and read all his books. What we are seeing happen in geopolitics and economics is happening now in real time. In regard to this video, I just saw in the news that a Korean company was building a chemical plant in the US. Of course, many German companies are as well. There are even some Chinese companies doing so.
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  354.  @knerduno5942  That is one of the events I always cite. Thanks for bringing it up. I have seen some commentators claim Trump was just trying to "force" the Germans to buy US LNG.
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  355. Have the Chinese noticed that in Ukraine ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles have routinely been shot down. The US Navy has the Aegis system which performs a comparable function at sea. In fact, these systems are far reaching and extremely effective.
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  356. Scheduling reasons? You must be kidding. That is always the excuse used when one does not want to have a meeting but is unwilling to make the real reason known. Even the idea that the decision was taken months ago is not verifiable.
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  357. Maajid, by the way, I made my last comment before finishing the video. Sorry. This is a FANTASTIC exposition of the situation.
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  358. Industrial chains take decades? Come on man. None of the factories mentioned were 40 years old. They had their "industrial chain" developed at the beginning of that time, not the end. I am aware of a factory that had been set up in the US, in the outer suburbs (sometimes called exurbs) of a large city where the company was located. In the 1990s the factory was quickly relocated to China. This trope about taking decades or generations is all bunk. Factories are constantly changing, and the critical part is the machinery, not the location. The massive transportation system that allowed China to play on the world stage is one of the most flexible and responsive systems ever conceived. As noted in the video, many of these industries were low skilled. Many of the workers are really peasants (nothing against them) that came to the cities like Dongguan to find work. In addition, many of those industrial chains were created by and managed by foreigners. These are smart and innovative people. Moving a factory, for them, is a challenge and is probably welcome by them personally.
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  359.  @oldgreybeard2507  You could probably make book on that in the UK. I agree that Putin's end will come at the hands of his own people. He will not see the Hague.
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  360. The overbuild in housing in the US in the 2008 crisis was, I have seen reported, 2-4%. In China it may be as high as 100%. Even if the number were 25% that is at least an order of magnitude larger. The number of mortgages that are underwater is large and growing. People are willing to "give away" their properties. The idea here is that the new owner would just take over the mortgage. The original buyer would lose their downpayment and any other equity they have paid in but would be out of the mortgage. The option of personal bankruptcy in China does not exist. The government has actually been advertising, on electronic billboards, the names and ID information of over 8M defaulters, many of them homeowners. These people are restricted from using public transport in many cases, among other things. On top of all of this there is the demographic crisis. Where is demand going to come from? The number of births is now lower than at time since the CCP took over. It is down 53% from the takeover. As for the financial institutions, by western standards they would be insolvent. Several in their "shadow banking" sector, some of the biggest, have already failed. A big portion of the assets on their books is real estate. Disregard the official statistics. Housing stock in the used market is massive and prices are down somewhere between 25% and 50% depending on the location. Even in commercial office space, some of the biggest, richest cities are seeing 20% vacancy rates with no relief in sight. Don't forget the belt and road projects. The numbers I have seen show that 60% of those loans are at risk or non-performing. By the way, while the counterparty risk was the big issue in 2008, the origin of the issue was government intervention in the housing market.
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  361. Fetterman might just switch parties.
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  362. Moscow backed Red Army? The Red Army as you call it was the Soviet Army. It was not backed by Moscow but was a part of the state.
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  363. Shooting locks absolutely works. I once got a lease on a shooting range at a closed government facility. I went to the office of the LRA to get the key. They had all gone home early (typical government employees). I was bummed. I had a trunk load of guns. i started to leave and then thought, I have a trunk load of guns. So I walked up to one of the gates, with a big government lock and shot it with my .45 cal 1911. It worked.
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  364.  @rameshg2717  Not really. China is a planned/controlled economy. They do not have the connections with the global banking system that the West has. The later is why Lehman Brothers was such a problem. Moving the supply chain out of China is not such a big thing. What do you think moving it to China was? It was the West that moved their manufacturing to China. They wanted to get into a big market. Without distortions, this would have been a great thing for both sides. But China, especially un Xi, has distorted the situation. Moving manufacturing is something all companies can do. I have seen it move from different places in the US to China and other countries. Manufacturing is what matters. Tech is easy to copy, as China has shown. On the other hand, the things I need to live are manufactured.
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  365. I am reading the book now. About a third of the way through it. It is great. and very timely.
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  366. Of course, you must realize that the housing market cannot be fixed. It is done. In the end, valuations will be down well over 50%. It will take the financial system with it.
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  367. Those companies that say it will take ten years to disengage from their supply chains in China are lost. China does not have ten years. The thing is, I would bet that if you looked at these companies, it did not take ten years to establish those supply chains. If they were early entrants, then they encountered a China with poorly developed infrastructure and a low-end workforce. I expect that they give these timelines for political reasons.
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  368. Right off the bat, Mr. Gawande says it all. That US taxpayer dollars should be spent to support "humanity" in a global sense is the problem. ANY program that does not support the AMERICAN people and direct AMERICAN geopolitical goals should be shut down. These programs were first started to support American geopolitical goals. The idea was to pay people to be on our side. By the way, it has not turned out that way in many cases. They morphed into something more akin to guilt money. We are rich, others are poor, so we should pay. That is not a valid foreign policy goal. What we end up with is people like Mr. Gawande running such programs. Add on top of that the corruption in many of the countries that the US had provided aid to, and it becomes clear that it is time to stop the madness.
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  369. The plane at the beginning of the video is a F-16. The Navy does not use these. You might want to spend more than a second on your graphics.
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  370. The people in "poverty" in the US would be considered lower, or middle, middle class in China, and much of the world. Not long ago I volunteered at a food pantry in the suburbs of a large US city. The vast majority of the "clients" had cars. These were generally nice cars. At the time I had an older car (since replaced because it was getting too old) and, although it was a high-end model, it was not as nice as most of the cars of the clients. In the US, the poverty line is not a set number. It is a percentage of the income locally, in the case of the standards used by the food pantry. By the way, this pantry was a deluxe facility. Most of the food was donated by local supermarkets and restaurants. It was also all privately funded.
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  371. Bolton is a classic unrepentant neocon.
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  372. Seal Team 6. This is getting serious. I had some Seal Team 6 members (retired) working for me at one point earlier in the millennium. As for the technology transfer issue, it is good to see the EU waking up. This was a large part of Trump's justification for initiating the trade war with Chine when he was President. It is something I have seen up close and personal in my work. If the CCP won't follow the established rules and norms of the west, then the west must reciprocate. The CCP then has a choice. Let's see where this goes.
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  373. I remember when the US M1 Abrahms tank was introduced. I was working on military tactics and systems then. One of the unique things about the M1 was that the shells were in an armored compartment behind the loader. The door operated automatically and was very quick. The M1 uses four crew. My understanding is the newest Russian tank designs take this type of thing into account. Of course, they are far away from having these in production. I understand that they only have a handful. They may even all be prototypes. In fact, they have only sent T-90s in battle very recently, and they have not done well. In WWII and Korea, the US put their latest tanks into the field, even though there were only a handful. This is the best way to gain knowledge. That the Russians have not done so leads me to believe that their machines are not ready.
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  374.  @PYROWORKSTV  Not even close.
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  375. Parents do have the final word on what children are taught in schools. They fund it. Education is almost totally funded by local taxes. Remember no taxation without representation? To say that parents have no say in what kids are taught is stupid, insulting and un-American. Parents have the ultimate say, They are responsible for their children and pay for their education. Anyone who says otherwise is a fool and an enemy of parents.
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  376. I will say it again (and again): someone who keeps working for three years without wages is an idiot. These workers only have themselves to blame.
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  377. Absolutely! We also need to investigate them for ties to the people they are "protecting". Why would they want to protect noncitizens who are here illegally? What's in it for them? Is it just politics? There is something fishy going on.
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  378. The issue with the operational experience in Syria is that the Russians were fighting an insurgency. This is nothing like what is happening in Ukraine.
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  379. Wow! Dalio finally gets it. I am amazed. The unspoken (except for by a few geopolitical strategists) issue here is that the peace, and whole geopolitical environment that we have had until recently, is underwritten by the US and has been for decades. It is no longer cost effective or necessary for the US to do that and the US electorate has been making that clear. What should have happened is that the major players in the world should have been adhering to a rules-based order makes the whole military aspect unnecessary. Instead, we have China and Russia playing the great power game of the 19th century. They have not evolved from that. This is the same attitude that drove Japan to take the actions it did in the first half of the 20th century. The result is that China and Russia are living in the past. They will pay for that.
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  380. Why is it American? I am an American, and I do get a bit miffed by the constant reference to the US in a lot of political discourse around the world. While it is understandable on one level, my problem with it is that it obscures what is going on elsewhere. But it is not an American plot or something Americans impose on the world. The world imposes it on itself. And that is not even to mention the whole idea of what left and right was originally. On top of all that the US is going through one of its periodic political realignments. So, global understanding of what the labels mean is flawed, or nonexistent.
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  381. Good video. People are catching on about the reality of the Chinese economy and the official statistics, that you have consistently pointed out. Just recently the CSIS has come to this realization and beginning to talk about. I have, of course seen others. Not only is it important for geopolitical reasons, but for investors. Any investment advisor who has relied on government statistics from China should be investigated. I think there has been a big scam going on for a long while now. I recently bought three lawn tools. The company is Chinese. They have a good reputation. Two of the tools were made in Vietnam. Looking at the company website, I see that they are even opening a high-tech plant in the US. With all the talk about foreign owned companies moving out of China, we must not forget all the Chinese companies doing the same. I think this is a way for the owners to get their money out of the country in the face of draconian capital controls. What do you think? The only saving grace, for the rest of the world, is that the Chinese economy is mostly closed from an investment and banking point of view. I know this sounds harsh, but the world did fine without China (or Russia) involved in the international economy. Xi (and Putin) have made their countries toxic to the rest of the world. My financial advisor always said he hoped Xi would get a third term, because he would tank China's economy. It seems to be happening before our eyes. Don't ever forget, the US was the world's factory up to WWII and the immediate aftermath. Then came Japan. Now it is China. Neither of the former economies has really slowed down, it is just that China took to low end. The idea was that, like Japan, China would move up the value chain. They haven't done that. As is often said, they got old before they got rich.
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  382. It's people like you what cause unrest. That's why I watch.
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  383. Tony, I sat down to breakfast and opened up the US based Wall Street Journal (on my laptop, of course) and there was the headline "Tumult Grips Chinese Stocks" with a live label on it. I immediately thought of you and started speculating on what your take would be. Now, I am sitting down with my coffee and cigar and look forward to your take on the situation.
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  384. The disarming of Ukraine (nukes) made sense at the time. That was a time where nuclear disarmament was a major movement around the world. First, it was not clear they could have controlled the weapons. After all, in the Soviet Union those weapons were under the control of Moscow. Second, Ukraine did not have the money to maintain them or a large military in general. The figures I have seen show that Ukraine's GDP per capita is lower than the Russian Federation's. This is borne out after 2014. They had eight years to build up their military but didn't. They relied on foreign assistance even then. Don't forget, they had some significant portion of the Soviet Union's armament industry, including significant tank production. I remember reports on that.
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  385. The concept of creating value locally in a globalized economy depends on respect for intellectual property. China has NEVER had this respect. Pretty much everything they have done is a rip off of someone else's technology. In my consulting activities I have seen this up close. Another issue is quality. Look at the example of Japan. In the early days after WWII their quality was very substandard. They addressed this and now make some of the highest quality products in the world. China has not made that leap. In fact, it seems that quality of Chines goods may be getting worse, even for simple goods. China has not figured things out. They grew so fast, and are so corrupt, that there is probably no path forward for them. Even if the CCP goes away, there may be little hope for China precisely because of the rampant corruption. The likelihood of China becoming an open, liberal democracy is very small.
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  386. China is making the push into EVs just as demand is cooling. Often times when a technology, or company, starts from a low level and grows fast people project from that initial condition to a total takeover of the industry. Often times that fails. I have seen the phenomenon in fields from industrial to software.
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  387. I saw the WSJ editorial. I have read the WSJ for over half a century now. I have lived through similar issues with the Japanese. The WSJ editors, in this instance, have been as much ideological purists as any Marxist. They are wrong. Unfettered free trade has never happened and is never a sufficient or good goal in itself. The fact is that the US opened up its markets is an attempt (successful), as Peter Zeihan puts it, to buy an alliance to counter the Soviets. It was never free trade for its own sake. It was never free trade so that Americans could have cheap goods. It was done for geopolitical reasons. To make free trade useful for both sides, it must be rules based and there must be mechanisms, real ones, to handle disputes. Government interference in capital markets, outside of reasonable regulation to protect investors, must be prohibited. None of this applies with China. Even Japan and Korea distort their systems. They need to be dealt with as well. In those cases, the "buying an alliance" aspect is in full swing, and in this case is fully supported by both sides.
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  388. The CCP are, quite literally, a bunch of commies. Their language is that of Marx and Lenin. I should know, I was introduced to those concepts 50 years ago this year at university. I got better though. I recovered rather quickly. To a contemporary audience this just sounds like so much claptrap, which it is. One of my concerns is the investment bankers and hedge funds that still talk about investing in China and China's rise. They clearly have no idea what they are talking about. A good example is Ray Dalio. One glimmer of hope is that the banks are seeing the warning signs, finally, and reporting on them. You can tell they must be on the right track since the CCP has slammed their analysis. Frankly, such firms have a fiduciary duty to their clients, and I wonder if they are changing their tune because they are afraid of potential legal consequences. Just using official CCP data should be an issue.
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  389. Very good points, Sabine. The idea of you going on to Joe Rogan's podcast is brilliant. I would pay to see that. I am impressed when Rogan asked, "from an engineering perspective". In the end, all this fundamental physics is meaningless, until it is applied.
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  390. The financial crisis is already here. First, the number of nonperforming loans, tied to real estate, is already massive. Some large non-bank financial institutions have already failed. On this channel and others, I have seen plenty of examples where people could not get their money from the bank. That is the western definition of bank failure. The CCP is just covering this situation up. As with my last comment, the CCP run Chinese financial sector is not run like a western financial sector, and yet the analysts act like it is. When will the madness end?
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  391. Every time I see Winsome Sears, I am more and more impressed. When I saw her speech when they won the election, I was quite emotional. I am not usually so. I am an old, hardened Cold Warrior. She just speaks with such clarity and sense that I cannot not be affected. The facts of here life story only make that much more powerful. If the Republican Party does not use her story and integrity going forward, then they are fools.
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  392. Many years ago, a contractor, for some stupid reason, imported a large quantity of wallboard from China to use in the construction of an apartment complex. It contained a lot of formaldehyde, and immediately started outgassing the heat (I believe it was in Florida). All of it had to be ripped out and replaced. The quality of Chinese goods is always suspect. I have other examples from major and minor industrial firms, some of which I was personally brought in to try and resolve. The corruption in China is so rampant, and is so deeply ingrained in the government, that the best thing we can all do is disengage from China until it is somehow reformed. At least we know that it is not directed outward, but that they do it to their own people.
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  393. The Arab states. Really? Yes, they have a lot of cash due to their oil revenue but that is all. The exception is Egypt, the largest Arab country by population, whose economy is in decline. As for the Arab states being hubs of innovation, all I can say is, come on man. Before the Gaza situation blew up, they were looking to Israel for innovation. Eary in the millennium I was at a company conference in Dubai. The sultan came to address us touting Dubai as the Internet city. As far as I can tell, all Dubai is known for now is glitz and failed projects. Talk about failed projects, just look at Saudi Arabia's Neom. Case closed. As for the US, they are in the process of withdrawing from the area. The Global War on Terror is over. The US is back on track to pull back from regions that are not important to it. With the increase in US oil and gas production, Middle East sources are no longer important to it. There are also lots of other sources if the Middle East blows up again. They may not be as easy to get at, but they generally are less unstable.
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  394. I was in the UK when the NHS was having one of its usual crises in the early part of the current millennium. Fortunately, in the UK, private insurance and health services are allowed. In Canada they are not. In Canada, what people do is to go to the US. don't forget that Canada, as vast as it is, has almost all of its population withing 50 miles of the US border. It is not unusual for a Canadian, experiencing a health problem, to go the US and then register the problem, In the US they will be immediately treated. In Canada, they would be on a waiting list, which may extend for years. Frankly, they might never get treated. This is the case in the UK as well. And believe me, I have been on the NHS and lived in England. This socialized medicine is foolish.
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  395. I love the comment from the Beige Book. They are exactly right. This is precisely why I always question the analysts' projections. The frequent disappointment when things don't turn out as predicted should be a clue. It would be a minor thing if people were not making major investment decisions based on these pronouncements from on high. If you look at many of the analysts, you will probably find that they are not right most of the time. Just saying. I have a financial advisor who is an independent and is follows a macroeconomic approach. He has been off China for a while now. If he were the type, he would be gloating right now. Of course, he is not the type.
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  396. Talk about not keeping up with events. It has been reported today that Ukraine has already been counterattacking with forces they already had in the area. The have the chance to trap the Wagner group in a cauldron. They could potentially be eliminated. Wagner has poor relations with the regular army. I just saw it reported that their representative was denied entry into a meeting with a recent meeting of the military command.
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  397. The actions of Xi in China reminded me of Erdogan's actions to try to tame inflation in Turkey. Erdogan persisted in keeping interest rates low, thus exacerbating the problem. This also has the effect of harming the currency in foreign exchange markets, which both countries rely on. These autocrats come up with unsound ideas, ignoring experience and data available to experts who stress policies opposite of what the autocrats choose. The result is that you have stupid people running the show. The time to get out is now!
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  398. Referring to Bernie drooping out of the race: Polling shows that 15% of Bernie's voters plan to vote for Trump. They are hopping mad at the Democratic establishment, which has twice denied Bernie the nomination (as they see it).
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  399. Rita, I love Lefties Losing it. It is hard to watch some of the examples you, and many others, show, though. Your comment on the girl from Middlebury and what she was wearing reminds me of another hilarious incident along the same lines. After October 7, there were protests in the UK. On one channel I saw someone interviewing some of the protesters. One was an older woman with a sign that read "Gays for Palestine". The interviewer asked her what the attitude of Hamas was toward homosexuality. She had no clue. Of course, she would have been thrown off a high building (I have seen reported that they actually do that). Clueless and priceless.
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  400.  @saltapozo  Europe has been dependent on the US for over a century. We look at China today as the world's factory. By 1900 that was the US, and I believe the percentage was higher than China's today. In both World Wars it was the US that was the decisive factor. And of course, in the Cold War it was the US that protected Europe from the Soviets with a massive troop presence and nuclear weapons. So, nothing new here.
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  401. Mike, I generally really like you. Your interview style needs some work, though. This is especially true when you have interesting and knowledgeable people on. DON'T INTERRUPT SO MUCH. Let her speak! She has a lot more experience and knowledge than you do. Let's hear what she has to say.
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  402. In the last item there was a statement about "high quality" EVs from China. Who are they kidding? There basically are no high-quality products from China. I have seen this myself. In the case of EVs from China, there are many videos from China about the very poor quality of the vehicles, and this is not just the batteries. Talking about Chinese made batteries, they are death traps. Even companies like Mercedes have experienced this.
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  403. The Ukrainians have surely shown that they are very quick on the uptake of any weapon system. Taking combat experienced pilots and transitioning them to a new platform in a time of war is not long process. The US has done it many times. In addition, what the Ukrainians have done with the Patriot systems is nothing short of miraculous. Yes, the Patriot is a good system, but it is also complex, and the weapons thrown against them were also new and untried by the Patriots. And yet, Ukraine has a basically perfect record with them from the beginning. Another thing I hear is the issue of training maintenance and repair crews. Well, I hate to break it to those people who say it will take too long. Training a maintenance operator is a lot simpler than training a pilot. The systems are designed that way. Setting up logistics, etc. will also take place in parallel with pilot training. People who raise this objection have no understanding of systems engineering. Another point is the idea that such a large country as Russia will prevail. Are you kidding? If you look at the last century and a half, this has only really been true once. And that was only with massive outside help, which Russia does not have this time. A great example is Israel. By the logic of the Russians Israel fought wars with a much larger disparity in population. What did they have, in addition to their will and intelligence, western weapons as against Soviet weapons. As for the Times Radio, I have noticed that attitude. I call them "snowflakes".
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  404. Freedom of speech has to absolute to be viable. That means saying hurtful things in some cases. Just look at some of the things people have said over the years about Christianity, in majority Christian countries. Where is your outrage over that?
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  405. That is our only real hope.
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  406. "...currently land and air transportation are significantly more expensive compared to sea transportation..." implies that it could be otherwise. Not true. Sea transportation will always be cheaper. All the grand plans China has to incorporate alternatives including land transportation (primarily rail) will increase shipping costs. It is a political exercise, not an economic one. Why so you think the original Silk Road disappeared? Considering the relatively fragile nature of long-distance sea transportation at its dawn in the era of sail, it shows how fraught that original Silk Road route was. The current transportation system we have grew organically and was not mandated by any political entity. It was made possible by the US guaranteeing security on the high seas. China, the biggest benefactor of this system now wants to overthrow it. That is one of the dumber foreign policy decisions of all time. It shows, if more proof were needed, the immaturity of Chinese foreign policy and governance. Frankly, the sentiment in the US is that the cost of maintaining the system is not worth it. This parallels the issue with the British colonial system. In the end, it was the cost of maintaining directly controlled colonies, like India, that brought about the dissolution of the empire. For the US, the order that was set up was a response to the threat of the Soviet Union. If you hadn't noticed that threat disappeared thirty years ago. The US Navy has not been configured to maintain shipping safety for a long time now. It has morphed into a power projection force, not a protection force. So, China sits on the sidelines in this crisis and, for purely anti-American political reasons, tolerates and even supports, clandestinely, the instability in the region. The Chinese navy actually has a squadron of ships stationed in the area. They have done little or nothing to help resolve the crisis. Now it is Chinese businesses that will suffer as a result.
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  407. The points made in the last article are actually valid. The point is that there is no way for a communist system to maintain control in a system that includes capitalistic features. Add in the massive corruption evident in all communist systems, and you get the mayhem and failure of the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela and now China. Don't forget one of the bedrock tenants of market economies. Markets work best when decision making is dispersed among the largest number of people. Individual consumers making decisions in their own self-interest is the most efficient way to organize an economy.
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  408. The petro-dollar system is NOT the basis for the US dollar. Frankly, the Euro-dollar market is at least important. If you hadn't noticed, the US is a net exporter of oil and refined products. This is in an environment where local politics are holding back development of those resources. Saudi Arabia is no longer of great concern to the US directly, and the only reason it is paid any attention is its potential impact on allies.
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  409. Love the second sign. Brilliant! You are truly a humanitarian philologist.
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  410. Early in the century, when I was living in England, I went to the castle in Edenborough. In the shop there I picked up a book on the possible tank war in the Central plains of Europe. Now, I had lots of experience in this. I had done work for a decade at the Command and General Staff College in the US where all Captains and above came to be trained. When I would go to the officer's club there would be many hats there with lots of stars and eagles. The surprising thing about this small book, published by a British company, was that they were projecting a win by the Western forces because of superior tactics and equipment. What we are seeing now is that they were correct. Frankly, in Ukraine, the basic equipment is similar to the Russians, but the addition of advanced Western equipment and Western training is telling. Looking back on it, with my background, I believe they were correct in this book. NATO is so much more powerful than Russia (or the Soviets before them) that Putin is just grinding his country into the ground. At one point, early after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there was talk of inviting Russia into NATO. NATO is a purely defensive alliance. It is a tragedy that Russia has acted as it has. They are condemning their people to poverty in the long run.
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  411. I have been saying for a long time what Goldman Sachs just said in their research note. This is disturbing. These bankers have a lot more data than I do. And yet, they fail to see the trends until it is unavoidable. There are two reasons for this. One is that they are not very good at their job. This is not very likely. The second is that their pronouncements are self serving. This is more likely and is not useful to their customers.
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  412. Neil, are so stupid to equate the postponement of a nuclear test with conventional exercises? What is your knowledge of these things and what is your motivation? You are a journalist. Report on what is happening. Do not try to understand what it means. Your viewers will do that for themselves. That is what they are supposed to do. A journalist who tries to shape the narrative belongs on CNN, not Fox.
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  413. It is interesting to see the official Chinese side of things. Your reporting on that is quite valuable. Your ability to analyze it is also quite valuable, On the potential Boeing jet deal, I think what is most important is that the indigenous Chinese aircraft, the C919, is not doing well.
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  414.  @jurybery  Good point!
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  415.  @odoibe3620  I think, given what we know now, that giving them the rest of the decade is being generous. They are already beyond terminal. Even the US hedge fund guys and banks are starting to abandon the sinking ship. So are many of their wealthy people, and CCP members have already made plans. They have based their economy on housing and low-end manufacturing (assembly). Housing cannot recover. They already have much more than they need. I saw one analyst who claimed that you could argue that they have one housing unit for everyone on the planet. A bit out there, but if the estimate off by a factor of ten, then they still are overbuilt. Even their own companies are joining the move away from China. As the internationalist investors realize that China is not a viable market in itself, they will pull out. Have you seen the latest figures for foreign investment? By the end of this year new inflows are expected to drop to zero. This is from a WSJ article, not Pete Zeihan or this channel. Massive flows moved into China because of two factors, and these two only. Cheap labor and a large market. Both are gone. This also is not a Zeinhanism.
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  416. Actually, the situation in Bakhmut is somewhat different from what you present. As for casualty ratios, the latest I heard was 1:7 in Bakhmut. The analyst you quoted was giving generic figures, as far as I can tell. For another, the Ukrainians are starting to attack the salients in the north and south that the Russians have created. I have been wondering for a while why they had not done this, but now they are. They actually have the possibility of trapping the Wagner forces in front of Bakhmut. I really think that the regular Russian military would be fine with this. At a recent meeting of Russian commanders on the front line, the Wagner representative was led out of the meeting. They don't like Wagner.
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  417. The statement is made that the housing industry will continue its slump in 2023. I would agree with that. On the other hand, the statement leaves open the possibility of a recovery down the line. This is, of course, not possible. The numbers are not there. In the west, you might see phenomena like foreign buyers coming in. This will not happen in China and there are already more than enough "houses" for the whole population, which is shrinking.
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  418. You need to read your history. For example, the North Vietnamese soldiers would come through a village where the children had been inoculated and cut off their arms. The killed and imprisoned a lot of people after Saigon fell. The fall itself was much more violent. Not saying that the current situation is good, but I think your comparison leaves something to be desired.
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  419. I am conflicted about the refugees from China. This is especially true of those that have money. The fact is that almost everyone, especially those that are successful, has had to participate in the corruption of the CCP. If they were government officials or officials of state-owned enterprises, then the participation rate is guaranteed to be 100%. Even those in private business had to leverage connections to succeed. Thus, their money is tainted and their whole method of operating in society is a problem. Most are not fleeing because of their disgust with the corruption, but for fear of losing what they have. In the west we would call these economic migrants. I am not sure if that is what we want. A final issue is the possibility that the CCP will slip in spies as well.
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  420. China has 20M unfinished homes and 60M finished and unsold homes. There are also a massive number of apartments that were bought as investment properties and not lived in. The population is shrinking and is probably much less that the CCP claims. There is no economic model for this situation. There is no coming back from this.
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  421. By the way, what the Europeans did in China they also did all over the world. The Chinese are nothing special in that regard. The Chinese last projected naval power in the early 15th century, in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean areas. This did not last long, as indicated. Later in the 15th century, the Europeans started projecting naval power and trade.
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  422. I read somewhere that the EU was looking at the problems with touch screens in cars and was considering mandating bringing back dedicated buttons.
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  423. Western support for Ukraine does two things. First it will help to deter Russia. They will not stop at Ukraine if they are successful, and then Europe will have another massive war. Second, it will degrade the Russian military. No one would choose to do things this way, but Putin brought the situation on.
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  424.  @dongxuzhou4661  You need to look at economics and finance. Lehman Bros. in the US actually had twice the debt, but in a larger economy. That crisis spread worldwide very quickly. It was also about property values and leverage.
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  425.  @JoeBlow-wr5em  Ah, yes. The omniscient and omnipotent CIA.
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  426. Is abortion a human right? Abortion laws, passed at state level, do not ban, but restrict abortion. In India this is also the case. Making everything a human right is just ridiculous. Ensuring rights is done by governments. Enforcing a right requires force, or the threat of it. The idea that one just has these rights is naive in the extreme.
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  427. I wonder if they even have five years. I don't think that there will be losses, or perhaps minimal ones at best. Don't forget, industrial equipment is constantly being modified, repaired and upgraded. Foxconn is a very experienced contract manufacturer with operations in many countries. They know how to handle this. Most of the manufacturing in China is low tech. They assemble the iPhones, for example, but the components come from all over the world (including the US) and by cost, the phone assembly is a small percentage of the total. Have you seen the pictures and videos of the iPhone assembly lines Foxconn has in China. Row, upon row of manual assembly stations, staffed by peasants from all over. These are not that difficult to move. The Foxconn exec who said, near the beginning of the video, that he could move anywhere quickly was correct. Another interesting note is that many private, and some state owned, manufacturers in China are opening plants in other countries. I recently bought three battery powered lawn tools. The company is Chinese (although the trade name is not, which should be a signal) and two of the tools were made in Vietnam. Looking at the company website, and it seems they are also opening a plant in the US. One of the reasons for this activity is the situation in China vis-a-vis wages and the business climate. Another may be that these companies want to get their capital out of the country, and this is probably one of the only ways they can do it.
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  428. The fact that there is a penalty clause in the deal clearly indicates that they cannot force him to buy it.
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  429.  @henli-rw5dw  Do you have any idea of what life was like in Russia and China during the Cold War. Yes, life goes on, but what kind of life? In fact, the dissolution of the Soviet Union had a lot to do with Glasnost. People were freer to discuss things and more information was available to the average Soviet citizen. They saw the difference in lifestyles. They didn't like it. As for China, that was built with foreign investment and technology. Remember the Great Leap forward. The Chinese couldn't even competently make pig iron. All those supply chains can be moved elsewhere. Heck, a lot of Chinese companies are doing that. You also seem to assume that industry is static. Get a grip.
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  430. I am always amazed at the poor quality of the analysis of financial firms. They make assumptions based only on the purely financial data. From a statistical point of view there are potentially non-financial factors in play. This is true not only for China related issues but for forecasting in general.
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  431. What is very interesting is the Reformation. I was a member of the Episcopal church and was married in that church. I was involved for over 30 years because of my wife. In the early part of the present Millenium, I lived in England, and was a member of the Anglican church (the Parish of Saint Faiths at the Hospital of Saint Cross in Winchester). I was even confirmed in the church and still have my inscribes prayer book. This was high church Anglican, or Episcopal. Once we went to a Catholic wedding (my son's violin teacher), and the liturgy was the same as we were used to. It was uncanny.
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  432. Allen at one point uses the phrase "often corrupt semiconductor industry". I would say that it is TOTALLY corrupt. The vast amount of government funds targeted at this industry have been squandered. Many people tasked with managing the funds have been arrested and jailed. None of the multiple rounds of this funding have been effective, and this while the Chinese still rely a lot on IP theft. This reminds me of the attempts by the Soviets to compete in this area. << I wrote that before listening to the whole quote.
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  433. In farmland, the ground next to the tree line is generally the most solid. In the middle of the fields, it is a different story.
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  434. All of these events, the bank closures and other issues, the disappearing of officials and the general paranoia of Xi are happening at a blistering pace. Keeping close tabs on what is going on in China one sees an accelerating breakdown in real-time. This is also reminiscent of the events in Russia. Those that think that China has until the end of the decade or that Russia has ten to twenty years before a breakup are hedging. I believe that in both cases, the breakdown or breakup will happen much, much sooner. In the earlier period the Soviet Union and China were isolated from the rest of the world economy. Today, Russia (before the sanctions) and China are integrated into the world economy. This means that what others do will impact both of them, and that is beyond their control. Those others are not primarily national governments but businesses which can move much more quickly when threatened.
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  435. The statement "the X platform formerly known as Twitter" always makes me think of "the artist formerly known as Prince". I always chuckle at that. Does anyone else remember that?
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  436. In the US we call it the "swamp".
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  437. Weather forecasting sucks. I have watched it closely every single day for years now. I am in the Midwest, which is an easy place for forecasting. I look at multiple forecasts, many relying on NOAA forecasts. Also, this news item says that the cuts are in weather forecasting, not research.
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  438. Xi's plan for a fortress economy sounds "good", but he has no hope of doing it. China cannot grow enough food to feed itself. Period. End of story. The land is poor, the recent flooding has impacted the agricultural sector, and both the land and water are heavily polluted. On top of that their land use policies are beyond stupid. As an industrial economy, China is dependent on external sources for oil, natural gas, iron ore and coal among other inputs. This is very similar to Japan's situation prior to WWII. The US cutting off oil and scrap steel exports to Japan was one of the triggers for the war. It is what led to Japan taking over large parts of Southeast Asia. That would be Xi's only hope. In the case of the 1930s Japan was successful for a while, until it was opposed by the US and UK. In China's case, things would happen a lot faster. What I am saying is that Xi's "dream" is a more of a mirage.
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  439. Those gold holdings still put China in 5th place globally. It also represents only about 2.5 percent of China's FOREX reserves. Just putting things in perspective. For comparison, the largest holder, the US, has about four times as much gold and that accounts for about 75% of US FOREX reserves.
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  440. I want an Ultra MAGA hat!
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  441. The outlook for China is not so rosy. Their mishandling of the economy in the last few years is starting to bite. For a country with a centrally planned and controlled economy, they have made massive mistakes. First, they relied too much on construction. It became much too large. Second, they messed with the economies that they trade with. This is leading to a move away from China for production and towards countries like India. Third, they flout the international rules-based system, and that has led to tensions that are unnecessary. I view lots of news sources from the Asia Pacific region, and they don't paint quite the same picture.
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  442. Thanks, Tony, the interview was very interesting. I did feel at the end that Mr. Koo sort of "tapered off". The societal situation in China, you can correct me if I am wrong, seems to be dire. All levels of Chinese society are experiencing issues. I recently saw a report about Chinese students studying abroad having to curtail their studies because their parents could no longer afford to support them. There are a large number of reports of university graduates having to work in food and package delivery. Many are going on to graduate school to delay the issue. On the other end of the spectrum millions of construction workers who were employed in building real estate projects are out of work. These are migrant workers who get few, if any, benefits. On top of that, many of those workers have not been paid, sometimes for years. There is also a report of many people from across China converging on the Supreme Court a few days ago with grievances. They were, of course, suppressed by the police. One of their grievances was collusion between police and criminals. This all sounds like societal cohesion is not present in China. That is a big difference from the situation in Japan. To bluntly say so may have been a bit too much for Mr. Koo to express openly. Thus, the "tapering off" I detected.
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  443. China taking Taiwan would totally destroy China. Look at the sanctions put on Russia. China is far more vulnerable than Russia primarily because it imports so much of what it needs. This includes energy, food, the inputs to grow food as well as other raw materials. China's farmland is not that productive compared to the North America, Europe and some parts of South America. All of these inputs would be cut off. As Peter Zeihan likes to say, they deindustrialize in a matter of months and mass starvation begins within a year. This is not an exaggeration. The thing about this is that it would take very little in military power to cut China off, and that power would not have to be applied close to China. As for the invasion itself, in WWII, the US considered invading Taiwan to get bases to bombard Japan. The projections then were for a force, as stated here, at least as large as the D-Day landings, if not larger. This is coming from a country, the US, which by this time had the sea power to do this and the experience. This was one of the issues used by MacArthur to steer the US actions to the Philippines. China would also not be able to use its whole military. They have other problem spots and issues to deal with as well. My understanding is that Taiwan has over 400K troops. Assuming the three to one requirement for an attacker, that would mean using about 75% of the PLA. This is unrealistic.
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  444. He does! He does! A Lord of the Rings elf, indeed. Great description. As I grow older, my health is becoming more important to me. I have eliminated all sugar, and all processed foods, from my diet. I make everything from scratch, and it is actually very easy. I stopped drinking alcohol a little over a year ago. That was my last source of sugar and empty calories. In fact, I lost a notch in my belt within a couple of weeks. I am in my late 60s and my body is back to where it was in my 20s. I expect that my caloric intake is probably less than 2,000 per day. I eat two meals a day and one "snack" consisting of either nuts or olives, and sometimes cheese. One thing I notice is that I never feel hungry or unfulfilled after eating. My blood pressure is down to normal, my joints are pain free and my stools are good. My mind is also very clear. The change has been dramatic.
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  445. The lack of effective and independent labor unions in China is a big part of the problem. I never would have thought that I would say that. I am not a big fan of unions. There is a whole history behind that, both family and professional. What makes this even more ironic is that this is happening in the "workers' paradise". Actually, compared to the west, China is labor hell. It is socialist practice that there be only one, state controlled, "labor union". This was true in Nazi Germany and is true in China today. Don't forget that Nazi stood for National Socialism. That economy is the closest there is to what China has become today. Xi is assuming that he does not have to enrich the people to allow them to spend, and potentially challenge the CCP. He has the tools of state repression to keep them in line. He doesn't have to make them happy. He has actually come out and admitted that. As long as the party stays together, they figure they can control things. This attitude and approach is another eerie parallel with Germany in the 1930s.
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  446. Mark, I love the term "corrosive skeptic". I am in that camp as well. Now I know what to call myself. India was considered the leader of the "nonaligned movement" throughout the Cold War. That is bunkum. India has always relied on Russian arms and support. They chose a side a long time ago. One can also see this in the commentary by former Indian military officers on Indian media. They are Russia supporters. India is in a precarious position. While wanting to move closer to the west for economic reasons, they are in an economic and military conflict with China. They are getting more western arms and are building up their indigenous military industry, but they are not in a position to sever their military ties with Russia. Frankly, Modi is the most capitalist of India's leaders since independence. The Gandhis and the Congress Party were and are socialist lite. This made them prime targets for Soviet influence. This carries on throughout the society to this day.
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  447. The CCP is indeed fostering nationalism. Indeed, that nationalism has a tinge of racism to it as well. Xi's "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is a thinly disguised move to "national socialism", and away from the internationalist socialism of Marx and Lenin. What strikes me is the similarity of Xi to a certain leader in a European country in the1930s. That leader also wrote a book (actually there were two volumes) laying out his ideology and which people were basically required to buy it. In fact, that is where a lot of his personal wealth came from. This type of nationalistic fervor is a last resort of dictatorships.
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  448. Tony, there is so much here, especially in EU China relations. I have seen nothing on this in the US mainstream media so far. You are doing stellar work. I am actually impressed with the line the EU has taken. As for Fu Ying's comments, I just have to ask, who does he think he's kidding. So, China, a vulnerable country that is not a developed country (they still claim to be developing) wants to go back to the multi-polar world that we had forever prior to the end of WWII. Just take yourself back in time. Delve into history. What was China's place in such a world? Is there any reason to believe that it will be different this time? China's relative place in the world has not changed. The last time they projected power beyond Asia was in the 15th century. As for any product China provides being essential, a good example from pre-tech history would be porcelain. Look it up. It is an instructive and fascinating story relating to today's situation.
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  449. It is interesting what you say about the people who attacked Russia. Especially that they are anti-imperialists. The idea of shrinking Russia to the Slavic peoples is an interesting and important one. The way the demographics were working out before the war meant that the Russian ethnicity would become a minority in a decade or so. With all the soldiers killed and people fleeing the country, especially since these are of the age to produce children, that schedule may be moved up. I know they a lot of the mobilized are ethnic minorities, but there are lots of ethnic Russian as well, especially among those who have fled. Along these lines, one has to consider the fact that China wants a lot of territory in the Russian far east back. I heard that a directive went out from the Kremlin that all maps of that area must include the names of places in Chinese as well as Russian. I am not sure of that, but that is what I heard. I think that the Chinese are just waiting for the Russian Army to be depleted or destroyed in Ukraine. Then they will move in and take "their territory" back. This includes Vladivostok, by the way. I personally think that the Russian Federation will break up. I believe that they will enter a period of warlordism. If you look at all the private armies and internal security forces, this is likely. The whole country is being run like a Mafia state anyway. Of course, this may also happen in China by the end of the decade. So, things will be very unstable in the East.
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  450. Great video. It is good to get the views from the Chinese side from someone who is unbiased. The rhetoric from the Chinese side is interesting. I don't know if the Chinese have noticed, but security cooperation with Asian nations has increased with the US.
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  451. Mahyar, Verhofstadt is actually correct. The period since the end of WWII was an anomaly. The world order you are used to is actually unique in human history, and only possible because of the result of the war. The order was set up to oppose the USSR. Even the US opening to China was predicated on opposing the Soviets. The thing is that the USSR was "defeated" thirty years ago. The US is now in the process of pulling back from many of its commitments around the world. I don't know if a European empire is possible in the way Verhofstadt assumes, but the other empires are possible. The problem in Europe is that one country would have to lead. As for Vienna, I think you are a bit off with your history. Of course, this also implies a Persian empire reappearing. Once they get rid of the clerics, they might even be a natural ally of the US. Of course, European integration is problematic. With Europe's demographic decline and lack of sufficient natural resources (which they could fix if they got rid of all this climate nonsense) Europe is not likely to succeed. The other aspect is that they would have to massively increase defense spending. Massively!
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  452. The CCP has no idea of what a stock market is for. It is not some vanity trinket as they seem to think. One of the main purposes of a stock market is to allocate capital. While they are not perfect, in a capitalist economy they reflect the decision of investors. As such, they are "bet" on the future. This sends a "signal" to companies and whole industries. By interfering in the market the way the CCP is doing, they completely disrupt the signaling and capital allocation functions of markets. The CCP should get out of the whole markets business, whether it be stocks, bonds or property, etc. Markets are not valid in their ideology. After 30 years, and with examples from all over the world, you think they would get it by now. They have not! Anyone who invests in such a market is a fool. The only exception might be an active trader, but even these people will eventually get caught making the wrong move.
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  453. The inflation in the US was affected by the energy issues but was not primarily caused by it. The main cause was the aftermath of COVID and the massive spending and increase in economic activity. In fact, many fossil fuel centered industries were moved to the US from Europe because prices were still much lower.
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  454.  @benkleschinsky  When I first went to university and studied physics, in the early 1970s, I started working in the High Energy Physics Department. There was a professor who was a great researcher. Working with her one on one I learned a lot. On the other hand, she was not a great classroom teacher. When she taught a required physics class, the enrollment was low. I really loved and respected her, but this is a symptom of our system. We require, in most settings, that researchers teach. This does not always work out. The advent of on-line resources, such as these MIT courses is, I think, the future of education and research. We should have lots more research institutes and a mostly on-line teaching regime. Then, the best teachers, who might also be good researchers, would do the teaching, and the researchers could concentrate on that.
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  455. The data I have seen on discharges from the Chinese plants put the figures at an order of magnitude larger than what Japan is doing.
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  456. Peterson's description of Hitler's psychological. following Jung, is very interesting and important. The idea of what Ferguson calls the false dichotomy of structural forces and significant individuals in history is also important to understand. It seems to me that there is an interplay between the two throughout history. Actually, what this reminds me of is a science fiction series by Asimov. It is called Foundation. In it, a group of psychohistorians (I believe that is what they were called) used statistics focusing on the structural aspects to map out the probable future. Then, along comes the "Mule" a strong figure with outstanding abilities, who disrupts everything. After reading that series, in the early 1970s, I have always thought of Hitler as the Mule.
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  457. The focus on online shopping is misleading. The retail sector also consists of brick-and-mortar stores. These seem to be closing at alarming rates. In the US, as elsewhere, total consumer spending is cited, with channels and sectors reported in the detail reports. China is cherry picking. As with just about everything else in the CCP does, the only thing that matters is making the situation look good. This lack of comprehensive and reliable data is a good reason for western companies to pull out of China. They would never accept this situation in their own countries, or anywhere else.
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  458. China's economic model is the issue. It has depended on capital from abroad, rather than capital formation at home. This is reflected in the totally distorted property market. Rather than allowing ordinary citizens to participate in the financial system, like in the west, China funneled almost all household investment into property. That bubble has burst, and the wealth that represented for households is gone. It will never come back. A new phenomenon I am seeing, related to the property sector, is the loss of jobs by people 45 and older. In most economies these are the most productive people. They are also a major source of private investment. People in that age group no longer have to care for children, and they invest to grow their wealth for retirement. They also are typically making more than they ever will. Once they retire, they will retreat into safer investments to generate income. This is a very well-known fact in the capitalist world. China, being ruled by a communist party, does not understand any of that. I see them making one mistake after another. Frankly, China has nothing to offer except cheap labor and a large market. Oh, wait, they don't have that anymore.
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  459. If France, and perhaps other European NATO countries do send "troops" to Ukraine, the best place to start would be with airpower. A NATO air presence would easily turn the tide and fill in the gaps while the Ukranian Air Force gets up to speed with new, western jets. It would also speed up that process. I am surprised that the US has not done something like the Flying Tigers in China in WWII. Something along those lines could also be done by one or more NATO countries. France, of course, has been advocating for an EU military structure for a while. This makes sense. The EU, taken together, is a large economy and has the inherent capability to do so.
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  460. Wow! At about 2:55 he implies that Congress has a fiduciary responsibility. That is just plain wrong. Congress is not in any way a fiduciary. Dagen makes a lot of good points. Frankly, my opinion is that the government has no place in regulating crypto. If it is accepted as a legitimate currency or asset class, then the regulation should be heavy and extensive. If it is just an asset class, like gold, then the government should not be heavily involved. Considering that the main purpose of crypto is to circumvent government control, it would be madness for the government to regulate it. As Dagen said, consumer fraud legislation that exists should be enough to prosecute this case.
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  461.  @RobynLeSueur  So, an academic should only read people with academic qualifications? That is daft. Especially in terms of "academics" that purport to study social issues. Can you really believe what you say? And if the academic has not read the book, then he had no real basis to comment on it. The quality of higher education in the social sciences has really hit a new low.
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  462. The Lithuanian situation, where they were able to find new markets, is a significant event. A similar situation has obtained with companies withdrawing from Russia, and China. No major company that has decoupled from those markets has experienced major, or in most cases any, detrimental effects. All the talk about relocating away from China taking a long time is bunk (trying to be clean here). The move to China for many companies was very quick. That was to a country that had none of the infrastructure or experience when the moves started. At the same time, many of the companies did not have the experience of such a move. And yet, they did it in record time. This time will be much smoother. On top of this, the local market in China is getting bad. That was one of the two draws of China. The other was cheap labor. Cost of labor is not just wage rates, but also includes productivity. Considering that aspect, Chinese labor has gotten much more expensive than their competitors. Add to all that the impending financial collapse in China, and it is not a good place to be. The zero COVID response also showed that China is not a reliable partner. Finally, the west is waking up to the fact that for years they have just been exporting pollution to China. This has been known for a couple of decades now but was basically ignored. It was over there, after all.
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  463. The CCP's pronouncements on the stock market would be considered market manipulation anywhere else in the world. It would come with prison time. Any investment fund from outside China investing in Chinese equities should be investigated for breach of fiduciary duty.
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  464.  @skye.325  Exactly. Who decides? That is the whole point of free speech. No one gets to decide what is "right" speech. That is just censorship.
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  465. Zalenski is providing exemplary leadership. He prosecutes the war well with what he has and also show outstanding diplomatic skill.
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  466. The flaw in the CCP's approach is that it is top down. The systems that have worked in the west grew organically, from the bottom up. That is really all that has to be said. CCP led China is heading the way of the Soviet Union. The main difference is that China does not have the natural resources the Soviet Union had.
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  467. When I lived in Winchester, my children went to Oliver's Battery Primary School. I was a Governor of the school. The name came from the fact that the location is where Cromwell kept his battery of cannon, which used to batter down the walls of the Castle of Winchester.
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  468. Actually, the Patriot systems are for use against ballistic missiles. That is one of their great strengths which was first demonstrated in the Gulf War. They have, as you point out, been continuously improved since. That is why Patriots have been deployed in South Korea, and I believe, Japan. In those cases, they are there to defend against North Korean ballistic missiles.
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  469.  @henli-rw5dw  Well, if you believe those figures then I hope you are not making investment decisions based on them.
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  470. Generally, the rhetoric around EU China trade from the CCP gets it all wrong. They are either just ignorant (my working assumption) or are playing a very stupid game (also very likely). First, the EU is, at its core, a protectionist cartel. They do it down to the level of products. Do people not know of the many trade disputes the EU has had with the US? Let's see, there was commercial aircraft, steel and aluminum and many others over the years. They are handled through treaties and a rules-based system. There have been tariffs applied on both sides. The trade continues to grow. By the way EU doesn't even have a free trade deal with the US. This is all because of chlorinated chicken. Look it up, it's hilarious. Second, regarding the CCP's attempt to separate the EU and US on policy, this is probably the stupidest time to try to do that. The main reason is that the CCP's buddy Russia invaded another European country, and the US is critical in the EU's defense. Many will forget that the Maidan Revolution (also called Euromaidan, a clue) was driven by Yanukovych's decision to switch from association with the EU to Russia at the last minute. There are also many ties between the EU and US at the governmental level as well as massive business to business ties. So, unless China totally abandons Russia, the EU will have no incentive to be amenable to any moves by China.
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  471. Great analysis. I remember talk about Japan's stock market reaching 40K. Commentators, such as Louis Rukeyser, often commented on this. Then it all crashed. Another problem with Japanese corporations was something that the business school professors I had in the US (these were mostly British and Irish) were gaga about. They gushed over 100-year plans that most of the big companies had. This is, of course, just foolish. Business has always been driven more by innovation, often leading to disruption, than by corporate planning. I often hear about this type of thing in China as well.
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  472. Syria probably will break up. What is Syria? It was a part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. It was created by a bunch of European imperialists. It is a multiethnic, multi-sectarian "entity" in an area where that is not the norm, and where differences are not respected. What will probably happen is a continued civil war among warring tribes. I see no leader or ideology that could knit the country together. It may well become another Lebanon.
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  473. Wow! A real person who speaks well as a Vice President. Who would have thought that is something we would have to be amazed at.
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  474. Labor HAS to kowtow to unions. They are the party of the unions.
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  475. It is interesting that you mention the difficulty in government careers for Americans who spend time in China. I ran into something similar. As a teenager I traveled around Europe (on my own, it was a gas). I visited a communist country. Years later I was going for a security clearance and that became a problem. I did eventually get the clearance, though. So, it is a real concern.
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  476. Great dig at Boston at the end.
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  477. For a country with 600 million people living at the poverty level, this whole technology infrastructure development plan is ludicrous. China is toast.
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  478. The internal circulation strategy is very similar to the Nazi idea of autarky. Don't forget that the Nazis were national "socialists". Their mixed model of state ownership and private industry directed by the state is basically the same as the current CCP system. It is much different from the purely state-owned economy of the Soviet Union. The CCP also touts the racial superiority of the Han race. You can see where I am going with this, I assume.
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  479. You are spot on. The economic theory that was used to justify the opening up to China economically assumed something that our political and financial leaders completely ignored. The idea, and we have seen it with countries like Japan and South Korea, among others, is that we start out with high end goods from the US for low end goods from these countries. They move up the value chain and we get a balanced two-way trade. Being democracies, we have mechanisms in place to deal with disputes, both legally and diplomatically. We broadly want the same thing for our populations. Who was the American president who opened up economically to China and got the ball rolling on China's WTO membership. Buffalo Bill Clinton. And everyone thought he was so smart.
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  480. My local bat would never come out in daylight. I generally see him right after sunset in my backyard. In fact, I like to have a cigar and some tea in the late evening and don't go in until I see the bat.
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  481. Fancy a bit of Soylent Green anyone. This whole thing is bonkers. We actually produce about twice the number of calories required by the world population. Any "food insecurity" is caused by distribution issues (i.e., money or conflict), not by scarcity. The biggest health problems in the world are obesity and attendant problems (e.g., diabetes). Also, at a time when we could feed double the population, world population is peaking and set to shrink, drastically in many places before the end of the century. If it is about global warming, or climate change or whatever they call it these days, that ship has sailed. In the US in the run up to the last presidential election there were surveys where people were asked to rate their concerns. Climate change got in the single digits, at the bottom of the table. It was all a bit of a scam anyway. There is no settled science as far as that is concerned. In fact, it is all junk science.
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  482. Aviation is essential to NATO doctrine. The lack in this area is why the Ukranian counter-offensive did not make progress. For example, when breaking through minefields it is essential to gain local control of the skies and to destroy any artillery that can interdict a breakthrough. If you look at any conflicts where US and other western aircraft have gone up against Soviet/Russian aircraft, you can see why this is such a game changer for Ukraine.
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  483. Jonathan, another great interview and a great guest.
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  484. I too, often wonder about his safety. On thing that I don't hear about being addressed directly is the collapse of the housing market where much of the wealth of the population is. It is likely that prices will fall, in the end, by up to 80%. This will wipe people out. How will they consume then?
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  485. The Goldman Sachs report was quite impressive, and my own experience with the price of my home mirrors their findings. One thing I did not hear was that of the oversupply issue. The numbers I have seen show that, as a result of loose mortgage standards (driven by government policy), housing in the US was overbuilt by 2-4%. The Chinese situation shows anywhere from a 50-100% oversupply. There is no economic model we have for such a situation. The other difference is that the Chinese financial system is not integrated with the rest of the world like that of the US is. It will, indeed, affect the rest of the Chinese economy. If you look at the investment outflows from China, they seem big. They are not in terms of the size of the hedge funds and banks involved. I even saw where one large pension fund lost money in China, but it turned out that less than 5% of their overall funds were invested in China, so a hit there, while unpleasant, was material to their overall results. Another factor is that China's imports make up less than 5% of their GDP, I have seen reported. Again, if China "falls off the map" individual companies may be affected, but most will recover. China is not the US.
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  486. Tony, you are waxing poetic today. I usually don't like the pop culture references, but you made them work. Kudos. I especially like the Thomas Sowell quote. There is a man who is very wise. I was going to say, "for his years", but he is in his 90s after all. On the housing front, I am wondering if both the non-Chinese analysts and the CCP are not using too much conventional thinking. The property developers in China have gone so far off the rails that it may be best to shut them all down. There are three ways in which they are toxic to the Chinese economy. First, the whole scheme where apartments were presold, and then the money used to create more leverage (basically a Ponzi scheme) is what kicked all this off. Of course, there was collusion by local governments and the usual level of graft and corruption that characterizes Chinese business and government. Second, these companies then used all that leverage to expand overseas while not even being able to finish their projects in China proper. The generally didn't finish the overseas properties either. Third, they branched out into different businesses, especially lately EVs. The best way forward may be to take over the developers (those that are still private) and focus them on solving the problems rather than going off on tangents. If China still has private companies in the future, then these entities could be privatized giving the government a boost and giving the Chinese people another investment avenue. A good example in the US was during the 2008 financial crisis. The Fed basically took over many banks. They later sold off these assets for a modest profit. Whatever the case, applying any sort of conventional solution will most certainly result in total failure.
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  487. God, I am glad I live in the US, and we have the First Amendment to Constitution. Europe is basically screwed by not having a similar founding document.
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  488. The comments about the "rulers" and their "family" structure harkens back to medieval times. I am thinking about Europe, but I believe it also applies to China. It was common for aristocrats to have mistresses. In fact, this was often an open "secret". This just reinforces my belief that any authoritarian regime reverts to a type of aristocracy. In China you have the princelings. In post-Soviet Russia you have the same phenomenon in the nomenklatura. Another good example is North Korea. Xi's attempts to steer the country back to socialism, or communism, whichever term you prefer, are just so much window dressing. It is bound to fail. Will we see a democratic revolution, or will some communist leader throw off the ideology and just become an in-fact emperor. Kind of like Putin in Russia trying to revive the czarist ethos in Russia.
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  489.  @ricardoxavier827  Actually, not true. They would take over all the military bases and equipment in their territory. That is what usually happens. It happened in the Civil War. Outside the US, when the USSR broke up, each new country had all the equipment that had been placed there by the central regime. That is why Ukraine had so many nukes. Remember the treaty we had with them to help them decommission them?
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  490. This is pollution, not climate change. Stop conflating the two. Poor practices such as those highlighted in Nigeria would be a problem regardless of climate change.
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  491. When I was growing up, we had neighbors from the Netherlands. They actually scrubbed the sidewalk in front of their house. My mother called them the "scrubby Dutch".
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  492. Xi is now looking a lot more like Puyi than Mao.
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  493.  @generessler6282  Precisely. Actually, we talk about the US being a hegemon, but for the first 50 years of that 80 the US was not alone, so not technically a hegemon. There were two systems, or blocs. It is just that the US led bloc was far, far more successful.
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  494. This is what I have been saying for a while. The same is true in China. Actually, China has seen more warlord periods than true centralized, unified government. Before WWII, they were in one. Mao was just another warlord. So, it will be again. In Russia, Putin is accelerating the alienation of the outer regions from the center. There is even some speculation that when China perceives that Russia has been defeated, they will take over much of the eastern part of the country. They already make noise about a historical claim to Vladivostok, and all the unequal treaties they were forced to sign in the last two or three centuries.
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  495. Priceless! Add that to the list of videos that the Republicans should use in their next campaign.
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  496. Big flaw in the argument vis-a-vis France. They will not transfer the technology to India. They could have solved their issue with Australia by doing so, but would not. I don't think the US would because of India's military ties with Russia.
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  497. Don't disagree, but we have all these things hit at once more than once in our past.
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  498. Contrast this with Japan. Many Japanese brands have gained worldwide recognition in many different areas. This does not really apply in clothing, but in many other product categories. They did this through a commitment to quality and design. What this whole issue also shows is how the CCP has ruined China. This whole counterfeiting issue is not necessarily driven by the state, but certainly is encouraged by it. It is a cancer on the Chinese people.
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  499. Vance was absolutely a good pick. What is so interesting is that here we have an old guy as president who is moving us into a new era. I am about a decade younger than the president and I am still doing things and creating things. I hope I am still going strong when I am his age.
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  500. I had a friend who told me about being in the IRR and being recalled. In the 1980s there were crises in Panama. This friend was a counter-sniper. So, he was called up and sent into the jungles to eliminate a sniper problem. He was successful.
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  501.  @pablosskates7067  Priceless!
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  502. I am glad to see someone mentioning the voters. People tend to make it about the leaders and personalities, but in the end, it is people who put them there and support them that are at fault.
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  503. That last point of a two-pole system is probably correct. Of course, these will not be equal. The US led side, which includes Europe, will be much bigger. The failure of the Belt and Road investments is going to weigh down China. The latest I heard is that 60% of Belt and Road loans are in countries that are experiencing financial difficulties, if not outright breakdowns. Some, if not all, of the European countries participating will, or have pulled out. Considering the weakness of the Chinese economy and the pressures pulling it down, that sun may soon fade.
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  504. Well said!
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  505. As you were reading the government statements at the end, I was thinking that it must have been difficult. Then you brief comment at the end confirmed it for me.
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  506. Waves propagating at the speed of light in in the earth? More like the speed of sound. Come on man!
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  507. AI is actually very old. The term covers a wide range of technologies. That is the problem. I expect that the dog bowl uses standard statistical learning methods and is in no way related to the current craze of LLMs. Not too long ago I was giving talks at statistical association meetings about this type of low-level AI even down to the IoT device level. In the 1970s I was working at a statistical analytics firm in the Washington, DC area (they were originally a K Street firm but later moved to the suburbs). One day my boss gathered us, and we played around with an artificial psychologist program running on a mainframe. It was based on what is called "expert system" technology. It was very good. I expect it would pass the Turing Test. That was almost 50 years ago. In the 1980s, while working at an aerospace and defense firm, I went to many conferences where AI algorithms, and especially interesting to me, chip architectures designed to efficiently execute these algorithms. That was 40 years ago. The thing is that we are seeing a hype cycle that exactly mirrors that of Big Data, which was not that long ago. I was giving classes on Big Data, then the hype cooled, and I wasn't. The business school types were saying that every major company would have to have a C-Suite executive responsible for Big Data. Big Data was going to be a valuable corporate asset which could be traded, and which should be in the annual report. It is true that it can be an asset, but monetizing it turns out to be difficult. On July 22 the Wall Street Journal had an article titled "A Clamor for Generative AI (Even If Something Else Works Better)". It is worth a read as a supplement to this video.
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  508. Henry, that was a fantastic interview. I am very impressed with your guest, Mr. Lambridis. Being an American whose grandparents are all from Greece I am very interested what Mr. Lambridis had to say. I am also very impressed with frankness of the discussion. Well done.
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  509.  @DoctorMangler  Very well put.
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  510. Hiring more people may, in fact, be a detriment. In the latter part of the last century or the last millennium I was working on a space program. The area I was working on was slated to rise to 100 engineers and scientists. One of the early project managers said this was crazy. He wanted my group, software engineering, to have 15 to 25 people who were highly qualified and experienced. He got that. The original 15, including myself, all had experience on multiple satellites. As we staffed up, bringing on more and more less experienced but highly educated people we started to agree with him. Later, while working on the design of the space station (the second iteration, the one that launched was the third iteration, and not much different) we did some analysis using a tool that was based on massive amounts of data in these types of things. It found that as you increase the number of participants in a project, considering it as a unified project, adding more people decreased productivity. The main factor was the cost of communication. This may be what is happening in science in general.
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  511. I wish I could give this video 10 thumbs up. This is one of the best of Dr. Starkey's videos. I was well aware of Disraeli, but never paid much attention to him. My loss. The English/British system is different from that of the US and other countries. This is not a bad thing, and in fact, is quite appropriate. There is no one best system. I am in the US, although I have lived in the UK. Both systems have their good and bad sides. I prefer to live in the US, although I loved my time in the UK. While I was there, I ran, and was elected. to Board of Governors of my children's school. It was the best experience I could have had. I got to see a small part of the government of the country. I actually had to get a letter from the Home Office to be able to run as a foreigner. I still have it, somewhere. I tool all the training available to governors (please excuse the spelling, but spell check won't let me use the proper one). Unlike most ex-pats most of my contacts and friends were locals. This, I believe, enriched my experience. To conclude, I must thank Dr. Starkey for his incredible content. I don't always agree with him (although I do more often than not), but I always appreciate his point of view and his knowledge. That he is willing to share it with all of us is a wonderful thing.
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  512. I have seen two indirect studies, performed outside of China, addressing both the number of COVID deaths and the size of their economy. In the former case the number is far greater, and in the later far smaller. The fact that these studies had to use indirect indicators is a testament to the dearth of official statistics, and their inaccuracy. In addition, it seems that the preliminary data from the latest census shows an overcounting of 100M people. So, India already has a larger population than China. You might recall that Justin Trudeau (Mr. Blackface) was not too long ago extoling the totalitarian regime's' ability to make decisions allowing it to control the virus. Doesn't he look stupid now?
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  513.  @simransidhu617  I assume that you mean he is good for everyone else but the Chinese. My invest advisor was always saying he hoped that Xi would get his third term so that he would tank the Chinese economy. He is very wise.
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  514.  @poweredbynato6313  These are the rich Chinese. They are the only ones that could really afford to get out. Billions of dollars in private capital have been taken out of China. What this has done is to raise housing prices artificially. making what was once a very reasonable market unaffordable for the existing citizens.
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  515. These cities and the people in them deserve what they get. They voted for these politicians, and do so regularly.
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  516. I just had a revelation. It was triggered near the beginning of the quote of the Foreign Affairs piece. Many in the finance community, and many in government who follow the economy, like to look at simple measures to get an idea of how things are going. This is a potentially disastrous approach in both spheres. As such it is potentially disastrous for all of us. China vis-a-vis the US/west is a perfect case in point on the government end. As far as I know, there are no actual targets set for GDP growth in the US by the government. In Europe, and I am more familiar with the UK, there is talk about what the GDP growth rate is likely to be, but not as a target for the government to reach. It is used there to guide government budget decisions. In fact, the main economic measures in the US that drive policy are employment and inflation. These are, for example, the Fed's target metrics. These are things that directly affect the people at large. Even the angst one often sees about recessions is more about the attendant unemployment than national financial matters. I saw a study of one southwestern US state where some policies actually reduced GDP there by a little, but where peoples' incomes actually rose. So, China, where GDP growth targets are set by the government, and obviously manipulated for political reasons, is behind those countries that do not make such a big deal out it. In fact, without external investment China would likely not have grown at all in the past 40 years. Being a communist, thus centrally controlled, economy these simplistic measures are often used. This is the weakness of the system. The CCP follows GDP growth so closely because it is a way to control the vast economy and because they think it will help bring in more foreign investors, if it is sufficiently high. The thing is, using relative growth numbers to project out into the future is foolish. The business world is replete with examples. I have seen it up close and personal. On the finance side I am reminded of the case of Jim Simons. He actually passed away while I was reading a biography of him. Simons is one of the, if not the, most successful investors in history. He is one of the fathers of the quant revolution in finance. He was also an accomplished academic mathematician. His approach was to look for measures that predicted market success. What made him different is that he did not care about why these measures worked. They only had to be effective predictors. Along those lines, many more sophisticated financial analysts no longer look at GDP. They look for what works. So, maybe there is hope for the finance sector. This, of course, is fatal for China because of what I mentioned above. The CCP thinks that having a fast-growing GDP will attract foreign investors. They don't worry about how they get it or what the effect is on the economy or people. They are, as they say, barking up the wrong tree. The investment community is moving on and the CCP is "Living in the Past" (an old Jethro Tull song).
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  517. "Promises made, promises kept." I never get tired of hearing that.
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  518. I got rid of sugar and all sweeteners several years ago. Don't miss it. I was always more of a spicy food kind of guys as opposed to sweets anyway. Lost a lot of weight (about 25% of my peak weight). I also don't eat processed foods with any additives. The most processed foods I eat are red lentil pasta (one ingredient, red lentils) and canned fish (in water or olive oil). Although I had lost a lot of weight, I decided to stop drinking alcohol about a year ago. I almost immediately lost 2" off my waist. That was a bit of a problem because I had just bought several pairs of jeans (on sale) having lost 2" at the beginning of my diet change.
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  519. One of the better analysts of the war. On the MI6 head's talk about Russians coming over to support the west as a self-interested action, that is brilliant. Even if none do so, it will sow doubt in the Russian hierarchy, since many of them have been adversely affected by the war, and frankly they have a motive to do so. US intelligence is also working along these lines. This is another front in the war that will be hard for the Russians to contain.
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  520. The whole Chinese EV thing is a chimera. They are very poor quality, and they are dangerous (battery fires, self-driving failures, etc.). To put it succulently, they are shite. In Russia Chinese brands, including EVs, are failing massively because of what I outlined above.
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  521. I am not convinced on the Maginot line issue. Of course, the Germans already knew this. They actually took the route they did because the plans for their primary option were obtained by the allies. So, to say that this report was the impetus for Hitler doing what he did does not fit in with any history I have read.
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  522. What I am seeing is that even Chinese firms are moving out of China. I recently purchased three products from such a firm. Two of the three were made in Vietnam. I went to the company website and found that they were even building an advanced manufacturing facility in the US. I expect there are two things going on here. One is associated with the issues in China that you mentioned. The other is basically capital flight. For private companies in China this is the best way for them to get their money out.
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  523. What prospects would Western Sahara have as an independent nation? If every ethnic group around Africa should have its own country, what happens to those people in the territory that are not of that ethnicity? What about Nigeria? What about Mali. Shouldn't there be a Taureg nation? What about religious and sectarian rights and divides? Again, we have a situation exacerbated by the vicissitudes of colonialism. Having said that, there are plenty issues within Africa that would come to the fore even without colonialism.
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  524. That, and we have to get rid of all these registries.
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  525. The problem with calling net zero, or the reduction of CO2, an environmental issue, you are confusing the issue. When most people think about environmental pollution they think about things that should not be released into the environment. CO2 is not a pollutant in that sense. In fact, it is essential for life on the planet. In fact, what we are seeing is significant greening in parts of the world that are supposed to be adversely affected by climate change.
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  526.  @popajoekiller  Perhaps Taiwan has a claim to China. I heard on a channel of news about China, which has since been deleted, that the people of Shanghai wanted to disengage from CCP led China and associate with Taiwan. I don't know the veracity of this, or how widespread it is, but it makes sense. The coastal areas have always had tensions with the powers of the northern plains. Due to their geography, they have always looked outward.
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  527. That may well happen.
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  528. Love John Waters. First saw him at the opening of Female Trouble at the University of Maryland. Ah, the good old times. Smoking weed in the theatre. Lots of beer. Women peeing at the urinals in the men's room. I took along a friend from a rich Nashville family who had studied film at Vanderbilt. To see his reactions was priceless. By the way, have you seen his first four films?
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  529. That most Americans don't care one way or another about the fate of Europe is entirely correct. Especially with the EU, which is basically a protectionist cartel, and which pursues policies contrary to US interests. As for the Germans talking about strengthening Europe, that is a laugh. It would take the Europeans decades to do so, and they don't have decades. Germany is so sclerotic and bureaucratic that they have no hope of doing what is needed. American presidents from Eisenhower on have complained about Europe not doing enough for their own defense. In addition, there are lots of people in Europe who don't want to build up their militaries. This may be a bit naive, but the trend is growing all the time. European politicians, instead of building up their own defenses after the Cold War, spent the "peace dividend" to buy votes. They have a choice, cut social benefits or raise taxes. Considering how high their taxes already are, I think they are screwed. So, let them have at it. All previous efforts to have a continental defense structure, outside of the US led NATO alliance, have failed.
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  530. Amazing! In the workers' paradise the workers are treated so badly. Many of the measures mentioned could not be implemented in the US, and I expect Europe as well.
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  531. This whole phenomenon of mil bloggers looking at these maps from "independent" sources is interesting and worthy of study. The look at three maps at the beginning, that all have slightly different takes on the territorial situation should be instructive. These maps and assessments are used because they are not government supplied. That overlooks that any intelligence agency can shape and control the inputs to these maps outside of visual evidence that is independent. Of course, an intelligence agency can interfere with that information as well. Don't downplay the ability to do that. There is also the phenomenon of sites like Onyx. They make a big deal out of having verified numbers of equipment losses. Who cares? If only half the equipment lost can be verified by their methodology, then their assessments are worthless and at best put a floor on the combat losses. For the general public that is meaningless and perhaps misleading. Looking at all this on a daily basis without knowing anything about plans of the leaders on either side is just a measure of foolishness. This is not reporting, but often goes into projection of what an outcome might be. It is a feature of our digital, interactive and interconnected present. Again, worthy of study as a phenomenon itself, but very instructive.
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  532. Again, with the misunderstanding about NATO. The US does not invite countries to join. They must decide that themselves and then apply. Do some research.
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  533. Depending on Russia for technology? China is scrapping the bottom of the barrel. Haven't they noticed that Russia cannot produce these technologies even the midst of a war. They never developed a viable computer industry during the Cold War and relied on stolen designs of western technology (sounds like an Asian country we know). Even then, they could never keep up. In fact, the current chip technology is so much more complicated than computers back then, that there is no way either China or Russia could catch up. Perhaps if China and Russia didn't constantly talk about taking over the world and imposing their systems on everyone, it would be hard for the west to impose such restrictions. The prosperity that Russia and China had is totally based on the world order imposed by the US after WWII. Now they want to break that. These must not be very smart people.
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  534.  @BestMods168  Yes, I have seen it before. On the other hand, the issue is not fake though. Look at my comment below, As for the image, this is endemic on YouTube. After all, you have a bunch of amateurs doing this stuff. I am talking about being amateurish in videography, as opposed to their expertise in the subject being discussed. Of course, there are lots of people who make videos about topics they are claim expertise in and then show by their content that they are not. And that runs the gamut. The vast majority of videos where there are background images are not exactly fake in their content, but often the photo or video clip has nothing to do with what is being said. Sometimes it is almost humorous. Someone talking about the war in Ukraine showing background from other conflicts which may even be from different periods for example.
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  535. I find it interesting that the term neo-Nazi is used in relation to the some of the people in these Russian groups fighting for Ukraine. Have you seen the picture of Dmitry Utkin, reportedly the founder of the Wagner group? He has SS and Wehrmacht eagle tattoos. Where ate the neo-Nazis?
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  536. Drones are important but the kind of disparity you discuss has been around since WWII when aircraft really came into their own. Don't forget, the biggest, strongest battleships ever produced were both sunk by aircraft with a similar price disparity. Drones are another tool in the toolbox. To understand my point, you have to answer the question of why the infantry, armor and artillery on both sides is not shrinking in significance. The US pioneered the use of drones in the GWT. What Ukraine has done is to us them to supplement their inadequate artillery and total lack of airpower. They are, of course, innovating but you also have to consider their adversary. If Don't get me wrong, the Ukrainians have been very creative. They have to be. But, as I mentioned, the drones are not allowing them to shrink the size of their military, especially foot soldiers.
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  537. You clearly don't understand the drug certification process. Each country and group requires their own experts to certify a drug. That is why in the US we have not certified certain treatments (not to do with COVID) that are certified in the EU.
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  538. I think that when the Queen goes, the monarchy as an institution will as well. Charles is a disaster. The monarchy will not last through Charles' reign. Sad.
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  539. This is so reminiscent of what the Nazis were doing in Germany. Don't forget, Nazi is short for National Socialist German Workers Party. Note the Socialist part. Also, note the National part. Nazism was a racially based ideology. The same is true of the CCP. Although the CCP started out as part of an internationalist Marxist-Leninist ideological bloc, Xi has steered it in a nationalistic direction. Recall the phraseology, "with Chinese characteristics". In common with the USSR, Nazi Germany and Xi's CCP rely on a strong national leader. The parallels are so interesting. Nazi Germany had four-year plans. There was also an organization, the state owned Reichswerke Hermann Göring, that was set up to absorb private assets involved primarily in the iron and steel making sector. A description of this organization sounds a lot like what you are discussing in this video. If the Nazis had been successful, this probably would have carried over to other industries. That is speculation, but it seems plausible.
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  540. Xi is the opposite of a pragmatist. His economic decisions and foreign policies are killing China. Literally. This "pragmatist" has decreed that all CCP and government officials must study Xi Jinping thought. The videos of the cadres in these study sessions are comical to a westerner. It kind of reminds me of madrasas in the Muslim world. Lots of recitation and memorization.
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  541. You pronounced it right the second time.
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  542. Mike, you say Dominic Cummings is a bit weird, but have you actually listened to what he has to say? He is much more sane and focused than any of your politicians.
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  543. When I lived in the UK, earlier in the century, one would often see painted on overpasses on the motorway, "England for the English". There has been support for this for a while.
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  544. As for combat deaths, the US had about 50K in each of the major post WWII conflicts it fought (Korea and Vietnam). In the Iraq and Afghan wars the total was about 6K total, in 20 years, and not all were combat deaths.
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  545. Prigozhin may be right about some of this stuff, but don't forget he is a small-time operator. His organization is basically like a special forces group and that is how they operated until this conflict. Now they are operating in a large conventional conflict. This is not their wheelhouse.
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  546. Not a lot of information. If he is your reporter there, then he needs to be replaced. There is lots more information in the web, especially about the steps that Ukraine has taken of the last weeks, with those new, more advanced weapons, to shape the battlespace. At present, the Russians have no way to bring up more heavy weapons or much in the way of supplies.
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  547. I never thought of calling the "stans" derogatory. They were all former Soviet republics (and before that Russian Empire regions) whose name ended in "stan". It is just a shorthand, not something derogatory. Frankly, I always thought of them as exotic. In the 1970s my boss went on a tour of the area. Not quite sure what he was doing, but that is another story. I was a tea drinker, influenced by my Indian friends. I used to make Indian tea (Assam or Darjeeling) in my Japanese tea set and take it around the office. Then, with the tea from Tashkent it was quite a novel thing.
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  548. I was watching a video on another channel where two experienced financial analysts stated that they no longer looked at GDP or GDP growth. They also implied that in the financial community this was becoming common. I am not sure of where I heard it (might have been the same video), but it was pointed out that you could have someone digging a hole and another filling in the hole, and all that is counted as GDP. with the net effect being zero That is, or course, true and may well be the case in China. Sometimes quite literally. I would like to know how accurate growth targets from organizations like the IMF are. These are mentioned quite a lot, but I don't have the information to analyze that. I can say that growth and revenue expectations developed by the same types of organizations for companies are often wrong. Thus, we see stocks constantly overshooting or undershooting "expectations" and "consensus estimates", thus moving the stocks up or down respectively. In these cases, a lot more detailed information is available. Any thoughts?
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  549. Japan has been brilliant in forging alliances with former adversaries. Just recently we have agreements with Korea and the Philippines as well. The Chinese commentator is just expressing the CCP's wishful thinking on the matter. This has been facilitated by the US. Together, they are forming a ring around China that will be hard for China to break.
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  550. The people who follow Little Sheep, especially the ones who were interested in financial advice, are either doing it just for the entertainment value or are not very smart. This reminds me of all the US vloggers who lost money in crypto, but still tout crypto. I was watching one of these who was following the SBF trial. My interest was the trial. I did notice, however, that she mentioned that she lost $200K in crypto. Actually that was just FTX. She lost more in other scams. Needless to say, now that the trial is over, I no longer follow her.
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  551. After the fall of the Qing dynasty through to 1949, China was in one of its many warlord periods. I have heard analysts say, and I don't know the accuracy of this, that China has been a unitary state run fully by the central power for only about 300 years of its long history. I believe this covers the time before 1949. Mao and Chaing were just two of the many warlords that vied for power after 1911. Mao just happened to be the warlord who won. This is the legacy of the CCP and Xi is trying to live up to it.
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  552. So, where were the raring agencies and news services like Bloomberg, as this was developing. Considering that many developers in China tap foreign markets for capital, this should have been something that would be examined. If all you are doing is reporting what happened, not the conditions of enterprises, then you are certainly not doing anything significant.
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  553. The tragedy is that in these cities that are experiencing massive problems, it is the citizens, who, by their votes brought the failed policies in.
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  554. Mahyar, to answer your question about what is happening with the leadership in the SNP, look up the Peter Principle.
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  555. The whole world is following Trump. Amazing.
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  556.  @calliekline1903  You draw a false equivalence.
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  557. The telling phrase is: "no matter how crappy your product was, if you had the guts to sell it, someone would buy it". This is the Chinese attitude to business. I personally will not buy Chinese products if I can avoid it. Actually, I have been on a buy American kick for a long time. I have also consulted with companies that outsourced either components or whole products to China. When I am brought in it is because they have a problem with the Chinese production. Some of the smaller ones went out of business. One even offered to sell me the company, he was so desperate.
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  558. At about 3:00 the statement that everything seems to be done on a whim is so telling. Peter Zeihan is fond of pointing out that Xi, as a total dictator, has gotten rid of anyone who disagrees with him or is capable of having an independent thought. In many cases he has killed the messenger. Thus, Xi is there making decisions, or more correctly pronouncements, and it is up to others to interpret his will and act. Zeihan likes to point to the images we all have seen of airport runways being disinfected. This is the most wasteful and stupid thing one can do. It makes the CCP and the Chinese people look stupid, and we know the people are not stupid, just misled.
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  559. Chickens, chickens. I just found out that my neighbor now has chickens. What is going on here?
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  560. That statement about Ukraine having a strong military even if it joined NATO is puzzling. One of the requirements of NATO membership is having a strong defense. Sadly, several NATO countries have failed to live up to this commitment, although that is changing for obvious reasons. As for NATO taking over responsibility for military aid to Ukraine, all I can say is it's about time. The US has complained often about the lack of commitment to NATO by European members after the fall of the Soviet Union. This is a valid complaint. The Ukraine War is a European war. Europe should take the lead, both in funding as well as coordination.
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  561. At the end Kishore Mahbubani states that the Chinese think long term. What bunk. At the end of the last century the company I was working for sent us through a certificate program in marketing. I was a product strategist, so I was sent. My background is very technical. For a couple of decades, I was a "rocket scientist". The professors were all British or Irish. They were gaga over the 100-year plans that many Japanese companies had. This is just stupid. What drives economies is not central planning (look at the Soviet Union, and China) but technology development, which tends to be disruptive. Thus, any long-term plan or thinking will be swept away. Who is the richest man in the world? It is Elon Musk, who has excelled in disruptive technologies, which he built from scratch. Look at Japan's performance. They have had little growth for decades, and their companies, the larger of which are conglomerates, are starting to feel the pressure of external forces as never before. A good example is Toshiba. Admiring China is just wrong thinking. Through the Great Leap Forward they could barely produce pig iron. Then the cultural revolution resulted in many talented people moving away. I know some. The only reason they have what they do today is because foreign companies have built it. Don't forget, Foxconn, who is a major contractor for Apple, is Taiwanese. The bond issue is an interesting situation. The buyer of government bonds must either hold them to term or sell them in the secondary market. There were lots of people in the US who did not understand this when it began. They thought that the Chinese could just demand the money back at any time. What stupidity. The trap, as this video points out, is that if they dumped them, they would get a much lower price than if they held them and bought more. Ignorance of how markets work is astounding.
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  562. This is so interesting based on what has happened since the video was released. One thing to remember is that Japan went through an inflated real estate market as well. This is not a good thing, since as we see in China, it distorts the economy. As for the market in China, it is never coming back. There are so many "used" homes on the market that are not selling that it will bring down the price of new homes (it already is). Plus, with the population starting its decline (officially, it is probably smaller than reported) there will be fewer buyers. This whole situation is a result of a communist country opening up to capitalism. Without functioning equity markets, things get skewed. Look at Russia. When the Soviet Union broke apart, the workers were given shares in the companies they worked for. They had no idea what this was. So, the people who did know swooped in an bought these shares cheap and became the oligarchs.
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  563. I had a woman working for me when I lived in the UK who was from South Africa. In South Africa she worked in a bank. They had lockers for their handguns for when they were at work.
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  564.  @murphy804  Don't be stupid.
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  565.  @murphy804  I don't know you and you don't know me. So, such statements are both stupid and inappropriate.
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  566. This is interesting. You cite examples of this in the past in the US. In the US this is acceptable. In fact, I don't think you could write a law that would prevent this. Many former politicians also go into journalism, although mostly on the opinion side, but not exclusively. Generally, the only ones that don't are presidents, and there are reasons for this, but no legal bar to it either.
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  567. Calling someone with the brief military training these ex-conscripts have reservists is a sham. As far as I can tell, there is no follow-on training. Now, there may be some with some combat experience, but unless it is recent, it will not be a game changer. We just don't know what the mix is. In the US we have two levels of reserves. One is the regular reserves associated with each service branch (e.g., Army Reserve). The other is the National Guard, which is associated with the states. In all cases, they are organized into well-defined units. They train regularly. Typically, one weekend a month and a two week session each year. They have also been deployed in our wars around the world as whole units. They tend to do very well. The Russian reservist is just a guy who once served. They may take as long as a raw conscript to get to the level needed.
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  568.  @ravindilip  Got a detailed tour of a waste treatment facility here in the Chicago area. By the time they are finished treating the water it is potable. We don't use that of course. So, it goes an extra step so that it can be discharged into a local river and is used as "grey water" to water a nearby golf course and park. Of course, in the Chicago area we don't have any shortage of water, but in areas that do, recycling like this could drastically reduce the need for "new" water. By the way, a lot of the energy used comes from the methane collected in some of the processing steps. This is currently only used where heating is needed but could also be used to run generators.
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  569. The Lend Lease loans were not paid off until the beginning of this millennium.
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  570. Good information. I have lost a lot of weight, but I did not go on a "diet", I changed my diet. The trigger was a divorce. Through a long marriage, I am in my late 60s, my wife sort of led the way on food. Now, I cook regularly as well. What I did was to cut out sugar (no sweeteners), gluten (she liked wheat pasta), all processed foods and all sodas, etc. At home I am basically pescatarian, but I don't always eat fish. For a while I would have an orange or apple each day, but currently do not eat fruit regularly. I start the day with rolled oats (I hear lots of bad things about these, but I have seen none of the effects) with butter and a little salt and cinnamon. I have a "snack" after that, usually nuts. Then for supper I have veggies and either fish, lentils (whole or in a pasta made just with lentil flour) or nothing else. I will also put on some cheese sometimes. For drinks I have water usually with lemon juice, no sweetener, brewed tea or coffee. I lost almost 50 pounds. I had gotten close to 200. This happened fairly quickly after the change in diet. Then, about a year ago, I stopped drinking. I immediately lost another inch on the waist. I am down to where I was in weight and shape in my 20s. No joint pain (I had started to have a little) and the high blood pressure went away. There are a few interesting things that Dr. Li mentioned that I do and that some other physicians who have health channels on YouTube caution against. One prominent one, just call him Dr. G, seems to contradict what I have experienced. One of the interesting foods is the chili peppers. I sometimes grow them, but I always have crushed red chilis on my vegetables. I love it. Now I know why. Another is lentils, usually red or golden. I don't soak them. The way I cook them is to put the lentils in water with a little salt and then boil them as opposed to putting them into boiling water. I don't get gas from them this way. As for seafood, I love basically all of it. I do eat salmon, but I also love cod. I actually find cooking them in the microwave on an automatic setting cooks them perfectly.
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  571. China is toast. There are many factors at play there. If they start a war, it would be a simple matter to cut off imports of oil and other imports. It may not be the US that does it. Plenty of others have motivation.
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  572. What is the issue with the "price war" in automobiles? The litany of sales and promotions sounds just like what has always gone on in the US. Tesla, in the US, had been immune to such pricing issues, but now is lowering their prices as well. This is due to increased competition. This is how it should be. This is how markets work. The whole thing reminds me of the situation with housing prices in China. A price is set, and the government penalizes companies when they lower the price too much. Again, this is not how markets work. So, the data we see are for listed prices. Who sets the price? If it is not the market, then it is an artificial price that distorts the market. When will the CCP learn? Oh, wait, they are commies. This is one lesson they cannot learn.
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  573. The age groups are a good indication of what is going on here. My oldest son was into competitive swimming. When he was younger the age groups were two years. When he was in the first year of the group, he did not do so well. In the second year he did very well. It is the same among sexes. I do not know why we are tying ourselves in knots over this transgender issue. What percentage of the population is transgender? It is less than 1% as far as I can tell. To throw our whole society in turmoil for less than 1% of the population makes us look ridiculous. This is especially true in sports, where the differences in physical makeup are a paramount factor. If you look at professional sports, which are played for money, there are no women in the men's leagues. Why, because they could not compete. In fact, most men could not. We need to stop this madness. The whole idea of Title IX was to level the playing field in academic sports between men and women. We are different! Get over it.
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  574. I generally respect Bjorn, but when he made a comment about Trump and free trade, he lost me. What we need is free and fair trade. Trade with China is neither free or fair. Capital controls, ownership restrictions, intellectual property theft on the Chinese side are not free or fair trade policies. Trump is trying to negotiate fair, as well as fair, trade with China. The other thing I wonder about is the idea of economists telling us what is going to happen with a particular policy. Look at the case of Brexit. Economists were predicting massive jobs losses and recession if the country simply voted for Brexit. The record since has been record employment and much better growth that the EU. So, these predictions are just so much guessing.
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  575. I don't see why this affair or her flaunting of her consumption would be a problem. Hasn't Xi been encouraging internal consumption? This couple seems to be doing their part. Shouldn't they be getting some sort of award?
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  576. At about 58:00, when talking about the American Revolution, Dr. Starkey makes a great point. I have even read one historian (I don't remember which) who wondered about why the revolution happened. Since, at that time in history, wealth was tied up with land, the Americans were fantastically wealthy because of their location. Even smaller farmers were relatively wealthy. I have in-laws who are farmers in Central Illinois who I used to hunt deer with. There was one spot called the Berlen (I forget the spelling) Spring at which there was the foundation of an old house. The family sold everything they had in England and bought a ticket to a location in Illinois where they could get land just by settling and farming it. They were dropped off at a flat spot on the Illinois River. It was a bit of a shock. Going from where they were relatively poor and had few prospects in England, they ended up with lots of land and were renting part of it out to others. This was in the very early 19th century. The mother went back to England and told the story to a son who had stayed behind and was a writer and teacher and he published it as a small book (a pamphlet, they would call it). The purpose was to encourage migration to the US.
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  577. Wow! The IMF has finally figured it out. This should have been evident to economists years ago. The whole financial system is a mess. With all the analytic power applied in this sector, they seem to only be able to understand the situation retrospectively. As President Joe likes to say: Come on man!
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  578. This concentration on simple measures is often exasperating. One reason we track these is that they are generally correlated with effects that we are really interested in. GDP growth, by itself is nothing, and I have seen where many in finance no longer use it in their calculations. The real reason is countries like China where the government manipulates it for mainly propaganda purposes. Let's be clear, the reason we look at GDP has nothing to do with GDP. The reason we look at it is the general correlation with various measures, such as employment, which is what really matters. We look at GDP growth because it is a leading indicator, as opposed to employment data itself. In China, this used to be the case and one of the main goals of previous Chinese leaders has been finding jobs for millions of people. Don't forget, China still has a long way to go. They have 600M people living on 1,000 yuan per month or less and 900M earning 2,000 yuan per month or less. Just look up the yuan exchange rate where you are. Why do you think the high-speed rail (HSR) to far flung rural areas loses money? I mention HSR because it is one of the big headline grabbing, GDP accelerating, projects that China indulges in. That sector also has almost $1T in debt and runs at a massive annual deficit. It will never drive economic growth as should be expected in the long run. And now we are seeing quality problems which lead to safety problems which leads to... No, that money is gone and now something else, equally as wasteful, will be found to replace it. And the debt is still there weighing down the financial sector. I read the WSJ (have for decades) and just look at the situation. Yesterday everything was sunshine and roses. Today the news, as people are starting to look at the details, is not so rosy. That is why analysts (like Tony) are more interesting to read or watch than journalists, like the WSJ reporters. The journalists just "report" on what they are told. The editors then put a snazzy title on it. This is great for corporate scandals, but bad for economic data and understanding.
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  579. I first met Indians when I started university in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium. I was born in Washington, DC. My best friends at university were two Indian students. I was studying physics. About a third were Americans of European descent. About a third were Indian. The last third, especially in the graduate school were Chinese. Of course, at that time, they were all from Taiwan. One of my Inian friends was from family of diplomats. His father was being recalled to India. His mother attempted to educate us in traditional Indian cooking. It was so difficult and complex that we ended up getting into Zen Macrobiotic cooking (I still have the book). One of my friends finished his studies in physics, got his PhD in the US, and went back to India and has achieved much in the field. My other friend stayed, became a US citizen, and changed his first name from Ravi to Robby. He switched from physics to business They were both successful. I changed to Computer Science and have done well at that. Today my neighbors include a lot of Indians. Next door and across the street. There is even a Hindi temple in the area. India is a natural ally of the US, and I hope our relations improve even more as time goes on.
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  580.  @dongxuzhou4661  Sorry you feel that way. It is clear you did not read my comment. I am not even sure you watched the video. The question is, what Chinese values you are talking about? Are they Confusion or Communist? These are two different things. I have talked with Chinese who emigrated to the US from China and other countries. I have gone to school, recently, with many Chinese students from China, and discussed issues with them. Many contemplate staying in the US. This is not a good advertisement for China under the CCP. I have even know several successful Germans that wanted to emigrate to the US. I dont see major emigration to Germany either. At many times in the history of the US there were lots of Chinese who wanted to emigrate to the US. In the 19th century there were many Chinese who came to the US to work on the construction of the railroads. There was lots of resistance to them by the locals (many of whom had migrated from Europe). I don't recall any major migrations from the US to China. That goes for all Western nations and many Asian nations. I wonder why that is. I expect that you are associated with the CCP.
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  581. Once, working for a large industrial firm with an aerospace group, I was sent to the corporate training center for an elite class. Prior to the class, we were given flash cards. A few of them had just latitude an longotude. When I looked these up, they were all in Khaghistan. This was, course, during the cold war.
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  582. Caucasian meals? Funny. Actually, the raw ingredients are often healthier. In the 1970s I "introduced" my mother to raw mushrooms. I was just starting out at university. My closest friends were Indian. One's parents were moving back to India (his father was a diplomat) and his mother tried to teach us traditional Indian cooking. It was soooo complicated. So, we switched to Zen macrobiotic cooking. Actually, one time, between places, I moved back into my parents' house for a couple of weeks. My mother decided to try eating what I did for a week, and she started to lose weight. Her doctor told me to keep it up for her. Well, I moved into a new place, and she did not continue with it and did not continue to lose weight. I went through a life change a few years ago and returned to a simple diet (no sugar, no processed foods, pescatarian, etc.) and lost about 25% of my peak weight. I was overweight but not obese. Physically I am back to where I was in my 20s and it feels great! Considering the problems that the Chinese people have with obesity and diabetes (which are related), this trend might be a good thing.
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  583. If France, and perhaps other European NATO countries do send "troops" to Ukraine, the best place to start would be with airpower. A NATO air presence would easily turn the tide and fill in the gaps while the Ukranian Air Force gets up to speed with new, western jets. It would also speed up that process. I am surprised that the US has not done something like the Flying Tigers in China in WWII. Something along those lines could also be done by one or more NATO countries. France, of course, has been advocating for an EU military structure for a while. This makes sense. The EU, taken together, is a large economy and has the inherent capability to do so.
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  584.  @sparks1792  Trump told them that in his first term and they laughed at him. Who's laughing now?
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  585. I recall seeing one fly through the center of Baghdad, down a street, during a CNN broadcast. While they may use GPS, what made them unique, and incredibly hard to defend against, is that they used terrain matching from images stored in the missile. This made them basically impossible to disrupt electronically.
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  586. Hu informed the police about the threats to his life. Is he not aware that the police might be behind it, or might be involved through the use of criminal gangs?
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  587. Actually, the US inflation rate is down to 3.2% already.
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  588.  @frankcooke1692  Well, I don't know about your comments on nationalism. Just look at Ukraine now and indeed all the wars fought in Europe over the last centuries. I think in China one should talk rather about regionalism. Does that seem right to you? As for China, you have an interesting point. The analysts I have read point out that the Southeast Chinese region is, historically, more used to dealing with outside powers. They do not grow sufficient food for their populations because of their geography. They are also major trading hubs. Any power that could supply them with food and raw materials and guarantee their safety would be welcome. Who knows how it will eventually play out. I still think it will break up. China as an imperial power is not really a possibility. They can impact areas like Central Asia and Eastern Russia but going south would be a real stretch. The east is blocked by the sea and major maritime powers. Add to that the fact that no one wants to invade China, and you get a situation where China should be prosperous and at peace. In fact, it is the US led world order that allows China to thrive. Break that order and China devolves very quickly into deindustrialization and famine.
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  589. Thank you.
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  590.  @GeoScorpion  The first part of your comment has merit. The second part not so much. As far as contagion from a China collapse, the CCP itself has made sure it will not spread too far. Yes, there will be pain in the west, but it will not extend to essential goods. Even China's involvement with "high tech" goods is relegated to the low-end assembly process. Have you ever seen pictures or videos of an iPhone factory in China? Do you understand that most of the people working on assembling those devices are peasants? I have dealt with companies that moved such production to China, one having just previously set up a new production line in the US, and it is not a decades long process that will break the business. The other factor is that many, many companies from the US and the rest of the world, that produce in China do it at arm's length via contractors. These can either be the big guys like Foxconn or can be direct relationships with Chinese firms. Many small and medium size brands, and some large ones, are design and marketing enterprises. The manufacturing, and often the distribution, is done through contractors. That gives them the ability to change contractors when necessary. The isolation extends to the financial system as well. We hear these numbers of missed bond payments, etc. What is rarely mentioned in the press is the percentage of the various markets this represents. We are generally not told what percentage of various investment funds are exposed to this. In the few cases where I have seen it, the number is miniscule. Mexico recently surpassed China as America's biggest trading partner. The most important thing to remember is that, in the US and the "west" in general, while the government sets the stage, so to speak, it is private companies that do the work. This is China's, specifically the CCP's, great weakness. They want the government to control everything. Wow! The coffee is really kicking in!
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  591. The idea that the social contract, if successfully implemented, would result in prosperity for the people of China is just not true. China's economic problems under the CCP are too big to fix. The whole property sector, 25 to 30 percent of the economy, had become a giant Ponzi scheme. That alone will tank the economy. No amount of private enterprise would bring sufficient positive activity to the Chinese people with that hanging over their heads. Just look at what happened in 2008 to the west when a different type of property bubble burst. The west recovered, but it was painful and protracted. China does not have the resources to weather this storm. The CCP, through its stifling central control, can delay and hide, but they don't have the resources to reverse the damage, and it is not only financial. People give them too much credit and really, the CCP leadership is not that smart.
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  592. Infrastructure projects in China as a bust. One good example is their high speed rail. Between major population centers they do alright. But they also build many between cities and regions that will never break even. They do it just for stimulus, not for any valid economic reason. There is massive waste because of poor economics and massive corruption.
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  593. The states you talk about are desert states. They only have agriculture because of massive public works. This was done originally, in many areas, so that those areas could be populated. Sometimes nature overwhelms those works. This is not the first time. I live in the Chicago area. The temperatures have been mild and the rainfall plentiful. My yard is overgrown. I am having to take plants out. Climate is the average over the whole globe. Weather is what we experience everyday.
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  594. Are you sure Prigozhin is dead. That would be a shame. He was so entertaining, in a very perverse sort of way. Who else locked himself in a bunker and indulged in fantasies about a war and his own forces? Oh yes, it was that German guy. What's his name? How did that work out? The analogy to a mafia organization is apt and has been noted for a long while. Nazi Germany also had elements of this, and it was part of the state. CCP led China is another example. In Russia this has been fairly visible for a long time. In China I get glimpses of it, but it is not widely discussed, especially by the expatriate Chinese community. This is curious but understandable, since it reflects poorly on their culture and society. In Russia it almost seems to be something to be "proud" of. Russian gangs in other countries have a "reputation".
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  595. New financing channels shrink. That is an interesting way to put it. Evergrande, and the other property developers in China, was a Ponzi scheme. There was only one financing channel, and it was going to end sometime. It always does.
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  596. Marriage is a state matter. Period! The fact is that people all the time go to other states to get married because the law in their state may be more restrictive (and I am talking about heterosexual marriage). The other fact is that marriage in one state is recognized in all other states. I got married in Illinois, because that is where my wife was from. We were living in Pennsylvania. We got married in Cook County, so we had to go to the government building there to apply. We didn't have to do anything special to be "married" in Pennsylvania. Many people get married in Las Vegas. There is no waiting time there. It is very loose. So, in respect to gay marriage, there will be states that will allow it. There will be states that do not. Thus, gay couples can get officially married in a state that allows it, and it will be recognized in other states. How is this different? If it ever gets to the Supreme Court, it will probably be overturned. Like Roe, it is the creation of a national right where none exists in the Constitution. Of Congress wants to pass a law, I still think there might be an issue at the court. We'll see. Don't get me wrong. I am not against gay marriage. I just think that deciding these things at the Supreme Court is just plain wrong.
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  597. The rule of law issue is worse than most think. One of the top judges in China actually stated that the goal of the courts is not to ensure the rule of law is followed, but to support the CCP. This is literally a Marxist-Leninist system we are talking about. The business ethics issue is much worse than most people, especially those trying to get you to invest in China, will admit. It has infiltrated all levels of business and society. These are risk factors that are seldom talked about in the financial discussion in the west. Ignoring these risks is at best stupidity, and at worse, well let's just say "rule of law" is stronger in the west.
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  598. Esther, you are amazing! You used the term Kung Flu. That is what I call it whenever I talk about. I thought people had forgotten about it.
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  599. For once, China has it right. The rules-based order was developed by the US to counter the Soviets. It has been irrelevant for 30 years. The US bore the cost of maintaining the order because of the threat of a much larger cost if they hadn't. The US populace is no longer interested in doing this and frankly does not need to. That brings up the cost issue. China does not have the economic heft to replace the US in that role, even if it is just to support their own trade. Heck, they are having trouble paying their army. The global south is really not a prize worth the effort. Outside of the west and China the rest of the world comprise no more than 25% of world GDP. A significant part of that group will ally with the west. That gives China access to maybe 10% to 15% of world GDP to move to their side. Not worth the effort. On top of that, if the order truly breaks down, those countries that do not side with the west will see their conditions significantly weaken. This may well take the form of deindustrialization, and more importantly, mass starvation. Many of those countries have seen massive population growth under the order. China cannot help them in this. In fact, China will be one of the worst hit countries if things break down. They import most of their energy. They import lots of food, and lots of inputs for food produced locally. They have relatively poor agricultural land and must apply three to five times the inputs (fertilizer, etc.) to this land to make it productive. Frankly, their whole rise in the last thirty years has been because of the US led rules-based world order. Consequently, they will suffer the most from the order's demise. This way lies madness.
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  600. Well, it does seem that Xi wanted to be another Mao. Now he is repeating the same mistakes.
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  601. Briiant! I am glad that you did not limit yourself on time. This is one of your best, and I am impressed with all of your content. Of course, I did not find it until late, and now as I finish watching it dawn is coming. Oh, well. This is not the first time.
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  602. Germany had conscription until 2010.
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  603. Decades ago, in a satirical magazine, China was represented on maps as the "great big empty spot". It looks like this could happen again. I have known people who, when young, went through the Cultural Revolution. They escaped to the US and have become very successful in the US. One, who I was close to, was the head of the CS department of a university in Chicago. He ran a very prestigious lab. I worked with him a lot as the head of the Computer Society of the IEEE locally. He was made a fellow of the IEEE for his work. China has lost many people because of the restrictions of their system. These people are generally major contributors to the countries they emigrate to. Just look at what Russia is going through right now. The numbers I have heard is that over 300K Russians, many with advanced technical skills, have left. The strength of the West is the openness of its system and the diversity of its people. This is especially true of the English-speaking countries, including the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. I have a lot of experience of this, including living in the US (where I was born) and the UK. I have also worked extensively in Canada. Most of Chinese industry was set up by Western companies, not by the Chinese. Many were even set up by Taiwanese, Japanese and Koreans. If China accelerates the decoupling, they will go down the tubes, as the saying goes.
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  604. The problem is that Russian officers are selling the engines on the side. There was actually one who was recently caught selling tank engines.
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  605. When I lived in Winchester we went to Hospital of St. Cross, and the parish of St. Faith's. The first time I was there, when the collection purse came along, I put in at 20-pound note. The old lady next me asked if was going to take change. I of course said no, since the Episcopal church is funded by the parishioners. Then the Master showed me around their water meadows, and I understood.
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  606. I have to argue with the idea that supply chains are inherently sticky. Actually, history has shown just the opposite. Look at the situation vis-a-vis Japan and the US starting in the 1960s and onward. Look at the rise of China. Those supply chains were elsewhere before moving to China. There are lots of examples (just ask me, I dare you). In fact, supply chains, the way they have evolved with China, are more flexible and movable than ever. What has built China is the contract manufacturing model. This model actually makes China less central. Many companies outside of China have devolved into design and marketing organizations with manufacturing outsourced. In the beginning many of these companies did their own manufacturing. They moved that to China to take advantage of cheap labor and to get access to a large market. This then became the default model for many new companies. The danger for China is twofold. First, labor in China is no longer cheap, especially taking into account productivity. For another the market in China is not developing as expected. In fact, it is devolving. As for there being no other country that could rival China, I beg to differ. India is actually in a better position to do so than China was at the beginning of reform and opening up. It is also as large and has better demographics. Finally, China has shot itself in the foot by making foreign firms who set up manufacturing in China take on a local partner. I believe that generally the Chinese partner has to have a majority ownership. This makes it easier for these firms to pull out by limiting their losses. Considering shrinking profit margins for manufacturing in China for industrial products like automobiles in the Chinese market, this has become the default move for many companies. It is always problematic to follow an "expert" who is focused on one country. They tend to have a vested interest. In business one has to take a more global viewpoint.
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  607. The French submarines are diesel. My understanding is that they took a nuclear design and modified it to diesel because of Australian policy at the time. The cost for such weapons was way too high. Why there could not have been a modification of the contract I do not know. The other aspect is this is that the Anglosphere is getting back together. That is the really interesting part.
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  608. Everyone gets upset about the stock market when these things happen. What is really happening is that investors are pulling money out of the market because of the uncertainty. This is normal. By the way, the bulk of these investors did not "lose" as much as the indexes indicate. That would only be the case if the stocks were purchased the day before. Most will actually make money. They will get back into the market when they identify stocks that will grow in the new environment. Bond yields are probably down because a lot that money being pulled out of stocks is going into bonds until the picture is clear.
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  609. The idea of the "state" owning all the property was actually the case in England for centuries. In that case, the monarch was the "state" and dispensed the land to various nobles to use. The difference with the Soviet system is the state was supposed to be "the people", which it clearly was not.
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  610. Totally misses the point on the attacks on the Russian airfields. Morale boost is one thing. The more important thing is that Russian air defenses have been shown to be insufficient to protect Russian territory. This will necessitate a response pulling some of the assets from Ukraine to protect Russia. That is probably more important.
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  611. Ongoing climatic changes? Give me a break. China's history is replete with natural disasters caused by flooding and storms. I also see from many videos that many Chinese cities are built in areas prone to flooding. This reminds me of flooding issues in England several years back. During this time there was lots of talk about "climate". Then, someone did an analysis of where towns and cities were built, and the result was that over 40% of these were built on flood plains.
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  612. No, not distracting. Actually it was interesting hearing you speak Chinese.
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  613. I had a subsidiary run by a couple of Seal Team 6 operators who had been active in the Gulf War. It was an organization that provided security to the main business and did security training, including Marines prior to deployment. Many of them would go back to Iraq as contractors. They would say they hadn't killed anyone for a while.
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  614. You talk about average voters. Well, average voters voted these prosecutors in. If the average voter is swayed purely by money in the campaign, then perhaps we need to look at these average voters.
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  615.  @agustintarzian9450  Oh, say its not true..
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  616.  @lowwastehighmelanin  Indeed, he is.
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  617. The slaves taken to the new world were property, so they had an economic value. I have heard that by the American Civil War, they were, collectively, the largest component of economic value in the country. As for slaves in the Islamic world, the men were castrated. Thus, they did not increase in numbers organically. They were replaced by new slaves brought from Africa. Indeed, there is still enslavement of blacks by Arabs to this day.
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  618. At about 2:30 you mention a bunch of attributes of these "new" missiles. I worked on SDI in the 1980s. All these things were what we assumed. Decoys, multiple warheads, and hypersonic. We were developing space-based systems that would intercept missiles that were traveling 18,000 MPH. In fact, the weapons would have no explosives. Two objects colliding at those speeds would just vaporize themselves. None of this is new. The US missile systems have had multiple warheads, and most likely decoys, for decades now. In fact, the pace of technology is much slower than people assume. When a new technology comes on the scene, it has been in development for years, if not decades. I have been involved in this for over 40 years. Putin is just trying to scare people. It is his own people he has to be concerned about.
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  619. As you pointed out, private industry in China would be daft to invest in this environment. Your report sounds a lot like what I have been saying. As for China's gold stockpile, it is 25% of what the US has. That is not affected by what is transferred to China, which is privately held stocks. As for the stockpiling of oil and natural gas, that can only stave off deindustrialization of China for a matter of a few months in the case of a war where China's imports are blocked by the likes of Japan, India and the US.
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  620. The retirement age in the US is 67. China and France need to do something about that. Their current standards are not sustainable. Even in the US it is a strain. Talking to some people in the insurance industry I was struck by a particular statistic. If you reach 65, you have a 50% chance of living into your mid-90s. Retirement at 60 is just plain irresponsible given China's demographics. In the US, by the way, that retirement age has been moving up over the last few years, adjusting for the population.
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  621. Excellent take on the issue. The aspect that was left out was the role of local governments. Property sales to these developers have been one of their largest sources of income. They have used this to build a lot of the infrastructure projects that the central government has pushed on them. On top of that, the money that flows through this system is a major source of corruption. So, not only are the average people affected, but the party officials and their cronies would be screwed. Add in the probable involvement of criminal gangs, and Xi has more to worry about than the common people. Oh, and the whole financial system, bank and non-bank, is underpinned by the property sector. If they used mark to market accounting, all the banks in China would be insolvent. Default rates are though the roof. To add insult to injury, 60% of loans for Xi's belt and road initiative are nonperforming. The Chinese courts are NOT big on rule of law. In fact, one of their top judges (the top judge?) said that the role of the courts was to support the CCP. The rule of law was, at best, a secondary consideration.
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  622. Are you aware of what the Houthis are doing. They are disrupting shipping. That shipping brings the products that the citizens want and need. You seem to think that these things happen in a vacuum.
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  623. Cheney is a disaster. It is only the media that keeps this alive. This is like our VP. A failed politician. So, how does this give her a national base? Are these commentators and media ignorant? It seems so.
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  624. I think this is way off base. There was already a move to decouple from China because of supply chain issues and the pandemic. Due to this their economy is either flat or growing very slowly. Even their official pronouncements and projections are very "modest". Carafano is talking like the Chinese are some sort of supermen when it comes to this. I could run off a long list of incredibly stupid things they have done in just the last year.
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  625. If Xi is as successful in controlling the cyber space as he is with the economy, then I think we will be fine.
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  626. I still have a problem with this whole situation, I fully agree with Mr. Homan as far as the enforcement issue goes. The problem I have is the "kids" taking these drugs. I did, although never opiates, and stopped over 40 years ago. Very few people I knew took opiates. We need to deal with the enforcement issue, for sure. But we also need to deal with the consumption issue.
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  627. You need to look at the latest data. Battery makers in China are struggling. EV sales in the US and Europe are stagnating. This technology is not the future.
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  628. You should read "Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921" by Antony Beevor. I got it because I have always been interested in the topic. It is well researched and well written. I have not finished it. I stopped reading twice. The things that Russians did to Russians are so reprehensible and so deplorable that it sickened me. It was absolutely medieval. I mean that in the worst possible sense. So, given that history, none of what is happening in Russia today is surprising.
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  629. Kind of reminds me of a child when they get what they want and then realize they didn't really want it.
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  630. Germany has stopped buying coal from Russia. This may also apply to the whole EU. There is lots of coal available. The US has massive amounts, but because of the environmentalists there are few or no exports.
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  631. Ktrharine is amazing. I have been following her for a while. When I lived in the UK in the early part of the century I became a governor of the school my sons went to. Being a foreigner, I had to get permission from the home office, which I did. I found the experience quite rewarding, and got resources for the school from my company. I also became close to the head, to the point that she would have me be part of the interview process for all new staff. I had the good fortune to grow up in a good family, and a good school system. I am in my mid-60s and still remember many of my teachers from elementary (you would say primary) school through high school. They were really inspirational. And I went through school from the 60s through the early 70s, which was a time of massive social upheaval. Part of it was parental involvement, although neither of my parents had a university degree (my father got an associates degree from the local community college, which was quite good). I was vey good in English, Math and Science. Interestingly, in high school I became a tutor in English. I have since gone on to a long career in computer science and engineering. Go figure. I fully agree that discipline in school, and parental involvement are keys to a good education. Having put two sons through a very good school system in the US (they both started in the UK) I can say that this is essential. The amount of parental involvement in the schools where I live in amazing. This makes all the dfference.
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  632. Precisely! The Israeli experience and the US experience in Iraq, twice, proves that. Those situations also disprove the old saw that the attacking side needs three times the number of troops as the defending side to be successful. The weapons, and tactics, are "force multipliers". People seem to forget that, but that is dogma (and a correct one) in the US military.
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  633.  @SSubersive  Guantanamo Bay. They can become permanent residents.
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  634. I changed my diet in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium. When I went to university, I was studying physics and my two best friends were Indian. One's parents were moving back to India (his father was a diplomat). His mother volunteered to teach us traditional Indian cooking. It was so complex and time consuming that we settled on Zen Macrobiotic cooking (I still have the original cookbook). We were in very good health, I followed this for about ten years. Then, under pressure from more conventional girlfriends (and later my wife), I got back into more conventional modes of eating and cooking. We still did lots of stuff ourselves, including making our own pastas, etc. Still, I gained a lot of weight. My blood pressure went up and there were signs of pre-diabetes. I have since been divorced. I changed my diet completely. I am now pescatarian, although I will eat other animal products when out (which is, of course, not often these days). I have lost about 25% of my peak weight. I am getting close to where I was in my early 20s, although I am now in my mid-60s. Blood pressure down. No joint issues (which I had started to have). I have not even taken an aspirin for five years! I have had ONE day of flu (prior to the Kung Flu). It broke in less that 24 hours. I actually felt it break. I still smoke cigars, and drink Scotch (only in the evenings). I do not take any type of sweeteners and have no problem with it. I drink my coffee and tea black. Generally, I drink water, either plain or with organic lemon juice (no sweetener). That is it. No sodas, or other strange drinks. You don't need it. Get over it, I am even transitioning to making my own red lentil pastas and other snacks. Currently my main snacks are nuts or olives. There are so many alternatives that it is laughable. The medical profession is now just a sham. They are great when it comes to dealing with acute issues. As for chronic issues, they are useless. I have followed this for decades. My father-in-law was a doctor of internal medicine. I would need lots of space to discuss the issues we dealt with over the decades, and he was a very practical person. Well, just to wrap up, Dr. Ekberg, keep up the good work!
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  635.  @pogo1140  You are assuming you actually know all the specs of what the US has and what has been shipped. I expect that is classified information. As with everything about reporting on this war, reliance is made of public sources. We really have no way of knowing how accurate they are. Add to this the fact that all sides have a reason to control and shape the information space, I would not be too sure of anything regarding actual weapons delivery or use. Just my opinion having worked in the area over the years (many).
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  636. Actually, BMW has been assembling all their SUVs in the US for many years now. I once told a German colleague that and he got quite upset. Many Japanese and Korean cars are actually assembled in the US.
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  637. The labor issue in India is qualitatively no different than the labor situation in China. Many of the workers in the assembly jobs for products like iPhones are relatively poorly educated villagers. Have you seen the videos and pictures of iPhone, and similar, production facilities? Rows and rows of identical workstations where people are manually assembling the product. These are not that difficult to move. I recall seeing videos, perhaps on this channel, of Foxconn workers leaving one of their facilities during a COVID scare. People forced their way out of the facility. They were living in dormitories and were concerned about an outbreak. They either hitched rides or, in some cases, walked back to their villages. It was reported that many of these villages were two days walk away. The bulk of the manufacturing jobs in China are low tech, as in low automation. in an iPhone, for example, the actual proportion of the cost of assembly is somewhere around 5-10%. Many of the highest cost components come from outside of China.
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  638. The issue of Yuan Shikai is interesting. This is probably the fate of China after the fall of the CCP. That period from the fall of the Qing dynasty to the end of the civil war in 1949 was a period of warlordism. This is a common occurrence in China.
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  639. Your use of all these surveys is kind of out of hand. For one thing, CEOs are not a reliable source of information. This is not something underhanded. One has to understand that pronouncements by CEOs, at least on western public companies, have a special status. They are not actually able to just give their opinion openly. Just look at what Elon Musk has gone through with his, sometimes unhinged, pronouncements. CEO's and companies get sued in the west. The CEO, in international business, also has to play a political role. So, you have Tim Cook in China opening a new store and making all lovey dovey with the CCP. All this while the CCP is banning the use of his products and openly promoting his Chinese competitors. Any rational actor would be pulling out. As it turns out, that is what Apple is doing. The only thing is that they are doing it too slowly and will likely suffer dire consequences. That is just an illustration of the complexities that have to be dealt with. CEOs will say one thing to protect their interests, while doing just the opposite. Each case is different and often complex. The thing that is important is to follow up on what is happening to those western companies that have pulled out of China. My understanding is that one of the Japanese car companies that pulled out experienced no material effect from the move. Just look at what happened in Russia with the sanctions. There a rapid withdrawal was forced. None of the large companies experienced a material degradation of their businesses. There are other markets, and China's is turning into a s**t show.
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  640. Love the program. But I have to say, Emma is making a big mistake equating pollution with climate. They are not the same thing. CO2 is not a pollutant. In fact, it is essential for life. Current levels seem to be historically low.
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  641. I was born in Washington, DC. I remember reading in the Washington Post, in the mid 1970s, about the mental illness problem. That was half a century ago. The problem back then was the closing of public mental institutions. There were lots of documented abuses and these facilities were "expensive". Well, look at the cost we pay for not having them. The problem we have is the poor quality of many public services. When you compare public institutions and services to private ones in many areas the difference is like night and day. This is a problem we must solve. Either we reform the public sector, or we privatize these services.
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  642. Well put. One has to remember that the current shipping routes came about "naturally" according to economics. With the exception of the initial investment in Suez, all the current routes do not require capital investment.
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  643. Peter, you are so far off base on this that it amazes me. Trump is building up political capital for himself (who doesn't need it) and the Republican Party he has built long into the future. You may want to limit yourself for geopolitics and long-term trends in the economy. Just a thought.
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  644. Why does that matter? No one required the dollar to become a reserve currency. Since the introduction of the euro there is almost as much trade done in euros as in dollars. Has that weakened the US. People use a currency because it is liquid ad available in large quantities. This is not true of the yuan or ruble. If the Saudis accept payment in yuan, for example, that is great for buying things from China. If they buy from anyone else, they will have to exchange those yuan for another currency. That exchange costs money. If they have dollars, the cost of that exchange is much less. Of course, the yuan is not freely convertible.
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  645. The housing sector is such a mess, and yet I don't see the CCP, or most economists, doing any good analysis. The point of any economic analysis is to predict what effect any particular policy choice will have on the economy. I point that out because all these analyses and discussions of China's housing sector leave out the used market. They also leave out the effects of the situation on the financial sector. The used sector is in even worse shape. The housing sector has probably already collapsed the financial sector, but the CCP is hiding it, mostly. They are letting non-bank financial firms fail. Most of these failures have been due to the housing sector. All the foreign (to China) analysts tend to apply western models to China. Thus, they zoom in on particular metrics. Those metrics are just parameters in a model. Everyone (in the field) knows the basic model, so they just need a parameter or two to get an idea of what the trend would be, etc. It is a communication convenience. So, imagine my surprise when you quote Alicia Garcia Herrero at about 5:00. It seems like the economists out there are starting to get the point. Some of the financial analysts and investment bankers seem to have figured it out as well. Late, but at least they are starting to see the light.
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  646. The fact is that many (most?) Foxconn employees are peasants. The whole thing about the established supply chain is also a bogus issue. Who set up those supply chains? Was China, at the beginning of reform and opening up, capable of doing any such thing. As President Joe likes to say: Come on man! It was purely foreign capital, management and engineering that led to China's rise. Replacing that with indigenous Chines equivalents is leading to China's demise. China was attractive for two reasons. Cheap labor and a large market. China's labor, on a productivity basis, is now quite expensive. With the collapse of the property market and catastrophic demographics, China's consumer market is no longer attractive. Layer on top of that the CCP's actions and China is increasingly unattractive.
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  647. Pull out all American military troops from Germany now.
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  648. She is woefully ill informed. The UK has been negotiating with France and giving them lots of money.
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  649. Mark, I totally agree with you. Amazing. Just a look at the BRICS countries is instructive. Brazil has massive problems. Their agriculture is totally dependent on massive inputs of fertilizer. Without that and modern technology, they would not be able to grow much. These all come from outside. They haven't even been able to agree on a currency in their local neighborhood. They also have totalitarian tendencies from both the left and the right. Their slums are epic. Russia we all know about. Enough said there. India is on a decent track, but they have a territorial dispute with another BRICS country that the Indians expect will turn into open warfare in the near future. I tend to agree with them. I think their democracy will help them. Look at the situation with Modi. All the pundits assumed he and his party would steamroll the latest elections. It didn't happen. Now he has to govern in coalition. China is going down. They are experiencing something worse than what Japan did which led to their three lost decades. Japan was rich when that happened. That allowed them to recover, and even then it took a long time. China is a lower middle-income country at best. They don't have the resources to recover. The CCP is going down. They have the territorial dispute with India mentioned above, and potentially with Russia as well. Then of course there is Taiwan. They are also antagonizing Japan on so many levels. Don't they remember what Japan did to them many times in the past (it was not just WWII)? Finally, there is South Africa. The country is falling apart. They can't even keep the lights on. The BRICS countries want a muti-polar world. They will get it. It is called imperialism. None of them did well in that era, which covers most of human history. How stupid can they be? Massively stupid it seems.
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  650. What most people don't understand is that economics drive everything. That should be obvious. Military power is also directly tied to economics, especially in the modern age. The last item in the video is a poignant reminder of this. I once saw an interview with George W. Bush, done after he left the presidency. He mentioned his first meeting with Hu Jintao. Bush said he always asked on such occasions, what keeps you up at night. Hu said finding jobs for millions of people each year. You can guess why Hu said that. It is a lesson that Xi has ignored in favor of ideology. Xi cannot admit defeat. To put it succinctly, Xi is toast, and it is all his own doing.
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  651.  @JB-xl2jc  Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I greatly appreciate it. I fully agree with you, except that I would consider having under 10% of the population being of other ethnicities not being ethnically diverse. Our perspectives on that are different. I am gratified to find someone who actually has a good grasp of China's history. I believe that if the CCP falls it will be highly likely that we will see a situation similar to that of the fall of the Qing dynasty. For example, I saw a report on a China focused channel (that has been deleted) claiming that there were people in Shanghai that wanted to break away from CCP China and associate with Taiwan. I don't know how credible that is as it is hard to get information on such things, but it would make sense historically. One of the reasons I believe that China will break up and go back to a warlord period is the lack of any real, credible unifying democratic figure. After the fall of the Qing, you had Sun Yat-sen. Look at the situation then, prior to the Japanese invasion. The nationalist government controlled a relatively small part of the country in the southeast. Sun, by the way, was a socialist, and nationalist, not a democrat. Another reason is that the Chinese people do not have a democratic tradition, and the CCP has done a bang-up job of indoctrination. For example, I see few protests against the form of government. The protests are mostly for the government to address the people's grievances, for example about things like pay arrears. They went from a peasant economy straight to communism. This, by the way, is not how Marx thought things would play out. All of this is actually mirrored in the Russia of today, by the way, and for the same reasons.
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  652. Done! Actually, I have been doing that for decades and have been successful at it whenever there was an alternative. I can afford to pay a little more, especially for products that will last a long time.
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  653. Rita, Lefties losing it is one of the best shows on YouTube!
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  654.  @CSDragon  Well, I only eat two meals, plus the snack (which could be considered a light lunch). I don't eat any wheat. Years ago (in my 20s , when I was a vegetarian) I made all my own bread. I used a little whole wheat flour and bunch of other flours (soy, rice, lentil, etc.). It wasn't hard.
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  655. The phenomenon of Chinese companies branching out into totally unrelated businesses is leading to these dire consequences. Whether it's Guirenniao moving into grain business or Evergrande moving into EVs, economic and financial theory has shown that conglomerates are not the way to go. In the west we often see companies break themselves into parts when they have accreted unrelated businesses over time. This generally has a positive effect. Compare what all these successful Chinese businessmen have been doing to what Elon Musk does. And Musk is not the only one. He has many businesses, but they are all totally separate. Some have basically failed, such as his tunnel boring business. The jury is still out on X. Others have done well. This is another example of the Chinese lack of sophistication in business.
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  656.  @Jeff55369  I think there was some feeling that including Russia in the EU would be a good thing, at least right after the breakup of the USSR. The block would then be energy independent and a real counterweight to the US and China. Russia's economy is not all that large, so that would limit their influence. Remember that it is financial contributions to the block that are among the most important factors in their decision making, not population.
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  657. The flaw in the argument is that Putin (and Russia) doesn't have time. Russia (and Ukraine) was already in demographic decline before the war. Now it is much, much worse. Before the war many geopolitical analysts were predicting the breakup of the Russian Federation. A few years ago, polls of these people went to over 50% for a breakup. The timetable was projected to be a couple of decades. Now, that timetable has shrunk for something like one to five years. Another flaw is the idea that Russia could build up its military again given some time. It took Putin 20 years to build up the military he attacked with in 2022. He had lots of oil and gas revenue and access to western technology during that time. He has none of that now, and he has lost that military. Time is not Putin's friend.
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  658. The CCP has spent decades destroying traditional Chinese culture. Now it is all the rage? Come on man! A big problem with this whole idea is that the Christmas buying season in the west is a big driver for Chinese exports. Christmas is very important to the Chinese people. The CCP should be celebrating it. As I keep saying, Xi is really rather dim. I have a financial advisor who was hoping that Xi would get his third term. His reasoning was that Xi would destroy China as a competitor. He is a very wise man.
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  659. KT is very uninformed on the Russian economy. Oil prices today are not particularly high. They are down about a third off their recent peak. Russia is not getting the world price for their oil. The discount they have to give is 30%. With transport costs, which are high for Russia, they are barley clearing their production cost. In addition, independent analysis of the Russian economy paints a very dire picture. All that said, her following analysis is bogus.
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  660. Of course they did it because of the upcoming anniversary, and wanted to score political points before the mid-terms. Shameful!
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  661. The problem with the schools in China is something I have been harping on for a long time. The fact is that schools in many countries "teach to the test". This is why the US does not do that well in rankings. And yet, the US is a hub of innovation. This has many facets, education being just one. Earlier in this century, I was invited to my son's high school for the occasion of a visit from a vice premier of China. I don't remember which one. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend. The report I saw in the paper was that he was amazed at how happy and motivated the students were, and how China should strive for this. Now, this school is a newer one in the suburbs of a major city. It has world class (I mean that literally) facilities. About 20% of the students take advanced placement classes. Both of my sons took almost all such courses, and even got college credit for many. There are very active sports and cultural activities. The music program is among the best in the country (actually true for all three high schools in the district). Interestingly, a majority of the students at the top level of these music programs planned to go into STEM fields.
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  662. You have to understand that Kissinger, although acknowledged as a great man, is also reviled by many as well. The opening to China had little to do with helping the Chinese. It was a geostrategic move to counter the USSR. It worked in that, by the way. As for the comments on your channel content address at the beginning, I think that you are providing a valuable service. It is important to understand what the government stance is. Unless you understand what the other side is saying, it will be hard to really understand the total situation. You treat these things in a good manner, although I have to grit my teeth and bite my tongue sometimes listening to the CCP stuff. Keep up the good work.
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  663. One aspect of maintaining the CCP's autocratic rule is corruption. That is how the party cadres siphon the wealth of the nation. Xi's anti-corruption campaign is not targeted at corruption generally, but at adversaries in the party. As such, it is ineffective.
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  664. Don't forget, the Chinese people are not citizens, but subjects.
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  665. When I saw "Captain Numbnuts" in the title I immediately knew who it was. Well done. Starmer is an embarrassment, but so was Joe Biden. The only one worse is Kamala Harris. She would have been a disaster on the world stage. Oh, wait, she already was.
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  666. Wow! The report from McKinzie Group is either total drivel or filled with wishful thinking. Increased urbanization? A large part of the urban population consists of migrant workers. As their manufacturing and construction jobs disappear, they are going back to the countryside. The statistics I have seen show population in several cities shrinking. For the services sector, looking at catering one needs to be more nuanced. There are lots of openings because people are losing their jobs, especially middle class professionals. There are also lots of closures. More than ever, in fact. Finally, the demographic picture does not support a growing consumer sector. Zhongzhi sounds like a classic Ponzi scheme. This makes me laugh, because that would mean you have one Ponzi scheme supporting another. This is one area where China excels. By that I mean the complexity and creativeness of their financial manipulations.
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  667. Tony, very interesting topics today, as usual. Ah, gold. Just before watching this video, I got a notification from the US based Wall Street Journal that inflation rose last month and that "underlying pricing pressures remained strong". It doesn't look like US interest rates will go down anytime soon. As for the BRICS being able to replace the dollar by 2050, that is just plain laughable. There is no issue for the US if two countries trade in each other's currency. It is no problem for say, China and Brazil, to trade in their respective currencies. Just remember, if that as trade becomes imbalanced one side will end up holding an excess of currency of the other. If this is not useful in trade with third countries, then it is a big problem. In addition, I have seen several analyses showing that the real value of the yuan should be half of what the official rate is currently. So, you have two currencies, at least, within the BRICS system that are crashing and not generally convertible. Good luck with that. By the way, mentioning Brazil, they are already complaining of dumping by the Chinese. Oh, and India will not trade with Russia for oil in rubles. In fact, they are curtailing their purchases of Russian oil. Non-aligned? Hah! Actually, the closeness of China and Russia is a concern to India. They fully expect China to be more provocative on their mutual border. Some even talk openly of war. Russia has been India's major arms supplier. This is worrying. On top of all that, India's economic future lies with the west. They are actively restricting commercial activity of Chinese firms in India. BRICS, indeed! Chinese machine tools. The reports that I have seen out of Russia indicate that they are crap compared to the western machine tools Russians were able to get before the sanctions. As for the Foreign Affairs article, Gabeuv is obviously a globalist. He fails to understand that our past several presidents have been/are, not. They have been getting progressively more "populist". This is not because of some grand plan of their own but reflects the will of the US populace. The last internationalist president the US had was George H. W, Bush, and he left office in 1993. He was voted out. Gabuev is clearly out of step with the times. Your comment at the end, that "a new era of a fractured global order may already be upon us"" is quite correct. That fracturing is a direct result of the actions of Russia and China. It is their choice. Good luck with that.
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  668. I saw some statistics recently that put a lot of this into perspective as well. First, 1.33B Chinese make 5,000 yuan or less per month. 900M Chinese make less than 2,000 or less yuan a month. 600M people earn less than 1,000 or less per month. Last I checked (very recently) 1,000 yuan equals $139. Also, the source indicated that 100M Chinese people have "purchasing power", down from 200M recently. Keep up the good work. Your content is very informative and well presented.
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  669. The Wall Streeters who developed BRICS did not develop it as an alternative to the dollar, Mark. It was seen as a group of countries in similar economic situations that made sense as a bloc of countries to invest in. It is not really any different from the Asian Tigers investment bloc. I don't know where you get this stuff.
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  670. Wow! $1,500 USD a month. Half a century ago, in the US, the starting salary for a corporate job with a bachelor's degree was just shy of $1,000 per month. So, China is going to surpass the US. Give it another 50 years. Oh, wait, the population will be half of what it is now and will be much older. Belay that.
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  671. Laying off older workers is the dumbest thing the Chinese can do. There are three issues. One is that those with kids are drivers of consumption. The second is that older, more experienced workers are typically more productive. Thirdly, workers in the last ten to fifteen years of their work life are big contributors of capital. Their expenses for children are done and they are trying to build up their investments for retirement. This is critical for China right now, since foreign sources of capital are drying up. Of course, this is how it is in capitalist countries. The Chinese, and the CCP, are, of course, commies. They have no understanding of how capital actually works, and it shows. Top that off with a healthy dose of corruption, and you have disaster looming. Perhaps it is already here.
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  672. What is this 100 years stuff? That would take us back to 1924. Extend that back a couple of years and you have the Polish-Soviet War. The Winter War, with Finland was in 1939-1940. The Russians extracted small territorial gains at the loss of massive numbers of soldiers and equipment against a much smaller foe. That was considered a loss, and was one of the factors which convinced that he could topple the Soviet government quickly. Then there was the Soviet-Afghan War which lasted for a decade and ended in 1989 in a loss for the Soviets. This is widely considered a major factor in the eventual breakup of the Soviet Union. Then, after that there was the first Chechen War, which Russia lost. This was a big factor in bringing Putin to power and damaging the President at the time, Yeltsin. So, where does 100 years come from? It is clear that Russians have no sense of history.
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  673. China's economy has little chance of recovering. For example, automotive sales are tanking. We are talking about more than a 20% decline. Housing, similarly, is unlikely to recover. The knock-on effects from these two sectors is massive. At the same time, exports and FDI are shrinking. A lot of new investment is going into countries like Vietnam and India. Central government actions have contributed to a lot of this. More central government interference is not going to solve the problem.
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  674. Military and naval reach. Most of the Chinese ships (yes, they do have a lot of them) have a combat range of at most 600 miles. Their aircraft carriers seem to have an even more limited range before they must be refueled. Their ability to project their army power beyond their borders is limited to states that are on those borders. Their equipment consists mostly of designs stolen from the Russians. I saw an article where, in a tank competition with the Russians, their tanks came in dead last. Add to that the fact that they lost the last war they fought (with Vietnam) and that was in 1979. China has not projected naval power since around the 15th century. Let's not get all hypes up about China, especially militarily.
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  675. What about all the smart, strong women Trump has appointed to his administration so far?
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  676. Well, actually we did sign an agreement to guarantee Ukraine's security if they would give up their nuclear weapons. They inherited these after the collapse of the Soviet Union and were consequently the third largest nuclear power after the US and Russia. Did you forget that? By the way, the other signatories were the UK and, wait for it, Russia. As for the southern border problem, it is not because of money that we have an issue. It is a matter of policy.
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  677. You know things are really bad when someone opening a Chinese restaurant cannot make it work. Especially in China. In the US Chinese restaurants always seem to be successful. There is always demand. Many years ago, my father, who worked at a government lab, had an engineer friend who was of Chinese ethnicity. He opened a restaurant, and it was successful. As a sideline. My father would bring take-home from his friend's restaurant and that was my first exposure to Chinese food. So, the current situation in China is worrying, and should worry the CCP.
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  678. "...at the helm charting the course..." Wasn't Mao referred to as "the Great Helmsman"?
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  679. This is great news. But what I would like to see is something like the US did in China before becoming involved in WWII. By this I mean the Flying Tigers. These were US pilots, crews and aircraft sent to China to fly under Chinese command. Such units could be in the fight immediately. Of course, the training of Ukrainians should continue so that they can then take over the operation when they are ready.
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  680.  @heinzriemann3213  Your ignorance of international relations is stunning. Any nation can decide to limit trade with any other nation. That is called sovereignty. To put it another way, there is no requirement to allow trade with another nation. In fact, nations grant trade status to other nations. It is not a natural right. The UN even imposes sanctions. If a nation is sanctioned, then the nation putting on the sanctions can also decide to sanction third parties that violate those sanctions. That is how the world works. What you fail to understand is that behind any law, local, state or federal (in US parlance) is force. Without force there are no laws.
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  681. If the EU ends up importing food, they will be making the same mistake they made with manufacturing and material processing. They are just exporting pollution and greenhouse gas production. In other words, they are making things worse, not better. The EU does seem to have recognized this in terms of CO2 emissions, with their Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), but this is just a small thing. If they are serious (and they are not) and want to "follow the science" (which they don't) then they would put CABM types of restrictions on all products imported into the EU. Otherwise, as I said, they are just exporting the problem and impoverishing their own people. What a bunch on dunderheads.
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  682. The lawyer is clueless. Israel has a legal and necessary blockade on Gaza and the boats publicly stated they were going to break the blockade. Where do they get these people?
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  683. Li Hengqing is incorrect. This has nothing to do with the Lehman Brothers situation. Such as characterization is either lazy or ignorant. That was an investment bank without common depositors. What we are actually seeing is standard bank runs. The banks in China have lots of their money tied up in property development. They were drinking the same Kool Aid that everyone was. In the Chinese system the value of those assets is not, as far as I can tell, reevaluated periodically (this is called mark to market). In western terms I expect that all the banks are insolvent.
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  684. When I see the WHO mentioned, I turn off. Ther failure in the COVID epidemic and their politization make them irrelevant. Frankly, the whole UN is irrelevant. Just look at what is happening in Ukraine. I am one in the US that believes we should at the very least drastically reduce funding for the UN and its organizations. I do support at least one more attempt at reform, but if that does not work, then the US should get out.
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  685. Tim Cook and Elon Musk are both smart guys and also stupid when it comes to dealing with international issues. There have been people calling for them to get out of China while they still could. Well, they missed the boat. The CCP is fully capable of killing their businesses in China and seem well on their way to doing that. Their shareholders should probably do something about that.
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  686. Hezbollah an ally of the current Syrian regime? You must be kidding. Do the people putting out this channel have any idea of what is going on. Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy. Iran was a big supporter of Assad. Hezbollah is Shia, the Syrian regime is Sunni. Who writes and researches this stuff?
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  687. Well, he was half American, after all.
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  688. The Russian Army is a clown show. I always felt that the US overestimated their capabilities. This goes back to the late 1970s and the 1980s when I worked on command-and-control systems. Now, we have the proof.
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  689.  @lance8080  STEM, especially the T and E, are best. Finance, business, law and management (the latter two at the master's level) are also reasonable.
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  690. Have you considered the case of Israel? They have a large reserve of trained people. In a conflict, of which they have had many, they call up these reserves of trained people. Thus. they can increase the size of their army in days. They are very successful in this. That is one thing I did not hear from you. These people should be kept in an active reserve with periodic training.
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  691. Very well presented. One must remember what the term Nazi stood for. It was a short form of the name "National SOCIALIST German Workers' Party" (emphasis mine). Soviet socialism was internationalist. German socialism was nationalistic in character. That is the basic difference. Today, Russia, while not using socialist ideology directly, is really implementing the same program, but on a nationalist basis. China, by the way, is doing basically the same thing. The economy of Russia, and China, is also very similar to the Nazi economy, in so many ways. The mixture of state enterprises and capitalist structures, with state control and direction, is exactly the same. There is also the presence of massive corruption. Some of this is within the state structures and some in traditional criminal underworld organizations. Finally, we have the imperialist angle. Russia is a de facto empire, trying to expand. China is an aspiring empire. They are both living in the past.
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  692. China's vision for a new world order is so silly that it might not be worth responding to. On the other hand, how can one resist. The world order developed by the US after WWII was designed to contain the Soviet Union and to prevent wars in Europe from getting out of control. It depended on two things. The obvious one was military power. One has to understand that military power is a result of economic power. The other thing was that the US opened up its market to all who would stand with it in opposing the Soviets and their allies. This was at least as critical. The obvious issue with China is that their internal market is nowhere near where the US was at the beginning of the process and is shrinking, while the US has expanded. The crux is that China has little to offer the world in contrast to the US, and now its allies. As for the "global south" this is another silliness. And it is for the same reasons given above. Africa is still only a source of raw materials and a small market for goods. As China is finding out, to its ruin, Africa is neither stable nor rich enough to sustain the type of development China wanted to enable there. The other thing that will be at least as important is the fact that the US is slowly relinquishing its role as the arbiter and enforcer of the rules based global order. Increasing populism in the US means that the US will no longer guarantee trade with areas that are not core to its own economy and security. Populations in places like Egypt and sub-Sarahann Africa have grown well beyond their carrying capacity. This is due to the order. These countries could freely trade with the rest of the world and thus their populations grew. Without the order there will be mass starvation in Africa, and China will not be able to do anything about it. In fact, if China becomes too belligerent it too will face mass starvation. Bringing up historical grievances will not do anything to alleviate this. The best approach to the whole idea of China driving a new form of governance in the world is to scoff at it. It is more likely that China, and the CCP, will not be functioning entities by the end of this decade. The most likely scenario for the world is a return to state of affairs that existed before WWII. That implies spheres of influence, and perhaps outright colonialism in some cases. Get ready for it.
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  693. Just listening to the moderator's description of ESG at the beginning I can tell you it is a load of crap. For one, it goes against the whole concept of equity investing. Stocks represent ownership in a company. That is all. People invest in stocks rather than say property or commodities because they expect to make better returns and have more liquidity. The fact that, in some countries stocks are not as well regulated or as easily traded, means that those countries invest less in stocks. You notice, I have not talked about anything to do with ESG. It is a fad. The real world will ensure that.
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  694. Remember what Ronald Regan said. "The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Does anyone even believe that the CCP wants to support private business. I expect that foreign investors will see it for what it is and not invest.
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  695.  @axlslak  You are forgetting Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Oh yes, almost forgot Pakistan (east and west) splitting. How about Ethiopia and Eritrea? These things happened not long ago.
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  696. The Nationalist government was never really in control of China, even from its earliest days. In fact, before the Japanese invasion, China was in a period of warlords, and the Nationalists control only encompassed a minority of the country's territory. This was, in fact, a common feature of Chinese history. Mao was just another warlord among others, in the end. So, the outcome we are seeing now is not unexpected. The only thing that differentiates them from previous warlord factions is ideology. As with all communist dictatorships, they mainly use this ideology to cement their own power and further their own corruption.
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  697. The interviewer's comment about the EU not letting Ukraine into NATO puzzles me. These are two totally different bodies. The EU, I believe, does not have any direct control over NATO. That is why they are trying to build their own military structure. In addition, the US and Canada are members, and they are not in Europe. The UK is a member of NATO but not the EU. This leads me to believe that he does not have a great understanding of the situation.
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  698. Caitlyn has a good point about those leaving Spotify. They are leftovers. Their music is pop music. Such music is by definition, not "significant". The music my mother listened to was not something my generation was really into, although most of it was jazz and swing, so I personally was into it. My sons listen to very different stuff than what I grew up on. That's the way it is. Pop music is not as much of a long-term money-making proposition as podcasts. Podcasts are the future. Live video and audio are dead I no longer have cable. I listen to Fox, and all other sources, strictly from the recorded versions. I know lots of other people who do as well. The only thing left to watch live is sports.
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  699. To anyone in China, or anywhere else in the world, who makes a big deal about France or the EU opening up an investigation in world trade bodies, I say don't be ignorant. Just look at EU US actions on trade in the last decades. Here you have two roughly equal players with similar rules, and there are still disputes. That is what international bodies such as the WTO were set up to deal with. If China can't handle the heat, they should get out of the kitchen, so to speak. They remind me more of a petulant child rather than a serious adult. I often wonder if it is the translations that give the particular cast to their pronouncements, but I have become convinced that this is not the case.
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  700. Good analysis. One thing I do have to wonder about though, is the media talking about presidential runs by failed politicians. Cheney lost by a massive margin in her own party. What appeal will she have nationally? Who comes up with these ideas? Is this some sort of conspiracy?
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  701. Again, with government relying on "land auctions" for income. I know, I know, people will make all kinds of justifications for this in China, and Asia specifically. But, let me tell you, this is a very primitive form of raising government money. It is also the least efficient and the least likely to enhance the economy long term. I mean just look at mainland China. The mania with land in a country with limited amounts, may be understandable, to some extent. Of course, this really doesn't apply to China, does it. But again, it is primitive. There also seems to be a lack of understanding in Asia about markets. Housing prices fluctuate, even in the US, over time. I have seen many cycles in my lifetime. Some were local, some national. There were many different causes. That is natural. But the lack of understanding I talk about extends beyond that. There are multiple financial markets operating at the same time, and the relative returns, outlooks among them are what really drives them. Money is a great invention, whether it be metals based or fiat. It can be moved around quickly (not so much for the former, thus the later) and thus one has to constantly look beyond the narrow confines of a single market and look at the economy in macro terms. From what I have seen in China, there is no real understanding of this by the leaders in their business community or the CCP. Primitive! China was never going to overtake the US. Look at all the remnants of empires that have long histories like China from Babylon to Persia to Egypt to Rome to Byzantium. That is the fate awaiting China, and it always has been. I am always fascinated by what is going on in China (and most of the world), but it really doesn't worry me anymore.
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  702.  @iiiDartsiii  Good points. The quality of life in a lot of Russia was not all that good to begin with. Remember all the videos of Russian soldiers taking household appliances from Ukraine? Russian prisoners, interviewed by the Ukrainians, who were from poorer regions indicated that they did not have indoor plumbing.
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  703. The assumption is that the majority of the American people support this. We elect leaders to make these decisions, not talking heads, or actual socialists.
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  704. My only regret is that I can only give one thumbs up to these videos.
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  705. The official figures on housing sound suspicious to me. I have seen specific instances of people who went into default claiming that their homes sold at a much lower price than they paid. Unless all of these are lies, the housing market prices are much lower than the statutory prices.
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  706. Both of these guys are great! Keep up the good work.
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  707. The whole issue of food shortages is just daft. The biggest health problem in the West is obesity. Come on, man. People eat too much and eat the wrong things. I used to volunteer at a food bank in my city here in the US. It is a deluxe facility, and I am not exaggerating about that. A large proportion of the "clients" I saw were overweight, and many obese.
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  708. I was going to mention Zeihan. Good that you did. I am finishing his third book (Absent) and have read all the others. His take on China is being played out now, as well. The reality is that these places cannot support this many people with indigenous resources. These populations are dependent on outside resources, and these are being disrupted. The presenter runs a clip where a UN official mentions war as one of the causes. This is war in the region. We are not told how much each of the causes contributes. The reality is that drought in this area is endemic. I have followed the area for over half a century. First through the National Geographic. The West will not :give" all the money the UN says they need. National governments do not exist to solve the problems of other countries. The sooner people in places like India understand that, the better.
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  709. The warehouse and office vacancy rates are just two examples of economic indicators that are not highlighted often enough. I am not surprised are either of these. There are also indicators such as poor attendance at trade fairs, workers at SOEs that are being told to "take a holiday", salaries not being paid in just about every sector, including government. The thing is that the analysts that make these investment decisions don't seem to be looking at such indicators. On the other hand, in the US, such indicators, taken as predictors of future trends, are often cited. This is another problem with not being able to be "in country" and able to collect data independently.
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  710. Liberal democracy does not mean letting in refugees who will not assimilate. Democracy is based on the will of the people and their interests. The reason that Europe has so many small countries is that each represents a nationality. These countries have often been at war with each other, for centuries. The interests of those nationalities are not often served by your idea of "liberal".
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  711. Having had security clearance before, I also wonder about this. Security clearance is on a need-to-know basis. When you leave a job, for standard clearances there is a one-year window to reactivate it. For higher clearances and compartmentalized clearances, there is no such grace period. I went through that. I was in a job that was did not require clearance for over a year and when I went back in, I had to go through the whole clearance process again. For ex-presidents it has mainly been a courtesy. They don't need it. The only legitimate reason is to allow them to keep access to files from their presidency so that they can work on their memoirs.
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  712. Both the EU and the UK have rejected trade deals with the US in the past. With the EU it was TTIP. I recall being a part of forums regarding this. In the end, chlorinated chicken was a big issue. No joke. Actually, it was also an issue with the UK. What has happened is that growth in the EU has become sclerotic. The UK is a tiny bit better off. By the way, I have seen economists projecting that the UK economy will surpass that of Germany within the decade. Considering what has been happening in Germany it may be sooner rather than later. Meanwhile growth in the US was already higher before the election and looks to accelerate. The US has been moving in an America first direction for a while. The thing is that the US has the resources, both natural, human and economic to do so. Under Trump, and even Biden, the US has become one of the biggest producers of oil and natural gas. That will increase as Trump takes the shackles off the industry. That means that increased US exports. Europe could really use that now. The EU is going to have to get in step with the US. On the other hand, it is a protectionist cartel. So, the future for them is cloudy. Let's hope the UK wakes up to reality. Under Labor that may be a stretch.
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  713. One thing I do have to wonder about though, is the media talking about presidential runs by failed politicians. Cheney lost by a massive margin in her own party. What appeal will she have nationally? Who comes up with these ideas? Is this some sort of conspiracy?
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  714. Just listening to the first six minutes of this video it is clear that Rep. Roy has things right. The sad thing is that I have heard it all before, over decades.
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  715. All my grandparents came to the US in the early 20th century. They came from a poor part of Greece (Arcadia in the Peloponnese). They had fourth grade educations. They all did well. One was a carpenter and built houses. He had his own (which he built) and lived a good long life. The other was a little more entrepreneurial and ended up with businesses and several properties. Of their children, a couple went to college. Of their grandchildren, ALL went to college, many with advanced degrees. They came with nothing, and also did not speak English. They learned. I say this, but one of my grandmothers did not ever speak much English. This type of story has been going on in the US since it was a colony of GB. The real measure of just how great our society is are the number of people trying to get in. How many are migrating to China or Russia, or Venezuela or Cuba? That should put an end to the debate. I am In the Chicago area. I once used a contractor which was an environmental engineering firm. The two owners were Mexican. One was of Aztec origin and the other of Myan origin. These guys were physically the archetype of their origins. The banter between them was priceless. The other leader in the firm was from Iran. Only in America. These guys were smart, good businessmen and lots of fun to party with. That is the real America.
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  716. I was a teenager back then. The Beetles were good, but I preferred Led Zeppelin and The Who.
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  717. Mr. Friedman is always worth listening to. I was having a discussion in response to a WSJ article about, on their site, and the topic of our politics and Trump came up. I suggested to my interlocutor that he read George's book " The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond" and he thanked me. It was very gratifying.
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  718. Jonathan, at the end, you are way too optimistic. Germany and Japan had attitudes similar to Putin's during WWII. They are now fully functioning democracies, and well integrated into the world. But look at what it took. They were occupied for years and forced to adopt western style constitutions. I think the only real future for Russia is to break up.
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  719. Oh my goodness, the Silicon Curtain Network. Visions of grandeur. All kidding aside, you do great work.
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  720. I miss the Cold War. I got to do incredible research projects with unlimited funds. i told this to a colleague of mine. He said he missed it because he got to kill people. He was a F4 pilot off the USS Enterprise. To each his own.
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  721. There is a lot of talk about purchasing power parity (PPP) that inflates the size of economies like China. This is, of course, bunk. A home in China is much smaller than in the US. In addition, those homes in China cost a lot more, in terms of people's incomes. In the US one usually qualifies for a loan of two to three times their annual income. In China the multiplier is many times higher. This is madness. In the first place the banks should not make these loans. In the second place the people taking out the loans should not be borrowing for a down payment. To a large extent they bring this misery on themselves. In the west we talk about the property ladder. One buys a starter home; one they can afford. Then, if the value goes up and/or their income goes up, they sell the first home and move up to something bigger and better. It seems that the people in China are trying to jump to that top rung right away. I have had friends try to jump on the property ladder a rung too high. We call them house poor because they often can't even afford to furnish their home. This sometimes doesn't work out. One thing I have heard is that the Chinese don't like to buy used properties because of some superstition. Again, this is a culture, raised under communist rule and some remnants of traditional Chinese culture, that has brought a lot of this misery on themselves.
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  722. Prof. Sachs talked about a coup and the US promoting regime change as if that was surprising. Heck, that's what USAID was set up for. As for the experiment in unipolarity, the US just fell into that. There really wasn't much support for it in the electorate. George H. W. Bush wanted to have the discussion about how the world should work after the breakup of the Soviet Union. He was our most experienced President in foreign affairs. He was voted out of office in favor of a candidate who campaign had a tag line, "It's the economy, stupid." It almost always is. If you look at polling on issue ranking among the American electorate in the last election, Ukraine was near the bottom, along with climate change.
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  723. The Republicans should just run the laugh clip you showed in their ads nonstop.
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  724.  @attilamarics3374  Begs? What planet are you on? Get a clue.
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  725.  @mattyghost3409  Surely. It seems like Xi has Mao envy, so he has to repeat Mao's mistakes.
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  726. I have been in a home for about twenty-five years. After about ten years the value went up to 170% of the original purchase price. In another ten years it was down about 30% off the peak. Now it is back up to the previous peak and rising. These things are cyclical. Each person and region will experience different situations. With my parent's house, which we sold about 22 years ago, there was a local downturn in the market, and we sold about 20% off the peak. That was still about ten times the original price, by the way. Unlike China, the housing market in the US is not the main driver of the economy. Really, as long as supply does not outstrip demand, we are in a better position. It is only when demand is way over supply that things get really bad. During the subprime crisis supply was 2-4% over demand. In China it is 100%. They are not coming back from that, and 30% of their economy is based on real estate. Finally, it is very likely that interest rates will come down in the next year. If you look at the graphs Patrick shows he only talks selectively about points he wants to emphasize. Look harder at the whole thing and you will see what I am talking about.
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  727. Very thought provoking, as usual. Keep it up. This is a very interesting and important topic. By the way, after WWII the US continued the arsenal of democracy, as the USSR was the arsenal of communism.
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  728. Pastor Brooks needs to run for Mayor as a Republican.
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  729. You might recall that Iraq had massive trench systems, including anti-tank ditches and minefields. How did that work out for them? And the Iraqi army was more experienced than the Russian army. As for the dragon's teeth, how did that work out for the Nazis in WWII? And don't forget, tanks were originally designed to deal with trenches in WWI. They are good at it. We have already seen Ukraine use tanks, along with infantry, to destroy trenches and their occupants. I get the feeling that all the reportage on this is just something that reporters can glom onto, without really analyzing the situation.
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  730. I remember, in 1974, the first time I was in Milan, seeing a lot of these cars. They all seemed to be 1300 Juniors. They were almost all red. I had not bought my first car (that would turn out to be a 1967 Austin Healey Sprite MK III). My brother had a 1968 Triumph GT6, and we were really into sports cars, so seeing all those Alfas in downtown Milan was really special.
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  731. Earthquakes? It must be due to global warming. The sad truth is that if foreign private companies have not left China yet, they are basically screwed (looking at you Apple). There are two things that moderate the impact of this on foreign companies. First, they are forced to "partner" with local Chinese companies who have a majority ownership in the enterprise. In addition, much of it is subcontracted. The second is that most of the manufacturing is low end and can be moved (is being moved) to other countries. Even Chinese companies are doing this.
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  732. Excellent analysis on the economy. This is what I have been saying for years. The problem for the CCP is that allowing the private sector to be successful will, in a normal society and political system, precipitate a shift of political power. A communist regime cannot allow this. The only thing that could save China is the abandonment of socialism. The country is more likely to break up into warlord led regions if the CCP falls, as it probably will. A good example is the in the UK in the 19th century. Historically the wealth of the country (most countries) was agricultural. As the industrial revolution took hold the economic power shifted to the industrialists. The electoral system, on the other hand, had never changed and was based on the agricultural model. In the UK, the shift happened internally, and peacefully. It was not ideological. By the way, one might notice that the US, in its Constitution, adopted at the end of the 18th century, had provisions for reappointment of congressional seats based on a decennial census.
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  733. I wonder if Zuckerberg has every heard of Second Life. Same thing, without quite as much tech. Still around, but a bit like My Space. That is where they are headed. Emily is correct, Facebook will start to fade.
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  734. Ah, the Cultural Revolution reborn.
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  735. Disclaimer: the following is not meant as investment advice, just personal observations. I am glad you mentioned Cathie Wood's projections on Tesla. I see reference to this all the time in YouTube videos and ads. In my opinion, Tesla is probably not going to advance much, if at all, in stock price. Tesla's slowing sales and slowing adoption of EVs generally seem to indicate this. The other thing that is a very big red flag is that Musk is touting Tesla as an Ai company. First, this is a manufacturing company whose products are manufactured things becoming something completely different. For another thing, adding all the electronics, and now self-driving, to EVs is just a sales tactic to justify the high price. For one thing, ICEs have lots of the same electronics and for another one doesn't need an EV to implement self-driving. The first instances of self-driving were in ICEs in the form of self-parking vehicles. You don't need an electric motor to implement self-driving, just a "fly by wire" control system, which most modern vehicles have. Another issue is that the AI bubble may already be bursting, especially regarding generative AI. On July 22 in the WSJ there was an article titled "A Clamor for Generative AI (Even If Something Else Works Better)". It is worth a read. Now, in the last month or so I have seen lots of articles talking about that bubble bursting along with lots of videos on YouTube. So, with slowing EV adoption, and the AI bubble bursting Musk might want to spend more time putting up satellites and setting up a colony on Mars.
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  736. Before watching the rest of the video, I wanted to give my take on the question asked (2014 borders) and the three possibilities (or bets). On the first question, it is unlikely. Absent one of the events given at 1:03, the only way to return the 2014borders would be for a strong NATO force to come in and kick the Russians out. WW3, anyone? As for the three possibilities, they all have finite probability, but it is not very large. For one thing, they would most likely take a long time. Ukraine does not have that kind of time. Between the demographic decline, exacerbated by the war but already an issue, and the war weariness in the populations of Ukraine's supporters, both in Europe and the US, Ukraine has already effectively lost as far as their maximum goal is concerned. Finally, a comment on the borders. Borders in Europe are a mess. Just in Ukraine you had the Donbas which was really a Russian speaking area. Then there is a region in the southwest of the country that contains with a lot of Hungarian speakers. A few months ago, a Ukranian vlogger that I follow turned her audience on to a history of Ukraine. I read it. She even had the author on. The idea was to "prove" that Ukraine was a thing. Unfortunately for the Ukranians it also showed that the borders in that part of Europe were quite fluid over time.
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  737.  @nancydelu4061  You are very welcome. Glad you liked it.
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  738. What Forbes said at around 3:00 is a key issue. Year-end spending to maintain your funding is not only a problem in government, but also in business. I ran into it working at GE in the 1980s. Jack Welsh tried to stop the practice. He said that capital spending would not be based on what you spent the year before. Most executives didn't believe him. I was the CIO (we didn't call it that then) for an aerospace plant. Because computers were something we could get delivery on quickly from the manufacturers I spent more than one holiday season (we were on a calendar year fiscal year cycle) popping into the plant to ensure that the equipment was delivered. Fortunately, I lived nearby.
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  739.  nigelmcgiver2275  Oh, Russia is holding back. Who are you kidding? Who is paying you, anyway.
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  740. So, with those casualty figures, what we can surmise is that Prigozhin was a better commander than Shoigu. Pretty sad for the Russians.
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  741. Down with the mice! I used to have cats. They were indoor/outdoor cats and were very good hunters. They got lots of mice and rabbits. We fed them well, but they still caught and ate the rabbits and mice. They would bring the rabbits onto the deck. They would eat one half, leave it, and then eat the other half later. It was wild. One even brought a small mouse into the house. I let the cat in through a second floor window, not noticing the mouse in its mouth. The cat then went to the door, turned around, dropped the mouse and sat there looking at me very proud of what it had done. The thing is that these cats were very active. They climbed on our house and neighbor's houses. These are all two story houses with high peaked roofs. When we would take them to the vet, the vet would only say, they are very lean. This is what you need. Hunter cats.
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  742. The EU is indeed targeting China, and rightly so. But this is not a specifically Chinese phenomenon. The EU competition authorities routinely target the big US tech giants as well. This is all done in accordance with existing laws. We also have to understand that the EU is a protectionist cartel of sorts. By the way, there are plenty of examples where the US has hit EU firms and applied tariffs for similar reasons. China has been flouting rules and regulations of other countries they trade with for decades. Now they have come out and openly stated that they want to dominate various industries. This is government policy, not companies competing to be on top. As such, China is a legitimate target.
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  743. What few people consider about the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) program is that the treasury actually made $15.3B on an investment of $426.4B by 2014 when the program was wound up. Not a fantastic rate of return, but a profit, nonetheless. For China to buy property now to turn a lot of it into low-income housing (one plan being touted) and at least break even the price they would have to pay would be very low. This would be devastating to current property owners and developers as well as the financial institutions. As most of Tony's viewers will know, several large non-bank financial institutions heavily invested in the property market have already failed. The CCP keeps the banks alive, but that is all artificial. In other countries, those banks would be considered insolvent.
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  744.  @Jinisinsane  Great point.
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  745. BYD's cars are trash. Advanced battery technology? Come on man! Their technology is crap. Their self-driving capabilities are sub-par. Their build quality and materials are very poor (and that is being kind). The number of vehicle fires is out of control.
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  746.  @jamesmoy1214  Crypto is toast.
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  747. To start out, I am not opposed to NATO or US membership in it. I also do not necessarily see NATO as being essential either. Its continued existence and goals are fair game for a discussion that has not been had since the end of the Cold War. The last US president that was willing, and probably capable of, leading such a discussion was George H. W. Bush, and he left office in 1993. All presidents since then have been progressively more populist, and I mean that in the strictest sense. While bringing up Trump's issues with NATO is fair, you leave out that Obama also chided the allies for their failure to meet their spending commitments. In fact, President Kennedy also complained about "lazy Europeans". So, this is a long-standing issue. Obama also initiated the "pivot to Asia" and considered himself the first "Pacific" president. He pushed deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), which the US never ended up joining. It didn't help that the corresponding deal with the EU, TTIP was derailed by the issue of chlorinated chicken. All this predates Trump. You have to understand that in a democracy the leaders do not have carte blanche to pursue any policy they want. They need to be receptive to and in sync with the desires of the electorate. That is why the idea of the "bully pulpit" is often applied to the US presidency. The president can cajole and persuade but cannot make unilateral decisions. The issue of disproportionate payment by the US into international organizations is one that exercises the populace and has done for some time now. There are also significant portions of the US population that question UN membership and the level of the US contribution to it. In the case of Trump, he is just the most vocal proponent of reassessing US commitments to some of these organizations. Finally, you mention alternative security arrangements, such as an EU alliance, or as some in the EU have been pushing, an EU army. I just have to remind folks that Macron once lumped the US with China and Russia as threats.
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  748. "...the likelihood of these individuals becoming Warlords..." It is good to see people showing an understanding of the likely fate of China after the collapse. By the way, this is also a likely scenario in the Russian Federation. China has been run by warlords for most of its history. One estimate I have seen is that there are only abut 300 years in the long history of China where the central authority really controlled the whole country. Don't forget that from the fall of the Qing dynasty to the communist takeover China was in another of its warlord periods. Both Mao and Chiang Kai-Shek were warlords. Some have given the CCP till the end of this decade. I think it will be a lot sooner. One, maybe two, years. The banks and the whole financial system are most likely bankrupt already. In Russia, a survey of geopolitical analysts showed over 50% expecting a collapse. They are giving it a decade or two, but again I think it is most likely in the next year or two. The result is that a large part of the world's land mass and population will sink into an anarchic mess.
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  749. It is interesting that you mention the underworld connection. Every once in a while, I see reference to this, especially in relation to nefarious financial dealings. What I wonder is, who is controlling whom. Is it the CCP controlling the underworld, or the reverse? This is something not talked about enough. That is understandable, due to the nature of the underworld and the opacity of the CCP. Any foreign entity doing business in China needs to take this into consideration in their risk assessment.
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  750.  @NixsonJr  Well, if they are preparing for it they are doing a piss poor job. They have not stocked up enough oil to go any length of time without. That would be hard to do. As for food, they are in such bad shape there that I don't know what they are thinking. Massive corruption has adversely affected their stockpiles. Actions taken in the last several months have badly affected current food production. A typical one is the flooding of prime agricultural land to protect Xi's pet project. All of that and more may indicate that they are either stupid, or don't really plan to invade Taiwan. It is hard to tell.
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  751. I had a neighbor, a guy in his 70s, who claimed to know what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. Of course, he wouldn't tell. He was in a position to know, because he was a VP for union relations of a major trucking firm at the time. Heck, he might even have been involved.
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  752. The statement that Spence makes about the transformation away from China would be "prohibitively expensive and logistically challenging" just plain ignores history, including that of China, and the nature of manufacturing itself. Historically we have the shifts that have taken place in just the last 125 years or so. Actually, by 1900 or so the US had a bigger share of global manufacturing than China does today. After WWII, for obvious reasons, the US generated 50% of world GDP. Then there was the shift from the 1970s to Japan. Finally, there was the shift to China itself. Now we see Japan moving manufacturing to places like the US, among others, and away from China. Some German firms are doing so as well. If you are talking about electronics manufacturing, specifically assembly, that is already moving. Foxconn, for example has moved a lot out already. We are talking plants that employ over 100K workers. The nature of manufacturing is constant change. Plants are constantly being reconfigured and rebuilt. This is a dynamic process.
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  753. Literally!
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  754. While it is interesting and useful to see the figures on growth, inflation, etc., these are often misinterpreted in a statistical sense. First, is the question of accuracy and quality. In the US, and the west in general, one often sees adjustments to such measures after initial release. That is because the numbers are statistical projections from a sample, and the various agencies continue to gather data and analyze. The second thing that bothers me, and I have lots of training and experience in statistics, is that the variance is not generally discussed. Frankly, when you have changes close to zero and what I expect is a large variance, then the best inference is that you have basically no change. For example, we have the deflation signal of 0.1%, I believe. If that is within the standard error, then you could have zero, or a slight increase. Considering the components of an inflation measure, a deeper analysis would be required before pronouncing something like deflation based on these numbers. One thing I would quibble with Pettis on is the use of month to month change as opposed to year on year. These types of statistics exhibit a definite seasonality. His choice seems to be unsound.
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  755. Great explanation of the process. It totally comports with my understanding. The problem with going from a communist system to a capitalist one is that the people have no education about what capitalism means. Add to that the corruption, and you get oligarchs. Now the oligarchs, and the apparatchiks are passing on the wealth and jobs to their kids. What you will end up with is a new aristocracy. A similar same thing is happening in China. They have not abandoned the communist model (and Xi seems to want to go back to that) but opted for a mixed model. The ordinary person is very limited in his ability to participate in financial markets, so they turned to property, which is something even an old commie can understand. Thus, their economic distortion was to have an outsized property market which everyone thought would grow forever. Well, the big real estate developers turned into Ponzi schemes with the blessing of the government, until one day that blessing was withdrawn. China is now paying the price. In addition, the society is turning into an aristocracy as well. One will often hear the term "princeling" referring to the children and grandchildren of the revolutionaries. They now run the country. In both cases, you also have massive corruption and a large criminal gang element. The best thing the rest of the world can do is to disengage from Russia, and China.
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  756. I agree with Varney. I am a strong Trump supporter. I understand what Kayleigh is saying, but I would like to see the party develop the considerable talent we have on the bench. It is still a debate, and one we should have, after the mid-terms.
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  757. It is the US that guarantees freedom of navigation. The South China Sea is international waters. The irony is that China is one of the countries that benefits most from this freedom of navigation. The US is actually drawing back from commitments worldwide and this will affect China negatively. As for the Chinese aircraft carrier sailing into the Gulf of Mexico, that is not likely. They don't have the range since they are fuel powered, not nuclear powered. They would probably have to stop by one of the US ports to refuel. That would be a good one.
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  758.  @CSDragon  Well, for breakfast I have oatmeal with butter and cinnamon. For dinner I have vegetables (I usually get frozen, which are more nutritious and convenient), then I might make a soup with lentils with the veggies. I will have a snack most, but not all, days. This will be olives (sometimes with some feta cheese) or nuts. I only drink water (usually with a splash of lemon juice), brewed coffee and brewed tea. Sometimes I will have red lentil pasta. I buy it made, but now have an attachment for my KitchenAid to make it myself. I am also pescatarian and will have fish a couple times a week. Hope that helps.
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  759. Nailed it! Once in Helsinki I saw three icebreakers in the harbor that I was told were nuclear powered. I just thought that was a fun fact.
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  760. Glad to see this list. I am also glad that I eat NONE of these foods. Actually, I eat a lot of the good foods that Dr. Ekberg talks about. The only things I differ on is that I eat lentils, and oatmeal for breakfast. Also, for fruit I eat either and apple or orange for breakfast. At home I am pescatarian. I eat only wild caught. I may eat other meats when out, but this is rare. I have also cut out most wheat, except for an occasional ramen. In fact, I have eliminated sweeteners altogether. I drink water with a splash of organic lemon juice. I eat my oatmeal with butter and cinnamon. I drink my coffee and tea black. I don't miss the sweeteners. I just don't need them. For snacks I have olives or nuts.
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  761. The big question is who cares. It was always going to go this way. It was the same with Vietnam. The people are not willing to fight this. In fact, the majority seems to with the Taliban. Why should it matter to the US. We initially did what we went in to do. We should have gotten out much sooner.
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  762. "Dearm"? I think the correct word is "disarms".
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  763.  @baruasafi5880  As I recall, it was Japan that attacked China, all of Southeast Asia, then the US. Were they controlled by the West? The projection of the end of Western Civilization seems to be a popular meme. You mention the wars in the first half of the last century. Have you looked at the history of Europe? The Hundred Year War, the Thirty-Year War, the Seven Year War, etc. And of course, the 19th century brought several more. War and revolution. And what about genocide in China? I am not talking about the current ones, but the one's that Mao perpetrated on his own people. Is that the fault of Europe?
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  764. The might not find someone. A Chartered Accountant (CPA in US terminology) is legally responsible for their findings. It seems clear that the previous firm withdrew because of irregularities which they could not/would not cover up. So, any new firm must either be willing to do so, which makes the liable, or they would come in and declare the whole thing non-compliant. In either case, there is no reason for any firm to do so. The SNP, for its part, can only deal with a firm willing to overlook or cover up the irregularities, and would have to know that in advance. Just think about that conversation.
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  765. I always stay on with you. You are the best. I don't always agree, but I value your point of view and the work you put into your content. I also like many other videos on this channel. I have a soft spot for India. In the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, when I first went to university, my two best friends were Indian. One went back to India, and one became a US citizen. He even changed his first name from Ravi to Robby because most people got it wrong here. In addition to that, I am a political a foreign affairs junkie. I was born in Washington, DC. My father worked for a government lab. I traveled abroad from my teens and lived in the UK for a while. It has always been something I considered important, although many Americans don't.
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  766. I was an executive for a US based multinational in the early part of the millennium. I covered Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Hiring in Germany was very difficult. Labor mobility is very poor. In addition, even for my employees in Germany, their salaries were negotiated by unions that had nothing to do with their jobs. It was a mess. I could go on, but you get the idea. As for outmigration of talent, that is a very big problem for the Germany, and I have run into many situations. In one, the CEO of a tech startup that worked with a friend of mine in the US was always talking about wanting to move his business to the US. In another case, the son of a relative of mine (through my wife), who was very well educated (as was his wife) was visiting us one day. We were standing on the deck at my house, which has a very nice view, if I do say so myself, and he expressed a desire to move to US. Both he and his wife had done foreign assignments in the US. They were in the automotive industry. Now his family were an old established and well off family. They had traced back their lineage to at least 1700. His father was a high official in the German government (SPD) and you would think he had it made. And yet he wanted to leave. Again, I have other examples. My sons took German in high school, up to the AP level, and considered taking a year of school in Germany, and maybe moving there. They never did. They had the perfect situation to do so. Relatives who were influential and proficiency in the language. They even took exchange trips to Germany in high school. Germany will have it tough.
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  767. Food is not a problem in the US. I have already shifted away from foreign sources. I had only a few, but there are domestic alternatives. The US exports massive amounts of food. All of the imported stuff is just a luxury. Domestic sources are just as good. We will not suffer.
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  768. Actually, I have seen videos from AI researchers that debunk this. As R W says below, AI is just about answering questions. This was also true about early expert systems (an early form of AI).
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  769. It is right that Ukraine should pay back the money. The UK only finished paying off Lend-Lease early in this century. The thing is that with a peace deal and an environment where it is possible to develop these resources private money will actually be used. This is money Ukraine does not have. Just prior to the war there were western companies working on developing resources in the east of the country. Of course, that was abandoned when hostilities started. What does not get emphasized enough is that half the royalties will go to Ukraine which they will need for rebuilding.
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  770. This has always been something that is overlooked. During the 1970s I would often see IRA "Provos" in Georgetown in Washington, DC (where I was born) just casually hanging around.
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  771. The price cap is often mischaracterized as we see here. The price cap did what it was supposed to do. The G-7 took away the one avenue to sell oil at higher prices using means they control. What is happening is what was always going to happen. Short of actually seizing ships on the high seas, there is nothing else that could be done.
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  772. Many years ago, there were a spate of floods in England. This was early in this century, about two decades ago. At that time people went to maps that were available online and found that many (most) of the houses flooded were in known floodplains. I remember this well, because my house in Winchester was at the top of the hill. No flooding problem there. It all sloped down to the Itchen in the center of town. I was also struck by this when visiting Old Sarum, which was nearby. Old cities were built on the heights, mostly for security. Then, over time, as things got more secure, people moved down to the river valleys. Transport was easier and more efficient. No hauling everything up a hill.
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  773. Restriction on export rare earth refinement and magnet technology? Who are they kidding. Long before China got involved in rare earth processing, it was being done in the west, and it is a dirty process from an environmental standpoint. The main reason China has so much rare earth processing is precisely the problem the west has with many such processes. They are environmentally problematic, and thus expensive, although ironically, they are often used in the production of devices meant to help the environment. Again, we see another empty threat from China. If it weren't so funny, it would be tedious.
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  774.  @INSANESUICIDE  Do you know if the contractor figures were high? Do you have any knowledge of that? As for the losses by allies, they are much smaller than US losses. Don't try to make of it something it is not.
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  775. The models are indeed no longer relevant. One thing Peter often talks about is the baby boomers taking their money out of stocks and putting it into bonds. Check out this article from the Wall Street Journal titled "These Hot New Funds Are ‘Boomer Candy’ for Retirees". The boomer generation (full disclosure, I are one) was already unprecedented. This is just another example of the difference from prior generations. This is important in the context of this video, since one of the issues Peter often talks about in regard to this industrial buildout we are experiencing is the massive capital required. Actually, I think that Peter overplays that situation. US, and European and Japanese capital are often being deployed overseas. This entails more risk for a potentially small extra return. There is plenty of capital about.
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  776. Thanks for an extra episode. These topics do, indeed, need their own video. As things heat up in China, you may have to do multiple daily updates. While the farming sector would be affected, there are two factors that might sway things one way or the other. First, the farming economy represents a vanishing part of the population. When I first moved out to the Midwest it was 10%. Today it is 3%. Second, there are other potential markets. Many companies in the industrial sector have found this and have been able to adapt and thrive.
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  777. While all of what is said about housing is basically correct, the young man at 19:25 is just being stupid. Mortgages in general, in places like the US, are structured this way. There are two reasons this is not a problem in a normal, market economy. The first is that housing prices are expected to go up over time. The second is that inflation, even at a low rate, will make the money used to pay off the mortgage less valuable than it was at the beginning. The other thing to consider is that without mortgages structured in this way very few people could afford to buy a house in the first place. In addition, without the income generated over the life of the mortgage, the capital it represents would not be made available. The real issue is that the CCP has manipulated the market to keep prices unreasonably high. Interference in markets by governments is always bad. The price to income, both median figures, in the US is generally about five, moving up to seven recently (the current situation is an anomaly). The same ratio in China is now 17. Even at the beginning of this millennium it was ten. So, prices have always been unrealistically high in China. Now, as they seem to be collapsing, the middle class, such as it is, will be wiped out.
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  778. She would be easier to take seriously without the head covering. The right to become a refugee is just laughable. If she really believed in fighting for the country she would be in the Panjshir Valley with the VP (now acting President) fighting the Taliban.
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  779. Everyone talks about a larger mobilization. What good is that without heavy weapons. It is not the troops in the trenches that been the real problem for Ukraine. It is the minefields. Simple as that. A bunch of trenches filled with troops with rusty AKs and Mosin-Nagants would not stop a mechanized attack without them. That brings in the other factor, artillery. Airpower would allow that artillery to be neutralized over a wide area quickly. The other issue that the analysts ignore is training. It would take six months to a year to properly train these troops. The Russians/Soviets have never stressed that. Read the WWII histories. It sounds the same. Waves of poorly trained troops sent right into the German lines to be mowed down by machineguns with masses of artillery backing them up. The Russia of today is not the Soviet Union of WWII. They don't really have the manpower. They are in demographic decline, specifically in the cohort of military age. They are also experiencing labor shortages in skilled areas needed for weapons production, and this time there is no US or UK sending them massive quantities of arms. So, let them mobilize. This will further alienate the various minority republics as well as collapse the center.
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  780.  Johnson Li  Breathtakingly uninformed.
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  781. Mike, you are wrong about firing the gun on the plane. They use what is called frangible ammunition, which splatters when hitting a hard surface, but will penetrate flesh. Do your research.
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  782. Market alternatives to the US (and the EU)? Are they kidding? I was looking at a list of the top 15 economies by GDP. Of those, only five were not part of what we call the west. The total GDP of those five (including China) only adds up to the level of the US economy. The other western countries, excluding the US, add up to the level of the non-western bloc. Thus, the "west" is twice as big as the China plus "global south". The idea that China can pivot away from the west and make up the difference in the global south is laughable. Perhaps it would work if they wanted to shrink their economy by half. Counting geopolitical units in some sort of competition is about as foolish as it gets.
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  783. Good speech. The reality is, though, that the world order we have today was brokered by and guaranteed by the US. The goal was to oppose the Soviet Union. That was successful 30 years ago. China's rise was a result of the US guaranteed order. Now the US is withdrawing support for that. China is on the edge, and without the US order it will fail. China has also been remiss in meeting any reasonable climate goals. They are building coal fired plants at a furious pace. The technology of green energy is not yet there to replace the old technologies. So, all this talk is somewhat pointless. It is a technological issue, not an international relations one.
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  784. People mischaracterize the minerals agreement. Yes, it would allow the US to get back money. But Trump has also said that it would cement ties between Ukraine and the US, thus making it harder for Putin to try to invade again. The other, and equally important aspect is that Ukraine does not have the money to exploit these resources. It will take western capital to do so. Frankly there were oil majors starting exploration in eastern Ukraine before the war. They had to stop, of course. Ukraine is a poor country. They were persuaded to give up their nuclear weapons, in part, because they could not afford to keep them in working order. By the way, Ukraine would get as much as the US out of the deal, as well as good paying jobs. They will need it.
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  785. I had just started to read the article, so it is interesting to hear your thoughts on it. I know there will be push back on what I am about to say, but it is important, and I have been involved in the field for a long time. The issue is the chip manufacturing issue. I remember when the whole idea of dedicated foundry companies became a thing. I do not have as much anxiety about this as most do. The Taiwanese companies are neither the designers of the chips nor the designer of the machines to make the chips. Don't get me wrong, TSMC does great work. The problem is that people assume that only they can do it. If you had asked the question 25 years (or even less) ago the answer to that would be Intel. In fact, Intel may be about to leapfrog TSMC. We'll see soon. This is one of the most dynamic industries on the planet with some of the highest capital requirements. A new leading edge chip plant can cost $10B. Heck, even TSMC is building new plants elsewhere. Ever wonder why? Like all the economic issues we seem to talk about the perspective is all wrong. In the west (broadly defined) countries are not the drivers of the economy. Companies, and thus capital, are. We are taking the CCP and Soviet perspective on the economy when we talk about these things in terms of primarily national competition. Look at how it worked out for the Soviets. Look at how it is working out for the CCP. The strength of the American economy, and its continued dominance for over a century, has depended on its companies. Heck, "industrial policy" is a dirty term in US business circles. Just ask the WSJ editorial board. As for Xi "telling" his military to do such and such by such and such a date I can only echo our president: Come on man! The article quotes MacArthur. This is interesting in terms of an amphibious landing on Taiwan. That was one of the options being considered, the other being the Philippines, in WWII. When the US was at its height in terms of numbers and power of its ships and experience in amphibious invasions, the Taiwan invasion was considered too risky and frankly would have involved a bigger force than that used in Normandy. The idea that China could do it successfully in the current environment is almost laughable. Given the corruption in the Chinese military, I think it would be a disaster for the CCP, and they know it.
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  786. TSMC is merely the producer of advanced chips. If indeed, the west were stuck at the say the 4 or 5nm level, they would still be ahead of the Chinese. In addition, IBM has just announced 2nm technology. There are alternatives to TSMC. I really think that their complaints in opening their US plant are more reflective of their own issues, not those of the US in general. They really developed their business with massive subsidies, which are now being made available in the US. Don't forget that they don't make the machines, software or chip designs. They are just the foundry. Others will step in if they falter.
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  787. I spent the summer of 1973 and part of 1974 in Greece. I actually only left Greece in 1974 because of the mobilization in response to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. The only thing moving, after several days of total lock down, was three trains to Trieste. When I got to Trieste, after stopping a bit in Yugoslavia, I read in the newspaper that the junta had fallen. My understanding is that the junta had so mismanaged government funds that they were out of money. That is why they did not mobilize right away. In fact, I had just gotten back to Athens from an island in the Cyclades late one day. When I woke up the next morning there were demonstrations in the streets. The people wanted to mobilize. They wanted to fight Turks. I was at my uncle's hotel in the center of Athens, so I got to see everything. It was a wild time. I could tell lots of stories about the junta from both my trips. Thanks for covering this.
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  788. It was Foreign Affairs magazine. That is a different publication. I know of Foreign Policy magazine but have not really followed it. I have read Foreign Affairs magazine for a long time and don't perceive it as right wing.
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  789. Europe's only hope is to increase the amount of inexpensive energy it produces. This means nuclear, coal and fracking. They seem to be unwilling to do any of this. So, there is not really much hope of European industry.
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  790. For a people that are so old, the Hong Kong anthem issue points to a country that has a lot of growing up to do.
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  791. The artillery fired cluster munitions are effective against IFVs and lighter armored vehicles. There are cluster bombs that are air dropped that are effective against tanks. When Ukraine gets F-16s they will be able to deploy those as well. These have proven effective in previous conflicts in destroying enemy tank concentrations.
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  792. Mathematics conquers all! In the mid-1990s I was working for IBM. I had a neighbor who was a seasoned currency trader. He was planning to use machine learning algorithms to automate trading and with a few friends who were also currency traders, went out on his own. As a favor to him I reviewed and analyzed the technologies and algorithms he was licensing. I found them to be good. So, they set up their system. First, they trained it and then let it "trade" without actually driving any of their actual activity. It performed brilliantly. Then they started to use it, with one caveat. One of them would have to actually authorize whatever action the system indicated. They let their years of experience get in the way, and often didn't follow the algorithm's indicated actions. Thus, they didn't do all that well.
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  793. You use the example of a case in California. California is a very liberal state. You say America should do such and such, but this is a state issue, not a national one. In some states babies can be electively aborted up until birth, and at least one state has floated the idea of post-birth abortion. A mother taking drugs while pregnant is endangering her baby. That baby will often become a ward of the state. Then it is no longer just the mother's responsibility, but the cost is born by all. If there were no state aid, then the state should have no say. But, in our modern societies, where we collectively support people, that support comes with state control. When my wife was pregnant, she almost completely stopped consuming alcohol. Just a glass one in a great while. This is what most people do. Even those that smoked tobacco would quit oe cut back dramatically. I would agree that some of the recent abortion restrictions are too strict. From what I can glean, in India, abortion is legal up to 24 weeks. It also does not seem to be fully elective. My understanding is that there are certain conditions.
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  794. The EV manufacturing industry situation is nothing new or out of the ordinary. In most new technology industries this is the case. Lots of people jump in, hoping to either be the ultimate winner, or to be bought out by a bigger player. In motor vehicles this happened at the dawn of the industry. If you look at the plethora of brands that GM and Chrysler have in the US (GM has since trimmed some), you have to realize that all these brands were independent companies before being bought or merged. There is distortion due to government subsidies (which are basically everywhere), and in China this results in the abandoned vehicles mentioned due to the nature of the subsidies. That is the motivation for the high number of companies and is a gross misallocation of capital. Of course, this is to be expected. Who would expect a bunch of commies to understand capital.
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  795. Fully agree. Electoral politics is not his specialty. It is also not at the core of his work. He should stay away from it. What we are seeing here is the manifestation of a trend on YouTube. People who have something valuable to say in one area decide they have to opine on everything even remotely similar. I find this in science communicators as well as many other topics.
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  796. Governments thinking they can mandate high tech development is just plain stupid. So many countries have tried this. Just look at Europe. They have lots of highly educated people, plenty of capital, and yet they massively lag behind the US in technology. I have even met successful tech startup executives from Germany who want to relocate to the US. To think China could buck this trend is either madness or ignorance.
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  797. This is news? People fleeing as a battle is about to take place. What a stupid title for a video.
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  798. She nailed it. The Democratic Party is no longer the party of working class. Actually, some time ago, really starting under LBJ, they became the party of minorities and intersectionality (before the term was popularized). Earlier this year I ran into it up close and personal while talking to a major donor.
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  799. Tesla bled money for years before becoming profitable. Now they are wasting huge amounts of money on "tech" (and I'm a techie) which is not necessary and does not require an EV to apply. All the tech was added to the cars to help justify the high price tag. Tesla would be in much better shape if they used the money on improving battery technology and production.
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  800. @@user-pi3fc1qt1l I tend to agree with you. The same thing happened with the Japanese. At least the Japanese situation happened while we were still in the Cold War (I miss the Cold War) and there was still some geopolitical justification for it. That has been gone for over 30 years now, and we can see what has happened to Japan. China is another story. It was mostly just greed. Wall Street saw a big market. Fair enough. But, like the Japanese situation, the system was not open. Even to this day, it is hard for foreign companies to invest heavily in Japanese companies. There is a lot of expectation that it can all be moved to India and Southeast Asia. We should be cautious about that. India has stringent capital and ownership controls. If they don't start to relax them now, I feel that we will run into future troubles. At least there is a chance this could happen in India, but it is not certain. Finally, don't make such a big deal out of China being the world's factory. By around 1900 through the 1970s that was the US (note this is before the wars). Then it was Japan. Now China. This stuff moves around. And in China's case, unlike Japan, and to an extent Korea, they have not moved up the value chain. No, China squandered its own future by being a bad actor. They deserve what they are getting.
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  801.  Dannnsss  Yes. Of course. They are democratic and have their own policies. Sometimes they have aligned with China, and sometimes with the US. Considering the support China gives to North Korea, I expect they will side with the US in future, but that is their choice.
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  802. The issue of welfare recipients not having to participate in the workforce is a union thing. In the beginning of such programs, it was conceivable that all these people the government was paying could be utilized for public works programs. Of course, the unions were vehemently against this, because this group would have competed with the lower tier of the union workforce. This has nothing to do with the needs of our society today. We either need to reform it or eliminate it. The needs of the majority are paramount. I understand that we want to protect minorities from oppressive majority actions, but the fact is that minorities don't pay for stuff (not talking about the economic distribution, but social, etc.). Put people on welfare to work! One of two things will happen. A lot of good programs will happen, or a lot of people will get off of welfare. Both are good.
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  803. If you read Peter Zeihan's books he talks a lot about this. Of course, he used to work for George. China will likely implode before becoming a real threat. Because of massive corruption and a lack of technology, they still lag behind both the Russia and the US. I think that the US, if Trump can get some resolution in Ukraine, will align with Russia (I keep wanting to write "the Soviet Union") against China. The people in Russia don't like Chinese goods, from cars to machine tools. They are crap compared what they used to get from the west. Frankly, I see the US reversing what Nixon did in opening to China in the 1970s. That was done as a part of a surround strategy against the Soviet Union. Now the plan is to surround China.
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  804. Does he even know what "fascist" means? Dissiapointing.
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  805. Something similar happened in Chicago. The Chicago Transport Authority (CTA) ordered about $1B of transit cars. Bombardier was the builder, and I think they may have been built in the US. The did use Chinese steel. This was found to be cracked. Bombardier's plan was to replace the steel components if and when they became unsafe. To its credit, the CTA said no and refused to accept the cars until the steel was replaced. Good quality control. Again, the common thread is substandard Chinese products. When will the world learn?
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  806. The Nazis were socialists. The name gives it away. National Socialist. The Communists were internationalist. The Nazis were race based in their ideology, but no less socialist in their ideas of social and economic organization.
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  807. I was worried about you. I thought they had "gotten" you. Good to hear from you. Recall that the luncheon in San Francisco where Xi spoke did not result in any positive movement. In fact, I believe that is a time when China could have turned things around, but as I recall, the executives did not hear anything to encourage them. I perceive that as the time when the pullout started in earnest. As for Tim Cook, he is walking a tightrope and not looking too steady on it. Will he get to the other side? The jury is out on that. I have my doubts. The worst thing is that there is no net, at least not for him personally. Actually, Apple has enough cash to create at least two more Apples without any outside capital. Really, going to a country where government officials and companies are banning your products and talking trash about them and then saying we are committed to your market. Come on man! He is almost as bad as Musk, but far less entertaining.
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  808. If you hadn't noticed, Ukraine is using mostly infantry to attack the trenches. They do use some tanks, but during mud season the Russians won't be able to use their tanks either. During WWII tanks, even Tiger II's, were used. Yes, they sometimes got stuck in the mud, but the battles didn't stop. The Tiger II is a little heavier than a M1 Abrams. By the time winter comes, F-16s should be appearing on the battlefield as well. A lot of winter fighting went on in this part of the world. Just read any account of WWII in the southern theatre of operations and you will hear all the place names we are talking about today. It is almost eerie. And this time it will be the Ukrainians, not the Russians, that will be better equipped for winter warfare.
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  809. The idea pursuing a green agenda by importing Chinese EVs is laughable. Looking at the life cycle costs, and the relative records of the EU and China in terms of GHGs, importing from China is the last thing you would want to do. Leaving aside the China angle, a typical EV needs to be driven at least 110K, using typical electricity generation, to make up for the deficit in GHGs used in manufacturing. This is from a report by Polestar, and EV maker. This also ignores the issue of battery handling and recycling. As with the solar panel situation, the pollution has just been shifted to China.
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  810. Considering how Russian weapons and tactics have performed in Ukraine, India would be smart to reassess their ties to Russia militarily.
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  811. When the government will not provide protection, then the citizens must. Call it vigilante justice if you like, but in any case it is a failure of authority to protect life and property. If this is how the government wants to proceed, then the two things will happen. First, citizens will provide their own protection. Second, we should defund the government that is not providing the services we pay for.
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  812.  @mikelisteral7863  What does that have to do with anything? You think that if your pet issue isn't being addressed then the action is invalid? Don't they teach civics there? Any society is more than one issue.
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  813. This is why I always say that even after the CCP falls, China will not become a democracy with rules and laws that mean something. These counterfeiters are not, as far as I know, state owned enterprises. This is the real China. It is also not new. On one gun related channel the creator talked about all the weapons the Chinese counterfeited during the warlord period after the fall of the Qing dynasty. Some of the copies were good, some were of dubious quality and some outright dangerous. They were paying no royalties and were selling them to other Chinese.
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  814.  @Siriuan  Rewriting history, are we.
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  815. When I lived in England, there was a family, whose children went to school with mine, that would go on vacation to the continent. They were very upper-class English. They fully distinguished between England (the UK) and the continent. They were English, not Continental. This is in the current millennium.
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  816.  @Willywoowilson  The investments grew because people assumed increased growth. This has not happened. Considering the unreliability of Chinese statistics, investors, even those who previously were bullish on China are now pulling out and advising other to do so as well. The latest investment reports show a steep drop. As for Chinese EVs, have you not seen the massive numbers that were registered and not sold. We are talking about tens of thousands. All Chinese EV makers are experiencing significant downturns in their business. There is a bloodbath going on.
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  817. I have worked for several companies, from the largest to very small and to my own. I have never seen a situation where a 10% reduction in staff would not be viable except for the smallest organizations. In fact, reductions could be larger, but that would have to analyzed in each case.
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  818.  @IamDarthMuller  What I was referring to was the fact that the church there, as in medieval times, relied on its land holdings for money. This of course was not the American experience. The Hospital of St. Cross was a retirement community of worthy men of limited means. It was founded by Henri of Blois, William the Conquers nephew. He was the Bishop of Winchester. The time was 1100 AD. The head of St. Cross was called the Master. He also ministered to the church there, which was called St. Faith's. To this day, they still rely on massive land holdings to fund their operations. They also hold a fete. This is a fundraising event to raise money for charitable operations. I often ran the coconut shy. Great fun. Hope that helps.
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  819. You nailed it. China's recent official maps show parts of Russia as Chinese territory. The territorial disputes, often mentioned by Xi, go back to the Russian Empire and Qing dynasty days. The Chinese claim that they were forced to sign several unequal treaties. Even in the recent past, Jiang Zemin signed away a big chunk of territory. After Jiang died it came out that the Russians forced his hand because they had compromising information on him from his time studying in the Soviet Union. Xi intentionally released that information but waited until after Jiang was dead. Some think that if Russia is defeated in Ukraine, it would be an easy thing for China to move in. Russian doctrine is to use nukes to combat such a move. Considering the relative size and quality of their nuclear arsenals I don't think Russia would even hesitate. Heck, half the missiles probably have water in them instead of fuel. Others are reportedly in silos that won't open. The thing about the oil price sanctions is a little confused. The oil price cap did what could be done by the west short of actually seizing cargos. Russian oil can no longer be carried on ships insured by western companies. This has led to the shadow fleet. which is far less efficient, something the west cannot control by indirect means. The other thing that Mark fails to understand is that China is paying a very low price for Russian oil and gas. They don't pay the world market price. Russia just needs to keep the wells pumping so they don't freeze up. The price issue is a big part of the reason the big gas pipeline Russia wants to build is not happening. China does not want to be beholding to Russia, having seen what they did to Europe. They also are offering too low a price. Russia also needs Chinese capital to build the pipeline. That is not forthcoming.
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  820. Serbia's GDP in 2023 was $82B. That is about 0.5% of the EU total. It ranks 79th worldwide. Its population is about 7M. In China that would be on the small side of a medium city. To put that in perspective, Apple's sales last year were $383B. Apple has $162B in cash reserves. So, I have to ask, who cares. From an economic standpoint Serbia is an irrelevance.
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  821. I was a young manager at a large company (not financial). I was working with a number of very senior managers. We were standing around outside my office having coffee as the news came in. The crazy thing was that these guys were very unconcerned. They had large portfolios. They were confident that stocks would come back. It was a bit surreal.
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  822. @AnnetteCurtain-tc4mh Yes, we had that in the US. Now the two parties are truly separated ideologically. People said they wanted that for years. Now that we have it, they call it divisive. What is happening with Reform in the UK is similar. In the US rather than starting a new party Trump took over and reformed the Republican Party. The old labels of left and right are obsolete. What we are now seeing, in many countries, is a new alignment. On the one side are the collectivists. These are basically old school socialists. On the other side are populists (I have a problem with that term) or nationalists who value individualism.
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  823. The reason people in China put most of their investment into property is that they do not understand equity markets. Property they understand. Stock markets they do not. This is similar to Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union. People were given shares in the companies they worked for. They had no understanding of what this meant, or how the markets in these equities worked. Then, people who did swooped in and bought the shares for a very low price. These were generally highly educated people who understood the situation. These became the oligarchs. China, being a formerly communist country, is in the same boat. The people have no idea of how markets work. They all rushed into property because the sort of understood that. The property sector in China is much larger than in the developed world. Now it is crashing and everyone will be dragged down. Even in stock market crashes n the West, people who kept their head recovered fully and prospered. I know, I have seen a number of these.
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  824.  @scudlee  Had to look that up. You may be correct. You learn something new every day.
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  825. What support measures? You have massive oversupply of housing (and office space) and a dwindling and aging population. In any normal economy one would have to work through the oversupply. But in China, this oversupply is so massive (some say 100%) that there is no way to do this. With such oversupply, even at massively reduced prices, it is not even possible to view these properties as an investment. There will be no buyers. On top of that, real estate loans are a big part of the assets of the financial system. Using western accounting methods, I expect that most, if not all, financial institutions in China are insolvent. That is why people can't get their money out of some banks and why some investment firms have gone under. It seems that the whole Chinese economy is a fiction.
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  826. This stuff has moved around. The issue, as Peter pointed out, is really capital and regulation. Take rare earth metals, for example. They used to be mined and processed in the US. The processing is extremely dirty and the cost in the US to do it cleanly allowed China to swoop in and take that market. It is the same with iron, steel and aluminum. Two things will be needed. Regulatory reform and industrial policy. This has been anathema to many, but world conditions will change that. The Chips Act is a good example.
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  827. BRICS as a concept was created by a Wall Street investment analyst to group economies of similar scale and development. As an investment vehicle it made sense. As a political grouping it is bat sh*t crazy. China and India are close to conflict. Russia is supplying both sides. South Africa is a basket case that can't even keep the lights on. Brazil is investigating China, one of its largest markets for agricultural goods, for dumping steel and other products. The political systems of these countries are all very different. Don't fear the BRICS. It is all propaganda.
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  828. Tony, caught in the Polar vortex here in the Chicago area. So, mostly a lot of shivering over the weekend. Looks like more of the same for the next week. How is it where you are? It is interesting that there is always lots of talk about developers defaulting. That is important for bond holders and banks, but it may not be the most devastating to the Chinese economy. The real threat is individual borrowers being under water on their mortgages and defaulting, especially if they lose jobs. This will start to take down the banks. Don't forget that the 2008 financial crisis actually started with this very situation. People tend to concentrate on the CDOs, because this is what is traded by the banks. What they often fail to realize is that the reason for the failure of the CDOs is the default rate on the underlying asset, the mortgages. Another fun fact is that the US housing market at the time was overbuilt by 2-4%. China's rate is 100%. I'll say it again, there is no set of "policy" tools that a government has to address that. There is no financial or economic theory where this does not result in a collapse. Perhaps you can ask Mr. Pettis about this.
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  829. My father worked on the original cluster munitions. I remember, in the 1960s, as a kid, going to an open house at the Army lab where he worked. We went into his office, and he had one of the bomblets on his desk. He was working on the fuse. The idea was to allow them to be set to either go off at about six feet off the ground, thereby killing a lot troops. The other option was to have them go off when they hit the ground, thereby wounding a lot of troops. It depended on the effect you wanted on enemy movement. These, of course, were early models delivered in a canister by aircraft.
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  830. Workers being exploited in the workers' paradise. Who would have thunk it.
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  831. "The thing that goes boom". Is that a technical term?
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  832. Electricity based powerplants. Sounds like a diesel locomotive.
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  833.  @commenteroftruth9790  Thanks.
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  834.  @din0kill  What the heck are you talking about?
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  835. The sale of overseas real estate assets overseas mirrors what happened to Japanese investors when they had their crisis. They bought high and sold low. That is actually a benefit to entities in those countries, as they got an injection of cash and then were able to get the properties back at a lower price.
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  836. Actually, the Germans will have to rely more on coal. They are already doing it. There was a recent situation where they dismantled a wind farm to expand coal production. They have also decided to extend the life of their remaining nuclear plants for at least a year. Even Gretta Thunberg has said that they should keep the nuclear plants open. Who knows, they may even have to begin fracking. Yes, they will resist this, but when the choice is to become cold and poor, things can change.
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  837. The whole idea of using GDP to measure health of an economy has lost currency with many financial analysts. This is precisely because of China's manipulation of the figures.
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  838. The consumption ship has sailed. The reality is that China is toast. I say this because of how a consumer-based economy works. The biggest consumers are young people. Why do you think advertising is geared towards them? Look it up. When people are younger, they are accumulating things and then when they have children, they have expenses related to them. They are typically borrowing, etc. When they get older, and the kids are gone, they tend to invest. From say 40 to 65 they are making as much money as they ever will (talking the average consumer) and investing for retirement. Then when they retire, they move their investments into safe, boring and relatively unproductive investments. This is how things work. It is not a result of government policy!! I went through all the above because all of the economists and pundits are analyzing China as if it were a western capitalist country. STOP IT!!! The other fallacy is that these analyses seem to ignore the demographic collapse. I laid out the details in my first paragraph to additionally stress that China does not have any levers to increase consumerism and it is not primarily a matter of current government fiscal policy. In fact, such government policy is what will kill China. Get the government out of the way. Heck, it was government policy on capital and corporate debt that was a major contributing factor to Japan losing decades of growth. Small government is good government. Another indicator is brands. Yes, brands. If you hadn't noticed, we have a lot of Japanese and Korean brands trading successfully in the US and around the world. For normal consumer goods, we have few Chinese brand names used. Ask yourself why that is. Just look at what happened in China with Apple's new iPhone. Tesla is another example. China at this point has little to offer the world except increasing CO2 emissions.
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  839. True. A corollary is that there is nothing America or the rest of the world can should do.
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  840. Even during the American Civil War, the US had elections. What is going on with Ukraine?
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  841.  @SGT-SierraPapa  They said that about Trump. How did that work out? What the speaker said was tell us what the goal is. If it is to allow Ukraine to defeat Russia, then that can be debated. If the Congress agrees then they can provide the resources necessary. As it is, the dribs and drabs that the Administration is giving become more and more difficult to justify. So, as our President would say: Come on man!
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  842. I have instinctively shy away from people who speak in slogans. You meet a lot of these in business settings. The comment about Shriver and how people with money are often deceived is so topical. One only has to look at Bernie Madoff to understand this. All his clients were successful people who assumed that, because they were successful (lawyers, doctors, etc.) they understood money and investing. To a large extent, they got what they deserved. Love your mocking sense of humor. It really came through in this video. There was just so much to mock.
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  843. I thought Trump was a misogynist.
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  844. The East India Company analogy is spot on. They even had their own army.
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  845. The characterization of the price of oil set and the income ignores the cost to produce that oil. What I have heard is that this is $40 per barrel. Thus, the money for the budget of Russia is one third of the numbers mentioned. This is not insignificant, but much lower than is needed by Russia to prosecute the war.
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  846. The use of these statistics can be confusing. The interesting number is how many of these new economy companies are there compared to some benchmark. In the current debate it might be best to use 2019. Also, the use of the number of companies going bankrupt in 2022 is correct, and a basic statistic, but when you say this is a reduction from the previous year, that is misleading. One would think that this would be expected. Without knowing how many companies were started in the same period, the comparison is meaningless.
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  847. Tony, I love that you use the phrase "great games" at the end. Yes, China is trying to catch up in the great game, as imperial expansion was called in the 19th century. It was the desire to play in this great game that motivated the Japanese in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. They felt left out. China is exhibiting the very same behavior. What Japan then and China now do not understand is that the world has moved on. They are as the saying goes, living in the past.
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  848. Rising in the East? Come on man! What has changed? Europe had controlled Chinese trade for at least two centuries. It also directly colonized much of Asia. The last time China projected power by sea was in the 15th century. All that time China had, as it does now, a bigger population. Nothing has changed. China is relatively poor in natural resources and for a long time has lagged behind Europe in innovation. Yes, you can point to innovations in China, but how long ago was that? The last of the "four great inventions" was about seven hundred years ago or so. The issues with physical environment have made the generation of sufficient capital difficult. You will notice that the last thirty years of Chinese growth was all done with foreign capital and natural resources. Japan tried to challenge the west, specifically the US, in naval power in the middle of the last century. In fact, the admiral who planned the Pearl Harbor attack knew, before the attack, that Japan could not overcome the US in the long run, and we are not talking decades, but a year or two. The best they could hope for was a stalemate which would allow Japan to negotiate to keep the conquests they had made prior to the attack. How did that work out? If something has really changed, I would like to know what it is.
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  849. The statement that the world needs a stable China-US relationship is balderdash. Think back to the Cold War period. The west had little or no economic interaction with China or the Soviet Union. Was the west in poverty at the time? Of course not. I will repeat what I have said before. The original opening to China by the US was a purely strategic move. The US was using China as a counterweight to the USSR. The later economic opening was purely an economic and financial action. Frankly, if China had played by the rules and really opened up their economy and integrated with the rest of the world, we would be in a much better place than we are in today. Instead, China ignores the rules based order, steals IP, limits investment and ownership and uses trade as a political weapon. They did it first, and the rest of the world is forced to react. The US has no designs on Chinese territory or resources (they have little). There are other places with now more favorable conditions for trade cooperation. What the current world situation has shown is that trying to integrate communist and totalitarian regimes into the world order without real reforms is just plain stupid.
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  850. Actually, the Secretary of State is considered the most important member of the president's cabinet and is historically first in rank. The Secretary of Defense is one of the most important jobs in the government? It is important, but how many can most people name? One that I can think of Robert McNamara, and the reasons that I, and most people, remember him are not good. In a time of war, even the undeclared ones we tend to have since WWII, it is the Joint Chiefs and the theatre commanders who are significant. I worked for many years in the aerospace and defense sector and interfaced with several general officers. Beyond their military skills some have been what I can describe as not great on the managerial or policy front. The Secretary of Defense is there, as are all political appointees, to implement the elected president's policies. This is true of most western democracies. I even have an in-law who had a position just below secretary (the called it minister) of defense who had, over the years, two briefs. Neither of which he was an expert in prior to the job.
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  851. Peter makes a good point. On the Monroe Doctrine, that was geared towards the Europeans. The US didn't want European wars coming to the Western Hemisphere. That has been successful for the most part. China will try debt trap diplomacy, and many people use the example of Sri Lanka. The US has no pressing interest in Sri Lanka. The Indians do. Let them deal with it. In South America the US will step in, where it makes sense, to bail out those countries, and it probably will be private capital. There are already examples of the "tofu dreg" construction that the Chinese are famous for in South America. The South Americans will get the point. This is true in Africa, and western countries have started to step in there as well. As China collapses things will get better. Frankly, that collapse is going to happen sooner rather than later.
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  852. Heaven is clearly displeased.
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  853. I love it. The Chinese are such babies. At least that is how their foreign ministry comes across. I think it is also how China as a whole is starting to be perceived in the developed world. Just look at the trade disputes the US and EU have had over the few decades. From commercial aircraft to aluminum, etc. there have been many disputes and investigations. Some are ongoing. The whole Inflation Reduction Act is seen as a big issue in Europe in just this guise.
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  854. I want an Ultra MAGA hat!
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  855. Jonathan, both you and Timothy overestimate China, especially their economy. Their middle class is shrinking. One analysis I saw was that it has recently shrunk by half. Less than 10% of their population is in that class. Secondly, there is quite a lot of analysis that shows that they are not growing, in spite of the official statistics. Their exports are falling, their property sector is in terminal decline, and even Chinese companies are moving out of China. The other issue is debt. Their growth in the last few years has been driven almost exclusively driven by debt fueled infrastructure development, and basically none of that is generating enough money to repay the loans. Just their much vaunted high-speed rail is losing $1T per year. The other issue is stability of the CCP. It is just as gangster as Putin's regime. Xi has been warning about a fate similar to the USSR's if they cannot get things under control.
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  856. Tony, good information. Actually, the sound quality was fine.
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  857.  @LRRPFco52  I mostly agree with what you said, except for one thing. China is actively trying to export fighter jets and other military equipment, such as tanks.
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  858. During the Cold War we talked to our enemies all the time. Heck, the Soviets had a massive number of nuclear missiles aimed us (we, in response did the same). Nixon even talked to CCP led China. So, what is going on here?
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  859. Great interview. The questions were tough but relevant and fair. Youngkin's answers were reasonable as well. They were a bit on the campaign style side, but he did answer.
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  860. Several years ago, I was doing a research project in a graduate program. My professor gave me a large data set. I was having some trouble with it, so I went to the paper in which the results were published. When I went to download it I found it had, in big red letters in the PDF the word "Retracted". So, I investigated a little further, and found that it was a big scandal, and the researcher was in criminal legal trouble because Federal funds were used for the research. I talked to another researcher, who had been the original researcher's advisor. It was a big mess. Too bad, since it was an interesting and challenging topic using functional statistics.
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  861. To say that Russia could use a peace or cease-fire to refit and rearm is ludicrous. Look at the current situation. Russia was rearming for 20 years to get to this point. Say there was a seven year period (I have seen that mooted) to resolve the issues. That is less than half the time they had before. They are also in a regime where they are cut off from technology, and soon income from natural resources. In the meantime, Ukraine will, most likely, be brought up to NATO standards in equipment (they are not there now). Even if Putin is gone, the system remains, and it is a corrupt system driven by organized crime (as is China, by the way). Of course, there is no reason, or need to bring the Russians into the family of nations. For decades they were isolated from the West, and it was not an issue for the West. As far as energy exports go, they have proven themselves to be an unreliable partner. Didn't Donald Trump point that out? The Germans laughed at him. No one will renew the relationship with Russia, and they should be treated as the pariah that they have always been. Frankly, the Russian Federation will almost certainly break up, and it won't take as long as many think it will.
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  862. I did a simple calculation. Your odds of dying from the Kung Flu are 1.34217E-07 . That is a very small number (deaths world-wide divided by world population. Just stop worrying about it.
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  863.  @jamesgreen1116  Have you ever followed history or current events? Even taking the example of Afghanistan is deluded. The Soviet Union had the same experience. In fact, in Afghanistan and Iraq the initial military operations were a smashing success. What failed, and will always fail, is the nation building aspect. By the way, in the Iraq situation, twice, it was NATO style of war and equipment against Soviet counterparts. How did that go. Look at Israel's wars. Again, western weapons against Soviet weapons and training. Your ignorance of history and military matters is stunning.
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  864. Why should the Vice Premier's financial information be confidential? In the west, that information is public knowledge, and often much discussed. I know that, for the CCP, this might be a sensitive topic, but for the people paying taxes this should be disclosed, including close family members information. Of course, the Chinese people are not citizens but are subjects (some say slaves).
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  865. I always say to people, as I have changed my diet, after a divorce, to something close to Keto, but not quite, I have seen three big changes. I lost weight, my blood pressure is back to normal, and my sh*ts are good. I pay a lot of attention to the later. Few loose bowel movements (maybe one in every two months or so, and definitely traceable to something I ate). I consider the ease and the actual aspect of the stools. Frankly, as I have become more pescatarian, it has gotten better. At home I eat only fish, and not every day. I use your guidance on what fish to eat. Oh, just a question, I recently got some walleye (wild caught) filets from Costco. Is this something you recommend? When out, I will eat red meat, pork or chicken. This happens very seldom these days.
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  866. Tony, you know that I am always going on about the wording of CCP statements. Well, here is another one. At 1:20 the communique uses the term "optimized" in relation to trade. Any investor, or politician worth their salt would be running for the hills. This is a giant "red flag" (see how I did that). Trade is business and business is not about "optimizing" relationships. It is about making money for your shareholders. Period. The problem with dealing with the CCP is that they are both the government and the owners. In the west, the government, in general, sets the rules and strategic direction, while overwhelmingly it is private companies actually do the work. You can't optimize that. In China, on the other hand, the government is also the owner (even if not outright) of the companies and does what it does for the benefit of the government and those controlling it. This impedance mismatch is, in my opinion, a great source of the tensions between China and the west. Italy needs to tread carefully.
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  867.  @RobynLeSueur  Wow, that is quite a statement. In politics, history and other fields, reading opposition points of view, and those outside of the formal literature, is required and the only way to move forward. To equate social science with chemistry, show a lack of academic rigor.
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  868.  @notanymore9471  Great point. The Russian currency is not freely convertible, and the Chinese currency is "managed" (read manipulated). Brazil tried to create some sort of currency union with a few of their neighbors and that flopped. Not a great record to run on.
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  869. Vita, I saw something this evening that made me think of you. Just before sunset I usually sit on my deck and read on my Kindle. I do that until I see at least one bat flying around. While I was there, I had two mice scurry across the deck right under my feet, which were up on a bench. I have lots of squirrels on the deck and in the two large birch trees on either corner of the deck. Rabbits often come right up to it as well. Last night my neighbor's dog was barking strangely and I took a flashlight and found there was a coyote at the back of the lot. Tonight, there was an opossum in about the same spot. We have lots of wildlife here, even though it is suburban city (about 185K people). Deer even run through the yard occasionally. I just thought you might find it amusing.
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  870. An extraction cost of $25? That may be for Urals oil, but is that reasonable for Siberian oil? Figures I have seen are more like $32. This does not include transportation costs.
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  871. Mr. Pettis gives an insightful analysis, as always. I just wish I could give these videos multiple thumbs up.
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  872. Tony, you leave out one other option for meeting growth targets. They will just fudge the numbers. Frankly, I am seeing more and more people, some with good academic backgrounds, claiming that China's economy is much smaller than reported. One line of analysis puts it at no larger than Japan's. Considering the massive amounts of poverty in the countryside and in the cities, I would not be surprised if this is correct.
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  873. Of course, the Jews in the US support the Democratic Party in the US because they saw themselves as an oppressed minority and bought into the identity politics of the Democrats. This meant also supporting blacks. In many cases this was not reciprocated. Don't get me wrong, I am a strong supporter of Israel and Jews in general. My comment only relates to the political aspects of what Kanye is expressing. He has become conservative, and thus probably feels that Jews who express as liberal are an issue. He is wrong, but this feeds into the worldview he is expressomg.
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  874. Prigozhin is the best entertainment the Russians have to offer.
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  875. Did it really "unable to shift gears"? My understanding is that Tesla determined early on that there was no need for multiple forward gears on an electric vehicle due to the massive amount of torque produced by electric motors.
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  876. One interesting thing about the new year travel is that a lot of people took old fashioned "green trains" rather than HSR. The journeys are longer, but the cost is much, much lower.
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  877. Individual rights? This is a response to the comment made by "netizens" at about 1:35. Who are these people? Do they not know that they are living in a one-party totalitarian communist society? There is no such thing as individual rights in such a society. Where have they been for the last 70 years? The population supported the revolution for material gain at the expense of those who had more. What they have is what they fought for. Are they that stupid? I think the answer to that question is yes. The drivel I hear from "netizens" (I hate that term; it is a real distortion of the language), is just infuriating. If you want individual rights, you have to fight for them.
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  878.  @sprague49  The ones getting their "cut".
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  879. Toxic and violent rhetoric in US politics accelerating? This kind of shows an ignorance of US history and politics. That is the bread and butter of US politics.
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  880. Overcapacity is real. China is the largest car market in the world, and yet plant utilization is way down. Chinese steel overproduction is well documented. Part of the latest round in steel overcapacity is actually a result of "natural" economic issues, such as the real estate slowdown. For most others it is a result of government policy. On the "new energy" front, especially in solar cells and batteries, the reports I have been seeing show slowdowns and extended production cuts. One may have noticed that the price of lithium has tanked, for example. These are worrying signs. The distortions created by the CCP's economic policies most probably will be a big factor in wrecking China's economy. This is already underway. The real estate debacle was only the beginning. As China recedes as a viable market for foreign firms, it will naturally be isolated. As Michael Pettis and others have pointed out, what is desperately needed is for domestic consumption to be greatly increased and for more of the population to participate. The CCP is congenitally incapable of leading such a transition.
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  881. Do you even know what freedom of speech is? Arre you familiar with the First Amendment? You are free to "spew hatred" unless you are calling for breaking the law. The most important thing about the First Amendment is that it protects political speech.
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  882.  @murphy804  That was based on your statement. I should have added based on your statement.
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  883. Geopolitical analysts such as Peter Zeihan and George Friedman also describe the EU as a failed project, and they are not far right politicos. They are not alone in that assessment.
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  884. That whole premise that the fire was a "bluff" is preposterous. Do you really think US military intelligence relies on random videos to assess an enemy's capability. Come on man!
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  885. I have read recently that the Russians are sending in T62 tanks. The new T14s are just protypes. The T90s are faring no better than the T72s. The autoloader system is the problem. I was working on tactical systems when the Gulf War happened. I was slated to go over, but the war ended too soon. I remember that one of the main features of the M1 tanks was that the ammo was stored in an armored compartment. The door activated quickly. This meant that the crew was four, instead of three for the Russian tanks, It also meant that very few were lost to Soviet/Russian tanks in either the Gulf War or OIF.
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  886. I hope some of those solid-state battery concepts come to fruition. I am skeptical, though, only because we have seen so many concepts shown in the lab that were not commercially viable. We need to get away from the idea of lithium-ion batteries for utility grade storage. The expense, and the carbon footprint, are way too high. Something like flow batteries, which are bulky, could be sited at substations, where there is space, to distribute the energy storage, rather than trying to build these massive battery storage facilities for utility scale storage. In the end, these are engineering problems, not scientific problems.
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  887. Tony, you bring yet another thought provoking piece of commentary to our attention. This is, indeed, a valuable service. The very last statement in the Martin Wolf commentary is the reason that Xi and the CCP will not be successful. I say it all the time, but we have the remember that the CCP is a Marist-Leninist organization. Adam Smith is sometimes called "The Father of Capitalism". Do you get the disconnect? All these commentators who look at the problems in China's economy and immediately go to capitalist solutions miss the point. The goals of a Marxist-Leninist system are not to satisfy the needs of the people. Marxism-Leninism is a collectivist system. Even Deng, who started the reform and opening up, made it clear that the tolerance of some capitalism was only to allow China to catch up with the west and then overtake it. He was not talking economically on a level playing field either. Xi is just trying to complete Deng's vision. The main problem is that the changing economic situation would inevitably lead to a change in the political system. The best example is the UK in the early 19th century. Industrialization had totally shifted the economic power balance away from land, and thus the aristocracy, as the major source of wealth and political power. Instead of a revolution the British reformed their system to reflect the new reality. They did fantastically well after that, by the way. From what I have said above it should be clear, there is only one real solution. It is not fiddling with stimulus and playing monetary games.
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  888.  @JB-xl2jc  The numbers I have seen show that China is not diverse. My info indicates that 95% of the population is Han Chinese. Perhaps you could enlighten us on China's diversity.
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  889. You need to study your history regarding Spain. The republicans were supported and greatly influenced by the Soviet Union. The republican side did include centrists, but also socialists and anarchists. They were often at odds with each other. So, this was not western liberal democracy versus fascists.
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  890. Everyone wants a "digital era economy". Everyone wants to emulate the US. The thing is that the US economy has never been centrally planned or controlled. That is why innovation is strongest in the US. The nuances of that are a long and complex story. Just think about how many "Silicon ..." efforts there have been in Europe in the last couple of decades. The flaw is that these are government programs. That is not how it works in the US. That is not to say there are no innovative companies in Europe, but their scale is nowhere near that of the US in general. In addition, many of the companies have a US component. In my experience, and I have lived and worked extensively in Europe, I have run into no one in the US who wants to move to Europe to develop a technology company. On the other hand, I have met, both in Europe and the US, several European tech entrepreneurs that want to move to the US. I have even met family members (in-laws) in Germany who were very tied in with government and industry that wanted to move to the US even though they were high level executives in industry. Part of the issue is raw ambition. Sometimes you hear it called "animal spirits". As an example, when living in Europe working for a large US firm, I was doing a lot of work in Germany. I remember one time at a bar with a number of German colleagues. My ancestry is 100% Greek, so I don't look "American" whatever that means. I also dressed like a European and spoke some German. One time I even flew into Germany from Paris and the border control people started talking to me in German. I guess they thought I was a southern European working there. So, back to the story, after a few drinks some of these colleagues started to complain to me that their boss was "too American", by which they meant ambitious. It was not a compliment. My experience there was very valuable in this context. Europe does indeed have a problem. I would also not get too excited by what China has done. It was done with foreign money and included a lot of IP theft. There is also massive corruption there, and it is a core part of how the government works. In addition, the Chinese economy is going down. If the CCP stuck by the rules that Europe and the US follow they would already be bankrupt. Technically they are.
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  891. The analysis of production capacity is shallow. For one thing the quality of Chinese production is very poor. For another, if China did move on Taiwan, they would be cut off from their sources of raw materials. This would make their production capacity meaningless. Just look at what is happening to the Russian economy under sanctions. It is imploding, and they have natural resources. If equivalent, or stronger, sanctions were placed on China, the fall would be faster and harder, even including mass starvation. The situation with Taiwan is also very different. Taiwan is a long-standing ally of the US and is important to the US economically. Ukraine is not a historical ally of the US, nor is it economically important to the US. In fact, until about 30 years ago they were a part of America's greatest adversary.
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  892. I am not a big Joe Biden fan. On this, I fully agree with him. What are the Afghan people doing? They just sit there and accept these terrorists? It is your country. You have to fight. If you don't believe in the civilian government and are willing to accept the Taliban, then you get what you deserve. What is the Taliban offering people that they acquiesce? This is either not a real nation, or it is a nation willing to accept an Islamic regime.
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  893. All of these analyses assume that China has a system of governance and decision making like the west. It also assumes viable economic data necessary to do a real independent analysis, either by independent groups or by governments, including the CCP itself. The internal dynamics of the CCP are factor that cannot be analyzed using financial data in the way one would for other economies. On top of that, demographics plays an important, perhaps crucial role. Japan also has terrible demographics, but they had the wealth to tackle the underlying issues, and it took them decades. China does not have that wealth and is misallocating what it has. Between their foreign adventures and the fact that they spend a lot on defense and even more than that on internal security, they would have to totally revamped their governance as well as their economy. I see little hope for that. By the way, I greatly appreciate your analysis and contribution to subject. I also appreciate your opening statement. I have no ill will towards the Chinese people. Of the people of northeast Asia, I see them as the closest to Americans in entrepreneurial spirit. Sans the CCP, a real China US partnership could have been an amazing thing. What I do have a problem with is the CCP and what it has done to the Chinese people.
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  894. For those concerned about the US political system, (which is far superior to the CCP system just judging by the results for China vs. the results for the US in almost every sphere), read the book by George Friedman titled "The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond". And I have to make a general comment on leadership. In the democratic system, especially the US system, it is really the populace that picks the leaders. Put another way, the leaders reflect the will and desires of the people. That the US is getting more populist and is getting tough on China is something that has been developing in the US since at least the start of this millennium. Trump, and Biden, are just expressing this. If a US leader wanted to do something that the electorate is dead set against, they will be stymied. The best example is FDR in the run up to the US joining WWII. Both prior to WWI and WWII the US electorate was very isolationist. In fact, that was the norm from the founding of the Republic until after WWII. After the fall of the USSR that isolationism crept back in, then 9/11 happened and the familiar pattern repeated. The votes in the US Congress for a war authorization were nearly unanimous. Most people outside the US, or too young to be politically aware in the US, forget that George W. Bush ran on a platform of drawing down foreign commitments and entanglements and in opposition to "nation building". Here ends the rant.
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  895. Exactly! One thing I have noticed is that the reported drops in real estate prices have seemed small considering the market situation. I have a suspicion that these "prices" are the listing prices, not the actual sale prices. In the US one generally follows the actual sale price data, which is publicly available. Used housing inventory in China has been rising massively. Then one finds that in the case where properties in which there has been a default are auctioned off, they sell for a much lower price than if they had been listed normally.
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  896. I am an avid watcher of Anna's channel. She expresses what is going on so well. I am also really impressed with Jonathan's long form interviews. He lets his interviewees speak, while so many would be constantly interrupting. This is really good stuff. I think Ukraine will be much stronger when they win. I truly believe that Europe and the US will help rebuild Ukraine and that it will be wonderful to behold. The democratic west needs to stop dealing with authoritarian regimes. We must insist they change, or we will not include them in our systems. Just one more thing about the future. I don't believe that Russia will exist as it is today. One thing about this war is that this is the last time they had the capability to do this. Demographically they are dying, quickly. In the not too distant future, the Russian ethnicity will be a minority in the Russian Federation. It is the last real physical empire. All the others fell apart after WWII, partly because of US pressure. This is the last act in that drama.
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  897.  antonystringfellow5152  Exactly! I like to use the comparison of two-way trade between China and Russia that is, I have read, somewhere in the $200B range, with Apple's sales, which are just shy of twice that. Another way to look at it that of the major western companies that got out of Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, none experienced a material hit to their business.
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  898.  @alanparsonsfan  I have heard that from several sources as well. One is Peter Zeihan.
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  899. Russia has not been in a major conflict for a very long time. I wonder about their actual readiness. The US, on the other hand has been in conflicts since the end of the Cold War, both with major armies and in asymmetrical situations. Even before the end of the Cold War, the US has been involved in major actions (Korea and Vietnam). While Vietnam was a disaster strategically (although we now seem to be allied with Vietnam), the US forces never lost a battle.
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  900. What's wrong with body shaming? Obesity is the main health problem we have these days. It drives the cost of healthcare.
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  901. The Russian economy is in dire straits. All of the "growth" is in the military industrial complex. At the same time, they are draining their reserve funds. They actually could run out of money by the end of the year. Next year at latest. As for helping China with energy resources, this is where geography comes in. There is no way Russia could replace the Middle East in providing for China's need for energy resources in any time less than a decade, or more.
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  902. Any outlet letting Angela Rayner present should be investigated. Have you heard some of the things she has said about her opposition? I do find her strangely attractive, though. Put that down to my weakness for redheads.
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  903. The Russian Army is following the Soviet model of centralized control. This is why, in WWII, they suffered such large casualties, much like they do today. The Germans were better field commanders, but the Soviets were just too numerous for them. The Ukranian army has been retrained along western lines, where lower commanders can make decisions based on the local situation. I worked at the Command and General staff college on systems from simulators to fielded C&C systems. This is why Ukraine, with basically the same equipment has been so effective. Command and control are much more important than numbers. You are an average infantryman. What is more important is the decisions made by the leaders in the field.
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  904. The idea of transitioning to all electric vehicles in a short period of time is unrealistic. In the US alone, there are about 300M light vehicles. About 18M are sold each year. Let's say it gets to 20M for ease of calculation. That means that it will take 15 or more years to replace the current fleet. That puts us out to 2035 or 2036. That is if we stop buy gasoline powered cars today. Not likely. With a transition period to switch production we are talking in the late 2040s, at best. Then there is the issue of powering all these vehicles. The electric grid will have to get a whole lot larger.
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  905.  @reioXyhi  There should be no peace until Russia gets out of all of Ukraine.
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  906. The speed on that mixed line to Vietnam is basically what we had in the US in the age of steam. There was actually a famous train from Chicago to Milwaukee that could reach that speed. The thing you didn't mention about HSR is the debt. I think it is running about $900B right now. This will easily push it over the $1T mark. Consider also that the number of abandoned stations is unusually large in China. Many have been sited poorly (for example, outside the city center, thus abrogating the advantage of rail). Most of the rail lines being added will be in areas without the population to support operation. There is already a surplus of rail lines with many being unprofitable to operate, so they are underutilized. This is not a plus.
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  907. Just one more thing about whether having central control, of banks, or anything else, is a good idea, I just saw an item where government departments are advertising low level jobs (janitorial) with an age limit of 35. And this comes from the top. At the same time, they are talking about raising the retirement age. Many companies are following suit. So, tell me how central control works in a system like this. I would really like to know.
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  908. Crimea was historically a part of the Russian Empire. It was administratively transferred to the Ukranian SSR during the Soviet era. It was never an integral part of Ukraine. To say that they are not happy about the current state of affairs is not supported by anything.
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  909. The point made at about 7:30 is salient to the reasons where socialism/communism was successful. Marx, as I understand him, thought that the revolution would start in the countries with the most developed industrial proletariat. He was thinking of Germany, the UK and the US. Of course, his whole theory of historical and social development was a load of crap. I was going to say flawed, but crap better describes it. For all their complaints, the proletariat understood that they lived better than the peasants. That is why they, or their ancestors, moved to the cities to work in industry in the first place. The first place a Marxist revolution succeeded was Russia, still mostly a peasant society. Then there was China, even more rural and poor. Even Cuba follows the pattern. What happened was that the communist revolutionaries found that the only way they could motivate people was by offering them free stuff. Of course, they had to take that stuff from someone. That was the more successful people in society. This is why we don't see these countries succeed on their own, either while communism is in force (China and Cuba) or after supposedly throwing off communism (Russia). They are still at heart poor peasant societies. The people have been so thoroughly corrupted by communism that they are in no way capable of building a rules based liberal democracy. It looks more and more like Russia and China will devolve into a period of warlordism. This happened to China after the fall of the Qing dynasty. In Cuba, I expect the regime to collapse (soon) and the US, encouraged by the large Cuban American population, to step in. They have the most hopeful situation. By the way, in China, the first nationalist leader, Sun Yat-sen, was a socialist. His goal was to consolidate power, then they would consider democracy. His program was nationalist, not democratic. China has no chance.
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  910. You and others keep claiming that China's economic woes and decoupling will be bad for the rest of the world. This just isn't borne out by facts or by history. I watched a video talking about China's EV business and there was a lot about foreign auto companies that have been withdrawing business from China. These companies have done well. There are other markets for goods and other places where the type of manufacturing China does can be moved to. China's middle class, and I mean that segment that can really afford western goods, is not that large. Frankly, many people considered in poverty in the US would be considered middle class in China, and much of the world. I have observed that from the last 50 years traveling and living abroad. Just look at what happened in Russia with foreign firms that had to suddenly abandon their businesses. As far as I can tell, none of them have suffered major stress. Don't forget that for over 50 years China and the Soviet Union were not a part of the world economy, and the world did just fine. In the western world it is companies, not countries that generate economic activity. The fact that the CCP controls so much of the economy is their Achilles heel. Also don't forget that for the first half of the 20th century it was the US that was the manufacturing powerhouse (and larger than China in percentage terms). Then it was Japan's turn. Neither of those have actually shrunk in overall manufacturing. They have just shifted their production to other segments of the market. The fact that China has not integrated its financial system with the rest of the world and that their currency is not widely used as a store of value will actually make the transition away from China much easier.
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  911. Kemi would be an interesting choice. I have always been impressed by her performance in the Commons. I am American but have lived in England. I still follow politics there. I was very involved in the schools, as my sons started out in English schools, and was a member of the Board of Governors of their primary school. I had to get dispensation to run from the Home Office as I was a foreigner. I still have the letter. Kemi would be an interesting choice as she is a black woman. She would be the third woman PM, all from the Conservative Party. She would be the first black PM. I am not a fan of "box ticking", bit this would be a real problem for Labor. Boris' cabinet is already the most diverse in UK history. Labor seems to have a problem with this. On the other hand, i am a fan of Liz Truss, and some of the other candidates. Let one of them get in and have the election at the appointed time and I think the Conservatives have a good chance at the next general.
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  912. Tik, you are straying into the realm of the history of philosophy. It is not going well. You have lost your way, it seems. This is not standard history and should not be treated as such.
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  913. Turkey is a NATO member. Interoperability of systems is a primary pillar of NATO strategy. This stretches from caliber of small arms to high end systems. That is why the US defense secretary called for India to look to the West instead of Russia for weapons (as seen in a recent WION video). By maintaining commonality this simplifies logistics and interoperability on the battlefield. Just an aside about India. Russia will not help India in the Indo-Pacific or on the border with China. This is now, more than ever, the case. Russia is now totally dependent on China, the literal enemy of India.
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  914. The problem is that to really do what needs to be done, which is a blockade of Russian shipping, is an act of war.
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  915. Great analysis, as always. When I was growing up, I was forbidden to say "you know" by my father. He understood what it meant and broke me of the habit.
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  916. Hong Kong is toast. I take no relish in saying this. Its allure was always rooted in its rule of law system. This is done. Under the CCP, there is no chance of a recovery. The US is in the process of taking away special privileges afforded to Hong Kong. This makes sense, since the basis for these privileges is now gone. Ass the woes of the mainland Chinese economy, and the existence of other centers in Asia large enough to absorb the capital, and there is no reason to continue to invest in Hong Kong.
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  917. Great points. Actually, the African situation is mostly the result of globalization. The populations of many of those countries grew well beyond the carrying capacity of the land because of globalization. As the Ukraine war has highlighted, these populations are very vulnerable. One example, which I got from Peter in his books is Egypt. They switched from wheat production to cotton for economic reasons. They could always buy wheat cheap, and their cotton was in demand. The population grew dramatically. Now, if they switched all their production back to wheat, they would not have enough to feed the bloated population. As you point out, they are F'd.
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  918. Donald Rumsfeld was both the youngest and oldest Secretary of Defense in US history.
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  919. The Red Nobility! China is degenerating into an aristocracy. Russia is doing the same, by the way. There are only three types of government, and the classification depends on the "source" of the ruling class. These are aristocracy, oligarchy and democracy. This was first laid out by ancient Greek thinkers over 2,000 years ago. Marxism always devolves into one of these. It is really an economic concept, not a system of governance.
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  920. Based on the quote at the end I have to say, China is toast. I also have to say that decoupling by the west needs to be accelerated. Socialism has never worked, and we see examples of that all over the world today. It always morphs into oligarchy and kleptocracy. The competition with the west was not the goal of the west. The expectation was that, as China opened up, and their economy became more capitalist, China would naturally evolve into a more open democratic country. What that requires is a rule-based system. China has none of that and is moving away from that ever more swiftly. What leaders in the west ignored was that China's ideology is Marxist-Leninist. The key term is "dictatorship of the proletariat" with an emphasis on "dictatorship". The fact that Xi is now pushing "socialism with Chinese characteristics" also indicates a move toward "national socialism". Recall that after their defeat in the Polish-Soviet War Lenin started talking about socialism in one country. This flatly contradicts all Marxist theory. Further recall that during the 1917 revolution the Bolsheviks fully expected the workers to rise up in Germany in the other European nations and throw off the shackles of capitalism. What they did not understand was that the proletariat in those countries were, by that time, much better off than their peasant ancestors. The two big nations that became communist were not the ones Marx theorized would see the revolution first. In both China and Russia, the Marxists based their mass appeal on the offer of "free stuff" to the peasants. Both countries had a comparatively small industrial proletariat. Basically, Xi and the CCP are dreaming if they think they can really compete with the west on their own terms.
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  921. India collaborating with the CCP? That statement alone brings into question everything said in the video. The CCP has laid claim to Indian territory and stationed large numbers of troops there. India is fortifying the Andaman and Nicobar Islands as an unsinkable aircraft carrier the be able to interdict Chinese shipping through the Straits of Malacca. This applies to commercial as well as military ships. India participates in the Quad specifically to counter China. Finally, India has been beefing up its own navy, including aircraft carriers, mostly to counter China.
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  922. I saw online a Russian general who is in his 60s (like I am) who had been called out of retirement. He is morbidly obese. Like their equipment, they are falling back on their old stocks. Their stuff is not that good. Look at the various wars Israel has fought (and I did a lot on that). Look at the Iran/Iraq war. Look at the Gulf War. Look at OIF. Soviet/Russian equipment is clearly inferior. I did a lot of work, over a period of ten years, at the Command and General Staff College. during the Cold War. I am not afraid of the Russians in a conventional war. If they attack NATO, they are toast.
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  923. Pugh Research center just put out a detailed survey of attitudes towards China by Americans. The overall view of Americans toward China is unfavorable with 81% holding that view.
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  924. Kazakhstan is already kicking Russia out of the space facilities on their territory. They are aligning themselves with China. This makes sense. Kazakhstan has lots of oil and gas which China needs. Russia makes it hard to get the hydrocarbons to Europe. It is easy to get to China, since they share a land border.
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  925. Social class barriers in a communist society? What kind of communism is this? China, like Russia is turning into an oligarchy which is morphing into an aristocracy. Oligarchy is actually very old, and the first mentions I recall of the term are from ancient Greece. In Russia, as in China, it is the children of the apparatchiks that get the good jobs and opportunities.
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  926. The US had ceased combat operations in Afghanistan a few years ago. We turned that over to the Afghan National Army. They had held off the Taliban, who are supported by Pakistan, a supposed US ally. This also happened in Vietnam. When we turned to fighting over to the locals, who supposedly had the same interests as we did, we found that they did not. If we are to go into countries in the future we must fully occupy them, as we did with Germany and Japan and South Korea. Then we can transition them to self rule over time. If we are not willing to do that, we should not get involved.
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  927. One of the best analyses I have seen of these issues. Of course, I expected as much based on his books and other videos. The China situation is what has really fascinated me and held my attention. The central part is Xi's role. Nothing that Xi or the CCP has done in the last few years has been off script from Peter's analysis. Nothing! I check the news every day and look at the effects of what the Chinese are doing and announcing, and it is like reading one of his books. The only thing I would quibble on is the timing. Peter gives them till 2030. I don't think it will be nearly that long. Actually, Peter's prediction is "by 2030" so that even if it happened tomorrow, he would be safe in that. By the way, Peter's overall view of the world and where things are heading is also spot on.
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  928. One of the interesting things about this whole idea of solar engineering is that the atmosphere is much cleaner now, at least in the western world, because of success in cutting out pollutants. I specify the west because this does not apply to China. All the soot, and other nasty chemicals, that came out of the tailpipes of vehicles has been reduced. As a consequence, automobiles put out more CO2. That is because CO2 is not a pollutant. In fact, it is necessary for life. We are actually seeing a greening of the planet.
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  929.  @ketivp328  Is having a woman PM the measure of development?
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  930. The PLA is the army of the CCP, not the state. Did people in China not know that?
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  931.  @samj1185  I would love to see that combo. Fully agree with you. I actually liked the results Trump achieved. Yes, he was a little weird. That was his personality, but he got results. He even got results for groups that did not vote for him. He was for Americans. It didn't matter how your "group" voted. He might win if he ran again just because of the economic results he achieved. But I think it is time to push forward the next generation of Republican leadership. These have been influenced by Trump and will carry forward his basic program. He could be the king maker, and achieve what he wanted when he first ran indirectly while strengthening the Republican Party. De Santis Scott us a great ticket. That sets up Scott to take over in 2032. Love the idea.
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  932.  @billjones3497  If that is your judgement of a national leader, then I feel sorry for you. Read my comment. What matters is not the optics, which for Trump we sometimes not good, but the results. You should reconsider your values.
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  933. To describe Sam's Club as high-end is hilarious. Yes, it is a membership store, but Walmart is not a high-end brand. In fact, it is just the opposite. It is a mass market brand, targeting lower income customers. It is a big corporation because of its mass market focus, starting in poorer rural areas. In the US it is considered a low-end retailer. The Fortune 500 designation has nothing to do with "quality" of merchandise as you seem to imply. It is a function of the stock market value of the company.
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  934.  @angrydragonslayer  Those were the days. We didn't even have gun safes. And yet there were none of the mass shootings. Something has changed.
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  935.  @vincentyeo88  The word plummet comes to my mind when looking at this. It reminds me of the Monty Python skit about the flying sheep. "Notice that they do not so much fly as...plummet".
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  936. I see differing takes on this. On the spot market, Urals crude is trading at a slight discount. The big customers, India and China, are switching to Iranian crude because it is cheaper. This market is very quick moving. A few days ago it was $100+ a barrel, now we are running at $85. That's a big difference. There is another aspect of Russian oil being available. While the price is currently higher than the $60, it is not as high as oil was at the peak after the invasion. One economist pointed out that keeping the Russian oil in the market, with restrictions, keeps the world price down. This is, of course, true. It provides Russia with some income, but it is also a source that could be interdicted at any time.
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  937. The food security threat to the developing world has nothing to do with climate. The threat is from the security situation. Take Africa, for example. The increase in food production there was made possible by a combination of the world security order set up by the US and large industrial inputs. As a consequence, populations rise. As the security order deteriorates, as we see now, the availability of those inputs will decrease, as will access to food grown elsewhere. Africa is not the only region where industrial agriculture is key. Brazil, an agricultural powerhouse, has very poor soil in most places. It is only through the massive application of fertilizer that much of the land can produce. These sources of fertilizer may well go away very soon. Conflict is another driver of food insecurity, as we see with the Ukraine war. Climate has nothing to do with it. In fact, if the climate warms large swaths of the Northern Hemisphere may be open up to agriculture.
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  938. The statement at the end about countries perhaps withdrawing support for Ukraine is puzzling. I don't see European or other western nations doing that. Those are the countries supplying the critical support. On the other side, India, and even China, are becoming wobbly in their support. As for countries in the rest of Asia, Africa or South America, who cares? These countries have little power either militarily or economically. So, what is the issue?
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  939. The fallacy about women in leadership, either in government or business, has been around for a long time. Back in the 1970s I worked for a small consulting firm in Washington, DC. One of our VPs was a woman, and I was working on a White House project for her. Some of our findings were audited (they passed, with flying colors) and after the meeting I was talking to the auditor. He said to me, your boss has balls the size of grapefruit. That would have been clear if he had noticed the cat o' nine tails on the wall of her office. Come to think of it, at a later job at a large engineering firm there was a senior editor who had a buggy whip on her wall. Curious.
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  940. All I can say is WOW and thank you. The topics you touched upon are right up my alley, so to speak, so they really resonated with me. The quote from Yao is surprisingly frank, open, and I believe touches on the crux of the matter. I am also surprised, as I expect you are, that he has not been suppressed. We will have to wait and see. The issue of the CCP being a Marxist party, and thus introducing a "foreign" ideology, has been raised before. The problem with this point of view is that Marxist, and Marxist-Leninist ideology is internationalist. It leaves no room for national identity, at its core. China's first-generation leaders were steeped in this ideology. Indeed, many were trained in the Soviet Union. Even many second-generation leaders continued in this trend. Don't ever forget, the main slogan of Marxism is "Workers of the World Unite!". Not nations of the world, not countries of the world, but workers of the world. Marxism is a distinctly anti-nationalist socialist ideology. Contrast this with Nazism. That word is short for NATIONAL SOCIALIST German Workers Party (emphasis mine). In fact, its corporatist economy, with a mix of state owned and private firms, is very reminiscent of what China did with reform and opening up. The parallels are striking. The moves of Xi today are also very much in line with what was going on in Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s. Frankly, what Putin, and old commie himself, is doing in Russia today is very much in line with this approach as well. Another thing to take away from the history of the USSR, that emphasizes the non-nationalist nature of the ideology, is the attempt to conquer Poland right after the revolution solidified control within the borders of Imperial Russia. Lenin and his cohorts really believed in the ideology. Poland was just the first step in spreading the ideology throughout Europe. This was with Poland was a war of ideology, not national conquest. They assumed the workers in the rest of Europe would rise up and join them. That they were stopped in Poland forced them into a rethink. Most people forget that they had to ideologically adjust and came up with the idea of Socialism in one country. This was not consistent with the Marxist ideology. They never fully gave up on the ideology though, thus you had the Comintern. I really believe that Xi appending "with Chinese characteristics" to many ideas, including socialism, is a trap for him. The motivation is to sinicize this foreign ideology. This leaves him open to comments like Yao's. It is also ideologically totally incorrect, as I point out above. The path China is pursuing, and I know this will be controversial, is little different from that of Japan in the late 19th and early 20th century. It is nakedly imperialist. In both cases these countries basically felt cheated out of participation in the "great game" of imperialist expansion. They tried (in the case of Japan) or are trying (in the case of China) to rectify that. The result will be the same. What Japan then, and China today, fail to realize is that it is capitalism that has moved beyond imperialism and is in fact the internationalist ideology today. Capitalism, freed from imperialism, is what allowed and motivated the west to make China's miracle of the last few decades possible. That the CCP thought they could control it and bend it to their purposes is beyond foolish. The leaders in the west understood this, and thus their expectation that China would, over time, liberalize along with their opening up. This, of course, contrasted with the vested interests of what socialism had become, which is oligarchy. Heck, even the Ancient Greeks understood these things. One only has to look at Polybius' theory of history, from the second century BC to see this. Polybius, by the way, was a great influence on the founding fathers of the US. Well, you asked.
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  941. Please don't take this the wrong way, but your pronunciation of "ruble" is actually of the word "rubble". Ruble is a currency. Rubble is a pile of rocks, or any disordered jumble of stuff. I am not being critical; I am sure my pronunciation of foreign languages would be considered funny as well. It is just the actual words involved and their meanings that make it funny. I do find your content valuable in understanding China. Keep up the good work.
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  942. I don't know about the 1911 being hard to shoot. It was the first handgun I shot. It belonged to my father's best friend, and it was one he brought back from the war. Actually, his hobby was collecting and refurbishing old military arms. He had an old pig farm in Winchester, VA. We would take a trunk load of guns out to the farm and just spend the day. I remember stopping by the local gun shop. There was a big wooden bowl by the cash register full of surplus .30-06 ammo. I think we paid about a penny a round. Yes, I also got to shoot his M1 rifle. So, I was 10 years old when I first shot a 1911. I was fairly good at it from the beginning. I could reliably hit a 3oz Dixie cup nailed to a tree from up to ten yards. I also got to fire his P-08 Luger. It was a hoot. By the way, I am of very average size. All this took place in the 1960s. Ah, the good ole days. By the way, my father, who was an enlisted man, carried a 1911 and an M1 Carbine in the Pacific. He had no prior background with guns or the frontier, as he grew up in New England and his father was an immigrant. His war experience was not pleasant. He told me that when he left the Army, he could have bought his guns for $5 each. He gave them back. The war was also his first experience of ships and planes. He avoided both afterwards. His first flight after that was in the late 1980s to attend my wedding as he and my mother could not make the long drive themselves.
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  943.  @MrSupernova111  My suspicion is that they love it because they get paid to do it. They don't have to follow it through and make it work. If things go bad, they get hired in again to revise it. Great gig for them.
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  944. The idea that CCP officials have been laundering money and stashing it abroad has been around for a long time. Estimates I have seen put it at the $1T mark. This, of course, makes perfect sense. Individuals do it in case they are singled out for persecution. The party in general does it against the possibility of the collapse of the government. So, while the detailed analysis presented here is interesting, it just reinforces what a lot of people knew.
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  945. A true Christian and a true American. He knows he is blessed, and he acknowledges it. He is a true inspiration.
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  946. There were two issues with the F--4 in Vietnam. One was rules of engagement. The US pilots had to visually identify targets before they could engage. This limited them and played into the second issue. The other issue was armament. The F-4 did not have a gun for close in combat. It relied on missiles, which, at the time, were very unreliable.
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  947.  @JohnSmith-ux3tt  Lot's of people vote party lines. Lots vote against someone, and if you ask them why they voted for the person they did they can't tell you.
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  948. Tony, I tend to agree with Zeihan, especially on this topic. People often tend to look at leaders like Xi, and Putin, in terms of their staying power. That is foolish. What one has to do is to look at their results. And to look at results one has to understand goals. Xi has taken actions in cases where action was required. In his case, he often made the problem worse. The goal was good, the execution was abysmal. Take the property sector of the economy. The big developers had become Ponzi schemes. They didn't start out that way, but that is how they developed. So, he introduced the three red lines and tanked the sector and the economy. Back to foreign policy, he has driven many countries into the US camp. Heck, the US now has fairly good relations with Vietnam. Actually, the US has a history of repairing relations with former enemies. Xi has exacerbated relations with India thus driving India to closer relations with the US. And of course, there are Korea and Japan. What is the goal in all these actions? Take the countries I just mentioned, including the US and you have a block that has about twice the GDP of China. And that block has many more allies taking that number much higher. What is the goal? Frankly, Xi is imperiling his own position and that of the CCP in general. That is the result of what Zeihan was talking about.
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  949. You talk about skills, but what about China. At the beginning they had NONE! Manufacturing moved there for two reasons. Low-cost labor and a large potential market. And all that manufacturing was brought in by outside firms. India is now in that position. The Chinese population is aging rapidly. Some projections show a population in China at about 1B by 2100, whereas India will be at 1.5B. They are already in demographic decline. They still have about 1B people living in relative poverty. 600B live at a very low-income level. If India makes the right moves it could displace China quickly. India has to get the investment climate right It is more a matter of policy than anything else.
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  950. I just wish I could gives a thumbs up a hundred times.
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  951.  @GivingBackOnline  The shits are supposed to come later, after breakfast.
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  952. The H-1B visa system is absolutely corrupt. About 15 years ago, I did some work for an Indian firm. Just out of interest I looked up the H-1B program. Full disclosure, I am a US citizen who has worked abroad on a traditional work visa in Europe. I found that you could actually get the list of jobs by company being filled. I noticed that Microsoft was hiring purchasing agents under this program. The program was designed to bring in "critical technical" talent. That was just a sample of what the program has become.
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  953. China does not have a leg to stand on, even in the case of the so-called advanced technology areas. Why is China so dominant in battery materials, for example. It is because they do not enforce environmental laws. I have said it many times, what the western countries has done is to export their pollution to China. China is paying the price for that. In addition, Chinese batteries are pure crap. The evidence is plain to see. Frankly, I welcome China's restrictions. This will allow other technologies to develop more broadly and in a cleaner manner. The utter idiocy of using Chinese products for "clean technology" is plain to see.
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  954. China has always dealt with weather events especially floods (why do you think they built all those dams?) and typhons. Don't blame it on "climate". It is just weather. China is, by one definition, hit by seven or eight typhons per year. Another definition says 21 (probably includes tropical storms). The peak season runs through October. The current season is forecast to be right around the average in terms of number of typhons. This year we have an El Nino, which ALWAYS increases the strength of typhons. This is a long-understood phenomenon and predates "climate change". So, do us all a favor and stop with the climate alarmism. The earlier typhons affected the agricultural regions because of the discharge from dams to protect Beijing and Xi's pet project. I have seen the reporting on this on this channel and others. Xi does not care about food for people. He has instituted policies like terracing hills for rice cultivation, which failed. He has directed the tearing up of trees planted to halt desertification so that more grain can be planted. How do think that is going. His minions have also torn up other agricultural crops to make way for grain production. The total idiocy of Xi and the CCP is breathtaking. One of the main reasons for the one child policy was to halt the population growth because of concerns about food security. The US led rules-based international order is what allows China to import what it needs to survive. China wants to destroy that order. China does not have the naval power to guard the necessary trade routes. Any belligerent action, either against Taiwan or India, will mean total interruption of all trade routes. How many people will starve in China? It is too awful to contemplate. China will literally go back to the era of Mao. Perhaps that is what Xi secretly wants.
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  955.  @judewarner1536  So, true, and not really the correct word to use. Frankly, I don't know if there is a correct word for what this person is trying to say. I see this all the time where people either misuse/misunderstand the language and/or the comment does not address the content of the video or someone else's comment.
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  956. Tactical nuclear weapons were once a part of our doctrine. When I did work at the Command and General Staff College the officers there talked distances in kilotons. In other words, two towns were 1.5 kilotons apart if in targeting one you affected the other. This was the perverse calculation of the Cold War at its height.
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  957. Sir John Sawer's analysis of the situation with Taiwan was quite insightful. He is, perhaps, an example of some of the best the UK has to offer. Well done.
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  958. Your Australian accent is priceless.
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  959. I tend to be supportive of Nikki Haley. On the other hand, her opening statement was basically platitudes, which I tend to support. But she ducked the question of how we engage the younger Arab demographic. This is an essential issue. As for saying we don't want our military around the world to be in harm's way, what the heck. These are not aid workers. Of course, they are going to be in harm's way, especially in the Middle East and Africa. That is what they are made for.
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  960. I have a lot of respect for Mr. Friedman. I do have one quibble with something he said. Let's say that nukes were off the table. First, if the US sent troops in numbers like we did in Vietnam the Russians would be out of Ukraine, and their troops would either be destroyed or they would flee, in a short time. Don't forget, what Ukraine doesn't have, and what all modern militaries rely on, is airpower. The US has the top airpower in the world and the Russians, both in equipment and personnel, have been shown to be third rate. Second, again assuming no nuclear exchange, if the US and its allies invaded Russia, I am not sure that the Russian people don't welcome it. I saw on a Russian expat's channel a picture of a banner on an old run-down residential building. It read something to the effect "Trump, please help resettle the barracks. Give us new homes." It seems as if they see Trump as the new czar.
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  961.  @khatack  He has become a typical YouTuber.
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  962. Just commenting on the title. This is what I have been ranting on about for a long time. The Chinese banks, and even non-bank financial institutions, have been reliant on property for much of their capital for a long time now. That was great when prices were rising with no seeming limits. With an overbuild of property of anywhere between 50% and 100% this was never going to end well. If you imposed mark to market accounting on the banks, they would all be insolvent. All of them. We have no models for how this will end. We definitely have no models for how to fix the problem. On top of that we have Xi and the CCP making policy on this. Anyone see where this is heading?
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  963. That anyone is repeating government statistics, especially GDP, is madness.
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  964. Great! I have a lot of background in this stuff (from the contractor side) and many of the things Ryan mentioned are things I have worked with. As for autonomous vehicles, these have been researched since the 1980s. The AI (or machine learning) aspects also stem from that era. We have the technology, especially if we stick to incremental improvements. The IFV situation is one I fully agree with. During the Gulf War there were lots of situations where a Bradley took out Iraqi tanks with their TOW missiles. With the newer missiles, it would be even easier. Having an unmanned gun platform working with the IFV is a lot like what the Air Force is planning with new aircraft. The idea is to have a manned vehicle that flied with several drones, both as decoys and as weapons platforms.
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  965. I wonder what is going on with abortion. We have a situation where it is difficult to adopt. In many cases people are going overseas to adopt. In my city, a few years ago, a big new fertility clinic was built right in the center of town. So, how can the Federal government support abortion while fertility clinics are opening up? It seems a total mismanagement of funds.
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  966. The Mosin-Nagant was first fielded in 1891. It was improved in 1930 but is basically the same weapon. I have a non-sniper version, made at the height of the war (and it only cost me $60, funny story). It is a fun weapon, and the package I got it in included everything. The historical significance a cool factor. Actually, I had a relative from Germany, who had been a high official in the German Army on the civilian side, who was visiting us in the US. When showing him my guns, I did not show him this one. His uncle was killed on the Eastern Front, so I thought it would be a little insensitive. Actually, his father showed me pictures of the uncle who had died. He was a captain and looked like someone right out of central casting.
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  967. Great video, as usual. On the M1s, even if it takes as long as you think, Ukraine will still need some serious firepower to deter Russia from ever doing this again. After the war, I believe that Ukraine will be let into NATO. They actually have already applied. By the way, the older M1s performed magnificently against Soviet tanks in the Gulf War. As for the timeline, I don't think it will take quite as long as everyone thinks. For one, there is a logistical tail for M1s in Europe already. The US keeps a number of them prepositioned in Europe right now. Poland has ordered 250 already. I expect other countries will as well, as they draw down their old Soviet stocks to send to Ukraine. On the training issue, I expect the Ukrainians will start with experienced tankers. These can be partially trained in high fidelity simulators (as our troops are). This is war. Things can be expedited. Experience has shown that the Ukrainians are tech savvy and quick learners.
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  968. I saw in the diary of a German general during Operation Barbarossa an uncanny assessment of the Soviets that applies to the Russians today. According to the general the Soviets sent forward poorly trained troops, but they had good artillery. Wow! Eighty years and they haven't changed, no matter what their doctrine says.
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  969. You and many other commentators keep trying to separate the "people" from the government. Well, last I checked, the "people" of Scotland have voted the SNP into power for a long time now. As we like to say, you get the government you deserve.
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  970. Of the three companies mentioned that are pushing against tighter controls in semiconductors (Nvidia, Qualcomm and Intel) two are designers, not producers of the physical chips themselves. Their concern has some merit, but one has to wonder why China has not achieved the result they fear already. This is a critical question in the debate.
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  971. Basically, the strategy. What people don't understand is that the last 70 or 80 years, with the rules-based order is an exception in history. The US bore the cost and opened its markets specifically to fight the commies. That war was won, and there really isn't any need. We are probably heading back to imperialist and colonial structures. And if you want to call the US imperialist, then the US is the nicest imperialist power in the history of the planet. Just look at the history of European imperialism, or Muslim imperialism or Asian imperialism. The things that were done were horrific. Look up the Belgian Congo. How about what the Spanish and Portuguese did in South America. So, the US will not continue to foot the bill as the world's policeman. China, in the meantime, will die an agonizing death. They have nothing to offer the world. The did have cheap labor, but that is done. They have no natural resources to export and can't feed themselves without outside help. They were only successful industrially with outside help. Remember when they tried to industrialize in even the most basic way, during the Great Leap Forward? And that is before one considers the massive corruption and mistreatment of their own people and their corrupt ideology.
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  972. I fully agree that the delay in getting weapons to Ukraine is a failure of the west. As for Abrams tanks, the US has about 3K in storage and 5K in active service. Even older models would be a superior to what Russia has. If Ukraine had been given 1/3 of the tanks in storage early in the conflict, this would be over. The only thing I would quibble with is the idea of Russia using any pause in hostilities to build up its forces to attack again. First, Ukraine would be building up capabilities at the same time, to a superior standard. Second, it took Russia 20 years to build up the force they initially attacked with. During this time, they had access to and used western technology. Even a five-year pause would not be enough. Their demographics and internal instability also mitigate against their being able to effectively mount another attack, anywhere. Losses from the war exacerbate this. This was always going to be their last shot, as Peter Zeihan likes to point out.
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  973. From what Mr. Pronomarev said at about 8:30 about the opposition groups, it seems that even they are following the old familiar pattern. The corollary to my previous comment is that it is not likely that either Russia or China will become a liberal democracy. or any type of democracy at all. The biggest issue is the lack of viable leaders for such a movement. The other issue is the lack of experience of democracy among the populace. The appeal to the paramount leader, Putin, from Russian subjects (I don't think we can call them citizens) on all types issues is no different to the deference to the czar in previous centuries. Read Gogol's "Dead Souls" and you will think that you are reading about today's Russia. This book was published almost two centuries ago.
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  974. Incredible. The US created a world order in which free trade flourished. It was originally aimed at the USSR. It was finally successful. In addition to containing the Soviets the US forced the dismantling of all the other colonial empires, even those of western allies. Once the USSR fell, the US continued to guarantee this order. So, yes, the US dictates terms. Russia and China do not seem to understand that their whole economies are dependent on this US guaranteed order. Frankly, China can be deindustrialized by just disrupting shipping lanes in a couple of places. There is no need to wage a major war. The cost of maintaining the order is no longer necessary.
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  975. The Chinese market is becoming less and less important. Part of that is the onerous terms one is subjected to there. The other part is that the Chinese market for high value goods is not that large. The middle class, according to figures I have seen, is no more than 10% of the population. The level of poverty below that is staggering from a western perspective. In addition, the examples you give show one thing that most commentators fail to understand. Companies, especially sophisticated ones, will adapt. They always do. For example, none of the companies that pulled out of Russia experienced a material hit to their operations, even though they lost their assets and business in Russia without compensation. The world did quite well during the Cold War when China and the Soviet Union were completely cut out of the world system.
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  976.  @makeway3080  So, who determines if a country has a right to exist? You? In case you hadn't noticed, it is military power that determines a country's right to exist. Either its own, or that of its allies.
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  977. Hitler did the same thing. How did that work out?
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  978.  @shundi4264  Who are you working for?
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  979. Who would immigrate into China? Maybe some Russians, I guess. I have been hearing that some Chinese companies are moving to places like Vietnam and Chinese workers are moving with them.
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  980. Very good report. This shows the total lack of systems thinking in the whole green energy space. It also shows how central planning consistently fails. What this says about solar, and to some extent wind, is that they are NOT the technology of the future. I say this because, in China, despite the massive increase in solar installations the build out of coal fired electricity production is proceeding at a rapid pace. China could avoid the expense and ecological issues caused by solar by just shutting it down.
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  981. While there is car traffic on the Kirsch Bridge, it is down to one lane and the delays are on the order of 12 hours or more to get out. As for Belarus, I would not be surprised that if they attacked then there would be an uprising. Lukashenko does not really have great support, and his armed forces are insignificant and poorly equipped.
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  982. That is a good point, Another thing to consider is who is giving out these pardons. Joe is not sound of mind, so it must be people on his staff. This needs to be investigated. Is there money changing hands? That is a serious question. It is either that or some sort of vindictive abuse of power. Whatever the case, we have a problem on our hands.
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  983.  @GoPoundSalt  Wow! You need to read some history books.
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  984. RIP Labor Party!
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  985. Food is not a human right, is it? One must work to get the money to buy it.
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  986. There is one thing that Peter leaves out about wind. Recyclability of the materials, especially the turbine blades, which are massive on the ones he is talking about. They are not, as far as I can tell, recyclable. I have seen a good bit of mention of the problem. Solar, by the way, is similar in this regard. So, if you take into account the life cycle carbon impact of wind, it may not be that great. Take an old coal plant and most of its parts can be recycled. That coal plant will last a lot longer as well.
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  987. That comment about Xi's connection with Iowa brings up an important point. I was aware of the fact that Xi had a connection with Iowa, so it did not surprise me. What it does bring up is this idea that people to people contacts through education would lead to more understanding between peoples. What a load of crap! I can't tell you how many times I have read about Japanese officers in WWII who studied in the US and had fond memories of their time there. How did that work out? Actually, this whole incident is not surprising given the rhetoric coming out of the CCP. There are also stories about foreign businessmen deciding not to stay in China because of the anti-foreigner messages coming out of the security services. The number of university students from China in the US is also an interesting issue. You must realize that this is something pushed by the US institutions, and it is purely for economic reasons. The US institutions grew to accommodate the "baby boom" generation. Rather than shrinking to reflect current population dynamics they made a commercial decision to widen their net. There is nothing more to it. Chinese nationals, and basically all foreign students, have to pay cash. I was taking some courses at graduate level and there was a Greek student who had to have his tuition in an escrow account to prove he could pay. I believe that something like this is the norm.
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  988. Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, tea totaling (mostly), non-smoking socialist.
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  989. Went to the store the other day to have my second jab and shop. At least half the people had no masks. The guy who checked me out was not wearing one and told me I could take mine off, which I did.
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  990. We used to make out phones in the US. I am in the Chicago area, and am well aware of what Motorola was doing. They built a plant in Harvard, Illinois, which was an outer suburb of Chicago. I was a great thing. Not long after, they moved the plant to China. The leaders of the plant went to China to set it up. Some of them ended up staying in China. Even at salaries that were not fantastic in the US, they were wealthy in China. The issue in the US is that our cities have made it expensive to operate. Industries then move out to the suburbs, and then out to the countryside. This is insane. The people are in the cities. We end up spending on welfare for these people when they could be employed for decent wages. This is a travesty brought on by urban elites and unions. A good example is the food processing industry. I am in my mid-60s. I have met people in Chicago (I am not from here) who, as teenagers, worked in the Chicago Stockyards. Now, all this meat processing is out in the boonies. No wonder we have lots of illegal, and legal, immigrants working in these plants. With the welfare system we have, and the prospect of having to move to deep rural regions, do we not have these people moving to where the jobs are. We need to move the jobs to where the people are. In addition, the conditions in the Chinese factories are such that we would not accept them in the US. We are just moving production, and poor labor practices, to places to where we have no control. It is this way with pollution as well. The true cost is hidden. Considering the massive profits that companies like Apple make on these products, there seems to be something broken in the system.
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  991. Once in 500 years? Not long after moving to the suburbs of Chicago we had torrential downpours that were said to be once in 100 years. This happened in two or three of five years. These measures are meaningless. In addition, detailed records in China do not go back that far, as far as I can tell. I often hear on this channel and others that such and such an event was among the worst on record, which went back to the 1960s.
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  992. Very good report. Xi's prescription for the economy is, indeed, more Marxism-Leninism. The CCP has lost its ideological way, turning into a kleptocracy, and frankly an aristocracy. This is the natural state of China. Marxism-Leninism is a European conceptual framework that has been imposed on China. It was useful in the beginning to unite people against the status quo. What one has to remember about this ideology is that it promised people "stuff" and that "stuff" was taken from other people. Is anything different in China today? I think not. This kind of reminds me of the efforts by some Roman emperors to revive the old pagan religion as Christianity, a Jewish sect, was growing within the society. Needless to say, it was not successful.
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  993. What Credit Suisse did was not necessarily tied directly to the Hindenburg report. The drop in Adani shares is enough to warrant their action. The brokerage has to look at the credit risk of the bonds considering the performance of the associated companies. That is just prudence from them.
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  994. The mention of climate change in the food crisis is invalidates your video. You won't know what effect climate has on agriculture until after it happens. As you mention at the beginning of the video, we produce twice the number of calories required by the current population. The biggest health problem, which drive most others, is obesity. I volunteered at a food bank (a deluxe one at that). Many of the "clients" were overweight, and they knew it. There we very, very few skinny people at this food bank. Have you ever stopped to think that these places facing starvation have populations that cannot be supported on the land they occupy? Too many people in places that are not capable of supporting their populations.
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  995. Wonderful interview. Vasilina is very perceptive and makes a lot of good points. I was going to say that I thought that Russia might fall into a warlord period, and she said it near the end, I believe that it might be a likely scenario. For one thing, the Russian Army is in the process of being destroyed in Ukraine. Thus, the central state will not have an army to maintain order or project its power. For another, there are already private armies in Russia. The key will be the internal security services. These can easily be coopted by various actors. Anyone who can pay them. The liberal opposition does not, as far as I can tell have a tremendous base within the country. It is a grim picture.
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  996.  @laurentitolledo1838  So true. The CCP made it that way.
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  997. I know, they will send them to the South Pole, where they can begin the journey again.
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  998. What did they do to deserve this? They supported the CCP.
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  999.  @nerfherder4284  Not the figures I have seen. The Fukushima discharge is at a level in the 30s and the Chinese plants discharges are in the low 100 range. That is what I was comparing, not normal operation. I cite that because that is what the Chinese are complaining about. I hope that clears thing up.
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  1000. My uncle was a FFL dealer and did not have a shop. This was into the 2000s.
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  1001. And don't forget the radiation.
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  1002. The polygraphs are a common feature of employment in security agencies and have been for decades. I don't know what the issue is with using them when there is a suspicion that a cleared person may have been compromised. That is also a long-standing practice.
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  1003. It's all about diet. Period. When I was 18 (about half a century ago) I became a vegetarian. I had a lot of Indian friends at university. It was cheaper and healthier. About eight years ago I had a life changing event (not health related) and went pescatarian, although I mostly eat vegetarian. NO HIGHLY PROCESSED FOODS. No sugar and no sodas, etc. I have found, again that it is cheaper and much more satisfying. I lost 25% of my peak body weight, blood pressure back to normal and no more joint pain. I had gone down several inches on the waistline, then I decided to stop drinking alcohol. I lost a couple more inches. I am back to where I was in my 20s. I take no drugs except for an occasional aspirin and then only maybe five a year, if that.
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  1004. You are totally ignoring the political aspects of this situation, which are paramount. This reporting is totally worthless. The regulations which are being imposed are politically motivated based on the upcoming CCP party congress which will select the next leader. The regulations are hurting Xi's allies, and are thus aimed at solidifying his position. Do you not see this? Are you gaslighting us?
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  1005. Free speech does not mean "correct" speech. Free speech means you can say whatever you want. If we don't hear ALL voices than we do not have free speech. The other aspect of this is that many of the times we have seen speech labeled "disinformation" is has turned out to be true. I sincerely hope Biden is impeached when the new Congress is in place. There are many grounds, and this is just one of them.
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  1006.  @skootdiggity1301  There is no actual law in China. The Chinese state has a constitution, but the real power, the CCP, chooses not to enforce it unless it suits their needs.
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  1007. At about 2:40 I was about to pause the video to make a comment about how this sounded like Soviet statements like the new "Soviet man". Then you said, "if this doesn't remind older viewers...". Well, I am one of those older viewers. I had to laugh. I also appreciate your covering this.
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  1008. It is interesting to hear what you say about the compact between the CCP and the people. This is precisely the terminology used to describe the situation in Russia. It is also the zeitgeist that existed in Nazi Germany, and many soldiers believed it to the end.
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  1009. This has been going on for decades. Actually, since the beginning of the Soviet Union. Take it from an old Cold Warrior.
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  1010. The main reason US universities want Chinese (and other foreign) students is economic. Plain and simple. The Chinese students pay full price (although I assume they may get scholarships from home) and help fill places. This is because American universities had expanded, first to accommodate the baby boomers and then their children. The fact of the matter is that a large percentage of US college grads do not get jobs in fields requiring their degrees.
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  1011. In the US, that "great resignation" took place in an environment where jobs were plentiful. In China, this is a totally different phenomenon. Some of the motivations may be similar, but not underlying situation.
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  1012. A "strategic" weapon reminiscent of the Cold War (I miss the Cold War, long live Cold War 2.0)? Well, duh! Let's review what the Cold War was about. The communists in the Soviet Union wanted to export their revolution worldwide. Of course, the Soviets would be at the center of this new world order. This is not much different ideologically from the European power they had just helped defeat. The CCP, which was trained by the Soviets, is talking in the same terms, and their actions bear this out. Perhaps they should examine their own culpability in this rise in tensions, especially in the South China Sea.
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  1013. I was a software engineer hired by a Silicon Valley firm (I lived on the East Coast) to help them go after three government programs with new technology we had. One of those programs was FAA modernization. That was in the early 1990s.
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  1014. The comparison to Stalin is much more valid than the comparison to Mao. Stalin was purging perceived enemies, often high officials and military leaders. Mao was disrupting society through actions that were blunt in their application and had what were probably unintended consequences, which were ignored. Of course, Xi is doing this type of thing as well. He has not reached the scale of Mao. Maybe that is one of his goals, who knows.
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  1015. Sadly, the survey does not include people in Asia. That is NOT an issue with the survey. The survey is meant to measure opinion in the developed western world, strictly defined. This is important since this population is the target of Chinese exports and a major source of financing. The impact of these populations is what is critical. North America and Europe make up just about 50% of world GDP. If you add India, Japan, Australia and China, in terms of GDP, you get close to 80% of world GDP. The rest of Asia, Africa and South America are therefore not significant in terms of potential impact.
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  1016. Debt trap diplomacy is definitely what China is doing. To say otherwise is to ignore the facts. As for the lenders being inexperienced and not the government, that is laughable on its face. All the major banks that make these loans (look it up) are state owned banks. As for the Belt and Road, it is a solution looking for a problem. The world's transportation system is the way it is because of competition brought about by capitalism. The old Silk Road died because, compared to ocean transport, it was dangerous, slow and expensive. The new one is the same. Substituting rail transport for waterborne transport for high volume and bulk goods is a disaster. Just look at the situation in Ukraine and grain exports. They can only get out a small portion of the grain by rail. Even if they took up the whole rail system it would not be enough. Some of the Belt and Road initiatives where you have seaborne transport being transferred to rail or road then back to seaborne transport are ludicrous. Each transfer is a cost. One example is the project to bypass the Panama Canal. The Panama Canal is not there because of some national plot by the west, but because it is one of the shorter routes available. Oh well, I apologize for the rant, but the CCP foreign office does that to me.
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  1017.  @d-23ad  That doesn't apply in this case, and really generally not in these kinds of programs. They don't just list everyone in the country and then take the top x. In the case I cited, another girl from the same village, who was ethnic Malaysian and didn't score as well, was given the scholarship. The scholarship, as with most government programs, is administrated regionally. Even in the US, there are many such programs at the state, county and even city level. Your last statement is just plain silly. Trump is not scrutinizing citizens based on their ethnic or family background. If you believe that he is then you are very ill informed. What Trump is scrutinizing is non-citizens. There are plenty here legally and plenty whose parents or grandparents came to the US legally. Some of his nominees for top appointed government positions fit into that category. I saw someone who worked for PBS in this country calling the Mexicans who are here illegally and being sent back to Mexico "citizens", implying they were citizens of the US. That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. I sincerely hope you don't fall for such fallacies. I am very concerned with the education system when people can spout and believe this level of drivel, and dare I say it, misinformation. Just because you live in a country that does not make you a citizen. I have lived and worked abroad, legally. I was actually asked to run for a local position (school board) but not being a citizen they had to get permission from the central government. It was granted by the way. I still have the letter, somewhere. I mention that because there are ways in which people living in a country legally can participate.
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  1018.  @AlienScientist  Ooooh, conspiracy theories.
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  1019.  @Ganiscol  To say that something is not a cannon because it is not a MBT cannon is silly. Size is not the issue. A cannon, as opposed to a rifle or machinegun round, has projectiles that are explosive. That is it. The 20mm gatling guns are cannons. He actually did equate it to a machinegun, by the way. That is the reason for my comment.
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  1020. With these levels of mortgage default, it is clear that the banks, and most financial institutions, in China are insolvent. Some non-bank financial institutions have already collapsed because of the real estate crisis. In the US, after the 2008 collapse, the government brought in "mark to market" accounting. That means that the bank's assets have to be revalued regularly. I believe that the requirement may be monthly. If this were to be done in China, then the whole system would collapse in full public view. It is only the CCP, through their machinations, that keeps this from the public and investors. By the way, rather than using the government mandated prices, the properties would have to be valued at actual sale prices, as is done in most of the world. In the US, all sales, except a very tiny number of private sales, are a matter of public record and easily accessible.
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  1021. Who you calling a third party? The decoupling is necessary for financial, environmental and security reasons.
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  1022. While the flooding is not hitting the wealthier areas, it is impacting agriculture. China already imports a lot of food. This situation is significant because, if China wants to invade Taiwan (or India) they will almost certainly experience a disruption of trade by sea. This would cut them off from food, as well as oil, natural gas and other raw materials. Talk about stoking civil unrest.
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  1023. I appreciate the extra episode. I slept in today, first day of "daylight savings" time. It is wonderful to share a good cigar and freshly brewed coffee. All from the western hemisphere. The Indian border, and borders in Asia and Africa, are always a mess. The number of border issues in those regions is mind boggling. Of course, it all goes back to European imperialism. It provides a never ending source or woe or entertainment, depending on one's world view. At least Beijing did not call India a puppet of the US. Is that progress? India making these moves now must be motivated by something. It would be interesting to find out what. One thing to remember about this border area is that this is where Mao fought, and won, a war with India in 1962. He initiated the war primarily to solidify his hold on the party and the military. He then promptly withdrew. I have always maintained that this is a very likely action for Xi to take for the very same reasons that motivated Mao. It is a much lower risk strategic move than invading Taiwan, and theoretically Xi has the resources he needs to do it today. To invade Taiwan would take more specialized equipment than is currently available and would involve the US, Japan and probably a host of others. The Maldives situation reminds me of Sri Lanka. It will be interesting to see if a similar situation unfolds. I love Wang Yi's pronouncements. He is a constant source of entertainment. Huang's criticism is right on the money. To understand the Chinese economy the best model is Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s. The parallels are striking. Add in the massive corruption and involvement of organized crime and you also have to look to the current Russian model. The plain fact is that all of China's growth was fueled by the capitalist west. There is a lot more to say on this topic, but I will leave it there. My only frustration is that I can only give one like to these videos.
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  1024. Another thing to consider s the territorial disputes China has with Russia. From the time of the Qing dynasty, through to the days of the Soviet Union and Communist China, China has been forced to sign unfavorable treaties from a position of weakness. These treaties stripped China of vast territories. They now claim that Vladivostok, along with lots of other territories should be returned. Seeing Putin's, and Russia's, weakness, they may be setting up for a realignment of borders in the Russian far east. Also, it is rich for China to talk about territorial integrity. They are currently contesting, militarily, borders with India. Some in India have voiced concern that China's next war will not be in Taiwan, but in the Himalayas.
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  1025. What everyone seems to leave out of the conversation on infrastructure investment is how this will generate revenue to repay the bonds. Sometimes, with something like a toll road or bridge, this is straightforward. With water and sewer projects, there are the rates paid by the users, etc. With many others, it is more subtle. A new highway, for example, must generate economic activity which will then result in higher economic activity and thus more tax revenue. If this is not the case, then the road (or HSR, etc.) should not be built. In the US this debate takes place all the time, since these projects are funded by taxpayers who are the ones who guarantee the bonds. In China, the whole process is opaque, and I think we can see now that a vast proportion of that spending is non-productive.
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  1026. The whole idea of a government funded broadcaster in a Western democracy is anathema. I say this an an American who lived in the UK and paid the license fee. In the current media climate, the idea of any national media entity in a western democracy is an abomination. Shut it down.
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  1027. The Russians/Soviets have been doing this stuff for over a century now in one form or another. In fact, others have as well. Remember the major scandal when a Middle East country directly bribed EU Parliament members? The idea of the EPP for Europe to develop a plan for the victory of Ukraine is really the key. I am an American, and fully support Ukraine and US support for Ukraine. I wish we would do more. One of the issues we have had in the US is lack of leadership. President Biden is a supporter of Ukraine, I think, but he has only said that we will support Ukraine for as long as it takes. He never says what "it" is. The EPP seems to be making it explicit. The latest aid package from the US includes a clause requiring Biden to produce a strategy document in 45 days. We will see. What I am getting at is that we don't see a lot of leadership from politicians among Ukraine's allies. There is lots of talk about how much money or weaponry is being sent, but I hear little about the goal. That is really the responsibility of leaders. France's President Macron has started to make that case and take the lead. That and the EPP action are good signs. So, yes, the Russians are trying to influence elections. We know that. The US did a lot of that during the Cold War, by the way. The Chinese are also in the game. Counterespionage is important, but leadership is more important.
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  1028. What you don't mention is that the property sector was the preferred investment avenue for individuals for two reasons. First, individuals are restricted in their ability to invest in equities. Second, China being a communist country, most people do not have a good appreciation of how the equities market works. Russia is a prime example of this. As for other sectors taking up the slack, I don't see it. There will be lots of losses for individuals in property, therefore lowering individuals ability to consume. At the same time, the export market will shrink or stagnate. With an aging and shrinking population, consumption is unlikely to increase.
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  1029. One can tell by the rhetoric coming out of China on the South China Sea situation that they are either running scared or gunning for a fight. I think that it is the former as any conflict there would not go well for China and would disrupt shipping to China on which its very survival depends. Unlike the disruptions in the Red Sea, there are not really any reasonable alternative routes. I think that the CCP is off its rocker, so to speak.
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  1030. I am just listening to a war diary of a German war reporter starting with the invasion of Poland. At 11 minutes in he quotes Nietzsche "of all writings I love only those that are written in blood". Amazing.
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  1031. Ruling through espionage? Guess what, that is what happened in the Soviet Union. The KGB initiated an internal coup in the 1970s and ruled from that point on. How did that turn out?
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  1032.  @Kim-sq9gp  Someone is woefully ill informed.
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  1033. I love how you worked the movie reference in there. I usually don't like those, but this time it was brilliant. As for the government numbers, people should realize they are manipulated and utter fantasy (I was going to use another word). Look at how the numbers are defined and collected. Their statistical methods rely on tracking large enterprises. Most economists, and just well informed people, should know that the drivers of employment and economic activity in most countries are small and medium businesses. This is true in China as it is in Germany and the US. They are scamming us. Retail sales growing? The recent 11.11 shopping sales were a bust. In the physical retail sector stores, and whole malls, are shutting down, and this is in prime areas. There is no way such sales are growing. On the housing front, the smartest thing the government could do is cancel all those unfinished homes. There is already a glut in the market. Then, the government, if they truly want to drive consumption, could use any money they would have spent supporting the completion of unnecessary homes to cancel the mortgages, return the downpayments to purchasers and make the banks whole. Otherwise, if the homes were completed, they would have a very weak market, as they do now, and would have enriched a group of developers who are inept, dishonest and corrupt. Of course, that may be the reason they are allowed to continue. As Pettis mentions, they should have done something in 2021 (smart guy, this Pettis). This would have been a perfect time for the CCP. It was during a pandemic, a black swan event, and social pressure could have been managed much more easily. As it is now, the CCP will have to do something, and just about anything they do will be bad. There is nothing to rally the populace and deflect full blame on the CCP. It is all on them.
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  1034. Another indicator on the import side is iron ore. In the US based Wall Street Journal, there is an article titled "Slide in Iron Ore Prices a Hiccup for Miners Amid Copper Scramble" with a subtitle of "Iron ore, used to make steel, is one of the worst-performing mined commodities this year". In the article they point to the buildup of iron ore at ports in China. This is driven by the slump in construction, especially housing, which is also hitting steel makers in China very hard.
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  1035. The whole woke thing is so amazingly stupid from a marketing point of view. I was, for a bit, a Marketing Manager for a tech firm. I was the strategist, and we had other specialists who were doing analytics (this was in the 1990s). Just looking at it from that point of view and having listened to the Bud Light marketing VP who got sidelined, I cannot believe that management at such a consumer-oriented company could do what they did. How big is the gay community? My understanding is 10% or so. I am not sure that the shareholders do not have grounds for some sort of class action lawsuit. The board can be seen as failing in their fiduciary duty.
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  1036. Tony, thank you for exposing us to some of these sources, such as the book, "How China Works". This is very useful in a world where we are inundated with information and access to it. The only problem is that now I will probably have to buy another book. Books are one of my two vices. The other is cigars. Whiskey used to be one, but I gave that up. The excerpt you read is enlightening, but not unexpected. Petts's response is also, as usual, quite salient. The one thing left out of all these discussions, and I will sound like a broken record on this, is corruption. The issue of employment and its effect on social stability is also one of the big issues, I would agree. When George W. Bush first met Hu Jintao, he asked what is the one thing that keeps you up at night (he says he always asked that of world leaders). Hu's response was finding jobs for millions of people every year. The problem is that the people in these jobs don't have enough money to consume the output of China's industries. At the same time, what middle class exists is going through a contraction. Bad, not good. On the resistance of banks to bankruptcy because it would expose the weakness of their balance sheets, this is a core problem in China. I fully expect that most, if not all, of the banks would be deemed insolvent under western accounting standards. The CCP is just sweeping the problems under the rug and kicking them down the road. This is bad, and Xi's recent admonition for the large state banks to buy government bonds is going to make it worse.
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  1037. A digital currency is not a crypto currency. All government currencies today are fiat currencies. This means that they do not have anything backing them but the faith and credit of the government. Bitcoin is a currency that has an absolute limit on the number or "coins". This is in direct opposition to government, fiat currencies. Frankly, I have not used cash is a long while. Most people I know do the same. Today, we typically use the equivalent of a digital currency. As usual, people mix up the two.
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  1038. What you don't consider is that they voted for this. Most voters, no matter where, seem to be swayed by "public" opinion rather that considering the correctness of a politician's views. It is easier than ever to fully understand what people really stand for. And yet, most people fain not really caring about politics. Bollocks! It really pains me t point that out. Thus, we get Jacinda, Justin, Bill (D) and old Joe. These are what the people voted for. I am against them all, but mine is only one vote.
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  1039. A further mobilization would be a great thing for Ukraine. First, as the general stated, it is unclear how the new group would be equipped. Heck, they are handing out Mosin-Nagants. I have one. There are massive numbers in the US. Someone could make a lot of money buying them up and selling them for a premium to Russia. All joking aside, Russia cannot equip their current army plus the first mibics. What will they give to the new group? The second advantage is that such an action will accelerate the collapse of the regime, as stated. The other effect is the drain on the population. I have heard, but cannot confirm, that there are two men in this cohort to every three women. The population is already collapsing, and this just accelerates that.
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  1040. I wonder about the massive quantities. We hear constantly about this or that battle and there are six or ten tanks and two to five times that number of APCs. That's not a lot. If you feed your forces in at such low rates, they are certain to be chewed up. Just for contrast, in the battle of the Golan Heights in 1973, the Syrians attacked with 1,200+ tanks. These were T-55 and T-63 tanks. The Israelis fought them off with a couple hundred modified Centurion tanks, airpower and artillery (which the Syrians also had). In the Gulf War, in the Battle of 73 Easting, the 2nd ACR, a scouting element, had with well over 80 M1 MBTs and over 100 M3 Bradleys. This was followed by four armored divisions and a mech infantry division. I have not seen the Russians (or the Ukrainians) being able to muster anything near this level of force for a single battle. This whole Russian campaign is amateur hour.
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  1041. This whole thing with college grads reminds me of conversations with my ex-wife. Talking to her was like being in middle of a conversation which was disjointed and of which I only heard part. Policy prescriptions from the CCP, such as those related to the unemployment situation with college grads, are so meaningless and out of touch it boggles the mind. They have an idea of what to do with youth unemployment when considered by itself, then ignore that the basic policy of the government is just the opposite. Hu Jintao once said to George W. Bush that his greatest challenge/fear was finding jobs for millions of people per year. Now we see the results of not doing that and the root of the fear he had.
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  1042. The characterization of Russia starting at about 3:45 is priceless.
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  1043. The charging station "inaccuracies" may not actually be an error. Assume that the charging station is accurately measuring the number of electrons delivered, the difference between what is delivered and what is registered on the vehicle may be a reflection of the inefficiencies of the charging system. Any time one converts energy, there is a loss. This is just plain physics. I would like to see a study on this for EV charging.
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  1044. Are you kidding me? It was up to the US to set out the reasons for the tariffs? No. Any country can put on tariffs for whatever reason they want, and they don't have to explain them to anyone else. Just think about all the tariffs the EU, China, India, the UK and others put on US goods. I don't recall any of those countries "explaining" them.
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  1045.  @MichaelEvans-wc9uv  Precisely!
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  1046. Pettis is spot on, as usual. I like that he also mentioned the treatment of labor. The labor situation and massive pollution are things that people in the west would never accept within their borders. And yet, the west gladly buys products made under these conditions. This is both foolish and unethical. The one thing that this situation China finds itself in highlights is the inferiority of their system. Centrally planned and controlled economies will always be inferior. History and copious amounts of economic theory prove this. Not long ago Justin Trudeau said he admired the CCPs approach and ability to make decisions without all that messy political stuff. Needless to say, he is probably regretting saying that today. The one thing Pettis does not highlight, and it is the crucial element, is corruption and its role in the economy. The CCP is a kleptocracy. That is what makes these decisions difficult to make and implement.
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  1047. As far as the last quote in video, I for one am not worried. For decades we have feared Russian military power. That is a chimera. There have been many wars since WWII that have shown that Soviet/Russian military power was overestimated. The latest is the Ukraine War. The Ukrainians have a pithy saying about this. Russia was supposed to have the second strongest military in the world. Now we see it is the second strongest in Ukraine.
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  1048. I am impressed! At about 11:40 the guy who is speaking says what I have been saying from the beginning. The self-driving feature and big screens in EVs are just add-ons to help justify the high (until now) price tag and have nothing to do with the environmental reason for going to EVs. Tesla started this and they have sent the whole industry off the rails. By the way, I have seen reports that the EU may ban these large screens, which are the only way to interact with the vehicle, because of safety concerns. Glitz is not always better. As for the performance, etc. the speaker has it completely right. Let me give an example. I had a 2002 vehicle with a 3.5L V6 that developed 250hp. I replaced it with a 2015 vehicle with a 3.6L V6 that develops 306hp They get the same gas mileage. The older vehicle performed very well. With the advances in technology, they could have produced a 3.0L V6 producing about 250hp. This would be more than enough for the needs of just about everyone and would have gotten up to 20% better gas mileage. This performance mania is just going to kill the car companies.
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  1049. I wish they would use the term "tax rate cuts". When rates go down tax receipts go up.
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  1050. Natale is a classic example of these "crypto reporters". Her life is tied up with Bitcoin, so that is still OK. She talks about Bitcoin being at $16K+ being a good thing. Well, it was, not too long ago (one year, almost exactly), at a peak of about $64K. Any asset that falls that much is a bad investment. Really bad. That is a drop of about 73%. Bitcoin is a sham. Its only real value is its worth in fiat currency.
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  1051.  @randyearles1634  I heard it from some of the YouTube channels that cover China. Many are overseas Chinese.
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  1052. I have seen reported that in one or both of the Iraq wars Bradleys destroyed more Iraqi tanks than M1s. Even if the number was close, that would be something. I am not sure why the Bradley in this case did not deploy its TOW missile. That would be an interesting thing to know.
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  1053. I would bet that a lot of her voters were dead. I actually knew someone who claimed to vote for his grandfather, as well as himself. The Chicago motto: one man two votes.
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  1054. Glad you are safe. I love your outdoor innovations. I especially like the brick, and now the old Soviet, grills. I may try the outdoor furniture idea you had.
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  1055. What Sabine is doing is just surfing the internet and reporting on articles and company press releases. Not very interesting. She is, of course, not the only one, not by a long shot. If you listen to these channels then you would assume all our engineering problems, such as energy storage, have been solved. I have been involved in the aerospace industry since the late 1970s. I have seen similar concepts come and go and have even worked on some. So, I fully agree with you on this. I have also dealt with other technologies, such a green power generation (outside of wind and solar) and have seen none of them go beyond demonstration stage. As for DARPA, I have worked on projects for them. Most are actually done by contractors, by the way. They often set out "stretch" goals. This is appropriate for their mission. On the other hand, what people like Sabine seem to assume is that slapping a DARPA label on it means that it is a done deal.
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  1056. If the Conservatives put forth Liz Truss as their leader at the next election, I think they will be unbeatable. A third female PM from the Conservatives, while Labor has had none. A very successful and competent person. Boris got the deal done, and got a great majority for it. Liz can move the party forward while distancing herself from some of the issues the Conservatives have had as a result of the Kung Flu (yes, I am going back to calling it that). She is also at the center of the global Britain project, which is the future of the UK. Boris may be able to win, but Truss is a better bet to take the UK forward, and she deflects those criticisms of Boris. He had a good run, now get a new leader in to take the party and country forward. Of course, most parties do not think strategically in this way, so we'll see.
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  1057. This was my parish when I lived in Winchester, early in the millennium. I remember spending many a wonderful Sunday, and other days there. I also volunteered at the church fete every year. I ran the coconut shie. When I left the UK, I had a nice car that I could not sell easily, so I gave it to them. It was a Renault and had an automatic gearbox. They found it useful. I remember chamber music concerts on the water meadows behind the buildings. Everyone would bring a picnic supper. It is a magical place.
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  1058. I know that this will be taken the wrong way, but to have an ethnic minority leading a "nationalist" party is kind of the wrong thing to do. These nationalist parties in GB use actual nationality as their raison d'être. Just being born in or growing up in a place does not make one of that nationality. It is not only about place. Otherwise, there is no difference in Scottish nationality and some arbitrary geographical unit. In such a case, nationality ceases to be relevant and so does the independence movement. Don't confuse nationality and state especially in a European context. Mahyar is not English in his nationality. He is British, but not of English stock. Of course, in England and the US that does not really matter. In Scotland, Northern Ireland and Whales these are movements to preserve their actual cultural and ethnic heritage. So, I am not surprised that all this is happening.
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  1059.  @wallyw4965  Good point. The Maginot line was a well planned and executed fortification. And yet, the Germans flanked it and took it from behind. I expect that the Ukrainians could do something similar with the Russian fortifications.
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  1060.  @adrianjanssens7116  Bollocks! I know plenty.
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  1061.  @marisabenson1222  I cannot agree with that. The Russian way of war is so very similar to the Soviet. Also, the structure of the government is quite similar (no, not the same). Don't forget that in Soviet times the party apparatchiks really were very similar to the oligarchs of today. The Ukraine war shows all the hallmarks of Soviet imperialism.
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  1062. The comments about Putin bringing up 1917 are interesting. I have pointed out that there are lots of parallels. First, Czar Nicholas II and Putin are both short. Second, they are both incompetent war leaders. Thirdly, in both cases they were/are fighting a smaller country (geographic and population) which had more advanced weapons. There are other parallels. I do disagree with Mr. Philips that bringing up something that happened over 100 years ago is the problem. While it was 100 years ago, as I have stated, the parallels are quite striking and are not favorable to Putin.
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  1063. Of course, humanity today is massive. If only 1B people were left, that was the population in 1804, then humanity would rebuild, From1804 to today, the world population has grown by a factor of almost eight. And, we would have the residual technology, no matter how bad things got, that would accelerate recovery in relation to previous disasters.
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  1064. When Russia became a communist country, it was a peasant society. The same is true of China. This is totally contrary to Marx's theories. Lenin was the one to bring in the peasants, offering free stuff. The peasants couldn't care less about collective ownership of the means of production. In fact, when collectivization of agriculture was imposed later it was resisted, In the Russian situation you can find lots of video appeals to the czar, I mean Putin, for the redress of grievances. Please, oh please, Vladimir Vladimirovich help us. Now I am seeing more and more videos of Chinese people acting like peasants from the past, on their knees. This is disgusting. In the case of both Russia and China the idea that either will become a modern liberal democracy is just plain stupid.
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  1065. So, who would enforce that?
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  1066. They keep talking about "members of their community" who are here illegally. Did those people vote for them? Perhaps that should be investigated. My understanding is that members of the government are beholden to the voters and citizens, including those here legally.
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  1067. In the US, splitting off or separating listing a subsidiary does not, in general, require additional capital. Initially, the shares of the spin off are typically distributed to the current shareholders. These can then be traded separately. The idea is to unlock value for the shareholders and to allow the spin off to stand on its own. I mention all this because you seem to be implying that the spin off of Alibaba Cloud would require liquidity from the market. This may be a difference in the Chinese market, but that would also make no sense.
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  1068. The question is how long it will take. Ukraine has been good at this and at defense. Offensively I would expect they would be just as good, but they are not. The problem is that they haven't been given the tools. So, we are in the same old situation. Ukraine does not have the combat power to push Russia out of its territory. Both Ukraine and Russia were in demographic decline before the war, and it is close to catastrophic now. Just recently it has come to light that Biden, as well as Trump, have called on Ukraine to lower its conscription age to 18. This was standard in the US when we had it, and 18-year-olds still have to register in case conscription is needed in the future. The reason Ukraine gave for not doing this is precisely the demographic problem. So, when Trump says the killing has to stop, he is correct. He knows about Ukraine having dealt with it in his first term.
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  1069. Retirement age, at least for Social Security, in the US is constantly adjusted upward. It has gone from 65 to 67 for those born in 1960 or later. It can still be adjusted upward, as the actuarial calculations indicate.
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  1070.  @jjg1501  They can sue if the home does not bring in enough to cover the remainder of the loan. On the other hand, in the US, the borrower may file for bankruptcy. In China, that is not possible.
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  1071.  @mchrysogelos7623  Are you kidding me? It was an ironic statement. You need to get a clue.
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  1072. A new Cold War. Wonderful. I miss the old Cold War.
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  1073.  @LIV2500  Considering it was my property, I don't understand your point. What is your real issue with this? As for boomer or not boomer, I can tell you that many other of my employees, who were not boomers, would have done the same thing, and stated so at the time.
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  1074. She is wonderful. I followed her on Twitter, when I was on Twitter (no longer). I have seen some of her videos and am greatly impressed. I speak up because I was a school governor at a comprehensive primary school in Winchester. As a foreigner I had to get elected, then permission to server from the Home Office. My sons started their education there. The head teacher was wonderful. One reason they wanted me was that I worked for a big computer firm, and as expected, I got them free computers from that firm. Over time, I developed a good relation with the head, and was asked to be part of the interview process for teaching staff and ever the new deputy head. As for parent involvement, we had been reading to our children from birth. I got so that I had memorized some of them. One day, at work, I recited Mo Ba LaLaLa. Most of my colleagues seemed somewhat disturbed. Most did not have kids. My children could read, and count, when they entered school. Actually, at a family and friends party by older son was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. He said a paleontologist. He even spelled it. He was 2-1/2. I say all this not to brag, but to amplify what Katharine is saying.
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  1075. Wow! Great show overall, but the Chinese culture segment was really something. I really appreciate that you read through all these materials. As you might guess, I might find it hard to do so without railing against, well something. It sounds a lot like socialist thought from the past. Going back to Soviet, Nazi (yes, they were socialists) and even places like Cuba the idea of developing a "superior" culture has failed. The fact is that culture does not naturally serve government. When government tries to make it do so, well you have all seen the results. Finally, I would like to say something about the traditional Chinese culture. It has been a long time since I really studied it. Back in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, when I first went to university, I had two Indian friends. We became very interested in Buddhism (even though they were Hindu) and spent a lot of time reading Indian, Chinese and Japanese works. We were at a university that had two massive libraries. Especially in the older one there was a large Asian section. I have not been as active in this lately, but still study a thing or two. What I never read was anything that would have supported Marxism, and especially what is happening in China today. In fact, Marx did not think that socialism would take root where it did. Both Russia and China were mostly rural, peasant societies. Marx assumed that places with a strong industrial proletariat would be the crucibles of the revolution. Thus, he was thinking more about Germany and America. Perhaps this is why it turned out so badly. The peasants did not want to advance society or any of that other stuff. They just wanted to take land from the current owners. It was purely self-interest tied to property. They wanted someone else's stuff. The revolutionary leaders promised it to them, then went back on that promise. You will own it in common, which is not what the peasants understood by ownership. Thus, it is hard to have a great deal sympathy for the people in Russia or China. They still retain some of that peasant mentality and their leaders use it against them. So, I am looking forward to the watching "When Marx Meets Confucius." Will there be an English language version, do you think?
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  1076. This reminds me of the situation of Quebec in Canada. I do wonder about the turnout. Can such a measure be considered successful if less than 50% of the electorate participated?
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  1077. I can't wait to see Mao suits coming back.
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  1078. Thank you for the content. The details are interesting and important.
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  1079.  @morrispantasticojr4260  That is true, but that is also irrelevant from a security point of view. The territory on both sides is marginal territory. Also, crossing the water there with large numbers of troops and weapons is basically impossible.
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  1080.  @dongxuzhou4661  Well, I can't agree with you there. Besides the actual real estate companies, there are all the supporting industries. China's dependence on real estate is much larger than the specific real estate development sector. It is higher than anywhere in the world, as far as I can tell. And, what do they get for it? Small apartments. I am middle class in the US and I have had a single family home for over four decades (most of my life). As for what happened before the 18th century, that is irrelevant. The British had an empire in the 18th through the middle of the 20th century that was much bigger. Image that. Britian. A small island nation. That dwarfs what China achieved. Actually China, at one time, had a massive navy, and could have dominated. Then they decided, for internal reasons, to pull back. Frankly, from this conversation, I know that we have out differences. To some extent they are chauvinistic. But one thing that I have always believed is that the Chinese are the people in Asia that are closest in temperament to the US as far as business is concerned. Absent the Communist Party, we would be great allies and collaborators. I believe that we are closer to the Chines people than we are to the Japanese or Koreans or Indians. I have lots of experience with Chinese who were part of the diaspora, and to Chinese industrialists. So, while I may not agree with some of your assessments, I do have lots of respect for the Chinese people.
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  1081. You know the old saying about socialism. It works great until you run out of other people's money.
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  1082. What I read about Chapter 15 bankruptcy states that this is done when there is also an insolvency in the home country of the debtor. Evergrande has not, as far as I know, filed bankruptcy in China. I wonder if the petition will be accepted. The hearing is, I think, next week. The guy at 8:05 shows an ignorance of the situation. Evergrande did not only raise money (take money as he states) in China. They also raised billions in the US.
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  1083.  @syfiliskerino1998  I was there in the early 1970s, not the 1980s.I don't know if that was just a typo. Let me know. I certainly saw the nationalistic fervor in Athens. I have lots of stories on that. I think you are reacting to the term "right-wing". I have a similar reaction, but that is the terminology we are stuck with. So, I get your points.
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  1084. David, I love your content, but not your American bashing. Look at the mess the UK and Israel are in by not having a written constitution. I am an American but have also lived in the UK, so I think I have some understanding of these things. The other issue I have is your equating US presidents with British kings. Just on an intellectual level that is, dare I say, dishonest. It also has nothing to do with answering the question. I am afraid your grade on that answer would not be very good.
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  1085. The mention of artists right at the beginning rankles. All cultures have artists. They generally only become influential when a culture has attained a certain material wealth. They do not contribute to that wealth. They are really superfluous. We look at art of ancient cultures and think, that's nice. It is what they achieve in material culture that matters, not art.
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  1086. Good video. I didn't learn anything new, but was reminded of the conflict. It unfolded from my youth and I followed it avidly. My grandfather was an avid reader even though he was not highly educated. He migrated from rural Greece to the US and became quite successful. He got me reading the National Geographic, which I subscribed to for decades. I remember the Ogaden. On a more contemporary note I had a college professor who was from Eretria. At first, he was loath to talk about where he was from, but I got him to open up, He left because of the communist oppression there. The beat goes on.
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  1087. Strikes? In the worker's paradise? How could this be? Chinese treatment of workers is like the west in the 19th century, maybe worse in some ways. That is one reason I try not to buy Chinese goods. I have also seen some information about worker treatment in Vietnam, another communist country, which is quite a contrast with China. As for the foreign aid and government investment abroad, your analysis is interesting, but I think it misses the essential point. The real beginning of modern foreign aid is a direct result of WWII and the Cold War. Prior to that I am fairly sure there was little or no foreign aid activity. It started with the need to rebuild places like Europe, Japan and much of Asia. This was important for two reasons. First, devastated countries are much easier to radicalize, and we saw what that led to. Second, the US wanted markets for trade, which was believed to lessen the risk of war breaking out. That was the first phase. The second is what Xi is doing now. Both the US and the Soviet Union competed to get poorer countries on side in the "third world", which we now call the "global south". Don't forget, the Cold War was a time of geopolitical competition with the constant threat of war. Devastating war. As the Soviet Union disintegrated, foreign aid morphed into a sort of altruistic phase. Lifting people out of poverty was a goal in itself, but what it also did was to create markets for the developed nations. That is not bad for the developing world. It is not predatory in the sense that colonialism is. Giving these countries a chance to participate in the world economy will only help them in the long run. Now, we are back to a competition phase. Cold War II has begun. We have Russia, China and the west giving out foreign aid to buy allies. For the west, especially the US, the fear is failed states like Afghanistan and Somalia. Don't forget, these failed states breed and support terrorism that today can have devastating effects. I personally am not a fan of foreign aid. The amount of mismanagement and corruption is staggering. It is basically a waste of money (as China is finding out) and only really works when a country is fully aligned with the donor's ideology and goals. This rarely happens. This also encompasses international institutions like the UN. This institution has become ineffective and is basically a waste. Defund it!
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  1088. Parents have the ABSOLUTE right to determine what is taught in the schools! They pay for them. The basic tenant of our democracy is no taxation without representation! That is why people need to know who they are voting for in school board elections. Adjunct to that is the FACT that parental involvement in children's education is a determining factor for success.
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  1089. One of the things that mitigates against a major impact of a China slowdown and decoupling is that foreign companies are forced to work with a local Chinese company and cannot own 100% of their production in China. In many cases the US company works through subcontractors. These are often companies from outside China like Foxconn. Thus, the subcontractor is responsible for moving the production elsewhere. Much of that production is low end and labor intensive. Those are the easiest to move. Many other companies simply buy from a supplier in China and then put their own label on the product. They have become basically just design and marketing enterprises. While not totally trivial, they can generally use another supplier elsewhere. This is unlike the US, or most of the western world, where a European company, say, can purchase an American company outright and vice versa. In other cases, a foreign company can set up a wholly owned factory in the US without any issue. Many have done this (US and European car makers for example) and that binds the economies closer together. Even within the US companies routinely move between regions and open new plants far from their established plants. This often happens when a new production process is being set up. And don't forget, many of the enterprises in China consist of production that was originally in the US. The lure was cheap labor and a large market. Those are both gone. Chinese labor is expensive when taking into account productivity. The property market collapse (and it will collapse, and it will be spectacular) limits the market to sell goods into as people in China lose purchasing power. Even on the financial front, the direct investment in China is really rather small in percentage terms. I don't see that having a major impact on the US financial sector, and it is very limited in terms of individual investors.
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  1090. Glad you showed the poll results. This is in line with many other polls that have come out over the last year. So, while we hear lots of media types and pundits holding forth on the war, with widely divergent opinions, there is a solid base for support for Ukraine. This reminds me of the Vietnam War. At the time (I was there) there were massive protests in the US and Europe against the war. Then, in the 1972 presidential election, Richard Nixon, who was a hawk on the war, won by one of the largest landslides in American history. He popularized the term "silent majority", and that was before the advent of social media. I think that is what we are seeing now. I mention all this because there are lots of people in Europe, including in Ukraine, who do not understand the dynamics of US discourse or politics. While things are not generally quite as open, or chaotic, in most of Europe (except for France, of course), there is still a lot of discussion and debate. That is good. On the other hand, YouTubers in Ukraine and some other places in Europe are often triggered by this level of debate and the tumult of politics. I see this a lot in channels like Anna from Ukraine and Vlad Vexler. Both of them are non-military channels and I find them valuable for getting a sense of what people are thinking outside of that sphere. They are so fixated on the "information war" and propaganda that I often find it amusing and sometimes infuriating. The Ukrainians are actually at war, and this tends to focus the mind. On the other hand, none of the countries that support Ukraine are actually at war. This makes for a strange situation, and I think it is hard for them to understand.
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  1091. I had a house in the country. We had mice, of course, and it was a nice, newer house on a large wooded lot. It was really funny when the kids would be in the lower floor, where their bedroom was, and one would run across the couch. One time one got into my car. The car started smelling bad. I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Then one day I decided to check under the seat in back. There it was, totally desiccated. Another time one got into the fan for the forced air HVAC system. It got crushed and shorted out the motor which we had to have replaced. Ah, the joys of country living.
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  1092.  @pacifiquetumu9650  I didn't say there was no borrowing abroad, just that is is not a significant percentage. Also, these are "straightforward" corporate bonds. In the Lehman case they were complex derivatives (CDOs) that were sold to everyone.
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  1093. Great one. And, yes, I got it.
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  1094. Of course, the same WSJ has an article titled "Why Some 20-Somethings Are Saying No to TikTok". This is, of course, TikTok's prime demographic.
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  1095. There is one easy solution to this problem in the automotive industry. One word. Standards. Have you ever noticed that there are few "foreign" cars in Japan? One is that the market is not as large as in Europe and the US. That has many facets. The other, more important, is that the Japanese implemented standards that favored their own manufacturers. These are called "non-tariff barriers". This is something that I had looked into decades ago. The Japanese strictly enforced these standards. Since the market was not as large as many others few bothered. The application in the China case is obvious. When one digs into many product categories where there are Chinese products and competing foreign products (phones as well as automobiles are good examples) at the grass roots level, and a different picture emerges. This channel is invaluable, but it follows policy pronouncements and macroeconomic issues. That is important. But look into the details including how products perform and what issues the people in China (or anywhere) are grappling with on a daily basis and you get a much clearer picture.
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  1096. The thing that bothers me when Mr. Starkey talks about cultural differences is the experience of people from all cultures when the get to the United States, and indeed to the UK. Even people born in these foreign cultures, then adopt the prevailing ethos of the US or UK. I wish you would address that. I have known Chinese that grew up in Communist China, who lived through the Cultural Revolution, who are staunchly American. How does this happen with your view of cultural difference? All of the people who came to the US in the early 20th century from Southern Europe and Ireland, who came from vastly different cultures, and were initially resisted, became fully American and "Western". They also became successful. My grandparents came from a poor part of Greece with 4th grade educations. They personally were successful. Some of their children went to university. All of their grandchildren did, with many advanced degrees thrown in. How does this fit in with his thesis?
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  1097. Tony, thanks for the extra episode. The second segment on David Ownby's article is fascinating. I found the article and will read the whole thing.
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  1098. I hear the same thing about the Saudi military. They are toast.
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  1099. This guy is nuts. Many of the kids that go to the school come from not very good backgrounds. They often live in environments without structure. Children need that. If not at home, then in school. When I lived in the UK I was a school governor, so I have some experience of what is needed. His comment about why we send our kids to school also makes no sense. We send them to be literate and to prepare them for work. If not, then why should I pay for your kids to be "well rounded'? Look at all the liberal arts majors from university that don't have any skills that are in demand. They may be well rounded, but they do not contribute, based on their education, in many cases.
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  1100. Laffer is so right on the primacy of tax rates. Associated with that is the nature of the tax code with brackets. As an example, in about 1980, my friend's father was a retired engineer. He had taken early retirement from a government job (I was in Washington, DC, where I was born). I was working at an aerospace and defense (A&D) firm which was desperate for people like this. So, he put in his resume and salary requirement which was quite low. The reason was that if he got what he was really worth (twice or more than he was asking), then his tax rate would go up considerably. So, his net would be better at a lower salary. This is the best reason for a flat tax! People would not make economic decisions based on and arbitrary tax code.
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  1101. I live in Illinois. There is a locomotive musem that has steam, diesel and electric trains. I was able to drive both a steam locomotive and a diesel there. Frankly, I think there is a place for coal fired steam locomotives in various situations. The musem is able to restore very old locomotives using only volunteers.
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  1102. I have said before that perhaps Ukraine should charge the US and other western allies a "marketing fee". Considering what the war has done for US and western weapons sales this makes sense. Actually, Israel did the same thing. Only in their case they were fighting Soviet weapons wielded by non-Russians so there was always some little question. Now that we see Soviet/Russian weapons being used by Russians being trashed by western weapons, we know that Israel's success is not a fluke.
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  1103.  @Tzizenorec  I can't agree with your last statement. Many of the North Korean soldiers and military leaders who fought in the Korean War had years of experience fighting the Japanese and fighting in the Chinese civil war. The current North Korean soldiers have had none, for a very long time. I have also seen reports that the North Koreans in Russia are very poor soldiers. I recently saw one report where it was claimed that a North Korean soldier nearly killed himself and those around him in training to throw grenades. These troops that were sent were supposed to be some of their best troops. Throwing grenades is very basic military skill. As for your first statement, have you looked at the history of the Korean War? After the disastrous start of the war for the South, it took about four months for them to get to the Yalu. The South Koreans and the US were not even prepared for a war. That is among the worst performances in history.
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  1104.  @memirandawong  True. The Ukrainians know that and I think that bodes well for them.
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  1105.  @pointlessvideos2321  US defense spending as a percentage of GDP during the Vietnam War ranged from 10% early in to about 7% at the end. It is hard to get accurate figures for the USSR, but I have heard it was up to 40%. I am an old Cold Warrior, and really miss it. I got to do incredibly interesting research with basically unlimited budgets. That aside, even with the USSRs economic strength compared to current day Russia, programs like SDI scared them. The things we developed were fantastical. Some of the proposed weapons were just scarry. Had a relative who worked at a national lab. When we met for Christmas one time, knowing what I was working on, he said "the atmosphere is no longer a barrier to lasers". He wouldn't say more, but I knew what he was talking about. Putin has created a system that has no chance of matching what the US, and the rest of the west, has. The sad thing is that he thinks he does, and evidence to the contrary, he keeps pushing.
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  1106. If what Nixon said about Indian women is true, then how come there are so may Indians?
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  1107. To emphasize the importance of "information warfare" in the military is a fool's errand. For one thing you don't need military training to conduct information warfare. To assume that is just plain stupid. Most people assume "information warfare' involves swaying the populations of an adversary. This is the common usage. If this is not what is meant, then that should be made clear. Second, the reality of war is reality. It is guns, bullets, artillery, missiles and airpower. You can have all the information warriors you want, but as Russia's invasion of Ukraine has shown, it is the better trained and led army that will prevail.
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  1108. Your mention of resource mismanagement in the USSR and the public sector in the US reminds me of my days with GE. I was the IT director of a large aerospace plant. Jack Welch was the CEO. He stressed that the situation you outline would not happen. It turns out that none of the plant managers believed it. We often had project slip, and all of a sudden, at the end of the year we would be directed to spend the P&E funds on whatever we could get delivered by the end of the year. One of these was computer equipment. So, at the end of the year, I was given these funds and I had to pressure our suppliers to deliver before year end. So, between Christmas and New Years, when I should have been home relaxing, I was going to the plant every day to see what had been delivered and haranguing vendors. All great fun.
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  1109. I just ordered Brian's book. It will be here tomorrow. There is so much I could say about this. I came of age in 1970. We did LSD in high school. A few years later, still in the 1970s we did mushrooms. I remember a time when we were going into a science fiction movie. We took the mushrooms in the parking lot. I don't remember the film. I remember taking the mushrooms, and remember that the experience was rather strange. I had a friend who was over 10 years older and grew up in Berkley. He and his wife did many drugs at the time. When I met him they had gotten into meditation and did not do drugs ro drink. One of my professors at university in the early 1970s talked about this. He said that when they first did LSD it was an almost religious experience and very controlled. One, or a few would do it and there would be others who were there to "support" them, if they needed it. He knew things were falling apart when people we sitting around bored and decided to do it just to have something to do. It had no significance and the outcomes were often very bad.
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  1110. The subsidy investigation is nothing unusual. The EU and US have both had investigations of each other's practices in various segments of the economy and in some cases imposed punitive tariffs. In most cases I can think of, there was not a concerted effort on the part of the government to take over a segment, but issues with policy that favored an industrial segment.
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  1111. The UN's usefulness is past. It is really a relic of the post-WW2 era and the Cold War. There are many in the US that would like to see the US pull out completely. Others would like to see US contributions shrink dramatically. Considering the ineffectiveness of the UN and many of its affiliated organizations, it seems that it is time for it to go.
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  1112. Wow! This is like having a high level university lecture right at home. I have always been a fan of Mr. Starkey. It is good to see him doing this.
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  1113. Sounds like the old 'Who song "We won't get fooled again". There is a refrain in the song that goes "Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss".
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  1114. That's a great one!
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  1115. You are learning. The goal of an offensive is to destroy the enemy army. Once you do that you can walk into any town or settlement you want. Also, have you seen some of the towns after they are retaken? They are often very small and destroyed, In themselves they are insignificant. The towns are just markers along the way. I see lots of commentators getting excited about this village or that being taken or not. What is more important is the terrain. Read some books on previous wars. The number of times you will see the battle for this hill or that hill is striking. The heights are what matters. A town or village might be an important road junction, but often those roads can be interdicted in other places for less cost. Considering the lack of airpower and modern western tanks, Ukraine is performing brilliantly. If Ukraine had been given F-16s early and many more Abrams tanks, then this thing might be over. We have lots of Abrams tanks. Even the early versions would be an overmatch to the Russian tanks. Many people think that Ukraine should be pursuing US style combined arms warfare. They forget how much that style of warfare depends on airpower.
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  1116. The title of the video is a bit misleading, isn't it? What's the secret?
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  1117. WRONG! Bagdad fell just less than three weeks after the start of the invasion. The US also used far less troops than Russia has in Ukraine. The Iraqi army and air force were much larger than the Ukranian military. They also had decades of major combat experience.
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  1118. The banning of the song in Hong Kong has an interesting analog in an action taken by the Australian authorities against X. In that case the content in question was a video showing a stabbing of a priest. X complied by taking it down for users in Australia. This is correct (but sad) within Australian law, but the Australian authorities went further and called for removal of the video globally, which X rejected. There is a big issue here, and it involves free speech globally. I am sure we have not heard the end of it.
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  1119. The US Defense Secretary has stated that the goal was to degrade Russia enough so that they could not do this for a long time. I think that this has played into Finland and Sweeden wanting to join NATO. Both Finland and Sweeden are much more powerful, militarily than Ukraine was at the start. This is not to denigrate Ukraine. With western training and equipment, they have built a very good military. The Nordics have an even better military. Both Nordic countries have also been working with NATO for years. If Russia attacked Finland today, it would be even worse than the Winter War, in which Russia lost 200K troops, and the Fins a tenth of that. The Soviets took some territory, but much of that was recovered in the Continuation War. I did some work at the Command and General Staff College some time ago, over a period of over a decade, at the height of the Cold War. I miss the Cold War. I got to do incredible research with unlimited funds. But I digress, as usual. This situation is ideal in a sense. We have a country that is motivated to resist and invader. As long as we provide equipment and support, they will fight. This is not Vietnam (for the US) or Afghanistan (for the Soviets). The Ukrainians are willing to fight their own battles as long as they have support. That was also true of the North Vietnamese. South Vietnam was a UN created entity. It was rotten to the core and the core collapsed. Russia, with the sanctions imposed on them, will not be able to reconstitute their military. If the war goes on long enough, Ukraine will be resupplied with advanced Western equipment for which they can be trained. This would be even worse for the Russians. They need to get out of this soon.
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  1120. Just watched the first three minutes. Utter crap!!!! Computers were developed to deal with repetitive and computational problems. They do this VERY well. My father had a cartoon from the 1960s. It showed a row of old style computer cabinets. On the last was button. The caption was, you too could be replace by a button. Turned out not to be true. The fact remains, that computers, even those running AI, or machine learning algorithms, are just adjuncts to human intelligence.
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  1121. Starlink is not free. One must buy a base station ($599) and then pay $120 per month for the service. This is the residential rate. Business rates are higher.
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  1122.  @hulamei3117  I love it! Mind if I use that?
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  1123.  @porkysharma8423  Vietnam is getting closer and closer to the US. Considering the war we fought, this is amazing. The Philippines is also moving back to a closer relationship with the US. Don't forget that Germany and Japan are very close allies of the US, even after the wars we have fought with them. The US does not hold grudges. We all have a common enemy in the CCP. That is what matters.
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  1124. David, you talk about how bad the Balkans are now. They were no better under the Turks. What does that tell you?
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  1125. You do realize that these things have been researched and prototyped since the 1980s in the US. I know, I was there. Looking at the footage, this vehicle is too slow and cumbersome. It is no better than what we had back then. A human reacting would have it knocked out easily. The AI is only as good as its training. This is just marketing as far as I can see. You don't want a fully autonomous vehicle (air or ground) because it could just as easily turn on you. You always need a man in the loop. The communication link is why drones, between tier 1 combatants, will all be gone in the first few hours of a conflict. The Iranians took down one of our drones. So have the Russians. The Russians and Americans have technologies to take down opposing drones very quickly by disrupting communications. Drones are great for asymmetric conflicts. They are not the future of great power conflict.
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  1126. Epic!
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  1127. I think Vivek is right. Alternatives to products and services from these woke tech giants should be easy to fund. After all, the tech giants have shown that these products are hugely profitable. There is a ready market for non-woke versions. The technologies involved are not rocket science. In terms of technical issues, file formats for documents and videos, for example are now open. Even if not, conversion programs could easily remedy that.
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  1128. Good thing you caught that because you know your audience will. For just a microsecond I had a vision of Russia having fallen apart. Just a microsecond.
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  1129. Mike, let someone else talk!
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  1130. Free speech does not mean "correct" or "verified" speech. It means ALL speech. Just from practical point of view, you want to hear all ideas, no matter how crazy. How can you argue with someone if you don't know what they are thinking?
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  1131. Great to see India making strides in this area. On the other hand, you are constantly berating the West on its weapons sales. Seems like a bit of a contradiction.
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  1132. The whole idea that Russia will invade NATO is ludicrous on the face of it. No matter how the war in Ukraine turns out, Russian forces will be badly depleted. Don't forget that at the beginning of the "special military operation", Ukraine had a fraction of the weaponry they have now, Russia had not been degraded and had their full combat power. They were stopped. So, what would Russia use to attack NATO with. The fact of the matter is that they don't even have the industrial capacity to reconstitute their military, much the manpower. Some geopolitical analysts think that China is just waiting for Russia to be decisively defeated in Ukraine before moving in on the Russian far east. This is a much more likely scenario than an attack on NATO and will tie up any forces and equipment the Russians have left.
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  1133. Wow, I know you warned us about the government figures, but the figures are so inflated and divorced from reality that it is mind blowing. Don't get me wrong, it is instructive to get the government take on it, but it is just amazing. I just saw a piece about a situation where prices for new apartments were dropped substantially by the developer and people who had bought just days before were suffering massive instant loses. They were also mad and protesting. This is, from what I can gather, becoming more common. The used housing stock is out of control, and it would take a decade to rectify the situation. They don't have a decade. By the way, the info I have seen on used home prices excludes court ordered sales, which are also rising and putting further pressure on prices. The thing about the housing sector is that we don't have models for this. The policy measures that the CCP is playing with really assume a more western style market. Those markets rely on good information. China has never had a real market in new homes. The government has always set the prices and restricted moves by the developers in adjusting prices downward in response to market signals. Any western financial or economics professional who does not understand this is engaging in malpractice. That is the nicest way I could put it. More sinister motives could also be ascribed. That is not hyperbolae.
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  1134. The Politburo approach is, of course, wrong. It is also at odds with past CCP policy. The goal had always been to provide full employment. That is what is important for political stability. It does not matter if it is a communist or capitalist country. Previous CCP leaders understood that. Xi has moved China too fast to try to compete on an equal footing with the west. China is decades away from being able to do that.
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  1135.  @leesteal4458  There are lots of sources of iodine besides iodized salt. Seafood, pasta, vegetables, and others contain iodine. I get plenty of these. I have been on this diet for years and have no problems. Actually, I am in my 60s and am back to where I was in my 20s as far as health. Perhaps even better.
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  1136. She is right on with her analysis. First, I applaud her for voting what is good for her district, not the party. Political parties are not a formal part of the government. People choose to organize that way, and that is their right under the constitution. It is called freedom of assembly. Everything else flows from that. Second, I am very impressed with her analysis of the politics of the thing. She is totally correct that this, by separating infrastructure from the socialist spending, makes the later less likely. That is why AOC and the progressives always wanted them linked.
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  1137. I commented on another video how my relatives, on my ex-wife's side, who are German, and quite successful, want to move to the US. Also, many tech entrepreneurs that I know of also want to move to the US. This is from a very successful country. Many of their best and brightest would like to move to the US. What does that say to you? This is the best place to follow your dreams and ambitions as an individual.
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  1138. The Belt and Road initiative is a joke. What is not mentioned is the failure of many of the projects, often due to poor quality construction. On top of that, many of the projects do not even make economic sense to the recipient countries. The transportation aspects of the program are explicitly meant to bypass the current transportation routes, not because they are more efficient (they are not), but because they bypass routes that were established by commercial companies making money. As a country with 600 million people (42% of the population) making no more than $145 per month, the amount spent on the Belt and Road, as well as space programs and a massive military buildup, is plain insanity. Thanks for doing the episode today. The background noise was no problem, and it is much appreciated as the content is quite important.
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  1139. Well, you asked. I did not listen to the whole extended quote from Blanchette's article. I jumped over the read the article myself. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. I did however listen at the very end. The west's support of democracies has actually been very strong. The equation is very complex, though. It includes geographic, historical and economic factors. Take the case of the states that broke away from the Soviet Union. These include the Baltics, Georgia and Ukraine for example. The Baltics quickly developed democratic institutions and integrated with the EU. Ukraine and Georgia, on the other hand, still were, are, under the influence of Russia due to long standing Russification programs. I was aware of the situation in Ukraine long before the war, and even the before the Crimea situation. I have a family friend who is in the diplomatic corps (very high up; he used to get us Cuban cigars, when that was hard, regularly which he sent back via diplomatic pouch) who was involved in the negotiations between Ukraine and Moscow from the beginning. He also served as the ambassador to one of the former Soviet republics. Even in Georgia today the situation vis-a-vis democracy is not great. By the way, one of my sons is married to a Georgian woman he met while traveling there. Economically, these states are not significant to the US. Geographically, they are difficult for the US and the EU to support. There is support, but it is by necessity limited. Ukraine is supported now because of the threat to peace for all of Europe. That is the Russian's doing. Then there is Taiwan. It is economically, historically and geographically significant to the US and the west in general. Actually, it is the last factor that is most important. Microchip foundries can be relocated. In fact, that is being done at present. Don't forget, and this is not to take anything away from the Taiwanese, the machinery and software that are critical to these plants are from elsewhere. Companies like TSMC are pure plays and they do a very good job of dominating the business. They did it through honest competition. Companies like Intel have foundry businesses, but they also have other concerns. Then, there is US support for Israel. One of the things that motivates it is that Israel is the only real democracy in the Middle East (or Southwest Asia, as South Asians like to call it). There are lots of historical reasons as well. Economically, despite what the Israelis like to claim, it is not so important. The CCP is making a big mistake that the west will tire. What was the whole Cold War all about? How long did that last? Does the CCP have any idea of how many troops the US had in Europe all through that "conflict"? Just look at how long the US has supported Taiwan already. Miscalculation by the CCP is to be expected.
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  1140. I have been following Stubb on YouTube as well. Good call.
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  1141. Well put. I, for one, don't think they will align their interests with the west. Best to pull out now.
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  1142. Oh, come on! A little turbulence? What a bunch of babies. Why were there water bottles and trays deployed during turbulence? This indicates a total lack of safety awareness.
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  1143. The internationally recognized rules on asylum state that one must apply in the first country one comes to which is safe and apply from there. So, if this is the "international law" (a stupid concept) then why don't the courts apply it. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) especially is misapplying the law when they block countries from deporting people, especially when those people clearly did not follow the law themselves. The other problem with asylum seekers is that they need to be supported by the receiving country. No international court has the right to tell a sovereign state how they must treat asylum seekers. Such courts do not have taxing power. This is one of the most basic functions of any government. A state is not sovereign if it cannot control how its own taxes are spent. Then there is the issue in Europe (and the US) that most asylum seekers in the world are economic migrants. These are not people the asylum laws were meant to protect. Frankly, the whole situation disgusts me. Meloni is doing the right thing.
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  1144. That people from various faiths around the world invoke God is something that everyone should know. Just as an example, we were talking to one of my neighbors just after her mother had died. She used the phrase "God willing". She is Hindu and often, prior to COVID, would host religious gatherings at her house. This is not uncommon. There are three faiths that worship the "same" God. These are the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In all others the concept of God may be different, or even non-existent. I really appreciate your addressing of this topic, and many others (Hitler's Socialism). I have read Chamberlin and several books making the point about the Nazi's being Socialist. Keep up the good work!
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  1145. Wait a minute. Do you mean a freeze warning for this particular date, or in general? Last time there was a freeze warning was 2013? I recall videos, perhaps on this channel, of freezing conditions so bad that the interiors of homes were freezing and covered in ice, just last winter.
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  1146. I don't know. Churchill was great during the war, was voted out of office and then came back for another four-year term. Trump had a similar comeback.
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  1147. THAT'S THE CHART! Sort of. The only thing missing is the forecast data in previous years. That would be difficult, I understand. What the chart shows, and this is something I harp on (and on and on...) about, is that the variance between targets and actuals (even considering the flawed source) is very large. So, getting excited about 0.2% difference is sort of silly. That it moves markets both scares and disgusts me. Another thing that any competent statistician or economist would notice is the time dependence on the variance. Wild differences before Xi. Then the two are right on. Then COVID hits and we get back to wide differences. Now the two line up. If this were presented as part of an academic paper it would be flagged as manipulated data from 2014 to 2020. The paper would be rejected, and some sort of action might be taken against the person presenting it.
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  1148. The most important point to note is that the First Amendment does not protect "correct" speech, it protects ALL speech. The second point is that proving that some speech is correct or not is very hard, if not impossible. I expect that if there is a test of this madness gets to the courts, it will be thrown out.
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  1149.  @JoanneLeon  You nailed it! That is precisely the situation. Many people have been talking about this and experiencing it. Trump finally did something substantive about it. Peter Zeihan puts it very well. After WWII we "bought" an alliance. We opened our markets to allies. Look at what happened with Japan. I remember going through that. By the way, I was not adversely affected by it personally, but I know many who were. A lot of what Trump was saying about China was said about Japan, and it was all true. After the Cold War (I miss the Cold War) was over we should have changed policy. While our presidents became ever more "populist" we are just now starting to concentrate on building up our own industrial base. This crazy supply chain mess we find ourselves in is the result of "financial" engineering, not real engineering. That is a long discussion. The only people who really benefited were the elites. Now the hedge funds are starting to break down. Their model is not working. It has caused a lot of harm.
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  1150. I thought that Trump was a racist. I am glad to see so many black people (am I using the correct term?) being welcomed into the Republican Party and the conservative movement. I am a little uncomfortable talking about it that way. I was brought up to be color blind, but it is striking.
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  1151. I actually met a man who was from, if I recall correctly, Czechoslovakia. He told us about how it was illegal to have a bible, and yet he had one and hid it. He was, of course, found out and spent time in prison for it. That only seemed to strengthen his faith.
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  1152. The sad thing is that when the CCP falls China is likely again to break up into competing warlord controlled regions. I have already been hearing that there is a nascent movement in southeastern China to break away. This region because of its location and geography has always been the most outward facing. I have even heard rumors of one city wanting to break away to ally/merge with Taiwan. All of this is rumor for now, but based on history it would not surprise me if it comes to pass.
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  1153. Ah, the Nikkei. It only took 34 years to get back near its peak. I remember those days in the late 1980s watching and waiting for it to hit and surpass 40,000. Some may remember Louis Rukeyser. He often mentioned it on his show. In the meantime the Dow Industrials have gone from 6,698.54 in December of 1989 to 37,680.54 in December of 2023. Frankly, it was government interference there that was a factor in its decline. Japan's markets were not that open to foreign investment. There are still impediments. Oh, and don't forget that Japan was supposed to overtake the US as the number one economy. In fact, there is a video listed in my sidebar of suggested videos right now titled "Why Couldn't JAPAN Finally Overtake the United States As the World's Largest Economy?" (channel Economics Nation). Fancy that.
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  1154. Come on guys. You can do better than that. The Foxconn situation is not just another way for the CCP to get money by imposing fines, etc. It is based on two things. One is the political situation with the founder running for president in Taiwan. The other is punishment for Foxconn's participation in their customers' decoupling activities.
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  1155. Wait just a minute. I thought that Trump was a misogynist.
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  1156. My father worked on the fuse for early cluster bombs. It had two settings. One would blow up at about six feet (two meters) to kill. The second would explode on the ground to wound, having exactly the effect you are talking about. I actually got to see this by the way when his lab was having an open house. We got to go to the secret annex he worked in. I was all of ten years old.
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  1157. The local government fiscal situation is just bonkers. This is a centrally controlled and planned economy. What's the problem? It mainly comes down to the targets set by the central government. This is the root cause. Intertwined with this is the internal structure of the CCP and the way in which officials progress in their careers. Overlaid on that is the rampant corruption. The sad thing is that until a CCP leader decides that the government is there to serve the people, the Chinese are totally screwed. They need a Trump. Another thing to note is that Canada's Trudeau once extolled the level of central control of the CCP. This was referring to the response to COVID. We now know that this was a disaster.
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  1158. German autos are already experiencing problems in China. Most are made in China in joint ventures. Volkswagen is currently shutting down its plant in Shanghai. BMW and Mercedes sales are slowing dramatically. Instead of trying to "save" their current sales in China, the German companies should be moving to new markets. Some of the Japanese manufacturers are already doing so.
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  1159. Feudalism and aristocracy have returned to China. It is similar to Russia. All totalitarian states move this way. Where do you think the aristocracy came from in ancient times. It was tribal leaders growing into petty kings. There is nothing special about these people as a group.
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  1160. Very interesting video. This is an important subject. Actually, a lot of it brought me back to those days (not all the way back to the beginning) at least from the late 1960s. The earlier events and players I have only read about in histories. I would also like to say that it is interesting to hear the Chinese pronounced by a native speaker. The language is very different, but also, it seems, poetic.
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  1161.  @Artaxo  Great suggestion. If it does disappear, and you took your eyes off it, then you haven't wasted time.
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  1162. The US has an all-volunteer Army. One thing that changes with that is that officers no longer have an attitude of move up or out. So, many people stay in even if their promotion path has slowed or stopped. This is mostly because of the specializations and technology.
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  1163. I think there was a movie about that. It was "Minority Report". Don't forget, you are innocent until proven guilty. At least that is our system. Especially in financial matters, it is incumbent on the individual to do due diligence. Investments are not guaranteed. That is usually stated. Frankly, anyone who saw SBF, from what I heard, should have had an inkling that there was something wrong with the whole thing. If it seems too good to be true, then it probably is not true.
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  1164. Of course, Katy, you had an Oxford man on to discuss a Cambridge situation. Just kidding. Well, sort of. Actually I am a big fan of Douglas and think his analysis is right on.
    5
  1165. All this talk about the US having to deal with two different fronts, Ukraine and Israel, and that somehow it will strengthen the Axis of Evil's hand is just so much drivel. Do people forget that the US fought, simultaneously, two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, using US troops. This is very recently. In the current instances we have two allies fighting, both with competent and motivated militaries. If China attacks in Taiwan, then the US still has its own forces available, as well as those of various allies. As for Japan, the information I have seen is that they are rapidly militarizing, and they are very competent. If this is the strategy of the CCP and its allies, then they are doomed to fail.
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  1166. Your take on this is quite naive. The Metaverse is just a rerun of Second Life. A lot of that has turned into pornography. I used Second Life for a couple of remote meetings where our avatars sat around a table, and we talked. Today, we do this with Zoom or Microsoft Teams. Those are much more useful than this virtual world stuff. Just look at any digitally animated video, amateur or professional. They are not nearly as good. Our ability to interact directly in the "real" world on-line has made this meta stuff irrelevant.
    5
  1167. George is totally wrong on Trump's management of the situation. It is both brilliant and necessary. In fact, George said that prolonged negotiations will not work. Look at TTIP (look it up). That treaty was sunk by chlorinated chicken (really!). Another aspect of this is political. Trump currently has a mandate and a favorable political climate. He has to take advantage of that now.
    5
  1168. Of course, we have the situation where clothes are relative cheap in the West because of an development decision made decades ago. I remember when most of my clothes were made in the US. Yes, I am old. Then we consciously moved a lot of that production overseas to help undeveloped countries build up an industry. Clothing was one of the first because it is relatively low tech. This seemed like a good idea at the time and helped lift a lot of people out of poverty. Now look at what it has enabled.
    5
  1169.  @UROKRK  Sal's channel is very good for that information. The other issue is the veracity of the GDP figures. They may well be in an actual recession with negative growth. Data on business closures seems to indicate that.
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  1170. If he doesn't flee, he will most likely be stung up by the people. Just think about what has happened in this civil war. He is done for one way or another.
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  1171. I got rid of sugar (and all other sweeteners) and almost all gluten. My gut is sooo much better. I have also moderated my cheese intake and eat mostly feta (I am of Greek descent, after all). I have cut out red meat almost entirely. I actually have not cut out anything completely except for sugar. I am mostly pescatarian and have watched Dr. Ekberg's video on fish to eat and follow that. I am not totally keto. I do eat legumes (or pulses). I eat vegetarian about three times a week. About three times I have fish, and one time eggs. This dietary change followed a divorce. I have lost 45 lbs., my blood pressure is normal, I have no joint pain, have not taken a medication (even and aspirin) and my poops are normal. This has been going on for five years, and I am my 60s. I am even getting back to where my body was in my late 20s. As Dr. Ekberg stresses, diet is everything.
    4
  1172. Great video. This whole thing brings back the good old days at the height of the Cold War. I miss the Cold War. Good to see it coming back. I was once working for an aerospace and defense contractor. At one point I was the CIO of the spacecraft plant. This was in a different group, operations, than I had been in before, which was engineering. All of a sudden, I became aware of details that in engineering I would not have dealt with. One was that the company (in conjunction with relevant government agencies, I assume) was tracking 15 known Soviet spies. The word "known" was stressed because we knew that we did not know all of them. I have started to see renewed talk about "illegals" in the press these days. There was a long and detailed article in the WSJ very recently about some in Europe that were caught recently.
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  1173. I don't know about this. I have seen YouTubers who were in the US nuclear forces who had interactions with these guys, and what they reported is not encouraging. From their descriptions, they seem more like the regular Russian army than what is described here.
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  1174.  @Vassiann  Is that true? The missiles are not much use if there are no warheads on them. It takes time to install them. I am certain that the warheads on the submarines are installed. All active silos also have warheads installed, at least in the US. The airborne warheads are generally not loaded onto the aircraft until needed. This applies to strategic arm and the stockpile we have in Europe which may be carried by fighters.
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  1175. Exactly. That is why I discount anything the investment community says about China. They all were in the same boat, even people like Warren Buffett.
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  1176. Great idea. I have done that for years.
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  1177.  @TheGoreforce  Are you sure about that? Think about the workers who lose their jobs as western firms move out. Look at Foxconn, the Japanese car companies, etc. They treated their workers much, much better than the native Chinese companies, including the SOEs. Even a lot of Chinese private companies are moving operations out of China.
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  1178. Are you sure about that?
    4
  1179. Pettis hits the mark yet again. The only thing I have a problem with is that everyone treats CCP controlled as a normal economy. We have all these theories and analysis tools that were developed for capitalist economies which I am confident are not applicable to autocrat run economies. The issue about what the US is doing with Russian assets and did in WWI and WWII is a red herring. As pointed out, these are war situations. In point of fact, the US has only frozen assets in the current conflict, not confiscated them. There is a move to do that, but it would only be within a legal format. There have already been situations where Chinese banks have denied Russians access to the yuan deposits when they wanted to convert them to dollars for various purchases abroad. Why do you think that the Russians have not shifted all their sovereign assets to China? The Euro is not much better and has either stagnated or declined as a world trade currency. Why? Because in the debt crisis they had with their southern tier they actually confiscated savings. Finally, the US government does not control the Eurodollar market. Individual companies decide to use this mechanism to facilitate international trade. This is what the CCP cannot understand.
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  1180.  @shundi4264  You know little about freedom of speech.
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  1181. Both Iraq and Afghanistan are artificial constructs of the British. They both share the same disfunction. I think that we may see a similar evolution.
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  1182. Tony, thank you for extra content. This is a very important issue. The discussion of the difficulty of administering any handouts, especially the regional problems, is probably the most important issue. The author talks about squeezing out the private sector. This is Xi's plan in fact. On the other hand, Xi is opposed to handouts on other grounds. It would distribute power too widely, and even in an environment without overt corruption, this would be a real problem for the central government. In fact, it parallels the whole debacle with property sales and real estate development.
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  1183.  @jazzrockr  Very good points. I am an ardent supporter of Israel, but being an American I am still sometimes uncomfortable with the role religion plays in their government. I understand it, but it is something alien to an American. Ultimately it is tied up with the uniqueness of what it means to be a Jew and their whole history, which is long. If you read that history (and I read the Bible every day), then you get the feeling that not much has changed in almost 4,000 years.
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  1184. Safe zones for civilians? Really? With the record of Hamas and other terrorist groups using human shields, this concept is laughable. I could see Egypt letting Palestinian civilians in, but only if they were confined to some sort of isolated camp. Who would fund this? Who would run these? Another Palestinian refugee camp? Consider the previous ones. The Palestinians have caused problems for Egypt in the Sinai in the past. They are unlikely to welcome in the same people into their territory now.
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  1185. I agree that the government should not be involved with crypto beyond the things you mention such as money laundering. Government regulation that "protects" people from doing stupid things with their money is not a good idea, and where would it end. I do question putting tokens in the same class as collectables. In general, collectibles are actual things people want to own and trade.
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  1186.  @guccidonbuzzflightyear4440  Good point.
    4
  1187.  @mjoshy9347  It is clear that you have no sense of history. Soviet communism had the goal of taking over the world and imposing the Marxist-Leninist system all over the world. Much like the Communist Chinese want to do today. If it weren't for the US, and 500K troops in Germany during the Cold War, Western Europe would most likely have been overrun by the USSR. And don't forget the US nuclear "umbrella" that backed it all up. Your ignorance of history is astounding. And, if the US institutions were so bad, why would so many countries want to join them. NATO is a US led institution. The Baltic states joined after they were free of Soviet communism. Ukraine and Georgia want to join. Why is this? It is Russia that creates troubles.
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  1188.  @EveryoneIsAmelak  What does that have to do with sending money to wealthy colleges? If you don't know why the US supports Israel, then you are incredibly uninformed.
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  1189. @ That is true. I have worked at a university (many, many years ago) as a paid student researcher. Even then I was aware of the massive percentage of the funds going to overhead. What I don't understand is why the universities with massive endowments don't just fund the research themselves. Have you looked at the size of those endowments? Either tax the endowments or require them to use the money to fund research themselves.
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  1190. Very insightful and well presented. I have a financial advisor friend who was hoping that Xi would get his third term. The reason was that Xi would destroy China. He seems very prescient now. Who knows. I once saw a video, on a channel like yours, that claimed that elements in Shanghai wanted to leave CCP controlled China and join with Taiwan. I don't know how true that is, but if you look at history, many of the southern coastal cities looked outward rather than inward for trade and commodities.
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  1191. Stealing my thunder. You put it very well.
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  1192. I think it's pronounced "Louie" Viton. It is French, after all.
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  1193. It is very interesting to see this happening in "real time". The comment about the companies having to relocate is important. I have seen many, even Chinese, companies relocate. I recently bought three items (battery powered lawn tools) from a company that manufactured in China. Two of the three are made in Vietnam. The reality is that industrial plant is always being renewed and revised. Moving it is not quite as big a deal as some make out. You only have to look at the US before the opening to China and the move away from the Northeast and Midwest. A lot of that was driven by issues with labor unions. It happens all the time. After the opening to China, I also had experience with major companies that had just recently opened a new plant in the US and turned around and moved it to China. With the contract manufacturing model most companies use now, the move is actually simplified.
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  1194. The decoupling is a lot easier than you think. Don't forget that a similar thing happened in the move of manufacturing to China (and before that to Japan).
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  1195. Good to have you back, Tony. I missed you. Your video is one of the first i watch in the morning, with my coffee and a good cigar. It is interesting to see the government figures. As usual, those figures and the reporting based on them are often at odds with other reporting I see about China. One thing I find puzzling is this issue of regional differences being a problem. In the US there are big disparities between regions and individual states. I have never seen it as a problem. Each state in the US works on dealing with its own issues and the states often compete. Business and populations ebb and flow between the states and that is considered a normal thing. There will be periods of stability and then, generally with industrial change, things shift. We are seeing such a shift now. I see two reasons that this is not a societal issue in the US. One is the federal nature of the US political system giving more responsibility and autonomy to each state. The other is that the US is a very ethnically and racially mixed country. China is not. Germany, by the way, has some of the same problems with regional disparities as China does, and is also an ethnically more monolithic country.
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  1196. Well, Erin, you must be doing something right. Congratulations.
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  1197.  @vaakdemandante8772  Well, I think you overplay the power of business interests. Actually, for most of business, war is not good for business. Also, there is not a real separation between business and the populace. If you hadn't noticed, most people work (in a business) for their living. As for there being a book about it, I can't believe you would base your opinions on a book. For just about any issue, you can find "a" book on all three sides of the issue.
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  1198. Tony, we understand. Enjoy your day off. Manufacturing, driven by unsustainable debt not profitable? Who would have thunk it. Why would this be any different from unprofitable spending on infrastructure driven by unsustainable government debt? China's HSR is just the most obvious example. Of course, the CCP are a bunch of commies (it's in the name), so what would they know about profitable investments. The fact is, they don't care. It's in the doctrine.
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  1199. Two countries that trade amongst themselves should not use the US dollar as an intermediate currency. If Brazil wants to sell raw materials and food to China and then to use the proceeds to buy Chines goods, then that trades should be in RMB. This makes sense. Staying with the BRICS though, look at the situation between Russia and India. India is buying Russian oil, and Russia stated that they wanted the payments to be in rubles. The Indians have decided not to do this, but then reneged. They are doing the trade in dollars. They considered a third currency, but that did not work out. Another issue with RMB is currency controls. Russia has found out that it cannot take RMB out of China to convert and use elsewhere. So, why do most people use the dollar?
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  1200. Have you ever thought about why this happens to these places all the time? This is not new. Many of these countries do not have, even in good times, the carrying capacity for their populations. They are regions that cannot, even in the best of times, feed their own people. They rely on outside resources. Think about it.
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  1201.  @nicks3608  No, these are commercial off the shelf (COTS) items that I am referring to. I also have experience with the computers used in the field that are, as you say, held to much more stringent standards. Those are indeed much more expensive, but are versions of commercial models.
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  1202.  @gmw3083  That's the narrative that matters. Even when referring to China, the CCP is a Marxist-Leninist party. A western idea. China also spends their time comparing themselves to the west, and everything they do is in reference to the west. They spend massive resources trying to influence the west. Even the belt and road initiative is a way to gain influence by getting countries to turn from the west. So, what's your point. Actually, the issue I was referring to was specifically about US politics, so you seem to totally misunderstand what was being discussed.
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  1203. I remember hearing about this at the time. I am surprised that there have not been more incidents.
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  1204. David, you make a historical mistake toward the end. At 56:25 or so, you state that the American Revolution pretends to be the French Revolution. Forgive me if I am wrong, but the American preceded the French by about 20 or more years. It was the French copying the American, and then proceeding to radicalize it. The US had the experience of the British system to draw on, and thus did not go too far.
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  1205. Excellent overview of the situation. The land and mineral rights ownership difference between the US and Europe (and probably most everywhere else) is something that is fixable but deeply embedded in European culture. I ran into this when I was living in the UK. In the US the landowner not only owns the mineral rights, but also the hunting and fishing rights. These are two activities that I enjoy. So, when I got there, I was asking about opportunities to partake in both. That's when I found out that they are all separate. Being a history buff (purely amateur, my field in technology, software and hardware) I looked into it. It really goes back to feudal times. In England, the monarch actually owns the whole place. Obviously, this has evolved, and the monarch would have difficulty claiming many of the old rights and prerogatives. He gives permissions to various people to use the land for particular purposes. Hunting rights, and to some extent fishing rights, were (still are) jealously guarded by the monarch. On the fishing rights, I had two interesting experiences where I lived which was Winchester in Hampshire. The River Test (the hallowed Test) was near the city. There was a town, Stockbridge, where I learned to fly fish. There is a hotel there and in the early 18th century they obtained about 12 miles of fishing rights on the Test. Then they set up a club. Prospective members had to live a day's ride (by horse) away. This was all done to generate business for the hotel. The club is still in operation. It costs about 400GBP to rent a small stretch of the river for the day for up to four "rods". On the other hand, the River Itchen runs through the city of Winchester, and anyone can fish there within the city limits (with a normal fishing license, of course). I tell this story because it is indicative of the many land use conventions that one finds all over Europe that are drastically different from the US, as Peter has pointed out. That would be difficult, from a purely cultural point of view, to change. One other thought. In Communist China the CCP owns the whole place. They don't actually sell land there, although one often hears about people buying land, or a home (usually and apartment). Actually, they are only paying for the right to use the land for anywhere from 40 to 70 years.
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  1206. You hit the nail on the head. To say all countries have the "right" is to leave out one thing. Rights need to be protected. That means military or police power. That costs money. People are only willing to spend that money if they have a vested interest. We bore the cost of the world's policeman for decades because of the Cold War threat from the Soviet Union. Our continuation of that was a form of inertia. People in the US are waking up to that, finally.
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  1207. Another wonderful lecture. You really don't have to make apologies about going on too long. I find these videos very informative and could listen for hours. I feel like I am getting a wonderful history education for very little. My sons and I have computer science backgrounds. Their mother is a mechanical engineer. One thing we all have in common is a love of history. We even lived in England, Winchester actually, at the beginning of the millennium. The wonderful thing there is the span of history. Once, while at the Great Hall you mention, we asked for directions to St. Giles Hill. The woman working there said, take the straight road, the Roman road... I could go on, as you often do (and don't stop), but I will leave it a that. I was very gratified when, while my younger son who was at university said to me, he enjoyed reading about math, computers and history. I felt so aligned with him at that time. My three vices are whiskey, cigars and books. Books are the biggest one, in many ways. When we moved from Philadelphia to Chicago the movers told us we had 3,000 pounds of books. That was 30 years ago, and I haven't stopped.
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  1208. The use of the term "flamethrower" in this context is not correct in, at least, American usage. Thermobaric weapons are different from flame throwers. The use of the term in this context confuses the discussion. Since flamethrowers predate thermobaric weapons, they have an established meaning.
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  1209. The analysis by Mao (the first article quoted) is very well reasoned. What I don't get is an appreciation of problems in the secondary market in housing. I also like that he mentions a new Cold War and global market fragmentation. This is one of the major themes of Peter Zeihan's works, by the way. It makes sense. The crazily complex supply chains we have now are a big problem. They are too easily disrupted and depend on all players following the same rules. China has shown that it does not want to follow even the basic rules, either internationally or internally. The one saving grace is that China has isolated its banking sector and requires local ownership. Thus, when a company pulls out of China, its losses are much less than they otherwise would be.
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  1210. It is quite acceptable, whatever your stand on abortion, for companies to offer this. As long as they are using their own money, that is. For a state that restricts abortion, since this the political decision that state, it is also right that they eliminate tax breaks for such support. Of course, if this money is used to perform a lot of late term abortions, there may be a significant backlash against the company. As for the ESG thing, I think that in the near future we will see waning support for that. When people cannot travel or heat their homes because of fuel shortages, they will agitate for more energy production, for example. Electric cars are not the answer. If we replaced all the ICE vehicles with EVs, the amount of electricity we would have to produce would go up by a massive amount. This would, in Europe's case, more coal. In Germany, especially, because of their decision on nuclear, they already are. With gas supplies drying up from Russia, it will increase the amount of coal used. And Germany's coal is among the dirtiest.
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  1211.  @attilamarics3374  Don't be silly.
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  1212.  @briseboy  Brilliant!
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  1213. One of the first commentators I have heard on this channel who actually acknowledges that there were elements within the security services and army that might have encouraged Prigozhin. That should have been obvious, but many commentators, who supposedly have years of experience either missed it or are just plain ignorant of how these things work.
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  1214.  @ryanward10  Well, I don't think "sadly" is an appropriate term. All issues are partisan issues until it becomes a direct threat to national security. While I think that Ukraine is a totally different case, America's experience in recent wars has a detrimental effect on the politics of the day. The outcome in Ukraine, one way or another, does not directly affect American security. The US playing the role as the world's policeman has not been relevant for three decades. Two major powers who benefited from that role, China and Russia, have decided they don't like it. Frankly, they are both vulnerable and look set to fall into chaos in the near term.
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  1215. I remember when home interest rates were around 18%. Recently they have gone up to the 4% range, in some cases. My first two homes I had under lease/purchase agreements. This was done with the hope interest rates would come down in the future, and my payments would be credited to the agreed purchase price. It is not a good thing, what is happening, but it is not catastrophic. Also remember that there is a huge market in refinancing loans, I have done that myself, until I paid off my home (twice, but that is another story). By the way, I love the comment in the description.
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  1216.  @jamesdallas1493  Thank you.
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  1217. Tony, increasing sponsored content to one a week is not a problem for me. Actually, the spots I have seen often have some interesting content. If it something that I am not interested in, I can easily skip it. I vote for doing what you need to do to keep the channel viable.
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  1218. The cost has nothing to do with the relative cost of the weapons in question. The true cost is the cost of the target.
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  1219.  @amunra5330  Understood. I wonder how common that is. In the US examples I used, one doesn't need to sign a separate contract. It is part of the general employment rules.
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  1220. Parties do not have to adhere to the standards you mention. Don't get me wrong, I am not a fan of the SNP. But you need to be clear on this issue. Political parties are organizations that consist of people who voluntarily decide to join. The party itself is not actually the government. They effectively become associated with the government by virtue of their voting power in the parliament. Equating government with party is a common misconception. For example, the Tories had a majority in Westminster, and yet they could not get enough of their own members to vote for a Brexit deal until a general election was held which changed the membership of the parliamentary party. I know these points are subtle, but I would expect more out of you.
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  1221. Helicopters are inherently dangerous. The number of military personnel lost to helicopter accidents is very high. In fact, in the US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, a large proportion of the deaths have been attributed to helicopter accidents.
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  1222.  @D-B-Cooper  Actually, oxygen usually occurs in the atmosphere as a molecule, O2 (two atoms of oxygen bound together). In the upper atmosphere atomic oxygen (a single, unbound atom) can exist in quantity because of UV radiation. In the rest of the atmosphere, it appears in molecules. So, before criticizing, if you see something that you think does not make sense, you may want to look it up. I assume you are watching this on a computer or smart phone. So, that would be easy to do.
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  1223. The idea that tariffs would be increased in areas where the government is the only sensible action. Putting money into an industrial sector only to have a competitor that is clearly not playing by the rules is just a waste.
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  1224. You should not be surprised about the support for Ireland in the US. I remember meeting IRA operatives in Georgetown in Washington, DC. They were there to solicit weapons. I wasn't part of that, but just met them through friends. They weren't even hiding. Even those Americans who are of English descent are not all that keen on the UK. Don't forget, at the time the American Revolution ended a lot of royalists that lived in the US went back to the England. The ones who were left were the anti-colonialists. Also never forget that the US was isolationist prior to both world wars. Part of the reasoning was that by supporting Europeans like the UK we would be supporting their colonial empires. After WWII part of the deal with the Europeans for their security on the continent was that they would have to give up their empires. So, you can see where the attitude comes from.
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  1225. "His yes is yes; his no is no". Very Biblical.
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  1226. Wow! When I started working at my first full time job, I worked way more than 40 hours a week. And I loved it. The work was interesting and the people were interesting. Actually, I have had few, if any jobs, where I worked less than 50 hours a week. These were all salaried jobs. In most cases, there was no overtime pay. Once you get into management, or higher-level leadership roles, this is actually the statutory norm. Oh, and by the way, one often was "on call" during weekends and holidays.
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  1227. The marijuana question is interesting, and it needs more study. I went to high school in the early 1970s in a very good neighborhood. Our school district was one of the top ten in the country. When they did surveys of the student body on drug use 85% admitted to smoking marijuana and 4% admitted to doing "hard" drugs. I think these numbers may be a little low. And yet, despite that, 100% graduated and 100% went to university. There were also no mass shootings at the time that I can remember. At that time people who had firearms often didn't even lock them up. I am not a big advocate of marijuana or drug use. Heck, I don't drink, or smoke weed, although I have in the past. But considering what I said in the previous paragraph I would hope that a more scientific approach to understanding the causes of both the school performance problem and the violence problem would be applied. I don't know what the answer is, but I am fairly sure it is not as simple as the mayor is making out. I do applaud him though for looking for answers and caring (even if he is a Democrat).
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  1228. The issue of college students studying subjects without major economic demand is one that interests me. We have this issue in the US. All the talk about the college debt crisis, when you dive into it, usually involves individuals with a "useless" degree. In the US we would only see Chinese (or Indian) students in areas like science, engineering and maths (especially statistics). Business and economics are other such areas of study, although those tend to be more geographic in application. One of the outcomes was that there would be many more Chinese women than western women in these classes. But often when talking to the Chinese women I was told that they would rather be studying something else. Marketing is one area I recall a lot. We are already starting to grapple with this useless degree problem in the US. In the past, especially before the college loan programs, one had to have personal money to get a "useless" degree, but that was okay because it was your money. Now that you are using national resources, it becomes an issue for all of us. The same is true in China. One other story about China and degrees you might enjoy. I have a brother-in-law who is an engineer in an international company. About least ten years ago he was doing business in China. His local counterpart was also an engineer. This colleague's brother did not have a degree but had started two businesses and was much wealthier.
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  1229. The quotes from the Congressional report are very strong, and very correct. From what you have quoted, I have some hope. As for all the critical materials from China, one has to remember that these do not originate from China, in general, but are processed there. This is done because China ignores environmental regulations, even their own, in processing them. That is why the country is so polluted. The latest I heard is that 90% of the freshwater resources in China are polluted. The land is not any better off. These are all solvable problems. Proper incentives can change the whole equation without massive disruption.
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  1230. I really like this channel, but this report is incomplete and biased. On the submarine deal: The French subs were originally a nuclear design. Since Australia has rejected nuclear power, they had the French modify the subs to diesel. This project is way behind schedule and has been performing poorly. In the meantime, the world has changed. What the US and UK were willing to do is to let the Australians share in the nuclear technology so that they could maintain it themselves. They are also building the hulls in Australia. None of this the French would do. On fishing: When the UK left the EU their statutory fishing waters were removed from the EU, which manages all their waters collectively. There is a treaty on this and there is a dispute, but frankly, France has not been keeping to it. The tension is being exacerbated by the French, not the UK.
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  1231.  5Head  How can you say they have no weapons? What do you call the rockets? They also seem to have lots of guns and anti-tank weapons.
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  1232. Tony, stay safe. Don't get whatever is going around. As for the Myanmar situation, there is ample evidence that elements within China are supporting the scammers. This may include organized crime gangs in China. The phone and communication lines used in Myanmar are, as I have seen reported, Chinese. The rebels there are all of a sudden well equipped and have given the junta forces lots of problems. It is very likely that the situation reported in the WSJ involves rival gangs turning on each other.
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  1233. Very useful. I really appreciate the historical context. Of course, at this time Pakistan is in bad shape both economically and politically. Iran has its problems outside of the Baloch region. Perhaps a confrontation in this region will force Iran to pull back on some of the other regions where it is causing trouble.
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  1234.  Prasenjit Roy  Actually, the Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. Last I checked he is not Chinese. The NYT is owned by a group of hedge funds, with BlackRock being the largest.
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  1235. You don't believe that America is exceptional? What history books have you been reading?
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  1236. Asylum seekers should be kept in well-guarded camps until they are fully vetted. Then, once let out, they should be well monitored. The whole set of asylum laws we have are a response to what happened in WWI to the Jews and other groups. That was a tragedy. Our situation today is quite different. We need laws for the situation we have today, not some historical situations.
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  1237. What a load of crap! Job training from the Federal Government. My uncle worked for a plan that shut down in Massachusetts long ago. There were federal job training programs, but no jobs. This promise of federal largesse is just plain stupid and a waste of taxpayers' money. Shrink the government.
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  1238. Of course, what is not said, is that this upward trend in Chinese equities is most probably a type of bottom fishing. That money can just as easily flow out as in.
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  1239. What Prof. Lo says at about 30:15 brings to mind another IBM related story. At one point they were involved in building what would have been the fastest supercomputer in the world at the University of Illinois. I went to a seminar there and got to see the system being built and got information on the technology. I was, from my time at IBM, familiar with a lot of this. One of the salient points of this new supercomputer was that it was made of a number of large modules. At one point, IBM determined that one of the main requirements for the machine was unobtainable and withdrew from the project. This was not a loss for them at all. Each module, consisting of two large cabinets joined together, was a formidable high-performance computer in itself. They sold a lot of them to Wall Street trading firms.
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  1240. The board supports the CEO? Didn't an experienced board support the CEO of Theranos? Stating that a board had a particular opinion is just plain stupid, as far as investors go. Just think of all the companies, with a long lineage and strong management culture have gone wrong. What is needed is outside analysis, not internal statements.
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  1241. You cannot believe the retail sales numbers, can you? Auto prices have dropped through the floor. I see videos with shopping districts in major cities showing many of the outlets closed. Also, this use of the year-on-year measure to measure where we are after the pandemic is totally obsolete and misleading. For an economist the only valid measures are with pre-pandemic levels of activity.
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  1242. You are correct. She paid a criminal to smuggle her to the UK. That makes her a criminal. If they so much wanted to be together, why did he not go to her? Actually, all these migrants are breaking international law. The refugee law states that one should apply for asylum I the first safe country they get to. Are they making the argument that France is not a safe country. Safe means not at war. Safe means that law and order prevail. This is all a scam.
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  1243. Looks like that is where things are heading. A diet of rice and pickled veggies is in their future.
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  1244. Fantastic! There is no international law. We are a planet divided into nation states. Each nation will tread its own path. Look at the US and the UK. In the US we have a written constitution that lays out how the government works and stands as an authority that controls government. I rather like that. The UK has a different system, without a specific written constitution. These are different systems, but they work for each country. We have similar standards, but not identical. That is fine. I have lived in the UK and was very involved in the school my children attended. I was elected to the board of governors (had to get Home Office permission to have a foreigner on the board) and was able to participate in local politics and life. It was different, but it was what the people in the UK had built for themselves over a long history. Ukraine has a different situation and system altogether. They are a young country and will evolve. Assuming they come out of this mostly intact, they will look to Western Europe and the US for inspiration. I hope and pray they will come through. Russia is a disaster. They never have had a "democratic" system. For centuries they had an autocracy. Then they had the Marxist/Leninist revolution, another totalitarian system. Then they had a corrupted "democracy". That is their system. As long as people there accept that, then that is what will prevail. Perhaps it is their fate. If they decide to change, great. I would not hold my breath.
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  1245. This reminds me of an event, about half a century ago, when there was a suspected detection of a magnetic monopole in a cosmic ray experiment. The buzz, at least in the physics department, was epic. There was a meeting held with all the faculty and students (including undergraduates) to discuss it. One event is not enough. The comparison with one UFO is totally bogus.
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  1246. Young people don't tend to vote. In fact, about 35 were arrested in the Northwest (Portland perhaps) protesting against Trump's election. It turns out that they actually hadn't voted. They love to protest (look at history, back to 1848 going through to the Vietnam era to Tiananmen Square to today), but they don't often participate in the process itself.
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  1247. That such reports get published in China is quite amazing. It means that there are people who think and can objectively analyze the situation. How long such people can remain free from coercive measures remains to be seen. Of course, such reports will not get to Xi. As for the housing developer loans, this is just a bad idea. That is probably why the banks had been slow in granting them until pushed by the central government. They did the analysis and decided it was foolish. Of course they were overruled. Is putting money into a sector that is already overbuilt a prudent idea? In a lot of places, the regulators would stop such lending. It would most probably be cheaper to take the money and make those that lost money to developers through "rotten tail" projects whole. This would release the money into the consumer sector much more quickly. Of course, that would interfere with the graft and corruption flow, so it will never happen.
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  1248.  @ducknorris233  What is that supposed to mean? Use your words.
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  1249.  @Mivoat  That's just plain silly. There is an article in a recent WSJ article titled "GE Appliances Spins Stronger Sales from Supply Chain Overhaul" with a subtitle "The manufacturer has brought production into the U.S. and changed how it manages inventory". With low-end products it is even easier to break China's "grip". As for materials processing, China does not even enforce its own environmental laws. What the west has done is to move pollution and poor labor practices to China. People, and more importantly, governments, have finally noticed, and this is resulting in barriers being raised on Chinese goods. Production will move elsewhere. In fact, many Chinese companies have been doing this for various reasons. So, talking about cornering any market sector just shows ignorance of how industry works.
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  1250.  @gawkthimm6030  Well, I don't know about France. Wasn't it Macron who has been pushing for an EU army. In his speech on that, he identified the EU's potential adversaries as Russia, China and the US.
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  1251.  @ScentlessSun  The best type of advertising.
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  1252. Kind of in the name, isn't it.
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  1253.  @Ezekiel903  Good observation. As Peter Zeihan likes to say, he has shot the messenger so many times no one wants to bring him any information. He is in his own little world.
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  1254. When I worked at NASA there were always digital clocks everywhere that displayed the time in Zulu time. This was GMT without any daylight savings time. We became adept in converting this to local time. It was a testament to our mathematical acumen.
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  1255. Kazakhstan was Soviet territory. Stalin was a Georgian. So, to say that Stalin would not order a test on Russian soil is technically correct, but meaningless. It was done on Soviet soil. At that point they did not think of the Russian SSR as something separate or unique. The Soviet space rocket launch site was, and the Russian one is, in Kazakhstan. The location was chosen on technical grounds, not, as you imply, some sort of nationalistic grounds. If you are going to talk about things happening during the Soviet era, you need to forget about the current situation. Kind of disappointing, really.
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  1256. It is too bad that we couldn't do something like the American Volunteer Group (Flying Tigers) which fought for the Chinese before the US entered WWII. I am sure there would be no shortage of pilots ready to volunteer. Heck, it doesn't have to be Americans, or just Americans. It doesn't have to be F-16s, or just F-16s.
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  1257. At about 8:15 the narrator uses the phrase "...suppress dissent and restrict citizens rights...". Of course, in China under the CCP, there is no such thing as "citizens rights". The fact is that the people are not "citizens" in the way that the term is generally understood. They are "subjects", or as some say, "slaves". This is true of any communist regime we have ever seen. By the way, the Nazis were National SOCIALISTS. Their mixed economy, state controlled with some private enterprise, moving toward total state control, is exactly the same as China's current state of affairs. In addition, the CCP uses nationalism (drop the populism label, it is imprecise and misleading) and racism to justify their actions. So, tell me what the difference is. Ever noticed how much this also resembles feudalism? It even goes down to restricting people's movement and tying them to the land. I am speaking here of household registration in China. Similar restrictions also held in the Soviet Union.
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  1258.  @skydragon23101979  Have you seen the problems China is having in Pakistan and Afghanistan with Islamists. China is asking the Pakistani Army to help protect their people and projects in Afghanistan. Even in Pakistan, the insurgencies in Baluchistan and the tribal areas are getting out of control. The Chinese are often targets, and those projects are not going well. As for the government to government contacts, these are geopolitically motivated, and are not necessarily supported by the populations. If you hadn't noticed, the countries you mention are authoritarian regimes. Why do you think China is repressing the Uighurs in Xinjiang. It is because of Islamist separatists. They have extracted pledges from the Afghans not to support this. Do you think that will really be the case? Does the Taliban actually have the ability to do that? I think not.
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  1259.  @johnnynephrite6147  They do, but it may also be an indication that the situation is much, much worse than any government figures would admit.
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  1260. The ban for life for the Chairman and Vice Chairman of Evergrande made me laugh. I don't think they have much life left to live. Again with the price declines. These numbers do not represent a valid number and even in the US would generally not be talked about. Now, correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I can tell these are the listed prices, just as with new homes. In the US this is not a measure followed much. The data which is valid is actual sales prices and number of homes available on the market. The numbers and reports I have seen on these statistics show a much larger drop.
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  1261. This idea that mass protests are the will of the people is all bunk. Let me give you an example form the US. During the Vietnam War there were frequent mass protests, at least on a par with what we see today in France (and Israel, another situation). And yet, in the 1972 election, Richard Nixon won by a landslide. He was not anti-war. The news media likes these protests because they provide material to fill out their programs. What matters is what the government can legitimately do.
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  1262. Winnie the Pooh
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  1263.  @youwouldnotlikeitanyway  It was. Talking about Spain, this was when Franco was still in power. I recall camping out on the beach in either Barcelona or Valencia. We asked the Guardia Civil officers who were there during the day if it was alright. They said yes. At the time they went around with submachineguns and semi-auto pistols, and the hats. Then, at about three AM we were awakened by another set of guards who demanded our passports. I was with some Germans. Fortunately I knew a little Spanish and things went well.
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  1264. The statement at about 13:00 amazes me. Various scholars, and of course autocrats, keep telling us that western style democracy is dying. Who are they kidding? Look at China. Look at Venezuela. I love the last part of the statement: "Centralized dictatorship will be consigned to the dustbin of history". It warms my heart to see this said in China. I have always maintained that the Chinese are the people in northeast Asia who are most closely aligned with the US in temperament. You can see it in the diaspora. Chinese people have always been entrepreneurs and hardworking people outside of the grip of the CCP. I have met many of them. Just look at Taiwan. This does not dampen my criticism of Chinese people under the CCP. I can only hope they will be freed from the shackles of communism soon.
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  1265. The housing market is toast. Trust the official statistics? Policy measures? Come on man. The most important market is the secondary market. An individual, or investor buys hoping to sell at a higher price. So, I wonder how the market analysis is being done. Look at this video from the channel China Observer titled "Something Scarier Than Housing Crashes Is Already Happening in China". In the first part is a lot of on the ground data about what is happening in the market. It seems to go against the analysis mentioned here, in a big way. For one thing, I am very disappointed at the analysts who take CCP data at face value. They would not do that in the west. Of course, in China, the CCP makes it difficult, if not impossible. That said, making prognostications based on CCP policy pronouncements is sort of silly, isn't it. These analysts are applying models that work in western economies to China. That is just statistical malpractice. I am trying to keep it clean here. Another situation that belies one of the statements made is also important. It seems that at least 6M construction workers who were involved in housing construction lost their jobs. Lots of other workers are losing jobs as well. They are going back to their villages. So, does anyone expect urbanization to continue, even at a moderate pace. During the 2008 financial crisis housing the US was overbuilt by 2-4%. The number of bad loans was far lower than we are seeing in China. As I say above, using models built for a different economy is a fool's errand. There is also a strong indication that the banking sector is failing or has actually failed. There are lots of reports of people not being able to get their money out of their own private accounts, sometimes for over a year.
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  1266.  @numap4701  To the US, it is neutral. If it is advantageous to the participants, then it is good, and their choice.
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  1267.  @jamesmoy1214  Each to his own opinion. Crypto is no better than fiat money. Its only real use is as a way to skirt regulation when transferring money across international borders. Otherwise, it is just a speculative commodity. In fact, it has lost 2/3 of its value from its peak.
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  1268. The world upheaval actually has little to do with China. The major factor is the US's slowly pulling back from enforcing the rules-based international order it developed after WWII to confront the Soviets. The last 70+ years have been an anomaly in history. Things will return back to where they were pre-WWII. This has little to do with China. In fact, China has little ability to affect the situation.
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  1269. I totally agree with your last statement. Two things that we have to remember. These things were said in the past, but are not generally repeated, although I think they are still operative. First, I believe it was the US Secretary of Defense stated that one of the goals was to destroy the Russian army in Ukraine. Second was Joe Biden himself calling for regime change in Russia. Because Russia is a major nuclear power, the west has to tread carefully. That does not mean it has to kowtow to Russian demands, and it hasn't.
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  1270. The downturn in China will make 2008 look like a walk in the park. In 2008 the US housing market was overbuilt by 2-4%. In China that is close to 100%. By western standards most, if not all, Chinese banks are insolvent. Their percentages on non-performing loans and the inflated value of property on the banks' books is beyond anything we have experienced, at least since the Great Depression. The only saving grace is that the Chinese banking system is not really integrated with the rest of the world. Gordon Chang is very sage. Xi is putting his economy on a war footing. He has openly said that more than once. The only saving grace for us is that he will probably mess it up.
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  1271. Well, what about annual flu shots? This is good for business, but it is not something new.
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  1272. "Taking out large numbers of Russian troops rather than gaining land." That is what I have been pointing out for a long time. A lot of the Ukranian mil-bloggers concentrate on the map and settlements. Have you seen the photos and videos of these villages after liberation. Basically it is Bakhmut on a small scale. The goal of any war is to destroy the enemy's military. After that you can walk into any town or city you want to.
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  1273.  @ocadioan  I am not saying cash flow is not important. I also am not aware of companies that are profitable and cash flow negative. Could you give some real-world examples. The situation that I am highlighting is a company that is persistently unprofitable but is still cash flow positive and emphasizes that over profit.
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  1274. The Russian Army is a joke. I watch reports of various battles. I almost never see more than ten armored vehicles involved at one time. I just watched one where the Russians were trying to infiltrate 70 soldiers into the edge of a settlement. Seventy soldiers. That is two platoons in the US Army. That is nothing. Of course they were all eliminated by artillery. They tried to infiltrate under cover of fog. Thu Ukrainian had thermal vision devices on their drones. It is a complete clown show. Ukraine has the problem of having to defend a very long border. They also do not have the airpower and other assets that are required for a real breakthrough. Of their four offensives, three were successful primarily because of subterfuge (a good thing in war) and the incompetence of the Russians. The fourth was unsuccessful when going up against prepared positions. Ukraine is doing what it can to attrit the Russian Army. Strelkov talks about the capacity of Russia to fight the war, and the large pool of people available. What he doesn't seem to understand is that if Putin does call a general mobilization and puts the whole country on a war footing then he is done for. Some in Ukraine see the collapse of the Russian Federation as the light at the end of the tunnel. That is not a viable strategy. It could happen, but the question is when. Does Ukraine have that long?
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  1275. When I did some work at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, the officers there used to talk distances in terms of kilotons. In other words, two towns might be 1.5 kilotons apart. The meant that a 1.5 kiloton nuclear artillery shell hitting one town would also damage the next. This was the height of the Cold War, and it was just taken for granted.
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  1276. France has always been advocating for "strategic autonomy". Ever since de Gaulle. On the other hand, France has also been a stalwart ally of the US and the rest of western Europe. As for Macron, he is always willing to engage with world leaders, even the controversial ones. This does not mean agrees with them. Just look at the situation regarding the Ukraine war Many supporters of Ukraine were very upset with him for engaging with Putin early on. Now Macron is calling for Europeans to send troops to Ukraine to counter the Russians. His style is very different from that of a lot of other world leaders and the Chinese misinterpret him, I think.
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  1277. The statement was made by Stoltenberg's chief of staff. This is not a policy making position. In fact, all the NATO staff is not a policy making body. They are a coordinating organization. The policy is made by the member countries. It is important that this chief of staff be fired. He had no place making such statements while representing the organization. It is totally out of his purview. Don't make too much out of the propaganda value for Russia internally. For one thing, it doesn't matter. For another, have you followed at all what they are saying on Russian official media? It is so bonkers that a people fed on that are either stupid, brainwashed or a combination of the two.
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  1278. This is amazing, but not unexpected. These so-called environmentalists have totally ignored the life cycle costs of renewable energy after spending decades talking about the very same issue in regard to everything else. A related issue is that renewables such as solar and wind require some sort of storage, usually batteries. They resisted adding the cost of energy storage to the system cost for a long time. At least in the US, many people install batteries with their solar systems. So, in addition to disposing of the panels, they will also have to dispose of the batteries. The whole thing disgusts me. The US report claiming that $15B that could be recovered may be a chimera. By the way, you seem to have gotten the idea that this is the cost to the consumer. It is a business opportunity. You may want to read closer. Back to the issue of recovery, it has often failed. Good examples include recovering precious metals from electronics and use of farm waste to make ethanol. In both cases, the costs outweigh what one can make from the process. Companies have gone out of business trying this stuff.
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  1279. Vita, I hope your birthday goes well. It has been very cool here in the Chicago area. I am wearing long pants and sometimes long sleeve shirts. I even considered wearing socks, although this is not really done (for casual wear, of course) if the temperature is over 4.44 degrees C. So, send us some of that Ukrainian heat, but not too much.
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  1280. I expect that those moving to the UAE are doing so as a temporary measure. They need somewhere to park their money and their butts until they can figure something else out.
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  1281. I is good that you prefaced the section on "Chinese Modernization" the way you did. It saved me from having to do a lot of typing.
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  1282. Good one. Actually, there probably was some Mongol influence in the Grand Duchy of Moscow.
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  1283. Wonderful and insightful discussion (as usual). I totally agree with what she said at the end about Russia. Others have come to the same conclusion, but on different grounds.
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  1284. Tony, no worries about the thumbnails. The content remains great.
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  1285. This is why China cannot invade Taiwan. They already have a major front on the Himalias with India. They have potential problems with Central Asian countries and Russia. If they go after Taiwan, all these others will potentially press their advantage. So, no matter how big their military is, they will not be able to cover these. In WWII the US looked at invading Taiwan, which was then controlled by the Japanese. The estimates are that it would have taken 500k troops. There were limited landing zones. In the end, they opted for the Philippines, which offered many more options for landings. China has never made an amphibious assault on anyone. Their last war, with Vietnam was a disaster. With the one child policy, their armed forces consist of only children. In a country where family is very important, this will be a disaster that could well bring down the CCP.
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  1286. The CFR statement you read shows a total lack of understanding of the situation. The world order that has persisted since the end of WWII was predicated on containing the USSR. When the USSR broke up, things went along in a unipolar fashion with the US still fulfilling its role as the guarantor of the order. The US has been pulling back from this for a while now. The last internationalist president we had was George H. W. Bush (1988-1992). The US is definitely preparing for a multipolar world. Just look at the structure of the armed forces to see how. The order that the US has been guaranteeing is an anomaly in human history. We are now going back to the way things were. I am disappointed in the CFR. I used to be an avid reader of Foreign Affairs magazine. Looking at what they are publishing now, my disappointment only grows.
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  1287. I have one of the Italian reproductions as well. Love it. It was left in a bad state at one point, and I am working on restoring it.
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  1288. Snow at the end of May (in the northern hemisphere)? Whatever happened to global warming?
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  1289.  @stevenschwartz-vf2lg  That is the real crux of the matter.
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  1290. This is usually the first video of the day for me. I have coffee and a cigar and watch this and one on China. While I love the videos where Peter is out and about in scenic places. On the other hand, this one was very entertaining in a totally different way.
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  1291. The First Amendment does not protect "correct" speech, but ALL speech. If this ever goes to the courts, it will be shut down.
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  1292. The mining of rare earths in China is not significant. It is the processing. As with many other materials, it is the lack of enforcement of environmental regulations that gives China an edge. Basically, the west has exported their pollution and hobbled their own industries. Have you seen pictures and videos of how these metals are processed in China. Disgusting. This goes a long way toward explaining why 90% of China's freshwater resources are heavily polluted. Rare earth mining and processing has started up again in the US, for example, and deposits are being found all over the world. Despite the name, these are not rare elements. The same applies to metals like lithium, where some of the largest deposits have been found in the US. There are also large deposits of cobalt being discovered and exploited. So, here we have another example of China becoming an unreliable partner for basic commodities. How did that work out for Russia?
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  1293. I cut out sugar a long time ago. The only thing I eat with "sugar' is fruit with my breakfast. For this meal I have oatmeal with butter and cinnamon, and either an apple, an orange, or a grapefruit. For drinks I have water (usually with some organic lemon juice, no sweetener), coffee or tea, without anything added. I have some scotch most evenings, which I understand will have some sugar. I do have some lentils or other pulses occasionally. Since I have done this, I have lost about 25% of my peak body weight. I am down to what I was in my 20s, and I am in my 60s. Blood pressure is down, no joint pain (I had started to have some) and in the last five years I have had one 24-hour flu (I even felt the moment it broke). I have not even taken as much as an aspirin. All the "drugs" in the house are out of date and are being disposed of. I love your content. I eat a much simpler diet than you do, I think. I generally have two meals a day, and some days a snack (olives, nuts or cheese). Keep up the good work!
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  1294. Well, it wasn't a missile strike. The apartment where the Hamas leader had a bomb that had been planted months before according to reports I have read. Oh, well, OTB.
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  1295. Lots has happened since this video was released. China is in trouble on many fronts. Alliances have been formed against it which have the ability to counter China's ambitions. China is still very vulnerable in the Indian Ocean which is a critical communication route for its trade and resources.
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  1296.  @jamieharper2554  The reason we went to war in Vietnam was that the Communist regimes to take over the world. It was called the domino theory. It also succeeded in Cambodia (with incredible consequences). Consider also Eastern Europe and the attempts of destabilization of the West. This was no less than the terrorism that we see now. Frankly, what we are seeing today is on a smaller scale.
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  1297. Keep the accent.
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  1298. Tabletop exercises are fraught with problems. During WWII the Japanese used these extensively, as did all militaries. There are documented cases of the commanders making ad-hoc changes to the rules to ensure their preferred attack plan was shown to be correct. Even in the Nazi military these were used extensively, but Hitler often ignored their outcomes or the implementors manipulated the results to please him. The fact that the person initiating them has a political axe to grind is a definite red flag.
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  1299.  @theresaburdett1054  You make some good points. Before changing my diet, I was overweight, had high blood pressure and some joint problems and was told I was pre-diabetic. All gone. I lost about 25% of my peak body weight. Now it's no butt, no gut. Had to buy a lot of new clothes, though. I was on meds for the high blood pressure. They didn't seem to be working, so I stopped them. I have not been sick for these last seven years either, except for one 24-hour flu. I even felt the fever break. I don't think I have even taken more than ten aspirin, and none in the last three years. I have friends, our age, who have gotten rid of their diabetes through diet and exercise. We can cut medical expenses in this country massively. I am rooting for Kennedy.
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  1300. I bought an edition of Chaucer's works titled "The Student's Chaucer". edited by Rev. Walter W. Skeat. printed in 1897, when lived in England. It cost 7 pounds 50. I think I got it in Bath. There is a great antiquarian bookstore there. It is wonderfully annotated and has lots of supporting material. I also have a number of historical fiction books I got interested in England. I lived in Winchester, and some were based there. Chaucer appears as a spy for the king in several of them.
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  1301. Vita, I am glad to see you are safe. With all that has happened I was a bit concerned.
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  1302. Thanks for the extra episode. The information is very interesting.
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  1303.  @crunchyfrog555  Oh, come on man. I have been driving for half a century, and have had two accidents, both caused by mechanical failures. These failures were not something a self-driving technology could avoid. I also know lots of people who have similar driving experiences. If a large number of people can go that long without a driver induced accident, then I call that a success. As for Tesla's technology, do you have data on that? I am asking sincerely. Sources and numbers. I have to admit, few of the Tesla drivers I know or have run across, use the feature, and it is generally not because they had a problem, but because it is new, and I guess can be somewhat scary.
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  1304. I was introduced to the father of my father-in-law's cousin, who by then was quite old, in Bonn (this was early in this century). I was told he was an administrator of Prague for the Germans. He had also retired as a judge in Germany after the war. They had traced their family background back to 1700. The were originally from the Dresden area. It was all very strange and interesting. In the apartment on the Rhine, I was shown the family photo album. In it the cousin's uncle, I think, who was a captain in the German Army appeared. He was a model German officer with an Iron Cross. He died on the Eastern Front. When the cousin visited us in the US a few years later I was showing him some of my hunting rifles. We are both hunters. I had a Mosin-Nagant rifle made in 1942. That I did not show him, since it might have been the type of gun that killed his uncle. The cousin, by the way, was a high official in the German military, on the political side. Most of the family were lawyers, except for the cousin's oldest son, who had an MBA. I guess he was the black sheep of the family.
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  1305.  @cc23001  Chinese manufacturing is crap. For example, in Illinois, we ordered $1B worth of subway cars from a Canadian manufacturer. The steel was from China. On testing the cars we found that the steel was sub-standard. The Canadian company said they would replace the cars if a problems was identified. Fortunately, the local authorities rejected this and required that the steel all be replaced. I mention this because it is becoming clear that the Chinese military is a Paper Tiger, as defined by Mao (I have the little red book_ Look at it this way, each time that the US military has been embarrassed, Vietnam and Afghanistan, the reality is that they were never defeated in battle. It was always the political powers that screwed things up. Then, the next time the US military was tested, Iraq (twice) and Afghanistan, they performed so well, all we surprised. In the first Gulf War, there were 350K American troops and a total of 500K. The Iraqi army was in the top five in the world, and had at least a decade of combat experience. They were defeated in three days. In the second Iraq war the US sent in about 170K troops. In that conflict we took over the whole country in two weeks. Given all that, what have the Chinese done? Their war with Vietnam in the 1970s was inconclusive. Their wars with India have also been inconclusive. In the current engagements, they have fared badly. For better or worse, the US military is the most experienced military in the world. It also has among the best equipment. In many cases the best by far. It also has the biggest economy in the world behind it. We have rarely, if ever spent 10% of our GDP on the the military. At the peak of the Cold War, the USSR spent at least 40% of their GDP on defense, and still could not match the US. Look at Afghanistan today. In all the pictures I see the Taliban have ditched their Soviet era AKs for American M16 type weapons. So, to answer your response, I have paid attention and have been involved. How about you. Where have you been? This is a legitimate question, since I do not know your story.
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  1306. Love it when Jack said it was not a right/left thing, but to think about it as up/down. I know that and, having followed many news sources, I see it, but I never had a good phrase for it. Fantastic.
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  1307. As for the affluent paying for their children's education, my experience is that they do. In my case, we were able to save for them, with our in-laws help, so that they had the money to get through college with money left over. Many of my affluent friends paid for it themselves as they went along. They didn't like it but they did it for their kids. I have met people, who were affluent, but whose kids borrowed for useless degrees. In these cases they have said to their kids that they should go back and get a useful degree, They were not going to bail them out. This is how it should be.
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  1308. I like this channel for the detailed information provided. I stopped buying packaged and manufactured foods a while ago. Actually, in the early 1970s I did the same. I became vegetarian and generally bought organic. I am now pescatarian and only eat wild caught. I have also gone back to making a lot of stuff from scratch so that I can control the ingredients. I drink water (with a splash of organic lemon juice), brewed coffee and tea. Oh, and whiskey, of course. I use no sweeteners! One of my bosses used to chide me, since I would not eat the junk food. He pointed out that after the "big one" (nuclear war, which we thought about a lot being in Washington, DC) hit that I would be among the first survivors to die. He said this because my body would not be able to process the junk food, which all that would be left. It was all said in jest, but was it really?
    4
  1309.  @HermanWillems  That is just one example. People in the US adapt and often refinance. In the 1990's when rates were coming down from fairly high rates I refinanced at a couple of times. I had neighbors who were refinancing every year. These things change over time. Just wait a year or two, I expect the landscape will be very different.
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  1310. The idea of making something in place of the EU as an economic and interest union actually makes a whole lot more sense than what the EU has become and is trying to evolve into. The US model for the EU makes no sense. The history and structure of the US is totally different, and not applicable to the EU. First, they would all have to speak the same language. What will that be?
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  1311. The Chinese vehicle market is falling apart. This not only applies to EVs. Some companies, particularly Japanese, have withdrawn from China and found replacement markets elsewhere. They have found that there was no material effect on their overall business results. China is not an essential market, especially considering their restrictions on foreign companies.
    4
  1312. That ratio is not outrageous or unexpected. In WWII the ratio of Soviet to German losses on the eastern front was generally eight to one.
    4
  1313.  @carlflaherty2215  I am fully aware of that. They just don't like being called "third world" countries. Actually, not a lot of them are in the southern hemisphere compared to the number in the northern hemisphere. They are actually referring to the fact that many of them are south of Europe and the US. Again, they can't get away from reference to "first world" countries. That must infuriate them.
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  1314. To compare the "settlement of 1945" to Versailles and to say it is worse is utter stupidity (that's the nicest way I could put it). A cursory comparison of the period between the two world wars and the period from the end of WWII to the fall of the Soviet Union totally refutes that statement. Don't forget, the settlement and the rules-based international order was based on the goal of opposing the Soviets. One must also remember that the Soviet goal was world domination and imposition of communism everywhere. That is the essence of Marxism, as distinct from other forms of socialism including national socialism. Frankly, Mr. Starkey's attempts to show the superiority of the English/British system have gotten a bit tiresome. The inherent problems and contradictions of the system are glaringly obvious. The whole structure of the government, especially the make-up of parliament, is so silly that it beggars belief. For example, that the UK should implement devolution without restructuring parliament shows a lack of sophistication. I lived in the UK, in England, earlier in the century. I would see graffiti on motorway overpasses reading "England for the English". This is just a tiny indication of what is silly and wrong with the British constitution. The UK is, quite frankly, being dragged down by its history rather than that history being an asset. Let's hope they can come out the other side of the current chaos with something better.
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  1315. Interesting comment about 1:02:00. The Russians inability to understand grassroots movements. They also experienced this later with the sanctions. The Russians, and the Chinese, were flabbergasted that major companies would pull out of Russia due to grassroots consumer demand. They just can't wrap their head around independent public opinion driving company or national decisions.
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  1316. The idea that the central government will not help the local governments is barbaric. All the infrastructure investment is directed from the central government. In a civilized economy, any governmental level that mandates some expenditure must pay for it. In the US we call this revenue sharing. Federally mandated programs must be funded in whole or in part by the Federal Government. This happens most often where a policy area is constitutionally the purview of the states, such as medical policy. If the Feds want everyone to implement something in that area, they must fund it. Getting back to China, the only way the CCP knows to create growth in GDP is through infrastructure projects. So, even if these projects are not viable, the local government must pursue them. A great example is High Speed Rail (HSR). The initial routes were between large cities and were viable. Then the central government decided that HSR should be extended everywhere. As a result, the system is almost $1T in the red. If localities had to analyze and fund these secondary routes, they would not be built. This applies to so many other types of projects as well. China is screwed. The CCP does not know what it is doing.
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  1317. It is not breaking international law. How could you be so poorly informed. Just because some MPs say it does not make it so. The ability to modify the protocol is in the treaty. Remember Article 16?
    4
  1318. I have a real problem with this whole approach. I think the real motivation toward quantizing gravity is that it is a "force", and all forces should have the same underlying structure and could thus be unified. After all it has been done with the other three. The thing that unifies other forces is how they are "transmitted". So, if one is to fold gravity in there has to be a force mediating particle. On top of that, it doesn't seem that physics has completely solved the phenomenon of emergence of the classical world out of the quantum world.
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  1319. You know, all of the YouTube pundits talk about "months or years". What a load of crap. How long has this full scale war been going on? Literally days over one year. Look at the massive changes that have already happened. Everyone talks about how big the Russian military is. Guess what, wars are won at least partly in the factories. Russia can produce about 20 tanks per month. They lose more than twice that in the same time frame. They also can't produce enough artillery shells. Who are you kidding. Russia does not have years.
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  1320. To say that the three red lines was an attempt to reign in excessive borrowing is really missing the mark. The Chinese property development market had become a traditional Ponzi scheme. It may not have started out that way, but that is what it had become.
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  1321. Asia is a bright spot? Let's look at this claim. Japan continues its slow to little growth. Korea is struggling. Even Taiwan is being affected by issues in China. Southeast Asia is a bright spot, but mostly at the expense of China. India is in a similar situation. Chinese statistics and projections are a fantasy. One indicator is the automotive sector. Companies, with local government backing, are discounting cars so much that the sales of used cars has crashed. The cars that are being sold are sold at a loss. The idea is to keep the factories operating and keep up employment. This is not sustainable. The property sector is another area that will not recover.
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  1322.  @noahjohnson935  Um, I think your knowledge of history is severely lacking. I want to be respectful here, but the idea of empire is as old as it gets. The exploitation and suffering are the norm throughout history. The US oversaw a system for the last 75+ years that tried to break that cycle. Not the Chinese. They want to bring empire back. Go back and do some more reading.
    4
  1323.  @noahjohnson935  Well, I think you have a poor understanding of history.
    4
  1324. Get it right. Poland has Soviet era jets that match what the Ukrainians have. Thus, there are no training or logistical issues. The US provision of F-16s would only fill in with the jets the Poles have been transitioning to already.
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  1325.  @chinmayau  Frankly, the UNSC needs to be reformed. India is the second largest country in terms of population, and the sixth largest in GDP.. Why aren't they permanent members? As for the veto power, that is ridiculous. Actually, a minor change would avoid the situation we find ourselves in. Just ensure that if a country is the subject of a sanction, that it cannot vote on that. Seems like a normal thing to do. In most systems, if one has a conflict of interest. does not participate in the proceedings.
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  1326. Corruption in the PLA? Who would have thunk it. Paying for promotion? My understanding is that this is the norm, even down to non-commissioned officer level. What else might be going on here?
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  1327. Ler's review. Russia has violated the UN Charter, has invaded another sovereign country and committed war crimes. Its leader is wanted by the ICC. So, should any country not doing these things be concerned if the EU (or US or UK) confiscates state assets in this situation?
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  1328. You Europeans wanted Joe. Don't forget that there was little, or no, support for Trump. In an election, one is presented with choices. At the G7 meeting everyone was happy to see Joe. How's that going for you now?
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  1329. Wagner is NOT an effective fighting force. They proved that in Bakhmut. Their casualties there show that. The bulk of those were former prisoners. Ukraine attritted them and then withdrew. In Syria a column of hundreds of Wagner troops attempted to overrun a small American force. They were crushed by superior weaponry (including HIMARS) and airpower. Poland has this. Wagner made their name fighting insurgencies in Africa and the Middle East. That is all they are good for.
    4
  1330.  @effexon  Moving the jobs would be a good idea. There are some advantages to concentration, but there are also disadvantages. Dispersion helps keep costs down for both individuals and companies.
    4
  1331. Private business becoming "to powerful" is bit as much an issue in democracies. This is not a bad thing. A good example is the UK in the 19th century. MP districts were centered on old agricultural, thus aristocratic boundaries. As the industrial revolution got underway, and people moved to cities, this became intolerable and highly corrupt. Early in that century they reformed that system. The US instituted, in its Constitution, a decennial census used to apportion legislative districts from the late 18th century. This was done, in part, because of the issues in the UK. Thus, the political power follows the population which often follows business opportunities. The issue in the UK basically came down to the power shifting from the aristocracy to the business class. Think of the CCP as the aristocracy.
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  1332. To say derisking is not decoupling is only half right. I saw half right because one cannot presuppose anything when derisking. It is an analytical process, whereas decoupling is not. If one has decided to decouple, perhaps as a result of a derisking process, the necessary steps and consequences are clear. Derisking could be accomplished by governments adjusting the rules. Or, it could be companies making decisions on sourcing, etc. The point is (oh, he is finally getting to the point) that these are two different things. It is not just an either-or situation, but one then possibly the other.
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  1333. We do sometimes worry about you.
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  1334. If the UK had a written constitution, then this would not be an issue.
    4
  1335.  @Stormcrow_1  Understood. I have actually been to the wall when I lived in England. I was just using that as a metaphor. It is good that you pointed that out though.
    4
  1336. China cannot be happy with the Russian destruction of and disruption of Ukranian grain. The weather in China has had an adverse impact on agriculture, especially wheat production. Is Russia an external force in Asia? It is, actually, the largest country in Asia and has a Pacific coastline.
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  1337. The Potemkin analogy also refers to the Potemkin Village, which was a sham village set up to show how well the country was doing. It is the same thing, I think.
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  1338. Fukuyama shows himself uninformed again. In talking about Trump wanting to pull out of NATO he is badly mistaken. Trump was trying to get NATO to actually meet their obligations. Russia has finally done that.
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  1339. At least the US kept the lid on for 20 years. What has India done? They are at least as much a threat to India's interests as to US interests. We did not spring this on the world. What we were doing was well known. India has a strong military and is a nuclear power. India should have been in there soon after the Soviet Union withdrew to ensure that things like 9/11 did not happen.
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  1340. That only applies if government stays out of the way of business. If government is there to level the playing field and curb the excesses then it is useful. What contemporary governments have done is to interfere with business. They have become a part of the business. So, Adam Smith's logic does not apply. The alternative, by the way, is to have government run by lawyers. Is that really what you want. That is what we have now.
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  1341. These commentators don't seem to have any more information than what can be gleaned from web and written sources by the average person. Actually, some of what they say is incorrect. For example, the US has used drones, from small surveillance drones used by front line troops to the largest lethal drones used to precisely take out targets from great distances. Ukraine has been innovating at a breakneck pace, and that is good, but to say they are ahead is somewhat overstating things.
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  1342. I was a kid at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. My father worked for an Army weapons lab in Washington, DC (where I was born). They had involvement in nukes, as well as many other weapons systems. Now my father had high level security clearances (as I did later). We had a neighbor who all of a sudden bought and had delivered a large number of solid concrete blocks. All we knew about him was that he has a very secret job for some government agency. We didn't know which. As it later turned out, he worked for the NSA and was translating a lot of the intercepted Soviet message traffic. He never ended up building the bomb shelter as he planned, and he gave us the concrete blocks, which we used to good effect around the yard.
    4
  1343.  @Dark_Detective  Interesting that you mention that. I just saw a video detailing the current stock market crash in China. The markets are down well over 50%.
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  1344. This is very entertaining. I love it. I know we will get the real story here on this channel. I will be ready, not with popcorn, but with English Breakfast Tea and cigars. When I lived in southern England, early in the century, I asked one of my English colleagues about the Scottish situation. His response was that the best thing would be to dig a trench across the border and hopefully the whole thing (Scotland) would just float away. Frankly, the whole devolution situation is just a mess, as with a lot of things the Blair government was involved in.
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  1345. You mention a set of technologies, Project-R and SPSS, for doing statistics. These are just tools. I did lots of statistics, primarily for simulations, in fields ranging from rom High Energy Physics to economics, using a basic programming language, FORTRAN. That was early in my career. I later used the tools you mention, among others.
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  1346. Great analysis. I wondered, when this phone came out, about statements that it had "5G like" capabilities, as opposed to being a "true" 5G design.
    4
  1347. It is hilarious to hear a Brit talk about the "far right". The UK is turning into a far-left totalitarian state before our eyes.
    4
  1348.  @adriandelosreyes263  Actually, Iran brought in religion to the issue. They have repeatedly stated that they would wipe out Israel when they get their nukes. The reason is that Israel is Jewish. This is purely a religious issue.
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  1349. My salt shaker is almost empty. Fortunately, I had some delivered yesterday.
    4
  1350. One of the main reasons it is so to process these elements (gallium, germanium and rare earths) is the lack of environmental controls in China. The subsidies are important as well. Rate earth elements were mined and processed in the US for a long time. The cost went up because of environmental regulations. The process of extracting the materials is a dirty one. As with many things that China is known for nowadays, the west has just exported the resultant environmental damage to China.
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  1351. Prigozhin is just so darn entertaining. Good to see he is still around and yelling.
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  1352. I think Pettis has it right. He has been pointing this out for some time now, as have others. The other issue in this, as with anything concerning the Chinese economy, is corruption. Even in the other cases, such as Japan, it is not really corruption per se, but a misallocation of capital based on some "national" goal rather than real market dynamics.
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  1353. I wonder how all the commentators can say things like Obama was charismatic or Harris was charismatic. I was once outside of a rally in Illinois where Obama and Dick Durban were speaking. Durban was a powerful speaker. This Obama guy didn't sound like much. Even after he became president, I never got the impression that he was "charismatic". Harris is on a whole other level. She is the polar opposite of charismatic. She is, to put it bluntly, an embarrassment and always has been. Do you remember what level of support she garnered in the Democratic primaries in 2020? I don't believe she ever broke double digits in support. She was strictly a DEI hire when Biden brought her on to the ticket. So, while I have to say that I am a fan of Mr. Hanson, in this I am very disappointed.
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  1354. Oh no, another gap. Remember the missile gap, and all the other gaps?
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  1355. That could be. We tend to hear about all these phenomena happening in China. The old saying is: it's something in the water. That is massively contaminated as well.
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  1356. The Ukrainians need to reengineer their drones to switch from GPS to inertial navigation when the GPS signal is disrupted. There are technological fixes to everything.
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  1357. The numbers at the beginning of the video don't really tell us anything. First off, I think that the numbers are probably the typical manipulated numbers that the CCP is known for. Also, and correct me if I am wrong, but the new home prices are set by the government. They do not reflect, as far as I can tell, actual sale prices. We have seen examples of developers doing all kinds of things, including selling at lower than the government set price and giving incentives to move units. The other thing is that the month-on-month numbers are just not very useful when talking about housing. Such figures might be useful in talking about commodities or even stocks, etc. but not housing. For housing, the only relevant chart is the price over a much longer period of time. Even someone who is investing in housing in order to sell would find the presented chart either useless or would use it as a reason not to buy.
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  1358.  @tshavfengvang7831  Um, the Roman Empire lasted about 700 years (counting from the defeat of Carthage), if you don't count the Eastern Roman Empire. Then make it another millennium. How do you measure success?
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  1359. Imagine that. Sowing division in the US. What a waste of resources. Divisions have existed in the US polity from the beginning. They are a natural part of life in a democracy.
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  1360. Your reporting is very poor on this. First, your title should include the word "some" before "progressive". The progressive caucus is much larger than this group of representatives. Second, the reason this bill had to be brought forward was that these same people had gotten the funding removed from a larger spending bill. These are all important points in understanding the situation.
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  1361. Tony, thanks for the deep dive into the Malaysian situation. This is not something one generally gets elsewhere.
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  1362. What does anxiety and depression have to do with the vaccine? One would expect an increase in anxiety and depression because of the global pandemic, for sure. Actually, I took the Pfizer vaccine. I actually felt a bit relieved. I also did not experience ANY adverse effects.
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  1363. Climate change does not even show up on many surveys of people's concern.
    4
  1364. A little ice age? Don't tell the climate alarmists. This would ruin their party. Or, as my wife was wont to say: whatever happened to global warming?
    4
  1365. Well, at least the injured in the hospital fire were already in a hospital. Ma was correct in the remarks that got him in trouble.
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  1366. Peter, you don't understand the goal of sanctions at all. They are two-fold. One goal is denying the object of resources. The second is to put pressure on the population to oust the leaders who brought on the sanctions. The first can have a short-term effect. The second is a longer-term issue. The idea of using sanctions is to show displeasure with a policy, short of declaring war. Would you rather us declare war? Your understanding of foreign relations is somewhat lacking, I think. Sanctions may not bring any immediate effect, but they represent the will of the people imposing them. In both WWI and WWII, the blockade of Germany, which denied them food and raw materials, eventually contributed to their downfall. These were sanctions in all but name. And they were successful in shortening those wars. In the case of Russia, I believe that these sanctions will have a more immediate effect. As some have said, Russia a gas station with a large army and nukes. Even a large part of their energy sector relies on Western expertise and investment. This is being withdrawn. They didn't even have the local resources to exploit many of their own resources. Withdrawal of Western companies and investment will cripple them. How much longer will Putin receive support? When the body count starts coming back to Russia, how much longer will he receive support? Short of us invading, this is the best we have. It will not be immediate, but it will work.
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  1367. Very good opening on what science is. When I started studying physics, 50 years ago, one of my professors said we could find out this all bulls**t tomorrow. He didn't expect that but did stress that it was a possibility. In physics, the two most successful theories are the Standard Model of Particle Physics and Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. These are both constantly being tested with each new set of observations and experiments. One physicist YouTuber, whenever she reports on another verification of General Theory of Relativity says, yeah that guy again. Then she nudges the bobble head Einstein she has on a table so that he nods yes. The Standard Model is the most accurate physical theory ever but is still constantly tested by experiment. Now, compare this with biology and medical "science". There the record is dismal.
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  1368. The Chinese response to item 6 in the last segment is just plain silly. The adoption of electric vehicles is slowing anyway, and for many good reasons. I saw another news item about the difficulty of charging EVs in China due to problems in the grid. There are also reports of mass EV charging problems stemming from the recent tropical storms. In one report a woman with a hybrid was elated because she did not have to rely on charging stations. EVs are not there yet, if they will ever be.
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  1369. Snow? In the south? In September? Whatever happened to global warming?
    4
  1370. Tony, I worry about you, but I also worry about Pettis. Considering the CCPs actions on "national security" lately it must be difficult. China is already in "trade friction" with many of its other trading partners. There are investigations into dumping by many countries.
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  1371. Love this format, as well as the interviews. Keep it up.
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  1372. China's debt is already about 300% of GDP. Japan's debt is 235% of GDP.
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  1373. This whole issue is just stupid. Why do we have fertility clinics when we have many people waiting to adopt. In the city where I live, a few years ago, a big building was erected for a fertility clinic. Madness!
    4
  1374. To say parents do not have the right to determine what is taught in the schools is just plain wrong, on so many levels. First, the parents are responsible for their children at a legal level. Second, the parents pay for the schools. through taxes or fees. As such they have a say. I was a governor of a good comprehensive school in the UK in the early part of this millennium. I was elected as a parent governor. We had a very well constituted board with wide representation from the parents, staff, community and government. We had two committees. Resources (of which I was the clerk) and curriculum. So, we did have a say.
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  1375. The statements about the C119 being a hedge against sanctions is just plain stupid. Just look at the experience of Russia. The number of aviation accidents is monumental. If you cut off the source of parts for the engines, avionics, etc., cannibalizing existing systems is dangerous and a short-term solution. Very short term.
    4
  1376.  @peterpan408  Yes, so maybe her pronunciation is both intentional and appropriate.
    4
  1377. Global food insecurity isn't real. That term implies that everyone will have trouble getting food. Nonsense. The world currently produces twice the calories needed. Just look at the West. One of our biggest health problems is obesity. This is the number one health problem, since it is a precursor for many other health problems such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer (yes, just saw a study on that). I volunteered at a food bank (a very deluxe one) in the suburbs of Chicago for a while. Many of the "clients" were overweight. Some clearly obese. We would talk about it and encourage them to change the way they eat. Several people did improve their health. Just because somewhere in the world will have trouble with the particular products affected by the war do not make it global. I am not saying that the world should not try to help those affected, but don't call it global.
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  1378. Tony, I find your channel interesting and informative. You tend to use government statistics, as one would in almost any country on the planet. But with China and Russia (and the Soviets before the current regime) there is no verifiable information. I am glad to see that you are mentioning in many of your videos the problem. Referencing the investment firms is also a fraught enterprise. Going by their public pronouncements, even in the last few months, one can only surmise that they were not being quite upfront about their actual reading of the situation. I tend to look at lots of different channels for each country or region I follow. Two that I look at for China information (and they are not the only ones by any means) are China Observer and China Insights. The things I see there flatly contradict what the CCP and the investment firms claim. I wonder if you can comment on that. On a more personal note, I just purchased some tools for yard maintenance (trimmer, blower, small chain saw). All were the same brand. The first two are made in Vietnam and the third in China.
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  1379. One consideration is the sophistication and innovativeness of the Ukranian Air Force. I saw on another channel that the Ukrainians, after losing almost all their SU-24s they were able to take airframes out of storage and make them combat ready in a very short period of time. I think they could handle anything thrown at them. They were, after all, a major part of the Soviet military industrial complex, and reportedly the most innovative.
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  1380. Watch videos of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, especially the parts about the Golan Heights. There the Israelis were outnumbered in tanks 7 to 1. They were using upgraded Centurion tanks. The Syrians had T-55s.
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  1381. Jessie, you really don't understand the history here. At the time of the breakup of the USSR Ukraine ended up with one of the most powerful militaries in the world, including nukes. They got that because each republic got whatever was on their soil. The problem is that they had no way to pay for it. The Soviet central government had been paying for all the military might and hardware. The real fear was that they might sell the nukes to generate cash. You need to read more than the headlines.
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  1382. Taiwan does not need to reproduce all of Starlink. It only needs to cover the island ensure the connection to the wider Internet. It could easily contract out the development, construction and launching of the system to existing aerospace companies in the US. The real issue is who owns the system and controls it. Heck, they could even have Musk build and launch it for them and then take over the running of it (not the best option, but doable).
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  1383. Don't worry, your loathing for Starmer comes through loud and clear.
    4
  1384.  @heinzriemann3213  That is just a turn of phrase. I believe that that case involved sanctioned oil. In that case, where is the breach of international law? As for Iran, they have a whole fleet of ships they have seized.
    4
  1385. So, how come they sell so many? Who decides price? The market.
    4
  1386.  @jmshwood2801  Thank you. I have been around for a while and am a bit of a foreign affairs junkie. After all, I was born in Washington, DC. I have also lived and worked abroad (although not in Asia) and have always been involved in such activities. Let's hope the "silent majority" you mention finds their voice. Let's also hope the people of China do as well, although I have less hope for that because of the CCP's policies.
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  1387. The Cultural Revolution returns! Long live the Cultural Revolution.
    4
  1388. Almost any organization of any size that I have belonged to could cut staff by 10%, or more, and still get the job done.
    4
  1389. Without foreign private investment China would be nowhere. Just look at China before the opening up and the Soviet Union before its dissolution. Another couple of examples are Venezuela and Cuba. Heck, in Cuba they still use mules in farming. Mexico, while mostly a private economy refuses to let their oil industry privatize, and it is dying. All you really have to remember is the Great Leap Forward. China couldn't even make pig iron. Who are they kidding.
    4
  1390. Founder of Myspace? This man has no credibility.
    4
  1391. Although many of their views are out there, many of those you mention are very familiar today.
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  1392. Artur, your thumbnail is rather silly and irritating. I see this WWIII stuff all the time and it is often tied with what is happening with Israel and the Middle East. Now, I am making this comment after listening to only the first 60 seconds. That is intentional. Does anyone spreading this WWIII mania vis-a-vis the Middle East have any knowledge of history? Please do some reading and get some education before spreading this nonsense.
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  1393. Even a lot of older people (like me and my friends) get news on social media.
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  1394. I live in a suburb of Chicago. We have a park named Nike Park. It was, indeed, one of the missile battery sites. In fact, under one of the office buildings adjacent to the park there is still an underground bunker that one can tour. As for nuclear missiles to defend against nuclear bombers, there were also the Genie and Falcon missiles carried by F-102 and F-106 interceptors used for the same purpose.
    4
  1395. This is the truth. This is how it works. Many traditionally licensed fields are state based. This includes law and architecture as well. My brother is an architect, and he lives in Maryland, near Washington, DC. To work effectively in the area, you have to become a certified architect in three jurisdictions (those two and Virginia). To practice law at the Federal level you need to be certified for that as well. Even to argue before the Supreme Court is a separate license. I had a General Counsel for a business who was so certified. The reason for all this is that regulation of these fields is not enumerated in the Constitution. Thus, it is, properly, left to the states. The fact that Roe permitted, at the Federal level, a medical procedure, based on a privacy argument shows how flawed it was. That left it open to what has now happened.
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  1396. I say this all the time and will say it again. The real estate market will never recover. China has much more housing than it needs. Heck, there are whole cities that are empty. In a market the drivers are supply and demand. In real estate there is way too much supply and little demand. The later has two main causes. The first is the demographic collapse. The second is that real estate was being bought as an investment. Chinese people had few other investments they were able to participate in. That has not changed, but the whole real estate market collapsing means that they have less and less to invest. With the withdrawal of foreign capital, where will money for investment come from? The CCP system was always going to end up this way. Long before Donald Trump started the trade war, people in the US were complaining about the unfair trade practices in China. Add to that the aggressive and toxic external (and internal) policies of the CCP, and China has nowhere to go but down. I do not say all of this as someone that does not like Chinese people. I have always said that in east Asia the Chinese people in their attitude toward entrepreneurship were the closest to Americans. Together we could have made something great, but that assumes no CCP. In fact, that was the driving force behind the opening up to China in the first place.
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  1397. While I agree with what was on the banner on the bridge says, the fact is that the Chinese people were fine with the CCP when the economy was growing, and people were making money. They were fine with the revolution when they saw they could take what the rich had. They were not smart enough to understand that if, in the 1940s and 1950s they could take these things, then at a later date they could be on the receiving end. Whole generations have been depoliticized and now they want politics. They should know that politics is messy. In Soviet Union the same thing happened, only earlier. In today's Russia the people gave up politics for money and security, and now they are paying the price, and that price is death and destruction. If the CCP is not stopped death and destruction will be fate of the Chinese people and it will dwarf what is going on in Russia. It may, indeed, result in more people being adversely affected than the whole population of Russia by a long shot. China is famous (infamous) for the scale of their disasters.
    4
  1398. Good to see you back. Of course, I have followed you on other channels. I wonder that more people do not know the story about right and left in the French assembly. I thought it was well known. As for the attitude about the Continent, I recall an interesting conversation from when I lived in England in the early part of this millennium. I was talking to some friends, whose children went to school with mine. They were talking about their upcoming holiday in Italy. They made some disparaging remarks about "those Continentals". I remember similar comments being made when I first went to England, in 1974. I had just come from "the Continent". It was all very illustrative of the attitudes of the times.
    4
  1399. Love these discussions. I have always been a fan of Nigel. He has great guests and treats them courteously, but also gets into some important and interesting points. Did not know about Ray Mears, but he seems to be a very good guy. I learned a lot in Scouts, and participated as an adult in my sons' Scout experience. The older one even started in the UK when we lived there.
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  1400. I notice that in Europe the Chinese EVs are sitting in lots at the ports. Some for 18 months.
    4
  1401. What this reminds me of is the Book of Judges in the Bible.
    4
  1402. Your comment on few businesses heeding Trump's warnings brings to mind another situation where this was the case. He warned the Germans that they were becoming too dependent on Russia for natural gas. He was also chiding them for not spending enough on defense. They laughed at him. There are videos. Trump is a strange guy, but on so many issues he was correct. Prior to the outbreak of COVID the US economy was going great guns. His basic program was the right one.
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  1403. While 600M people make 1,000 yuan ($139.50) per month or less, which is ridiculously low, 900M people live on 2,000 yuan ($279.00) per month, also ridiculously low. China is a poor country, overall.
    4
  1404. I have found myself not frequenting the cigar lounge near my house, which has a large black clientele, because I do not want to deal with potential controversy. The thing is, I consider lots of the black patrons friends and have lots of respect or them. I even dated one of the black women I met there (not the first time, back in the 1970s I had a black girlfriend, and a Japanese girlfriend, and lots of other ethnically diverse girlfriends. It was college, after all.) . This whole situation is moving lots of white Americans from their contacts with other races because they don't know what to expect. This is driven by what they see on the news. Why bother, when you might be castigated just for being what you are.
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  1405. China is not printing money? As President Joe like to say: C'mon man! In addition, much of China's GDP growth is artificial consisting of unproductive infrastructure projects. Just look at their High Speed Rail (HSR). The system has almost $1T in debt. The first lines between major cities were profitable so Xi decided he wanted HSR everywhere. Look at the reports of stations built, at high cost, that are not in use. Many are in areas that are not close to customers and inconvenient. HSR is just one glaring example. There are others.
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  1406. Not much of an explanation. These stone monuments, and there are many of them, are massive undertakings. And yet, there are no other significant stone constructions from that era. To talk about it as a social thing, a gathering place for mundane purposes is preposterous. It is correct to say we may never know. There are no records of what was going on at the time to explain how they lived.
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  1407. This is not a criticism of you or the video. I have to say, though, that the statements quoted from around 4:30 are just typical Marxist-Leninist claptrap. Even as far back as the early 1970s, when I first went to university, we had Marxist professors. One, who was a very popular philosophy professor (I was studying physics, but we had to take some out of major classes) gave a group of us, who were close to him, books by Marx and Lenin to read and discuss. We would get together and get high and discuss. Actually, we used to socialize and party with our professors a lot. Things are different today. Ah, the good old days.
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  1408. The fallacy of China's attempt to lead any type of post GSI world lies in its economy. Frankly, it is about to fall apart. First, there are no viable solutions to the major systemic problems. Secondly, they have 600 million people who are desperately poor. That is 43% of the population. In the US, no more than 10% of the population is classified as "poor", but in reality, they would be considered middle class in much of the world. Just to give a flavor of this, I volunteered at a food pantry in the suburbs of a major city. Almost every "client" had a nice car. Parking was always a problem. At the time, I had a nice car, but it was very old (since replaced) since I did not do much driving. The poor people had nicer cars. Many of the ""poor" we served were overweight, some outright obese. Food insecurity? Give me a break. I also would sometimes these same people in the local supermarket buying high end goods. It is often said that China got old before it got rich. This seems to be playing out, and will constrain China's ability to realize their global ambitions. Don't forget, the US "bought" the alliance they had during the Cold War by opening up their market. China is going the other way. They are actually treating their international clients very much like the European empires treated their colonies. This means that they use them as sources of raw materials, including food, and then as a dumping ground for their manufacturing. Let's just see how long it takes for those countries to bridle at the situation. Actually, we are already seeing it.
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  1409. Wow! This is a professor? Just in the first three minutes I have heard a bunch of drivel (trying to keep it clean). Containment in the Cold War was NOT about opposing communism per se. It was about the goals of communism, especially Marxist-Leninist, internationalist aspirations. Remember what happened when the Soviets were defeated in their invasion of Poland? That was Polish-Soviet War which ended in 1921. Lenin had to back off and started talking about "socialism in one country". This was an admission of defeat of the ideology. At least for a time. After WWII the Soviets renewed their push to forcibly communize the rest of the world. If the communists had been content to develop their system and offer it as an alternative, with presumably better outcomes, then there would have been no Cold War. American industrialists, such as Ford, were even active in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, building plants. This was not a government program from the US, but government policy did not prevent it. I guess what is most disappointing is that the professor ignores the actual experience we have had with the illiberal regimes in both Russia and China. The US thinking going into engagement with these regimes after the Cold War was that by being exposed to capitalism and interacting with the liberal democracies, they would grow and evolve to be more like the west. That has not happened. I am not sure it can happen. I expect both of these countries to fall apart. I would have expected China to go first, then Russia, but it is now looking like a horserace. As for Russia having elections, capitalism, etc. that is a load of bunkum. Both Russia and China are dictatorships, and their economies are more like that of Germany in the 1930s than the anything else. In China their constitution guarantees freedom of speech, for example. They do not have such rights. The country is ruled by the CCP. The head of their court system has actually come out and said that the role of the courts is to support the CCP, not any arbitrary laws. The same is true in Russia. Well, there is more to be said, but I will leave it at that.
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  1410. If you look at construction in China itself, you will see the same. They call them "tofu dreg" projects or construction. There are also countless examples of the poor quality of Chinese materials. In the US there was a development in Florida which imported drywall from China. It was installed and started outgassing noxious fumes. It all had to be removed and replaced. In Chicago, the local subway system ordered new trains from a Canadian company. That company used structural steel from China. It had cracks in it. The Canadian company, in consultation with the Chinese supplier, wanted to replace the components when the cracks appeared. The Chicago transportation authority said no and would not accept the cars until the steel was replaced. This project cost over $1B. These are just a couple of examples. It is a good thing that India does not participate in in the BRI.
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  1411. The US seems not to be approaching recession. That is the consensus view, and the US seems poised for continuing, albeit slower, growth. The US will continue to wean itself off of Chinese goods, which is a different situation altogether, but will have a similar effect on China.
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  1412. Wow, William, you miss a lot in the discussion of the Rouble. It went back up precisely because of intervention by the Central Bank. This has been well documented. In terms of the effect on "ordinary" Russians, you also miss the boat. Anyone who has any money left wants to buy dollars. The Rouble is done as a store of value in Russia. Something similar has happened in Turkey which recently experienced even worse inflation. In both cases, the banks restricted access to dollars for "ordinary" people.
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  1413.  @paulm518  Aw! Is someone upset?
    4
  1414. She should be your next PM. Boris has had a good run. He got Brexit done. He has done some good things. But, he has also failed to make important political decisions, especially regarding the Kung Flu pandemic. Britain is a great trading nation. Liz has been at the forefront of the success Britain has had since Brexit. She has the right idea on how to proceed. In addition, if she were to become PM, she would be the Conservative's third woman PM. The Labor party has had none. How would that look?
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  1415. If the Democrats have any hope of recovering, they will need people like Lindy Li. The sad thing is that they just might drive people like her out.
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  1416. I fully agree with what Mr. Browder wants to do with the sanctions, but the oil picture is more nuanced than he makes out. Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld from Yale School of Management makes a good case for letting oil exports from Russia continue, at least as long as current prices prevail. First, Mr. Browder makes the mistake of equating top line oil revenues with oil profits. It is the profits that are used to fight the war. Currently, Russia is either breaking even or losing money on the oil it sells. Putin is even taxing his oil companies based on the price of benchmarks, like Brent, rather than what they actually make in profit. That should tell you everything. The other thing that Professor Sonnenfeld points out is that keeping Russian oil in the global supply mix helps keep prices down globally. Russia's market for its crude is effectively limited to China and India. That gives them massive pricing power. So, keeping supply up and prices down, while not providing profit seems like a great combination to hurt Russia.
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  1417. Tony, doesn't this remind you of the Boxer Rebellion? The violence is not only against the Japanese. Read the Wikipedia entry on the Boxer Rebellion. There plenty of other sources as well. It sounds eerily like the current situation.
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  1418. I love to hear about hybrid warfare as if it something new and omnipotent. First thing is that attacks on cyber assets have been going on at a high level for many years. Several years ago my sons showed me a site where one could actually see visually the cyber-attacks that were going on in real time. It was massive. Many of these were private actors, but many may have been government sponsored. The other thing to remember is that life in the west is so rich in material aspects that momentary interruptions are inconvenient but are not life threatening. In most, if not all cases, the effects are not permanent. It is not like being bombed. Additionally, the defense against such attacks gets better as time goes on. So, I agree that the west's response is correct.
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  1419. The idea that more people to people exchanges will soften the attitude in Taiwan to reunification is, as another commentator quoted points out, the last thing you want to do. Someone has been reading too much Xi thought. Drinking too much of the Kool-Aid, so to speak. This really highlights the insidious role of propaganda in authoritarian regimes. I am constantly amazed at the scope of it in China. They are, as I constantly point out, true believers in what they were taught by their Soviet masters. They even got the inherent corruption of such a system down to a science. No matter how much they try to differentiate themselves by tacking on "with Chinese characteristics" to everything they are true heirs of Lenin. This is just another example of Chinese copy culture, which predates the CCP.
    4
  1420. Davis Starkey, you are amazing. I am glad that you do these videos. You are most amazing. I love the references to your own life and experiences. Keep up the good work.
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  1421. Government managing the economy is, as we know, a bad idea. This whole thing about new energy vehicles, the low altitude economy, and all the "new" stuff being able to take any economy forward is just plain stupid. If you can't get the basics right, the placing a bet on the "new: stuff to save you is the height of folly and results in a massive misallocation of resources. Take Chinese EVs. Between the battery fire problem and the LiDAR sensors ruining surveillance cameras the Chinese are not anywhere close to being able to use this to advance their economy. The same is probably true of UAVs. China's specialty is not technology, reliability or quality. No, it is over subsidization, dumping and IP theft. The world is now at a place where many nations, generally the most important, are on to this and tired of it. So, beware the government subsidy in China. Most of it will be stolen anyway.
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  1422. At about 47:00 Dr. Starkey talks again about revolutions. I don't know if this audience will know the song, but The Who had a song, We Won't Get Fooled Again. It fits in so well with the remarks here. One line from the song is "meet the new boss, same as the old boss". And of course, the refrain, 'we won't get fooled again". I hope Dr. Starkey listens to the song. It is a masterpiece and fits in so well with what he is saying. The golden age of English rock music was populated by groups that seemed to have a classical education. Forget the Beetles and the Rolling Stones, it is groups like The Who, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin and others, who had a real appreciation of culture and history that made their music great and timeless.
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  1423. Earthquakes? It must be global warming.
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  1424. The problem Ukraine has is lack of airpower. NATO and the western way of war depends on that. It is why the US spends insane amounts of money on airpower. That is one of the problems with the expectations for the offensive as well. In the west we are used to "shock and awe". The air campaign prior to Desert Storm lasted at least five weeks. In the Iraq War of 2003, the "shock and awe" was truly impressive, and is something Russia, much less Ukraine, could never do. So, to expect something similar from Ukraine is silly. Ukraine has been impressive, but there are those who claim they are now the best army in the world. As much as I am a supporter of Ukraine, that is just silly. I think it was the Chieftan who said that a strong armored corps (he even specified the divisions) could clear the Donbas in a short time. He is correct in that assessment. On the other hand, they would have all the tools that a typical NATO army would have. Ukraine has done well with the resources they have. They have moved closer to NATO standards and have shown great bravery and resolve. They need to be given the full set of resources.
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  1425. When I first started traveling abroad, in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, I realized that a large number of "poor" people in the US would be considered middle class in much of the world. Don't forget that poverty levels in the US are, for official statistical purposes, relative, not absolute. Decades later I was volunteering at a food pantry in the city I have lived in for the past 32 years. It is a deluxe facility, privately funded. Large amounts of food are given out. The vast majority of "clients" drove their own cars to the facility, so parking was a problem. At the time I had an older car. It was high end when I bought it, but because I did not drive much, I kept it. It was, by then, not as good as the ones most of these "poor" people were driving to pick up free food. An interesting factor was that all these people had cell phones, some high end. Many were also overweight, or outright obese.
    4
  1426. I fully agree with you, I lived in England (Winchester) in the early part of the century. My older son was a right little Englishman. In year one and two he had a wonderful English accent I also recall that he was constantly beset by the girls who would often kiss him against his wishes. Of course, years later, when he was in high school, he would often have many girls at the same time. Needless to say, I was very proud. He did indeed have some English ancestry through his maternal grandmother. Part of her ancestry was from Lincoln. We did research there but did not come up with anything definitive. English identity is a real thing. Back in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium I arrived in England and was immediately thrown in with a wonderful group. Frankly, before that I spent a month without talking to a native English speaker. It was an interesting situation. I have always been a great D.H. Lawrence fan. One of my first meetings in London was with Colonel Grey of the Indian Army. At our meeting was a man who could have been Lawrence. It was a magical time. i bought a copy of Lady Chatterly's Lover from a used book seller in London. When I got back to the US I showed it to a friend who was a Lawrence scholar. He inscribed it with "the expurgated". All this is to say that English culture is amazing and globally important. Carl is absolutely right to discuss an English identity.
    4
  1427. This is not really a criticism of this channel, but it does apply to all channels that give daily updates. We are, of course, in an exceptional situation in war reporting. Just don't get too caught up in the minutiae. You might want to read about (or watch some of the excellent videos available) the Battle of Stalingrad during WWII. Bakhmut seems to be so very similar. So, don't get too caught up in the smallest details. These will change day by day and are not necessarily good predictors. Also, don't get too caught up with the maps. They don't all agree and small changes may well not signify anything.
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  1428. Christian is young. He doesn't really understand the Vietnam War or, as George so eloquently puts it, the reality of the geopolitical situation of the time. The only thing I would add is that the US also miscalculated by not allowing itself to move into North Vietnam. I think this goes back to the Korean War when we went past the demarcation line the Chinese came in. The situation geographically was very similar in the two wars,
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  1429. The homeless crisis started decades ago when we stopped institutionalizing people because of perceived problems with state mental institutions. This aversion to taking people who are a danger to themselves and society as a whole off the streets is killing our cities. Perhaps the cities don't deserve to be saved. Perhaps we will move to other forms of social organization. Who knows? Whatever the case, we need to have a real national conversation on the topic.
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  1430. If inflation is indeed 8.7% then why hike the interest rate to over 20%? Generally, one has to raise the interest rate to just over the rate of inflation. In the US inflation has been brought down even though interest rates never reached the level of the inflation rate. Of course, the answer is that the rate of inflation is well above the reported number.
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  1431. I think you will find that, if this decision is what is expected, that it will be decided on constitutional/legal grounds. The fact is, in the US Constitution, those powers not specifically called out in the Constitution are the purview of the States. People in the UK may not well understand that. The US is a federal system. Medical matters are not addressed in the Constitution, so they are regulated by the States, not the Federal Government. This is one argument against Roe vs Wade. The rights of citizens are called out explicitly called in the Constitution. A "right to choose" in this case is not. This is another major argument against. The court, in Roe, created a right. I personally neutral on the subject. I do think it is better handled by the various States. We went through a period where the Supreme Court was "activist" and created many "rights". We use the phrase: "legislate from the bench". You would not accept that in the UK.
    4
  1432. I have been seeing videos where people within Russia have been talking about wanting to get out of the Russian Federation. They are very aware it is an imperialist empire. Sometimes these are educated people, sometimes they are not. It is already happening. With the Armenia Azerbaijan situation people in areas still in the Russian Federation are looking at this being their chance. In addition, several other former Soviet republics, which have border disputes amongst themselves. are looking at Russia's weakness and are starting up their own conflicts. So, another area where Peter is getting it right.
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  1433. That is funny. Lambda-CDM is "better" that MOND. Then why doesn't it predict this. Being better than MOND does not mean it is correct. By the way, I am agnostic on this whole situation. It seems that the physics community has come to the point where the simulations are gospel. Those simulations are based on theory and observations, (I assume the latter). All simulations make assumptions. Trust me, I have worked with simulation for half a century in many fields. The way it was explained to me towards the end of the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, one runs many simulations with different assumptions. Then one runs the experiment. If the actual data matches with one of the simulations, then the best you can say is that the assumptions made in that simulation tend to be supported. This is especially true in areas where the scale is very small (I was working in High Energy Physics at the time) or very large (where they cannot be experimented on in the usual way).
    4
  1434. While there has been a lot of foreign investment in China, you can't just add up all the past investments. This investment has been primarily in industrial plant. Much of that has returned profit already. A lot of it is lower tech. Look at Apple's plants (actually owned by someone else). These plants are labor intensive, thus easier to relocate. The actual added value of assembly in China is a tiny fraction of the cost of an iPhone, for example. Many companies have been relocating outside of China, including many Chinese firms. These companies are not going under. Many do quite well after relocation. Companies are complex organizations and are adaptable. Look at what happened in Russia with the sanctions. Many of the companies lost all of their investment in Russia. These companies did not go under, even though some had massive investments. The ones that will hurt are those investing in purely financial instruments such as stocks and bonds. This is a small amount of the total investment in China. Fortunately for me my financial advisor will not invest in funds that include direct investments in China. Another thing to understand is that China does not generally allow foreign majority ownership in enterprises in China. This will come back to haunt them. The conclusion is that a crash in China will not be as impactful as many believe due to the semi-closed nature of the CCP's policies.
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  1435. The CCP says that the tariffs are "politically motivated". Well, duh! What is government? It is politics. Everything the CCP does is politically motivated.
    4
  1436. At least none he thought himself.
    4
  1437. Well put.
    4
  1438. In the second Gulf War the US used about 165K troops to overrun Iraq in two weeks. The Iraqi army was well over twice the size of Ukraine's. It was combat hardened, which Ukraine's is not. The Russians will easily have air superiority, as the US did in Iraq. Ukraine has no hope of winning. The question is will Russia be ready for the consequences. In the Iraq situation, the whole world was against Iraq, even the Russians (I will not comment on the correctness of that conflict). In this case, most of the world is against Russia's actions. Russia has been touting its relationship with China. Good luck there. China claims Vladivostok, which is a part of Russia. China claims rights in the Arctic, which Russia disputes. China is an alternative market for Russian energy, but is it big enough to replace the rest of the world? Not really. In that event, China would be able to dictate terms and prices, and energy is Russia's only really valuable export. Also consider that China has been stealing Russian military technology for decades. This is one of Russia's only manufacturing exports of any note. Putin has dug himself a very deep hole. He is not nearly as smart as people think.
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  1439. I love it when Li talks about "scientific decisions". It reminds me of "scientific socialism". When communists talk in these terms they are deflecting. Brings back memories of the "good old days".
    4
  1440. I have seen some of the critiques of the Ukranian offensive. Even though some of those are from former military officers, they still fall apart under any real analysis. On the other hand, people I respect more, such as David Petraeus and Ben Hodges give a more nuanced view. They point out the lack of airpower as the key factor. Long range fires are also an issue. Neither of these are available to the Ukrainians today. Personally, I am convinced that an attack by a much smaller US force, with large numbers of tanks and the whole complement of airpower, could overwhelm the Russians in short order. Air power is the key. With what the Ukrainians have today they are doing very, very well. I think they still have the ability to reach a significant objective in the next couple of months.
    4
  1441. I love the Chinese rection to the UK security laws, and the references to the US. The reference to McCarthyism is especially delicious. The fact is, that while McCarthy was way over the top in his witch hunts, the Soviet Union was doing the same thing China is trying to do now. Russia is also back at it. Ah, just like the good old days of the Cold War. I miss the Cold War.
    4
  1442. What I don't understand is this military analysis based on numbers. It totally ignores the quality of both the equipment, forces, leadership and planning. The best example of this is the Israelis. From the beginning the numbers were even more skewed against them, and yet they have not lost a war. Another situation is Iraq. In the Gulf War the US and allies had about 500K troops. In OIF the US sent in about 180K. Iraq still had a large army, but it was of very poor quality. Of course, it had mostly Soviet era weapons. The rule of thumb is that the attacking force has to have a three to one advantage in personnel. So, what it seems is that a lot of the professional military analysis is shallow and incorrect.
    4
  1443. You have to remember that this war footing was what brought down the Soviet Union. The Soviets had spent a large portion of their national budget on defense for decades, neglecting their own people. I think we will see something similar. This time it will result in the dissolution of the Russian Federation. Actually, that dissolution has been predicted for some time in the next couple of decades anyway. Now, it may happen much sooner.
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  1444. Food safety in China? You must be kidding me. YouTube is full of videos about gutter oil, and now, poop water. Several years ago, my wife became concerned about contamination in rice. Particularly arsenic and some heavy metals. While some is found naturally in all rice, the issue seems to be particularly severe in China. So, we looked it up. The Chinese government had a standard that was half of the WHO standard. They tested the rice from over 60 counties in China and found the concentration in all but a couple to be over twice the WHO standard. So much for food safety and standards in China.
    4
  1445.  @APEXMACHCORPORATION  They only have a few T-14 Armata tanks. is basically a prototype. They are no where near full production capability. With the embargo of advanced chips, there is little chance it will be produced in any numbers. In fact, the latest I heard is that they a dusting off their stockpile of T-62 tanks. These are not in good shape, so they will have a limited supply of these as well.
    4
  1446. Wow! just saw this one. Of course, since it was recorded, Johnson has resigned, and it seems the Pincher incident was the straw that broke the camel's back. Fantastic.
    4
  1447. At about 1:15 you stated that the CCP considers its state driven mechanisms is central to what Beijing considers its superior system. They are either ignorant, stupid or delusional. Most likely it is all three. History has consistently proven them wrong. Let's start with the Soviet Union. Then there is China before the reform and opening up. How about Cuba? Pretty much all economic theory stresses that individuals making decisions in their own self-interest is the most efficient way to go. At least this silliness is entertaining, in a perverse sort of way.
    4
  1448. The countries that abstained, especially in areas like Southeast Asia, were probably doing so because of the issue of China. China is a big influence there. It was most likely out of fear, rather than principle. As for the action to suspend, that makes total sense. I don't see why you can't see it. A country under suspicion of major war crimes being suspended is a prudent step. And it is a suspension, not an expulsion. In any democratic system this is reasonable. It is also quite common in many legal contexts.
    4
  1449. This whole global south thing bugs me, but that is just a pet peeve of mine. I have done a little of analysis on this. The CCP shills like to throw around big numbers ($1T, 100+ countries). It is all a sham. First, the $1T. This investment takes the form of loans. The terms tend to be onerous and involve corruption (as does most foreign aid). In fact, the terms are generally kept secret. Ever wonder why? The numbers I have seen show that 60% of those loans in distress. China has a very bad record of helping their client countries when they run into difficulties. It is also very likely that one of the motives for the whole initiative is corruption. In China corruption. This is the best way for officials to get money out of the country. The second is the opportunity for China. I looked at GDP figures from the IMF. The global south, minus India, generates about 25% of world GDP, at most. Of those, perhaps half would align with China. So, China is going to replace the west and its allies with a trade bloc that represents an eighth of the world's economy. Yeah, good luck with that. This relates to the number of countries. First, considering the variation in size and economy, this is a totally meaningless figure. The rhetoric also glosses over the fact that most of these countries are also tied to the west in some form. The global south is a nothing burger. All their progress in the last several decades came from the US led world order. Take that away and the norm will become poverty and starvation. This sounds harsh, but it is not an exaggeration. Populations there grew because of the order, and they will fall once that order is broken. Or those countries will become mere vassals of a larger power. Sound familiar? What China wants is the old Imperial system. In that system, China is not well placed to be a major player. They never have been, and all their past vulnerabilities are still in place.
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  1450. China has to realize that the US has minimal interest in this trade route through the Red Sea. US flagged shipping through there is minimal, and a lot of it is food assistance and military supplies for US forces and their allies. Some of the containers going through to Europe are transloaded and shipped to the East Coast of the US, but that can be avoided if necessary. I personally think it is more out of habit than a considered policy stance that drives the US to deal with this situation. The countries with real interests in this are the Europeans and China. China has a squadron of six ships in Djibouti. They like to make videos but have not participated in protecting ships. Perhaps they are afraid to find out if their missiles actually work. The piece you quoted at the end by the gentleman from Shanghai shows that he has a superficial understanding of the Middle East situation. This lack of understanding by commentators in Asia, is a source of concern.
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  1451.  @bobwatson8754  That is a good point. The only problem, if this escalates or goes on for a long time, is selling it to the American people. Americans are tired of the wars, especially in the Middle East.
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  1452. I like what Vivek and Elon are going to do, but I have an issue with his first statement. We elect legislators and executive branch leaders. I don't expect the legislators to "run" the government, do you? I expect the executive branch leaders to oversee their departments, but to run them, I don't know. There will still be people who do the day to day work, and they won't be elected. What I think Vivek is getting at is the policy aspect. That is where our elected leaders have fallen down. That is what we have to fix.
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  1453. While not meeting claims, your reporting shows they do emit less carbon than all ICE cars. As you say, they reduce emissions by a third. Is that not significant? And, what about people who mostly drive within the range of the battery? I have known several. One had a Chevy Volt. The all electric range was enough to get him to work and back. And it was not a short commute. He, by the way, worked at a government energy lab. Another friend of mine just got a hybrid SUV. His office is quite close to his home, and almost all of his daily driving is within electric range. Another thing to consider is that all electric vehicles depend on subsidies. This was shown clearly in China where the subsidies were stopped, and EV sales plummeted. This just happened.
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  1454. Oh, come on. AI and quantum computing being the main aspects of the "arms race" of the new Cold War is to ignore what war is. Just look at what is happening in Ukraine. You even have WWI weapons being used, effectively. AI and quantum computing are tools. Tools are important. What I get from Niall and many other pundits who throw around these terms is that they are just picking up on the buzzwords of the time.
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  1455. Tony, your personal experiences are a valuable addition to the conversation. No need to apologize. When I was living and working in Europe I had a lot of interesting experiences. I am American but my heritage is Greek. When I moved to the UK I bought clothes locally. Most of my suits were Saville Row. One time I was in all black, suit, shirt, tie, shoes (it was the style), and upon entering Germany from France the border patrol asked for my passport in German. Fortunately, that was a language I studied at university. So, when I traveled throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa (my area of operations) I was assumed to be southern European. In addition, even when people knew I was American I would get comments from them about other Europeans. It was often enlightening, and somewhat entertaining. It actually helped in my business dealings.
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  1456. The comment at about 5:00 is basically ignorant. I remember, before the opening to China, a satirical publication, Mad Magazine, which routinely showed on maps China as "the great big empty spot". As far as I can recall the west was doing just fine without China then. There were two main reasons to open to China, and neither were altruistic. The first was to use China as a counterweight to the Soviet Block. This was another large population block cut off from the west. The idea was to sow discord in the Communist bloc. The second, which came much later, was to see China as a massive market for western companies. What the idiots in western diplomacy neglected to do was to require a level playing field economically. This has come back to haunt the west in a big way. Fortunately, a move out of China is not something that businesses will find difficult. Don't forget, they moved into China quite easily. China, before the opening basically had no industrial base. Remember the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Elements of both, and especially the later, are being revived right now. As for ignoring a large part of the earth's population, what about Africa? These kinds of statements show a real lack of understanding of history, politics and economics. And this is from our diplomats.
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  1457. TikTok is wasting its money.
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  1458. Rob has a strange take on this. He constantly refers to equalities legislation, then goes on to pan regulation. Seems like a bit of a double standard.
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  1459.  @AlexAnteroLammikko  I basically agree with you, except on the point about Europe picking up the slack. The economies of the EU plus UK taken together are ten times larger in nominal GDP terms than that of Russia. The population is three times as large. It is in their interest to take up the slack.
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  1460. The Defense Department Report makes me laugh. Having a lot of experience in the aerospace and defense industry, I have to say that this is par for the course. Going up to 1,000 nuclear warheads is not a big threat. Do you know how many warheads the US and Russia have today. Each has several times more than China is moving toward and can up those numbers very rapidly. In fact, during the height of the Cold War (I miss the Cold War) the Soviets and the US each had well over 10,000 warheads. They also had more sophisticated delivery and control systems. The corruption issue is also much more important than people in the defense community are willing to admit. The Ukraine War should be an object lesson in how important this is. Quality of equipment and forces, and this includes a lot of factors, is critically important. A good example is the T-34 tank in WWII. It was an innovative design, but the Germans were able to destroy lots and lots of them. The main issue was the relatively poor (compared to the Germans) sighting systems and crew training. We see the same type of thing with the Russians today. Finally, who the heck is going to invade China? What is there that anyone today wants? The answers are no one and nothing. China has poor farmland, no major sources of raw materials and all those Chinese (no disrespect meant to the individual Chinese person). The only countries that might invade China are Russia and North Korea. This may seem strange, but there are reasons for both.
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  1461. Sugar is bad for you. Period! Better to do without it.
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  1462. The Greek attitude is driven as much by the shared experience under Ottoman rule as anything else.
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  1463. I really wonder if Rahm's comments about Xi are not intentional. Rahm is extremely tied in with the Democratic Party hierarchy and is an experienced operative (I have some experience of this having lived in the Chicago area for more than 30 years) and it may be that his remarks are a backdoor way to criticize Xi and the CCP without it seeming to come from the White House. Distrust of China and the CCP is one of the issues that both Democrats and Republicans can agree on.
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  1464.  @plumeria66  You majored in philosophy, interesting. Did you do graduate studies or get a professional degree (law, MBA, etc.)? As for "kids" being duped, I have to disagree with you, with a caveat. That is, parents are also involved in these decisions. Either the parents are paying, or they at least acquiesce, assuming the student gets a loan for their studies. I will give a typical case. The son of a friend of mine got an English degree from and expensive school. He had well over $100K in debt (this is in the US). He asked his father for help when he couldn't get a sufficient job. Hs father, who was very successful, said he would only help if he went back and got a practical degree.
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  1465. The US actually doesn't have energy interests in the Persian Gulf. In fact, the US is winding down its presence there. It is the Europeans that have to worry. Also, you have India nearby and they have the means to interdict any facility there. On top of that, as you mention, the location of the Gwadar is in a province with a significant separatist movement. This may be a problem for both the Pakistani government and the CCP.
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  1466. Tony, I love the text on the thumbnail for this video. I also really appreciate the extra episode. I follow China affairs closely and your program is one of the top ones I have found. I am more and more impressed with Raimondo. The comments in the Global Times editorial are actually quite reasonable. What they leave out is that the actions being taken and contemplated in the US are driven by CCP policies. They are just as populist as the US leaders. What most people don't pay attention to is the direction of US politics. It is going full populist. Peter Zeihan puts it quite well, but he is not the only one. He points out that all of our presidents since George H. W. Bush have been progressively more populist, Biden even outdoing Trump. One of the reasons things are falling apart is that concept of "financial development with Chinese characteristics". That is their right, by the way. They are a sovereign nation. But other nations are sovereign as well and can decide that they don't want to participate a system with "Chinese characteristics" if it would be detrimental to their own economies and people. Most people forget that the sub-prime crisis in the US was driven by a populist political intervention in the financial markets, mandating the extension of credit to people who really didn't qualify for it. Look where that got us. By the way, this idea of "Chinese characteristics" is just as populist as anything in the US, or the rest of the west. The fact is that we are entering another Cold War (I miss the last one, I got to do incredibly interesting research with unlimited budgets) and it is driven by the CCP's decision to go back to its ideological roots. Full Mao indeed. Coupled with Full Stalin, and you have the complete package.
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  1467. The interviewers on this channel seem to be on the side of the Russians. They are skeptical of any success by Ukraine. The last few interviews I have seen on this channel are striking in that the interviewees, who are often military men, have been very upbeat about Ukraine's chances, while the interviewers have been less than enthusiastic. They rely on size of countries and forces. If this were the actual case, then how do you explain the Israelis. How about OIF, where a much smaller western force destroyed a much larger army in a matter of weeks. War is not only a numbers game. It is also a matter of strategy, tactics and training as well as morale.
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  1468. Kudos to the Print. I love the content, especially Cut the Clutter. This is an amazing video and format, and I hope there is more in the future. You guys are the best!
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  1469. Whatever happened to global warming???
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  1470. Well said, especially the last part. You are learning.
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  1471. Tony, I appreciate you making these documents from CCP officials available to us in translation. It is good to hear from the source. On the other hand, listening to what the CCP officials are saying I just want to scream. In fact, maybe I will scream. ... There, that's better. US a hegemonic power? Come on man, as President Joe likes to say. The US and the west are the reason China has even gotten to where it is. To continue up the ladder the CCP would have to basically abolish itself and turn China into a democratic country with an open capitalist economy. Going down the national socialist path they are on today is not going to get them to where they say they want to be. On top of that, it is China that is harboring dreams of hegemony. They say so. They flout international agreements. They support other bad actors. China has no "right" to develop as they want or to participate in international commerce on their own terms. The US is pulling back from policing the world's oceans and imposing its will. This has been true ever since the fall of the Soviet Union. China wants a multipolar world. Well, as I often say, they are going to get it, and they are not going to like it. Just look at history. Over the last 200 years or so China has fared poorly in that milieu. China's geography has not changed. They are always going to be vulnerable. Japan is in the same boat, so to speak, but they have chosen a different path.
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  1472. What interests me is the discussion at the end where she talks about the problem of Ukraine being an example, on the border of Russia, of a related people going a different way. This is very much like what is happening with China and Taiwan. In fact, I saw an item recently where it was claimed that people in Shanghai wanted to leave CCP controlled China to unite with Taiwan. I don't know how credible, or extensive, such a movement is, but the fact that it is being expressed is telling. What this shows is a pattern where a failing totalitarian state is afraid of a democratic state on its borders presenting a counter example to its own people.
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  1473. I know i shouldn't react to the Chinese reaction to the debate, but that is difficult. On WWIII, there are many people, outside of the US especially, that believe we are in it. I can't accept that. Look, as far a number of troops involved on both sides, Korea, Vietnam, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War and the Iraq War in 2003 involved forces as large. All but the Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War, lasted many years. On a bit of a tangent, the 2003 war is sometimes taken as going from 2003 to 2011. That is bogus. The regime present in Iraq at the beginning of the war fell quite quickly. The decision to try to stabilize a unified Iraq, which itself was a figment of the imperial British and French was just plain stupid. If you want to use that metric, then the war against Germany did not end until reunification. Considering we had 500K troops there all that time, how is it substantively different? The war in Korea, similarly, never ended. Why do I bring all this up? Because history never really repeats itself. As one pundit put it, it rhymes. There is one big, nay huge, elephant in the room. NUKES! How do you think that all those local wars during the Cold War period did not turn into WWIII? Nothing has changed.
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  1474.  @JohnJaneson  That may be one of Xi's fears. He must know how bad the corruption is. It kind of reminds me of something I read a while back. It was about some sort of war with Pakistan. The Pakistanis went to launch a nuclear missile and it failed on the launchpad and the warhead went off. I know it was fiction, but I think it was based on realistic expectations.
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  1475. That might be true in the abstract, but who's blood and treasure will be used to impose those consequences? Asking for a friend.
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  1476. The countries in these areas are mostly (all?) colonies. The borders often do not take into account national differences between peoples. This has happened all over the world where colonial powers divided up the land in ways that were conducive to their interests, not those of the people living there. This is often the root of conflicts all over the world.
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  1477. AS soon as I heard that the CEO had run software firms, I could tell what was coming. It is a rare individual who can switch industries at that level. I once worked for a software startup. They brought in as the CEO a guy who had run one of Intel's chip plants. Needless to say, it was a disaster.
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  1478. And you wonder why the US went to war in Afghanistan? We will probably have to go back in there in a year or two. It is time the world united to fight this scourge.
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  1479. Failla is great, How times have changed. He says get the kid a beer. Should have been done already. When I was 10, I was in a bar with my father, my uncle and my brother (who was two years younger). We sat in a booth and my father and uncle got a beer and they brought over a couple of small glasses of beer for my brother and me. Then a cop walks in and sits down with us and orders a beer. Turns out he grew up with my father and his brother (I think he was in my father's year). We did not get into trouble. Of course, this was 56 years ago, when things were a little more sane.
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  1480. The military being loyal to a leader, not the country. Well, where have we heard that before? Oh, yes, Nazi Germany.
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  1481. In the Soviet economy they did have full employment. On the other hand, they were terribly inefficient. As the old saying goes "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work".
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  1482. You are definitely on my list of favorite YouTubers. Having first been to UK just over half a century ago, and having lived there early in this millennium, I like to follow what is going on. Actually, I try to follow sources from all over the world, having traveled to many places. Keep up the good work.
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  1483. Trump is perfectly capable of cancelling the meeting. The old strictures of diplomatic protocol do not apply to Trump (thank goodness). Also, Trump's domestic opponents are in total disarray and sinking fast. Hoping that they will be able to stymie him is foolish.
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  1484.  @henli-rw5dw  Wealth inequality is never the issue. It has always been around. What matters is the level of "wealth" and income of the majority of people. When most people have a reasonable level of wealth, the fact that there are those who have a lot is not destabilizing. There are a lot more factors than just money. One is geography and population density.
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  1485.  @BrickIndiana  Well, I knew that, but I wanted Artur to say it. Then again, how come it took so many rounds of sanctions? I know some were delayed to give time for the Europeans to adjust. On the other hand, the incrementalism argues for their not believing that the sanctions would have immediate effect. In fact, the critical sanctions, on energy, took a very long time to enact. While Russia may be self-sufficient, money is becoming so much an issue that some gas stations are running out. I have also seen reports that the range of foods in Russia may become a bit of a health issue in Russia. They export a lot, but import lots of types of foods to balance their diet. By the way, from your profile I deduce you are in the Chicago area. So am I. Thanks for the engagement. It is always good to share knowledge and opinions.
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  1486. That is a strange statement on the Abrams tank logistics. The US, for a long time, has prepositioned equipment in Europe, including M1 tanks. This prepositioning also includes the logistics. These tanks have also been ordered by Poland. The info I see indicates the number is 250. I think we will see lots of M1s in Europe very shortly.
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  1487. I love what you say about the British cars. Yes, you do have to be a mechanic and to be able to work on the cars yourself. I still have the tools needed to totally rebuild my MGB or Austin-Healey Sprite engine. They don't take up a lot of space. I even remember one time, when, at 2AM, I realized I needed to change the clutch in my MGB so that I could get to work the next day. I had a great garage setup, and I could do that job in about two hours. It was wild. At that time of night, I could hear, and see, the deer running down the street outside my house. Ah, the good old days.
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  1488. I watched that video by Modern MBA. I have also been in the computer and software industry for about half a century. I tend to see Modern MBA's view as a bit extreme, but he does have a point about the hype cycle. I remember the big data hype. I was a part of it. I even went on to teach professional classes in it. The demand eventually dropped off. But at the height of that hype cycle the business community was saying things like every company needed a C level executive to address big data. Big data was going to revolutionize things like advertising. What a joke. I still get ads for things I have already purchased, and I don't hide my identity. That was one of the areas where big data was going to make things more efficient. Why hasn't it happened? The cost. Period! It is cheaper to shove out a useless ad than to use big data to understand who I am and what I might be interested in. That is just a small example. There was also an expectation that data would become a monetizable asset. This has happened a little, but nowhere near the expectation. In addition, he is not the only one. The Wall Street Journal had an article on May 31 titled "The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam". Will AI be useful. Absolutely. Will it totally change the world. Well, that is still a question. The big issue seems to be the cost, sort of like big data. Another problem is with the term AI. Do you mean neural networks, large language models, machine learning? All of the above? Well, if so, then this stuff has been in use for a long time. For example, you mention predictive maintenance in manufacturing. In about 1980 I was working at a simulator company. I did a really neat R&D project, using an innovative hardware feature in a CPU chip we were just starting to deploy. It allowed me to develop a system, without adding hardware, to predict and pinpoint failures using a primitive form of machine learning. I have worked on many other such projects over the years. I have even given lectures on the topic prior to the current hype. Another example you mention is medical diagnosis. Several years ago (a decade I think) IBM, among others, was applying advanced AI to medical diagnosis. They worked with some of the best institutions. The AI was no better than the human doctor at the task. Now, what you mention, that it helps doctors is the correct way to go. Assisting the human doctors, not replacing them. It is a tool, and a useful one. How many other tools have been developed over the years for similar purposes? Lots.
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  1489. Not only is it not cost effective, but it has $1T (and growing) debt. China started out with a few lines between major cities that were profitable. Then Xi made the decision to build HSR everywhere. This has led to underutilized lines (many), abandoned stations (built at great cost), and of course, the massive debt. Great success?
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  1490. Coldest winter in memory? Whatever happened to global warming?
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  1491.  @Fleshox19-uz3qt  It is only partially a joke. It started out that way, but we are seeing cold weather in lots of places. This lowers the average temperature, which is the critical parameter in the whole climate change (formerly global warming) issue.
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  1492.  @jfverboom7973  Well, considering the short time that records are available, I don't think you say that with any confidence.
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  1493. The First Amendment does not protect "correct" speech. It protects ALL speech. If this goes to the Supreme Court, I fully expect it will be struck down.
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  1494. China an innovator? You must be kidding me. You can discount the whole Allen report. The one part I do agree with is at the end. I do believe that American and Chinese people are more similar than most people think. I have thought that for a long time. Unlike the rest of northeast Asia, China is large and diverse in its regions, much like the US. The problem is its current governing system. If this had only changed, as many in the US and the west hoped, the future would have been much brighter.
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  1495. First off, I want to state that I am ardent supporter of Ukraine. One thing you have to understand, in regard to the UN, is that it has no power by itself. Another is that the general assembly is nonsensical on a one country, one vote basis. The idea is ludicrous. To make sense it would have to structured so that the votes are proportionally distributed. How to do that is a really complex issue. Should it be population? Should it be economic? Should it be contributions to the UN? Maybe some combination of these? You can see how complex the issue is. I expect there is no resolution. Thus, you have the security council which represented the winners of WWII. What is missing from the debate is that rules, without an enforcement mechanism, are meaningless. This makes the whole idea of "world governance" a chimera. In the US there are plenty of people who would like to defund the UN. That might be a good idea. Then they would move it to Geneva, and it would wither and die like the League of Nations. Finally, it was the Budapest Memorandum, not the Budapest Treaty. That is a crucial distinction. If it had been a treaty, then the US and UK could have been obligated to commit troops in 2014.
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  1496. Mike, you dismiss the possibility of having to get another vaccination next year. What about the flu? We have different vaccines each year because of the different prevalent strains expected. And these are yearly things. Before COVID tens of thousands died each year because of flu. There was gnashing of teeth about the NHS being overwhelmed each year because of the flu.
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  1497.  @lenorefoxmoor9985  Thanks. I downloaded the book, "Nietzsche and the Nazis" to my Kindle (it was even included in Kindle Unlimited, oh joy). I find it well written but hard to read. That is because I want to respond to Nietzsche all the time. Sometimes I feel like screaming. Of course, it makes sense. Nietzsche's philosophy led to the Nazis and a lot of the racist totalitarian regimes we have today.
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  1498. Thank you, Tony. I always look forward to your videos. Keep up the good work. Let's hope things get better for the Chinese people soon.
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  1499.  @JohnJaneson2449  Agreed. Serbia is not a member of either the EU or NATO. Outside of their belt and road projects they have little significance.
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  1500. One more comment. Don't forget the Winter War waged by the Soviets against Finland. Add to that the appalling casualties the Soviets took against the Nazis, and you will see why all this talk about the Russian military is just so much crap. Look at what the Israelis did as I mention in another comment, against Soviet supported militaries. You should also look at videos of Russian prisoners being interrogated by Ukranian forces. This is not the professional military that we have in the West. The population of Russia is not the compliant group that we saw in past times. Putin made his name in the second Chechen war, where he blew up everything. Look at the brutality it took then. I think his military will fail. Their casualties are much greater than they have reported. When this is known to his people, things will get dicey for him internally. There are already massive protests in Russia. He very well could be headed for a fall.
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  1501. Fewer members of the military now than before? You need a Pete Hegseth. The numbers in the US were heading down, now they are way up. And we are getting a fancy new fighter on top of that.
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  1502. Even the older nuclear power plant designs in the west are incredibly safe. The two major failures, Chernobyl and Fukushima are really outliers. Chernobyl was a stupid design which would never be used in the west. Fukushima was in a very stupid location which is, again, not something that would be done in the west.
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  1503. The Japan situation was very similar to China's in a very fundamental way. The Japanese government could not contemplate disrupting the status quo. In Japan you have the keiretsu system of cartels. Japan was loath to disrupt these. The solution at the time would have been to open up its industry to foreign investment and ownership. The government has consistently shut such efforts down. They put more effort into maintaining the companies than into reforming the economy. In China you have the issue of systemic corruption in the CCP. Changing to a market-based and rules-based economy in the current situation would disrupt the major source of income to these people. That would immediately turn the party cadres against the leadership. That is one way the CCP falls apart. Some are now (long after me) speculating that China might devolve into warlordism. That is a system where local leaders exercise a large amount of autonomy from the central authority. It could mean, but does not require, the breakup of the country. Image it, lots of little Chinas. It could happen. It did happen after the fall of the Qing dynasty. Xi is starting to resemble Puyi in my eyes. On the other hand, China has had full central control of the country for only about 300 years of its long history, according to accounts I have read. Each region has very different conditions and needs. This is indeed how a bunch of much smaller European countries were able to control Chinese trade for a couple of centuries. If you try to claim that with technology, etc. the CCP can maintain central control, then you ignore two interrelated things. One is the cost. They spend more on internal security than on the military. The second is the number of people required. Currently we are seeing lots of examples where police and civil servants are not being paid. How long do you think they will support CCP repression, especially when there might be others who can pay them.
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  1504.  @andrejspetersons8500  Having a strong community is one thing. The real question is the growth.
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  1505.  @shundi4264  US decline? First, compared to what? Get a clue.
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  1506. The Gallup announcement should be the most worrying to the Chinese. What is left out in all this discussion of policy decisions is that, in the non-communist world, it is companies that make decisions. Government can constrain or encourage, but they ultimately don't make the decision for the companies. The Russians found this out when many more companies stopped doing business there not based on government requirements but based on internal decision making and consumer pressure. This surprised the Russians, and especially the Chinese. In their totalitarian systems such actions are unthinkable.
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  1507. Correction, the real estate market is facing collapse, and that will take down the financial sector with it.
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  1508.  @awm9290  Yes, they need a written constitution. So do the British. Actually, in the latter case, someone I admire and follow, David Starkey, is critical of the US with its written constitution. The Brits bang on and on about the constitution (small "c" intentional), when they have suffered from the effects of not having one. The best example of this is the Supreme Court in the UK. Under Tony Blair and Labor, they had, for a time, a very large majority. So, the legislature made massive changes to the structure of the government (devolution, House of Lords reform, Supreme Court) simply through legislative means. They are still struggling with these changes, and it is not good.
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  1509.  @generaltnt2790  Well, I would disagree with you on the UK situation. I have lived there and first traveled there almost half a century ago. The legislature there created a Supreme Court out of thin air at a time when one party had a large majority. It has not been pretty. They have a different concept of government that we do, and than much of the world does. I actually think Israel inherited a lot from them, and this court and constitution issue part of it. To the Brits, Parliament is sovereign. This is the basic organizing principal of their government. It is something that the newly created US did not want to follow. There is a whole history discussion there, but I hope that my meaning is clear.
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  1510.  @ancesthntr  I actually fully understand what you are saying and that is my motivation for what I said. I could conceive of other ways to deal with the problems, but I believe that a written constitution would be best. That might also have something to say about how the justices are chosen, etc.
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  1511.  @youman5079  Are you surprised? They have fought a number of wars, and have current points of contention. To say this is some sort of obsession is ludicrous. And never forget, both countries have nukes. Thus, any conflict can escalate to an unimageable level.
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  1512. When the revolution comes first to go will be the lawyers, then the investment bankers. I don't know why that came to mind. I have a good friend who is a lawyer and another who is an investment banker. One of my favorite uncles was a lawyer. Actually, for a communist country to have such a large investment banking sector is a contradiction. Perhaps this whole purge of the system is the dialectic at work.
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  1513.  @Andy-P  Yes, but Hungary gets a lot more from the EU (and NATO) than it gives. They try to play the spoiler but are generally brought into line. Actually, I am now seeing protests against Orban in Hungary. I don't think his stance is popular anymore.
    3
  1514. I have a bit of a problem with the governor of the state of Arkansas being tough on China now. Walmart, which is based in Arkansas is one of the companies most responsible for manufacturing jobs going to China.
    3
  1515. Frankly, I experienced all of the benefits listed at the beginning of the video. I have been doing this for over five years now and I am in my 60s. Along with some other changes of diet (after a divorce, where I could easily do this) my body is back to where I was in my 20s. Now I just have to deal with excess skin.
    3
  1516. Finally, some good news. Maybe there is hope for the Brits yet.
    3
  1517. The latest futures price for WTI crude is $72.78 per barrel. While it did increase, I didn't see it go to over $80, and I look every day. The current price is the level it has been for some time now.
    3
  1518. The B-29 was called the Super Fortress. The Flying Fortress was the B-17.
    3
  1519. How about "The Richie and Toshik Show". Is that how you spell the cat's name?
    3
  1520. The whole idea of conflating "intelligent connected vehicles" and EVs is just plain stupid. The original purpose of EVs was to lower carbon emissions. That has nothing to do with "intelligent connected vehicles". In fact, almost all current, and recent, ICE vehicles are fly by wire and can, or do, have intelligent connected capabilities. They could also be self-driving. Lower-level self-driving features were first demonstrated by ICEs. These include self-parking and low speed automatic braking. I have a 2015 car with the later and it has saved my bacon at least once. It was really Tesla that started the craze. They did this for a nefarious reason. EVs still don't have the range or convenience in charging that is necessary to make them viable, or at least comfortable, for most people, especially given the cost. All the electronics were a way to make EVs seem something special to justify that cost. The reality is that the cost of including all this stuff is really not that high, especially compared to the batteries. Frankly, the reports coming out of China on BYD and other cars show that their technology does not really work that well and that their quality is substandard. In fact, there is a suggested video in YouTube, from the China Observer channel, right beside this comment box. The title is "Engines Shake, Sound Like Tractors, Wheels Fall off Mid-Drive—How Poor Is BYD’s Quality?". The reports on Tesla's quality, in the US and generally, are not very favorable either.
    3
  1521.  @st0rmrider  Well said.
    3
  1522. There is some merit in what you say, but you give the wrong impression. One of the reasons, among many, for the US to initiate trade with China was to hopefully bring them into a more western style of governance. This has clearly been a failure. To lay the blame for these travesties at the feet of the US, or the west in general (face it, a lot of major countries are just as involved) is just plain wrong. That said, to highlight the continuing engagement of the west with China after all this has become known is fair. The Soviets did similar things, using psychiatric confinement for dissidents, and the US responded. Jie makes a big mistake by emphasizing the Nazi parallels (which are fair) and not the Soviet ones. It is easy to say Nazi to garner support, but that is diminishing in effect as everyone is being called a Nazi these days. The Soviet parallels would be better. This is not to say he is wrong but is more of an editorial comment. I, for one, would like to see disengagement from China based on these, and other, human rights issues. That will be hard given the economic entanglement, but it is starting to happen for many reasons. You are right to point out that the press in the west is failing in this regard, but don't forget that the press in the west is not government controlled like it is in China.
    3
  1523. Well, you just have to look at why they came here in the first place. They were forced by the potato famine. Those are the people Irish Americans are descended from.
    3
  1524. I find it interesting that details about the injuries are given in such detail. This is meaningless data. It tells us nothing about the incident. It is an anomaly of journalism that such data is given prominence. Journalists glom onto such mundane details. Don't get me wrong, these are not mundane for the people suffering, and my prayers go out to them. On the other hand, as i said it tells us nothing. It is like the meaningless pictures we often see of ambulances outside of the site of a tragedy. You could use the same picture for any tragedy and it would fit in. It would also tell us nothing.
    3
  1525. I recently bought three battery powered lawn tools. The company was started in China, but two of the three tools were made in Vietnam. I looked on the company website and found they were even opening a factory in the US.
    3
  1526. There are big differences between the situation with Japan just before WWII and today. The most important is nukes. Along with this is military technology in general. Finally, just prior to WWII the US military was well underfunded. That has not been the case for decades now, primarily because of the Cold War with the Soviets. History does not repeat. It does, however, rhyme.
    3
  1527. If you have anyone on welfare, then you don't need immigrants, especially for low end jobs.
    3
  1528.  @joethecrow6451  You need to check the facts and learn a little history. How many tanks did the US lose in both Iraq wars? How many troops. They were fighting against Soviet/Russian equipped and trained forces. Ukraine is halfway between a western supplied force. Once they are primarily western supplied, it is all over.
    3
  1529. Placing economists in senior positions is a true measure of desperation. The old joke about economists is that you ask 100 economists in a room a question, and they will give 103 answers. A sure sign of impending doom.
    3
  1530. I understand what you are saying, and generally agree. On the other hand, for many of the athletes, this will be their only chance to compete. I have met athletes who were scheduled in the 1980 Moscow games. It was a great disappointment in their lives. It is a tough choice for all.
    3
  1531. Having highly trained military and test pilots was never a necessary thing. All of our space vehicles were computer controlled, and in general had few or no avionic surfaces. Experience as a pilot was useless. The only thing these pilots brought with them was physical resilience. There are lots of other people who have that as well. Even in the case of the Apollo 13 mission, it was the engineers on the ground who came up with the solutions. Spaceflight is an enormously complex endeavor, and having a hot shot pilot involved is just ludicrous. I have worked on many space programs over the years, so I have some knowledge of what is happening. So, this is a great achievement by SpaceX. We can move more quickly now that it has been proven that ordinary people can go into space and return safely.
    3
  1532. Interesting take, but I saw on another channel that it was Kim Jong Un's wife that was becoming the kingmaker and that she was blocking out his sister in favor of her children. This other channel is Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park. A month ago, she presented some convincing evidence to back up her claim based on an understanding of how the system works from the inside.
    3
  1533.  Muslim Critic  That would be great. But, it is a two way street. The reason the US is so active around the world is that before both WWI and WWII we were very isolationist. You know what that lead to. The the USSR actively planned to convert the world to their system. We would stand back if we could, but the world won't let us.
    3
  1534. They didn't pay "pre-sales deposits". They paid 100% up front and took on mortgages to cover it. A deposit will typically be returned, at least in part, if the builder fails to deliver. At least that is the way it is in most of the world.
    3
  1535. Click bait! The war in Bosnia was very well publicized at the time. If you didn't hear about, you weren't listening
    3
  1536.  @Jacmac1  That makes him both human and useful. Oh, and interesting.
    3
  1537. This 1% of valuable material that is expensive to recover is reminiscent of the craze to recover gold from electronics in the early 1990s. I had a colleague who had a business doing this. He made more money working as a technology expert at a software firm than running a recovery company. This material is essentially lost.
    3
  1538. At about 45:25 the statement is made that the road is running in a straight line. Surprising for pre-Roman Britain. Surprising indeed. Once, when I was living in Winchester I was at the castle. I asked for directions and the person I asked said something along the lines of, follow the straight road, the Roman road.
    3
  1539. Overestimating the Russian capability and underestimating the Ukrainians is typical. Sometimes our analysts in the intelligence community play a numbers game. This is shallow. I had experience at the Command and General Staff College many years ago. Training, quality of equipment and quality of staff are of paramount importance. Russia, and China, do not have that. Don't forget, the Chinese equipment is based on Russian equipment. Chinese organization and doctrine are also close to Soviet/Russian models. If China invades Taiwan, they will face the same problems, and they will have to do it with amphibious landings and supply lines. I also expect that the US, Japan, and perhaps India and Australia, will provide immediate military help. This fear of China is stupid. They have not been able to overcome the Indians in the Himalayas. Their last war was with Vietnam in 1979, which they lost badly. Heck, Vietnam is now an ally of the US. Their army is made up of "little emperors" and, I expect will be reluctant to fight if presented with any real resistance. Their country is not being attacked. They have no skin in this game. For better or worse, the US and its allies have been fighting somewhere since the end of WWII. Even our defeats were not on the battlefield but were political.
    3
  1540. The Thucydides trap? Come on man! Each country's survival "requires" that they also cooperate with each other. The US, and the world, survived just fine without China for a long time. China only joined the WTO in 2001 which is when western foreign direct really started to take off. The US will do just fine without China. China's value to the US was always twofold. One was as a source of cheap labor. The other was as a market. China is no longer necessary to the US in either case. The US will survive a split with China just fine.
    3
  1541. Matthew, let's hope, against hope, that something good comes out of these protests. As for the Army, I have already seen videos of tanks being deployed in front of banks over the last few weeks as the banking system unravels. It will get bad, as you say.
    3
  1542.  @FranzBieberkopf  That seems to be the case. Xi might really want to attack someone, but as all the high-level dismissals and trials show, that is not what the military leaders were expecting or wanting. Another thing to consider is that many are "princelings" and got their positions through family connections.
    3
  1543.  @Zodinthara-jo5yi  Great points. As to the Nazi situation, yes, it is logistics that killed them, as you say. I have been reading and listening to (same thing) war diaries of German soldiers from common soldiers to officers. It is not uncommon for them to bemoan the equipment and supply situation. The only ones who didn't see it, or ignored it, were the Nazi higher ups.
    3
  1544.  @77thTrombone  Good conclusion. It was also an interesting look at the time being written about. I always find it interesting to see what people were thinking at any one time. Sometimes it is something quite foreign. Sometimes it is something quite familiar. When I first read Plato's Symposium it felt so contemporary, even though it was almost 2,500 years ago.
    3
  1545. If these people put as much energy into fighting the Taliban, they would not be in this situation. And never forget, Afghanistan hosted, and still hosts, Al Qaeda and other international groups. With the Taliban in control these groups will be free to operate. The west did not just flippantly decide to invade an Asian country for fun.
    3
  1546. From what we have seen in the war in Ukraine in general and the sad and comical Russian military and media, I think it may be time to consider a run on Moscow by the west. I don't think it would take long. I am kidding, by the way.
    3
  1547. This is nothing new. I lived in England soon after the Scottish Parliament was established. One of English colleagues said that they should just dig a canal along the border. His hope was that it would then float away. I also saw graffiti on motorway overpasses that said "England for the English". I was in Canada when the first Quebec independence referendum was held. I was in Ontario, and the feeling I got was that, if the election were held in the whole of the country, that Quebec would be independent now.
    3
  1548. Excellent analysis. The purpose of combat troops in a war is not primarily to take territory, but to destroy the enemy combat troops. Once that is done, then you can take whatever territory you want. By attriting the Russian forces in Bakhmut, especially given the combat ratios achieved, Ukraine obtained a favorable result.
    3
  1549. The Senate in the US passed the aid for Ukraine (and Israel and Taiwan) a while ago. The issue is in the House of Representatives.
    3
  1550. Ah, yes. The omnipotent and omniscient CIA. As President Joe likes to say: C'mon, man!
    3
  1551. If you have ever worked or attended a trade show in the US, you would know that there are almost never quiet times like those shown in the video.
    3
  1552. Soldiers reloading simultaneously. Poor fire discipline. I remember a picture from the Vietnam War, Tet Offensive, where the Americans were, as it said in the caption, showing "good firing discipline". This type of thing is drilled into western soldiers.
    3
  1553. The only issue I have with a lot of these projections of how much labor will be needed is the just that, the projections. In the technology field I can recall very few projects that were not overstaffed. This runs the gamut from aerospace and defense to commercial (I have been at it for decades). As a percentage of the workforce that 900K or so is at most 6% of the workforce. Most of the overstaffing I have seen is in large enterprises. These are already cutting back and it is not affecting their performance. Quite the opposite. So, this number does not concern me.
    3
  1554.  @thedabblingwarlock  Technically correct. Thanks. That said, I tend to think of Central America differently. My bias.
    3
  1555. Crimea was a part of Russia, and never a part of Ukraine. It was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR during the Soviet era as an administrative action. The borders of the USSR, internally, were a matter of administrative convenience. Many of these "nations" had not been independent for centuries. Remember what USSR stands for. It was a result of the Russian Empire that existed before.
    3
  1556. I love that you mention at the end that Prigozhin might be husbanding his forces for the potentially upcoming power struggle in Russia. I have been hearing this more and more in videos about the war. I personally have been predicting a breakup of the Russian Federation, based on what I know and what I read from geopolitical analysts. The predictions from before the war gave Russia 10 to 20 years max before breaking up. Putin's war has brought this down to one or two in my estimation. There was even a recent poll of these analysts where about half predicted that Russia would break up in at most ten years. So, the upshot is that you will, even after the war in Ukraine ends, have lots to talk about. That is unless you are not back in Russia fighting the next revolution.
    3
  1557. That whole thing about the money remaining in the US is a just a silly detail. As any country, the US has requirements for its own stockpiles. The US, especially, is involved in a lot of flashpoints around the world at the moment. This is just an implementation detail. It allows quick delivery to Ukraine while ensuring US stockpiles will be quickly replenished. It is only mentioned for political reasons.
    3
  1558. Your arguments are weak, and do not take into account how many of the current states in the world came to be in the first place. For example, look at the Middle East. These modern states were created after WWI by the major powers of Europe. They never existed before and were all a part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. The Central European and Balkan states were created out of the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many of these have broken up, mostly voluntarily. The best examples are Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union was based on the Russian Empire. The Soviets drew their own borders internally. The shuffled territories between the Republics by administrative fiat. They also pushed Russification of various regions, much like China is attempting the Sinification of Xinjiang and Tibet, and perhaps even Inner Mongolia. Don't get me wrong, what Putin is doing is dead wrong, but to constantly refer to the UN Charter is not very persuasive. The UN itself has no power to impose outcomes. It can pass resolutions, but it is up to actual nation states with militaries to enforce those resolutions. Both Korea and Vietnam we UN sanctioned conflicts, as was the Gulf War to eject Iraq from Kuwait. Afghanistan was actively harboring the terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks. The second Iraq was more problematic, but Sadam Hussein could have avoided it if he had fully cooperated with the UN on WMD inspections. As it was, based on his previous invasions of Iran and Kuwait, and the fact that he used chemical and biological weapons against Iran and the Kurds in his own country, he left himself open to distrust.
    3
  1559. That last statement of food security being risky in times of war should be taken seriously by the CCP. Chinese imports of food are large. If a war is started in Taiwan, then the US doesn't have to confront the CCP directly. Just stopping food and energy getting to China will mean rapid deindustrialization and famine. All of this in less than a year. I would not want to see that for the Chinese people.
    3
  1560. Cosmology is not a science like physics or chemistry, or even observational astronomy. It is more like archaeology, paleontology or anthropology. In the former, theory leads to experimentation which ether tends to prove or disprove the theory. In the latter, one builds a picture with incomplete data. Then, as often happens, a new discovery comes along and the whole structure needs to be reformed and rethought. Another aspect where these differ is that physics and chemistry can be used to do something. In the case of the others, it is only explanatory. I mention this because if a physical theory is wrong and one tries to use it to obtain an effect, then one will fail. In the case of the others, if our theory is wrong, there is no meaningful effect.
    3
  1561. And rightly so.
    3
  1562.  @ThadGuardi  👍
    3
  1563. It is almost worth buying Lampton's book for the subtitle. The quote from Lampton was very powerful. I am tempted to buy it (one of my two vices, which are books and cigars), and there is a good chance I will. The only problem with many of the books I have bought on current affairs is that having lived through them myself, and being someone who pays close attention, I find little that I consider new. This is not to say that the books are not well written or that I would disagree with the authors. As sad state of affairs indeed.
    3
  1564.  @noobplays-saslow2920  Great! Lots of research to be done. I also don't think China will overtake the US. Don't forget that China has lots of land border with states that are potentially arrayed against it.
    3
  1565.  @周军-i4w  So, how is this any different from the history of Asia, or any other part of the world? If you are trying to cast aspersions, you might want to look closer to home.
    3
  1566. Your characterization of US debt being similar to China is disingenuous. Bonds issued by government entities at all levels are covered by taxes and fees. Taxes are usually direct. Refinancing to pay off older debt only takes place when a lower interest rate can be obtained. The school district where I live did that several times and it kept the taxes required to run the system down. The situation in China seems to be taking out new bonds to pay the interest on the old bonds because of the insane tax regime in China. A government body that has no taxing authority was issuing bonds based on an ever-rising market. In other words, as you say, a Ponzi scheme.
    3
  1567. I had to laugh at the first story. You do realize why Asian food developed to be so spicy, don't you. It is the same reason as the development of heavy sauces in Europe. It all stems from the lack of reirrigation. Without the heavy spices or sauces the food would be unpalatable. Then, over time, as cultures become more established, and richer they developed more elaborate cuisine. There is a cultural aspect here as well. Since women were available full time to prepare meals, they could become more elaborate.
    3
  1568. There is a very friendly op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on May 23 about Kemi. She claims to be a big admirer of Thatcher and Regan. Her comments on what conservatism means are totally wishy washy. What Farage is doing, and what Trump has done in the US, is to actually elucidate an ideology. They both have a diverse appeal, including union voters. There is a realignment of politics going on, first in the US and now all over Europe (and perhaps beyond).
    3
  1569. Love the imagery. I won't be able to get it out of my head, nor do I want to.
    3
  1570. Wise words from Pettis as usual. I like that he used the term mercantilist. That is precisely the policy that China is pursuing. It was also the policy of Japan and to some extent Korea. This is a policy approach that is the stuff of empires of the past.
    3
  1571.  @bobwatson8754  Must be. He is an emperor, after all.
    3
  1572.  @anthonyballard8468  Look, I have spent time in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia in the summer. In Madrid I once went on business. My plane arrived late morning. I had a couple of meetings then we went to the cafeteria for a late lunch. After that, everyone went home. Their schedule revolved around the heat. This was early in the century. So, it is something they have dealt with forever. People go to work very early in the morning, then have a meal together and go home. Then they go out for dinner very late, when things have cooled down. This has been going on for centuries. I think they complain because they are now told there is a cause to it that they should talk about. Come on man.
    3
  1573.  @arrmannpyae2012  Bro. Show the data.
    3
  1574. While I am not a fan of China or the CCP, I do have to take issue with your characterization of the situation in China. The fact is that it is normal. Look at the dawn of the automotive age. In the US and Europe there were probably about as many brands. Look at GM in the US. It was, until a rationalization a few years ago, made up of eight brands. It now has four. These were originally independent car companies. Chrysler has at least three brands and has shed some over time. These also started out as independent producers. Ford had three brands and now has two. If you add up the brands that made up the US big three automakers, you get about 15. Look at the British car industry. The story is the same. Along the way, many independent producers did not get consolidated and just closed their doors. The statement made at the end of the video that ultimately only 10% of car makers in the Chinese EV space will survive is probably correct, and normal. This whole arc of many brands at the beginning of a new product cycle is a part of normal growth. This can be seen in industries from locomotives (steam and diesel) to computers (mainframe and personal) to software to search engines to social networks. The issue in China is muddied by state subsidies. This forms part of the capital of these brands and can distort the market. That is the real problem, not the proliferation of brands in itself. In the rest of the world, this proliferation was funded by private capital. That is the difference when trading internationally and what the EU and US are looking at. Nothing more.
    3
  1575. Hey, that was going to be my comment. I am a big fan of Zeihan. I have read all his books, and everything I see and read tends to support his conclusions. Some of what he points out I was aware of a long time ago, but he puts it so well. I don't always agree with him on some details, especially on military matters, but these are small things. I like to follow lots of different thinkers and news sources. One, Vlad Vexler, takes a philosophical and sociological view of things. I like Vlad, but I think his approach is basically wrong. I watch him because he was born in Moscow and has a perspective on the society. I just tend to think that these aspects are not the really important ones.
    3
  1576.  @daniell1483  Agreed.
    3
  1577.  @tonysu8860  Very good explanation. My understanding is that US manufacturing is among the most efficient in the world, by standard measures of productivity. This includes a lot more than wages, of course. What has always impressed me is that, after its high point after WWII, when most of its competitors had been bombed into rubble, the US settled to a position of producing about 25% of world GDP. No matter that Germany, then Japan recovered and prospered, then, with US help, China came on the scene, the US share remains steady in a narrow range.
    3
  1578.  @morganangel340  The last figures put the middle class in China in the 100M range. As for the average salary, I find it hard to believe your figures.
    3
  1579. Tony, it is invaluable getting this type of information here in the US. Your perspective is really interesting and useful. We rarely get this type of information. Of course, it was the CIA. It is always the CIA. I love it. The omnipotent and omniscient CIA. The other thing that is funny to US audiences is the international impact of soccer (or football in most of the world). This coming weekend is the Superbowl in the US, so there is even less attention being paid to international sports events. Soccer has a minimal impact in the US. I happen to be a fan of soccer (as well as American football), but I am totally in the minority. My sons are big fans of soccer and follow the international game fairly closely. That probably has a lot to do with our living in the UK when they were young. Just a funny little story to show the importance of soccer outside of the US. I was at a corporate training course in Italy. It was a weeklong affair and there was a formal dinner planned in the villa at the training center. There was a EUFA match, the final, taking place at the time the dinner was scheduled. So, the staff set up a large screen TV in another room and brought in drinks and snacks so that we could watch it. The staff also stayed to watch, of course. Of the 22 executives in the class 18 nationalities were represented (this was typical) so there was lots of spirited banter. After the match the dinner proceeded (well into the night). it was great fun.
    3
  1580. The EU violating the WTO? That is one path that China really should not go down. China is the biggest scofflaw on the planet as far as international rules and agreements go. Remember UNCLOS, anyone? I know, I know, I shouldn't respond to these bozos and their commie drivel. But what the heck. It is one of my guilty pleasures. Plus, I have seen and personally dealt with some of the issues mentioned directly, so it often hits a nerve. I am also old enough to have experienced somewhat similar issues with the Japanese. How did that end up? Frankly, while there are lots of differences, there are important similarities as well. Xi would do well to remember that. Oh, wait, Xi is really an uneducated fool. At least that is what many Chinese say. He proves them right almost every day.
    3
  1581. The Bhutan situation and the article you quote from reflect the new reality. Borders are not intrinsically sacrosanct. They are only valid if they are backed by military force, either one's own or that of one's allies or a combination thereof. Actually, I call it the "new" reality, but this is the way it has always been. Again and again, we see people, especially in the international relations commentariat, who fail to understand this. They make the assumption that the period since WWII is the norm. It is not. Much of the conflict we see in the world is a result of the idea of the inviolability of borders when those borders often bring disparate peoples together who often have a history of antagonism toward each other. Good examples are Sudan (the current crisis and the previous one that resulted in the creation of South Sudan) and Ethiopia. There are lots of other examples as well. Then we see borders that separate people of the same ethnic background. Examples in the news today include the Baluch and the Kurds. I am afraid we will see much more of this.
    3
  1582. Peter, and others, keep saying we won't see the type of colonialism we had in the past. I am not so sure. Russia is clearly playing the old "great game". China as well. I can certainly see Turkey doing it. What one must remember is that many, many of the countries in the world are former colonial possessions. Their borders make no sense in many cases. As Peter points out in his books the period since WWII has been an anomaly in history. The motivations for a return of the colonial mode are the same. Resources.
    3
  1583. Have you heard this accordion joke? A guy pulls up to a store with his accordion clearly visible in the back seat of his car. When he comes back, the window is broken and there are three accordions in the back seat. This was told to me by an accordion player in the wilds of Michigan. The Mosin does not have to be reloaded every shot. It is fed by stripper clips (five rounds). I have one, from 1942. The Thompson was designed at the end of WWI, and Col. Thompson styled it a "trench broom".
    3
  1584. So true. I even hear that they are not even being paid for some of the oil sales they make.
    3
  1585.  @MICKEYISLOWD  CO2 and water, through photosynthesis, create the sugars. You need to take a basic class on this, I think.
    3
  1586. You segue form US immigration visa issues to the visa free travel that China is implementing. That is dishonest. The visa free travel for China is for tourist and other short stay purposes. It is not commensurate with immigration visa rules.
    3
  1587. I know of many people, even from advanced western countries, that have expressed a desire to move to the US, and several have done so. I lived for a while in the UK as an executive for a US company covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa and had lots of interaction with people from all these areas. I tried to blend in with the Savile Row suits I wore and other outward signs. I was very successful, even though I still had my American accent. Sometimes this led to hilarious results. One time I was at a bar with a bunch of German colleagues, and they were complaining about their boss. The complaint was that he was too aggressive, too American. Imagine that. I also had a couple of incidents where a German expressed a strong interest in moving to the US. These were both highly successful businessmen. One had his own high-tech startup. The other was an executive in a manufacturing firm (and a relative through marriage). So, the Chinese wanting to come to the US and stay should be no surprise. In fact, I have known many Chinese who did that or expressed an interest in that. I have said many times that of all the peoples of northeast Asia that the Chinese were the closest in temperament to Americans. Without the CCP and its distortions of the Chinese people, we would be great partners and unstoppable in the world. What do you think?
    3
  1588. If 8,000 yuan per month is average, that is $1,100 (or less as the exchange rate is falling). If this is middle class in China, then those in the bottom 10% in the US would be considered middle class in China.
    3
  1589.  @hemaccabe4292  Thank you. I think a lot about these issues.
    3
  1590. As I listened to this video, I was going to put in my comment the Stalin quote, but you beat me to it. Europe is often the source of major wars. WWI and WWII were the greatest examples in the last century. But even Vietnam and Korea were caused by European powers. Vietnam was a French colony, and there was massive fighting there before it became a UN and US war. North Korea was supported initially by the Soviet Union, a mainly European power. In both WWI and WWII, the US public was reluctant to get involved because even our allies were colonial powers, and we, for obvious reasons, did not want to support colonial empires. So, skepticism about things like this happening in Europe was only natural.
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  1591. No country is indispensable in manufacturing. The US was the factory to the world in the first half of the 20th century. Then Japan rose up. Now it is China. Actually, the US and Japan still have massive amounts of manufacturing. The productivity of this Manfacturing far surpasses China's. China does the low-end stuff. Even the steel mentioned is often of low quality, and I have seen examples of this. So, the position China has now is not likely to last long. Actually, it is starting to fall apart. Even Chinese companies are opening factories in other countries, including Vietnam and the US. As for investment, it is dropping precipitously. I think it will dry up.
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  1592. Economists? Really! If you get an opinion from an economist, then you are statistically better off taking the opposite view. You know the old joke about economists, don't you? If you have 100 economists in a room, you will have over 100 opinions (the number varies by the teller).
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  1593. China has been dealing with floods on the Yangtze River for millennia. All the dams, including the Three Gorges Dam, were built to try and contain the river. This is the result.
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  1594. The JCPOA was a treaty and never ratified by Congress. In the US, the Executive can negotiate treaties, but they do not become effective until two thirds of the Senate concur. Obama decided to observe the terms of the "treaty" via executive order. This is why Trump could reverse Obama's policy. There never was a ratified treaty. The most famous example of this is Wilson's negotiation of the League of Nations treaty. It was never passed by the Senate, so the US never became part of the League.
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  1595. I tend to be optimistic about both Ukraine's prospects in the war and in reconstruction. Especially for the later. Many western businesses will be interested in Ukraine. There are also significant energy resources in Ukraine, and they are in more favorable locations that many of the Russian energy resources.
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  1596. The video highlights the China-Philippines situation in the South China sea, but this is only one of several. China is also redefining borders in the Gulf of Tonkin. This is causing tensions with Vietnam to rise as well. It seems that China is aiming to precipitate some sort of showdown with its neighbors and the west.
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  1597. Paul, you seem not to have noticed that the US has configured the military for power projection, not stability maintenance. The US will only get involved directly when its own interests are at stake or when it and its treaty allies are directly attacked. I remember conversations during the 2000 election regarding the candidates' attitudes on foreign, especially military, affairs. George W. Bush was talking about pulling back from military engagement overseas and was especially against "nation building". Then 9/11 happened and we got the GWT, of which you were a part (thank you for your service). That was a detour in the arc of American foreign policy after the Cold War. The path we are on is the will of the American people, which has been made abundantly clear by the leaders we have selected. The last US president who wanted to have the conversation about how the world should work after the Cold War was George H. W. Bush. He was the last president we have had who had the experience and background to lead that discussion. He was voted out of office. His opponent's campaign had a tag line that went "It's the economy, stupid". We are basically back on track. We are headed toward a multipolar world order. That is what China and Russia want. The weird thing is that those countries did not do very well in that environment over the last 175 years or so. Read Peter Zeihan's latest book to get a feel for where we are going. On top of that, you have to understand that the Biden administration is just a continuation of the Obama administration. All the major players are retreads from that administration. Recall that Obama stressed "diplomacy" over military power. Biden is working from the same playbook (if not being directed by Obama). I recently heard Keir Starmer, the UK Prime Minister, give a talk at the UN that sounded exactly like Obama. Bad, not good. Just look at how the Biden Administration has handled Ukraine and the Middle East, and the Afghanistan withdrawal before that. So, none of this should come as a surprise.
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  1598. Well, they got the government they wanted. The west was pouring in massive amounts of aid, development as well as military.
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  1599. I wonder about these timetables. A year to refurbish tanks? You could build them in that time. They might be better off sending them as is to Ukraine and letting them get them up and running.
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  1600. The whole EV market is based on subsidies. Even Tesla would not have been successful without them.
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  1601. I have heard it said that the Russians have incriminating materials on the SPD politicians. I don't know how credible that is, but I would not be surprised. As for Germany's record on territorial integrity, I think a cursory look at history will show that it is lacking. To be fair, borders in Europe are often quite arbitrary. This is, of course related to the many wars fought there. I find it amusing when people feign surprise at a conventional war being fought in Europe in the "21st century". Why should this century be any different from all the centuries preceding it. Donald Trump scolded the Germans about two things in particular. One was their underfunding of their military given their treaty obligations. The other was their over dependence on Russia for energy. They literally laughed at him. Who is laughing now? Europe is always fretting on their overdependence on the US for their security. Well, are they willing to spend what it would take to do it themselves? I think not.
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  1602. My understanding is that Lehman's debt was twice that of Evergrande.
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  1603. In the late 1970s I had both a MGB and an Austin Healey Sprite Mark IV (as well as a Triumph Bonneville and 250). Both were 1969 production. My house was a real workshop with a garage at basement level. My brother and our friends were always over working on cars. Both cars were heavily modified by me. Both had Weber carbs and tuned exhausts. They were fun to drive and fun to work on. I put a tube shock conversion kit on the rear of the B. On the Sprite I put track filler caps on the lever shocks. Boy, you could really feel the road. Oh, and both had wider, better tires. We did lots of other little mods to the engines as well. They were both fast (for the time and what they were) and incredibly fun to drive. Sadly, I don't have any of the vehicles I mentioned anymore. I got to know the cars so well, that once, on a lonely, dark country road, the lights went out. I didn't have a flashlight. I was so familiar with the car that I reached under the hood and pulled the proper fuse and replaced it all by touch. I still have all the tools needed to rebuild the engine. Maybe I should get one again. I have lots of room in my 3-car garage.
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  1604. It was an IRBM, not an ICBM. I thought Starsky was all for combatting misinformation.
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  1605. Slack global demand for manufactured goods? The US economy grew at a better than expected 2.4 percent in the last quarter, and a lot of it was manufactured goods. I know that globally there are differences, but exports to the US are a large part of what is slowing in China.
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  1606. Very interesting. Now what are the observables that would allow this theory to be "proven"? Just having two different mathematical formulations that give the same result is not enough, wouldn't you agree?
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  1607. Sujit brings a note of sanity to the discussion. Maria has decided that there is a conspiracy. There may be, but she presents it as if it was proven.
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  1608. The comments from the first woman are very intriguing. I was also struck that she was wearing a Kangol hat with the logo prominently displayed. Isn't that a western brand? Aren't all westerners evil? Seriously, though, her expectation that a person must be completely formed before having children is to ignore biology. Children are not there to be intellectually developed (although that is a good thing), but are there carry on the family, nation and species. Chinese youth seem to have forgotten this. Their education is seriously lacking, My grandparents immigrated to the US from a poor part of Greece over 100 years ago. The way it worked was that the men came over, established themselves and sent back to "the old country" for a wife. This sounds like similar to what we hear out of China today (I mean the establishing oneself). The difference is that in the US there was opportunity and growth. Of course, this was also the case in China until soon after Xi came to power. See the connection there?
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  1609. Xi is ignorant of history. China has not been a significant military power, with the ability to push to other regions since the early 15th century during the Ming dynasty. In the 18th century a number of small European countries opened China up to trade, often by force. in the 19th century the British forced China to open the opium trade. Before then, most of these European powers, and later the US, had trade concessions on mainland China. Then, of course, in the late 19th century, Japan, a much smaller country, started annexing land in China. In the years leading up to WWII, Japan invaded China and from then on, until the end of the war, had taken a large part of the country. In Soviet times, the USSR took lands from China, continuing the trajectory of the Russian Empire. The last war China fought was with Vietnam in 1979. Vietnam won. So, what is this great power mania based on? China has never been one of the Great Powers, and I expect that through its history it has had a larger population than all the Great Powers combined (not including colonies). While economic instability may drive a country to foreign adventures, this is the worst time for China to do this. They are very vulnerable; their economy is breaking down and they can be easily isolated. They spend more on internal security than on their military. This is one the most worrying signs. Add to that the corruption of the whole system, and you have a situation like Russia in Ukraine, only worse. And Taiwan is not Ukraine. This is just a death wish.
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  1610. What recession in the US? The latest quarter saw a 5.9% increase in GDP. Projections for the next four years are a growth rate of 2% or more. No, the decrease in demand for Chinese goods from the US has to do with the shifting of supply chains, not recession. On top of that, there is no scenario in which the real estate sector recovers. None! China is massively overbuilt and consequently prices are dropping. Frankly, the people who put their money in real estate will be wiped out. The industries that rely on real estate development are already suffering and will not recover.
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  1611. This is a great source. He has intelligence background, and direct experience of the war. As far as I am concerned, Putin is a dead man walking. At this point, he has nothing to offer his own people, including the oligarchs. I am actually surprised that he has lasted so long. That is, of course, a product of his security mechanism.
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  1612. The section on the racial/ethnic exhortations of the CCP is almost hilarious. Historically, racially pure societies have not done that well. In the run up to WWII, both the Japanese and the Nazis, specifically Hitler himself, decried the US as a bunch of mutts and thus inferior. How did that work out? In the US and UK, the most diverse of western societies, people of non-white background have had, and still have, leadership roles in politics and business. Many Chinese are included in this. The US has had a president of African descent and the UK currently has a prime minister of Indian descent. Diversity is the west's strength, not a weakness.
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  1613. Let's hope it happens soon. I don't hold out much hope though. These things only happen when there are leaders who mobilize the people. This does not exist in China. It is similar to the situation in Iran, where most of the people are not happy with the current government, but there is no individual or group that is leading them, and all protest movements fizzled out.
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  1614. I commented on the chart on China's exports when you first showed it. I made a point of taking into account seasonality and that is clearly shown in the chart, but was not in your commentary. Looking at that seasonality, it is actually a disappointing performance. This is especially true since in the US a lot of companies had front loaded their imports because of the port strike.
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  1615. It is so funny that we have to refer to an "expert" who wrote a book, such as George Magnus for a validation of a well known phenomenon. I have nothing against Mr. Magnus. i just want to point out that I saw a video many years ago which was an interview of George W. Bush, not long after he left office. He indicated that he asked every national leader he met what is the one thing that keeps you up at night. When he asked Hu Jintao the answer was finding jobs for millions of people each year. The phenomenon of unemployment, including youth unemployment, is an issue in any society. What the emphasis on youth unemployment covers up is the unemployment of people over 35. Those people have already bought homes, and can no longer afford the mortgage. That is actually a larger problem, and is contributing to killing the property sector and damping down consumption.
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  1616. Rep. Plaskett has no idea what the First Amendment is about. She is a disgrace. Joseph Goebbels would be proud of her.
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  1617. The situation with EVs is not a real issue. It is in fact typical of the technology adoption cycle. The same thing was seen in the automotive industry in the early 20th century. Many other technology sectors, such as computers and software have gone through the same thing. This is not really newsworthy.
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  1618.  @DDDrumpf  You have no idea what you are talking about. Even with electronics China is still mostly involved in final assembly. And where are all the chip designs from China. They have spent billions and have nothing to show for it.
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  1619. This is just a pet peeve of mine, but to have to quote an "expert", a "scholar" no less, to say that cars, trucks, tanks, planes and tanks cannot run on crude oil is just funny. That such an "expert" feels the need to say this is just as funny. One would have to be very, very low information person (or perhaps a Russian serf, er citizen) to not know this.
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  1620. Why is this national news? I agree it is a tragic situation for the family, but why are we hearing about this from national news outlets?
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  1621. How do these people get elected? We need some sort of sanity and intelligence test for our representatives.
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  1622.  @Onion_Knights  I am interested in which countries. I have only lived in the US and UK.
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  1623. Whatever happened to global warming?
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  1624. It is often said, correctly, that the two reasons western countries invested in China are cheap labor and a large market. There is a third, which is not talked about much. China's lax environmental enforcement is this third reason. That is why a lot of "processing" of materials takes place in China. The EU is now implementing the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). At least climate change has gotten their attention. Imagine if they applied such a mechanism to all pollution and environmental issues. Rare earth metals are a great example. These were mined and processed in the US well before China opened up. Environmental regulation in the US made this expensive because the processing of the materials is messy. In China, no problem. Have you seen the videos and pictures of what goes on there? It is disgusting. I was once at a meeting with the head of a family run industrial concern. It was all low-level stuff. One of the sons, a cousin of the guy I knew, was asking a US customer if he wanted filtration in the plant making the products for him. It would, of course, raise the price. The answer was no. What did he care. It wasn't his factory, and he had no liability in China for it. I could go on and on about this, but you get the idea.
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  1625. Oh, so who decreed that the US dollar is the global currency of choice? The US? No, it became that for purely economic reasons. Look up the history. Actually, it might be a good thing if the dollar was not so heavily used internally by third parties for trade. That is not a threat. Look at the Euro. It has risen to be the second most used currency. Still far behind the US dollar, but large. And if you think the RMB will become a reserve currency, think again. If you have RMB in China, you can't get it out. US businesses and even the Russians have found that out the hard way. /And if you are thinking about Russia, do you know how big their economy is? Russia's economy is about 75% that of Italy's. Even India's is only about two thirds that of Japan's. All efforts to create an alternative have failed. There is a reason for that.
    3
  1626. While I agree in general about the Russians not being great, they were nothing out of the ordinary. What do you think the British did in their empire (the largest in history). Look at what they did to India. India was actually a fairly (very?) advanced industrial power at the time of colonization. The British made sure that ended. Why do you think South and Central America speak Spanish or Portuguese and that most are Catholics? Keeping with Imperial Russia, have you heard the term "the great game"? We often use it in terms of contemporary situations, but it was coined to refer to the rivalry between the Russian and British empires. You see, it takes two "sides" to have a game. The actions of the Japanese in the 19th and first half of the 20th century were really a response to what the Europeans had been doing. They had the strength to compete and felt they were owed. They also needed resources. Why trade for those when you take them? Along the same lines why did Germany, a latecomer to the game, colonize Africa? How about the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth? From the late 16th to the late 18th century, they controlled much of what is now Ukraine. Look into how that worked and the effect on Ukrainians. To judge the world of the past by our contemporary standards is really foolish. One thing that is germane to this whole discussion is the stated desire of the Russians and Chinese to have a multipolar world. What that really means is returning to the historically normal state of things, namely imperialism. In the last 200 years that did not go well for either of those countries. The basic reasons for that have not changed. That they would want it shows a fantastic level of ignorance of history and their current condition.
    3
  1627.  @SamD999  Russia is not a free and open democracy. Get that out of your head. France is also not necessarily a reliable ally. The Israelis found that out. They were using French planes, which were quite good, but at one point decided not to supply them with new planes or spares, for political reasons. Watch out for the French.
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  1628. "you made I..." Where are these people educated?
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  1629. Discourse "hegemony". I love it. A new form of hegemony. I didn't even know it existed. Of course, it must be a plot by the omniscient and omnipotent CIA, right?
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  1630. Hey, when I lived in the UK I had a Renault Laguna and an Alfa Romeo GTV. They were both highly reliable.
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  1631. The points about what it takes to blow up a dam from the air are right on target. Remember the Dam Busters in WWII. This was a special unit formed with the Royal Air Force using a special type of large bomb. There was a movie made about it, and lots of historical videos on YouTube.
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  1632. US investment should be restricted not through government action, but through commercial considerations. First is the lack of transparency of government statistics and a fiduciary duty of the investment firms. Second, as you mention, the legal environment for foreign firms is unfavorable. On the first point, I would not be surprised to see US firms sued by their own investors (recall that the firms are investing other people's money) for taking unnecessary and ill considered risks. I am surprised this has not already happened. As for the US wanting to contain China, that is correct. The current US administration is one of the most populist ones in recent history. Frankly, the US has been turning more populist since the last internationalist president, George H. W. Bush, who left office in 1993.
    3
  1633.  @gtw4546  Not that old saw again. In the US, anyone can incorporate. When you do, you are not getting permission from the government, you are just registering an entity and that gives certain protections. I know, i have done several myself. As for businesses upholding stability over profits, I don't know where you have been for the last several centuries. The object of business is to make money. If it is not profitable, it will fail. Then, either someone else will buy it up or it just goes out of existence. You don't seem to have a grasp of either the history or practice of business.
    3
  1634. Another stellar episode. That last quote from the security services is quite telling and, of course, shows their ignorance of the west. For one thing, investors in the west will go wherever they can make money. Heck, Citibank was investing in Russia right up to the revolution in 1917. Of course, they lost it all and subsequently had to be bailed out. What I am getting at is that international finance and industry is not, in the main, nationally directed in the west. The CCP is applying their system and assumptions to other countries and thus totally misunderstanding the situation. This points to a total lack of sophistication in the thinking of the CCP. One would think that they could do better. The Chinese are not dumb people.
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  1635. During the late 70s inflation, I was lucky. I had a skill in very high demand. While inflation was high, my salary went up at over twice that rate. I don't see that happening now.
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  1636. Mentioning an opinion poll in Russia is poor journalism. You know that it is not valid. I was once in a country that was having a vote, yes or no, to the dictatorship. It won by over 90%. Everyone I met on the street laughed at the result. Another thing mitigating against getting a valid result in Russia is that they passed a law, after the war started making protest, and even calling it a war. illegal. One could get up to 15 years in prison.
    3
  1637. In modern times Russia "won" once using these tactics. In WWI, they lost even with superior numbers. In the Polish-Soviet War in 1920 they had rough parity with the Polish forces. They lost. In fact, this conflict convinced Lenin to draw back on his internationalist drive to spread communism. He coined the term socialism in one country, which was a stark contrast to the ideology of the time. In the Winter War with the Fins Russia had overwhelming numbers. They technically won but suffered massive casualties and failed to conquer the country. The situation in WWII was aided by the allied attacks in the west, including Italy. The big Soviet offensive in 1944, Operation Bagration, only happened after D-Day. So, bringing out the trope of Russia being able to overwhelm any enemy just by throwing bodies at them is missing the effect of modern weapons and command and control. Just look at the Iraq War. In less than a month the US collapsed the Iraqi army while being outnumbered by over two to one. And, of course, there is the example of the Israeli Army. Same situation as Ukraine as far as numbers and the source of support. As far as I can tell no Soviet/Russian equipped and trained military has defeated a western equipped and trained military. Finally, as you point out in your books (I have read them all) Russia's demographics are horrible. Add to that and the fact that about 500K men of military age have left the country and you get a recipe for disaster.
    3
  1638. Putin is a rational actor. In what universe is what Putin has done rational? Turned off the video at this point.
    3
  1639.  @rubengonzalez620  You must be kidding me. He has tanked his economy. He has made Russia a pariah state. He has proven to the world that his military is incapable. This, by the way, has tanked his military sales (in addition to the needs of the war), which is significant, since military sales were their second biggest earner of foreign exchange. It also constituted the bulk of their manufacturing exports. If you think any of this is rational, then you have a very different view of the world and of the goal of government.
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  1640. The ONLY reason the Chinese economy had the growth it did after the reform and opening up was foreign investment. The CCP, being a bunch of commies, have no idea of how capital formation works. A good example of this, and why China will fail, is this whole issue of getting rid of workers in their late 30s and 40s. Actually, for indigenous capital formation you want those older workers. They are more efficient and especially once the kids leave home, these people tend to invest a lot more and, in normal capitalist economies, are a major source of capital. This is another example of China totally mismanaging its human capital. Of course, I cannot be too sympathetic with the Chinese people. They support their stupid and corrupt system.
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  1641. If you look at the US Army today, we have one Armored division. We have mostly what are called Mechanized Infantry Divisions, usually just called Infantry Divisions. There are a handful of others (airborne, cavalry, mountain). They are much larger than previous divisions, and have everything from tanks, to mobile infantry, recon, artillery and aviation (helicopters, including attack and cargo/personnel). This might be more like what Lindemann was talking about. The Germans had lots of problems because their Armor divisions often got ahead of their Infantry because of the vast difference in mobility.
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  1642. There is a lot of talk about what Russia will do in the "next ten years" or similar timeframes. Really? Do you know how long it took them to build up the force they attacked Ukraine with last year? It took 20 years. During that time, they had massive oil and gas revenues and access to western technology. Neither are available today. Demographically it is worse. Even before this war, they were at a tipping point demographically. As a result of the war up to 1M men of military age left the country. They have probably lost, killed and badly wounded, at least half that, and by the end, the number will most likely surpass that. These people are crucial for rebuilding the military and, more importantly, the industrial base. So, tell me, what will they be able to do in ten years. There is lots of talk about the militarization of the youth. Come on man. The commies did that, as did Hitler. How did that work out. This was always Russia's last shot.
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  1643. Tony, thanks for the extra episode. Very interesting topic. I love it when the CCP talks about "socialism with Chinese characteristics". This is national socialism. Remember that from the 1920s and 1930s in Europe? The characterization of western, especially US, democracy is so off the mark that it would be laughable if it were not such an important topic. In the US, the populace gets the leaders they want. I can think of few, if any, exceptions. Currently, the US, and much of the west, is moving in a populist direction. Why. Because that is what the electorate wants. They were not told this is what to think. They think what they do because they see what is going on. The US population has been, from its inception, rather isolationist. The last 75 years has been an exception. The US is returning to its roots. All this really becomes clear in the 1970s when Richard Nixon used the term "silent majority". He rode that majority to one of the biggest electoral wins in US history. In fact, the bourgeoisie that the commies like to go on about were against him. Examine the term bourgeoisie. It was originally applied in the Middle Ages. We tend to take it to mean middle class. It is specifically associated with people who are not aristocrats (CCP members, for example) or peasants. The problem with the way the CCP tries to use it is that it no longer applies in its original context. When the term was coined, most people lived in the countryside. In the developed west, the opposite is true. In the US, for example, very few people are involved in farming. In fact, it is now under 5% of the population. The bulk of these people are not poor. So, in the west the distinction is rather dated. In China, on the other hand, it may still be relevant. Correct me if I am wrong, but I have read that in China a majority of people live on farms, and a vast majority of them are rather poor.
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  1644. Who is paying these guys?
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  1645. Actually, in the US, tap water was not universally available. I used to go and visit my wife's (now ex-wife, which is why I don't go anymore) family (on her mother's side) on the farm in central Illinois. When I first went, they had a well on the farm. Then, about 10 years ago they had tap water run out even to the farm. This even included non-dwelling buildings. There may still be places in sparsely populated rural areas where people depend on wells. This is not necessarily bad, but sometimes wells can have problems, and they are expensive. I remember times when the well on the farm had problems.
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  1646.  @rakeshkrishnan1099  NO on Biden! It's not kamala either. Some think it is Obama. Lot's of his former officials in the administration. Don't know for sure.
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  1647. Based on Wright's claim that China will not surpass the US in the next two decades, we can confidentially say that they never will. In 20 years, China's demographics will be much worse than they are today. Don't forget that in the 1970s and 1980s it looked like Japan might overtake the US. Their demographics are as bad as China's. I have even seen videos with tag line like Japan population gong to zero. Neither China nor Japan are countries with significant immigration, or the cultural environment to promote it. The US on the other hand has often grown through immigration, and people continue to come. One thing I have noticed through a relatively long life is the US share of world GDP. After WWII it was at least 50%. This was an unnatural situation due to the nature of the war. It finally settled around 25% (24% as of 2019 to be exact). It's lowest, in 2010 was 23%, due to the financial crisis. So, if you are an American, or one of its partners, don't worry, be happy.
    3
  1648.  @glibsonoran  Great points. Actually, assuming no Russian ownership in the refinery, the added value of those refined products doesn't go to the Russians. India, Turkey and China have plenty of refinery capacity.
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  1649. William has little understanding of things military, as is the case with many analysts.
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  1650. If you believe that China's economy is growing, then you are very deluded. If you got that impression from Chinese statistics and believe it, despite all the evidence of manipulation, then you are...
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  1651. Everything you say about Prigozhin is correct. On the other hand, I will miss him in a perverse sort of way. He was, at least, entertaining.
    3
  1652.  @garethnewfield  You are just making stuff up. TPS is not a fixed term contract. TPS is an administrative action. It is up to the DHS Secretary to make the determination on when to end it. The situation in Hatai is not the responsibility of the US. As for the impact on the US economy, you are just not very well informed, either on the specific situation with the Hatains or the economy in general. Where do you get your talking points?
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  1653. You nailed it. The First Amendment protects the speech, not the mode of speech. In this case, there are lots of other outlets.
    3
  1654.  @culturematrixmc  Minority groups. I have directly experienced the use of identity politics by Democrats in the US when dealing with high level party operatives. Unfortunately, I was not a member of an oppressed minority, so I was informed that I could not take advantage of my ethnicity or group identity when trying to game the system.
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  1655. At about 13:00 you state that the Chinese are smart by going after the fringe groups. Do you know how stupid that sounds/is? These are FRINGE groups. There is a reason they are fringe. That said, I agree with a lot of what is being said. By the way, Russia has at least as much motivation, if not more, for blowing up the pipeline. They had contracts to provide the gas. If the pipeline were destroyed or disabled, they could legitimately back out of those contracts without penalty.
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  1656. Why do commentators keep saying that a mass of poorly trained conscripts will bolster Russia? That is just glaring ignorance. These troops are already being killed on the front lines. They take up logistical resources for NO combat impact.
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  1657. Pettis is, as usual, correct. As I was listening to Tony I was thinking the same thing, and then he comes out with the quote. Stellar.
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  1658. Pettis is sage as usual. Tony, you talk about China trying to set up an alternative to the US dollar-based system. That is a fantasy. The thing everyone fails to realize is that the US dollar is not the reserve currency because of any desire by the US government for it to be so. For a country, or group of countries to displace the dollar they have to provide the proper conditions for businesses. I think you, and most watchers of this channel, will understand what those are. Prior to the dollar there was the pound. This was "backed" by the substantial resources of the British Empire. Where is the empire now? Where is the pound? It has become an important, but secondary, currency. Then there was the Euro. They were making headway until, during their sovereign debt crisis (think Greeks, Italians, etc.) they confiscated bank deposits. They did this by imposing a tax, I think it was 10%, on deposits. This was not a tax on the interest income, but the principle. That put a stop to its wider adoption. The dollar became the world's reserve currency because, after WWII, the US share of world GDP was 50%. Only the US had the liquidity. It also had the legal framework to inspire confidence. The US share of global GDP has settled into a range a bit over 25%. The Eurozone GDP is about $14.75T while that of the US is $27.94T. China's is about $17.52T. These are 2023 figures. So, you can see one issue for China. The other is the legal framework. The head of China's court is actually on record saying that the goal of the courts was not to enforce some abstract law but was to support the will of the CCP. China actually has stopped their erstwhile "friend" Russia from exchanging RMB to dollars in several cases simply by executive fiat. This then brings up the issue of convertibility. By the way, one issue for China these days is that Chinese companies that do business overseas are currently refusing to convert their earnings from dollars to RMB. They see what is happening with the exchange rate. On top of that are the political uncertainties. The CCP can talk all it wants about this. It is businesses, not countries, that make these decisions.
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  1659.  @juliantorres2772  Actually, those were Saudis who trained in the US. One of the problems we had with the Afghan Army was that they were mostly illiterate. There weren't enough educated Afghans to train in maintaining the equipment. In some ways, that is more complex than flying them. Had a neighbor who had a high school education and joined the Army, during the Vietnam War, and flew helicopters. Maintenance was a whole other thing.
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  1660. The main purpose of an army is to destroy the opposition's army. Specific territory is definitely secondary. This was part of the issue in Vietnam. It was also an issue in Afghanistan. I too thought that Bakhmut was a mistake. When territory is lost, it can be retaken. Major wars in history often show this, especially WWII in the Soviet Union. Especially in Ukraine.
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  1661. I get a bit upset when I hear people ascribe to the west some responsibility for the conditions in places like North Korea to inaction. Do you remember when the west, and especially the US, gave food aid to North Korea? Did that help weaken the regime? And these comments beg the question of what would you have the west do? North Korea is heavily sanctioned by the west. It is one of the most isolated countries in the world, although Russia and Iran are close seconds. To do what you want means war. How many Americans should lay down their lives for North Koreans? Don't get me wrong, I am a fan of Yeonmi. I feel for the people of North Korea. But don't ever forget that China is a nuclear power, and North Korea might be. That changes everything as far as what can be done. Take the case of Ukraine. If Russia were not a nuclear power, NATO troops would probably already have been deployed there. At least NATO aviation. Long range weapons would already have been provided. If a full-scale nuclear war broke out, it is Americans, in the US, who would die. So, take a deep breath. The US is doing what is needed to maintain the integrity of South Korea, and that country has prospered. I am afraid that there is not much more that can be done given the military and geopolitical realities.
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  1662. The fact is that just about "all the other countries are going down". Look at what is going on. Peter is not exaggerating.
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  1663. This is one of the best interviewers I have seen. She is not too intrusive and asks good questions.
    3
  1664.  @AlienScientist  That would be par for the course. Have you seen the stuff DOGE has been digging up? Stunning.
    3
  1665.  @corujariousa  I bet you could get a Federal grant for that. Better hurry, though, DOGE is on the case.
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  1666. I am all for cutting government in general, and stupid projects in particular. As for the contractors, just looking at the numbers is kind of foolish. If they are working on projects that do matter and that we want to continue, eliminating the contractors means growing the government workforce. The reality is that the real work on most government projects, and I have worked on many, is done by the contractors. My experience is in aerospace and defense. The government neither builds the satellites and rockets nor does it operate those systems, many of which are up there for years. Actually, when I was a boy, I remember my father complaining that government was contracting out a lot of stuff that had been done by government employees. He worked for what is now the Army Research Lab. So, the funny thing is that I became one of those contractors. The contractors tend to be more efficient and more skilled than the government workers. I have seen that up close and personal. They also have to bid competitively. Do you want a bureaucracy to do all this stuff? So, the reality is that if DOGE is looking at things this way, they will either realize that there being a contractor is not the issue, or they will fail and end up growing government employment.
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  1667. Listening to the first part, I cannot but help think that China is storing up massive problems for itself by getting in bed with these Muslim majority countries. I have nothing against them myself, but China's record with Islam, and all religions, is so poor that it is only a matter of time before there are anti-CCP movements in these countries. The real reason China wants to improve relations with the "stans" is natural resources. Just imagine if they get going on that and then there is a religious uprising.
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  1668. Pettis gets it right, as usual. The thing is, we have a country in China, that openly says it wants to take over the world and impose their system. That is a little rich coming from them. The Soviet Union had the same goal. What they will face is the same thing. Isolation and containment. The results will be the same and will come much more quickly. As for the automotive industry, the US has about a quarter of the population and there are over half as many automobiles sold in the US each year. Do the math.
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  1669. It is interesting that China, with one party and one leader cannot seem to organize the country in a way that makes sense. When similar issues arise in the US, there is lots of discussion. People stake out their positions in public and there is debate. Some resolution is arrived at we move forward. It is not always an optimal solution, but in general it gets the job done. But wait, that is democracy. China is a one party commie state riddled with corruption. Please forgive the harsh language, but it is the truth. In the context of the current situation with local governments in China, the analog in the US would be revenue sharing. This was started because there were federal programs and mandates that were administrated on the state level, but there was no local tax base to carry them out. Sound familiar. The US came to this formula, which sounds like a good fit for China, fifty years ago. Come on man! The real problem for China, and westerners wanting to invest in China, is that everyone is using economics and finance theory and approaches that were developed with the underlying assumptions of capitalism and functioning markets. Thus, all these economists, even within China, who have at least a large dose western training, cannot really comprehend the situation. Thus, they cannot come up with real solutions that could be applied in reality. Just to give an example, there is an article in the WSJ today titled "Big Shareholder in China? Don't Try Selling". That type of arbitrary interference in the market is what I am talking about. And it doesn't end there. The currency controls and manipulation also make the theories these academics and professionals try to apply just plain silly. Of course. I could have just said that the economists are applying theory and practices appropriate for regulated economies to an organized crime enterprise. But, of course, that would be no fun.
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  1670. I turned off right at the beginning when he started talking about the glide bombs.
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  1671. The analysis at the end regarding the CCP ideology is flawed in an important way. China never had a real industrial proletariat. At the time of the revolution, it was a peasant society. It still mostly is.
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  1672. This whole price issue puzzles me. Are these the listed prices. or the actual sale prices? For example, in the US, the actual sale price is used, and this is public information. Listing prices are basically irrelevant. We know the price of new homes is controlled by the government, but there is also the sales volume to consider. Another issue is that I have seen lots of other reports, especially concerning secondhand homes, which contradicts the data presented. The figures reported are more like 30-50% down in price. The stock of available homes is also rising putting further pressure on prices. At current sales rates it will take years to clear the existing stock. This is in first tier cities.
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  1673.  @nfuryboss  Excellent points. I have recently seen more and more stories about EV graveyards in China. The attempts to saturate other markets with EVs and solar panels is already starting to lead to anti-dumping measures, and these will only get worse. If the large economies do, as I expect, step up their anti-dumping activities, then the "global south" (I hate that term) is not really an option. Take out the large, developed economies and China and you are left with 25% of world GDP. Perhaps half of those economies will align with the west. That is not a market one can use to replace the large economies with. China is going down the wrong path.
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  1674. My father had a TR7. Actually, my brother inherited it, but a little bit ago he lost his storage space for it. He tried to get me to take it, and I would have liked to, but he is on the East Coast, and I am in the Chicago area. I do have room for it (a three-car attached garage) so that was no problem. On the other hand, it had not run for well over a decade. I wasn't sure I wanted to take on the project. Now I regret not doing it. My father bought it in 1980, but it was a 1979 model. You are probably too young to remember, but inflation, and thus interest rates, were MUCH higher than the recent inflation we have experienced. Twice as much, basically. My brother and I had always had sports cars (Austin Healey Sprite, MGB, Triumph GT6, Alfa Romeo Giulletta) and I think my father always wanted one, seeing how much fun we were having (too much, really). So, he wouldn't buy one until he retired. There is a whole story behind that. I mention the interest rates because of how he bought the car. It listed for $20K, but he went to the dealership and offered $10K CASH. SOLD!
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  1675. English exceptionalism? Sounds like American exceptionalism. Another thing we inherited from the English.
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  1676. LOVE Tim Scott!! As far as voter suppression, this is incredibly stupid! I was an election judge for many cycles. If we got over 60% participation it was a banner day. The fact is that about 2/3 of our population (being generous) vote. A full 1/3 do not. After Trump was elected, in the NW. there was a protest and. I recall, 35 people were arrested. None of them had voted. The reality is that any of our elections could go any way. The number of people not voting could sway any election. Think of that. Then ask if there is any thing such as voter supression.
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  1677. Welcome to the "free" market. Of course, it took a US company to get things going. The automotive industry is a classic case of a capital intensive industry. You can either charge high prices, and thus lower capital utilization, or you can price for volume sales and thus higher capital utilization. In businesses such as the automobile industry, it is the volume vehicles that make the most money overall. What is critical is manufacturing efficiency and quality of the vehicles. Many of these Chinese brands are from companies without a history of automotive production. Don't forget that Tesla went through years of losses before becoming profitable. The thing is that they had the market all to themselves for a while and had lots of subsidies. It seems that the majority of Chinese brands were created to garner subsidies. This is a misallocation of capital that is typical of the Chinese economy.
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  1678. Standards among the highest? Well, that only counts if you enforce them. China never does. My wife became concerned about arsenic in rice. I did a little research and found that China did indeed have high standards. The concentrations allowed by law were half of what the WHO advocated. The problem was enforcement. At one point, in China, rice from about 60 regions was tested. The amounts found were twice what the WHO set. Most of the arsenic was from anthropogenic sources (i.e., pollution). This is just one example, but of course an important one in China.
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  1679. It's good to Piers looking so happy and relaxed.
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  1680. I live in a city in Illinois that actually pays attention to those things. I actually recall reading about the zoning here, years before I ever contemplated moving here. It was in the WSJ. Now that I am here (for thirty years) I see the wisdom of it. Just after I moved back to the US from the UK there were many floods during a period of heavy rain. Someone did research, using public on-line resources, and found that some 40% of the housing stock was located in known flood areas. They knew it. In China they are having drought. On the other hand, they have built so many dams that the whole system is failing.
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  1681.  @danielcraft3727  In my city the migratory birds have lots of habitat. I live next to a park with a small lake. I keep a list of the migratory birds I see here (nothing formal) and it is long. The Canada Geese are a bit of a problem because of all the droppings, but it is not too bad.
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  1682. This idea of the west eventually growing tired of the war puzzles me. There is no historical evidence for it. It also reminds me very much of Hitler's magical thinking when he launched the Battle of the Bulge. He thought that if he could split US and UK forces that the alliance would fall apart. One thing he didn't understand was that there were lots of American troops in the north fighting with the British. But now let's just look at the conflicts since WWII that the west, especially the US, has been involved in. First there was Korea. That was over 70 years ago. We are still there with one of our most powerful Army divisions and are increasing our presence. Then there was Vietnam. We were there for over 10 years. Then there was Iraq. We were there for 20 years and are still supporting that government, even to the point of selling them advanced weapons. And how about Afghanistan? Again, 20 years. In the case of Vietnam and Afghanistan the problem in the end turned out to be that the people we were working with did not fight for themselves and did not really want us there in the end. Vietnam is now growing closer to the US, as we have strategic interests that are aligned. Then there is Israel. They have been the biggest recipients of US foreign aid for decades and a big defense partner. In many of these conflicts there were also allies that stayed with the US, mainly NATO members. So, where is the historical precedent? I really believe that all the pundits who repeat this trope are unwittingly falling into a Kremlin trap. Then there is the cost. There are lots of ways to look at this. Compared to Iraq and Afghanistan, this is the budget war. Our expenditures in Ukraine would be a rounding error on those conflicts' expenditures. Another way to look at it is that what we have spent on Ukraine is about the same order of magnitude of the fraud that has been found in the COVID relief packages in the US. There are always those in the west, especially the US, that take a contrary view. That is the result of an open society and free political discourse. Even during the Vietnam War, when there were big protests and many thought the country was against the war, Richard Nixon won reelection by a landslide, and he was no peacenik. By the way, compared to all the conflicts I mention above, this one is much more consequential to the west than any of them. Another war in Europe. You know how that ends up if you are not careful.
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  1683. My ex-wife used to say she liked divided government. That way they could not do too much. For her that is a good thing. I agree. The other thing we have to understand is that the US is not a formal ally of Ukraine. The agreements we made, with Russia and the UK, to guarantee Ukraine's security, are not actually treaties. Such a treaty probably would have had difficulty passing the Senate at the time. Another thing is that the US is not at war with Russia. The US has not been attacked by Russia, neither has any of its formal allies. When the US is attacked, think Pearl Harbor or 9/11, the Congress is united and acts quickly. Just look at the votes for action in Afghanistan and Iraq. They were even more overwhelming than the recent aid votes (which surpass the veto override threshold). The fact that the US has not been attacked and that the President has not elucidated a strategy is what allows the opponents of aid to Ukraine to cause delays. Many have been calling for the President to lay out the strategy. One of the biggest proponents is retired general Ben Hodges. He is not alone. Congress has recognized this fact and part of the bill is for the President to produce a strategy paper within 45 days. The only thing President Biden has stated so far is that we will support Ukraine for "as long as it takes". He never defines what "it" is. Does he mean as long as Ukraine is willing to fight, or until they gain victory on their terms or something in between. We don't know. Bad, not good (the robot said). The fact is that Ukraine is a European country. They were planning to join the EU (a process now underway) and NATO (not possible until after the war is over). NATO was created at a time when western Europe was not in any way capable of defending themselves from the Soviets. Until the end of the Cold War the US had at least 300K troops there, and still has 50K troops in Europe. The economic situation is, of course, no longer the same. Europe's (the EU plus UK) economy is about ten times that of Russia. Its population is about three times as large. Frankly, they are quite capable of shouldering the whole burden themselves, financially. I am not advocating that, but that is the reality. When I see the amounts being bandied about, I have to laugh. Just the amount of fraud in the COVID relief funds that has been uncovered so far is close to this Ukraine aid package. Compare this to what was spent on those wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was figured in the TRILLIONS. As President Joe likes to say: Come on man!
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  1684. The examples of western style democratic regimes in Russia are all very short lived. This indicates to me that these are not ideas that fit in naturally with the Russian ethos. Another interesting vide I get from Professor Khapaeva is that she differentiates between right (Nazism) and left (communism). Nazism stands for National Socialism. It is a socialist idea. It shares with communism the goal of taking over the world to impose their own system. They also share the idea of state control or both the economy and society. Another thing they share is the use of both propoganda and terror, internally, to control the population. The real dichotomy is between liberalism (as understood classically) and totalitarianism.
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  1685. The term is warships, not battleships. A battleship is a particular type of warship. Frankly, I thought the English were the experts on precision of language. Very disappointing.
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  1686. Thought the quote from Murphy is interesting in light of the current economic situation. You are just a young man. I lived through the last major inflation in the US, in the late 70s and early 80s. This was accompanied by minimal economic growth and the term stagflation was coined. Since the 80s, we have seen countries around the world "print" money through gov't borrowing. most of the largest economies have gov't debt at over 100%. China and Japan are in the 200% range. And yet, we have seen inflation flatline. Most governments around the world are trying to boost it up to 2%, without much luck. So, I am not sure that gold is an answer.
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  1687. As I watch this, and I have reviewed a lot of other material on this topic, I am just appalled at the stupidity involved. This extends from the government, both local and central, to the developers to the purchasers. Add to that the meaningless and obviously manipulated statistics and you have a recipe for disaster. The fact that foreign investors, especially from the US, also participated in the scam also bothers me. Fortunately, the exposure of the US economy is limited. This is going to sink the Chinese economy overall starting with the banks. The corruption is massive, but that is par for the Chinese economy under the CCP. What were they thinking?
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  1688. As you say in your books, the Chinese coast looks outward. I have seen reports. which I am not sure are credible, that Shanghai wants to break away and associate with Taiwan. Just the fact that such speculation exists is a big deal.
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  1689. Well, you haven't followed events too closely. Chinese companies are rapidly moving out of China as well as foreign ones. Let me give you a little personal example, I recently bought three battery powered lawn tools. The Company is Chinese. Two of the items were made in Vietnam. I looked at the company website, and they are even opening up their most advanced facility in the US. This is not a one-off situation. As for proof, look at Zeihan's books. He gives lots and lots of data. You would be happy.
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  1690. Yes, the higher demand will require more investment in the electricity sector outside of the EV charging stations. People don't generally take that into account. What that means is that general electricity rates will rise for everyone. Switching to EVs means a significant upgrade to the charging, transmission and distribution infrastructure.
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  1691.  @joso7228  Don't be a child. If you have a contribution or alternative to what I wrote, that would be helpful. Comments like this are childish.
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  1692. It is true to say that the order set up by the US has given peace and security since WWII. The original impetus for this was to contain Soviet communism. In this the order was successful. Everyone cheered. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union the raison-d'etre for US leadership of this order has been questioned. This includes people in the US, in China, in Russia, in the "global south" and in Europe. Macron famously said that the EU needed to have its own military to defend against Russia, China and the US. The EU, taken as a whole, has the third largest economy in the world and could thus easily shoulder the whole expense of their own defense. They have two nuclear powers. While I still think that the US should fully support Ukraine, I can only wonder why the Europeans are not shouldering the burden themselves. The US does it for historical reasons. Many destructive wars in our history have been started by European countries. We have often been drawn into them anyway. Mr. Lucas echoes the attitude of many foreign and intelligence "experts" that the US led order must continue. What they fail to realize is that the US is already backing off on the whole endeavor. Like the situation that the UK experienced with its empire in the middle of the 20th century, the US is coming to the conclusion that it is not worth the expenditure. I think a term for what these pundits espouse is "status quo-ism".
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  1693. The shot at the beginning of the video of you splitting wood is priceless. Love the Freedom tee-shirt. Your roses look great. I didn't trim mine and they are not doing so well. I will have to try better. The apples look delicious.
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  1694. @Fattys Toob Then all criminals should be deported? Do you even understand what citizenship means? By the way, where would they be deported to?
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  1695. All these Asian countries make a big thing about 100-year plans. Who are they kidding? I once took some graduate business school courses as part of a company program. The professors were from the UK and Ireland. They were gaga over the 100-year plans of Japanese companies. How has that worked out for them? Life, and especially business, is too dynamic to be making such plans. It is a sure sign that a country or business is out of touch when they make such plans.
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  1696. Another old Soviet saying: They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.
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  1697. Peter is correct on tactical nukes. They were developed to stop massed tank formations. We have less "controversial" ways to do that these days. Frankly, with all the defensive formations put in place by both the Russians and Ukrainians, we are not seeing massed tank formations attacking. Just the opposite is happening. All of the reports are of two or three tanks, or at most ten or twenty. To allow for massed tank movement in this situation requires air superiority so that narrow corridors can be secured to then allow masses of tanks and other armored vehicles to move through and into the enemy rear. Neither side has that, even locally.
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  1698. You are still playing the numbers game. Quality of equipment, training, motivation and leadership are the decisive factors. Two good examples are available. One is Israel in all its wars. They were supplied by the US and their adversaries by the Soviets. The population disparity was even more lopsided. Another good example is the wars in Iraq. In the first, the Gulf War, the US had over 300K troops in theatre with coalition partners taking the number to over 500K. That war lasted 100 hours. In the second invasion, the US and allies had no more that 200K troops taking on an army of over 500K. Again, modern US equipment, etc. versus Soviet era equipment. I think you are way off in your assessments.
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  1699. I love that Tony, and all the financial community, put stock in what "analysts" or economists "predict". I cannot count the number of times I have seen significant moves in individual stocks, for example, because a quarterly report does not match what the "analysts" predicted. Here is another glaring example. I believe that this is driven by the financial press so that they have something to report. This is a great thing for them because they get at least two stories (and plenty of opinion pieces) out of each such event. I mention this because it is just kind of funny and a quirk of the financial press. A pet peeve of mine.
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  1700. Whatever happened to global warming??
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  1701. The first part of the video was a recitation of the wait times. Why? The specific numbers don't mean a lot to most people. They could change at any time. I guess reporters see a "fact" and glom onto it, even if the specific number is not meaningful. It is like the number of dead and injured in a natural or manmade disaster. To those not involved, the specific number conveys very little information. It is just data.
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  1702. The issue of Russian deposits in Chinese banks is instructive. For all those people who think the yuan, or some sort of BRICS currency can displace the US dollar, pay attention. Look at the two situations. The Russian money in western accounts has not been seized. It has been frozen, and there are limitations. Russia could get it back if it stopped the invasion of its neighbor which is supported by the west. This is a wartime situation, and the rules are still adhered to. In China, an "ally" of Russia, the CCP is blocking withdrawal of Russian funds. China has stringent currency controls. Just imagine what the CCP would do with the funds of adversaries. Russia is screwed.
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  1703.  @turnerfamilyinozi  What? This is not some kind of academic forum. I f you would read a bit and studied history, you would know that this was the case. Campuses have been a hotbed of leftist rebellion since the mid-1800s.
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  1704. Is Obama ignorant of the history of the US? This has never been a united country on domestic issues. There has always been a partisan divide. People seem to view the late 1940s and 1950s as "normal". It was not. Read history, listen to some of the excellent podcasts out there. Any open democracy will have people on opposite sides of the political divide. I have seen it from all sides, and I have been around long enough to see lots of it. I have lobbied in my state and in Washington, DC. Heck, I was born in Washington, DC. I could go on and on (but to spare you I won't). The political divide in natural and has existed from the beginning of the republic. Get over it!
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  1705. What I read is that he wanted to refund 20% of the DOGE identified savings and use the rest to pay down the debt. Did you hear something else? The real question is what should the tax burden be. Decide that first. Then live within that budget prioritizing what the government should do and dropping the rest.
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  1706. The description, at around 15:45, of the recruitment of dancers is not unusual. Why would these requirements be considered "strange" as you seem to be implying. Dance is a visual medium. Except for the prestigious school requirement, this is no different than how dancers for strip clubs are chosen, including the personal interview by the owner (always behind closed doors).
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  1707. Ivan's comment at about 30:00 about the change of attitude of the Soviets. During the Cold War one of Europe's fears was an American/Soviet condominium. By this was meant that the two great powers would decide the fate of nations between themselves without much reference to those affected.
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  1708. The "smart car", self-driving car or whatever you want to call it is a detriment to the adoption of EVs. This feature drives up the cost, along with the battery technology. The battery is necessary. Self-driving is not. By the way, have you seen the videos showing how bad the Chinese brand self-driving is? It is great comedic entertainment. Almost all contemporary ICE vehicles are mostly "drive by wire" and could easily be made self-driving. With the exception of things like low-speed automatic braking and self-parking features, this is not the case. Ever wonder why? Having taken an Uber several tines, some of which are Tesla's with self-driving features, I have yet to find a driver that uses the feature. My firm belief is that self-driving features were added by Tesla as a differentiator to help justify the high price of the vehicles. From a material standpoint the feature is cheap. EVs will only take over when they are priced similarly to ICEs. including operating costs, and when the charging issue is solved. Oh, and when the electric grid is doubled or tripled. Can't forget that.
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  1709. The home price that is significant is the used home actual sale price, not the artificial new home price. Let me explain. People buy these houses as an investment. One only realizes the gain from that investment when selling. The numbers I have seen are 30-50% declines in used home prices in many markets and a massive uptick in supply. Many people have also borrowed on the value of their property, for other purposes, and are now in a world of hurt. This fall in prices is a major factor in the lack of consumption. New buyers are reluctant to invest. Current owners are feeling the pinch and in many cases are underwater on their investments. This leads to a downward price spiral. This even applies to primary residences. The only real solutions are radical ones, and ones which Xi and the CCP will not, or cannot, implement.
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  1710. The Iraq War was over withing three weeks. Iraq's military was much larger and more experienced than Ukraine's. In fact, it was the about the fourth largest in the world and had been fighting for at least three decades. For Russia to be where they are today is a travesty. Russia is a joke.
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  1711.  @Ms777lalaland  China and other countries. What the brands are selling is the designs. Ripping off the designs and trademarks is just plain theft.
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  1712. An interesting thing is that the Pakistani M48 had a gasoline engine. In WWII this was a weakness of the German tanks. The M4 Sherman used a diesel engine.
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  1713.  @chuckschillingvideos  I know. Actually, Sabine has strayed far, far from her area of expertise. I am much more interested in the videos on fundamental physics.
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  1714. Wagner is not an elite fighting force. In Africa they are fighting poorly equipped insurgents In Syria, you might recall, they attacked a small American force and were decimated by US weapons (including HIMARS) and aviation. In Bakhmut they used untrained prisoners and suffered unimaginable losses. Don't be afraid of Wagner. Poland is similarly equipped and will crush them if they are so foolish, and that assumes other NATO forces do not join in.
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  1715.  @seemev2.0phuckbootube78  Read what I wrote. They will be worse off for it.
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  1716. Patton was also of this mind. It would have been a good idea.
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  1717. With all the decoupling going on, what seems to be missing from the analysis is a rational consideration of the commodity impact. Yes, there will be an impact, but it is not a zero-sum game. It is most likely that a significant portion of the commodities that China imports will simply be redirected to other countries for processing into products and for infrastructure development at other locations. This will not be one for one, but the delta may well not be large. Agricultural commodities, including foodstuffs and, perhaps more significantly, the inputs for food production, will still be required. One of the biggest impacts we may see is in the migration of Chinese people. This may even include a significant number of CCP members.
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  1718.  @roryschultz3788  Gov. Abbot is another viable candidate for the presidency.
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  1719. My brother had a 2002 in the early 1980s. He bought it with 150K miles on it and ran it for a few years (not 31) and put an additional 300K miles on it. I don' remember having to replace anything. He upgraded it. My house had the garage with a facility to pull engines, etc. so most of the work was done there. He did put in Recaro seats, upgraded the camshaft, installed a Weber carburetor, and put some nice wheels and tires on it (we had a friend who had a tire distributorship who would also get parts for us) just for the fun of it. We grew up with small English sports cars and motorcycles (Triumph, MG, Austin-Healey) and all were heavily tuned. It was our hobby at the time. By the way, he still has first car, a 1968 Triumph GT6. He recently took it apart and totally redid it. He also has a 1964 Alfa Romeo Giuletta which he totally restored and rebuilt (a friend of ours had trashed it, like he did everything). Might those be cars you might want to do a video on?
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  1720. The whole premise of the phrase "radicalised by the centrist subculture" is sort of silly. Radicalized by centrists? C'mon, man, as President Joe liked to say.
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  1721.  @spanglerimagery Well, you are correct regarding who is at fault for the actual pollution in China. My point is that the west should limit trade based on environmental as well as other factors.
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  1722. On education, I was a school governor at a primary school where my sons went. As a foreigner, I had to get permission from the Home Office even to run as a parent governor. I won election and served for almost three years. I developed a great relationship with the head, to where she had me interview any new staff to be hired, including the new deputy head. I was very impressed with what was achieved at this school. It was in Winchester. I worked for a large US firm with a major facility nearby. I loved the experience, and took all the courses for governor that I could. What amazed me was what was done with what I would consider in the US, minimal funds. This was both for the facilities and teaching. Education in important. At its best in US public schools, it is fantastic. I live in the Western Suburbs of Chicago. We spend about 2/3 per pupil compared to the city of Chicago. And yet, out facilities are second to none, and encompass fantastic academic, music, athletic and vocational training. The Vice Premier of China visited one our high schools, and he was amazed at both the facilities and the attitude of our students. In the UK you teach to the test. This is your failure. You need to teach your students how to think and live.
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  1723. "Of course, Beijing isn't pleased with any of this." The pace and tone of statements and actions that Beijing is displeased with seems to be increasing. I think we may be near, or may have reached, a tipping point in foreign government relations with the CCP. The CCP has made itself repugnant to most of the rest of the world. The allies it does have either don't matter or are repugnant as well. China is also becoming somewhat of a joke. Its diplomacy is full of adolescent Soviet style rhetoric. Its military is now seen as a joke. A paper tiger, if you will. As we all know, political, diplomatic and military power emanates from economic power. China's current economic power comes from the west. Both in investment and markets the hated, developed west also holds the key to China's future. To see this, contrast the arc of China's economy prior to opening up to the west to that which existed when their primary ally was the Soviet Union. Enough said. Tony, I do appreciate, and value, your analysis of the official sources of information within China. It is quite important and revealing. It is also more important in a totalitarian, one party (man) dictatorship than in a democracy. On the other hand, it is interesting to follow non-official sources in places like India. I have seen many pundits, often recently retired military men, who fully expect a war with China. I think there is some merit to this, and the reasoning is the parallels to the situation Mao faced in the 1960s. The parallels are striking.
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  1724. Now, I have lived in the UK. I have been traveling to the UK from the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium. I have also traveled to many other places from that time. I was even a school governor in England in the beginning of this millennium. So, I think I have some valid reason to opine. From what I can see, the UK should get rid of the honor system, it has become corrupt. I don't say this because of my opinion, but because of what i see in UK media. The other is that you should very seriously consider getting rid of the monarchy. I got a book while I was in England titled Bring Home the Revolution. While the current monarch is a wonderful person, and monarch, the ones coming after will cause you much turmoil. Nip it in the bud. And this comes from one with plates of the Silver Jubilee on my living room wall.
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  1725. China is a primitive society confronted with modern social and economic issues. The CCP runs China more like a feudal aristocracy than a modern socialist party. China is toast. As a westerner I am not worried.
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  1726. What is left out is that a lot of this processing moved to places like China primarily because of environmental regulations in the US and the west in general driving up the cost. Yes, the Chinese subsidized heavily, but the west also found it a convenient thing to do to export their pollution. A simple solution to this is to apply the same environmental standards to materials that are imported as our industries are forced to comply with. Although CO2 is not a pollutant, the EU is instituting what they call the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. This is basically a tariff on carbon intensive products and production. The same mechanism can be applied to any number of processes. It would also make sense if you care for the environment. The other alternative is to just relax the environmental regulations in the west. This could happen if things get bad enough. As for things like aluminum and steel production, a lot of that is used in China. It is not necessary to produce as much as they do to meet the needs of the western world. Don't forget that prior to 30 years ago all this stuff was done in the west. As for semiconductors, those also started out in the west, mostly the US. It became a more efficient thing to do for chip designer firms to go to a "foundry" to have the chips manufactured. Those foundries can be anywhere. And don't give too much credit to Taiwan and companies like TSMC. They purchase the equipment and everything else needed from western companies (I include Japan in the west here). Again, subsidies.
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  1727. The comment at 1:45 brings to mind the phrase, "lies, damn lies and statistics".
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  1728. The differences between the Chinese and US housing finance systems is striking. The first is the fact that in China, once one has taken out a loan, they are solely responsible for repayment. In the US, that risk is shared. If one cannot afford the mortgage anymore, the bank reposes the property. The buyer loses the principle put in, but then no longer has any liability. That allows one to at least try to start over. The other puzzling thing is the discouragement of pre-payment. I have done that (twice, long story) with my home. There was no issue, and it is good for both me and my bank. Details like this can massively affect an economy. In the case of China, where the property sector is proportionally large compared to the rest of the world, it is turning out to be devastating.
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  1729. David's comment, regarding the sexualization of children, at the end is very important. It reminds me of what people say about Qanon. Could Qanon be right?
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  1730. Burns states that the Chinese would "start an extensive hacking operation" in the event of a conflict over Taiwan. I hope you boys and girls weren't waiting for the FBI director to tell you this and were already taking precautions. What is often left unsaid is what the US would do in retaliation, or even maybe preemptively. This reminds me of the financial world and their attitudes toward China. Frankly, the issues, in both the financial and security realm, have been known for well over a decade. Heck, when my kids were teenagers, they showed me a website that gave near real-time graphical information on cyber-attacks. It was clear that China was a threat matrix then. That was at least 15 years ago. On the financial side we now have mainstream analysts and economists saying the obvious. China's growth last year was between zero and one percent, not the 5.2% reported. People have been saying this, and doing analysis to understand the situation, for several years now. They find a picture far different from the official figures. Even some CCP officials, in unguarded moments, admit this. I guess what I am saying is that it is interesting the way our discourse goes. Don't forget that government officials have political motivations and considerations. The financial analysts have vested interests. What we don't have, in the public discourse, is much analysis on what is likely to happen. Thus, you get the situation we have with the cranes.
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  1731. The Bishop quote at the end is something I have been harping on about for some time now. I am lucky to have a financial advisor who takes a macro approach and looks at a lot more than the charts. He has been bearish on China for a long time He also was all for Xi getting a third term. His reasoning is that Xi would tank the economy. Everything that has happened since proves him right. It seems, though, that some of the largest investment houses in the US have not seen the risks. Considering their high-powered analytic capabilities this is puzzling. There are even firms that help companies analyze and assess political and systemic risks using sophisticated statistical models. I saw one commentator opining that there might be a basis for lawsuits for failure of fiduciary duty due to the lack of consideration of the risks posed by the Chinese system. I can't wait. It will be fun to watch. And of course, if they had followed China Update, they would have had some idea of what was going on.
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  1732. Love the comment on the family. The idea of the American family is that the children will be nurtured and then go out on their own. We had an Iranian family friend whose family operated totally differently. Everyone lived at home until they got married. All the family resources were pooled. The kids could get nice cars, etc. They men lived at home until they could "afford" to get married. I moved out when I was 19 with an older woman. Not a happy thing for my parents. The relationship fell apart, but by the time I was 24 I had a house on my own in the neighborhood I grew up in. This was many years before I got married. We were all very individualistic. That is the core of the American family. Individualism. Call it weak, if you like, but it makes for people who are very self reliant.
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  1733. What is so crazy about limiting oil production in the US is that the government looses out on the taxes and leasing fees. If you were for moving to green energy, one of the best things you could do is to use those taxes and fees to fund green energy projects. By buying oil overseas, you loose out on that. How dumb is that?
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  1734. My favorite book of the Bible is Revelation. I first read it in about 1980. My brother gave me an album (on vinyl) by Vangelis titled "666". So, I put on the album, lit up a joint and read it straight through. It was a magical experience.
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  1735. Experience has shown that the fighter mafia and reform movements we basically incorrect. Some of the things they pushed had a good effect, but for the most part, putting up large numbers of cheap planes (and MBTs and iFVs) is not a winning strategy. The Soviets/Russians have that strategy. If you look at the Gulf War and OIF, you see a more sophisticated army with more advanced equipment crushing an army equipped with the Soviet/Russian equipment. This is also true of the Israelis.
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  1736.  @The_Judge300  Very likely. The FSB (KGB, etc.) has always been in charge. Remember back in the 1980s when Andropov became leader? He had actually been KGB head. Putin himself was KGB. I saw somewhere recently that "Kremlinology" was making a comeback.
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  1737. The parallels between the situation of China and Russia are striking. Both tried to expand their territorial reach. Both elicited something they certainly did not want. That is a straitening of alliances targeted toward containing them. When will they ever learn?
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  1738.  @JohnJaneson  And people wonder why there are lots of people in the US who are concerned about the "deep state". It is not only the US. Similar issues are present in the UK.
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  1739. Having a Montecristo with my morning coffee watching this. Momentum on the battlefield is often fleeting. This was shown in the initial invasion and after the successful counteroffensive by Ukraine. There is even evidence that the Russian forces invading toward Kharkiv are being heavily attritted. As for "de-dollarization", China has a problem there of its own.
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  1740. You use the term "nation". Do you mean "state"? For example, in the UK there four "nations", but one "state". Canada is likewise divided by French speaking and English speaking "nations", and many "first nations", but is one state.
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  1741. Of course people are being sent to places like Chicago and New York City. They advertise themselves as sanctuary cities. They decide to not cooperate with Federal law enforcement and then complain about what is happening at the border, which is supposedly a Federal matter. Then, those people who question whether access to services is being provided adequately. Well, get off your bums and demand higher taxes. Either that or advocate for cuts to services to citizens. That is the choice.
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  1742.  @308_Negra_Arroyo_Lane  Have you seen the reports about failures in flight?
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  1743. The thing people don't consider when thinking about Europe and its past and then projecting into the future is demographics. Europe always had a burgeoning population. Lots of people to throw at wars of conquest. Remember what Hitler was always going on about? It was lebensraum. He wanted more space for the increasing German population. Well, as far as indigenous populations in Europe (and other places as well) this is no longer an issue. The big issue today is how to deal with an aging and shrinking population (outside in immigration).
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  1744. Very interesting. A completely different take on the guy, and very valuable. Stellar analysis. Of course, I wonder what he was thinking. Prior to the influx of western capital, the Chinese economy made the Soviet economy look like a success story. The term for creating a totally self-dependent economy is "autarky". That was Hitler's idea. The only thing I disagree with you, and many others, on is an assumption that the current complex global supply chains we have are necessary, or even a good thing. In fact, there are two motivations for the current state of affairs. One is that our product companies are no longer run by engineers, but by MBAs and bean counters. I explain below. This leads to the constant search for labor differentiation. A corollary to that is the move of manufacturing to countries with a large and growing market. This is a way to get around protectionism, plain and simple. Look at automobile manufacturing. Japanese and Korean companies build cars in the US. Why? Is the labor cheaper? No. They were trying to forestall being kicked out of the most lucrative market in the world. Another example is BMW. All of their SUVs are assembled in the US. I told a German colleague of mine this and he was not happy. To show you the madness of this, my attorney (and friend; good to have one of those) bought one recently. He had to wait for a while because parts and assemblies were flying back and forth across the Atlantic. In the 1980s the movement in manufacturing was to collocate engineering and manufacturing. This was, in large part, because of the concept called "design for manufacturability". It was driven as much by quality as cost. To go back to automotive, GM wanted to design a "world car" platform they could sell, with local adaptations, anywhere. They could also produce it anywhere. They had fancy graphics of the envisioned assembly plants. All their suppliers would have feeder plants actually abutting the main assembly plant. This was also driven by the idea of "just in time" or JIT manufacturing. This all falls apart in the current model. I have already written too much, but just a couple more things. One is that I have already seen examples of products that were brought back to the US after moving manufacturing to China. Instead of just making the same thing, the product was reengineered to be more efficient to manufacture. The cost actually came down. In the US! I have consulted with companies and know of the situations of many more (some very large) that contract manufacturing to China. I was involved, of course, because they were having problems. The Chinese manufacturers did not build the product exactly as specified, and they failed. You can't separate engineering for quality (product and production process) and quality control from manufacturing. The result is the low quality of many of the goods we have now. This is a part of what I talk about above. The other thing is automation. Have you seen the plants in China that produce the iPhone? There are hundreds of thousands of people involved using very little automation. The workers are literally peasants. What we will see as disengagement from China proceeds is much more innovation in automation. That is capital intensive, so it is not likely to work in China, or in Russia. By the way, I use a lot of examples from the automotive world, but my background is in aerospace. We often studied what was being done in other manufacturing areas to get ideas for our own manufacturing.
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  1745. She is the most biased person I have heard in a long time. Her treatment of Conservatives contrasts sharply with her treatment of Lib Dems and Labor figures. The evidence in on YouTube. What she should be looking at is the polls. Johnson is rising while the others are doing poorly.
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  1746.  @JohnJaneson2449  You are welcome.
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  1747. Public opinion in the US is softening on Ukraine support. As for multipolarity, it is here. Several countries have been calling for it. These include India as well as Russia and China. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said so publicly. Actually, the US electorate has been leaning that way since the election of Bill Clinton. One must also remember that foreign policy is usually not a big issue in US elections. In the latest one, and this is typical, when polls are taken Ukraine was down near the bottom of the list of voter concerns, along with global warming, both polling in single digit territory.
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  1748. I love the reactions to Biden's decision not to run again for president. Priceless! Rumors and conspiracy theories are a lot of fun. The ones you read coming out of China are a real hoot. I especially like the one about Harris cancelling elections. Most will not remember, but on the right in the US there were speculations and fears that Obama would not leave after his second term. Great fun for a Wednesday morning (my time). Thanks for sharing.
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  1749. ICBMs? Really? This guy doesn't know what he is talking about.
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  1750. Have you ever considered that your opinion is not the majority opinion, even within the center left party? You either need to start a new party, or accept the Democrats program.
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  1751. Of course, the industry will fall apart. This is one of the most capital-intensive industries around. Note the word capital. Built by capitalists, not commies pretending to be capitalists. Don't confuse this with capital intensive infrastructure projects owned by the government (for example high speed rail). The Chinese government totally screwed this industry by offering direct to company subsidies. This is far from the only such failure in China. When you have a government interfering with market-based industries you will always fail. To some extent that is what happened with the financial crisis of 2008 in the US. That is also what happened to China's property market. Now, the auto industry. When will they learn?
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  1752. The comment at 2:30 shows a decided lack of understanding of the US. It is stunning. People in Ukraine should pay more attention to the dynamics in and history of the US and should educate themselves about it. A good place to start is George Friedman's book "The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond". They should also read Peter Zeihan's books. I also detect a bit of the old Soviet mentality. By this I mean that they assume that the US as the most powerful country in the world, both militarily and economically, should be doing such and such. That is not how it works in the US and not how the US sees itself. I support Ukraine, but sometimes they don't understand the situation they live in. For one thing, the US has not been attacked. That historically has been the impetus for US action. For another, there is not a long-standing alliance with Ukraine. Ukraine has not been around that long. In fact, before Ukraine emerged as an independent country it was a part of America's main enemy. Ukraine's situation is totally different from that of Israel, Taiwan or South Korea, just to give some examples. For another, the US populace is moving away from wanting to be the world's policeman, nation building and globalization. Finally, this trope about Russia, if they win in Ukraine, going further in Europe is just silly. Putin may want that, but he won't be able to do it. It took 20 years for him to build up the military resources he attacked Ukraine with. Those forces are gone. During that time, he had access to western technology and massive oil revenues. In addition, while Ukraine has performed brilliantly with what it had, their forces, taken together, are not up to NATO standards. If you want to see what might happen, pitting a NATO, or NATO like, force against a Soviet/Russian force look no further than the Gulf War, OIF or Israel's wars with their Arab neighbors.
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  1753. What is this assessed market value? What is it based on? We hear about situations like this all the time in China. Is this the assessment for tax purposes? I thought there were no property taxes. So, what does it all mean? In the US, we get an assessment for property tax purposes, updated each year. The actual details will vary by locality, since these are local taxes. What I get is a number based on actual sales of similar homes in my location for the past three years. So, for the assessment to be so far off from the selling price tells me that this term is not being used correctly. It is meaningless if it is just some number set by a local bureaucrat, or worse yet, a realtor.
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  1754. You don't need to be rich to have a girlfriend younger than your daughter. I knew a guy (he worked for me) who was in that situation. He even met with his daughter and girlfriend on a trip to New York (we were in Chicago).
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  1755. What the heck do politicians mean by saying vaccination is defense against the Kung Flu? Vaccines do not stop one from getting it. They do not stop one from transmitting it. The only real effect is the lessen the severity in the vaccinated person. As a social measure, vaccines are meaningless. One cable news personality in the US, in her 30s, was vaccinated. She had the Kung Flu twice in 2021. Once at the beginning of the year and once at the end. Vaccines are not a panacea. In fact, in Taiwan, at the beginning of the troubles, there were more deaths from the vaccine that from the Kung Flu. The vaccines have some use, but they are not the end of the story. If you have any knowledge of these things at all, you will know that vaccines generally take many years to produce. The current ones took months. They are approved under emergency use protocols. The real solution is herd immunity and treatments. Vaccines are just a stop gap. This is a flu type virus. The flu is a whole family or diseases. Each year flu vaccines are produced to address what authorities expect will be the most prevalent four or so strains. They often get it wrong. Flu vaccines, which have been around for decades, are only about 60% effective. One last thing. About 100 years ago we had a much more deadly pandemic. Many times more people died, out of a world population that less than 25% of what it is today. At least in the US, there was not even a recession. What is the f**king point of what our governments have done? Just think about it.
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  1756. Lots of things to say here. First, without insurance Russian ships cannot go through the Suez Canal, for example. They also cannot berth at many ports. Second, they cannot viably stop pumping from many of their wells. For example, the wells in Siberia will break if they stop pumping (built through permafrost, the pipes will crack). Russia does not have the expertise or resources to replace these wells in the future. That was done by foreign firms. Building new pipelines to China, and perhaps India (if a route could be found) will take years, and lots of money. Third, the Gulf States rely on the west for security. Will they want to rely on Russia (how has that Russian equipment performed?) for security assistance? Good luck. Russia has no leverage in this situation. OPEC risks alienating their customers. That will spell trouble for them. Many of them are unstable, much like Russia.
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  1757.  @Mark-ci3kt  I hear you brother. We have gone through a wave of insanity in our politics. i think it will correct itself in both our countries very soon. I even think it might happen in China. The ultra-communist Xi may well not be reelected. He might even be killed. Considering what he has done to China, that would be mild.
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  1758. What drivel. Colonialism was not primarily about the slave trade. That was an unfortunate byproduct of colonialism. The slave trade the Dutch were involved in was well established in Africa and the Pacific areas long before the Dutch or other Europeans. It was run by Africans and Arabs, and by some accounts is still happening today.
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  1759. When Jin Canrong talks about the size of the Chinese economy vis-a-vis the US and mentions PPP I started to get less interested. PPP is a concept that has been discredited. Even traditional GDP is only a rough measure and is widely ignored by serious financial analysts. One of the reasons for the latter is that countries like China, with their massive state intervention (leaving aside outright data manipulation) makes the GDP measure incommensurate with that of other economies. Thus, it is very much less useful in comparing economies. Then he states an obvious untruth when he says, "China's manufacturing and product quality are excellent". That is patently untrue, and I have seen many examples, some up close (and I am not talking about consumer goods). As for the international situation, I am seeing more and more support, often tentative, for Taiwan independence. China's aggressive and confrontational foreign policy is rankling many countries around the world, including some of their erstwhile friends, such as some of the BRICS countries. That coupled with Taiwan's importance in semiconductors will, I believe, weaken their international position. Otherwise, he makes a lot of very good points. He is very realistic about China's dependence on the rest of the world for critical materials and food. This is an insoluble problem. In this situation China is perhaps beginning to understand the tyranny of geography.
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  1760. McCarthy was over the top, but the plain fact is that the Soviet Union was infiltrating American government and institutions. Even in the 1980s there was a huge presence of Soviet spies in the US. I worked for an aerospace and defense contractor on the east coast. My background is in engineering, but at one point I took a position as the "CIO" of the spacecraft plant in our complex. As such I was part of the operations group (one of the three main components) and got to see some things I would never have seen as an engineer. The rest of our complex included some very classified work and was actually larger in terms of personnel than the spacecraft plant. Their buildings had no window offices. In fact, only the newest building had windows, but there was only corridor there. I became aware that we were tracking 15 known Soviet agents in the area. There were several incidents of our employees being caught out, often in bars, and losing their security clearances. Some of these clearances took six months or more to obtain. We even had to be careful of how we situated our computer screens since, in those days, we were still using CRTs and the contents could be read with sophisticated devices aimed at windows. We tracked such devices and often sent down false information. Ah, I miss the Cold War.
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  1761. China courting the EU is kind of silly. China is one of the reasons VW is closing factories for the first time. It is also affecting BMW and Mercedes. Trying to court allies in Europe when you are banging the nationalist drum within China is just plain tone deaf. As for the visas, that is a real hoot. With the national security laws, it is dangerous for foreigners, especially businessmen, in China. Have you seen the numbers of people going to China? How about the declining number of international flights. A lot of the people who do go to China are from Russia and the "global south". Those are China's allies now.
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  1762. The Chinese economy is not "expanding rapidly". Their growth rate has been well below what they need or project. In addition, it is not possible to trust the figures coming out of China. Most of the "growth" has been associated with infrastructure projects, most of which are not economically viable. There have even been studies, using indirect evidence, that claim the Chinese economy might be much smaller than what everyone thinks. As for the pipeline, it will have to be totally funded by the Chinese. Russia does not have the resources to do it. It will also take many years to build. Odds are, the Russian Federation may not exist in a year or two. It is not unlikely that China will just take over the Russian Far East in that timeframe. They have claims on it based on their rejection of treaties signed between the Russian Empire and the Qing Dynasty. Don't forget that they have fought many border skirmishes over the years.
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  1763. It seems like the CCP is becoming a NATONAL SOCIALIST party. We have seen this before. I think I have commented on this before on this channel. Even the economic model and its trajectory are similar. This is a worrying trend.
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  1764.  @icarusproject  Thanks.
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  1765.  @SideEpics  Then, you run out of missiles. Unless you destroy the enemy's whole force, you are left open to massive retaliation. You are also assuming that every hit will be successful and that there will be no effective defense. So, not a great plan, and the Chinese Rocket Force knows it.
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  1766. While the US did support Israel in 1973, there were some issues that delayed that support. Israel had to make concessions to receive it. I think that Israel deserves US support, for the reasons stated. On the other hand, Israel is an ethno-religious state. The US, quite frankly, is not, and this always keeps open the possibility of opposition to Israel in the US on those grounds. It is hard to separate the issues of opposition to support for Israel, a liberal democratic state, and antisemitism. This is just the reality of the situation. We support Saudi Arabia and many other Arab states that are also ethno-religious. In those cases, it is mostly because of the oil. The US no longer needs the oil, but our allies do. We often find it hard to disentangle from relationships that no longer make sense from a US point of view. I expect this is true of most countries. This is a problem for the US that has not been addressed since the end of the Cold War. It should be. Mention that the US should be the policeman of the world, and you will be shouted down by all sides of the US political spectrum. The fact is that the US populace is moving away from support for that role. It is unclear whether the relationship will deteriorate further. Most young people who are protesting have little idea of what they are protesting for or against. They also don't recall the horrendous things Palestinians did to Americans over the years. Ignorance of history is rife today.
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  1767. China always had a relatively close relationship with Pakistan. That is why, when the US was trying to open up relations with China in the 1970s, Pakistan was the intermediary. This close relationship was, of course, based on a shared antagonism towards India.
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  1768.  @moisesfernandes1258  I wonder if there is something that could be done with that brine which may be usefil.
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  1769.  @নিরভ্র  That is the term for buildings, roads and bridges that fall apart quickly. It is as if they are made out of tofu, not concrete. Look it up on YouTube. It will amaze you.
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  1770. The real question is who would lead a reform movement. I don't know of any figure that could fill that role. That said and considering all the surveillance and military force in the country, it is quite probable that there would be a devolution into warlordism. Some parts of the country would break away, and a unified China may cease to exist. This is, or course, what Xi fears. It is the breakup of the Soviet Union all over again.
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  1771. Love your videos, and your book. This is another situation where physicists come up with something that might be interesting and revolutionary, but probably does not exist. In the mid 1970s I was a student in physics at a large university in the US. There was a cosmic ray experiment that seemed to show that magnetic monopoles might exist. If they did, they would have had a large impact. We had a massive meeting of all the undergraduates, graduate students and faculty to discuss. There was a large cosmic ray experimental department at this school as well. The discussion was that this finding was probably not credible, both on theoretical grounds and experimental grounds. It was really interesting. Glad to see you carrying on the tradition.
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  1772. To think that the policy makers in China have any hope of designing policies that would solve the property crisis is the height of folly. Just look at the numbers. There are 20 million unfinished apartments. What is less talked about is that there are 60 million apartments that are finished and unsold. Of course, this does not include the large number of apartments that were bought as investments and not occupied. I don't know what the number is there, but it could be as much as the previous two put together. There are no existing economic or fiscal models that could be used as a guide here. There is also the issue that the CCP officials have not shown ANY ability to design and implement policies that do not cause more harm than good. Just look at the "three red lines" policy that set all this off. There was, indeed, a problem. The whole real estate development sector had become one huge Ponzi scheme. Something needed to be done. The policy chosen was not that something. Now it looks like the Chinese economy is going to collapse because of the ham-fisted way this was approached. This is not the first such policy and will not be the last. The whole push for "high quality development" is another stupid policy that is going to cost China massive losses in the end.
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  1773. Actually, there is a lot of racism in small town rural America. It is not "official" but embedded in the culture. I have seen it up close. I am not a minority, but saw it expressed in individual contacts, and even on things like economic development boards I participated in.
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  1774. Actually, China's banking sector is not that well integrated with the rest of the world, especially in banking. This is nothing like the situation in 2008 in the west with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the crisis in investment banks. In the west, these were all tightly integrated. With the capital controls in China, it is difficult to get too far involved with Chinese banks. In addition, financial institutions and companies in the west have highly diversified investments. Just to give a couple of examples, start with Evergrande's total debt and the amount of that in dollar bonds. The dollar bond amount is tiny. Another example is what happened with the Russian sanctions. Many large companies closed down in Russia, but there are none that I can think of that were materially affected in the short to medium term, and certainly not in the long term. China also limits ownership of foreign companies in China, with further limits exposure.
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  1775. Wouldn't England and Whales be better off without Scotland? I was living and working in England in the early 2000s. When I asked one of my English management colleagues about the Scotland situation his response was quite interesting. He said, build a trench across the border and hopefully it will float out to sea. This was also the era of the Quebec independence referenda. They had two and neither was successful. I had a meeting in London with a Canadian business partner just before the second. He predicted rightly, that the second would fail. What was happening then was demographics. You should have seen the speculation in the US on what would happen if Quebec had separated from Canada. I recall one PBS report that speculated that the rest of Canada would become part of the United States.
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  1776. Elections in the US are generally very clean. I have served as an election judge in the past and a lot of care is taken to ensure votes are counted and counted accurately. On the other hand, there are areas where there might be some issues. From what I can tell, these are not enough to sway national elections. People are, I assume, aware of the quips regarding elections in Chicago. Well, I live in the suburbs, and I used to have a business associate who lived in Chicago who claimed to vote for his grandfather. He told me he made sure that his deceased grandfather was kept on the election rolls and then voted twice. I have no proof of this. This is what he told me, in all seriousness, but it is plausible. I could tell some other stories of stuff that goes on in Chicago. There have been issues in elections, including presidential elections, in the past. I read an authoritative biography of LBJ, and it was mentioned that people were paid for votes in places like Texas. Many of these people were migrants. This was not considered a controversial statement. Just saying. I firmly believe in in-person elections, with photo ID, with absentee ballots only for specific reasons. I have voted absentee, but only because I was living on another continent on a foreign assignment for a large US company. In Illinois we have in person polling starting, I believe, three weeks prior to election day. I usually vote on election day but have used the other service on occasion.
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  1777. Wow! You mention the growing anti CCP sentiment in Southern China. Historically, this is normal. The southerners have always been more outward facing than the northerners. The other thing that amazes me is that I heard somethng similar on a China focused channel which no longer exists. The idea there was that one of the larger southern cities wanted to break off and combine with Taiwan.
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  1778. The XM7 is not replacing the M4. This rifle will see limited deployment. Only 107,000 have been ordered to be delivered over the next decade.
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  1779. I believe that the US Secretary of Defense has stated that the US is willing to support Ukraine to grind down the Russian military. So far, this has been successful.
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  1780. Right off the bat William has hit on one of my pet peeves. The media almost always goes to "experts" and we often get no more than the obvious which would be clear to anyone with common sense. What gets me going on this is that they seem to be implying that unless you hear it from an "expert" you wouldn't know it. Maybe I have been around too long, read too much and been involved in too many things. Don't ever forget that "experts" in foreign relations, political "science" and similar fields are experts in their fields just because they read a lot (some of it not available to the public), and some of them think clearly about it. This is not science. Even those involved in the military are dealing with situations and structures that are clearly not scientific. They would be the first to tell you that.
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  1781. Another experience I had, in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, is instructive here. When I started at university (the University of Maryland) my two best friends (and I mean best, we shared everything, including girlfriends) were Indian. So, I got into vegetarianism. One time, between places, I was at my parent's house for a couple of weeks. My mother was curious, so she ate what I did for a couple of weeks. She started losing weight. She was very thin before marriage, then gained a lot of weight after having kids (not unusual at the time). Her doctor, who would take plenty of time talking to his patients (very old school) actually called me up and discussed the situation with me. He encouraged me to help her change her diet, because in just those two weeks she had started to lose a significant amount of weight. She did not take the advice, and it did not go well for her. I also introduced her to salads with items such as raw mushrooms, which she had never eaten. She was now in her late 40s. What I am trying to convey with these comments is that you are so right on with your approach. Diet is THE most important issue in health. Most of our doctors are not attuned to this reality, and are thus useless, We could probably half the cost of our healthcare system if we emphasized diet.
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  1782. The migrant crisis is a real issue worldwide. The current statutes and norms were a result of the treatment of Jews in the 1930s. Such situations are legitimate to consider, but somehow the world has extended this to anyone who wants to migrate. There is also the issue of how the statutes are implemented. The main principle is that once one gets to a safe country they should then stay there and apply for asylum in that country, or in other countries while staying in that original safe place. So, is Russia indicating that it is not a safe place?
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  1783. Oh, I hope Xi will put out a "little red book". I can add it to my collection of Mao's and the Regan parody one. What a delight that would be. My two "vices" are books and cigars (whiskey used to be in there but I stopped drinking).
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  1784.  @axle.student  Can't agree with you there.
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  1785. The price cap was predicated on western control of the shipping insurance industry. By restricting access to insurance ships could be barred from ports, etc. What most people don't seem to understand is that only Ukraine is actually at war with Russia. The US and the rest of its allies are not technically at war with Russia. Think back to US support for the UK prior to Germany declaring war on the US. This is precisely the same situation. That is the whole crux of the matter. If the US or other western allies simply stopped Russian ships at sea, or blockaded its ports, then they would effectively stop the flow of oil. It would not even be difficult to stop the overland flow, either. But if that was done, it would constitute an act of war. This is precisely analogous to situation with Iran. Leadership in the west is trying to punish Russia (and Iran) short of going to war with them. So, I repeat, we are not at war with Russia. If we were, Russia would have been done long ago, or the nukes would have been flying and we all would be done.
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  1786. Lei, I often hear the term "shadow banks" in reference to these Chinese institutions. How are they different from "investment banks" in the US?
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  1787. If the abolition of the police in Minneapolis passes on Tuesday, all of the sworn officers should quit immediately. Florida would have them. So would many other parts of the country where there are vacancies. Then, let's see what they do. In reality they would have to call in the State Police and the National Guard. Let's see how they like that.
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  1788. Housing prices have never just gone up and up. Over a long period, they might. On the other hand, they have dipped in local markets at various times. My parent's house was worth $180K at one point. Of course, they bought it many years before for a fraction of that over 30 years before. When they passed away, we ended up selling it for $140K. In inflation adjusted terms, it may have been a wash. My own house, which I bought in a divorce settlement, was at a trough when I have to settle it. It has risen, but is still not up to the peak just prior to then burst of the real estate bubble. And I live in a desirable suburb. What is important in real estate is when you buy or sell. It is not just location, but timing. Taking into account inflation and interest rates, the equation is much more complicated.
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  1789. Sanctioning individuals for hacking for a government? If these are the bozos making policy and in charge of our security, then we are doomed. If the US and UK are going to claim that these hackers are working for or are part of the CCP, then the only rational response is to hit back with similar actions. Have you heard the phrase "bringing a knife to a gunfight"? The actions taken so far are so weak that they can only embolden the CCP.
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  1790. The conditions for internal consumption are not there for China, especially when talking about replacing external trade. One factor is that, by reducing external trade, China will no longer have the foreign exchange required to import the raw materials they need. The other is that China is not rich enough to support such consumption. Peter Zeihan has it right when he points out that Xi has killed off anyone who can really analyze the situation and has become a one man show. Housing is just one such area. The three red lines had become a necessity. Real estate developers had become Ponzi schemes (literally). By implementing them in such a precipitous manner he tanked the industry. Then there is the policy on ownership. It has oscillated between houses are for living in, not investment, to allowing (encouraging) multiple property ownership in secondary cities. These policy shifts come within weeks or months of each other. This has created instability in the market and shows a lack of understanding. Xi will tank the Chinese economy.
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  1791. This reminds me of a conversation I had with an English Literature major, in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, on the novels of DH Lawrence. Now I was a physics major, I was also a great fan of Lawrence. In fact, on one of my travels in Europe I was at Col. Grey's house in London, and there was a guy there who was a doppelganger for Lawarence. Also, on that trip I bought a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover. My friend looked over it an determined it was the expurgated version. He was working on a thesis that looked at the circular imagery in Lawarence's major novels. I thought this was a bit much. Actually, I was auditing a course on Lawarence in the literature department, and it turned out I had read and digested much more than the English Literature majors. My point is that a lot of these issues such as circular images in Lawarence, and coincidences in novels have nothing to do with how we perceive these works. It is a way for literature majors to justify themselves.
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  1792. That is just plain foolish. "Climate change and the El Nino" push temperatures higher. We know the El Nino does. Bringing climate change in as a part of the explanation is scientifically ignorant. I live in the Midwest in the US and our temperatures have been very mild. Actually we seem to be right at the long term average. So, what does that tell you?
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  1793. As an American I have always believed this is the way to go. Actually. the US stopped processing and reprocessing (especially the later) nuclear fuel because of nuclear proliferation concerns. This was done by Jimmy Carterr in the 1970s. Actually, for most materials the US has its own, or very nearby, friendly, sources. Look at what has happened with oil and natural gas. Rare earths, lithium, etc. are also available in the US. In fact, materials like rare earths aren't rare and were processed here very early. The thing it is a very "dirty" process to refine them. What has happened to both the US and Europe is that the processing of a lot of these materials was moved out of the countries to places like Russia and China for cost reasons. Those costs were driven by environmental regulation. What ended up happening is that the west has just exported its pollution. This is a travesty! There should be environmental tariffs on those countries like Russia and China reflecting this.
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  1794.  @jrstf  We don't need goods from China. What we did was to get low labor rates, avoidance of environmental regulation and labor laws. I have dealt with Chinese manufacturers and they ask their US customers if they want filtration for workers. If so, of course, the cost will be higher. Most say no. We have plenty of people in the inner cities out of work. Why do you think they are there? Their ancestors went there because that's where the jobs were. Now these people are there and the jobs have moved, first to the suburbs, then overseas. We have the people. We just have to put the jobs where the people are. A low level job is not worth moving for. Move the jobs to where the people are.
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  1795.  @jerrypeal653  Well, at least it would be our junk.
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  1796.  @Adyen11234  There is one more point, to amplify my last paragraph in my previous response. Don't forget that the Soviet Union had no "businessmen" or, of course, "capitalists". Even prior to the Soviet Union Russia was an autocracy (I guess things don't change much there) and everything was controlled by a landed aristocracy. That is why Imperial Russia was so far behind the rest of Europe in industrial modernization. The oligarchs put the robber barons in the US to shame. At least the robber barons had to adhere to some rules. Not the case in Russia.
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  1797. This is a lot like the Winter War against Finland. It also calls to mind the reason the Egyptians kicked out the Soviets, made peace with Israel and allied with the US. I was doing work at the Command and General Staff College just after that. What I hear the General saying is that Russian doctrine is no different from Soviet doctrine. This is my understanding as well. I also worked on the Army tactical command and control systems modernization. This was around the time leading up to the Gulf War, where these systems were first used. The Russians are also still using T72 tanks. They talk about all their new stuff, but the bulk of their equipment is the older stuff. Unless they use nukes, they are a paper tiger.
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  1798.  @Andy-P  Indubitably!
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  1799. Whatever happened to global warming?
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  1800.  @JohnJaneson2449  On your first point, I don't completely agree. I just gave you my example. I could also add the example of my parent's house. Both were in large metro areas. Of course, it depends on the time horizon. I also have friends who have taken advantage of those ups and down in the core downtown areas of major cities. On your second point I fully agree.
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  1801. I can attest to this. I was once at a meeting, in the US, where the head of a family that had 13 factories in China was over drumming up business. I was sitting next to one of the sons who was talking to an American about some product he wanted produced. These were all low-end stuff. The son asked the American if he wanted filtration in the plant to protect the workers. The American said no, he didn't care. It would only drive up the costs. Another situation which I became aware of was pollution in agricultural products. My wife became concerned about cyanide in rice. There is always a little that occurs naturally. In China, the standard was half the amount of the international standard. But somehow this became public knowledge, when samples were taken from, I think it was 60+ rice growing regions, all but a couple exceeded the international standard. As you say, the standards mean nothing.
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  1802. I love the financial community's terminology. One of my favorites is "under pressure" as applied to sales of Country Garden at this point. Actually, it is applied to many situations which are clearly catastrophic. As for the price drops, especially in the secondary market, these are unbelievably low. There are many, many examples of much larger drops that are anecdotal, but compelling. Often these apply to properties in foreclosure. If China ever really opens its property sector to market pricing, the drops would be well into double digits. By any measure of market dynamics, Chinese property is overvalued by over 50%. Your message about "enjoying" episode is telling. To some extent I am. I actually feel a bit guilty about enjoying this, but the CCP has gone so far away from being a rational player in economic terms that it is just natural to feel that way.
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  1803. This is no proof, but such markets have been around in East and Southeast Asia for a long time. I have a friend who has traveled there extensively. We do not see massive outbreaks all the time. With these numbers, we should.
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  1804. The idea that there is a question mark in the title of this video is amazing to me. Of course, new alliances are dividing the world. This was always going to happen. The world of the last 75 years is a anomaly. The US was the only country with a functioning worldwide navy and the means to sustain it after WWII. The alliance was created to contain the Soviets, who openly wanted to spread communism across the world. Well, the whole program of the US was successful 30 years ago. Its reason for being is no longer operational. The world order created by the US is what allowed everyone to trade with everyone else. The European colonial empires were dismantled at the insistence of the US. What we are heading back to is the norm in world power politics. Get ready for it. This is your future. The crazy thing about it is that the countries that are most interested in changing the world order benefited from it greatly. Then, based on racial ideas, they have decided to change things. This is the new norm, and I would not be surprised to see colonies coming back.
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  1805. Tony, I am just commenting before listening to the video. I am responding to the title. Ray Dalio admitting that it is bad in China is a watershed moment. It is interesting to me because my financial advisor pulled all investment in China a few years ago. Now this guy was at a very high level at one of the very largest Wall Street investment banks before going out on his own. On the other hand, when I made some unfavorable comments about Dalio he came to Dalio's defense because of some of the risk assessment methods Dalio had come up with. That always made me curious.
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  1806. So, the solution you are proposing is that all Afghan women should leave the country. Are you serious?
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  1807. You have to realize that the whole communist program was based on taking. This was true in the Soviet Union as well as other countries, like China, Cuba and Venezuela. The leaders, Lenin, Mao, Castro and Maduro built their followings on a message of taking what the rich and middle class had. Marx thought that the socialist revolution would start in the developed countries with a well-established industrial proletariat. He was thinking of Germany the UK and the US. The thing is life in an industrial job in a city was better than life on the farm as a tenant farmer. The poor peasants in these places thought that they would own the property that was taken, that is why they followed the communist leaders. Later, they found out the truth, but it was too late.
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  1808. My thought as well. You have these people on, experts in their fields, often, as with Bolton, an actual actor in government, and you interrupt. I find that a lot on this channel. I am always pleasantly surprised when one the Times interviewers does not interrupt.
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  1809. Bishop said it all. The only thing I would emphasize is that this would also massively increase the cost of raw materials, on which China depends.
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  1810. No, they are not human They are commies. Just look at what Mao did in pursuit of communism.
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  1811. I still marvel at the expectation that a mass of troops will win a war. What about the Israelis? In all their wars they were massively outnumbered. In the earlier ones, up to and including the 1967 war, they were also outgunned in numbers and quality of equipment. What helped them, still helps them, is superior leadership, will and external support. Sound familiar? The Russian empire sent masses of troops against the Germans in WWI. Same conditions and results. There is also this implication that Putin has "something up his sleeve". You must be kidding. This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Look at Soviet/Russian military experience in the last 50 years. Invasion of Afghanistan. Result: withdrawal with 10K dead and a failed state left behind. Their next great involvement is Syria. Fighting poorly armed insurgents they respond with massive firepower. Lots of civilians killed and still the insurgency exists. There are still large swathes of territory not under central government control Who defeated ISIS in Syria? The US with local allies. Their one success was Chechnya. Look at how that was done. Putin and the Russian military command are armatures, at best.
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  1812.  @exhaustguy  Me too. I was on blood pressure meds, but they made me feel bad, so I stopped taking them. Still had the high blood pressure. Changed my diet, lost the weight, and the blood pressure is normal. I haven't even taken so much as an aspirin in five years. Feel better than ever.
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  1813. Tony, another great and thought-provoking video. Thank you. As you can see, my thoughts were much provoked.
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  1814. Record cold? Whatever happened to global warming?
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  1815. A battalion is two or three thousand troops? Really? You are a combat vet, right? A battalion is composed of up to 1,200 troops, probably closer to 800 or 900 troops in most cases. It is considered the smallest independent maneuver element. You should get your facts straight.
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  1816.  @HankSemoreButz  I like Peter and enjoy and value his geostrategic stuff, but he is a liberal internationalist. He states that many times. On US politics, or any current politics, his analytical style and approach is pretty useless, and irrelevant.
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  1817. I would be willing to bet that exports to Europe and the US will never return to previous levels. In fact, they will continue to decrease. There is nothing China offers that is worth the risk. Money and jobs poured into China because there was a lot of cheap labor and a large potential market for western goods. By the way, when talking about labor costs it is not only the wages, but the efficiency of the labor. On that basis, China is no longer cheap. These factors have now shifted to other countries. One thing to know about capital is that it will seek out the most productive uses. China is applying their on conceptions of capital being controlled by the party. In the west, capital is controlled by private entities. The CCP will never understand this. Add to that the political and "security" situation in China and there is not only no incentive for western companies to be in China, but it has become dangerous for them to be there.
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  1818. Paul, just looking at the map at 0:20. Do you notice that this is a classic salient? To take pressure off Pokrovsk the obvious approach would be to attack the flanks of the salient. All this talk about the granular situation is sort of irrelevant. I follow these reports all the time and the only thing I can say in the Ukrainians defense is that they don't have the equipment, including airpower, to implement a credible strategy.
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  1819.  @colinwaller1332  That's a tricky one. If the UK doesn't change its system of government, then it is really not worth it. That would be a revolution. When I lived in the UK, earlier in this millennium, devolution had happened. What a sh*t show. Dumbest thing I have ever seen, mostly in the way it was done. I often saw graffiti on overpasses which read "England for the English". There was a book I picked up titled "Bring Home the Revolution" by Jonathan Freedland. One thing that is advocated in that book was having a written constitution. This refers to bringing home the American revolution to the UK. Don't listen to ossified traditionalists such as David Starkey. And stop voting based on tradition. I have some hope with Farage and his party. Something different than the uniparty and deep state.
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  1820. This is good news for Ukraine. If the Russians move their troops taken from Kherson to this region it will open up space in the south for a move on Crimea.
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  1821. The EU "arrogant, weak, self-absorbed"? The EU engulfed in a "clash of civilizations"? Sounds about right. One has to understand that the EU is, at its core, a protectionist cartel. As for "submission" to the US, that is off the mark. The EU killed a trade deal with the US (the TPP), mostly over chlorinated chicken (a little joke there, look it up). The EU is often at odds with US policy. One just has to look at the EU's reliance on Russia for natural gas as a major policy disagreement. It turns out that the US was right on that. There are many other examples.
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  1822.  @SvensktLejon  He didn't say that the Russians controlled all of Donbas. He seemed to say the resources in areas in Donbas.
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  1823. France's anti-religious stance comes from the French Revolution. This is nothing new. They even tried to kill off the Catholic Church at one point. They even established an atheistic, state religion called the Cult of Reason. They are being true to their roots.
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  1824. On the tax rate issue, you totally forget that in the UK you pay for health insurance through taxes, while in the US this is done through direct payment (either through employers, or directly by the consumer).
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  1825. The period from the fall of the Qing dynasty to the eventual success of the CCP was another of China's warlord periods. Mao was just another warlord. The nationalists never controlled a majority of the country. So, it is not unreasonable to expect that the CCP's fall will result in a similar situation. China has already devolved into a type of aristocracy. The term princelings is often used. This is also true in Russia. The nomenklatura has become hereditary as well. This is the fate of all oligarchies.
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  1826. I first went to England in the early 1970s. Most of the pubs were either Watney's or Whitbread. The beer was not very good, and I often opted for Stella Artois. Then in the late 1980s I was back again. At this time there was a movement, the Campaign for Real Ale (CMARA). The in the early 2000s I moved to England to work for a few years. By that time, independent pubs and small batch ales were all the rage. I used to frequent one pub which made their own beer. This was in the Winchester area. I was living in Winchester. The water for the beer came from a well which was accessed through a grate behind the bar. It was wonderful. I went there to dine with an employee of mine who was based in Newcastle who would stay at the pub. Actually, he stayed in a stable block that had been converted to accommodations. Six rooms, if I recall correctly. We would arrange these meetings around curry nights. A couple from South Asia who worked for another tech firm in the area did this as a sideline at the pub. Often there were a group of Morris Dancers practicing outside at the same time. It was magical.
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  1827. Belarus, and Ukraine, are historical Russian territories. The Kiev Rus were Viking kingdoms that presaged the Russian nation. These are not separate peoples.
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  1828. I see no way for the real estate sector to recover. The three red lines policy was brought forward because the industry had become a giant Ponzi scheme. In addition, the Chinese people had few other places to invest. The equities market was not really open to them, and it is too small and illiquid to absorb the money. In addition, living so long under communism, they did not understand it. Property they understood. I have seen an analysis claiming that there are so many homes (apartments) in China that everyone on the planet could have two.
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  1829. Right on, Mark. I have just seen that the State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in China are sending workers home. They don't have enough work for them. Xi has been stressing SOEs and suppressing private industry. In China you have Xi, an economic illiterate, making decisions for the whole economy. He has no real advisors. He has "shot the messenger" (sometimes literally) so many times that no one will tell him anything but what he wants to hear. So, not only are centrally planned economies inferior in general, but in China you have an idiot running things. On top of that, like Russia, it is a massive kleptocracy. I tend to agree with Peter Zeihan when he says that China will not exist in its present form by 2030. I give it only a couple more years. It is chaos over there
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  1830.  @i6power30  You obviously have no idea of what is going on in the US. I see more debate and diversity of views in the US than anywhere else.
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  1831. That statement by the CCP at the end of the first segment is so 1930 commie that I find it hard not to laugh. It reminds me of all the parody films, shows and books during the Cold War. Frankly, it is almost Monty Python-ish. Is John Cleese writing their stuff? The thing is that they are serious. As I like to say and will continue to say, this is not a market one can apply western standards to for investment purposes. This holds true for both domestic and foreign investors. What you have in China is the CCP rigging the system, interfering in the market directly and getting the spy services involved in economic matters. Imagine if the CIA in the US had a hand in directing the market. At a minimum, the analysis would be quite different.
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  1832. The Russians have not won all their wars. Recall the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, WWI, and the Soviet Polish war in the 1920s. In all these situations they lost to smaller countries. In the last on that list, the Soviets were forced into "communism in one country", which was anathema to Communist ideology. In WWI they mobilized massive numbers of poorly trained and equipped troops. The Germans were breaking them and then helped foment a revolution. Russia lost massive amounts of territory. They only got back territory because the western powers defeated Germany. The main reason they won in WWII was support from the west, which was massive. They don't have that now.
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  1833. The Beige Book pronouncements do not comport with the reality I have been seeing. One of us is operating in a fantasy land. Many large industrial firms, from solar panels to auto manufacturing to metals (iron and steel) to even electronics manufacturing seem to struggling with overcapacity and are either shutting down or taking extended work breaks to work through unsold inventory. Housing prices, that is prices actually paid, are way down, especially in the secondhand home market. By the way, that is the big market in the rest of the world, by a long shot. It is also the most important market. It is important because it is the largest market (in most of the world) but also because it is the market all new homes will be sold into. That was a bit muddled, but correct. People in China buy a house because they assume they can sell it for more in the future. They use it as a "store of value". The value of homes in the secondary market is what drives sales. That is what bothers me about all these numbers coming out of China. They need to be normalized to western standards to reflect their economic importance, not the government reporting goals.
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  1834. This has always been an issue on the East Coast. I was born in Washington, DC. I think that I-95 didn't really exist when I was born. The big problem is that the authorities are not smart enough to clear out the blockage right away. We are talking about tens of thousands of people affected just so that a few people can get the information they need for a court case. That is really what it comes down to. It is idiocy of the first degree, and this is not the first time. Stop the madness. This could be cleared in minutes
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  1835.  @MohammedKumar-si4ec  Who are you working for? I don't smoke or drink, by the way. If you believe what you are saying give an actual rebuttal, if you can.
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  1836. This is a totally artificial situation created by the Russians. There are many reasons for this, but the most important is the weakness of the Russian position. This escalation is the type of thing a weak government does to detract from their own failed policies at home. China, vis-a-vis Taiwan is a similar situation. As I have pointed out many times, in WWII the US decided not to invade Taiwan because it would have required a force greater than that required for D-Day in Normandy. It was an alternative to the Philippines, since it was close to our ally China. China is undergoing a slow-motion breakdown, both economically and militarily. The idea that they have an alliance with Russia is laughable. China is trying to take over several central Asian states that were once part of the Soviet Union. This is the same issue that Russia has with the West in Ukraine. They also have claims on Russian territory (e.g., Vladivostok) and are trying to convince people that they have influence and a stake in the Arctic. All of this is anathema to Russia. The Russians, also being weak, are using the Chinese to prop themselves up. More and more countries want to join NATO. Besides Ukraine and Georgia, there are Finland and Sweeden considering joining. Rather than the West being weak, it is Russia and China that are weak.
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  1837. The statement at about 8:40 about foreign companies shifting out of China because of the weak domestic demand is key. There were two main reasons companies produced in China. One was relatively cheap labor. The other was the lure of the Chinese internal market. The cost of Chinese labor is no longer as cheap as it was. Considering efficiency, it is much more expensive than many other producers. One advantage down. Now, with the internal market collapsing the second pillar has fallen. China is no longer viable for foreign companies. Oh, and did I mention the IP theft, counterfeiting and corruption. A related issue is poor quality. I have seen it myself. I had one client who had a subassembly made in China. They substituted a couple of components (in this case, power transistors) without telling the customer. The substituted components failed after six months. My customer had been very successful in selling his product, but when the units started failing, he was just about wiped out. He even tried to get me to sell me the company cheap. The product was very good and useful. I related this story to a friend who worked as an executive for a large company that had moved a lot of production to China and had run into quality issues in a consumer product area. It turns out that their main competitor had the same issues. One of the assumptions behind the complex supply chains was that the same quality goods were made using cheaper labor. This is a fallacy. It also goes against all the engineering and manufacturing engineering principles that had been developed through the 1980s. The MBAs took over and we have suffered ever since.
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  1838. Temu is a purveyor of the lowest quality goods available. In fact, there are many documented cases of substandard and frankly dangerous products being sold on the platform. High quality products my a$$.
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  1839. I generally agree with Tucker. The problem I have is that he talks to us as if we didn't know all this stuff. Anyone watching is already aware of a lot of what he says and agrees with it. There is nothing new, or particularly insightful. Maybe I am too well informed and too much of political junkie. I was born in Washington, DC a long time ago. I have always been into this stuff. s So, I wish these commentators would come up with something interesting to say. It seems like they feed off each other, and the major newspapers, the WSJ and the NYT.
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  1840. This is the 130th anniversary of Mao's BIRTH, not death. He died 47 years ago. Come on man!
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  1841. This is offensive! I say that as a fan of the channel.
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  1842. Spies! Spies everywhere! This reminds me of the good old days during the Cold War (I miss the Cold War). I worked at an aerospace and defense contractor. I did a stint as the CIO (we didn't call it that then) at the spacecraft plant I was informed that we were tracking fifteen "known" Soviet spies targeting our company at the location. We also had to take special measures to deal with what was obvious EM espionage. In addition to the spacecraft plant, we had two other facilities at the site that did work for agencies I was not cleared to know the names of. Later, working for one of these groups, on their only DoD project, I was amazed when traveling and a colleague would check into a hotel under a different name than I knew him by. We even had a dedicated facility that belonged to a large rental car company to service the large amount of traffic between our facility and customers in the Washington, DC area. We were their only customer there. In a way, it was all sort of exhilarating.
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  1843.  @volkerr.  Earlier in the millennium I was with my family at Epcot. There was a GM exhibit there and they had a fuel cell concept car. It was already very old. It was probably the same vintage as the Mercedes you mention.
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  1844.  @oceanwave4502  Using hydrogen for automotive purposes is bonkers. About 20 years ago I was at the offices of the construction management/engineering firm (one of the largest) that I was using on a project. They showed me the consumer hydrogen fueling stations they were designing for BP. If you think the total cost for electrification is crazy (and it is) then this is on a whole other level.
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  1845. Russian offensive? Really? What are they going to use? Where are the tanks? Where is the air supremacy? Come on man!
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  1846. The statement at about 7:40, "where few people care about it" takes me back to the times mentioned. There was a satirical magazine that dealt with foreign affairs and Cold War espionage. They would often have maps in their cartoons where China was just a white area with no detail. It was referred to as "the great big empty spot". Perhaps we are returning to those times.
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  1847.  @markryan3498  Oh, I messed up. Sorry.
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  1848.  @TimboTbagz  Well, if my garden got hit, then so did everywhere else. I just used that as an example I personally experienced. As I was told about it, and looked it up, the storm at that time had effects across the area, not just in the UK. You should work on your comprehension skills.
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  1849. Very good point. It all comes down to a very basic question of what money is. There is a lot of talk about fiat currency. This brings about the question of what would replace it. Gold? Come on man. Bitcoin? Whoa!!! None of these have anything to do with the underlying economy. Even when we used gold to back the currency, what did it really mean? All currency is fiat currency. It always has been.
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  1850.  @henrycarlson7514  So, what does that mean? We also have to pay income and sales taxes.
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  1851.  @ptonpc  I would agree with that. There was a tension there that kept things a bit more contained.
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  1852.  @Nickname-ef9tv  You are too soft (wet?) on Sunak. He had a big majority in Parliament and did really get anything substantive done.
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  1853. Tucker, one of your best! I have, in the past, been an election judge in Illinois. When we get north of 60% participation in a presidential election, it is a celebration. On the other hand, in off year local elections we get under 10% participation. I live in a high end conservative suburb of Chicago. A few cycles ago the left gained control of many local gov't functions because they persuaded a few hundred people to show up. Participation is key. Considering the turnout of elections across this country, any election could turn out different if a larger turnout was achieved. Again, no election we have had in decades has had over 70% turnout. So, unless you voted, you have no right to complain about the politicians who run your government.
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  1854. I have seen other reporting that indicates participation in the Expo this year is well below the first Expo. This is especially true for European and Taiwanese firms.
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  1855.  @dave23024  The best example is Israel.
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  1856. Tony, you did it! at about 1:30 you talk about reform measures and then mention the number of articles, etc. You then state that it is a significant document and imply that you can tell how significant it is by the number of articles. You have truly been steeped in the communist ethos. I can just hear Mao coming out of the meeting declaring this. I am not criticizing you, per se. It is the CCP that bears the criticism. The whole issue is the use, or misuse, of language and forms of discourse. This is not, by the way, a Chinese thing. These people were trained in the USSR. I have a theory that... No, better not talk about it.
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  1857. You have had ample time and notice of the work that needs to be done. You have failed, it sounds like, at least half the time. Why do you think that Congress has such a low approval rating? The current Congress is trying to intrude on American life in a major way. That is insane, and will lead to major change. When Trump reduced the role of government, the economy took off. We need less government, not more. That way lies maddness.
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  1858. About 40 years ago I was studying Tai Chi and Kung Fu. I was inspired by a western friend, with whom i worked. We were both engineers on NASA projects. One thing he said to me, that I think is germane to this topic is that I should probably also study Karate, especially at a school that emphasized sparing. This is because it emphasized the actual physical contact aspect of fighting. He also pointed out that many kick boxers (the precursor of MMA) who had real street fighting experience, were often successful against Kung Fu adherents. This, again, was because they had the actual experience of combat.
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  1859. I am an avid watcher of Anders' channel. I was surprised and impressed at his statement around 16:00 about a new Cold War and Iron Curtain. I fully agree with both ideas. Russia has shown itself to be an unreliable partner, especially in the energy field, where investments often take many years to become profitable, and where steady, assured supply is vital. Then there is the other elephant in the room, and that is the potential (I think assured) breakup of the Russian Federation. As foe Russia wanting a long war of attrition, I think most analysts get it wrong. Russia does not have the industrial base it had leading up to WWII. It also does not have the equivalent allied effort to supply them that it had in WWII. At least 20% of their material came from the west in that conflict. And, as mentioned above, there is the very real probability that Russia will experience an internal collapse in the near future. It was basically in the cards but projected to be another 10 years or more. This action has pushed that up significantly.
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  1860. The cost of the hammer comes down to all the engineering drawings. It was the last helicopter out of Saigon, not Hanoi.
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  1861. All countries made up? There was an evolution from empires and kingdoms to nation states. This was more organizational than "made up". You act as if people deciding how to organize themselves is something "made up". Get over it. In Europe, especially, there are many nationalities and regions that have existed for many hundreds or thousands of years. Many are not modern countries. Especially after WWI, the major powers made up "countries" or nation states. Lets just look at a couple. One is Czechoslovakia and the other is Yugoslavia. Both of these have split into parts. The Czechs and Slovaks did this voluntarily and peacefully. In Yugoslavia the process was violent, but the several "nations" there split into many "states" There is still turmoil. Many countries came out of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. And then there is the Indian subcontinent. British India was not a takeover of an established country or empire. It was a conquest of many small kingdoms. Upon the end of British rule, it split into two, then three, modern states This is not some arbitrary thing that just happens. I expect better from you guys.
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  1862.  @LIV2500  I was paying good money for that facility. The lock belonged to me. It is really not a big deal. If I was locked out of my home and that was the only way to get in I would do it.
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  1863. The tax issue is revealing. There is an internet ad that comes up often in YouTube (for me) where the question is asked, have you ever heard of a society taxing itself to prosperity. The answer is, of course no. As you increase tax rates on higher earners, they change their behavior. At a time of particularly high tax rates in the US, in the early 1980s, I worked for an engineering firm that needed experienced engineers. My friend's father had retired early and wanted to go back to work. He applied but asked for a relatively small salary. If he was paid more his tax rate would go up and he would actually net less. This actually caused the company to look on his application unfavorably (they didn't know about his motivation). When, not long after, the Regan tax rate cuts came in, the government actually collected more in gross tax revenue. I personally don't think that the CCP is smart enough to devise a tax system that is fair and raises sufficient funds. Another nail in the coffin of the CCP, and perhaps China as it exists today.
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  1864. Lowest temperature recorded? Whatever happened to global warming?
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  1865. The description of ether's benefits and that it was not "harmful" reminds me of a similar pronouncement. A good friend of mine had a grandfather who was a doctor. Now this was in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium. His grandfather stated that cocaine was a great drug. It gave one lots of energy and seemed to have to no adverse effects. Of course, the doctor only saw it used in medical situations and had no experience with it in an environment where it was used for other purposes.
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  1866. On the Iran deal, it depends on how it is done. The last one was done as an executive action, not a treaty. As a treaty, it could not pass the Senate. That is why Trump was able to get out of it. If this is done the same way again, then the same thing will happen if the deal is done in the same way. This is likely because it could not pass the Senate as a treaty today.
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  1867. Lin has things all wrong. The fact that he is a major policy advisor says a lot about what is wrong with China today. That said, Tony, it is good to hear those views. It helps us understand the situation.
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  1868. Victor's last comment is incorrect. The education you get depends on your parents, and the schools you go to. For example, I am in the suburbs of Chicago. In the suburbs, in general, the education is exemplary. I have two sons. The school districts here are small. I grew up in a state where the school districts are county wide. They each took the maximum number of AP classes and went into college with at least a semester of credits. In fact, 20% of the students took AP classes. And the cost per pupil is 2/3 of what it is in the City of Chicago. Even given that, the facilities are world class. I mean that. Having lived in several places and been a school governor in the UK, I have some knowledge of these things.
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  1869. A load of drivel.
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  1870. Even in elementary school, and beyond, my sons were not allowed to cite Wikipedia as a source. It is convenient, for sure. I sometimes look at it for math and science related content, but do not rely on it. There are better sources for that. If I am watching a military history video I might refer to it for specifications on a weapon system. But, I am not relying on that as the final word, just a convenient way to get some simple data. I have actually seen where biographical information of current public figures has been manipulated and changed, to that person's detriment.
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  1871. This is Peter's wheelhouse, and I think he nailed it. As one wag once said, history doesn't repeat, it rhymes. The big difference today is nukes. That is it. That is the whole difference between today and the time before WWII. I have seen reports of a French official, I think it was a military officer, who posited that the French might have to go in and take control, directly, of some places in Africa. There are instances of that colonial mindset creeping in all over. The Chinese and the Russians want a multipolar world. They will get it. As Peter has often pointed out that is the norm throughout human history. By the way, the Chinese and Russians did not fare so well in that world. They might want to consider that.
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  1872. Modi is an Indian nationalist. There is no disputing that. I, for one, feel that a leader should emphasize his own nation's wellbeing first. On the other hand, in this last election his party did not gain a majority. He had to go into a coalition. Many thought it would be different. Democracy is alive and well in India. It is tumultuous, but that is to be expected considering its size and diversity. As for Islamophobia, there is certainly some of that. You might want to look into the history of India. You may start to understand some things. In fact, look into the history of Islamic countries throughout history generally. They are not on your side, Mark.
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  1873.  @popcorn6931  Yes, ambition, but also massive corruption.
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  1874. I see the geese are there. We have Canada geese, and they are just arriving in numbers. There is a lake behind my house, and they like to gather there. They also come onto the yards and eat the grass. That is fine with me, I have too much. This is all old farmland, now a suburban city. The geese poop everywhere, including the path around the lake. All cats like to destroy indoor plants, it seems. In my first house, when I had my first cat, my mother gave me some very nice plants. One was a snake plant that was very old. One day I came home, and the cat had overturned the pot and shredded the plant. I was very sad, and angry. The Russians are indeed animals. Well, that may be an insult to animals. Monsters, orcs, may be a better term. Stay safe.
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  1875. Toward the end it was stated that Israel had twice attacked the "Arab nation's" nuclear program. This would be a surprise to the Iranians, and an insult. Iran is a Persian nation, not an Arab one.
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  1876. The ICC is not a national court? What is the executive power it answers to? Countries that represent at least half of the world's population are not members of the court. The three most militarily powerful countries are not members. Countries that are not members also represent at least half the world's economic output. Any court only has jurisdiction over countries that are represented. Thus, France's considering not carrying out the arrest warrant since Israel is not a participant in the court. On top of that, one member of the court, Mongolia, has already refused to arrest Putin when he went there. This is a bogus court.
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  1877.  @baruasafi5880  If you believe any of that then you are well and truly deluded. I read history extensively. I also read the source books. I am probably much older than you. I lived through a lot of this stuff. Your hidden history is bunk, plain and simple. You are just making this stuff up. You seem to be some sort of conspiracy theorist. So, tell us, what explains the whole thing.
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  1878. The party officials laughing should tell "the people" all they need to know. All of these totalitarian regimes become much more like aristocracies as they age. Family connections become paramount. This has happened in Russia where the nomenklatura are made up of people with family connections. Don't forget, democracy is rule by the people, no matter what family background or connections. Aristocracy is a leftover from tribal times where "blood" is what is important. Oligarchy is purely rule by people who control resources and band together on that basis to rule the populace.
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  1879. Sounds good. But does that mean the UK has to take the chlorinated chicken?
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  1880. Russia does not have time. Demographically they are imploding. They were before the war, and the war has only vastly accelerated this. Then there is the political situation. As soon as Russia either loses the war outright, or their Army becomes fatally degraded (happening as we watch), China will move into the Russian far east and the whole thing will fall apart. Many were predicting this over the next ten to twenty years, but with this war, I expect it to be one or two (at most). Russia is not an ethnically unified population like North Korea. It is a colonial empire with many disaffected ethnicities. Going back to demographics, at some point in the near future, the Russian ethnicity will become a minority, among many. And that does not even take into account the oligarchs and private armies. Putin can talk all he wants. He is toast.
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  1881. Considering what was said about the gov't and its corruption, it seems that the decision to pull out is the right one. Why is there a nation state called Afghanistan? These are, indeed, tribal people. We spent massive amounts of blood and treasure, and look what is happening. Many Afghan soldiers are going over to the Taliban. It would literally take 50 years of direct rule and a will to inflict civilian casualties to make the change we seem to want.
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  1882.  @nonamecommonsense9089  So would England. Hadrian's wall revived?
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  1883. It is interesting to "see" Diana. We often hear her voice in reports on the channel. I have commented elsewhere that in the US there have been several former military men who have become diplomatic or political leaders. One response to this comment was that not all military men are "qualified" for diplomacy. I retorted that there are many civilians that one could characterize that way. Higher command in the military often involves negotiation and diplomacy on many different levels. From what I have seen of Zaluzhnyi, he should do well.
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  1884. This trend of laying off older workers is the stupidest thing that could be done. It is the older workers that are both more efficient and that invest the most. Generally, in normal economies, it is workers 50 and older that invest the most and are more aggressive in their investments. This is where a lot of the capital comes from. If the CCP really wanted to encourage "internal circulation" they would put an end to this practice right away. With peoples' wealth from property rapidly disappearing (never to return, by the way) they will need this cohort to generate enough domestic capital.
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  1885. I am glad Ambassador Burns mentioned the situation vis-a-vis China and India. This is a flashpoint area that is not well covered in the west. If you follow the Indian media, they fully expect war to break out on the border and they expect it sooner rather than later. This may be another situation where Xi emulates Mao. The latter started a war with India in this region to solidify his hold over the military. It worked. As an invasion of Taiwan is not feasible today, and for some years to come, and would be difficult, at best, Xi may turn his sights south. There are other signs as well. There is speculation that China is encouraging Pakistan to put pressure on India to draw Indian attention away from the northern front. Whatever the case, China is playing a dangerous game, and one I don't think they can win. The Indian military today is not the Indian military of 60 years ago. China is also more vulnerable to disruption of its oil and gas imports, and imports/exports generally, and India has a plan to disrupt those. They probably would get help from their friends.
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  1886.  @Gametheory101  It does, doesn't it. By the way, I read your first book on the war and have three of your Game Theory 101 books. I have started them but not yet completed them.
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  1887. At 7:45 Peter says an extraordinary thing. He says the British PM should tell the Americans "...we've declared our independence from you." Just think about that. Stunning.
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  1888. It is interesting to hear someone like this. Good job, Anders. What is very likely is that the Russian Federation breaks up. This would take the form of ethnic republics and regions breaking away first. The demographics are such that ethnic Russians will become a minority in the Russian Federation. The war is accelerating the process. This could degenerate into warlordism as well. Considering the distortions of the Putin regime, this is not unlikely. Of course, China would use the situation to take big chunks of the Russian far east. They could use the land and the resources. Some analysts believe that China will break out into a period of warlordism as well. They have had many, many in the past. Mao was essentially just one of the warlords from the early 20th century. So, things are not looking good for Russia. They do not have the democratic traditions of the west. They are also one of the last traditional imperial empires.
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  1889. The incident referred to at about 6:30 reminds me of the incident that set off the Arab Spring. Could we see something similar in China?
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  1890. So, this guy wants to shut down political discourse and free speech because they might cause offense. In politics, especially, there are opposing points of view. This guy is an MP. Looks like he knows nothing.
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  1891.  @timboatfield  You never know. Remember bell bottoms?
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  1892. Lock him up!!!
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  1893. Actually, Tony, you left out the American–Japanese–Korean trilateral pact (JAROKUS). Last I checked, Korea was in Asia. I do wonder, though, why Korea got three letters and the others only two. China has done a wonderful job of rehabilitating Japan's standing in Asia. This is a stunning achievement.
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  1894. BRICS is a joke. Of the main members, three have economies that are in decline (R, C and S), one is marginal, and only one, India, is thriving. In addition, there are territorial disputes between India and China and Russia and China. Many in India expect this to break out into war soon. Of the new members, Iran and Saudi Arabia, could go to war and are bitter ideological and sectarian enemies. The UAE has a major dispute with Iran (notice a pattern here) over islands in the Persian (or Arabian) Gulf. Egypt is suffering food shortages and price hikes because of Russian actions in the Black Sea. So, the possibility of some two of the BRICS countries coming to blows is significant. Can you say that about NATO, or about the allies of the west in Asia? As I said, BRICS is a joke.
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  1895.  @Tracey_Eva  Thanks!
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  1896. You are swallowing the Russian propaganda as far as the tanks. In following the news, I find that many of the tanks are T-72 tanks. These are the types of tanks that were massively defeated in the Gulf War and in the wars Israel fought with Russian supplied Arab nations. Russia has announced advanced tanks. but they make up a tiny percentage of the equipment they can actually use.
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  1897. Vita, thank you for video. Very interesting and entertaining. One thing I liked about living in Europe is the history and old places. I lived in Winchester in the UK. One time I asked for directions. I was at the old castle. The person giving directions said, "follow the straight road, the Roman road". The old British roads were all old deer paths. The city was about 1800 years old with some remnants dating back to that period. Some of the old Hill Forts I used to take my kids to were several thousand years old. I now live in the Chicago area in the US. Nothing goes back more than 200 years or so. I do remember one time, with my family, driving in Greece. We came up to Mycenae. My younger son said "oh, no, not another pile of rocks."
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  1898. Whatever happened to global warming??
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  1899.  @gtw4546  Love it. Good advice.
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  1900.  @SeattlePioneer  I have read that China as a unified entity only existed for a small minority of its existence. I don't know what the percentage is. China has gone through many warlord periods. The period from the fall of the Qing dynasty to the takeover by the CCP was one such period. Sun Yat-Sen never controlled the whole territory. Actually, the Republic of China controlled a relatively small territory. Mao, for example, was really just another warlord. Both Sun and Mao were ideological warlords. The rest were not. As for China at over 1B people being too big to govern, there may be some merit in that. I hear all kinds of things about how China might break up. One thing i saw not long ago was that there were people in Shanghai that wanted to break from CCP control and ally with Taiwan. In general, the south has been more outward facing because of their geography. Who knows what the future will bring. Let's just hope it is good for the people of China and the world.
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  1901. The Internet is NOT why people have fewer children. That was happening long before. What causes that is urbanization. Having lots of children on the farm is useful, even necessary. Having them in an apartment in a city can be problematic. So, right from the start, I see a lack of understanding. It is fashionable to cite the Internet. The real reason the Internet might be a "cause" is the plethora of information it provides. Much of which may not be quite correct. Dissiapointing.
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  1902. Peter, I thought of you when I saw an interview on Megyn Kelly's channel with Marco Rubio. At about 2:00 he talks about how we are reaching the point where we have a multipolar world. I thought of you immediately. My first thought is that he has read Peter's books.
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  1903.  @davewang202  Good observations. As in many of these situations, the CCP is becoming hereditary and forgetting their roots.
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  1904. Rudd makes an interesting point, but one with a contradiction in it. He talks about Xi making the CCP more Marxist, more Leninist, more nationalist. The contradiction, and it is the crucial one, is that Xi is stressing nationalism. Marxism-Leninism is staunchly internationalist. A socialism that is nationalist (especially ethically nationalist) is national socialism. It has been tried before, in Germany in the 1930s. Frankly, the Chinese economy today is much more like the German economy of the 1930s and early 1940s. That is a whole discussion in itself. Lenin, for his part, assumed that when the revolution was getting going in Russia the workers in Germany and other adversary countries would rise up in solidarity. Workers of the world unite! He, and Marx, had the whole thing wrong. In fact, Marx thought that socialism/communism would arise first in those countries with the most developed industrial proletariats. Instead, the first major countries to go communist were Russia and China which both were mostly peasant-based societies. Lenin tried to force the issue with his invasion of Poland in the early 1920s. It was only after that defeat that he began talking about socialism in one country. That was never the Marxist ideal. I think there is another model that might be just as applicable. That is Japan in the early 20th century. Japan was nationalist and basically totalitarian. It had a strong sense of ethnic and national superiority. For example, they thought they could defeat the Americans because they were mutts. They were also jealous of the Europeans and their colonial empires. That was their motivation for their initial forays into Asia.
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  1905. Clever.
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  1906.  @eyaklen4804  Didn't the Mongols conquer China at one point? I think they ruled China before the last Han led dynasty, the Ming, which was followed by a Manchu dynasty, the Qing.
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  1907.  @Hedgehobbit  Yes, I know. That is more for tax and convenience purposes. Several American companies do that as well. The US has cross border agreements with places like that. In the end, what matters is where the bulk of the assets are. The FTX case is instructive in this. FTX is incorporated in Antigua, but their bankruptcy is being done in the US. While these offshore venues are convenient, mostly for tax purposes, they really have no power if courts and creditors in major countries decide they want to handle the case. The issue is still, did they file for bankruptcy in their "home" country. What is the Chinese law on this? If they file for bankruptcy in the Cayman Islands, how does China deal with that. Do you have any information on that? It would be interesting to know.
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  1908. China shifting towards green energy and EVs? Yeah, sure. Chinese EVs are being shunned in Germany. The quality issues with Chinese EVs will come back to haunt them. China is still building coal plants at a high pace. Photovoltaic companies in China are experiencing a slowdown. Rogoff seems to be regurgitating tropes about the Chinese economy, rather than doing up to date research. The other thing he talks about is a recession in the US is another example. If he hasn't noticed, the last quarter for which we have data (3Q 2023) the growth rate was over 5%. In the previous four quarters it was at least two percent. Projections I have seen call for around 2% through 2028. Another thing he hadn't noticed is that inflation in the US is coming down, and the Fed is signaling lower interest rates. So, why is he surprised that the US has not had a recession? Come on man!
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  1909. Wow! Thanks Tony. I always like to start out my day with China Update, so Sunday is usually a bit blah. I am also a policy (and general) nerd so you know I will be here with you. Huang's policy prescriptions seem to be fairly reasonable. The issue really is with the goals of the policy. The goal in China is to keep the CCP in power. This really means a socialist or communist system. The dose of capitalism that Deng allowed into China to spur development is, to a communist system, like a virus. The fact is that ideology cannot stand against economics in the long run. It is like water on rock. The most successful system we have is free market capitalism. This has certain requirements. Just a comparison by the numbers between the capitalist countries and the communist countries makes that clear. Two good examples from history that illustrate this. The industrial revolution in the UK and the USSR. In the case of the UK, before the industrial revolution it was land and agriculture that ruled the economy and thus the government. With the industrial revolution economic power shifted decisively to the industrialists or bourgeoisie. So, while political power remained with the landowning aristocracy (the "rotten boroughs") economic power had passed on. In the UK, rather than having revolution, the system changed itself over a fairly short period of time. There were winners and losers, but the losers still had substantial resources although much less political power. Just a note on western policy vis-a-vis China. The US and its allies assumed (hoped?) that something like this would happen in China. The industrialists and tech sector would rise up and the government would change in response. This seemed to be happening right up to the point where Jack Ma was suppressed, and Ant Group's IPO was cancelled. It would happen slowly, and in a way that made sense in China, but the west was fine with that. The US is not particularly ideological. The only time the US imposed its system on countries was after WWII, and this for obvious reasons. It was a stellar success for both countries involved, by the way. In the case of the USSR the situation was the opposite and more akin to China's. The Soviets, with all their natural resources could never match the west economically, technologically or militarily. This was actually also the case with Imperial Russia. Once centralized systems get to a certain point, they implode. Now, The Russian Federation is operating in a way that resembles the USSR, but without the ideological cover. This latter point is what I think lies in store for China. Without a mechanism to allow the political system to evolve with the economic system there is little hope for success. If you give the people the resources to consume, they will demand changes. Policy prescriptions like those from Mr. Huang and Mr. Pettis will inevitably lead to the demise of the CCP. The oligarchy, which is what the CCP is, will not give up power willingly. Unless they do, China's economy cannot progress.
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  1910. In principle and practice I support the ban on TikTok for precisely the reasons stated in the proposed legislation. But. and you knew this was coming, the privacy issues are overblown, and probably mostly irrelevant. Now, I do not have a TikTok or X account, but I do see and read about what is being shared by individuals on these platforms. People are voluntarily sharing intimate details of their lives, with video. This often involves details that in the past (and present?) would have been considered highly embarrassing. They are KNOWINGLY sharing such content with hundreds of millions of strangers. X is not foreign owned. YouTube is not foreign owned. It is not just a TikTok thing. For example, we have privacy laws regarding medical information, such as HIPPA, and yet on YouTube we can find people sharing their medical conditions, often with graphic detail. We often get these laws to protect a minority group. Then it turns out that the vast majority don't care. Just as a humorous, pre-Internet example, while a teenager I was at a shooting club event with my father. While I was on the line getting ready to shoot, I heard someone ask my father how he was doing. I immediately smirked to myself. The guy basically got a complete medical history. The issue with TikTok is not privacy per se, but it is who is collecting that information, and what they might do with it. The fact is that there are much more insidious personal information collection activities going on and these are not government initiatives. Interestingly, I just saw news that the US spy agencies are paying these data collectors for that information. It was in today's WSJ. This is commercially available information. On a lot of the channels that follow China there is a lot of buzz about a company in China, iS00N, that was doing precisely this. I have been in corporate software seminars where tools for scraping the Internet for such information are discussed as a way to collect data for statistical analysis for marketing purposes. You say it, it is out there, and now everyone knows. Welcome the wonderful world of the Internet. The Congressional legislation on TikTok may well pass, but what we need is a bigger conversation on data privacy and data use.
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  1911. Mentioning "countries", in the modern sense, going back centuries, and then projecting to the present is very disingenuous of you. Why do the Ukrainians speak a different language from Russian? How about the Baltic states, which each has its own language? These are different nations, not states or countries as we understand them now. Just look at the UK. One modern state, with a cental government and four "nations", each with its own history. Each arising separately, but eventually conquered by England. To follow Putin's logic, the UK would be quite justified in reconquering the modern state of Ireland. The history is at least as long. The Russian Empire was made of lots of these conquered nations.
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  1912. The services PMI is not a reliable indicator. Recall that the manufacturing PMI, like the services counterpart, only surveys larger businesses. In manufacturing, smaller suppliers typically feed the large ones. Therefore, the large firm PMI is a reasonable proxy for overall activity. In services, this is basically untrue. The services economy consists of many firms that are very small and sell directly to consumers. They include small shops, restaurants, accounting firms, law firms, and a plethora of others. The situation of these firms is not at all reflected in the PMI. Don't forget that these types of businesses are big employers, in the aggregate. What I have been seeing is that massive numbers of restaurants and small shops have been closing. Even the large retailers are shuttering locations. Plus, I will say it one more time. This is a survey, and an index of a survey at that. Highlighting tiny moves in such measures is statistically insignificant, and meaningless.
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  1913. Well, this is the UK. Nothing out of the ordinary if true.
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  1914. DOGE is not Musk's program. It is Trump's program. DOGE is a department of the Federal Government. It's in the name, DEPARTMENT of Government Efficiency (emphasis mine). Trump is the elected head of the Federal Government. Nothing happens that Trump does not approve of or direct. Your misunderstanding may have something to do with Europeans having a parliamentary system as opposed to a presidential system. The only country I can think of that has something similar to the US is France. Another thing about Trump is that he was president before, and in both his successful election runs he emphasized that government was out of control (the Deep State) and vowed to "drain the swamp". So, to emphasize Musk in this is really kind of foolish in so many ways.
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  1915.  @bertiescunsbutch9323  The problems with not having a written constitution are twofold. The first is that any time a party has a sufficient majority they can change the structure of the government. With the US Constitution, the bar is much higher. The second is that, decisions by a high court can be politicized and opaque. So, in the UK, you have devolution. How is that working out? And look at Israel today. There is actually widespread support for some sort of reform of their supreme court, which has become politicized. The UK also has several examples of supreme court decisions that clearly go against the government. According to that UK "constitution", Parliament is supreme.
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  1916. The Marines, of course, do not have a massive R&D budget, but they do some. Many years ago, I was working on a satellite system. The ground control element, which had to be dispersed and varied, had an interesting requirement. It had to survive a nuclear blast nearby. Looking at the requirements, we asked the Air Force program office about it. It seems that the requirement was such that the system had to survive and the next operator to arrive would peel off the guy working there at time of the blast and continue operating the system. They said, yup. Well, it seems the Marines had developed such a terminal. They can be clever.
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  1917. When I was living in the UK earlier this millennium, I got into reading historical murder mysteries. I am an avid reader of histories and mystery novels, so this was a two fer. One group took place in the 13th century timeframe. I was living in Winchester in southern England. My British colleagues told me the temperature range was 30deg F to 85deg F. During the years I was there we had two snows of a couple of inches or so. They both melted in a few days. Now, in these novels, some of which took place partially in Winchester, there was a lot of snow in the winter. Sometimes it even made it hard for horses to get through. I mention all this because there have obviously been changes in circulation that have affected the temperature in Europe, and this was not thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of years ago. The point is that people, and societies, adapt. Another point is that this happens without "human intervention" and always has.
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  1918. You have to understand that the US was already doing about 50% of the world's manufacturing before the war.
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  1919. Is this controversial? This was war. The looting of farms was to keep his troops fed. He was deep into enemy territory, and they would have to live off the land. That is not strange or controversial. The people of the South had decided to break up the Union, not the soldiers. Are they innocent? Shermans campaign was brilliant and an important part of the war. One does not go to war without intending to win. The South attacked the North for the same reason. Your liberal, modern snowflake sensibility is way out of place when discussing these topics.
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  1920. How many people in the UK are on the dole? There should be work requirements! The migrant workers would have to go to where the work is, and thus live in temporary accommodation. Why not a UK citizen on benefits? This is crazy. All these rich Western countries with generous welfare systems coddle those in benefits. They would rather import foreigners to fill the jobs, because they have no ties and have no issues going where the jobs are. We have the same issue in the US. If these people don't watch out automation will take over. I am already seeing ads on YouTube for automated harvesting machines for crops that traditionally require human labor. Grain crops are now harvested by automated combines that are expensive, but very efficient.
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  1921. My father worked at an Army weapons lab. So, growing up (I was born in Washington, DC) I was always aware of the threat of nuclear war. At the time, estimates of civilian casualties in the 60 to 80 million range were considered acceptable, and survivable. The total population in the 1960s was around 200M. This is the type of calculus our military planners were using at the time.
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  1922. The tanks at 12:23 look like Soviet T34s.
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  1923. If you hadn't noticed, Elon Musk, the largest EV manufacturer in the world, has come out against these tax credits. What the Democrats have done is to come up with one huge bill that includes all kinds of things that are not related. Rather than voting on the merits of each policy, they shove it all into one bill and expect a party line vote. Well, Senators and Representatives are elected in districts that may have very different priorities. The actual cost of the bill is well over twice the figure you report. Do some real reporting on this. Isn't that your responsibility?
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  1924. The only thing I would quibble with is your characterization of the victims of "traditional" Ponzi schemes as greedy. They are just investors, usually individuals, looking for a good return on their capital. That is not greed, but just good fiscal sense. That these people could be taken in so easily is more a testament to the perpetrator of the scheme than to greed. The victims should have known better. But make no mistake, they will move funds from equities to bonds and back again to get a good return. This is just prudential activity. You expect that of professional money managers, whether managing a pension fund or private funds.
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  1925.  @noahway13  Thanks. I am saving the Cohiba for my next birthday (a big one).
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  1926.  @Mr2greys  I hear you. Well, aging cigars is a grand tradition. On the other hand, I have had some right out of the factory that were great. I am not aging this one for flavor. It is more of a sentimental thing.
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  1927. TSMC is not strictly needed. Other companies have fabs as well. It is an economic and financial issue, not a technical one. TSMC does not make the equipment or software to make chips. I do not mean to take anything away from them, they do what they do well, but they are just the foundry. That industry developed because it was more financially viable for chip companies to go fabless, outsourcing the work. The term foundry is used because of the similarity to iron and steel works. Go back to the beginning of the automotive industry. Early on, Ford took in raw materials, from iron ore to rubber, and made everything themselves. Over time this was demonstrated to be less efficient than working with specialized companies that could cast the parts, at least to some level, and make the tires and glass, etc. These companies could also provide similar services for many different customers, thus achieving economies of scale. This is EXACTLY what TSMC is doing. It works, but like I pointed out, others can do it as well.
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  1928.  @INSANESUICIDE  Well, I have a lot of experience with these people. I had a number of them working for me (not in Iraq or Afghanistan). Some went back to the theatre of operations. The main reason given was that they hadn't killed anyone in a while. That is what they were trained to do and what, for some, gave their lives meaning. As a result, I received after action reports from those theatres from both military and contractor groups. I did not see any major casualties from the contractors. The use of contractors was not an attempt to lower the casualty figures for the military. They were mostly used in situations where full military capability was not required and in areas no longer as active. So, I would be interested to see what figures you come up with.
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  1929. This guy is off his rocker if the thinks Harris did a good job and was a viable candidate. I frankly think that if she had had longer to campaign it would have been worse for the Democrats. Looking over the coverage from Time Radio of this election it is clear that they are biased. That is the nicest way I could put it.
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  1930. I think that the issue of the one year showing an uptick, followed by a further decline, is important. Not to the issue of marriages alone, but to the understanding of trends in economy and society. Making a projection based on one data point in a time series amounts to statistical malpractice. I see this all the time, especially by government officials, economists and financial analysts. The thing is these people actually often have the statistical training to know better. They choose to ignore the science for their own aims.
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  1931. What are you? Are you ignorant of history? Heck, after the fall of the Soviet Union there was even some talk about allowing the Russian Federation into NATO. Do you even know what NATO is?
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  1932.  @billmoretz8718  An even better plan, except for one thing. After independence, they couldn't afford to maintain them. Of course, the US, NATO or EU could have stepped in to help but think of the situation back then. Lots of corruption, still elements in the country (oligarchs) with strong ties to Russia. Ukraine gained independence in1991, but the Maidan Revolution didn't occur until 2014.
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  1933. The idea that Russia could effectively develop these weapons is ludicrous. The other fact is that the current nuclear weapons possessed by both Russia and the US could do exactly the same thing. It does not take a new torpedo to disable a port, A standard ICBM or SLBM does the same thing. This is just showmanship. I worked on SDI in the 80s. At that time both sides had deployed both MIRVs and decoys. All this "new" stuff is window dressing and propaganda. The stuff we had in the 80s could easily overwhelm defensive systems, and that is all that matters in nuclear war. Putin is just trying to sow fear that he has something new. Don't forget that ICBMs fly at least 18,000 MPH. This is truly hypersonic and has been available since at least the 1970s. You are just spreading Russia propiganda.
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  1934. The statement about Russia having to "save" the people of Ukraine reminds me of an old trope from the Vietnam era. It went something like, we had to destroy that village to save it. People actually said such things.
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  1935. Plastic and air quality have nothing to do with climate change. Zero carbon has to do with the greenhouse effect, not pollution. CO2 is not, strictly, a pollutant. It is necessary for life on the planet. The issue is how much, and how that level effects the temperature. Journalists who bring in all these extraneous issues are doing a disservice to the debate. You should get educated on the issue before you speak.
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  1936. This is a good example of the fallacy that "politics is downstream from culture". It is precisely the other way around. The board, and most of Hollywood, drank that cool aid and now they will pay for it. This is not the early days of Netflix when they were an alternative to cable. The number of alternatives is massive, but they have not adapted. Perhaps it's time to short the stock.
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  1937. A V8 putting out 304hp? I have a 3.6L V6 in my 2015 Cadillac SRX which puts out 306hp.
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  1938. On the last question, Nigel talks about food. When I lived in the UK, I saw a massive amount of rape planted. Now this is used for oil from the seed. Is there any possible use for that much of this crop? I assumed this was tied to the EU CAP. Now that the UK is out of the EU, is the agriculture sector becoming more rational?
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  1939. As I point out often, the differences month to month of 0.1% or so are generally not statistically significant. The issue is not the number this month compared to last but whether the latest reading is within the parameters of the time series (that is what all these things are) under consideration. There is also the matter of the error bars on these measurements. There is no magical counter in the background, in China or anywhere in the world, that accounts for every yuan or dollar being spent. In addition to being part of a time series these measurements are generally estimates themselves. The data is sampled, if you are familiar with that statistical process. I point this out because the whole reason everyone looks at these numbers is to see if they can discern a trend. In the end, the people most interested are investors, followed by government officials (both at home and abroad). I think that in the case of China the CCP is making too much of the numbers. Look at US GDP, for example, on a quarter-to-quarter basis it actually varies wildly compared to that reported in China. By the way, the investors in the US look at longer term averages and trends.
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  1940. I hit the thumbs up button just for the first minute of the video.
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  1941. Mr. Starkey, your characterization of the invasion of Afghanistan is totally fatuous. I lived through that in the US. The invasion of Afghanistan was only justified because Osama Bin Laden had been hosted there and planned 9/11 from there. Afghanistan had become a haven for terrorist organizations. In fact, since the US withdrawal, it has become so again. Such comments are beneath you. I really love your content, but I also see a very anti-American tilt to them. I guess that is because the United States is the first major British possession to break away from Britian. Sounds like sour grapes to me.
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  1942. It is good to hear the general mention that the EU economy, plus the UK (he also adds Canada, which I usually do not) dwarfs Russia's. The EU plus UK economies, in nominal GDP terms is about ten times that of Russia (before the war). Another thing not mentioned is that the population of this combination is three times that of Russia. This is a European war. When have we heard that before? Oh yes, almost the whole of the 20th century. Don't forget that during the Cold War the US had 500K troops in Europe, falling to "only" 300K at the end. There are still 100K there. The point is that the EU should be able to handle this themselves, especially from an economic point of view. As for Trump's attitude toward Europe on defense spending, in that he is correct. There is a famous clip on YouTube where he is telling the Germans that they are becoming too dependent on Russia for natural gas and that they are not spending enough on their own defense. They laughed at him. Who is laughing now? Trump was not the first, though. Even Obama had that attitude as well and I don't think he was the first. Remember the pivot to Asia. Obama wanted to decrease troop strength in Germany to move those troops to the Pacific. The Germans screamed and wailed, and the plans were scrapped. Finally, the supporters of Ukraine have spent their time ragging on Trump. Currently, support among the US population and in the Congress, is solidly behind Ukraine. So, the Ukraine supporters have been disrespecting over half the electorate. The US has been moving away from being the world's policeman. The general should be well aware the last National Security Strategy document, developed under the Biden administration, is geared toward force projection, not stability maintenance. That is the will of the people. Get used to it. The Russians and Chinese (and the Indians) want a multipolar world. They will get it. It did not work out too well for them the last time we had that (especially the last 250 years or so). Nothing has really changed in geostrategic terms, except nukes.
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  1943.  @ryuzakitodoroki2604  You missed it. Their stock market was going up, but a couple of days ago it stalled. Don't forget, it is still almost 25% off its peak. The US is up in same time about 300%.
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  1944. The comments I have seen make sense, but there is one thing they seem to miss. It was a unanimous decision and as mentioned in the report even Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made a comment in support. Maybe she is evolving. Let's hope.
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  1945. The base for a percentage move is all important. I saw this in the WSJ (a US based publication) as well. The question is, where are the profits compared to the previous years, such as the pre-COVID period? On the other hand, I have to question the veracity of these figures. I mean really question. Steel profits are way down, primarily due to the real-estate crisis. Auto profits are basically non-existent. The EV makers are struggling and losses at many of these companies are very large. Battery and solar cell makers are losing money and furloughing workers and idling production capacity, at least temporarily. ICE auto makers are seeing their sales decline, and their plant utilization is way, way down thus leading to lower profits.
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  1946.  @generessler6282  Well, I can't agree with that. If you haven't noticed Foxconn is moving hundreds of thousands of jobs from China to Vietnam and India right now. They load the machines (workstations really) on trucks and ship them out. Of course, it won't be free. On the other hand, maintaining the current supply trains is not free either. Any change is a chance to modify, and in many cases, improve the supply chain. This is dynamic stuff. I have been involved in areas like aerospace with massively complex supply chains. Sometimes the complexity was intentional, for political reasons. Don't apply static analysis to this. That is a big mistake. As for inflation, that is likely to stay above the last 15 years before the latest bout. That period was actually an anomaly.
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  1947. This whole thing is just silly. Carville is off base. What I am getting at is that we now have what people said they wanted. For many years, going back to the 1980s, voter turnout was declining. The reason was that the parties were seen as too similar and it didn't matter who you voted for. People wanted the parties to be clearly delineated ideologically. In the US, each party had a people on the left and right. We called that the wings of the parties. Now, we have what people say they wanted. Now they call it divisive. I repeat, it's what people said they wanted, a clear choice. The Democratic Party has been taken over by socialists (collectivists). Trump has reformed the Republican Party as the party of the individual. Guess who wins in the US. Carville represents the old power elite of the Democratic Party. They started this whole thing. They were not socialists. Don't forget, the Democrats were the party of labor, especially unions. In the country as a whole, from the 1960s on, union power was waning (to a large extent due to Democrat policy). They needed a way to get votes, so they reached out to minorities. These were a diverse bunch who often had little in common except that they were "oppressed". They went down the path of what we now call "intersectionality" although they didn't know about that at the time. Now they are reaping the whirlwind. Put it down to LBJ. He bought off various groups, with public money. So, Carville may want to look inward to understand his dilemma. He may want to start another party. He, and his ilk, have lost the Democratic Party.
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  1948.  @Shaze1  Wow, did you even understand anything of what he said? Part of it is just his personality. Part of it is that he has built a successful technology company that has had real impact. Gorard is working for him, expanding Wolfram's framework. Have you considered that? Have you listened to Sabine? She is very confident and "likes to toot" her own horn, although she has not really come up with anything new. She makes some interesting and important observations about the state of physics, but she has not come up with anything groundbreaking that I know of. So, given that, what are we to make of Sabine? What Wolfram is proposing is a whole new way of looking at physics using a whole new approach that is really rather new in the history of science (and humanity). I am talking about computation; in case you didn't get the point. This "computation thing" by the way (talking in general, not in terms of physics) is the most impactful and important concept in the history of humanity. A brief glance at the history of the pace of scientific, technological and societal change should make that clear. So, when he has this idea and framework that could revolutionize physics, why would he not "toot his own horn". By the way, he knows, as well as anyone, that if he cannot show some result that can be verified by observation, that his idea will just become a footnote.
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  1949.  @jurycould4275  Good point. By the way, if Gorard's calculation in the paper Sabine references is "proven" by observation, then he will be very famous and well regarded. Just coming up with a result or calculation in a physics paper is not sufficient to make it true. Having that result verified by experiment or observations is what is most important. This is one of my pet peeves about science communication on social media. Many of the channel creators, ranging from people with a bachelor's degree to those with PhDs and research experience. seem to think that if a paper is published it is a "result". I actually hear that term used a lot. Until it is proven by experiment or observation, it is just speculation and should be treated as such. Language matters!
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  1950.  @robwatson3600  Good point. I remember when buying my first house interest rates were in the 15% range. That was end of the 1970s, early 1980s. I forget what the rate was when I moved to where I am now in 1992, but it was in the range you mention. Then, toward the end of the 1990s mortgage rates came down. I refinanced at least once before buying another home in the same area. Some of my neighbors were refinancing annually.
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  1951. Trump has broken the political parties! Yeah! Both the Democrats and the traditional Republicans had ideological stances and ignored actual issues. The Democrats started out as the party of the working class, then moved on to any group that they could convince was oppressed. Republicans were the party of business and only business no matter what the cost to the country. In the midst of that both parties totally ignored the actual people, the majority. I am amazed at how well Ms. Easley laid out the issues. Trump will stay the course, and things will get better for the people that traditionally made up the Democrat base, and the country as a whole. just as they did in his first term (before COVID). By the way, those groups didn't vote for him back then either.
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  1952. The Afghan people need to fight, not run social media campaigns.
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  1953. I like Tulsi, and often agree with her. On this, I think she is being short sighted, as is Tucker. First, the numbers we are talking back are a pimple on the a** compared to what we spent on Iran or Afghanistan. Get over that. This is peanuts. The difference is that in this case we are supporting people willing to the fighting themselves (as opposed to South Vietnam, or Afghanistan for both the Soviets and the US, or Iraq). The other thing they both forget, or decide to ignore, is that most of the major wars of the last many hundreds of years have started in Europe. This is still the most developed part of the world, along with North America. China is big, as is Japan. On the other hand, both are in demographic decline and will be irrelevant in a couple of decades. In addition, China has a number of people living in poverty that is twice the population of the US. They are not the long-term threat. All their industries were developed by "Western" firms, and these are starting to move out. There are lots of alternatives. If you ignore war in Europe, then you ignore the next big war, and perhaps the final war. That is what NATO is about.
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  1954. I know people make as much money as the doctor in retirement income. And they are not making much in terms of US retirement income. We see again that China is not a rich country. That might have something to do with the prevalence of corruption. When even skilled people work very hard and make an average salary, who would bother. A relative of mine who did work in China told me about an engineer who he interfaced with in China. The man's brother, who is not well educated, had a couple of private businesses and made much more than the skilled engineer. Now that Xi is clamping down on private businesses that avenue to build wealth through hard work will disappear. You can't have a consumption led economy if people don't have the money to consume.
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  1955. The idea that there is at least an element of a Ponzi scheme in this latest financial scandal is not one I have heard before, but it makes sense. That was the issue in the property developer sector as well. Even if the developers did not start out that way, that is what it developed into. What I don't hear in your analysis, or that of the financial analysts in the west, is that the root of the problem is corruption, and the involvement of organized crime. Yes, organized crime. By the way, this is the problem in Russia and the two systems of governance have many of the same problems. Of course, this makes perfect sense given their histories. Every once in a while, one hears of tirad activity. Of course, the government tries to suppress reporting on this. I heard on one of the YouTube channels that covers China issues an employee of Zhongrong Trust mentioning that some of his colleagues had been taken by triads and threatened. I don't know about the veracity of this, but it makes sense. The police involvement you mention is another twist in the story and tends to support my suspicions. Since there is no rule of law in China, the whole system, from party officials at all levels to organized crime is skimming off the society. Xi's various anti-corruption campaigns are not that at all, but target Xi's adversaries. BRICS. What a joke. The US led order had a goal and an adversary which represented an existential threat. What does BRICS have? Their "adversary" is a country that has been the foundation of their current development and wealth since the 1990s. That's quite a threat, isn't it? Don't downplay the India China issue. There is a very real possibility that the two may go to war soon. That is the expectation within India. Such a war would also serve Xi's purposes, as it did Mao's in the 1960s, as opposed to the Taiwan adventure. War with India would not directly involve the US. As for BRICS forming a bloc to rival the G-7, they must be kidding. The G-7 comprises over 50% of world GDP. So, if BRICS could coral everyone else, they would still be overshadowed. Of the BRICS core, only India has a healthy economy, and this only because of their growing ties with the US and the rest of the G-7. South Africa cannot keep the lights on. Brazil has a much more fragile economy than many think. China is faltering and Russia is at war with the rest of Europe and North America. Don't fear the BRICS.
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  1956. China already has ideas about "Russian" territory. Some analysts believe that they are just waiting for the Russian army to be destroyed, or significantly degraded, to make their move. It won't be long now. Xi is putting his country on a war footing. The main belief is that they will attack Taiwan. Well, that will not go well for them. On the other hand, he has a hot border dispute with India and issues with Russia. I think they may move in the north. They already lay claim to Vladivostok and other territories. They bridle at the unequal treaties signed between the Qing dynasty and the Russian Empire and with the Soviets. It has been reported that a previous leader, Jiang Zemin gave up territory because the Soviets had dirt on him. They routinely conduct live fire exercises in the area, and the only adversary is Russia.
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  1957. Having allies is a problem? I guess I shouldn't respond to the drivel that comes out of state-run media in China, but really. As for the idea that the US power is fading, I have to laugh. I just hope they don't believe their propaganda. That is the most dangerous thing.
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  1958. The questions from the interviewer show a decided lack of understanding of the world situation and a tendency toward the US and Europeans to be the "policemen of the world". This is really retrograde stuff. It smells of British imperialism. A lot of the issues in the Middle East are leftovers from British and French colonialism in the 20th century. The US ambassador, even though he had been in the Obama administration (of which I am not a fan) is much more realistic and nuanced.
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  1959. Interesting and important information. Thanks for sharing. I am American. Several years ago, I met some Mongolian women at our church. Mongolia, during Soviet times, was aligned with the Soviet Union. These women had gone to university in Moscow. It was very interesting getting to know them. Fortunately, the book you mention and your book "The Prince of the Soviets" are available on Kindle Unlimited. I have downloaded both and look forward to reading them soon. Just another thing that you might find interesting and something that drives my interest in the topic. I am an old Cold Warrior (I miss the Cold War; I got to do lots of cutting-edge research with unlimited budgets). My father worked for an Army weapons lab in Washington, DC. So, our attitudes toward Russians were colored by that experience. Perhaps you can guess what those attitudes were. At one time the company I was working for was tracking 15 known Soviet agents targeting our facility. Some of it was very classified and our company security people were well equipped with automatic weapons. Ah, the good old days.
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  1960. Tony, thank you for the extra episode. It is one of the more interesting and impactful you have done. Perhaps a real conversation may get underway within China on the way forward. This would be a welcome change from Xi's stress on centralized control and Marxist economics. I am often a harsh critic of China, but don't mistake that for as criticizing Chinese people in general. It is criticism of the CCP. I have often said that, in northeast Asia the Chinese are most like Americans in their entrepreneurial temperament. This is witnessed by the example of Taiwan and of the many Chinese I have had the privileged to know outside of China for over half a century. China and the US could be great partners. That was the expectation, and hope, of the US's opening up to China. Sadly, things have not gone in the direction that people expected.
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  1961.  @dvidli4042  Well, you are incorrect in many of your assertions. As for China growing into a superpower like the US, please give me a break. China has 900M people living on $280 per month or less. The poor in the US would be considered lower middle class in China. China is investing massively in the rest of the world and still cannot take care of its own people. The CCP is launching spaceships and can't feed its own people without massive imports of food. The recent policies from terracing mountains for rice cultivation to returning forests (which were built at great cost) to farmland is imperiling food production in China. The quality of that production is poor and, in many cases, toxic. The recent flooding of agricultural land in the Beijing area is another own goal. Over the last couple of decades, the massive amount of IP theft from the rest of the world is another driver of mistrust. I have seen it up close. The unbalanced nature of the Chinese economy will bring it down without any help from outside. Need I go on?
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  1962.  @randomness7053  Are you a bot? The peak oil price was about $120 per barrel in June and is now down to just under $80. You can find this information on the web quite easily.
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  1963.  @henli-rw5dw  They don't really care about the consequences and don't consider market conditions. This is the crux of all their problems. On top of that is the massive corruption. I mean massive. They have had at least two rounds of funding for development of their microelectronics sector. Both that I know of ended in failure with lots of people arrested.
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  1964.  @simontang5487  Well said.
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  1965.  @alexjulio-rl7zo  I think you should cool it with the ad homonym attacks. You don't know me, and I don't know you. Stick to the actual statements made. Since Regan is dead, and of course not president, that is a bit of a silly question, don't you think. Tell us what you really mean.
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  1966.  @gstlb  That may be true, but they did participate in it.
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  1967. Just change your diet! Period. I went through that, and it feels good. The first thing to go is the dizzying variety of foods. We don't need it and it is unnatural. I eliminated all sugar and sweeteners. ALL! I am not radical on the carbs, but many days consume little. I also only drink water (with a small amount of lemon juice), brewed coffee and tea (again, no sweeteners or dairy). While I have been doing this for a while, I recently eliminated alcohol and immediately lost an inch off my waist. There is nothing more to give there. I also do something you and many other health experts say is bad. For breakfast I eat rolled oats with butter (and a little cinnamon). According to you this should trigger fat storage. Bollocks. This mania with counting molecules is totally off base.
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  1968.  @PlanetCHINA.1  Ignorance is bliss.
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  1969. Many people n the west have decided that people don't want what Liu stated were the requirements to revive the economy of China. During the protests that led to the lifting if COVID restrictions we heard calls for democracy and for Xi and the CCP to step down. We never hear calls from the people in China or elsewhere, perhaps with the exception of Russia, for more dictatorship. If you look at India, which is a democracy, and China which seems to want it at the grass roots level, that is a third of the world's population. To those who play down democracy and capitalism, I say bulls**t.
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  1970. What no one talks about in promoting American energy is money. By supplying our own energy needs and drilling enough to export to our allies, we make a lot more money here, including tax revenues. Currently this money is going to other countries, some of which are not friends of the West.
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  1971. I've fallen asleep in meetings, when I was MUCH younger. I also snored on trains, especially the Eurostar when I was going to Paris, which I did regularly for my job. I was often woken up by other passengers who complained. I had to apologize. It was such a smooth and soothing ride. Considering what I could hear from the news clips of Biden falling asleep, I am sure I would have fallen asleep as well. And I am not nearly as old as he is. I am also not a Biden supporter. That said, the President of the US should be more aware of his image abroad. When i was an executive for a large US computer firm in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) I decided to blend in. I lived in the UK. I once bought a black suit (at M&S) with a black shirt and tie. One time I flew from Paris to Stuttgart. When I landed, even though I had a US passport, the officials there talked to me in German. Fortunately, I had studied German at university and could reply intelligently. What I am getting at is that being aware your surroundings and how you come across is a basic skill of anyone who is in public life, either in business or politics. It is a basic skill, and Biden does not have it.
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  1972. Tony, great coverage of the Xi-Ma meeting. The racial component is concerning. Echoes of national socialism. Bad, not good. Just think about it in terms of your own country, New Zealand. What if the UK decided it should collect back its former colonies because of "racial affinity". Xi is turning positively medieval. Frankly, there is a question of what the legitimate government of China is. Perhaps Taiwan will bring the mainland back into the fold. Wouldn't that be a hoot. Actually, when China breaks up, as I expect it will, southeastern China may well decide to ally/merge with Taiwan.
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  1973. I have been watching a lot of channels on the situation in China and consuming a lot of news about it as well. I have also read all your books. By the way, looking at the news from around the world is like looking at your predictions coming true in real-time. Many of the outcomes and specific situations you mention are not "new", but you distill them in a way that makes lots of sense. One thing that I think, and I would be interested in your opinion, is the influence of criminal gangs in China. The CCP itself is a criminal organization. Corruption within it is entrenched. Xi's "anti-corruption" campaign is only a way to purge other factions within the CCP. In addition, there seem to be lots of traditional criminal gangs, and this flies under the radar in the West. It seems like this might be another source of instability.
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  1974. Unconventional methods to exert influence? In all warfare, no matter how sophisticated, in the end it is the soldier on the ground that is decisive. Exerting influence is not what militaries do. What they do is to destroy things, especially the other side's military. That is the only legitimate goal. Concentrating on anything else detracts from that goal and leads to failure.
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  1975. I read once that an executive at Chrysler (perhaps Iacocca), when he saw the competitor's offerings in this segment, which were more truck like, said that he knew they had won. My in-laws got the first minivan that I experienced. This was right after we got married. It was a second car for them and was practical, used to haul stuff up to their second home. We decided to get one, again as a second car. This was even before kids. I think my wife just wanted to be like her mother (they were very close). We wanted a four-cylinder model, it was a Voyager, because it was cheaper. When we went to the dealership, they didn't have any. So, we got the 3-liter V6. Later we got Town & Country models with a four-liter SOHC engine. It was great. Of course, now I have a Cadillac SUV (not the larger one). I am looking for a Vette as my second car. The one thing I miss about the minivan is the sheer practicality of it. I could fit 4x8 drywall in it. Not even close in my SUV (and I won't drive the big ones). Heck, Bart, you could probably even fit your MG Midget in a minivan.
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  1976. I think it interesting that the fact that they take your biometric information at the airport is mentioned. I have not flown for several years now, but throughout my life I have gone through many periods where I did, sometimes three or four times a week. The last few times, in the US, they have taken detailed biometric data. Don't forget, this was several years ago.
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  1977. Always my first stop. I sit down in front of the computer with my coffee and cigar.
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  1978. This was an intermediate range ballistic missile. The heavy intercontinental ballistic missiles warheads are traveling at about 15K MPH in the terminal phase.
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  1979. In the US we also have monuments that are old tanks (and sometimes aircraft). These are often outside of Veterans halls, but not always. In one farm community in Illinois that I used to go to a lot there was a M60 tank in the town square. Mind you, thus is a town of just under 2,000 people. Come to think of it, most of the tanks I see are M60s, commemorating the Cold War.
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  1980. Lowering the yuan exchange rate is likely to have another effect. Other countries will look at this as currency manipulation and take measures. Since China depends so much on foreign trade, that will be another risk.
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  1981.  @SinkLikeStone  That is the crux of the matter. There is nothing else to invest in. My understanding is that the average person cannot invest in equities easily, if at all. The other side of it is that this is a communist country. Equities are not something people (we're talking about the average person) would know about. Property they understand. A good example is the Soviet Union. Same situation of a communist population suddenly being exposed to capitalism. People were given shares in the company they worked for. They had no idea what a share was. A small group of smart people did know (they were often engineers or scientists) and swooped in and bought the shares cheap. The average person got something for paper they thought was worthless. The smart ones became oligarchs.
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  1982.  @HKim0072  Not really. Housing would be out of the question if there wasn't economic activity, in this case manufacturing exports, to provide the funds to invest. The whole thing is export led.
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  1983.  @davidgeiszler4764  That would certainly increase the tourist industry.
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  1984. Michael is misleading on the reason for "socialism in one country". Lenin and the Bolsheviks firmly believed that because the revolution had happened in Russia that workers in the other European countries would also revolt. In fact, he thought that this would also end the war. That didn't happen. Then the Soviets invaded Poland and were defeated and had to withdraw. That was when they decided on "socialism in one country". Marxist-Leninist socialism is an internationalist ideology. After the debacle in Poland, they created the COMINTERN (1919) to foment revolution all over the world.
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  1985.  @ThatOneInTenThousand  Now that is a sensible policy. Dealing with refugees is not costless. It also ensures that the refugee is not an economic migrant. Of course, if a country wants economic migrants, they will enact policies accordingly. One must not forget what the genesis of the general refugee policy we have now is. It is a response to the way Jews were treated in the 1930s, which was reprehensible. The Jews were persecuted on religio-ethnic grounds. Many we actually secular and had been successful in places like Germany and Austria. Some had fought in WWI in the armies of the nations they were citizens of. They were well integrated into society. You get the picture. These were not generally political opponents of the regime. When they tried to find shelter in other countries, they were often denied entry. Then Germany would refuse to take them back. They ended up wandering about stateless in Europe. Bad, not good. That is the problem we were trying to solve with asylum laws and treaties after WWII. What we are doing now is just plain stupid. There is another class of people who are economic migrants. All my grandparents came to the US as such. Without money, resources or much education. All of their children finished high school and some went to university. ALL of their grandchildren went to university. This is actually a typical case. The US wanted and needed people and had for a long time. Don't forget that the US was larger in terms of manufactures and manufacturing exports back in the early 20th century than China is now as a percentage of the world economy. We had the land, the resources and the capital to absorb all those immigrants. Now Europe and Japan are just the opposite. Again, the historical perspective is lacking in our politics and especially in finance and economics. In the 1930s what was one of Hitler's main talking points? Lebensraum. Look at his plan for the Slavic regions. Japan took over Manchuria and sent lots of people there to farm. What was the driver of European imperial expansionism from the 15th century onwards? Resources and somewhere to put all those excess Europeans. Each country has its own needs and desires and these change over time. Each country should decide how to deal with these issues themselves. That is the essence of sovereignty.
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  1986. The retirement age issue is, indeed, a problem worldwide. It is, to some extent, a consequence of how much healthier we are and how much better our medical systems have become. The unintended consequences of success. I have a friend in insurance, and he pointed out that if you reach 65 today you have a 50% chance of living into your 90s. Back when I was working at a large US corporation, this was in the late 1980s, I was made aware that many of our retirees were dying off not long after retirement. This was good for the financial health of the pension plan, but not the retirees, of course. The US system has been in "crisis" for decades now. I was at a conference in Washington, DC earlier in this millennium which was dedicated to that issue. It was not a new issue even then. There are several rather "easy" fixes. They are often not politically easy, but they should be if only our leaders would explain the need for policies rather than just spouting slogans. I won't go into detail here. At least the US, France and other western countries have the money to solve the problem, unlike China. One thing that is much different in the US is that private pension plans, which were often underfunded by the corporations, were required many years ago to be fully funded and reports sent out to people on those plans with the funding levels clearly indicated. The other thing that is interesting is that the steady rise in the Social Security age in the US has met with little or no controversy, unlike the situation in France. What is interesting is that US government employees have no mandatory retirement age. You can work till you drop, even if that is well into your 80s.
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  1987. Your point at about 13:00, and your earlier videos, is correct. You make the point forcefully. The whole idea of "international law" is a sham. Any "law" depends on a mechanism of enforcement. The courts are the last step. First one has to apprehend the perpetrator. This requires force. In common situations, this is police. In international situations, this is armies.
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  1988. Of course, the Great Society program was so successful. All of these social welfare programs are such bunk. Bring the jobs back to the cities where the people are an you won't need any of these programs. Why do we have such large black populations in the northeast and mid-west? Because that is where the jobs were. Then we killed the blue collar jobs in these formerly industrial cities, and the population stayed, We have been subsidizing them ever since. The solution is simple, but government will not do it. Why are we paying for this government? Lower taxes and let people go where the jobs are.
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  1989. At first the accent turned me off. But, the more I heard the more respect I have for her.
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  1990. The real question is are any of these faceless people getting paid for these pardons? Think about it. This warrants a full investigation.
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  1991. The point made at about 34:00 is interesting. The very same thing could be said about Taiwan vs. communist China. In fact, I saw a video where it was claimed there was a movement recently in Shanghai to leave China and join Taiwan. I don't know how extensive it is, but there is the glimmer of what might happen in China, Actually, Peter Zeihan points out that the southeast coastal areas of China have always looked outward. This has a lot to do with their geography. So, Putin is not wrong to be afraid.
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  1992. Love it! This whole "unlimited partnership" between China and Russia is a constant source of entertainment to one who has followed the situation for several decades now. The whole idea is ludicrous, and the actions of China show this. One such action is the encroachment by China into the central Asian republics. This is a key part of Russia's "near abroad". Another is the release of information about Jiang Zemin's indiscretions in the Soviet Union which were lined to treaties between the Soviets and the CCP which Xi claims were unfair and unequal. This is something that Xi keeps harping on. The release was only done after Jiang's death. This, of course, leads into the third action and that is the maps the CCP put out claiming part of Russia for China. I mention all this because people forget that one of the main geopolitical and strategic reasons for the US to open up to China in the 1970s was to use China as a counterweight to Soviet power. It was, in effect, the opening of a "second front", and it worked.
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  1993. Interesting talk at the very beginning. There is really something to it. In the area I live in, the high school students start school first, then middle school, then elementary school. Researchers have known for a long time that it should be the opposite. The only excuse I have seen has something to do with sports. This is madness.
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  1994. I always find it interesting when people from the UK, and almost any other European power, mention the idea of the US as an "imperial power". Does anyone over there in the eastern hemisphere have any knowledge of history? There was a short period of time when the US harbored imperial ambitions. This was the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. After all, everyone was doing it. The US had become very powerful economically. In fact, if you take the numbers in their historical context, more powerful and impactful than China is today. As such, American leaders saw no reason why the US should not play in the "great game" of imperial expansion. Recall what the "great game" was originally. It was the rivalry between the British and Russian empires in Central Asia. Later it came to represent imperial expansion in general. It was, to some extent, the motivation off Japan's actions in that period as well. The US actually acquired some territories after defeating imperial power Spain. But look at what the actions of the US in its own neighborhood. There were invasions of Mexico, but the US never stayed and occupied the country. Any European power would have. No, after WWII (notice the two) the US decided that it had to stay engaged to counter the imperial ambitions of the communist powers. These were the true imperial powers of the 20th century and are continuing that trend today.
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  1995.  @alien4422  Yes, on both counts. The quality of information on YouTube (in whatever sphere you choose) is abysmal. On the other hand, I would expect more from a The Times. As for Newman, she has been an embarrassment for a long time, and wonder why the Times would employ her. She is a talking head, nothing more.
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  1996. You are scary. Suella is impressive. One point, that I think she epitomizes, is that the proposed cabinet that was leaked is incredibly diverse. And this is in the center right party. I think that in the video you recorded on this there was one old white guy. The rest were women and people of color (and some who are both).
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  1997. Mr. We Pang was applying for jobs paying $2.26 per hour, in 2023. I made that, in the US, as a part time student worker at the university I was attending, in 1973. So, 50 years later, many Chinese are making what was basically minimum wage in the US half a century ago. On top of that the gentleman was denied the job because of his age. This ageism, for everyone, whether in manufacturing jobs or skilled white collar jobs, will actually kill the Chinese economy. In western countries, it is people over 45 who provide a lot of the capital in the society. They are highly skilled at their jobs, therefore much more efficient, and have fewer expenses for children, etc. They are generally making their highest incomes they will make and are often investing aggressively to maximize their savings for retirement. Once they retire, this pool of funds is generally withdrawn from the capital markets and put into safe, boring income producing investments. Every economist knows this, except those advising the CCP leadership, apparently. Well, of course, we should not be surprised. They are bunch of commies, after all. China is well and truly screwed.
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  1998.  @chilled_beer821  I don't agree with Westerners who say those things. India is truly a multicultural society, and has been for centuries. France is not. Especially from the time of their revolution, they have been steadfastly secular. Having spent a lot of time there, I believe that is the real ethos of the vast majority. I once saw a report on France24 where women reporters went into a majority Muslim neighborhood. They went into a coffee shop, and were refused service. That should give you some idea of where the issue stems from.
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  1999.  @adamsaleh664  Understood. But, they came as conquerors. This has to effect the situation today.
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  2000. Tony, thanks for the extra episode. The comment about Trump shows both the bias of the author, and an ignorance of Trump's policies. In fact, and it has been often discussed, Trump's unpredictability is one of the reasons cited for there being no major conflicts during his presidency. The plain fact of the matter is that traditional diplomacy has been shown to be lacking. I am often a critic of it. I take perverse joy in tweaking such people. Some of the reactions are priceless. Look at Iran, Taiwan, the Middle East, Ukraine and a host of other hot spots. What answers does traditional diplomacy have? I have noted that even within appointed diplomatic circles there has been a tendency to break away from the norms and state things directly. One example is Rahm Emanuel's (ambassador to Japan) comments over the past year or so and those of the US ambassador to China, Burns. What really interests me is the contrast in the backgrounds of these two. Emanuel is a consummate political operator and politician. Burns is a product of the diplomatic corps. That people from the opposite ends of the spectrum are coming to similar conclusions is telling.
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  2001. You had a guest on who just repeated what anyone who is even minimally informed already knows. What is going on with journalism? Give is some real information that is not already public knowledge.
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  2002. I love it! I am talking about the CSIS report at the end. First, I think everyone knows what the issue is gallium. Second, it sounds like they are talking about a "gallium gap". It is an old Cold War reference, and it made me laugh.
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  2003. Ah, the maggot larvae. My brother-in-law did several trips to China on business. He was at a buffet once and saw what he thought was mac and cheese. It turned out to be the maggot larvae. Put him right off his feed.
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  2004.  @dongshengdi773  You are so right. My investment advisor moved early. He was actually all for Xi getting a third term. His reasoning seems to be that Xi would tank the economy. He was so right. China's economy under the CCP is so corrupt that it needs to fall before something else can take its place. Hey, maybe Taiwan can take over China. Of course, being China, the most likely outcome is a return to warlordism. Not looking good. Actually, this corruption is also a reason I would not let rich Chinese into the country, any country. Some are doing this already. It is almost a sure thing that their money is tainted by corruption. Maybe there was no other way to be successful in China, but do you want such people in your country? This is especially true of CCP officials. I see accounts of many of them sending their families, and much of their money, abroad. No thanks.
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  2005. Dealing with China in a war scenario is even easier than stated in the video. If China starts a war, it is a simple thing to cut China off from all imports that come by sea, which is the bulk of them. In this scenario China deindustrializes in months and mass starvation starts soon after. In addition, China is threatening war with India. The Indian news outlets have been highlighting this in the past few weeks. If that war starts, China would also be cut off, even without US intervention. Considering that the US is drawing India closer, I expect that the US will intervene, and the result would be the same.
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  2006. Rubio's comments are entirely correct. I have seen the IP theft situation directly and am also aware of many others. The thing is that IP theft has a long history in China, predating the CCP. Copying, counterfeiting and outright theft are endemic in the Chinese economy. These are not people we want to do business with. Just a comment on the whole globalization situation. The US, as Peter Zeihan likes to say, "bought an alliance" after WWII. This was a key part of Cold War strategy. The problem is that after the Cold War an adjustment was not made. What Trump is planning is to finally make that adjustment.
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  2007. As stated at 9:30 the actions needed are not possible for the CCP. A capitalist, western style economy (which is what is called for) has no place for a communist party. Power is intimately tied to economy. Xi may be the implementor, but I think that the consensus in the CCP has been that the reform and opening up had shifted too much of the economic power to the private sector. As an example, where the transition was done peacefully and within the system, look at the UK in the early 19th century. The boroughs, or legislative districts, were static and drawn on lines reflecting old centers of economic power. This was the aristocrats who controlled the land, which had been the source of much of the economy. With the industrial revolution, the real economic power had shifted to a totally different group, the business owners. In the UK, this prompted the redrawing of legislative districts and a peaceful shift of power. Such a shift is not possible in a one-party system. This begs the question of what comes next. The system is riddled with corruption, and this is not just the graft of political cadres. It has seeped into the whole society and is evident from the wholesale IP theft and counterfeiting. To assume that a society that has never known democracy would turn into a liberal democracy overnight, without outside influence, is probably incorrect.
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  2008. Shareholders are NOT creditors. They are investors. One will find that in any offering of stock investment, the caveat that there is a risk of total loss of principal is always included. In fact, with a liquidation, shareholders are automatically wiped out, at least in the US (and I suspect most western countries). So, get it straight. Words matter.
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  2009. Arranged marriages are not a Chinese thing. In fact, in the Jewish community there are matchmakers, and this is a long standing tradition. In the early 1970s, when I was first at university, my two best friends were Indian. They used to show me the marriage ads in the Indian papers. They were like what you show in this video. There were pages and pages of them. It was like the classifieds. Finally, my neighbors are Indian. They actually arranged a marriage for their son, who was born in the US. They had to do it twice because the first one did not work out. He ended up with a very beautiful woman from India who had a master's degree in engineering, and I believe has since gotten her PhD.
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  2010. The USS Enterprise just a testbed? I always say that I miss the Cold War. I told a colleague of mine that. My reason was that I got to do a lot of interesting, cutting-edge research with unlimited budgets. He retorted that he missed the Cold War as well because he got to kill people. He was a F-4 pilot on the Enterprise flying missions over Vietnam. You might want to update your information.
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  2011.  @JohnJaneson  That is a great point. The business risks in China have become very severe. Xi is moving to expand the state-owned portion of the economy. So far, he has not, to my knowledge, taken over any foreign owned companies, but there is no guarantee that he won't. Don't forget that foreign companies, to set up operations in China must partner with a local company and that the foreign company cannot, in most cases, own a majority stake.
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  2012. The soldier's experience mirrors that found in the Soviet/Russian military. This, of course, makes sense. As for those saying that the military is a mere extension of the CCP, I just have to say. DUH! If the people in China did not already know this, then the CCP has done a great job of keeping them ignorant.
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  2013. Copeland's claims about Dalio and China make perfect sense. In terms of China, the investment climate there has been poor for years now. You only have to look at Dalio's comments on the leadership inside China. If he really believed that, then he is stupid. I don't think he is stupid.
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  2014. Masterful. I have purchased the four volumes for my Kindle. I am almost embarrassed to say they cost me under $20 altogether. While I would love to get hardcover volumes, I am running out of room (in a large house).
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  2015. The US Senate is working on a resolution to characterize the use of nuclear weapon by Russia in Ukraine, as well as any incident at a nuclear power plant, as a NATO Article 5 event. This means that NATO will respond directly, not just with material support to Ukraine. So, they are listening.
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  2016. Mary Gallagher's comments probably have some merit, but I think they miss the point and show a lack of understanding of these totalitarian systems, at least the ones we have example of. There are two issues here. One explicit, one implicit. The significant totalitarian, centrally planned systems we have seen in the last hundred years are Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Communist China. All have five- or four-year plans. And yet all also had multiple companies in key sectors. For example, in aircraft, the Nazis had Messerschmidt and Focke-Wulfe among others. The Soviets had Mikoyan and Sukhoi among others. So, it is no surprise that China has lots of different, competing companies even with their tight central control. These companies are either outright state owned, or the state controls them. The issue is that even in totalitarian systems there is a realization that many, especially critical, industries require multiple sources. If one fails, there is still the other. This is a basic tenant of western, competitive economies, but it is just as true in centrally planned economies. The main difference in centrally planned economies is that the government gets to decide who plays and where the resources go. The issue with the Chinese is that they are really bad at all this. The misallocation of resources is what will cause their downfall, either by internal pressures, external pressures or both. One might ask why they are so bad at it. That is down to the implicit issue. It is one that is not talked about publicly very much, but I bet it is key at a lot of risk management analysis firms. That issue is corruption. In the three countries I mention the most important underlying factor was/is official corruption. These were/are kleptocracies at their heart. How do you think the ruling party in each case stick together? We ignore this aspect at our own peril.
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  2017. Not this again. This has been talked about and researched for decades, and yet deployment is minimal.
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  2018. Love the mask story. Thanks, Tony, for sharing. What this shows is that for any measure there is a countermeasure. This is true of facial recognition as well as for drones.
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  2019. I see online many issues with BYD cars. Their batteries are particularly problematic from what I have seen. Their self-driving features are also shown to be substandard when tested. As for all the technology, it is bunk. I have yet to ride in an EV where the technology is actually used. It was an add on pioneered by Tesla to help justify high prices at a low cost. A friend of mine put a "Tesla like" display in his older Cadillac. It cost $600, retail. Since basically all cars made in the last 10 of 15 years are fly by wire, one doesn't need an EV to have self-driving capabilities. Low levels of this technology were already present prior to EVs. Examples are self-parking and low speed automatic braking. I have a 2015 Cadillac which has the later (saved my bacon once already). The purpose of EVs is to lower carbon footprint. If EV makers were actually interested in that, they would produce efficient, basic EVs with much longer range. They are all starting from the high end and were supposed to work their way down. Consider Toyota. They started the other direction and were much more successful. In fact, there are several examples of this.
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  2020.  @bobwatson8754  Battery powered lawn tools. A hedge trimmer, leaf blower, and small chainsaw. They seem to be of good quality, so far.
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  2021.  @FOLIPE  The issue in Western Sahara seems to me to come down to ethnic groups. If the people, there had all been ethnic Moroccan we would not have this issue. Was Nigeria self-ruling before independence? Was there, prior to colonization, a country of Nigeria within the current borders? I am wondering sincerely. There have been lots of tensions along ethnic/tribal lines in the past, including separatist movements, and there are further tensions flaring today between the north and south. The situation in East Timor mentioned would argue that it is about the self determination of ethnic/sectarian groups. Examples abound around the world in former colonial territories.
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  2022. What the heck does that mean?
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  2023.  @luvitluvitbaby  That's silly. Read what you wrote originally. Your second statement is a total non sequitur. For another thing, you cannot be subject to a law that you do not acknowledge. Just think for a minute. There are lots of things that are legal in one country that are illegal in another. What I think you are really trying to get across is judicial independence. The example of criminal gangs is a security issue. Judicial independence is a structural issue.
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  2024. Still listening to Hodges? He was talking about Ukraine retaking Crimea not long ago.
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  2025.  @kevinmiller-ri4mo  A bit cynical, but probably true.
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  2026.  @oooTACooo  Very good point, and one of the major risk factors. This is the way of the CCP leadership. In fact, Mao's war with India in 1962 was precisely undertaken to solidify his position in the party, which was under threat. China won, but then mostly withdrew. We could see something on the Indian border instead of Taiwan. People in India actually expect that this is a strong possibility. It would serve the same purpose as the 1962 war and be less costly no matter which way it went.
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  2027. Whatever happened to global warming?
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  2028. What they need to do is to declare open season on drones in the border area. I am in Illinois, and they used to pay $25 for coyotes killed. The hunting season is still year-round with just about any weapon, but they took away the bounty. Now the coyotes are a problem. So, let people take out the drones and give them a small payment. Heck, many people in Texas would do it just for fun.
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  2029.  @H0LDENSUX  That's one way to look at it but misses the point.
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  2030. Since they are government entities perhaps they should be called "Super Duper Zombie".
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  2031. That housing data is, as far as I can tell, all lies. For one thing, the housing sector in China is not a market. It is government controlled, even to the level of discounts that can be offered. Look at statistics like the number of used homes listed, and the time it takes to sell them, if they can be sold. And consider that the statistics may well be all made up. Moody's risks getting caught up in problems if they rely on opaque data, which is known to be manipulated. If you are invested based on their data then you are already screwed. Just think back to 2007-2008.
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  2032. Ah, the weeds. I actually got a complaint from a neighbor. On the other hand, the grass grows like crazy where I am. It is old farmland, now a suburb. My solution to the weeds is Roundup. I learned about this from a farmer relative. Now it is in common use. Better living through chemistry. I love shouting out Roundup, with heavy emphasis on the first syllable. My sons and wife grew tired of it. Good luck with your gardening. I am terrible at it.
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  2033. So, why are we seeing moves to leave the EU in other countries? How about Germany? Is the EU doing well? Most of the UK's issues have little or nothing to do with Brexit. Most are self-inflicted. Most would be worse if the UK has remained in the EU. In addition, I have seen projections that the UK will overtake Germany as the largest economy in Europe by around 2030. The way Germany is going, it may be sooner.
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  2034. Scotland would be a basket case, for sure. A lot of their best people have left the country over the decades (kind of like Greece, where my ancestors came from) and you can see it in their economic performance. First thing that would happen is that they would become an economic failure. Then they would be rejected by the EU, which does not need another economic basket case, or another breakaway region. Then would come depopulation. Perhaps after that the English could reconquer it. Wouldn't that be fun.
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  2035. The characterization of Russia is way off. It took them 20 years to get their military to where it is today. The did that in an environment where they had access to western technology. They cannot do that again in 10 or 20 years. There is no scenario in which they can rebuild. Another aspect is demographics. I have seen figures showing that is the demographic that would normally have children. there are two men for every three women. They will not have the people to prosecute a war in ten or twenty years. They also are being isolated from the world economy and will not have the financial resources. Putin may not be an accountant, but if the money is not there it will not happen.
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  2036. Love Senator Kennedy! Love his accent (and I am not a Southerner) and love his commitment to our country. Keep it up Senator!!
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  2037. That was my first thought.
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  2038. This mania with GDP growth is ruinous for the Chinese economy. It also is not helping the Chinese people. A while ago I saw an article in the WSJ, I think, analyzing a southwestern US state. Rather than pushing policies to juice up the GDP figures it emphasized policies that were more business friendly. Their GDP growth was not so hot compared to nearby states, but workers' salaries and overall employment were much improved. Mr. Pettis would find this a good thing. I bought on Kindle the book he coauthored called "Trade Wars are Class Wars" but have not had a chance to read it yet. I need to get on that. GDP, and its growth, has become a tool used more by the political classes than the financial analysts lately. One reason is that governments like China have started to manipulate it. GDP as a measure of the real economy really only works as an indicator if the government is not directly involved in making large scale decisions about investments. Otherwise using it to compare countries is useless. It is also a very crude measure. This is another example of how economic models are specific to policy systems. The issues in China that western companies are now experiencing could have been avoided if the financial wizards had been paying attention. When the CCP was basically allowing a more open system to develop, there was one model, closer to the western model, that could work. As Xi started making large policy shifts and began restricting private enterprise and information, these models should have changed. The Jack Ma situation alone should have forced a reassessment. By the way, the WSJ has an article today about the CCP expanding the state-secrets law, as they put it, now covers "work secrets" for government and party bodies. The actual details have not yet been released. The screws are tightening. The issue of political economy analysis not only applies to China. Japan is another example. Their corporate and financial systems are different from the traditional west. It is much more corporatist and statist. That goes a long way toward explaining their issues over the last 30 years. Korea's is much closer to the Japanese model. India has some major differences and those need to be taken into account as the west engages more heavily with them.
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  2039. What a stupid premise. The Afghan situation is not at all an analog for Ukraine. The fact that this is brought up by "some analysts" shows that WiON is listening to the wrong analysts. The Afghan is more similar to the Vietnam situation.
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  2040. The quote at about 19:17 shows some real ignorance. I am referring to the phrase "Beijing is pursuing a 21-century vision...". The rest of the quote is pure European colonialism starting in the 15th century or so. The world order that allowed China's rise was created by the US and is an anomaly of history. Only the US, with its inherent advantages, could have, after a devastating world war, created such an order. China does not have the resources to do this, and never has.
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  2041.  @albertcheng1168  Well, that's one way to look at it. But you can't separate that from security and economic concerns.
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  2042.  @Martincic2010  Well, I am not in Europe for one thing. As for pipelines to China, these will take years. In Xi's last visit to Russia, Putin did not obtain support for another pipeline. China is running out of money. Russia has none. As for buying from diesel from India, that is brilliant on the part of the Europeans (and Indians). The price India pays for Russian oil is, at best, break even for the Russians, and perhaps is sold at a loss. This continued trade helps keep world oil prices down. India makes the profit from the sale of the diesel, and none of that goes back to Russia. As for all of this leading to power shifts in Europe, these were happening anyway, and it is not related to the war. The big issue in the EU is immigration. The secondary issue is the crazy "green" policies. You label the opposition as "extremist", but they are representing people's concerns which the established parties are ignoring. That is how politics works. Get used to it.
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  2043. I like when the guy in the sunglasses (Terry) talked about what he read. I especially like it when he mentioned the Book of Revelation. That is my favorite book in the Bible. A lot of the symbolism has roots back in the Ancient Greek mystery religions. Being of Greek descent I was always interested in the Greek classics. I also got into Jung (and Freud a little), among others, when I was a teenager living with a woman who turned out to be schizophrenic. That was a trip. I first read Revelation almost half a century ago. My brother gave me an album by Vangelis titled "666" based on the Book of Revelation. So, I put on the album, got high (it was the late 1970s after all; I don't even drink alcohol now) and read the book through in one sitting. It was magical. Actually, Terry's English is very good, and I like that he speaks it with an American, not a British, accent. Sounds very Mid-Atlantic. I am not anti-British by the way, I actually lived and worked there for a time. I just prefer the American accents, and we have lots of them. Some of those I don't like. Vita, just a question. In your linguistics teaching do you discuss accents?
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  2044. All the attributes of the Sarmat with respect to MIRVs have been common to ICBMs, and SLBMs, for decades now. Perhaps half a century.
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  2045. Krystal, how can you talk disparagingly about consumerism? How many dresses do you have? Almost never see the same twice.
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  2046. Don't hold your breath. You may pass out.
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  2047. Mark, this is very interesting. I personally always look for parallels in history. The placing of Nazi party members on the boards of companies, of which I was already well aware, brings a striking parallel to mind. This the parallel between today's CCP controlled China and Nazi Germany. The first thing to consider is the move by the current chairman of the CCP, Xi, toward a nationalist version of socialism. He calls it "socialism with Chinese characteristics". You are, of course, aware that Nazi is short for "National SOCIALIST German Workers' Party" (emphasis mine). The current mixed economy in China with State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and private capital is very much like the Nazi economy. Under Xi CCP officials have been placed on the boards of many private companies through what is referred to as "golden shares". Xi is also moving toward squeezing out private capital. China today is over 90% Han ethnicity. The CCP also heavily suppresses ethnic minorities even going to the point of building concentration camps. Xi often uses racist rhetoric to foment hatred of foreigners. Lately this has had tragic consequences. The repressive nature of the Chinese surveillance state is also well known and has grown under Xi. Another parallel is the movement of capital abroad. I have seen estimates that party officials have moved between $1T and $3T to offshore accounts. This money was obtained through corruption. Many of the officials have also moved many of their family members abroad. It may not be a coordinated plot as in Nazi Germany, but then again, it may. I am now seeing credible, but unproven, speculations that Xi is losing power in China. Perhaps, after a change of regime, this capital will flow back into China. Who knows. There are also lots of western financial institutions and leaders who, until very recently, were "bullish" on China even as the fundamentals were turning sour. Many have shifted course only recently. Thanks for another interesting and insightful video.
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  2048. Calvin, if you hadn't heard, mail-in voting drop boxes have just been invalidated in Wisconsin, one of the swing states. I was an election judge for several years in Illinois. The idea of mail in voting on a mass scale is appalling to me. You must understand that I voted by mail, from the UK, when I lived there. That is legitimate. This mass mail-in voting is not.
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  2049. Interesting, although I have been following Lei for a little while and China for a long time, so I have heard all of this. This interview brings it all together, though, in one place. As for war, although Taiwan is the best prize for Xi, and the focus or his rhetoric, there is another option for him. It also follows the path Mao took. China could invade India along the LAC. Mao did it in 1962, successfully, to cement his power. Then he withdrew. Xi could do a similar thing. It is so much easier than an amphibious assault. China has been building up its troops there, and frankly the Indian military and media are assuming it is going to happen, perhaps soon. It is a hot topic in India. That would also not involve the US. India does not feel it needs direct military help to prevail this time I tend to agree. So, watch the south. One other thing to consider is the Russian situation. If Russia does indeed fall apart, China has historical claims to lots of territory in the Russian far east. Taking territory there could indeed solve a number of problems for China. So, watch the north as well. Either the south or north would be much easier options for China to achieve something.
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  2050. Great point. What irks me is that there is all this talk about the "global south". As you have said in your books (I have read them all), those countries, depending on how bad things get, may end up being colonies again. This may be economic, or literal. It doesn't matter what form it takes. What matters, and has always mattered, is economic and technological power, not population or land area, Frankly, the "global south", and the non-aligned movement are both a joke.
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  2051. Your claim at the beginning is incredible. How do you know that? Is there some verified reporting that this was the case?
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  2052. A lot of the cost to develop these homes in China is money paid to the local government for land use rights. I think they are in deep trouble here. There are no good solutions. This is just another step back to the Mao era. Bishop's comments, as well as what I assume are Tony's own at the end of the segment, strike me as very correct. This is a quagmire. The CCP is stuck trying to keep elements of a capitalist system while really being a hard-core Marxist-Leninist party. The contradictions are just too great. They need to pick one path or another. This muddle in the middle is bound to fail.
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  2053. I was a Boy Scout usher at Nixon's first inauguration. We had to wear our uniform, so if you didn't have an official Boy Scout jacket (and none of us did), then it was just the uniform. So, we had lots of layers underneath. It was still cold.
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  2054. At about 8:00 Peter says I don't know whether Netanyahu knows what he is doing. Who is Peter to even say that? Does he have any idea of Netanyahu's experience, past actions and accomplishments? It's not like Netanyahu is an unknown quantity. It's like he is talking about someone who just came off the streets into the role of PM. If he doesn't "know" if someone like Netanyahu is capable, then he is either singularly uninformed, or just plain disingenuous. The issue at hand aside, this level of reasoning and rhetoric is very disappointing, especially in Peter's case, given his background. I guess I should expect it. He has a world view and is unwilling to see other points of view or to reasonably analyze actual situations. I say this as someone who has followed his work in the past, although less and less so over time. He has fallen into the trap of being a bit of a shill for his point of view. I guess channels like this have him on because they know what they will get.
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  2055. If she really believes that, then we are in big trouble. Can't wait till the mid-terms.
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  2056. Running an ad with her stances on issues is good. Better would be the Kamala laugh track I saw on Gutfeld a few days ago. Just run that on YouTube, TV and anywhere else one can think of. If you think Trump is sort of "different", well, Kamala is in a whole other league.
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  2057. You Brits are so off the rails now. Look at your current leader and those of the last ten years or so. In addition, have you ever listened to Kamala Harris? Of course not. It is not worth the time and effort.
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  2058. Let's see. Apple is experiencing a slowdown in China and lowering its prices. Tesla is lowering prices in China. So, where is this great market in China?
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  2059.  @laurieleroy8298  Well, I have traveled extensively. I was a little strong in my statement before. I am sure there are Indians in Russia, but I would be surprised if the numbers matched what we see in the US. I would love to see figures on that. India is a lot like China. There are massive numbers of Chinese who have emigrated all over the world. I had an investor who had a successful company in Chicago. He was ethnic Chinese, but his parents had lived in the Caribbean. Even Ghamdi made his name initially in South Africa.
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  2060. That phrase "low investment efficiency" holds the key. A big part of the "low efficiency" is due to corruption. I have read that on many projects that by the time one gets to the companies actually doing the work over 50% of the funds have "disappeared". Just think of how much that is. This is on top of the lack of rationality of the planning process. HSR is the headline example, although not the only one by a long shot. The puzzling thing is that the centrally planned economy is supposed to be more "efficient" according to communist doctrine. Of course, we have multiple examples of why this is not the case outside of China.
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  2061.  @eyemc2450  Thanks for responding. I was beginning to think it was just me.
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  2062. @@UncleSam7.62 Where have we heard that before?
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  2063. I agree, but I have one problem with the whole conversation. They have an ambition, but they don't have the means. The same is true of China.
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  2064. NATO has already lasted longer than the Soviet Union did.
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  2065. What is interesting about the idea of replacing Einstein's GR based on this speculative issue/paper is that this is the one area where there is an indication that Einstein is wrong. On this channel, and on many other channels, as well as papers I have seen copious examples where Einstein has been proven correct.
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  2066. The issue of there being "too many" EV car companies is puzzling to me. If you look at the automotive industry in the US and Europe, at the beginning there were a massive number of companies. If you look at the Big Three auto companies in the US, they were each made up of several brands. These had been independent companies that were merged over time. It should be noted that GM, until recently, had eight "brands", four of which they have now shut down. Ford has shut down one of their three brands. On top of all that, there were a plethora of companies that did not make it. So, what is happening in China is nothing new. The point is that this is the norm in capitalist countries. In the beginning of any new technology there are many, many competitors. Over time this number gets winnowed down, either through mergers or bankruptcy. Let's look at the history beyond automobiles. Go back to the age of steam. There were many locomotive manufacturers. Even in the diesel era, there were many at the beginning. Now there are two (talking about the US here). In the mainframe computing era, we all know about IBM. But they were not always the leader. There used to be a joke about IBM and the seven dwarfs. Full disclosure here, I worked for IBM and two of the seven dwarfs (Univac and GE). People may have forgotten about the PC clones. After IBM came out with the PC, there were many, many clone vendors. IBM had made the mistake of using all off the shelf components, and thus opened themselves up to this. Today there are still clone companies, but not nearly as many as at the beginning. In fact, IBM is out of the business. In database software there were several RDBMS vendors at the beginning. There are really only a couple of major commercial ones left (Oracle and Microsoft) and a bunch of "open source" options. Full disclosure here, again, I worked for Oracle. Even looking at the tech world we have today, and major platforms such as search and social networks, the current incumbents are not the first movers in these fields and there were lots more options and competitors early on. The only issue in China is the source of capital. In the US, and most of the west, it is private money, and people either made it big or lost a lot. The normal ebb and flow. The problem in China is the potential misallocation of public funds. But we have to remember that China is a communist country, and all funds are really owned by the government. Finance is a tool of the state. Xi reminds us of that.
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  2067. MTG is seen as a clown in most of the US. There are at least 350 (of 435) votes in the US House of Representatives that support Ukraine. I think that the percentage may be higher in the Senate. The US is a democracy. Everyone has a voice, even those on the fringe.
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  2068. When Russia goes into general mobilization, that is when the government falls. That is why they have not done it until now. They do not have the equipment, and their industrial base to produce it is not there. They also need parts that they have, in the past, sourced from the West. That is also the point where all the propaganda falls apart.
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  2069. While I abhor the Russian actions in Ukraine, the Olympics question is thorny one. The original Olympics in Ancient Greece were held even in times of war. The idea was that hostilities would stop for the duration of the games. Perhaps this should be a requirement of participation in the modern games.
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  2070. This idea of working abroad is very common. Especially in the 1980s and 1990s, there were lots of Brits who worked in the Middle East. They could pocket lots of money because of the subsidies they received and the opportunities they had. They often spent on expensive clothes and cars and were considered "brash" by the people back in the UK. I personally worked abroad for an American company. The subsidy did indeed cover all my housing costs and normal living costs. Thus I could bank most of my normal paycheck. I was also in a position to make bonuses, etc. This is not uncommon indeed. Of course, in the west you don't have the issue of state owned enterprises muddying up the situation.
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  2071. This is the reason why having government or political people. or people who are not educated in statistics, run an economy. Using a single statistic to infer a trend is malpractice. Plain and simple (and the nicest way I can put it). Finance and economics are all dependent on modeling. A model, of an economy, stock or sector, is not determined by one measurement. So, when people react to a single data point, I tend to see it as a sign of, what? For example, take the comment about "rising unemployment" in the US. In Barron's (affiliated with the US based Wall Street Journal) today we have the following headline: "Stock Market News: Dow Rises 500 Points The S&P 500 and Nasdaq are also gaining after better-than-expected jobless claims data." So, is unemployment rising. This indicates it is not. Unemployment rose, indeed, but is it a trend? We don't have enough data to make that claim. Anyone who claims they can predict from one data point is either a charlatan or woefully uninformed. This is especially true of the comments out of China on trade. It is either a deflection or a manipulation. You may wonder about the stock market moves from these individual statistics. That is actually reasonable. Trading stocks is a betting activity. A very sophisticated betting activity, but a bet, nonetheless. The active money manager needs to stay ahead of the trend to be successful. The traders are in the last few days are betting that there might be a downturn in stocks, so they get out. The first thing you have to know is that most of them selling are making lots of money, even as current stock prices fall. Most stocks are not bought at the latest price. Most large investors have taken their positions over time, and even in times of downturn make money, if they act fast enough. They are just changing their stocks for cash, thereby preserving their gains and setting themselves up to take advantage of the next opportunity. That may well entail buying the stocks they just sold, only now at a lower price. For example, look at Berkshire Hathaway. They have a well-defined investment strategy and don't see investments that fit the strategy. They have been selling various stocks and have accumulated a cash hoard of $277 billion. Some of that, by the way, they made in selling large positions in China, and some in Apple. Things are much more complicated than the headline numbers indicate. As you can see, this is a pet peeve of mine. I have seen lots of these situations, many much worse. I have a great story about the 1987 crash many people are bringing up as an example of what we are seeing today.
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  2072. Michael, I know you are taking a position to promote the discussion, but most of the things you say about the effect of drugs (insurance costs, etc.) is true for obesity, for example. In a world where we rely on insurance and government redistribution programs, personal behavior is everyone's business. So, if you allow obesity, which is much more of a cost to society than drugs, you have to allow drugs. At least if you want to be consistent.
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  2073.  @w1ngnuts  I totally agree with you. I value Peter's general analysis, but a lot of the details are not so strong. To your list I would add military and industrial supply chains. You might notice that he sometimes talks to intelligence and military groups. He also admits that they often don't agree with him. I have been aware of the river issues in south and southeast Asia for a while. It is not something that there is no information on. This is going to be, as you point out, a flashpoint in the not too distant future. Hopefully, it won't be a nuclear flash.
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  2074. Tony, have you heard the old quip about history. It doesn't repeat, it rhymes. I think we are seeing something similar in the comparison between China today and Japan from the 1990s. One of the aspects of the two situations is demographic decline, as stated. As most people know, the decline in China was artificial, and actually quite disgusting. On top of that, China has a repressive political system paired with traditions that are old and outdated. So, after the one child policy we have a marriage crisis, which may be as impactful. Don't forget, China socially is still in a traditional peasant mode. It has not evolved. Just to give some context, look at the "requirements" Chinese have for marriage. It sounds like something I have familial experience of. My grandparents were from a rural area in Greece. They emigrated to the US at the beginning of the last century. The men did first. They established themselves then sent back for wives, who were much younger. Their children would get married and live in rented apartments and then get a house when their children were on the way. Maybe when the second was coming. They didn't need a fancy house and fancy car to get married. They had evolved. This is not what I am seeing in China.
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  2075. I saw that retired US General Petraeus has been calling for ATACMS missile to be sent to Ukraine. This is significant since he has good standing in that community.
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  2076. The system of having different schools, vocational and general education (college preparatory) is also the case in European countries like Germany. Of course, the implementation is a lot better.
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  2077. The reaction of the second speaker to the first speaker is truly revealing. The Chinese truly know nothing about free speech. The first speaker's remote may be inappropriate as far as the second speaker is concerned. But the fist speaker is not an official and is not expressing government policy. So, the second speaker attacks the first speaker for making "inappropriate" remarks. He does not engage with the content of what the first speaker said. This is what is really "inappropriate". In any kind of debate on issues this is not useful. We call it an ad homonym argument. Of course, we run into this in social media all the time, whether it is in China or in the west. As to the content, if China did send troops to Russia, then China would be over. Done! We are talking about deindustrialization and mass starvation, and that is not an exaggeration.
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  2078. The New Statesman comment highlights one thing very well. China violates all those principles laid out in their own constitution. I love the back and forth conversation at the end. When the Chinese diplomat said, in answer to the question about who started the war, that it was for historians to decide it reminded me of something else. I am referring to the question "what is a woman?". When the latest Supreme Court nominee said she could not answer the question because she was not a biologist. It just means you know that if you follow the party line your answer will be wrong, so you sidestep the issue. Priceless.
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  2079. Listening to you talk about the issues going on between the various private armies and the government, I was reminded of the situation in the US in the 1920s and 1930s with the criminal gangs. If you want to understand what is going on, that is the thing to study.
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  2080. What was the government of France like at that time? They did it for geopolitical reasons, not out of some real sympathy with the colonists' goals of freedom. In fact, the French had their revolution six years later which overthrew the government that supported the Americans.
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  2081.  @nfuryboss  Very well put. One thing you have remember is that China never ruled, or was going to, rule the world. They had this thought because they were somewhat ignorant of the rest of the world. The last time they projected power beyond Asia was in the 15th century. From then on, it was a bunch of small European powers that held sway, over Chinese external affairs as well as that of most of the rest of the world.
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  2082. The figures I have seen show nine times more people die of cold than of heat. So, if heat deaths triple and cold death half, 50% more people will still die of cold.
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  2083. Dave, don't keep saying we don't want people to die. We all die. And most of those deaths are from health problems caused by lifestyle choices that can shorten life. In the final analysis, we don't really seem to care.
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  2084.  @jaketwigg1065  I just finished his latest book and thought it was good. He gives a lot of detail about specific products and situations.
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  2085.  @axlslak  What do you mean by "IT guy"? I don't know what you are getting at. The Roman case is interesting. Many people adopted Roman customs to get ahead, and they did. In addition, a lot of people in the Empire who later rose to prominence were not of Roman ethnicity, but they adopted the Roman customs. In the case of Russia, they actively displace people with ethnic Russians. China is doing something similar in Xi'an.
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  2086.  @FlatDerrick  No, this was in the early 2000s. There had been a spate of kidnappings of executives leaving the airport. That is what I was told by our security (which was very good and extensive).
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  2087. Good analysis. Great statement at the end. Heck, Stalin wasn't even Russian. He was Georgian.
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  2088. I find it interesting that you feel the need to quote a Research Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace about the importance of refineries and the fact that cars, trucks, tanks. etc. do not run on crude oil. Everyone knows that. It is common knowledge. I find it even more incredible that the Research Fellow has to say that.
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  2089. When you show home price data are you talking about the listed price or the actual sale price? This is important. In the US we don't look at the listing price that much. In the US we have access to actual sale prices, in pretty much real-time for real estate. Setting prices is more an art than science. Do you list high and then either get a per unit premium with a smaller volume or offer significant discounts to increase volume. Alternatively, one can list low and make a profit on volume. In any case, what matters is the actual price paid. In relation to listing price sometimes one will pay less and at other times more. Right now, because of the smaller number of homes available, sellers are receiving more than their listing price in many cases.
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  2090.  @EBZ-z5n  Compared to China, yes. There are, of course, issues in the US, but they are not an integral part of government policy. Don't forget, the government and the military are subordinate to the CCP, not the country. These are not the same thing. The CCP is not elected. It is a membership organization and determines who its members are based on its own criteria. The CCP has 90M members out of a population of 1.4B, which is 6.4% of the population. Frankly, it is basically an oligarchy.
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  2091.  @jaydee6268  Would those be the gold painted lead ones?
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  2092.  @gtw4546  Love it. From tofu dreg buildings and infrastructure projects to tofu gold. That would be so appropriate.
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  2093. The 19nm and above technology is "primitive" or old but is also very useful. it is generally very low power, and lower speed. That is, of course, the right fit for many applications, especially in the IoT. It will also be the easiest and cheapest to implement elsewhere. Of course, to complain about US subsidies is just ludicrous. What about the programs the Chinese have used to try and displace the US and others. We in the west are lucky that there is such rampant corruption in these programs. Just look at all the high level officials involved that have been arrested. They spent billions on nothing.
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  2094. Actually you have only part of the story of like on Twitter. It is also a way to mark a tweet one is interested in so that one can go back to it later more easily. This is how I used it when I used Twitter. Of course, I no longer look at Twitter because it has become such a piece of crap.
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  2095. Concentrating on percentage changes is basically meaningless. For one thing, percentage changes are very sensitive to where you measure from. What is more important is the absolute level. Just to give an example, if you bought a stock, or some commodity, say ten years ago, you may have made massive gains, then lost money, on paper. The relevant measure is the current value compared to what was originally paid. So, if I spent $1000 on a stock, the it went up to $3000 and then dropped to $2000, I did would not lose $1000. I gained $1000. If you don't understand that, talk to the tax man, he will tell you. So, I would be much more interested in comparing the actual volume of trade before the pandemic to the current level than to a year in which pandemic measures were in full operation. Of course, there would also have to be adjustments made for inflation and currency fluctuations. Taking the nominal value is of little value in an inflationary period.
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  2096. There is a need for energy. The most cost-effective fuels are coal and natural gas. These will not go down, no matter what the climate change alarmists say. As more electric vehicles are sold, the demand for electricity will climb. The only way to do this quickly is to build coal and gas plants. In the long run we need nuclear plants to satisfy this demand. Until then, it will be coal and gas.
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  2097. I recall reading somewhere that YouTube was created as a place to exchange cat videos.
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  2098. Kissinger was indeed a brilliant man and a controversial figure. You are correct that he was not a China expert. In fact, the opening to China was not primarily concerned with China, but with the Soviet Union. China, for Kissinger and Nixon, was a counterweight to the Soviets. Opening to China also had the effect of splitting the Communist bloc. One does have to take anything he said with a grain of salt since he started his consulting firm. It was one of those known as a K Street firm, referring to the street in Washington, DC (my hometown) where many of them were located. My first full time job was with an analytical K Street firm which had moved to the suburbs. Early in this millennium I had some peripheral dealings with his firm. These firms make their money from lobbying and of course any stance they take is influenced by the power structure and must be taken as potentially (probably) biased. This is also true of pronouncements of financial firms and their stances on China.
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  2099. Tukhachevsky's reason for hating Jews (about 3:50) exactly echoes the first theorist of German National Socialism, Rudolf Jung. Striking.
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  2100. Dedicated to "global security"? What security? Perhaps you should call it "global conflict". Just saying.
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  2101. Sadly, this may indeed be the prelude to a war. The 1962 war was initiated by Mao to solidify his position within China, which at that time was threatened. Xi is in a very similar position which is why he has been talking up war against Taiwan. On the other hand, he builds up forces on the Indian border. That war would be "simpler" for Xi, but I still think India would win. Xi might have a different take on his prospects there. That is the danger.
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  2102.  @xinyangli8505  Well, I know why it is named "New" Delhi. I am not sure why that is relevant here. Please let me know. I am genuinely curious.
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  2103. On the iPhone front, the Chinese are totally clueless. Don't they recall the celebrated situation several years ago when the US Government wanted Apple to unlock an iPhone which was suspected of having information related to a domestic terrorist attack. Apple refused. In the end, a third party had to be used to break into the phone. In the US data privacy is closely guarded and the government does not have the automatic right to violate it. This situation in China is completely the opposite. As for Tesla, China has already taken the actions they are upset at the US for considering. So much for rationality in the CCP discourse Of course, when you hear the term "resolutely" used in any of their pronouncements you know you are listening to Mao era claptrap.
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  2104. Two things. First, we are seeing diplomacy in real time. This is not what usually happens. Just look at the headlines in this channel over the last day or two on this issue. Second, General Keane talks about Ukraine's rights because it is a sovereign nation. When has that ever been the case? Nations are not individuals. They have the right to sovereignty only if they can defend it, either through their own efforts or through alliances. This has been true throughout history. I am very disappointed with the General.
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  2105.  @billpetersen298  It is built into their ideology, and Ideology is everything to Xi.
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  2106. Oh my god, who cares. I am disappointed with GBNews, which I really like.
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  2107. With superior airpower and weapons on the ground, a much smaller force can overcome a massive army. Look at Iraq. They had one of the three or four largest armies in the world. They had a decade of combat experience. In the first Gulf War the West assembled 500K or so troops and forced the Iraqis out of Kuwait and occupied a good bit of Iraqi territory. This was done in about three days. In the second Guld War about 160K US troops, plus some coalition partners, took over the whole country in about two weeks. Russia could easily overcome Ukraine.
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  2108. Trump was the first president to act on the IP theft issue. Others have complained about it. I have seen its effects up close (as a consultant). This is one of the most egregious problems the world has with China, along with the related problem of counterfeits. The EU has recently begun talking about requiring Chines companies locating in the EU to share technology. It seems that the world is starting to treat China the way China treats the rest of the world and China doesn't like it. Frankly, there is little that China has really led in for well over a century. They generally copy and steal.
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  2109.  @nfuryboss  Very well put! Now the following is just my understanding from online sources from some westerners who lived in China for a while. The idea is that a lot of the homes that were bought as investment properties, especially in "ghost" cities were left unfinished because of feng shui. The idea is that it would make them more valuable since the new purchaser, assuming they were to live there, would outfit it to their liking and none of the original owner's qi would interfere.
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  2110. The facts known so far are that there has been no animal host identified. In previous outbreaks, the host was identified in a matter of months. It has been over a year. Considering that there were candidate hosts from the start, this is a major clue. In addition, wet markets operate all over East and Southeast Asia. I have a friend who travels extensively over that region, and he has been to these. That they have been operating for a long time without such issues in another potential indicator.
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  2111.  deliaengelbrecht4658  Yes, and it is also an issue of the quality of the credentials. India has millions of degreed professionals, but very few of their universities would pass accreditation in the west. So, the actual number of qualified professionals is fairly low.
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  2112. How do you prepare for a nuclear attack, the interviewer asks? I lived through the depths of the cold war. The answer is: duck and cover. Oh, and have lots of canned food and ammunition.
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  2113. Gifts and toys for kids are mostly wasted. When I walk around the lake behind my house, part of the path is gravel. I will often see kids playing in the gravel. I always say to the parents, why do we buy them toys. At a minimum we can buy them far fewer gifts. The wise men did not smother Jesus with gifts. They each gave one.
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  2114. I was and Episcopal (when in the US) and an Anglican (when living in the UK). We were in Winchester and went to St. Cross (the parish of St. Faiths), founded by Henri du Blois in about 1100. The vicar there was a wonderful man, and we were very involved in the church. The last rector (that's what we call a vicar here) at the church I went to in the US was a black woman. She was from the inner city of Chicago. She ended up as the rector of a very white, conservative congregation in the suburbs. Frankly, she was also very conservative. I really loved and respected her. We were together at a diocesan council, electing a new bishop, and it was very interesting to see her conservative views in that context. I do agree that the Anglican/Episcopal church in the UK and US have become too political and left wing. An interesting phenomenon in the US is the rise of Anglicanism in the US with bishops consecrated by Anglican bishops from Africa, who tend to be more conservative.
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  2115. A roller delayed "gas" blowback operation? Do you have any idea of what you are talking about? Roller delayed actions do not have any type of gas system. It's in the name of the mechanism. This is true of the CETME-L and all CETME rifles, as well as the H&K G3.
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  2116. You have to remember that there is a lot of sympathy for Ireland in the US. I even remember, in the 1970s, meeting provos on the streets of Washington, DC. After WWII it was the US pushing the UK to dismantle its colonial empire. In fact, it was that colonial empire that was one of the reasons for US reluctance to get involved in both world wars. While Rosevelt was a big supporter of the UK, he had to pull the country kicking and screaming into following him.
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  2117. WOW! Same story as gallium arsenide. Faster switching times, early adoption by the military (involved in some of those) and hard to work with. In the meantime, silicon improved fast and overtook gallium arsenide because of its lower cost and larger scale. I recall once a relative of mine asking about a stock tip in a gallium arsenide company. I told him the story I have just related, and he did not invest. Good thing, since that company went under not long after. Gallium arsenide may well have a niche place in the industry, but I expect that is all.
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  2118. China's right to economic development? What right? Where is it written? I know you mention this to show what the Chinese are writing, but I can't help but react. I say bring on Cold War 2. I miss the Cold War. I got to do a lot of interesting research with unlimited budgets. I told this to a colleague once and he retorted that he missed the Cold War too because he got to kill people. He was a Phantom jet pilot based on the USS Enterprise. Ah, those were the days. Seriously, though, China is not essential. It has not evolved beyond the developing economy stage and low-end manufacturing. The fact that even a lot of Chinese companies are moving manufacturing out of China is a telling sign. Compare China with Japan. Japanese brands are well respected around the world. There are some Chinese brands that are reasonable, but they do not use their Chinese names. Ever wonder why? Another way to look at how inessential China is, consider how it was viewed during the Cold War. One satirical magazine would depict world maps with China being just plain white with no text. It was referred to as the "great big empty spot". This was not inaccurate.
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  2119. Pettis is truly a genius. I am impressed that a professor would recognize that the models we were applying to China (and in lots of other cases over time) were not valid. I have been saying this for a while. I have also seen financial analysts who realized this a while back. What concerns me is that there are plenty who have not come to this realization, and many of those are managing massive amounts of money or making decisions at high levels of government. They seem to go with the inappropriate model and then wait for a breakdown to change course. Not impressive.
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  2120. On the electricity front I saw recently that Gretta Thunberg was calling for Germany not to close down their nuclear plants. Just think of that. The alternative in Germany is to go back to coal, and theirs is the dirtiest.
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  2121.  @john-or9cf  Well, I don't think AI is the answer to the fusion issue. The real problem is an engineering and materials science one. Even just getting to break even fusion is not enough. You then need to be able to sustain it, for a very long time. AI only helps with the control problem. As for NVIDIA, you may be right there.
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  2122. It is more likely than not that the US, and Japan will defend Taiwan. As for war gaming the situation, this is something that militaries have done for at least 100 years. The Germans used this in WWII extensively. The US has simulators that go from battalion level up to theatre level. Actually, there are also strategic simulations. I have worked on some of those. The fact that a think tank has done this and published it is interesting. The CSIS is in Washington, DC. I was born there and used to walk by their office all the time. They of course get some funding from the government. Another scenario, that could play out, is for India to attack China along the LAC, liberate Tibet and take back territory China has taken.
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  2123. Love Lubyana. I was there in the early 1970s when it was still part of communist Yugoslavia. I had just escaped Greece after the Invasion of Cyprus and the fall of the junta. It was a wild time. I was travailing with a German woman I had met on an an island in the Cyclades. We were on our way to Trieste where we learned about the junta's fall. The days in Athens before we left were wild and somewhat of a massive orgy. It was a strange time for a teenager from the US.
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  2124. Tony, congrats! Frankly, you should have many more subscribers. Your content is great, and this is a massively important issue area. Thank you for all you do and keep up the good work. By the way, I did mention on another channel that I watched that channel and then one on China with my morning coffee and cigar. I was asked what the China channel was, and I mentioned this channel. The commentor responded he looked at your channel, found it interesting and thanked me. I hope, and believe, that he subscribed. Just one small step in what I hope will be continued growth of the channel.
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  2125. What I didn't hear was why the Ukrainians were willing to give up their nuclear weapons. One of the major reasons was cost. Think back to the time those agreements were made. While countries that came out of the breakup of the Soviet Union kept the military equipment that was on their soil, they did not get the budget necessary to maintain them. In the Soviet Union, that budget came from the central government. This issue was also present in conventional arms, especially in Ukraine. I recall seeing articles and videos from the 2014 period where there was a large tank facility with lots of tanks. The tanks were stored there but had not been maintained because of funding issues. The cost to repair and update them was prohibitive. Also, at that time the world was welcoming the new countries from the defunct Soviet Union, including the Russian Federation, into the international fold. The breakup was very peaceful as these things go. There was lots of optimism. With different leadership in the Kremlin things could have turned out much differently.
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  2126. On the Russian ethnicity front, I have heard, and I think it was Zeihan, that the Russian ethnicity will be a minority in the Russian Federation in the not-too-distant future. Given their demographics before the war this was true. Now, with the war, that will be accelerated. Oh, by the way, get better soon. I enjoy your content.
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  2127. Actually, in the 1980s I was working on a large Army project. We went to Boston, to MIT, and did indeed see a hologram projected into thin air. It was a computer image, not a holographic plate, that was then processed through a massively parallel computer. This then controlled a laser beam that went around on a table with mirrors and lenses. It then reflected off a spinning multifaceted mirror spinning at the speed of sound. Finally it exited through a quartz crystal. Finally, there it was. A hologram in the middle of the room.
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  2128. A Lego enthusiast! Maybe a little old for that. Have you been to one of the LEGOLANDs? I have been to the original one in Billund, twice. Stunning!
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  2129.  @SixOhFive  I have to agree with you there. There are some other professional degrees (such as architecture) that have some relevance, but their demand is limited. In many cases, the schools offering these degrees are selective and limit the size of classes. In the liberal arts, there are few employment opportunities. We need some people in these fields, primarily as teachers. From a practitioner point of view, they are a total bust. The only successful ones are those that ones go on to get a law degree or an MBA. Again, with limited job opportunities.
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  2130.  @tuppenceworth5485  Such ignorance is staggering. The Chinese government at the time mandated that all exports could only be paid for in silver. It was not the British who decided to use silver. Your second point is also just plain wrong. I am trying to keep it clean here. Have you ever heard the term "legal tender"? Look it up. A shopkeeper has to accept that in exchange for goods. So, in the US, that is the dollar. If you walk into a shop in the US with euros or yen or yuan the shopkeeper can legally refuse to accept them. This same concept applies in those other countries. The reasons a shopkeeper would not want those other currencies are simple. For one thing the shopkeeper takes on exchange rate risk. I have worked in large corporation overseas. Even big companies have problems with that. If the payment is made in precious metals or some other commodity then the same issue holds. It would have to be voluntary on the shopkeeper's part. So, before putting your tuppence worth you might want to do some research.
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  2131. In the first story, this is a good example of the poor quality of Chinese goods. It is known, from places like Italy, which early on received a lot of test sets from China. The error rate was high. Well over 50%. The number of cases is also a statistic from China which should be discounted. In fact, they should be discounted from everywhere. If you are not testing everyone, or are not testing a statistically designed survey sample, then those numbers are meaningless. Do you know how many people who get the virus who show no symptoms, or only mild symptoms that could be something else. That number is very large. Most people I have met who had it had mild symptoms for a few days. One had bad symptoms but was not admitted to the hospital. I have only heard about two or three deaths, second hand.
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  2132. Rights are granted and guaranteed by the state. Unfortunately, the state in Russia is hostile to rights.
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  2133. Europe united? I think one country tried that in the last century. Another one in the century before.
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  2134.  @mikelisteral7863  Got to agree with you brother.
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  2135.  @soco13466  Exactly. In the Soviet Union there was an old saying: they pretend to pay us; we pretend to work. When I was a teenager, delivering papers for fixed pay, I once got a check from the Social Security Administration. The paper had been shorting me, and the SSA caught it. The authorities were making sure everyone got paid properly. Of course, this allowed them to fake their cut, but overall, that is best for the workers.
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  2136. Love Mahyar. Have been a follower for a while. What he says about making money to be able to do what he does is very interesting. People often complain about media being there to make money. This is stupid. Media, from the beginning, has been about making money. From pamphlets to newspapers to radio to TV, it has been about making money. If you don't make money, you will have a very short run. Making money means catering to, or developing, an audience. This is not something nefarious. It is filling a need or want. This is pure capitalism. You provide a good or service that people want to pay for and you make money doing it. When you stop providing what people want, you lose money. Just look at the MSM cable channels (I am in the US, so I will use those). CNN and MSNBC have lost well over half their audience. The peddle drivel and are losing more and more audience all the time. This is how it works.
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  2137. Hannity shows his lack of historical perspective when he talks about the FBI and CIA. They have not always been perceived well, by any means. Like any organization, they have their ups and downs. His question to Chaffetz is just sort of silly. And it is not only the FBI and CIA. What about the Supreme Court? We now have a court that abides by the Constitution, but prior to that we had decades of a Supreme Court that was activist and legislating from the bench. People matter. While some structural changes might help, it is the people running these organizations that matter.
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  2138. Not typical, like your last one, but very interesting.
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  2139. Using New York for any measure on a national basis is totally bogus. What percentage of the national population is in New York? Compare that to the larger cities in China. In addition, most metropolitan areas in the US have a larger portion of their population in the suburbs, and this trend continues apace. So, you really need to use the metropolitan area, not the official city. This is a unique feature of the US and political boundaries. Alos, for PPP to work, you have to take into account what you get for a unit of whatever you are paying for. That is a very complex computation, and the proponents of PPP have not done it.
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  2140. We have always had divisions in our politics. The difference now is that instead of both political parties having both "left" and "right" wings, the Democratics have become hard left. Look for some Democrat politicians to switch parties. I have already seen one example. It will be similar to what happened under Regan.
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  2141. The conventional idea that all conflicts end with diplomacy is patently wrong, and examples abound. WWII is the quintessential example. On the other end, the defeat of the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka, ended with all the rebels being jammed into an area the size of a football pitch and killed. Then there are the many times where diplomacy was tried, and one side just ignored it. For the US, Vietnam and Afghanistan are good examples.
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  2142. Many decades ago, while I was first at university (in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium) I became vegetarian, but not vegan. I did that because many of my friends were Indian Hindus. We did eat some cheese. About six years ago I went pescatarian, although I do not eat much seafood. I do eat some cheese and eggs, but am really thinking about giving up on the eggs. I make everything from scratch, except for some legume pasta (although I do make some of that myself). My health has much improved and I am getting back to where I was when I was first vegetarian. I will eat meat when I am out (which is not often) but more often eat fish at those times. I really enjoy making things from scratch and just winging it. There is no real need to eat processed foods.
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  2143. The EU is nothing but a protectionist cartel.
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  2144. At about 9:02 Tiffany says "...just threw in a banger..." in response to Patrick's mention of the bribes to Chinese officials and Thai prostitutes. Priceless. I don't expect that she gets the implications of her choice of words. I could be wrong though. Any thoughts, anyone?
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  2145. So, they are finally letting the market set prices. Wait, they are a bunch of commies, right? The whole problem with this is that market forces are supposed to influence the supply of a good or service. Using "market pricing" to clean up a massive supply imbalance is a very inefficient, and for China, painful process. Don't forget, it is not just the property companies that are impacted. It is also construction, materials, interior decoration and appliance firms that have in the past grown to service the inflated market. The whole banking and financial sector is deep into housing. We all know all this, right? What gets me going in the morning is reacting to a lot of the financial prognostications. Tony does us a great service by giving us a more inside look at the information coming out of China. The thing is that the predictive power of the monthly or quarterly figures is very low. Take just about any of the measures we see reported. The changes month on month are statistically insignificant. They will not help you predict the next month much less the next year. That is the nature of statistics. In statistics one is applying a model and computing the parameters to potentially make some prediction. I saw a great example just this morning in the US. Because of higher interest rates, etc. the projection was that the housing market in the US was going to crash. That was based on last month's data. Check out this headline from the US based Wall Street Journal. It reads "U.S. Home Sales Edged Up in July, Prices Still Near Record Highs". There is a subtitle that reads "Sales of previously owned homes rose 1.3% in July, ending a four-month streak of declines, as a recent drop in mortgage rates helped boost activity." Open the article and there is another subtitle that reads "Recent decline in mortgage rates helps boost activity, but it remains stuck at low levels". All of that is from tracking one number. Are you going to tell me what will happen next month, six months from now or next year based on that information? By the way, my neighbor sold his home in a very short time at a price that over 2.5 times what I paid about 25 years ago. The crux of the matter is that the financial and economist gurus are looking for that signal and that one set of statistics that will predict the future. The problem is that they don't have a model for this, and it is a multidimensional problem. It wouldn't be such a big deal except that these people are managing massive amounts of everyone's money, so it does matter.
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  2146. You use the term Asian NATO. Interestingly, NATO has been opening offices in Asia. NATO already has bilateral agreements with Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand. The heads of state or government are participating in annual NATO summits. Cold War II is coming. Containment of China is going to be a reality if China does not change course. It will go no better for them than the first Cold War.
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  2147. The agricultural practices of the CCP remind me of the Great Leap Forward. At least this time around there is the possibility of importing food, so famine should be averted. On the other hand, if China invades Taiwan they will be cut off from the rest of the world and deindustrialization and famine will quickly result.
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  2148. TIK, I just saw a video on the John Anderson channel where he had a discussion with Stephen Hicks titled "The Nazis & Nietzsche". In it he also mentions Marx and the influence Marx had on their socialism. At about 0:40 Hicks states that Goebbels loved Karl Marx. Just another indication that the Nazis were indeed socialists. Actually, I have read books making this point before discovering your channel. I commend you for pointing this out. In a contemporary context, Putin's Russia is very much a Nazi state.
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  2149. Larry, I thought you were a smart guy. She is not saying that she is the puppet of any of the people she mentioned, but only that she has been accused of so being. You are engaging in something I like to call "keywordism". Think about it. Listen to the senator.
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  2150. I was hired by a Silicon Valley firm in the early 1990s to go after three projects on the East Coast. One was FAA modernization. That's how out of date this stuff is.
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  2151. Wonderful interview, as usual. I watched this in two sessions, and in between I saw a video on Vlad Vexler's chat channel. He gave a long response to a viewer's question about what would have to be done for Russia to reform. At the end, you asked how we would change things in Russia going forward, nudging them in a more democratic direction. This is, frankly, silly. There are few if any examples of this happening, especially in large, strong, countries, without a complete breakdown. The studies of the transition into democracy are a bit of a sham when it comes to countries such as Russia, and China. If you look at history, you will see that these authoritarian states can only transition when they have suffered a catastrophic defeat, and then have a revolution. So, while the information is very illuminating regarding the inside workings of the Soviet/Russian system, I think I agree with Maria that things do not look great going forward.
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  2152. Varney does something that infuriates me. He asks about the trade deals, and when we are going to get them. He says they are promised but don't appear. What a load of crap. I generally like Varney, but this kind of question is sort of dumb (trying to keep it clean). There have been some trade deals, and we know there are negotiations going on. There is no real deadline. Even if some country fails to meet a deadline and the tariff goes up, if they come back and ask to negotiate and agree to America's terms, then the situation will change. That is all part of these types of negotiations. If the outside world were not desperate to do business with the US, they would just say eff off. Why do you think they haven't? The US totally has the upper hand here. What this is emblematic of is the MSM just repeating talking points. I see it here on Fox, and I see it in the Wall Street Journal. These are both outlets I have generally liked in the past, but I am rethinking that. They are no different from low information individuals. That they get paid for this is a travesty, and a waste of money.
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  2153. Merry Christmas Tony from Chicago. I am definitely along for the ride, and appreciate your work.
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  2154. Great episode, by the way. What you said at the end about, following the Bruce Jones book about the breakdown of the freedom of the seas is definitely going to come to pass. You should read Peter Zeihan. Especially his latest book, "The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization". For someone in your industry this should be required reading.
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  2155.  @bartscarstories  Very different. Actually, the time I am talking about is the late 1970s and early 1980s. Besides fixing the cars myself to get to work, I would sometimes borrow my brother's Triumph 1968 GT6 or my father's 1970 Oldsmobile Delta 88 (it was a third car he just kept around). My brother still has the GT6, and recently totally took it apart, restored it and put it back together. At one point my father offered to sell the Delta 88 to me for $25. I declined. Recall that this was just after the second oil shock and the Olds got just 10 MPG. I actually had room for it, but even making good money, it was just not practical.
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  2156. Wait a darn minute. I thought the Nazis were the Ukrainians. If you study it, you will see the Nazis were socialists. All socialists are collectivists. Remember that Nazi is short for NATIONAL SOCIALIST German Workers' Party (emphasis mine). During WWII one of the main differences between German socialism and Soviet Marxism-Leninism was the one was nationalist and one internationalist. In a lot of other ways, they were similar. These include things like concentration camps, called Gulags in the Soviet Union. Don't forget that the Nazi concentration camps were originally designed to hold political opponents and other undesirables, not specifically Jews. Expecting consistency from a Mafia run government is just plain silly.
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  2157. Vernon is great. Wish him well. The idea that parents cannot go to school boards and question what is being taught is un-American. Taxation without representation is what that amounts to. School boards are elected. The ability to question elected representatives is the bedrock of our system. The one thing I will point out is that people have to be careful of who they vote for, and hold them to account. If you vote purely along party lines you are an idiot!!! You need to understand what people stand for.
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  2158.  @Willywoowilson  Countries don't order cars, businesses do. We'll see how they sell. Just look at the actual market share even among EVs. The last figures I saw show China's share was minimal. There is also disturbing data that many EVs produced in China were manufactured, "sold" and have never been insured. In other words, they are sitting in a field or abandoned buildings. This is just to get the subsidies.
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  2159. Wow! Just $825 per month average starting salary. That is just under what I made in my first full-time job just under half a century ago. My oldest son made about nine times that much in his first full-time job and he had dropped out of school halfway through (as I did, but I later went back). No wonder they react as they do.
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  2160. With non-performing loans rates this high, these banks would be considered insolvent in the west.
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  2161. The belt and road initiative is crap. For one thing, using rail, or any land base transport, to replace seaborne transport is a stupid idea. This has been known since ancient times. Adam Smith went on about it in his writings. Rail costs at least three times as much as shipping. It also doesn't have the capacity. Just look at the Ukraine situation with their grain which was stuck at the Black Sea ports. Dedicating ALL their rail transport could only move, at most, 20% of what was sent out of the ports. This info comes from the people in Ukraine who ship the grain. The belt and road is also crap because of poor quality construction and massive corruption. It is already dying a slow death. I have read that up to 60% of the loans the Chinese have made for these projects are nonperforming. There is a reason the Silk Road, on which the belt and road initiative was modeled, is no more.
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  2162. A survey of 73 economists? Did they get 75 opinions? That is an old economist joke, by the way.
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  2163.  @jaydee6268  Brilliant. If you don't mind, I may use that one in the future.
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  2164.  @jaydee6268  Thanks. I am sure I will.
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  2165. Did a lot of work at the Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth in the late 70s and early 80s and then again in the early 90s. The mantra was Combined Arms Warfare. Mostly because of the things you discuss in your video. Great stuff. Love your work. Don't always agree, but that is rare. Keep it up!
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  2166. Your auto buying example is right on point. My mother-in-law was out to buy a new car. She was a good negotiator in general. The salesperson at the dealership actually told her that if she did not buy the car that day from him, the chance that she would be back later to buy were miniscule. She was also not under any type of pressure and had bought from the dealership before. So, she got a great deal. I have seen this in other cases. Her daughter was also good at such negotiating. I am not, at least for consumer purchases. On the other hand, in my professional life I am great at large multi-million-dollar negotiations with experiences working for large companies and for my own companies. Go figure.
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  2167. According to the refugee treaties, a prospective refugee should stay in the first country they land in that is safe for them. Clearly, France is a safe country. Thus, any prospective refugee that is moving from France to the UK should be turned back. This is what the treaties require.
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  2168.  @kurtwinslow2670  Thank you, Kurt. While I was well aware of the issues, having been involved in various military and foreign affairs areas over the decades. A good source on these issues, that I found recently, is Peter Zeihan. His approach is from geography, demographics and economy. It is a bit different than what I grew up with, but comes to the same conclusions.
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  2169. The issue of Chinese holdings of US Treasuries, and the fear that generated in the US, mirrors the situation with Japan in the last part of the 20th century. The fear is basically a misreading of the market.
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  2170.  @frankbee2657  bot, bot
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  2171. Chinese growth has always been driven by infrastructure projects and housing. Both of these are dead ends. As Peter points out, the example of Japan is instructive. China had that example and went ahead anyway. My favorite example is high speed rail (HSR). The lines between large cities that are economically vibrant are great. Then they extended HSR to everywhere. Latest figures I saw show they are losing about $1T on this. And then there is housing. Housing in China is a different animal than in the rest of the world. Housing was really the only thing the average Chinese could invest in that generated a lot of return. Most people were barred from the stock market, etc. So, now they have overbuilt and have a declining population. Much of that overbuilding is in locations with no real economic activity and is sitting empty. Their property developers have literally become Ponzi schemes (and I mean literally). Property is not coming back. I have a friend who is a financial advisor concentrating on macro factors. He always said he hoped that Xi would get a third term. His rationale was that Xi would be the best one to destroy the Chinese economy. Well, he was not wrong.
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  2172. Sabine, while some people are worried about the health effects of 5G, many are protesting a different aspect, as they understand it. In Australia, 5G protestors were linked up with anti-vaxers. The later claim that COVID-19 is a hoax, while the former claim that 5G = communism. This is what I had heard about the protests in places like the UK as well. That is why I was surprised about your video. I understand what you say, but I do not think 5G was implemented without any forethought. In general with these things there are standards for power and safety that are in effect. These wavelengths, as you point out, have been used in applications, especially by the military. In fact, the military was upset because some of the spectrum was taken from their allocation for 5G.
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  2173. What's this talk about ancestors? What kind of Marxist-Leninist communist is Wang Yi? He sounds like some sort of monarchist revisionist. Perhaps he needs some reeducation.
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  2174. Bollocks! The UK cannot even abolish, or privatize, the BBC. The Lords will only be abolished when the UK becomes a Republic. That time may not be long off.
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  2175. What' with the beard? Asks the guy who has had one for the last half century. You give way too much credit to the Russians. In WWI they took massive casualties as well and lost to a German Army that was fighting on two fronts. In the Winter War they took massive casualties against a much smaller country and fought basically to a standstill. They were only successful in WWII because of the massive material support from outside and because the US and UK were keeping about 100 divisions tied down. If the west had not invaded then most of those divisions would have gone east and the outcome would potentially have been different. Finally, the fact that they could not prevail in the Donbas over all those years when Ukraine was at its weakest is a testament to their ineffectiveness. Don't forget, it took them 20 years to build up the military they invaded with last February. During that time they had access to western technology. A year, with their current isolation, and a wrecked economy, will not help them.
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  2176. The FTX situation shows the incompetence of the VC community. SVB is just another. These guys are gambling with other people's money, and not doing a great job overall.
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  2177. Having government, especially in China, run something like chip development is ludicrous. Remember what happened the last time. Nothing, although lots of people did get arrested for corruption.
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  2178. Good to see you back. I was worried about you after the last video. I love how you say driving in Kiev is "interesting". Classic understatement. The tour of the old "Soviet" building was fun. It reminds me of a time, literally half a century ago this month, when I was traveling in Europe. At one point I had to stop in Yugoslavia. I was traveling with a German girl, and we stopped in a shop to buy some food. I picked up a package of cookies and exclaimed "communist cookies" (I like the alliteration) and laughed. My companion was not amused. I know it is hard. I pray for Ukraine daily.
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  2179.  @pianoforme122  I don't agree with how national agencies do this. If another national agency has approved a drug, then it should just be necessary to certify the process, and then allow the drug. After all, once a drug has been approved and used somewhere, we not only have trial data, but actual use data, which is much stronger.
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  2180. David, I have been putting off watching this. Just the title and premise offends me. I have been an old Cold Warrior for decades. The idea of either Russia or China winning the battle of ideas is ludicrous. Russia and China buy other countries, they do not convert them with ideas. Look at the vote condemning Russia in the UN General Assembly. None of the Stans (former Soviet republics in Central Asia) voted for Russia. That Biden is a bumbling fool is not disputed. On the other hand, given the atrocities that have been discovered in Ukraine, there is now widespread call for regime change in Russia. There are pundits and commentators saying he should, or will, be deposed. Even a former Russian Duma member, who is now in Ukraine, has predicted Putin's downfall. Russia is going back to the bad old days of the Soviet Union. They didn't win the war of ideas then and will not now. How many people are clamoring to get into Russia? How many are clamoring to get into China? Compare that with the influx into the US and UK.
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  2181. Laura is, as is typical for talking heads, uninformed about the whole foreign student situation. We have so many because we have a higher education system that is too big. It was sized to accommodate the soldiers returning from WW2 and taking advantage of the GI Bill and then expanded even more to accommodate the baby boomers. That is not the case now. So instead of rationalizing, like any business would, they recruited from outside the US.
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  2182. I feel the topic is important, and greatly appreciate your thoughtfulness in addressing it. I am an American and I don't particularly like that the Republicans are "colored" red. I grew up with the Cold War (I miss the Cold War, I got to a lot of interesting research with unlimited funding) and during that time the Soviets were the Reds. We had a saying: Better dead than red.
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  2183.  @DailyBeatings  What does that have to do with anything? Is that your best response?
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  2184.  @everforward8651  Well, we have hit a nerve. Being a boomer, I don't see it. All the ones I know are doing quite well, thank you. As for my prose, I do well with it. Try something else, like responding to the actual issues raised.
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  2185. China's rise IS due totally to the US. Without US investment and the welcoming of China into international organizations, China would not be able to develop to this point. Europe couldn't do it for them, and neither could the Russians. There are three main reasons the US opened to China. The first was as a counterweight to the USSR. The second reason is as a source of cheap labor. The third reason is because of the large potential market. That market is only attractive if China moves up the value chain. They have failed to do so. It is the US that made the complex supply chains that include China possible. Without the security provided by the US, China deindustrializes and probably starves. Don't ever forget that China had been on the decline for over 150 years.
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  2186. I just saw a video on a channel from Azerbaijan titled "Kremlin elites intend to reach an agreement with the West and return Ukraine's territories". They were quoting a Russian on one of the propaganda shows. The end is nigh for Putin indeed.
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  2187. Stop this! Where I am in the US, we have had cool weather. I still sleep with my down comforter at night. This is weather, not climate. Weather varies region and by year. If you average this out, you get "climate". The Southwest has always had more extreme weather than the rest of the country. So, get over it.
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  2188. No, it is not unusual to get married during a war. In WWII many people got married as the men were going off to war. Not all of these lasted, but it was not unusual.
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  2189. The European adjustment funds made for a lot of useless projects. It was really brought home to me when I was on a family vacation in the Peloponnese in Greece (where my family hails from). We were driving in the far southwest corner (and I men far) along a fantastic road with no traffic around. The view of the sea was breathtaking, and the area was totally undeveloped. I really wanted to build a house on the water here. I later looked it up, and this was some sort of national park. Bummer. This is just one glaring example of useless projects. It will never lead to any economic development. It did not provide a connection between significant population centers. It is a lot like the Chinese projects used to goose their GDP while in the end just saddling them with unsustainable debt.
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  2190.  @JohnJaneson  You are welcome.
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  2191. You sound better Tony. Hope you are feeling better as well. Lots of good content today. The last bit is stunning. I wonder how long before the author of this report experiences special measures. How long will the piece be available? Who knows. The thing is, he is right on the mark. That is the most stunning part. The idea of an informational cocoon applies, of course, to Xi. In spades. Can China change course before it follows Russia down the same path?
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  2192. You say the Kurds were fighting alongside the US forces. This is not quite right. The Kurds were fighting in the Civil War in Syria, they did not come to a recruiting station to join up with a US led force fighting ISIS. The US decided to help them in that and then help them in fighting ISIS, which is an existential to them. While the West certainly has an interest in supporting them in that, we also have a problem with the Kurdish situation through the whole area. I generally support the Kurds and think we should consider a Kurdish state in the area. This, of course, would lead to the break-up of many countries there and many years of conflict. You also have to remember that Turkey is an ally and they have legitimate security concerns. The whole situation is a complete hash, and historically the British have had a hand in making it so.
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  2193.  @JoachimwGermain-co4zw  Nonsense firings? Really? You need to get out of the basement and get some experience.
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  2194. This is a great move, especially if he is made ambassador to Serbia. Trump is peeling away moderate Democrats. It could be a calculated political move, but I think it is more in line with Trump's America first ideology. He is willing to work with anyone who supports that. He is really remaking the political landscape in the US, and so far, the Democrat Party has no answer, except for more of what got them in trouble in the first place.
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  2195.  @shundi4264  Well, if no one is paying you, then you are offering your ignorance for free. China is the one violating other countries' territory. This was adjudicated in a tribunal that China signed up to, the UNCLOS. By the way, the US is not a signatory to UNCLOS. Get your facts straight.
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  2196. On the insurance it is not that you would not want to ship anything large in large ships. Most ports, and facilities like the Suez Canal, require commercial insurance. So, even if you load it in Russia you can't dock in most ports, you even have to go around Africa to get to Asia.
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  2197. At about14:00 you make a big deal about how the Russians do things. I am not sure that you have it right. The defense in depth tactic, in trench warfare, is something the Germans perfected in WWI. The analysts you disparage have a lot more experience and understanding of tactics and history. You are making the same mistake that I think all the YouTube Mil bloggers make. To you the whole thing is the information war. That is because that is where you live. Sure, there is an element of information war in all wars, going way back. Real war is fought in the field, not in the information space. In the case of Russia, especially, since they have such a tight lid on the information space in their own country (a lot like the Nazis in WWII) I think they are not as susceptible to this. Just look at WWII and places like Stalingrad. That is where the infamous "not one step back" order came into being. Was that done as a worry about "information war". Don't make me laugh.
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  2198. Tony, thank you for making the extra effort. It is greatly appreciated. I was wondering what I would watch with my morning coffee and cigar (a Rocky Patel Decade). BYD cars are, as far as I can garner from all the reports, trash, and a safety nightmare to boot. The other Chinese EV makers are no better. The fact that BYD is now coming out with a PHV is telling. So are other companies. GM just announced their plans. Toyota is winning in this segment as well. When will Tesla see the light? As for these new energy sectors, they are looking more and more like a dead end. EV sales are slowing. There are a plethora of reasons. Photovoltaic production capacity in China is about twice demand. Several companies are experiencing trouble and are close to collapse. Wind is in a similar situation. As for solid state batteries, those are also being developed in the US and elsewhere. Two companies in the US are close to commercialization. The west will not make the mistake again of letting critical industries move to China. The quotes from Magnus and Pettis were very interesting and prescient. Thanks, as always for bringing them to our attention.
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  2199. Afghanistan was NOT invaded to allow women to wear miniskirts! It was invaded because that is where Al Qaeda was based. It was invaded because of 9/11.
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  2200. Student loans are stupid! Most are for people who take degrees in the social sciences. I had a friend whose son took out $200k in loans for an English degree. His solution to that was to have his son go back and get a "real" degree which would earn him a real income. My friend had plenty of money. These are the people we are thinking of forgiving loans for. In those fields where people will not be able to repay their loans, we don't need a lot of graduates. Let those who can pay go into them. We need to limit the program. We put away enough money for our kids to go to school debt free. In fact. because of scholarships, they had money left over. Lots of it. Today is not when I started university, I had a part time job, paying minimum wage. I earned twice the amount of tuition and books. Think about that. I went to a very good state university near to where i lived. Why is tuition so high today? In fact, that university is still very cheap compared to most for in-state students. What is going on here?
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  2201. Ukraine used to be a major weapons producer in Soviet times. I also remember seeing at the beginning of the conflict, in the 2014 timeframe, videos of lots of old tanks that Ukraine had. They were obsolete and needed lots of work. The problem is that Ukraine did not have the money. In fact, that is one reason they were willing to give up their nukes. Those systems are not cheap to maintain, and frankly after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine did not have the funds. Don't forget, the military and arms production in the Soviet Union were funded by the central state, not the regions or republics.
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  2202. When I was living in the UK I was a Governor of our school. There, each school had a Board of Governors. A great concept. We had two committees. One for resources (finance; I was the Clerk of that committee) and one for curriculum. This was very much controlled by the parents. When we moved back to the US we were very involved in the school. We went to every parent teacher day. We were very involved in our children's schoolwork. We were involved in their extra curricular activities, including the committees that supported them. Many of the parents of our schools were so involved. It is essential!
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  2203. The Cultural Revolution returns!!!!
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  2204. This brings back memories. I followed these events from when I was a boy (over half a century ago). In very recent years I ran into someone from Eritrea. He was actually a professor and department head for a program I was enrolled in. At the time I had two colleagues, including this professor, who were from Africa, both of whom were reluctant to talk about where they came from. One was from Uganda. The professor was from Eritrea. His father was forced to leave because of the oppression. By the way both were reluctant to go into detail, so I did not press them out of respect for our friendship. Come to think about it both had PhDs. One in mathematics and the other in statistics.
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  2205. IRS agents to the border. GO TRUMP! Actually, some have questioned this as far as the skills of the agents. Are they just plain ignorant. The IRS has enforcement functions and capabilities. It came home to me a couple of years back when I read that the IRS ordered a large number of shotguns. This was part of the large increase in agents under Biden. I don't think they were planning to use these to protect their offices. I like Fox, but like almost the whole media, the level of research is not great. I am a fairly well experienced person (read older) and well informed about lots of issues with a good memory. I assume the anchors have a team of producers behind them. Do they not consider the questions and objections that might come from people? This is a basic and quite effective technique that is common in sales (I am technical but was once thrust into a sales executive role). I assume these producers and writers went to what are considered "good schools", probably Ivy League schools. That concerns me greatly.
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  2206.  @noIMspartacus2  So, socialism works better? Get an education. The old saying in the Soviet Union was they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work. The current Russian system is just a continuation of the Soviet system without the ideology. So, I guess that you would rather live in Russia. Read sometime about people from the west who moved to the Soviet utopia in the 1930s. Then you might understand something.
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  2207. Yes, bring back Jacob! I miss the Mogg of the Week.
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  2208. The blood issue is one that has been around for millennia. Even in the Bible, especially the Old Testament, there is lots of concern with blood. Prohibitions against eating animals with the blood still in them. Sprinkling the altar with the blood of the sacrifice. Then, in the New Testament, we have the sacrament of the Eucharist, the body and blood of Jesus. All of this was, I expect, quite separate from the "philosophical" concepts, and predates them, so it really tends to support your thesis. And, no, not too much information. It is stimulating. It is also YouTube. I can stop and restart any time. Keep it up.
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  2209. First off, I love your content, Tony. The foreign policy content is hard to take, however. This has nothing to do with you. It is the CCP's language. It is just so much commie drivel that I cannot help but be triggered by it. It makes me want to scream at my computer screen. I just hope that my computer does not develop PTSD as a result. These foreign policy updates are the only ones I have to watch in small doses.
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  2210.  @gtw4546  Love it! Yes, the CCP has not evolved since they were trained by the Soviets in Marxism-Leninism back in the early days.
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  2211.  @a.westenholz4032  The only problem is that they don't have the money. Those that do (talking about the Chinese) are getting it out if they can. That includes party officials who basically skimmed it off the public purse for their own enrichment.
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  2212. In the late 60s I was in a shop class. The teacher was out sick and the substitute ran a film for us of launch failures. I can still remember that film.
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  2213. Shannon, don't you have staff? Can't they do some real digging? I just saw a video on a channel where a Russian woman who left Russia is now bemoaning that she is no longer getting USAID funding. What the heck? The funding is going to be administered by the State Department, which is the right place for it. It is foreign aid after all. USAID was created, by executive order by the way, for what is really nefarious purposes. It might have made sense during the Cold War, but if you hadn't noticed the Cold War ended over 30 years ago. Has Fox been reduced to just having people respond to reporting by other outlets?
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  2214. The wet market explanation is very weak. I have a friend who travels extensively in Asia for work, and he pointed out that there are wet markets all over. They have been around for a very long time.
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  2215. Biden called Xi a dictator. Xi has met with Biden and is now in Europe meeting with the leaders there. He is, I posit, as reprehensible as Putin. Xi even did the same thing Putin did. He amended the CCP rules so that he could run for a third and fourth and fifth, etc. term. The Chinese always follow the Russians. The CCP was trained by the Soviets.
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  2216. The main "comparative advantage" China has in reference to the belt and road is corruption. Of course, China will run out of money before many of these projects are completed. The client countries are already doing so.
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  2217. During Cold War 1.0 the US did very well. As they saw, Russia is a gas station with nukes. They were not economically important as a consumer or producer in the past. Their biggest export, after oil, is military equipment. This war will kill that market for them as people see how inferior their equipment is. For Americans, this is a non-issue. Even with oil, we have vast resources of our own. Along with Canada and Mexico, North America is a major producing area.
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  2218. This guy is delusional and well as ill informed. The Taliban is already oppressing women. They are executing people, especially gov't officials. They will go back to their old ways.
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  2219. Individuals have no rights in China. You don't say. The communist education of the population is lacking if they don't understand this. Even the property they "buy" is not really theirs. They only have the right to it for a fixed period of time. How can people be so stupid?
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  2220. The Kroeber quote is interesting. The thing Xi and all communist leaders get wrong is that they have the ability to steer the economy. There is an old saying that sums it up. To paraphrase, the business of America is business. Governments can only set the conditions. Look at the difference between the US economy and CCP led China. The US leads in technology and economy overall, by a long shot. Even the poor in the US would be considered middle class in much of the world. Believe me, I have seen it in my extensive travels and in some work (volunteering) I have done over the years. The one summer I worked in construction I was working for an independent. He had taken a motorcycle trip around the world. Because of the dire poverty he saw in many places, especially in Asia, he said that he somewhat regretted it. He did not see China, of course. This was the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium after all.
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  2221. Soft drinks are bad for you. Maybe this is a good thing.
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  2222. Jake Sullivan is the problem. Period! He is a lawyer by trade and has no business being in the position he is in. The National Security Advisor should have a foreign policy, intelligence (sort of the same thing) and/or military background. He is a holdover from the Obama administration, where he had a different role. Look into Obama's record on foreign policy. Bad, not good. That really explains everything you need to know about Biden's disastrous foreign policy. Think about it, from Iran to the withdrawal from Afghanistan to the Ukraine war where he has not laid out a strategy. Supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes without saying what "it" is does not count as a strategy.
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  2223.  @brmnyc1984  I understand. I also think it is overblown.
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  2224. These comments from Macron are standard French fare and have been since De Gaulle. In the 1960s France withdrew from the NATO command structure, but not NATO overall.
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  2225.  @marksnyder8022  Well, let's look at the current situation. Belgium has real tension between the French speaking and Flemish regions. Occasionally there are movements to separate. Czechoslovakia voluntarily broke into two countries along national lines. Of course, one can't neglect Spain, with at least three separatist regions. The UK has massive tensions between their nations. I lived there, and I used to see graffiti on motorway overpasses saying: England for the English. Italy has regional differences, and there have been movements not so long ago to split off the more industrialized north. Switzerland is a real exception. The historical German situation is interesting. Of course, all that intermarriage did not prevent wars in the past, going right up to WWI. The King of England, the Kaiser and the Czar were all related. Of course, Germany was united under the Prussians, and there have always been tensions. This is not evident today. There are, of course still resentments in the former East Germany in regard to the national government. One nation, but two different experiences. As for your insult at the end, I don't know about Moscow. I am in the American Midwest and have never been to the Soviet Union or Russia. In fact, I spent decades fighting against the Soviets.
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  2226. One time I was vacationing in Cornwall with the family while I was living in England, and I saw the most interesting thing on the tele. It was a program asking about people's attitudes towards the EU. This one man said something along the lines of "I am Cornish, I am British, I am European, I AM NOT ENGLISH". I also noticed that the were Cornish flags and EU flags but no British Flags.
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  2227. The statement about homes being for living in, not speculation is curious. I had heard recently that the authorities were encouraging people to buy second and third homes to help stimulate the sector.
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  2228. What is the fascination with this. It happens all the time, by all sides. Do you people not remember the scandal when the US was caught hacking Angela Merkel's phone? Get over it.
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  2229.  @JamesKerLindsay  Good point. Actually, I read Gogol's book "Dead Souls" which was written in the middle of the 19th century. It seemed very much like contemporary Russia. There is an underlying social structure that seems to persist.
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  2230. Taking on the culture wars? Are you kidding. Roe vs Wade was the start. Abortion advocates decided to use the courts, then more liberal, to impose a cultural construct, bypassing the legislative branch. I am neutral on the issue. It has not affected me and I only have one friend that has had to deal with that, and it was over 30 years ag. What I do wonder, though, is while the government is using my money to fund abortions, a large fertility clinic opened not long ago in my city. It is not trivial to adopt, and many go overseas to do so. What is going on here?
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  2231. You say you can't show violence on YouTube, but I see channels showing the tanks blowing up and grenades dropped from drones in individual soldiers who are obviously "knocked out cold".
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  2232. Everything in the "intelligence expert's" account is well known.
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  2233. The migration problem is a result of people fleeing places with limited economic opportunities to western countries with massive social welfare programs. Thus, in places like GB, the system gets clogged up with economic migrants, making "legitimate" asylum seekers wait years. I put the term legitimate in quotes, because until their claims are adjudicated, just as with accused criminals, their status is equivalent to "alleged". I worked in the UK for a few years with a work permit. I was working for a US based multinational corporation. I was, rightly, often asked when re-entering the UK whether I was still employed at the company. I of course said yes, and this was the honest answer. The current asylum rules are a response to what happened in WWII. They really need to be looked at again.
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  2234.  @AskMississippiAskMississippi  First, that is stupid and racist. Second, it has nothing to do with the Olympics.
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  2235. Japan joining AUKUS. JAUKUS? That actually is pronounceable. It has just the right number of vowels. Go for it! The security concerns really seem ironic to me. How did the Soviets get information about the Manhattan project and other nuclear secrets? I'll tell you (that's just how I am). It was through British Cambridge grads who were spying for the Soviets. By the way, at about 4:30 when you said "pawn" the CC function on YouTube translated it as "porn". Just thought you would be amused. The idea of a "structural security blockade" against China is completely true. Why wouldn't the US, Japan, Australia and India want to do this? It is the only rational response to China's words and actions. There is no world constitution, rights of nations or world government. That would require an enforcement authority. And don't talk to me about the UN (now I am sounding like my ex-wife, referring to something else). The UN is a joke. Neither China, nor any other country, has the "right" to develop or do what it wants. That is what militaries are all about. Just think of what China is doing and advocating. Frankly, a more militaristic set of allies against China would already be sailing up their rivers with gunboats. Oh, wait, that actually happened. In the 19th century. China is actually, as I have said before, trying to emulate those powers long after such "diplomacy" became obsolete. They are "living in the past". Frankly, I think Xi, if he were to be honest, would admit that. His rhetoric certainly supports that assertion. I am actually impressed with the report from the China Foreign Affairs University that was quoted from. That report seems to get it right. So, how come the CCP does not seem to understand what is going on. Maybe they do and think that their use of rhetoric and "soft" power will change things. There is a reason it is called "soft", and it is not what most people think.
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  2236. Container radars are old technology for detecting nuclear missiles. The primary systems, at least for the US and I assume the Soviets/Russians are space based. I worked on some of this in the 1980s. When the Soviets turned on their first ABM radars, they were so powerful that the signal bounced off the moon. They are thus easy to detect, even if you try to hide them, and easy to neutralize, as the Ukrainians have shown. Fixed systems like this are not the best choice in the 21st century, or late 20th century. I am not saying the radars are useless, but I would be surprised if they were the primary means the Russians have.
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  2237. I am a real fan of Zeihan. I agree with most of his analysis. One thing I do find him lacking on is timing. Predicting timeframes for many of the trends he discusses is a fraught exercise. For example, he is here talking about Putin winning in less than six months. There are several military experts who believe that Ukraine can win. By his logic, which I believe is based on size of the armies and nations involved, Israel would no longer exist.
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  2238. You make an interesting point. See my comment about his characterization of the other party he won't name. I am not a resident of East Germany, although I have in-laws who are from there (and actually fled to the western part of Germany). I also did a lot of business in Germany earlier in the millennium while living in another part of Europe. By the way, feel free to correct me if I said anything too wrong or outrageous.
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  2239. Love the Angry spots. Black or White. You guys are the best,
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  2240. Epic! This reminds me of my student days in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium. We didn't have video games, but we did have science fiction books. Actually, there was a collection of them in bathroom, just in case one needed a good read. I am sure we analyzed wormholes at the time.
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  2241.  @saltapozo  Well put.
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  2242. Don't forget that the EU is basically a protectionist cartel. Pettis is correct, with the caveat that projecting these growth rates out is actually invalid. He does hedge this analysis, of course, with an admission that the ability to absorb this increase is probably not there. That being said, the statistics do not comport with the reality. There is enough anecdotal evidence that the "urban" unemployment rate is bogus. In China, when workers lose their jobs, many of them being migrants from the countryside, they tend to just go home. Now they are no longer part of the pool. Another thing missing from these analyses is the contribution of the property sector to manufacturing. All that stuff put into property development is locally sourced.
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  2243. What you said about Harris and Vance is bunk. Both were US Senators. What was JFK before becoming President? A US Senator. What was Barak Obama before becoming President? A US Senator. In fact, by all reports he was not active in that role. You might want to stick to geopolitics and economics.
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  2244.  @Chirtopher-x4e  True, and suspicious.
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  2245. You are clearly not educated on what is happening. The US is actually withdrawing from the world order they had set up after WWII. That was done to contain the Soviets, and it worked. It worked 30 years ago. The US has been maintaining it for far too long. The irony is that China's rise was made possible by the order. In the near future China will have trouble getting the massive inputs that their economy depends on, as the US will not guarantee safe passage of world maritime commerce. There are various analysts that predict that China will not exist in its current form by the end of the decade. Look for it to break into four or five parts. China, and Russia, do not have the power to maintain the order.
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  2246. Yeah, what he said.
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  2247. Very well reasoned. Those who hope for a "democratic" revolution in Russia are ignorant of Russian history and society. This will be more like the end of the Qing dynasty in China, which was followed by a period of warlordism. Frankly, in that situation, Chiang and Mao were just two of the many warlords. Look for something similar for Russia post-Putin.
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  2248. The support of regimes in Africa, or any of the global south, is meaningless. In war, and economy, these countries are a total insignificance. In war, it is industrial and economic power that reigns. These countries in Africa have no way to help the Russians with military aid, or much in the way of economy. Two things have to kept in mind. First, many of these regimes in the global south are corrupt and/or incompetent. They are often unstable, and Russia through Wagner, has contributed to that instability. Second, as the world order the US has maintained for decades breaks down, the people in these countries will suffer the most. If it really gets bad, many will starve. The US backed order allowed them to participate fully in the world economy, and their populations grew beyond what they could support themselves. A great example is Egypt. Under the order they went from growing food for themselves to growing cotton as a cash crop. Their population soared. Now if they turned all their land to food production they could probably not feed themselves. Sub-Saharan Africa is in a similar situation. In their case it was mineral exports they used to buy food. When the food cannot get to them, it will be chaos.
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  2249. In the Gulf War the Iraqis used the Soviet style to build fortifications across the whole front line. This did not stop the US and allies from launching their offensive. Ukraine is being given some of the equipment used to breach such defenses. Don't sweat the defenses.
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  2250.  @johnathanh2660  Good points. We see Ukraine attriting Russian armor on an almost daily basis just with their small drones dropping grenades.
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  2251. Leading up to the Internet bubble I was working for IBM in Europe. At a management meeting at the lab I was working at, we had some outside speakers. One was with an investment firm. They had developed a measure of Internet companies. This was meant to measure their investment potential. One of the companies, which had no income, had a measure in the tens of thousands. IBM's measure was about four. Of course, IBM was making lots of money on the Internet. I remember that when I heard this, I knew there would be a crash. It was just a feeling. Of course, it was correct. The investment community was making stuff up to drive money into the market. A typical case.
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  2252.  @OfficialGapTV  Not how it works. Territory is what matters. In secession it is only territory that matters. You need to read up in the situation. Look at another case. If Scotland secedes from the UK, the UK has no right to the bases in Scotland. This is one of the issues in this situation. You clearly have no understanding of how things work.
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  2253. The Soviets repressed and ruined religion in the Soviet Union and the whole Soviet bloc in Europe. Poland seems to be one of the exceptions. That was, of course, their intention as good Marxists. You have several generations that lived under that tyranny. It will take a breakdown of the Russian state as it is now and the ability of outsiders to proselytize. It will likely take decades if it is allowed to happen at all.
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  2254. All the poling of the membership, as opposed to the parliamentary party. show Truss ahead. In fact, those polls show that all three of the women candidates out of the initial five would beat him.
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  2255. I wonder about something you said. You mention IBM. I worked for IBM and GE. Both of these had massive corporate R&D departments. They both led the world, for many years, in patents. I did corporate funded R&D at GE, and another company. So, the question is, if you are spending all this money on R&D, why do you need acquisitions? Shouldn't you do one or the other? The real advantage these companies have is in marketing and brand recognition. This is why it is so stupid for them to spin off consumer businesses. If management cannot figure out how to make money in the consumer space, then they should be replaced. This is where the real money is. I worked in the corporate side of things in both IBM and GE. We made good returns, but in all businesses the real money is in the mass market,
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  2256. As for the use of the term barbarian, you must know that this was not as derogatory a term as is it now. It simply meant anyone who was not Greek, or later, Roman. It did not necessarily mean that they were inferior, just other.
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  2257. Tony, you put the blame on the crop problems in Henan on the weather. I have seen video evidence of the government preventing harvesters from getting to the wheat fields so that they can collect fines to help fund he local governments. Rain is always an issue in this activity. I have relatives who are farmers in the US Midwest, and they are hypersensitive to weather. I have seen years where rain put off harvesting because the ground was too muddy for the combines to operate on. It was often a close-run thing. This is actually typical of farming, not some result of some global environmental problem.
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  2258. 1. Great production up. 2. Massive flooding in grain growing areas in 2023. Crops lost. 3. Massive purchases of grain from abroad. The first two cannot be true at the same time. The third is the best indicator of the lack of veracity of the first.
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  2259. Looking at the data, US exports have not really fallen in total dollar terms. Right now, they are slightly below China's total exports. The makeup changes over time, but this is nothing new. Looking at the 25-year chart, there is much more "choppiness" in the Chinese data. Look at the history of the 20th and early 21st centuries. In the first sixty years of the 20th century the US was the "world's factory". Then it was Japan. The Japanese did the same thing to the US that China has been doing over the last 30 years. They tended to monopolize and strip out whole industries. A good example is TVs. I live in the Chicago area and there is an object example of this. The old Zenith HQ is located along one of the Interstate Highways north of the city (it may have been torn down by now). The Japanese bought the company and moved the whole thing to Japan. They did this with other companies in the sector as well. You should also notice that a lot of Japanese and Korean auto manufacturing has moved to the US. BMW actually assembles all their SUVs in the US and exports them around the world. I told a German colleague of mine this when I lived in Europe, and he got quite upset. I have even seen some Chinese companies building factories in the US lately. As for Wall Street, they have always (and I mean always) looked overseas for growth. I was reading a book about Citibank, and the bailouts they had required over the last two centuries. In the early 1900s they had invested heavily in Russia. Then came the revolution, and they lost it all. All of this is to say is that the current situation is not unprecedented. There is one big difference between the US and CCP controlled China. In the former it is private companies that make the decisions and the necessary adjustments. In the latter it is government. Guess who will do a better job of navigating the situation. As for the last point made by Robinson, I consider myself lucky. My financial advisor (and cigar buddy), a former managing director of a Wall Street firm who went out on his own, has stayed away from Chinese investments for a long time. We have had many discussions about it. Long before Xi got his third term my friend was hoping he would. His reasoning was the Xi would tank the Chinese economy, and he turns out to have been correct.
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  2260. At one point you use the phrase "...the LEADERSHIP of Keir Starmer..." (emphasis mine). I have to take exception with anyone who applies the term leadership to Keir Starmer. That, to my mind, is an abuse of the English language.
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  2261. Tell us what you think. Don't hold back. We can take it. Frankly, I fully agree with you on this. Labor has always been a socialist, or actually as you say a Marxist-Leninist party. Blair was an exception. He was only interested in power and, in the end, making money off it. Blair was basically the British Bill Clinton. If you hadn't noticed, neither the Labor Party in the UK nor the Democratic Party in the US has made any move back to center left policies. Interesting how that works.
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  2262. You left out one of the most important Polish victories. That was the Polish Soviet War in 1920. The Poles won. The result was that the Soviets gave up their dream of revolution across Europe, especially in Germany. and settled on a policy of socialism in one country. This was, of course, anathema to the socialist ideology, which is an internationalist one. Remember the slogan, workers of the world unite. That is one reason why Stalin hated the Poles so much. Another thing you neglect to mention is that the US now has a permanent NATO base in Poland.
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  2263. One shouldn't be surprised that Labor is waging a class war against private education. Labor, after all, is a socialist party. In fact, it is a Marxist socialist party.
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  2264. Globalism is dead. The reasons are many, but the main one is populism in the US. The US created the current world order and guaranteed free trade. This was done to counter the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It persisted after the collapse of the USSR, and the US is tired of it. The US Navy is no longer configured to police world's oceans. If you hadn't noticed, there is a realignment of supply chains going on. China is on the decline, and Russia is in shambles. What are people calling for in China? Democracy and free markets. Forces such as demography, geography and energy determine how countries and peoples progress.
    2
  2265.  @luciferjohnson8495  If you believe that then you are sadly mistaken. The debt situation is very complex, and really all countries around the world run a deficit. There is a reason for that. As for default, are you totally ignorant of history? We have had this situation before. We have even had government shutdowns. The debt limit is a purely legislative device. It was meant to make the Congress more accountable. There was a loophole, though, and that was the ability to raise the debt limit. It has been done time and time again. As for $31T in debt, compare that with a GDP of $27T. Now look at countries like China, Italy, etc. That makes the US figure look respectable. As for unemployment, it is at a historic low.
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  2266. This is not quite the same, but when I was a kid (pre-teen) over half a century ago, I went to an open house at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, just outside of Washington, DC. My father worked for and Army weapons lab which had facilities on the NOL property, so we were invited. I got a key ring ornament of a Subroc missile/torpedo. This carried a 250 kiloton warhead. It was launched from a torpedo tube and then flew ballistically. It was not steerable like the promised Russian torpedo, but with that yield it didn't have to be that precise. It was also undetectable by the sub it was attacking. I mention all this partly because it is interesting, and partly to highlight how the Russians are just, seemingly, staring to catch up to capabilities the west has had for decades. Another thing to remember is that any torpedo will be much slower to target than a missile. So it may actually not be much of an advantage Also, the actual record of Russian weapons, especially the advanced ones, is very, very poor.
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  2267. The EU is a protectionist cabal. Several years ago, I was commenting on a forum which was pushing TTIP (the proposed free trade agreement with the EU). While the points you make are all valid, one of the major areas of disagreement back then was with civil society in the EU. A large part of the protectionist aspects of the EU is product standards. American and EU standards are divergent in many areas, and the EU groups were rabid in their opposition to accepting US standards (remember chlorine washed chicken?). As you point out, with the EU in demographic decline, this is no longer an good deal for the US.
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  2268. I love all these percentages that are bandied about by economists. The G7 has seven of the top ten economies by GDP. Russia ranks 11th, after Canada. Anyone know what the population of Canada is? Compare that to Russia. Talking about percentage growth by country is not very useful. For example, China's trade with Russia is just over half of Apple's sales. So, we hear this growth month to month or compared to a year ago. Then people draw trends from this monthly data. I hate to break it to you, but one data point does not make a trend, especially in time-series data. I also wonder about the trade data. For example, massive numbers of Chinese EVs are sitting in northern European ports unsold. I expect that they would have been counted by customs. Many have been there for 18 months. A large proportion of them may never be sold. Revenue recognition (revrec) is often an issue for companies. Believe me, I have worked for companies, especially in high tech, which had issues with this and had to institute strong controls. Are we seeing something similar here?
    2
  2269. So, if textiles contribute 8% of greenhouse gas emissions, how much of that can be reduced by changing the system. I personally am not part of this problem. I tend to keep things until they actually wear out, which can be several years for cotton, and decades for a wool suit. I guess I am not a fashion follower. I am wearing Levis 501 jeans as I write this. These are the same type of jeans I first wore over 50 years ago. So, there are two aspects to this. One is on the fashion front. The other is to find a better way to recycle the textiles. The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is likely to be minimal. So, why is this an issue that anyone would be concerned about. If you could cut the emissions by 25%, then you would reduce worldwide emissions by 2%.
    2
  2270.  @francoiskeulen  I assume you jest. I do go over it with a blower after mowing and when leaves have fallen. I don't scrub it though, and it seems fine.
    2
  2271.  @bigbadlara5304  Just that. Using a long-handled brush like one would do in cleaning a floor.
    2
  2272. I really like your basic point of view, but you do one thing that all independent pundits do which is destructive of the movement. What I am referring to is your heavy criticism of the "conservative" party as not being conservative enough. This may be true. But what that does is to sow division and, in the end suppress votes. Let me give you an example. In the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections in the US Rush Limbaugh, and independent conservative, was very down on the Republican candidates. i truly believe he suppressed the conservative vote. Don't forget, the actual turnout for elections in the US (and I think the UK) is around 60%, so voter suppression is a real issue. And I am not talking here any official or statutory interference. His audience, although immeasurably larger than yours, was probably very similar in outlook. So, in both cases, you are not going to influence the leftist loonies, but are going to depress the more conservative among us. Politics is always a matter of compromise. Find a way to unite conservatives to fight the socialist left, not the other wing of the more conservative polity.
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  2273. Wrong! He was a bishop in Chiclayo in Peru. There were issues there. You may want to get the prescription for your glasses checked.
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  2274. The Ukrainians' ingenuity is becoming legend. Another aspect of this is that Turkey is becoming the dominant power in the Black Sea by accounts I have seen. I know you will talk about it in the next video, but on the general issue of the war, Ukraine and the west have played it all wrong. The biggest issue is the lack of leadership from Biden. He has never come out and said what the goal is beyond saying that the US will support Ukraine "as long as it takes". As long as "what" takes? As President Joe himself likes to say: Come on man! We all expected Ukraine to be able to mount some grand counter-offensive with only part of what is needed for the situation they found themselves in. Again, Ukraine and the west allowed the hype engine to go into full swing when anyone with any knowledge of these things could have told you they were not ready and fully equipped.
    2
  2275.  @bwarre2884  All very good points. The Cold War changed everything. I miss the Cold War. I got to do lots of very interesting research with basically unlimited funding. But I digress. Yes, the percentage of the US economy is a measure that may not be useful in looking at the impact on the US. Even at the height of the Vietnam War the US never spent over 10% of GDP on the military. Contrast that with projections that the Soviets spent 40% of their GDP on the military. That fact was a major factor in their downfall. The US does, indeed, profit from some conflict, as you say. It is, though, not purely a profit motive. To have conflict you have to have two sides involved. For example, you don't see the US and the EU gearing up for conflict with each other. On the other hand, the US helps to arm Taiwan, and now Vietnam, because of a credible threat. As for the "middle America" thing I was being a bit pedantic. I understood what you meant by the context. I guess I also suspected that you were not American, but I couldn't help myself. I appreciate your insightful comments. I certainly learned something in the conversation.
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  2276. The Arab world? China can have it. Consider the countries involved. The largest is Egypt. They are a basket case and could fall apart at any moment. Syria has already fallen apart. Jordan has masses of Palestinian refugees and really should be the Palestinian state. It was actually a part of the original League of Nations mandate for Palestine. Saudi Arabia is basically a failing petrostate. If they didn't have so much cash, they would have failed already. They rely on people from elsewhere to do everything. At the high end you have expensive talent. At the low-end people are treated like slaves. The Gulf States are much the same. Then you have another actual failed state, Yemen. They actually, and openly, practice chattel slavery. Oman seems somewhat calm, but I am not up to date there. Of course, there is always Iraq. For many reasons this is another state on the edge. Once the Arabs see the poor quality and debt trap methods of belt and road they will change their mind quickly. Actually, there is a US and Europe backed project to build a rail link through the Arabian Peninsula that has been announced. Competition? The US should not be involved. We were involved because of oil, and later because of Islamic terrorism. Neither of those issues is core to US interests today. The only thing that keeps us engaged is Israel. So, I would be more comfortable with leaving the Arab world to the Chinese and Europeans to fight over. Back to the good old days.
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  2277. What are going on about? The CCP is striving to create the new communist man. Tradition be damned!
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  2278. The opinion piece from Pei is interesting, but I think we all knew that. The issue is not that Xi needs to either share power, or step aside. That much is clear. The issue is how he gained all that power in the first place and why he cannot change direction.
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  2279.  @pog0777  I think I said it. Birth rates are high. The West, out of guilt has helped support these populations. Then, when there is an issue like Ukraine, the supply of external food is impacted. For a while, it looked like India could step in and fill the gap. But, India is experiencing one of its frequent droughts, so they are stopping exports. The US has some capacity, but the farmers I know have been getting out of wheat and into corn and soybeans, which are more profitable. So, to answer your question directly, Somalia, and other countries like them, have more people than they can feed or afford. China has to import lots of food, but they can afford it. It is simple economics. It is the NGOs that keep these people alive, until a massive crisis like Ukraine comes along.
    2
  2280.  @humphreybumblecuck5151  Thanks. I am a big believer in nukes, having worked on nuclear space reactors. My ex-wife worked on nuclear power for interplanetary missions. Very different things.
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  2281. You throw out the 20% number as if it has meaning. That is not the measure. Russia already controlled part of the country in the Donbas. I am not including Crimea, and I think that Zelenski does not either. The relevant measure is what percentage of the country has been taken since the invasion. That would be a good indicator of the progress the Russians have made.
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  2282. Those technologies are the way to go. Siting them is also important and I have yet to hear anyone address that. I have been advocating for a while locating batteries at substations, as well as on premise. This would leverage the existing infrastructure. The space is already available at most substations. The issue becomes control of the system. I have worked with technologies that can handle that, and i don't think it is a big deal.
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  2283. Vita, I don't know if you have heard or read, but there was an editorial in the Wall Street Journal about Iryna Tsybukh's situation published on June 7.
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  2284. But, wellies are required in Scotland, aren't they?
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  2285. Assigning numbers to these things in advance is difficult. Look at US experience after WWII. In Vietnam the US lost about 50K troops while the North and the Viet Cong lost about 1M. Yet the US lost the war, abandoning the South. In the 2004 Iraq War, the coalition sent in just over 177K troops, while the Iraqis had over 500K troops and 650K reserves. They Iraqis lost in a matter of weeks. The defining feature in both wars was air power. This was also, at the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the case for the Germans as well. It is much more complicated than just numbers. At the time of the VN war, US doctrine said that the defenders needed 3 times as many troops as the attackers. When it was shown that this was not the case, confidence in the prosecution of the war waned in the US. The US was never going to send over that many troops. Another factor is organization. The Germans started out much better than the Soviets, but later in the war this became more equal. There is a lot more to these things than a silly equation. Keep up the good work. I like your stuff, and always compare it to many other sources, and generally I think you get it right.
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  2286. Jake,, great interview. I have subscribed to Anders' channel. Actually, I have found these interviews you do quite informative and useful, and definitely look forward to your content.
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  2287. The two main pillars of the early investment in China were cheap labor and a large market. Well, in terms of productivity, China's labor is not more expensive than its competitors. With a shrinking of the population, especially in the prime consuming demographic, China loses its other draw for investment. This is now being reflected in in FDI figures. It will get worse. Add to that the actions of the CCP and their belligerent actions on the world stage, and you have a recipe for disaster. Does anyone in the CCP have a clue? I expect not. Pundits and analysts that projected that the Chinese economy, and China as a thing will not last until 2030 are now being proved to be correct. Long before 2100 there will not be a China as we know it today.
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  2288. A long war is not in Russia's favor. First, recall that the force they used to invade initially took them 20 years to build up. In that time, they had access to western technology. Now, they have to do it without that access, and they have proven themselves incapable of do so. Even during Soviet times this was the case. Second, prolonging this war increases the instability within Russia. Some geopolitical analysts have projected the dissolution of the Russian Federation with the next two to three decades. Now we may see it within the next year or so. Demographically, ethnic Russians will become a minority in Russia in the near future. Taking out the men who would be having children from the population will just accelerate that.
    2
  2289. The Russians and Commie China seem to be of the same type. They remind me of teens who are ignored by the group and want attention and will do anything to get it. The fact is that in the Great Power Game neither has been very successful. Yes, Russia has vast amounts of territory, but the vast majority of it is marginal (putting it nicely). They were often at odds with countries like the UK, Germany and Japan, which were much smaller and much more successful at the Game. China is even more of a failure in this regard. The last time they projected power beyond their borders was in the 15th century. After that their external trade was controlled by a bunch of small European countries. For centuries. In fact, the last dynasty of China was not Chinese, but Manchurian in origin.
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  2290. What are you talking about? I love broccoli.
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  2291. The corruption is not only present in the construction industry but is endemic in all sectors, as was mentioned. That is one reason why one shouldn't fear the Chinese military.
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  2292. As for the railway investments, especially in the less populated areas, this is a recipe for disaster. The projects that have been completed to date have lose $1B per year, Iam led to believe. More such projects will just raise debt and will, in the end, have to be bailed out.
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  2293.  @Waverlyduli  Re-read what I wrote. I said that he did see it coming, a while back.
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  2294. Who is the CCP trying to kid. I mean, come on man. The buildings being built in China are "tofu dreg". They can't build something that is structurally sound. The walls crumble, and in some cases fall off. The buildings tilt and flood. They are built in inappropriate places. The materials used are dangerous to health. After the Fukushima discharge issue people all over China got radiation detectors and found that the inside of their homes was the most radioactive place. At the end of the video entrenched vested interests are mentioned. This is the elephant in the room. The fact is that the CCP system runs on corruption and graft. There is almost certainly an element of organized crime involved. Perhaps this has reached into the state itself. I fully expect that is the case. The point is that it is the reason the CCP does not take measures to stimulate consumer demand directly is that this would make the type of graft practiced in China today impossible. The CCP members wouldn't be able to get their cut. In that case the whole system falls apart. Of course, going on as they have will create the same result. Pettis makes good points and policy suggestions. He will be ignored, as none of what he says is in the interest of the CCP members but follows good economic and financial practice.
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  2295. The CCP is showing its weakness. Taiwan is much more important to the world economy than mainland China. In an age when microchip technology is of paramount importance, everything else China does can be done elsewhere. On top of that, Taiwanese companies such as Foxconn are very important to the Chinese economy, and they are leaving. All the low-end stuff China produces can be produced elsewhere (anywhere). People are starting to notice that much of the material processing done in China is done in such a way so as to cause massive pollution. Related to that are poor labor practices in China. China's low consumption and demographic decline means that one of the pillars of foreign investment in China is gone (a big new market). The other, cheap labor (compared to productivity) has been gone for a while. Top that off with poor quality, IP theft and outright counterfeiting and it is a wonder anyone still does business in China. The CCP goes from weakness to weakness. The odds of China increasing consumption in the near future, or ever, are as close to zero as one can get. Two less mentioned trends in employment are key here. One is the phenomenon of laying off workers in their mid to late 30s or older. Really, China. These are peak consumption years. When the kids are grown, then you hit the peak investment years, at least in developed economies. In addition, those older workers are the most productive. So, the Chinese are cutting off consumption and indigenous capital formation at the same time. It doesn't help that their investment markets are rigged against individual investors. The only other avenue left, property investment, is gone. I am not sure that there are any tools in the toolbox that the CCP can actually use.
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  2296. The Russians were successful throwing large numbers of troops and artillery at an enemy once and everyone assumes this will work again. The success in WWII was more of a fluke than anything else. That success depended on what other countries did and on the internal dynamics of the country. Even Putin understands that there are limits. He is not Stalin, and the Russian Federation is not the USSR. Why do you think he has not done a general mobilization? The reality is that if Hitler had not gone all racist on the Slavs, he had a very good chance of winning. It was a pivotal point at which the Germans could have turned the population against the Soviets. Instead, they proved themselves to be just as awful as the Soviet leadership. Just look at Russian wars before WWII. The Winter War with Finland. World War I. The Russo-Japanese War. The Crimean War. The Russo-Japanese war caused a mini-revolution. WWI caused a full-scale revolution. The Winter War was a contributing factor in Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union when he did. That is a lot like the situation today where the US withdrawal from Afghanistan influenced Putin to start his full-scale invasion, oh, I mean special military operation, in Ukraine. Why do you think no other major power has really followed the Russians in their style of war? The people who think about these things in other countries have studied it and know better.
    2
  2297.  @charles-cl6xj  Owning commercial property like that the Japanese did in NYC does not bother me. For one thing, unlike owning a company, they cannot take it back to Japan. In fact, they have to operate it to make money. That was their purpose. This is unlike the Chinese, who do things for political reasons.
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  2298.  @thomasherrin6798  The term APEC means "Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation". It is not strictly an Asian effort. In fact, there is Australia (which first proposed the idea) and several South American countries. In fact, next year's summit is scheduled for Peru. All three North American countries are involved, and two South American countries (Peru and Chilie). Otherwise, I fully agree with your assessment.
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  2299. In the US, government pension (Social Security) ages are adjusted upwards. It depends on when you were born. This takes into account life expectancy and costs. For me the age was 66 and two months. I am still working on startups, though. For my sons the age is 67. Of course, company pension plans will have different ages and can be flexible. On top of that, most people have what we call a 401K plan which is a self-directed pension savings plan. There are also Individual Retirement Accounts. The growth of these funds is not taxed. One pays taxes only on withdrawals. So, seeing how low the age is in Europe is somewhat amusing to us. Another interesting thing that my friends in insurance tell me is that if you make it to 65 you have a 50% chance of living to 95.
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  2300.  @ThinkUkraine  Vita, after I had watched the video, I recalled a situation from my youth that you might find amusing. It was in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium. I was a teenager just out of high school and taking my first trip to Europe. I was in Greece and had just come from a city in the center of the country. My aunt's father was there. We were very close to him as he lived in the same city in the US, and we did lots of things with him and his wife. He had emigrated to the US and had done very well financially. He was in his late 70s. He was a widower and joked (I think) about looking for new wife. I had just met a nice American woman in her 20s on an island in the Aegan and told her about him. She was quite interested. She would have married him for his money. Heck, how long could he last (over another ten years, as it turns out). His son is in his 90s and still going strong. He actually still lives with his ex-wife. I am not sure I understand that situation. By the way, as far as Social Security is concerned, one can take it early (age 62), but the monthly payments will be reduced. He did that and now regrets it. Not that he really needs it.
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  2301. Yeah, Latvia!
    2
  2302. It is interesting to hear the official readout from Tony's perspective. What a contrast from the reaction of expatriate Russians. One of my favorite little entertainments is the pronouncements from the CCP on foreign relations. I mean this stuff is worthy of Monty Python. Between contemporary Russia and the CCP I seem to be watching a bunch of elementary school kids when compared to the rest of the world. Heck, they make Donald Trump's delivery sound sophisticated. Actually, I think I just might have insulted elementary school students.
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  2303. Classic Starkey. I was actually relieved that there was no real America bashing.
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  2304. Whatever happened to global warming?
    2
  2305. The idea of a successful invasion of Taiwan by China seems ludicrous to me. In WWII an invasion of Taiwan was considered. It would have been larger than the D-Day invasion. That is why the JCS decided to support the Philippines invasion instead. And don't forget at that time the US had great experience and equipment for such an invasion. The Chinese have none of that. Their last was with Vietnam, on their border, which they lost. Their current conflict with India shows their weakness militarily. China would be foolish to invade Taiwan. If the US and Japan helped Taiwan resist it would be catastrophic for them. The current Chinese military is in no way comparable to the Japanese military that occupied Taiwan in WWII. So, how do you think it would go?
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  2306. The reporter says that it was Trump and Vance laying into Zalenski. What biased reporting. Zalenski was spewing his propaganda.
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  2307. Comparing China today, with its shrinking population, to Germany and Japan in the pre-WWII era is not quite valid. Both countries had large populations for their physical size. China does not have this constraint. Don't forget Hitler's ranting about Lebensraum. When the Japanese took over Manchuria, they had plenty of people to send to populate the area.
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  2308. These are not active reserves such as we have in the US. Our National Guard and Reserves regularly train and are fully equipped. They drill one weekend a month, with a two week training session each year. In all our wars since WWII, they have been used and acquitted themselves well. In Russia, as in many other countries, reserves generally mean someone who has been trained, then is liable to be called up in an emergency. While not raw recruits, they still need training which includes training on equipment. Operating a tank effectively is not something that you do for a bit and then can do competently after a few years hiatus.
    2
  2309.  @crosslink1493  I have seen claims that something like only 20% of allocated project funds are actually spent on the actual project. Even if it is twice that amount, it is bad.
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  2310. The answer to why Macron called this election is simple. In the past, the EU parliament elections were seen as a "protest" vote, and people in elections for their own parliaments were then generally more "rational". You should ask more knowledgeable experts. What everyone seems to misunderstand is the issues that motivate the electorate. These are often not what the "chattering class" talks about. People are concerned about issues like migration, inflation and in Europe, social cohesion. The average voter is not as concerned about climate change, gender, DEI, foreign affairs or other such issues which the pundits are always going on about. For example, in the US climate change is generally at the bottom of a list of concerns when polling is done, generally getting single digit support. Another thing we are starting to see in the US, and it is happening suddenly and fast, is major businesses scrapping their DEI programs. What seems to be happening is the "silent majority" is making itself heard again. Don't forget the Bud Light and Target debacles. The leadership has been catering to minorities for too long. Now that it is starting to affect people's lives they are reacting in their own best interest, which is how democracy works, by the way.
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  2311. BRICS is a joke. The core members do not have common goals, and most are in decline. We have Russia. Need I say more. Then there is China, which is going through an economic breakdown much faster than anyone thought. Then there is South Africa which can't even keep the lights on (China runs into this at times as well). Brazil? Come on man. The only one that is relatively healthy is India. Oh, but wait, India and China have a border dispute that is threatening to break out into war. Commentators in India are actually expecting this to happen sooner rather than later. As for the new members, you must be kidding. Iran and Saudi Arabia are sworn enemies. Which one will China side with if it comes to that? Can China do anything in that regard? Ethiopia and Egypt. Oh yes, they bring a lot to the table, don't they. Come on man. As for Saudi Arabia getting paid in yuan for oil, they will regret it. Unlike dollars, the yuan is not freely traded. Don't forget the yuan will be in accounts in Chinese banks. Russia recently was doing this. Then when they tried to get the money out to buy dollars for some other purpose China said no. And Russia has nukes. Unless the trade between Saudi Arabia and China is reasonably balanced a substantial amount will build up in Chinese banks which will be difficult to access. Will Saudi Arabia then be forced to invest this money in China, or wherever China directs. How do you think that will work out. Come on man. Don't fear the BRICS.
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  2312.  @ThadGuardi  You are genuinely a low information commentator. Do you have any awareness of what happened in Syria under Obama and Biden, especially Obama. Look it up and come back with a rational comment.
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  2313.  @ThadGuardi  I was talking about the civil war. I think that is what the original comment was about and that is what I was reacting to.
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  2314. What Hamas and the protesters have done is reprehensible and deserves the maximum sanction. On the other hand, at about 13:30 Douglas talks about a Jewish demonstrator in London asking where is the reciprocity? The Jews supported BLM, after all. This is the mistake of so many groups, Jews included. They look at an oppressed group and say we too are oppressed, let's support them, even though they have nothing in common besides being "oppressed". It would take too long to lay out how different, and incompatible the Jewish and black causes are. It does include religion, by the way.
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  2315. The Ruger P95, which came out at the same time, does not have any metal reinforcement for its guide rods. These, like the CZ pistols shown here, are molded with the frame. They are not full length. I have one of these and have had no issues. I have also not seen any issues with the gun from other sources.
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  2316. On the first segment, I wonder about Putin's view of Ukraine. As I have been researching this, many of the Soviet Republics had their own language. including Ukraine. The Baltic states all have their own language. To somehow say they are, in some sense, part of Russia, except by conquest, is madness. These are conquered nationalities.
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  2317.  @DroneTonSoukhoï...etPafLeMig  You are so uninformed. Trump actually lost wealth when he became president. He was wealthy through private business activities. Prior to the pandemic the US had great growth and low unemployment. You can't even blame Biden for most of the problems we have now. Actually, the US has very low unemployment and fairly good growth considering the world situation, even though everyone expects a recession (and have for a while now).
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  2318. Um, you do realize that the King (or Queen) of England is the Head of State of Canada, don't you? I guess not. Such ignorance.
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  2319. The idea that English is somehow a colonial imposition is ludicrous. In the colonial age it was also French and Spanish that were, and are, widespread. It is because of the structure of the language that English wins out in the computer age, and will continue to do so. English is not an inflected language. It is also very flexible. If Anmol does not understand that then perhaps she is not getting such a good education.
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  2320. Homan is a stud! Of course, he has it easy. The leftist MSM is so stupid and clueless. It is almost unfair.
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  2321. The idea that Ukraine would be training pilots without combat training is just ludicrous. Where does this speculation come from? Does Clarke not know that Ukraine has a surplus of combat pilots? They had many planes destroyed on the ground at the beginning of the war. They do not need new pilots now, and if they need to train up brand new pilots in the future, they can obtain the simulators themselves (I used to work for a simulator company, so I know).
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  2322. Mark, look at the charts for oil. Brent oil was as high as 91 in April. It is 72.83 as of the 25th. WTI was as high as 86.91, also in April. It is 68.72 as of the 25th. These prices are testing their lows in the last year, not increasing.
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  2323. "A statement that doesn't always instill confidence." To say this is understatement is putting it mildly. For a state-owned company to be saying this should be a "red flag" to investors. The fact that it is a local government makes it even worse. After all, it is the local governments quest for cash that turned this whole thing into a Ponzi scheme in the first place. Local governments were responding to central government's need to show GDP growth to the world to keep the communist myth alive. So, who wants a centrally planned economy? Just follow the CCP's lead, and good luck with that.
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  2324. I think the monarchy in the UK is on the way out. The Queen is great. But, once she passes, if Charles becomes king, then all bets are off. I think he will be seen as deeply unpopular. There is some hope if the crown passes directly, or quickly, to William, but the damage may well have been too great by then. For an institution like the British monarchy, personalities matter.
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  2325. Wow, you were/are my favorite rock band.
    2
  2326.  @drajitshekher  Good points. I was just referring to those on Wall Street who just look at price data and see the stocks are cheap. In a normal market that would be a buy signal. That said, P/E ratios are not everything, and in the end, as you point out, getting any profits out might be problematic.
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  2327. This reminds me of when the southern Democrats switched parties under Regan. I think we will see more of this. Both parties used to have ideological range. Heck, FDR's fist VP was what we would legitimately call far right. The southern Democrats were a leftover from the Reconstruction era and had little to do with the old Democrat Party's labor base in the Northeast. As George Friedman lays out in his book "The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond", we are going through one of our periodic political (and cultural) realignments. I don't think Friedman would have thought Trump would have been the major catalyst, but here we are.
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  2328. The issue of nuclear waste in the US goes back to Jimmy Carter. He banned the reprocessing of nuclear fuel over proliferation concerns. The rest of the world reprocesses its fuel. This results in less waste.
    2
  2329. Have you ever wondered why the original Silk Road on which the Belt and Road initiative of Xi is modeled fell apart? Look it up. The trade routed that replaced it were more cost effective and safer. They weren't imposed by anyone but grew organically. For any government to try to create something different for political reasons is just plain madness. China has many needs at home, and yet they waste money abroad. Money they don't really have.
    2
  2330.  thientuongnguyen2564  Very well put. One other thing that China does not mention is that these routes go through many different countries, some of which are unstable. What is going to happen when the Muslim world finally shows some backbone and consistency and finally confronts China over the Uighurs, for example. Also, many of the countries have disputes amongst themselves. When the Russian Federation breaks up, the constituent parts may well not be friendly to each other. In the past, as I expect in the present, they exacted tolls and taxes. Nothing has changed. We are lucky in our enemies in that they often make stupid decisions driven by ideology.
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  2331. I like how you are thinking. There is no one size fits all. For every place where green energy is applicable, that lowers the overall emissions. We should be concentrating on the overall picture. This will evolve over time. Activists tend to just see their local situation. Actually, most activists are just tools of other actors who have little or no interest in the activist cause I have seen it. Long distance power transmission, with small loss, is now possible. Ironically, it is with DC transmission. DC originally lost out to AC for transmission because of the technology of the time. Technology changes. As for the cost comparisons, that is going to be interesting. I liken this to how we compare ICE powered vehicles to EVs. There is an attempt to force fit a measure that tries to emulate MPG for EVs. That is stupid. The real measure, now that we have completely different "fuel" sources is cost per mile. Interestingly, I have seen reports that it costs about the same per mile in the UK (and I expect most of Europe). To get back to the subject, we don't pay for electrons, we pay for the reliable delivery of electrons. A measure that can take that into account across different power sources would be the best way to compare. After all, it doesn't matter to the end user where the electrons come from, just that they are available when needed.
    2
  2332. Hey, Peter, you should read this book I found. Something about the end of the world and the economy. Very prophetic. All kidding aside, I just started reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about just this topic. The title is "On the High Seas, a Pillar of Global Trade Is Under Attack". So, far I have not seen a reference to your books in it, but it sounds like a Peter Zeihan piece. Did they contact you about it? The question is, and always has been, who will pay for the freedom of navigation we take as a given. The CEO of the Port of Antwerp-Bruges at least asked that question. Almost no one else does. If you follow the people who follow shipping on YouTube and other sources (yes, one must use other sources) then the freedom of the seas is just a given and they react from that vantage point. If we are going to "police" the seas, then we need a police force. Regular police forces in the US actually adhere to standards for size of the force based on population and other factors. It is a fairly well researched field, and in many jurisdictions, there are statutory requirements on the size. This in turn is a major factor in setting the cost. In the naval realm, the US Navy has lots of research on this topic as well. The number of destroyers (the cops) that you routinely point to is not something you made up (I assume). Policing the seas has been the responsibility of the US Navy and allies, although as you point out, they are limited. As with any police force, you have to pay for it. That means taxes. Who do we tax? If the answer is just the American people, I think you know what the answer will be. This issue is critical. For a historical example, one has to understand that the British would have given up their empire anyway, primarily because of the cost. It is not just cost, really, but the cost benefit ratio. Maintaining an empire is expensive. When what that empire provides is no longer providing enough benefit, it ceases to be viable. Having the conversation about what we are doing is something you have long advocated. We have never it, and as you like to point out the last US president who wanted to have it left office over 30 years ago. That conversation is much more complex than who pays for the ships.
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  2333. In the US every is covered, yes, but you can't opt out either. Your benefit also depends on what you earned (and thus paid in). All the companies I have worked for that had regular pension plans also did not allow the employees to opt out. Thus, you paid into both Social Security and private plans. Even as a young teenager, I had a job that paid a salary. The Social Security Administration found that the employer was shorting them, and me. I got a nice check.
    2
  2334.  @tonysu8860  Well, I don't take everything Zeihan says as gospel. I do often disagree, especially on details. He tends to make sweeping generalizations that ignore reality. On the other hand, the basic tenet of his writings seems to be correct, and seems to be happening in real-time, especially where China is concerned. As for saying "should never have been expressed", well that just smacks of speech suppression. You may want to rephrase that. Just think about what you heard in this video. The second person quoted is obviously saying things that "should never have been expressed" as they do not comport with reality, for example.
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  2335. Demarais is right to contrast de-risking with decoupling. They really are two different things. If decoupling really were done, we would be back to the situation that obtained during the Cold War. Just consider how the two sides fared in that situation.
    2
  2336. The Germans, especially Merkel. were not just naive, but frankly stupid. There are three major decisions Merkel made that are crippling Germany now. One is the overreliance on Russian gas. The second was the opening up to masses of refugees. The third was closing the nuclear power plants. As a result of this last one they are burning more coal. And their coal is some of the dirtiest.
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  2337. This is a good idea. It turns out that over 40% of college graduates are in jobs that do not require a college degree. Many are in fields unrelated to their major. China has a similar problem. They are graduating a record number of students, most of which cannot find jobs, much less in their fields.
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  2338. Tony, one would think that the CCP would be trying to lower tensions with the outside world in light of their need for foreign investment. It seems, sadly, that they are going the other way. All the talk about the "global south" really bugs me. This is basically the old nonaligned movement from Cold War days. Unfortunately, the global south will continue to be what it always has been, a source of natural resources and a literal battleground for major powers that most people won't be terribly concerned with. Walz's comment on Trumps comment on COVID is another vapid thing he says. Frankly, most people thought, at least initially, that China's approach was severe but effective. Even arch liberal Justin Trudeau said the same thing. The issue Vance brought up about protecting American workers from unfair labor practices in China is not only valid and important, but a key part of four key issues that I think define the trade frictions between China and the west. Besides labor practices, there is pollution, IP theft and firm ownership rules. The first will turn many working people (and others) against China, while the last one actually lessens the impact of decoupling. China has, I think, set itself up for failure.
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  2339. Kursk has no strategic value? Come on now. The Kursk offensive is purely strategic. You may want to deepen your understanding of the terms.
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  2340. Your "fear" of the bull reminds me of an incident I had several years ago while deer hunting. My uncle told me to go through this fenced field where he had two bulls (larger than the ones in your village). Now, I was armed with a shotgun with a rifled barrel and shooting very powerful ammunition. I was still afraid. Of course, I had on a hunter orange vest (required for safety) and I wondered if it would have an effect similar to a red cape. Well, I did make it through, but those bulls were staring me down the whole time.
    2
  2341. Whenever I hear Xi, or Putin, or their officials talk I just want to puke. Free trade does not mean just low tariffs and free flow of technology. In fact, it is also tightly tied with the rule of law, open economies and intellectual property protection across borders. China, and the regimen it wants to implement, falls woefully short in all those areas. Frankly, Japan and South Korea are a bit problematic as far as the openness of their economies. They have had government shielded corporate cartels since the end of WWII. The US allowed this and opened up its system to them because of Cold War realities. Both countries have demographic problems akin to China's so like China they won't be a problem long term. At least in Japan corporate governance is starting to open up just a bit so we may see some progress there. They need to do something differently. Like China, they cannot rely on immigration to solve their population woes. All these nations are very insular and frankly racist. They really have no mechanisms for absorbing newcomers culturally. All three are entering territory that humanity has not really experienced before. They, and the world at large, have no theories or policies to handle this coming demographic collapse. I point this out because any nation hitching their hopes on a CCP led world order are going to be disappointed and perhaps crushed. If they go that way after listening to Xi's drivel, then they deserve what they get.
    2
  2342.  @operator9858  You may be correct. I cannot find the article where I thought I heard that. I stand corrected.
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  2343.  @jerryrichardson2799  On the GDP issue I have to disagree with you. Follow the logic of what you are saying. Nothing was produced in the example, that was the point. It was even chosen to show that. If such activities could really drive an economy, then why do all the hard stuff. The basis of the money must come from somewhere. The activity should fill a need. Your comment on growth in China is spot on. Economists estimate that the growth has been overreported by about 2%, but that is just a guess, and they admit that. As for your explanation of the process, I know all that. I have participated in that type of work. I appreciate your responding with an explanation, though. What I was interested in was data about the accuracy of the projections, not the process. I would like to see the time series of IMF estimates vs. actuals, for China and other countries. This would help in understanding the model's viability. Thanks for taking the time to respond.
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  2344. Westerners aren't happy with mainstream western journalists. It is not only Russia they lie about. The thing is that they lie by parroting the lies told by totalitarian governments. This is a bit off topic, but it gets to the heart of the matter. Look at all the mania about the Chinese AI that just popped onto the scene. This is EXACTLY the playbook we saw with Huawei and their "advanced" chips. It is the same as saying that Chinese EVs are advanced. They are utter crap. First there were the battery fires. Large numbers of them and lots of deaths. Then there was the self-driving feature that doesn't work. Again, lots of damage and death. Now I read that the cars are rust buckets, rusting away in just two years. So, this situation with Russia is just par for the course. The media is only useful if they take a critical view and warn of issues beforehand. A great example from the past is the Enron situation. The WSJ warned about it well before the whole thing blew up. That was real investigative journalism. That seems to be dead. We have non-traditional media, like Konstantin on Russia and Lei on CCP China to name just a couple. They are analytical and knowledgeable about the topics they cover. There is hope, though, at least in the US. It turns out that a substantial majority of people do not get their information from traditional media. In a very recent turn of events the new Presidential Press Secretary in the US just announced that non-traditional media would actually have a place in the press briefing room and were encouraged to apply for credentials to cover the White House. Where the US leads, others will follow.
    2
  2345. Siba Shakib finally said it. The people have nothing to lose, that is why they continue. The journalists and pundits I have seen across YouTube seem to have no idea. They don't understand anything as far as I can tell.
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  2346. That long payout period is not unprecedented. The US loaned the UK lots of money during WWII. In 1945 the US extended a large credit line to the UK so that they could avoid bankruptcy. That loan was paid off in 2006. It is funny how these war and military loans work out. We often hear about arms deals, but we don't hear a lot about how they are financed. I think that if we did it would be mind boggling.
    2
  2347. The characterization of China as being a manufacturing powerhouse ignores reality. A lot of manufacturing was moved to China, yes, but it was the low-end stuff. It was also done with western capital, which is now withdrawing. Chinese EVs are, to put it nicely, trash. Chinese military equipment is similarly trash. Look it up. There is lots of evidence. I get the feeling that a lot of these analyses are based on headlines, not deep analysis. Then there is the internal instability in both China and Russia. The odds of both making it to the end of this decade are not high. In case of war, the west has the ability to collapse China's economy very quickly, and easily.
    2
  2348. The impact on international building materials will probably not be what the report expects. Most advanced economies will probably activate anti-dumping tariffs. in addition, many advanced economies are experiencing demographic downturns of their own. In the event, the materials will go to places that need housing and do not have sufficient industrial capacity of their own. Low prices in this situation would be a benefit. All of this, of course, assumes that China does not collapse before then.
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  2349. Have you seen the North Korean soldiers? They are malnourished runts. There are photos of them standing next to their South Korean counterparts. Since when have they fought? In the Korean War in the 1950s they were defeated. It was only the commitment of 1M Chinese troops that gave them some success. As for the Afghans, you must be kidding. They did not win by martial prowess, but through subterfuge. In conventional battles with western forces, they were not successful. In the end, many of the official Afghan Army just went over to them. I really don't think they could stand the war in Ukraine.
    2
  2350. Kallas talks about Russia waging a war in Europe. She is the EU foreign policy chief. The war is not being waged in the EU. So, to threaten a sovereign state with "consequences" because of their participation in the commemoration of a historic event seems a bit out of place. This is true especially because that event was a part of liberating Europe from an evil European nation that had enslaved most of Europe.
    2
  2351. Did he just say bitcoin is something that should not have existed in the first place? Wow! His stock in my eyes just went up a lot, and it was already pretty high.
    2
  2352. It is very interesting to hear calls for Anschluss in 1920. Actually, at the establishment of the German Empire, driven by Prussia, in the 19870s, there was a call for this. It was rejected by the Prussians because Austria was Catholic. If let in, that would skew the balance of power in favor of the Catholics.
    2
  2353.  @TeamAlleiahFamily  Provide some data. i am in the mid-west. I have relatives who are farmers. Yields are very high compared to historical levels. I think you are gaslighting us.
    2
  2354.  @alanparsonsfan  Thanks.
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  2355.  @sandymilne224  China has often played the ostrich. So had Japan. In the 15th century China has the biggest fleet in the world and started taking long voyages, Then, the Ming dynasty decided to withdraw into itself. That did not turn out well. Maybe Xi wants to repeat that. Who knows. Let's hope there is change soon. My feeling has always been that the Chinese, out of all the northeast Asian people have always been closest to Americans in temperament. Isay this because of my experience of the Chinese diaspora, which has always been very entrepreneurial.
    2
  2356. Just at the beginning the talk about WWIII is ludicrous. I lived through most of the Cold War. While never in the military. I was in the military industrial complex. I always say that I miss the Cold War. I got to do fantastically interesting research with unlimited budgets. What could be better. My father worked at an Army weapons lab, and he did lots of cool stuff. But I digress. The nuclear calculus has not changed. If Putin starts a nuclear war, then Mother Russia is gone. Done forever. That is the only thing that stopped the Soviet leaders. If Putin started a war with NATO, and it did not go nuclear, then it would be over in a very short time and Russia itself would be dismembered.
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  2357. Tony, we understand. Keep up the good work.
    2
  2358. Prior to the war, western oil companies were starting to develop oil and gas fields in the east of Ukraine, and in the Baltic. If well supported, Ukraine can be an economic driver for Europe. The US helped a devastated Europe rebuild after WWII and look at the result. Even after the breakup of the USSR, the west was helping Russia to develop. Frankly, they were on their way to being successful, then they started to invade their neighbors. Russia would have a much more diverse and richer economy if they had just refrained from war. Now it is Ukraine's turn.
    2
  2359.  @Midlifecrisis-g6u  That is true. It was also something that the US press was well aware of. Of course, those same oil companies were operating in Russia, so they were used to it. There is a lot of overlap between the oligarchs in Russia and Ukraine. At least Ukraine is trying to do something about it. Let's hope they succeed.
    2
  2360. This crisis in the "shadow banking" sector is precisely what Jack Ma got in trouble for mentioning in that conference of banking regulators. The man knew what he was talking about. Now look at him. Xi, and the CCP, is a clown show.
    2
  2361.  @teresas8173  You are assuming something about @antonmaler5172. How do you know his politics. There is a whole spectrum out there. Your comment is really an ad-hominem attack. As for the fascists you seem to forget that they were socialists. Nationalistic socialists, but socialists, nonetheless.
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  2362. As Peter often says, we need new economic models for what is happening in the world. This is the scary part. What scares me most is that the titans of finance are not the most advanced when it comes to theoretical thinking (trying to keep it clean here). That is not what they do. When the assumptions they make are false and/or something new comes along, they are typically at a loss. Their whole approach is using what came in the past to predict the future. One of the best examples is the housing market in China. The problem here is that they rely on statistics and mathematics, as most scientists also do. Now don't get me wrong, I have a significant background in statistics and mathematics. The problem comes in when you rely on these for the explanation. The statistical information, or advanced mathematics, do not tell you why something is happening. Statistics is a tool. It is not an explanation. Models of everything from markets to economies to the universe are based on assumptions and explanations. The math does not give a crap about that. The crux of all this is that we are likely to stumble around looking for a model or solution to the problems we face. The thing that makes me pessimistic is that this is all going to happen in the political realm. Politics is the worst place to do this. Politicians are the worst at telling people why they are doing what they are doing. Sometimes it is because they don't think the people could take it (not an unreasonable assumption) and part is because it they did, they might be lynched.
    2
  2363. Mahtar, while I abhor what is happening in Iran today, you and many others keep calling for something to be done. Suggest something. You seem to be saying we should be talking about this more. What good does that do. So many people have demonstrations in west, where that is possible, against various repressive regimes around the world. Does it make any difference? I would say no. How about the climate protestors who demonstrate in western countries that are actually decreasing emissions, while China and India build coal fired power plants at a breakneck pace. I am just using that as an example of people living in west who think that they might have some effect. Get over it.
    2
  2364. Property, and the reporting on it from the central government, is still problematic. There are three major issues. One is that the market in China is not a free market, like in the west. The government sets the prices for new homes, for one thing. Thus, doing any analysis on it using western financial and economic measures is meaningless, eve n if the data were true. That brings me to the second issue, data quality. It is, putting it as nicely as I can, total bunk. Any statistician, financial analyst or economist that relies on these numbers at face value is committing malpractice. In your case you are reporting what the government says, and that has some value, but is not analytically useful. The third. and perhaps largest issue, is reporting on the new housing market and not the secondary market. Any viable housing market is a combination of both, and the prices of both will affect each other. Related to this and the point above, is the housing stock available, the rate of sales (actually more important in the regulated part of the market) and the number of people pulling out of housing contracts. The reason I harp on about these things is that housing is an outsized part of the Chinese economy. The GDP figures have been unbelievable for some time, and now with housing shrinking it is even more unbelievable. It is also one of the sectors that could contribute to "internal circulation".
    2
  2365.  @HistoryHustle  You may be correct to some extent. On the other hand, talking about the 20th century, Europe was still a major factor. Korea and Vietnam were hangovers from WWII. This is both because of the territorial split of those countries and because of the threat of Communist expansion. Communism was a European idea. Even the Middle East situation was created by the Europeans and their horrible actions after WWI.
    2
  2366. The idea that the foreign student exchanges could foster understanding between peoples, especially adversaries, is way overblown. I have read about several Japanese officers, including generals and admirals, who had studied in the US. Despite this experience they fought brutally against the US. The phenomenon of foreign students in the US is also misunderstood. The issue in the US is one of population changes. US higher education expanded rapidly after WWII to accommodate the baby boom generation. The institutions worked to attract foreign students to keep their numbers up. What really needs to happen in the US is for these institutions to shrink to reflect more accurately the demographic situation as it is.
    2
  2367. The "right way" to deal with the problem would be to "turn back time". Peter does indeed have a unique perspective.
    2
  2368. S.E. Cupp as a serious political pundit? You must be kidding. The only thing she has to offer is her sexuality. Go back and review her time on FOX. She has nothing to say, save what her paymasters decide.
    2
  2369. Whatever happened to global warming?
    2
  2370. The CCP is a Marxist-Leninist party. As such it is an internationalist organization. Nationalism does not enter into it. This is in contrast to the Nazi party which was a national socialist party (it's in the name). Xi, with his socialism with Chinese characteristics is steering the CCP toward a national socialist path.
    2
  2371.  @mikaelarkanghel5094  Agree. Most people today do not have physically demanding jobs or do a lot of physically demanding activities. The idea that most people need 2,000 calories per day is silly. It was brought home to me when I was talking to the manager of a health food restaurant. He started talking about 1,800 and 1,500 diets. Carbs are not a problem when you are doing a sustained physical activity. When I used to do 100-mile bike rides, we would start out with pancakes. Then for supper at the end, we would have pasta. All this was part of the fee. Still lost weight. Meat is good for you and the reports I have seen from people who have gone to total meat diets have been good. I choose to be pescatarian, and many days vegetarian. It works for me.
    2
  2372.  @dancopp5607  What does that mean? Did you leave out the "if" after the "As"? I find that spending a few seconds checking what I wrote before posting works wonders.
    2
  2373. No! China not telling the truth about its economic data. That can't be. Just kidding.
    2
  2374.  @jackbass5860  What the heck does that mean? That has to be one of the stupidest things I have ever seen in comments, and I have seen lots of stupid things in comments.
    2
  2375. Jonathan, the "grey zone war" you talk about sounds no different from the Cold War. It really is Cold War 2.0. Don't ever forget that during the Cold War we had the Korean War, the Vietnam War, all the wars that Israel fought against its Arab neighbors. We also had the Iran-Iraq War. That war had about as many participants on both sides as the Ukraine War and devolved into the same type of positional war we see in Ukraine. It also lasted almost a decade. Then there was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And while the information space which you are so enamored with was not nearly as well developed as it is now, there was still a major propaganda war carried on by both sides. So, no, I don't see this as WWIII. It really is Cold War 2.0. Using the term "world war" for it is totally incorrect and ignores what the two real world wars of the 20th century were.
    2
  2376. I worked on some of the early ATACCS systems. The idea was that every vehicle would transmit telemetry for every 25 meters of movement. This was then sent back to command where a real-time picture of the battlefield would be displayed. The EM signature of a unit using this system was MASSIVE. For some reason, when specing this out no one took the EM signature into account. Testing is a good thing.
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  2377. Oh, come on man! What one has to understand is that leaders in a democracy, especially one as open as the US, represent people. No one, by the way, represents the views of everyone. This is not a hit on Tony, but on the commentators he brings us. There are lots of people who feel about Taiwan, at least on the security side, the same as Trump. There are lots of people who feel the same way about our European allies as well. Trump was not the first to chide the Europeans on their lackluster defense spending. It goes back to John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s. In the current war situation, Europe should be able to shoulder the whole burden of the Ukraine War. I don't think they necessarily should, but they could. The EU plus the UK has an economy ten times as large as Russia's in GDP terms. They have three times the population. Why do they need the US to shoulder most of the burden? The reason is that they have depended on the US for security for 75 years. They put the money they saved into social programs. That is coming back to bite them in the butt big time right now. The following is a quote from JFK library. In a speech at NATO headquarters in Naples on July 2, 1963, Kennedy highlighted the necessity for unity, mutual trust, and mutual respect among NATO countries. He stressed that NATO’s strength depended on every member nation pulling its weight and contributing to the collective defense effort. Notice the last part. Look at the history of NATO. The primary reason for the US to remain involved in Europe after WWII (as opposed to what happened after WWI) was to counter the Soviets. That is something everyone understands. The other reason was to prevent Germany and France from rearming heavily. Don't forget that Europe has been the most warlike and blood-soaked part of the planet for at least the last 1,000 years. American foreign policy from the inception of the Republic was always to not get involved in European wars. As for the chip side of the comments, there is some merit to what Trump says, but it is not the "fault" of the Taiwanese, or some clever plan by them. I have dealt with the chip foundry business from its inception. It was driven by the rapid pace of change in chip production and the massively increasing capital costs. Even on the design side the costs can be very high. Last I checked, and this was a bit ago, one seat of the software that is used to do chip layout, that is the step needed to hand off to production, cost well over $1M. That's before you hit the foundry. The chip industry is the most capital intensive and high-volume industry in on the planet. For national security and economic reasons, the US needs to bring back chip production. As for Trump's first term being "chaotic", that can be laid at the feet of his opponents. Prior to COVID (where did that come from?) the US had a very, very good economy. All racial and ethnic groups benefited. There were no new wars. There were also lots of peace initiatives bringing bitter enemies together. I'll take that "chaos" over what we had under Obama and Biden any day.
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  2378. Great news! I don't agree with him on much, but he is great entertainment.
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  2379. Temperatures reaching their lowest level since records began. Whatever happened to global warming?
    2
  2380. Great information. Internal Taiwanese politics is something that only someone close to the situation can adequately convey. The housing crisis is another matter. "...as of yet ineffective measures..." That is an understatement. Pettis, as he often does, gets it correct. I would go further and say massive structural reform is required. I see no way out using conventional means. Considering that the CCP controls everything, their use of conventional tactics is puzzling. It shows a total lack of imagination. The real explanation is, as with much in China, corruption.
    2
  2381. Actually, you have missed out on the major issue in Sri Lanka. This is the Chinese debt trap. Their biggest creditor is China through its belt and road initiative.
    2
  2382.  @robertjohnson4154  You need to read the response of @adonis8289. He has it right. Heck, the US didn't just supply weapons, the provided food, clothing. trucks and jeeps. If you want to go into the history of Russian/Soviet wars then look at the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, WWI, the Winter War, the Continuation War. WWII was an anomaly, for the reasons stated.
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  2383. The statement that economists often repeat is that "...if you have free trade and good relations economically..." ignores the political aspect of international relations. The evidence was always there, but the issue was political and geostrategic, so economists downplayed it. Look at the 20th century. The reason this worked for western Europe was that there was a US security umbrella and an active enemy on the border. The EU did not bring peace through trade between countries that had been enemies for centuries. It was 500K American troops and nukes. Something similar happened in Japan and Korea. Their democracies were imposed by the US. Heck, the Japanese and Koreans only admitted they were on the same side in the last month or two. What is the common thread? Trade? As President Joe likes to say: Come on man! It was the threat of immanent nuclear annihilation. You have to get the order right. It is the security landscape first and the economy and trade later. When the Soviet Union disintegrated the leaders of the west did, as you say, assume that this was different. The thought was, in the case of Russia, that the death of the communist ideology would bring change. Well, they forgot the Czarist, Imperial Russia that came before. In the case of China, the ideology didn't even disappear. My point is that the US and other western leaders are what I would charitably call rank amateurs. The last US president with any real foreign policy experience and knowledge was George H. W. Bush. He even wanted to have a conversation about how we move forward and evolve the system in light of events such as the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He was voted out of office and left in 1993. Who took over after him? The governor of a small southern state, Bush's son, the governor of a larger state, a junior senator, a businessman (he at least had foreign business experience) and a long-time senator from one of our smallest states. The American people don't care about this stuff. That is the history of the US, by the way.
    2
  2384. If I hear you correctly, then the pork imports from the EU amounts to $3B. That is not significant for the EU economy. Heck, in the beginning of this century, I worked for a big US technology firm, and our software sales of just the product line I was involved in were $2B. The margins were much better as well.
    2
  2385.  @taiwanisacountry  Very interesting. It is good to learn new things. I didn't know that about Denmark. Retail pork prices can be a bit different from wholesale prices. That may explain why the price difference.
    2
  2386.  @Adrian-jk4kx  Well, for one, I am not Irish. Bringing up the Native Americans is not appropriate here.
    2
  2387. On the new energy vehicle sector there are a couple of things that you do not mention. Some of the makers (maybe the majority) lose money on each vehicle sold. In addition, I have seen reports that vehicles are not actually used and are parked in remote areas.
    2
  2388. Look at the shale cost situation more closely. First, through technology, the costs have come way down. Second, it only takes weeks to get a shale project online. Conventional sources take years.
    2
  2389. The US had an election during the Civil War (last war or its territory) and during WW2. Soldiers even voted. Considering how Ukraine touts its online government services, I don't understand their not having elections.
    2
  2390.  @StarskyUA  I understand now. I stand corrected. Thanks for the respectful reply (as usual). Looking at it the range is basically on the boundary. On the US side, the issue is could the missile hit the western hemisphere from Europe (or Asia). For the Russians there are other continents that could be hit from Russian territory. That is just my speculation, but I think it makes sense.
    2
  2391.  @StarskyUA  Actually, the last nuclear arms treaty between the Soviets/Russians and the US, New START, was suspended by Russia in February of 2023. It was set to expire in February 2026. So, the treaty angle is probably not at play. As for inflicting fear in westerners I think you have to separate Americans from Europeans. I literally grew up in the Cold War. A little before I was born my father was involved in the design of the B-52 which was designed as a nuclear attack bomber. He was specifically involved in the design of the bomb bay. I was actually born in Washington, DC and we were definitely on the target list. By the way, he was slated to part of the invasion of mainland Japan after already being in several campaigns in the Pacific already, so we were definitely happy about the bomb. When I was 17, I took my first trip to Europe (on my own, it was a blast). I found a lot of young people there very pessimistic about war, especially nuclear war. It was not something I had run into at home. I certainly can understand that. The experience of Americans and Europeans of WWII was, of course, very different.
    2
  2392.  @StarskyUA  I am glad you liked the Smithsonian and Washington. I was born in Georgetown. Did you get to see that area? I used to hang out at the Smithsonian a lot. My brother had some sort of membership there for special events. They we really fantastic. I don't live there anymore. Now I am in the Midwest, but when I visit the area, I do go. It was a great place to take my boys. As for the RS-26 that is a good point. I guess that may be why it is classified an IRBM by the west.
    2
  2393.  @StarskyUA  The Air and Space Museum is one of the coolest. Good choices. In my career I got to work on several satellites and even on the design of the Space Station, so I always enjoyed it.
    2
  2394.  @UATVEnglish  Actually, ATACMS is a result of a similar situation. I has the range it does because of a different treaty. The follow on to ATACMS has a much longer range and is already being deployed in the Pacific to counter China. Perhaps the US should consider giving those missiles to Ukraine now that Russia has done what they did.
    2
  2395. I had to laugh at the situation in the open-air markets in regard to trying on clothes. As a teenager traveling in Greece in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium it was not uncommon to just change in the streets. We even did this in downtown Athens, and I usually went commando back then. One time, on an island, while waiting to board a boat in the evening a group of us, boys and girls, stripped and changed into warmer clothes. Then we looked up and saw that we were in front of the main police station. No one bothered us. Early in this century I was in Athens and from my hotel balcony I looked down on the pool. Two couples went up to the pool and just stripped completely and put on their swimsuits. What is really funny to me is that my sons, born in the 1990s, seemed much more squeamish about nakedness than my generation. That always makes me laugh.
    2
  2396. What is all this mania about Putin invading Europe outside of Ukraine? Is this some kind of info opp? Who is behind it?
    2
  2397. Seems like he has a better handle on things than the current crop.
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  2398. Jesse, you said what I have been saying. These city officials are elected politicians. The fault lies with the voters. They are getting what they deserve. This may also be an indication that these cities are not that important as far as our national wealth and wellbeing are concerned.
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  2399.  @davidc2838  I certainly know that resources are important to countries and why Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Your response just reinforces what I said. My point was, and forgive me if this did not come through, that the size of an economy and its success does not depend on having the resources indigenously. This is clear through history. I really didn't mean to say the resources themselves were unimportant. Japan, for example, could have tried to get the oil and other natural resources where they eventually did, in Southeast Asia. They ended up going there anyway. The US would not have mobilized to defend colonial territories. That is one reason we hesitated to get involved in both WWI and WWII. A majority of the US population thought that supporting the UK, France and other European powers would help them retain their empires. This certainly was the case after WWI. On your last point, while technically correct, the ability to adapt and substitute is also the sign of an advanced economy. Even figuring out how to get those resources on your own land, such as with fracking, is a sign of an advanced economy. Europe could do that now. They won't for political reasons, but they have the resources, all except liquid oil.
    2
  2400.  @liveinsea1  Have you been watching what is going on?
    2
  2401.  @Libertarianmobius1  Well, I look at lots o things. Not all are unbiased, and not all are solely focused on China. The bias of some of the YouTube channels is obvious, but if the facts presented can be verified, they give useful information. In some cases, government and think tank reports are referenced and these can be easily obtained. I am an old codger and have a lot of foreign policy analysis experience, and have lived abroad (not in Asia) so I am comfortable piecing things together myself. I also look at news and opinions from other regions, including their take on Chinese events. So, with all those caveats, the following are some of the sources I look at the WSJ, of course. There are other geopolitical resources such as the Council on Foreign Relations. China centered YouTube channels include, but are not limited to: China Update, China Observer, China Insights, China Truths, Lei's Real Talk, etc. Some are, as I said, obviously anti-CCP, but all are pro-Chinese. Other channels have occasional China information that is very useful in cross checking. These are just some sources to start with. I hope that helps.
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  2402.  @jfverboom7973  Fair point. I did not mean to stress the immigration aspect. Looking at it, I probably could have left that out, perhaps. What I am trying to get across is the parallel between marriage customs in China and Europe from a century ago. As I understand it a man must have a job, car and a home to attract a bride in China. There has been lots of discussion about this on this channel as well as others.
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  2403. In the Chicago area, where I am, we have had a very cold spell (the Polar Vortex has got us in its grip) and the reports of EVs not being even able to run, much less charge are all over the news. Most of these are Teslas. It is a travesty.
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  2404. Tony, I wonder if you saw the article in the US based Wall Street Journal about Michael Pettis. It was published on October 11, 2024. The title is "The Economist Whose Contrarian Streak Has Gotten Attention in Biden and Trump Camps". The subtitle is "Michael Pettis has spent two decades in China, and he calls free trade a mirage. He has also been a punk-music-club and record-label owner." Very interesting. As for his students, they sound more like speculators. I have seen many, many reports of Chinese individual investors losing lots of money in this last week. I wonder what the distribution of losses to gains among individual investors and institutional investors is. The term "leeks" comes to mind.
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  2405. Very good points. Artur Rehi has a good take on it and generally agrees with you. The next question is who did it. Artur has some good ideas on that as well.
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  2406. It is interesting that you show the Russian statements as if there were any validity to them. You don't make a disclaimer that all official Russian government statements have been shown to be inaccurate, and invalid. to date. If you add up what the Russians have claimed, they had already shot down all the F-16s, even before they arrived, and all US provided equipment has been destroyed, twice over, etc. As for the number of Ukrainian soldiers involved by in this operation, 1-2K, that is just ridiculous. The reports, which include unit numbers, show that Ukraine has 10K to 20K soldiers involved. You seem to make the same assumptions/mistake that many in the west do. That is to underestimate Ukraine's resources and ability to apply them. You may want to go over your information sources. Since your "methodology" relies on data, things are not looking good for your "analyses".
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  2407.  @jeanmcneil6353  Thanks. I am into walking, but I need to start on the weights. You inspire me to do so.
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  2408. At 1:12:40 you mention that God exists outside the universe we inhabit, and say that is hard to accept. Why? That is what I have been taught, and it is the only thing that makes sense. God is above, and outside, of the existence he created.
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  2409.  @FrancisHegarty  You must be kidding.
    2
  2410. Lord Kerr brings up Sweeden, Finland and Austria. Don't forget that Sweeden had been neutral for about 200 years. This was due to Russia. In WWII they actually supplied one side, the Nazis, with critical raw materials. Finland had neutrality foisted upon them by the Soviets. Vienna, after the exit of troops from Austrian soil, became a den of spies. Neutrality is no guarantee of safety if there is another general war in Europe.
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  2411. What does plastic have to do with it? Climate change, supposedly driven by CO2 emissions has little or nothing to do with other types of pollution. Get your facts straight first, then talk about the issue.
    2
  2412.  @solodad7999  What is a gob? If you want to get your point across use proper language. Profit first is not a uniquely American thing. That is a fallacy makes no sense if one looks at history at all. Profit is a human thing. Otherwise, why would one do anything. Do you do whatever you do just because of some altruistic motivation. Get real.
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  2413.  @debbiesherman3215  interesting point. I have a plaque I got in Greece of Asclepius that clearly shows the snake.
    2
  2414.  @mchrysogelos7623  I see lots of people turning from traditional medicine for long term health solutions. You can see it on YouTube. There are so many people talking about holistic medicine and health. The great thing about a lot of this is that since it is not tied to medications and doctors, it doesn't cost anything.
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  2415. The Russian way of war? Come on now. It only worked in WWII because of their industrialization prior to that war, and massive western help. In the Winter War, they were badly mauled. In WWI they had a massive army that was badly mauled. In the Russo-Japanese war they were badly mauled. Going back to the Crimean War, they were badly mauled.
    2
  2416. Most of California is scrubland. I was born in Washington. DC, and grew up in the Mid-Atlantic states. I now live in the Midwest (outside of Chicago). California is not for me. I lived in the south of England for a bit as well. California is desert and, frankly the housing is crap compared to the rest of the country. I can really say this because over the years I worked for California based companies and spent plenty of time there. The first time I went to California I flew into San Jose. We drove to the facility I was supposed to review (part of a large company) and I commented on how sparse it was. I was informed by my collogues that I was there at the peak of their springtime, and this was how green it would get.
    2
  2417.  @logangrimnar3800  Interesting. I was recently looking at a site with many images. There was one group that had green backgrounds and was very green. I found it very disagreeable.
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  2418. While you are probably generally correct, I am getting a little tired of all the talk about how Russia and China are doing this or that to "scare the west". This is not unique to this channel which I find interesting and valuable. What I am trying to say is that there is waaaay too much emphasis on the propaganda. This applies even more to China. My sense is that this is a non-specialist area that people can understand, but it is not ultimately decisive. Both Russia and China are the most vulnerable major countries on the planet. They are both dragged down by their innate characteristics. For China it is the very large population and demographics along with poor geography. For Russia it is very large land area and geography. Russia also has the demographic problem. The idea of them "getting together" will not solve their problems. Again, it is the innate characteristics topped off by their failed state models and cultures. The cultural issue is what will lead to their downfall, and this will happen soon.
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  2419.  @DancingShiva788  Like a slap.
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  2420. When the Soviet Union broke up, all the military assets within each country went to that country. Ukraine had a large army and air force. The problem was that they could not afford it. It had been funded by the central government, which no longer existed. They had to cut it back massively for that reason alone. This also applies to their nukes. As I understand it, the Russians even kept the launch codes, so it is doubtful if Ukraine would actually be able to use them. Also, the earlier agreement was the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. As for NATO, Ukraine has moving toward NATO membership in their constitution, I believe. Joining NATO while a country is in a conflict with a non-NATO member is against the NATO rules.
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  2421. The report you mention at the end is very telling. The most important thing is the name of the organization, AidData. They make their living off of the foreign aid ecosystem. That is something to remember and consider. The data in the report looks like it could be useful, but I heard nothing in your short synopsis that I had not already read before. What I did not hear was an analysis of the effectiveness and quality of the projects. We know that this is a problem for the BRI. That is actually more significant and may explain why the public approval ratings are what they are. It is the conclusions and implications that are even more interesting. One example is the Chinese success at swaying the elites in the countries they give aid to. Well, duh! The history of US aid to many of these countries is strewn with scandals (too mild a word, I think) around these leaders. For example, did you know that Yassar Arafat skimmed off so much aid that he was reportedly had $2B in personal wealth. The "global south" is replete with similar examples. As always, thanks for the work that you do. Having someone "on the ground" there is very useful, and your insights are appreciated. Considering the importance of China, I just don't know why you don't have ten times more subscribers than you do. Of course, I could be the outlier.
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  2422.  @skipperson4077  Thank you for that. I learned something from the video and our exchange.
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  2423.  @warrenharrison9490  I am pescatarian these days (eat fish). I eat only those wild caught and mostly avoid those that might have high mercury content. Many years ago, for at least a decade, I was purely vegetarian (not vegan). I am in my mid-sixties, and my health has improved immeasurably over the last five years. My body is getting back into the shape it was in my mid-20s. Diet is the main issue we have to address. Avoiding foods that can cause problems cures most ills. The chicken issue you raise is a real one.
    2
  2424. I am neutral on this. Let them wear what they want, in the abstract. But, someone has to pay for these sports. The competitors do not. It is generally TV advertising revenue that pays for these events. That being the case, the organizers do have a say.
    2
  2425. As tankers like to say: if it can be seen it can be hit, if it can be hit it can be killed.
    2
  2426. Now I know for sure that the CCP statistics are all lies. It seems that this is also infecting private analysis. Measures like GDP and PMI make sense, a little, when applied to capitalist countries. In those countries government does not manipulate the figures via policy with government targets. To compare communist and capitalist countries using these measures is statistically invalid. GDP is only useful as a gross measure of activity and only when comparing countries in relative terms. In the financial markets those that are more sophisticated ignore these measures. As for PMI, I don't believe it. Many small and medium manufacturing companies are closing due to lack of orders. Auto companies are running at historically low utilization rates. Lithium-ion battery manufacturers are also running are low utilization rates. There are many other examples.
    2
  2427. A deep sense of grievance among the ruling elites in China against the US? Wrong word. The correct term is envy. China is such a big country, land and population, and have developed so much technology and literature over the centuries that they think they deserve a larger place in the world. What they don't understand is that one has to earn that place. They are also embarrassed. They are purported to be the second largest economy in the world (I still think the jury is out on that one). Look at the first, third and fourth. These are countries that are tiny in population compared to China, and don't have as long a history. In the case of the Americans, they are practically babies in civilizational terms compared to China. And yet, which has the greatest cultural impact today. They are also embarrassed by their military weakness. Look what little Japan did to them in WWII. Actually, the embarrassment started much earlier than that. Even the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union have "had their way" with them. No, right now they are acting like a bunch of entitled children. Actually, that is precisely what they are (princelings).
    2
  2428. The GDP growth figures I have seen show about a 5% growth in the latest quarter (3Q) and projections are for two percent growth in the next few years. That may be understating it. The last two quarters of negative growth, Q1 and Q2 of 2022, have been followed by growth figures ranging from 2.1% to 4.9%. So, I don't know where this 1% growth in US GDP comes from.
    2
  2429. Not much information here. There is much more on channels that track the war maps, and other news.
    2
  2430.  @harnes64  Look at the data. Two points. First, this is not unusual for this area. Second, you cannot infer a climate trend on one or two data points. That shows wither a disregard for the science, or a misunderstanding of the subject.
    2
  2431. All this international law stuff is silly. The case of UNCLOS is typical. The US originally signed the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court (ICC), for example, but then withdrew its signature. It was never even submitted to the Senate. Actually, this pattern goes back to the League of Nations, which was proposed by a US President (Wilson) but was never ratified by the Senate. The Senate ratification issue is rife in US international diplomacy. Another example is the security assurances given to Ukraine to encourage them to give up their nuclear weapons, known as the Budapest Memorandum. Both President Bush and President Clinton determined that a more robust security guarantee would not pass the Senate.
    2
  2432.  @danshabash  Well, as to your point 1 that is more semantics than anything else. The military was centrally controlled by the Soviet Union, which no longer existed. To take back all those weapons would be "difficult". So, getting paid for them was a good deal for both sides. Your point 2 is one that I often make, so I basically agree with you. Where I differ is somewhat along the lines of my comment on point 1. There is another factor. Because the central Soviet government controlled all the weapons, my understanding is that the Ukrainians did not have the ability to control, thus use them, anyway. Their only real option, as you point out, would be to sell them, thus the nonproliferation concerns. The Ukrainians also didn't have the money to maintain the nukes, or much of their other military equipment. They had tank factories, for example. I was actually aware of that not long after 2014. On the nuke side, they have lots of powerplants. I don't think it would have been a big deal for them to develop nuclear weapons.
    2
  2433. Pastor Brooks, you are an inspiration. Fox News in great for supporting you. Keep up the good work.
    2
  2434.  @kamsunleong6648  He was not talking about returning to the "old China". What you leave out is that under the CCP's "new China" there was also widespread poverty and famine. Frankly, the poverty rate in China should be an embarrassment to the CCP. Most of the poor in the US would be considered middle class in China.
    2
  2435. On the whole NATO question, don't forget the examples of Finland and Sweeden. They have not been members of NATO. This is, of course, changing. That is the important point. They have had access to NATO weapons and coordinated with NATO military operations. So, for Ukraine not to be immediately a part of NATO is not the issue it seems. These things evolve. Another issue I have is that the journalist conflates NATO and EU membership. That is very ignorant. Now, personally I think Ukraine should be a part of both. But there are separate processes for joining each. There are members of NATO that are not members of the EU, and vice versa. As for conflating the situation in Europe with the Middle East it is just plain wrong. Israel has not fought a major war with another state in the area. They are dealing with religious and sectarian conflict, both between them and their neighbors and within those neighboring areas. This level of analysis is very disappointing. If this is one Ukraine's most famous journalists, they have a problem.
    2
  2436. The Declaration of Independence starts out with the right to life. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness follow.
    2
  2437. Marissa's description of what she believes as a Democratic voter is just plain wrong (was going to use another word). She may think she knows, but does she have any experience of high-level decision makers in the party? I doubt it.
    2
  2438. Military jets (and helicopters) crash without being fired upon at an enemy. In a farming area where I hunt one could often see Air National Guard F-15s flying. Nearby one crashed because of pilot error. They were practicing some risky stuff. These were pilots who had lots of experience and training in those planes.
    2
  2439. Those North Korean artillery shells are not as significant as the numbers suggest. Yes, North Korea has been stockpiling these shells for a long time. Since Soviet times. The thing about artillery shells is that they have a shelf life. Countries like North Korea and Russia are not good at maintaining such weapons (or anything, apparently). A lot of the shells are not effective, and some may actually cause the artillery piece to blow up,
    2
  2440. What a load of crap!!!! Canadians are not US citizens and have a somewhat different view and system. Quite frankly, the US has been through much more divisive times than we are going through today. And, on the democracy front, we have elections every two years that can change the balance of power. Gravitas should be smarter than to put out crap like this based on what one survey, or one political scientist says. Do some real historical and political research. This is beneath you.
    2
  2441. The Russians are giving orcs a bad name.
    2
  2442. By the way, I am not defending them. Don't like or read either.
    2
  2443.  @Onion_Knights  Thanks for the info.
    2
  2444.  @henrikhumle7255  While your basic point is correct, the two words have very specific meanings. "Outdated" refers to a measure of reliability. Beyond the date the probability of failures becomes unacceptable. Items have a shelf life, like artillery shells. In this case the shells, which are clearly marked, are often reloaded with new powder. When I was a kid, over half a century ago, my father, who worked at a military engineering lab, would bring me electronics components that were being thrown out. They were perfectly fine, but they had passed a date by which they might not be. So, to avoid having an issue they just replaced them. I never had one that failed. Another area where this is applied is airframes. Here the measure is flight hours. After a certain number of hours, the probability of something breaking becomes unacceptable and the airframe is either refurbished or replaced. "Obsolete" refers to function. It is a matter of the requirements of the mission. An example would be a bolt action rifle for front line soldiers in the 21st century. In general, this is a bad thing. On the other hand, many sniper rifles are bolt action rifles. Another example is the use of propeller planes. A good example is the OV-10 Bronco. It was specifically designed (in the 1960s) for Close Air Support (CAS) and was very successful. In fact, they have been used recently in that role, on a limited basis. Jets might do the job, but they cannot loiter long enough and, frankly, go too fast for some missions. So, there you have it. The definitive guide. The difference is reliability vs requirements. If William is going to opine on these issues, he should get the meaning of the words correct.
    2
  2445.  @henrikhumle7255  Do you have any experience with these things? All of what I wrote is based on actual experience. As for the language, you are the one making things up. the following is an example of usage of the term from an online dictionary that is directly applicable: "cause (a product or idea) to be or become obsolete by replacing it with something new" As for credentials, I think I mentioned them, but here they are. In the example from my youth, my father worked at a US Army research lab and explained to me why he was able to give me the "outdated" components. These were not being replaced with new components, but were being retired because their shelf life had passed. He had responsibility for ensuring that no outdated components were used. I have well over 30 years' experience in the aerospace and defense industry. There, language really matters. I remember the long discussions on the meanings of the words "shall, will and may" in developing requirements, for example. I was also involved in redeveloping a closed military base where artillery shells were "unloaded", recharged and relabeled. I have actually seen the process. Enough credentials for you?
    2
  2446.  @frederichardy8844  Yes, as I mentioned in a previous comment, I actually saw a plant the reloaded artillery shells. The shell casings were also inspected. At the same Army depot there were facilities for "de-milling" rifle rounds.
    2
  2447.  @SkyCommanderOverlord  Considering the size of the Russian military and the size of the front Ukraine is doing very well. They have done this without significant airpower, which is core to how modern warfare has been fought since WWII. Once they get that, even in limited numbers, things will change dramatically. They are also attriting the Russians massively. While everyone makes a big deal out of the size of the Russian population, the fact is they are short of people in the core demographic required to fight a war. They already have massive shortage of skilled workers in their civilian sector and in the defense production sector.
    2
  2448. I wonder why you make so much of the weather events. None of this is unusual, at least as far as I can tell. I have seen worse in the US over the years, and I am talking about areas in the mid-Atlantic region and the Midwest.
    2
  2449. Glad Jordan has brought back the beard. I have had one since I was 19. I am now in my 60s. It still turns women on.
    2
  2450. Hu's essay was very good and showed a high level of understanding of the topic. But as our friend Peter Zeihan likes to say the messenger has been shot so many times that making an argument, even a well-reasoned one, that contradicts Xi's line is not something that would be tolerated. Hu did, indeed, get off light. I wonder how long it will be until he moves to the west. I am sure he could find a great position in a think tank somewhere.
    2
  2451. Tony, thanks for the extra episode. As for the Five Principles of Peacefull Coexistence, all I can say is: Come on man! The CCP are literal Marxist-Leninist communists. Those principles are totally at odds with the ideology. The reality is that the commies worldwide were stopped from fomenting revolutions from within at the dawn of their era. During the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks expected revolutions in the other countries fighting. After the Civil War they invaded Poland to spread their revolution. They were stopped and Lenin came up with "socialism in one country". This is NOT a socialist concept. Xi's "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is on a par with Lenin's pronouncement (with a tinge of national socialism). It was a recognition of defeat and a ruse. After their defeat in Poland the Soviets set up The Communist International (Comintern) to foment revolutions around the world. That is the Marxist-Leninist ideology. The concept of "building a community with a shared future" is actually at odds with the five principles. This is Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris, level stuff. The whole belt and road initiative is a thinly disguised way to interfere in the internal workings of other countries. The saddest thing in the world today is that the leaders of the three most powerful countries are Biden, Xi and Putin. Three more addled and uninspiring leaders at one time would be hard to find in history.
    2
  2452. Characterizing NATO troops in Ukraine as a "real" red line is, I think, faulty logic. Putin has almost no troops facing NATO. He is even withdrawing troops and equipment from Kaliningrad. Frankly, the way to Moscow is open. Not that NATO would or should do that, it still has to be taken into account. As Bill Browder points out in a short on this channel today, Putin would lose a war with NATO in three days. That is not an exaggeration. The best thing NATO could do right now is to send in massive amounts of airpower into Ukraine, with NATO pilots. They don't even have to enter Russian airspace. They could, in a matter of a couple of days, clear the skies of Russian airpower.
    2
  2453. TIK, I just noticed that Jordan B. Peterson's latest video is titled, in the thumbnail, "Marxism is a Religion". Great minds think alike.
    2
  2454. What the heck good will stretching out the increases to 2035 be? Russia is in Ukraine now. They are building up at the NATO border now. Poland is already up to more than 4% of GDP for 2025.
    2
  2455.  @recondax  Quite likely. One issue is the type of degree. A few years ago, I was taking graduate courses in Applied Statistics and there were lots of Chinese students in my classes. A lot of them wanted to study other, generally non-STEM subjects, often things like marketing. Their families were against it, so there they were. Of course, their parents were correct. I could go on and on about this (college education, not Chinese students), but I will spare you. I think you get my drift.
    2
  2456.  @hanslepoeter5167  You are correct that the grain deal may resume, especially if Turkey applies pressure. As for access to the payment system being unrelated, Putin did tie it to the deal.
    2
  2457.  @steven4315  Nuclear has always been expensive on the front end. In the long run it works out well. If you really add up the costs of alternative energy, and apply them, then the equation gets even better. The EU is starting to impose tariffs with their Cross Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) which recognizes that a lot of carbon emissions are just shifted to other countries, such as China. Solar cell construction there is very environmentally destructive. In China they are building coal plants at breakneck speed, but that is only part of it. Batteries are an illusion, at least in the way we use them now. The focus is too much on lithium ion, which is very expensive and actually very harmful to the environment. Not in their use, mind you, but in their creation. In addition, add up all the capacity available now, and in the foreseeable future, and you have maybe an hour or so of capacity for the grid. A better solution would be to site something like flow batteries at the substation level creating a distributed grid. Long range transmission, using DC, is something that might work. When the solution to the switchgear problem was created, a few years ago (sorry Nicola Tesla), IEEE Spectrum magazine had articles about creating a worldwide grid. This would bring power from places the sun shines to anywhere it is needed. Perhaps a bit ambitious but leaning in the right direction. As for coal, in the US we have cheap natural gas, so yes, coal plants are probably out. If the natural gas was not available, then you would see new coal plants. In Europe, to a large extent due to the war in Ukraine, they do not have this luxury. They are mining and burning more coal. New mines are opening up in Germany and the UK. In one case, in Germany, they tore down some windmills to make way for the expansion of a coal mine. They are also extending the life of nuclear plants, at least in the near term. The power generation landscape is very complex. As consumers we pay for electrons at the point of use, and for reliable delivery of those electrons. That is not a simple task, especially when trying to integrate intermittent sources which you have little control over. I have experience setting up multi-generation systems, and the systems to control them. It is certainly doable, but not trivial. It really will call for a rethinking of the grid. This is also not inexpensive.
    2
  2458.  @steven4315  Good points and good information. Except for nuclear I think we are basically in sync.
    2
  2459. Aaaagh!!! Global "governance". Any governance REQUIRES the ability to apply force if necessary. The US no longer needs to shoulder this burden. It hasn't since the breakup of the Soviet Union. It only carried on out of habit. Over the last four presidencies it has gradually been backing away. Frankly, if the experience of failed states that then foster international terrorism aimed directly at the US had not happened, then the US would have been out of the enforcement role a couple of decades ago. It was already headed that way. The last US president who had any interest in internationalism was George H. W. Bush. He left office in 1993. For one thing, does anyone think that the "world" would accept China, or Russia, or the two of them together, as enforcers of a new world governance? If things seemed to be heading that way, you can bet your last dollar that the rest of the world will be running to the US for help. Heck, the US is considering selling F-16 fighter jets to Vietnam to counter China. Vietnam, for heaven's sake. After decades of trying to bring all peoples of the world together through development, we now have nations like China that want to go back to the days of imperialism. One cannot even rule out the development of directly ruled colonies in such an environment. Is that what the world wants?
    2
  2460. Talk about cancelling Russians, would you not have cancelled Nazis? It is the same thing. Putin's ideology is imperialist and racist. I guess this might be appealing to some British. How can you do any type of business or cultural exchange with a nation that has done what Russia has done in Ukraine?
    2
  2461.  @dannyvestal299  So, where is "here"?
    2
  2462.  @OkarinHououinKyouma  I think India is doing a good job of navigating between all the different power blocks. They are focused on their own security and will deal honestly with any group that furthers their agenda. This may have something to do with their leadership of the non-aligned movement during the Cold War.
    2
  2463.  @SamD999  Thanks for clearing that up. I am not really up with the emojis or I might have caught that. The situation we have had since the Cold War has been very confused. It used to be easy. I say this as an old Cold Warrior. The shifting alliances are a bit of a problem. So, I think we can agree. The Communists are failing again. China is imploding, and Russia lives only on their mineral resources, mostly oil and gas. Lets hope that continues.
    2
  2464. The density of dark matter was huge in the early universe. Really? Has anyone ever detected dark matter? I am not talking about an effect. The claim is that dark matter is stuff, as opposed to dark energy. So, I think this is a valid question.
    2
  2465.  @AllOtherNamesUsed  I had to look up those speeches. I was familiar with the Biblical reference though. Actually, there are many references in the Old Testament to "putting under the ban" whole populations. That was a common occurrence in those times. I don't know if it is a problem. I would not have used those references, but then I live in the US. Our situation is different. Personally, I don't think such references are useful in Israel at this time. Beyond the effect on the Israeli public, I think such references will have negative repercussions in other places. While I fully support Israel, I have always had a nagging feeling about states that are "national", again probably because I am in the US. I have to remember that most of the world's nation states are just that, national.
    2
  2466. Plastic pollution has nothing directly to do with global warming. The production of the plastic might, but the pollution in the ocean is not a contributor to global warming. It may be harmful to marine life, but that is NOT global warming. CO2 is not a pollutant. It is a necessary element for life on the planet. Other types of pollution are a problem, but to conflate them with global warming is just bad science. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, our cars put out more CO2 where they previously put out more noxious greenhouse gasses and gasses that affected the ozone layer.
    2
  2467. Xi is doing everything he can to destroy the CCP from within, without intending to do it. The whole system is rotten to the core, and always has been. It is modeled on the Soviet system, which trained all its leaders. Xi is right to want to try to avoid the same fate as the Soviets, but he is not that smart. I am not even sure it is possible. Xi is the Gorbachev of China. Literally. He is trying to reform the system and make communism work. That is why I say that he is not very smart. Between what happened to Gorbachev and the USSR and all the accumulated history and wisdom of China, he should know that the whole Marxist-Leninist project is a lie and a corruption.
    2
  2468. Yellen in her three points starting at about 6:00 leaves out, or declines to mention, the two most important points about China and the US's opening to China. That still leaves the others valid, but the ones she leaves out would have more resonance with the people. The first critical issue is pollution. The main result of moving manufacturing to China from the developed world is that companies no longer had to deal with environmental costs. There are many examples from materials processing like rare earths and the materials for EV batteries. I have also seen it with the manufacture of low-end products where a Chinese manufacturer would as an American client if they wanted air filtration in the factory to protect the workers. There would be an increment in cost, of course. The answer was no. I was there when the exchange took place. The second is labor. Manufacturing was moved to China because wages were cheap. That happens all the time, and where it makes sense based on demographics and production process it is a natural thing. What makes it a problem is that we are exporting jobs to places where workers are treated like dirt. It is worse in China than just about any other country and runs the gamut from low end manufacturing to high tech. On top of that you have slave labor and child labor. Heck, Vietnam is a true worker's paradise compared to China. In fact, they have strict labor laws, which are enforced. These are the important issues. Western leadership leaves them out. Ever wonder why.
    2
  2469. Protests? You can't protest in the "worker's paradise." Who do these people think they are?
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  2470. It is amazing to me that this is the first time you have cooked over an open flame. In the Boy Scouts we did it when I was very young. My uncle used to roast a whole lamb over an open fire in the back yard for Easter every year. I remember that especially because all of us kids had to take turns turning the lamb. It was fun. I still have a fire pit (a bit of ground with one layer of stones surrounding it) that my sons used to use to cook over.
    2
  2471. Join the club. Well before Musk took over, I dropped off twitter. I was on for professional reasons. The company I was doing online training for, in the electronics industry, had us use twitter as a communication channel. The engagement was not great, then a lot of other stuff started happening, and as I explored around, I found it toxic.
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  2472. VSH, the minerals they have are not rare. The deal Trump wants is for mineral rights. Basically, it is for US companies to come in and develop the mineral resources (oil, gas, and others) and the US will get half the royalties. Ukraine gets the other half for their reconstruction. They also get jobs, and by the way the government gets tax revenue from the jobs. Ukraine does not have the capital to develop these minerals on their own. The rare earths are not, despite the name, rare. Lithium is not rare.
    2
  2473.  @phlm9038  That would be the best solution.
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  2474. What you fail to understand is that the system of a country is what determines its values. In the US, and the UK, and to some extent Canada, which all flow from the British system, there are people from all over the world who exhibit the same patriotism. In the US, even the successors of slaves exhibit all the patriotism of the people from Europe who originally colonized the continent. I once worked on a major defense project where I was the lead technical engineer from the contractor. The leader of that part of the project I was involved in was as Colonel who was African American who had served in Vietnam. His lead technical officer, a Captain, was Korean (inevitably named Kim). The three of us were tightly bound in our patriotism and commitment to the task. Many Chinese I know have that level of patriotism. I once worked with a Chinese American woman whose family had been in the US for at least two more generations more than mine, who came from Greece. I have met many Chinese Americans who are fully committed to the US. I worked at one time with a professor at a local university (in the Chicago area) who as a youth experienced China during the Cultural Revolution. I was very bad for him and his family. He is a VERY patriotic American. Patriotism is not about how many generations of ancestors are buried in the ground on your land.
    2
  2475. I love hearing from Wang Yi and the whole crowd of spokespeople from the CCP foreign ministry. They are very entertaining, although I mean that in a way they would not appreciate. When I hear Wang Yi talk about the "rejuvenation of the Chinese race" I see the national aspect of Chinese socialism. That reminds me of some other socialists, in Europe, from about a century ago. The fact is that the CCP has destroyed the Chinese race with its population policies. China's population is projected to shrink to somewhere in the 600M and 500M range by the end of the century. At the same time, the US population is projected to rise to over 400M. There will be lots of Chinese in that number, by the way. I also love all the talk about US hegemony. After the Cold War (I miss the Cold War, good to see it coming back) the US wanted a world where nations adhered to a rules-based system. This facilitates trade and capital investment to the benefit of all. If that is a problem for China, then they are in worse shape than I thought.
    2
  2476. When living in England I went with my family to Salisbury. There was a reenactors convention there, so of course, while we were in frot of the cathedral, there was a Roman patrol, speaking Latin, a contingent from the English Civil War and a bear baiting group. We were at a traffic light and there broke out in front of us a debate (this was the bear baiting group, complete with a bear) on whether they should pay attention to the traffic light, since these were not period correct. We also went to Old Sarum and took a tour where the discussion of the rotten boroughs came up.
    2
  2477.  @donrane  Of course, that's the solution. Why didn't I think of that?
    2
  2478. If Russia were actually fighting with the US and NATO as a whole, this thing would have been over a long time ago, with the NATO flag flying over the Kremlin. Don't forget, the NATO members bordering Russia have reported that the bases facing them are basically empty. Just look at the conflicts between US and NATO supplied nations and Soviet/Russian supplied nations in the last half century or so. These include all of Israel's wars, the Gulf War and the invasion and conquest of Iraq. Some have always had the thought that. well, these were not the Russians directly. Well, now we see how well the Russians do, and it is no better than their allies. The meme that Russia went from the second strongest army in the world to the second strongest army in Ukraine has now morphed into the second strongest army in Russia. That is against a country that does not have the full complement of weapons that a typical mid-tier NATO country would have.
    2
  2479. Considering how long lived and successful the AR-15 design is, all these alternative designs are just dead ends. The original design works incredibly well and is combat proven. In fact, combat proven for coming on 60 years and still going strong. The gas piston models just seem to be more expensive and don't really offer any advantage.
    2
  2480. I find this very useful, James. Thank you for an enlightening exposition on the current state of affairs in the region.
    2
  2481. The citizens of San Francisco voted these people in. They are fools. You need different politics before anything changes.
    2
  2482. Sports, and mania for sports, is not uniquely American. Why does everyone keep talking like it is. The real reason sports is so popular is the element of chance. That, in our entertainment world, is unique. When a sport becomes predictable, it looses popularity. That is why we have salary caps. Don't try to make it more than it is.
    2
  2483.  @TheAmericanDreamLives  Thanks. There is one more thing to say about this. There is a good chance that Russia will not exist in its current form in ten years. This opinion used to be an outlier from people like Peter Zeihan. Within the last year though I saw a poll of geopolitical analysts where over 50% expected the Russian Federation to break up in the next ten years or so. I expect that if the poll were taken today, the percentage would be higher. Corruption, internal instability and lack of access to the west will tend toward a breakup. It will not be pretty. On the other hand, the lessons that the remnants of the Russian Federation will take away are that Putin's expansionist dreams are really a nightmare. They want to make money, not fight wars.
    2
  2484. The people doing this are all perverts. They are groomers. This is one of the worst things in the world. I don't know anything about Qanon but what I read on Wikipedia, and don't want to know more. On the other hand, it seems that Qanon has a point about a conspiracy to groom children. The current generation of young kids is being horribly damaged by this stuff. It has to stop, and lots of people have to go to jail.
    2
  2485. Wow! This was not flagged by YouTube. I sometimes get a message asking if I really want to post a particular message (they never say what triggered that). I always post anyway.
    2
  2486. You use the case of Henry Ford, but you fail to contrast your statement with his stated goal. That was to make it so that his workers could afford his cars. Of course, if others followed suit, then even more people could afford cars as well. In capital intensive industries, it is mass markets that make one money. This explanation is much more plausible than any conspiracy theory.
    2
  2487.  @pinkybrown1525  Yes. I was a new driver with no driving record and not on my father's policy. It was the state insurance fund. It went down after that first year by quite a bit when I got "regular" insurance.
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  2488. So, the other pole in the multi-polar world is the China-Russia axis. Wow, I was beginning to think that I should be worried. Now I can relax. "What we have here is a failure to communicate." Oh, no, wait, that is a line from a movie. I rarely make pop culture references, unless it involves Monty Python. But this actually seems to fit. What I was starting to write is: what we have here are two countries with failing economic models and terminal demographics. What we have here are two countries that very well might not exist as coherent political entities in the near future. What we have here is two autocratic leaders who are not very smart. Before you argue with that consider this. What is their goal? How are their countries doing? Before you try to counter with the situation in the US currently, look at history. The US is going through one of its periodic political realignments. This is a natural occurrence. There is an excellent book by George Freidman on the topic. From the point of view of the US, and the west in general, there is a salient point that most people miss. It is an old truism about the US. The business of America is business. The business of Russia and China is rampant corruption. I know where I would put my money. Finally, look at the causes of the wars of the 20th century. Both Germany and Japan had growing populations and limited land. One of the motivators of their conquests was, as Hitler put it, to acquire "lebensraum". The Japanese moved into Manchuria for a similar reason. That ship has sailed.
    2
  2489. The main issue I have with Hessler is that his claims about the efficacy of Chinese COVID policies do not rely on any objective data, or even the chance to critically look at the data. We don't have any idea of how many people got ill, or died, during the pandemic. We also know that the number of deaths after the lifting of restrictions was monumental, but because of government censorship, and refusal to publish data, the magnitude is unclear. We also know that the government has, to this day, restricted doctors from reporting deaths where COVID was present or to put that cause on death certificates. As for the deaths after the lifting of restrictions, this clearly shows that the policies the Chinese followed were mistaken. That is also linked with their vaccine situation. Is it hard to believe that in a country where gutter oil is used, and food oils are transported in tanker trucks that also carry deadly chemicals, that public health is not a primary concern of the government. I will give some examples of some of the absurdity of some of the measures the Chinese took. My favorite is that they were decontaminating runways at airports. The absurdity and waste of resources involved are monumental. Another is the practice of welding people's doors shut to prevent them from leaving their homes. Then there is the fire in Urumqi. The list goes on.
    2
  2490.  @ohioplayer-bl9em  That is what I have been saying for a while as well. I have a friend who bought a hybrid with a battery that could take him over 35 miles on a charge. That is actually enough for his normal daily needs.
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  2491. @ Tesla's market cap is stupid, I agree. They tout themselves as a technology company, which is utter bunk, but it drives the valuation. I worked for two large companies that went outside of their core competencies, GE and IBM. GE has been broken up, and prior to that many pieces sold off. They are actually doing quite well, in general. IBM is starting to refocus on technology, not consulting. We'll see how it goes. As for Musk and his motivations, I am not sure. Say his net worth was cut by 75% from its peak. That still puts him in the top 10 I believe. He is a strange one, for sure. I expect that if he publicly sold shares in SpaceX he would make lots of money. It will be interesting.
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  2492. Ron's comments on the vaccines, and the drug companies wanting to have immunity leaves out one very, very big issue. The usual timeline for vaccine development is years, many years. The COVID situation required something in months. Of course they were going to want immunity. This has basically never been done before. The government knew that and thus they supported them with immunity. By the way, even those vaccines that took many years to develop are not totally free from adverse effects.
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  2493. When I lived in Winchester, in the early part of the current millennium, I noticed something weird when going to the center of town on Saturday and Sunday mornings. There were piles of puke everywhere. Bing drinking, that is what they do at home.
    2
  2494.  @Mivoat  You are welcome. It is good when one has more a conversation. We both learn something.
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  2495.  @daikyosenshi  Is it common sense for one country to attack and take territory from another country while not being threatened themselves? Come on, get real.
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  2496. Best show on YouTube!!!
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  2497. Russia has nothing to fear from the West. There is no scenario where Western powers would want to invade or compromise the Russian state. It is only in the East that there exists a real threat. Russia making waves in areas such a Ukraine, is a fool's effort.
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  2498. Actually, a woman's fertility goes down as they age. I don't think that pregnancy at 18 is a health problem. It is a problem when they get into their 30s and 40s.
    2
  2499.  @kgjung2310  So true. The US seeking less involvement in European security is based on economics. When the US was involved in Europe early on in the Cold War it had massive numbers of troops stationed in Germany. As the German economy recovered, with American help, it was expected that Germany would contribute more to defense. As we all know, they have not, and this is a problem.
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  2500.  @zipperdeedooha  As I recall, Sweeden's neutrality was precipitated by a major loss to the Russian Empire. I never saw Sweeden as some sort of intermediary between Russia and the west. They have always followed their own self-interest. For example, during WW2 they continued to supply minerals to the Nazis. Not is not really a neutral act. To get to Sweden the Russians would have to go through Finland. What the war in Ukraine has shown them is that the Russians are willing to invade their neighbors. Frankly, Ukraine was neutral prior to 2014. Russia has also been aggressive in the Baltic Sea. Neutrality does not seem to be a protection from the Russians. As for keeping the money flowing the Swedes are a big developer and producer of weapons, and have been for a long time.
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  2501.  @SwapnilRupanwar  Thanks. Actually, in the early 1970s, when I started university, my two best friends were Indian. One has moved back to India and one has become a US citizen. I was studying physics. About a third of the students were Indian, a third Chinese (from Taiwan, of course at that time) and a third Americans of European descent.
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  2502. Um, I just fired up this video and after the first 28 seconds I checked on egg prices. They ARE coming down. This isn't geopolitics. So, you may as well stop watching.
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  2503. The whole housing market issue and financial and economic analysists' pronouncements on it just, as you know, makes me livid. The one exception is Pettis. Notice that he doesn't look at it in a one-dimensional sectoral fashion. Most analysts are assuming models of the housing market based on the experience of the capitalist west. It is simple malpractice. Take the moves in housing prices and multiply by at least ten. There is ample evidence for this. The "statistical" methods used are so blatantly manipulated that it beggars belief. For one thing, they don't use court liquidated housing prices. How can one analyze a market while a big chunk of the data is left out. That is just the tip of the iceberg.
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  2504. Crocs do eat people. In Florida there are occasionally incidents of people being killed. If one chases you then run in a zigzag fashion. They cannot turn quickly.
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  2505.  @chuckcurtis  That's the answer! Wormholes! Only way he could do it.
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  2506. Russian communist techno! I will never forget that. I am a bit older than you guys. In the 1970s we had discos. I would go to these, especially in southern Europe. It was a great place to meet women. The music was what we now call classic rock and roll (this is not the discos of the 1980s). Of course, in northern Europe there were private clubs. The women were not prostitutes. They were just members who, like the men, liked to have sex with lots of people around. Being an American teenager experiencing this stuff, it was magical.
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  2507. That last statement is interesting. What does it reveal? More effective than sanctions. Lots of people might have a motive in that case.
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  2508. While I abhor "abuse" online, it is a part of the medium. If you participate in this medium, you open yourself to exposure to unsavory people, as well as supportive people. I have gotten off FB (a long time ago) and Twitter (in the last year). I see little value in them, personally. As for their response, unless the people abusing you are threatening actual bodily harm, they cannot do anything. In a society with free speech, that type if speech, while reprehensible, is protected.
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  2509.  @grey5751  What you seem to ignore is that it is a totally optional designation. The US does not have to grant TPS to people of any country that is in turmoil. For example, it was not granted for the Congo or Sudan and plenty of other places experiencing civil unrest or invasion.
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  2510.  @garygnu8775  So, you are the arbiter of truth? As President Joe liked to say, "C'mon. man!" Get over yourself. By the way, why do you even care about this? Do you know any Hattians? What is your interest in this issue.
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  2511. I used to volunteer at a food bank. Many of the "clients" were overweight. Some were morbidly obese. In the developed world food insecurity is not a real issue. The range of food available was as good as a well stocked supermarket. Clients were encouraged to make healthy choices, and items were clearly labeled as such. As for amount of food, I have seen reports that the world produces twice the number of calories as required for the population. The problem, as always, is distribution. I remember discussing this with fellow students in the early 1970s.
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  2512. Tony, you didn't tell us what your costume was. You know that a society is on its last legs when it has a problem with Halloween costumes. Notice that I said "society", not government.
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  2513. Yes, the corruption in Ukraine is a problem. We have known about it in the US for a long time. Heck, Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union, so it is baked in. I think that Ukraine is trying to deal with it. A younger generation is different. As for the money itself, who cares? It is not US money. Let it flow.
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  2514. What concerns me is the parents of the victims. I have sons. I do not have experience of daughters. When I ask my friends who do have daughters, they agree that this is, at least partly, the fault of the parents. One good friend, who has a daughter who has just graduated college, agreed with me that parents should be involved with their children and should know what is going on with them. A lot of these issues have a parental breakdown aspect to them. The breakdown of the family in some segments of our society is the reason that predators such as Epstein and Maxwell could do what they did. Children just don't know what is going on. They are ignorant. They need that parental guidance.
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  2515. Good information on the housing sector. Including the secondhand home market is important. To individuals buying homes that is the more important market. I find the two graphs, volume of sales and price moves of the two sectors invaluable in understanding the situation. They reinforce the anectodical information I have been seeing. New home sales are really more of interest to people investing in the development companies. As an individual homebuyer, that is the irrelevant metric. Unless one separately invests in real estate companies, trust products or has money in banks, of course. That is a commentary on the whole financial sector, really a joke, by the way. When buying a home, especially when investing in second, or third properties, etc. the goal is to have a store of value and to realize gains by selling the property at some point in the future. Even if one is taking out loans on their property, to say, start a business, it is still the price of the property in the secondhand market that is the key metric.
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  2516.  @culturematrixmc  Fully agree. I am not black, but I have seen the racism close up. Growing up, one of my father's colleagues and good friends was black. I thought nothing of it. Many years later I had a business in a rural area in the Midwest. I hired a firm to do HR. It happened to be owned and run by a black man. We were both from the "big city". He hired a white woman locally to be the on-site representative. She then came to me an tried to get me to drop him and hire her directly. I told him and he fired her, which was the right thing to do. She sued him, and I had to testify. She lost. The thing is, I had been included in the local economic development council. The things I heard at those meetings were very disturbing and racist. And that was in the current millennium.
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  2517. With one the last set of quotes, which as you pointed out, seems to go against the "party line" (and which make sense), I see another example of opposition to Xi's policies. Recently the head of the central bank (I believe) opined that the short-term measures of the party working group, especially regarding housing, were just inevitably delaying needed structural reforms. I may have heard this here or in one of the many other sources I follow. The situation is dire, and cracks are appearing.
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  2518. Bring back the Mao era! Party control over all! The people have been deceived by having a "government" ostensibly separate from the party. They think they have rights under a national "constitution". Balderdash!
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  2519. To call anyone in the Russian military "elite" is somewhat stupid. That term is overused in so many contexts.
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  2520.  @gtw4546  Thanks.
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  2521. On the commodity front, it is true that the demand generated by China's infrastructure and housing will probably decrease overall demand. At least some of that will go elsewhere as developing countries ramp up their own spending on such items. Unlike manufacturing output, commodities are not lost if there is a slowdown. By that I mean that if demand for a particular commodity is down, it remains in place and is available if demand rises later, or elsewhere. This results in a short term decrease in revenue but is not an issue in the long term. Shifts in commodity demand happen all the time. Also, I caution against talking about commodities in terms of countries. While some countries have nationalized their commodity production, I expect that the bulk is controlled by international conglomerates. It is not countries, but companies that are affected and have to adapt. They do this all the time as well. In fact, those countries that are nationalized have the most difficult time in adapting. As for companies that sell in China, they will be fine. They will shift to other markets. Tesla, for example, is already in the process of building a plant in India. Again, companies adapt much more quickly than countries. You have to remember that during the Cold War both China and the Soviet Union were cut off from trade with the west. The west did just fine without them. Capital is both mobile and sophisticated. Communist countries are neither.
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  2522. The sponsored content was actually quite interesting. I usually skip over those, but because it appears on your channel, I watched it. It seems that the company is reading Peter Zeihan's books. The opening message was pure Zeihan. Interesting. The Pei books sounds interesting as well. I will read the Foreign Affairs piece. It looks like I will have to buy another book. Darn. I need to get going on building those bookshelves I had planned.
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  2523. I love your message at the end. You are doing a good job. I truly don't get that you are following the "government line", or any other. I find the information you give is valuable, even when I do not agree with it (the information). In the end, we are all making our own judgements based on both information and personal experience and knowledge. In that instance, this channel is a valuable resource among many.
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  2524. They might force pilots to fly them, but there were no Afghans maintaining them. That was done by US contractors. Thus, in a very short time they will have useless junk. They might be able to sell them, but I am not sure who will help them maintain them. Pakistan may try to help, but it is not clear how well they can do that.
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  2525. It is no fair characterizing Senate reaction by bringing on Ron Paul. He is an outlier and always has been. So was his father in the House.
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  2526.  @NeostormXLMAX  Well, look at history. Don't judge it in contemporary terms. At the time the "angloid subhumans" took Hong Kong they controlled the largest empire the world has ever known. If they are subhuman, what does that make the Chinese? In the 1840s the UK's population was about 27M. The Chinese population at the time was about 450M. Just on that fact alone, according to your racist views, the British must be considered superior. The Japanese in WWII considered the Americans "mutts" and thought they could beat them easily. How did that work out? Speaking of the Japanese, when they attacked China in the 1930s their population was about 75M. China's was about 550M. How did that work out? China last projected power outside of China was in the 15th century. The last war the Chinese fought was in 1979 against Vietnam. How did that work out? As for Hong Kong, the CCP gave their word that Hong Kong would enjoy their semi-autonomy and the ability to maintain their system for 50 years. What is the word of the CCP worth?
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  2527.  @astamano1274  Thanks.
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  2528.  @tapassinha9846  Great point.
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  2529. Russia's revenue is vastly down from previous years. Just released figures show this. And this is just before the sanctions and price limits on refined products come into force. The price they are getting for their oil is nearing the cost to produce it, which means no actual revenue left over to apply to the war economy. The sanctions are working in that sense. Sanctions, by their very nature, are not a short term solution, but in industrial warfare they are very important.
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  2530. Peter is one of the best geopolitical analysts around today. I don't see eye to eye with him on everything, but those things are on some of the details. Just look at what he has said about China, for example. Following the news there is like watching his predictions and prognostications come true in real-time. It is actually a lot of fun, from the outside. It behooves people to listen to him. As for the US Congress, it seems like Representative Marjorie Taylor Green has just filed a motion for Speaker Johnson to vacate his position. This is very breaking news. Speaker Johnson made a statement after meeting with President Zalenski in Washington a while back that was actually quite measured and quite correct. His main point at that time was that the US President needs to give a clear strategic direction to our support of Ukraine. This is true. The only thing President Biden has said is that we will support Ukraine for as long as "it" takes. He never clarified what "it" was. Many commentators and leaders have pointed that out, including Gen. Ben Hodges on this channel (as well as elsewhere) I believe. The leaders in the US and Europe need to take a stand that is definitive. Once they do that it can be debated and if accepted, it justifies the expenditures and actions needed. This is how democracy is supposed to work. Otherwise, we get something like the Vietnam War. Bad, not good.
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  2531. In German there are many dialects. At university I learned the Hochdeutsch, or standard German. One time, in the last quarter of the last century of the last millennium I was traveling with a German girl I met in Greece. At one point we ended up in Solothurn, Switzerland. I had met some guys from there the previous summer, and they had invited me to visit if I was in the area. So, I did. They would lapse into their local dialect, and she could not understand them. I think it infuriated her a bit.
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  2532. Spy games. Love it! Reminds me of the good old days of the Cold War. I miss the Cold War. The CCP has to let the market set prices. Either that or they will have to take the whole thing under state control. You know how well state-owned enterprises have done in China. The current abortion of a system where government set price levels and still had private developers building and selling was never going to be sustainable. Couple that with the stupid tax system, corruption and state control of banks, and you have a recipe for disaster. You have big companies that become massive Ponzi schemes. You have the Chinese housing sector. You know what happens eventually to Ponzi schemes, of course. The problem for the CCP is that they will have to allow detailed market information to be published. Aren't those "state secrets"? I don't believe any of what is published at this point. They will also have to enforce mark to market accounting. This will bring down many banks, including shadow banks. I expect that the Marcopolo projections to be in the correct range. Considering some of the players involved I also expect that we will see things that will surprise and disgust us. This is a hornet's nest, and it is going to be ugly.
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  2533. Brilliant. When I saw the news in the WSJ, I immediately thought of you. I have read all four of your books, so this came as no surprise. I know you are not a big fan of Trump, but he made two points to the Europeans that they resisted and have now come back to hurt them with a vengeance. The first point was that they were becoming too dependent on Russia for energy. You can still find videos of the German leaders laughing at him. The other concerned the Europeans doing more for their own defense. They freaked when the US wanted to partially draw down troop numbers in Germany so that these troops could be redeployed to the Asia-Pacific region. It is going to be up to the Europeans to provide security to their own supply lines. They have the money and the industrial capacity.
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  2534. The First Amendment confuses a lot of people. It prevents the government from making laws limiting free speech. An individual has no right to, say, publish anything they want in the US based Wall Street Journal as an example. That is privately owned. The same is true for social media platforms, and that is a big part of a larger debate. The US is not actually, in this case, banning TikTok directly. It is only banning foreign ownership of a media resource. The famous case on this was Rupert Murdoch who became a US Citizen so that he could buy media properties in the US. TikTok does not have a legal leg to stand on. Another thing is that the platforms on the Internet have nothing, or should have nothing, to do with the government. This is not like broadcast media where it is necessary for the government to regulate the medium because it is a finite resource. Without that regulation, it would not work. The Internet (with a capital "I") is a privately funded resource. It is paid for, ultimately, by the users, both individual consumers and content providers. The latter are critical. Individual consumers and creators like Tony are not the customers of the media service providers. Their customers are the advertisers. Too many people misunderstand this. The Internet IS NOT the PUBLIC SQUARE! When you talk about the public square, you are talking about something owned by the public. The other thing to consider is the content on TikTok. It is a pox on humanity. You only have to look at the case of the Rhode Island state senator who twerked on TikTok. Case closed. Actually, I enjoyed it, but felt dirty afterwards.
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  2535.  @jaydee6268  Love it! My grandfather owned a pool hall. So, I get the vibe. Internet fiefdoms, another wonderful vision of the future. A dysfunctional future.
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  2536. The mortgage adjustments will probably not be effective since lots of borrowers are "underwater" with their mortgages. Until that issue is resolved, the crisis will continue.
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  2537.  @gtw4546  So true. I just can't help myself, though.
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  2538. Of course, in that US withdrawal, many of the US trained troops went over to the Taliban.
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  2539. Until the last point you made, I was about to start a rant (love to rant) about how the US and the rest of the west needs to get out dependency on Taiwan. I am also not very comfortable with moving production to other parts of the Asia. We really need to move it back to North America. As for some of the points you made about economic growth, I wonder if the government in China believes any of what they are saying. I watch this channel because you are a good source and I believe well informed, about what the authorities are saying and doing. I expect you know quite well that this is not reality. Growth in China is a chimera. It is quite likely that the CCP is just making up all this stuff. Even the WSJ just reported on the fact that people are paying off their mortgage rather than spending on goods and services. Car prices and sales have collapsed. Containers have been building up at the export ports. Growth rates are not very relevant after an event like COVID. After a massive drop at the beginning of COVID, US GDP growth rates were much higher than what China is experiencing and projecting. I expect that things will get far worse going forward.
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  2540. India is a great civilization, no doubt. But, to talk about literature in terms of number of lines is just uneducated claptrap. The fact is that Homer has had more impact. That is demonstrable fact. The other fact is that a number of small European countries were able to colonize India and control it for a long time. This aspect of history is very interesting and is, of course the subject of much study. One thing I find interesting is that in the 18th century there was a leader of the East India Company who was in tune with the culture of the subcontinent. This irked people in the GB, and they put a stop to it and imposed strictly British values. Imagine if cultural merger had been allowed to take place.
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  2541. Listening to young people about anything is just plain stupid. I was young once. As were all of us. In the last quarter of the last century of the last millennium I first traveled in Europe. The northern Europeans were especially dramatic. They would go on and on about friends who had died (mostly drug overdoses). The northern Germans and the Scandinavians were the worst. They were so concerned about nuclear war. They were so concerned about anything happening in the world. Some were driven to suicide. It is so incredibly aggravating. They were living in a time, as we are now, where prosperity is at an all-time high. These are first world problems.
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  2542.  @Κώστας-τ9μ  I just wrote that to give some of the "color" of what it was like half a century ago (this year). So, it doesn't "help". Or, as some would say, I was just bloviating. It was "any blondy", if I get you meaning correct. The German girl and I went on an unplanned odyssey through southern Europe and then ended up in Switzerland. We were there to visit some guys I had met the year before. Then, as her vacation was coming to an end, we parted ways.
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  2543. I was living in the UK for some years before 9/11. In Europe I noticed heightened security. In Paris, at the airports and in the Metro I would often see patrols of three men. Two military and one police. The only difference being the uniform. Each carried an military assault weapon. The police in black and the military in camo. I sometime stayed at the Sofitel near the Opera. There were generally police outside armed with UZIs. Not long before 9/11 I flew back to San Jose for a meeting. I was so refreshed by the lack of all these security measures. It was wide open. In addition, everyone was not wearing black. Soon, it would all change.
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  2544. The idea that the F5D was scrapped by the Navy because Douglas had too much of its business has merit. I was working for a simulator company in the late 1970s. We were bidding on an Army tactical command and control simulator. We were initially denied because the company had so much Navy and Air Force business. We were able to overcome this only because it was an Army program, and we didn't have much business with that branch. That took a lot of lobbying to achieve.
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  2545. On the last point, about Putin doing this again, I think that is unrealistic. Russia does not have another shot. It took 20 years to build up their military to this level. It turned out to be garbage. Putin's resources are dwindling, not increasing. In several years Ukraine will be much stronger, and perhaps a member of NATO. No, this was his last throw of the dice. I seriously doubt he, or the Russian Federation, can survive without a total win.
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  2546. This war presents a really unique situation. We see daily updates with detailed maps. I really don't know how accurate those maps are. Who is vetting them? Who is putting them out. Many commentators opine on what the meaning is. Frankly, it is hilarious. A comment is made about Wagner's progress in the city and how significant it is. In the same commentary the loss of territory by the Russians around the city is noted. War is not linear. It would be good for the commentators to watch as much as they can about the Battle of Stalingrad. I find myself ignoring many of the daily bloggers periodically. The real problem I have is their analysis. Most, if not all, that I have seen have no qualifications to make judgements on the situation. Even the combat veterans tend to have been lower level officers, at most. Their knowledge of and appreciation for the high level tactical and strategic considerations is limited. There is a reason the military has training schools as the Command and General Staff College and the Army War College. If you look at what those who have been, and sometimes are, the top commanders in the US Army, they are much more circumspect and general in their commentary. They know that they do not have the info needed to make very precise pronouncements. The real source of the information required, the Ukranian General Staff, is fantastic at keeping its plans quiet. An incredible feat in today's information environment. We know lots more about the Russians. It is amazing. This is not meant to be a criticism of Artur's content, but more of a commentary on the whole YouTube commentary space. I see similar things in regard to many other topics and parts of the world. It is a phenomenon.
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  2547.  @KenLong-to1ig  That's a great idea. Bring in efficiency incentives like what I saw in industry even from the 1980s.
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  2548. To say that the fines signal the end of the wave of purges is to apply western logic to the CCP. Is there something more to justify this statement? Considering the poor performance of western analysts in assessing China's economic situation, you might want to refrain from mentioning such assessments unless you have something else to back it up. This might indicate just very poor analysis, or something more sinister.
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  2549. As regards the college enrollment situation, it is not just falling birthrates. It is supply and demand. After WWII, the colleges and universities expanded to accommodate first the GI Bill influx of our servicemen and then the baby boom generation. Then, after that generation, more people decided they had to go to college. It turns out that about 50% of college grads are in jobs that don't require their specific degree or any degree at all. The universities also filled in the declining domestic demand with foreign demand. This is actually a problem. A lot of those students are from China, and they are under lots of economic pressure. This will not get any better.
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  2550. Tony, I love the way the PMI indexes are treated as if they are something significant to such a level of detail that a 0.1 change could tell one something. This is not a criticism of you, but the numbers I heard basically tell me there is no change. Is that what you are trying to get across? The first thing to notice in the way these things are reported there are no "error bars". The changes you report are well within any expected margin of error. The second thing is that this is a time series. As such, I would expect to see a confidence interval (CI) at some level (say 90%). The third thing is that people seem to look at these measures as some sort of predictor of trends. A tick up or a tick down gets people all in a tizzy. It's a time series, and as such one measurement will not generally indicate a trend. It takes several. Given my previous points, reactions to a point here or there is sort of silly, and I would hope investment managers and government advisors would do some more detailed analysis.
    2
  2551.  @timtrewyn453  Yes. A real man of the people.
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  2552. At about 9:00 you make a big, and very common, mistake. Putin's actions will not encourage other autocratic countries to become more aggressive. For one thing, you are wrong to say that Putin and Russia, are not suffering consequences. The consequences are both great and in point of fact threaten the stability of his regime. The CCP has to be looking at that.
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  2553. The Americans being the "world police" is what created the global rules-based order, under which the EU, China and Russia, among others, benefited greatly. It also successfully led to the downfall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Mahyar, you are so young, and I am afraid not very well versed in geopolitics. If you hadn't noticed, the US has been slowly withdrawn from the order. This should have happened 30 years ago when its raison d'être disappeared. The Europeans were never willing to shoulder a fair share of the cost, and that has always been a point of contention in the US. Now that the US is energy independent again, it has minimal interest in the Middle East. Look for that region to devolve quickly. Really, what we are headed towards is the state of play prior to WWII. That sees to be what people want. The Western Hemisphere will do fine in the new world. Europe, Asia and Africa not so much. Finally, is there any scenario where you want Germany to have any say in nuclear arms use, ever?
    2
  2554.  @Boujois23  That is a fair characterization of Mr. Bolton, but you ignore what is happening in the world. His aggressive posture is a result of all the bad actors on the world stage. He has a reason for his aggressiveness.
    2
  2555. What get me is the idea that in this day and age an attack drone would be designed so that it could be jammed. There are methods and technologies that predate things like GPS and other navigation systems that cannot be jammed because they do not communicate or rely on external signals. They can be close to as accurate as a GPS guided system, and that should be good enough for the types of targets we are looking at. What Ukraine is doing now is not the type of thing the US can do with its advanced drones, such as taking out a single individual without collateral damage. Frankly, early cruise missiles fall into the category of an attack "drone" that cannot be interfered with.
    2
  2556. Great analysis by both Jason and Chamath. On the regulation front the European Commission actually commissioned a report which said that they had too many regulations on business to be able to compete with the US and other countries. On the startup side, Chamath hits the nail on the head. Even several years ago I knew German entrepreneurs who wanted to move to the US. These were successful tech guys who found growth in the EU to be too difficult. I even had a relative (through my in-laws) whose oldest son wanted to move to the US. We were standing on my deck when he said it. He was an executive with a German auto parts company with some US operations. He had done a foreign assignment in the US. His family was well connected (his father had been in the government) and traced their lineage back to at least 1700. If someone like that wants to move to the US, what hope does Europe have. I did a foreign assignment in Europe for a US tech company when my sons were young. They took German throughout HS, including the AP level. They considered moving there after university, thought about it, and said nah. Consider that they had CS backgrounds (like their dear old dad) and family connections. That is damning.
    2
  2557. I had a friend and colleague who was a Navy pilot. He also did some wild test pilot stuff. The craziest thing he told us about was the very early Wild Weasel missions. He flew an Air Force F-105, completely stripped down, right up the Red River in Hanoi. The Vietnamese would shoot at him and F-4s would come behind and shoot at the radars and missile sites. This is what he told us. I tend to believe him. When I knew him, he was the commander of a reserve P-3 squadron. While in that position he was elevated to take over the Nave Reserve Space Command. In the change of command announcement his bio was heavily redacted. You have to realize that at this time we both worked on some very classified stuff for a major aerospace contractor. I miss the Cold War. I got to some incredible research with basically unlimited funds.
    2
  2558. You have been reading my comments.
    2
  2559. On the other hand, Luckin Coffee has become the biggest coffee chain in China, surpassing Starbucks. At the same time, Starbucks has indicated that China was about to become its largest market. Looking at individual restaurants and small chains is not a good indicator. Turnover in the restaurant industry is always massive, even in the best economies. That said, I do believe that China is experiencing a slowdown, especially in domestic consumption. The most relevant indicator is the secondhand restaurant equipment market that you mentioned. Many of the other examples you cite are not necessarily indicative of anything.
    2
  2560. The guy in the update video from Bakhmut was half right about the Budapest Memorandum. What he fails to understand is that Ukraine did not have the money to operate or maintain any substantial forces when that memorandum was signed. Ukraine was one of the centers of armor production in the USSR. I remember many years ago, most probably right after the invasion of Crimea, seeing videos about a large number of old Soviet era tanks they had. They were, of course, not operational because Ukraine could not afford to refurbish them. Ukraine's situation is like that of Israel. There you have a smaller country, highly motivated, surrounded by much larger neighbors. Without US support, Israel would never be able to field the military they have. In fact, up to the time of the Ukraine war, they were the largest recipient of US foreign military aid. This is something that is debated over and over again and it does not change. Finally, and this is encouraging, a western supplied and trained military has never lost in combat to a Soviet supplied and trained military.
    2
  2561. This surprise at the fact that payments start out paying mostly interest, not principal shows the lack of knowledge of how mortgages work. It is the same in the US, and most western countries. There sis no mystery in why this is the case. The funds represent a large investment for those providing the funds. They make their income up front to make it worth their while. Then, later the principle is paid back. It all comes down to the lack of financial education in communist countries. Something similar happened in the former USSR when that country fell apart. Workers were given shares in the companies they worked for. They had no idea what these were and people who did swooped in and bought the shares cheap.
    2
  2562. I was wondering if you were going to mention that multiple real estate developers in China, many state owned/controlled, are returning land to local authorities. In many cases they had bought the rights to develop years ago.
    2
  2563. Hey, China, NATO threw off the Cold War mentality after the fall of the Soviet Union. Where did that get it? Now they have a hot war in the center of Europe. China is clearly an enabler (the enabler?) of that war. What China has done, in pursuance of its geostrategic goals, is to pull together the most advanced countries in the world, in both economic, and more importantly, military terms. The reality is that China has neither the technology nor the economic heft to challenge NATO directly. The PLA (and the CCP in general) is riddled by corruption. The CCP admits this and has made recent statements (and taken actions) decrying it. To no avail, by the way. Even if they got their house in order, it would take decades to fix the situation. Decades in which the west will have moved further ahead. On top of the direct NATO issues, China's rhetoric and actions have spawned a number of anti-Chines defensive alliances in the Indo-Pacific. Now, many of these are drawing closer to NATO. Frankly, I have never seen a more foolish (trying to keep it clean) foreign policy since the Qing dynasty. How did that work out for China? Are there no historians in China?
    2
  2564. Talk about manipulated economic figures, China takes the cake. Check out this video titled "China’s Fake Economic Boom Collapses! New Data: 800 Million Earn Below $140 per Month" on the China Observer channel. At 8:55 they quote Japanese sources pointing out that China's GDP growth is actually negative. There are lots of other indicators all over the web in print as well as videos.
    2
  2565. If you are going to look at the whole cycle of processing and transport for natural gas, then you have to do the same thing for coal and oil. Otherwise, any such analysis is invalid. The extraction and transport of coal and oil, especially oil, produce a lot of emissions, at least comparable to natural gas. Of course, the Germans could just frack locally for natural gas. All this schlepping stuff around the planet is just crazy. I have a friend (and attorney, good to have one of those) who recently bought a hybrid BMW SUV. He had to wait a while for it because parts were being shipped back and forth from Germany to the US (where all BMW SUVs are made), and probably elsewhere. Years ago, GM had a plan for what they called the "world car". They would build plants all over, and their suppliers would build their plants right next to the GM plant. This avoids shipping costs and delays. Well, we have now gone in the opposite direction. Frankly, Ford, in its early days, made everything themselves. They just received raw materials and made everything from steel to glass to rubber onsite. Should we be headed back to that?
    2
  2566. The US had 500,000 troops in Europe during the Cold War and right after. When the Gulf War hit, the US deployed 350,000 troops, most from Europe. So, 100,000 now is not an issue. As for Russia, their poor performance in Ukraine makes Putin's threat a bit of a paper tiger. They are even dusting off T-62 tanks (designed in 1962). They are running out and their tank production is very low. With the embargos, it is difficult for them to get parts. As for imperial ambitions, you have to be kidding. Putin has been comparing himself to Peter the Great, and has plans to take territory after Ukraine. Who is the imperialist. As for wars that are brewing. what about India and China? What about Taiwan?
    2
  2567. Don't put too much stock in these simulated wargames. For example, all such systems predicted a massive overrun of NATO forces in Central Europe during the Cold War. There were naysayers, but they were in the minority. From what we have seen in Ukraine, these simulations very much overplayed aggressor capabilities, and downplayed technological and training factors. These are critical in the Pacific.
    2
  2568. The first article you quoted sounds very good, but there is just one problem. These are the same people who caused the housing financial crisis. First in their letting the companies morph into Ponzi schemes, then in using a blunt instrument (the three red lines) they crashed it. They want state control over everything, but they have no idea of how to run it. Frankly, no one does, or ever has. The CCP has proved particularly incompetent in this regard. Just an editorial comment on communism and control. To have control of an economy, and to have it work (if that were possible) one has to have goals. These have to be measurable goals, and they have to be stated and the key indicators available for everyone to understand. Then you have to have buy in from the people who have to actually do the work. I know what you will say, it is a command economy. So were the Soviet Union and Cuba. In the USSR they had a saying: you pretend to pay us (the currency was worthless) and we pretend to work. That should say it all. Chen Long's comment is interesting especially in light of the last sentence. The CCP has had that "supervision" over all aspects of government. If they were smart (and they are not) they would intimate that there were some outside actors causing the problems. I know they try to use foreign governments, but there is nothing there as far as foreign exchange is concerned. If you want to be "scientific". or objective, you would have to attribute the failures to either the current leadership, or to the system itself. Anywhere else in the world just good politics would mitigate against pointing out the issue in this way. This goes back to my parenthetical above.
    2
  2569. Australia has implemented a statute along these lines. This works.
    2
  2570. The whole idea of reporting "local" government debt as something different from national government debt in China is a chimera. It is truly false. Local governments react to national directives to increase GDP. They do this to fulfill CCP directives. Their leaders are all CCP members. These people advance in the party through these local government postings. Pettis hits the nail right on the head as usual. Your comment that it is going to be a very bumpy year is also right on the mark. Rather than concentrating on GDP growth as the main driver of policy the CCP needs to work on fixing and rebalancing the economy. If they don't, the rest of the world will do it for them. Of course, trying to do this could mean the end of the CCP, because constant upward economic growth is all they have to offer their people. Bad, not good. Have a very merry holiday, and thanks for all you do.
    2
  2571. In what universe is Russia doing well economically? In what world do you take the word of a president who lies outright on media available worldwide? Is this journalism? If so, it is a waste of time.
    2
  2572. For every argument and counterargument there is a counterargument. For example, on the intelligence front one of the most important for the US is the Five Eyes network. Two of the five are not NATO members, are indeed in the Pacific. The US has also been strengthening its alliances in the Pacific region.
    2
  2573.  @JamesKerLindsay  Good points. The Brexit story is not yet done. I have seen projections that the UK economy will be the best performing in Europe over the next 15 years. This is from Bloomberg on December 25, 2023. While it goes through ups and downs, so do Germany and France, for example. All three are projected to grow, but France has the best prospect at 1%. The UK comes in at 0.6% and Germany at 0.5%. Not stellar numbers by any measure. As for Africa, the US activity there is really part of the war on terror. This is like playing wack-a-mole. Many Americans are surprised at the level of US military activity there. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
    2
  2574. "getting born rich". Interesting. A very European perspective. In the US most of the wealthiest and most successful people one hears about were not born rich.
    2
  2575.  @b_8103  I was thinking more about the tech entrepreneurs. Larry Ellison's mother was unwed, and he was adopted by an aunt and uncle. Bill Gates was decidedly middle class. On the finance side I am thinking about someone like Jim Simons. I was reading a biography of the man, and he died while I was reading it (not really relevant, but interesting, I thought). Again, not from a wealthy family. Simons was an accomplished academic mathematician who later became one the founders of the quant style of investing, and arguably the most successful ever. Mark Zuckerberg's parents were medical professionals. Inherited wealth was not involved in his success. In earlier history Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland and his father fell on hard times and moved to the US. They were not wealthy.
    2
  2576. Whatever happened to global warming?
    2
  2577. Russia making gains? Have you seen the gains in the north? A few farm fields here and there. That's it. And they have reportedly dedicated 100K troops and lots of tanks to this effort. On the Ukranian side there is progress in Bakhmut as well as in the south. I look at all the reporting on this and it makes me chuckle. I often see in the same publication articles that clearly contradict each other. The other hilarious phenomenon is the daily reporting on YouTube. War does not run on a daily schedule. Some of these pundits are former military. Many were lower ranking soldiers and officers and do not seem to have studied much history. In addition, they rely on third party maps that we, and they, know are not updated in real-time anymore. Who checks the veracity of these maps? Exactly! Ukraine is showing tremendous progress within the constraints they have. That does not make them equal to western militaries but does show how superior they are to the Russian military. That is really all that matters.
    2
  2578. You use the term "cosplay" to try, it seems, to differentiate Halloween in China from the US. Is that what you are doing? If so, that is bulls**t. The same costumes are prevalent in the US. Always have been. This possibly predates the term cosplay. The plain fact of the matter is that this is another example of the Chinese adopting a western cultural practice. It is simple as that.
    2
  2579. The attention span thing is so incredibly stupid. How long were we in Iraq? How long were we in Afghanistan? How long did we support the Mujahidin in Afghanistan against the Soviets? Putin is going by the news cycle. That is not, as Jake correctly points out, what matters. In fact, the bureaucrats have a vested interest in keeping the thing alive. Even members of Congress do. Putin is screwed.
    2
  2580.  @Hackenberg  I have plenty of firearms. We have FOID system here, which is sort of a pre-check. We still have a 3 day wait on handguns and one day on long guns. It doesn't bother me because I am already well armed. I buy because I want a hunting gun or because I am buying a gun for collecting.
    2
  2581.  @t.dickinson7942  Well, it was meant to be a joke. On the other hand, you can't have cold and snow and claim warming. Global warming is about the average global temperature over the year. This brings that down.
    2
  2582.  @war-painter  Glad to see some else understands. I just an interview on the channel with Tobias Ellwood who also seems to have a good grasp of the situation. Worth watching.
    2
  2583. Tony, thank you for your work on this channel. Let's hope you can keep doing it. It is a valuable resource.
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  2584. You are too hopeful about what the future might bring. The Russian Federation is an old-style empire. As such it needs strong control from the center. The most likely scenario is the breakup of the Russian Federation paralleling the breakup of the Soviet Union. The last act, so to speak. It is unlikely that this will result in a peaceful democratic transition. There is no democratic tradition in Russia. Many analysts expect the country to break up into warlord run blocs. This is similar to what happened after the Qing dynasty fell in China. That may also be the future of China, as well.
    2
  2585. The idea of old people not having kids is funny to me. I have two sons. The first was born when my wife was 34 years old and the second was born when she was 37 years old.
    2
  2586.  @ThinkUkraine  You are welcome. I think I have weeds to rival yours. I also have lots of grass and the flowers are out. Even my roses have started to bloom. But the weeds seem to do best.
    2
  2587.  @turnerfamilyinozi  Well, yes, when they are younger. This is a well known phenomenon. In the UK they are fond of saying that in your youth you are a leftist, and then when you get older, acquire a family and career you become conservative. This is actually well proven by the data. I remember when I got a good job, got a house (I have had my own since I was 24), had to pay substantial taxes and all my own expenses, that I really appreciated my father. He was very conservative but did not really make known to us his leanings. He came from a factory town in Massachusetts. Many of his relatives were union members and fairly left wing (at the time very different from the leftists today). Most of them were not well educated. In fact, my grandparents came from the central Peloponnese in Greece with 4th grade educations. Some of the children went to university, ALL their grandchildren did, many with advanced degrees. When I would go to my parents' house (it was only a few blocks away) I would give him a kiss. I was grateful for how we were raised. We were not wealthy, perhaps lower middle middle class. But we had a good life growing up and good support. We were taught to think for ourselves. Sometimes that led us down strange paths.
    2
  2588. The teacher at the beginning of the video reminded me of the situation in Russia. We often see people there petitioning the czar, I mean Putin, for a redress of grievances. This often involves bad actions by local officials. It is really stunning and shows how much both societies are mired in the peasant mindset. As I often say, these are not societies that will morph into liberal democracies. They are primitive. Actually, the fact that these two countries were the first major ones to see a communist revolution would have appalled Marx. He assumed the revolution would start in the advanced industrial societies with a large industrial proletariat, such as Germany, the US or UK. Instead, the revolution started in two peasant economies. The tactic used was to offer people free stuff.
    2
  2589.  @urkiddingme6254  Original design old, yes. So are most of the MBTs in the world. On the other hand, they have been continuously updated. Another example is in aircraft. I recently saw information on the latest F-15. It is much improved and modified from the original design, which is of a similar vintage as the Abrams. On the other hand, it now has fly by wire controls, a much more powerful engine, radars, etc. It is expected to fly for quite a while and will still be a formidable platform. I think your reaction to this is really conditioned by the automotive and electronics industries.
    2
  2590. Very interesting. I was studying physics in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium. I worked in the physics department from the beginning of my studies. That was in High Energy Physics. I learned a lot of physics in the job as well as in class. I basically was tutored by some of my professors. In fact, the one who hired me was a woman who was very well respected. She often took me aside and taught me some quantum mechanics. I also learned computer programming and advanced statistics. I really had it made, but some things came up in my personal life and I dropped out, got a job doing programming and statistics. I finally went back to school, on the company dime (a different company than the one I started out at) and studied computer science, pure math and statistics. I actually had many chances to put my physics knowledge to use at various jobs. One of my motivations for not pursuing the PhD in physics (and I would have had full support by the HEP department) was that I saw many professors not getting tenure and getting out of the field. One, who I was close to and taught me through my first year, was up for tenure. He was one of four for one slot. They all "deserved" it. Well, he didn't get it. He went on to head a CAT scanner group at a large company, also directing the software and physics branches. One of the cochairs of HEP was very much into computer science as well. He had a joint appointment with the then new computer science department. I learned a lot from him. There were also two graduate students I worked with who both finished their degrees, but didn't even try to get into academia. One had a wife who had a good paying job. He wasn't ambitious. He just wanted a regular programmer job. He went to a new sonar lab for an interview. When they found out he had a PhD in physics they offered him a position as the director. He declined. The other one ended up at a prestigious university, in the information technology support department. I have lots of other stories like those. Yes, a physics degree is useful, but just not in physics, for the most part.
    2
  2591. @RocRocket-cl3vc Speaking personally, I assume.
    2
  2592.  @thomasherrin6798  I saw that. I watch his videos regularly. The number I mentioned was from and analyst source, but it is never clear if that is at the wellhead or at the destination. The $45 is closer to what I have seen from other sources.
    2
  2593.  @SamtheIrishexan  Actually, it is advantageous for the US in the long run. As for your expectation of a change of leadership "fixing" things, that is not going to happen. The last four presidents have all been less internationalist. That last one who was is George H. W. Bush. That was so last millennium.
    2
  2594.  @CJLAKE123  Well, if you think you are well informed by watching YouTube videos, I think you need to reassess. There is no official world reserve currency. As I stated, there is almost as much trade done in euros today as is done in dollars. Who made that decision? Get educated.
    2
  2595.  @Tabula_Rasa1  Well, be that as it may, this is the reality. As for point 4, the information I have is that you are incorrect. As for hyperinflation, I assume you are young. I lived through the 1970s, when inflation was over twice what it is now. Home mortgages and car loans were running at 18%. The main point is that no other economy in the world can provide the liquidity that the US does. Chinese currency is not freely traded. In fact, I just saw that Russia was paid in yuan for oil recently, and China is not letting them take it out of the country. So, I really don't get your point.
    2
  2596. What I have read is that the 1962 war was motivated by Mao's need to assert control of the PLA more than having anything to do with borders. In fact, the border is called the Line of Actual Control (LAC). It was defined by the British when they ruled India. This is another example of the colonial era which created many borders that ignore the people involved. Another example is the Durand Line separating Pakistan and Afghanistan. Look it up. Another fine British mess.
    2
  2597. Why is the Alibaba situation news for this channel? Why would you assume that they were going to exit the A shares market? This type of restructuring happens ALL THE TIME in the US. This is similar to the situation with new EV manufacturers. At the beginning of any technology cycle, there are often many companies. Some die, some merge with others. The railroads at the dawn of the rail age were many. Now there are just three or four in North America. Look at GM in the US. All those brands (they had about eight at one time) were independent companies initially. The fact that the government in China is encouraging this is not unusual. The situation is that whoever controls the capital, whether it be the government, banks, venture capital, etc. makes decisions about who to invest in. In most cases, What I am trying to say, in my convoluted and wordy way, is that this is a non-issue.
    2
  2598.  @ChinaUpdate  You are welcome. The information and analysis you provide gives us an insight into the unraveling of a major player on the world stage. Frankly, I wish China had taken a different path, but there it is.
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  2599. Tony, I always appreciate the extra content. One thing I do notice is that there are two tiers of commentators. Not really tiers, but two approaches. The first, and the order here is not significant, are those that are more professional in their background. These include you, of course, and Peter Zeihan among others that I follow. I mention Peter because he releases his videos earlier (but only Monday through Friday). So, I watch you two to start the day. the second are those sources, generally tied to a particular country or region, sometimes in the region or from the region now residing elsewhere. You would consider them amateurs, but well-informed ones. The often use a lot of data, but it is more fine grained and sometimes situational or anecdotal, but real. The difference is that the "professional" analysts tend to zero in on published macroeconomic indicators while the "amateurs" look at more fine gained information. For example, you often mention PMI and government set housing prices. The "amateurs" look at retail store closures, specific business failures and actual secondhand housing prices and sales volumes, etc. Just as a philosophical matter you might want to familiarize yourself with the investor Jim Simmons. When you do you might get a better insight into what I am getting at. I could explain if you want. Why do I mention all this? Well, on Friday Zeihan's video was titled "China Will Soon Lose the Title of "World's Manufacturer"". Then there is your video today, and the report you reference (thanks for that). Now I fully agree with both and have been saying so for a long time. So have a lot of the "amateurs". The thing is they have been saying it a lot sooner. This should not be taken as a criticism of you or others I put in the "professional" group. It is just an observation. To get a real handle on what is going on it is important to look at a lot of diverse sources and opinions. The only slight ding might be timing. This is driven, I believe, by the belief that government action can really turn economies. This is the fallacy of Marxism and all other central planning approaches. If it were true, and we have seen the results over centuries in many different economic environments, then there would be no market crashes, banking crises, etc. Something to ponder.
    2
  2600. So, Putin says their relationship was not directed against "anyone". Do Putin and Xi actually think "anyone" believes them? Are they that stupid or are they just outrageous liars? Wait, don't answer that. It was a trick question. The answer, of course, is both.
    2
  2601. I have heard that one reason Austria was not included in the newly unified Germany in 1870s the was that the Protestant Prussians did not want a Catholic Austria included.
    2
  2602.  @leialee6820  Memories of WWII. On top of that, in the Budapest Memorandum, the US (along with the UK and the Russian Federation) guaranteed Ukraine's security.
    2
  2603. I know that the thumbnails are intended to drive the algorithm, but what caught my attention today was the text: "What are they about to do?" My first thought was something stupid. I am sure that I am on solid ground here considering the track record of the last decade.
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  2604. This always amazes me. The group that started as a feed company gets into property development and mining. A phone maker or property developer becomes an EV maker. There are lots of other examples. I hear this sort of thing often on this channel and other channels that track China. This is the weakness of the Chinese economy. The people running these businesses think they can run any business because they have run a business in the past. This is not how it works, guys. No wonder there are so many poor products and tofu dreg buildings. I have seen the results of this lack of expertise in industrial products bought in China and their effect on other companies in other countries. China will never move up the value chain with this mindset. The issue here, as I have seen in the whole Chinese economy, is corruption. The reason these businessmen think they can do something unrelated, in which they have no experience or knowledge, is that they concentrate on bribing the right officials. They seem to think this is the main competency required. They don't care about IP or counterfeiting. They just use their contacts to get into something else. Disgusting, really.
    2
  2605. The title of the video shows total ignorance of how these things work. The closest war we have to this one, in terms of how it is being fought, etc. is the Iran Iraq War in the 1980s. At the end of that war, which had become a stalemate very much like the Ukraine war, there was a large exchange of missiles (we are talking hundreds). This did not change the facts on the ground, but not long after there was a ceasefire and peace talks.
    2
  2606. It seems that Macarthy may have been at least partially correct. China's actions in the US in the last many years sure seem to indicate that. I worked in the A&D industry for a long time. At one spacecraft plant we were tracking at least 15 known Soviet and Chinese agents just targeting our plant.
    2
  2607. Pentagon assessments about how long a war will continue should be taken with a grain of salt (maybe the whole shaker).
    2
  2608. China is toast.
    2
  2609.  @colemarsh13  Thanks.
    2
  2610. Yes, tell us the truth about the "rent boys". I love me a good scandal.
    2
  2611. I love the comment about the history of China and cultural issues. If you want to talk about 5,000 years of history, and relations between China and France, then you have to be open about what that history was. France, along with the UK and Spain, was one of the major imperialist powers of Europe in the last several centuries. I don't think the Chinese, or Asians in general, really want to go there.
    2
  2612. So, why does the thumbnail on this video depict a F-16 dropping gravity bombs when it is about a long-range cruise missile? If they can't get that right, how can you trust anything they say?
    2
  2613. The Germans laughed at Trump in his first term when he told them they were too dependent on Russia for energy and didn't spend enough on defense. The videos are here on YouTube. Who's laughing now? Obama tried to remove some troops from Germany (I think it was a brigade) to support his pivot to Asia. The Germans squealed like stuck pigs and the plan was scrapped. During the Cold War the US had 500K troops in Europe falling to "only" 300K by the end. We now have at least 100K troops there. Questioning an alliance when those being protected will not, as a group, pull their weight is reasonable, and it is something many US presidents have done. The alliance was negotiated at a time when Europe was literally on its knees. It has really not evolved since. Now the GDP of the EU+UK is about ten times that of Russia. The population is three times as large. Why are they not providing most, if not all, of the support for Ukraine, for example. Heck, they should be providing troops. They are the ones who are next on Putin's list. What the European politicians have done since the fall of the Soviet Union is to use the money they should have been spending on defense to buy votes. Don't forget that Europe has been quasi socialist for a long time.
    2
  2614. You have to realize that Trump's goal with tariffs is to modify behavior. He is not doing this to punish anyone. He has goals that are important to the American economy. Even the EU is an issue. Frankly, the EU is a protectionist cartel. Look further at what Trump has said. He stresses reciprocity. You lower tariffs and non-trade barriers and work with the US on critical issues to America and the US will respond. If China actually followed the rules, then things would be much better for them. China, on the other hand, has openly stated that their goal is to overtake the US (no chance of that now, kind of like Japan in the 1980s and 1990s) and displace US power. Fat chance. China's military makes Russia's look good, which it is not. The rot in both systems is pervasive and corrosive so that any grand visions of taking over the world are laughable. It is not only China, as we have seen. Most countries in the world put up both tariff and non-tariff barriers to US goods and services. As Peter Zeihan likes to point out, after WWII the US "bought" an alliance by opening up its market. Well, the Cold War is over. A new economic regime is required. This is true not only of the US. Many countries are experiencing the unequal nature of trade with China. Tariff barriers are going up around the world based on what China is doing, not on what Trump does. About 100 years ago, and then again after WWII, the US had as large a share of manufacturing as China does now. The difference was that America was, and still is, an innovator. The US is also an open economy. China got where they are through government subterfuge and theft. Frankly, China has not been an innovator for centuries. This explains how a bunch of small European countries, sometimes with US involvement, could control China's trade for so long. Examples of IP theft go all the back to the late Qing dynasty and the warlord period and continue today. As Trump says, if the US and China worked together many of the world's problems could be solved. The US would welcome that. CCP run China has no intention of doing that and sees things in a zero-sum way. That is why China will, indeed, fail.
    2
  2615. I think the interviewer should get hazardous duty pay for this one.
    2
  2616.  @MohammedKumar-si4ec  Uncle Sam is smiling.
    2
  2617. Centralizing robotic and AI development in the CCP. That, in case you hadn't noticed, is a recipe for disaster. In addition, history is replete with examples of the first mover in industrialization being overtaken. A little quiz. Which country first industrialized? Answer: the UK. Which country became the industrial powerhouse in Europe by the beginning of the 20th century? Answer: Germany. Science, technology, and industry being centralized is a recipe for disaster. Don't worry about China.
    2
  2618. Sabine, you must be kidding me. Just over half a century ago I was studying physics and actually working in the High Energy Physics Department at a university. There were three HEP subgroups based on the types of "accelerators" in use. One did experiments at Fermilab (which was close by), one at SLAC and one used the cosmos (cosmic ray experiments). I mention all this because there was a single detection in a cosmic ray experiment of what some thought was a magnetic monopole. There was a department wide meeting, professors, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students. There were two aspects to the discussion. One was the experimental aspect, and one was the theoretical aspect. Basically, in some form, every argument you just laid out was discussed. So, not progress in over half a century. It turned out, by the way an error was found in the detector. And another thing. Just because someone publishes a paper that passes peer review that does not mean it correct. You should know that. For example, I actually have a copy of the third edition of Dirac's book "The Principle of Quantum Mechanics". It was sold to me by a graduate student who had bought the fourth edition. He did that because the last part of the book was incorrect. He didn't tell me that before he sold me the third edition. As for the list of benefits at the end that monopoles might bring that is just the type of thing particle physicists or tech companies might publish to generate funds. Isn't that something you rail against? Just saying.
    2
  2619. De Niro and the other Hollywood and media types obviously didn't get the memo. Just like traditional "news" media, their day is done. They are the past.
    2
  2620. The flaw in the numbers regarding R&D is in the assumption that all R&D is done by scientists. A lot of what is classified as R&D is engineering. Then, one has to consider that a lot of that R&D is in areas like computer science, which is more of a mix of science and engineering. I tend to follow journals from the IEEE, most of which are peer reviewed. I wonder if these are included in the analysis. Many of the researchers in what would be considered engineering have PhDs in physics, for example. Patents are another interesting area. I have worked at various times for a couple of companies that were at the forefront of patent production in the US. Many ideas were patented and never used by the companies. These were ideas that were generated in the course of research, often for engineering purposes, by people one would not consider traditional scientists. They both had a booming business in licensing and selling those patents to others. So, I think all these measures are problematic.
    2
  2621. The man is a treasure!
    2
  2622. So, true. Money will be useless. I remember a post-apocalyptic game my sons played. This was probably about 15 years ago. The only currency was canned food and ammunition. So, even kids playing video games in their teens knew this.
    2
  2623. A whole unit of the Russian paratroops was wiped out in the initial attack on Ukraine at the airport near Kiev. The use the remaining paratroopers against well equipped infantry and armor is just plain foolish. Yes, they are better than the mobilized troops, but they are not trained or equipped for this kind of combat.
    2
  2624. My family situation was quite similar to yours. My grandparents came over from Greece, Arcadia in the Peloponnese. The men came over and established themselves and then sent back for wives. Ah, the good old days. On my father's side, my grandfather was a carpenter. He built his own house. It is still in the family. They lived a decent life in a factory town (Springfield area) in Massachusetts. On my mother's side, my grandfather had several businesses over time, the main one being the pool hall on Main Street in Annapolis. He also built a house in town (not by himself) which is also still in the family. All of them had a fourth-grade education. My mother's father was very well read. Some of their children went to university. Boys only, of course. ALL of their grandchildren went to university, with lots of Masters, PhDs and some MDs. Not untypical. My father did not go to university. He got into Harvard but would not let his parents borrow the money. I love and respect my father, but that was a real mistake. He was very mathematically inclined. In the 1930s he studied calculus in high school. So did I, which was rare. So did both my sons. In fact, they took a university course. My father later went back to get an associate degree. I was born in Washington, DC where my father had moved to work at an Army electronics and weapons lab. He got to do some extremely interesting stuff, most of which he couldn't talk about. But he did expose me a lot of fascinating stuff. Enough of the background. Now to the Depression. My parent's experience could not have been different. The Depression greatly affected my father, and it was quite negative. As a kid he would walk around the neighborhood selling corn from his wagon. As an industrial town, Springfield was hit hard. My mother didn't notice the Depression. The pool hall was in a building owned by my grandfather's uncles. They basically said pay what you can, take care of your family, and we'll settle up when this thing is all over. That's what he did. Also, Annapolis is the state capital and has the Naval Academy. It was also a fishing port at the time. So, my mother happily roller skated around town with her dog, half collie and half wolf I was told, totally oblivious. By the way, Mark, the housing thing has a lot to do with the baby boom, don't you think. When your parents bought their house, the population of the US was much smaller.
    2
  2625. John's attitude toward Trump and Biden really diminishes him for me. That doesn't affect my appreciation for his art, but it does call into question his intelligence. The president's importance is not his demeanor, but the state of the country. Under Trump, before the Kung Flu. the US was in better shape than it had been in decades.
    2
  2626. Your characterization of the "far right" political parties in the EU is flawed. While environmental regulations have become onerous (just wait until Ukraine joins, you won't like it) the main issue that is buoying the rightist parties is immigration. This does not refer to movements of people within the EU, but to immigration from outside, especially illegal immigration.
    2
  2627.  @telebubba5527  Bollocks! Immigration is an issue in Europe. More specifically it is the type of immigration. It is a big issue partly because of the generous social welfare programs. Another problem is the lack of integration of immigrants into the social fabric. This comes from both sides, the indigenous Europeans and the immigrants. Europe is not the US. In the US, after a generation or less the immigrants typically become very American. That is because of the nature of the American experience. Europe is still a very diverse place with strong local culture. I have no problem with that, but it is the reality. When I lived in Europe, I saw a lot of it up close. All my ancestors are from Greece, so many people saw me as a southern European. I was based in the UK and wore English suits, so I did not stand out as an American. I got an earful from many Europeans about other Europeans. The one area I will agree on is the need for immigrants. But the immigrants coming in are not the ones Europe needs. The mismatch is also a real problem. Both my sons considered moving to Germany to work in the tech sector. There are lots of jobs available. They took German in high school at a high level and have plenty of German relatives on their mother's side. They eventually decided against it. That seems to be the norm. On the other side, I have known several Germans who wanted to move to the US. One was the son of my father-in-law's cousin. He had done a foreign assignment in the US and one day while he was visiting my home in the US, he expressed the desire to emigrate to the US. Another example was the CEO and founder of an electronics startup who wanted to move to the US because of its better business climate. There are other examples.
    2
  2628. The colleges and the foreign student issue is part of something broader. The size of our university system is way too large. It grew to accommodate the baby boomer generation (full disclosure, I are one) and we obviously don't have as many American students to educate. What needs to happen is a resizing of the university system in this country. Along with that, many people getting college educations end up with jobs that have nothing to do with their education. I have heard numbers like 50%. China, by the way is finding the same thing. Look at the reports of university grads there, often from their top universities. getting jobs paying about $280 per month when they expected $1,400 to $2,800 per month. The resizing I mention is slowly happening and is market driven. It starts with the small liberal arts colleges, but it also needs to be more widespread. By the way, I mention China, and it is starting to happen there as well.
    2
  2629. 1.75 meters is too tal.
    2
  2630. Um, I thought that people in the UK knew that Labor was a party rooted in the Unions. It's in the name. In in the governance structure of the party. Politics does not stop when a party gets into power, especially in a parliamentary system.
    2
  2631.  @EconLessons  Many, many levels. It also connects many themes that were present in many religions and cultures that preceded it.
    2
  2632. Very interesting insights. I think you may be on the right track. The Ukrainians are much more clever than the Russians.
    2
  2633. So, TIK, when are you going to write a book? You make a lot of good points. I don't always agree with you, but I do find your approach refreshing. One of the issues with professional historians is, as you point out, they always have biases. To see this, just look at historical works over time. The same events will be presented differently at different times. This just proves the point. The fact that most of these historians do not disclose their political affiliations is a problem.
    2
  2634.  @philipwoodgate9555  Yea, it's a house of cards. A lot of that huge industrial capacity is geared towards the property and infrastructure sector. If that goes away, they will have to try and "dump" the output on other national markets. This is happening in EVs now, and that will be blocked. If you don't believe that, then just look at the anti-dumping tariffs imposed between western countries for the same reason.
    2
  2635. When is PETA going to go after the animals that are cruel to each other. It is not unusual for some predators to start eating their prey while they are alive. I have seen it. By the way, vegan food is not more nutritious. Vegans have to take supplements to get the nutrients they need. We did not evolve to eat just plants. In fact, it was when our distant ancestors started eating fish, and getting more fat, that human brains started to develop.
    2
  2636.  @stephennewton2777  Correct. It seems that Russian military spending, as a percentage of GDP, is reaching Soviet levels during the Cold War. This was one of the factors leading to the breakup of the USSR. Expect to see the same thing with the Russian Federation.
    2
  2637. From President Ron. My favorite quote. My second favorite, for a completely different reason, is from President Joe: Come on man!
    2
  2638. Thanks for the information. I just found this and was going to comment negatively on the video. For him to say too salty, I don't know why, is a real problem for me. I see videos of all types where something significant is not researched or explained. I especially find this egregious in a history video. It's history. This is a critical detail. It kind of diminishes the whole thing for me. I generally am interested in the subject of this channel, but find it "light" on real information.
    2
  2639. Werewolf! I knew it.
    2
  2640. Wow! Mortgage rates of 9%. When I was looking for my first house, almost half a century ago, the rate was almost twice that. Nine percent would have been fantastic. Actually, my first two houses I got on a lease purchase basis because of the high rates. As for the long-term outlook, if rates go down, there will be, as there has been in the last couple of decades, a massive refinance market. It got to a point where my neighbors were refinancing annually. I just paid the thing off. Much better rate. Any movement in the housing market, which is one of the more dynamic in our economic life, is generally only temporary. The value of my current home has gone up by over 50% from initial purchase, then down by 40%, and is now back up to its peak valuation just before the 2008 crash.
    2
  2641. The BRI has failed in three ways, at least. First, many of the projects are not economically viable. Second, China brings in Chinese workers, thus failing to help develop the economies of their clients in that way. Third, many of the projects are of "tofu dreg" construction. If this is an alternative to western approaches to development, then I'll take the old western model, for all its flaws.
    2
  2642.  @majorrgeek  Good one. Then what is Putin? He is more like a little gnome.
    2
  2643. Great video. In the 1970s I had an MGB. I got the shop manual, and right at the beginning there was a British to American glossary. I was a full, large page. In the early part of this millennium, I lived in England. My sons went to local English schools. My older son picked up the full, rather upper class, British accent. Sometimes I had trouble understanding him. As for the German, it persisted into the early 20th century in some places. I read a biography of Lyndon Johnson. He grew up in the Texas Hill Country. Many German immigrants we enticed to the area. The local paper in the town he grew up in had a German language newspaper.
    2
  2644.  @pax6833  What questions? Your comment does not seem to have relevance here.
    2
  2645. This report is totally ignorant of the facts.
    2
  2646.  @nfuryboss  A lot like Russia. The Soviets trained the CCP leaders over the years. They have learned the lessons well.
    2
  2647. Hong Kong is finished. Its only allure in the past was that it was a British colony embedded in China. This allowed the financial and other economic activities to thrive. Nothing else. Even were the CCP to fall, and that will be a painful process, Hong Kong, as a purely Chinese entity is nothing special. In fact, the US is restricting the special status of Hong Kong, since the basis for it is gone. Time has indeed run out for Hong Kong.
    2
  2648. Gaza might well end up like Hati. I personally would not support funding for reconstruction from the US unless there is a total change on the Palestinian side. The US has been giving massive amounts of security assistance to Israel for decades. To give money to those who threaten Israel is madness. I am not very happy about the money given to the Palestinians so far. A lot of international aid over the years has been stolen by Palestinian leadership. Another indicator is what the Palestinians did when Israel withdrew from Gaza. The Israelis had created, for example, extensive greenhouses which would have provided the Palestinians with income. What did they do? They smashed them. I have seen other examples of Arab neighbors of Israel refusing to use technology from Israel because it was Israeli, or if you will, Jewish. Sounds like the attitude of a certain European country in the middle of the 20th century.
    2
  2649. Generally liked this. But, what is much more interesting and important is how we go from farming communities to this great civilization. Since archaeologists don't really answer this question in any sources I have seen, I expect that they don't know or don't have any evidence. So, sadly, we are left with the central question unanswered.
    2
  2650. The idea that doctors are constrained by their national, and to some extent, international organizations, is as old as the hills. Don't forget that not all doctors are scientists. In fact, the vast majority are clinicians or practitioners. Thus, they are dependent on what they read in the journals and what their national organizations say. I have seen it up close, both in situations with relatives who were being treated and relatives who were medical doctors. My father-in-law and his sister are both MDs. One in internal medicine and one in psychiatry. I will just share a small anecdote. One day, when we were all together, I mentioned an article in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that quoted studies claiming that many doctors were doing too many tests and wasting vast sums of money. I just mentioned the article since I had two practitioners in the room and sought their opinion. I was in no position to judge the situation. They "jumped down my throat" as the saying goes. Then, a while later, when the professional societies decided that the studies were correct, it became obvious to them that this was the case and my father-in-law, who I lived nearby and saw regularly, was often going on about some of his older colleagues who would still run a massive number of tests whenever a patient came to them. Over the years I saw many other instances of similar situations in their thinking and practice. It was fascinating. I always admired my father-in-law, by the way. He kept up his reading of the top medical journals even after he retired.
    2
  2651. Saying that Americans are enamored with the royal family is a stretch. Does Kinsey have any data. Look at her job title and you know she would have to say that. We fought a war to get away from it. We framed a Constitution so that we would never have it here. Even through we were reluctant to get involved with European wars, to a large extent because of our (and I mean the majority of the electorate) disdain for the the colonial holding the British still had. I say all this as one who has lived in the UK. I have seen the republican feelings expressed there, although not by the majority, yet. When the Queen dies, I think this republicanism will come out and will perhaps become majority opinion. Just look at here sons and grandsons. William is alright, but clearly not inspirational, and that is what they need if they are to survive. Heck, the are German, not English.
    2
  2652. The idiocy of not drilling in the US is that the money stays here. It generates lots of tax revenue that can help fund a rational transition to other forms of energy. As it is, all that revenue is going overseas. What are these people thinking, and why are you people not highlighting this?
    2
  2653. Affordable housing, social housing or public housing, no matter what you call it the record of this idea around the world has been grim. One could write a whole dissertation on this (I am sure there have been many) but I will spare you. The biggest issue I see is the people. All of the local housing I have seen, read about or been told about was really not maintained well by the recipients, in general. There is a reason they have not bought somewhere already. Buying a property costs money, but so does owning, or even renting, one. Upkeep, folks. Government almost never has budgeted sufficiently to maintain the properties. Without fixing that, this becomes a disaster. By the way, this is not a value judgement, that cost is real. When I got my first job, then house, at a fairly young age, I learned to really appreciate my father. Understanding what he had to go through, the cost, etc. to maintain a nice house for us I was overwhelmed. We weren't rich, but comfortable. We did all the work around the house ourselves (I actually enjoyed it) with help from friends. Every time I visited my parents (I lived less than a mile away) I would give him a big kiss of thanks. No, what China needs to do is to provide decent jobs, at locations where there are people. This they are actively trying to shut down.
    2
  2654.  @ci6516  Another tech company sustained by investment in the hopes of eventually turning very profitable. We'll see. On a personal note, I use Uber occasionally. Now I get lots and lots of emails touting food delivery services.
    2
  2655.  @vardh  I started out in physics. But, there were few jobs in physics research. A lot of what we did involved computers so I switched to that. I got into statistics at a small firm, and then got into the aerospace industry. Basically a rocket scientist. I then got into the software industry. In the past few years i have been doing on-line teaching, some writing, consulting and work on some startups. These span cryptography and analytics. Hope that helps.
    2
  2656.  @vardh  Thanks.
    2
  2657. I have to stop watching these YouTube videos with interesting authors. I just bought a copy (for my Kindle; just got the new Scribe). I always say that I have three vices. Books, whiskey and cigars. Well, I have stopped drinking alcohol, actually, so that leaves only two. At least with the Kindle I won't have to build so many bookcases. All kidding aside, thanks again John for your wonderful content.
    2
  2658.  @swingingvoter4309  The Chinese are good at that sort of thing.
    2
  2659.  @secretbassrigs  That was meant to be a bit flippant, but I agree with what you write. The CCP seems to do things without fully considering the consequences. Even reigning in the property development industry with the three red lines sort of made sense considering what they had been doing. On the other hand, the solution was so clumsily applied that it is now taking down their whole economy. Something similar is going on with international issues.
    2
  2660. Their socialized medicine is a disaster, Richard. At various times I have worked in Canada. My colleagues there would tell me about situations they had experienced or knew firsthand about that you should be aware of. For example, a Canadian with a heart condition would often be on a waiting list. So, he or she would go to the US and then complain about their heart, go to the emergency room and get immediate treatment. I also lived and worked in the UK, and was on the National Health (yes, I had a number), but I also had private insurance through my US employer. While my family and I did not have any problems while there, our neighbors did. It was pitiful.
    2
  2661. I am wondering the same thing. First, how are they surviving. Second, why didn't they leave after the first few months.
    2
  2662. I really think the threat from China is overblown. Their ability to project power is minimal. The vast majority of their navy is short range, including their aircraft carriers. For better or worse, the US and UK have much more experience of combat. In fact, China's last real war was with Vietnam in 1979, and they lost. Most of their military technology is Soviet based or stollen, and the quality is not very good. Another factor not often mentioned is the ideological component. Remember the political commissars in the Soviet Army. They contributed a lot to the initial failures to stop the Germans in Operation Barbarossa. Over time, even Stalin curtailed their power. Well, in the CCP army they still have these functionaries. How do you think this is going to work out in modern warfare? If Xi feels the need for a war to cement his power, he may well do what Mao did in 1962 and invade India. There is already a significant buildup along the LAC and the Indian are expecting it. The west tends to ignore this. By the way, the Indians are actually very confident this time around.
    2
  2663.  @landontesar3070  Thanks for the comment. I don't have handy a particular book on the interactions and motivations. There are several out there that deal with quality engineering and control. Frankly, what we studied was often the Japanese systems that were motivated by research done in the US. My experience was in working as a design engineer on spacecraft and military systems. As for the balance of payments, this is a long-standing thing with the US. The way it gets dealt with is through foreign investment in the US. The US has the most open investment environment in the world. So, a lot of the money flows back into the US. There is also the massive services sector.
    2
  2664. I remember looking at pictures of the Lamborghini online with my sons when they were teenagers. One of them said it looked like the car wanted to hurt him. It scared them.
    2
  2665. The total idiocy of many advanced developing countries is stunning. China cannot even pay its civil servants, and yet they have ambitious plans for space exploration and build aircraft carriers. No one wants to invade China. The CCP actually spends more on internal security than on the military. There is great poverty in China. The "poor" in the US would be considered lower middle class in most of the world, including China and India. India is another case. They also have massive poverty, and yet they are also blasting off into space. While they do build aircraft carriers, they do have enemies (including China) to fear, at least. China is a net importer of food, energy and minerals. I believe that India can feed itself (they did just stop all rice exports, though), but they too need to import energy and minerals. If these countries don't take care of poverty first, they will collapse.
    2
  2666. Your comment at the end is interesting. Considering what the Russians, the successors to the Soviet Union, are doing in Ukraine, I would expect that these Ukrainian Waffen units will be celebrated even more. Any organization that fights, or fought, against the Soviets/Russians should be celebrated.
    2
  2667. Yeonmi, I love your videos. I am a subscriber. I also have your book. I do have to take issue to one thought you have at about 1:50:05. One thing that may not be clear to you is that in Western democratic societies there is an ebb and flow. Something that is happening now may, and today is, be resisted by people in the society. We have constant movement back and forth between different parts of society. This is a natural part of our evolution. Just look at Jordan Peterson, who you are talking to. He has been assailed by the left, cultural warriors, whatever you want to call it. He, and many others are fighting back. Things will change over time. That is the hallmark of a dynamic society. Things will change and evolve.
    2
  2668. For once I completely agree with Peter. I would add that Bush was also a Navy Aviator in WWII and Ambassador to the UN. Another thing to understand is that Clinton's campaign had a tag line which went "It's the economy, stupid." That is generally the determinant of US elections, not foreign policy. Even in 1980 and 1984 Regan, while strong on foreign policy was primarily running on economic issues. He was all about a strong military and deterrence (Trump has made similar statements) but it really was about the economy. I have seen surveys from this election of the reasons people voted and the top three never included foreign policy (Ukraine) or climate change. The thing is that I would not be too certain that the world order ever could have "fixed". In fact, Bush was impressive not because he was talking about how to cement the world order of the time, but that he wanted to discuss it. His approach gave people, as we would say in today's parlance, "agency". I think he was smart enough, experienced enough and honest enough to know that this was a whole new era. It was a situation that had never happened before. That just adds to his stature in my opinion. Just to enhance Bush's stature a little more, it was under him that the "Powell Doctrine" was put forward. He was talking about military action by the US assuming that diplomacy, etc. had failed. The following list I copied from Wikipedia: 1. Is a vital national security interest threatened? 2. Do we have a clear attainable objective? 3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed? 4. Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted? 5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement? 6. Have the consequences of our action been fully considered? 7. Is the action supported by the American people? 8. Do we have genuine broad international support? Now, just think about this in light of the Ukraine War. We don't have troops there (I think) but we have committed military assets.
    2
  2669. Looks like Illinois. If you hadn't told me it was Ukraine I would have said I have hunted in those fields, or ones very like that. If I recall correctly, the highest elevation in Illinois is about 457 meters (that's 1,500 feet in "freedom units"; it's a joke) and that is just in the far northwest corner. I am from Washington, DC, but have lived in the Midwest for over three decades now. I have actually come to like it.
    2
  2670. The whole idea of the current asylum system in the west is based on the treatment of the Jews in Europe in the 1930s. There was a real threat to life then. This has been played out into a system that now allows anyone to declare themselves "at threat" in their home country. Just look at the recent incident of all those asylum seekers planning to go back home for Christmas for a couple of weeks from the UK. The real solution is for nations, each individually (remember national sovereignty) to declare, on a case-by-case basis which situations in other countries warrant asylum. It may even be useful to have a couple of "grades" of situations. One size does not fit all. Just because organized crime in a country is out of control is not necessarily a valid reason to offer asylum in another country. If a nation wants to accept this as valid, then they can, but it is their choice, not some supranational court's decision. General asylum should really only be offered if there is state breakdown or organized state persecution. An example would be refugees from Afghanistan for the US. Finally, asylum seekers should be sequestered for at least a year in a holding camp. This has several benefits. The first is that it would deter "casual" asylum seekers. Unless you have a real fear in your home country. you won't want this. Second, it allows thorough investigation of asylum seekers before letting them into the general population of your country. We already know of terrorists breaching the US southern border. A government's primary responsibility is to its own citizens, after all. By the way, this time limit should be AT LEAST a year. If there is a large influx, or there are not sufficient resources available at the time. there is no reason to make that a hard and fast limit. All the requirements for granting asylum MUST be fulfilled before release into the general population. If the camps that a state sets up become full, then further asylum seekers should be turned away until either people are moved through the process in the existing camps, or more camps are built. This may seem harsh, to put it mildly. It is. But, as I said, the state's first responsibility is for the safety of its own citizens. As we have seen, the current system has brought disaster upon many countries that tried to be accommodating. It is not working. One more consideration is to make asylum conditional. If the state being fled is somehow righted and safe, then the asylum seekers should be sent back. If an individual still wants to migrate to another country, they can follow traditional routes to residency from their home country.
    2
  2671. Quality is not measured in nanometers. It is measured by actual quality (failure rates, longevity, etc.). Using the most advanced chip making processes for IoT chips is just plain silly. There are very good applications for the most advanced chip technology, to be sure, but the vast majority of chips and applications do not require these.
    2
  2672. What a dolt! Does he not know that the basic tenant of representative democracy is no taxation without representation? If Scotland wants to get Westminster out of their affairs, then they have to stop taking money from Westminster. As long as Westminster, and for thar read England, pays the bills they will have the say. If Scotland wants to pursue its own policies, then it will have to massively raise taxes. Even if they left the UK, they would have to do this. So, live within your means and learn what democracy is all about.
    2
  2673. This is classic Joseph Goebbels. I really mean that. Tell the lie boldly and often enough and people will believe. Hopefully, in our much more connected world, people will ignore this stupidity.
    2
  2674. Naval infantry are what we in the US call Marines. They have been deployed far inland for a long time. In WWI they fought deep inside France.
    2
  2675. A navy to protect commerce and trade. That is NOT what the US Navy is configured to do. To protect commerce and trade the US Navy would need many more times the number of destroyers it has now. The US Navy is configured to project power and protect the homeland. This is a totally different mission set.
    2
  2676. What is this mania for having other countries invest in EVs in your country? If EVs are a good investment, does an economy like Europe's need external investment? The actual answer is that EVs are not a great investment. EVs are simpler than ICE vehicles. Look at the two most successful companies in the space, Tesla and BYD. One was a greenfield startup, the other started out making rechargeable batteries. Actually, auto manufacturing is well understood, no matter what the drive train. In today's world one could source the parts from someone else and assemble any configuration you want. Actually, that is a common feature of the current industry. We are far from the days when Henry Ford built plants that took in raw materials and produced finished vehicles. So, I ask again, why isn't France marshalling the capital themselves? This is an important question.
    2
  2677.  @richatlarge462  Yes, that would be great. On the other hand, I don't think "my" Charles Murray" really cares about, or previously knew about, the other Charles Murray.
    2
  2678.  @girlwriteswhat  I was an election judge for a while. In Illinois we do signature matching. Two judges have to agree that the signature matches. Not as secure, but at least something.
    2
  2679. The odds of Musk buying TikTok are nil. Yesterday I saw Kevin O'Leary opining that a bid by Musk, or even an organization like Meta, would not pass regulatory scrutiny. That argument has merit. O'Leary is interested in buying TikTok himself and is willing to buy it without the algorithm. He has reportedly talked to people who could develop a new one. That is not hard. This brings up one thing that is the most important aspect in understanding China, world trade and how those will develop. That aspect is that there is nothing in how business is done, supply chains or technologies that is critical and irreplaceable. Nothing. Business evolves in a complex interchange between all those aspects. If one path is blocked, changes, etc. then another will be found.
    2
  2680. I don't agree that young people do the innovation. When I was at a large company, one of the top patent producers in the world, we studied that. Patent and innovation production was high at a young age. It dropped off in middle age. But those that stayed technical were just as productive in patents in their later career. I have an acquaintance who came up with a patent in his later 30s or early 40s. He is now in his 60s and is still producing patents and new businesses. In fact, there are lots of startups that are led by older people. It is not the age that counts, but the environment.
    2
  2681. "Whoever committed corruption should be held accountable." That would be everyone. The CCP officials and the company executives. They would have to arrest everyone.
    2
  2682. Just seeing this. My experience is of many US soldiers from the first Gulf War and after. I ran into many who went back as contractors and soldiers. Many of them said the did so because they had not killed anyone for a while, and they wanted to. Don't forget that our casualties in the Middle Eastern wars were trivial compared to WWII, Korea or Vietnam. Really less than 10% of those conflicts. Many of these people I met were in high level combat formations, such as Seal Team 6. These people join because they want to kill people. They are motivated and want to engage in combat.
    2
  2683.  @gkseitei2195  Could happen. Easier said than done, though.
    2
  2684.  @shomadea  Who blocked China from space? How would that happen? Russia had a space station before the ISS, and did themselves, as the Chinese have now done.
    2
  2685. Talking about energy from the rounds, I notice that the highest energy from these rounds, the Buffalo Bore, is 461 ft-lbs. I have guns in 9mm, .45ACP and .40S&W. The 155gr, at standard pressure, generates 500 ft-lbs. in various self-defense rounds. I have Winchester Silvertip and Ranger loads. These are not high-pressure rounds. I recently got FMJ ammo from Federal which generates about 490 ft-lbs.
    2
  2686. @Bon-ob8si Well, someone at that level needs to be held accountable. In government and industry, this would mean dismissal, or at least demotion. I think one or the other is appropriate here.
    2
  2687. The reason they said that Trump was a Russian operative was that it was they who were the Russian operatives. Obama, Clinton and Biden were the real Russian operatives. Biden is showing this now. He intentionally hurt our own energy sector in favor of Russia. He has also alienated the Middle Eastern oil economies. They will not help us.
    2
  2688. Continued war. Get used to it. Countries like Russia and China have decided they don't like the US led world order. This is curious because that order gave them what prosperity they have (had in the case or Russia). The US is no longer interested in maintaining the order created after WWII. It is not worth the cost. One also has to consider that those 70+ years have been unprecedented in world history. We are going back to the norm.
    2
  2689. Generally, I like your stuff. This video was not very useful. If you look at the foods you call out, this is a majority of what people eat. The reality is that a small number of people have food allergies. For example, I have met one person who has celiac disease. I meet a lot of people. I know no one with a peanut allergy. I have met a couple with a problem with dairy. I eat a lot of the foods you mention that might cause problems, yet my health has gotten better and better. I have cut out nothing but have restricted meat and wheat. I am in my mid-sixties, and my body is getting back to where it was in my 20s. I probably adhere to a lot of what you advocate, not because of you, but I still watch to get good information. I may eat "junk" food once a month. I may have a pizza once every six weeks. Otherwise, I eat pescatarian, and often have vegetarian only. I have no joint pain, have lost weight, normal blood pressure and normal sh*ts. This was not always the case. I feel good when I eat. I do eat oats, for example, for breakfast, with butter, cinnamon and fruit (orange or apple) every day. I drink only water, usually with lemon juice, brewed coffee or tea, and in the evening's whiskey.
    2
  2690. The whole issue of mental illness on a large scale in this country goes back at least five decades. I remember reading and talking about this in the 1970s. The issue was that state mental institutions were closed. They were not, as one would imagine, deluxe facilities. So, the answer was to close them. All those people were let out on the streets because they could not, even if they wanted to, afford private care. We need to institutionalize a lot, maybe a majority, of these people. Many end up in prison (well, not so much anymore), and that is not working out well.
    2
  2691.  @ThinkUkraine  You are very welcome. I must say, I had to laugh when watching you clean the fish.
    2
  2692.  @JohnJaneson  Well put.
    2
  2693. The current world trade and economic system is silly, and as the British say, not fit for purpose. It was created, as Peter Zeihan puts it, to buy an alliance to counter the expansionism of the Soviet Union. Period! It was never reevaluated after the Soviet Union fell apart. We are now having the reckoning, only instead of doing it in an environment of peace, we have to do it in wartime. Economically, the current system is incredibly stupid. COVID has shown that. The experience with Japan should have been a warning. Especially in manufacturing all the previous theory and practice mitigated against the current situation. This is what happens when you have MBAs running things instead of engineers. The west's motives were to include China and then help them evolve into a system that would bring them closer to the west. They had, after all, a big market and cheap (for then) labor. They needed capital and expertise. Just as with the west's embrace of former adversaries that was successful in the cases of Japan and Germany after WWII, they thought that something similar would happen in China. The thing all those "wise" policy makers and pundits failed to see, or forgot, was that the situation is totally different. In the former case the US and the collective west could impose terms. The situation with China is totally different. How could they not see that? China could have short circuited all this talk in a number of ways. Economically they could return to reform and opening up only with actual, enforceable rule of law, and a real opening up. On the diplomatic front, they could rein in their good friends in Russia. Who am I kidding. They can't do that. China actually wants the world to break into separate trade blocs. They have stated so many times. Their current diplomatic drivel (and that is the nicest way I could put it) is just designed to distract. They just want the freedom to create and control their own bloc. As for China's ability to drive a wedge between the US and the EU, that is just their own private wet dream. Europe is again dependent on the US for security in a very real and existential way. China, on the other hand, is supporting the threat. The EU will, I predict, follow the US as it is a more important market for them. China is falling apart economically. As Tony has pointed out in many videos, much of their economy is in tatters. Their financial system is actually insolvent. Even in the new economy areas things are bad. In the YouTube suggestions alongside this video there is one titled "China's EV Giant’s Profits Plunge 90%: Poor Quality, “Coffin Cars” Crash Sales, Biggest Layoffs Ever". Chinese EVs are piling up at ports in northern Europe. Information I have seen shows clearly the overcapacity in the solar panel industry. With the slowdown in EV adoption in the US and Europe the battery sector is also affected. Well, I'll go back to my coffee and cigar. Today it is a Punch. Very nice.
    2
  2694.  @SteveWard151  That is the question. Who will the FSB choose?
    2
  2695. Michael, you are a big fan of proportional representation. This is what happens. It is not rare on the continent. I recall one time when it took six months in one country, I think it was Germany, to form a coalition government. Not only is this a problem, but it means that representatives are not aligned with constituencies. Not a great idea.
    2
  2696. I love FOX. They just seem to be rational. When i look at the other networks I see utter crap!!! I find it hard to listen to it. In fact, even when FOX runs clips of the other networks to criticize them, I find it hard to watch. It reminds me of Obama, especially in his second term. He lied constantly, and I always turned him off. I never voted for Obama. I actually blame Rush Limbaugh for Obama getting elected both times. None of the Republican candidates were good enough. Whatever you think, they were both better that Barak. Thia idea of ideological purity is a pox on both the left and the right. If that is your idea of how we should operate, then you are unamerican. Don't forget, political parties are not Constitutional. They are a product of freedom of association. We, as citizens, can change that.
    2
  2697. Epic good description of the situation. There is one aspect that I did not hear, though. The issue is the value of the assets on the bank's books. NPL is tied to that indirectly. One thing that came out of the 2008 financial crisis is "mark to market" accounting for banks. In the US, banks have to update the actual value of their portfolio often. I believe it is monthly (need to check on that), This is not done in China, as far as I can tell. The reality of the Chinese real estate market is that prices are down significantly. The official statistics for new homes are garbage. These are set by the government, and desperate developers often try to circumvent them. Look at the secondhand home market, including foreclosures, and the story is dire. We are talking about anywhere from a 30% to 50% drop based on sketchy information. It could be more in some places. On top of the stuff going on in China, the large Chinese state-owned banks lend heavily to the belt and road (I like to say toad) initiative. Don't forget that the Chinese have spent about $1T on this, almost all of it loans. I have seen reporting that up to 70% of those loans are nonperforming. Conservatively let's just say 30%. Apply the US standards to the Chinese banks and they are ALL insolvent.
    2
  2698. Carnell saying that massive government investment in infrastructure would be beneficial shows an ignorance of the efficacy of such spending to date. As of a few years ago, much of the infrastructure spending has been wasteful and of little benefit to the real economy. In fact, it has also been a major contributor to the financial crisis. One only has to look at high speed rail, which after being built between economically significant centers was extended everywhere. The debt has reached the $900B mark, and there is little prospect of ever recovering from that. And yet they keep on building. Most of the trains running between lesser cities have occupancy rates that are very low and do not cover costs. Consequently, fewer of these trains are scheduled. They may actually not be able to service the debt soon (if it has not already happened). This is only one glaring example. So how beneficial would infrastructure spending be?
    2
  2699. Sounds like time for another invasion of Afghanistan.
    2
  2700. I remember see George W. Bush being interviewed for a Google talk. He stated that he always asked foreign leaders, when meeting them for the first time, what is the number one thing that keeps you up at night. When he asked this of Hu Jintao the response was finding jobs for 60M people per year. In other words, economic growth. At 4.9%, the Chinese cannot find jobs for the people they need to pull up in the economy. They still have 600M people in poverty. And, don't forget, this growth is from the depths of the Kung Flu contraction.
    2
  2701. Fins a better AI,
    2
  2702. Interesting. I remember watching Louis Rukeyser (show how old I am) and the run up to 40K in 1990. I wonder what the "inflation adjusted" value would be, if that even makes sense. The Dow at the time was at 3K. Time horizon is everything. The Dow, even in its current diminished state, is 11 times higher. The Nikkei has not even recovered. The get to the previous peak, it would still have to rise almost 33%. For the Dow to get to its previous peak we are talking less than 10%.
    2
  2703. I find this channel invaluable.
    2
  2704.  @DR_1_1  When I first at university studying physics many graduate students claimed to be adherents of "the church of the malicious divine". They claimed that the divine would change the rules just as we were starting to understand them.
    2
  2705.  @Charlesputnam-bn9zy  Well, we'll see.
    2
  2706.  @uzeirdautbegovic1148  You misunderstand the definition of empire. An empire is a group of states controlled by one of those states. A good recent example is the British Empire. As for the Christian angle, I tend to agree with you. There are lots of fringe (and they are fringe) groups of millenarians who look at any current event in terms of prophecy, taking the Bible literally. That is a naïve approach, at best. I went to a Catholic university and had to study the Bible, so I have some feeling for this.
    2
  2707. If China does start a war, they will collapse. It would only take a couple of destroyers to cut off imports of oil. Food imports from the west would stop. Frankly, there would be rapid deindustrialization, followed by famine.
    2
  2708.  @Roundwave23  Exactly! At the start of the reform and opening up of the Chinese economy most companies were state owned (SOEs). These laid off lots of people. The SOEs were terribly inefficient. The laid off workers were absorbed by the new private economy and growth followed, aided in the main by foreign investment. So, if the government was concerned about the welfare of the people and economy, that would be the obvious solution. Of course, the government is not concerned about those things. They are concerned about the power of the party. Those private enterprises were becoming very successful, rich and powerful. In the west there are lots of examples of the industrial class growing in power and displacing the landed aristocracy, for example. The UK at the start of the industrial revolution is a case in point. Democracies respond to this. Communists do not. So, the result is that they are doomed, DOOMED!
    2
  2709. WOW! You got it right. Couldn't say it better myself.
    2
  2710. The comment by Steven Leung shows surprise about the investors selling on the news about Baidu. That is actually funny. This is the way stock markets typically work. An investment in stocks is a bet on the future. Well informed investors use past data and external factors to decide how to bet. In this case the external data, the US-China relationship, is a key factor outside of the individual stock's performance. It is indeed relevant. The comment about whether it is true or not is actually irrelevant. The news is something available to all and, true or not, will be considered by other traders. That is the psychological aspect. This is just business as usual for traders. I do realize that there are buy and hold investors and investors that are interested in dividends, but these are a different group and do not usually swing markets.
    2
  2711.  @general9064  I know that. The idea of recycling the water was also mentioned. I was just giving an example of the possibility of doing this a lessening the impact.
    2
  2712. Have you heard the term "tofu"" construction? Get over it.
    2
  2713. I think that these responses to questions are some of your best works. Don't get me wrong, I like it all. As for the greenness of the Lancashire countryside, I once had an English friend who called England the land of the idiot gardeners. Anything would grow there. I saw this when I traveled there (from the early 1970s) and when I lived there, early in this century. I am glad I had a gardener to take care of the large garden we had.
    2
  2714. Did he really say he was a "Trumpist"? That is stunning. It is also, as far as I can tell, correct. Trump is a nationalist. The left-wing press likes to use the term "populist" which is an attempt to obfuscate. Pure propaganda.
    2
  2715. Did he just call for censorship?
    2
  2716.  @Jaysqualityparts  That's probably correct.
    2
  2717. You forget, when Trump was president before he warned the Europeans (specifically the Germans) that they were too dependent on Russia for natural gas and that they were spending too little on defense. They laughed at him. Who's laughing now? Well, probably no one is laughing, but you get what I mean. NATO has been a free ride for the Europeans ever since the Soviet Union fell. There is movement, but pressure has to be kept on to ensure they take this seriously. As for Ukraine, they need a stop to the fighting. They don't have the offensive capacity to get through heavily fortified positions. Compare their capabilities to what the US did in Iraq, twice. Kiev doesn't have the required capabilities. Look at all their offensives. In Kharkiv they surprised the Russians. Then, the next year they tried to break through in the south and failed. In Kursk they went into a lightly defended area with total surprise. They have lost a lot of men also. Both Russia and Ukraine were in demographic decline before this war. This is not good for either side.
    2
  2718. John, your numbers for oil prices are way off base and alarmist. Today the price averages at about $110. Drilling in the US is picking up, despite Biden administration efforts. I don't see it going up much further. China will buy Russian oil, at a discount, which relieves pressure on open market oil. Your "predictions" are just silly. Where do you get this?
    2
  2719.  @princybella5386  Very true, but not the extent I have experienced. One of the things fueling this is a lack of contact with other types of people. This is just a natural consequence of the geographic situation.
    2
  2720. Tony, I find the situation with the White House Press Secretary amusing. The current one is the stupid and embarrassing (and I am trying to be kind here). I can't watch her. She is only there because she checks off several boxes in the Democrats' identity politics game (black, female and lesbian). This is not the first, nor will it be the last, gaff she has made. Frankly, she is a good fit for Biden.
    2
  2721.  @nfuryboss  Did you watch the Digging to China video on this topic? If so, I was thinking the same thing as I watched it.
    2
  2722. As my ex-wife liked to say: Don't be a baby.
    2
  2723.  @robertrobert7924  Would like to get one of those.
    2
  2724. Mr. Zwaxk's answer at the end is interesting. One thing that the pundits do not point out, and that is critical, is that the Chinese have been allied with the Soviets since the beginning. Their military structures are similar. This means that China will understand that they don't have the type of military that could take on Taiwan. In WWII the Army wanted to invade Taiwan, which was a stronghold of Japan. It was close the mainland of China and could have helped us support the Chinese. The only problem was that it would have taken an invasion force at least as big as the D-Day landings. That is one reason MacArthur was able to persuade the President to go for the Philippines. China has nowhere near the naval and landing force power we had in WWII. They have nowhere near the experience we have. For better or worse, we have a military that has been fighting since the end of WWII. Their last major experience was the invasion of Vietnam in about 1979. It ended badly for them. Most of their equipment is based on Soviet era equipment. Just like the Russians today. Most of the tanks in Ukraine are T72 and variants. Both China and Russia talk up their new stuff, but it makes up a tiny (and I mean tiny) percentage of their combat power.
    2
  2725. What many people don't understand is that colonialism is actually the natural state of things. The years since WWII saw an unprecedented situation. It is now unraveling, and the world is probably heading towards separate trading blocs, in which some countries will be ascendant, and others subjugated. The whole idea of a rules-based world order is something the US created to combat the Soviet Union and its expansionist ambitions. Then, when the Soviet Union fell, the US continued to maintain that order to the whole world, not just its allies. By the way, part of that order required the Europeans to dismantle their colonial empires. The cost of maintaining the order is no longer something the US is willing to bear. The last internationalist US President was George H. W. Bush. He left office in 1993. All of the subsequent presidents have been progressively more populist. China and Russia are in no way capable of filling the gap left by the US, and never will be. Both will likely experience massive breakdown, and perhaps dissolution (Xi is China has already expressed this fear) before the decade is out.
    2
  2726. What bothers me about almost all interview shows, whether news or opinion, is that the questioner does not let the interviewee speak enough. You have the leader of a country involved in a major conflict and you are worried about what Bernie Sanders says. Idiotic. As a consumer of news I want to hear what the principals have to say, not some set of questions that an editor put together.
    2
  2727. The statistics mentioned, especially home prices, makes no sense. I ask again, are these prices paid or listed? From all the data and activity I have seen it must be listed prices. In the US (and most of the western world) the numbers tracked are actual sale prices, and these are matters of public record.
    2
  2728.  @ElementaryWatson-123  What do you mean by "math analysis"? If you have something to say, say it. As I often had to tell my sons when they were young and got frustrated, "use your words".
    2
  2729. This is nothing new in academic literature studies. In the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium I was at university studying physics. One of my friends was an English Literature student. We were both big D. H. Lawrence fans. His paper was on circular imagery in Lawrence's writings. I still remember having a discussion with him about how silly that was. At least it wasn't a woke intersectional diatribe, but it was silly, nonetheless. So, I am not surprised at this paper that is being disused. Rather than meaning the field has long been mired in discussions of structure and externalities.
    2
  2730. All this time people are calling Donald Trump, and others Russian assets, and it turns out to be the top democrats. It is a well know technique to call your adversary what you are. Classic disinformation. This should seriously be looked into.
    2
  2731. I generally like her lectures, but this one is hard to take. She is talking to a roomful of, what I think I can safely assume, are reasonably well-educated people. Then she starts out with stuff that, quite literally, would have been considered basic for me in second grade (and that was a long, long time ago). I mean that literally. In second grade I was given a book to read about nuclear energy which went over much of this.
    2
  2732. I turned off when at about 6:50 when you started talking about Trump's America being deeply divided. This is such a trope. There has been division in political terms in the US (and the UK and many other countries) since the modern world began. In the US the major parties have polled about 50/50 in most elections. It is rare for a national poll to be far off from that. What you are doing is to equate the period from the end of WWII to the 1960s and Vietnam conflict as "normal". It was anything but. A little more reading of history would be useful.
    2
  2733.  @norbertdapunt1444  What is not? Come on, use your words.
    2
  2734. The issue with all this talk about the market is that the CCP has been actively trying to destroy market forces in China. There is lots of talk, but the actions taken are quite contrary.
    2
  2735. Sounds like the Cultural Revolution in on its way back. Long live the Cultural Revolution!
    2
  2736.  @JMM33RanMA  Thanks for your reply. Yes, I have read Lao Tzu and Sun Tzu as well, alas, as in your case in English translation. I have also read a lot of Chinese and Japanese Zen texts. I find them a bit similar to Stoic philosophy in the west. I first read the Book of Revelation while listening to Vangelis' album 666. Sometimes music can add to the experience. As for the whiskey, I gave it up for health reasons, but not because of any problems. After a life changing event (again, not health related) I completely changed my diet. It is more akin to how I ate when I was reading all those Zen books. It was very good. So, I just decided one day to give up alcohol. I lost another notch in my belt. Now, although I in my late 60s, my body looks and feels like it did in my 20s. Best wishes to you as well for the holidays. Be well.
    2
  2737.  @JMM33RanMA  Thank you for the information. I stopped drinking whiskey abruptly and suffered no ill effects. That was after drinking (and smoking cigars) for almost half a century. I feel great and have no desire to go back. I did not get rid of the alcohol already in the house. That is for guests that might want to partake. About four decades ago I stopped using weed. I also had no bad effects then and have no desire to take it up again now that it is legal where I live. For me, a healthy body and mind are important. Yes, merry Christmas is appropriate. Thank you for the sentiment. The same to you.
    2
  2738. Patrick, this is the best thing that could have happened to you. Twitter is a cesspool. I got off a long time ago, and don't miss it.
    2
  2739. The US fielded it's first such missile in 1961, and it was not short range.
    2
  2740. I love the characterization at about 14:00 regarding the "investors". This is one reason why I am not sure that the government should get involved. Unless there is an upside for the government, this is a poor use of taxpayer funds. If these are real markets that should be policed by the government, then there needs to be a full regulatory framework. If this does not exist, then protecting these investors is not a valid government function. Let me know what you think.
    2
  2741.  @samsonsoturian6013  Ah, but they are regulated, heavily.
    2
  2742. The idea that you need three to one to attack is not borne out by most of the wars of the last sixty years or so. On the other hand, the issue of the lack of air power on the Ukranian side is a valid issue. People were expecting "shock and awe". Well, that term was used by Gen. Franks in the second Iraq War. A lot of that shock and awe was airpower. The thing that is in Ukraine's favor is that Russian aviation is nothing like US and western airpower.
    2
  2743.  @stlouisix3  I agree with the paganism and heresy, but what about a little debauchery? Just kidding. The science is not settled. In the 1970s the same climate scientists were predicting an ice age and the military was convening conferences on how to fight in such conditions. Frankly, no science is ever "settled". When I was studying physics in the early 1970s, one of my professors told me we could find out is was all BS tomorrow. He didn't expect it, but it could happen. In real science theories are always tested, and each test could change everything. Out two best theories, the Standard Model of Particle Physics and General Relativity. The former has been around for 50 years and the latter for over 100. They have been tested in many, many different experiments. So far they have been proven correct. One YouTuber, a PhD physicist, whenever a new observation supports GR she says, that guy again, and show a picture of Einstein. There is a feeling that there is something more, but we haven't found it yet. Considering that we have more PhD physicists trying to find alternative explanations than ever before, this should be a clue. I mention this because it is interesting, and because one has to contrast it with "climate science".
    2
  2744. People keep mentioning the geopolitical tension between the US and China and tightened export controls by the US. This gives the mistaken impression that it is the US doing something untoward or unilateral. This is a total misrepresentation of the facts. Fact: massive IP theft by Chinese companies, both private and state owned. Fact: massive counterfeiting/copying of everything from luxury goods to military hardware. Fact: The CCP's stated goal to displace the US and remake the world in its own image. Fact: it was the US opening up to China and getting China into the WTO that is responsible for China's rise. Why do you think all that FDI was forthcoming? China does not have the natural resources or geopolitical positioning to challenge the US. It does not have the capability to generate sufficient capital from its internal resources. Now, because of its own policies, it has a demographic disaster on its hands. It also does not seem to have the social resources to progress on its own. This is not the fault of the US, or the west in general. It lies totally with the CCP and its culture of corruption. Don't forget how the last dynasty ended up. That is the fate that awaits China when the CCP dynasty falls. Frankly, China has poisoned its environment so badly and made itself so toxic to the rest of the world that there won't even be anyone interested in invading.
    2
  2745.  @axle.student  That's the kind of thing I would have heard/said half a century ago when I was first at university.
    2
  2746.  @sidharthghoshal  That is a point of view. Actually, matrices were applied in physics well before Dirac used them in quantum physics. They were first applied to electromagnetism, another field theory. In other words, Dirac was doing nothing new in that sense. In electromagnetism the field was "discovered" first, and then mathematical formalisms were developed. In fact, the first electromagnetic formalisms were mechanical, because that is what people understood. It was Maxwell, I think, that used a mechanistic view, stating that it was probably wrong, but that it gave him a way to think about the phenomena. What Dirac did was to find a formalism to describe nature. He was not just playing with mathematics. He was certainly aware of the analogy with electromagnetic field theory. When I was studying physics as an undergraduate, a graduate student sold me a copy of Dirac's book, third edition. I found out that he had bought the fourth edition because the last chapter of the third edition was incorrect. When I read it and got through the first chapters where Dirac lays out his mathematical formalism I was transported. I had considered changing my major to mathematics as I was doing slightly better in my math classes than physics. So, I asked my math professor what a pure mathematician did. His answer was: think up theorems and prove them. That did not appeal to me. I needed a physical motivation, it seems. Of course, at that time I did not even know about applied mathematics. It is very curious that mathematics often precedes its use on physics. Matrices were not invented for physics, but for solving simultaneous equations. Riemannian geometry was created long before it was used in general relativity. There are many examples. I was aware of this long before reading Sabine's book. As for you contention that "the mathematics IS the reality", one could look at it another way, one that I have heard more often. Mathematics is the language of the universe. It may actually be difficult to distinguish between the two. What do you think?
    2
  2747. An "illegal invasion into a foreign country"? Before you talk about legalities you need to understand what the legal status is.
    2
  2748. Tony, you do a great job. Now on to 100K then onward to 1M. Aim high!
    2
  2749. It is a few degrees warmer in Chicago (well, maybe a couple). We are under a Winter Weather Advisory, with freezing drizzle today, then snow forecast in a couple of days for a few days. As I watch the video and write these comments, it seems that snow has started, not freezing drizzle. Yes, the vets in the US use those plastic cones. I had cats for decades, but not now, and they never had them. My last cat went with my wife when we split. He died a year or so ago in his 20s. I still have the ashes of his sister on the mantle. Some I spread in the yard by the patch of catnip she loved. I have never seen anyone decorate the cones. That is fabulous. You are very creative. The story of your grannie reminds me of a commercial that has become famous. It starred a comedian, Larry David. I think it is still available on YouTube. It had several scenes, throughout history, where his character made bad choices. In one he was part of the US Constitutional Convention. He asked, so everyone gets to vote, even the dumb ones. The others there said yes, and he rushed to where the document was and started to rip it up. I just thought you might appreciate that. Praying for Ukraine, and you, every day.
    2
  2750.  @Delgwah  Fortunately I can stay inside since I work from home (for myself).
    2
  2751. Have you seen the videos of captured Russian soldiers being interrogated? These are conscripts that were told they were going to exercises, not an invasion. They don't even tell their soldiers what they are doing. A few top professional soldiers are not going to turn the tide, as you should know. Large wars require large forces. In Iraq we were fighting one of the world's largest armies. They were very experienced. It was air power and the professionalism of our troops that overcame them in a relatively short time. In addition, the Iraqi population was divided between Suni and Shia and Kurd. In Ukraine the population in united. Tanks in an urban environment are a liability, especially with man portable anti-tank weapons. And never forget the old adage, God created man, Colonel Colt made them equal. This refers to repeating arms. An average person with an AK47 can easily kill an elite soldier given the right circumstances. And those circumstances present themselves in an urban combat environment all the time.
    2
  2752.  @texasoilfields  Glad you found it useful. Actually, if I may, I must say that watching events in the world today, from US policy to China to Germany to Russia and the EU, and having read all of Peter's books, I feel like I am watching his prognostications coming true in real time.
    2
  2753.  @texasoilfields  Agreed. He would probably agree as well. It is not the details I am interested in, but the trends. He would also agree, and I think has said, that the timing is not something he can give, just timeframes.
    2
  2754. Actually, your comment about taking half a decade to move major production is not borne out by the experience. At the beginning of this process of industrialization in China, which was led by western companies, major production was moved quite quickly. I have an example quite near to me. Motorola built a cell phone plant in the exurbs of Chicago, and it was hailed as a big win for the area. Soon after, they up and moved it to China. It did not take anywhere near five years. There are lots of other examples. No, this will happen quicker than you think.
    2
  2755. Whatever happened to global warming?
    2
  2756. On China: I have a financial advisor friend who hopes Xi will be reelected. His reasoning is that Xi will wreck the Chinese economy. I tend to agree with him. A good source on what is likely to happen in China is Peter Zeihan. He is not the only one with a gloomy outlook for China, but he puts it well.
    2
  2757.  @sparkiekosten5902  Thanks.
    2
  2758.  @Zzzxxxxx959  Afghanistan was created by the UK. Afghanistan hosted Al Queda who attacked the US. Pakistan's security services supported the terrorists. How is this mess created by the US?
    2
  2759. John Bolton is a war monger. Afghanistan was created by the British, and is really an abortion. Much like Iraq, created by the UK. Finally, it is the Pakistanis who fund and protected the Taliban. Total failure of the international community. Good thing we are leaving.
    2
  2760. Great charity idea. I have already purchased and read all of them. What I like is that the things you predict seem to be happening in real-time. I follow news on Ukraine, of course, but also on China. It is falling apart.
    2
  2761.  @YourHineyness  That is a very typical Asian viewpoint. Remember what the Japanese thought of US serviceman at the beginning of WWII (they were quicky disabused of their notions). First, they looked down on Americans as "mutts". The Japanese were a pure race and thus superior. Second, they assumed Americans were soft and would not be able to hack combat. They kind of ignored WWI and all the wars that came before. This also extends to the European nations. So, if the Europeans are weak, why did they control such large parts of Asia through the first half of the 20th century, including parts of China? I could go on, but I will spare you.
    2
  2762.  @happymelon7129  You must be joking. Did you check the data before posting? It is available on the web, at least in the west. The US is not in recession and is projected to have positive growth for the next five years. The EU is problematic, but still shows growth. That growth is under 1%, but it is growth. This is actually typical for the EU. The UK is problematic, but that is mostly of their own doing. Still, the projections are for a contraction of less than 1%. No, the real reason is that companies are moving out. Wages are too high in China for the added value (low productivity). And what is most striking is that, although we hear about Taiwanese and other foreign companies moving out, so are the Chinese companies. I recently bought three items (lawn tools). The company is China based. Two of the three were made in Vietnam. Looking at the company website I see they are even opening up a factory in the US. So, believe what you want, but China has a real problem. As the analysts say, they got old before they got rich. This will not be pleasant. One further note on the Chinese companies moving out. That action is justified on the basis of labor costs, but it is also a way for Chinese businessmen to move a lot of their wealth overseas. This is the kind of thing that happens when you have strict capital controls.
    2
  2763. Well, if that is the case, I would be surprised. Medicine is not science in the way we think of the physical sciences. Very few doctors are scientists. They are, basically, technicians.
    2
  2764.  @thecrookedtrail679  If you are talking about doctors, then yes.
    2
  2765.  @edwardd9702  Max Hastings wrote a good book on the atrocities committed by the Vietnamese communist forces. I believe it was published in 2018. You might want to take a look at it.
    2
  2766.  @GROWLEYMOLD  Fully agree with you on that point.
    2
  2767.  @jamieharper2554  They did help destabilize all the countries around them. So, perhaps not global. But they were part of a movement that also wanted to destroy the west.
    2
  2768. What about all the childhood vaccinations we give in the West. Many childhood killers have thus been eliminated. We require these vaccinations to attend school.
    2
  2769. This idea of splitting China and Russia has real promise. There are some real tensions between the two, not the least of which is Putin's new partnership with Kim. As for the trade between Russia and China, it is presented in percentages. In terms of actual volume, it is miniscule compared to the overall volume of China's foreign trade. As for Ukraine, what most commentators leave out is that Trump relies on credible threats. He has also said, in relation to Ukraine that if Putin does not comply, he will flood Ukraine with weapons. He is also correct about the killing. Both Ukraine and Russia were in severe demographic decline before the war. Finally, look at the geostrategic situation in Trump's first term compared to today. Putin did not attack Ukraine. In the case of North Korea, while negotiations between Trump and Kim did not go as well as one would have liked, Kim was quiescent during Trump's presidency. There was peace in the Middle East, which seemed to be spreading. Trump is not a traditional politician or leader. People need to understand that. Biden made decisions (if indeed he was making any) based on political calculation and polls. Do I have to point out how stupid and damaging that is?
    2
  2770. So, whatever happened to "follow the science"? This is misinformation at its finest. The issues we have in all this are three-fold, at least. One the one hand, there is a lack of a holistic, or systems, approach to solving the problem. Without such an approach we will likely see massive failures and wasted resources. A systems approach would also include a transition plan. We are not going to electrify transportation, for example, based on currently available resources. The increases in critical materials required are just not possible in the time frames envisioned. Then there is the problem that politicians do not lead, but just react to protests. The German reaction to a tsunami in the Pacific was one of the stupidest things I have ever seen. And the German chancellor at the time had a PhD! Stunning! Another problem is that much of the pollution has been offshored. Manufacturing in China is CO2 intensive and massively degrading to the environment in many, many other ways. I have seen reports that China's ground water is over 90% contaminated. Conditions for workers processing lithium, for example, are horrendous and pose health problems for them. Where are the protests in front of the Chinese embassy?
    2
  2771.  @LaurentCarty  Oh, I see. I typed it incorrectly. It is Lawrence. Hope that helps.
    2
  2772. House of cards to a circus of clowns. What a wonderful turn of phrase.
    2
  2773. Safe China. Sounds like the SS and Gestapo, or perhaps the KGB. Have they ever wondered why all those small countries in Europe controlled so much of the world? Have they ever tried to figure out how the US got so advanced, rich and influential with far fewer people and much less history? Don't forget, the US was significantly strong economically not that long after independence. By 1900 the US share of world manufactured exports was, I believe, larger than China's is today. Of course, the US leveraged Europe's systemic advantages and took them to the next level. Part of the answer was that there was no analog to the CCP. At times and in places where there was in Europe, things didn't go so well. I expect nothing different in CCP run China today.
    2
  2774. The US hasn't ratified the Rome Stature either. In fact, the US and Russia have the same status vis-a-vis the court. They both signed the original document and then withdrew. The other states in that category are Israel and Sudan.
    2
  2775.  @cajun1253  Speak of coming back, I have toilets in my house that are US made. I have, over the years, replaced all the internal parts, the external valve, and the flexible hose from this valve with US made parts. The last was the flush handle, which arm which pulls in the float. I found the manufacturer had two options for this part. One, made in China, had a plastic arm. This was what was installed. The other. made in the US, had a metal arm. The difference in retail price was very small ($1 to $2). So, I bought them for all my toilets. Just a small example of what we are subjected to.
    2
  2776. I realize that the state media comments are propaganda, but really. As you state, they are made for local consumption. As President Joe likes to say: Come on man!
    2
  2777. America Uber Alles!!!
    2
  2778. The interviewer keeps interrupting the conversation to throw in some factoid, as journalists are wont to do. Who care if its 22 incursions of Chinese aircraft over the median line or 32? I find this style of interviewing a bit exasperating. You have a real expert on the subject on and interrupt to throw in these minor points. Anyone who has followed the situation is going to know the number, or at least the magnitude. I seriously doubt that the vast majority of watchers of this channel are uninformed about these things.
    2
  2779. Foreign trade is a relatively small part of the GDP of the US. And over 50% of that is within NAFTA. So, overall, foreign trade is not crucial to the US economy. In fact, American policy is to redirect trade away from these areas affected. This is not a good use of US Navy resources for the US. My opinion, of course, but look at the numbers. The mostly European nations being affected are quite rich and some have extensive naval resources. Let them do it. We need to have this debate! Your contribution is very timely.
    2
  2780.  @genericscout5408  Russia should be able to do that but they never have been. I think it is a cultural thing.
    2
  2781.  @Adyen11234  Totally wishful thinking, and very naive. First off, soft power without the threat of hard power is meaningless. Secondly, why would one expect the oligarchs to be any better than Putin. Don't forget the massive corruption in Russia. It involves both the state apparatus and organized crime. The oligarchs are at the center of that. They are not people you want to do business with. I am further convinced as time goes on that Russia will break up. It could very well end up in a warlord situation, like the situation in China after the fall of the Qing dynasty. By the way, this is also what is likely to happen again in China after the fall of the CCP dynasty. The fact is that the whole society is rotten and corrupt. Read Nikolai Gogol's novel "Dead Souls". It was written in the middle of the 19th century. Nothing has changed.
    2
  2782.  @Adyen11234  Making a point out of there are good and bad oligarchs is just one of the worst arguments I have ever heard. You fail to realize that oligarchs are not businessmen. Read about ancient Greece, for example. The education might be useful. An oligarch is NOT necessarily a businessman. Oligarchy means rule by a few. That some of those few are "capitalists" as you claim is immaterial. Of course, in an economy ruled by a few with rampant corruption, money tends to coalesce around the political elite. As for the ones that you are talking about, go back and get an understanding of how they made their money and how they gained control of business. That should put you off of wanting to deal with them.
    2
  2783.  @greenghost5009  Are you for real? I have rarely seen a more ill-informed comment, and that says a lot. If that is your take on international relations and economics, then you may need some more education. smh
    2
  2784. One big issue with Harvard is the whole DEI debacle. Harvard made its name long before it started "diversifying". In fact, it made its name even before it let women in. As for the Trump effect that is posited regarding Harvard, Canada and Australia, Ferguson is being way too short sighted. He is, in this case, just looking at the headlines and not digging deeper. In Canada, the Liberals did not get a majority and there are already moves to move Carney out. In addition, there are moves afoot in the western provinces and Quebec to either break off from Ottawa or at least redefine the whole federal system there. The conservatives in Canada were not really ready to take Canada in a new direction. It is a process. I am not as up to date on Australia, but I also hear rumblings there. Frankly, his analysis on this is a bit disappointing.
    2
  2785. in a country with a socialized health system, this type of thing is definitely valid. When the public is paying for your health service, anything that affects health is on the table. Quite frankly, most of these "foods" are just plain bad for you. Having done away with them, and changing my diet, I have lost weight (I am getting down to where I was in my 20s, and I am in my 60s), my blood pressure is normal, and I have no joint pains (as I sometimes had). And I have not totally eliminated any particular category of real food. I have not taken even an aspirin in about 5 years. And I am not the only one I know who has vastly improved their lives through diet and exercise. By the way, I still drink whiskey (and some wine) and smoke cigars. Processed foods are the bane of our existence. Refined sugar is a health disaster. You don't need it. So, ban the advertising, and put on the warnings, they are quite valid.
    2
  2786. In the early 2000's I had a guy working for me who was a Seal Team 6 member (actually couple of them) who were real Glock 22 fans. They carried them as civilians. Thay actually ran a security firm which was one of my subsidiaries. These guys were active in the first Gulf War. And I mean active. I am a fan of the .40 S&W myself. My first semi-auto pistol was a .40. The standard load was a 180-grain projectile generating 400 ft-lbs. I like the 155-grain projectile generating 500 ft-lbs. The standard .45 and 9mm projectiles generate about 350 ft-lbs.
    2
  2787. If something happens to Pelosi, then another Speaker will be chosen. Unlike the President and VP, the Speaker is not specifically elected to that office by the electorate. The Speaker is just another Representative selected for the post after the Congress goes into session after an election. There are 434 backups.
    2
  2788. The US has a free trade deal with Canada and Mexico. There is no such deal with the EU. I remember commenting on this in a forum on US EU relations some years ago when the TTIP agreement was being discussed. It was opposed by civil society groups in Europe that did not want to accept any US involvement in regulation in the EU. So, this issue is a chimera. It was the EU that really killed it. They, as usual, took too long and a different administration came in with a different agenda.
    2
  2789.  @wendolynmutunhu2866  Is the author Barns Carr?
    2
  2790. Very astute. What Sal fails to realize, and that I often comment on, is that the freedom of the seas since WWII is not a normal situation. In fact, this is the only time in human history where this has happened. It is the Russians and the Chinese, two countries that have benefited greatly from the US led order on the seas that have decided that they don't want a US led order. The US has other options and more resources than just about anyone plus a diverse economy. The US has a smaller percentage of GDP involved in global trade than most, if not any, major developed country. The comment about how world prosperity has increased under this US led trade regime is true. It is also not something that the US populace wants to fund. It is not the responsibility of the US to ensure that some poor country in another part of the world can be lifted out of poverty. It might be nice, but that costs money. If the US going to pay for you to develop then there had to be something in return. It has to be a two-way street. The US did what it did after WWII for strategic military reasons. Period! At the end of the Cold War President George H. W. Bush wanted to have the conversation about what the world should look like and how security should be handled. He was voted out of office. He is the last president we have had that had the experience and knowledge required to do that. Look up his bio. It is impressive. But the US is a democracy, and the people get to decide. The US has selected progressively more populist presidents since. The cost of being the world's policeman, which is what the US is, has become too great and is no longer necessary for US security.
    2
  2791.  @Luredreier  My, my, you are big on the international law thing. International law is a fiction. To be a law there has to be an enforcement mechanism, and as the term implies, that means the threat or use of force. This is where it all breaks down. Laws also require a judicial process. For example, the Houthis are effectively blocking ships from using internationally recognized waterways. They are breaking international law. There have been some desultory attempts to counter this and punish them. The only real effective solution is to invade their territory. The question is who will do that. Who will expend the blood and treasure to make the Houthis comply with international law. There are alternatives for most shipping and most companies are taking those alternatives. Another great example is China's actions in the South China Sea. In that case an international court, of which China is a member, found China in violation. So, frankly, any country would be justified in attacking China's ships and dismantling their artificial islands, etc. That is what enforcement would mean. Why has this not happened? Oh, yes, there is no independent enforcement mechanism. So, you may want to get off your high horse about "international law".
    2
  2792. You make some very good points. The Shah was a totalitarian. I expect your family situation might have been impacted by that. His secret police apparatus was massive and repressive. As for Carter's energy policies, he was the one who stopped uranium reprocessing in the US. That was dumb. He did it because of proliferation fears. A lot of the policies were, as you point out, driven by the Cold War (I miss the Cold War; I got to do a lot of interesting research with unlimited budgets). That was a very different time. It also kept the lid on a number of the issues we are dealing with now.
    2
  2793. Wow! Can't these people not see that SBF was basically a liar and cheat. I don't believe for one second that he believed EA.
    2
  2794. Yes, what Ukraine needs is the means to fight the combined arms battle. This means aircraft. Lots of aircraft. Russia is struggling, but so is Ukraine. They have not been able to break through Russian lines except when the Russians were unprepared. Then they run up against prepared defenses and stall again. Look at both wars the US and its allies fought in Iraq. The deciding factor was airpower. The US broke through heavily prepared defensive lines because airpower prevented the Iraqis from getting close enough to stop the breaching maneuvers. This war has turned into the Iran Iraq War from the 1980s. Literally. Read about that war and it looks about the same. That war lasted about 10 years, by the way.
    2
  2795. The issue of intelligence "under the current government" is a red herring. How long was this current government in office before the attacks happened? The intelligence failure started under the previous government. This is a systemic problem, not the fault of any administration. Frankly, the whole issue shows that the people of Gaza are behind Hamas. They are able to recruit even in the current conditions, as you point out. But it is not only because of the Israeli actions. This may have to end like the Tamil rebellion in Sri Lanka. Look it up.
    2
  2796. If the price of grain is trebled, then the farmers make more money. I have a relative who grows corn and soybeans. When I visit him, I can always tell from his mood how the price is doing. He is a bit transparent that way. If the price is up, he is happy. When it is down, he is irritable. One year the weather was bad, and his yield was down (as was everyone else's). What that meant was that the price per bushel was up, and he had obtained drought insurance. So, that time he was happy. What I really am trying to say is that if you don't know anything about it, don't talk about it.
    2
  2797. I really sympathize with this father and his loss. On the other hand, I would like to know how he voted. Did he vote for these Democrat politicians that promogulated these policies? If he did, then how can he complain. If he didn't, then I apologize. If he did, then how can he complain about the policies?
    2
  2798.  @ThinkUkraine  You are very welcome. Keep up the good work.
    2
  2799. I love the PETA response. I expect he knew it was coming, and relishing it. If you have ever watched some of his shows, or just looked at the titles, you will see that he can be a real bastard at times. That is part of his persona.
    2
  2800. The TROs by the courts will be overturned. USAID was created by executive order, so I am sure Trump will get his way in dismantling the agency. Frankly, USAID was created to combat communist expansion during the Cold War. It has a history of questionable actions and was often used as a front for intelligence agency activity. The list of batsh*t crazy programs is epic. I even saw one Russian woman who had left Russia and has a YouTube channel complaining that her USAID funding had been curtailed. Why the fu*k are my taxpayer dollars going to such people? Programs funding research in other countries is not an American priority. Many of those countries have large economies. The responsibility for the programs that remain will be taken over by the State Department where it belongs.
    2
  2801. Who in the west likes the strong man culture in Russia? Asking for a friend. I think I have mentioned this before in comments on your videos. Read Gogol's book from the middle of the 19th century titled "Dead Souls". It perfectly describes the current situation in Russia. For the most part, with obvious exceptions, the Russian people never stopped being serfs, even in Soviet times.
    2
  2802. Competition with the US? Nukes, like most weapons, can be either offensive or defensive. Having a defensive nuclear capability means having enough nukes to respond to a potential invader and making the invasion scenario too costly. If that is China's intention, then they have enough nukes. The important thing to remember about China is that, in the world after WWII, NO ONE WANTS TO INVADE CHINA. China does not have excess natural resources and can't feed itself. It would be a liability to any nation taking it over. They must know this. So, China is signaling that it plans offensive actions in the future. In that case the only rational course for the US and the rest of the west is containment. In the current environment, a total collapse of the Chinese system could take as little as a couple of years. Is that what China wants? To be clear, no one wants any of this. China is regressing to either the imperialist colonial mindset, or the communist international mindset. They are both the same, frankly. Is this really what the Chinese people want?
    2
  2803.  @far_centrist  The living cost crisis would mitigate for working longer, wouldn't it?
    2
  2804.  @rorysmith2415 I knew that about Wales. The autocomplete got me. As for your later point, that is just an administrative thing. I was talking about the actual meaning of nationality. If you are going to just classify minorities as Scottish, you might as well be in the US, or England.
    2
  2805. It's the Institute for the Study of War, not warfare.
    2
  2806.  @salvalooez2249  You need to brush up on your history.
    2
  2807.  @danielcobbins8861  That's a great point. Hitler's stupidity goes beyond that, of course. Many people in territories captured by the Germans were actually anti-communist. Because they were Slavs, however, rather than treating them well he had them brutalized. Of course, Hitler did this just about everywhere he went. His stupidity, in this and in many other spheres, was a great help to the allies.
    2
  2808. The green energy growth does not add up. As usual the investment has distorted the market, if it is real. Reports of overcapacity in the solar cell industry, for example, have companies shut down or suspending production. The same is true in the battery sector. Another thing to consider is that China is also building out its coal power generation capacity at a record pace at the same time. The green technology is just for show. Again, a state directed misallocation of capital. Ah, the wonders of central planning. And a final note on all this green stuff, especially, but not limited to solar. I saw a report that in UK, on a particular day, their wind capacity satisfied all their electricity needs. For about thirty minutes.
    2
  2809. No pain. I love it when you get technical.
    2
  2810.  @jonathandewberry289  Now you are just being silly. If you don't know what people mean when they talk about processed food, then you will not understand.
    2
  2811.  @anthonydelfino6171  Sounds great. Good going, Actually, I recently cut out fruit (long story) and I don't miss it. I also stopped drinking alcohol. Just that got me another belt notch. I tend to have two meals and a snack. So, I eat breakfast (oatmeal with butter) and nuts for a snack. Frankly, since I have increased my nut intake, my stools have gotten even better. For supper I have vegetables and either fish (I consider myself pescatarian) or lentils. One thing about eliminating the processed foods is that the whole foods I eat are satisfying. I feel satisfied and never feel bloated.
    2
  2812.  @saschaesken5524  Half of the deaths in the US were people 75 years and older. As we know, that cohort has many more health problems than people below that age. In fact, it is not uncommon for people in that age group to die of pneumonia as the proximate cause in "normal" times, although most that are younger would survive.
    2
  2813.  Greatwhite Wiggy  I lived in the UK early in this millennium. I was on the NHS. There were meltdowns even then. The annual flu "epidemic" is a time honored tradition with the NHS. I have a little story to tell. Being an ex-pat, I also had private insurance. One of my neighbors, who were actually British citizens, but were doing a "foreign assignment" from the corporate HQ in the US, where they had lived for a long time. The wife got a bad double vision. It could be one of two things. Either a virus or a tumor. If a tumor, then one must operate quickly to avoid blindness. The way to determine this was to do a CAT scan. They waited overnight at the hospital (we took care of their son). They were told to go home and that they would be contacted at some point about the scan. Realizing they had private insurance, they went to a private clinic. They got the scan right away. Fortunately it was not a tumor. This is the NHS at work, and it has not gotten better..
    2
  2814.  @lrmackmcbride7498  You are just guessing. The Russian battalions are about the same size as US battalions.
    2
  2815. The birdfeeder looks great. Very innovative. I have an idea for a poster you can sell. When I lived in the UK we were near Bath. Once while visiting we got a poster titled "Doors of Georgian Bath". Then, when I had a country house near a historic town on the western edge of Illinois, we found a similar poster titled "Galena Doorways". Each was just a collage of interesting doorways. So, my idea for you is "Generators of Kyiv". It should be a big hit, and a great seller even after the war. Be safe. I pray for you daily.
    2
  2816.  @careyfreeman5056  I wasn't commenting about the efficacy of the policy, just the correspondence of the issues in presidential politics. Actually, if you follow Peter, he generally says NAFTA was not great, and Trump's renegotiation of it, the USMCA, is considered much better.
    2
  2817. MBGA just doesn't have the same ring to it as MAGA. Maybe it should be MUGA (Make the Uk Great Again).
    2
  2818.  @ronarnett4811  Thanks for the info. This was in the early 2000s. Geopolitically, things were much different then. As I mentioned, I was "told" they were nuclear. If I recall correctly, their hulls were painted red.
    2
  2819. Flu viruses generally peak in the fall and winter. A similar pattern was observed with COVID in the US. This should be expected.
    2
  2820. National Christian churches predate the English church. All of the Orthodox churches are national churches. I grew up in the Greek Orthodox Church. I converted to the Episcopal church when I got married, because of my wife. I was an Anglican when I lived in England (Winchester). The Anglican communion consists of a number of "national" churches. Actually, I was once in Conwy. There was a Church of Wales there. It was mostly deserted, and the grounds were overgrown. When I let that happen in my yard the city slaps me with a violation.
    2
  2821. Interesting. I usually have some whiskey in the evening. I have oatmeal in the morning. I have one piece of fruit in the morning (orange, apple or grapefruit). I eat vegetables, and some pulses, generally lentils. This might be lentils themselves or lentil pasta (made with just lentils). I also drink coffee. Just a story about all this. My father had a stomach ulcer. At the time (early 1980s) they removed half his stomach. It was a traumatic operation. He drank very moderately. He did drink coffee and smoked cigarettes. Well, he stopped all that. Soon after he developed late onset Type II diabetes and Parkinson's. What I have read is that coffee is good for warding off both of these. There is also some evidence that nicotine may be good for brain function. I don't really know about that, but it makes sense. Your whole approach and channel is about insulin. Don't get me wrong, I value the content you present. On the other hand, I don't add sugar, or any other sweetener to anything. I have lost weight. I am back to where I was in my 20s and am in my mid 60s now. My stools are good. I have not taken even an aspirin for over five years. I do eat some fish, cheese and eggs, but these are not a major part of my diet. So, I am not sure if all the advice you are giving, especially on specific food types, is all that significant. You may be getting too much into the weeds here.
    2
  2822. China is a paper tiger. For better, or worse, the US has been fighting wars since WWII. Even in Vietnam, the US never lost a battle. The final defeat was due to political factors. This is also true of Afghanistan. In the first Gulf War with Iraq there were 350K US troops, and our coalition partners brought that up to 500K. We were fighting the fourth largest military in the world on their home ground. They had over a decade of combat experience with Iran just before that. The ground war took about 72 hours. In the second Gulf War we sent in 170K troops and took over the country in two weeks. Over 1.5M US soldiers have served in Afghanistan over the years. What experience does China have? Their last major conflict was with Vietnam in 1979, which was a disaster. The one child policy means that their soldiers are not as willing to fight, since they are the only heirs to their family name, which is very important in Chinese culture. We have seen this problem with their conflict with India currently. The US and it's allies have no interest in invading China. They will, though, resist China in incursions in other lands. China does not have the wherewithal to project their power. That is difficult. I see this Chinese aggression as a reflection in Chinese internal politics. There are already signs that the military in China is resisting these tendencies. You should research a bit more before putting out such content.
    2
  2823. Where is the mainstream media, you ask. You are the media. The MSM is becoming irrelevant.
    2
  2824. The Democrats forgot the role of government. Trump gets it. The Democrats embraced an ideology. The US is not an ideological country. Europe, for example, is and look where that has gotten them for the last 125 years or so. Remember the old saying, "The business of America is business". The core values of America are individuality (the most important), rule of law, private property and prosperity. When we stick to those we do well, as Trump showed in his first term.
    2
  2825. Quantum computing, like many trends in computing today, is hype. That is not to say that it might not be useful. One of the previous hyped "technologies" was big data. It is not that big data is not useful, or important, but that it has just become another tool. Big data, by the way, is an essential element in another hype wave, artificial intelligence. Again, it is not that AI will not have an impact, but that it will be another very useful tool. Frankly, all of these new developments will probably have less impact than the initial phases of computing. At that time, we went from manual processes to automated processes. The two industries initially most affected were banking and insurance. Not only were millions of people doing back-office processing put out of work, but there were predictions of mass unemployment. Guess what? It didn't happen. What you got was better service and lots of new services and possibilities. My father had a cartoon which showed a row of mainframe computer cabinets (you younger people might need to look that up) with a button at the end of one. The caption was "you too could be replaced by a button". I could go on and on with examples, but I will spare you. The fact is that most of what we do with computers is done best by the current technology (binary computers). There are good reasons for that.
    2
  2826. I have noticed that crude futures prices have been trading in fairly tight band for a long time. They are currently near the low end of the range. As of yesterday, WTI crude futures were trading at $74.52. There is lots of capacity worldwide and lots of reserves that have not been tapped. As for the French going in and colonizing, I think that gets more and more probable every day. I heard one French official, I think it was a military officer, talking about something along those lines in regard to the situation in the Sahel. Peter's prognostications about how the world order will change in the future are looking more and more probable.
    2
  2827. "Common ground while retaining differences". This concept can only be taken so far. Putting aside all the geopolitical saber rattling and just looking at economic and environmental factors, this is not really tenable. On the environmental front, what the west has done is to ship pollution to China. When this was local pollution no one really cared about it. Now that we a are addressing global issues where China is the most significant player, the issue can no longer be ignored. On the economic front, the EU should no longer ignore the treatment of workers in China, from slave labor to child labor to companies just not paying their workers and a host of other issues. The left in the west goes on and on about the plight of Africans in mining and the abuses there (many started under European colonial rule) and ignores similar abuses in China. Workers of the world unite!
    2
  2828. So, how did the Hitler Youth work out for the Nazis? Don't sweat it.
    2
  2829. Tony, the panda story was supposed to be something "lighter"? The Soviet Union tried to go it alone in space science. Just saying.
    2
  2830.  @1940limited  This is modern warfare. If you are going to mention WWII, then you must also mention the MASSIVE material support the Soviets got from the allies. They were also fighting an enemy that was constantly making stupid decisions. I have a lot of experience and knowledge of military doctrine. The Russian doctrine in Ukraine has been one massive mistake after another. In this case it is the Ukrainians that are getting massive support from the west. Russia is toast.
    2
  2831. While agree with the premise that Putin was not legitimately elected, I have to say, so what? Countries are not people or companies. Frankly, just about everything said here could be applied to China, or Iran, or a number of other countries. President Biden has come out and said that Xi is a dictator, and yet the US still has to deal with China. In these cases, one has two choices. One is to just deal with these regimes. The other is to isolate them, which is being done with Russia. Actually, I misspoke. There is a third choice. Invade and impose a legitimate government. So, who is up for doing that?
    2
  2832. Hey, it was the 1960s 1970s. This is nothing out of the ordinary for the times. I actually read most Castaneda's books back then. To us it seemed more like fiction back then. Between reading ancient Hindu, Buddhist and other such works, we were up for anything.
    2
  2833. From my experience and from what I've seen and read, THE most important thing is diet. A little over five years ago I was going through a divorce. So, even though we lived in the same house during the proceedings, we stopped eating together. I went pescatarian, and I don't eat fish every day. First, my diet is quite simple. This feeling that people need to consume all these strange foods is just plain stupid. There is no support for that. Half a century ago, when I was first at university and my best friends were Indian, I went vegetarian. The mother of one of my friends, who was moving back to India (her husband was a diplomat) tried to teach us traditional Indian cooking. It was difficult and frankly bizarre. So, we found a book, Zen Macrobiotic Cooking, which was incredibly simple, and ate that. It was magical. It was cheap, easy and very nutritious. Then, went away from that, but not eating junk food. In the years prior to the divorce, I had gained weight, girth and developed high blood pressure. So, what did the doctor do? He put me on medication. It didn't work. He even took and EKG and said it looked perfect. Well, the medication made me feel bad, so I stopped. Since I changed my diet, I lost 25% of my weight, six inches off my waist and the blood pressure is normal. I am literally getting back to where I was in my 20s (I am in my late 60s). And I have seen this in other guys I know my age. Actually, one who had type 2 diabetes symptoms lost a similar weight percentage, and the symptoms "went away".
    2
  2834. Your characterization of Trump's trade actions against China makes it seem like Trump was the one who identified the problem. That is far from the truth. For at least ten years prior to Trump taking office there has been concern about China's trade practices, including IP theft and forced technology transfer, as well as the trade imbalance. As a consultant I worked with several companies that had been adversely affected by these unethical practices. Coupled with the poor quality of Chinese manufacturing, and I can give many examples, the opening to China has been a disaster for companies large and small.
    2
  2835. Well, Silver Fox, you are a rabble rouser and probably should be locked up. As Monty Python would say, "It's people like you what cause unrest". I just hope you realize that I am joking, right?
    2
  2836.  @wolfumz  The market unequal? That has always been the case. That is built into how housing is financed.
    2
  2837. It is, and has been, common practice and knowledge. The issue is confiscatory tax rates, which leads to outrageous government spending. In the US, the top 1% pay 40% of income taxes. What these reporters totally ignore is crypto currency. This exists for the same reason. That is to hide wealth from the authorities. This is being used by people at much lower income levels, and is a lot easier to do. They also do not, as far as I can tell, comment on the legality of these practices. As pointed out in this report, many of those named insist that they have done nothing wrong, taken no illicit funds to do what they did, and informed the authorities as necessary.
    2
  2838. I had a Mark III (1967) and a Mark IV (1969) Spite as well as a MGB (1969). I can attest to the rust problems as well. I was the fourth owner of the Mark III. The first owner had raced it, and it had a hot engine. It also had rusted floorboards under the driver. Someone had screwed together some old road signs to cover the missing metal, and when I would go through a big puddle the back of my calves would get soaked. Curiously, there was a fine oil leak on the passenger side of the oil pan and that side had no rust. The only real rust on my other two was on the rocker panels. I was able to obtain new ones for the Mark IV. I never totally got the MGB sorted before I had to let it go. Tragically, I crashed the Mark III into a light pole when the brakes failed due to a leakage problem with the main cylinder. Interestingly, I had a problem with the clutch slave cylinder as well and replaced it with a custom part. I was a student at a large university studying physics and we had our own cyclotron. The guys in the machine shop made me one out of titanium.
    2
  2839.  @Marzimus  Thanks. Yes, we were really into it. It was not just my brother and I, but all our friends as well. It was a bit crazy, and fun (and the women loved it).
    2
  2840.  @Marzimus  Ah, yes. Brings back memories. Thanks.
    2
  2841. It is interesting. Your expectation for life expectancy is somewhat short. There are absolute numbers, based on the broader population. On the other hand, if you look at the actuarial data, you will see that there are very great differences between age groups. For example, if you reach 65 these days, you have a 50& chance of living into your mid 90s. So, for an individual, the gross figures are not significant. That is an average over a massive population, with an incredible variety of life experiences. What is more relevant is this type of actuarial data, which takes into account characteristics of the individual at a particular time. We all know that the "mid-life crisis" point has moved from 40 to 50. I have changed my diet and lifestyle, especially after a divorce about five years ago. I have gotten down to the size I was in my 20s (about a 25% reduction from my peak). The good thing about that is that the very expensive suits I bought from Savile Row in the UK, while I was living there in the early 2000s, now fit. The bad news is that I have almost no need to wear them. Oh, well. My high blood pressure has gone away (no drugs). No joint pain (had some, but not major). Interestingly, I thought I had allergies to pollen, etc. This has not been an issue either, anymore. Maybe I was allergic to my ex-wife. Something to consider. In fact, I have not taken an aspirin since being served with divorce papers and no longer eating with my ex-wife. I was a vegetarian many decades ago (my best friends at university were Indian, and Hindu). It was tasty, healthy and very inexpensive. Today I am pescatarian at home. I will eat almost anything when out, but I don't get out much these days. Diet is the major determinant of our health. Channels like this help us understand what we need to do. I greatly appreciate it.
    2
  2842. This is not the direst health emergency we have faced. The worst, in the 20th Century was the Spanish Flu. There were anywhere from 25M to 100M deaths worldwide. So far, we have about 5.5M deaths, and there is reason to believe that the reporting inflates the numbers. And don't forget, the population in 1918 was 1.8B. In 2020 it was 7.8B. Do the numbers. The US population is also much larger than in 1918, of course (by a factor of over 3). My financial advisor, who is a total numbers geek pointed out that in the US we didn't even have a recession. In fact, the Spanish Flu preceded a decade of massive economic prosperity. The whole idea of science based, or facts based, decision in government is TOTALLY bogus. Just as an example, let's look at start times for schools. Everywhere I am aware of, high school starts first, then middle school and then elementary school. This is just the opposite of all the facts about sleeping patterns for children. It should be just the opposite. Why is it the way it is. Because of sports. We do not give a CRAP about science or evidence-based decision making in this country.
    2
  2843. My mother worked at the Naval Institute. She was born in Annapolis. Great to see you are working with them. I always say that I have three vices. These are whiskey cigars and books. When I moved from Philadelphia to Chicago the movers told us we had 3K pounds of books. That was 30 years ago, and I have not slowed down. Actually, after technical books (computer science and math) I prefer history. That Is why I love channels like yours.
    2
  2844.  @qrsx66  There is some validity to what you say. Don't forget that the last almost 80 years have been an anomaly in world history. It started with the US building a coalition to counter the Soviet Union. It was continued after the Soviet Union fell. Don't forget, maintaining that order is very expensive. The American people are no longer interested in bearing that cost. As for shitty things happening everywhere, what do you think has been happening since the end of WWII? Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, multiple wars in the Middle East, wars on the Indian subcontinent, invasions of Chechnya and Georgia and don't forget Azerbaijan and Armenia. For better or worse, the US military has been fighting for most of the 20th and 21st centuries. With that brings experience and enhances weapons development. The cost of doing what the US has done for the last 80 years has been massive. The only two actors that seem to want to control the whole thing, Russia and China are in no shape to take that role on, and both are declining. At least until the end of this century I don't see any country, or even coalition. being able to take on that role. There will be no "world police". Things will go "back to normal".
    2
  2845.  @qrsx66  Very well put. It would be nice if something could be done to regulate trade and other issues in, as you put it, a collegial way. Let's hope something can be done in that area. As for Iraq, and Afghanistan, the second Iraq invasion and the Afghan invasion were driven by a horrendous act on 9/11. I voted for George W. Bush after discussions with my then wife about his attitude against "regime change" wars. Prior to 9/11 that was his sincere viewpoint. I was actually living abroad on 9/11. It was quite a shock. If you look at the first Iraq War, the liberation of Kuwait, or the Gulf War, it was actually sanctioned by UN Security Council resolutions. The US set a goal of liberating Kuwait, and after that withdrew from Iraqi territory in accordance with the resolutions. There were lots of countries contributing to the effort and it looked as if the world system was working to resolve such conflicts. Things were very hopeful. I was almost sent over to the area because I was working at the time on some brand-new technology that was being deployed for the first time in the ground campaign. Fortunately, the war was so short there wasn't time for anything to break down. As for the prospects for the US, they do seem reasonable. Our demographics are okay. The baby boom generation, of which I am a part, was an anomaly. The other thing the US has going for it is immigration. I know there is a lot of angst right now, and that causes tension. On the other hand, the US has always been driven by immigration. My grandparents came to the US from Greece over 110 years ago with 4th grade educations. Some of their children went to university. ALL of their grandchildren went to university, with a lot of advanced degrees among them. I would expect nothing less from the current crop of immigrants. I think it will work itself out. I do appreciate your thoughtful, and hopeful, comments. I tend to be more pessimistic. I would not be upset if I was proven wrong, but we won't know for a while.
    2
  2846. I find it a bit aggravating when the "capacity" of solar and wind projects use the same nomenclature as coal, gas and nuclear plants. This gives a false impression that they are interchangeable. Bollocks! A new measure is needed to describe these projects. One that takes into account how often these technologies can actually produce electricity, because the reality is that they need to be backed up by the more traditional power sources, or some sort of energy storage mechanism.
    2
  2847. I really appreciate your exposition of the Russian point of view. On the other hand, NATO and the EU have never had any designs on Russian territory. I am an old Cold Warrior. There has never been any plan to invade Soviet, or Russian, territory. The West is very much in favor of territorial sovereignty of the existing states. What Russia has done is move Finland and Sweeden towards NATO membership. I saw a video recently where a former Prime Minister stated unequivocally that Finland would join soon. The situation in Sweeden is moving rapidly in that direction as well. This gives another major avenue of advance for the West to invade Russia. Of course, NATO is a defensive alliance. It has no plan, or charter, to invade. Perhaps if there was an EU military, they might decide to do so, since that would not be defensive alliance. That is really the only thing Russia has to afraid of, and it is many years out, if it ever happens. Russia is thinking in terms of centuries past. This is stupid. That is putting it mildly. Adding the nuclear issue, and you have a "fear" that is unfounded. Due to Putin's stance and the sanctions from the West, Russia is experiencing a brain drain. I have read that 5M people have left Russia under Putin. Considering that Russian birth rates are under replacement level, this is disastrous. Many of those leaving are well educated and this will further repress the Russian economy. Add to that the sanctions, and the unwillingness of Western companies to continue to operate in Russia, and that spells disaster. This is especially true in the il and gas industries. It is Western investment that helped Russia increase their output. Without this expertise, their output will fall.
    2
  2848.  @jollyroger6329  Waa it an actual treaty? NATO membership is up to the nations who apply. It is not up to Russia or any other nation to deny. Being a defensive alliance, it is no business of Russia.
    2
  2849. In the last part it is mentioned that the Chinese excel in all academic tests. That is the problem. Most of the world's educational systems teach to the test. So, it is no wonder they do well. The US does not, and despite not doing as well in some of these rankings excels in actually doing something with the knowledge. If you look at some of the most successful entrepreneurs in tech in the US, you will see that many did not finish university. Examples are Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. What is more telling, and more important economically, is the low educational level of the blue collar work force.
    2
  2850. During the Great Leap Forward, the CCP tried to eliminate swallows as a "pest". This had disastrous effects on agriculture. Will something similar happen this time? Bringing in climate change is interesting, and I think unwarranted. For one thing, the climate concerns are an increase in global temperature. So, how does this play into the cold temperatures experienced now? Where I am, the temperatures have been very mild and well within the normal range. Climate change refers to the global situation. Weather is local.
    2
  2851. Let's look at the reality. Military action in by the CCP would be a disaster for Xi. His military is a joke, especially the navy. Frankly, most of their military technology was stolen, , primarily from the Soviets/Russians, and is a poor copy. So, even without the corruption they are at a disadvantage. Just look at the Ukraine war. With the corruption, it would be a s**t show. The PLA cannot even provide the proper logistics support to their troops. The parallels with the Soviets/Russians are just too much to ignore. At least the Russians had some war fighting experience. The PLA has had none for a long time (over 40 years), and the last one did not really go their way. What is more likely to happen is that the CCP will implode. Heck, they can't even pay their soldiers (or police). China could break up into different regions, many run by warlords. I can even see the southern coastal regions align with Taiwan. I actually heard, on a channel (that was take down), that there were people in Shanghai who wanted to break away and do just that. I don't know how credible that was or how many people in Shanghai really supported that, but the fact that such speculations exist says something. It is also historically supported that the southern coast does not really like rule from the northern plain, and has always been more outward focused. Actually, this is the real reason Xi has such a hard on for Taiwan. It completely mirrors the real reason for Putin's invasion of Ukraine at this time. In both cases you have a democratic country on your doorstep with the same or similar ethnicity doing well and aligning with the west. To a totalitarian dictator this is unacceptable. In both cases it seems that it may lead to the downfall of the dictator.
    2
  2852. This is interesting. The consensus I have seen is that a recession is now not likely. In fact, growth is expected to be good through the end of 2024, at least.
    2
  2853.  @detrockcity3  Do you really think you can project out that far, especially with all that is going on in the economy and the world?
    2
  2854. Chinese products have NEVER been "quality products at low prices". This is a fallacy dreamed up by MBAs, not the people who have to produce things. I try to avoid products made in China. Of the ones I have, only the simplest ones are reasonable. And the quality has been going down and down. Recently I bought a simple can opener. It was a major brand item (you will notice that there are not too many Chinese brands out there, compare that to the Japanese). It went dull in a very short time. I binned it. I could go on and on and on from my personal experience to experience from my consulting with many businesses.
    2
  2855. The tried bringing this back in commie China a year or so ago. I mean there is basically no difference. How can the British people be so stupid as to vote in an openly commie government?
    2
  2856. Actually, this is not as crazy as it seems. I noticed at a large Catholic university in Chicago that there were lots of Muslim students. I asked about it and was told that they are comfortable there because of the religious support at the University. They feel more comfortable there than in a secular university.
    2
  2857. You mention at one point that we will always be able to develop defensive weapons to deter offensive capabilities. That is not true for ICBMs, at least not in aggregate. I worked on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). All of the systems we were developing were viable. Testing them and proving the concept, as an integrated whole, was not. How do you test such a thing? On the other hand, many technologies were developed from SDI that are now in use in a less grandiose way. SDI was a factor in the downfall of the Soviet Union. At that time the US was spending about 6% of GDP on defense. I always say that I missed the Cold War, since I got to do really interesting research with unlimited budgets. The Soviets, at the time, were spending about 40% of GDP on defense. The escalation that SDI represented was just plain out of reach of the Soviets. In addition, some of the weapons developed, which were considered defensive, could have been used for offensive purposes. This also scared the crap out of the Soviets.
    2
  2858. All you need is Mein Kampf. That is what I was thinking of listening to this.
    2
  2859. The salaries mentioned for government officials at the beginning of the video seem shockingly low to me. I know people in the US who get more than many of them on Social Security. Salaries of civil servants not being paid? Whatever happened to the "workers' paradise"? I have a financial advisor who said that he hoped that Xi would get a third term. His reasoning and expectation were that Xi would tank the Chinese economy. He, like many, was never a fan of the CCP and their economic policies. Well, it seems he was right.
    2
  2860. It is not just cohesion and security interests at stake here, although you rightly point these out. It is also environmental. The EU is already beginning to address this with the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) in the case of climate change. The other issue that the west has cynically ignored is more "standard" pollution. The west has literally just exported pollution along with jobs. Those critical materials are not generally sourced in China (although some might be) but are processed there to a much lower environmental standard. That is a large part of why they are so cheap.
    2
  2861. My insults? What insult. I am giving my reaction to the video. Is that not allowed when talking about Ukraine? I am not attacking UATV or its supporters. I I reiterate that I am making a comment on a particular video and conversation. Do you agree with everything they say? Is that a requirement? Sounds a bit like the old style when Ukraine was part of another country.
    2
  2862. And very unreliable. Made my MGs and Austin-Healey's look reliable.
    2
  2863.  @EyesWideOpen61  Well, my experience predated yours. Actually, early in the current millennium I was living in UK and had an Alfa Romeo GTV (2.0L Twin Spark). That car was very reliable and a whole lot of fun to drive. My brother, who has a 1964 Giuletta with the 1600cc Duetto engine (he fully restored it and has had it for decades) told me I could bring the GTV back to the US. I really wanted to. I put new larger wheels on it with Bridgestone low profile wet weather racing tires. With the original tires I could spin the wheels and burn rubber (which I was wont to do). Not so with those Bridgestones. Then my foreign assignment came to an early end because of economic conditions, and I found the cost to bring the car to US was prohibitive. I was very, very sad. On the other hand, I sold it in the UK for almost what I paid for it.
    2
  2864.  @sonialelii9038  It is sad. Of course, it is Russia's choice. Cold War 2.0.
    2
  2865. Companies have to conform to national laws and policies. Our constitutional protections only apply to the US. That said, I do not like what LinkedIn did, but they are only doing what they are required to do in China. The Internet is not a thing that can circumvent national laws. Sad, but true.
    2
  2866. Keep up the good work. I always eagerly await these videos.
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  2867. The problem with him making a public appearance, if he indeed had a heart attack, is that the optics would not be good. People who have gone through this, especially at his age, won't look good. You really can't pump him full of stimulants in this situation to make him seem healthy.
    2
  2868.  @NotOnDrugs  He finished his tour and returned home. He had decided not to go to college and enlist. When he got back, he got a job in IT operations and did very well for himself.
    2
  2869. Your characterization of how wars go for the Russians is a bit simplistic. For example, it doesn't work for many wars going back to at least the Crimean War. It doesn't work for Russo-Japanese War, WWI, the Polish-Soviet War and Afghanistan. It worked once in very different conditions. One thing you should notice is that these wars that failed were all wars of aggression directed outward. The "Great Patriotic War" and the French invasion of Russia led by Napolean were wars of conquest by outside powers moving into Russia. They were defeated as much by the terrain in Russia as anything else. It is important, in statistics, which is what these analyses are based on, the take into account the many factors that make up the dataset and their interaction.
    2
  2870. A pipe dream worked up by people who could not make it in the mainstream. Look at the "last" nonaligned movement. Was India truly nonaligned? They got most of their weapons from the Soviet Union, which last I heard was one of the poles of international "alignment". In the relatively near future there will be many poles and regional groupings. Trying to stand outside of those may not be an option, both on military and economic grounds. So, dream on.
    2
  2871.  JackSmith-mk1ru That is just silly. In the US both own the house. The bank provides the money, you provide the income to the bank to allow them to generate the capital to loan to you. You sound bitter. What is the alternative to the system we have now? You don't buy a house until you have saved up the money to buy it outright. Come on man. This is basic economics.
    2
  2872.  @henrycarlson7514  Well, that might not be such a bad idea. Actually, I would like to see much less government. Much less. Strip it down to the bare minimum. If you would permit a little philosophizing, I would like to point out that the government just hires people to do the jobs that need doing (and lots of jobs that don't need doing). For example, in one city I lived in the government did not collect garbage. There was a list of companies, and you could choose the one you wanted. The prices and service varied, and you could change the one you used. There is almost nothing that the government does, including fire and police, that could not be done by a private company. Set rules and parameters for them, basically contract terms. After all, the real work is just done by a bunch of people. If you do not use government employees, you can change out the provider when necessary. Look at the aerospace and defense industries. Note the term industry. We talk about NASA programs (I have worked on several). All the work is done by the contractors. The same is true for military equipment and systems (I have also worked on several of those). Look at building a house. There is the general contractor, but the work is almost all done by subcontractor who compete for the business.
    2
  2873.  JackSmith-mk1ru  The bank is the lien holder. Unless you are independently wealthy you cannot buy a house without a loan. So, what is the problem? Without the system of home loans, you would have nothing to do as a real estate agent. So, I am not sure of what you are getting at. If you don't pay taxes in general, you will be adversely affected. That has nothing to do with homes. Go back and look at foreclosure law. The banks have no income if they cannot make loans. Their income is from the interest paid on those loans. They will try to work with you to avoid having to repossess. So, look at the wider picture.
    2
  2874. So, did Sunak do any better? As President Joe likes to say, come on man!
    2
  2875.  @Silver_Prussian  Well, that is one opinion. Considering how the USSR broke up, and that none of those new countries has decided to reassociate with Russia, I cannot agree with you.
    2
  2876. This Xu Gao sounds like some sort of radical. I hope he has strong backers, for his own safety. Of course, Pettis nails it. Someone will have to pay. The thing is, in a system like the CCP, this is going to he a big problem.
    2
  2877. This is why the UK needs to get rid of the royalty.
    2
  2878. Fully agree. This guy is basically a clown.
    2
  2879. Why is the hailstorm such an issue? I have experienced that in the US Midwest. A few years ago, we were at the school for an evening concert, with my father in law's car and our two cars in the parking lot, along with lots and lots of other cars. While listening to the concert we heard what sounded like exceptionally heavy rain. When we went outside, we found that it had been a hailstorm. The metal on all our cars was dented. Several cars had windows shattered. The cost to fix the cars was massive. We took the insurance money and did not fix them. The paint was not cracked, so it was just the looks that were affected. Several roofs on houses were damaged. We were told, a while later when we called the insurance company that we had hail damage, and they paid for a new roof. I tell this story because this stuff happens. It does not happen often. So, again, how is this significant? It is just weather.
    2
  2880.  @LaconicMuse378  Most probably correct. It would be interesting to see what the situation is.
    2
  2881. Maj Toure has really nailed it. If we want to win we have to compete.
    2
  2882. The interesting thing here is the idea that the international community, whatever that is, has a responsibility. The international community did not do any of this. No one has supported this, except for perhaps China. What can the international community do? We sanction countries that do these things. To date, this includes China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and others. Beyond sanctions, how many of our soldiers should die resisting these regimes? That is what is comes down to. A strong military power, such as Russia or China or North Korea, all of which have nuclear weapons, is not something one would attack. The answer is containment. That takes time and resolve.
    2
  2883. What is most important for young people is parent engagement. That does tend to be different by income and education level. We were taught that you should read to your children. We did from the time they were very, very little. We read some books so often that I had a couple memorized (and I am not the type to reread and memorize). One time I was with a bunch of colleagues who were a bit younger than me and did not have kids. I forget why, but I recited "Moo, Bah, La La La" to them. Their reaction was not favorable, let's say. I get the impression they thought I was a little weird after that. On the other hand, when my kids got to school, they knew how to read. The younger one quite well. Actually, the older one knew how to spell from memory by two and a half. At that age, at a party with some of my in-laws' friends, someone asked him what he wanted to be. He said a paleontologist. I jokingly asked hm to spell that. He did, correctly, without hesitation. They actually started out in school in the UK, in Winchester, in a comprehensive school. I was actually on the Board of Governors of the school (had to get Home Office permission to run for the seat). I was quite impressed with what they did with the resources they had. Once we got back to the US, though, the difference in resources between a good American school and those in Europe became apparent.
    2
  2884. Heavy snow? Whatever happened to global warming?
    2
  2885. This kind of thing happens even in the US under private insurance, but in a slightly different form. The crux of the matter is what you point out. Doctors are independent businesspeople. In the US it all seems to have taken off in the 1970s. I became aware of it through a movie, of all things, when a couple of doctors were talking and one said to the other, while golfing, you should incorporate. Over time, one ended up with groupings of doctors incorporated and there you go. Another thing that made me aware of it was a friend who had a roommate in college who was from Sweeden. He was pre-med and expressed an interest in moving to the US after he got his medical qualifications. The reason was that in Sweeden doctors were on strict salary, which wasn't very good, whereas in the US he could make much more operating as an independent businessman.
    2
  2886.  @mikeharrington5593  I usually do. Looking back on it I think that it could be broken at "Don't forget..." near the middle.
    2
  2887. Nothing new here. Not to dispute it, but we already knew this stuff. Add to that the interviewer throwing out tired old tropes, and it is a disappointment.
    2
  2888. You lost me when you went on about Iraq. I expected to hear about Russia. The Iraq situation you talk about has nothing to do with procurement or readiness.
    2
  2889. Well, based on what you opened with, this is a non-issue. Who the heck cares? You can collect all the personal data you want, but basically it is all bullsh**t. I am much older than you, Kennedy. You are basically a low-level commentator as far as real social issues go. Quite frankly, anyone who really lived in society would be banned from any type of media. You cannot, and will not, actually discuss what real people experience. Stick to politics.
    2
  2890.  @lettucesalad3560  That is exactly what I was trying to get across. I think my explanation was lacking. In the case I was talking about the idea was that he would take home very little above of what he was asking. Therefore, he thought he would make himself more attractive to the employer by asking for less. I also left out that his wife also worked, so their combined income pushed them into higher brackets, and again the incremental gain in income would be consumed by taxes above a certain level. I hope that helps clarify.
    2
  2891.  @lettucesalad3560  Correct. But he was trying to make himself more marketable. That is the behavioral aspect I was trying to get across. Yes, he would take home money from that top tax bracket, but he resented paying such a high tax rate. A lot of people did back then. That was also a time when executive compensation was shifting to stock grants and options. The capital gains rate was, and still is, much lower than income tax rates.
    2
  2892.  @lettucesalad3560  You are correct. That was my mistake. i hope my subsequent comments clarify.
    2
  2893.  @Itried20takennames  That is a good point, and I would not advocate little or no tax. If people don't want to pay tax, then they should expect fewer services,
    2
  2894. The thing to remember about the EU is that it is, in effect, a protectionist cartel. At least it plays by the rules, and they are many. As for Germany's place in it, they are as much an export driven economy as China. In fact, they have a less dire, but still serious, demographic problem. I expect that Germany will evolve along the lines of Japan. They have lots of similarities. What sets Germany (and Japan) apart from China is that they became rich (very rich) before they grew old. China, on the other hand, is basically broke. The rhetoric and tone of the CCP is so childish (and frankly in many cases racist), that it is hard not to laugh, or in some cases scream at the screen. The other thing that sets both Germany (and Japan) apart from China is that they produce quality goods, whereas China produces crap, even at the low end. As for their EVs, that is a disaster, and not only because they catch fire at alarming rate. Their build quality is probably the worst in the world. The software and electronics are a joke.
    2
  2895. Sub-Saharan Africa is not racist. It is geographical. The climate, racial makeup an history is much different Saharan Africa. In addition, the desert was, for a very long time, a real barrier to movement of people and goods.
    2
  2896. Good to see James on the channel. I really enjoy his channel. I don't always agree with him, but I always find him interesting and stimulating. The territorial integrity of states is a big problem. The fact of the matter is that many of the boundaries of the current states in the world were drawn by European imperial powers. This is true even in Europe. The funny thing is that the Ukraine situation is not one of these, and yet is the impetus for the discussion. Just looking at Europe, you have the breakup of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Africa is rife with such situations, as is the Middle East. China and India have a border which is not called a border, but the "line of actual control" or LAC. The Durand Line, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan was similarly drawn by the British and now hotly contested. China also claims parts of Russia, their putative ally and friend, and the list goes on.
    2
  2897. I don't think there is any evidence that bombing steeled the German's will to fight. That makes no sense. They fought to the end, at least in the east because of fear of the Soviets. In the last months of the war there was a mass exodus to the west in an attempt to surrender to the British and Americans. It was a full-fledged rout in the West. These raids occurred only six weeks before the end of the war in Europe. They were not the proximate cause, but I expect they did contribute. To say that the Germans continued to fight for six weeks and that it was significant, after five and a half years is laughable. By the time of these raids some German towns and cities were surrendering to the Western Allies. In cases where cities were fanatically defended it was almost always SS troops. They even shot civilians who hung out white flags. So, I would say your premise is false, frankly.
    2
  2898.  @kasikwagoma6740  What a stupid statement. Who are you to make such a statement. You have not backed up your claim. So, tell me how you would portray it. Just making bald claims is no way to have a discussion.
    2
  2899. The fact that it is an AI generated voiceover is not significant. Frankly, most, if not all, of the AI systems used for voiceover are very poor in quality and are obvious. Sophistication is in the eye of the beholder. What I have seen, contrary to the ASPI report, is much mocking of Chinese based AI assisted content aimed at the west. It is really rather comical. As for the 1.2M views and number of subscribers, you have to consider other channels on YouTube, for example, that reach that type of number? Check it out. It may amuse you. On the Internet that is good, but not groundbreaking. I found one channel by a woman who talks about how stupid and crazy women are in the modern dating scene. She has 1.9M subscribers and over 1B views of her videos. By the way, the 1.2M views, if all unique users (not likely), would represent 0.02% of the world's population and 0.36% of the US population. As for the content, people are waking up to the problems with Chinese Belt and Road projects. They are often (mostly?) inappropriate projects (the Hambantota in Sri Lanka; many of the rail routes used as alternatives to sea routes). Let me see, if you add in the onerous financial terms, use of Chinese as opposed to local labor, poor quality and outright corruption, then I think the world is already getting a different message. Look, I get it. All of us who watch Tony's videos are informed "information warriors." We are not the general populace. If I were cynical, I would see this attempt to raise alarm at such developments as a way to generate concern, and to drive up funding for the organization. Oh, wait, I am cynical.
    2
  2900.  @gtw4546  Let's hope that is the case. Another good signal is that western countries, either individually or in consortia, are stepping up to compete in this arena.
    2
  2901. First off, I am not a supporter of what Russia is doing. or Russia in general. The problem I have with these discussions, and I don't dispute the figures, is that we rarely see the Ukranian losses (at least not to the level of detail we have on the Russian side). I have seen figures for Ukranian losses at anywhere from a one to three to a one to six ratio, but rarely any solid numbers. This is important because of the relative size of the two countries. It is also important because both Russia and Ukraine were in demographic decline prior to the war. As for tanks, look at the numbers in WW2. Disregarding the early phases of Operation Barbarossa where the Russians had massive numbers of light tanks, they consistently lost many more tanks than the Germans, and yet they prevailed. Talk about the decline and eventual collapse of the Russian military have been going on for a while now. Frankly, I expect the whole Russian Federation to fall apart in the next decade or so. The issue is, how long will Ukraine be able to fight at these intensity levels?
    2
  2902. All of what he says is true, except one thing. They said that Trump was a disruptor, and he implies that is one of the lies. On that, they were actually correct. He was in his first term and people wanted that. They certainly want it now. In this cycle he made no bones about it, and what he is doing with his cabinet and other appointments is a good indicator. Trump is an indicator, and leader, of one of the periodic shifts in American politics. George Friedman, in his book "The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond" has a great take on this.
    2
  2903. Hope you feel better soon. Of course, one has to understand that the EU is a protectionist cartel. I have also heard about the slow sales of Chinese EVs. Frankly, their quality is sub-par. This is from reports out of China. As usual, China is, in cases, copying European designs. This results in poor quality products. For example, the new Xiaomi SU7 is a copy of a Porsche. Initial reports are that it is junk. The is endemic across the Chinese economy, and even extends to their military equipment. For example, their jet engines for their latest fighters are copies of Soviet/Russian designs, but performance is not up to the originals thus limiting the performance of their aircraft.
    2
  2904.  @gtw4546  Of course they aren't. Actually, all this copying has stunted their own development.
    2
  2905. The idea of China using tariffs as a weapon is laughable. As Pettis points out, it is the trade surplus country that suffers. Just look at the restrictions on Australian products put on my China because of the PM there calling for an open investigation on COVID. What are Australia's main exports to China? Raw materials. What happened? They found other markets. China is a raw material processor. That can be moved elsewhere. It is easier than people think. Just look at how fast it moved to China. This is just the type of thing that will accelerate disengagement. I am a fan of Pettis, but the world trade thing is a problem. Unrestricted world trade depends on all party's following the rules. China does not. They want to rewrite the rules. They would do this to advantage themselves only. Following the CCP model only leads to a dystopian future. We are heading to a world of trade blocs.
    2
  2906. Who told you that you are not supposed to show Russian prisoners of war? Those videos are all over YouTube. I have seen both videos you show, with nothing obscured.
    2
  2907.  @T.K.P.  Good point. Even in science, in books, there are "inaccuracies". I once bought, decades ago, a copy of P.A.M. Dirac's Quantum Mechanics. It was the third edition. The grad student who sold it to me did so, unbeknownst to me, because he wanted to buy the fourth edition which corrected a couple of the latest chapters.
    2
  2908. Mike, why are you so down on Boris Johnson? You say he can't solve any of the problems. What is you evidence? Is it just because they are hard? He is a very intelligent man and has good advisors. Give him a chance, why don't you.
    2
  2909.  @eskemeldgaardkrogh4145  Totally true. But what you are saying is that it is based strictly on government policy. The Norway model is not generally reproducible.
    2
  2910. Panick in that area of the front is going to be much more effective than anywhere else. Anyone there who has any intelligence knows that whatever form the counteroffensive takes, these troops are likely to be cut off and destroyed (or will surrender).
    2
  2911.  @iivarilappalainen9836  I tend to agree with you. Actually, Russia has been in this state for centuries. Some of the czars wanted to become more like their western European counterparts and modernize the society, but this never took off. A good primer on the Russian people is Nikolai Gogol's novel "Dead Souls". It was written in the middle of the 19th century, but it reads like a description of Russia in the first half of the 21st century.
    2
  2912. Very interesting to see this perspective. Don't take what I am about to say as supporting Putin's actions, but these are issues that Central and Eastern Europe have been dealing with for centuries. The Crimea, from the information I have seen, was not a part of Ukraine until Soviet times. The transfer to the Ukrainian SSR from the Russian SSR was done in the 1950s on an administrative basis. If Putin had allowed an internationally administered referendum, he might have won. As it is the international community does not trust him. The borders in the east of Ukraine are also problematic. Just look at the borders and issues created after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after WWI. Why were the Czechs and Slovaks put into one country? Because they were a part of a medieval Kingdom. They have since settled that, peacefully, and split. Even looking at the UK, we see a desire to split the country up along national lines. I don't think it will, but the pressures are there. In Canada there were two independence referendums for Quebec to split off. Both failed. In these cases, the impetus for independence is along national (as n nationalities) lines. In the US, we had our Civil War because of slavery, not nationality. Outside of that, the US is not organized along national lines, so that is why you don't see these types of pressures today. The one exception is Hawaii. A while back there were some nativists who wanted to secede. That went nowhere but was driven by the fact that there was a distinct national group involved. The Russian Federation is made up of many nationalities. It is also fragile. Just look at the Chechen situation. The US is not perfect, but our Constitution was designed to balance local concerns with Federal and to recognize the different sizes of the various states. It is this federal structure that makes it work. This is not so well done in Europe. Even the EU suffers from a lack of clarity in this regard.
    2
  2913. Another thing to consider is the health of the North Korean soldiers (and indeed the whole population). I have seen pictures of North Korean soldiers standing next to South Korean soldiers (at the DMZ). The north's soldiers are shorter and scrawnier than the south's soldiers. These guys are actually malnourished. It would not be a fair fight. I have to wonder how many of the North Korean soldiers would simply give up early in the conflict.
    2
  2914. Laura, you missed an opportunity to at the beginning of the piece to raise an important issue that people don't talk about enough. The issue is money. Whether you have private or public health systems they are all basically insurance schemes. What is insurance? It is a way to spread the risk and costs. So, if someone is intentionally pursuing an unhealthy lifestyle then that impacts everyone else in the form of higher costs.
    2
  2915. I sort of agree with Peter 's conclusion on this, but I think his understanding of the Internet is leaves something to be desired. What we call the Internet is based on the internet protocol or TCP/IP. This defines a way to communicate between networks. It is also an adaptive protocol. The other thing is that there are different types of traffic. There are various optimizations. Data centers are often located in larger countries, sometimes for efficiency reasons and sometimes for regulatory reasons. This is not the old phone system. The whole point I am trying make is that the network is adaptive and resilient. In the US we will be fine. If it comes down to conflict between, say, the US, China and Russia a lot of that traffic would be cut off anyway, and not by cutting cables. Heck, cut the cables and the US and its allies will have fewer malicious attacks. Hey, maybe we should do that now.
    2
  2916. If you want to ensure that the Scots do not vote to leave, then cut the amount of support they get from the central government.
    2
  2917. Why should US tax dollars go to benefit businesses in other countries? This is why we are in the current situation with vulnerable supply chains and vanishing jobs.
    2
  2918.  @Theyellowchild  Of course. Actually, chlorinated chicken actually helped sink the TTIP trade deal with the EU. I was a part of the discussions on that. The thing is that the EU allows chlorine washing of some vegetables.
    2
  2919. Matt Welch says that Americans want to be seen as having a moral stance in the world is just plain silly. Look at what happened from the end of WWII to today. Americans want security. We deal with dictators all the time. We dealt with the Soviets for decades. We deal with the CCP. Those are not "moral stances".
    2
  2920. I often use this fraud data when discussing military aid to Ukraine. The point being that the US (and other governments) spent trillions on programs that may have not had the intended effect, and demonstrably did contribute to the high inflation we are seeing now. With all that said, the Ukraine connection is that we are spending about the same as we lost in fraud in these programs. Considering the consequences of war in Europe vs. short term economic impact in the domestic economy, I don't see how one can argue against the aid to Ukraine.
    2
  2921. The woman at about 3:00 is totally clueless, and ignorant. Men can have healthy children even into advanced age. It is the woman's age that is the limiting factor. Actually, the women in this video are not very attractive. They are not what I would call ugly, but they mostly do seem well past their prime as far as men are concerned. They, like many women in the west, were constantly told how "special" they were, when they were nothing of the sort. It all comes down to biology in the end.
    2
  2922. You must be very ignorant of how international relations work.
    2
  2923.  @nonamecommonsense9089  It would be a great public works project.
    2
  2924.  @Andy-P  Whie it is obviously not an Asian power, the US is a Pacific Power. China, on the other hand, claims to be a near Arctic power, although it has no physical connection to the Arctic. So much of what the Chinese foreign ministry says is so bizarre that I tend to take it as a perverse form of entertainment.
    2
  2925. The funny thing about this statement at about 2:40 is that there is change coming, but it will be more like the Boxer Rebellion. I don't mean occupation by foreign troops, but more like the fragmentation of the country and the emphasis of trade links over imperial ambitions. The only direction that China could feasibly expand is in Central Asia and the Russian far east. They are already doing this. Don't forget, the world did quite well when China was totally isolated. Just a funny note on that is the depiction of China in the old Mad Magazine as the great big empty spot. Look it up. It is quite hilarious. Come to think of it, the world did quite well when the Soviet Union was isolated as well. I heard, on a channel which seems to have disappeared, that there were people in Shanghai who wanted to quit the CCP controlled PRC and join the ROC on Taiwan. I don't know how widespread this desire is, but if it is even being talked about, then things are terminal. If you read the history of China, the regions are not a cohesive whole. That is why the western colonial powers and Japan could carve out large concessions in China. Considering the poor performance of the CCP, I fully expect this will happen again. People talk about the massive growth of China, but this has been due to FDI, not CCP actions (except to allow the FDI). Now China is moving to stimulate internal demand so as not to be reliant on FDI. This will, of course, fail. Just think about it. The last time China decided to industrialize on its own, the Great Leap Forward, they could barely make pig iron. In a world where China is isolated, it would take a long time for them to catch up to where the west is today, and in that time the west will have moved on. And don't forget that China's population living in poverty is almost twice the size of the US population. Frankly, the poor in the US would be considered lower middle class in China, or most of the world. The EU stance is also interesting and encouraging. There are two things happening that will devastate China's export economy. One is that there is a movement afoot to take away China's designation as a developing economy. The other is that the EU, and after them I expect other countries, is recognizing that they have just shipped their CO2 emissions and other pollution, to China and other countries. The EU is bringing in a tax/tariff on carbon emissions, the CBAM. What all this indicates is that the west does not have to target China in any overt way, but just needs to treat it like they would their own countries and companies. This will tank China all by itself.
    2
  2926. Very well put about Zaluzhnyi and about NATO doctrine. It shows a very good understanding. The political issue is important, especially in democracies. I am still unsatisfied with the phraseology "as long as it takes". As long as "what" takes? Assuming one wants to support Ukraine, there are two choices. One is to give them just enough to maintain the status quo and perhaps make some marginal gains. The other is to commit to Ukranian victory, as Ukraine defines it. There is a decided lack of leadership on this. Without clarity on this point, it will be hard to garner the necessary support. For Europe especially, but also for the US, a full defeat of Russia is necessary. President Biden in the US has failed to lead on this issue. The US Speaker of the House of Representatives Johnson gave a very well thought out statement after he met with Zalenski. Many supporters of Ukraine (I count myself among them) do not like Johnson. But on the topic of leadership by the President he is totally correct. The administration keeps asking for money, without stating an explicit goal. If the goal were explicitly elucidated, then the debate could be had on that goal. Once accepted, it would be quite clear what support would be needed and it would be easy to justify the proper level of support.
    2
  2927. Great commentary. For one thing, we have been eating lamb for millennia. For another, you make a great point about how carnivores in the wild hunt and kill their prey. I have actually seen some of it. It is brutal. In some cases they start eating their prey while it is still alive. Actually I have pointed this out to vegans. I don't get a good response.
    2
  2928. You really aren't saying that the scientific community is either fully correct about COVID, are you? What about the lab leak? You were all over that story, and in it there was a group of doctors publishing an open letter against the lab leak. Are cloth masks effective. I have seen no authority saying that they are. Are vaccines effective? The do not stop transmission. They do lessen symptoms when one does contract the virus. They are, most likely, less effective than prior exposure to the disease according to the studies. These vaccines are also approved on an emergency use basis. People have had adverse effects from taking them. I don't know anything about Joe Rogan, except what others say about him. I don't have a Spotify subscription. What I am reacting to is your assumption that the experts and fact checkers have it right. You do realize that they do not, and many "facts" have been modified or reversed. If you want to censor, then say so. Free speech is absolute, at least in the US. The other thing to consider is who is leaving Spotify. These are old has been performers. Their music is basically just pop music. It does not have long lasting significance. On the other hand, podcasts are the future. Spotify is playing the long game by sticking with the future, not the past.
    2
  2929. The characterization of the "real name" issue is somewhat at odds with reality. One of the roots of the poison on social media is anonymity. If one can create a persona and screech out poison on social media with impunity, then, well, we get the poisonous atmosphere we have today. Note that the tendency of allowing anonymity is what allows bots. X is currently trialing a $1 fee to be able to tweet and retweet. They have a $7.99 fee for verification of user identity. Yes, these are ways to make money, but they are also a way to filter out content that is intentionally divisive such as that spread by bots. Just think of what one does in person. The anonymity provided by social media destroys all social norms, and we see the effect. In China one might argue that this will dampen dissent. Well, that is already the case with the level of monitoring and control of social media in China.
    2
  2930. Are the People's Daily people drinking too much maotai?
    2
  2931. 37 degrees, that is hot. Here in the Chicago area, it has been in the high 20s. We are expecting a high of 32 degrees on Wednesday, then back down to the high 20s. We are lucky where I am because the lake is nearby. It moderates our weather.
    2
  2932.  @ThinkUkraine  Greeting to Kiev, and the village. Actually, I got into commenting on the weather from in-laws who are farmers. I never used to pay much attention (unless going sailing). With my farming relatives it was, of course, all about the weather. Before the Internet they had a satellite "terminal" (it was actually a PC with specific programming and a dish) to get information useful to them. Now, this was a farm of about 1,200 acres (486 hectares), which is about the smallest a grain farmer can be profitable at i the US. They had weather from around the globe, keeping an eye on their competitors. They also had futures prices for everything from the crops they grew to gold and currencies. It was an eye opener. So, now I am a bit of weather geek. I am glad that you don't mind.
    2
  2933. You are caught in the fallacy of Russia being large and therefore effective. Study the wars from the Crimean War through WWII. There are no examples where Russia's mass proved effective. In the Crimean War Russia had a land border with the disputed territory. They also outnumbered the attackers who mostly came by sea. They lost. In WWI they had more troops than the attacking Germans. They were poorly trained, poorly equipped and poorly led. Sound familiar. In addition, the Germans were fighting a massive war in the west. In the Winter War they could not decisively defeat the much smaller Finland. In WWII they got at least 20% of their equipment from the west. There were also almost 100 Nazi divisions in the west to deal with the UK and US. If the western allies had decided to simply isolate Germany and not attacked, then most of those divisions could have gone east. I don't see the Soviets being successful in that case. No, mass and inferior weapons do not win wars. In the Iraq War (the second one) the US and its allies, with no more than 200K troops destroyed an army about twice their size in a month. It was superior weapons and tactics that made the difference. I am surprised that you fall into this trap. One data point does not make a trend. And in this case, that data point points in the opposite direction.
    2
  2934.  @JenGM24  And it's a one man show.
    2
  2935. "We don't owe the government. Our only debts are to our parents." Who do these people think they are? Where do they think they are living? Heck, it's your parents who put the CCP in power. They did it because they wanted free stuff. You are now reaping the "benefits". Stop complaining.
    2
  2936. The whole idea of which "race" is going to lead the world comes up time and time again. It is not only in Europe. The Japanese believed they were the master race. They believed they could defeat the US because we were a bunch of mutts, not a pure race. How did that work out? The Chinese today have the same idea. Despite their actual history, they believe that China should have a bigger place in the world. This ignores the fact that their whole recent economic "miracle" (really a facade that is about to come crashing down) was financed by the west. Left to themselves they would be a third world country. They are heading that way.
    2
  2937.  @timgerk3262  Exactly!
    2
  2938. Digital dollar? As Gary said, we already have digital currency. That is fiat money backed by national governments and regulated. Crypto currencies are a whole other thing. They are a decentralized commodity. The crypto comes from the technology used. Thy are more like gold than fiat currency. And yet, they are priced and exchanged in fiat currency. No one cares how much bitcoin you have, per se. They care about how many dollars that bitcoin is worth at any one time. This is because it is those dollars you use to actually purchase things. There are, I realize a few exceptions, although the number of bitcoins an item costs is based on the dollar value of bitcoin. Thus, bitcoin, just like gold, is tied to the fiat currency based on its trading value.
    2
  2939.  gary trana  I used to. Lost my hunting grounds in a divorce. Sad day.
    2
  2940.  @jaycoburn7755  LGB!
    2
  2941.  @uio890138  Yes! In the past couple of days the governor of Florida has offered to open up ports there to the container ships. This is also closer to many of the markets they are destined for.
    2
  2942. @Joshuatree7746 Well, I can't agree with the claim they do not teach to the test. The goal of the education system and the tutoring industry is to help students pass the tests needed to get into the best schools. A lot of the rest of what you point out I do agree with. I don't think they are mutually exclusive.
    2
  2943.  @NelmacCity  Great point. I ran into this phenomenon in the US. I used to participate in a seminar at a local technology university on massively parallel computing. The professor was a Chinese American who had lived through the Cultural Revolution. Many of the students were Chinese nationals. Some of the concepts and ideas were noteworthy. I asked the professor why they hadn't patented them. His response aligns with your comments. They are not aware of, or used to, such protections. In the US, universities often have agreements with staff and students regarding patentable ideas. The university shares the patent revenue with the originator. Thus, places like MIT reap the benefits, as do the professors and students. I have worked with some of these people, and the system works.
    2
  2944. I didn't forget that Australia was almost invaded by the Japanese. Of course, my favorite reading material, from early on, has been history.
    2
  2945.  @bobbafett1849  So, who bailed out the auto industry in the US? Obama. Are you accusing him of being influenced too much by corporations? Do you know why he did it? He did it to avoid massive job losses. Should he not have? Did Trump do anything like that in his first term? You need to look at facts, not slogans. You forget that old saying, the business of America is business. That is how you build up and spread around wealth.
    2
  2946. Love the sign. Brilliant! By the way, I love your village videos and all your "adventures" with your plants and animals. One thing hedgehogs like to eat is frogs. Slugs are also on the menu. We had plenty of them when I lived in England. My wife was very fond of them. I have lots of hedgehog figurines in the house.
    2
  2947.  @larzkruber822  The merry go round has stopped indeed. Good point.
    2
  2948. Very well said Stuart! Diplomacy needs a shakeup. I was born in Washington, DC and I know a bit about it. I know some diplomats as well.
    2
  2949. Great video. The problem with all these processes is that energy, time, cost to do this often just doesn't work out. Over the years I have reviewed many, many alternative energy sources, primarily for a data center I was setting up in a remote location. Just an example, not directly involving chemistry might be illuminating. For ethanol production you could use the stalk of the plant as well as the corn. I have a relative who is a farmer. He looked into it. The cost to gather the stalks, ship them, etc. was greater than the value of the stalks. Labor and cost of equipment was not figured in because it was his farm, and he already had the equipment. There are power plants that reuse waste heat, as indicated. They are very efficient. I got a tour of the power plant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They used coal and gas turbines. They captured the heat and used it to drive secondary steam generators, and they also used waste heat to run a chiller plant for HVAC on campus. Their efficiency is fantastic. This is also complex, but efficient because they had a compact facility to use all these methods. There is no one size fits all. That's where the engineering comes in.
    2
  2950. The China Africa summit is a good thing. China should be engaging more in economic development rather than building military capability or fomenting conflict. Of course, as you point out, China's situation on the continent is not all that favorable a far as trade is concerned. Considering Africa's economic, political and geographic situation I can foresee problems for China, as pointed out. Africa is, and has always been, problematic. China will be contending with the EU. As long as that competition is based on sound economic and development principles it will be fruitful for all concerned. It is interesting that the last naval expedition by China was to Africa. That was early in the 15th century, by the way.
    2
  2951. At about 24:00 he talks about Moore seeing the need to resist the breakup of the Church into many fragments by resisting Lutheranism. He points out that this is what happens. Now, there had already been one, in the 11th century. The real question is what unity did, at least in the West. The Roman church had obviously become corrupt. My father was not a great reader (except of technical documents and books), but I remember one book he read called something like "Children of the Pope". This book talked about all the children that these supposedly celibate priests had. Was the western Christian world more peaceful because of this unified Church? I don't see any real utility in this unified Church. In the Orthodox world the churches are national churches. This seems more reasonable. Each of these worships God in a way that respects national sensibilities. In the US there was, intentionally, no established religion. This has resulted in a more religiously engaged population, and kept religion out of politics for the most part.
    2
  2952.  @hdthor  Very interesting analysis. I would hope that the Democrats will move away from their current stance. the VP is half Indian.
    2
  2953.  @agk18  You are correct there. We don't have to be the same to be friends and allies. Each culture has its own imperative. Frankly, Europe has as many differences with the US as we have with India. I have traveled extensively there and lived in England at the beginning of this century.
    2
  2954. Bakeries closing? Good! The ones shown are serving pastries, which have lots of sugars and refined carbohydrates. This stuff is BAD for you. Considering China's obesity and diabetes problems, a return to more traditional foods is indicated.
    2
  2955.  @nwjh1957  Thanks for clearing that up about the Russian influence on Brexit. Now that you mention it I do vaguely recall hearing about Russian funding for UKIP. Your observations on the issues with socialism are right on the money. In China, the CCP got scared by the growing economic power of the private sector and people like Jack Ma. I believe that is why they shut his IPO down. Individual Chinese people tend to be, when allowed, very entrepreneurial. That just doesn't fit in the CCP's ideology or interests.
    2
  2956. Musk, if he is true to what he says (and I do not doubt it), will make a killing on this deal. Twitter was going down financially. We will see tomorrow. After taking the company private, and changing it for the better, will then be able to take it public again. Just think of how much money he would make of he was successful in that. Considering that this deal consumes just about 20% of his total net worth, he is quite rational to pursue it. If he was to totally fail, he would then be only worth about $200B. Is that an issue?
    2
  2957. The Storm Shadow and equivalent to ATACMS? This "expert" has no idea what he is talking about. Storm Shadow is an air launched cruise missile, ATACMS is a ground launched ballistic missile. Where do they dig up these people? What a load of crap.
    2
  2958.  @richardm4825  That is not what he said. In addition, it is very important. He said "equivalent". Range is just one characteristic, and it is not the main one in defending against the two types.
    2
  2959. I was just struck with a thought about the off balance sheet debt of local governments. This practice, in any business, is fraught with danger. Recall Enron in the US. One of the biggest bankruptcies ever. It was caused, to a large extent, by off balance sheet debt. After Enron, many companies were scrutinized and such practices were highlighted and eliminated.
    2
  2960. I agree with the premise of the conversation, but I take issue with one point. The cost of food issue is totally bogus. Our food problem is obesity, not food cost or availability. The rate of overweight and obese people in the US is approaching 75%. Obesity is a leading cause of diabetes and heart disease. I saw a report recently that stated that the world was heading for a 50% obesity rate soon. It has a lot to do with the types of food as well as the quantity. Just think of how much we would save if we reduced obesity rates in just healthcare.
    2
  2961.  @리드-w7k  Interesting to know. People in the US like stocks more than property. My financial advisor, who is now independent, was very high up in one of the largest Wall Street firms. At least in the US, investing in stocks has always been much better than investing in direct ownership in property. He is very quantitative and has the numbers to prove it. I also note this from people I know who tend to move from property to other investments. I hope it is clear that I am not making judgements on what individuals do. What I have been trying to say is that China has an over reliance on property. This is probably caused, as some have pointed out, by government policy. Property development is not as productive as industry. Even agriculture is not. In the US we are down to 1% of the population involved in agriculture, and we are a major exporter.
    2
  2962. The pro-Russian bias in this report is palpable. In Vuhledar Russia, including Wagner has been pushed back with massive losses. At the rate Wagner was advancing in Bakhmut, it will take months and many thousands of deaths to make progress. Prigozhin has been on record saying that to get to the border of the Donbas would take two years, and to Kiev three years. This is not an effective fighting force. Neither is the Russian Army.
    2
  2963. The amount of trade with Russia is not significant on a global scale. There is not much room for it to grow much further, either. To put it in perspective, Apple's gross sales are over $390B. As for the machine tools from China I have seen reports where Russians complain about the quality compared to the western machine tools they had access to in the past. This is not an improvement. Remember all those western companies that withdrew from Russia after the full-scale invasion? Well, none of them has experienced a material effect to their operations. The Russian economy is not that large. As for the "global south", their combined GDP is no more than 20% of the global total. The bulk is made up of North America, Europe, Australia, Japan, India and China. So, if China and Russia want to pin their future on the global south, they will suffer. This, of course, assumes that the whole of the global south sides with China and Russia, which is not likely. The term "global south" is just a label. It is really the old non-aligned movement, much of which was not really "non-aligned". The global south is, in some cases, resource rich. That is why Europeans colonized much of it. This could benefit China but is a potential problem for Russia. Don't get me started about BRICS. That was the creation of a fund manager on Wall Street. The fact is that China has territorial issues with India (and Russia), Brazil is now concerned about dumping by China and South Africa is a basket case. The only healthy one is India, and it is moving closer to the west and restricting China in its economy. India is also turning away from Russian oil. So, don't fear the BRICS!
    2
  2964.  @Kamalost  Good points. It is good to have a conversation on these issues. One learns something. I hope you are right (I expect you are), because it seems the situation may come to this soon.
    2
  2965.  @neurofiedyamato8763  Well put. I tend to concentrate on the military aspects.
    2
  2966.  @xhagast  Excellent point.
    2
  2967. At about 2:20 you show the US Defense Secretary and Li Shangfu, the recently dismissed defense minister in China. Anyone know where he is?
    2
  2968. The Germans are fools. The Foreign Minister, for example, is from the Green Party (last I checked). She can't be happy with China, human rights aside. A lot of this language sounds suspiciously like talk from Germany on Russia before the full-blown Ukraine War. When will they learn?
    2
  2969. On the taxes, you are wrong. Only 51% of people pay income tax. Everyone who works pays FICA, but this is a flat tax, and has a limit. So, lower income people are already being massively supported by people making good salaries.
    2
  2970. The World Bank should know better than that. US GDP growth in the Q3 2023 was over 5%. Prior to that it was 2% or higher for four quarters. The last negative reading was in Q2 of 2022. Consumer demand in the US has remained strong, confusing some economists. Trade flows are shifting, not declining. In addition, the US is reindustrializing. The examples given of the US "harvesting" China's financials are laughable. Was 2008 about China? How about the recent interest rate rises. The US Federal Reserve does not make decisions based on effects on external economies. Come on man!
    2
  2971. Well, hold on a bit. Everything that is being done is actually part of the system. In the UK, you vote for the party, not the head of government, who selects the government ministers. If a party has a majority and it holds, then they can change leader, and thus the PM all they want. That is your "constitution".
    2
  2972.  @johndoh5182  Well, my initial issue is what I read about Chapter 15. My understanding is that the company needs to have filed in the country in which they are located. We'll see what the bankruptcy court has to say on that. They may allow it to try to protect the US creditors, otherwise the US court has no real interest in protecting Evergrande. There is also the issue of how Evergrande would be able to pay off their debts in the US. Their prospects for doing this will also influence the ruling. As for your last point on tax and convenience purposes, you must be kidding. The reason these venues are chosen are precisely because they have very lax laws or low, or no, taxes or both on corporations. Another example of this is the flagging of commercial shipping. There are many small countries that become "flags of convenience" for similar reasons. You must not follow international finance or business very closely. I mentioned the FTX case above. You might want to look into that to see an example of how important those laws are when it comes to US or other large government involvement in bankruptcies. As for Evergrande in China the figures I have seen show a company that would be in bankruptcy just about anywhere else. Their debts dwarf their assets, and those assets are probably overvalued. The prognosis for their main business is abysmal. Those debts span everything from suppliers to banks and investment firms. There is a real question about whether they could build their way out of their current situation. Oh, and did I mention that the market for their product is drying up. As for the Chinese government doing what it wants, that is true, but only to a certain extent. If they keep it private, then it will go bankrupt, unless the government covers the losses. If they do that, they will experience an immediate loss themselves, and quite frankly they don't have the money for that. Their other choice, nationalization, would be very costly as well. You have to consider that Evergrande is not the only one. Whatever they do for Evergrande they will have to do for Country Garden and others. Why do you think they haven't done anything about it until now? There is also a real question about whether they really have the intellectual capacity within the CCP to come up with a solution.
    2
  2973. When looking at the belt and road countries, instead of counting the number of countries, count the proportion of world GDP. That is the only legitimate measure. I think you will find it under 15% or the world total, if that. Similarly, look at the figures on growth in trade with Russia. How big is the Russian economy? Enough said. What makes the situation in 2023 different, as has been pointed out, is that China is alienating its trading partners and sources of investment. They don't have that luxury.
    2
  2974. Interesting comment at about 21:00 about the Russians being able to take more than the west. As I recall, the Japanese thought they could defeat the US because we were "mutts" and they were a pure race. They also saw us as soft. And what about the Germans in both world wars. They are part of the west.
    2
  2975. Look at electric cars. How many cars are there in the UK? How many are sold each year. If everyone started buying electric cars only, right now, how long would it take to replace the ICE? And that is just one consideration. The other is that the cars are up to replacing the ICE cars now. When will they be? Lots of technical issues to be solved.
    2
  2976. Somehow, they seem to be pulling through? As President Joe would say, "C'mon, man!" The country is basically insolvent. This refers not only to government debt, but also includes banks, both government and "private" institutions. Just the fall in property prices (real prices, not the government manipulated, listed ones) would doom the banks in the west. Remember "mark to market"? Then there is the belt and road initiative. That includes over $1T in lending and reportedly 60% or so of that is nonperforming. Are those banks solvent in any real sense? Individuals, and many businesses, can't get even their money out of many banks, and this has been going on for over a year. Is that "pulling through". What is happening is that they are hiding the problem. Their statistics are ALL made up. Many analysts with major institutions have growth at 1% or zero, for example, not the 5% the CCP claims. Unemployment is anecdotally much higher than the government reports, and the CCP clearly manipulates the figures. People, including in many cases government employees, are not being paid on time. Sometimes people go a year or so without being paid. In addition, compensation is falling. Is that "pulling through"?
    2
  2977. The Chinese people are the source of China's economic growth? Come on man! What about the years before the west opened up and let China into the WTO? It was western capital and expertise that created China's economic "miracle". What is really interesting is that what Xi is doing now, suppressing the private economy for state purposes, is very analogous to what Hitler did in Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s. This includes coercion and, in the end, state ownership of critical industries. Nazi stands for National SOCIALIST German Workers Party (emphasis mine). Xi is turning China into a nationalist socialist state. China is ruining it economy through corruption. As this channel, and many others, has pointed out, counterfeiting and poor quality has become the norm in CCP run China. I have seen it in my consulting with many businesses. In fact, I suspect that it is only corruption that keeps the CCP in power.
    2
  2978. I just made a comment on Jake Broe's about how people were reporting on the war on YouTube. You are definitely one of, but not the only, exception to that. I think it useful to really use the topography. Recall that in many previous wars after WWII, you would hear about the battle for this hill or that hill. These were important for just the reasons you point out. My critique was that I was hearing about all these little settlements, day after day, week after week. If you look at them, you will see how insignificant they are. They are also mostly destroyed. If they contain a road junction, that is irrelevant. If you disrupt a line of communication anywhere along its route, you make it unusable. Also, the goal is not some little farm settlements, but it to engage and destroy the enemy forces. In WWII, in Operation Barbarossa, this was the goal. And the Germans were very successful at it. When they went to taking and holding territory, as Hitler insisted on later in the war, they got clobbered. By the way, many of his generals did not agree with him. Good job.
    2
  2979.  user-qr8fc8ji4h  You sure. I don't think so.
    2
  2980. Why does Harris keep saying that Huckabee is the nominee to be the Ambassador to Israel "at the United Nations"? Did someone mistakenly put that in her teleprompter?
    2
  2981. Well, judging by the comments James, you have stirred up a hornet's nest. That is not necessarily a bad thing. The Balkans have always been a complex and unstable part of the world. I for one am glad you covered this. I have followed the situation over many years, and even visited Yugoslavia once (while fleeing Greece in 1974). It is always good to get more detail about the history, as well as the current context.
    2
  2982. I just saw an item where a charity is sending a ship from Spain. They are building (planning on building) a jetty out of rubble from destroyed buildings and infrastructure in Gaza.
    2
  2983. It's amusing to see all these videos where the combat map is displayed. The exchange of an insignificant village, or suburb, is often given significance. Look at how many have gone back and forth. One day it is disaster for Ukraine, a couple of days later it is a great victory. The issue is that we have such detailed information available to the general public, and it really is easy to overthink it. This channel tends to get the situation right, and it is obvious why.
    2
  2984. In China, the people are subjects, not citizens. The CCP is a Marxist Communist Party. They practice the "dictatorship of proletariat", which should read the "dictatorship over the people". Of course, as in Russia, they are moving toward aristocracy. While they stayed out of the people's way economically, as Mr. Posen points out, things worked pretty well. Now that Xi is pulling the CCP back to its Marxist Maoist ways, things are getting bad. There is no way out but revolution. When you take everything away from the people, or they don't have much to begin with, that is when conditions are ripe for a revolution.
    2
  2985. Europe having to fight for its place at the table. Interesting. Of course, when Trump was President, and he told the Germans that they had become too dependent on natural gas from Russia and were not doing enough for their own defense (he was not the first to point that out) they laughed at him. The videos are on YouTube (or at least they were). Who is laughing now? Europe has certainly not been doing enough for their own defense and for Ukraine. The GDP of the EU plus UK is ten times that of Russia's. The population is about three times as large. Why do they need the US to sort this out? Two of the European countries, France and the UK are nuclear powers. There is still the US nuclear "umbrella". During the Cold War the US had 500K troops in Europe declining down to "just" 300K at the end. There are, at present, about 100K US servicepeople in Europe. I believe that are also prepositioned supplies and weapons for more. So, to summarize, Europe has intentionally taken a "junior" role in their own security. There are countries that are exceptions, but the largest countries are not among them. The US electorate has been pulling back from international entanglements since the end of the Cold War. The Global War on Terror was a detour in a process that had started earlier. Don't forget that before the World Wars in the 20th century the US military, especially the Army, was small. This had a lot to do with geography as well as American attitudes. Europeans need to understand that. The US is no longer the "world's policeman". Its military is geared toward power projection, not stability maintenance.
    2
  2986.  @korinogaro  I know all that. I often point it out in comments that I make on various videos and platforms. I also mentioned that in my next to the last sentence of my comment above. You are ignoring the fact that the government has been manipulating prices at the same time. First, we heard a lot about the "private" companies that got in trouble. Well, now the state-owned ones are in trouble as well. The government used these state-owned companies to drive up prices by withholding supply. The CCP also controls prices and until very recently banned discounts beyond a small amount. There is some move to relax this now, since at the controlled prices nothing is selling. Finally, it is the same government that set the investment environment you point out. The dearth of investment options is an intentional government policy that goes along with the others I mentioned above.
    2
  2987. Good assessment of the situation. Actually, my son married a Georgian woman he met while traveling there. The only weakness in his argument regarding the Europeans is a demographic one. This is surprising considering that is one of his main areas of study. All this talk about WWIII and comparing the current situation to that just prior to WWII etc., ignores a lot of things. All of these are in Peter's wheelhouse. Markets, population, agricultural production and raw materials access are all major drivers of all previous conflicts along with the strategic positioning Peter talks about. Guess what, everything about all those areas is different today. Everything! So, his nervousness about the Europeans getting together and "doing stuff" is overblown. Why do you think they abandoned their empires after WWII? The cost benefit equation did not work anymore, and US told them to do it. On the other hand, there are many, many places in the world which were better off in the imperial age, and which have turned in hellholes and sh*tshows since the end of that period. That doesn't mean the answer is to bring back imperialist colonialism, but it does mean we have to totally rethink the borders of nation states. Woodrow Wilson actually brought up the issue. The European powers resisted him on that. Look at Syria and Georgia. Look at the separatist regions in Georgia and their history. Really look at both situations. These are prime examples of what we are dealing with.
    2
  2988. Very interesting as always. I am so glad you are doing this. With my younger son, I mostly read books on history, mathematics and science. One thing that I find interesting these days is in Scotland. There are whole websites devoted to how one can buy titles and land for very low rates.
    2
  2989. Videos like this show that the Chinese are a childlike people under the CCP. This is a phenomenon in Asia. All this ethnic one upmanship is only hurting China. Think back to the 1930s and the lead up to WWII. The Japanese were just as racist. They really thought that they could beat the Americans because the Americans were "mutts". How did that go for them? In addition, what about what the Japanese did to the Chinese in the 1930s and 1940s. Without external help (read American help) China would surely have lost. Franky, America's strength is in its diversity. And anyway, innovation is not the result of "peoples", but of individuals and the system they live in. The reality is that Huawei stole most of its technology.
    2
  2990. Thank you for sharing. Looks wonderful.
    2
  2991.  @undead890  All ICMBs are seriously hypersonic. In addition, many of them have maneuverable re-entry vehicles.
    2
  2992.  @clayearth8287  Well, three is multiple. I was talking about the 1980s. The group I worked for built re-entry vehicles and defenses against them. US SLBMs carry eight or more warheads. MIRV is alive and well. As for your other point, I grew up at a time when the expectation was that there would be about 40% casualties. That works out to up to 80M people. That was considered acceptable. Your biblical references really puzzle me. I am religious and read the bible every day. I find the references the Apocalypse, at this time, very strange. If you had lived at the time of the Civil War (the most combat deaths in US history) with a much smaller population and high death rates, you might have been justified. If you lived through the massive casualties of WWI, and the horrid conditions of the trenches, you might have been justified. If you lived through WWII, the deadliest conflict worldwide in history, you might have been justified. But, like most people predicting the end times, it is always the present that is it. Why? How is today any worse than those events I mentioned?
    2
  2993.  @uuclmusic2711  Good advice! Actually, I won't eat anything from China. I actually try to source all my foods, as much as possible, from the US.
    2
  2994.  @cliffontheroad  No problem.
    2
  2995. Ah, buying gold at the peak. Kind of like buying property at the peak, or any commodity. This will only end up like the situation the Japanese faced in the 1980s and 1990s. They were the drivers of commercial property prices in the US, buying up signature properties at high prices. Same situation. Not driven by local demand. Then when the bubble burst in Japan they had to sell the properties in the US for cash. In many cases they took a 50% loss. When the Chinese economy collapses people from outside of China will gladly give them hard currency for their gold. The only thing is that, because of the oversupply in that case, the price will be half of what they paid.
    2
  2996.  @jamesdallas1493  Thanks.
    2
  2997.  @Andy-P  That would be my preference. Actually, the US won't totally withdraw. We are everywhere. That said, the US will not go out of its way to get involved.
    2
  2998. That is totally against the asylum laws. One is supposed to apply for asylum in the first safe country one comes to. The case is then to be adjudicated and if successful, asylum can be granted. So, considering that France is just as safe as the UK, why would they come across to the UK?
    2
  2999. Excellent analysis. I have seen some of those nuclear-powered ice breakers up close. Impressive.
    2
  3000. I just found an interesting interview by Michael Pettis on the Blockworks Macro channel. Thanks for introducing him to me.
    2
  3001. @Bluebell Flora Good one. Actually, I did not find so much criticism (not zero, though). Now, you have to understand that I worked for a US based multinational with lots of facilities in the UK and Ireland (as well as all over the world). It was quite fun for me. My ethnic background is Greek (100%). I bought my suits and clothes at Gieves and Hawkes, shoes at Church's so I was not wearing American fashions. Even all over Europe I was often mistaken for European and spoke some German (sadly, not much Greek). I had children just starting out in school, so I became a member of the Board of Governours. The Home Office had to approve. I really liked that because I got to meet lots of local people I would never have met in my job. There was training for Governours and I took all I could, so I could interact with even more local people. Many expats go before having children or after their children were grown. I traveled all over the territory, which was Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). I had actually traveled all over Europe as a teenager. I had my 18th and 19th birthdays there. So, I guess I did not elicit as much criticism.
    2
  3002. Peter, TDS again. No one is anti-immigration. The issue has always been the type of people let into the country. It does matter.
    2
  3003. Need to go nuclear!
    2
  3004. Well, you lot keep voting Labor in. Back to the nostalgic 1970s, eh. I got laid a lot in the 1970s (and 1980s) so I look back fondly on those times. I for one, did not need you to tell me that Angela was stupid. Knew that a while ago. On the other hand, and I keep banging on about this, there seems to be a misunderstanding (ignorance?) about political parties among the electorate. Especially in a parliamentary system, the parties represent ideologies. Labor, it's in the name, is a party of the unions. They don't suddenly change their ideology when they come to power and are responsible for running the country, now do they. Don't get me wrong, I agree with a lot of what you say, but on this point, I find most people worldwide ignore this basic fact.
    2
  3005.  @gregtaylor9806  Suppliers, and their salesman, have an inordinate effect on the physical stores. Shelf space is limited and the suppliers compete for this. I have first hand knowledge of this phenomenon. On the other hand, it is almost trivial to list in an on-line store, or even possible to set one up yourself.
    2
  3006. When I hear about these situations, I just have to shake my head. Following financial advice of influencers on YouTube? Really? It sounds harsh, but they deserve to lose their money.
    2
  3007. China going after agricultural goods is a sign of weakness. The two types, manufactures and agricultural products are not equivalent. For one thing it is much easier to find a new market for agricultural goods. This often also applies to many raw materials. In addition, even though modern agriculture is more capital intensive than in the past, it nothing compared to something like auto production. The point is, and this is where the rant begins, that Xi is ignorant of history, especially Chinese history. It all comes down to geography. Between poor farmland, lack of abundance of critical natural resources and lack of natural barriers to invaders, China is screwed, and most people know that. As I often point out, China and Russia want a multipolar world. They want the world of imperialism. They will get it, and they will not do well in that environment just as they did not do well in the past, especially the Chinese. The other thing is China going to the WTO. I only wish western leaders would be aggressive in that forum. Of course, the reason they are not is that the WTO is becoming less and less effective as the years go by.
    2
  3008.  @erichimes3062  I can believe that.
    2
  3009. The "critical minerals" are not rare. In fact, their exploitation started in the US. China is only a player now because the processing of these materials is a really dirty and potentially environmentally damaging. Basically, this is just another example of the west exporting pollution to places where environmental concerns are not an issue. The reality is that projects are already underway in the US to process such materials in environmentally safe ways. This will be more expensive, for sure, but it should have been done long ago.
    2
  3010. The Russians are idiots. That is the nicest way I could put it. In both Ukraine and now Syria they are wasting resources attacking civilian targets as well as military targets, with, it seems, emphasis on the civilian targets. Especially in Syria, their air assets are more limited. As I said, idiots.
    2
  3011.  @donaldkasper8346  Can't argue with that.
    2
  3012. There never was a Palestinian state. There were Arab kingdoms in the area, but they were conquered by the Turks many centuries ago.
    2
  3013. One thing missing from discussion of housing in China is that it has become one of the only types of investment for ordinary Chinese people. Unlike the US, and most western economies, the equity investment sector is restricted. I recall, back in the last century, when the percentage of people invested in equities in the US reached 50%. I expect it is higher now. Even with its ups and downs, over time equity investments typically outperform housing. It is also more productive for the economy, funding innovation and organic growth.
    2
  3014. What you hope for Russia is laudable. I don't see it happening. They had their chance after the Soviet Union fell apart. They chose "stability" over freedom. If you look at the other republics of the Soviet Union that became independent countries, the record is very mixed. The Baltic republics did democratize and integrated with western Europe and became part of the EU. At the other extreme you have Belarus. Then there are places like Georgia which is not fully rid of Russian influence and interference. Even Ukraine was touch and go, and was much like Georgia is now, for a time. The Russian people are basically serfs. Look at the videos that come out of Russian peasants appealing to the czar, I mean Putin, for redress of grievances and protection. It is like something out of the19th century. Read Gogol's book "Dead Souls". It was written in the middle of the19th century. It precisely describes Russia today. That Russia and China became the first major countries to have successful Marxist communist revolutions goes totally against Marx's theory. He assumed that it would be the industrial proletariat that would be the vanguard of the revolution. Workers of the world unite! Remember that slogan. Marx was not talking about the rural peasantry. Even Lenin assumed this would happen after the successful revolution in Russia. Didn't happen. Then Lenin added his twist to Marxism by offering the peasants "free stuff", which he later took away. Mao did the same thing in China. When, not if, The Russian Federation falls apart it is very likely to break into a number of warlord-controlled pieces. I predict that China will do the same, by the way. That is their history.
    2
  3015. I am going to miss Prigozhin too. He is so entertaining.
    2
  3016. Tik, this is a great video. Your laughter added a lot to the tone. Too bad I can't give it a double thumbs up.
    2
  3017.  @deewesthill1213  That sounds like a good explanation. May an experienced person like me has basically much higher expectations regarding charisma.
    2
  3018.  @toolegittoquit_001  That's the best way I have heard it put yet. Thanks.
    2
  3019.  @oreolo764  Good points. Can you imagine the Indians using the yuan? I mean, if you are going to have an alternative to the dollar, it either has to be an existing currency, or a new, made up one that replaces existing currencies. This is much like the Euro. How is that working out?
    2
  3020. On the top ten container ports, I noticed that the US is not on the list. And yet, the US is a major trading country, at least in dollar value. Actually, in terms of percentage or GDP, it is not so much. So, does that mean the US is limited in its maritime trade capabilities?
    2
  3021.  @Dqtube  Good points.
    2
  3022. Very well put! This has been done before (companies training their employees) to great effect. I am thinking about companies like IBM. At the beginning of the computer age there were no computer science degree programs. IBM had to train people to do that. They also did it among their customers. I learned to code while a student studying physics. That was actually a paid job, not the result of classes I was taking. I dropped out (intending to go back) and with those skills got a job making what college grads were making when I would have been in my junior year. I did eventually go back but got a computer science degree instead of a physics degree. By that time, before I got the degree, I was a senior engineer, engineering manager, and had worked on and led advanced R&D projects. I say all this not to toot my own horn, but to show what can be done. By the way, my older son followed a very similar trajectory decades later.
    2
  3023. You do realize that China is a paper tiger, don't you? You have heard of the term "little emperors", haven't you? The last war China fought was with Vietnam, in 1979, with Vietnam, which China lost. They have no military experience since then. They are fighting India at the LAC and are not doing well. Their Navy has lots of littoral ships, and a much number of "blue water" ships. Your analysis sounds like the analysis of the Russians before the attack on Ukraine. Looking at the numbers is foolish. You have to look at the capabilities of the equipment, training and doctrine, and motivation of the forces as well.
    2
  3024.  @sunnyjo2059  Sad, but true.
    2
  3025. All this talk about "austerity" reminds me of Labor beating on the Conservatives for just such programs not that many years ago.
    2
  3026. I volunteered at a food bank in the town I live in for a while. This is a deluxe food bank and people generally walked out with 200lbs of food a week. I noticed two things. One was that a large proportion of the clients were overweight. The second was that they all drove nice cars. In fact, I had a high end car, but it was 20 years old (I don't drive much these days) and it was the worst on the lot. I have since remedied that. Many of the people you show in the video could make some other choices and not need a food bank. There were also no people who looked undernourished, and some were obviously overweight.
    2
  3027.  @LD-xt1vo  You nailed it!
    2
  3028. At the end there Nicholas is starting to sound like Peter Zeihan.
    2
  3029. There is an old Soviet joke that goes, they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.
    2
  3030. The agricultural land area affected seems small. I have a cousin who has a farm of 485 hectares. He has always stated that this is the smallest size for a grain farm, based on cost of equipment and operation for an individual farmer. So, the 2,412 hectares is about five to six small US grain farms.
    2
  3031. I think that the problem with the pipeline is twofold. On the one hand, China is wary of becoming more dependent on the Russians. On the other hand, China is running out of money. Also, I don't think a pipeline that long and through such difficult terrain can be built in a year.
    2
  3032. It seems that China should be active in opposition to the Houthis in the Red Sea. The wildcard in this is that China is allied with Iran, who are the Houthis major arms supplier. So, they are caught between competing interests. The fact that China is emphasizing globalization is actually kind of funny. They have a big navy, but it is limited in range and scope. As the US backs off on commitments t0 globalization, there really is no one to step in and take over. We are, indeed, heading back to the pre-cold war times.
    2
  3033. Only 1,000 warheads? One Ohio class sub carries 24 SLBMs with up to 12 warheads each. There are 18 of these subs. The Russians have similar systems.
    2
  3034. You really don't know history, do you? The country has always been divided politically. Even from the beginning. Heard a podcast once where a politician from NYC was going to a place in upstate NY, I believe. He was advised by a friend that if he revealed that he was a conservative, he would be beaten. This was in the early 19th century. I mean, they were going to do him physical harm just for having a different political view. This is not unusual in American history. The short memory people have today is astonishing. For a short time after WWII we had consensus. There was an external force that united us. That is NOT the norm in American politics. You should all do some reading and research before opining on our current situation.
    2
  3035. Homs has already been captured.
    2
  3036. Pettis makes a good point. There is one thing he, and most commentators, leaves out. He hints at it, but I rarely see it tackled head on. China is not well positioned to generate capital internally. This has a lot to do with the geography. Poor in natural resources, including minerals and farmland. The latter is what the one child policy was all about. The article by Sine does mention the corruption issue. This corruption is what keeps a system like the CCP going. It is endemic. CCP run China, like the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation that succeeded it are all kleptocracies. This is the real issue. The anti-corruption campaign is not really oriented toward rooting out corruption but is instead targeted at political enemies of Xi. As such, it is having little real effect. Thanks for taking the extra effort. This is quite enlightening.
    2
  3037. Aid to Ukraine by the UK is a moral imperative. It was the US, the UK and Russia that "guaranteed" Ukraine's security in the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons.
    2
  3038. The story at about 6:00 is interesting. This is a university student, reportedly. He does not seem very smart.
    2
  3039.  @tshavfengvang7831  What does that have to do with either your original comment or my response? While you are correct, in general, not all that territory was occupied by Rome all that time. Frankly, I have been through a lot of that territory from Hadrian's Wall (actually up to the Antonine Wall) to the eastern reaches. For example, Hadrian's Wall was built 150 years into the imperial period. Its furthest extent east seems be around 180AD. There were ebbs and flows. It was, after all a very long time.
    2
  3040.  @User5260jo  The gasoline price in CA is higher than most of the country and has been for years. It is the result of regulations and taxes. You need to use the national averages. Even within states there are huge differences. I live in Illinois. The price of gasoline in the City of Chicago is always greater than it is in the suburbs and the rural areas. Often by 25% or more. Then, if you go across the border to Iowa, it is cheaper still. All that said, how does the price of gasoline in CA have anything to do with my comment? I was just giving the official inflation rate.
    2
  3041. Yes, the fish was probably a bad idea. That is why I never put meat in my compost bin. And my compost bin is a sturdy wooden structure my son and I made based on what he saw volunteering at an arboretum. We built it for a Boy Scout merit badge project. Actually, I don't eat meat at home anymore anyway, come to think of it. I just eat fish, but canned or frozen.
    2
  3042. Moving government operations from an established center to another location is a difficult proposition. I remember a situation in the US in the 1960s. My father worked at a government lab in Washington, DC (where I was born). The rumors abounded that much of the government would be moved to the middle of the country. I recall that St. Louis, MO was mentioned. This was not considered a good thing, personally, for the people involved. My father was born in Massachusetts. Many of his colleagues were east coasters and the idea of moving to the Midwest was not appealing. Funny thing, I ended up in the Midwest, but not with the government and not in St. Louis. There are other examples. Look at the situation in the UK. There has been talk of moving whole government departments out of London for years now. Progress has been slow, at best. In Egypt the government is building a new capital in the desert. It will be interesting to see how successful they are. Of course, in Brazil they seem to have been successful moving the whole federal government to the planned city of Brasilia. Xi has his work cut out for him.
    2
  3043. Just saw a video on the SNP's connection with fascism and Nazi Germany. I left a comment there comparing that to the current SNP. The channel is "War Stories with Mark Felton". It is worth a look.
    2
  3044. This whole issue is a stupid relic of poor legislation. To try to stop the growth of government spending a legislative solution was applied. It was crude and stupid. Mind you, I am greatly toning down my language here.
    2
  3045. The EV market in the US is also experiencing a massive slowdown. The lack of sufficient charging stations is a major contributor, and this does not seem to be on the way to being solved any time soon. As for lithium, a major, major deposit has been found in the southwest US. This will put even more downward pressure on lithium prices.
    2
  3046. It is clear that China wants war in the South China Sea. They keep increasing the level of tension and persist in ignoring "international law". Is it just for the oil?
    2
  3047. Tony, I am fine with six but would have no problem with five. The information is always quite valuable. Whatever works best for you. I watch them all.
    2
  3048. The reason that Trump wants to pivot to the Pacific is that there is "kompromat" on Trump? Really? Are you forgetting Obama's Pivot to Asia strategy? What did they have on him? Obama at one point wanted to draw down about 10K troops from Germany to send to Asia and they squealed like stuck pigs until he relented. This was before Trump had even decided to run for president. You might want to get that TDS taken care of. There are two things at play here. One is that Asia, and specifically Taiwan, are important to the US both economically and strategically. Ukraine is not. The only reason the Ukraine was ever on America's radar was the Budapest Memorandum which a part of a whole nuclear nonproliferation effort. This happened on Clinton's watch. Have you noticed that all this, and the current debacle happened under Democratic presidents? The other aspect is that the Europeans have the resources in economic terms to support Ukraine themselves, but don't. They also have the motivation to do so. What they lack is the will and leadership. Trump is completely correct when he says that Europe should shoulder the burden for supporting Ukraine. Trump is providing the leadership on this. If it were left to the Europeans, then Ukrainians would continue to die without the possibility of winning (on their own terms) on the battlefield. A little history and current data for you. NATO was formed to combat the Soviets at a time when Europe was prostrate after WWII. That is not the case now. The GDP for the EU plus the UK is about $24T, which is over ten times that of Russia. The population of the EU plus the UK is just over 500M or over three times that of Russia. So, why is the US doing this? There are currently 100K US troops in Europe. During the Cold War the number was 500K decreasing to "only" 300K at the end. Europe has had a free ride as far as security is concerned. Trump is not the first president to point this out, not by a long shot. They used the money to buy votes by expanding their social welfare system. In their current demographic decline this is killing them.
    2
  3049. I am over 65. I am not immunocompromised. I have not had a headache for over five years. About that time, I was served with divorce papers and changed my diet. I have had one day (just one) of fever, from a flu, in all that time. That was pre-COVID. I eat right, and exercise, and many of my, admittedly minor, health problems have eased or disappeared. I lost weight, I have no more joint pain (probably the weight loss), my blood pressure is down (without the drugs, which I stopped taking anyway), and my bowel movements are normal. Diet and general attention to health are much more important than all this crazy stuff. I am vaxed, I thought that was prudent. I am not boosted, but plan to be (probably tomorrow). I have never taken a flu vaccine, for example, and have never had a problem with that. I drink scootch and smoke cigars, and that is probably the best thing I can do to ward this off. Very few of my friends who do have gotten COVID, and none seriously.
    2
  3050. The EU is a protectionist cartel. The UK is better off out of it. What is interesting is that I read many conflicting things about the UK economy. It's up, it's down. On the other hand, I read reports that the UK economy is expected to overtake Germany's within the next decade. Harmonizing with the EU will only, as you say, delay the UK's progress.
    2
  3051. Have you ever noticed the parallels between Putin and Czar Nicholas II? They are both short. Neither is/was a particularly dynamic speaker. Both were losing wars against smaller countries better equipped and led. In both cases the morale of the army was poor. Sounds like another situation of history rhyming.
    2
  3052. You mention Israeli actions, but not those of Hezbollah. This makes it sound like Israel is taking action based primarily on its own initiative without any provocation. I am certain that you are aware of the provocations and of Iran's role in them.
    2
  3053.  @JamesKerLindsay  You are correct, you did cover it. But you did it later. My reaction was to the way it was put in the beginning of the video. I thought that it should have been brought up earlier. It is really just a stylistic thing. I would have started out with the rockets fired by Hezbollah first, to give some context to what Israel is doing. This is just a pet peeve of mine. Otherwise, the video is a good and important addition to the conversation, as usual.
    2
  3054. If China is so powerful and if their system is so superior, then why don't they just create their own trade bloc? Other countries would naturally flock to join, wouldn't they. The answer, of course, is that China is neither so powerful nor is their system so superior. They have BRICS. Of course, that concept was created by an asset manager in the US. It made sense at the time as an investment concept. As a trading bloc or alliance, it is a total sham. So, what are China's options? Assume they cannot, or do not want to, trade with the west (G7, EU). What does that leave? In GDP terms (I know, a crude measure) that leaves 25% of the world's economy (the west plus China makes up the 75%). The global south, if you will. One has to consider that of that 25% a good chunk is allied with or leaning toward the west. India, the largest economy in that group, actively blocks Chinese investment and products and is disengaging from China. Brazil is investigating dumping by the Chinese. Others are outright allies of the west. That doesn't leave much. The fact is that China has relied on the west for the development of its economy. Without the west, China goes back to the Mao era. It seems that Xi is intent on that. Cultural Revolution 2.0! Why would anyone want to trade with a country that ignores all the rules and openly states that it wants to reform the world in its own image? As President Joe would say: Come on man!
    2
  3055. You bozos voted for them. Then there is Sadiq Khan Just like people in the US voted for Joe Biden and all those blue state governors and mayors. The Labor Party and the Democrat Party are very similar. Then there are all the whiners in Ireland who are going off on their government letting in all those migrants and messing up their country. In all these cases the people voted knowing full well what these parties stood for. This is one of my pet peeves. People vote but often don't think too hard about it. They vote for the label, not the policies. They vote their identity in many cases.
    2
  3056.  @TomTomicMic  Good point. What happened to Hong Kong is tragic.
    2
  3057. The CCP, and from what I have seen the Chinese people, are really poorly developed. They are like teenagers, not adults. I mean seriously, not celebrating a holiday because of a similarity in pronunciation. The childness of it all, and this is not the first case for Xi of this type of thing. It would be laughable except for the toll it takes on the populace. I include the Chinese people (not the Chinese ethnicity, but citizens, or subjects, of CCP run China) because of the plethora of items I have seen on this channel and others regarding China. They are in a hard place, stuck between a doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist-Maoist system and an opening to capitalism. They just don't seem to get it. Some examples include their understanding of how mortgages work to the "overcapacity" in the automotive industry. I have seen several instances of people complaining about the way interest is charged in mortgages which in China is actually in line with how it works in most western economies. The latter is actually the norm for new industries. At the dawn of the auto industry in the US there were over 100 companies involved. Some merged or were bought out to form bigger companies such as GM. Many others just went under. I could go on about the details of a plethora of other industries from the dawn of the industrial revolution to the tech giants of today, but you get the point. That is how capitalism works.
    2
  3058. The interviewer asks about regulating platforms because of disinformation. This is a totalitarian tendency. Freedom of speech precludes this. She also talks about disinformation and fact checking. Who are the fact checkers? Governments? Intelligence services? You must be kidding. Just look at the fact checking that went on around COVID. So much of it was, and is, wrong. Masks? Not effective. Vaccine boosters? Switzerland has just stopped this and presents scientific findings to back up the policy. A lab leak in Wuhan? Now it seems probable, although China will make sure we never know. We have always had misinformation in the public space from the beginning. Remember "yellow journalism"? And, of course as Starsky points out, this has been done long before social media. The only thing that can be done is to fight back against "misinformation" with information.
    2
  3059. Whatever happened to global warming?
    2
  3060.  @silversun119  Yes, I agree. There is often a lot of good information here, but now there seems to be a search for more issues going beyond what is medically relevant.
    2
  3061. Nineteen percent interest rates sound like the late 1970s and early 1980s in the US.
    2
  3062. The TSMC story is an interesting one, and a lot more complex than most of the pundits are aware of. TSMC is just the most successful of the chip foundry companies. The foundry business became a thing as the cost of building chip plants skyrocketed. At the high end this can reach $10B or more. The semiconductor industry is multilayered and mind-bogglingly complex. TSMC does not make the machines that make the chips, and they do not design or market the chips. That is possible because of the layered nature of the industry. I have witnessed this transformation from the beginning. Look at it this way, to use an example from the auto industry. In the early days of the Ford Motor Company, they made everything from raw materials. The made the steel, glass and even the tires. Famously, Henry Ford tried to make the rubber plantations in South America more efficient to control costs and improve his business. He failed, by the way. Over time the auto industry evolved to the point that most car companies get a large number of components from other suppliers. These suppliers specialize and serve multiple competitors. The chip industry has gone through a similar evolution. Like the auto industry, the value of having outside suppliers for critical components is to have them compete with each other. The fact is that the Taiwan situation, as mentioned by the CCP Taiwan affairs office is to a large extent correct (can't say that very often). For the US, and other countries, to have a critical technology located in a place like Taiwan is, to put it colloquially, bonkers. Once the foundry business is out of Taiwan, there is still a reason to support Taiwan though. A CCP takeover of Taiwan would allow them to break out of the first island chain trap. That in itself is a reason to support Taiwanese independence.
    2
  3063. Parties in a multiparty state like Germany represent very specific points of view. That is the point. Trying to steer a very ideological party to the "center" is both foolish and dishonest.
    2
  3064. All of these issues are interesting because they show the total breakdown of the British form of cabinet government. I think this really started with Tony Blair and his goal of making the Prime Minister into an American style President. In the British system, unlike the American system, the Prime Minister is not supposed to be an absolute ruler. In the American system, every appointee, throughout the government, serves at the pleasure of the President (who is head of state and head of government and is elected independently) and can be removed at any time. In both systems it is important to pick the right person for the job. President Trump found this out in his first term. He made the adjustments and the cabinet he ended with was fairly good. In his case, at the beginning of his term it was his lack of experience in government that was the issue. Not anymore. He learned and his second term shows that. What the Labor Party has done is to fully embrace the "woke" agenda. Competence is totally unimportant. Joe Biden fell into the same trap, and the results are obvious. Basically, this means that the UK is totally screwed. Time to get out while you can, unless there can somehow be an early election (like now). Labor incompetence is going to take everyone down with the ship.
    2
  3065.  @nicolebass4352  Yes! When they attack your house in the suburbs then you need it. In many cases the police will not even come to your house to protect it.
    2
  3066.  @josmotherman591  Good point on the voting. In the latest polling in many places participation is up dramatically. I was an election judge for many cycles in Illinois. In a presidential election we might get a little over 60%. For some off year local elections the turnout might be in the single digits. Any of our elections could go either way, considering the numbers that don't vote. Funny story. After Trump's election in 2016 there were lots of protests. At one in the Northwest 35 people were arrested. It turns out that none of them had voted.
    2
  3067.  @josmotherman591  Thanks.
    2
  3068.  @kpokfposkf  Bonds are treated differently. The legal remedies are different, They are a completely different class of investment. Bonds are sold through investment banks to individual, or institutional, investors. They may also be included in funds. The money ultimately comes from real investors. In the case of Lehman, their derivatives were traded among the investment banks at very high levels of leverage. This is because of the trust they had in each other. What Lehman did was to break that trust. Because they had such high leverage, there was no way they could cover the CDOs when they were called in by the other investment banks. This is a totally different class of investments.
    2
  3069. The answer as to why YouTube might ban someone, and perhaps Buy Me a Coffee, is that they are commercial enterprises. YouTube relies on advertisers. It costs a lot of money to procure and run the number of servers required to support the vast community of users on YouTube. This is not paid by the creators or the consumers of content. This is true of basically all social media. People tend to take these platforms as the "public square", but it is really commercial enterprises, not some sort of public platform. And don't think that if the government ran it that things would be more open. Far, far from it. I mean any government.
    2
  3070. The cost exchange ratio is silly. The real issue for interception is the potential cost of the targets compared to the weapons launched. The cost exchange ratio is only relevant to the military authorities themselves. Of course, those authorities are funded to protect the assets of their respective national governments, and thus populations. There is another aspect. The relative impact on the economies of each side. The western coalition is much, much larger in terms of resources than Iran. Don't forget, Iran is a basket case economically right now. They really need those resources domestically.
    2
  3071. When I was young, the generation that had come from Greece began to die. We went to my father's hometown to many funerals in that time. These people had all done well in the US and there was not tragedy in their deaths. They had lived long lives. Among their children, all had done well. Some had gone to university. All of their grandchildren had gone to university. Some with Phd's and some with MDs. They had all come over with 4th grade educations. We all understood we would die as well, but the overwhelming thing we considered was our children and legacy. It is not all as bleak as you make it to be. We strive, and sometimes we succeed. We work to help our children to have a good start, and in many cases they too succeed. What more do you expect?
    2
  3072. The situation in the stock market in China will more reflect the Japanese model. The recent bump up is a result purely of direct state intervention in the market. That is a sign to get out, now. The other misleading thing is the percentages quoted. The ones quoted are from the previous day or week. Percentages are funny that way. It depends on where you start. The only way to potentially make money in this market is through quantitative methods and day trading. Most fund managers are not able to do that and the policy of the CCP is to curtail such moves. The fact that the premier is deciding not to meet with the CEOs is much more telling than manipulated market moves. In the current climate, macroeconomic factors are much more important. For example, the trend toward buying gold argues for reduced liquidity inside of China. This is not an environment where there is internal support for the market. Another factor is that the overriding policy goal of the CCP is internal circulation (i.e., isolation).
    2
  3073. China's "high inflation environment"? The data shows deflation, not inflation. This statement sort of negates the premise of the video.
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  3074.  @grantharriman284  I know. I was also a Scout Leader and took the training. The funny thing is that one of the adults would carry a pistol (a Walther P-38) in case someone got out of hand. It is quicker to point. It gets worse. Often the Jeeps (original Willy's) would break down and we would have to help pull it out. So the adults would go into town and get us a couple cases of beer. Remember when this was.
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  3075.  @wizzard4063  Yep!
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  3076. Those that want to distance Nitzsche from the Nazis should read "Nietzsche and the Nazis" by Stephen Hicks. Oh, and don't forget, Nietzsche was certifiably nuts. I did enjoy reading his books when I was young, though. I especially liked "The Birth of Tragedy", "The Case of Wagner" and "Ecce Homo" most of all, but these were not his overly philosophical and political works.
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  3077.  @NightmareCourtPictures  Well put. You obviously have put a lot of thought into this.
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  3078.  @realityisenough  That's kind of a low information way to put it. Are you young? It sounds like something someone who grew up with social media as the primary source of information would say. That is not really meant to be a criticism, just an observation. There is a particular tone and style to your comment. Actually, there is an article in today's Wall Street Journal about the phenomenon. I haven't read it yet, but I expect it will validate my comment. Wolfram came up with the overall concept. This is similar to the way physics (and mathematics and science in general) advance. Usually there is someone (or a small group) who comes up with a different framework, or conceptual idea. We can identify that person. For the field to advance, though, many, many, people have to work with that idea and contribute. You can go back to Newton. Then look at the early 20th century. We had Einstein with General Relativity and a small group (which included Einstein, by the way) with quantum mechanics. We remember those names because, in general, they broke new conceptual ground. If that were all that was needed, then what are the other thousands of people doing? Their work is important and necessary to be sure but will generally not have an impact that is similar as the first conceptual break.
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  3079.  @effexon  For those that came to the US or UK (or the rest of the anglosphere the transition was relatively easy and beneficial. I have also talked to Chinese citizens who I studied with in the US, relatively recently. and they were conflicted. Should they stay in the US or go back? They had trouble with the issue, seeing what the situation is in the West compared tp their home country. And look at the large numbers of Russians, mostly educated, that are leaving. I think there is something to the Western value system.
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  3080.  @joelmanning249  Good point. But, that does not mean it cannot change. China, for example, is afraid that it could split into four parts. The main part, Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. They are actively trying to suppress the cultures in the later three. Even in main part, you have the Mandarin speaking part and the Cantonese speaking part. This is basically a north/south divide. My opinion is that the Chinese, in their entrepreneurial spirit, are more closely aligned with America and the West than say Japan. Their diaspora certainly is. Without the stranglehold of the CCP, the West's expectation of liberalization would have been realized. I do think the CCP is on thin ice, especially with the Kung Flu pandemic response. There are lots of other reasons to believe this. It will take time.
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  3081. These guns, the Cracano M91, are still available. I found one online resource that had them for $199.
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  3082.  @jenniferjean  Playing the race/gender card? You can do better than that.
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  3083. The point that Jonathan makes at about 30 minutes in is very interesting and rings true. It mirrors what is happening between China and Taiwan. I think that China will break up by the end of the decade. Already there are people in Shanghai that want to break away from the CCP to join Taiwan. Who knows how serious or advanced this is, but just the fact that it is being talked about is indicative of the problems. These problems are very similar to what happened to the Soviet Union.
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  3084.  @darrensiew2440  Well, if that is your position, then keep investing there. Just don't try to take any of the money out.
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  3085. Iron Dome is designed to shoot down short-range rockets and artillery. Ukraine is really in need of systems to shot down ballistic missiles and cruise missiles.
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  3086. Silver Fox, you are in rare form in this video and obviously enjoying things. It must be the weather where you are. Well, done.
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  3087. At about 6:05 you talk about clearing the forest belts. We call them hedgerows or sometimes windbreaks. I hunt deer in farmland in central Illinois that is similar to the agricultural area of Ukraine. I have, many a time, hunted such forest belts. The deer like to hide in them because, if a predator comes, they can run in either direction to get away. They can also see the predator coming. We would put people on either side and walk up the belts (we also used radios for safety and coordination). Hunting is a lot like being infantry in the forest and fields. That is where the German term Jager comes from.
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  3088. Of course, the relocation of Russian troops from Kherson is problematic for the Russians. If the Ukrainians then attack from just east of the reservoir, it will mean a disaster for the Russians.
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  3089. Orwell was a great writer and thinker. It is on his supporter for socialism that I part ways with him. His ideas about money and capitalism are naive at best. Remember that Marx called money stored up dead labor and meant it in a derisive way. This is just plain stupid. Without a way to "store up" the fruits of one's labor, you end up with feudalism, and real slavery. That is what has been the case in all the countries where socialism has been tried, especially the more extreme examples such as the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Nazi Germany and Venezuela. Without a market to allocate resources and a medium of exchange which is also store value, there is nothing but totalitarianism. His pipe dream of democratic socialism has never taken hold. Why do you think that is?
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  3090. What is intrinsically wrong with two party politics? The US has had that since the beginning. That is about 250 years. The UK has had, for some time, two parties that tend to rule. Of course, there are other parties, such as the Monter Raving Looney Party, but it is generally two main parties that control things. Also, I find it curious that you bring up climate change in relation to Bangladesh's flooding problems. I seem to remember that this is actually quite common historically. You might want to look into that.
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  3091.  @Reticulated_Spline  That is indeed truly impressive, as is much of what Ukraine has accomplished. But, the use of sufficient airpower over a specific area could eliminate the artillery threat and enhance a breakthrough operation.
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  3092. Wrong on gasoline prices. They do go down, as well as up. By quite a bit. I remember earlier in the millennium when they we $4.25 per gallon. Now we are in the $3.50 range. They were a low as just under $2 a few years ago. They vary wildly. It is a commodity.
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  3093.  @ChnesRep中華民國OfTaiwan  Actually, that is not true in the US. In the US, health insurance is generally provided by the employer, not the state. So, employers often get very involved with health initiatives concerning their employees. The healthier the employees, the lower the cost of health insurance.
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  3094.  @ChnesRep中華民國OfTaiwan  Not really. My ex-wife worked of a mid-sized firm. Each year the employees and any covered individual (spouse, children) could get a full battery of tests. The company was informed of the overall statistics. This affected their bottom line.
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  3095. The idea of Russia attacking Europe, most of which is in NATO, is ludicrous. Unless he is willing to resort to nuclear weapons, he is not even capable of defeating Ukraine. You must understand that the Ukraine forces have been retrained in western tactics and doctrine. The Russians are still stuck in the Soviet era tactics and doctrine. This only worked against the Nazis because of the attacks by the western allies and the massive losses endured by the Soviets. In current warfare this is not possible. The training needed by the troops is much higher than what the Soviets had in WWII. In addition, the Russians, unlike the Soviets, do not have supply from the western allies. They are basically on their own. Even the Chinese will be reluctant. They have too much riding on trade with the west to go all in to support the Russians. Russia could never replace the west as a trading partner. The Russian economy is just too small and insignificant. I think it is about the size of Italy, which is the third largest in the EU. Ukraine has a good chance of defeating them.
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  3096. Madona is a public figure who trades on her looks. She is fair game. Mo on is saying she can't do it, but they certainly are entitled to have an opinion of it.
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  3097. It is interesting that countries like Hungary and Peru are mentioned. These countries are not important in any global sense. It would be much more impactful to talk about China. The calls there today, from the dissidents and ordinary people, are for democracy. The calls there are for the government to adhere to the written constitution, which actually guarantees many rights that are just not honored.
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  3098. The CCP and the Chinese people are showing themselves to be immature. They really are not a threat. If their feelings can be hurt by such things as are shown at the beginning of this video, then they are clearly at a lesser stage of development. This is also true about their geopolitical views. They are jealous of the many smaller countries, mostly in Europe, that controlled China's trade for a couple of centuries. They are jealous of the US. They want to play the "great power game" which they missed out on in the 19th and early 20th century. The world had moved on, and they do not have the resources to play that game anyway. They never have. As the US backs off on using its military to enforce the "rules-based international order" which the Chinese rail against so much, they will get their chance. They will be crushed.
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  3099. "Combat the cold"? Whatever happened to global warming?
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  3100. Not my experience in Illinois. My sons went to a school where there were many Asian students, both South and East. In fact, Asians as a group were slightly ahead of Blacks and Hispanics, as a group. The class valedictorian was often Indian. When I started university, in the last quarter of the last century of the last millennium, my two best friends were from India. We shared EVERYTHING, including girlfriends. Well, it was the 70s. Many of my neighbors are Indian (next to me and across the street, for example). That there are teenagers who act this way is not surprising, especially in places where minorities are rare. I grew up in Washington, DC. The population is very diverse in the metropolitan area. I had friends from all over the world. When I went to university and studied physics (I later switched to Compter Science) about a third were Americans of European descent, a third Indian and a third Chinese (at that time from Taiwan, of course). There is a lot of inter-faith violence in India, and many other countries. Just look at China. Over 90% of the population is Han Chinese. Look at what they do to their minorities. How many people are immigrating to China? Frankly, and I don't know the answer, how many people are immigrating to India? Ask yourselves why?
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  3101. Dave, I do want to say that you are one of the best interviewers out there. You let your guests speak, and you have good questions and points to make. Keep up the good work and enjoy your vacation.
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  3102. The Gini coefficient in terms of income inequality is not really useful. No one cares where they fall in some measure of income. What matters is what they can afford. The US is a country blessed in its geography. This means that a factory worker in an industry such as automotive can afford a nice house, a couple of cars and perhaps a cabin in the woods. Compare this to Japan. I saw a study a while ago. Japanese auto workers made about the same as US workers. Yet, their ability to have the same things is not there. It is due primarily to the physical geography of the country as much as anything else. By the way, this is why I rail against PPP. Look at what Chinese people can buy at similar income scale levels. There is no comparison. The concept of PPP is bunk, especially in the way it is measured.
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  3103. The French efforts and pronouncements (such as the possibility of NATO troops in Ukraine) are significant. Macron tried reaching out to Putin early in the conflict. He tried and the Russians made him look bad. Now, France has reversed course. This is very bad for Russia.
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  3104. I love your opening. I wish I could insert a great meme I found. It is a picture of the artist formerly known as Prince. The text reads: Don't believe everything you read on the internet. Bob Dylan, Drummer, Metallica.
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  3105. I am not sure that the disparity between "offline" and "online" stores is that great. Don't forget that the ecommerce companies have warehouses and other physical facilities, whether directly or indirectly, as well as delivery, both within their systems and to the final customer. They can, of course, optimize, but this also takes a lot of infrastructure. The big difference is that online shopping generally gives one more choices, both in products available and in sources. Retail, even membership, does not offer that.
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  3106. Wishful thinking. China's stated aim is to impose its system on the world. It claims it does not like the US led western system. Of course, China has never really played by the rules. This spans the spectrum from territorial disputes (South China Sea), IP theft, state subsidies to attempt to dominate industries, and others. All of this while China has benefited greatly from the current system. It is unlikely that China's vision would not result in similar benefits. Don't underestimate the desultory effects of large-scale poverty in China (600M making 1,000 yuan, or about $140, per month) and worsening demographics. China got old before it got rich. It never moved up the value chain, nor did it improve quality, both things the Japanese did successfully. Frankly, China does not have a lot of time left for their economic model. If I hear talk about "climate change" in reference to China, I am going to scream. First, China is the largest contributor to CO2 emissions, as well as other pollution, and it is not getting better. Second, you may not have noticed this, but peak climate hysteria is passing in the west, and we will see a move away from dramatic targets as the economic costs become clear.
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  3107. Following China today is like watching the dissolution of their economy, whole system and perhaps their country, in real time.
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  3108. Actually, I hate to point this out, but this is nothing compared to Korea, Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the US invasion of Afghanistan, the Gulf War and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Oh, and did I mention the Iran/Iraq war. Not to minimize the suffering of the Uranian people, or the immorality of what Russia is doing, but this is not the biggest thing that has happened, by a long shot. The difference is that it is taking place in the continent if Europe.
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  3109. Everyone talks about protectionism in the US as a problem. Really? How has the unrestricted free trade model worked out for the US? Think about it. We need something different than what we have been doing. That much should be obvious to anyone. The other thing that bugs me is talking about Trump or Biden, or any of our political leaders, as if they were thought leaders. In a democracy, this is not the case. Anyone, no matter how smart or idealistic, will not be able to lead in a real democracy without reflecting the will of the people in general. Just a basic lesson in politics for those that don't follow these things. The idealogues in US politics, such as the Green Party and the Communist Party, do not do well in the US. It's not because of the two-party system. It is because, thankfully, the US is not an ideologically driven population. Look back at the 20th century. The best performing third-party candidate was Ross Perot. Was his campaign ideological? Heck no! He was channeling frustrations within the populace. Interestingly, these are very similar to the frustrations people are feeling today. Think of those countries that are/were ideological. Germany in the 1930s. Russia in the first two decades of the 20th century. China from the mid 20th century. Real democracy is a balancing of sometimes competing wants and desires of the populace. Democracy generally does a better job of it than any other system. Just one of my pet peeves, and also my favorite rant.
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  3110. Don't make too much of what percentage are actual combat troops vs all the support. Two things, First, all armies have the kind of ratios you mention. Second, the front-line combat troops cannot fight for more than a day or two without all the other stuff. I guess a third is that, in a pinch those "support" troops can fight, especially in defense. At least in western armies they will have all the basic skills.
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  3111. What a bunch of crap, Greg. We have more than enough food to feed people. In the developed world, and some of the developing world, the real problem is obesity. I used to volunteer at a food bank (a deluxe one at that). Many, I would say a majority, we overweight. Many very overweight. And they were coming to a food bank for free food. And they got lots. We received over 2M pounds of food a year, much of it overflow from local supermarkets and restaurants. We bought very little to supplement this. So, worrying about grain production for ethanol is just plain stupid. That land would not be suitable for vegetable production. Most of that land is useful for corn, soybeans and wheat. We produce so much more than we can use, that millions of pounds of these crops are exported to places like China.
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  3112.  JackSmith-mk1ru  Well, you might want to read some history.
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  3113.  @realnapster1522  How so. Unless they use nukes, they cannot go it alone militarily. If you are talking about the economy, then they are likely to fall apart as a modern economy. They do not, and never did, have the ability to compete with the west economically. Their oil production depends to a large part on western technology, which has been withdrawn. They will begin to loose that production.
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  3114.  @randomness7053  Really? The US has plenty of oil, and is, in fact one of the largest producers, if not the largest. The US also produces a lot of natural gas. In fact, the US is exporting it. As for Germany, and the rest of the EU, they are already working on procuring new sources. These are available. In fact, German companies are moving (have already moved) many energy intensive operations to the US because feedstocks are cheaper. As for US the US dollar, that is not a worry. The dollar is only strengthening against almost all currencies. Don't forget that there is no "official" world currency. People are free to trade in any currency they want. The issue is liquidity and volume. No other currency has that. If you are speaking of Russia, it is too small a currency and only good for buying Russian commodities. It is also not freely traded. China also has that problem. No one puts their money into yuan. In fact, many people in China try to get their money out of China and into dollars. Oil prices have gone way down, and are about where they were when the war started. Russia is having to sell to China and India at a 20 to 30 percent discount. Much lower and they will actually lose money on it considering their production cost.
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  3115. We indeed are seeing a realignment in politics around the world. That is why so many failed policies are still being pushed by the establishment.
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  3116.  @henli-rw5dw  That is easy for you to say. Frankly, they are fast running out of runway for any further stimulus. They just sweep the problems under the rug, but they are still there.
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  3117. @Purvi Short selling is a legal and recognized way to invest. If the report from Hindenburg is false, then Adani has recourse to the courts, and in all likelihood, if they are in the right, they will recoup the losses. Hindenburg, of course, knows this. If they are in the wrong, then they open themselves up to massive penalties. We'll see. Of course, what opens up companies like Adani is their attempts to raise money internally. Making it a national thing is silly.
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  3118.  @bobwatson8754  You are very welcome.
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  3119.  @Leshic2  I am glad you feel it useful. I will try not to let your comment go to my head. That said your comment is very much appreciated. I do find that the comments in Tony's videos are a bit more erudite than most. Tony is a valuable resource, and he has a great community here.
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  3120. That is a good question, but I think the tide is turning. The fact is that this attitude is fairly new. At least through the Vietnam War civilian casualties were not an issue. The thing that changed was that Korea, Vietnam and all the wars since that have been fought by the west were not existential. It took a while for the ideas to sink in. An existential war will change all that. If Russia is allowed to continue then this becomes existential. The main issue is nukes. They are something completely new. I grew up during the Cold War. I always say I miss the Cold War. I got to do a lot of interesting research with unlimited funds. Other people I knew would say they miss it too because they got to kill people. But I digress. Traveling in Europe as a teen I met a lot of people my age who had a real angst about the war and felt they had a high probability of dying in a war. That was indeed the policy. Both sides were targeting each other's civilians. That leads to the issue of the Russian situation today. This whole thing would have been over in a matter of weeks or months if Russia did not have nukes. I am a big Regan fan, but I do take umbridge with the quote. We are not citizens of the world, but of nation states. That type of talk was just a way to build alliances. It has gone too far.
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  3121.  @allhimwithme5115  Well, I don't take his advice in general. On the other hand, if I want to criticize, that is what the comment section is for, among other things. This is a public forum. Complaining is a part of public discourse. By your logic, you shouldn't have commented on my comment.
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  3122.  @LK-hy5jz  I generally eat two meals and one snack. The snack is usually nuts (peanuts, almonds, walnuts or pistachios). I consider myself pescatarian, although I do not eat fish every day (3 - 4 times a week). I also will eat come cheese, usually grated cheese on pasta. I always have vegetables and often red lentils. The red lentils I will have in dried pasta form, or I will make pasta myself. This always contain just red lentils. i will also sometimes just make the lentils or use them in a soup (typically in cold weather). Two things about all this. I always feel fully satisfied after my meals. Also, several health "experts" explicitly single out lentils and rolled oats as bad. Now, I have been doing this for over six years. I lost a lot of weight, my blood pressure is down, my joints no longer bother me at all (I had some mild joint pain when I was overweight). Frankly, I am in my late 60s and my body is back to where it was in my twenties. I hope that wasn't too much.
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  3123.  @erikdavies2572  Great point. Actually, the allies got a good bit of the way up the boot before they hit the first major defensive lines. Then it was a tough slog. At least it tied up a lot of German divisions, which was useful. I still think we should have landed in southern France. Much nicer coastline.
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  3124. If the government collects that data, it belongs to the public.
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  3125.  @frankcooke1692  Well, you make some good points, but I have some issues (of course, it wouldn't be a discussion otherwise). One is on the middle-class. Recall that during the second half of the 20th century the US fought two big conflicts, Korea and Vietnam. The US middle-class was already very large. We also had a draft, so all levels of society were involved. In general, there was good support for both those wars. Even in Vietnam, this was true till near the end. Don't forget that in 1972 Richard Nixon was reelected in a landslide. The issue in both of those wars was Communist expansion. The Communists had as a stated goal global domination. This was an existential threat. People understood that.
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  3126.  @MrSupernova111  👍👍
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  3127.  @cripstopheriii3509  Well, making assumptions about your interlocutor can be perilous. I have over 40 years of experience in the space and defense industry. I have been dealing with these technologies for that whole time and have seen their application. I have even developed some. So, did my father. So, I think I have some inkling of what I am saying. What you fail to have understood is that I was not saying that technology would not have an effect on the battlefield. It obviously has. What I was reacting to is the issue of "information warfare" outside of the battle space. This is something you get all the time, and it mainly involves situations, like Ukraine, where the protagonists are trying to sway the political situation in the other's camp. It is also prevalent on social media because that is what people can discuss there. What it still comes down to is what it always comes down to. Destroying the other side's ability to wage war. That means killing his soldiers and destroying his means of waging war.
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  3128. Whatever happened to global warming?
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  3129.  @tonywilson4713  My experience is similar to yours, I think, but I also have experience with large scale data processing, although some of that was in a "near" real-time environment. I agree with you that many people making the opposite transition would have a problem. My background spans statistics and analytics, as well as aerospace and defense. I often half-jokingly say (only half, mind you), that I miss the Cold War. I got to do lots of incredibly interesting research with unlimited budgets. Oh, those were the days. I look at the type of crap people, for example, at Google do as "research" and I have to wonder. Mind you, they do have some interesting technology, but a while back I was interacting with them, and most of what they were doing had nothing to do with their business. It also did not have much application elsewhere It often was not actually very good. They just had so much cash that they could fund anything they wanted. As for an example for getting something wrong and having consequences in the real world, I have a little example from earlier days in the space program. We were told about this example to ensure we would not make the same mistake. A measurement on a spacecraft was taken in little-endian form. Then when it was used in the control program the programmer assumed that it was in big-endian form. So, instead of the spacecraft pointing toward the earth, when they went for a correction burn to establish the correct orbit, the spacecraft shot into space and was lost. Not life threatening, but a big mistake. There is just so much more to consider.
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  3130.  @tonywilson4713  Another good example and good points.
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  3131. Very well done! China's food problems and vulnerability are really underplayed in western circles. If China goes all militaristic over say Taiwan, or India, then they starve. Plain and simple. Their land is poor. What I have read is that it takes three times the inputs as American farmland. Brazil has this vulnerability as well, by the way. So much for BRICS. Oh, by the way, Brazil has opened dumping investigations against China. Brazil is a major food supplier to China. China has also done a lot of stupid things recently that have been detrimental to their own agriculture. The main is all the dam discharges to protect Beijing and Xi's pet project, Xiong'an New Area. The resultant floods have devastated lots of farmland. Then, there is the drought in the norther plain and massive rains and flooding in the south. This is not a catalog of all the stupid things they have done, far from it. As for BRICS, that was the invention of a financial advisor. It made sense at the time in that context. As an alliance, or alternative to the US led order, it is a joke. You have two countries, India and China, that might soon go to war with each other. Of course, there is the situation you mention between China and Russia. Brazil is vulnerable, as I mentioned above. South Africa is a basket case. Russia is likely to fall apart. China probably won't make it till the end of the decade. Don't fear the BRICS. As for Africa, they are still suffering from the effects of imperialism. Most of the countries there are creations of the European powers. They have no objective reason for being and there have been many, many civil wars. Many are still going on. Several countries have broken apart already. Two examples are Ethiopia (Eritrea broke away) and Sudan (South Sudan split away). Africa is still what it was during colonial times, a source of natural resources. Otherwise, it is not significant. On the flip side, the US has been strengthening their alliances and creating new ones. Heck, they even got Japan and South Korea together. Think about that in light of the history between those countries. The US is even drawing closer to Vietnam, which has lots of beefs with China. NATO is being strengthened. The Swedes, who have been neutral for over two centuries are now part of NATO. The South Koreans are contemplating sending arms to Ukraine. The massive defense spending in China is both stupid and puzzling. Who is going to invade China. They have poor farmland, poor essential natural resources and then there are all those Chinese. China is toast.
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  3132. David, you are a treasure. Like my younger son I like reading science and mathematics, but also history. When I moved to the Mid-West from the East Coast, the movers informed us that we had 3K pounds of books. That was 29 years ago, I have not slowed down. Some are electronic, and I have many, many of those. But I still like physical books. I am about ten years younger than you but have still that connection to the physical book. In fact, some of my math, computer science and statistics books that I originally purchased as digital books, I have bought as physical books.
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  3133. I generally like your stuff, but laowhy86 does something at the beginning I find objectionable, and endemic on YouTube. He feels he has to tell us what EV means. Most YouTubers assume that they are talking to the most uninformed viewers they can think of. There is one science YouTuber who feels she has to explain spectroscopy every time she mentions it, for example. First, if someone is that ill-informed or uneducated, they will not be interested in your subject. They will just watch cat videos (which, after all is why YouTube and the Internet were invented). Second, I am watching this on the Internet! If there is a term or something I don't get, I will open up another tab and look it up. How do YouTubers not get that?
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  3134. You are right on target with your particular style of humor. This topic makes it so easy, and the entertainment value is off the charts. But seriously. I am still very bothered by the way these things work. With the changes coming in the world economy, especially de-globalization, capital will be needed. There is also the issue of lots of risk capital coming out of the market because of the retirement of the baby boomers worldwide. Captial costs are going up, and that will not change for a long time. I understand that VC firms operate by investing in lots of startup companies with the expectation that at least some will go big even as most crash and burn. But the problem I have is just what the opening describes in terms of the founders of these "pseudo-tech" companies, and realistically others as well. The massive waste of capital is just mind boggling. As long as this type of approach is limited to VC firms and private, high risk investment platforms, that is fine. Stupid, but fine. What gets me is the total lack of analytical skills involved. A lot of VC firms and even more traditional investment funds have been making stupid moves while shooting for the moon. Just a few examples include FTX (and many other crypto platforms) and investments in China, both in equities and physical manufacturing facilities. In all these cases, an analysis that looked at more than financial charts would have shown problems and would have avoided a lot of embarrassment and loss. Heck, there are even companies using sophisticated numerical techniques, that will tell you about the risks. Does no one in the investment community understand this or use these services? The fact is, what I see is that these high-powered investment platforms are always on the trailing, never the leading, edge.
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  3135. You guys need a written constitution. No American President can make a treaty without the Senate concurring, by a 2/3 margin.
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  3136.  @YourHineyness  That's great! In the old days, at the height of the Cold War (I miss the Cold War, long story) there was a satirical magazine. They would have maps of the world and China was just blank. It was called the "great big empty spot". China is not essential, and is growing less so by the day.
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  3137.  @stormy5877  Agree with you. On judges, they are people. Each has their own biases and approach. We can't get around that. That is why we have so many layers, so that, hopefully, gross mistakes will be corrected. Doesn't always work, though.
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  3138.  @manoshinandy5180  I agree with you on the F104. It was not intended to be a dogfighter. Its design goal was to be able to attack incoming bombers. For this it needed to be able to fly high and fast. That was also the case for the F106. The US situation, when they were designed, was different from that of the Soviets. To get to the US you had to fly a long distance. There would be no way to provide fighter cover. So, I think we are in agreement.
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  3139. What many -people don't remember is that the introduction of mainframe computers had a similar effect. Millions lost their jobs in back-office processing in companies in the insurance and banking industries primarily. Was there an overall dip in employment at the time. No. Not only were people redeployed, but new skills were needed (programmers, computer operators) and the companies could make their operations more efficient and developed and offered new products. The same will happen with AI.
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  3140. The Pettis comment is quite telling. The phrase "politically contentious process" hides a lot of meaning. Specifically, it hides the massive part corruption plays in the CCP's operation. You might point to Xi's anti-corruption campaign, but this would be wrong. Xi uses this effort to go after his rivals, not to change the system. If he did try to fundamentally change the system, either he would be deposed, or the whole thing would collapse. This is another example of how economic and financial types talk about these things. They basically assume all systems are similar. Housing is the best example of this. There is no financial theory or experience that matches China. The CCP is seen by the finance types as using traditional levers to try to support the sector. Any mathematically rational approach would tell one that the whole sector needs to be torn down and rebuilt. There is no example of an economy building enough housing for twice its population. By the way, a lot of this overbuilding was driven by corruption.
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  3141. Sliced bread is abhorrent. Slicing bread is easy and simple. Even before I had a good bread slicing knife I could do it. For a long time, in my early 20s (decades ago) I made all my own bread. The whole premise is just ludicrous.
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  3142.  @gumdeo  Thanks. Any idea why they were put together after WWI?
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  3143.  @gumdeo  That makes sense. Thanks.
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  3144.  @Kelderon  And a whole lot better than the MSM.
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  3145.  @BoyceBars  Brilliant! I can just picture it. Hopefully Peter will see your comment.
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  3146. I generally like your content and have one of your books. What I wonder about is the way in which you and most people in finance talk about China. It is not a system with its own rules that just differ from those of say the US and UK. It is basically a system of no rules except the will of the CCP. This is not an exaggeration. I will give some examples. First is the legal system. The top judge (his official title eludes me right now) has actually gone on record saying that the role of the court is not to enforce the law, but to enforce the will of the CCP. You sort of hinted about that but consider what that means. Basically, no rule of law in finance (or anything else for that matter). Participate in such a system at your own, considerable, risk. Another interesting point is the attitude of the CCP to the stock market. As far back as Deng Xiaoping the possibility of just shutting the stock markets down has been around. Deng basically said, we can have this, but if it does not advance our cause, we will shut it down. Talk about this has surfaced again. They might just decide to do that in the near future. The property market is, of course, a big driver in all of China's problems today, on top of the geopolitical tensions, which in no way contributed to the property sector's woes. The property developers had become literal Ponzi schemes, Not Ponzi like, but literally. Some also talk about the local governments and their debt, which is closely tied to the property sector, as a newer, bigger, Enron. I had been thinking that, and now lots of people are saying it. The central government was right to try to do something about the property developers, but their actions were so ham fisted and uninformed that they may well have totally tanked the economy just by that one action. On top of that they are doing lots of other stupid things at the same time. There are lots of other differences in the system that need to be stressed, and are much more important than some rule differences, but I have gone on too long already. The main thing is that China does not even belong in the conversation when talking about finance and the rest of the world.
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  3147. Actually, what you report they are saying is quite reasonable. This whole move toward a '"United States of Europe" totally ignores the differences between the US and Europe. In the US, all these European nationalities, as well as many other nationalities, meld together using one language. It grew organically over a period of time. Actually, the US doesn't have an official language, per se. Going back to the economic roots of what became the EU, without a lot of the crazy regulation, would be a great step.
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  3148. Russia will fall. Actually, there are geopolitical analysts that have been predicting this, and it has nothing to do with Ukraine. Between their demographics, appalling politics and downright racism, the Russian Federation was slated to fall apart. I mention the demographics because the Russian ethnicity is on its way to becoming a minority. They are also one of the last empires. What comes next will probably be a period of warlordism. By the way, China is going the same way for similar reasons. There might well be a rump Russian state, but it will be a shadow of what it is now.
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  3149. I have seen some videos by or with Jacob Barandes where he talks about alternatives to Hilbert spaces. These might be instructive.
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  3150.  @CptJistuce  Love it!
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  3151. The language is imprecise, and this has meaning. In the first example, an individual was stated to have invested 1.5M yuan to purchase a property. His down payment was 400K yuan. That is the amount he invested. The mortgage for the rest was invested by others.
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  3152. The analysis i the first segment where the blocs are compared on overall characteristics such as GDP, population and land area is an important part of the debate. At one point the number of countries is mentioned, then "walked back" as being unimportant. I mention all this because we see in debate about global issues (economy, war, resources) this number of country metric being brought up often. The fact is that most of those countries were set up by the Europeans, mostly as a way to administer their empires. The tension within those countries and the resulting instability and relative lack of economic development is a result of this. Just look at the tribal conflicts within countries in Africa. Why don't the Kurds have their own country? Who put together large Suni and Shia populations in places like Iraq? What the heck is Afghanistan? Then, of course we have the whole Indian subcontinent. It has since broken down into three countries from the one the British had, but Pakistan could easily break up into two or three countries. Oh, well, another rant driven by the crazy, stupid and insulting rhetoric of the CCP. Yes, bring on Cold War 2.0.
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  3153. There is lots of talk about a long war. I don't see it. Yes, Russia is big. But modern wars are industrial wars. The latest reports I have seen indicate that Russia is running out of workers, specifically industrial workers. Unlike Ukraine, or the Soviets in WWII, Russia does not have big industrial powers working for it. Besides the casualties, Russia lost up to 1M men of military age when they left the country. We also see videos and pictures of Russian troops showing that many are very old (for military men). Even before the war Russian demographics were bad, very bad. Life expectancy for Russian men was low. So, to say it again, I don't see it.
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  3154.  @snipingflute4346  Didn't know that. Hilarious.
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  3155. The words of the student at about 3:30 forward are so true. When Xi talks about socialism with Chinese characteristics he is talking gibberish. As the student in this video points out, Marxism is a foreign concept. The form of it practiced by the Soviet Union and the CCP is Marxism-Leninism. In other words, Marx as interpreted and implemented by Lenin. What that came down to is a new form of oligarchy. If you look at the three forms of government that have existed since ancient times you will see the crux of the situation. The three forms are aristocracy, democracy and oligarchy. This refers to where the leaders are selected from. Look it up. It will become clear. Marxism-Leninism is a form of oligarchy. That is why, even after communism fell in the Soviet space, Russia continued as it did. All those with real power come from the power elite, not some hereditary aristocracy or from the demos. The nomenclature in Russia is becoming hereditary and this might morph into some sort of aristocracy. We are seeing something similar in China and the CCP with the phenomenon of the "princelings". Those who say democracy is not the end-game in politics are just plain stupid (that is the nicest way I can say it). First, and foremost, allowing leaders to arise from the whole population is always the best approach. This is true in business (so many examples there) as in politics. Don't get me wrong, it does not always work, but the exceptions often prove the rule. Aristocracies often produce incredibly weak and incompetent leaders. Just look at the history of China. Oligarchies generally degenerate as well. No system is perfect, but some are destined to fail.
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  3156. The real question is who are the rebels? While the government action is reprehensible, will we find a situation like Syria, where it was hard to support the rebels there because many of them are jihadists, and worse. Look at how strong ISIS became in Syria. So, until we know better who is fighting and what they are fighting for, it will be hard to have an opinion one way or the other. Often people like Stuart Ramsay bring us the humanitarian disaster part, but not the essential political part. It seems like a lot of the insurgents are groups representing ethnic minorities. The British, of course, set the stage for this, as they had done around the world, by pitting ethnic groups against each other, and then collecting these disparate groups into a "nation". It was a very economical way for them to control their empire. So, next time bring us someone who can talk about the essential issues and players in this situation. You need to go beyond what is going wrong, an tell us why.
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  3157. You are correct about the North Koreans. The really striking thing is to see a North Korean soldier next to a South Korean soldier. Decades of depravation and starvation has resulted in the North's people actually being physically much smaller in stature than those in the South.
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  3158. At the time of Jiang's death there were reports that Moscow used the threat of exposing "indiscretions" Jiang committed in Russia to get him to sign those treaties.
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  3159. China will experience this deflation more than just about any other country. The structure of their economy basically guarantees failure. The source of that failure is the investment sector. This has driven most personal investment into just one area with little or no alternative. The idea of open investment markets is for people and companies to have many alternatives for investment. China denies this to its citizens. They are basically screwed. This is because one of their only options is dead. It is not coming back. Never! The Chinese can't even move money to other economies that are growing (unless they are very rich). By funneling all personal investment for ordinary people into one sector, that sector has grown too large. When that collapses, it is over.
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  3160. You talk about buttons and switches vs the giant iPad. This is interesting in light of something I heard recently. It is from Europe, and the authorities there seem to be wanting to push things back to buttons and switches. The giant iPad is just too complex and often more of a distraction than utilitarian. It is seen as a safety concern.
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  3161. Jake, on the timing, it might be instructive for you to read about D-Day. It was delayed both because of weather and training. The buildup of weapons was also a factor.
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  3162. I wonder about this whole topic. For one thing, the whole issue some people have the seeming fact that the universe can be described by numbers and equations is kind of silly. What is the alternative? For another thing, I am not sure that trying to explain many of the issues brought up in this video is actually a question for science. This may well be one of the reasons that science seems to have lost its way. The questions being asked are more in the realm of metaphysics. Physics, and science in general, is the description of what is. Engineering is the use of that description to manipulate the physical realm. Nowhere in there is the question of why such and such a number, etc. is included, or necessary. That is not to say that the question is not interesting, it is just not science.
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  3163. In the 2000s I used to get after action reports, especially from Iraq. Don't ask. I remember one where a group of contractors were using ARs in .50 Beowulf. There was one series of photos where they broke down a concrete wall section with their guns. There was another of an insurgent who had been shot in the head with one. Serious stuff.
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  3164.  @blueclover9918  Thanks.
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  3165. You are correct, the man is an idiot. A tube with an air-hockey table. An air-hockey table is just the opposite of what the hyperloop is supposed to be. Love these videos. They show how stupid the investing community is. Musk is right up there with SBF.
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  3166. Oh, you think the CCP is worried about some major institutions experiencing problems? Pretty much every financial institution in China, including the big state-owned banks, are heavily invested in the property market. The real value of the underlying collateral is well below what is reported. The default rate is above, maybe well above, what was seen in the US in the 2008 crisis. If these institutions were in jurisdictions with reasonable, independent, regulation, they would have been closed down by now. That IS NOT an exaggeration. What is infuriating about this move by the CCP, and the talk around market indices generally, is that the analysis is that of a day trader. I have nothing against day traders per se. As long as it is a legitimate way to make money, then I am fine with it. One caveat with this is the experience of the 1990s and early 2000s. Day trading was all the rage. People were quitting their jobs and putting all their money into high frequency trading. The markets were irrational, partly based on trading activity. Training for traders became a big business in itself. When it all came crashing down, there was a spate of murders of the people who had trained the traders. I mean literally. People were "going postal" (look it up) on the training firms. By the way, the number of adds, and videos, for this training I see on this platform are very reminiscent of those times. Just saying. So, when the financial press goes all gaga over the CCP announcing a policy I begin to worry. Have you noticed that it doesn't seem to matter what the policy is. If this is the level of analysis, then we are all at risk.
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  3167. It is somewhat rich for anyone in the EU to pan the French for "protectionist" attitudes. The whole thing is a protectionist cartel, and that is not an exaggeration. As for TTIP, I participated in some on-line dialogs with German groups at the time it was under consideration. A lot of the concerns were shared by "civil society" groups that had fully bought in to the EU rhetoric.
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  3168. Whoa! What is with the map at about 14:53? It labels Vietnam as French Indochina. A bit out of date, don't you think?
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  3169. The issue is that the government does not have a clue as to what is the right thing to do in this pandemic. They also have no idea of what the achievable goal is. There is no way to eliminate death from this disease. What we should stive for is herd immunity. That can come from vaccines or exposure. I wonder about all this emphasis on vaccines (and I am fully vaccinated). I watch a program on YouTube, and one of the regulars is vaccinated, and has gotten the Kung Flu twice. What is going on here? It was never severe but being vaccinated did not help in avoidance. The real issue is not avoidance but limiting the severity. From an individual's perspective that is all that matters. This is a flu. Most people who die with the flu die from something else. In the UK, it turns out that only 17.5K died because of the Kung Flu itself. All the others who are listed as having died of the Kung Flu (many times that number) really died from co-morbidities. This is also true of the common flu. Promoting general health, which means a massive change in diet, will do way more than all the vaccines and drugs we pump into the population. I have seen it myself, and in many other people. I have seen people lose weight and actually beat diabetes. I have lowered my blood pressure just by changing diet and losing weight. I am actually better off without a traditional doctor's ministrations. Just getting rid of sugar in the diet and limiting or deleting junk food would improve people's lives. Does the medical profession support this? NO! That is the travesty. The medical profession is fantastic is you have an acute problem. On the other hand, they have NO answers for life issues. In fact, you should ignore them as far as that goes.
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  3170. All of the issues attributed in the report to the populists are things the government should be doing.
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  3171. There is a simple and all-encompassing explanation for all these phenomena. It is "global warming" or "climate change". That's the reason for anything that happens these days.
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  3172. @Shiba Emoon Actually just ordered some cod liver. Coming in a few days. Love liver in general and am now pescatarian. Listening to this channel and others, as well as my own experience and knowledge, I have eliminated processed foods and drink. Changed my diet a few years back, mostly because of a divorce. Have not been to a doctor in probably a decade. Have not even taken so much as an aspirin (I think most of the stuff in the house is out of date). Admittedly, I never had major problems, but I lost weight, my blood pressure is normal and my sh*ts are good. My GI tract actually feels good. The only issue I have had when, at Dr. Ekberg's urging, I got macadamia nuts. Only time I had an issue pooping.
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  3173. Bull! Manufacturing moving from one country to another is a constant occurrence. China's large impact is only 30 years old. By the beginning of the 20th century the US produced 50% of the world's manufactured goods. Then, after WWII, manufacturing moved to Japan starting in the 1970s. Then, in the early 1990s the move to China. The guy in this video can't see the forest for the trees. If he thinks he has such a "complex" integrated supply chain in China for textiles, then he should look at other industries. One example I was close to was a new cell phone plant built in the Chicago suburbs in the 1990s. In short order it was moved to China in the early 2000s. That is a more complex supply chain and manufacturing process, and they did it. Many other industries did as well. The thing people forget is that these things are done (moving manufacturing) by smart people with sufficient capital. They could literally go anywhere. The last century has shown that.
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  3174.  @4end  Great deal. My friend, and attorney, offered to sell me a 13. I just decided to get the latest instead. I will certainly use if, as you say, for many years to come.
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  3175. The official explanation that the holiday explained the deflation seems suspect to me. While there may be some discounts to stimulate demand, won't there also be price hikes on desirable items?
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  3176. In the Korean War, after the North had pushed the South and their American allies into a pocket, the South and allies pushed them all the way to their northern border in a matter of months. At least the North Koreans back then had combat experience fighting the Japanese and fighting in the Chinese Civil War. It took 1.5M Chinese troops to get back the original territory of North Korea. By then the North's army had been decimated. Since then, they have had no combat experience. Why Putin would want another inexperienced army involved is beyond me. But they say he is the master strategist.
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  3177.  @pauljackson2409  Edward was a Nazi sympathizer. All of the books I have read on the subject are clear on that. He was not alone in the British elite.
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  3178. Always find Peter insightful. I have read all his books, starting with the fourth one. What he said at the end is exactly what I am experiencing. Being a geopolitics and news junkie, I find that the current world situation is like watching Peter's predictions play out in real-time, and I often say so. The funny thing is that I don't hear much from Ray Dalio these days. I got a book titled "The Fund", by Rob Copeland which is about Bridgewater and Dalio, but I haven't read it yet. I think that needs to move up my list.
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  3179. No magazine capability and a weight of 40 oz. No thanks. I think the HP from Springfield Armory is a much better option. It solves a couple of small issues and has magazine (and many parts) compatibility with the original. With the 15-round magazines from MEC-GAR, there is no need to change the mag.
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  3180.  @jaydee6268  No, not that one. During the Cold War there was always talk about this gap and that gap. They referred to a gap in capability or stuff. The one I am thinking of is the missile gap, Such "gaps" were often used by the military industrial complex to justify more spending. It wasn't always wrong, but it was often funny.
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  3181. So, why do you have a photo of an American attack jet (looks like an A7 Corsair II) at 1:07? No pictures of Russan aircraft?
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  3182.  @samsonsoturian6013  Absolutely correct! By the way, many of "clients" I mention were overweight and some outright obese. Such people were probably in the majority. And this is at a food pantry. Just in general, many of our problems in the US are "first world problems" that people in the rest of the world find puzzling and just plain stupid. Actually, there is not a world-wide food problem. There hasn't been in a long time. I have read that we produce 1.5 to 2.0 times more calories than we need as a planet. The problem, as always, is distribution and cost. It has been so since I was young and became aware of the issue (over half a century ago). There were always famines here or there, often driven by war and conflict and the food would be found. The exceptions, in places like Mao's China during the Great Leap Forward were all caused by politics. Another example is the Holodomor in Ukraine. There was no shortage of food worldwide at the time. It was all politics. No, there is a bigger problem, especially of China and Russia get their way in reshaping the "world order". The problem is that the order, led by the US and its allies, has allowed anyone, anywhere to trade and become specialized. This means, and this is the crux of the matter, that many places have grown in population well beyond the carrying capacity of the land locally. This is fine if world trade is stable and safe. That period is about to end. The most glaring example of this is, of course, China. Africa is another example. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of those regions. Another example is Egypt. In the post WWII world order they switched from growing wheat to cotton. Don't forget that as far back as during the Roman empire they we one of the breadbaskets of the Roman world. Cotton is a lucrative crop. They could sell cotton, buy food from outside and pocket the difference. Their population grew so much that, even if they abandoned cotton production altogether and went back to wheat, they would still not be able to feed themselves. What is the result of all this? In a "multipolar" world, split into different spheres of influence, lots of people will starve. That's the third world problem, and it is coming, and it is China and Russia that will precipitate it.
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  3183. So, will the practice of paying for one's rank be abandoned?
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  3184. I am impressed with Rubio, and Trump's foreign policy in general. As far as NATO is concerned, one must consider the history. It was created when western Europe was prostrate after WWII. The US had 500K troops there during much of the Cold War going down to "only" 300K at the end. We still have 100K troops there. If you consider the threat, Russia, the EU plus the UK currently have a GDP ten times that of Russia. Their population is about three times as large. The role of the US should be, as the Secretary says, to act as a backstop, not the lead. The Ukrainians have gotten a bit cocky lately, at least the ones I have followed. They think NATO needs Ukraine because they are such good warfighters. They reality is that they are at a level closer to that of the armies of WWI than of modern armies. To be fair, they don't have the tools the US and its NATO allies have. They are lucky, in a perverse sort of way, that the Russians are incompetent. General Kellog made a great statement recently in an interview on Fox News. He pointed out that Ukraine has already lost many more troops, in three years, than the US lost in ten years in Vietnam. They have executed four offensives (often referred to as counteroffensives). Three were successful, but in each case, they relied on subterfuge (a good thing in war) and the unpreparedness and incompetence of the Russians. In the fourth, they failed because they went up against prepared defenses. That was actually the most important one. They are good at defense, but don't have the tools needed for offense. It takes years to develop the expertise and equipment to match what NATO can deploy to be successful at such offensives. Their only hope of actually getting back all their territory is if Russia fails. This could be a breakdown of the army or a general breakdown of the Russian Federation. Both are quite possible, but how long will that take? Do the Ukrainians have that kind of time. Trump was right that the killing has to stop. Both countries were in demographic decline before the war. It is now much worse. I am very encouraged by Secretary of State Rubio in that role and by President Trump's aggressive foreign policy.
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  3185. Very good points. I liken AI to Big Data (full disclosure, I used to teach Big Data classes, and have involvement with it). Big Data was going to revolutionize the world. Well, it has in a way, but mainly as a tool. It is also a tool that is not used very well, and the types of things I used to expect are not happening. Take YouTube ads for example. Even though I am known to the platform, I still get ads from companies I have bought from for the same products I have already bought. You know the old advertising adage: I know half my ad spend is going to waste, but I don't know which half. Well, it does not seem to be getting better. I see the same thing in AI, especially in the creative sphere. I was looking at an art site and for each creator using AI all the faces seemed to be the same. There are maybe two or three types. One is obviously more Asian, and the other more European in appearance (remember this is a moderate sample). They seem to be stuck in a loop. It is actually somewhat boring after the real thing. The thing is that no matter what the technology the old database adage of "garbage in, garbage out" still holds. Another way to look at it is that most statisticians will admit that they spend 80% of their time on data quality, as opposed to making inferences. Good thing, too, or there would be way fewer jobs in the field. It is also not surprising. Data is not generated with the end goal of making inferences. Actually, one can learn from this cleansing process. Perhaps something like this will happen in AI, with the help of organic intelligence, of course.
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  3186. The left is operating according to Dr. Goebbels playbook. It is literally that bad. I will let you draw your own conclusions about what that implies. As for politics, it is no longer the left right divide that matters. This used to pit labor against ownership. It is that simple. This goes back to the French Revolution where the term originates. Politics should be about values, not identity.
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  3187. Sitting here with my morning coffee and cigar watching Tony's video (after Peter Zeihans's). A good way to start the day. On the foreign investment front, the Japanese government actually has a fund for companies moving out of China, either back to Japan or to other countries. It has tens of billions of dollars in funding. As for the talks between diplomats being a good thing, having studied a lot of history and having known some diplomats, just the fact that they are interacting may not be a great indicator. Just saying.
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  3188. Musk is a charlatan. Autonomous driving features (Autopilot) were added to EVs to help justify the high price tag. This has nothing to do with the whole rationale behind EVs which were developed to limit CO2 emissions. This would be a private commercial matter except for one thing. Subsidies. Those subsidies were meant to increase adoption of EVs for environmental reasons. Those subsidies are paid for by the taxpayers. The companies, all of them, in the US, China and the EU, have been diverting the money into self-driving features. It is a good thing that subsidies are being withdrawn in many places. The industry needs to stand on its own. They are misallocating funds away from the main purpose of their product for strictly marketing reasons. The thing is they are failing. The fact is that such features can easily be added to most current ICE vehicles. Just cast your mind back a few years to self-parking cars. Is that even still a thing? The other thing is that Tesla, and now Ford, are being investigated for fatal crashes involving their autonomous driving systems. These are not one offs. And don't get the idea that I am anti-technology or anti this technology. I have taught on-line courses on multi-sensor fusion, with the main application example being automotive. I have a long history with sensor electronics and processing going back several decades. Most of my early experience was with military and space applications. Heck, I even saw attempts by the military to develop self-driving vehicles for the battlefield in the 1980s.
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  3189. The Cultural Revolution! Long live the Cultural Revolution! I jest. I have known people who lived through it. Bad, not good.
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  3190. The idea of chipping away at dollar dominance is a joke. First, China is in no position to do this. Their currency is not freely convertible, and the capital controls it has in place make it unusable as a reserve currency. Second, chipping away at the dollar, considering its dominance in international trade, would take decades, many decades. China does not have decades. The EU tried this with the euro. When they had their liquidity crisis, they raided the banks of member countries. That ended the euro's rise as a reserve currency. Even if there was a move to go to gold, don't forget, the US gold reserves are four times that of China. The top four countries in terms of gold reserves are all G7 nations. China is fifth. The US reserves are greater than the next three combined. Second, China does not have decades. They probably don't have until the end of this decade. Now, if countries want to trade without using an intermediary currency, there is no problem with that. If, say, Saudi Arabia wants to sell China oil and receive yuan and turns around and buys products from China using those yuan, that has little or no effect on the dollar or the US. Now, this only really works if the trade is fairly evenly balanced. The additional issue with yuan is the aforementioned capital controls. Russia has already run into this. They were accepting yuan for oil. Of course, these yuan were kept in Chinese banks. When Russia wanted to take them out to buy dollars for other purposes China said no. So, what is the point? Many of the BRICS countries, including China, Russia and Brazil, became more prosperous because of the US led rules-based world order. They have neither the military nor economic power to replace that. They will only become poorer in a multipolar world.
    2
  3191. Actually, I believe that the Marines tended to use 20 round magazines in their Thompsons.
    2
  3192. The idea that you need a theory before you should fund experiments is totally ahistorical. Think back to all the experiments around electricity and magnetism, for just one example. The theory, as is often the case, followed the experiments. There are lots and lots of examples. As for DARPA funding, you are clearly not informed about how it works and what it is for. DARPA often funds research based on unrealized, and seemingly unrealizable, requirements. I know, I have worked on some. Just look up the name. The ARPA should tell all. By the way, $1.3M is not a lot in terms of what DARPA funds.
    2
  3193. Pettis is correct, of course, but he leaves two things out. The first is that we see many examples of infrastructure projects that cause ongoing debt and may never be positive. Examples include High Speed Rail (about $1T in debt) and the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge. There are lots of others. The other thing Pettis leaves out is corruption. I have seen estimates that 50% or more of the money allocated to these projects is siphoned off through graft at all levels. This is significant and explains the "tofu dreg" phenomenon.
    2
  3194. A lot of investment strategy is geared toward managing risk. The CCP seems to not understand this.
    2
  3195. Paul Wood is woefully ill informed about Biden. Experience is one thing. That just means time in the job. As a former Obama Defense Secretary said, Biden has been on the wrong side of every foreign policy issue. I have seen the same thing. Mr. Wood should stay informed.
    2
  3196. Vietnam, like Korea, was a United Nations mission. Iraq, like Afghanistan, was in response to attacks by people hosted there, on American soil. The first Iraq War was sanctioned by the UN Security Council. It had the goal of expelling Iraq from Kuwait, which was achieved. The second Iraq war was probably a mistake, but Saddam Hussein made it easy to mobilize allies. He took over another country by force (Kuwait). He used chemical weapons. He did this in his war with Iran and on his own people. He left ambiguous the idea that he might have nuclear weapons, as well as having demonstrated his willingness to use chemical and biological weapons. Afghanistan presents different problems. The Soviets went in to support a Communist government. The US went in to destroy those that had directly attacked our territory.
    2
  3197. So, Jordan, when are you going to move to the US? One solution I am seeing here in the US is to make the tech companies utilities. Then, they could not refuse to carry any content, just like a phone company or an electric utility.
    2
  3198.  @lillyie  If you want to get a good idea what is happening in China, just look at Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s. The parallels are truly amazing.
    2
  3199.  @charliepearce8767  Life. I don't know how old you are, but at the height of the Cold War things were different. Actually. China and Russia are taking us back there, so I guess now it becomes the same.
    2
  3200. Welcome back Tony. "Well below economists' forecasts." Where have I heard that before? Economists and analysts often seem to be off on those forecasts. That will be my next analysis target. I only get worked up about it (of course, not hard to do) because these forecasts seem to move markets. The only reason people pay attention to them is to try and get a jump on the market. Otherwise, they are meaningless.
    2
  3201. Putin invade again? Think about it. Unless there is a total regime change in Moscow the west will not let up on the economic pressure. The army he attacked with took him 20 years to build. During that time, he had plenty of money from oil and gas and access to western technology. And yet, even given all that, he botched the initial invasion. That military, by the way, including the equipment and most of the trained soldiers is gone. Putin does not have the resources to build this up again to that level, which we have seen was inadequate. Ukraine, on the other hand, will have the support of the west. Just the EU plus the UK have an economy ten times bigger than Russia's before the war. The US economy is almost 15 times larger. Modern wars are as much dependent on economy as on manpower. Ukraine will have access to the best modern technology while Putin will have the Chinese crap. Most of the Chinese stuff is a cheap knockoff of the Soviet technology. The other issue is just plain demographics. The reality is that both countries, Russia and Ukraine, were in demographic decline before the war. Russia is getting the worst of this, but Ukraine is hurt as well. This is one reason Trump says the killing has to stop. He is not wrong. What we need is for regime change in Russia. Then Russia can be taken back into the fold of the west and together we can go after the Chinese. I have actually seen analysts saying that. Of course, both Russia and China are in dire straits right now and most likely will not last long with their current regimes. We in the west just need to stay strong.
    2
  3202. Insightful as always. This demographic change is, I expect, going to drive fundamental changes in capitalism. I fully expect it will strengthen it. I have been on all sides of this, management, ownership and labor. Making change is generally good, except for the entrenched interests. What I think has changed is that we are no longer capital constrained. I know Peter is talking about how it will become more expensive, but that will not be a major factor. The last decade or so is not normality. Cheap or zero cost capital is not the part of economic history at any time except right after the 2008 financial crisis. What this reminds me of is the expectation that the 1950s was a normal period in American society. Are you kidding me? Just look at the situation with China, and the developing world (started typing "third world", then stopped myself, then didn't, oh my). The west has been throwing capital at it for over 100 years now. I am talking about the "modern" economy. Capital is not the constraint. We in the west always have much more capital than we can absorb here and have been looking abroad to deploy it for centuries now. Just look at the SBF situation! I rest my case. Look at it this way. For a long time, we were production constrained. (<<<<NOTE: This sentence was flagged in red by YouTube when I typed it. I cut and pasted it and now it seems fine! Beware the algorithm!) Before that it we were resource constrained. None of these is true today. We can have a whole debate on the resource issue, but if you argue against there being enough you will lose. What we have is unreasonable policies regarding resources, not a problem with the resources themselves. For example, I just saw testimony in Congress where a Congress person just claimed that her state (I think it was New Mexico) had enough lithium for 80 years of US requirements. Look at the situation with oil. Weren't we supposed to reach peak oil sometime in the last century? Come on man. The number of examples is legion. Change is coming. It will be interesting to see what form it takes.
    2
  3203. The first thing, right out of the gate, is the statement that there is a need for policy support. Say what? This is a market. One of the features of a market is that it sends out pricing signals to investors. If the government is a major investor, or controls major investors, then this whole mechanism breaks. If you are a foreign investor, or a private Chinese investor, you need to get out, like yesterday. China is a communist country. Any capitalist who invests in China does so at a great risk. The question is, was that aspect of risk made clear to their clients. If not, I think that there may be actions by those clients. It will be interesting to see. The CCP, and Xi, are basically economically illiterate.
    2
  3204. I first saw a F-5 in person as a kid in 1965. It was at Westover AFB in Massachusetts which was near to where my father grew up. We would go to the Springfield area often from our home in the Washington, DC area. The event where we saw the F-5 at was an open house, and an example of just about everything the USAF had, from the F-5 to the B-52 (which my father did some design work on in his work at an Army weapons lab). It was cool. We were also given a slick publication with a description of the entire USAF inventory. I believe I still have it somewhere.
    2
  3205. Forget fusion. This has been this close for over 50 years. I have been following this stuff since I was a kid. Even when I studied physics at university. in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium (I later switched to computer science), it was always 20 to 30 years off. The problem is not doing it. Heck. we do it nuclear bombs. The problem is more in the engineering. Making devices that can reliably generate power over a long period of time We are not close to that. As for alternative nuclear fission reactor designs, these have been around since the 1980s. I worked for a large corporation that had a nuclear division. I was in aerospace, and in a reorganization we picked up the nuclear reactor research lab (we were working on spaced based reactors). The new ones may not be the same as those, but there have been alternatives to our current reactor designs for over four decades. Even using our current designs, this is a very safe and efficient technology. Just look at the record.
    2
  3206. The phraseology "forcing civil servants to take pay cuts" puzzles me. Is China that different from the rest of the world? The correct way to phrase it is "cutting civil servants pay". In most places, the pay levels within enterprises, public, private and government, are set from the top down. I bring this up because I am trying to understand if there is something going on here that is different from what one would expect.
    2
  3207.  @skippyfixit  Good point. I actually have not been clean shaven for about half a century. I do trim a couple of times a week, though.
    2
  3208. Germany is a non-entity in foreign affairs. We only talk about them because of their large economy. Because of their history, they are an enigma on the world stage. In fact, they are quickly becoming an irrelevance through their actions. In Europe, both France and Great Britian have nuclear weapons. That gives them a major influence in international affairs. Germany does not. They should not and will be prevented from having them by all of their neighbors. That is correct.
    2
  3209.  @BoycottChinaa  I never forgot. In one job I had we were given flash cards to study before a class at the corporate training ground. Some had latitudes and longitudes. These were the main missile fields in the USSR. I also am very familiar with treaties we signed with Ukraine and Russia. Of course, I have always been a political junkie with special interest in foreign affairs.
    2
  3210. The Biden administration is actively colluding with the tech giants. So, the answer is no. The legislature may do something about it. We'll see. On the other hand, why don't more countries develop their own. There is really nothing about them that is technically advanced, as far as sharing of information goes. Much of it is public domain. Their technical "advances" are mostly concerned with serving ads.
    2
  3211. I generally agree with you VDH, except for your characterization of the Ukranian military. They are crap at offensive warfare. They are fighting an attritional war against a much larger country. How stupid is that? If our military did that the generals would all be fired, and rightly so. General Kellog pointed out, at the beginning of his assignment as a negotiator, that Ukraine has lost several more times the number of troops than the US did in ten years in Vietnam. Even wonder why they don't publish casualty figures on their own side. They publish greatly detailed accounts of Russian losses in men and equipment. They also are being trained by NATO and private US trainers. Why do you think that is? Their military roots are in the Soviet system.
    2
  3212. Why would Chinese celebrate Christmas. It is a religious holiday. This all reminds me of a picture I once saw. It was in a store in Hong Kong, I think. It was Santa nailed to a cross.
    2
  3213. There is a good book which includes chapters on the M60 and M14, among many others, by an Army Officer and engineer who worked on these. He was based at Springfield Armory. His name is Roy E. Rayle, and the book is "Random Shote".
    2
  3214. The lies in the statements of the Chinese officials is breathtaking. The capricious nature of CCP policy is what is driving the whole movement. This is especially true of their attitude toward intellectual property (IP). I have seen firsthand IP theft experienced by clients of mine. One thing that is funny about CCP resistance to "de-risking" is that many Chinese companies are participating in the practice. We have already seen several companies do this. I recently bought three items from a company that originally manufactured in China. Two of the three were made in Vietnam.
    2
  3215. Jonathan, the Taliban didn't kick the US out of Afghanistan. The US decided to leave Afghanistan. The withdrawal was done very badly to be sure, but it was done for American political reasons. Just to give some background, as far back as the 2000 presidential election George W. Bush ran on a platform that included a cessation of "nation building" activities by the US. Then 9/11 happened. That, including the whole GWT was a detour. This all goes back to Vietnam. There too, the US withdrew. Prior to that, though, was Korea where "nation building" has worked brilliantly. Unlike Ukraine, both in Vietnam and Afghanistan, the people the US was supporting were not willing to fight for their own freedom. So, the US has veered away from such engagement.
    2
  3216. Fully agree that the EU is experiencing and existential turning point. As for the EU being a peace project, come on man. If the US were not there amid the threat of the Soviets to the east, there would certainly have been more wars. It wasn't the EU. The EU we know today came into being AFTER the fall of the Soviet Union. I do have a problem with the "rule of law" comments you and many others make. While I may not like or agree with some of things the countries you are talking about do, the use of the term is a little disingenuous. Does this "law" come down from God? Come on man. The only way this works is in a truly federal system like that of the US. The abortion of a system the EU has was never slated to succeed. That is why some in the EU want to push for ever tighter integration. The problem is that they won't tell the people what that really means, which is a loss of national sovereignty. How many in the EU, made up of countries with centuries of history and disparate interests, would vote for that necessary integration? The EU does not provide common defense or a common tax system. When the majority disagrees with a country, the only real punishments they can mete out are fines or the withholding of subsidies. Is this how you understand rule of law? Whose law? Who enforces that law? The real alternative is to take the EU back to the status of a trading block. Some have called for that. It makes more sense given their history.
    2
  3217. What do you mean "so called" G7? That IS what they are called. It's a name. They can call themselves whatever they want. I would like to know why you use the terminology you did. You are implying something, and it would be good for your subscribers to know what it is.
    2
  3218.  @karlharrison2449  Your assessment of what is going on is flawed. The Ukrainians have been trained by superior Western militaries for at least the last eight years. They are showing the results. Finland and Sweeden joining NATO is purely their choice. If you think this is US interference then you are totally uninformed, or more likely a Russian bot.
    2
  3219.  @johnlerner5346  YES!!!!
    2
  3220.  @LuisA-pi3ds  That only matters if you are paid in dollars. Look at the data more closely. The multiple of average income for a house in China is many times what it is in the US. Look at the difference in average income, or GDP per capita.
    2
  3221. Moody's downgrade is perfectly reasonable. In fact, given the outright manipulation of statistics by the CCP, there should be a major risk factor added. As for the off-balance sheet borrowing, this reminds me of the Enron situation. That is what sunk them. Now, you have government doing it on a grand scale. One also has to consider that the distinction between local and central government actions is artificial. They are all controlled by the same party, the CCP, and directed by the party, for central government purposes.
    2
  3222.  @brucetownsend691  Yes, fully agree, of course. By the way, I notice the level of engagement for this channel is one of the highest, and best, that I have experienced on YouTube.
    2
  3223. The Germans took Crimea.
    2
  3224. You lost me when, at about 8:30, Kennedy used the term "high quality" in reference to Chinese EVs. There is ample evidence, both anecdotal and statistical, that this is not true. In fact, BYD's vehicles are death traps.
    2
  3225.  @jaydee6268  I have actually seen a couple of his videos. Frankly, I couldn't watch any of the for long. He is a fanboy. A lot of what he says shows a real ignorance of technology. He has one video where he claims that nuclear is more costly than renewables. What anyone who believes that ignores is the cost of energy storage. I could go on about that, but I will spare you. In fact, nuclear is one of the cheapest power sources in terms of cost at the point of delivery. It is true that it is expensive to build initially, but then so are a lot of the renewables, as we have recently seen with offshore wind in the US east coast. In addition, he pushes the same fallacy that many YouTubers who dabble in "science and engineering" content do. He projects from lab discoveries to something in full production. This rarely happens. The figures on sales in China, their manipulation, and the evidence of quality issues are well documented. On the quality issue, JD Power just put out a report, which covers cars sold in the US. Polestar, which is really a Chinese brand, has the worst record of all brands. Tesla is up there with them. In fact, Tesla and Rivian are only surpassed by Dodge, an ICE brand.
    2
  3226. Herman Hesse. Wow, that take me back to my youth in the third quarter of last century of the last millennium, when I first read Hesse. That was also the time when I first read Lao-tzu. Actually, your description reflects what was happening in the 1960s in the US, although for different reasons in a different environment.
    2
  3227. Not a ballistic missile. That should be obvious from the title of the video. Cruise missiles are so named because they are not ballistic.
    2
  3228.  @pablosskates7067  Yes Even the original sea routes with sailing ships were more efficient and "safe". They put the Silk Road, which Xi models the Belt and Road initiative on, out of business.
    2
  3229. Right off the bat, the rhetoric makes no sense. Like it or not, might does make right. That is what the whole of Marxist-Leninist ideology is based on. It is also what the whole of human history is based on. I am writing this with the clock on the video reading 2:47. Actually, I have been listening to the war diary of a German soldier on the Eastern Front in 1942. There is a point at which they are discussing a speech by Hitler. IT SOUNDS THE SAME! This is not just hyperbolae. Jealousy and ignorance seem to be the driving factors in both cases. China has never been a great power in the sense that the term was used in 18th and 19th century. In fact, China has not projected power for centuries. Ever wonder why? Ever wonder why the small countries of Europe could control China's trade through military means for so long? Ever wonder why the British could control so much territory? Finally, the reason behind the US led rules-based order has a lot to do with countries like China (and Russia) wanting to control their own spheres of influence. If the Chinese had not noticed, the US was slow to get involved in both world wars. In both cases there was a strong anti-war movement prior to the US being attacked. The US had always wanted to stay away from European wars (that is where most world conflict originated for the last 400 years or so) and that was the policy of the people and the government. What it all boils down to is that the Chinese and Russians want to go back to the world of the 19th century. They feel cheated that they didn't get to play the great power game. It is all a bit childish. It would be funny if the consequences were not so devastating.
    2
  3230.  @christianevanherck6023  Amazing detail. Thanks.
    2
  3231. Accelerating while in a turn is not a problem for a normal car. I have done it many times, in my younger days especially, in my little English sportscars. I have also done it in modern (21st century) sedans. I have to wonder if this is not a problem with newer cars that are basically "fly by wire" and have computer controlled "stability control". If that is not done correctly it can cause problems. After all, the SU7 was made by a phone maker, not an experienced auto maker.
    2
  3232. Protests are normal in democratic countries. In the US it is a protected right. In the 1970s, when I was living in Washington, DC (where I was born) I would walk from my apartment to an Indian restaurant (I was a vegetarian back then) and had to walk by the White House. There is a park right across the street, called Lafayette Park, where there was always a protest going on. Always. Perfectly normal.
    2
  3233.  @living_well_18  Sadly, that seems to be true.
    2
  3234.  @jirajira2872  Perhaps a more apt term.
    2
  3235. I don't know what Trump will do about Ukraine. On the other hand, I have been saying for a while that Biden has been disastrous for Ukraine. His "strategy" for Ukraine has either been nonexistent or detrimental. Remember Obama. Diplomacy, not military power. How did that go? There are people that speculate that Biden is just a figurehead and is being controlled by someone in the background. The speculation is someone is Obama. The Biden administration is full of retreads from the Obama administration. Jake Sullivan is a prime example. While there is a strong majority among the population and the Congress for Ukraine Biden's policies and approach have been foolish and untethered.
    2
  3236. @ Check your facts. Trump prevented the completion of Nord Stream 2 during his first term.
    2
  3237. @ Your comment was a bit garbled, but I think I agree with you. Only one thing, it is not that the US could not perform the role, but that it does not want to or need to. Let's hope the transition is peaceful. It does not have to end in violence.
    2
  3238. The comment at the end about the welfare state sounds all very good, but there is one major flaw. People who receive any benefit should work. Sometimes this is called workfare. The reason it is not as common as it should be is the unions. Having a population that does low end work at the direction of the government is perceived as lowering wages and dilutive of union power. Of course, I think the dynamics might be a bit different. If you are going to have to work anyway why not get a real job.
    2
  3239.  @vladimirbrovkin4052  Russia not fall apart? Well, you are in the minority as far as that goes. Recent surveys of geopolitical analysts have been giving the Russia falls apart scenario a better than 50% chance. Frankly, the breakup of the Soviet Union was just the first stage.
    2
  3240. Shekhar, since you are an avid reader of books on foreign affairs, I have a reading suggestion for you. The book is by Peter Zeihan and is titled "The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization". I encourage to read it. He has several prior books as well.
    2
  3241. Well, what you say in your first paragraph is, in the abstract, true, except for one aspect. The "horse trading" is how politics works. It is a feature, not a bug. On the other hand, the bill in question does not, objectively, violate your principle. The bill is a security assistance package. All these things can be seen as related. It is not like they are tying military assistance to funding a bridge in Ohio. These things were also tied together initially because it was assumed that there was something in it for almost everyone to support. Again, all things that are related. Finally, who decides what is related or not? You? Me? Come on man!
    2
  3242. This whole net zero, stop oil and gas exploration thing in the developed west is just bonkers. For one thing, how is it greener to get oil and gas from elsewhere when you have to ship it a long way. Also, if one does it locally then one can control how it is done. Do you think oil and gas extraction is cleaner in the Middle East or elsewhere? What this shows is that the people, like Miliband have no knowledge or understanding of the whole issue. Dumber than a bucket of rocks is the phrase that comes to mind.
    2
  3243.  @soniapinkney1342  As long as her parents, or her future husband, support her, no problem.
    2
  3244. Don't listen to the claims of "once a millennium" event, etc. In the town I live in we had once in a century events two or three years in a row. That was over 20 years ago, and we have seen nothing like it since. Weather is highly variable, and mostly local. I see all the reports about high temperatures in China, and elsewhere, but in the upper Midwest of the US we are seeing pleasant weather with mild temperatures and good, but not too abundant rain. If you judge climate by what happens where you live, then you will most likely come up with wildly different answers.
    2
  3245. All this cultural stuff is irrelevant. Russia, as it is now, will soon cease to exist. There are lots of scenarios. China taking territory in the east (this is a fairly high probability), warlords taking over other parts, breakaway republics, etc. Also remember that the Soviets have practiced Russification for decades, in Ukraine and all other parts of the USSR. This has not really worked. Even in many of the cities in southern Ukraine, which are Russian speaking, there is a strong attachment to Ukraine.
    2
  3246. Another fantastic video. The issues in the last piece you reference really get to the crux of the matter. I actually had just started reading the piece you referenced. Actually, Pettis also addresses the same issues. The problem is that all of the commentators on this issue assume that the Chinese system can change to a local consumption model. This would mean abandoning the whole CCP model. I fear that this is not possible. Even if there was a revolution, or some breakdown of the CCP, the result is very unlikely to be the emergence of a western style open democracy. The result is likely to be something more like the end of the Qing dynasty.
    2
  3247. What you say at about 4:15 is true. What strikes me is that, when I was at university (decades ago) one of my professors told me that we could find out it all wrong tomorrow. He didn't expect it, but that is always a possibility. And that is a hard science. Actually, over the centuries it has turned out that we were wrong about physics, and new theories came along. So, to expect it for history is the rational stance to take.
    2
  3248.  @drive2160  That is the biggest crime.
    2
  3249. Declining west? Really? What about China and Japan? At one time similar things were being said about Japan. Remember when Japan was going to overtake the US? That was a thing at the time. At least Japan is rich and can manage its decline. China, and all the other Asian "powers" have a lot to overcome to come up to the level of the west and cannot do it without investment from the west. China has ruined the appetite of the west for such investment. The idea of investment in any developing country for a developed country is that the developing countries will grow and become a market for more upscale goods from the developed countries. They will move up the value chain themselves. Then investment will move on to the next developing area. The issue seems to be that most developing countries get trapped in lower end. Bangladesh is a good case in point. It often comes down to government structure which maintains interference in natural market development.
    2
  3250. Bring back the Cultural Revolution! The purge is needed! The plain fact is that the Chinese people have supported the Communist Party for decades now. When they were making money, everyone was happy. All this talk about law is just so much drivel. Under a dictatorship there is no law, just the party's dictates.
    2
  3251. Wrong! The water would be heated, not by going through the nuclear reactor itself, but by going through heating elements driven by the reactor. Even current nuclear powered systems, including subs, ships and power plants do not rely on exposing the water driving the system to the nuclear fuel. A closed loop of liquid (not always water) is heated in the reactor. This then is used to heat other water to drive whatever process is needed. It would probably be the same here.
    2
  3252. Another example of Times Radio having on a charlatan showing the channel's TDS. Did you see the press conference Trump had today (12/16/2024)? Compare that to Joe Biden's press conferences.
    2
  3253. To think that Matt Walsh, or indeed you two, set people's opinions is just plain silly. I for one, watch many pundits on YouTube not to be told what to think, but to evaluate what they say and react. I f there are those that look to Matt Walsh or you two to be told what to thin, then they have very weak minds. These criticisms remind of my ex-wife when she did not have an argument to make in a debate. Who cares how you present your thoughts? Have you seen the kind of toxic crap that comes out of the left? Get over yourselves.
    2
  3254.  @hughmungus2760  I understand that, and that is what make the recent failures interesting. There are two ways they have failed. In the first instance, the ones that have been built recently have often washed away. There is lots of evidence of this, and it was happening before the typhons. In the second instance, the terraces as built are not amenable to mechanical harvesting. There are not enough people in the countryside to work this type of agriculture. Don't forget that in past times there were lots of peasants to work the land. I hope that clarifies things.
    2
  3255. Mike, at about 26 min. you talk about pollution and the environment (global warming). You conflate these two. They are completely separate. Electric cars have nothing to do with plastic bags in the ocean. This is a common mistake. It either means that you have accepted the woke stance on this, or that you really have not thought it through. CO2 is not a pollutant. Plastic bags, etc. are.
    2
  3256. The government intervention to try to save the housing market through manipulation of mortgage rates and terms is worrying. Don't forget that the 2008 financial crisis was precipitated by the mortgage market and US Federal intervention.
    2
  3257. You know the end is nigh. Putin just sacked Gerasimov and put the head of the KGB Bortnikov in charge of all Russian military forces defending Russia, and perhaps all Russian forces. Putting Bortnikov in charge of defending the homeland is so much like what Hitler did in WWII. At one point he put Himler in charge of the army defending the Reich. First in the west and then in the east. He failed both times. What a brilliant move by Zalenski and his generals.
    2
  3258.  @mito88  On that you are correct. In WWI and WWII, the early US neutrality was based on the UK being an imperial power. This was the stance of the populace, It was only our leaders that wanted to take sides. Frankly, although we have somewhat different vires, I have enjoyed the discussion. I hope you take it in the same way.
    2
  3259. So what if he is addicted to publicity. Lots of other people are too. Musk just happens to be one of the most recognizable. If there was nothing to him then you would not be talking about it. So, what is the point of the segment?
    2
  3260. A concomitant consequence of this operation may be a speeding up of the deployment of troops from various European countries to Ukraine. There has already been an offer from some Baltic countries. Frankly, I think the US should plan on basing two full heavy mechanized corps in Eastern Europe (Poland, Finland, the Baltics, etc.). During the Cold War (I miss the Cold War) the US had between 300K and 500K troops in Europe. The level today is 50K. Large deployments in Europe would also be a big help for recruitment into the US Army. If the US did this, it would free up troops from those "front line" states to go into Ukraine as backup to Ukranian forces. This would allow Ukraine to move more forces to the front line, with substantial allied reserves to immediately back them up if something happened.
    2
  3261.  @thomaswaldron5215  I was going to point that out as well. As that manufacturing moves out of China, the demand for the inputs will shift as well.
    2
  3262. Is small government what passes for "populism" in Europe? I was going to say that this must be a misunderstanding of the language, but this is a British channel.
    2
  3263. Superconductors under pressure have a limited application, I would think. The most impactful application of room temperature superconductors would be for power transmission, as you show in the screen background. So, how would you apply this theory to that scenario?
    2
  3264.  @dougaltolan3017  I agree with your first point. I am not so sure about the second. I don't have enough information to quantify that. If you do, it would be interesting. Finally, I am not saying that uses of room temperature superconductors are not important. What I am reacting to is the use of a graphic that is inappropriate to what is being discussed. These are all over YouTube.
    2
  3265. I can't believe I am hearing this. Music to my ears. What I am talking about is getting rid of the public sector and privatizing the government. In the end, the people doing the work are employees. It doesn't matter if they are "public" or "private" sector. That is just a matter of how they are organized and led. I could give lots of examples. I have always been private sector, as an employee or business owner. Once I was working on a NASA project. I was going to a meeting at the NASA facility. At the company I worked at we generally wore suits to work (it was the 1980s). I had noticed in earlier meetings that the NASA employees were very poorly dressed compared to us. I mentioned that to our deputy program manager as a potential problem. He said they know that you get paid more, you just had to make them aware that you were worth it. So, we got paid more, were smarter and made a profit, and were more productive. By the way, almost all the work done by NASA and frankly for the military is done by private companies. The NASA overhead is just crushing. Just look at what Musk is doing with Space X.
    2
  3266. At abut 18:00 the idea of a cyclic universe is mentioned. Interestingly, this is a serious theory today. One proponent is Nobel Prize Laureate Roger Penrose is one.
    2
  3267.  @Trigon_Lucas  You are correct. But I like to react. It is sort of sport. Yes, the Indians are pro-Russian. They pretended to be non-aligned but were always on the Soviet side. Until not long ago they were even blatantly socialist. This pains me a bit, since some of my best friends and plenty of neighbors are Indian.
    2
  3268. China is falling apart in real time right before our eyes. It is just as you said in your books (all of which I have read). With the zero COVID policy and Xi being "re-elected" I think the time frame you mentioned may be shortened. My financial advisor, who is a real macro and data guy, has been saying that he hoped Xi would be re-elected because Xi would put the Chinese economy under.
    2
  3269.  @clown6507  I fully agree. India also has a very multicultural environment. This gets messy at times, but it is also a strength. India, being an open society will grow and adapt in their own way, as most societies do. It is interesting that you mention the role of arranged marriages. My neighbors are Indian (born in India but now US citizens). Their children, a son and daughter, were born in the US. I am not sure about the daughter, but they arranged a marriage for the son. Actually, they picked one girl, and she came over from India to meet him and it didn't work out. Then they found a second one. That one took. She is beautiful, smart (had a MS in EE and now has a PhD). They have wonderful children (aren't they all). Back in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, when I first went to university, my two best friends (we shared everything, sometimes even girlfriends) were from India. The parents of one went back to India while he was an undergrad (his father was a diplomat). He had a long string of failed affairs and would often say that he was tired of it and just wanted his parents to arrange a marriage. Strangely, theirs was not an arranged marriage. They met at university in the UK. I have really lost contact with him, but I do know that he got married and had two sons. I do not know if it was an arranged marriage.
    2
  3270.  @littlekeyb6352  Not clear what you mean here. Which is oldest? Which is most successful? Interested to know.
    2
  3271.  @Juneisthebestmonth  Well, they need the money, don't they. Scaring off rich people seems to be having a detrimental effect on government revenues. They have to get it somewhere.
    2
  3272. The confusion of the Chinese between the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor is hilarious. In reality, the Secretary of State is considered the most senior cabinet member, and it is a position that has been in place since the beginning of the Republic. The National Security Advisor is a White House staff position created after WWII. As such, it is, in protocol terms, a lower-level position than the Secretary of State.
    2
  3273. The first island chain is NOT a US policy aimed at boxing in China. How ignorant can you be. The first island chain is a geographic feature. It has been a feature of the Chinese geography for centuries.
    2
  3274. The hate speech laws in the UK show that you do not have free speech. If people have ideas you do not like, and that are generally deplorable, then you should let them have their say and confront them. Shutting them down in public does nothing to suppress the ideas. When will you learn? In the US, we have the 1st amendment which allows people to say what they want. If we don't heat them we can't confront them. If you do this too much, you will have a very bad situation on your hands. Let the people talk, If you don't, they will go underground and will pop up in a most unpleasant way, That is the history of Europe, isn't it.
    2
  3275. That's interesting. In the 1920s, there were tariffs that the US imposed, and that Europeans imposed as well. I had to look that up. It is interesting because even in that atmosphere of tariffs, I have never heard of that being an issue in the Great Depression of 1929. So, your statement that tariffs could/would cause depression seems to be unsupported. There were several depressions in the US prior to the Great Depression, and none of them, as far as I can tell, had anything to do with tariffs.
    2
  3276. I have heard one Chinese commentator, based now in the US, who believes that Qin was being groomed as the successor to Xi. If she is correct, then this is indeed a problem for Xi and shows real division in the CCP.
    2
  3277. Every state made up? What about England and the UK? What about Greece and Italy, just to name a few.
    2
  3278. Well, this is indeed the time to try disruptive measures. It really can't get any worse. Maybe a currency board could work, but something radical like dollarization may be needed. With a currency that has lost something like 90% of its value, trying to find parallels with past situations is kind of silly. As for the Trump comparison, the real parallel is the disruptor aspect. Also, calling Trump a protectionist is kind of insulting and ignores the situation, especially vis-a-vis China. In China, there is massive manipulation by the government, open IP theft from state owned enterprises down to small manufacturers. It is state policy. Are you suggesting that constitutes a basis for free trade? That is beneath you Patrick. In the disputes with the EU, don't forget that the EU is a protectionist cartel. Generally, these situations require two players to be at odds. Why doesn't the US have a free trade deal with the EU. Remember TTIP? That was derailed by a chlorinated chicken (a joke, sort of). As for Trump being protectionist, have you looked at Biden's actions on that front? Frankly, I am not a Biden fan, but in this I am with him. The world is reordering. Due to actions by various countries, especially China, the current world economic order has become untenable. Unbridled free trade is no better than unbridled mercantilism. So, who knows how successful Milei will be. I hope he is successful. The Argentine people have suffered enough.
    2
  3279.  @ivermectindealer  I tend to agree with that. The people have been around, but their culture is destroyed. I have friends who survived the Cultural Revolution. It was not a pleasant experience.
    2
  3280. Tony, Australia is NOT an Asian country! Asia is a continent. To be called Asian a country must be on the continent of Asia. Australia is on the continent of Australia (funny how that works out). Australia is a Pacific nation. I think that is the term you meant to use.
    2
  3281. Wu reminds me of commentators that are somewhat ignorant of the world around them. The whole idea of communism is to remake humanity. The fact that the CCP has allowed family structures to persist as they have is only an expedient. In the Soviet Union, family structures were torn apart. The "New Soviet Man" would not need family. As for cannibalism, where it has occurred, it often involved people eating their own children out of desperation. This is usually the result of a siege. We see this from ancient times to the 20th century in places like Leningrad.
    2
  3282.  @phcert6267  That happened a lot.
    2
  3283.  @rugendorunene545  Yes, that is true. I make simple dishes. It is easy and quick. Don't get me wrong, I can cook elaborate meals. Many years ago I was even part of a group of four couples who had a gourmet club. It was fun.
    2
  3284.  @JMT1985MO  They are echoing what the Dobbs case opinion said. On the other hand senators like Ted Cruz have stated that this may not be correct. The court is correct in saying that Dobbs is different. On the other hand there is an issue with the use of due process to "create" rights not specifically stated. Don't forget, the US is Federal system. Those rights and aspects of law not specifically enumerated in the Constitution are to be handled by the states. That is why medical, legal, architectural and engineering certifications are state certifications. Issues related to these are state concerns. as are the associated standards. Marriage has also always been handled at the state level. In the case of marriage, the license has been recognized across state lines (reciprocity). In the other areas I mention, there is some recognition, but not universally.
    2
  3285. Your comment on the manual loading in the US M1 tank is really silly. The loader will not get tired in sustained engagements. The tank holds 55 rounds of ammo. In addition, for each round, the loader can select the proper round. An autoloader has a fixed mix of ammo. Another issue is that an autoloader can jam, putting the tank out of action. Also, the ammo is stored in a contained compartment. This makes the tank much more survivable for the crew. How much do you know about tanks? Have you looked at actual tank warfare? China has no experience in this area. If they go head-to-head with, say the Indian Army, they will have a rude awakening. That is the only army they are likely to face in major combat. Their last war was in 1979 with the Vietnamese, and they lost badly. The fact that they rely heavily on Soviet/Russian technology is another problem, considering the results of the current war in Ukraine.
    2
  3286. It's people like you what cause unrest.
    2
  3287. Putin calling for reforming the St. Petersburg military district with ten non-existent divisions reminds me of Hitler. In WWII he assumed that he had divisions and armies available to defend Berlin when, in fact, they did not exist.
    2
  3288. Russians are serfs. That appeal of the wounded soldiers is like something out of the 19th century. It is an appeal to the czar to right an injustice inflicted on them by their local leaders. You also see this kind of thing in Russia today when civilians make video appeals to Putin. What none of the peasants seem to understand is that the czar put their leaders in their places and care more about them than "the people". It is truly pathetic.
    2
  3289. Astronomy is more like anthropology than physics. We have new observations/evidence and that makes us rethink our theories. We have no control over when or how these new observations occur. The launch of a new satellite, or a new telescope on earth, can change the game.
    2
  3290. Good point about the form that Israel should take. I am talking about the difference between a modern secular state and a nationalistic, religious one. I have always been a supporter of Israel, but this has come with a feeling of unease on its basis. The current controversy over the judiciary, specifically the Supreme Court, is traceable to the fact that Israel does not have a written constitution. Having a court that can block legislation when there is no governing document is just plain silly. The UK is finding this out as well. The founders of Israel, especially Ben-Gurion, resisted the development of a constitution. The reasons were not explicitly stated, but one can guess.
    2
  3291. Those M1917 revolvers were not specifically officer's sidearms. The Colt and S&W guns, although they had the same model designation in US Military service were different guns. They were just modifications of each manufacturer's commercial arms.
    2
  3292. Mother's day, father's day, Valentines day and a host of others are just commercial holidays that mean nothing. These are just ways to get people to spend money. So, who the heck cares. It is beneath a channel like GBNews to cover this.
    2
  3293. "Boomer tech". What's wrong with "boomer tech"?
    2
  3294. In a world where there are no public health resources, and you pay directly for everything, then you would have the right to go out and congregate, etc. It is the pooling of all these services that gives the government the power to direct our lives. Now, what you do impacts the public use of that service. Now the government has an interest in controlling behavior. This is easiest to see in the case of roads.
    2
  3295.  @GarrisonFall  Brilliant! Who said that?
    2
  3296.  @GarrisonFall  Thanks for getting back to me. Reading it again, it sounds like Mark Twain, but when I look it up, I just get images. When I follow those links the sites, usually selling tee shirts, attribute it to anonymous.
    2
  3297.  @GarrisonFall  That's great. I used to have a Curtis E. Lamay quote on my wall. I worked in the aerospace and defense industry for a long time. The quote is, "If we maintain our faith in God, love of freedom, and superior global air power, the future looks good." I need to print that out again. Usually, it would have some military aircraft as a backdrop. I think I will put a B-52 on it this time. My father worked on the design of that plane.
    2
  3298.  @GarrisonFall  Lemay is one of my favorites. My father worked for an Army weapons lab and worked on the design of the bomb bay. Don't forget, at that time the primary mission for the B-52 was delivering nukes.
    2
  3299. I have heard that India is taking much less Russian oil recently. They have a disagreement over payments and can get the oil at a reasonable price from the Middle East. As for LNG to Europe, this is a great opportunity for the US. Let's hope they take it.
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  3300.  @daniellebcooper7160  Agreed. The Chinese are a very entrepreneurial people. I believe that, given a different governmental system, they would be great allies of the US, and the rest of the West. I think that was the original hope of the opening to China. That, along to their being a counterweight to the USSR.
    2
  3301.  @joeradler  Good points. Politicians, if not controlled by nefarious characters (and some are, I suspect), are often the slaves of publicists. This is only slightly less bad. Along those lines I have sometimes been pleasantly surprised when hearing a retired politician. Free from the constraints, some of them actually make sense. Then there is Trump. I am not a fan of his style. On the other hand, his results were better than anyone in recent memory (perhaps going all the way back the Regan). You can tell that there is no publicist holding him back. That is refreshing.
    2
  3302. It was not Jiang, but Hu Jintao who was unceremoniously escorted out of the National People's Congress.
    2
  3303. Love the soap commercial. Hairy, really hairy.
    2
  3304. A literature professor? Really? Considering who the channel has had on regarding the election and the titles and thumbnails the bias is clear. Not a good look for a "news" outlet. In addition, no matter what you think of Trump, has anyone from the channel actually listened to Harris? Obviously not.
    2
  3305.  @jexy_marshall  I hear Bondi talking about that. Unfortunately, the courts are a slow process.
    2
  3306.  @jojoha252  They need to be fired, and possibly prosecuted.
    2
  3307. Sabine, you are basically correct in your assessment of what has happened to physics. I recently ran across a video on a fairly good channel titled "The "All At Once" Universe Shatters Our View of Time". Like string theory, I am seeing lots of this type of stuff. It really comes down to making things up. Traditionally, we have come up with models that are understandable in terms of what we already know. These are just models. My favorite example is Maxwell's first model of electricity and magnetism. He pictured it in terms of mechanical elements (e.g., idle wheels) and fluids. This is what physicists knew. It helped him visualize and develop his theory. He also knew it was probably incorrect, but it was convenient. Of course, he abandoned it as he developed his theory further. What we see today is physicists making things up and believing they are the reality. These are as you point out in your book, mathematical constructs that help us calculate. Reality is out there and doesn't care about us, quite frankly. This is one of my pet peeves with quantum mechanics. We state that the universe is 13.5B years old or so. Humans have existed in their present form for maybe tens of thousands of years. Mathematics is much younger. So, how does the observer fit in? Was nothing happening before? Finally, the thing that physicists won't talk about is why society (governments) still spend such large sums on areas like particle physics. The main reason is weapons. That is what spurred the massive increase in funding on basic physics after WW2 and the development of nuclear weapons. At some point society will get fed up with it because of what you point out, namely the lack of progress, as well as the lack of utility.
    2
  3308.  @jonathanlovesadventure7838  Were they university students? You don't need a university degree to do that. I would also have thought that they would have been learning since at least high school. By the way, one of the issues now is that Xi is restricting English education in the schools.
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  3309. My gawd! The EU is beginning to sound like Donald Trump. I mean really sound like Donald Trump. And Trump was not nearly the first to say such things. They laughed at Trump when he told them that their dependence on Russian gas was going to be a problem. The scoffed at the trade situation with China being an issue. Who's laughing now? There are two other areas where trade with China goes against the EU's interests. The first is pollution. Countries moving manufacturing to China are very often doing this to lower costs, and a part of that is the lax pollution enforcement. Very lax. They are just shipping their pollution elsewhere. This is despicable. In recognition of this the EU is implementing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. The second area is worker's rights. I don't hear much about that these days. That might be the next battleground. As Chinese consumption cools and the population collapses (and it will) China also becomes a less desirable market. That new market that China represented was one of the two pillars in opening up to China and letting it into the WTO. Well, without that, and with the policies, and policy uncertainty, of the CCP, China is no longer a desirable investment destination. What Pettis says misses the point. I don't think any country in the west is really interested in running big surpluses. They want balanced trade.
    2
  3310.  @ruleoftwo6174  Understood. On the other hand, Germany does the same thing, both within the EU and outside. In the period after WWII the west dealt with these aggressive, autocratic regimes by isolating them. We called that the Cold War. I miss the Cold War. It worked. Then we tried a different tack. Let them into the system and they would become more open and democratic. Who the heck thought that one up? Oh, our political leaders and foreign policy "experts". They failed to understand that the two autocratic states that we turned to democracy and economic openness, Germany and Japan, were completely defeated by and occupied. The system was imposed, and it took. As you say, they never learn.
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  3311. Chamberlin's "Grand Strategy" sounds like what a lot of politicians in the UK and US are talking about now. From the Obama administration the US has pursued this. Much of Biden's administration are retreads from the Obama administration. Keir Starmer's recent speech at the UN mirrored the Obama/Biden talking points. The situation in the Middle East, from this standpoint, is almost a mirror image of the situation vis-a-vis Germany in the 1930s. The western powers urge diplomacy with regimes that have openly called for the destruction of the people of Israel and death to the Jews. Just like Hitler in Mein Kampf, they are open about their aims.
    2
  3312. The giraffe story was even carried in the WSJ (a US based publication). I also saw in other sources that the Chinese investors were explicitly calling for the US to save them. I assume that the investor class is educated. If so, this is the strongest evidence yet that no one in China is educated on economics in general, from the poorest peasant to the educated in the big cities. I have also seen lots of times in videos people who buy homes express dissatisfaction at how mortgages work. They are surprised that the interest income is taken up front. It is a revelation to them and upsets them. How do you think anyone would make a 30-year investment otherwise. Come on man! The propaganda of the CCP on this, and every other issue, shows that the propaganda department are ardent followers of Joseph Goebbels. Repeat a lie often enough and people will believe it. Frankly, China's economy resembles that of Germany in the 1930s. There really are strong parallels. Of course, Germany at that time was also socialist with a mixed economy as well.
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  3313. This is not the late1930s or early 1940s. The big difference is nukes. Don't underestimate that. Take the Korean War, for example. On the South Korean side there were hundreds of thousands of American troops, as well as thousands from other countries. On the North Korea side there were over 1M Chinese troops and thousands of Soviets. Was that a world war? To quote President Joe, "C'mon man!" Then there was the Vietnam War. There were troops from several countries on both sides. Lots of them. In the post-Cold War era there was the Gulf War, the Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan. In all those the US built coalitions from lots of countries. Were those world wars? I think what we are seeing here is a Eurocentric view. Europe has been, frankly, stupid about its own defense. US presidents have been chiding Europe about this for decades. Get over it.
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  3314.  @Stilicho19801  Why is that relevant? I was not indulging in "whataboutism" but was making a comment about the language used. Your labeling my comment an "ism" is what is irrelevant. Go back and read it, especially the first sentence.
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  3315.  @Notrusbot  Where do you get your information from? What you imply is that Russia does not make gasoline. Really? Come on man, as President Joe likes to say. Gasoline is made from heavy oil. The issue is not what you make from the different grades, but the configurations of the refineries. That can be changed, but it is costly. The fact is that Europe has already moved away from Russian oil. The US never imported much and has also moved away from it. You might want to educate yourself.
    2
  3316.  @MikeBenko  Well put.
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  3317. Trans people make up, as I have read, maybe 1/10 of 1% of the population. While they should be left to live their lives as they see fit, why is this an issue for polity generally? I have heard from credible sources that many of the trans activists are not trans. This is also true of movements like BLM. Polling has shown that blacks in many cities in the US want more police, not fewer, by a large margin. Politics in the UK and US seem to be driven by minorities. Polling in the US seem to indicate that this is about to reverse. I hope that is true in the UK as well.
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  3318.  @skipperson4077  Great response. Love the "Lizard Larry" reference. So apt. Actually, I watched part of a video (it became tedious) about some of the new battery chemistries. On the channel this guy talks about these new developments a lot. He has been asked, where are they in practice? So, he has decided to, over 2024, go back and look at the developments to assess why they have not panned out. On Temu, what they have been doing is squeezing manufacturers to produce the lowest quality goods. Looking at China centered media, the stuff they sell is utter crap. Beyond bad. This is much like Walmart. Once they became the biggest retailer, the began pressuring their suppliers to lower costs. The only choice was to move production to China. Quality came down, and lots of the stuff sold in Walmart became utter crap. I have friends in the brands that were affected and dealt with many in my professional career. On the computer front, China is the assembly point for the devices. A lot of the components, especially the more high-tech ones, come from elsewhere. I recently saw that HP and Apple are moving lots of production out of China. They will continue to assemble there for the Chinese market. Frankly, building a PC of any type from parts is ridiculously easy. My younger son, in his early teens, did it. He sourced all the parts and we put it together at Christmas time (some of the stuff came as "gifts") in a short while. It had everything, including a water cooler for the CPU. It had a small radiator, like something out of a car, and lots and lots of fans. It was a blast.
    2
  3319.  @PNH-sf4jz  Exactly. I am a pretty conservative guy. I first became aware of talk radio when I was doing some work in the Southeast in the early 1990s. I was driving a rental and turned on the radio. In succession I heard Rush Limbaugh. Oliver North and one other. Now I was born in Washington, DC and by then was living in Chicago. I heard a lot of things that night I never heard on the MSM. Some of it I agree with, some not so much. But I was glad to hear it and get an idea of what some other people were thinking. Made me think more about issues I really wasn't aware of.
    2
  3320.  @PNH-sf4jz  Thanks. 👍👍
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  3321. Exposing children to sexualized content is, indeed, abusive to children. That is why the Playboy magazines were hidden under my parents' bed. Actually, I enjoyed the panto when I lived in the UK. It was good family fun and my kids loved it too. I don't know any more about it than what I read in Wikipedia, but it seems like this might have something to do with the conspiracies Qnon talks about. What other reason could there be for it?
    2
  3322. Vita, you have inspired me. I have a big "plot" (in the US we call it a yard; in the UK it is called a garden). It is not in a village in the country, but in a suburb of a large city. I have a vegetable garden that my son and I put together for my ex-wife several years ago. It is about 5m by 5m. I have not used it for a long time, but I think I will start again. What you really inspired me about is the fruit trees. I actually have a large number of trees for the neighborhood. None are fruit trees. I think I will plant several. Less grass to mow and fruit when in season. What you need for the weeds is Roundup. That is an herbicide. I don't know if it is available in Ukraine. I was introduced to it by some relatives who are farmers. They love it.
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  3323. When you have record turnout, how can you say there is voter suppression or decide that a change is made. The turnout was still only 67%. I was an election judge for many cycles, and if we got to 60%, there was a celebration. Just think about it. Any election could go any way if 1/3 of the electorate also turned up. I read that after the 2016 elections there was a protest in a NW city. Of the 35 people arrested, as I recall, none had voted.
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  3324. @GaiaTheia-j5r What is a "couptaji" (asking for a friend). If you have a comment on the content of what I wrote, I would like to read it. Otherwise, you are doing something I find typical in these comments. You make some glib remark about someone you don't know and show your ignorance. So, come on. You obviously disagree (or do I assume too much). Let's hear it.
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  3325. Your comment at about 8:00 ignores history. Russians, and indeed, the Soviets, would not do anything that resulted in the destruction of the motherland. You have to keep this in mind. Nuclear weapons are not offensive. Their first use by a country results in that country being destroyed. That, no Russian, or in previous times Soviet, leader would countenance. i am an old Cold Warrior. My father worked in an Army weapons lab. Once, when I was a child, we received a large format postcard (I mention that, because it was not in an envelope) with a mushroom cloud from a nuclear test. This was sent by my father's colleagues who were at the test to witness their work. It basically said, test went well, we were all knocked down in the blockhouse, but we are alright. This is the world I grew up in. I actually worked on SDI. The plan was audacious, and there was no way to test it. On the other hand, while the US at the time was spending less than 10% of GDP on defense, even with the Vietnam War, the Soviets were already spending 40%. This was actually a major contributing factor to their demise. Some of the weapons being developed, while intended to be defensive, could also be offensive. That was not the intent, but it was the reality.
    2
  3326. On the technolgy sector, the problem is that investors and companies need certainty. Products in these sectors often take time to develop. Just look at the property sector. All within the last year or so the CCP has vacillated between a policy of homes ware for living in to invest in property. No one trusts them. The increases in the stocks you mentioned are from a low base, considering how much they have lost. They are very speculative.
    2
  3327. Elon Musk has a massive bullhorn. That doesn't mean he knows a lot about everything. As for the Egyptians destroying a lot of Israeli tanks in the Yom Kippur war. that was true at the beginning. On the other hand, Israel won that war, and was actually positioned about 100km from Cairo and occupied land on the west of the Suez Canal. And this was in a duration of just under three weeks. We still talk about this loss of tanks early because it was surprising, not because it was decisive. They also had reverses on the Syrian front early on, only to end up 30km from Damascus. From this point they were able to shell the outskirts of the city. They made a lot of their progress because of their air forces, but also because of their tanks.
    2
  3328. The ECHR is not a part of the EU. The UK is still a signatory, as is Turkey. This is not a Brexit issue.
    2
  3329.  @williammcwhorter6405  Very well put.
    2
  3330.  @fly463  Thanks for the correction on the Ganges.
    2
  3331. Tony, no problem with the background noise. You came through loud and clear. Actually, it added a little local "color" to the video. On the shakedown of private businesses, I think that the CCP official raising the alarm is somehow not in tune with Xi's plans and goals. Despite various pronouncements, Xi really does want to take China back to the past. His actions, and some of his statements clearly show that.
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  3332.  @nickrr5234  Well, that is not precisely correct. There is an effect that is observed, but DM has never (correct me if I am wrong) actually been observed itself. At this point, it is a placeholder in the theory.
    2
  3333.  @nickrr5234  That is evidence for something else going on. Some sort of undetected matter is one theory. By the way, I am not a big fan of MOND either, precisely because of the reasons you give. I just have a problem with dark matter as well for reasons I have given in previous comments.
    2
  3334. Big spending victims? Who are they kidding? Who "forced" the to spend so much money renovating the properties? These stories just show the ignorance of these people.
    2
  3335.  @daretodream7204  Some people can control their drug use, and even stop by themselves. Some can use drugs, such as weed or alcohol, in a moderate way. Many cannot. The only solution to that is institutionalization. We tried that a long time ago. We decided that was not a good situation, so we closed down the mental hospitals. Now we have the whole situation laid out before us in the street in every large city.
    2
  3336.  @yangleezhao3641  Is that real? There are lots of Indians in the US. They are an integral part of US society. To say the US does not value India is to ignore all the diplomatic, intelligence and military cooperation between the two in the last decade. Remember that India was a leader in the non-aligned movement during the Cold War. Thus, we were not allies then, by India's choice. That has now changed. One thing India and China have is common is very large populations. When I was growing up the conflict was between the US and the Soviet Union. Our military planners assumed that in a nuclear exchange between the two we would lose between 60M and 80M people. The population then was closer to 200M. That was deemed acceptable. Just imagine that. Between China and India you have about 2.5B people. Any nuclear war between them would be vastly more deadly, but the surviving population would be over 1B, most likely. These are the kind of strategic calculations that go on. It is frightening.
    2
  3337. My two boys are in their mid to late 20s now. The school district we are in is actually very, very good. About 20% of the students take Advanced Placement (AP) courses. My sons took just about all there were and entered college with a full semester of college credits. In addition, the facilities are top of the line, from academic to music to arts to sports to vocational training. I am in the suburbs of Chicago, and with all this, we spend just 2/3 of what the city spends per pupil. Believe me, the schools are palaces compared to what the city has. When the second high school was opened in our school district (we now have three), Jesse Jackson came out and said this is what all our schools should be. The vice premier of China visited our third high school and was amazed at the facility and how happy and engaged our students were. Don't ever forget, in education rankings, that the rest of the world teaches to the test. I was a governor of a school in the UK in the early 21st century. I have a good idea of how other systems work. That is why ours is superior, no matter what the so-called rankings show. We have a big problem in inner city school systems, but many of our suburban systems are vastly superior.
    2
  3338. The country "bankrupt"? Actually, just about all the major economies in the world are in the same boat.
    2
  3339.  @zoeherriot  Good conversation.
    2
  3340. Great video! I grew up in the Greek Orthodox church. I thought the experience was great. Then when I went to university, I grew away from the church. My best friends at university were Indian. So, I started reading Hindu and especially Buddhist tests in the library (it was a large state university with two massive libraries). Years later when I got married, I got involved in the Episcopal church, which my wife had grown up in. She had grown away from the church, but decided, as we got serious, that we should get back into it. Towards the end of our marriage (of thirty years and two sons) we had a pastor who was a black, conservative woman. This was in a white conservative congregation in the suburbs of Chicago. I really respected her and was very involved in the church. I am still searching for a spiritual home. I have looked at some of the contemporary protestant denominations, but they are basically clown shows. A lot of "contemporary" music and laughable sermons. The music really irks. It is sort of Christian rock played by a bunch of people who were probably massive stoners in their youth. Bad music and badly presented.
    2
  3341.  @alexisj7034  Words matter. Redefining a word to support a political purpose does not help the cause.
    2
  3342. I heard that there was a directive from Moscow that all maps of the far east of Russia should include Chinese names along with the Russian names. This was a few weeks ago. The channel was taken down by YouTube, twice, so I tend to believe it. The CCP has been complaining for a while about unequal treaties that were negotiated between the Russian Empire and the Qing dynasty. The Chinese have also laid claim to Vladivostok. And never forget that the Soviets and the CCP fought many, many border conflicts over the years. This is the beginning of the end for Russia. Many analysts were predicting this for the next 10 or 20 years. Now, I think the timeline has shrunk to one or two. With that, and the predicted collapse of the CCP, and perhaps China, by the end of the decade, it is important that the "west" stay together. Don't worry about the global south. Yes, they have lots of population, but not much economic power. History teaches us that it is economic power that matters. Just look at what the European countries did over the last few centuries. China has never been able to project power abroad, and I don't see them doing it now. I have read that there were only about three centuries in China's long history where there was a really unified central government. I am not sure about that but can believe it. For the rest of the time China had many warlords. In fact, from the end of the Qing dynasty to the victory of the CCP China was in one of these warlord periods. Mao and Chaing were just two of many. So, don't worry, be happy, as the song goes.
    2
  3343. I am a big fan of Starsky. But, one thing I am irked by is this statement that this is the 21st century and there should be no wars. I am afraid that the 21st century will probably see many wars. The world, especially autocracies like Russia and China, seems to not want the rules based order the US set up after WWII. The crazy thing about that is that Russia and China both benefited from that order. Now they will die without it.
    2
  3344. This phenomenon is not even interesting. It happens in ALL industries, especially at the beginning. A new technology comes along and lots of people jump in. That is natural. Just look at the early days of the automotive industry. You will see the very same thing. Look at mainframe computers. There was IBM and the seven dwarfs (I worked for IBM and one of the dwarfs). At the very beginning IBM had real competition, but then progressively took over the market. Staying with the computer field, look at the PC market. Do you have any idea how many companies there were at the beginning? We could also talk about the railroad industry, and the companies that made the locomotives. Many other industries and technologies have followed the same path. It is the natural path, especially in capital intensive industries. So, don't draw any conclusions about the ferment in the EV market.
    2
  3345. Glad you covered it. I did some work in Maastricht early in this century when I was based in England. Beautiful city.
    2
  3346. I really wish all those pundits that extol the central planned economy and technocrats would watch this video. The Chinese leadership is stupid and incompetent.
    2
  3347. Actually, the Storm Shadows are launched by Soviet era Su-24 jets. Ukraine's MiG-29, Su-27, Su-24 and Su-25 jets carry the AGM-88 HARM missiles. Adaptations for these Soviet era jets were available within NATO to accommodate the former Warsaw Pact and post-Soviet countries that fielded them. Yes, the F-16 will, out of the box accommodate more of these weapons and generally do it a bit better, but one seldom uses all of them and Ukraine needs to come up to speed on the whole system.
    2
  3348. China started from scratch. They built up their industrial plant with foreign capital and expertise. That came from the US, Europe, Japan and Taiwan. The capital is there, and the expertise is there. Frankly, the production in China is often of questionable quality, especially for low tech goods. Even the high-tech goods like EVs, are trash. One YouTube channel has a recent video with the title "BYD's Global Dream Ends: Shoddy Work, Unfixable Issues, Risk of Global Ban". I have been seeing examples of this for months now. Everything from the build quality to the batteries to the self-driving feature is junk. And this is their top EV manufacturer. There was also an article in the WSJ a few months back about GE Appliances bringing back manufacturing to US. They are owned by a Chinese company, by the way. This is not going to be as hard as Peter thinks.
    2
  3349. Empire Day? Starkey, you are a rabble rouser.
    2
  3350. I am in that 65+ group. I haven't watched broadcast TV for five years now. I get my news and entertainment on platforms like YouTube. Even when there are live broadcasts on YouTube, I almost never watch them live. I wait until they are published after the live broadcast. The main reason for this is control. I can start and stop when I need to (to get up and go to the bathroom, or to get another coffee or cigar) and can skip to the parts I find interesting. I can also go back over interesting content. And of course, I can easily comment. I also like that many YouTubers, like yourself, present information in smaller chunks that stick to a particular topic. I do like some long form content, but that is typically history, science or maths. Broadcast is dead, It is irrelevant.
    2
  3351. Is this a comedy channel?
    2
  3352.  @jaymudd2817  Good point. Look at all the people living in deserts. Then compare that to Siberia, most of Canada and Alaska.
    2
  3353. Just looking at your title my first thought was it's about time. I like to point out that GDP of the EU plus UK is about ten times that of Russia. The population is three times as large. The US bailed out western Europe twice in world wars in the 20th century. The US kept western Europe from being taken over by the Soviet Union by stationing 500K troops there (falling to "only" 300K by the end) and extending its nuclear umbrella over Europe. Instead of using that to build up their own resources for defense they put it all into social programs and expected the US to take up the slack. Remember when Trump, during his first term, told the German leadership that they had become too dependent on Russia for natural gas and oil and were not spending enough on their own defense. They literally laughed at him. Who's laughing now? He was not the first one to chide them on their lack of defense spending, by the way. Obama at one time wanted to draw down troops from Germany and send them to the Pacific as part of his pivot to Asia. The Germans wailed and screamed, and the plan was scrapped. Heck, the US still has 100K troops spread across Europe. What is that all about? The west tried to bring Russia into the fold of the western developed world after the fall of the Soviet Union. That the breakup itself was peaceful gave them hope. Remember the G8? Russia was invited in and then just decided to piss on the west and told them go f themselves. That Europe is waking up is a good thing.
    2
  3354. There is no 7.62x54 "Russian". The R stands for rimmed.
    2
  3355. The comparison with Hitler is actually quite apt. It applies to Xi as well as Putin. Don't forget what Nazi was short for: National SOCIALIST German Workers Party". Soviet socialism, and by extension, Chinese communism, were internationalist. Putin's Russia, and Xi's China, have both now emphasized the racial/ethnic aspects of their societies. In all three cases you have mixed economies, socialist and capitalistic, trending toward total state control.
    2
  3356. Didn't that German guy in the 1930s try to do the same thing? I am not kidding or exaggerating here. The Made in China 2025 plan is just another form of Hitler's idea of autarky. There are lots of other parallels with the Nazi economy. Lots. The mix of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private companies as well as the placing of party officials on the boards of companies are just two examples. The whole CCP program is a foreign idea. Marxism-Leninism is a foreign idea. So, will China abandon socialism/communism? There is nothing like that before the early 20th century, most notably with Sun Yat-sen. Of course, he was not pursuing Chinese ideas either. Think back to those times. One of the reason those ideas took hold was that the previous, native Chinese ideas were so, how to put it, bad.
    2
  3357. Wow! Chua is a professional investor? Come on man! Anyone who bases their investment decisions on such drivel is unqualified to manage money. One pays professionals to have insight on what is likely to happen, not to retrospectively get out when bad things happen and then to "express regret". Whenever the government intervenes in a stock market, it is time to get out. End of story.
    2
  3358. Now, this is not a fully formed thesis, but the idea of Heraclitus, that everything is struggle, might have some merit in explaining human social evolution. Man went from living in family groups (tribes) to more complex forms of organization. These tribes often struggled against each other. The banding together of several tribes under a leader is likely the origin of society as we know it. This was driven by struggle of one group against another. This then prompted innovation. It is not likely that people just sat around, absent some motivating force, and said let's invent something. It is most likely a combination of wanting to understand existence and a struggle of some kind in the community or between communities. Just a thought.
    2
  3359.  @goodmorningsundaymorning4533  Good point. I try not to be too controversial, I guess.
    2
  3360.  @richardwest8832  Well put. Remember what Ricky Gervais said in his awards speech. Something about spending less time in school than Grett Thunberg.
    2
  3361. At the beginning, Mr. McFate, talks about Putin as very clever, and I see no evidence of that. It is a common trope. He had a great gig going, and now he has destroyed it. And for what? There is nothing clever about what Putin has done in Ukraine, or Syria, or indeed the rest of Africa. He is essentially a gangster, not a politician. He had all the resources of the state. He reportedly is among the richest men in the world, if not the richest. This is the result of his demanding half the wealth of each of the oligarchs he allows to live. This according to Bill Browder, who has also been a guest on this channel. Is that what we consider clever now? Another thing I think shows muddled thinking about mercenaries and all that is that there is no real difference between a soldier of an official military and a contractor in one important aspect. They are both paid to perpetrate violence on enemies of the state. In fact, most of the core Wagner contractors, as well as people like Mr. McFate himself in US military contractor groups, were experienced military. The real difference comes about when comparing feudal levies to paid armies. And even in ancient and medieval times when there were feudal levies, these were sometimes also supplemented with mercenaries. Mr. McFate is correct when he points out that the last 200 years have been different, and that we are probably going back to the more "normal" state of affairs. Don't forget that Magna Carta was about taxation, and in those times, taxation was mainly used to fund wars. In the American Revolution the British used Prussian mercenaries. These were not allies, like the French were to the Americans. They were soldiers for hire.
    2
  3362. If the west were indeed fighting directly with Russia, Russia would be done for in short order. Just look at the conflicts where Soviet/Russian arms and tactics faced off against western arms. This includes all the Arab Israeli wars. It also includes the two wars in Iraq. And don't forget that Iraq was just coming off a war with Iran when it invaded Kuwait. They had a lot more combat experience than the Russian army in large scale conventional war. Another curious thing about this war in Ukraine is the Russians utter failure at large scale maneuver warfare. Just look at the Syrian attack on the Golan Heights in the 1973 war for example. The Syrians attacked with over 25K troops and 800 tanks in one operation. Have you heard of Russia being able to do that? What Russia should fear is direct NATO involvement. They haven't seen it yet.
    2
  3363. Mr. Browder used the term "annexed". That is not quite correct. The territory has been seized. What Ukraine should do is to formally annex the Kursk oblast, just like Russia has done with Ukrainian territory. Pass a law in the Rada and have a ceremony. That would be a real kicker. The Russians have nothing really to throw at the Ukrainians in Kursk. They have emptied all their military bases facing NATO. Everyone is engaged in Ukraine. They still have to deal with their eastern regions, and Xi has his eyes on Russian territory there that he believes Imperial Russia and the USSR took in "uneven" treaties, as he characterizes them. If only Ukraine had more F-16s right now. Hey, how about an analog to the American Volunteer Group (Flying Tigers).
    2
  3364. We have the same problem in the US. The bulk of workers in meat processing are foreign workers. One problem, here in the US, is that the processing plants are located in rural areas where there are not enough local people to fill the jobs. The jobs need to move to where the workers are. That means in the cities. Had a friend my age who grew up in Chicago. As a teen he worked in the Chicago Stockyards. It was a huge operation. Now that is gone. But, the people who worked there did not move to where the plants are.
    2
  3365. Don't confuse the Constitutionally defined roles of Congress with the dynamics of the politics within the government. In foreign policy the Congress still has the power of the purse. It also, through the Senate, has the power to ratify, or block, treaties. An additional layer of involvement is with party politics. Schumer is in the same party as Biden and there are party political considerations there as well. That is why these Congressional delegations have always been important (and I am not just talking China here).
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  3366. Tony, well that didn't take long. A little late this morning, but the coffee and cigar are calming me down. In the US based Wall Street Journal there are two headlines today that say it all. I include the subtitles. The first: Stock Market Today: Dow Gains; Oil Prices Slip Shanghai Composite suffers worst day since February 2020 The second: China’s Stock Market Tumbles on Doubts About Government Stimulus Index has worst day since February 2020, Finance Ministry calls press briefing for Saturday I hope investors did not act on the research notes from investment advisors you mentioned yesterday. Just a quick edit/addition. This goes back to what have said before. The misunderstanding or misuse or something less savory in using time series data is a real problem. The statement that starts out at 1:35 has a tinge of truth to it. The whole problem is that the CCP totally misses the point. For one thing all that innovation is the direct result of the rules-based order. Just look at the Soviet Union and CCP led China. That should tell you all you need to know. The innovations that the CCP wants to steal (there is no better word for it) belongs to those that created them. That is typically not governments, at least in the decadent west. Even during wars, in the west it is private companies that come up with most of the innovation. Not all, mind you. My father worked for what is now called the Army Research Lab and they do some innovative stuff.
    2
  3367. Just from the opening remarks in the first 37 seconds of the video, I can tell you, it is a playground. This is the big flaw in British style parliaments. The people in power have the choice o when to hold an election. Our founding fathers, in the US, were so wise in eschewing this method of governing. That is why we have a solid written Constitution, which the UK does not. Even though Canada has a written Constitution, it chose to follow many of the conventions of the UK system. There are even those in the UK that would like to bring in a republican government and written constitution.
    2
  3368. Just reacting to the first question about the "new world order" that China and Russia want to create. This is just another example of the "chattering class" responding to propaganda from these two countries. These are two countries that probably won't exist in their current form in the near future. They are no more likely to define the world going forward than say, Brazil or Nigeria (just picking two out of thin air). Both China and Russia are in demographic collapse. Both have autocratic leaders who are making really, really bad choices. Both have economies that are highly unbalanced. Both depend on the good will of those countries in the rest of the world they would like to displace. The utter stupidity of their pronouncements and actions is mind boggling. If one looks at reality, rather than propaganda, it is the US that is defining the "new world order". The US has been creating new alliances left and right. How many alliances do China and Russia have? The US is also extending the reach of their existing alliances to new regions. As an example, look at NATO getting involved in the Pacific and individual NATO countries extending their military reach there. Look at the alliances the US has been entering into or facilitating today. Of course, the US is tightly allied with Germany and Japan, two countries they fought a devastating war with. The US just recently gotten Japan and South Korea to come together. Look up their joint history. Stunning. Vietnam is moving closer to the US. American aircraft carriers have been calling at Vietnamese ports. There is talk about Vietnam purchasing F-16s to counter China. The Philippines has moved back into alliance with the US both militarily and economically. India is tilting toward the west, including Europe and the US both militarily and economically.
    2
  3369. That last quote rings true. It also may be what China needs to change course. If Trump follows through, then he may just be the one who saves China from itself.
    2
  3370.  @anonymousdonor8084  Of course. You must have read their sales pitch.
    2
  3371.  @Gothiclovesick  I guess you don't understand irony. Actually, you may be right, but I took it as a dig on the substandard clothing.
    2
  3372.  @deepblue3682  All reports I have seen show the Indian population still growing, so I don't know where you get that. Perhaps you do not know what the term means.
    2
  3373. Roman's comments at the beginning are just silly. Everyone has known about pipeline and communication line vulnerability forever. One thing that people wonder about is that the pipelines across Ukraine, in an active war zone, have not been sabotaged. As for communication links, just look at what has been done with satellites in Ukraine and elsewhere. The attitude. it seems, is that the populace does not know anything until the media tells us. Give me a break. Journalists are experts in none of these things. They ask an expert. Then they tell us what we already know. It is, frankly, insulting.
    2
  3374. All of Trump's picks for his cabinet are important, but this one especially so. On a side note, someone needs to look at Trump and what he does. For someone of his age to have the stamina and mental acuity he does is both amazing and inspiring (especially after old Joe).
    2
  3375.  @АлексейПолегенько-г5х  It is quite obvious that, if the Americans and the British had not supported the Soviets and if Hitler were not so dumb, that the outcome would be a whole lot different. The American part was the over 20% of materiel the Soviets used, from tanks, planes, jeeps and trucks to uniforms, boots and food that was provided by the US and UK. I was reading a war diary of a German infantryman on the Eastern Front. He said something interesting. When he saw a US jeep, he thought to himself, the war is lost. Cogitate on that a bit. On the German leadership, Hitler was an idiot. He was an idiot in how he planned the Barbarossa campaign. He was an idiot in how he prosecuted it. He was an idiot in declaring war on the US in December 1941. The US was much more interested in defeating Japan. The US was happy to help the British stave off the Nazis and would have continued in that vein. If Hitler had not declared war on the US, it is questionable that the materiel support to the Soviets would have been forthcoming. Let's not forget the Soviet leadership. How many men were needlessly sacrificed? Why take so many casualties in the Courland Pocket? Why sacrifice so many men to take Berlin? there are lots more examples. That's Hitler level of leadership.
    2
  3376.  @williammasselink  Thanks. Like that last sentence.
    2
  3377. FORTRAN is not issue. Development style is the issue.
    2
  3378. New Zealand and all the countries that try to have zero Kung Flu are just plain stupid. That is not how pandemics work. WION disparaged the Brazilian president because he was praising Omicron. It is highly transmissible, not very deadly and will equip the population with natural immunity with a fairly low cost. Natural immunity is better than the vaccine. He was completely right. Those countries that are trying to have no Kung Flu will suffer the most. Look at the statistics out of England. Only a small proportion of their Kung Flu deaths were actually from the virus. Most were from comorbidities. This is also the case for common flu. In a healthier population (less obesity, hypertension and others) this would be less than a really bad flu season. The fact is many of those who have died from the Kung Flu would probably have died in a short period of time from something else, triggering their underlying health problems. The last real pandemic we had, a century ago, the Spanish Flu, killed in absolute terms a factor of 4 to 10 times more people. In population percentage terms it was over four times higher. A financial advisor I know, who is big on historical data, looked at it and informed me that there was not even a recession because of it in the US. Over 20M people died in a population less than half of the current population. Our government policies are just plain stupid. They saddle our children and grandchildren with debt that was not necessary. We are all going to die. Going from the CDC data there were 200K unintentional injury deaths last year. The leading causes were unintentional poisoning, unintentional falls and vehicle traffic deaths. Then there are the massive number of deaths from chronic conditions (heart disease, diabetes, etc.), The Kung Flu is the third largest cause of death in the US in the las years. Heart disease and cancer each caused almost twice as many deaths as the Kung Flu. Many, if not most, of these deaths are preventable. Kung Flu is NOT the health problem of our time. Chronic illness, in large part caused by obesity, is much more deadly. It is also preventable. Anyone who tries to push body positivity to make obese people more comfortable is just plain stupid. It costs the majority of society more money in heath spending and is a major cause of death.
    2
  3379.  @jasonlucas2328  I am too. I was at the launch event.
    2
  3380. The commander's comments asking people not to speculate about what will actually happen may in itself be a part of the Ukranian General Staff's information warfare campaign. Who knows?
    2
  3381. When you talk about prices, are you talking about listed prices or actual sale prices? It is not always clear.
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  3382. I think the Trump situation vis-a-vis Ukraine is a bit of a wild card. Don't forget that Trump warned the Germans that they were becoming too dependent on Russia. He also chided them on their low military spending. They laughed at him (the clips are on YouTube). Who's laughing now? He also killed the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, just as it was about to be completed. His relations with Ukraine are also complex. Ukraine has had a real problem with corruption. This was basically a holdover from Soviet times. There were many oligarchs, with Russian connections, operating in Ukraine. Georgia is going through the same set of problems today. In the end, Trump would have to deal with the US Congress as well, in which there is overwhelming support for Ukraine.
    2
  3383.  @ivancho5854  Very interesting analysis and as far as I can tell quite true. I saw one analysis that claimed, and I have no way of knowing how accurate this is, that China has only had effective centralized control for about 300 years of its long history. Whatever the specific number, it is interesting in terms of the efforts by the CCP.
    2
  3384.  @ivancho5854  Good point. Whatever the actual figure, it shows something about perceptions in the world about China. The 19th century imperialists used China's regionalism to influence trade. Perhaps this should inform our policies today. Without the gunboats, of course.
    2
  3385.  @codyshi4743  First to your last point, China is not a developing nation. As for your first point, I. for one, never said that China "should" do anything. I am pointing out what is likely to happen given the history of country. The way you put it "...that a big state like China should be divided like what it is during the warlord era..." is a misrepresentation of what I said. As for comparing China to the "poor oppressed" people of Middle East, that is both foolish and ill informed. The countries you mention were creations of the imperialist powers after WWI. Prior to that they were part of the Ottoman Empire. For quite some time, by the way. The imperialist powers of France and the UK drew lines on maps that suited their purposes, not those of the local populace. So, how does this comport with the situation in China? You mention the Iraqis. Don't forget that in the 1980s they invaded Iran and then in the early 1990s they took over a neighboring sovereign country. A country of fellow Arabs. They used chemical weapons on the battlefield and against one of their own ethnic minorities. Poor Iraqis indeed. As for Syria, they were, are, a dictatorship. When their people called for democracy, they brutally crushed the protestors. Then there arose in their midst one of the most reprehensible and brutal movements in recent times. Poor Syrians indeed. Palestine and Yemen were also creatures of the colonial era and are such a mess that I won't go into more detail, except for one thing. Do you realize that the Houthis actively and openly practice slavery. Yes, good old-fashioned slavery. Who forced them to do that? Ah, the oppressed peoples of the Middle East. Again, I ask, what the heck does that have to do with China?
    2
  3386. Joe is not well informed about the situation. The Japanese have, several times in the last year, stated that they would support Taiwan in case of a threat from China. Most of the countries in the area, from India to Japan do not want China to have a clear opening to the Pacific, and they have stated this. China has two large aircraft carriers. Between the US, India and others there are many more arrayed against them. In addition, China has no experience in amphibious operations. Nor do they have the equipment.
    2
  3387.  @lisagerman2111  You are welcome.
    2
  3388.  @johnpaullyle9995  Might be, but that would be very inefficient and indirect. When we had the crisis in the US in 2008, the banks, which were not government institutions, we recapitalized by the government by, in effect, buying shares in the banks. One thing you don't hear about is that the government actually made a good bit of money when they sold their shares later on. In China they can't do this, in general, because a lot of the critical banks are state owned.
    2
  3389. To say the US is a made-up country is just foolish. You lay out its evolution yourself. How is that different from the Roman, or Persian, or British, or Austrian, or German empires? To use the term "made up" is a real bastardization. If you don't know how nations arose, or even how modern nation states arose, then the whole premise is wrong. The issue of Germany is interesting. In the beginning, there was talk of bringing Austria in. The only problem was that it was Catholic, and Prussia was Protestant. There were already Catholic regions like Bavaria, but bringing in Austria would have tipped the balance, so the Prussians rejected it.
    2
  3390. I love how the finance types look at percentages. The fact is that such numbers are very sensitive to the terms of reference of the percentage change. That is fine for speculators and traders. For assessing the health of a company or market, that is often irrelevant. The real number is how many houses they have to sell to make their business viable. Capital intensive industries are especially sensitive to this measure. This is not a criticism of your presentation. You immediately follow up with the relevant information on the base from which these statistics are taken. But just watch, the financial types will jump on the numbers to justify all sorts of crazy ideas. Just today, in the Wall Street Journal, a US based news outlet, has an article titled "Yes, There Is a Bull Case for Investing in China". So much for paying attention to the external factors in play.
    2
  3391. That would require the rule of law to be operative in China.
    2
  3392. Directed out of the White House. A prescription for disaster. Remember the Vietnam War? LBJ was picking targets for airstrikes. Bad, not good (says the robot). Remember the Gulf War. Quite successful. Remember the Powell doctrine. Part of it was that, as you point out, the political leaders give you a goal and resources and the military leaders implement it within the parameters set. Now we are back to LBJ. Agggh!!!! Actually, this is also the problem with the Ukraine war. The administration has not set a clear goal for their support for Ukraine. If the President said the goal is to defeat the Russians, the Congress could debate it. If they agree, then it would be quite clear what resources should be provided. The damn war might have been over by now. Instead, we have support given in dribs and drabs. No wonder Biden is facing resistance in Congress. The Speaker made a statement to this effect after meeting with Zalenski. He was spot on. Lots of Ukraine supporters in the US were incensed, but the Speaker had it right. Tell us what you want to do, Joe. Come on man! In this environment, with such a dysfunctional White House, one should not hold out too much hope.
    2
  3393.  @Dreamhelmet  Good point.
    2
  3394. While I am a staunch supporter of Ukraine and its war aims, I have to be brutally honest. The "brutal colonial past" is coming back. This is what China and Russia want. The US doesn't want it, but the cost to avoid it is way too high compared to the benefits for Americans. The last three decades have been an anomaly in historical terms. Don't forget the era the chattering classes seem to think is normal is only three decades old. That is a blink of the eye in historical terms. During the Cold War (I miss the Cold War) we had a bipolar world. Prior to that we had "classical" imperialism. That is the natural state of things. The last US President who wanted to have a discussion, both nationally and internationally, about how we move forward as a planet after the Cold War was George H. W. Bush. He was voted out of office. The catchphrase of his opponent's campaign was "It's the economy stupid." That should tell you all you need to know about American politics. There are lots of people who seem to be unable to understand how we can have war in Europe in the 21st century. A lot of these people are in Ukraine. Why should the 21st century be any different? War in Europe is the norm in historical terms. In fact, the US has already fought two large conflicts in the 21st century and the century is not yet a quarter done. The issue for Russia and China, especially China, is that things have not really changed since the earlier colonial era. They will fare just as poorly today as they did then.
    2
  3395. Just looking at the title, my first reaction was "Duh".
    2
  3396.  @YourHineyness  So, you have heard that joke as well. In the version I heard it was 100 economists in a room and you get 103 opinions.
    2
  3397. The auto situation, I think you will find, is another one in which the top line statistics are probably misleading. Here are some of the indicators that I have pieced together from news sources. Much of the increase is probably going to Russia. Since the Europeans are no longer in that market, this is not a threat. An interesting note on this is that the Russians are not happy with the Chinese cars (or machine tools, or anything else from China). In addition, the Chinese cars are sold in Russia for more that what they are sold for in China, and the Russians know it. The car market in China is experiencing a downturn in prices. It is getting so bad that used cars cannot be sold. The new ones are so cheap. This applies to EVs as well. The discount wars in the EV market are well known. This also leads to many EV manufacturers having financial problems. By the way, the battery makers are also suffering. That leads to lithium prices dropping like a stone. The overall EV market worldwide is slowing. Reports I have seen claim that purchasers in Germany do not want Chinese EVs. I have lived in Europe and the Germans, as well as many others, value quality in their vehicles and are willing to pay for it. China does not provide that.
    2
  3398.  @Taber01  There are lots of minerals that we can get in Alaska and Canada instead of, say, Russia. It is basically the same geology. In fact, I believe that in one of the sponsor messages here on Tony's channel there was a mining concern talking about their holdings in Alaska of at least one important metal. I have also seen articles and ads in places like the US based Wall Street Journal.
    2
  3399. I read somewhere that we were all going to be eating snake meat soon. You might want to start a snake ranch. Actually, my brother-in-law brought over a can of snake meat he got in Arizona. We tried it. It wasn't all that good.
    2
  3400. Get a better AI or just have a human read it.
    2
  3401. Great analysis on the housing market.
    2
  3402.  @srj607able Great story. Thanks for sharing. That reminds me. At one time I had a range at an old Army base. My ex-wife used to volunteer at a thrift shop, and they got lots of toys from happy meals which they really couldn't sell. A lot of them were the low-end furbies, made in China, of course. So, on Friday afternoon, after a long week, I would say to my staff, let's go kill some furbies and they knew exactly what I was talking about. Of course, the guns were of larger caliber and varied. Those things really blew up.
    2
  3403. I don't know, Jake, Prigozhin got pretty far with a lot fewer troops. He could have gone all the way. All the bases facing NATO have been emptied. Kaliningrad is being emptied. All the Russian forces are in Ukraine with the exception of those in the far east protecting Russia against China. There are even rumors that Kadyrov is ready to revolt. This may be the time.
    2
  3404. I once heard that YouTube was created to share cat videos.
    2
  3405. Battery swap is an idea that has been around for a while. Your friend Elon once touted it. Haven't heard much about it for a while. One issue, as with everything else with EVs, is the cost. The swapping stations would have to have a large supply of batteries to begin with. Lots of up-front capital.
    2
  3406. Your roses look just like mine. I have two bushes. I think that there is a way to trim them to increase their bushiness and increase the number of flowers. I need to look into that. My ex-wife took care of all that. Speaking of her, by younger son and I made her a large, fenced garden (I even made a nice gate from scratch). I have not used it and the weeds are over a meter high. I will deal with that today.
    2
  3407. The idea of formerly colonized nations siding with the Palestinians, because they perceive that they have "shared experience" is short sighted and potentially perilous for them. This was brought home to me when I saw an image put out by Black Lives Matter (BLM) celebrating the Hamas invasion. Jews in the US generally have aligned with the Democratic Party because of their identity politics. Yes, Jews were repressed socially by the establishment, as were blacks. Outside of that, they had little in common. Now it is showing through.
    2
  3408. It is interesting to see how the Ukranian soldiers handle these trench networks. They are doing it very well, and using tanks in the way they were originally created for. Recall that tanks were introduced in WWI to help the infantry break through the German trench networks. Many early tanks in the 20s and 30s were "infantry support" tanks. Just look at the Panzer 1. it was armed with machineguns. It wasn't until later that tank-on-tank combat became a thing. There are even tanks fielded today that serve the infantry support role. The US is developing a new one and the French have a good one. So, don't get all agitated about the trench networks the Russians are building. They are so last century.
    2
  3409. Do people have such short memories? One of the findings after 9/11 was the siloing of information that prevented agencies from "connecting the dots". The DNI office was specifically created to avoid this problem.
    2
  3410. How is Washington number two and Moscow number one? What does that even mean? When Trump talks stopping the killing, he is entirely correct. Both sides were in demographic decline prior to the war. Both sides. For example, I just read recently that both Biden and Trump have called on Ukraine to lower their conscription age to 18. When I was that age that was what it was in the US. Even today, a male in the US must register for the draft at 18. We don't have a draft, but you must register. Prior to the US moving to an all-volunteer military, 18-year-olds were routinely drafted and sent to war. Ukraine has resisted lowering the age and their reason is demographics. In addition, Ukrainians are also feeling the effects of inflation, and even die-hard supporters of the war complain about it. If Ukraine did not have so much external support, they would already have collapsed.
    2
  3411. This is NOT a Federal issue!!! School boards are state institutions. Education is a state responsibility. Get the Feds out of it. If they don't have anything better to, like say deal with possible terrorists coming in over the southern border, then lets reduce their budget and size. We don't have money to waste.
    2
  3412. Of course, these men pretending to be women are all perverts, by definition.
    2
  3413. Actually, I think it was Stalin said that first, not Spock.
    2
  3414. The point about the pensions is salient. My understanding is that this is a large part of Greece's spending, and they are one of the few countries that have been meeting the 2% target.
    2
  3415. Sounds like this Wang guy was quite successful.
    2
  3416. History is back! Great points made. It is important to keep the history of the region in mind. As Peter points out, Europe is one of the most blood-soaked regions in the world. That is why I get a little annoyed at people who rail against "this war happening in Europe in the 21st century". Why should the 21st century be any different? Nationalism in Europe has always been a great driver of war and destruction. Heck, we are even seeing a return of "the troubles" in Northern Ireland. Early in this century I was an exec for a technology company. I was based in southern England. I had wanted to go to Northern Ireland to meet with potential clients. I was advised by our security not to because the IRA was kidnapping people like me. This was very low-level stuff compared to what is happening now. And that was not even "great power" competition. Just plain nationalism. Another thing this reminds me of is the US involvement in WWI. Once the US got involved and started their buildup even the allies became alarmed. If the war had gone on a little longer the US would have had over 4M troops in France. They would be the dominant military force and would be able to dictate the situation. Don't forget, everyone else was massive attritted by then. After WWII that all changed. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the US drew down. Not long ago the Finnish PM bemoaned the reliance that Europe had on the US. This was not an anti-US statement, but a statement about how the Europeans had neglected their own defense.
    2
  3417. The temperature got up to 33 degrees yesterday, 32 today, but is supposed to be 25 on Tuesday. Here in the Chicago area, we are having a mild summer. I have had my air conditioning on for the last couple of days because of the humidity. I will turn it off on Monday evening.
    2
  3418.  @ThinkUkraine  You are very welcome. You mentioned you are a philologist, if I heard correctly. I was wondering. Friedrich Nietzsche was one as well. So was my German professor at university, Frau Lloyd (she married an Englishman, but was originally from Vienna; I never knew her maiden name). Today (it is Tuesday here) is very nice. While cloudy it is cool, and the humidity is gone. I hope things get better for you there soon. You inspire me with your gardening. My ex-wife was the gardener in the family, and I am very bad at it. I was always just labor I have a large yard which is mostly grass. The area was formerly corn fields and the soil is very rich. I am planning on replacing a lot of the grass (it grows too fast) with native perennials. If you can get rid of the weeds by the side of your house you may want to try that, and put a path in. I have a lot of trees at the back of the lot, three large spruces and two very large corkscrew willows. And now I have two "volunteer" oak trees. One is growing between the two willows, and both are doing very well. I am planning on planting a couple more oaks from acorns from the volunteers. You have inspired me to also plant blueberries. I will also plant a couple of cherry trees (my father planted one at our house when I was young). Keep up the good work, I know it is hard. I always pray for Ukraine, and you, among others. I wish my country would do more.
    2
  3419. The crisis in the West is a "first world problem". Transgenderism represents less that 1% of the population, and yet it is a "big" problem. Even homosexuals probably represent no more that 10% of the population. Outside of the West, they are treated poorly. Look at the Islamic world. Look at Russia. Climate change is a big issue in the West, but not in the rest of the world. In fact, as petrol prices rise to ridiculous levels, you will see this fall by the wayside in the West. The best tell on this is the conflation of climate change with pollution. When you have to conflate an issue with another that most people support, you have already lost the argument. The war in Ukraine and all the global disruptions caused by this and COVID (or as I like to call it, the Kung Flu) are changing people's thinking.
    2
  3420. This comment was "flagged" by the YouTube algorithm. I posted it unchanged anyway. What in this comment is incorrect or offensive?
    2
  3421. No! The saying goes that war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means.
    2
  3422. Just what I was going to say. I lived and worked in the UK, being from the US, for a while. So, I still follow UK news avidly (also Indian news because I have had lots of Indian friends.
    2
  3423.  @yeseniah7373  Well, it is often infuriating to see how some executives in the west are rewarded for poor performance of the company. Of course, in many cases their bonuses are not related to financial performance. Often, the bonuses are in stock. In addition, there is the contractual aspect. In China, it seems that contracts mean nothing. But you are equating this with what happens to regular employees, not executives. As I started my comment, this is happing in the "workers' paradise" and in China it seems that the regular employees are most affected.
    2
  3424. Time to recognize Taiwan. I have actually heard that southern China wants to secede from China. I have also heard rumors that at least one major southeastern city wants to break away and join Taiwan. These are all rumors, of course. That said, it would follow historical patterns.
    2
  3425. Fetterman is an idiot. The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the working people. Open borders is a slap in the face to the working people. They have become the party of intersectionality. If you hadn't noticed, that is very much a minority in the country.
    2
  3426. Jeffrey being chosen to be ambassador to the US is right in line with modern British diplomacy. He was a natural choice. Your amazement at the sleaze in politics is precious. I can only surmise that you have never really dealt with it up close.
    2
  3427. As to the crew of the T-90, the reports I have seen say they abandoned the tank and two of the three were KIA.
    2
  3428.  @joemama.556  That is the silliest thing I have ever read. Go back and take a physics course.
    2
  3429.  @juliam248  I have to agree with you on that.
    2
  3430. Another reason the UK might be better off without Scotland. I was in England not long after devolution. I asked one of the local managers what he thought of it. His response was that they should dig a channel across the island and that maybe it would float away.
    2
  3431. Well, the EU deals with Saudi Arabia and China. The leaders of both are not wanted war criminals but are acknowledged to have done things that most people consider criminal. As @AlexAnteroLammikko states, that is how the world works.
    2
  3432. Jake, I am reading a book, "The End of the World is Just Beginning" by Peter Zeihan. In light of the OSCE map I think you will be very interested in it.
    2
  3433. The Chinese pronouncements sound childlike, and frankly ignorant of history and current realities. Is it any wonder that more and more Pacific nations are moving closer to the west? The level of the rhetoric, and Chinese actions, cannot but push nations away. Frankly, it sounds like something straight out of Mao's little red book. Don't forget that he wrote that for a largely rural peasant society. Has China not progressed politically?
    2
  3434. I find it quite amazing that everyone disparages the US and then everyone seems to want to join NATO which the US helped found building on alliances that had started to form in Europe after WWII. There has been chatter about some sort of NATO in the Pacific, perhaps even as an extension of the current NATO. NATO has opened office in countries in the region and has some cooperation programs. I say it is amazing because many in Europe, especially in the EU prior to the events in Ukraine, were clamoring for something else. There has even been talk recently within NATO about a NATO without the US. Outside of NATO the Russians, the Chinese and parts of the "global south" (I hate that term) rail against the US and want a multipolar world. They will get it, by the way. That is in fact the natural state of the planet. After WWII we had a bipolar world. Then, after the breakup of the Soviet Union we have had a unipolar world. Don't forget that has only been a bit over 30 years. Those who are loudest about the multipolar world are some of the countries that did very, very well in the unipolar world (looking at you China and Russia) and who did very poorly in the bipolar and multipolar world milieu. The thing is that the factors that led to that poor performance have not changed, and other factors are now in play that will make their lot even worse. So, as an American I find it rather funny, in a weird sort of way.
    2
  3435. Tony, I am watching this video about four hours after it was posted. You have hit 75K subscribers. Well done! Now on to 100K.
    2
  3436.  @Kodakcompactdisc  Oh, you are so clever. Get a clue and think for yourself.
    2
  3437. Love the Clinton joke.
    2
  3438.  @carlflaherty2215  Yes, and the latest figure for the US, released today, is 2.4%, up from 2%.
    2
  3439.  @marlenestockton2269  Don't doubt that is true. But music is a malleable thing. People tend to listen to what they liked in their youth. It is habit. When most of the boomers (and I am one) are gone, it will change to a new set of 50-year-old songs. So, I don't know what your point is. If these songs were not available, people would find something else to listen to. As for better than the new stuff, that is a matter of taste, but as I said in my comment, it is all just what is popular at the time. I don't listen to any of it, so I don't care. I don't need to be entertained by something I heard when I was a teenager. Except for a small amount of the music produced, that is always true. It is a matter of taste. If the people who like Joni Mitchell more than anything else are upset, they will go somewhere where her music is available. So what? Spotify has about 155M subscribers worldwide. About 61% were in Europe and North America. Those regions have a population of just over 1B people. Thet means most people do not listen to Spotify. So, why are we talking about this?
    2
  3440.  @secretbassrigs  Granted, but still boring. He may bring down Apple with his China fixation. I am glad I don't have any Apple stock.
    2
  3441. A socialist market economy? What does that even mean. The CCP are even dumber than I thought. This is a word salad on the level of Kamala Harris. They are just making this stuff up.
    2
  3442. Actually, the IEEE Spectrum had an issue about DC transmission a few years ago. The issue with DC transmission was, first the switchgear required was not available. Siemens, and I think ABB, had come up with such solution. The losses were indeed much lower for long distance transmission. What you say about the copper is interesting. If you look at the history of the war of the currents, the original issue was loss, yes, but also that early DC lines required more copper. Also, you may want to check the history. Tesla was a contributor, but Westinghouse was the real driver for DC.
    2
  3443. The new emphasis on militias must be part of the preparation for Cultural Revolution 2. Long live the Cultural Revolution! Seriously though, what is the external threat to China? Who is going to invade China? The Russians? The former Soviet republics of Central Asia? Vietnam? India? North Korea? Of course there is Japan, but their days of invading anyone are over, although at one time they were up for invading anyone, anywhere. China has minimal natural resources (compared to consumption) and imports many, many critical materials. Their biggest contribution is in processing. Their farmland is not particularly productive compared to places like Ukraine and most of Europe, Russia, Argentina, Canada and of course the US. So, China is no prize from that point of view. So, that only leaves the Chinese people as enemies of the CCP. Don't forget, these militias are associated with the PLA, which is the army of the CCP, not the nation state of China.
    2
  3444. Roe vs Wade is a non-issue for the vast majority of people. Over decades I only know of one abortion. It was a good friend. His girlfriend got pregnant, got an abortion, then they split up. I expect that my actual experience with the issue is more common than not. With the economic issue (which typically decides elections) being so dire, this Roe vs Wade issue will fade for most people.
    2
  3445. The pronouncements out of the conference show a number of important things people in the west must understand. First, and foremost, the language used, and the attitude transmitted. is sophomoric and annoying. Of course, this is typical commie claptrap, so it is to be expected. It also is telling in that China is becoming a country that is increasingly state controlled, thus, instead of companies being in the fore, it is the CCP (not even the formal government). This is also a sign that a country is in the second or third tier, economically. Yes, we talk about the Japanese and German economies for example, but there is much more talk about the major companies based in those countries. For people and companies in western democracies this should be a sign, and a worrying one. One thought that comes to mind when hearing this stuff is that the CCP is really using language more appropriate to addressing a peasant population trying to dig out of dire poverty. You know, like at the beginning of the revolution. In other words, they haven't really evolved, and until they do, or they are pushed out of the way, China won't evolve either.
    2
  3446.  @ChinaUpdate  Glad to be of help.
    2
  3447.  @unsalbulent  All military equipment was USSR. All was given to the various republics that broke away. There was, of course no precedent for such a situation. I have also heard that there was a move to get around the controls. I have no idea of how that might be done or how successful it would have been.
    2
  3448. By the way, the belt and road initiative is falling apart, or is about to. There are three main reasons. The first two we know well. Debt trap diplomacy and tofu dreg construction. The third is something I have now seen concrete evidence of. The CCP is running out of money. For a good example look at the canal project in Thailand. China was supposed to provide much of the funding. They have drawn back from that, and the project is basically "dead in the water". I think we will see many more such situations. Brazil's decision is just another indicator.
    2
  3449. What is wine roasting? I am not familiar with this term/process and can't find info on it.
    2
  3450.  @pezpengy9308  Thanks. I was wondering if that were the case.
    2
  3451. The comments at the end are just silly, Global value chains have not been building for 50 years as far as China is concerned. Look at Chinese companies involved in manufacturing. They are no older than 30 years and that is unusual. It took very little of that time to do the initial setup. The other thing about "value chains" is that they are constantly evolving. In fact, the restrictions on foreign ownership set up by China has fostered a model where many companies have become design and marketing firms (brands), using subcontractors to make the products. This is actually relatively easy to move around. China has set themselves up for a fall in this regard.
    2
  3452.  @hmmcinerney  The Stans will either align themselves with the west, or with China, or both. There are also reports of conflicts between some of them.
    2
  3453. They tilted toward the Soviets. Absolutely! They touted themselves as leaders of the non-aligned movement. Balderdash! In fact, even today, their pundits and many people, especially with military backgrounds, are still pro-Russian.
    2
  3454. The comments about Xi starting a war to solidify his and the party's power is right on the mark. Don't forget that in 1962 Mao invaded India for just such a reason. That was followed in 1966 by the Cultural Revolution. The future for the Chinese is bleak.
    2
  3455. Silver Fox, "bathing in the blood of young European men" is pretty much the history of Europe. In fact, it only stopped when the US decided to stay after WW2.
    2
  3456. The Soviets did not shape the boundaries of the USSR. It was the Russian Empire. You leave this out making your analysis somewhat questionable.
    2
  3457. Leavitt is impressive. I don't mean to take anything away from her but it's not hard considering who she had to follow.
    2
  3458. Peter, when talking about a bunch of drones the term is not "fleets" but "flocks" or "swarms". Trust me, there are lots of discussions on this on other channels.
    2
  3459. The US replaces the powder and explosive in their artillery ammo on a regular schedule. I expect that the Russians don't do this.
    2
  3460. Not much different from the Higgins boats from WWII.
    2
  3461. Well said. Actually, I am also seeing the EU showing real concern, and potentially action, about China and their dumping of cheap goods. Trump is firmly in control. The thing is that Trump, and others, have been talking about this stuff for decades now. Finally, someone with real backbone has the ability to do something about it.
    2
  3462.  @666vhd  It's a joke. Although, the low temperatures experienced in China, and expected where I am, in the middle of North America, also contribute to the average temperature. Remember that global warming was supposed tp result in warmer temperatures in the Northern latitudes.
    2
  3463. China and Germany. What a pair. Two countries with export led economies. Two countries in demographic decline. In Germany you have the greens and human rights activists. Where are they when it comes to China?
    2
  3464.  @troypeterson7943  Well, that is not how it sounded to me. Sorry. I over reacted. I am little sensitive to that since I was once criticized at work for being a good speaker. I had to present a business plan, which I developed, to the board for a new product offering. It went very well and was approved. One of my colleagues was critical of how smoothly I presented it and how easily it was approved. I must admit that I knew lots of the members of the board, and they trusted me, but come on.
    2
  3465. Whie I fully support press freedom, the ability of companies to determine if an employee's outside activities are compatible with their employer's goals is a well-established principle. For example, when I was working for a large US multinational in the UK (I am an American citizen and was on a foreign assignment) I ran for a local office (school Board of Governor). I had to clear that with the company (I also had to be cleared, as a foreigner, by the Home Office). It was, in my case, fully supportive of the company's goals and was approved. Had they determined it was not, I would not have run. For a news outlet, access to government officials is a critical function. So, I can see where that would be an issue in this case. As regards to the organization in this case, its relationship to the government has changed. The government has changed, and the laws have changed. I see this as a valid decision on the part of the WSJ. As for bringing up the Gershkovich case, that is completely different. He was charged, unjustly, with espionage.
    2
  3466.  @zaryalace7475  Good point.
    2
  3467.  @newagetemplar6100  Actually, before I got divorced, we had a big garden. I have a big yard. I am not much of a gardener, that was my wife. I am going to repurpose it. I plan to start growing food myself again in a different configuration. Actually, one thing I do have is a good patch of volunteer asparagus. It is wonderful to just be able to go out an pick it. I also have some nice herbs.
    2
  3468.  @newagetemplar6100  Actually, as regards the Indian diet, that is not really what we followed. The father of one of my friends was a diplomat. When his parents were going back, before he finished school, he decided to stay. His mother tried to teach us traditional Indian cooking before they left. It was so complex and time consuming that we ended up with Zen Macrobiotic cuisine. I still have the original cookbook. i do love Indian food, , though.
    2
  3469. I got off of all processed food. The only thing I eat that would be considered processed food is red lentil and chickpea pasta. Each of those only has one ingredient. I am even planning to make my own. I also got totally off sugar. In my 60s I am back to my body from my 20s. It also costs a lot less. RFK Jr. will have a fight on his hands, but if anyone is up for a fight, he is the man.
    2
  3470. Full Stalin! Yes! While there are lots of caveats, this is quite believable. Getting too close to the west is indeed a problem for Xi. After all, Xi is ordering a deemphasis on English in schools. I have seen that in Beijing they are removing English from road signs. Capital controls are a sign of decoupling from the Chinese side. Openly saying you want to overtake and displace your major trading partners is, perhaps, another clue. So, this is all too believable.
    2
  3471. The land route between Europe and India is NOT cheaper. Sea transportation is three to twelve times cheaper than land transportation. This, like the route through Saudi Arabia, is purely political and not justified by economics. The transport system we have today was almost totally developed by private companies. They will take the most cost-effective route available. The other thing about sea transport is its capacity. Take for example grain coming out of Ukraine. It was basically all done by ship prior to the war. Now they are trying to get some out by rail, but this amounts to only about 20% (at most) of what they need to, and previously were, moving by sea. Also, land transport (basically all rail for bulk commodities) is a much more limited resource. This has been a cause of tension between Ukraine and their allies in the EU as this takes away from capacity needed by those EU members.
    2
  3472. It is a little late for reform and opening up. Unless the rule of law, including international law, is fully instituted, all these reforms internal to China will be for naught. One of the motivations for Trump's trade war with China was IP theft, and the ownership structure that is a core part of the Chinese system. Both of these were issues for Americans well before Trump took office. China, like Russia, has shown itself to be an unreliable partner and doing business with either is foolish for the west. Don't think that China, if isolated from the west, could trade with the rest and continue as they have. The total GDP of the major "western" countries (North America, EU+UK, Japan+Australia) is 57.7 trillion dollars. That is a total percentage of world GDP of 55.2. Add in India and you get 58.7%. China's is 16.9%. Ad all these together and you get 75.7%. That means that if China traded with everyone else, other than those mentioned above, they would have just under 25% of the world GDP to trade with. So, they would have to make up the trade lost with countries making up less than half of the major nations they trade with today in the west. Of course, many of the countries in that remaining group are actually aligned with the west. They have just spent the last seven or eight years pissing on the countries they rely on for trade and investment. A little reform and opening up without taking out the CCP and its socialism with Chinese characteristics (which is really just standard Marxism-Leninism) is not going to cut it. Let's face it. China is toast.
    2
  3473. The Trump derangement syndrome is in full swing in the commentariat. I am not a big fan of Trump's style, but many of the things people pan Trump for are common to many, if not all our Presidents for over 50 years. Do some research rather than watching CNN. For one thing, you put up a picture of Regan and Thatcher. You do realize that Regan denied the UK some assistance during the Falklands war, don't you. Americans do not like supporting European colonialism. That is a large part of why we were pacifist prior to both World Wars and why the US pushed for the Europeans to abandon their colonial possessions after the second one. How about the Nixon administration's initial reluctance to supply weapons to Israel in the midst of the Yom Kippur War? How about Obama's "pivot to Asia"? What about Biden's Afghanistan debacle? He didn't even tell our NATO allies. Look at what Biden has done in Ukraine. He has never elucidated a clear strategic goal for US support to Ukraine. This is what gives opponents to aid the ability to hold it up. He has only said we will support Ukraine "as long as it takes". He never says what "it" is. Just as a comical aside, that phraseology reminds me of Clinton's statement that it depends on what "is" is. Oh, by the way, speaking of Biden just look at how is handling the situation in Israel today. American presidents are steadily becoming more populist. The last real internationalist was George H. W. Bush. He left office 31 years ago. There are lots of other examples, but as President Joe likes to say: Come on man!
    2
  3474. Interesting turn of phrase there at the end about satisfying the authorities. In the US we would have said something like meet the statutory requirements. Satisfying the authorities sounds more like they have some leeway about it. They are just certifying that the requirements in the law have been met, or not. I know it is just a turn of phrase, but having lived in the UK I am somewhat sensitive to it.
    2
  3475. MEGA (Make Europe Great Again). That actually works. I wonder what color the hats will be.
    2
  3476. Henry VI was perhaps a bad king and imbecile, but wasn't he king for 38 and 1/2 years?
    2
  3477. To say we, human beings, are part of the world is trite and uninteresting.
    2
  3478. As an interested foreigner, and an avid watcher of this channel, I am aware of the concerns Australia has had over the French submarine contract. The cost and the limited utility of these boats has been a concern in Australia for some time. The solution offered by the US and UK (I am and American citizen and have lived in the UK) is one that I am not sure France would offer.
    2
  3479. Goebbels would be very pleased with the CCP foreign ministry's statement on the G7. Cassic nationalist socialist propaganda. The G7 not contributing to world economic growth? Who are they kidding? PPP? That is a discredited measure and pulling that out to justify themselves and the "global south" is an act of desperation. Frankly, the growth rates put out by China are very suspect. Even one of their own Premiers, Li Keqiang, admitted this. Finally, the reference to the portion of world population is the final straw. The UK, with a smaller population than it has now, controlled, for a long time, the largest population and land area of any empire in history. Where was China in all that? Take Europe as a whole and they controlled most of the globe. This is one area where size does not matter.
    2
  3480. Bring on the new Cold War. I am an old Cold Warrior and I miss it. I got to do lots of very interesting research with unlimited budgets. Ah, those were the good old days. Another problematic feature of China's economy is the state involvement in the economy. The EU is always taking the US to task for any state subsidies to targeted industries. This has flared up recently, but has been going on for some time.
    2
  3481. Sounds like you are articulating a MBGA (Make Britian Great Again) agenda.
    2
  3482. I love this idolization of the "Nordic" races. If one looks at history, intellectual development objectively then one would come up with a different conclusion. Since when did a Nordic empire outlast the Roman Empire? In fact, the history of the Nordic peoples has been one of extreme instability.
    2
  3483. That Pettis points out that one cannot analyze the Chinese economy as if it were a western economy is THE most important point, he, or anyone can make. I have been saying this for a long time. The policy levers and the opacity of the statistics make it perilous for western investors. Data transparency is ESSENTIAL to economic analysis and investment. In the US, and the west in general, economic data is public and detailed. Sophisticated investment analysts pore over these data with a fine-tooth comb. This is both to glean micro trends and to keep the government honest. Contrast that with China.
    2
  3484.  @insertcognomen  Reports I have seen vary. The most genera explanation is that they are sold on the black market. That still doesn't explain what is done with them. Another explanation I have seen is that they are sold back to the tank factory. Since the factory has already been paid for them, they now get paid twice, and perhaps a bonus for early delivery. It is a plausible explanation in a system like Russia's.
    2
  3485. This, and many others, are not traditional news sites. The traditional news sites love to repeat "facts". That is a part of their role. That is not a part of the role of a random YouTuber. All these little factoids you mention really have the opposite effect from what you are trying to convey. The German equipment, while useful, is one of this and two of that. Is that going to win the war for Ukraine? It actually seems that the Europeans, and to some extent the Americans, are slow walking support. Bad, not good. This can only be a comfort to the Russians. The Ukrainians are fighting for their very survival and sovereignty. If they fail, then the rest of Europe, and the US, will be involved in a war with the Russians. The Europeans, especially, should be flooding Ukraine with weapons. Perhaps they should be flooding in troops as well. There is no way Russia could effectively attack anywhere else in Europe (or the rest of the world). The only saving grace is that Putin and the Russians have so effectively screwed themselves up. Their equipment is crap, their military organization archaic and their corruption legendary.
    2
  3486.  @chuck-jy7mz  Same thing. The politicians were looking to open up markets for higher value Western goods. As income rose in these developing nations they would want higher value western goods. One thing the Chinese did very well, and I have witnessed this and used this, is that they make it easy to deal with them. In the US, if you were looking to hook up with small and medium manufacturers you had to subscribe to a service, which cost thousands. The Chinese just sent some of their children to drum up business directly. I know these people. They do a great job. Until Xi, the business environment was competitive and the Chinese did some good things to capture market share. Now, with the IP theft and lots of other nefarious practices, they are messing that up. i will disagree with you on the idea of helping of developing countries. At least on the political level. This would help in that regard and open new markets for advanced manufacturing, which the West assumed they would continue to dominate. There is a difference between the political and purely economic.
    2
  3487.  @playwelldowell8739  Good points! The only thing I would point out is that if you add up the GDP and military might of all those adversaries of the west you get something less than impressive. Much less. Why do you think that Europe and some of its former colonial possessions have controlled much of Asia, at least in economic, if not literal, terms over the past several centuries? The only Asian country to play in that arena is Japan, and only after they adopted European technology. The main thing they have is a surplus of people. That can often be more of a hindrance.
    2
  3488. Finally, a proper British hat.
    2
  3489. The case of Texas is instructive here. They have a revolution to secede from Mexico. They were an independent country for about ten years before becoming a state. I could see the timeline being shortened in the current case, but it would be up to them.
    2
  3490. The lack of understanding of the situation with NATO is breathtaking. Europe is totally dependent on NATO for protection. Prior to the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many NATO countries has neglected to spend sufficiently on defense. This was in large part due to the end of the Cold War. The US has repeatedly chided Europe to spend more on defense. At one point Trump was in Germany. He said two things to the Germans. One was that they were being foolish by becoming too dependent on Russia for energy. The other was that they needed to spend more on defense. They laughed at him, literally (the videos are on YouTube). They are no longer laughing. The thing is that Trump was not the first to tell the Europeans this. Obama did as well. They are also massively ramping up their spending. There is also a dream, pushed by France, of having an EU army. This is foolish but fits in with France's attitudes since de Gaulle. The whole idea of NATO was to extend the US nuclear umbrella to Europe. Yes, Europe feels dependency on the US. The alternative is to massively increase their own defense spending, well beyond the 2% of GDP required by the NATO treaty. I don't see that happening. With the war in Ukraine, NATO has been greatly revitalized. You need a better research department.
    2
  3491. What will you do when a sane government finally takes over in Westminster? Are you paying Labor a cut of your earnings from YouTube? You should. They provide so much great material.
    2
  3492. What this NSA chatroom incident tells me is that QAnon is right! All I know about them is what I read on Wikipedia. Read the first paragraph of the page. It is scary.
    2
  3493. Tony, have you seen the reports of tens of thousands of EVs in China registered and "sold" that have been abandoned by the manufacturers? This is, of course, a scheme by the manufacturers and government officials to milk the system for subsidies. How would this play into the calculations of the market? Another thing that NEEDS to be done is to hold China to environmental standards, especially when it comes to EVs and batteries. If that is not done then we just have another example of the west shipping their pollution to the developing world. Where is Gretta when you need her?
    2
  3494. Trump was reacting to something that people in the US had been complaining about for at least a decade. I actually saw two aspects of it in my consulting work. One is the rampant IP theft. The other is the poor quality of manufacture in China. Coupled with the difficulty and cost of dealing with long distance supply chains makes the current system basically unstable. One example, which put a small company under, was the substitution of a couple of critical parts. These were power transistors. The Chinese manufacturers couldn't get them, so they substituted another part without telling their customer. The US company was using power supplies made, they thought, to their specification in China as just a part of their product. At six months all the Chinese made parts started to fail after the company had installed a large number of their systems at customer premises. Frankly, up to then, they had been very successful. There was no saving them at that point. I have other examples of where this type of thing even happened to large companies. On top of that, Trump also caught onto the trade imbalance. This was also a big deal when Japan was on the rise and taking jobs from the US. This had a lot to do with the closed nature of investment in Japan at the time. Japan is still not as open as the US. Ironically, the Japanese spent a bunch of that surplus buying property in the US at the peak. When things got bad in Japan, they had to sell at a big loss. The market in the US is, after all, a free market, especially in property. It seems that China will do the same thing. As people flee China and the CCP, they tend to overpay for property elsewhere. This affects the locals in the short term. Those inflated valuations will, at some time, come back to earth and the Chinese investors will lose money, just like the Japanese did. When will they learn?
    2
  3495. A state fund to stabilize the stock market? Are they kidding? This would be about as successful as state intervention in currency markets. Remember George Soros? Look him up, and how he made his money. For a more recent example, look at Turkey.
    1
  3496.  @SiliconCurtain  On that I fully agree with you. I have often pointed out that Russia is one of the last old style imperial empires.
    1
  3497.  @MichaelT-  Says it all.
    1
  3498. Finally, someone from the west who admits that Putin cannot sustain a long war. He built up the army he attacked with over 20 years with western technology and oil money. Well, both have gone. The sanctions have choked off the technology needed. The Russians are selling oil at break-even rates (at best), and they have no access to the western technology to keep their oil infrastructure going. Their tank production is pitiful. The west, especially the US, has tanks in inventory, from their many wars over the last thirty years, to supply Ukraine for quite a while, and has the capability to build more.
    1
  3499. First off, I don't think Musk did the right thing. On the other hand, he had every right to do what he did. Starlink is private property. Using privately owned assets to fight a war is fraught with danger. This is especially true if the owner is not in your country.
    1
  3500. Ah, the Cold War. I miss the Cold War. I got to do a lot of interesting, cutting-edge research with unlimited funds. Actually, I said that to a colleague of mine and he said he missed it as well because he got to kill people. He was a F-4 pilot flying off the USS Enterprise during the Vietnam War. My father worked at an Army weapons lab in Washington, DC doing a lot of cutting-edge stuff himself. I could go on. As for the Russians in the US, I when I was at university studying physics, in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, we had some Soviet scientists visit the department. They were all dressed in dumpy dark suits. They we accompanied by KGB handlers, in somewhat nicer suits. Ahh, the good old days.
    1
  3501. Trained vaccinators? I got the Pfizer jab. It was a simple injection. Any nurse, or someone who got a minimum of training, could do so. This is a bunch of crap. There is nothing about any of the vaccines that requires a high level of skill. The vaccinator does nothing but administer a shot. This is very low tech and does not require any knowledge of the vaccine or its effects. There is nothing that they can do once a patient has decided to take the vaccine. So, I don't understand what this is about.
    1
  3502. Also, the data is retrospective. People have to get the vaccine, and are then tracked. This is a data issue, not an issue of administration of the shot. Many millions of these jabs have been given. That is the real data. As far as this is concerned, it is one of the more effective vaccines. That is what matters.
    1
  3503. My father worked at an Army weapons lab. When I was a teenager and taking physics and caliculus in high school. He set me a problem. They had a flywheel. The dimension were set, as was the speed of rotation. The only thing they could vary was the density of the material. So he had me calculate the density. Of course, it was all classified, so he couldn't tell me anything about the application, but I firmly believe it was a power generation system used in the field. This was about five decades ago.
    1
  3504. The west, especially the US, tends to overestimate their enemies. This is true of the Soviets/Russians and the Chinese. The thing is that China's military probably makes the Russan military look professional, competent and caring. Of course, we all know why this is, especially in the US, but the less said the better.
    1
  3505. What Fiat should have done was to introduce a new, luxury marque, much like the Japanese did. I am thinking of Lexus by Toyota, for example. It is all a matter of branding.
    1
  3506. Going with guns? You are going into unknown realms. What do you expect these people to do? Relitigating the past is a fool's errand. Are you really advocating for rewriting history? If so, you are a fool. Do you think that people in Cook's time knew about communicable diseases? Come on now. Get a grip.
    1
  3507. So, was the Korean War a "global" conflict? Besides the two main protagonists you had over 300K US troop, British troops, and others on the side of South Korea. On the North's side you had over 1M Chinese communist troops and the Soviets. What about the Vietnam War. How about the Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan? How about the wars in the Middle East where multiple countries invaded Israel. As President Joe likes to say, "C'mon man?" These people are playing a dangerous propaganda game. I am supportive of Ukraine, but at this point they are grasping at straws and doing the same propaganda/misinformation thing that they accuse the Russians of. That is not a good look and will cost them support.
    1
  3508. The majority of the parts for the Iron Dome interceptors are sourced from Raytheon. So, it is not only money. On the Raytheon website it is also indicated that Raytheon is building a system based on the Iron Dome, to be built in the US and that the US military is planning on buying several Iron Dome systems. Once the US starts building its own version, it can provide it to other partners. The partnerships that the US has with its NATO and other allies is a real source of strength for military technology and power. Add to that the economic heft of the US and its allies, and you have a combination that is hard to beat.
    1
  3509.  @BrickIndiana  The people saying that were politicians, intelligence analysts, and economists. Have you heard the old economist joke? If you ask 100 economists for their opinion on an issue you will get more than 100 answers. I have a long experience dealing with such people (all three I mention) and their record of getting things right is, to say the least, poor. This is not science. For example, there are geopolitical analysts that posit that Russia, and China by the way, will not last. This is a plausible scenario, and I tend to agree. The issue is that the timeframe runs from years to decades. Not very useful. So, I understand where you are coming from. We would all like this conflict to end and for Ukraine to win.
    1
  3510. What is the impact on American interests? Basically, there is none. The shipping going through there is between Europe, the Middle East and Asia. When will the administration come clean with American people, and the world? We need to have the conversation. The countries providing the protection for these ships should include the Europeans and the Chinese. Oh, wait, the Chinese support Iran who support the Houthis.
    1
  3511. Ho Ching (not sure I got the spelling correct) puts Xi's actions over the last 12 years perfectly. Xi is big on ideology. His whole idea of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is nothing more than "national socialism" (yes, that ideology from Germany). His emphasis on Han identity is the same as in the earlier example. Actually, the economic system, with mixed state controlled and private companies, also controlled by the state, is also very much the same. This is not Marxism-Leninism. It is not even Maoism. China has turned into a kleptocracy with a veneer of socialism.
    1
  3512. Donald Trump warned the Germans that they had become too reliant on Russian gas. They laughed at him, literally. The video is on YouTube.
    1
  3513.  @swanpride  Well, I don't know about that. The cost has been heavy. Germany is losing industry and burning a lot of dirty coal.
    1
  3514. Another argument for breaking down globalization.
    1
  3515. Jake, you should look more closely at the history between Poland and Ukraine. It was not a happy time for Ukraine. I don't for one minute believe that colors relations between the two today. They both want to live securely within their current borders.
    1
  3516. Love the rolling "r"s. The idea that there can only be negotiations with Russia with Putin replaced is something Joe Biden said, I think it was in Poland, near the beginning of this conflict.
    1
  3517. The GDP of Texas is $1.9T. What is the total population of the 100 counties?
    1
  3518. Wow! What an uninformed premise. Trump breaking the existing world order to create a new one? You have to be kidding me. The current world order, the supposed unipolar one, has only existed for about 30 years. Prior to that we had about 45 years of a bipolar world order with the two main protagonists threatening to destroy reach other (and just about everyone else) and arming up to do so. The multipolar world order we have now is the norm throughout history. The Chinese, Indians, Russians and others have been calling for a multipolar world order since the fall of the Soviet Union. George H. W. Bush wanted to have the conversation about how the world should work after that event. He was voted out of office. The order that William is lamenting takes a lot of money to maintain and enforce. Guess what? The US electorate has not wanted to do that since the elder Bush was president. Our erstwhile allies have failed to pull their weight and loaded up so much on social welfare programs that they currently have little or no capacity to do so. On top of that, the international institutions that underpin the order that is passing is broken. They never were very effective. So, all in all, a load of crap.
    1
  3519. The ability of man portable missiles was first shown in the Yom Kippur war in 1973. The Egyptians were initially very successful against Israeli tanks. The Israelis quickly responded but were initially hard pressed. What the Russians failed to learn was the need for combined arms, including infantry and air power in addition to armor. The Russians are a second-rate power. With Western training and weapons the Ukrainians have become a first-rate power. After this is all over, I think they will become a NATO member. Then, along with Finland and Sweeden, Russia will truly be hemmed in. I would not be surprised is Russia dissolves, much like the Soviet Union did.
    1
  3520. Well, that's what you when a bunch of convicts are allowed to form a country. The left, all over the world, have abandoned their roots in the working class and are now associated with the Champaign socialists and the gay and transgender lobbies. I am not against either of those groups, but they are a tiny minority, and their concerns are not those of working people. Corruption in the police and courts will lead to revolution. Thomas Jefferson famously said we might have have a revolution each generation. He was most concerned about authoritarianism. and a return to monarchism. In Australia it seems that the unions are being run over roughshod by their leadership, which have tied themselves to the state rather than to their members.
    1
  3521. Love Pastor Brooks. But he is wrong, as are the people shown saying they did not vote for being a sanctuary city. They did! They elected the politicians that made the decision. Just look at what being a sanctuary city entails. It means that the city will not assist the Federal authorities in enforcing the law. It means that the city will provide resources to these illegal immigrants. That's what they voted for.
    1
  3522. Of course, you realize that it was all up to aliens.
    1
  3523. Back in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, when I studied physics as an undergraduate (I switched to computer science and statistics), the grad students used to joke that they were followers of the church of the malicious divine. This was an omniscient and omnipotent being, who would, just as we were about to figure it all out, would change the rules. Could be support for the simulation hypothesis, don't you think. If it were just programmers running simulation, then they could do that, right? Anyway, did you ever hear anything like this when you were in grad school?
    1
  3524. When economics was mentioned, and Shekar mentions that economics is complex and 2+2 does not equal 4, I was reminded of an economics joke. It goes something like, if you have 100 economists in a room you will have 102 opinions. I am from the US. Some of my best friends in the past were Indian. Many of my neighbors are. It is good to have such a high-quality source of information on India as The Print. Thanks for all you do.
    1
  3525. A stock market in a communist country? Who would invest in such a thing? That would be madness. Add to that the fact that many of the companies are state owned and any western capitalist investing in China's stock market should have to answer for a failure of their fiduciary duty. Let the lawsuits begin!
    1
  3526. I am sorry to have to say this, but it is not the role of the US, or the rest of the world, to ensure the wellbeing of the Chinese people. That is up to the Chinese people and their government. That is the essence of sovereignty. In his autobiography, Henry Kissinger states that one of Richard Nixon's motivations for opening up to China was that we cannot ignore such a large country or its people. The funny thing is that, in the satirical publication, Mad Magazine, they would have world maps. China was indicated as "the great big empty spot". Of course, one of Nixon's other motivations was to use China as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. So, how has that worked out? The west, and especially the US, made it possible for China to develop as far as it has. In return, China now states that it wants to displace the west and become the new world hegemon. Yes, China has become the new "evil empire". The best way to deal with such entities is to isolate them until they fall apart under their own contradictions.
    1
  3527. You mention Lord of the Rings and how the Nazgul were like the Oprichnina in Ivan the Terrible's time. What this brings to mind is that in fantasy, and to some extent in science fiction, there are few totally made-up things. I can't count the number of times while reading history or reading the Bible, when I have come across a name of a person or place that I first encountered in fantasy and science fiction books.
    1
  3528. Clarence Thomas is a sitting Supreme Court Justice. In fact, he is the longest serving.
    1
  3529. James, I had to laugh when you talked about the "long history of" Abkhazia. You could say that about every state in Germany, for example. How about the English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish in the UK. Oh, sorry, I left out Cornwall. I was once vacationing there while living in the England. This was before Brexit. There were Cornish and EU flags but no Union Jacks or English flags. Cornwall is formally a part of England. I heard one guy say on the BBC, "I am Cornish, I am British and I am European, but I AM NOT ENGLISH (his emphasis)". I know a guy here in the US who is from Devon, and he is definitely NOT Cornish although he grew up near the border. Another example would be the Basques and Catalonians in Spain. We can't, of course, forget about the Walloons and Flemish in Belgium. I won't even get into the whole Austro-Hungarian or the Ottoman empires. That might take all day.
    1
  3530.  @JamesKerLindsay  James. this is not at meant to be a dig at you. I fully understand why you mention it and appreciate that. It was more of a commentary on the state of most of the world. Being an American it just seems odd to me. Of course, the whole history of Russia, including the Soviet Union period, is one of control of populations and attempts to use that to control their empire. Just a little story about how that continues to manifest itself. My grandparents came from Arcadia in the Peloponnese. One time my mother went to pick up one of my cars from a shop that was owned by some Greeks. I was traveling a lot at the time. She had dyed her hair blonde, and they did not think she was Greek. So, when she started talking to them in Greek, they were all excited. Then they asked her where she was from. When she told them one of the older guys started cursing at her. You see, they were from Sparta and there has been animosity between the two regions for over 3,000 years. By the way, when I lived in the UK, earlier in the current millennium, I used to see graffiti on the motorway overpasses that read "England for the English". I always had to laugh at that. It was not about migrants, by the way. Do you recall seeing that?
    1
  3531.  @bartscarstories  By the way, I love the channel. Keep up the good work.
    1
  3532. FSB forces stop Wagner? Come on man. FSB are internal security, not regular military. They would be crushed. Not only that, but Wagner is made up of seasoned troops who have been fighting, and to some extent winning. Who are these FSB goons? They are selected for loyalty, not military prowess or experience. They are also just as likely to turn on the Kremlin as support it if the conditions develop that way.
    1
  3533. BRICS is a joke. Just look at the facts. India and China are actually close to war on their shared, undefined, border. China and Russia have major territorial disputes. South Africa can't even keep the lights on and is close to breaking up. Brazil has anti-dumping investigations going on against China. As for going away from the dollar, in theory that is fine. If China and India trade and use each other's currency it makes no difference to the US. Of course, good luck getting your yuan out of China. Russia has already experienced that issue.
    1
  3534. Just ban TikTok. Considering the security and privacy concerns, it has no place. While this is a highly popular app, it does not serve any essential purpose. Frankly, all such apps are easy to replace. Just look at Twitter in China. It is banned there and there are Chinese equivalents used. Banning TikTok would have no adverse consequences.
    1
  3535. The western world has not been destroyed. It has been impacted, but that has happened in the past, and we have persevered. From the world wars, the Spanish flu and other catastrophes, we have persevered and moved forward.
    1
  3536. I agree with the senator, but he does something I find annoying and counterproductive. This is common thing with pundits as well. He repeats the litany of problems in a very formulaic way (they all are obviously memorizing this from a script). They are not wrong, but we all know it. After the first several hundred times, I get sick of hearing about. He is a leading politician, and we are not getting enough about the solutions.
    1
  3537. Zalenski is believing his own propaganda. I see it spewed on YouTube by Ukrainians and sympathetic Americans and Europeans. A couple of points. First, when the issue of the "ocean" came up you missed the critical point. Zalenski said that we would feel "influence" from Russia. As President Joe liked to say: "C'mon, man!" The Soviets were doing that almost since their founding. Look up Comintern. Second, there has been credible reporting that the Democrat legislators, who Zalenski met with prior to meeting Trump, encouraged him to take a hard line. Is he so dumb as to not to know that they are in the minority? Does he not know how US politics works? He has been dealing with it for years.
    1
  3538. Drones, in a first tier conflict, will be destroyed in the early stages. We have done, the Russians have done it, heck, even the Iranians have done it. And I mean they have done to some of the most sophisticated drones. The communication link is the the vulnerable part. Autonomous drones are problematic. Ensuring they do not target your own troops is still an issue, especially when the armies are in close combat. A drone is much easier to take down than a typical crewed combat aircraft. The small drones can be taken down by an automatic weapon, or even a shotgun. Detecting these at the front can be relatively easy. Again, they have been used successfully in asymmetric conflicts, and are great for that. In a first world conflict I don't even think that regular aircraft will survive for long.
    1
  3539.  @emhyrvaremreis4540  That is just down to not having the right countermeasures in place. It is not an inherent attribute of the drone.
    1
  3540.  @emhyrvaremreis4540  Some of it public. The rest...
    1
  3541. The issue with crops in China is not just rain, but the wholesale flooding of agricultural lands. The CCP is truly incompetent.
    1
  3542. All of the big tech firms are wildly overstaffed. I worked for decades in the aerospace industry and we had fewer employees on projects that were much more complex.
    1
  3543.  @eddienoragong402  Agreed.
    1
  3544. at about 23:51 you state that the US has converted itself to a militaristic power, implying a war economy. This is not true. Even during the Vietnam War, our defense spending did not go over about 10% of GDP. Even the latest wars in the Middle East have not seen our Defense budget got that high. We are usually at about 6%. Contrast that with the Soviet Union which was spending 40% on defense throughout the Cold War. This was a major contributing factor in their collapse.
    1
  3545. Science is NEVER settled. Literally. In the third quarter of the last century, of the last millennium, when I first went to university, I was studying physics and working in the High Energy Physics department. My professor, who I was also working with, told me something in his office that has stuck with me. He said, we could find out this is all bullsh*t tomorrow. We don't expect to, but that possibility exists. Now, if this is true in a "hard" science like physics, just think about it in terms of biology and medicine. I took some graduate courses in statistics and in one we actually reviewed why that study on aspirin and heart disease was flawed. My father-in-law is a doctor and was actually a part of the study as a subject. Speaking of him, we had a disagreement on some statistics involving a certain social topic. Now, I have dealt with statistics at a very high level in fields ranging from physics, economics, space and military applications. What I have found with most doctors is that their understanding of the field is somewhat "underdeveloped". I saw one video on YouTube where a very successful heart surgeon made a statistical statement that was TOTALLY INVALID. But he is a doctor, so people listen. What we need, and what the Senator is emphasizing, is an open debate on these topics.
    1
  3546. Looking at the "world" from a population view is the wrong way to look at it. The economic aspect is what matters most in world affairs. The reason, of course, is industrialization and technology. Just think back to how the British created such a large empire. Just saw an interesting chart showing that the "West" (which includes Japan) has over two and a half times the GDP output of China and Russia combined. Russia's economy is already shrinking. China is having a very hard time growing. With their approach to COVID, I could see them in the very low single digits, or worse, this year. In addition, they are facing a demographic catastrophe, which is starting the bite now. Along with this chart was another showing that the West had three times the R&D spending of China and Russia. Most industry on China was set up by the West. Heck, even Apple phones which are assembled in China are made in plants rub by a Taiwanese firm. As for the military, I think you are much mistaken. In addition, Xi has to be looking at Ukraine and feeling a bit wobbly. His military follows the Soviet/Russian model and much of its equipment is based on Russian designs. All the new stuff that the Chinese and Russians are talking up is in short supply, or not even available yet. I could go on. This is an area I have been involved in and followed for over four decades.
    1
  3547. Allocating resources to the whole Titan affair considering what you said seems like another case of government waste. Are there lots of submersibles of similar design? Are they a real US concern? Just because it was built in the US and owned by an American, the company ownership was not US and the ship hosting it was not American and it was not in US waters.
    1
  3548. This WW3 talk just pisses me off. Look at the Cold War. Was that WW3? Well, we have the exact same situation. In the Cold War we had three conflicts that involved one of the major powers. These are the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Soviet-Afghan War. The first two involved more troops that the Ukraine War. The third one was close. In the first two we had multiple countries involved on both sides. Oh, and by the way, during the Cold War we had the Iran Iraq War. That was also as big as the Ukraine War. For many parts of the world the Cold War was hot. No, this is Cold War 2,0. We see a containment strategy by the west already starting to develop. By the way, after the Cold War we had the Gulf War, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Those also involved large amounts of troops and armor and aircraft. It is only a world war when the major powers are directly fighting each other on one or the other's territory.
    1
  3549.  @zacklewis342  No, not the 1930s. You forget nukes and ICBMs. History does not repeat, it rhymes is an old historian's saying. The realities are also starkly different on a couple of other fronts. One of the driving forces of imperialism, and the WWII Axis powers, was population pressure. Remember Hitler's lebensraum? As far back as the 19th century there were German offices encouraging migration to the US to relieve population pressure. Think about Japan in the 1930's. They conquered Manchuria and sent farmers. The world is in a totally different place today. China, Russia, Korea and Japan are all in massive demographic decline. The other issue in WWII was natural resources. Both Germany and Japan were fairly poor in the needed natural resources. Their actions we a classic imperialistic response. In today's world Russia is resource rich, while China is resource poor and yet it is Russia who started the current round of hostilities. Oh, by the way, prior to Operation Barbarossa the Soviet Union was providing raw materials to the Germans in quantity.
    1
  3550. Odessa is another false flag. No one is trying to get anything in or out of there with Russian military presence in the Black Sea. The essential military supplies are coming through places like Poland, not the Black Sea.
    1
  3551.  @breadnewbie6326  You give them too much credit. These are the same people who invested in FTX and SVB. How about all the SPACs that were all the rage? Most have lost money, and many are defunct. The people you seem to admire made the decision to invest in those. In many cases they were following the herd, not doing any fancy analysis. The only thing that saves most of them is diversification. They spread their money among many investments and if some go south then they are not affected so much. Of course, they are also using other people's money.
    1
  3552.  @huggybear441  If you have something to say then say it. Use your words.
    1
  3553. "As a government governed by law,..." Who are they kidding? Ensuring the citizens' right to be informed is not a concept that is present under communist rule, anywhere, period! To talk about government's responsibility to the people is the height of ignorance. The people of China need to get a clue. Oh, wait, the government would shut that down. The Chinese, the Chinese economy, and the CCP are toast.
    1
  3554. Power generation, steel production, and other heavy industries are well developed and well understood. It does not take long to build or extend a coal fired power plant or steel mill. This is not chip production, which is one of the most expensive and complex technologies in the world (even more complex and expensive than rockets, and I worked on rockets). A new chip plant will cost between $7B and $10B+ for the latest technologies. A new automotive plant about $1B or so. Coal plants, depending on size are 10s to 100s of millions of dollars depending on size. Steel plants and in the 100s to 1B dollar range depending on size and other factors. Just for comparison, a high rise building in a US city will cost between $500M to $1B. So, you can see that what China has done is to begin the movement of production away from China in industries that are in a range that is feasible. Don't forget that in the Great Leap Forward China could barely produce pig iron. At the time of opening to the West, they were not much further along. It was Western technology and capital that got them going.
    1
  3555. What is also interesting is that a lot of Russian artillery is hitting unoccupied farmland. They are just shelling empty spaces. They are in effect just wasting ammo. I guess they have a quota and just expend it wherever. Now, with HIMARS targeting their ammo dumps, they are running out. They are screwed.
    1
  3556.  @tonyhawk94  That is true about unguided artillery, and especially MLRS as the Russians use it. Still, with the issues they are having with their ammo supply, this will adversely impact them.
    1
  3557. You might want to look harder at your sponsor. The art market seems to be tanking.
    1
  3558. An improvement in international relations will not cut it this time. Even if the CCP were thrown out of power, China has proven to be an unreliable supplier. Add to that the shrinking population and there would be no reason to return to China. Recall the two pillars of opening up to China. The first was cheap labor. The second was a large market. Frankly, the CCP and Chinese businesses are STUPID! The CCP, because of its one child policy took away the many of millions who are the consuming cohort of society. Businesses because the trend of not hiring mature workers cuts off a major source of internal capital on top the skills and efficiency of those workers. These are well understood aspects of a capitalist economy. Of course, the CCP are a bunch of commies and don't understand even the basics. They don't even know history. The evidence is in folks. Planned economies don't work.
    1
  3559. What I find interesting, and somewhat annoying, is the tone and tenor of the interviewers and questions. For one thing, there is no evidence that the Russian military is, or ever was, competent. So, the implied assumption that they could win given the circumstances is ludicrous. I like the guests and format of this channel, but have trouble with the, let's just name it, namby-pamby interviewers and questions.
    1
  3560. Wow! As Peter predicted in his opening you have to stay to the end. He did it. He made the point and did it very well. I was never a Carter fan. I was studying physics and working in the High Energy Physics department during the 1976 election. There was a poster on the wall in the hallway which sticks with me to this day when I think of Carter. It showed him with long white hair and beard and dressed in a white robe with the caption "Only JC can save America". I also remember talking to the co-chair of HEP who despaired of the choice between Carter and Regan and opined that he might have to vote for the Socialist Workers Party candidate. He wasn't even a socialist.
    1
  3561.  @Fleshox19-uz3qt  Aw!
    1
  3562. "Our communities." Intersectionality, that is precisely what got the Democrats in trouble. If these people had any idea of what the country is about and the Constitution, they would know what the role and government is and it is not pushing "communities", or anything else, on the people. The Democrats are toast.
    1
  3563. Konstantin is wrong to equate the Maidan to the American Revolution. The circumstances were completely different. What he is doing is using a rhetorical device to generate sympathy. This is endemic in the Ukraine situation and in Europe as a whole. It was behind Zalenski's performance at the White House. He believed his own propaganda. The end result is that the American people will see through the rhetoric and will question their support, first for Ukraine and then for Europe as a whole. This shows the Europeans' foolishness. They need to get off their high horse. They think themselves so superior and yet is the US that is surging ahead and driving the train economically, culturally and politically. This has actually gone on for a long time now. I would argue at least a century.
    1
  3564. My neighbor's wife is a real estate agent, and I would not look to her for advice on the economy. You are in the market for an apartment. Does that make you an expert? As President Joe often says, "C'mon man!"
    1
  3565. The answer to the question posed in the title is yes. The US bought an alliance after WW2, as Peter Zeihan argues. This was to counter the Soviets. NATO has not really been relevant since the breakup of the Soviet Union. That is a major factor contributing to the issues within the alliance ever since. In fact, the Ukraine invasion has partially rejuvenated NATO. As for the claim that the US is washing its hands of the Ukraine situation and that the Europeans, Ukranians and Russia, without the US, will decide the outcome is just plain stupid (trying to be nice). Who is negotiating with the Russians? Macron? Starmet? Ursula? C'mon, man, as President Joe often said. If you think the European people want to get as involved as their leaders want to then you just aren't paying attention. Just look at the protests in France and the discussions in the UK. Really, this video is just a bunch of drivel.
    1
  3566. Your assessment of the fatality rate is somewhat meaningless. The real rate is the number dying who are infected. If you assume everyone will get it, then your figure has merit. What is the experience in the rest of the world? If you use the metric against the whole population, then the fatality rate of some our worst diseases is miniscule. If that is the metric, then why worry?
    1
  3567. I don't hate my smartphone, but it is totally overkill for me. I upgraded my iPhone, after over five years (7 base model to 15 Pro), but only because the battery was getting wonky. I know I could have probably had the battery replaced, but there is also the crack in the screen. I don't spend a lot of time on it. I have a group of friends that are active text messaging. Usually it is about cigar nights, but sometimes there are also humorous exchanges. Texts are not new, are they? I do play two different card games, mostly when I am on the can. Before smart phones my sons and I used to take our laptops into the can. So, there are some weight savings there. Let's see, I also check the weather a good bit. I can also check my credit cards and bank account, but I can do all that from my laptop. I am very concerned about the AI features. I already have those annoying Siri messages about things I should be doing which I usually do anyway. Why? I didn't ask for that. I have to figure out how to stop that. Just checked, and I think I have done it. We'll see.
    1
  3568. A lot of these symbols have nothing to do with the Nazis and predate them. The swastika is an ancient symbol that was used in many cultures. To associate them with the Nazis of the 30s and 40s is not necessarily genuine. Runes predate the Nazis by centuries. In addition, there are many people throughout Europe that are uncomfortable with other races coming into their countries. I was once vacationing in Sweeden. At the time I was living in the UK. I had an interesting conversation in a shop with an American woman who was married to a Sweed. She talked about the racism she experienced. Europe is not the United States of America. The US, for all its faults, is a multicultural society. It was from the beginning. Europe has never been. Another thing that is often not brought up is that many of those cities and regions in the south and east of Ukraine that are being attacked consist of mostly Russian speakers. They have become Ukranian and fully support the right of Ukraine to exist as a separate nation. Are they neo-Nazis? Mariupol is a Russian speaking city. Are they neo-Nazis?
    1
  3569. Wow, Saagar, you sound like Q Anon.
    1
  3570. The Teamsters president saying social issues are important is so disingenuous, especially among his members, that it makes me want to throw up.
    1
  3571. We can only hope he keep his word that he will not make a habit of doing this. Peter's TDS is in full swing right off the bat. Trump packing his cabinet with functional incompetence? Really, Peter? So, Biden had the A-Team in place. What about Obama. Let's just mention some of the stellar Cabinet and top advisors Biden has. The list is long, so just some highlights will do, including Pete Buttigieg, Janet Yellen, Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan. These people have presided over some of the most disastrous policies and events we have seen in a long time. What Peter doesn't understand is the role of the Cabinet. The Cabinet is not there to manage. These positions, down at least one level from the Secretary, are policy positions. They are also not independent. The Cabinet members are there not to make their own policy, but to implement the policies of the President, who is the elected official. That Peter does not seem to know this is a good indication that he should not be opining regarding current policies and personalities, or at least we should not listen so closely. His whole value as an analyst is in detecting and revealing global trends and their potential impact on a large scale.
    1
  3572. Jyoti Malhotra seems to be supporting the India Russia relationship. Considering the issue India has with China. This is not much different from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Another issue is the dependence on Russian military equipment. The war in Ukraine shows how inferior that equipment is. Just look at how Pakistani air power (provided by the US) has done against Indian air power (provided by Russia). If India wants to confront China in the South China Sea and the Indo-Pacific, they cannot rely on Russia.
    1
  3573. You can still see the steel works in Gary, Indiana from downtown Chicago. i was once at an event on the 80th floor of a building in downtown and it was a clear night. Impressive sight.
    1
  3574. This is odd. I have seen projections that the UK economy will overtake that of Germany within the next decade. The EU is a protectionist cartel and is failing.
    1
  3575.  @wavell14  There seem to be lots of better examples. Many years ago, I ran into a Swedish student who was studying medicine in the US. His plan was to move to the US because he could do much better in the US than in Sweden. My understanding, and correct me if I am wrong, is that doctors there are employees of the state.
    1
  3576. A cheaper idea would be to just bring back the M-14. Another alternative is the AR-10. There are several manufacturers making 7.62x51 AR style rifles that are much lighter. The new Ruger SFR is an example. The 16" version weighs 6.8 pounds. The 20" version weighs 7.3 pounds. Of course, this does not include the optic. For the number of times such an optic would be used, I think there could be better alternatives.
    1
  3577. You make the same mistake that most YouTubers do. Wars are not won by taking and holding territory. Just ask the US after Vietnam. Wars are won by engaging and destroying the enemy. The real tragedy of this war is the real-time maps. Just look at what you showed today. Any westerner who sees this will look and say, with the Russians, see how little they can move. You, and all the others, are doing no favors for the Ukrainians by showing this stuff. I have noticed some war commentators starting to realize this. Let me give you a good example from WWII which actually partially took place in this same territory. In Operation Barbarossa the Nazis had goals such as Moscow, Kiev and St. Petersburg, but their main tactical goal was to engage and destroy the Soviet Army. When Hitler switched to taking and holding specific territory as a goal, he started to lose big time. Frankly, if he had not thrown away all those troops in the east trying to hold places like Crimea, he might have had a better chance of later defending Germany. Moving toward a place which has value to the enemy is generally only useful if the enemy commits his troops to defend it. If you destroy those troops you just walk in. I think the mentality comes from medieval times. I do enjoy your content, but I am seeing this phenomenon I mentioned across all media.
    1
  3578. You should do a little research before publishing stuff like this. First, you put Meta and Twitter in the same bucket. A minute or so would show that Meta made almost $95B in profit in their last fiscal year. Twitter still does a slim profit. Apple has over $450B in net assets. For 2021 it made $153B in profit. It is seeing growth in 2022. Because of these numbers, they hired without regard to expense. That there is a retrenchment is not unsurprising. The downturn in the economy is a good time to reassess. One good thing, a silver lining so to speak, is that this will free up tech workers for employment in other companies that have had trouble attracting tech workers.
    1
  3579. Water is basically never destroyed. H2O molecules do not generally get destroyed. The water reappears somewhere else.
    1
  3580. Actually, the interest rate in Turkey is 50%.
    1
  3581. Why should an individual homeowner with solar get paid the full market rate? You have no QoS agreement with the utility. You only provide power when it suits your needs.
    1
  3582.  @puraLusa  That has not been my experience, or that of anyone I know. This is especially true in the Internet age, where all car buying research can be done online.
    1
  3583. I find it interesting that James contrasts "economic interests" with "global, wider interests", In the end, it all comes down to economic interests. That is an ironclad law that many people in the international relations/diplomacy field tend to get wrong. What was the reason for the expansion of the British Empire? Economics. Why did the UK eventually withdraw? It was no longer cost effective. You can look at other empires in the past, and see the same dynamic. Why do you think the US populace is no longer interested in the international order? The sacrifices US workers made to help cement the order were massive. It may have been a good idea, and the low cost option at the time, but this is no longer true. By continuing it far beyond the original goal, to contain and deter the Soviet Union, was madness. In the end, that policy only enriched our enemies. The US, like few other countries, has other options.
    1
  3584. NO! Not Brown Sugar. I was never much of Stones fan (preferred Led Zeppelin and the Who). I first heard Brown Sugar in a disco in Rhodes in the early 1970s. I can still visualize the girl I was dancing with.
    1
  3585. "Illegal revolution"? What the heck is that? There is no such thing as an "illegal revolution", no matter who "sponsors" it. It is either a revolution or it is not. The Russian revolution in1917, by that measure, was sponsored by the Germans. Is that also an "illegal revolution". Was the Soviet Union just a lie and a German plot?
    1
  3586. You may be wrong in your assessment. This behavior may be a part of the whole trans ethos. You need to consider that. You are trying to split the trans "community" into different parts. I am not sure that is valid. It might be, but it is worth discussion.
    1
  3587.  @IaconTorusStateEmbassy  Very good point. I wish that the channels and other news sources would give more information on organized crime in China. Every once in a while, something shows through. Being a totally corrupt entity, the CCP is likely linked to organized crime, and in fact the later may have much more influence than we are led to believe.
    1
  3588. I am still pushing for Georgina. See my comment in the last video. Go Georgina. It is perfect.
    1
  3589.  @offred6013  Well, you could also mention Korea. How about Czechoslovakia breaking up. Of course, if you mention Afghanistan, you must mention the Soviet action there as well. What these all had in common was that the great powers never directly clashed.
    1
  3590.  @MarsStarcruiser  Thanks
    1
  3591.  @magnaviator  First, the US has not fully turned its back on the free trade order. It is slowly pulling away from the security guarantees. Second, what are you talking about? That is one of the more foolish things I have heard lately.
    1
  3592. You make a very good point about capitalism. That is the only system that can adjust organically to changes. As you have pointed out, it does that well. I follow Zeihan, and many of his prognostications and predictions are spot on. I have read all his books. Some of the situations he talks about are happening in real time. It is fun to watch. I think he even got the Ukraine situation correct as far as the invasion. There are things I disagree with him about, and one is the flexibility of capitalism and industry. I could go on and on (as I am wont to do) with examples. There is one thing I just saw from him, that makes me think he is shifting his thinking a bit toward mine. His latest video (today) on his personal channel is titled "China Will Soon Lose the Title of "World's Manufacturer". He does mention the sunk cost of industrial plant and infrastructure in China, but then makes a surprising admission. This will shift to other places where economic factors are more favorable. Don't forget that China has only been industrializing for the last forty years or so. A fun fact, which I think I got from Zeihan, was that by 1900 or so the US had a larger share of industrial exports than China does today. Industrial facilities are always being tweaked, improved, reconfigured and moved. I have been involved in some of that. Ukraine, like Poland, will be an attractive investment destination once the war is over. Just before the war one of the oil majors was starting a program to drill for oil in the east of Ukraine, for example. There are plenty of natural resources in Ukraine that could benefit Europe. And, as you say, an innovative and motivated population. Maybe they will even have a baby boom like after WWII once the Russians are kicked out. I like what you say about NATO vs. the EU. I tend to agree with Zeihan that the EU is dying. It is a protectionist clique after all. For example, there is currently lots of angst in the UK about their leaving the EU. Actually, there are people talking against that and economic predictions that the EU could overtake Germany in economic size in the next decade. We will see.
    1
  3593. The Russians are going to start another war further west with a NATO country? Really? With what military. Their weapons are crap, their tactics are crap and don't even think about strategy when talking about the Russians. On top of that, and I really got tuned into this from Peter, they don't have the people. On the transition, he is right. I heard an interview of the incoming NSA Waltz, and he indicated that he was in the room with the outgoing NSA Sullivan. He did not sound concerned or upset with the decision.
    1
  3594. In the US, the Social Security retirement age has been going up. If you were born in 1937 or earlier, it was 65. For me it was 66 and 2 months. For those born in 1960 or later, it is 67. Individual companies can set different retirement ages. The US Government does not have a retirement age limit. You can retire at an age similar to Social Security, but you can also work as long as you want and are able. The thing is that retirement age has to be adjusted to reflect the actuarial realities. In the US, the data shows that if you reach 65 you have a 50% chance of living to 95. A few years longer for women. This has an impact on the finances of any pension system, public or private. I expect there were a couple of reasons for the low retirement age in CCP China. The first was the same that drove the one child policy. Lots of young people coming up. They had to make room for them. The second was that the life expectancy was not that long. Of course, because of the one child policy and improvements in medical care and standards of living. this needs to be adjusted. The issue of job scarcity at the present time, as the economy goes through a painful adjustment (caused by the CCP) is real and may be around for some time. The CCP has made China so toxic to the rest of the world, that it will also have to navigate this on, even if the CCP falls. The corruption, IP theft and counterfeiting is endemic to the society. It does not look good.
    1
  3595. One of the major drivers of consumption in the US is demographic. Young workers get married, have kids, buy cars and houses, etc. It is not government investment that drives this activity. The CCP, with its communist, central planning model, is going to sink the Chinese economy. Central planning on a large scale never works.
    1
  3596. Russia has already lost almost half its Ka-52 helicopters. They don't seem to be able to replace them at present. As for the F-16s, people are still buying them. Part of the "package" that persuaded Turkey, no small player, to finally let Sweeden into NATO was the US promise of F-16s. The US has just recently upgraded Pakistan's F-16s to a newer standard. Taiwan is upgrading their fleet of F-16s (they have 141, moving up to 200) to a new standard. These planes are still relevant and still in demand. Pilot training in Russia is a good bit less than half of what it is in the US, or NATO, in general. Maintenance also seems to be abysmal in light of all the accidents since the start of the war. Even their effectiveness on the battlefield is questionable, again coming down to the training issue. Add to that the fact that Ukraine has four times as many experienced pilots as planes, and it we may be surprised at how quickly they can come up to speed. Perhaps that is wishful thinking, but I heard it in a few places, and it makes sense.
    1
  3597.  @gilgameshomar  that is just in the last day or two. The figures say that at least 40 have been shot down before that. Russia reportedly has 114 but had planned to order more.
    1
  3598.  @ccc_the_painful_truth  You are totally wrong. Learn how to use the internet and get some education.
    1
  3599.  @ccc_the_painful_truth  Oryx reports that by August 14, 2023 they had confirmed reports of 40 Ka-52s. Is that good enough for you? Where the heck did you get your information?
    1
  3600. Your report is somewhat silly. If nuclear bombs are used, we are well beyond worries about collateral damage.
    1
  3601. Mentioning that bitcoin is up YTD is misleading. It is, even with that recovery, only worth a third of what it was at its peak. It has barely gotten back to where it was at the end of 2020. As a commodity, it would be one of the worst investments of all time depending on when it was purchased. I guess timing is everything.
    1
  3602. Russia has been cut off by the west from technology. Consequently, as the try to ramp up tank production, they are producing T-62 tanks. These are old. In the Gulf War the US lost no tanks to the Iraqis and destroyed approximately 4,000 tanks, many of them T-72. as well as T-62 and T-55. The Russians will not be able to repeat Stalingrad, in no small part because of precision weapons. If they try to bring supplies over the river, they will be interdicted.
    1
  3603. Isn't Charles fond of Islam? If so, then he could have another three wives. Heck, as a monarch, he could have as many as he wants.
    1
  3604. The sad thing is that the UN has become irrelevant. In the US there have been moves to defund it, and move back to funding. Without reform, I think the time for the US and its allies to pull back from the UN is at hand.
    1
  3605. The lack of historical context is breathtaking. By the early 20th century, it was the US that was the workshop of the world. Then after WWII it was Japan. Neither of those countries has really receded in manufacturing but have moved low end manufacturing to China. The idea is then to move up the value chain (although the US was already there) which is what Japan did. In fact, the US is reindustrializing and remains a consumption driver of the world. Many Japanese (and German) companies have moved manufacturing to the US. There is also a diversification of trade away from China. China was not only a place to do cheap manufacturing but was also perceived to be a big market. It never moved far enough up the value chain, though. China has 600M people living at or below the world poverty line. The US rate is about 10%, but that is by local measures. Many of people in poverty in the US would be lower middle class in much of the world. I used to volunteer at a food bank. The cars of the clients were actually rather nice. Many of the clients were overweight, and some were obese. The foodbank was also a deluxe facility. I would place it easily on a par with Aldi. Almost all the food was donated, and the facility was built with private funds. Compare this with rural China or India and you would be amazed or appalled, maybe both. In the case of China, there is also the demographic disaster taking place right now. This also limits its allure as a market. The economy is unbalanced (way too much invested in the property sector) and the government is unstable, especially when it comes to the economy. There are also analyses that claim that China's economy is not as big as they say, and the opaqueness of government statistics makes it likely that things are not as they seem.
    1
  3606. What always amazes me is the idea that any outside power would want to attack and take over China or North Korea. One could extend that to Japan and most of northeast Asia. These places don't have fantastic natural resources and don't even have great farmland. In addition, it is a very crowed place. All those northeast Asians. Before you point out that Japan attacked China in the 1930s, that was a time when Japan had a growing population and was relatively poor. Compared to Japan Manchuria was an agricultural paradise. Compared to most of the world, not so much. Even the natural resources in Siberia, especially oil and gas, are in the far north in an inhospitable region. There are plenty of these resources around the globe in much nicer areas.
    1
  3607.  @frevazz3364  True. The basis of the problem is that those supplying the funds are often not people who made money managing money. A great example of what happens is Bernie Madoff. He preyed upon successful professionals, many of whom were retired. FTX was a similar situation, but generally with younger people. It takes all kinds.
    1
  3608. The litany of companies having problems have a common thread. They are all diversified. Basically, they are conglomerates, consisting of totally unrelated businesses. If you hadn't noticed, in the west, especially the US, this style of business went out of favor a long time ago. If you look at someone like Elon Musk, he has many different businesses, but they are all separate. This business style in China is both inefficient and frankly stupid.
    1
  3609.  @fatemad4012  The big difference is that his businesses are separate and trade separately (those that are public). I said that in my comment. Perhaps you need to work on reading comprehension. The reason that in the US most conglomerates have broken apart is that separately the pieces are more valuable and easier to analyze. It also allows them to develop in ways that are more appropriate to their operation, again making them more valuable. Musk is a motivating factor in his various businesses, but he does not run all of them on a daily basis.
    1
  3610. James, I thought you were going to mention other times when the US actually intervened, with military force, in Mexico.
    1
  3611. It seems that the Fujian might have copied the propulsion system of the Soviet/Russian carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, which burns "bunker oil" and also requires a support ship to follow it (when it sails, which it hasn't in a long time). In fact, one time the Admiral Kuznetsov had to ask the US to help tow it when its engines broke down.
    1
  3612. James, you have been listening to me. Your comments about borders, especially those drawn by colonial powers, are spot on.
    1
  3613. So, how come a lot of the background video you provided shows F-18s, not F-16s?
    1
  3614. So, Dave, what about brother-brother marriage or sister-sister marriage?
    1
  3615. I found a "meme" on the Internet that lays this out clearly. It is a picture of "the Artist Formerly Known as Prince". The caption read: Don't believe everything you read on the Internet, Bob Dylan, Drummer, Metallica.
    1
  3616. I have read, many places, that photons do not experience time. I am also wondering about this experiment. If a photon is absorbed by an electron and then reemitted is it the same photon? If not, then what is the point of all this.
    1
  3617. Don't get so caught up in the specs of aircraft. The F-16, I have seen, in Israeli and US service has had a 65 to 0 record against Soviet and Russian aircraft. Even in Desert Storm, one F16 dodged 6 SAMs on a mission. A lot of the success of an aircraft depends on the training of the crews and doctrine. The US is just superior in that regard. The US and Russia probably have the most experience, with the US far ahead. Even in Vietnam, in the early days, the US Navy, with the F4 had a superior kill ratio when compared to the US Air Force. This was because of their training (think Top-Gun). When the USAF adopted similar training their ratios went up as well. Don't forget, the US has been in wars, with experienced senior officers, for decades. The Chinese not since the late 1970s. They did not do well. This is way more important than the specs of the planes.
    1
  3618.  @view1st  You are fighting the last war, so to speak. Frankly, the Germans were almost successful, and well might have been without the US getting involved. Without material support from the US the Soviets were in great trouble. Without a second front, which Stalin was constantly on about, the Germans would have had far more troops in the East. The Germans had over 400K troops tied down in Italy by 1945. Without US involvement they would have had none. All that was before Normandy. Anyway, the US has no interest in invading China. If it comes to all out war, then it will be over quite quickly. If our forces met it would be on peripheral battlegrounds.
    1
  3619. Interesting examples you use of dictators that died with no successor and civil society in shambles. Iraq and Libya are countries totally unlike Russia, Germany, etc. Those countries are long standing empires that grew organically. Iraq and Libya are creations of conquering empires. What happened after the dictator is that the disparate groups that were put together in a modern nation state now had no one to impose order. They are tribal societies in the original meaning of the word. We see that especially in the Middle East (Southwest Asia) and Africa, the two places that were most tribal and most conquered by European empires.
    1
  3620. Russia was already on the way to breaking up. It needed no help from the West. A recent poll of geopolitical analysts showed about half expecting a breakup within 10 years. With this war, I give it one or two. We are already hearing rumblings out the Kremlin and the oligarchy that Putin needs to be replaced. China is eyeing the Russian far east. The many republics of non-Russian ethnicity would like to be free of it. In a decade or so, the Russian ethnicity will be a minority. Their demographics are a disaster. The losses, demographically, from combat casualties to people fleeing, are just accelerating that trend. Without western foreign investment, their economy, including oil and gas, is a joke, just as it was in Soviet times. The Russian Federation is the last large imperial empire. To participate in the world order the US created after WWII, in order to contain the Soviets, the European allies were required to wind down their empires. They did alright. Four of the top ten countries by GDP are in Europe. The combined population of these countries is less than 300M. Their combined GDP is only a little smaller than that of China. They are allied with the first and third largest, by GDP, countries. I see no real problem with the Russian Federation breaking up. It is a shambles as it is.
    1
  3621. You could just send the to an island. I hear that Australia has lots of desolate places.
    1
  3622. You talk about the plight of the Afghan people. Who are the Taliban? Afghans. Who are their supporters? Afghans? Like in South Vietnam, there was little support for the regime. On the other hand, you ignore the successes the US has had with countries divided, and/or occupied after WWII. These include South Korea, Germany and Japan. Considering Afghanistan's ethnic makeup and rivalries, can we really consider this a real country?
    1
  3623.  @Anurag-xe2jp  India is one of the exceptions. For this is should be admired. Pakistan in another story. I don't know how stable it is. Not very, I believe.
    1
  3624. Artur, It does not have to stay stationary for long. It is not like it sitting there for minutes. Properly programmed it should be seconds. It should also be possible to detect kamikaze drones as well and act accordingly.
    1
  3625. Don't discount the profit that Musk will make if he is successful. Here's how it goes. Take the company private. Fix it. Then do an IPO. If he is right, and successful, he will make a healthy profit. Considering it is no more than 20% of his net worth, this is a great business play. If anyone can make this work, it is Elon Musk. Remember, he made his first fortune in a software-based tech firm. This is much closer to his origins than either Tesla or SpaceX, and both of those are exceeding all expectations. He went from software tech to cars. Then he went into space. I just saw an article that touted SpaceX's recent response to a Russian attack on their assets in Ukraine that a military expert called amazing,
    1
  3626.  @kanishkdwivedi5739  I was not talking about patent waivers. And in this case, it is not an issue as far as I can tell.
    1
  3627. I agree with you that Malone sounds more believable. On the other hand, mass psychosis is not his area of expertise. He is just another smart guy who has a plausible idea. Any moderately educated person, with a good grasp of facts could come up with a similar idea. So, what you are doing is what you are complaining about. You are listening to an "expert" who is not, in this field. This is not how science works. Science collects data, and then analyzes it. That analysis often takes years, even from well designed scientific experiment and observations. Science will not be able to determine what went on for years. Just think about vaccines. They generally take years to develop and gain acceptance. The vaccines we have are effective to an extent, but nothing compared to vaccines we have used to eradicate various diseases. The people you show in your montage were clearly just echoing talking points and were politically motivated. Anyone who has the answer today is not much better.
    1
  3628. Nazism as a reaction to Bolshevism is a perfectly reasonable idea. What is interesting is that both were collectivist movements, and both were socialist. Recall that the Nazi party was the National SOCIALIST German Workers Party. Bolshevism was internationalist, whereas Nazism was nationalistic and racially based. The Soviet's leadership included lots of Jews and people who were not of Russian ethnicity. Stalin was himself a Georgian, not a Russian. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, they were actually welcomed by large parts of the population. They rejected these people. I have read and listened to a number of German soldier's war diaries. Many of the common soldiers could not understand this attitude. As they got to know the local people, they began to have sympathy with them, which was not shared by the leadership. This proved to be a catastrophe for the Nazis, but it was a flaw built into their ideology.
    1
  3629.  @Kathakathan11  This could be the case. Both my sons are into gaming. When I took them out deer hunting and they got a deer it was like a revelation. I asked my older son when he got his first if this was better than gaming, he said emphatically yes. They are still into gaming, but I do not worry about them. They don't live at home so I am not worried about them coming after me (actually, since their mother divorced me the ignore me).
    1
  3630. I would not be surprised if the belligerence over Taiwan has become a feint. For one thing, China's chances of success are very low in that direction. On the other hand, Xi has been whipping up war fever. He may need to use a war to deflect from his economic problems. There are two other avenues of advance for Xi. One is north, into Russian Siberia. China has territorial ambitions there and lots of historical claims (Xi likes those). Speculation is that Xi will wait until the Russian army is either destroyed, or at least heavily degraded, to move in. The other, and I think more likely, direction of conflict is south. China has been building up its forces there significantly, and Indian media is starting to get a bit exercised over that. There are practical reasons for China to strike there. India has relied on the Soviet Union, and now Russia, for arms. Russia is no longer able to provide those. India is on a path to pivot to internal and western sources, but that would take time. Better to strike now.
    1
  3631. Brilliant! I just saw a video about a trash emergency in St. Paul, Minnesota in the USA. Another city in the US run by lefties.
    1
  3632.  @crickman76  Can't agree with you on that. When I lived there he was going on about architecture. He has been going on about organic farming for a while. He also goes on about global warming. I also got a book titled Bring Home the Revolution. So, who knows.
    1
  3633. Putin is a godless commie. End of story.
    1
  3634. She says this is not what the country voted for. How does she know that? It may be precisely what the country voted for. Who really knows. The reality is that Trump and his border czar have indicated that, to keep families together, some with US citizenship might be deported. It will be interesting to see how that works.
    1
  3635. The CCP believing that its only path to unification is force is different from the CCP being able to successfully use force. I refer to the CCP here quite intentionally. since the military in the PRC is controlled by the CCP, not the national entity. By the way, the last time China projected naval power beyond the first island chain was in the 15th century. The authors of the Foreign Affairs piece also overplay China's importance to the world economy. Taiwan is far more important to the global economy than the mainland. The best thing to do is to continue to support Taiwan, and possibly to upgrade relations. The CCP will implode the mainland's economy in short order.
    1
  3636. Your whole premise is wrong, given what happened with the Torries just recently, don't you think?
    1
  3637. Back to the Cold War! I miss the Cold War. I got to do a lot of cutting-edge research with unlimited budgets. It was fun.
    1
  3638.  @rockets4kids  Well, I have checked. I have been "refreshing" my clothing and tech over the last year or so. I got only one pair of linen shirts, from a US brand I trust, that was made in China. All the other stuff was made in the Americas or south Asia. Even a lot of the tech providers are moving to those areas.
    1
  3639. If she actually went on with Rogan Trump's margin of victory would have been much larger.
    1
  3640. The E3 is based on the Boeing 707, not the 737. That is significant, since the 707 was last produced in 1978. It is a very good airframe. Like the B-52 bomber, it may be in service up to 100 years.
    1
  3641.  @nationalistcanuck7800  Not sure about why they continued to use it. It could be that the satellites could not always be where you wanted them when you wanted them there. As for the Soviet planes "catching" the SR-71, I wonder why they did not shoot one down. Their action with the U2 showed that they were not adverse to doing so.
    1
  3642. Both the title of this video and Lahren are ignorant of history. When Regan got into office many Democrats in the South switched parties. Manchin may well do so soon.
    1
  3643. The reality about the Russians pulling their forces from the border areas with NATO is very, very important. There is a constant drumbeat about the Russians invading NATO in the future. Bollocks. Any way you slice it, Putin currently doesn't have the resources for such an invasion. Nor will he. It took 20 years for him to build up the military he attacked Ukraine with. During that time, he had access to western technology and oil money. He has neither now. If the Ukraine war bogs down and becomes a stalemate he has nothing with which to invade NATO. If Ukraine is successful, which entails destroying the Russian army in Ukraine, he has nothing. Add to that the demographic crisis in Russia, and he has nothing. Any way you look at it he is screwed. The best thing for NATO, especially the US, would be to put substantial forces on the Russian border. Two armored corps should do it. That is a little less than the force that invaded, and conquered, Iraq in the second invasion. In a matter of weeks by the way, against a prepared enemy. Against a diminished Russia, this would be enough. They don't even have to do anything aggressive. Just being there would be good. That size force would be less than the US had in Europe at the end of the Cold War. It would also be a great recruitment tool for the US Army. Another thing to consider is China. They actually lay claim to big chunks of Russian territory in the east. Some friends. That whole situation is a train wreck waiting to happen, and it will happen. Russia (and Putin) is toast. The west just has to keep up the pressure. It looks like they will. The sooner Russia collapses, the better.
    1
  3644. No country with a nuclear weapon program should receive IMF loans. If they can afford such weapons, they can fund themselves.
    1
  3645. Ideology? Rise of the east, decline of the west? As usual the CCP is living in its own fantasy land. This is the same Marxist claptrap I have personally been hearing for half a century. The CCP needs to learn about the better bomb theory. It goes like this. Two cultures on a planet develop without knowing about each other. They develop in completely different ways. One is more mystical the other scientific. When they meet, they clash. The side that wins is, of course the more scientifically oriented one. They have the better "bombs". Actually, this is not just a theory, but reflects the history of the world. The stark reality of the world is that the side emphasizing "soft power" is the side that is losing. When it comes down to it, it is not your words or opinions that will win, but the other guy's bullets.
    1
  3646. Those who "have a much longer view of history" are domed to fail. What history has shown us is that it is disruptive factors that matter (e.g., technology, wars). I had business school professors who were also consultants who were just enamored with Japanese companies who had 100 year plans. Complete bollocks. The most valuable companies in the world did not exist that long ago. The technologies they exploit did not exist. Look at where Japan is now. Stagnated for decades.
    1
  3647.  Where's Walshy  I was only reacting to the correspondent's comment at about 9:35 where she talked about China looking at the much longer term. If you think you can predict the future, you should bet on the stock market. I was not really concerned about the monarchy. Frankly, this stuff might actually support Qanon (which I know little about), Of course, the judge you reference has a bit a problem being taken seriously because of his hair style. What is that all about?
    1
  3648. China is breaking down from within. Some reputable commentators believe that China as a nation state will not exist by the end of the decade. I tend to agree with that. All the news coming out of China is bad, and that is before the natural disasters. The mandate of heaven has been withdrawn.
    1
  3649. Violates Interational law? Are you kidding? What law? A sovereign state has the right to decide who to trade with. Period. As for the west vs the rest, who cares about the rest. I assume that you include Japan and Australia with the west. Therefore, the vast preponderance of the world's economy is imposing sanctions on Russia. The so-called global south is insignificant economically and militarily. That is what matters. The global south only has what economic development it has because of the US led world order. As that protection is drawn down, those countries will become much poorer and many will experience starvation, especially in Africa. They want to get the US out of the way, so be it. They will pay the price. Finally, what do you think should happen to Russia? You are glad to bring up the UN, but do you know what the UN Charter says? One of the primary tenants is respect for internationally recognized borders. Are you supporting the invasion of a country's sovereign territory. That's what it sounds like.
    1
  3650.  @marywalters1181  Did you actually read what I wrote? From your response I would have to guess you are a Russian troll. Actually, I don't believe that, but it seemed to fit.
    1
  3651.  @everforward8651  Did you read what I wrote?
    1
  3652. Everyone wants to counterbalance against China these days. I have even heard speculation that once the war is over the west would use Russia for just this purpose. This makes sense. The opening to China in the 1970s was a ploy to use China to counterbalance the Soviet Union. The fact that China and Russia are next to each other and have a fraught history with each other long predating communism in either makes this a natural feature of geopolitics.
    1
  3653. Chicago is known as the City of Chicanos. It is also a sanctuary city. What is the problem?
    1
  3654. Completely agree with Travis. He gets it. She either does not get it or, just as likely, is spewing propaganda. The news media has ALWAYS been run by media moguls. Many of them became rich because of their media empires. This has been true throughout our history. The other thing she forgets, or chooses to forget, is the old saying, "The business of America is business". What AOC and the Democrats have done is to make politics about ideology and that is UNAMERICAN! Let the Europeans do that. Look where it is getting them.
    1
  3655.  @ZxZ239  Well, I can think of two. One is the US and Canada. The other is the US and Mexico. Of course, what you say applies to Europe and all of European history (we don't even have to restrict it to modern history). It is also more generally correct. Right now, the French are in an alliance opposing Russia. This is often the exception. Think of the situation before WWI. France and Russia were allies against the Germanic empires. On the other hand, Napolean invaded Russia in the previous century. In WWII, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, France and the Russians were back on the same side. Then, after the war they weren't. But the most glaring example of this, and the most relevant to the current discussion, has to do with China. Nixon's opening to China was specifically seen as a counter to the Soviet Union. Initially it was nothing more. The bulk of the economic stuff came after the fall of the Soviets.
    1
  3656. Quantum technology a military advantage? Come on man. Whenever you hear these lists of technologies, whether from the CCP or even some western sources, you can be fairly confident that it is a bunch of bull puppies.
    1
  3657. The idea of free tuition is, as is pointed out, just a shifting of the cost. To be fair, those who are university educated could benefit the whole society. On the other hand, it is more like the NHS. Free at the point of use. What people don't seem to understand is that the result will be that the government will choose how many places there are and in what subjects. This might actually be more efficient on a social level, but it does limit choice. No one talks about that.
    1
  3658. Rentoul doesn't know what he is talking about. EU businesses have made known that they want a free trade deal, without all the fluff. They sell more into the UK than the UK sells into the EU. They are the ones who will suffer, and they have said so.
    1
  3659. Back to the level of the Cultural Revolution? Bring back the Cultural Revolution. Long live the Cultural Revolution!
    1
  3660. Tony, it is interesting that you point out that many do not believe CCP statistics, but we cover it anyway. That caveat may not be necessary since you make it clear that they are official statistics and each person can interpret it however they want.
    1
  3661. Does anyone in the commentariat have any idea of what their talking about? The CCP belt and road initiative has cost China at least $1T. Estimates show that up to 60% of the loans (they don't do grants) are nonperforming. In addition, the quality of the construction is such that they are alienating the countries they are trying to influence. Some have even cancelled projects and gone with western countries and agencies. In addition, a lot of the transportation routes they are constructing are less efficient than the ones they are trying to displace. The world trade system is the way it is because it was developed through private capital, not for some political purpose. The term belt and road is supposed to harken back to the old Silk Road. That has been out of operation for centuries. Look it up. Think about why it died. So, let them have at it. And get educated.
    1
  3662. Megyn, the Constitution says nothing about this. It is not a Constitutional issue. This is the relevant text from the First Amendment: "...; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;". So, before making it a First Amendment issue, look at the text. This in no way stops anyone from expressing their views. Determining who gets to be in the "pool" is a convention, not a right. There is not even a "right" to have a press conference, White House press corps, etc. It makes sense to have them, but it is not a right.
    1
  3663. To blame capitalism ignores the fact that birthrate problem is much worse in China (and Russia), Actually, our demographics are not so bad overall. We have a one-time issue with the baby boomers, which will not be repeated. The baby boom generation was the result of a singular event.
    1
  3664. Most, but f not all, foreign aid should be stopped. If it is not directed at the national security of the US and its allies, it is invalid. We did this crap to buy off people around the world as a part of Cold War strategy. The Cold War has been over for 30 years now. This is why Washington is broken.
    1
  3665. The speaker at the beginning of the video (sorry, I do not know who he is) just gave a great comedy performance. He has a future in stand-up.
    1
  3666. You are correct in what you say, but it is put much better by Peter Zeihan in his books and videos. Even Dugan's concept, as you lay it out, somewhat misses the point. Putin and Dugan really use a lot of, let's be frank, racist rhetoric to justify a security play. This is much more palatable to the Russian people than what Zeihan lays out, which is a security concern. That concern, not the Russian nationalism, is what really drove the czars to expand westward and southward. And don't forget, the era Putin, the "historian". likes to go one about, the imperial era, is long gone. Of course, due to his, and Xi's actions, it may be coming back. You may be familiar with the term "the Great Game" which is associated with the imperial age. Many people use it in a wider sense, but it was really coined to describe the rivalry between Imperial Russia and Imperial Britian in the 19th Century in Central Asia. The security concern was, let's face it, valid. It is a feature of the geography of Europe that has driven centuries of warfare and conflict often not primarily focused on Russia. I say was valid because there is one thing that has changed the situation completely. That one thing is nukes. The Russians would actually be justified in using nukes if the territory of their state was invaded and in danger of being overrun.
    1
  3667. Who are these sagacious individuals mentioned at 8:15? While the three principles mentioned are rational and correct, this is exactly the opposite of what Xi is doing and preaching. Xi is an old commie. He is doing the exact opposite of what is set out here by the sagacious individuals. For example, private property rights does not apply to companies only, but to all private property. There is also the issue of massive corruption involving the government, private entrepreneurs and most likely organized crime. The other thing to understand is that decisions on investment and consumption are not made primarily by governments in the west.
    1
  3668.  @randalsaladbar  Sadly true.
    1
  3669. I think the recent bombing in Yemen using a B-2 and bunker buster bombs may have been a rehearsal and demonstration for a strike on Iran's nuclear sites. They could fly from the US directly.
    1
  3670. Egypt struggles to feed its population because they have turned a lot of farmland to growing cotton for export. This is an economic decision, not an environmental one.
    1
  3671. Strong capital controls are actually a sign of weakness. The Russian economy is toast. Without high tech imports, even their military is toast.
    1
  3672. The comments on US China relations from the Chinese side are laughable (as usual). If China is so powerful and advanced, then why would it care what the US did or said.
    1
  3673. You assume something I think is not real. Americans, in general, are not wowed by the royals. In fact, most are proud that we got shed of them. Anyone who says they are wowed by them is weak and stupid, putting it mildly.
    1
  3674. Don't fall for the leader of HTS saying the type of things outsiders want to hear. He is, himself, a terrorist. His fighters are fully invested in the ISIS ideology. I have seen, in several places, HTS fighters screaming about going on to Jerusalem and then Mecca. They want a Sunni dominated caliphate in "Arab" lands. Once they get that they won't stop, of course. Fortunately, they don't have the power to realize that goal. The thing is that Turkey is involved. Turkey would like to see an Ottoman dominated Middle East. They do have the power. As the world becomes more multi-polar (an inevitable trend) Turkey will most likely be one of those poles. Iran might become another. Unlike Syria, Iraq, Jordan, etc. Turkey and Iran are "real" countries. The others were created due to the fall of the Ottoman Empire after WWI by European imperialists. The world, by the way, is littered with such flotsam as a result of European imperialism.
    1
  3675. Very shallow analysis. The Soviet Union was a disaster. The reason Gorbachev did what he did was because he knew it was failing. The issues they have are not due to democracy or its failings.
    1
  3676.  @Streghamay  What the heck is LMAOROF? Say what your mean. or don't say anything at all.
    1
  3677.  @mrdiplocaulus  Well, it has gotten into the 90s here, in the Chicago area. I finally turned the AC on (I have had it on only five days in the last two years). The way it works here, if it gets cool at night I open the windows on the second floor and vent them during the day. My house is very well insulated. The first floor, where I spend my time during the day remains cool. It looks like after today it will be cool at night (in the 50s or 60s) until about five days from now, then two days of high night temperatures. The real issue is humidity. When I was in my teens, decades ago, I would spend summer in Europe, especially Greece and the south. The temperatures would get to 110 deg in the shade. Some beaches had wooden paths to the water because the sand would get so hot. But it was dry, and there was the water. If you are in the southern US, then you have a totally different experience, and always have. I have been in Maimi on business in the summer. It is dreadful. I had a friend whose family had properties in Chicago and Miami. In the summer he would still have to wear a suit in Miami for business. He would change his shirt at least twice a day.
    1
  3678. All this rain and flooding are actually very common in China throughout history. Dynasties have even fallen because of flooding. Of course, all the dams built in China by the CCP were supposed to mitigate the flooding. So, what happened? Wasn't the CCP going to tame nature?
    1
  3679. The German businesses are really very stupid. They are going to pay, big time.
    1
  3680. Putin more secure than he was? Come on man, as President Joe likes to say. Just on this channel I have seen the following two videos, "Putin runs out of allies as new FSB generation could turn on him | Mark Galeotti" and "‘Putin must be removed’ | Diane Francis". In the later one, Diane Francis calls Putin a "one off". Her point is that we should not fear what comes after Putin. Frankly, the oligarchs and the siloviki can now see that Putin's approach is impoverishing them and the whole country. Anyone who comes after will more likely be trying to repair relations with the west. Don't forget, this is not the communist Soviet Union with their internationalist Marxist-Leninist ideology. Putin is just a money and power hungry kleptocrat who has made a real hash of it.
    1
  3681. Considering the utter crap that makes up the content on TikTok is should probably be shut down on moral grounds. That is meant as a joke, sort of.
    1
  3682.  @gtw4546  You are most probably correct. The CCP seems to be in turmoil at the moment. Do you think that it is Xi's faction, or some other faction behind it? The politics of the CCP are often inscrutable.
    1
  3683.  @gtw4546  There is a channel, China Uncensored, that occasionally has a spoof soap opera he calls "General Hostility". This reminds me of that.
    1
  3684. There are reasons the old Silk Road disappeared. These are the same reasons all these new corridors will fail. As for bypassing the Straights of Malaca going through Thailand, this does not solve China's problem. It is just as easy to interdict this new route as was the old route. A total waste of money.
    1
  3685. I started "War and Peace" a little while ago and had to put it down because I had other things I had to read (mostly technical). I was struck by the portrayals of aristocratic society in the beginning. This video makes me want to go back to it. Soon. I have a couple of others to get through first. One is for a book club. The other is one of yours, "Russian Treasures". I am almost through it. I am enjoying it. I had a little trepidation because of the period covered. I started reading a recently written history of the Russian revolution and civil war. I was so disturbing that I stopped, started again, and have not finished it.
    1
  3686. Your info on long distance power transmission is a bit out of date. High Voltage DC (HVDC) is a thing now and is more efficient than AC. Edison wins out over Tesla in the end. As the new gear needed to make this work became commercially available a few years ago I read in Spectrum Magazine (from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE) about the possibility of continental, or intercontinental, power grids. You need to update your information. As for interstate projects one only has to point to the Interstate Highway System or interstate rail. The US Constitution is set up to deal with such situations.
    1
  3687. Come on man! Classifying COVID with natural disasters is just not credible and shows a high degree of ignorance. I am not talking about this channel, but the people they are reporting on. Have they ever heard of the Black Plague or the Spanish Flu? And how do we know that the paths of the typhons are peculiar? Consider how many are there per year. How long have we been tracking them in detail? If the people of China are thinking this way, their education system needs a refresh. Come on man!
    1
  3688. The CCP is a communist party and as such has been destroying traditional culture and beliefs. The actions of the teacher are just one example of what happens in such cases.
    1
  3689. What you say about the Irish lobby in the US is correct. I am from Washington, DC. I remember Provos openly operating in Georgetown. I even met a couple, just casually, on the street. This was in the 1970s.
    1
  3690. The wargames and expert analyses often turn out to be wrong. A lot depends on the rules of the game and the parameters of the analysis. For example, who would have predicted through these efforts the results of the Ukraine war. In WWII the Japanese Navy use wargames extensively. Reading about them what was often made clear was that the top commanders would often tweak the rules so that their preferred outcome was the result. We cannot guarantee that this is not happening now.
    1
  3691. I got back on X (I have been on and off a couple of times) because some people I wanted to follow were there. Almost immediately I started getting people, usually young women with no content on their accounts, following me and messaging me. I got off immediately. I also get invites to connect on LinkedIn. Some are clearly this type of thing, and I decline the invites. Actually, I got wind of this from a book I became aware of watching this channel. The book is "Number go up" by Zeke Faux, who you interviewed. I enjoyed the book, and he went over these scams in some detail.
    1
  3692. Strange that you would place so much emphasis on string theory. My understanding is that it has become a dead-end.
    1
  3693. Why does this even come up? Remember when people talked about Meghan Markle running for president? Must be a slow news day. The whole idea that just because someone has name recognition that they would run for president is just bonkers.
    1
  3694.  @FranceGaulGallia  Well, I doubt that. Look at Afghanistan today. Also, look at all the alliances against China and the Jihadists. The West, and their allies, have much more power. Look at what happened to ISIS in Syria and Iraq. When they push too hard, the world will come down on them like a ton of bricks. It will not be pretty and will not be liberal. It that is what they want, that is what they will get.
    1
  3695. On the subject of treaties you are correct. No treaty, or international agreement with the US is done until it is ratified by the Senate. There are two good examples of this, outside of the Ukraine situation that are instructive. One is old and one playing out now. The old one is the League of Nations treaty. In this one, the US president, Woodrow Wilson was actually the originator of the League of Nations concept. So, the organization was set up, and the US never joined. The Senate failed to ratify. The one that is current is the whole Iran nuclear deal. Obama made the deal with Iran, and as in the League of Nations scenario, could not get it past the Senate. There is no treaty with Iran involving the US. So, what did Obama do? He issued executive orders to implement as much of the failed agreement as he could. Then, when Trump got into office he issued an executive order rescinding Obama's executive order. Now, with another change of administration, there is a move to restart the treaty talks. Of course, Iran's abominable behavior has probably killed any chance of a treaty now. Frankly, I don't think such a treaty would pass the Senate today, either. So, to all those people trying to point to some agreement, or statement, that some diplomat (and I know some of those guys) as a justification for war, you just might want to get some education on how things really work. A final point about the Ukraine situation and agreements is also in order here. There was an agreement, not a treaty, regarding Ukraine giving up its nukes. This included security guarantees for Ukraine. Who were the signatories? The US, UK and Russia. This was not a treaty, but an "agreement". Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
    1
  3696. Not having listened to the video yet, I think I can answer this question. The answer is yes. The reasoning is that Ukraine did, with a much less well equipped military. Poland also has as much hatred and fear of the Russians as the Ukrainians, and thus just as much motivation.
    1
  3697.  @ГригорийШумилов-ф5р  You don't read much history, do you.
    1
  3698.  @secretbassrigs  What does that mean? Use your words.
    1
  3699.  @secretbassrigs  Good one!
    1
  3700. It seems to me that there is little risk to the buyer. I am assuming that the buyer is not putting any money down, which seems to be the case. If, for some reason, the house is foreclosed on, it is just as if they had been renting. They would then need to rent, or buy, somewhere else. Am I wrong in my assumptions?
    1
  3701. Self-driving is a side show. It was only introduced to help justify the high price tag. Add on some tech and voila. This is both stupid and a waste of capital. It is a sales gimmick. Self-driving is not an EV thing. For years now most ICE vehicles have been drive by wire. Implementing self-driving features on these vehicles is just as easy as with EVs. In fact, it had already been done on a lower level. Remember self-parking cars? Is that even a thing anymore? I have a 2015 US made ICE vehicle which has low speed automatic braking (saved my bacon) and some other automated safety features. All contemporary cars have over 100 microcontrollers and a vehicle management system built in. The tech is already everywhere. I don't own a Tesla, but I have been in some while taking Uber. I always ask the drivers if they use the self-driving feature. They all quickly respond in the negative.
    1
  3702. BRICS is a joke. You have Russia, who is at war and heavily sanctioned. You have South Africa that is literally a failing state. You have China which is in decline. You have India, who is rising, but may be at war with China soon. That is the expectation by the Indian government and press. Then there is Brazil, which is very vulnerable as it needs massive external inputs to thrive. Oh, and none of them have a currency that is that open, or even close to challenging the dollar.
    1
  3703. Don't fear the BRICS. The I and C are likely to go to war. The R is allied with both the I and the C, sort of. The C has designs on the territory of the R as well. The S is a failing state. The B is not much better off and has many vulnerabilities. On the one hand it supports the C while on the other hand has opened anti-dumping investigations against it. Don't forget, BRICS was a creation of a Wall Street investment banker. At the time it consisted of three economies that were at a similar stage of development, and thus were grouped as an investment target.
    1
  3704.  @ecommerceltd  You obviously have no knowledge of geopolitics.
    1
  3705.  @shundi4264  Scott Ritter is obviously in the pay of the Russians. What little of his stuff I could stomach is so blatantly factually incorrect that it is clearly not opinion. Juian Assange released classified documents to the public. I have had security clearances in the past and I would expect to be prosecuted for doing that. You might want to find some reasonable examples.
    1
  3706.  @alanparsonsfan  Thanks. I am also an Alan Parsons fan.
    1
  3707.  @shundi4264  So, you made my point. China signed on to UNCLOS. They broke the treaty. They are guilty.
    1
  3708. Maybe China should stop claiming that they will overtake the US and destroy it militarily. Why would any country accept that. The real stupidity of the CCP is that they are so vulnerable. It wouldn't take the US to cut off China from its inputs, including food. There are other countries that could do this easily if China's belligerent behavior continues. The CCP is so ignorant of geopolitical realities that they shoot themselves in the foot at every opportunity. Those feet must really hurt by now.
    1
  3709. The statement at 7:40 is so funny. Everyone knows that the EU is a protectionist cartel. It has been especially true since the latest round of tighter integration resulted in the current structure. So, if China wants to complain about it then they need to get to the back of the line. Of course, for China to complain about this is just too much.
    1
  3710. Any "guarantee", whether from the US or any other country, is not worth the paper it is written on. If you want something solid, you need a formal treaty. A memorandum is totally dependent on the administration issuing it. If a president of the US cannot get a treaty passed, then you know you are in trouble. Heck, the League of Nations was Woodrow Wilson's idea. It was never ratified by the US Senate, so the US never became a member of the organization it conceived of. Another example, in addition to the ones given is the JCPOA with Iran. Obama couldn't get that passed as a treaty, so he issued an executive order. Trump withdrew from it. Biden (who is really controlled by Obama) at least partially reinstated it. Trump, of course will withdraw from it again.
    1
  3711. "Where is morality? Where is civility? Where is conscience? Where is propriety?" The person who wrote these words seems to know nothing about communism. This is strange, for if they are mainland Chinese they grew up under communism and yet seem to have no idea of what it is about. What are they teaching people in China?
    1
  3712. The main usefulness of tactical nukes is against massed armored concentrations. I don't see the Ukrainian forced being concentrated enough to make the use of one of these weapons effective. On the Russian nuclear doctrine, I think it is a bit more nuanced than you present. I believe they have stated that the survival of the Russian state would have to be at risk.
    1
  3713. So, you are saying we need global warming.
    1
  3714. You make a good point about the structure of Russian society. The thing about the communist revolution in Russia that was brought about by a serf revolt is that it ended up as a communist revolution. Remember the "dictatorship of the proletariat"? That is pure Marx and was a key point of Lenin's ideology as well. If the Russian Federation falls, the odds that it will end in a democratic revolution and vanishingly small. The same is true in China, where the communist party was basically trained by the Soviets. The thing is that in both cases the serfs and peasants were offered free stuff. Who can turn down free stuff? That is not the basis of a democratic revolution.
    1
  3715. Actually, this gain of function research was funded by Fauci through a back door at a time when it was regulated, and in fact banned, by the US government.
    1
  3716. Just listening to the description of Russian attacks on this and other channels I am amazed at how bad the Russian army is. They have 50K troops in Kursk and they only have battalion size attacks at the largest going down to three and four man squads. They supposedly have air superiority, it's their own territory after all, and the Ukrainians are in a real deficit in aircraft and limited in where they can use the western ones. Compare this to all of Israel's wars, for example. In 1973 the Syrians attacked the Golan Heights with over 500 tanks, and lots of other armored vehicles. The Israelis "only" had a couple of hundred tanks. Neither Russia, nor Ukraine, has amassed such numbers during most of this war. Not even close. You can also look at the US wars in Iraq, where even the lead "cavalry scout" groups had 100 tanks, followed by multiple armored divisions. One of the main tenants of ground warfare is concentration of power. This war is basically a clown show. I can understand the issues Ukraine has to deal with. The Russians, no.
    1
  3717.  @LloydBrodrick-ne5ei  And you are an expert? As President Joe likes to say, "C'mon, man!" Did you just see what Israel did in Iran? What do you think all the air, anti-air and anti-missile systems are for? It's called combined arms, and the US military is very good at it. The US is also reconfiguring the Army with heavy divisions after previously opting for brigade size units. Why would they do that? I have worked on these systems and on the tactical doctrines. You are way off the mark.
    1
  3718. The problem has been solved. I just saw this article, "Microscopic black holes may explain all dark matter in the universe" which references an article in Physical Review Letters titled "Primordial Black Holes with QCD Color Charge". Case closed, right?
    1
  3719. When you talk about people who tell you what you think and feel, it brings me back to a time, long ago, when my schizophrenic girlfriend started to do that. We were driving home and I was literally ready to jump out of the car. It can get scary.
    1
  3720. All the Republicans have to do is show clips of Kamala laughing. I saw one such track on Gutfeld a week or so back. Just run that on YouTube, TV, wherever one can.
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  3721. Xi is such a tool. Many of the floods are caused by dam releases. These are not routinely announced in a timely manner. That is all due to the local governments. The fact of the matter is that if flood damage is caused by a "natural disaster" the liability of the government is much less than if it is a planned "event". As for cutting costs, this has a very different meaning in China than in the rest of the world. If that is done in the rest of the world, the cost of the project will be lower. In China the cost remains whatever was allocated for it and the difference is pocketed by corrupt officials and their friends.
    1
  3722. You mention, at about 4:30, a survey of economists. Such surveys are mentioned in many contexts, from Wall Street projections to national economic situations. In this case, of course, they were off by 50%. Basically, they were completely wrong. Lots of investors, and others, use these surveys to make decisions. My question is, does anyone track such economist surveys. I recall, and maybe this is my bias, that many of the surveys are wrong. Just wondering if you have any insight into this.
    1
  3723.  @brucetownsend691  Love it. Good points. Do you know of any publicly available analyses of their accuracy?
    1
  3724. You started out with some trepidation at criticizing Penrose and his CCC idea. You should not have. Your criticisms were quite valid, and I expect Penrose would agree with many. The problem with all cosmology ideas is that they are hard to test, especially when projecting out to the end of the universe, or even to the beginning. I think you did a good job of laying the theory out and explaining it and the issues. As usual a good clear exposition.
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  3725. Not a new concept at all. The technology of what they would fire is new, but the concept is not. During WWII the US and US deployed a ship called the Landing Ship Tank(R) with the R referring to rocket. They were converted LSTs carrying a very large number of rockets used for saturation bombardment of landing beaches. The US Air Force is developing a similar concept. This calls for launching cruise missiles from cargo planes.
    1
  3726. The US was an early producer of rare earth metals. The problem in the US is environmental regulation. Mining and processing rare earths is a dirty process. In China, where there are basically any environmental standards that are enforced, it is cheap. Just look for videos on how they do it in China. It is disgusting.
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  3727. You are correct. Read the first paragraph of the QAnon entry in Wikipedia. I am not a conspiracy type, but I was told that a friend of a friend was a believer in the QAnon conspiracy theory, so I looked it up. What is so interesting is that for politicians who, as a general rule, like to hold on to power for its own sake they are being just plain stupid. Politics is a numbers game. Being woke, a perv and a predator, is not a winning combination in such a game. The only reason, as you point out is that they are all pervs, etc.
    1
  3728. Looking at the map you are correct about the border. There are lots and lots of places for incursions into Russia by the Russian Volunteer Corps. Are the places Russia is attacking now the avenues used by these groups in the past? If anything, by concentrating their forces for this incursion, the Russians hobble limit their ability to react when an incursion comes in a different area. As it is they are engaged with the Ukranian forces, and it would have devastating effects if they had to disengage and pivot to a different direction. The proper action for the Ukrainians would to be to let loose the Russian Volunteer Corps between Sumy and Kharkiv. They might even want to go in north of Sumy as a feint. All of this brings up one of my issues with the Ukrainian leadership. They seem to be much more reactive than I consider appropriate. They are, in effect, letting the Russians decide the time and place. I know that they have limitations, but a more active and aggressive approach might bring better results.
    1
  3729. I am an older guy. I did my dating in the 1970s and 1980s. It was much different. I would sometimes be sleeping with three women, who all knew about each other. It was cool. Sometimes it would be more than one at a time. We used to joke about being into prime numbers. We were geeks (but not socially awkward). Then, I got married and I was very monogamous. Then, after 30 years she ended it. There were very complicated issues related to the passing of her mother. I think, but don't know, that she was monogamous as well. If I found out that was not true, I would not be surprised. After that I look back on the situation, I have to question being monogamous for so long. I certainly had many, many opportunities. I even have reason to believe that in my professional life being monogamous turned out to be a detriment. I have a problem with the whole situation of modern relationships. What I do find amusing is the women depicted on this channel. I have to say I find it entertaining. These women, putting themselves out there on social media, think they are something special. Well, they are not. The fact of the matter is that they have lots of competition. Doing the social media is an incredibly stupid thing. You don't think guys can find this stuff? They make themselves toxic. Then there is dating after divorce when you are older. I was out with a bunch of the guys once and a friend, who was in a similar situation to mine, gets a text with a picture. It was a close up of his last date's vagina (nicely shaved). He was in despair and vowed to never date again. I expect he did not follow through on that. The best thing for older guys is to find the young women with daddy issues. That is the most fun.
    1
  3730. It's a model that works when the people the US is supporting are motivated to fight for themselves. Korea was one of those situations, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq were not. Ukraine is also one of those situations where this works. The thing is, in the situations where it did not work, we really knew that it wouldn't, or at least some people did. George H. W. Bush was correct in his decision not to take over Iraq after the Gulf War. George W. Bush was wrong in his decision to invade Iraq. That country, as is true with many in that area of the world, is a mess. There are ethnic tensions that no amount of military power would resolve, unless one was willing to commit genocide. This is, of course, a hangover from the imperial period when the European powers created most of these states. Blame it on the Brits. They deserve it.
    1
  3731. The Chinese are amazingly stupid. Their whole prosperity is based on the US led world order. As soon as there is a real break in that order China is toast. As one analyst, Peter Zeihan rather dramatically puts it, in a couple of months China deindustrializes and in a year there is mass starvation. China has never been able to project power beyond its borders. Ever in its history. There are good reasons for this. The most important being geography. As for the BRI, that is a joke, and is fast falling apart. This is in part fiscal, and in part due to poor execution. Just look it up. China is spreading "tofu dreg" projects around the world. Also, the BRI depends on modes of transportation that are much less efficient than those being used today. So, poorer countries will pay more for transportation of goods just to avoid the US led order. Are you kidding me. This whole BRI debacle is a way to funnel money to members and allies of the CCP. You will notice that the work is done by Chinese companies and workers sent to the various client countries, not indigenous workers. It is a scam.
    1
  3732. On the Ukraine issue Hitchens does not understand that the goal of the US is for the Russian Army to be destroyed in Ukraine. Our military chief of staff has said so. There is a real chance that could happen. Russia does not have the ability to train anything like 300K troops in a short period of time. For most armies it takes a year. In war conditions you might do with six months, but you would end up with an inferior force. Russia is also running out of heavy equipment. They are sending in large numbers of T62 tanks out of storage. Just saw a video of a trainload of these being blown up by Ukrainian artillery. Their industry is not up to the task of making tanks, and other vehicles, in large numbers. At the end of the war Russia will not be a real threat to anyone for a long time.
    1
  3733.  @golfbulldog  You may recall that Russia annexed Crimea and parts of the Donbas in 2014. Now Crimea is a special case. The other was a case of using the fact that there were ethnic Russians in the territory as their excuse. Recall that Russification is a policy of the Soviets. This is also a problem in the Baltics. This is also the excuse Hitler used in his aggressions before invading Poland. Same concept. You should also be aware that Russia was a signatory to a pact to guarantee Ukraine's security if it gave up its nuclear weapons after the Soviet collapse. As such, Russia has been an aggressor in the region. The US as a member of NATO, and all of Europe, gains because Russia would not be able to threaten them with military force. As for turmoil in the Russian Federation, this is coming. I would expect it to break up in the next couple of decades anyway. Putin has just accelerated that. The people in the non-Russian regions are already upset about the disproportionate number of soldiers being sent from their populations.
    1
  3734.  @golfbulldog  You asked good questions. One thing I would like to comment on, and it is not a criticism. We often talk about one country meddling in the politics of another. You are bot wrong about the EU and US vis-à-vis Ukraine. Russia does it as well. On the other hand, it is legitimate. If Ukraine was not taking money and security guarantees from all these entities, then that meddling would be illegitimated. As it is, that is the price one pays for assistance.
    1
  3735. It seems to be said only obliquely, but the fuel price subsidies, and all such subsidies, distort the economy. The topic is mentioned, and its effect on the "common people", but rarely, if ever, the true nature of it. The fuel subsidy exists as a way to buy off the people. Now, the central government cannot even afford that. But they can afford nuclear weapons and upgraded fighter jets. Who are they kidding?
    1
  3736. Oh, come on now Gen. Hodges. We can blame it on Jake Sullivan. Actually, it is the whole cadre of Obama leftovers that is to blame for this, the Afghanistan pullout and the appalling treatment of Israel in their response to the Hamas attack. Sullivan is a lawyer with basically no real security, intelligence or military background. That is a travesty in a national security advisor. That role was created so that the President would have an expert in these matters that was not part of the cabinet or the bureaucracy. Sullivan is a political hack.
    1
  3737. It's not "can't", but don't. It is a matter of regulation, capital and oil trading.
    1
  3738. As for that quote from the beginning of the video of the Top Gun pilot, this is correct. In the Vietnam War the Air Force was not so successful with their F4s. The Navy was doing much better. Then the AF got on top of the training and turned the tables. I worked for a company that provided simulators. One of the findings was that, if a pilot successfully survived his first encounter, he had a high probability of survival. Between the simulators, and programs like Top Gun, our pilots are the best trained and most skilled. They have their first kills, and engagements in highly realistic scenarios, and when they go into actual combat, this is not their first experience.
    1
  3739. There is no way the INTSC is cheaper than the wholly sea route.
    1
  3740.  @ancesthntr  Probably true.
    1
  3741. The adults are back in the room!
    1
  3742. Peter, your history of Cuba is a bit biased and misleading and incomplete. Yes, after the Spanish American War the US was deeply involved in but it was never a colony unlike Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam. It was declared a republic in 1902, although the US had influence and the right to intervene. Yes, the government there was corrupt, but so was/is Castro's government. I would posit that it is worse under communism. My father-in-law was actually there on a tour the week Castro died. He brought me back some Cuban cigars and a copy of the newspaper Granma with a big picture depicting Castro covering most of the front page and the headline "Cuba es Fidel". My father-in-law also told me he took a tour of the countryside, and they were still farming with mule pulled plows 2016. So much for communist progress.
    1
  3743. What does this have to do with the NHS. This implies that places that have private hospitals, like the US, would not have done as well for him. It is the doctors, not the system, that saved him.
    1
  3744.  @davebrewer7170  He is indeed a traitor. He is changing his tune now. So is Warren Buffet and most of the others.
    1
  3745. The Kung Flu IS NOT one of the most formidable situations we have faced. As far a disease, that would be the Spanish Flu. The interesting thing is that we did not even experience a recession because of the Spanish Flu. This idea that we can eliminate death due to a disease is laughable. We have tens of thousands of deaths from the common flu every year. As with the Kung Flu, this is mostly due to comorbidities. All governments around the world have approached this the wrong way. Developing vaccines and treatments is the way to go. We have health systems that cannot deal with these situations. That is not unusual. How often do we have these situations? You cannot build a health system to respond to a situation that occurs once a century.
    1
  3746. Malone is a good scientist. On the other hand, I saw an interview he did on Candace Owen's show where he said some stupid stuff about Bill Gates. Now, I am not a fan of Bill Gates, but I am using Microsoft Windows to type this message. I have never been an Apple OS fan, but that goes back decades. Too long a topic for this. What I am getting at is that just because someone is successful in one are, this does not mean they are the font of all knowledge. A good example is all the people Bernie Madoff duped. They were all successful people. And yet, this charlatan bilked them out of massive amounts of money. Malone is talking about something he does not have expertise in. On this I happen to agree with him. But your putting special emphasis on it because of his drug innovations, is just foolish.
    1
  3747. Chinese labor skilled? The types of work done in China to, say, assemble an iPhone is the low end stuff. If you look at the components being assembled, they are often from somewhere else, including the US. Recall the near riots and walkouts at the largest iPhone assembly plant. Many of the people who left walked back to their villages. These are mostly peasants. Look at the images of the inside of the plant. There is row upon row of stations where repetitive manual labor is performed assembling the phones. One geopolitical analyst pointed out that Mexico has a more educated work force that is cheaper. And guess what, Foxconn is starting to move some manufacturing there, as well as India and Vietnam. So, I agree with your overall premise, but not with this point. Another thing about why China is such a go to place is that they actively go after the work. I have some experience of this. In the US the companies that could do this work have traditionally had to advertise in an expensive catalog. At one time,, when I was looking at these things (so the numbers might not be quite current), it cost $5K just to subscribe. The Chinese industrialist will put some of his relatives in the US to look for the work. When the patriarch comes over to discuss specific projects he puts on an event and provides 50-year-old Scotch to the prospective clients. They ask if you want air filtration in the plant to protect the workers. Many decline the extra expense, especially for low end products. The Chinese have this kind of flexibility that a US based manufacturer does not.
    1
  3748. Dana talks about Biden getting something done here. Not going to happen. A Democrat cannot cross the unions. Lightfoot is now, but she knows that this is her last term. If Joe gets involved and lambasts the unions, then we will know it is his last term as well.
    1
  3749. Putin's approach to his subordinates EXACTLY matches what Hitler did during WWII. It is amazing that Putin talks about de-Nazification in Ukraine when his whole regime is a mirror of the Nazis. This extends to how the economy works and to the massive internal security apparatus. Of course, this is also true of the various communist countries, such as China, Venezuela, Cuba and Soviet Russia. Nazism was national SOCIALISM. The main difference with the others is that they claim to be internationalist, while the Nazi ideology was race based. Of course, the CCP in China is also a very racially motivated regime. So, let them fight it out internally. It provides entertainment and lowers their effectiveness.
    1
  3750. Focusing on what is in school libraries is really stupid. School libraries are generally quite limited in size and scope. The major source for most students is the local public library. This was true when I was growing up (over half a century ago) and for my children. What does concern me is the statement that one parent complained, and the school librarian reacted. This is tyranny of the minority, and it has to stop!
    1
  3751. If Ukraine had airpower, the traffic jam of tanks would have been totally destroyed. Look up "Highway of Death:" from the Iraq war.
    1
  3752. Happy Birthday, Tony!🎂 Your information and insights are very much appreciated. I am glad that you enjoy doing this. Next stop 100K subscribers, then on to 1M!
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  3753. Frequency hopping was first developed, many years ago, for cordless phones. Not cell phones, cordless phones. It has been used by the military for secure, and unjammable communications for decades. I expect that there are commercial chips that do this. It is not "rocket science".
    1
  3754. This interviewer, and in fact most interviewers in the MSM, seem to be taking Russia's side in this conflict. They bring on experts and then ask questions that presuppose that the west is somehow in the wrong. Russia invaded a neighbor. They broke the UN charter. They illegally "annexed" territory of another sovereign state. To be concerned that Russia might be upset strikes me as classic snowflake behavior. This is a full scale war in the center of Europe. Are these people ignorant of history? Perhaps they need some people with some real knowledge. It is infuriating.
    1
  3755. Science is the study of natural world. PERIOD! Engineering is the creation of devices and processes to solve problems and build new things. Engineering is the creative discipline, no matter what degree the practitioner has. Decisions about what to do in a particular situation is politics. Lobbying for a particular course of action is a political act. This last point is very important. For one thing I see many who push back against the climate activism not as deniers but as people who question the validity of the science. Frankly, that is a good thing. Just look at the history of science. Limit yourself to quantum mechanics and gravitational theory. Climate science is not the same as experimental physics. It is more like archaeology or anthropology. On the political front, the reality is that the public is getting tired of the whole climate change mania. If you look at surveys asking what issues are important to voters, climate change is generally at the bottom of the list. As government policies push up the costs to society in either monetary or other terms, support will shrink even lower. This is tied up with the advocacy issue. COVID hurt "science" a lot. The "scientists" involved made many decisions and pronouncements for political reasons that, by all reports, they knew to be incorrect.
    1
  3756. Joe Biden had at least two bouts of COVID. One TV personality I saw indicated that she got it four times. Both were fully vaccinated.
    1
  3757. Some of this may be relevant. As for whether Musk paid too much, only time will tell. Twitter is a very valuable brand, although it was being run horribly by the previous regime. The reason Parlar could be crushed was because Twitter existed. Starting such a brand from scratch is difficult if there is an existing competitor. Being a first mover is very valuable. On the other hand, there are examples where later entrants into various technology fields took over, but this takes time.
    1
  3758. Lock em up!!
    1
  3759. That collective unconscious is present in the society. It is clear that the society in Russia corrupt. The thing is it has been for centuries. I have mentioned it before, but one should read Gogol's book "Dead Souls" which was written in the middle of the 19th century. It reads like a description of Russian society today. It is also entertaining. Peter the Great, also in the middle to late 19th century, tried to modernize Russia. Frankly, he didn't get far. The Soviets tried to create "the new Socialist man". They failed, and under Putin we see a return to the time of the czars. A majority of those Russians who might have understood what is going on left the country. The thing that is instructive is to look at the US. People from all over the planet come to the US. They typically assimilate and thrive. The culture in the US is flexible, unlike that of Russia. Another part of it is geography. The US has, basically, among the best farmland in the world, and lots of natural resources. I read once a historian speculating on why the Americans revolted. Frankly, they were, on the whole, much wealthier than their European counterparts. I am talking about the average person. My own is typical. My grandparents came over from Greece towards the beginning of the 20th century. They all had 4th grade educations. They were successful. Far more successful than they would have been in Greece. All their children had high school educations with some going on to university. ALL their grandchildren went to university, with a number of MS, PhD and MD degrees in the mix. That is typical. And, as in most cases, they did not bring any wealth with them.
    1
  3760.  @arfajob4246  I have totally given up fast food. processed food and all sugars and sweeteners. I am back to the shape I was in in my 20s. That was almost half a century ago. The problem with the water is a very bad one in China. As the robot said: Bad, not good.
    1
  3761. The biggest issue in China is that the ratio of home price to income is very high. It is much higher than in the US. That people thought this was a viable option says a lot about the Chinese system. The people were fooled into thinking that home prices would always go up. Perhaps over a very long period of time, but the rate of return is generally not going to be as high as other investments, at least in a real market. I have a financial advisor who studies all this stuff, and he has looked at it over long periods of time. As an investment, property is not the best. Meaning that putting all your, and your family's, savings into property is risky and not likely to be optimal. For one thing, property is generally not liquid, as people in China are finding out. There are times when a house can be sold quickly for a good price and others when it cannot. If you try to sell into a situation like the later, you are going to suffer. I have seen this up close. When I first moved to where I am now, from the east coast of the US to the Midwest, there was a recession just starting. Lots of people lost their jobs and ended up moving. I looked at 200 homes in the city I now live in. At least half were empty. Fortunately, we had gotten a good price for the house we sold and were able to upgrade for a modest price. In the house I am in now, I have seen the value go up, down and back up. It never came down below what I paid for it but the difference between the peak and trough was on the order of 35%. It is now back at the peak. What I am trying to convey is that markets go up and down, and the Chinese people don't seem to understand this. They overextend on housing, and I get the impression from various sources that it is a prestige thing. People in the US have been known to do that as well, but never to the extent that they do in China. They also often "pay the price".
    1
  3762. Load of crap. Do these people even know what happens in the natural world. Brutal killing of one species on another is the order of the day. I have seen it up close in many instances. Once, when setting up a house on a heavily wooded lot, with my young boys, we looked out the living room window, There was a doe and two fawns at the edge of the yard. An Idyllic scene. Then, quite suddenly, a large coyote came out of the woods and grabbed one of the fawns by the neck killing it. It then dragged it off to eat it. I have many other stories I could tell of this kind of natural event I could tell. I have also been a hunter for many years. We eat the meat, whether it be a land animal or sea creature. This is natural and normal. It is the way of the world. It has been since the beginning. I have even heard that our ancestors became more intelligent by eating sea creatures they could get near the shore, thus increasing the nutrients we needed to increase brain capacity. Have you ever heard of the food chain?
    1
  3763.  @watchdominiondocumentary266  No, not really. This is the way of life on this planet.
    1
  3764.  @watchdominiondocumentary266  The need for food is what drives these interactions. Few, if any, wild animals kill just to kill. They kill for food. Why are we any different? If anything, our handling of animals for food is much more "humane" than the wild kingdom. And to your point, it is not easily avoidable. The need for protein is important for humans. We can get it from plants. I do, mostly, and I also eat seafood. I was a vegetarian for 10 years when most of my friends were Indian (when I started university, long ago). So, I have seen all the different ways one can consume food. By the way, the Indians I knew ate dairy and eggs. They were not vegan. The wild animal interactions between the members of the same species are all for dominance. Not so much different from humans. We already emulate it.
    1
  3765.  @watchdominiondocumentary266  Actually, I get a lot of protein from lentils. Found a source from the US and have three types. I have also found pasta made from red lentils or chickpeas. I plan to start making my own. I will make flour from the red lentils and have a pasta maker attachment on my KitchenAid mixer. As I mentioned, I get a lot of my protein from plants, but do not avoid animal protein. That is just my choice. As for the CO2 gassing of animals, that is much more "humane" than traditional ways of killing animals. It is used on other animals as well. In the wild many predators start eating the animal even before it is dead. Most anthropologists see the eating of animal protein as the trigger that helped proto-humans increase brain size and function. As you point out, we have some other alternatives now, but they were not present at that early stage. We became what we are because of taking in animal protein. As for animals for human consumption, it is more varied than you make out. It is true that pork production has become "mechanical". Have some relatives who are farmers. Their families raised hogs. A typical family farm would have between 1K to 2K animals. They were, in effect, free range. Then the factory farms came along and the farmers got out of the business. They sell grain to the factory farms, but do not raise the animals themselves anymore. They next got into cattle. These were free range. They got attached to the animals, and one cousin, after he got out of that business, even considered have one or two as pets. There could be big improvements in handling of animals. When I lived in the UK I noticed that sheep were raised in a free range manner. In a lot of areas, even near to London, you could see sheep roaming the hills all the time. I don't have a "final" answer for you. You would probably approve of how I eat. But I don't want to decide how others eat.
    1
  3766. Good point Mahyar on the PPE. I never really thought of it that way. What if the whole mask thing was just a way to make money. For China to make money. All the leaders in the West who pushed mask mandates should be investigated to see if they have received any money from the Chinese or one their fronts. I am not joking about that.
    1
  3767.  @timonsolus  Frankly, I don't blame them. For example, Yasser Arafat and the PLO aligned with Saddam Hussein when he took over Kuwait. Are these the type of people you want to let into your coutry? Actually, after writing what I did in the comment above I read an editorial piece in the WSJ, from the editorial board, advocating Egypt taking the refugees and outlining how it could be done. Balderdash. Like you said, they won't take them. Their obligation is to their own citizens.
    1
  3768. Are these immigrant voters citizens?
    1
  3769. The F-16 can carry all that ordnance, but its performance at full load is much diminished.
    1
  3770. The off-balance sheet debts should have been a warning sign. I recall the first articles in the WSJ regarding Enron and its then potential debt problems. The problem that the WSJ reporters uncovered was that much of the debt was moved to off balance sheet entities. This sounds exactly the same, and it is the government doing it. China is toast! Bring back the Cultural Revolution! Long live the Cultural Revolution!
    1
  3771. Kat, you weren't even alive when the Beetles were at their peak. Are you even allowed to have an opinion?
    1
  3772. You are very poorly informed. What the West, and I hope India, is fighting for is a rules-based system. Under this system, certain steps must be followed. This gives the offending party a chance to mend its ways. If they do not, then other means may be necessary. I would hope that if you were ever personally in a dispute that you would have access to a process that is well defined and designed to give all sides their say. If the EU acted outside of the WTO, then they would have given China a victory. I know it is hard, especially for journalists, to understand process, especially in international relations. These things are complex and move slowly most of the time. That is intentional relations. THERE IS NO WORLD GOVERNMENT!!! What we have are treaties that sovereign governments participate in. You react strongly when, say, the UK and Canada comment on your agricultural policy. You should. So, don't lambast the EU. They have to let the agreed process play out before taking more concrete action. That is just the way it works. You should know this. A good example is the South China Sea. China made an outrageous claim. It was brought before the relevant international body, to which China has signed up. They lost but persist in their policy. Now, the whole world is opposing them there. That is how international relations works. Get over it.
    1
  3773. My experience deer hunting on a farm, and generally, was that the farmers I knew rarely buried dead animals. When deer hunting, the gut piles we left behind rarely lasted more than a day or two. There were also deer skeletons, I remember one in an area I hunted often. I watched the skeleton being eaten and taken away over several seasons. These were not deer that had been shot, but that had died of natural or other causes. One night I shot a racoon trying to get into our living space on the farm. I took it out back behind another old building. It too was gone not long after when I went to check on it and perhaps bury it. One time I ran across the body of an adolescent pig that was out in a field and offered to bury it. My uncle said no. It was bait for the coyotes. After they switched from hogs to cattle, I would often find cow bones in pasture fields. They are big and heavy, and I once tried to kick one that was partially buried. It was good that I had heavy boots on. They had a name for possums. They called them "greasers" because they would eat their way through a dead pig body and come out all "greasy".
    1
  3774. Job reports are strong, but we are still not up to the number of jobs we had before the Kung Flu.
    1
  3775. The cost of labor, as is pointed out, is not the same as the salary paid. The other factors mentioned are important as well. The one paying for that labor (the industrial customer) sees what is often called the burdened cost (salary plus all other overheads). On top of that, there is the efficiency factor. For China to compete with other countries it must be more efficient. Those other countries may have lower labor costs or be more automated. China lags in all these aspects.
    1
  3776.  @talete7712  The US "fought" a Cold War with the USSR for decades to keep democratic western Europe out of the hands of the totalitarian Soviets. The US is the guarantor of Western freedom from Russian aggression, through NATO. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US and Russia signed treaties to help Ukraine denuclearize (the had plenty of Soviet nukes on their territory from the Soviet era). We also agreed with the Russians to protect their sovereignty. That is why the US is involved and why the Russians want to talk to the US.
    1
  3777.  @LaVictoireEstLaVie  It is not only the US. Most of 'Europe, including the EU, is against a Russian takeover of Ukraine. In fact, it is Ukraine that insists on joining NATO. Russia wants to block that. It is not Russia's place to decide that, but it is for NATO and Ukraine to decide that. Ukraine is a sovereign nation, if you hadn't noticed. NATO is a voluntary alliance. No one is forced to join. Russia still insists on its sphere of influence, where it decides on which nation joins which alliance. Sounds like coercion to me.
    1
  3778.  @LaVictoireEstLaVie  If you believe that Russia and China are free countries then we have nothing to talk about.
    1
  3779.  @Gilder-von-Schattenkreuz  I think you are totally wrong about that. It would take some more investigation to resolve the issue, but I think I am right in thinking that. Much of NATOs military power comes from the US, not Europe itself. The US spends at least 6% of GDP on defense. The 2% commitment, whatever you think of it, is a treaty commitment. And, if Germany met its commitment, then Russia would not even think of doing what it has been doing. The Europeans have been so scared of US disengagement in Europe that when the US was planning to move troops from Europe to Asia Pacific, they protested loudly, and the move was scrapped. As for worrying about Germany, I think you have a jaundiced view. Today's Germany is not the Germany of the 1930s.
    1
  3780.  @kmaggs7804  What are you talking about?
    1
  3781. Of course, you have to look at the early history of all these water developments in the West. The US can grow all it needs without using the deserts. That would mean giving up some foods, but these are not critical, no matter how desirable. The reason for all the dams and water projects was to enable the US to populate the areas, from Idaho on down to the Southwest, so that no one could come in and try to claim the region. There was little planning for what we have today.
    1
  3782. If the American people are so smart why did they elect Joe Biden?
    1
  3783. His admiration for the Chinese reminds me of the admiration many business professors had for the Japanese. The MBA types were gaga over the 100-year plans that many Japanese companies had. Look at where they are now. It is frankly sad to see this from our intellectuals.
    1
  3784.  @johannuys7914  Look at China today. It is imploding. The last part of your comment is unnecessary. It's the type of thing that makes the internet toxic. Feel free to disagree with me. That what makes for good debate.
    1
  3785. Wait a damn minute. I just saw a bunch of videos saying that they were best buds again and that Musk was coming back.
    1
  3786. China will not dominate us. I have seen credible commentators saying that China may not even be a viable state in its current form by the end of the decade. There is lots of evidence for this.
    1
  3787.  @mitchyoung93  That is possibly the dumbest thing I have ever read. If you don't know what property rights are, and what taxation is, then you need to educate yourself.
    1
  3788.  @mitchyoung93  Do you even know what your property taxes go to fund? How about your income, payroll, gasoline and sales taxes? Taxes fund government services and other purposes that we vote for. If you don't want to get taxed, then don't ask the government to do anything for you.
    1
  3789. Xi is channeling Stalin. Remember what happened after that?
    1
  3790. I find it hard to believe that .45 ACP is such a hard cartridge to handle. I shot my first one at 10 years old and could reliably hit a 3oz Dixie cup nailed to a tree (we were at my father's friend's old pig farm in Winchester, VA; long story) without any training. I am of decidedly medium build (height, weight and hand size). By the way, my father and his friend had both been soldiers in WWII. The friend's hobby was collecting and restoring old military arms, so I got to fire a bunch when I was a kid.
    1
  3791. Every morning you wake up in a new country. You, and many conservative pundits, are destroying your own credibility. Make no mistake, I am probably more conservative than you. This is a product of the daily pundit show. Things don't happen that fast. Don't know what the answer is, but one element may be cutting back on frequency of commentary.
    1
  3792.  @bigbubba4314  Yes, but does it need to go to these elite institutions? If they will not change then the money will go to institutions that do conform to our values. And guess what, the researchers will follow the money.
    1
  3793. At about 13:19 the person speaking in the video uses the term "persecution". The correct term is "prosecution". I hear this mistake being made all the time. What the Russians are doing could be considered persecution. What the court does is prosecute.
    1
  3794. Love the title of the video. When I was in high school (a long, long time ago) some friends were putting together a band. They wanted to call it Country Cock. Then they would call their first album "Country Cock Goes Hard". Epic!
    1
  3795. Government shutdowns are good. The government plays too much of a role in the most countries. This goes to show how ineffective government spending is. Let's have it.
    1
  3796. Are you just as ignorant as you sound? This is not a freedom of speech issue; it is a contract issue. Carlson took a lot of money to talk on the TV. He has, as with any job, legal obligations and restrictions. This applies to any job, even ones that are not associated with presenting content. He was not a YouTuber, like yourself. You put out your content, and only get revenue after the fact based on views and ads. He took the money as a salary, with a guaranteed term and amount. If you think that any company would do that without having some say in the content being produced, then you should perhaps try a different line of work.
    1
  3797. The whole problem with this is that all of the areas he talks about, including sports, science, economics and culture also depend on the others who are not in the top tier. I have more experience in the sciences, and there it so much more complicated than how many papers or theories are published. There is a massive amount of work that goes into developing theories in science and mathematics. We like to concentrate on the ones who publish the seminal works. There are very important. On the other hand, there is so much other work that is not so celebrated that makes those possible. I would love for Dr. Peterson to look into that. If it was just the top guys who do everything, then we should, in areas like science, lower the number of people involved. This is the actual conclusion that one has to draw from what he is saying.
    1
  3798.  @JordanBPeterson  Restaurants are a good example, Not many independent ones last very long. Even some of the chains do not last. The hammering they have taken because of the pandemic is not significant. If, as we are seeing now, people are going out eat more than in the last two years, new ones will crop up, The cost is not that great. In fact, taking over a failed one is quite cost effective. Much of the major equipment is still there. This lowers capital costs significantly. Frankly, I eat at home most of the time and it is much more healthy. It is also much, much cheaper, and very easy, but that is another story.
    1
  3799. Oh no, lines on maps. You didn't even give us a warning. It seems that you have now become a follower of Peter Zeihan. You gloss over the demographic problem in the war fighting age cohort. These are also the people who make the weapons of war and who, for example, keep the heat pipes from bursting. The Kremlin has been very foolish about their mobilization and recruitment issues. It is probably worse than you have presented.
    1
  3800. This use of the idea of an "oppressed class" is precisely what has been used by the Democratic Party for decades. I have seen it up close. That is how they drew in Jews. Now they are trying it with Muslims. In the case of Jews in the US, I think that group has been poorly served. Muslims will find that they too will be disappointed. Actually, in relation to this channel, we are starting to see this realization taking hold in the black community as well. The case of Mesha Mainor in Georgia is just the latest example.
    1
  3801. Pettis speaks words of truth in terms of the property market. Frankly, it is done. China already has too much residential property. There is no one to absorb it. It is good to see the major investment banks finally catching on. What is disappointing is that it took them so long. A lot of bad investment decisions were made in the meantime.
    1
  3802. What is this mania about cases? Unless you test everyone, or do statistically valid sampling, this is just a meaningless number. Stop talking about it, or you are talking nonsense.The fact is, we know that most people who test positive are asymptomatic. The number of deaths, the last number I saw was about 5M, is insignificant. There are 8B people in the world. Work out the percentage. The fact that the average of those who have died is about 80 should also tell you something. People of that age will often die of pneumonia contracted with illnesses like the flu. Almost all had co-morbidities such as obesity or diabetes. This is an overblown "pandemic". We destroyed our economies because of this. Even with the Spanish flu, about 100 years ago, we did not have a recession in the US, and I expect the rest of the world, with many more deaths and a much high percentage of the population effected. This is a scam.
    1
  3803. I live in the Western Suburbs of Chicago. We have facilities that are WORLD CLASS. We spend, per pupil 2/3 of what Chicago does. This is typical of the suburbs. We have attainments that are stellar compared to Chicago (although not as good as where I went to school in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, where 100% graduated and went to university). Just a little aside. The school district I am in has one of the best music programs in the country. In fact, of the three high schools we have, it is often not unusual to have all three at the top of the national rankings. And we are at the top in the STEM fields as well. In fact, our jazz program at one school had an all-day clinic with the faculty of the NIU jazz department (one of the best in the country). There were a couple of professional jazz musicians with them. At one point in the program, between numbers, they mentioned that our auditorium was nicer than Carnage Hall, in NYC. These guys had played at Carnage Hall more than once. Heck, the acoustic screen on the stage cost $500K. The sound board (digital, of course) cost $70K. We even had a black box performance space behind the auditorium which cost $500K. And yet, our cost per pupil is much lower that Chicago. And don't get me going on the sports, home economics and vocational facilities we have. There is no Constitutional requirement for a public education system. In fact, public safety (fire, police, etc.) could all be provided privately. Either have people pay the private companies directly or collect the money centrally and contract out the services. A great example was a city I lived in in the Philadelphia suburbs. Trash collection was not contracted for by the city. Trash collectors could get certified by the city, and then each household would decide among the certified companies. At the time I was there, there were five. This, of course fostered competition. This can be done for any service, even police. What is a police officer? You have heard the term "sworn personnel". Well, these are just individuals that have been sworn in to have the ability to use force, perhaps deadly, to enforce the law. Who cares who they work for? That is irrelevant. The designation is for the individual. Not every employee of a police department is a "sworn" officer. The fact is that we can easily reimagine every aspect of our public sector. The only exception is the military. This is the only organ of government that MUST be part of the government.
    1
  3804. Why is the Sahel significant from a global point of view? All the nation-states here are creations of the colonial era. These are tribal lands, not real nations. This is a hangover from European imperialism, which was preceded by Ottoman imperialism. I have even seen where some French officials have been talking about bringing back colonial/imperialism mode in the region. This is actually something Peter has talked about. Heck, and I know this is an aside, but it fits, all of Europe is not much different. Look at the countries that have split apart in Europe after the end of the Cold War and the withdrawal of massive numbers of American and Soviet troops. If things are allowed to take their natural course, there may be a few more. The Belgium situation seems to be flaring up again. Just look at the names of various regions that are not nation-states today. These have massively long cultural and ethnic heritages. I am particularly fond of Bohemia and Galicia (for silly personal reasons). Recently Viktor Orban was in Ukraine warning Zalenski to treat Hungarian speaking Ukrainians well. This was a region that "should have" been in Hungary if we are going on ethnic and linguistic lines. To net it out, all the effort the world is expending on keeping these places together in their colonial borders is just a waste of blood and treasure. If is the Great Game come back to life (look it up).
    1
  3805. The OPEC announcement is probably nothing. They are currently 2.3MBPD under the quota before the latest announcement. If they all produce their full quota, then production will probably go up. So, I think the prediction to $60 before $100 is correct. Russia, when it can sell oil, say to India or China, sells at a $20 to $30 discount. So, they are not far above their beak even point.
    1
  3806. If you believe that Harris will sweep the election, then you are truly out of touch. I saw on a show a Harris laugh (cackle) track. All the Republicans need to do is play that over and over again in ads.
    1
  3807.  @TheFrewah  That is not really correct. The problem with Biden was not specifically that he is old, but that his cognitive decline is evident, and it seems to be accelerating.
    1
  3808. This is another example of Europe being totally sh*t at defense. If the US wasn't there even the inept Russian Army could overrun the rest of the continent and probably the UK to boot. So, as an American, I have to ask why we are defending Europe anymore?
    1
  3809. You are wrong on how Trump is handling this using executive action. He runs the executive branch. They are the implementers of the laws Congress passes. I don't think that Congress put in this training. I expect that it was done by bureaucrats. The Executive is a coequal branch of Gov't and the President is our elected overseer of that branch.
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  3810. One thing that strikes me in all these videos is the migrant workers who are in dire straits. This puzzles me. They are migrants. They live in dormitories. If the businesses have moved to other parts of the country, why are they still in Shenzhen, living on the streets? Why is this an issue? They are migrants. They should migrate to where the jobs are. Of course, if their jobs have moved out of the country, that is a different thing.
    1
  3811. Of course, we should never forget one of Lemay's most famous quotes: If we maintain our faith in God, love of freedom, and superior global air power, the future looks good.
    1
  3812. Your take on Brexit is so silly. You are not the only one, though. How is the EU doing economically, socially, etc.? As President Joe likes to say, "C'mon, man!" In fact, I think I recall a guy named Peter who said something like the EU is a protectionist cartel and that it was going down? Another thing I am seeing reported is that the UK is poised to surpass Germany in GDP within the next decade. Heck, it may do so by the end of this decade. As for losing access to food from the EU, that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Why would the EU stop selling to the UK, or anyone else? They need markets for their products. Being a protectionist cartel, they might not want to buy British products, but as you say there is not much on offer there anyway.
    1
  3813.  @mirthab.7576  Me too.
    1
  3814. Ah, the ignorance of history by the youth of today is in full bloom. On the conventional side I was looking at an issue comparing this conflict to others after WWII. One very interesting one is the Korean War. On the size and scale of the military front this war and the Korean War are of a very, very similar. Number of troops, casualties, etc. The one difference is that a lot more civilians died in that conflict than in this one. That war lasted for just over three years (at least the active fighting did). In the end the borders at the beginning were reestablished. Sound familiar? On the nuclear side, it is similar but not quite the same. While a nuclear power was not directly invaded, its ally was, by a non-nuclear country. As they say, history doesn't repeat, it rhymes. Another note on the nuclear issue. The commanding general on the UN side, Douglas MacArthur, wanted to nuke the Chinese forces invading from the north. He was prevented from doing so. The only other instance I can recall where there were people calling for the use of nukes was in the Vietnam War. There were some who wanted to nuke Haiphong Harbor to prevent the supply of weapons to the north from the Soviet Union. That was also discarded. Nukes are great for preventing an existential threat to the state. As we see from Russian history, the borders are somewhat arbitrary and fluid.
    1
  3815. Hey, what's wrong with the 1950s? I am from the 1950s.
    1
  3816. So, who does enforce it? What do the Olympic rules say?
    1
  3817. This is a communist society. Scrap the whole marriage thing. The Soviets did something like that. Let the state raise the children. Perhaps China needs something like the Lebensborn system that the Nazis had.
    1
  3818. Looking forward to it. I would pre-order, but on Amazon, where I bought the original and all your other books (on Kindle), the pre-order does not work. It always takes you t the original edition. I have pre-ordered books before, both print and Kindle, so I am familiar with how it works. You might want to contact them about that.
    1
  3819. I am a Kudlow fan, but his harping on about China and wanting to concentrate only them is kind of silly. This trade war (really a realignment, so let's stop calling it that) is NOT a China issue. It is a global trade issue. After WW2 the US opened its markets to "buy an alliance". It worked. The Cold War (I miss the Cold War) was won. Then, we got rid of George H. W. Bush who had lots of foreign policy knowledge and experience in favor of someone who did not. Bush wanted to have the conversation about how things would work after the fall of the Soviet Union. We never had that conversation. Now, Trump is righting the wrong policies the government and Wall Street have reflexively followed for decades. By the way, Japan caused almost as much harm to US manufacturing and trade as China. A lot of the same issues persist between the US and Japan that parallel the issues we have with China.
    1
  3820. Tax cuts inflationary? Are you kidding? You cannot tax your way to prosperity. That way lies madness. You can only grow your way out of the situation. Without growth, all the tax rates are meaningless.
    1
  3821. India and China get a 30% or more discount. At the price they are currently paying Russia is barely covering their costs, so it really does not support their war effort to sell at this price. They are just buying allies. For the world economy this is good in two ways. First, it relieves pressure on supply. Second, it depresses prices. That oil India and China get from Russia is displacing oil from elsewhere.
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  3822. You know what this "publishing" by Xi reminds me of? Adolf Hitler. He made massive amounts of money from his book "Mein Kampf" and was the owner of "Vőlkischer Beobachter" the Nazi party newspaper. This was a major source of his persona wealth. Xi is follow in the footsteps of the master dictator.
    1
  3823. This is not a particularly new idea. Details change over time. One of the first was Iridium launched in the 1990s.
    1
  3824. I think this last meeting with business executives and Xi went about as well as the one he had in San Francisco. After that one the pull out of capital really got up a head of steam.
    1
  3825. Thanks for doing this. I need my daily fix.
    1
  3826. Well, he was wrong about Farage. As for success in politics he was the main proponent of Brexit. That passed, didn't it? He was an MEP for a long time. He retired from politics. Now he is back and leading a realignment of British politics. He leads the polls asking who should be the next PM. His party, built from scratch, just did very, very well in local elections, and by elections for Westminster. His party also leads in the polls. So, you may want to check you biases at the door. By the way, I am not British but follow British politics closely having lived there early in this millennium. I actually tend to follow politics worldwide due to my experience doing business around the world.
    1
  3827. The idea of the government deciding what is disinformation is frankly unconstitutional. If it ever comes to the Supreme Court, it will be stuck down. The First Amendment does not protect "correct" speech, it protects ALL speech.
    1
  3828. Ah, the Middle East. China is actively arming Hamas, according to reports I have seen. So much for peace initiatives. There have been no pan-Palestinian elections for president in over 15 years. Why? Because Fatah fears Hamas would win. If there had been an announcement for elections in the very near term, then this might have been significant. As it is, it is just so much hot air. The history of trying to bring peace in the Levant is littered with failed attempts. The Palestinians have passed up several opportunities, and some of those situations were before the Fatah-Hamas split. That split is as wide as ever. As for China and the "global south", CCP influence is already waning. My attitude is that China is imploding economically and that the CCP is fracturing. Xi reportedly is talking about "civil war". It won't be long now. It is very likely that there will not be a unified Chinese state on the territory of current day China in the near future. So, nothing really to see here.
    1
  3829. His post was entirely correct. Ukraine's last chance was in 2023 when they tried a counteroffensive in the south specifically targeted on taking back Crimea. They failed miserably. Neither Ukraine nor Russia is any good at offensive warfare. If you want to know what this will look like, read up on the Iran Iraq War from the 1980s (basically the whole 1980s). Is that what Zalenski and Putin want? On top of that, they will lose the support of people in Europe. Just look at the recent demonstrations against remilitarization in Germany and the rising popularity of the AfD. One of their signature policy positions is no to support to Ukraine and the reestablishment of relations with Russia. They are not alone in Europe. Even in the US support is waning. There have also been demonstrations in France. Zalenski is a fool.
    1
  3830. Peace through strength. The more capable you are the less likely you are to be attacked is actually correct. The problem is, who would attack China? The only ones with a motive to do so are the Russians. Frankly, China has poor farmland, limited natural resources (especially in relation to its size and needs) and all those Chinese. Who is going to attack a country like that? If there is a war and it does not go nuclear then what will happen is that China will be blockaded. This will result in, as Peter Zeihan likes to point out (and I agree with him) rapid deindustrialization (months) and mass starvation (within a year). The thing is that it would not take much to effect a blockade, and it doesn't have to be done close to China. One of the military reasons for China to want to take Taiwan is to break out of the stranglehold of the first island chain. This might be good for its navy, but only for a short period of time.
    1
  3831. So, you have labor standards in your country, but it is fine to trade with countries that don't even have basic protections for workers? You have environmental standards, but don't care that you have exported your pollution to another, less developed country? How does that work, Alex?
    1
  3832. I like Fox News. I am not a big fan of Hannity. At about 3:40 he interjects his opinion. Why? He has a much more experienced and knowledgeable guest. What he is saying is just a repeat of what everyone knows. He is like most politicians, on all sides, that in response to questions repeat the talking points. The sound bite lists. Actually, I think that is the limit of his intellectual capability. Many of these talking points are valid, but anyone who is half sentient already knows them. Just repeating them on and on is what gets politicians as a group such a low approval rating. ALL interviewers should let their guests do most of the talking. The interviewer is not an opinion maker. If you think that I clicked on this video because of Hannity, you are sadly mistaken. In fact, the interviewers are to some extent, a negative for their audience. Rush Limbaugh, with whom I would agree on most things, did this. He helped get Barak Obama elected twice. He pilloried the Republican candidates in both elections with his audience (which was huge) and gave the election to Obama. No one was conservative enough, or pure enough. What he didn't understand is that the bulk of the electorate is centrist. What he didn't understand is that no one is pure enough/ The truly conservative will never be a bulk of the electorate. By suppressing the vote for the Republican, he guaranteed a Democratic win. Any Republican would have been better.
    1
  3833. All this talk about the Baltic states reminds me of a line from Doctor Who. The Doctor is talking to an old English aristocrat in his country estate. When the aristocrat asks him where he was from, he said Gallifrey. The aristocrat, unfazed, said something like, oh, I don't know that one, I never could keep all those Balti bits straight.
    1
  3834. I have nothing against the LGBT community, but for a mass market retailer or a political party to cater to this community is madness. For a company it smacks of an abrogation of their duty to their shareholders. The LGBT community may be up to 10% of the population. The T is the smaller part of that community. Of the other 90% of the population, a much larger proportion may be offended by some of this stuff. So, the companies are alienating a much larger proportion of the customer base to cater to a community, much of which just wants to be accepted as a part of the wider population. I think there is an opening for shareholder lawsuits. I see this is already happening in the Target case.
    1
  3835. Pistol caliber carbines are a blast to shoot, and much more accurate. I have hunted for years with a .44 Rem Mag revolver and am very proficient with it. My revolver, a S&W 629 Classic, with a 6.5" barrel is good out to at least 75 yards on whitetails in Illinois. I have taken quite a few. I was able to purchase from a friend a Winchester 1994 in .44 Rem Mag. It was a Trapper model with a 16" barrel. Totally traditional, with a straight walnut stock and saddle ring. Made in the US. It is a joy to shoot. A real joy. With hunting ammo, which is 33% more powerful than the standard ammo, it has no real recoil and is incredibly accurate. I only go on about this because I love the gun, and it is an example that reinforces the Army's rational. Now, I am very accurate with the 1911. That was the first pistol I shot, at 10 years old, and I could hit a three-ounce dixie cup at ten yards with no trouble. Man cannot. My father was in the infantry in WWII in the Pacific. He was armed with a M1 Carbine and a 1911A1 pistol. He would talk about shooting from the hip. You could not do that in close quarters with a M1 Rifle.
    1
  3836. As an adjunct to my comment, it should be noted that most people in the Old West used pistol caliber lever action carbines or rifles. This was for the same reason that the military thought to filed the M1 carbine vs. pistols. Most people can just shoot them better. This is also why pistol carbines remain popular today.
    1
  3837. The BBC is not on a par with the NHS! They are NOT essential to British identity. There is no room in this era of media for national broadcasters funded by taxpayers. This is spoken as one who lived in the UK for a bit, and paid the license fee, and one who lives in the US with NPR. I also believe NPR should receive no federal funds here as well. I don't listen to either. I see their biases (having watched both before these crept in) and am appalled.
    1
  3838. Laura makes great points here. In thinking about this what I conclude is that this can be attributed to Trump being a business leader. If you look at long running successful companies, succession planning is a very important process. A lot of politicians, especially those that have never done anything but politics (anyone come to mind) are not as interested in grooming and encouraging that next generation. This is also true of most dictators, by the way. Just look at Putin and Xi.
    1
  3839. TIK, why do most people give unemployment in terms of numbers rather than percentages? If we talk about this, the number is significant, but it needs to put into context by using the percentage of the working age population.
    1
  3840. Is this the "evil" Shannon Bream that Gutfeld talks about?
    1
  3841.  @EllieMaes-Grandad  Always!
    1
  3842. While I am not a fan of the CCP, the decision in 2020 to restrict credit to the real estate industry was a reasonable decision. These firms had become Ponzi schemes. There are two major flaws in this scenario which show the weakness of the communist system in general. One is the impossibility of centralized economic planning. We have seen it ever since the Soviet Union started the five-year plan. Especially in an environment of corruption, the folly of central planning is obvious. The second flaw in what the CCP did was that they made no provision for unwinding the real estate developers once they lost access to credit. There was just no planning for this scenario. That is incredible. Justin Turdeau once lauded the central control model of the CCP. He liked the idea that they could just command things to be done. He has been quiet on that front ever since. Wonder why, NOT!
    1
  3843.  @bobwatson8754  You make some good points. On the other hand, at present it seems like more and more people are going toward plug-in hybrids. The sales numbers bear this out. A neighbor of mine had a Volt. He could get to work and back on one charge. My attorney, and friend, just got a high-end BMW PHV. The all-electric range is, if I recall correctly, and 35 or 40 miles. This is sufficient for the vast majority of his daily driving. Being a hybrid, though, he doesn't have to worry if he needs to take a longer trip. I work from home and could easily use an EV. I also have a three-car garage, so no issue with charging at home. On the other hand, one of the things I have a car for is to occasionally take longer trips.
    1
  3844.  @TomTomicMic  I think you meant "stole" rather than "stoke". Actually, BYD uses a multi-sensor approach, whereas Tesla primarily uses visual sensors. I have actually given on-line courses on multi-sensor fusion. It is a complex task. I also have experience with it in the mil-aero realm. I don't think BYD is up to the task. Your other point is right on the mark.
    1
  3845. Are you ethnically Ukrainian because your Polish ancestors occupied parts of what is now Ukraine? Asking for a friend.
    1
  3846. How real is this video? There is a guy talking on a cell phone in a metal pipe. At least that is what the translation seems to indicate. That is, of course, bullsh*t on so many levels.
    1
  3847. The Chinese economy is in freefall. Consumption of EVs and ICEs are all down, as is the income of people who would normally buy these cars. This is not an issue with motor vehicles, but a systemic problem. Germans are obsessed with quality, and BYD cars are of poor quality. The number of incidents with their cars is massive. It not only involves batteries but also their self-driving and safety features. I have literally just seen a report that eight EVs a day self-combust in China. Many of those are BYD vehicles. Several examples of cars catching fire at charging stations are documented. In addition, BYD is learning, without so far taking remedial action, that the battery pack underneath the car is suspectable to damage from even small debris on the road. Tesla found this out the hard way and now puts "armor plate" beneath their vehicles to avoid this problem. In addition, the BYD battery pack architecture makes it impossible to repair them, unlike other brands.
    1
  3848. Waltz is right. Look at the videos of the conflict. The Ukrainians are in trenches and in destroyed buildings. Also, don't forget that the tank was developed in WWI specifically to break through trench lines. As for the drones, I would rather have airpower and artillery. In fact, that is why Ukraine has had to rely on drones, they lack sufficient artillery and airpower. Don't get me wrong, Ukraine is doing a stellar job with what they have, but what they have is not sufficient to get the job done. I have yet to see the drones make a real difference in offensive actions. They always seem to be used in defensive operations. The Ukrainians are grinding the Russians down. If only Biden had given them the necessary offensive capabilities early on, this conflict might have been over in Ukraine's favor. Ukraine has limited capabilities in mechanized warfare. I see many map reviews and there are examples of Ukraine doing it right with flanking maneuvers against Russian salients, but these are relatively rare.
    1
  3849. A new Republican leader in Illinois? What we are seeing is the Democrat coalition falling apart. The Dems built the party on gathering disparate racial and ethnic groups, telling them that they had to resist "the man" and offering them money. They were doing intersectionality before we knew the term. Trump is blowing that apart. A lot of these groups the Dems relied on have nothing in common with each other, except not being a part of the majority. Finally, they are seeing the light.
    1
  3850. Men are men, women are women, and little furry things are little furry things.
    1
  3851. Foreign aid which goes to anyone but strong allies that have real needs is just a waste of money. Let private organizations do whatever they want, but government needs to be very parsimonious with such funding. From what I have seen, over decades, foreign aid has been a disaster.
    1
  3852. I find all these pundits and those of the commentariat who characterize the political landscape in old, outdated terms both infuriating and laughable. To say "...she represents what people want, rather than what politicians have been giving them" is the essence of democracy. To call this "right wing" or "populist" is dishonest and ignorant. Really, just a load of drivel. The political landscape has totally shifted. Trump in the US and Meloni in Italy represent the individualist, nationalist trend. The so-called leftist, or really establishment, politicians represent the collectivist trend. This is basically, socialism (including national socialism) or communism.
    1
  3853.  @saltapozo  Well, today is not that time.
    1
  3854.  @saltapozo  I am not exactly sure what you mean. I expect it has to do with aging of the European population. Is that correct?
    1
  3855.  @saltapozo  You may be excused for saying this if your native language is not English. The term "baby boomers" refers to a massive number of babies born in a short time after WWII. This did not just happen in the US. It is a moniker for a generation, not a description of their current state. It is like Gen-Z, or other such labels for a generation. You could say "elderly baby boomers", but they will always remain baby boomers.
    1
  3856.  @saltapozo  Come on man! That is the most ignorant statement I have read in a very long time. In terms of societal and political development, China has basically not progressed at all. In the next step, they will regress back to where they were at the beginning of the 20th century at the end of the Qing dynasty. Think warlords. Economically, it is only with western help that they developed at all. By not adopting some of the essentials of the western system, such as rule of law and private property rights, they have condemned themselves to regress back to where they started. It doesn't help that they have a doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist-Maoist economic illiterate running their economy now.
    1
  3857.  @saltapozo  Well, if you believe that you will believe anything.
    1
  3858. You know what will happen? All this green agenda will fade away as war and strife around the world interrupts supply of energy. I have noticed in many places that discussion about climate change has faded. Of course, in the developing world, it never was a real priority. China has over 1,000 coal plants and is building 300 more. Much of south and southeast Asia cannot afford the price of LNG, so those cargos are being diverted to Europe. They are going back to coal. If the UK is not smart and doesn't start fracking now, their economy will be devastated.
    1
  3859.  @shilohbrutalis582  Thanks.
    1
  3860. Actually, enrolments are down at universities. One problem is all these stupid degrees, especially at the undergraduate level. She wants to study public policy? Why is that a subject at the undergraduate level? Don't get me started on all the other fake degrees now common. The problem is that universities grew too large. First to absorb the WW2 vets using the GI Bill. Then even more to service their children, the baby boomers (full disclosure, I are one). This expansion was driven by the whole student loan debacle as well. It is also the reason we have so many foreign students. They pay full fare and fill out the places at schools. Then there are the racial/ethnic social engineering initiatives. The whole system is broken. What I am seeing is a realignment and consolidation in the system. There was a recent article in the WSJ about this. It needs to come faster.
    1
  3861. When Jan Crawford said "we" could have had a proper primary I think that takes away any credibility the legacy MSM had.
    1
  3862. Ukraine was basically in the same demographic boat as Russia prior to the war. They have lost a lot of people as well. Russia may well break apart (a likely scenario), but the question is how long it will take. It could be one decade or more. Unfortunately, they can do a lot of damage before that. Where will Ukraine be by then? It's all an utter mess.
    1
  3863. Who the hell is Taylor Lorenz. These people are not even on my radar. What is going on here?
    1
  3864. China is toast. The corruption of the CCP is so massive that they cannot recover.
    1
  3865. Elvira, have you read "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin? If you have, what do you think about it? If so, when did you read it? One reason I ask is because, clicking on a link in the description of this video I was taken to a novel by one of your students titled "The Russian Gladiator". As a senior in high school, I was in the top tier English class. We had to do a final paper which was a large part of our grade. I choose to compare and contrast three dystopian novels, "We", "1984" and "Brave New World". This was just over half a century ago. It was the height of the Cold War (I miss the Cold War; I got to do very interesting, cutting-edge research with an unlimited budget). I was born in Washington, DC and my father worked at an Army weapons lab. So, it had a lot of meaning for me at the time (still does). I got an A by the way.
    1
  3866.  @elvirabary  You are very welcome. I really do appreciate and enjoy your videos. It is interesting that you read "We" in high school. Was Russia still the Soviet Union at the time? I agree with you that it is very dark. It sort of had a fascination for me, though. I was in the advanced track in English class, but I was more interested in math and physics (I was in the advanced track in both of those as well). We considered it a science fiction genre book as well as a dystopian one. A lot of science fiction was also very dark.
    1
  3867.  @elvirabary  Interesting. When I read it, it was not available in the USSR.
    1
  3868. If NATO really wanted to escalate and could neutralize Russian nukes (I was working on that stuff during the Cold War) then the way is open to Moscow. It has been reported, by our NATO allies on the border with Russia, that the Russian bases facing NATO have been emptied. Troops and equipment have even been pulled from Kaliningrad. The way to Moscow and St. Petersburg is open and it is not that far from the NATO border. Putin blusters and shouts but he has nothing left in the tank. He can't both keep the economy running, including the military industrial complex, and fight the war in the way he has been doing it. He is just plain running out of troops. This is not WWII. Russian demographics are catastrophic today, unlike the middle of the 20th century. He may even face a two-front war. It is no secret that the CCP, especially Xi, would like to have big chunks of territory in the Russian far east back. During WWII the Soviets made a deal with Japan. No such deal with China is likely today The other thing is that Russian equipment has proven to be substandard. The Russian air force is a joke. If they tried to invade NATO, they would be wiped out in hours. For example, Ukraine has a handful of Patriots SAM batteries. European NATO has many times that. On top of that NATO has plenty of planes ready to respond. If Putin couldn't overwhelm Ukraine, he has no chance against NATO. I am not advocating invading Russia, by the way. NATO is a defensive alliance. That is why Putin can take troops away from facing NATO. On the other hand, with the new members of NATO and the memories of what the Soviets did in some of the countries now in NATO, it is not something that Putin should discount.
    1
  3869. The idea of stimulus payments directly to low-income consumers is probably the right path to take. Thus, the CCP will not take it. Despite Xi's anti-corruption campaign, corruption continues to be rampant in the CCP. This is the only way to keep the party together as a going concern. Xi is trying ideology. He is, as they say, pissing in the wind. This reminds me of the Roman emperor, Julian, who tried to revive paganism and ancient Roman values in the face of Christianity. He was the last pagan emperor of Rome. Will Xi be the last communist emperor of China?
    1
  3870.  @DerrickHistory  You have the right to buy or purchase food. The government does not have the right to deny you food. Those are two different things. A right is something guaranteed by the government. If it costs money for you to have it, then it will have to come from taxes.
    1
  3871. One aspect of military grade parts is that they have been through testing. They often are generally commercial parts with perhaps some modifications. I was working in the industry when the change to Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) parts was started. A ruggedized commercial computer would cost up to twice what its commercial counterpart did. Part was packaging, and part was the rigorous testing. The purpose built military computer would often cost ten times as much, often with less capability. For something like a suicide drone, the need for military parts, especially electronics, is non-existent. The fact is that most commercial grade parts are still quite reliable.
    1
  3872. Why would anyone believe what a Hezbola health official says? Why would anyone believe what Hamas reports about casualties in Gaza? Why do we rarely see how many Israeli casualties there are, or how many people have been forced to evacuate their homes? I ask this because of how you report the Ukraine war. You assume that the Ukrainian officials would not tell the truth, so you use all those third-party sources for your information. You know that the Russians are spewing nonsense in all their reporting about the war. So, you use no official reporting on that conflict. The thing is it is not only independent YouTubers that do this. The MSM does as well. How can we trust any of the reporting on these conflicts? The thing is it doesn't matter. Who cares what the exact casualty figures are? I am talking here about consumers of information, not those directly affected, of course. Does it matter if the actual number is off by 10%, 20% or 100%? Just saying.
    1
  3873. That is so incredible. The Democrats control both houses of Congress and the Presidency. Mara Gay is either just plain stupid (most likely case) or a liar (also very likely). The MSM is so cringe worthy that even when clips like this are aired by media I like to show the hierocracy I have trouble watching them. It is that bad.
    1
  3874. My mother worked for the Institute, many, many decades ago. Glad to see them supporting your content.
    1
  3875. For the EU to be successful, and more than a protectionist bloc, it really needs to adopt a US style Federal system. Either that, or it needs to concentrate on economic matters and free trade internally, while having little to do with the internals of the member states. That is sort of what the UK wanted prior to the Brexit vote. The EU said go pound sand. That is why Norway and Switzerland are not part of the EU. The problem is that the EU is made up of countries that have long, long histories and strong and unique cultures. Having lived and worked there I have experienced the situation. Even the US did not have to deal with such diversity in the beginning, so I would say the best they can do is the latter option.
    1
  3876. You know what they used to say. You get the lab (Labrador, a very popular dog breed in the US) for companionship. Then you have the kids for the tax breaks. Actually, the Pope should read the Bible. The New Testament was full of skepticism about bringing children into the world. St. Paul talked about this alot.
    1
  3877. This is getting tiresome. Why are you, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro even on Twitter? It is so toxic, and all you do is complain about the foolishness of it. It helped Trump lose an election. Get off of it. Starve it of oxygen. There are other platforms, as you well know. You become part of the problem when you go on and on about it. It is like the TV program The View. It does not have massive viewership, and yet people like you and many conservative commentators talk endlessly about their latest foolish rant. You keep them in business.
    1
  3878.  @irrationalmale  Wow! Actually, Trump has shifted the Republican Party. I see this in the UK with the Conservatives. The attitudes are much more flexible.
    1
  3879.  @irrationalmale  What are you talking about? Are you uninformed. Rubin started Locals. Trump has created a social media company, as have others. They are doing the free market thing. I agree with you on Twitter. That is why I got off. I was only on because a company I did some work for had a presence there and I needed to be there. This was a tech training group. The engagement was minimal, so I eventually got off. There is nothing technologically advanced about serving up videos or having an on-line messaging platform.
    1
  3880. Myanmar is one of many, many "countries" around the world that make no sense. These are spread all over Asia, Africa, South America and Europe. Considering that most of those countries, as we know them today, were once ruled by Europeans it all makes sense. The situation in Myanmar is more than just ethnic and geographic, but religious as well. A typical case. Combine all those and what one is left with is former colonies or former empires or both that cannot, in my opinion, be brought into a "more perfect union". We cannot impose our western values and norms on them without getting much more involved and dictating terms. That would require time and blood and treasure to try to make it work in such places and that is just a waste of resources. I tend to think Peter is generally correct that the world is fragmenting into a situation reminiscent of, well, all of history minus the last 40 years or so. China and Russia want a "multipolar world order". They will get it. It is called imperialism and colonialism. They did not do well the last time and will not do well this time.
    1
  3881.  @TomTomicMic  All fine sentiments, but that is not the reality. If you think for one moment that the issues within Myanmar could be resolved peacefully, by the people there themselves, then you have not read enough history.
    1
  3882. Watching these videos, I find myself not being afraid of the Chinese. In fact, I feel sorry for them.
    1
  3883. In my experience, there has always been a feeling in Canada against immigrants. This is generally among the working class. In the early 1990s I was doing a lot of work in Canada for a US tech company. I am an American, by the way. One time I was working with a Chinese Canadian engineer, who worked for the client company. We went to the loading dock to check on the equipment from my company, which had just arrived. The native Canadian loading dock workers were openly making racist slurs about the Chinese engineer, right in front of him. He was very careful not to respond. I asked him about it later, and he just waved it off. This was in the Toronto area. I was also warned about Chinese who were involved in organized crime in the city. Then, a few days later I saw it in downtown Toronto. Two Chinese men in a Mercedes had stopped on the road and pulled a woman out of the car and started threatening her. It was a tense situation. Often it is the government types that welcome the immigrants, for various reasons. Canada does indeed have a demographic problem. This is not the 19th and early 20th century in Canada or the US or Europe. Today we have extensive social safety nets. This means taxpayer dollars. In the earlier times the immigrants had to fend for themselves. Even then, there would be feelings against the immigrants. At least in the US it was a time of rapid economic and geographic expansion. Not so anymore.
    1
  3884. So, Mike, I noticed that you put yourself between your guests this week. I don't think you usually do that, although you did separate Dawn and Christo. What gives?
    1
  3885.  @volkerr.  Whatever, that is the question.
    1
  3886.  @alanparsonsfan  Precisely. It seems like all this news is following his playbook. Following China I feel like it is playing out in real-time.
    1
  3887.  @alanparsonsfan  Good question. I don't think they have a chance. I tend to subscribe to the school of history and development that looks at broader measures more than personalities. One channel that I find useful, but not always correct, is Lei's Real Talk. Lei puts much more emphasis on personalities and the "inside scoop" than on the major trends. She is heading more and more in that direction as time goes on. She reminds me of Karl Rove. The quintessential insider who was right once but is getting further and further from being a useful source. For example, her videos about the sinking of the Chinese sub recently were basically ill informed. She was again relying on "insiders". She seems to be a competent economic and financial analyst, but the politics and intrigue stuff is well beyond her. On one of her recent live streams, she was asked about Zeihan and indicated she had not followed his works. I left a long comment about him and what he tries to do. I ended up sending it to her as an email. She responded that she got it but did not give me any feedback. By the way, I am a big fan of Alan Parsons as well.
    1
  3888. Your point about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a good one. Another thing to consider is that US shale oil wells in the US are now profitable at price as low as $30 per barrel and the costs are coming down. There are two other considerations. One is that shale oil wells take a very short time to bring online. The other is that the oil majors are buying up these reserves and they have massively deep pockets to weather and storm.
    1
  3889. The universities are a different sort of issue. We have a similar problem in the US. The schools in the US dramatically increased in size after WW2. First it was to absorb the influx of soldiers going to school under the GI Bill. Then came the children of these soldiers, the baby boomers. So, the schools have been sized for a population that no longer exists and that probably will not exist in the future. So, what did they do? They started soliciting foreign students. One of my sons went to a private technology university. His roommate was Chinese (although he spent most of his time in his girlfriend's room; coed dorms on the same floor; she was Malaysian). It got so bad that some rich alumni put together a full ride scholarship program for any US citizens from the state the school is in. I know some whose kids took advantage of it. What needs to be done is to shrink the universities. One reason for soliciting foreign students is to foster cross border understanding. Well, I have read many times about Japanese officers who studied in the US. Did that help in cross cultural understanding? Another thing that I have seen is that some 40 to 50 percent of university leavers have jobs that don't require the degree they have, and in fact don't require a degree at all. This whole system needs a total rethink, both in the US and the UK.
    1
  3890. Load of crap. No one forces anyone to use the dollar for trade not involving the US. They never have. In fact, if you are familiar with the Eurodollar (nothing to do with the Euro currency), this is totally out of control of the US. As for Fed rate rises, the latest round is nothing compared to the 1970s and 1980s. The whole issue is tied up with two salient facts. The first is convertibility. The second is legal protection. Even though the Russian assets in the west were frozen, that is not unusual or unexpected given that Russia has invaded another UN member, totally violating the UN Charter and is killing civilians and committing war crimes. These funds have not been given to the Ukrainians or used to offset western expenditures on military aid. They are frozen. There are legal moves affront, emphasizing legal, and the outcome is not predetermined. Compare that to the yuan. Tight currency controls. Even Russia, which sold oil to China and was paid in yuan, cannot get that money out of China. Look at the Euro. It was supposed to be a rival to the dollar. It represents an economic zone nearly on a par with the dollar zone. The percentage of dollar foreign exchange transactions has actually risen for the dollar, not fallen. This topic is just plain stupid and keeps coming up. Not a good look.
    1
  3891.  @MrForeveryoung201  Well, don't bet the farm on it. Actually, the USD share of foreign exchange transactions keeps going up. The sanctions against Russia and Iran are fully justified by what those countries have done. If you don't believe that then it means that you support their actions. Is that the case?
    1
  3892.  @MrForeveryoung201  You are kidding, right? Many of the sanctions put on Russia were EU sanctions. What about those? Did the EU have to get permission from India, for example to do that? If you believe that there was no consultation, then you haven't been listening to what has gone on. In any event, any country can put sanctions on another country on their own at any time. That is their right as a sovereign nation. You have heard of national sovereignty, haven't you?
    1
  3893.  @MrForeveryoung201  Look, you have a much different view of the world. You are free to think whatever you want. As for the EU sanctions, they are driven by the existential threat to their own security. They have suffered some setbacks for those sanctions, but the alternative is much, much worse. They scoffed at Trump when he told them they had become too reliant on Russian energy and were not spending enough on defense. Look where that got them. As for the Iran deal, yes, they wanted to make a deal. But look at what Iran was doing. They were not only threatening to wipe Israel off the map with nuclear weapons, but they are supporting terrorist organizations around the world.
    1
  3894. Why is this video even here? Every time someone has national exposure you ask if they should run for president. Is that for real? Liz Cheney has no national base, and now has none in her home state. What kind of analysis is it to ask if this portends a presidential race? I guess what I am saying is that this is stupid.
    1
  3895. Load of crap. If you will notice, the cargo has be unloaded, transported and loaded. This greatly increases the cost. It may not even be cheaper than just sailing around the southern tip. Get real. A similar project, this in Southeast Asia, was mooted as a part of the Chinese belt and road. This was done for a similar reason, that is to bypass the Malacca Straight, another chokepoint. Finally, the issues with infrastructure in South America have nothing to do with geopolitics, and everything to do with geography.
    1
  3896. The banking collapse in China is inevitable. There is nothing the CCP can do to stop it. Banks are too invested in real estate. Residential real estate is overbuilt by between 50 and 100%. The value of real estate carried on the books of banks is illusory. In addition, the belt and road initiative is a real money loser for the CCP and the banks involved. The reports I have seen claim that up to 60% of the loans are nonperforming. The CCP under Xi has been totally foolish and inept. There really is no solution.
    1
  3897. You mention the wars they fought where they were initially "sucker punched" and then bounced back. Are you talking about Chechnya and Georgia and such? Those were much smaller countries and did not get western support. They were also well within the Russia or the Russian sphere, with little or no chance of resupply from the west. The salient point you do make is about the corruption within the Russian military. They don't have the new commanders to send in. Even if they conscript troops now it will take months just to get them through basic training. Then much more time to teach them to operate things like tanks. I tend to believe that they are done. Ukraine seems to have goof leaders, and have the support and intelligence operations of the US to back them up. Just one interesting example. I suppose you have seen the ammunition depots that the Ukrainians have taken. A smart adversary, knowing where that is would have sent missiles or planes to destroy them with the Ukrainians in them. Nothing. In fact, the Ukrainians have been flying over this territory. The Russians cannot, even with the numbers, stop that. By the way, I have now read all your books. I started with the last one and then got the rest. Great stuff, and I see everyday the things you talk about happening, basically in real-time.
    1
  3898.  @JonySmith-bb4gx  What are you referring to?
    1
  3899.  @JonySmith-bb4gx  Proof of what?
    1
  3900.  @JonySmith-bb4gx  I will say to you what I did to my sons when they were young and frustrated, use your words. I made several statements and claims. Which are problematic for you? If you have a question, engage with the content. Otherwise, I will have to conclude you are a bot?
    1
  3901.  @JonySmith-bb4gx  You need to work on your punctuation and capitalization. You might want to get some education.
    1
  3902. In reference to the 2008 crisis the term shadow banks is used. In the US we call these investment banks. What happened in the 2008 timeframe is that the mortgage financing market had changed. Mortgages were initially offered by and remained with banks. Then the financial guys came up with the idea of buying up these mortgages and turning them into securities. One of the biggest causes of the financial crisis is the mislabeling of these securities with some of the highest investment grade ratings. Then, when the underlaying asset had a problem there was a sell off. So, in some broad outlines Krugman is correct. In the details the situations are very different.
    1
  3903.  @ovid4  Now you are talking semantics. Did you actually read what I wrote? Rhymes, not repeats.
    1
  3904. Interesting! My first two cars were Austin Healey Sprites. One was a 1967 Mark III which the first owner had tricked out as a race car. The other was a 1969 Mark IV. It was pristine and had a separate hard top and roll bar (the Mark III also had a roll bar, or course). My third car was a 1969 MG B. All these were bought in the 1970s. My brother's first car was a 1968 Triumph GT6. He still has that car (sadly I don't have any of mine left) and recently took it completely apart and rebuilt it. We souped these cars up massively. They were fun to drive, reasonably fast and handled well. An additional feature was that the women loved them. On driving fast on an English country lane, I have lots of experience with that. It was magical. I lived there in the early 21st century. I didn't have a Midget or B, but an Alfa Romeo GTV. That was a fantastic car as well.
    1
  3905. While I believe that Biden's visit to Ukraine was a great thing, you have to understand that American elections are not won or lost on foreign policy issues. One fantastic example is Richard Nixon's reelection. He won in a landslide even though the Vietnam war was going on and there were massive protests against it. American elections are always about domestic issues.
    1
  3906.  @urkiddingme6254  I am not sure I agree with you on that. John Kerry was not an appealing candidate. Just my point of view.
    1
  3907.  @sans3go342  I know. I just like to complain.
    1
  3908. Actually, Tom, the untrained conscripts on the front lines are a detriment to the Russians. I heard an intercepted phone call from one of the professional soldiers. He pointed out that the conscripts would run at the first contact with the enemy, giving away the Russian's position. This resulted in accurate artillery fire from the Ukrainians. These conscripts are more of a burden on the Russians. They stretch logistics and are not effective. In Kearson Russian logistics are already in bad shape. Sending a bunch of ineffectives in is not a strategy for success.
    1
  3909.  @raymondmerchant988  Similar. Actually, a Bouncing Betty is a mine that pops up into the air when activated and then detonates.
    1
  3910. "Shared employees" are just contractors. That model is used all over the world. There are consulting firms that do this exclusively. This can be especially useful in project-oriented settings where the work is not steady. Early in my career I worked for one such company. We had one customer who had a group that designed industrial plants. There would be long stretches between one phase of their work and the next. The group had two permanent employees, the manager and a technical expert. They did a lot of simulations, so they hired people from my firm to come in and do those. I was brought in to program a microcontroller. As consultants with specialized knowledge, we were generally paid much better than the permanent employees at the same level. So, I am wondering why this is something that appears in this is being discussed on this channel. It is neither strange or uncommon or unique to China.
    1
  3911.  @coleclairelgbt  Values? I guess that depends on what you mean by values.
    1
  3912.  @phillipemery572  I fully agree. There is a cost to outsourcing. When I was working at a spacecraft plant several years ago, one of the manufacturing theories was that then current was that there should be a tight interaction between engineering (where I worked) and manufacturing. Moving supply chains outward broke this bond, and leads to increased manufacturing costs and lower quality. For those that try to keep the quality high, there is a significant cost to creating that function in dispersed enterprises. After leaving the aerospace industry, I was consulting with a small manufacturer who had some components of a system he was selling made in China. He, of course, could not station people in China. The Chinese manufacturer had trouble sourcing a couple of components, so they substituted them with what turned out to be inferior components. The systems were selling well, and were installed in some large customer facilities. Then, about six months in, they started to fail. All of them. Of course, we could not save this company. I could go on with several examples I was either involved in or that were related to me. Just one other example from industrial history comes from GM. It was in the 1980s, I am fairly certain, that GM came out with their "world" car concept. They would build factories in target markets that were all set up the same way. Their suppliers would set up their operations collocated with the GM plant. Thus, no inventory problems and no supply chain problems. It also gave GM total insight into how their suppliers were performing. Who knows, we may see something like this brought back.
    1
  3913. Who are these bozos protesting? They elect the guy on a pro-Russian platform then the protest against him when he follows through.
    1
  3914. The mineral wealth is impressive, and Senator Graham is correct in not wanting to give that to Russia. Actually, just before the war there was at least one western oil major starting exploration for oil and natural gas in the east of Ukraine. Of course, they had to withdraw. We have to be more strategic in our economies in the west. This whole supply chain madness has to come to an end. On the other hand, don't forget that "rare earths" are not actually rare. What the west has done is to make it prohibitively expensive to exploit these minerals on their own territory. The mining and processing is a dirty process. So, as usual, the west has just exported their pollution. In places like China and Russia, where they don't care about the environment, the impact is devastating, both to the environment and to the people. This has to stop!
    1
  3915.  @1djbecker  I agree with your spin on it. As for the consumers, they clamored for cheaper goods, so they are not totally blameless. I agree with you that the country that has no rules prices out cleaner extraction. On the other hand, the receiving country could insist that extraction and processing meet some standards. The alternative is to put tariffs on or to prohibit them altogether. The EU is going to do this (in 2026) with CO2 emissions, with something they call the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). I would like to see this across the board.
    1
  3916.  @1djbecker  Well, I think we have a different perspective. I actually have close acquaintances who are higher ups in US manufacturing companies that outsourced their production to China a while back. They did it because their direct customer, Walmart, insisted on lower and lower prices. This was to satisfy Walmart's customers who wanted lower and lower prices. It all comes back to the consumer in the end.
    1
  3917.  @1djbecker  Now you are just being silly. The products are labeled with country of origin.
    1
  3918.  @1djbecker  My previous comment stands. If you are not smart enough to check the package (I always do) then that is on you.
    1
  3919. My economic advisor, who avidly studies historical economic events, mentioned to me, as the current pandemic took hold, that the Spanish Flu did not even cause a recession in the US, despite resulting in many more deaths than the Kung Flu.
    1
  3920.  @ang1852  Yes, and there was a reason for that. Security. When things became more secure it was much more convenient to locate near a river for transportation. It was somewhat limiting and expensive to haul everything up the hill. And, as you pointed out, the lowlands were cheaper and more abundant. I lived in Winchester for a while, and it was fun to visit hill forts and other sites. An interesting site was Old Sarum. This was the original Salisbury. After the need for the town to be a fort, they abandoned it. It was also one of the "rotten boroughs", but that's another story.
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  3921. Sal, Sal, Sal. The US Senate is also referred to as the world's greatest deliberative body. One should never forget that. Actually, the US Senate has failed to ratify several treaties that were negotiated by various administrations. One of the earliest I remember is the League of Nations. This was a concept and organization pushed by US President Wilson. This body was ineffective, and I don't think that the US participation would have made much of a difference. By the way, the US Senate did ratify the UN Charter. How has that worked out? Another, more recent one that was not ratified was the Iran nuclear deal. Now, adherence, or lack thereof, is at the whim of the President. Another significant one is the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). Clinton, who signed it, did not even submit it to the US Senate because of concerns about how the court was organized. So, US Senate action regarding UNCLOS is not unusual. There is just not enough support for it. Frankly, as with all international treaties, or laws, the big issue is enforcement. Look at the case that went against China in the South China Sea. Case closed.
    1
  3922. Tonia, love you (I am 100% Greek descent, born in the US), but I have to disagree with something you said. You look 100% Greek. Quintessential Greek. Otherwise, I am not disagreeing with you.
    1
  3923. Well, in the case of Poland that looks more linear, not exponential. Still good, though.
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  3924. A few of points of interest. The first regards the military map. A feature of this conflict is that we have this real-time picture of the battlefield. This is not very useful. To go on about the capture of some fields and houses just because that group of houses has a name is really silly. The second that is very interesting is the proliferation of private military groups. I have been predicting for a while that both Russia and China will break up and devolve into a "warlord" period. It looks like this is happening very quickly in Russia. The third regards the idea of a first mover having an advantage. Are you serious? Who was the first to have a smartphone? it was not Apple. Who was the first to have a social network? It was not Facebook. Who was the first to have an Internet search engine? It was not Google. Who was the first to have a viable business PC? It was IBM. Where are they in the business today? This is all basic business school stuff.
    1
  3925. Sal, don't fear the Chinese navy. Look at this video (China’s Ships, Subs, Missiles, Planes’ Fake Strength Exposed: They’d Fall apart Without Enemy Action) from the China Observer channel. Another video (China’s Aircraft Carrier Sacrificed?25-Year Electromagnetic Launch Research May Destroy Its Aircraft) from the same channel is also instructive. The strategic role of the US Navy has changed from protecting shipping to power projection. I have concerns, as you do, about the procurement process. Having worked in the aerospace and defense industry I am all too aware of the problems. I have been out of it for a while, but whenever I dip back in, I find the same issues I saw decades ago. Not much improvement there.
    1
  3926.  @yoxat1  The first point is true. The second, I don't think so. The Russians do not have full control and are actually losing lots of planes all the time. We don't hear much about it, but Ukraine is still flying.
    1
  3927. Don't make a big deal about troops being sent into a war zone they knew nothing about. That is just plain stupid. It is also the norm for troops to be sent to areas they "know nothing about". There was an old, frankly anti-war, poster that sums it up. It went something like "Join the Army. Travel to distant exotic lands. Meet interesting, exotic people, and kill them." US troops sent to Europe in WWI and WWII were not in general "world travelers". My father is a good example. He was from western New England. Before the war he had never flown in a plane or been in an ocean-going ship. He was sent to the Pacific. It was not fun, but he did well. After the war he would not fly or take a ship. In fact, he forwent some work opportunities because of this. Then there was Korea and Vietnam. How many Midwesterners do you think had seen such mountainous terrain or jungles? Even in the era of the volunteer army this is the case. How many US or European troops had experience in the desert do you think?
    1
  3928.  @istvanglock7445  That is true in general today. But it was not really true at the start of the current millennium. There were lots of lessons learned and lots of equipment issues even in the Iraq and Afghan wars at the beginning. That was not very long ago.
    1
  3929. NATO should be threatening Russia directly. What is Putin going to do? He has no troops to confront NATO with on the northern front. The bases facing the Baltics and Finland are reportedly basically empty. So, what does he do? Divert troops from the Ukraine front and perhaps abandoning Syria? This would also be a chance for China move into eastern Russia. Heck, their maps show a lot of the territory there as Chinese. That would be a great thing to see. The two "best friends" fighting amongst themselves. You have to understand the history. One reason for the opening to China by Nixon was to pressure the Soviets on another front. I have even seen people speculate that after the Ukraine War that Russia could be "rehabilitated" to put pressure on China. Ah, geopolitics at its finest.
    1
  3930.  @Trevor7727  The market at work.
    1
  3931. I have seen statistical studies showing that there are many millions of deaths due to COVID in China. We cannot trust any figures coming out of China. Even in the West, the whole idea of tracking the number of cases is ludicrous, I have been vaccinated, but never tested. I have had NO symptoms. Even some of my friends who think they might have had it, were not actually tested. In the vast majority of cases people do not need hospitalization. I had on acquaintance who suffered for a couple of weeks. He was still not hospitalized. The figures I have seen indicate about 5M deaths due to COVID. Most of those had co-moribundities that would have resulted in death from a severe flu. Don't forget, the world population is about 8B people. The odds of dying from this are miniscule. One must also consider that the vast majority of the people dying are very old, and any serious illness could kill them. I say this as someone who is not young.
    1
  3932. The title of this video is a lie. It is click bait and shameless. Shame on GBNews! Scotland has returned this corrupt leader to power many times. Scotland does not, indeed, punch above its weight. Scotland receives massive payments from England. Without those, they would be in even worse shape than they are now. Even RBS is only what it is because it is tied to London via the Union. Without the Union, they would most likely (no, almost certainly) move to England. So, I don't know what you base the premise of this video on. The Scots are a small, woke and dependent nation. I say that with sadness as a decades long Scotch whiskey drinker, and when I lived in the UK, a member of the Scotch Malt Whiskey Society. The Scots are a dead issue, and frankly, for a nation of their size, all too often in the news.
    1
  3933. More in depth deep dives. Like the studio better.
    1
  3934. What a crock! India was ruled by a much smaller power for a long time. China's foreign trade was controlled by the small European powers for more than a century. Equating size with power is just ahistorical. The analysis fails basically from the first sentence. India's geography is not bad, but it still relies on external sources for raw materials. At least it has shorter distances to protect to get those materials and could possibly secure them. On the other hand, China controls the sources of most, if not all, the major rivers India relies on. India also has a long, long way to go. China is basically totally dependent on external sources for essential commodities. It also does not, and will not, have the ability to secure those sources. In any scenario where China tries to exert power beyond its borders, especially by sea, it will simply be strangled by its adversaries. It would not take much. And its potential adversaries are many. Once they are cut off, they deindustrialize in a matter of months and then comes mass starvation within a year. Don't forget, their agricultural land is very poor. They need to apply 3-5 times as much input per unit of output as places like North America and Europe. Add to that, China is fast falling apart. They won't survive in their current form till the end of the decade. It may only be a year or two until this happens. Xi seems to be intent on accelerating the process. No, China will not become a great power. It will most likely degenerate into another period of warlordism just as it did after the fall of the Qing dynasty. Actually, the periods of total central control are rather rare in China's long history.
    1
  3935.  @alexborisov1301  You are woefully uninformed about what BRICS is and what it does for China. Do you ever read beyond the headlines? For one thing, BRICS is not much more than a talking shop. They are not a free trade zone or a military alliance. India, for example, one of the most important countries in BRICS is also part of a military dialog specifically targeted at containing China. How is that helping China? India has recently banned many Chinese apps and lots of Chinese investment. India recently bought some big tunneling equipment from China and refused to let Chinese engineers into the country to assemble it. India is shifting its's oil purchases to the Middle East from Russia, at least part because of payment issues. China and India have significant military forces facing each other on their mutual border. Many Indian commentators expect China to attack India before they attack Taiwan. China, oh such a great friend, claims parts of Indian territory as their own. Significant parts. They also claim parts of Russia's sovereign territory by the way. Do you need geography lessons. Are these the actions of "allies".
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  3936. This is what galls me watching a lot of the videos on YouTube. The people producing these videos have no knowledge of their subject. They don't even try to get it right. I can sort of understand it for an amateur creator, but for a channel like DW, this in inexcusable.
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  3937.  @Deadassbruhfrfr  It was kind of a joke at the time. The idea was, let the Texans do it.
    1
  3938.  @NoName-mi8bm  WOW! Where to begin? Most US Jews vote Democratic. This may be changing, though. To even suggest that Texans are under the influence of Israel is laughable, That their politics align is understandable. Much of the oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia was built by US firms, most based in Texas. As for attacks on Iran, these are justified and should be undertaken by the US. We have almost as much grievance as the Israelis. Iran is a terrorist state with the stated aim of destroying, preemptively, another country. What would you call that. Do you support that? Israel is forging relations throughout the Arab world. After all, they are from the same region. This reconciliation was brought about by a Republican President. What would you expect?
    1
  3939. The Democratic Party was the party of working man. Stress on was. In other countries it would be called the Labor Party, or something along those lines. The working man at the beginning was more likely to be part of a labor union. As labor unions became less powerful and as more people went into white collar jobs, the Democrats looked around for ways to keep their numbers up. That is when they brought in the minorities. This included groups such as blacks, Hispanics and Jews. The only common thread is that these groups were either ignored or disparaged by the Republicans. The reality is that they generally had little in common outside of their feeling of "oppression" by the white man. This was basically intersectionality before we used that term. That is a very corrosive way to do politics, by the way. What Trump did, and it was all Trump, was to break down that coalition of the oppressed. Just look at what is happening in Chicago. Look at clips from the Chicago City Council meetings recently. There you have blacks and Hispanics wearing MAGA hats (I even saw one MAHA hat) and tee shirts reading "Chicago Flips Red". Can you even imagine that? I live in the Chicago area and was talking to a high-level Democrat operative/donor once about navigating some government programs. The first thing he asked me was my ethnicity. It was not one of the useful ones. So, what we are seeing is the periodic realignment of politics and culture that George Freidman (who Peter used to work for) talked about in his book "The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond". Trump is accelerating the process. It would be interesting to see what Freidman thinks now.
    1
  3940. Where do you get your data on retail spending? Have you seen what is happening in the automotive industry? If you are just reporting government statistics then there is little value to this channel.
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  3941. Stop speaking about Crimea. It was, historically, never a part of Ukraine. It was transferred to the Ukranian SSR in the 1950s by the central Soviet government. It had always been a part of the RUSSIAN empire. Don't get me wrong, I am not an apologist for Putin. In fact, I am an old Cold Warrior. But the Crimea situation is completely separate from the Ukraine situation. If we go war over Ukraine, it would be travesty. Heck, the Kievan Rus were a Viking kingdom that was a percussor to the Russians as a people. This area is so historically complex that it boggles the mind. That said, we should be sensitive to the wishes of the current Ukrainian people. They seem to be more interested in being a part of the West, rather than Putin's East.
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  3942.  @Nick-pq4ri  Actually, its Albert Speer, and he was an architect. Very different profession and more appropriate for the task.
    1
  3943.  @knopkaplay0507  You are welcome to your opinion. I agree with Mark that most people want more meaning out of life. I can sort of understand where you are coming from though. Many of the Protestant sects can be a bit strange, and in my opinion, a bit sketchy. I have seen this up close over the years.
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  3944. As I have been saying a lot, the party alignments are all wrong. It is not conservative or liberal, in the way those terms are generally understood. It is nationalist and socialist (with a bit of green thrown in). Reform is a nationalist party, much like the Republican Party in the US has become under Trump. Labor, like the Democrats in the US, is the socialist/green party.
    1
  3945.  @dhavamaneeganesh2147  Thanks.
    1
  3946. Your description of how Afghanistan's borders mirrors the story of Iraq. The one constant here is the UK. An these are not the only examples.
    1
  3947.  @henrylee3379  Do you mean right?
    1
  3948. Well, she does have one "talent". Her ass.
    1
  3949. In the US most power companies are investor owned. They are well regulated, but, if they do their job, they can be guaranteed a profit margin of about 10%. This allows them to raise funds in the capital markets at favorable rates. Since they are shareholder owned companies, they are also regulated from that point of view. There is also a motivation to upgrade and maintain the systems. A while ago there was a wave of deregulation of power generation. The electricity system consists of three parts: generation, transmission (long distance power lines) and distribution (the delivery to your premises). I live in a city where the distribution is city owned. It is VERY reliable. On the other hand, they buy electricity on the open market, so our rates are very reasonable. What US companies are selling is not just the electrons, but the reliable delivery of those electrons. This is the thing most people forget.
    1
  3950.  @blinklost  True. They will suffer the consequences.
    1
  3951. Graham talks about America policing the world. What an idiot. The US has been drawing back from this role for a while now. The whole idea was born out of Europe not being able to police itself. Frankly, the first half of the 20th century was horrendous, but not unprecedented in European history. Just look at the names of the wars in Europe over the last several centuries. You have the Hundred Years War, the Thirty Years' War, the Seven Years War, etc. The only reason the US, after WWII, remained involved in Europe, and much of the rest of the world, was the threat of the Soviet Union and nuclear weapons. If you hadn't noticed the Soviet threat disappeared thirty years ago. The US is returning to its roots which are decidedly isolationist. The world will undoubtedly return to the situation prior to WWII, with regional powers and perhaps traditional colonialism as the need for natural resources drives powerful nations to secure supplies.
    1
  3952. India buying Russian oil is a good thing. This is from a Yale professor interviewed on DW. His main point is that India pays just about what it costs the Russians to produce and ship the oil, so they don't make any profit. Another salient point is that this helps keep worldwide supply high, thus keeping prices down. It helps the Indian economy. India is also exporting refined products from this Russian oil. Again, keeping supply high. That activity also does not help the Russians. They don't make any money off of it. So, all in all a good thing, both for the war effort and for Europe.
    1
  3953. Compare the women in the Republican Party to those in the Democratic Party.
    1
  3954. Whan was this written? The EU just offered zero for zero tariffs. Trump rejected that.
    1
  3955. Trump was so much better on foreign policy. There is no comparison. Your bias in this is ugly. Trump was a strong ally of India. Biden is not. As for Kung Flu deaths under Trump, don't forget that it was he who developed the vaccines. They were not available at the beginning. Biden had those from the beginning. Consider a troop buildup under Trump. And Trump was not a fan of foreign entanglements.
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  3956. The trans community is less than 1% of the population, Gays are maybe 10% of the population. In electoral politics these are insignificant numbers. Those pushing these groups are condemning themselves to a permanent minority. This is not to say that these groups should not be able to live as they want. But, to make the vast majority bow down to their ideology is a losing proposition.
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  3957. Love the rolling of the r's in the opening referring to the propaganda.
    1
  3958. The Russian oil is bad (so are the equivalents used in the rest of the world for the same reasons), but the worst food quality is in China. There they have things like "gutter oil" where people skim oil literally out of the gutter and reuse it. Then you have cooking oils transported in the same trucks that transport hydrocarbons (fuel) without proper, or in some cases any, cleaning. And that is just the tip of the iceberg in China. It is truly frightening.
    1
  3959.  @Alkes777  They aren't Syrians.
    1
  3960. I worked on ATCCS, first iteration. AFATDS was one of the major components. ATCCS was first deployed in the Gulf War. I was actually slated to go over in case there were issues with the system in case there were any issues. Fortunately, the war was so short they didn't even have to reboot the computers. I was working for the system integration (SI) contractor. At the time, ATCCS was an $8B program. Just the SI had about 200 people. We only worked on the top-level specs and integration and testing. So, it is great to see the system still in operation 30 years later.
    1
  3961. Don't make too much of the metrics, like attacking forces lose a lot more than defending forces. A lot depends on leadership approach on both sides. Since WWII, especially in situations where large conventional forces are used, there are many examples of attacking forces not losing that many men. Look at both Iraq wars. The attacking allies lost very few men, especially when compared to the Iraqis. In the Iran Iraq war, the casualties were roughly the same. In Israel's wars the Israelis lost fewer men that the Arabs, even when attacking. In the early part of the Korean War, before China attacked, the US lost less than 10K dead while the North Koreans lost about 150K. During this time the US was attacking and basically made it to the northern border. These were all wars with large conventional forces, lots of armor and artillery. These were all wars where the defenders had massive defensive works, including trenches and minefields. So, there are lots of examples that contradict the "received wisdom".
    1
  3962. Viva la revolucion! Heck, this could be the 51st state.
    1
  3963. So many important numbers. The percentage of GDP spent on defense is basically at Soviet levels. That was a major contributing factor to the breakup of the USSR. Hyperinflation, as we know from history, is a major contributor to social instability. Considering that Russia is made up of a lot of disparate regions and nationalities, many of which are restive at the best of times, that is very significant. We generally look at total revenue from oil and gas, but we rarely hear talk about net profit. Russian oil is among the more expensive to extract. It is somewhere in the region of ten times more expensive to extract than Saudi oil, for example. Russia's trading partners in the area are all demanding big discounts. Now we see the cost of the dead and wounded soldiers becoming significant. By the way, the "open source" numbers are almost certainly very low. I tend to think the numbers published by the Ukrainian military are closer to the truth. Video evidence, from the Russian side, shows that not only are the casualties higher, but the ratio of wounded to dead is probably quite different from what is experienced by western militaries. Have you seen the videos of Russians shooting their wounded, or just leaving them to die? That is real stuff. On top of that, Russia has emptied their military bases facing NATO. So much for NATO being a threat or being threatened. What the US should do is to station a couple of heavy mechanized corps in that border region. That would include Poland, Scandanavia and the Baltics. It would be a big boost for recruitment as well. All the guys I knew who were stationed in Europe during the Cold War used to say, if you can't get laid in Germany, then you have a problem. The pickings are probably just as good in the regions I mentioned.
    1
  3964.  @kyarl6311  Well, there are instances where a campaign that was basically funded by the individual running, who was not wealthy, and who won. The latest is in New Jersey. If I recall correctly it was for the State Senate. There have been others over the years. I do agree that there is a level of corruption in the system. I was an election judge for a number of cycles. In presidential election years if we got over 60% participation, we were ecstatic. But that means 40% did not vote. Any election could go any way if everyone voted. Actually, one year, in an off election for local government officials, where the turnout might be in single digits (I always vote), there was an unusual result. The city I am in is very Republican, but the Democrats did a great get out the vote campaign and won many of these local elections (township, etc.). Turnout is key. Maybe we should make voting mandatory.
    1
  3965.  @carlostuggle6515  What a crock of shir! The crisis is that Biden has crippled the US oil industry. Even if you are for alternative energy, it requires money. Letting the US oil industry come to its full potential would fund new technologies and lower the trade deficit and the national debt. In addition, US energy would lower our carbon footprint. Do you have any knowledge? You are an idiot.
    1
  3966.  @charlesfreeman1224  Great! Thanks.
    1
  3967. I notice that your examples of far right terrorism are from the US and New Zealand. This attack took place in the UK and it is a UK political issue. I notice this from a lot of Europeans. You need to concentrate on the incidents that you can do something about, and not to discuss situations in other countries.
    1
  3968. Bringing up the ideas of communists is probably the stupidest thing I have ever heard of. The communists around the world are the worst polluters and generators of greenhouse gases on the planet. She is truly dumb. Anyone who listens to her is likewise.
    1
  3969. Wow! How much was the CCP paying Gave. The list of industries he gives at around 2:20 are, according to reports I have seen, doing poorly. The investors and analysts are so transparently shilling for themselves or for the CCP. Considering that many of the companies listed on the Chinese markets are state owned or controlled, the activity of the party and the hype around it would bring insider trading accusations in any western market. It is clear that no one involved in the Chinese equity markets can be trusted. The reasons should be clear to all who watch these videos and other content on China.
    1
  3970. We are hearing more and more about the possibility of corruption in Federal programs. I personally believe that it is rife. It took Trump to say it out loud and to take action.
    1
  3971. Jake, I thought you were a big Biden fan. Admitting that Biden was not willing to do what was necessary. That is quite a leap.
    1
  3972.  @ibvghgfvbnbc  Not sure I understand. The US does not build its self image primarily as a superpower. In the 20th century the US was quite isolationist until directly attacked. After both those experiences the US had to become more activist. This was primarily driven by a USSR which was actively taking over countries and spreading their ideology around the world with a view to taking over the world. The old saying goes, the business of the US is business. In an interconnected world this means ensuring trade flows freely.
    1
  3973. It is good to see Piers Morgan back, and seemingly quite happy, in the US. His show Good Morning Britian was good, although I think I liked it because of Susanna Reid. I really had the hots for her. Oh, Ii guess I should not have said that. I have seen Piers on The Five, and he was wonderful. Like Douglass Murray, he is a great addition to our American media landscape. That is the power of the US, that we can integrate people from all over the world, in media, business and academia.
    1
  3974.  @mattl3729  In that you are correct. The difference was that they were using covert means, not military means which they assumed would work in the beginning. What you are talking about is the Comintern. The attacks you mention happened well after the Polish Soviet War and were the result of the rise of the Nazis in Germany. All of the attacks you mention took place in 1939 and 1940.
    1
  3975. The Ukrainians will not treat the Russians like the Nazis did. The Russians in regions like Kursk may well become allies of the Ukrainians. When the Germans first invaded the Soviet Union, they were welcome with open arms in the border regions, including Ukraine. Hitler could have treated them well and maybe he would have won. Instead, he turned the people against the Germans. In many war diaries of German soldiers, one gets the feeling that the common soldier was sympathetic to the people. Then Hitler sent in the Einsatzgruppen to kill civilians. His racism knew no bounds. He really planned to kill or enslave the Slavs. Just look at the difference we are seeing here.
    1
  3976. In WWII the US did not get involved in the war in Europe after the invasion of Poland and the defeat of France. You seem to imply that we did. Before both WWI and WWII, the US was very isolationist. One of the reasons was that by shoring up those countries that eventually became our allies, we would be helping them to keep their empires, and the US population wanted nothing to do with that. After WWII, we made sure these allies wound down those empires. In fact, the US only got militarily involved in the war in Europe after Hitler declared war on the US. You can't even compare the support we are giving Ukraine to what we gave the UK in WWII. Before entering the war, we exacted a massive price in land, bases and money. In fact, the UK's war debt to the US was only paid off in 2006. I am fully supportive on our stance on Ukraine. If the Russians are not stopped there, we will be fighting them on NATO territory. That said, though, it is the Europeans that should have jumped in with the bulk of the support right away. The EU is just plain stupid. Not long ago the EU was starting to develop an EU military. Not long ago Macron was talking this up as a way to defend the EU from China, Russia and the US. Yes, he mentioned the US as a potential adversary. The Europeans have been freeloaders for way too long. The world order is changing, and the EU is going to have to adapt. I don't see this ending well. The DeSantis case is interesting. He is a war veteran. He was in Iraq and was awarded a Bronze Star. Like Tulsi Gabbard, he is against entanglements abroad. This is an interesting phenomenon. Decorated war veterans being against wars. I once had a bunch of war veterans, including some Seals, working for me. There were a bunch that wanted to get back to fighting. Some joined contractors in Iraq because, as they put it, they hadn't killed anyone lately. It takes all kinds. By the way, Tucker Carlson is an idiot. I really can't watch him. And it is not only this issue.
    1
  3977. I am surprised that it has taken this long for the EU to get tough on China. The EU, after all, is a protectionist cartel.
    1
  3978. We need to shut down and defund these "intelligence" agencies. They no longer do the work of countering foreign intelligence agencies and enemies. They now go after elected officials and parents. Calls to shut down the FBI are actually justified. We do not need, or are justified in having, a national police force. They go after gangs, drug cartels, etc. and yet these are still major threats. We are spending massive amounts of money on organizations (FBI, ATF, etc.) that have never been totally effective. We need to bring them to account. If these organizations cannot solve the problem, we would be better off letting local law enforcement deal with the problems locally. We do not need, nor does our Constitution call for, a national police force. Shut them down.
    1
  3979. When I lived in Winchester I would notice on Saturday and Sunday mornings piles of puke on the streets of the central business district where most of the pubs were. Never saw anything like that in the US.
    1
  3980. You shouldn't worry, though. Generally, one can understand what you meant from the context. Whenever I think about criticizing someone for mispronunciation of a language that is not their native language, I just think of how I must have sounded speaking German when I lived in Europe. I was living in the UK but had big operations in Germany. Keep up the good work.
    1
  3981.  @titob.yotokojr.9337  If the CCP lasts that long, it will be his last.
    1
  3982.  @truthaboveall7988  No, China is just repeating the pattern of the last dynasty.
    1
  3983.  @luciferjohnson8495  What about it?
    1
  3984.  @vindowmaker5819  BRICS is a sham. You have India and China, who have an active border conflict that many in India think will go hot soon. So, how are the BRICS countries going to come up with a common currency. In addition, Russia, the traditional arms supplier to India, has stopped providing those arms. This includes systems India has already ordered. Russia has become a vassal of China. And China is in the process of imploding. Of course, you have Brazil which is going through many problems. Then there is South Africa which cannot keep the lights on. I don't think the US, or the west in general, has anything to worry about from BRICS. As for the French making payments in yuan, there is nothing wrong with that. If they are in two way trade with China and they want to do that, it is their choice. The French have always chaffed at US power. Prior to the war in Ukraine Macron was pushing for an EU army. He stated that this was to protect themselves from Russia, China and the US. That should give you some idea of the attitude. What would be interesting is how much of their trade is in yuan. I expect it is not a lot. In fact, the use of the dollar as a reserve currency has only increased, not decreased. France may find out, like Russia did, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to get their money out of China.
    1
  3985. The EU is better than China, but at its root it is a cartel.
    1
  3986. We have lots of Abrams tanks. If just a couple hundred of the ones in "storage", even older models, were sent it would, as stated, make a significant difference. Couple that with fighter jets and the war will be over soon.
    1
  3987. What motivated this video? I have heard this all before. It comes up every once in a while. What you are referring to is the size of the number that can be handled in one CPU instruction cycle. As for an 8-bit processor only being able to represent 256 numbers, that is technically true at the register level, but that is not the issue. I worked on an 8-bit processor in the1970s on which we created a software system that could do math on arbitrarily large numbers. This system supported four CRT terminals and a printer. As a life test, I programmed it search for the next Mersenne Prime. We had no chance to do that in the lifetime of the universe, but it was a calculation we could run to really exercise the machine and determine any systemic errors.
    1
  3988. Northwest? The US troops are in the far southeast. What kind of expert is that?
    1
  3989. The defensive positions of the Russians look like piles of dog crap. Was this intentional?
    1
  3990. I was thinking about the Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka in this regard, and about to mention it. It is good to hear from someone who has knowledge of that situation. What complicates these situations is the populations where these terrorists live. Can one really say that no one in Gaza who is not an active Hamas member is guilty of supporting them? The same was true in Sri Lanka and is generally true.
    1
  3991. Times Radio might want to concentrate on something else. Leading up to the election they were very biased against Trump. The odd thing is that I don't recall much positive about Harris. This shows a clear bias for speakers who are, frankly, biased, and steeped in status quo thinking.
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  3992. Trump was truly for all Americans. Blacks and Latinos did nor vote for him, but his policies pulled them up. He was for Americans, and they are Americans, so that is why he did things that raised them up. The fact that they did not vote for him in sufficient numbers just shows that they did not understand this.
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  3993. There are reasons to believe that gravity is different. The other forces rely on an exchange of particles. Gravity, according to Einstein, is the bending of spacetime by mass. Nowhere does and exchange particle exist. I have been seeing more talk of this lately. I wonder what people think about it. After all, it has been a long time that the "best" minds have been searching for it. One motivation is to explain the first nanoseconds of the "big bang". How is this useful?
    1
  3994. There is a lot that is important to remember in what he says in the first part, the overview of where we came from and the US role. I actually lived through all that and remember and understand it. I do have a problem though. He seems to be tied into two things that I believe are holding back the world. First, there is sacrosanct borders. Many of the borders of countries in the world were drawn by the imperialists and victors in wars. There are so many examples. In Africa, the picture is just a total mess. He mentions Sudan. What about Eritrea and Ethiopia? The list goes on. In Europe you had Czechoslovakia. It's split was peaceful. It was a country that had been an administrative district of the Austo-Hungarian Empire. It was created at the time to pull together the Slavic peoples within the empire. Yugoslavia was a leftover from the Ottoman Empire. The borders we have in many cases separate ethnicities or don't allow for the national expression of some ethnicities (e.g., the Kurds). In other words, it is a mess and guaranteed to cause tension and war. Second, the Sudan issue brings up another problem. Yes, perhaps it was outsiders enabling the conflict and eventual breakup of Sudan, but this would never happen if there weren't already tensions within the country. That the US or others (it is not only the US, see Eritrea for example) contribute to the situation is just a continuation of history.
    1
  3995. The title of this video is misleading. I don't see what the relevance of the term "laser" has to do with the topic.
    1
  3996. On the resurgence of local government bonds, one must always remember that investing is, and always has been, a form of speculation. In other words, gambling. History is littered with examples where the gamble has not panned out. While the central government may currently be trying to forestall the eventual downfall of these instruments, they may ultimately simply fail, or grow tired of it. That is the big gamble.
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  3997. A major amphibious landing requires complete control of the airspace over the landing beaches. Without that, the landing craft and landing forces are vulnerable to even a small number of aircraft or even cruise missiles. In fact, in the Pacific theatre the US and its allies also have a large number of ballistic tactical missiles. Recall that Japan has just increased, massively, its supply of US cruise missiles. They also have a large and capable navy. Taiwan itself also has a strong defense and has been preparing for this for decades. Consider why Hitler did not follow through on his plan to invade England with ground troops. That plan was called off precisely because the Germans did not have air cover. It was even worse for them, because the British had superiority at sea as well. Fast forward to the Normandy landings. German airpower was already minimal, and its sea power gone. While it takes ground forces to destroy an adversary's military and take territory, air and sea power in landings are crucial. While this is an issue for Taiwan and its allies, the prognosis for China is not good. The war in Ukraine has shown that US and western air defenses are capable against Eastern Bloc (Soviet/Chinese) weapons, while the reverse is not true. Xi might still do it, but it would probably be the last thing he does.
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  3998. On the Alibaba situation, this says to me that this business is in decline. When companies start worrying more about corporate structure than products and services, they are on the decline. Perhaps that is what the CCP wants. The smart thing to do is to get your money out.
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  3999. GDP is, in general, a flawed measure. It is totally invalid to use GDP to compare economies in very different situations, or that have very different system of political economy. For example, to compare a country at war, like Russia, to the rest of Europe is clearly invalid. Another example is China. There, in addition to the clear manipulation of the numbers, one also has the fact that it is a centrally controlled economy. In fact, much of the growth of the Chinese economy has been counterproductive. Sure, they have all that High-Speed Rail (HSR). That goosed their GDP, but now the system is $1T in debt and that debt is only growing. The same with the whole property sector debacle. Yes, that increased GDP for a while. Now they are overbuilt by, some say, up to 100%. Now it is dragging down GDP. In fact, there is no way that China has GDP growth when consumption is anemic, and the property sector is going bust. Those are two of the three pillars of the economy. People who have studied this in some detail believe that they are actually in recession in GDP terms. Even the prior premier of China, an economist by education, Li Keqiang, stated that he did not trust the numbers. To expect anything different from Russia, an oligarchic kleptocracy, is the height of madness. I agree with you about the Economist. I used to read it avidly as well, then I started to notice a lot of stuff I was familiar with which was just plain wrong.
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  4000. Great video. As I was watching, I was wondering if you were going to mention German infantry squad doctrine. I was going to chime in, but you nailed it with your description. Well done.
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  4001. It is funny to hear one of the shop owners in the auto parts city talk about "you capitalists". What does he think he is? Come on man!
    1
  4002.  @mingchen-l9k  Say what?
    1
  4003. I can't wait to see the pictures on a site like DeviantArt.
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  4004. Mahyar, you complain about how the central government handled the bailout, but you are misguided. If the funding for TFL was purely local, then there would be no scope for central government representation on the board. In this case we have money coming from central government so it is appropriate that they have representation on the board. This type of thing happens in private industry all the time.
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  4005. I find this so interesting and disturbing Here is a conservative newspaper tearing apart the Conservative Party. Don't they know that this just hands the opposition ammunition to harm the Tories. This is the same phenomenon I saw in the US with Rush Limbaugh. In both of Obama's elections Limbaugh was constantly excoriating the Republican Candidates as not being conservative enough. Don't forget, he had a daily listenership of about 25M, if I recall correctly. It was at least that. Of course, the Tories may be alright, since the Spectator has nothing that reach. Don't get me wrong, I was an avid reader when I lived in England.
    1
  4006. Bringing up Smoot-Hawley is just silly and a sign of the shallowness of analysis that one sees in public discourse today. The background for Smoot-Hawley has nothing to do with the current situation. The Great Depression had started. A large number of goods weren't even taxed. Industrial employment actually went up initially. The problem is that economics is not really a science like physics or is basically a branch of statistics. In statistics one builds models. To use one situation to predict what will happen in another, those models have to be the same. Get where I'm going here. We don't know what effect the Smoot-Hawley tariffs would have had absent the stock market crash and basic destruction of the capital and banking systems. That is not how statistics works. To use any of the data from the Smoot-Hawley era and apply it to today is statistical malpractice of the most egregious kind. Forbes, with his background and knowledge, should know better.
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  4007. Digital currency is already here. I, for one, have not used cash is a long time. I keep some paper cash around, but only for emergencies. Most people use their credit cards for basically all transactions. I think these national leaders think that people will equate digital currency with crypto currency. These are totally different things. All of our currencies worldwide are fiat currencies. That means that they are not tied to any asset. The form of a fiat currency is totally meaningless.
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  4008. The real solution is polygamy. Those can afford it will take several wives and repopulate the country.
    1
  4009. She is so young and naive. "We try to be a people pleaser" she says. That is not it. She is either naive or disingenuous. Either way, that's when I stopped watching. This is nothing more than misdirection. It is much more insidious than she claims. The Democrats started out as the working man's (labor) party plus the party of southern whites after the Civil War. This later group was very important and grew out of Reconstruction and as a response to the carpetbaggers (look it up). As organized labor shrank as a percentage of the workforce they started to appeal to minorities, often by offering them free stuff (sort of like what Lenin did in Russia). Then, Regan peeled away a lot of the southerners, who had always been rather conservative. Then they doubled down on identity politics even before CRT reared its ugly head. Luckily for the rest of us the Democrats will get it wrong the next time as well.
    1
  4010. The risk of provoking Putin is another false issue. During Vietnam the Soviets supplied the North with massive numbers of weapons. Did the US threaten nuclear war? There was some suggestion that we should nuke Haiphong harbor to stop this support. I supported that, but few others did. Would the Soviets have risked their homeland for Vietnam? I don't think so. They supported the North to cause pain to the US, not because they had any need for it. This is the same as our support for the Afghans in their struggle against the Soviets. Putting all this in a philosophical context is ignoring the realities of politics, international relations and war itself.
    1
  4011. Your conclusion about how the Russian people will react is premature. You are basing that on the hard right propogandists. As far as I can tell, those propogandists have not moved the needle on Russian support for the war. It still seems to be 20% in favor, 20% against and 60% apathetic. You only hear the mil bloggers side and think this is the whole population.
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  4012. Love the show, but like most of what I see, you are putting too much weight on things that Americans, in general, do not care about. I would not have known what Biden said unless I watched this. And hearing him (basically every time I do) I discount what he is saying. As you say at the end, this is too much inside baseball for most of us. And I say that as a news and politics junkie.
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  4013. The so called "global south" comprises, at most, 25% of world GDP and has a lot of the world's population. Their ability to absorb Chinese goods is very limited. Many of those countries have also participated in belt and road initiative projects. The last I heard was that 60% of the loans for those projects are not performing. The projects are also overpriced and poorly built.
    1
  4014. The three countries in the world with the biggest militaries have not ratified the Rome Statute. Cogitate on that. Mongolia is bordered by two of those countries.
    1
  4015.  @utahcornelius9704  War profiteers make their money when the war breaks out. If you look at the US before WWI and WWII, they must have had very light thumbs.
    1
  4016.  @bwarre2884  Absolutely. But you will also find that most of this activity took place in the 19th century (with a little spillover into the early 20th century). The US was also following the attitudes of the time in which great power politics was the game. Compared to the size of the US economy its involvement in all this was minimal. By the way, I think it is Central America, not "middle" America. That term usually refers to the Midwest in the US.
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  4017. The whole issue of what France thinks in this situation is, frankly. irrelevant. The fact is that Europe is wholly dependent on the US for its security. They have the economic heft to do it themselves but have taken advantage of the US to avoid spending the money. There have even been situations in the recent past where the US had to provide French forces with assistance since France does not have a capability. These are conflicts in France's former colonial possessions, where they are still deeply involved. As for China's historical claims on territory, there are big chunks of Russia that the CCP claims should be given back. Does France support that? Does France support the CCP in the South China Sea, with their nine dash line. This claim has been repudiated by international courts, but China has ignored the judgements. So, is France no longer a believer in the international rules-based system?
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  4018. Making a big deal out of this term "rare earth minerals" misses the whole point of Trump's deal. It is a minerals deal. Even talking about "critical" minerals is kind of silly. Those terms are pure propaganda. The deal talks about all kinds of mineral resource extraction. To do mineral extraction requires lots of capital and time. This is not just time to get the process going. Because these activities are capital intensive, they must run for a long time to recoup the investment and recoup the upfront costs. This requires a stable environment. For example, prior to hostilities at least one oil major was exploring in the east of Ukraine. Once hostilities commenced, that activity stopped.
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  4019. As to the fires, that is a favorite tactic of organized crime. We know that Russia has a massive organized crime issue and that organized crime has infiltrated the state.
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  4020. What a misleading title. This has nothing to do with the 2008 crash. The reasons are totally different. The impact on the overall economy. and the financial sector are totally different. Even the scale of the decline is different.
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  4021. At about 43:00 you are talking about tests on rifles. I have a Soviet era Mosin-Nagant rifle from about 1942 or 1943. This is a rifle that was prob. used in the war, put in an arsenal, and then sold in the west, as were many. I don't think there are any replica rifles of this type, because there was no need. There are millions upon millions that are now in circulation. Ammo to the WWII spec is widely available. I assume your ignorance of this issue us because you live in the UK where your access to firearms is limited. When I lived in the UK one of my friends was an Army Major, who could not even own, privately, a Lee-Enfield. I could, back in the US.
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  4022. Peter, I like and have bought and read all your books. I think you have a great take on the long-term trends in the economy and the world in general and the reasons these things happen. As for your take on the short-term issues (not trends) that is not so valuable. I watch, but as you have seen in the comments, I have a lot of issues with your prognostications on the details. I know you are trying to use the platform to make some money from your audience. No problem with that. The mass market is always more lucrative than the specialist market. There are two things you might consider, though. One is that I find that you are doing something that many, many YouTubers do. You are branching out into peripheral topics. For example, there is a science communicator on YouTube whose area is fundamental physics. Now she opines on anything even slightly technical, such as AI, quantum computing, superconducting powerlines (her latest video). These are engineering and computer science issues for which many other people have more information. Get the parallel? The other is that many YouTubers seem to assume that their audience gets their information primarily from them and that they are the font of all knowledge. If you hadn't noticed, we are watching this on the Internet. Your audience has access to about as much information as you do. We come to these channels to get the creator's take on the substance of the issue. We can look up particular details with just a click or swipe. I find this in more traditional sources, even including things like Wall Street Journal articles and editorials, as well. I don't need the history or background. In many cases I am just as informed on that (sometimes through sources like the WSJ itself) or, again, I can look it up. As you can tell, this is a pet peeve of mine. So, until I have a pressing business need for your take on things in real-time, I will be watching on YouTube.
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  4023. I am glad that you point out the disparity between western MBTs and the Soviet/Russian tanks. Even Bradleys took out lots of such tanks in the Iraq wars. An instructive engagement is also the Yom Kippur war. While Israel was initially pushed back and suffered heavy losses from anti-tank missiles, they ended up 60km from Cairo. All this in about three weeks while also fighting a major conflict in the north against Syria. Modern western weapons and tactics against Soviet weapons and tactics. Also, apropos of the current conflict, you had a very small country fighting against a much larger population. Another thing missing from all these analyses is an almost total lack of information about what is happening on the Ukrainian side. What you don't mention is the state of affairs west of Soledar, where the Ukrainians seem to have defensive positions that are brutalizing Russian attempts to advance. Holding a town with no operating industry and basically no population is not a good use of forces. What Ukraine did was the correct thing. Attrit the enemy and then withdraw. The Russians get nothing out of it. Ukraine, on the other hand, in their actions further north are attacking communication and logistics targets that are making a difference.
    1
  4024.  @seraphx26  Keep believing that.
    1
  4025.  @seraphx26  Tosh! They had more T62s and T72s than T55s at the time of the Gulf War. You have no idea of what you are talking about. I was involved, on the industrial side, at the time and saw what was going on up close.
    1
  4026. Hey, prof, the New Deal of FDR did not work.
    1
  4027. Foreign policy specialists. All of them have biases. All are pressured to express views one way or another. A foreign policy "expert" is not some sort of scientist, after all. Sometimes the pressures are systemic, sometimes they are personal, often they are both. The whole idea of the study is totally invalid. It could be considered statistical malpractice. Unless one had the same data for the population under other political conditions, how can one make any type of valid claim?
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  4028. Having lived through the Saudi oil shocks of the 1970s I would sort of like to see the Saudis get their comeuppance. There was all kinds of crazy talk at the time. Some wanted to invade and just take over the oilfield part. Others talked about turning the desert to glass (if you don't know what that means, just ask). The embargo, by the way, was all about supporting the Palestinians. That should be remembered. These Arab states are all tribal groupings. There were never any modern states along the current lines prior to WWI. The European imperialist powers created them. I love the part at the end regarding Turkey. The Arab oil states territory was taken from Turkey, by the way. Personally, I think that Turkey swooping in is close to what will happen. Then the Turkish (Ottoman) empire and the Persians can go at it again. Oh, joy. There are a lot of "unfortunate" situations in the world going on now that a lot of people would not have predicted (remember the "end of history"). There are a lot of concepts in governance and foreign relations that are poorly developed. This is an issue in our politics. The politicians talk about doing this tax break or that regulation, but never why. That is a whole dissertation. What is important here is that the world went from colonial imperialism to the ideological rivalry of just two powers to ... what? No one is talking about that? As Peter likes to point out George H. W. Bush was the last US President who wanted to have that conversation, and was the last one qualified to do so, so we voted him out of office. The world we live in is not the world pre-WWII. I will let you take one guess as to why. On the other hand, it might well, as Peter points out in his work, resemble the pre-WWII situation quite a bit. I am seeing outright talk by some Europeans of a return to colonial control of places in Africa. This is low level rumblings and not from national leaders, but that is how it often starts. This is another one of Peter's prognostications which I bet will come true. There is another thing to remember vis-a-vis the Saudis. Yes, they have easily exploitable oil. That does not mean that it is essential. Look at many of the flashpoints around the world today, like the South China Sea, Venezuela, Africa. Many, many of them have a lot to do with oil. I also saw that Pakistan just found massive oil reserves. The quantity of oil available is not an issue. There is lots of it and we get better and better at finding and exploiting it all the time. Then you have the trend of electrification. That probably won't take over completely, but it does dampen the demand growth for oil (on an aggregate worldwide basis). Then you have the soon to come peak of world population and followed by a reduction. For the Saudis, as the robot said, bad, not good.
    1
  4029. First off, I like your channel and generally agree with you. On this I think you are wrong. Russia will not stop at Ukraine, if they are successful. The next stop is NATO territory. That goes nuclear pretty quick. If you noticed, the US is sending the latest tactical nukes to NATO territory. Our Secretary of Defense has said openly that one of our goals in helping Ukraine is to destroy the Russian Army in Ukraine. The fact of the matter is that what we are spending here is cheap. Russia will not go nuclear with a non-nuclear power. I have dealt with this stuff for decades. Ukraine has the need and desire to defeat the Russians. With western help they will do that. What is the alternative?
    1
  4030. You may want to look at the history of batteries, and not modern batteries. You may be surprised.
    1
  4031. I find the Glock to be alright. I have them (along with a lot of other guns) as a good fit for a SHTF situation. The same is true of the Beretta 92 series and the 1911, except that I really like those pistols. Having all three, along with an AR, makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. So, to have one with these from a reputable manufacturer at just over $200 less (comparing to a Glock 19 Gen 5 MOS) and all the compatibility is a real draw.
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  4032. The grid issue is indeed key. In the US most electric utilities are investor owned. They raise money from private investors. They are highly regulated, but that regulation also means that they tend to get a targeted return of 10% or so. This makes them an attractive investment to many. On top of that the US deregulated electric generation some years back. The whole system consists of three parts. There is generation, transmission and distribution. The second two are still highly regulated, but the first is not. This creates a wholly different dynamic. The whole idea of this regulation is both to control monopolies and to ensure reliable operation. Most people forget that last point. When you pay for electricity, you are not just paying for the "electrons". You are paying for the reliable delivery of those electrons. That costs a lot of money. The final issue, which I think will have political consequences, is that the cost of all these upgrades is borne by all users of the system. Thus, a customer with no electric vehicle will pay for the extensions required for the electrification of transportation. Once people realize this, I think there will be a different dynamic playing out.
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  4033. Are you a shill for the Russians? They are screwing up big time. They do not have air supremacy. They are facing in Kiev a massive resistance. They are losing many vehicles and personnel in this convoy, and they still haven't reached Kiev. It is a cluster fuck, not some sort of master plan. They had actually planned to reach Kiev in a couple of days. You are a humble infantryman. and should stick to what you know.
    1
  4034. This is it! You mention the oligarchs creating their own private armies. I have been talking about this for a while. The term I use is warlordism. The Russian Federation will cease to exist. Russia as an entity is an international pariah. There is some hope that parts of Russia not associated with the current government might be able to convince the outside world to give them a chance. I saw a recent survey of geopolitical analysts where 48% saw Russia breaking apart within 10 years. I give it one year. Don't forget, this is a gangster country and economy. The gang war is starting. I have even started to hear the PMC Patriot, Shoigu's private army mentioned more often. All of this is, of course, great news for Ukraine and the whole world. I love your map, by the way.
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  4035. One of the things that happened when the USSR broke up was that workers got shares of the companies they worked for. Having no experience of this, the people who became the oligarchs swooped in and bought the shares cheap. In China, individuals have limited access to the capital markets. Thus, they put their money into property. When people are not educated on how ownership of companies works, or when their access is limited, they do stupid things. In Russia you have an oligarchy. In China you have a property sector that is too large a part of the economy, and thus a bubble that is now bursting.
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  4036. Has Mr. Alexeev considered the Vietnam War? During that time, the Soviet Union was totally isolated from the world economy. It was not a factor. The US had at one time, 500K troops there. The US suffered 50K dead, and many wounded. Vietnam probably suffered one or two million casualties, both civilian and military. The war also lasted about 10 years for the US. To ignore relevant history is to not take lessons from it. Yes, there are differences, but there are also lessons to be learned.
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  4037. The original Olympic games were held even in the midst of wars. For the duration of the games there was a truce.
    1
  4038.  @BaBaYaga1999-p7u  What does that mean? If you have something to say in response, say it. As I used to say to my sons, use your words. To make ad-hominin attacks is undercoming.
    1
  4039. Thanks for sharing. Georgia, or Georgina (my suggestion) is good.
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  4040. I hear you about the Episcopal Church. It was the original church of the Republic. I married into it. I was a member for over 30 years. Having grown up in the Greek Orthodox Church, it was a different experience. But, over the years it has become something unrecognizable. Actually, one thing I experienced and saw, was the movement in the US of formerly Episcopal churches to associate with more conservative Anglican congregations, often in Africa. Don't forget, the Episcopal Church is NOT a part of the Anglican Communion. I was, actually, an Anglican when I lived in England at the beginning of the Millenium. The church I went to, in Winchester, was founded by Henri du Blois, nephew of William the Conqueror. His chair is still there in the Brethren's hall, almost 1,000 years later. All this is a long and convoluted way to say, in agreement with you, that many of our institutions have changed unrecognizably. Often these changes have not been supported by the majority of the original supporters. NPR is a good example. I am fairly conservative, and my ex-wife was (not sure now). We were avid listeners and contributors. Then the change came. For a long time, they were very balanced. We noticed and commented in it often. They would always have on a government official and someone from the other side. Sometimes they would actually agree to look into an issue together. When I lived in England, we listened to the BBC. We bought a radio there that was rather nice, and had two alarms. I think it is broken, though, since I can't get Radio 4 anymore. Actually, several years ago there was a big scandal regarding BBC News. I forget the particular issue, but I stopped listening to it, or watching it, because of it. Now, the whole thing has become politically biased and woke. Therre is a massive movement in the UK to remove public funds, and either shut it down, or let it continue with either a subscription model or advertising. The whole idea of a state funded (even in part) broadcaster, or any kind, in the 20th century is ludicrous. Actually, it has been for at least 40 years. In an open, democratic society, there is no technical or moral justification for it. NPR should be shut down in the US. It is actually UNAMERICAN!!!!!
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  4041. The evil Shannon Bream?
    1
  4042. Right on! Actually, they don't have the money. They spent their "peace dividend" on buying votes with ever expanding social programs.
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  4043. Wrong! Right out of the gate, things like PPP are mentioned. Have you compared a "home" in China vs a typical home in the US? Put PPP aside. It is a flawed measure. In addition, unlike the Soviet Union, China is totally dependent on the outside world. They are dependent on open shipping lanes, which are guaranteed by the US, their adversary. There are analysts that give the Chinese economy until the end of the decade. I think that is the outside limit. Their housing market is in permanent decline. It had become a literal Ponzi scheme. Then the government stepped in and arguably made things worse. Exports are not doing well, and many companies, including Chinese companies are moving out of the country. Their debt, local and central government is unsustainable. Their only real solution is to print a lot of money. Not good. The Belt and Road initiative is fast falling apart. Part of the reason goes back to the debt. Technically, they will not be able to catch up to the west. On top of that, there is the demographic collapse. No, this will not take long, and the west will win it.
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  4044.  @mountainguyed67  It also looks like the Ukrainians are taking some territory back. When the latest Western weapons come on-line for them, they will be able to mount credible counter offensives. The Russians are making the same mistake they made at the beginning. They are moving on too wide a front at once. They are tactical and strategic idiots. A couple interesting points I have seen on-line. One is that they are bringing into service T-64 tanks. Two of their tank production plants have shut down for lack of parts. In addition, some sources speculate that they have run through their experienced infantry soldiers. They are now using their Donbass population as front line infantry. These are poorly equipped and trained. In many cases they are demoralized. I have even seen them go into battle with backpacks that are equivalent to what my kids used in school. The Russians are toast.
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  4045. China's Manhattan? Why is everyone copying the US (think of all the "silicon valley" copies) and then disparaging the US. Losers!
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  4046. I actually heard about this video before watching it. It was on the Unzicker's Real Physics channel. I left a comment there. Actually, as far as those physicists finding jobs, that will not be a problem. It probably won't be in physics. About 50 years ago I was a physics undergraduate working in the HEP department at a large state university with a good physics department. They had a rule for assistant professors. You could do two three-year contracts, and if you didn't get tenure by then you had to leave. There were four up for tenure one year, including one that I took my first physics class from and who I worked with in HEP. He was good at both teaching and research. Actually, all four of the professors up for tenure deserved it as far as I could tell. So, my professor did not get tenure. He went on to run the CAT scanner division at a large company and also headed up the physics and software departments there. He was actually paid quite well at that university, but I am sure he made at least an order of magnitude more in his new position. I actually took the knowledge of computers and statistics that I learned in my two years at school and made a very good career out of it. I eventually switched to computer science. I am still interested in physics, but I think I made the right choice. I have lots of other examples. Many companies love to hire PhDs and physics PhDs are very attractive to them, so the job issue is bogus.
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  4047. This constant question about how strong, and long lasting, western support will last is just the press and the commentariat parroting Russian propaganda. What is the evidence that western support is, in general, short lived? Let's look at it. Korea? We are still there and increasing out presence. Vietnam? Over ten years of bloody involvement. Iraq? Twenty years on and we are supplying the Iraqi military with advanced weapons. Afghanistan? Twenty years and we disastrously withdrew, although we had not been fighting for two or more years. Israel? This is the closest analog to Ukraine. Let's see, how many decades (not years) has Israel been our largest recipient of foreign aid, most of it military? Germany? Well, it is coming up on eighty years. When Obama and Trump wanted to draw down troops there, it was all hue and cry about how we couldn't do that, and the US president backed off. Finally, Japan. Also, eighty years. So, when you get repeat this stuff, you are doing Putin's bidding. Why? Is there something you are not telling us? Come on man!
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  4048. Mahyar, stop using the term empire in cases like this. Empire has a very specific connotation, which you alluded to. Soft power does not an empire make. You call it a "group think empire". Just leave out the empire part. One other thing. If you equate the culture and society with Twitter, then you are missing a lot and giving too much power to the nutters. A small minority of people are actually on Twitter. I think the ideas expressed there get much more traction outside of the platform.
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  4049. Tim Scott in 2024. Now that would drive the Democrats crazy.
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  4050. The Russians, if they really believe any of this stuff, are idiots. First, exploding nukes in space is a bad idea for everyone, including the Russians. Second, they you have any idea how many Starlink satellites there are? These systems, like the Internet itself, are meant to run as a decentralized system with redundancy and adaptability. So, the Russians are either stupid, or their propaganda is totally out of control. Either way, it is disturbing.
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  4051. The world is changing. The US guaranteed freedom of navigation from after WWII as a part of Cold War strategy. The goal was clear. If people hadn't noticed, the Cold War ended over 30 years ago. We have had no substantive discussion in the US since about the need to do ensure freedom of navigation worldwide. The last US President who wanted to have the conversation was George H. W. Bush. He left office in 1993. Just a little aside that will illustrate the leadership problem is the situation in Ukraine. President Biden has never laid out the goals of our support to Ukraine. He has two choices. Support them in defending what they have now or support them to defeat the Russians and push them out of their territory. So, legitimate questions can be asked about the funding. It is quite different for those two options. It is also a matter of what the country wants. Supporting the status quo may have little support in the electorate. No clear goal, no clear understanding of what the funding should be. Do you see the parallels? It all comes down to leadership. The current structure of the US Navy does not support protection of commerce as a major goal. To really do that would require over five times as many destroyers as we currently have. The US Navy today is configured as a power projection force, not a commerce protection force. I happen to agree with this, but it is a discussion than needs to take place. I am fairly confident that if the choice was laid out to the American taxpayers, they would not support the US Navy ensuring global commerce. Again, if you hadn't noticed, US companies are busily revamping their supply chains. A lot is coming back to US and its close neighbors Even Chinese companies are setting up shop in the US and Mexico. It will take time, but the change is coming. Government policy today is pushing that effort, not only in the US but in countries like Japan. Even the EU is starting to reconsider things. The situation in China may very quickly force the hand of many companies and countries. It is much more dire than most people will admit. The US military, and many of its leaders, current and former, have come to believe in a status quo that is no longer the policy of the country, implicit or explicit. I have great respect for these people, but this is a political decision, not a military one. Just one piece of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, should tell you all you need to know. Globalization is no longer a key driver of US economic policy. All that said, I think this video and the Congressional hearing provide a good start to the discussion.
    1
  4052. I really like your content, so don't take this comment in the wrong way. It is a general comment about YouTubers and many journalists. You seem to be assuming that your audience does not even have a basic education, or access to the Internet. Why would you explain what the solstice is? That is something learned early in elementary school. Doing that is the same as someone explaining a very basic mathematical concept to an audience interested in scientific content. It is a bit insulting to anyone with a decent education, and certainly to those interested in such topics. It is also a waste of time.
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  4053. I lost you at about 4:50. Free enterprise is what built this country. It is what gives us the means to help people and protect them. Given that, I agree that many Supreme Court decisions in the past were deplorable. On the other hand they were in line with the law, and societal norms, at the time. You cannot expect anything different. It is the legislature that decides what is law. The courts can only deal with cases brought to them and decide based on the law at the time. You make the mistake the left always makes. You assume that the courts will fix things based on some abstract notion. Kim, you show your ignorance of the system government we have. You need to study more, rather than just spouting the party line.
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  4054.  @LahvTM  Well, from what I have seen and heard, the Imperial Palace has not flooded before in its 600 years history. I expect there were some big storms in that time.
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  4055. This should not surprise anyone. Russian equipment vs US equipment has always been a one-sided battle. Look at the Iran Iraq war. The Iranians still had (have) US F-14 and F-4 aircraft. Even the new plane they have built is based on the F-5. They more than held their own against Iraqi Soviet planes. In the Gulf War and Iraq war, the US devastated the Iraqi air forces, and the Iraqis had some French planes, I believe. I have no nervousness of a war where NATO faces the Russians in the air. Even our fourth generation planes are superior. The Russians have very few, if any, operational fifth generation fighters. We have lots.
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  4056. Finally, a cogent video. The whole idea of nuclear war, especially with unstoppable (for now) weapons like ICBMs, is sort of absurd. They are only good as a defense. During the Cold War we had the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). The understanding was that the Soviet leaders would do everything they could to protect the motherland. They would not want to see it destroyed. So, unless you threatened Moscow or St. Petersburg, they would respond in other ways. Putin came up through that system. That is also the thinking on the US side. For example, during the Korean War Douglas MacArthur wanted to use nukes to take out the Chinese hordes that were attacking. That would have been effective but would also have crossed a threshold no one else was willing to cross. During the Vietnam War there was talk about using nukes to destroy Haiphong Harbor to stop the flow of Soviet weapons. Same thing happened. By the way, in the Korean War context there were no ICBMs. The US did not really fear the Soviets escalating to a full-scale nuclear exchange because of the reasons given in the previous paragraph. They would not have sacrificed the motherland for either Korea or Vietnam. They would have been pissed, and would have responded in other ways, but all out nuclear war was not on the table. As for WWIII, it is best to listen to Tom Lehrer's song "So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III)". He makes a statement about the duration of the war (an hour and a half). That about sums it up.
    1
  4057.  @Growlizing  Brilliant!
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  4058.  @MarcosElMalo2  Wow! You have a great understanding of the issues.
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  4059. What all this government intervention reminds me of is the 2008 crash. The base problem that precipitated it was government intervention in housing to help make home buying easier for people who really couldn't afford it. That, coupled with some bad moves by the rating agencies and financial institutions, caused the crash. As for a CCP mouthpiece talking about "the US" as if the financial institutions were run by the government shows a total ignorance of the west in general and the US in particular. I really appreciate your insights and the information you provide. I have often wondered about the risks. I hope things continue to go well for you.
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  4060. America becoming an oligarchy because of Elon Musk? That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Does Mr. Gray even know what an oligarch is? He is just repeating talking points. This is the depth to which our "chattering class" has sunk. Otherwise, an interesting take on the situation.
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  4061. Coal as a backup power source? That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. The only conventional energy source that can do that is natural gas. Coal, nuclear, and to some extent hydro, are not sources that can be ramped up, or down, quicky. They are baseload. So, this is either another case of an outright lie, or an indication that there is no one left in Xi's administration that knows anything.
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  4062. There's a new sheriff in town. The Federal bureaucrats better beware. This phenomenon is not unique to the US. The UK has also been struggling with the "deep state" problem. One also hears rumblings out of Australia.
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  4063. These women are fools. They are also very materialistic. They are doomed. Biology is a funny thing. You can't go against biology.
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  4064. I am a big fan of Anna, and Jonathan, but I have to take a bit of exception with a couple of statements/concepts. One is that of labeling Russia as evil. There are many in the west, at least in the milieu I am in, that label Russia, China, North Korea and Iran as the new "Axis of Evil". I really think that is becoming the norm. Don't forget, though, that not negotiating with them is not really an option. What is all comes down to is nukes. Simple as that. The US negotiated with the Soviet Union while calling them the Axis of evil. The US has negotiated with Iran and tried with North Korea. The US negotiates with China. In fact, right now there is pressure being put on China because of their support for the Russian war effort. The problem is that diplomacy in the nuclear age is complex and dangerous. The other is about the crimes committed within a country. Ukraine wants to retain its sovereignty. Sovereignty means something. All four countries I have mentioned as the new Axis of Evil perpetrate horrible human rights violations within their territory. The US has done a lot to sanction them for that. Unfortunately, short of invading (remember the nukes) there is not much else one can do. Relying on international law is silly. For anything to be called a "law" there must be way to enforce it. For the so called "international law" there is no such authority. The only choices are diplomacy, sanctions and/or war. You can't just call up the global gendarme when someone violates "international law". It doesn't exist.
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  4065. This is both good news and bad news. Good in that the theory really has failed. Bad in that people keep working on it. What string theory reminds me of is the early days of Maxwell. His first theoretical formulation actually used a mechanical model for electromagnetism. He did this because mechanical systems were what people knew. He also knew it was not correct, but it was a useful way to visualize things. He, of course, moved away from that explanation. Unfortunately, in the case of string theory the situation is much worse. For one thing, strings are a totally new thing. There is no indication that there is any reality to them or that they actually have any explanatory power. What are these strings? Where did they come from? This is literally the type of thing high school students (at least where and when I went to high school) and undergraduate physics students would dream up, usually under the influence of certain substances.
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  4066.  @Birch37  This is the kind of reply that is a real problem on social media. It cast aspersions without any substance. Unable to articulate the respondent leaves us wondering whether there is wisdom here or just, what? If you have something to say, say it. If you have higher wisdom, we could all benefit from it. As I used to say to my boys when they were young and acting up, "use your words".
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  4067. This European effort is a sham. They are going to present their ceasefire plan to the Americans. I didn't know that the Americans were directly fighting in Ukraine. To be valid they have to present it to the Russians. So, from the start, this is silly talk.
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  4068. I have actually seen reported that the world produces twice the number of calories needed for the population. If you hadn't noticed, the biggest health problem in the developed world and in large parts of the developing world (such as China) is obesity. Yes, even in China where Type 2 diabetes levels are very high. I volunteered at a food bank in the suburbs of a major city for several years. I would say that a majority of the "clients" were overweight, with a good number being obese. These are the people who are "food insecure". No, the world will not have a problem producing enough food for peak population. We already do. The issue that Africa faces is that globalization has made it possible for populations to grow well beyond the carrying capacity of the land. This was made possible by the unrestricted free trade made possible by the US led world order. That is an anomaly in world history. It is coming to an end. A good example of the distortions caused by this is Egypt. They switched from growing wheat to cotton. Then, their population mushroomed. Even if they went back to growing only grains, they would not be able to feed their population. Once things really begin to break down, famine will become commonplace. China is another good example. If they start a war and they are cut off from food imports, you could see 500M people starve. They have so badly mismanaged their agriculture that they are on the verge of facing shortages now. Let's just say that it is all downhill from here. That is until they perfect soylent green.
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  4069. I can't agree with the second part of the title of this video.
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  4070. India is actively moving to decouple from Russian military supplies. They have passed a law requiring more and more of their military equipment to be made in India. They are buying their latest tranche of advanced fighters from France.
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  4071.  @gmw3083  No idea of what you are talking about. I see two replies to my reply. If you are going to make the types of comments you did, then you might want to elucidate a little more. Frankly, from the level of your comments you are not very well informed or a deep thinker. I say that, but I don't know you and you don't know me. The only way we can communicate is through our words. As I used to say to my sons when they were young and frustrated, use your words. On specifics, the issue of Marxism-Leninism being a western import and not necessarily germane to the Chinese situation is a topic of discussion in China. It is not a westerner's construct.
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  4072. Michaell, you ask right at the beginning of the video "what sort of democracy is that". I am surprised at you. The EU is a protectionist cartel. Its purpose is to protect the elites. It was set up for and is run for the benefit of Germany and France. Don't forget, we are talking about continental Europe here. Democracy is not a primary concept for them.
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  4073. I see a lot of talk these days about a "no landing" economy in the US. Goldman Sachs's chief economy puts the probability of recession at 15%. That is considered significant because of his good track record.
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  4074. I am just wondering if you are familiar with the YouTube channels China Insights and China Observer. They give a lot of on the ground information, some, but not all, anecdotal. The picture painted on those channels is totally at odds with the official government line. It may be much worse than portrayed. In fact, about five months ago a macroeconomic channel, Money & Macro, had a video speculating that China's economy was 60% smaller than reported. This is based on a peer reviewed paper by a University of Chicago professor. You might want to check this out. You might also want to check out the work of Peter Zeihan.
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  4075. When are you going to run for Parliament?
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  4076. They don't understand because they are all a bunch of Marxist socialists. I first ran into the food desert issue in the late 1970s. I went to visit a friend in Chicago who was going to the University of Chicago. Only small shops and the prices were astronomical compared to what I was used to in the suburbs in the East Coast. It was a bit of a shock. I now live in the Chicago area, in the suburbs. In the city, which has massive crime problems (worse than usual) the large supermarket chains are moving out of the low income, high crime areas. And it is not only in Chicago. It is in basically all of the liberal run cities. So, of course, there is a hue and cry about it and much gnashing of teeth. Fortunately, in the US the legislation being contemplated in the UK would not pass muster. The openly socialist mayoral candidate in New York City has a solution. City owned and run grocery stores. That will work, right?
    1
  4077.  @yelenaclark4209  Considering that there is no independent media or polling, that statement cannot be verified. I have seen some, from Russia, say the opposite. That cannot be verified either. Let me ask, were those Nazis planning on invading Russia? From where?
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  4078. Now that people have looked at the model and the code they see the flaws. The government used it without proper peer review. REAL science is done through peer review. Papers do not get published until peer review. They may be available before the review, but they are not assumed to be correct, or viable, until many other scientists have reviewed them. This is the problem with all these financial projections as well. They are put out in an unscientific way.
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  4079. So, are these cranes economic migrants?
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  4080. Responding to your comments at about 24:30 I thought back the old song from The Who, "We Won't get Fooled Again". The last lines of the song are "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss". Actually,, I just went back and looked again at the song. The chorus says it all. Just look at it. It is amazing.
    1
  4081. NATO was created at a time when western Europe was on its knees. The US, during the Cold War stationed 500K troops there reducing to "only" 300K by the end. There are still over 100K US troops there now. The Cold War has been over for 30 years or more, and yet Europe has not adapted. What Weidel says about Europe taking responsibility for its own security in Europe is true. The interests of the US and Europe are not exactly the same. That is to be expected. In fact, Obama wanted to withdraw a brigade from Germany (about 4K troops) for his pivot to Asia. The Germans squealed like... (some things are best left unsaid). The GDP of the EU plus the UK is about $20T with a population of over 500M. Russia's GDP is, at best, a tenth of that with about 160M in population. The Europeans should be footing the bill for the war completely, and frankly considering the threat to their own security, they should be sending troops. Don't get me wrong, I support Ukraine and have no problem with the support the US has given, but let's be real about this. Trump was not the first president to chide Europe for not doing enough for their own security. Another thing Trump has said is that the killing has to stop. Is he wrong? Both Ukraine and Russia were in demographic decline before the war started. It is much worse now. As Weidel points out, Trump is probably the only one who could get peace talks going.
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  4082. Your final comment about the change in international relations being changed from what we have seen in the past 80 years is quite true. Don't forget that these last 80 years have been an anomaly in world history in every way. From the Cold War containment policy to the opening up of unrestricted trade everywhere, there has never been anything like it. The first phase, the Cold War was driven by fear. The second phase, after the fall of the Soviet Union, was based on hope that the former Soviet Union and Communist China would integrate into the rules-based world order. Of course, this has not happened. We are unequivocally heading back to the era of great power politics. This was the choice of Russia and China. The sad fact is that they were both major beneficiaries of the order they now want to destroy. They will be the biggest losers when it does fall apart.
    1
  4083. Forty-eight billion dollars in exposure? That is chump change for these institutions. As for the analysts who criticize the banks for their concerns about China, they are either ignorant or history, the fiduciary duty of the bank management or are in the pay of the CCP. The Chinese financial system is controlled by the CCP and is not run for the investors or other stakeholders. It is run solely to keep the CCP in power. On the history side of things, I read a history of CITI not long ago. When the Russian Revolution came, they were heavily invested in Russia. All that money was lost. That is likely in China if things go south there. If it can be material to the bank's capital structure then they have a duty to consider all the risks involved.
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  4084. Overdoing it a bit, aren't we? This is nothing like the first half of the 20th century. The West came through that stronger than ever before. Even in the second half of the 20th century there were many challenges. The Cold War, and the Communist world's stated goal of taking over the world. Do you not remember that? When I was young the military assumed that there would be 50M - 70M deaths in the US, That was deemed acceptable, and the population was about 2/3 of where it is today. Then, there was Palestinian terrorism. I remember many times having to leave a Federal facility because of bomb threats (and it was scientific, not military). Even within the US we had black nationalists, and other domestic terror groups, disrupting our inner cities. There were also Korea and Vietnam. These were massive conflicts. One we sort of one, one we lost. And yet, the West continues to be strong. We have our internal dissension, granted. This has always been the case. We look at periods where there was stability and think that is the norm. I think that if you added it up, that would not be the case.
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  4085. The Senator has it exactly right. Get government out of everything unless no one else would do it. There are lots and lots of areas where government workers are used where a private company would do much better. This includes some areas that are "traditional" government functions. The fact is that those government workers are just employees. Money is collected through taxes and fees and paid out to workers. The problem with many government workers is the structure in which they operate, not necessarily the people themselves. The reality is a lot is already done by private contractors. These companies, generally, have to compete. In addition, the employees in the private sector tend to be smarter and better. They have to be. They generally get paid more as well. I spent a lot of time in the aerospace and defense industry. I was working on a NASA project in the 1980s (the space station). I was going down to a NASA facility to meet with some of the NASA employees. I said to our deputy program manager that I was a bit concerned. In those days we still wore suits to work. When I met with the NASA employees before I observed that their attire was not up to the standards we had. I was considering dressing down. The deputy program manager said you will not be able to convince them you are not paid more. You have to convince them you are worth it.
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  4086. Don't hold back, Sabine. Tell us what you really think.
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  4087. They won't blow the dam. If they do, they cut off the fresh water supply to Crimea.
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  4088. Putin going back to Roman and Medieval times seems to be an example of the old-world dictator's disease. Look at Xi in China with his "nine dash line" in the South China Sea.
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  4089. What is the meaning of your fascination with the US? This is one person. Is this an endemic problem? What does one event mean in making policy or understanding a situation? It would be more interesting to hear about the situation in India. That is why people watch this channel. They want to get an understanding of the issues and perspectives of the Indian people on issues that are central to that part of the world. An individual tragedy on the other side of the world is not journalism.
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  4090.  @tikatank6772  That still does not address the issue of this particular report. Was any work done to see if this was endemic? No! It was an attempt to smear the US, not present an important issue. How many people die of auto accidents? How many die of drug overdoses? How does this compare with India? This is gaslighting. Sure WION is "worldwide", but look at their actual reporting. There is a lot of bashing of the West. What has India (which I am a big fan of, and have had, over the years many close Indian friends and have many Indian neighbors) done in this part of the world? Afghanistan, which at the time of 9/11, was a threat to all, is in India's backyard. Why didn't the powers there deal with it? For a country at the other end of the world to have to come in and deal with it is an indictment of those countries, and there are many besides India, that have a much closer connection. There is plenty of terrorism emanating from Afghanistan that also affects India, and it seems that now there will be more. For god's sake, you are a nuclear power.
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  4091.  @EILF7842  I do follow several of these.
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  4092.  @que_93  I mean no disrespect to India. i have had, over the last 50 years, many close Indian friends, both here and in India. I also worked, briefly, for and Indian firm. One issue I do have, and this is not national, is the accounting of COVID deaths. I have read, that by UK standards, EU COVID deaths would be double of that reported. This is like the flu. People generally don't die of the flu, but of associated syndromes. Many die of pneumonia. Of course, this is brought on by the flu. Deaths of individuals, unless provably a symptom of a systemic problem, is not a proper subject of journalism. If that were not true, my father's death should have been front page news. The failures of the medical establishment in his case were legion. This is why I react to this report so strongly. Without tying it to more extensive statistical evidence and other evidence of a failure of the system, it is just sensational cherry picking. I could give you several examples from my own experience which spans over 60 decades. This is meaningless, since it does not take into account the wider picture. I have experience in statistics from the mid 1970s. That is why I react to this type of reporting. It is basically dishonest.
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  4093. Mark, I think you may be correct, but there is a wildcard in the equation. That wildcard is China. The situation is outside of pure economic theory and is political. Perhaps you should also talk to a political economist. China is likely to try to prop up Russia, for obvious geopolitical reasons. While this may not be effective in the long run, Xi and the CCP are playing some very dangerous games right now. Frankly, it seems like we are already in the beginnings of Cold War 2.0 (I miss the Cold War; I got to do a lot of interesting research with unlimited budgets). Russia, China and their allies will not do well in that environment. Actually, Russia and China have stated that they want a multipolar world order. They will get it. The world is basically heading back to the times before WWII. The last 30 years saw the genesis of a rules-based liberal world order. Then Putin, followed by Xi, came along and decided that wasn't what they wanted or needed. Prior to that we had the bipolar world order. The prior to WWII we had straight out imperialism and colonialism. That is the natural state of the world. China and Russia did not do too well in that milieu. There is no reason to believe it will be any different this time.
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  4094. Why would anyone report what the Russians say. If you listen to them then Russia has already eliminated the whole Ukrainian army and all the F-16s (before they arrived).
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  4095. The woke agenda really plays to a minority. I am glad that our politicians are finally getting that. Now it is time for business to get on board too.
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  4096.  @Corteum  Anti-woke. If a business alienates the majority of their customers for marginal gains from a minority, then they risk losing that customer base. If the new customer set is not as large as the original one, then that's the end.
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  4097. This mix of outdated culture with communist immorality is, as we can see, deadly. I have seen lots of videos about the leftover women. Highly educated and successful women find themselves in their late 30s. Their standards are very high, but the men that meet the standard all want younger women and they can get them. As for the man in Europe I personally don't think he should do anything other than what he is doing. You mention they dated for a few years. She cannot be so ignorant of the culture she is marrying into.
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  4098. Won't be able to tell what is real and what is not? Of course, none of it is real. We live in a simulation. Isn't that what the physicists tell us?
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  4099. ATACMS range is limited in range because of treaties we had. A longer range replacement is already being fielded, specifically in the Pacific.
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  4100.  @evancombs5159  That is an important issue that will have to be addressed. We need to redirect our education and training systems. In the past, this was done by the companies themselves. I am thinking about the early years of the computer age. Many people with degrees in other fields, or with no degree but with some experience, went into the software field. I am not sure of how this would work for healthcare, but I think that the entities involved have the resources to address the issue.
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  4101.  @DrTTube  Yes! That is good for everyone.
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  4102. You used to have Trump in your cartoon intro. Do you realize that under Trump there were no new wars? In fact, he was the force behind historic peace treaties. Russia was never going to invade Ukraine under Trump. This is the reason, although I do watch some of your videos, I will not subscribe.
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  4103. Liz needs to be your next PM. Perhaps even before the next general election. I think if that could happen then the Conservative majority could be increased. It would also be a real blow to Labor. She would be the third female PM for the Conservatives, as opposed to none. With Labor pushing identity politics, this could be epic. And it would be her competence, as opposed to "box ticking".
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  4104.  @andrewoliver8930  So, what were Boris' qualifications? Mayor? Get real.
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  4105.  @andrewoliver8930  Actually, I knew that. I love the Greek Classics.
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  4106. I have worked for myself for the last couple of decades or so. Consequently, I have not really looked at the whole issue of having to prove you were a citizen when getting a job. Prior to going out on my own I routinely had to present proof of citizenship. So, what happened? Was the system abandoned? If the system (E-Verify) exists, then did the government stop prosecuting businesses for violations?
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  4107. Don't know about Elvis, but UFOs seem to be a real thing, if you can believe all the recent reporting. In fact, that sounds exactly like the lab leak theory.
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  4108. What is this idea that Crimea is impregnable? Where does this come from? Has Professor Clarke looked at the history? Start with the Crimean War in the 19th century. I had a neighbor, when I lived in Winchester in the UK, who was a retired Major of artillery. He fought in both WWII and Korea. On the wall in his living room were a pair of crossed swords. These belonged to one of his ancestors who fought in that war. Crimea was taken from Russia. In WWII, it was taken twice. First by the Germans, then by the Soviets. In the current situation, considering the poor performance of the Russian army, and the advanced weaponry being provided to the Ukrainians, I think the odds are in their favor. It actually echoes the Crimean War scenario.
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  4109. NATO was set up at a time when western Europe was devastated and in no way was capable of defending itself. From the end of WWII to the time of dissolution of the Soviet Union, the US had between 500K and 300K troops in Europe. It still has 50K troops there. The economic situation is different now. The EU plus the UK now have an economy, as measured by GDP, that is ten times that of Russia. It also has three times the population. There is no reason for the US to give aid to Ukraine. The US was not attacked. A part of Europe was attacked. It is Europe that is in danger. Don't get me wrong. I am all for US support for Ukraine. That support should be sized so that Ukraine can win on its terms. I am just agreeing with Mr. Syed. Europe is missing in action here. A lot of it comes down to feckless German leadership. That is why Macron (and the Poles) is stepping in. There was a recent article in Foreign Affairs titled "Europe—but Not NATO—Should Send Troops to Ukraine". Something to ponder.
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  4110. George Friedman has as book, published in 2020, titled "The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond" where he talks about the cycles in the US in political and social terms. Read it. It will tell you what is going on. Trump is the instrument of the current cycle of change. In his first term I had friends (very well educated and tied into politics and the economy) who, although they were not big fans of Trump, supported what he was doing in trying to disrupt the system. Now Trump is back, bigger, better and smarter than ever. One of the most important things he has done is to reshape politics. The terms left and right, liberal and conservative, are irrelevant. In fact, they have been used incorrectly and have been irrelevant for decades now. What is most amusing, and gratifying, is that the Democrats are still using the old playbook. They are becoming irrelevant, both culturally and politically. That gives me hope.
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  4111. I prefer the American system. Before you react, I have also lived in Europe and had to deal with to political situation from a business point of view. So, I have lots of experience, but this is also just my opinion. I also have in-laws who were a part of the government in Germany, not the legislature, but the government. The family history is long and interesting. Of course, the system in Europe is also what gave us Mussolini and Hitler. What Peter neglects is his US history. In the US the two parties, prior to this century, each had their extreme left and/or right wings. The Democrats, had, until Regan came along, the Southerners. These people were on the right of the spectrum, and in many cases outright racist. This is why there were many successful US Presidents from the Republican Party who were legislatively successful with Democratic majorities in Congress and some Democrats who were not. The two best examples and Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy respectively. Another interesting example is in the Democratic Party and FDR. Look at his first Vice President, John Garner from Texas. He was about as far right as you can get. The parliamentary system was developed in an environment of hereditary leadership, in other words kings and aristocracy. It morphed over time to the proportional representation we see today. Interestingly, in the UK they still have first past the post. The US system was basically a clean sheet break with the past. The parliamentary system is also prone to instability, and it is not uncommon for it to take six months or more to "form a government". This has even happened in Germany.
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  4112.  @michaelotoole1807  Not really. I think it fits here as well.
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  4113. How can this happen in the "worker's paradise"? As some others have pointed out, in the comments, the fault lies with the workers. What did they think would happen if they continued to work without pay? Are the employers going to prioritize paying them when they worked so long without a salary? Did they do it just to say they had a job? The ignorance of the populace is one reason I don't fear China overtaking the US, ever. Even among seemingly more educated groups, like the individual investors who lost most, if not all, or their money in the market, as I have seen on this channel and other related channels, the ignorance of the system is astounding.
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  4114. The fact that the tanks we have seen are T72s should tell you something. For example, in the US, I don't think you will see any M60s.
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  4115. One thing you did not mention is the attrition of the Russian units that are attacking Mariupol. They will not be available for use until they are reequipped and reinforced. That may take some time.
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  4116. I stopped listening at about 4:00. I really dislike presentations like this that assume the audience has no knowledge of the topic. This is endemic on the Internet, especially YouTube. For one thing, I would be willing to bet that the whole live audience here knows all of what he is saying. Talk about not reading the room. For another thing, for someone watching on YouTube, we have the whole Internet available. If there is something that we don't understand we can stop the video and check it out. Someone has to tell these people. Get to your actual point.
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  4117.  @jerryrichardson2799  Good point. They get the good food and organs.
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  4118. It's not just national security risk. The idea of China taking out the US is ludicrous on the face of it. We are where we are because of the openness of our system and the liquidity of our currency. China will never have that. They CANNOT take over from the US because they are centrally controlled and not rules based. It is already the case that companies are moving out of China. They are already running out of money and have massive loans all over the world that will not perform. They have a demographic situation that is a disaster. They have resource problems that make the vulnerable. On top of this, a centrally planned economy CANNOT cope with this. The financial firms are salivating over the size of their market. Foolish! The Chinese populace has no experience, or understanding of, equity markets. That is why property is the main driver of their investment economy. Get back to basics. Just parroting the talking points of the CCP is just plain foolish.
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  4119. The "world order" is already falling apart. It was created by the US after WWII to contain the Soviet Union. It was successful, thirty years ago. It is no longer of interest to the US. The last US president who was interested in maintaining this was George H. W. Bush, and he left office at the beginning of 1993. The world will return to the situation that obtained before WWII. That means imperialism, with various blocks controlling different parts of the world. As for China, it will cease to exist in its current form by the end of the decade. Frankly, it is already falling apart. I know that you are there and went to university there, so have some bias in that regard. On the other hand, there is lots of evidence of the decline. One thing that I have seen reported is that the population of China is actually much smaller than Beijing claims. It is hard to tell. China rose fast, but only because the US let it into the WTO and because of the world order that the US guaranteed. It can just as quickly shift and is in the process of doing so. If you look at the large factories in China, they are actually doing the low-tech stuff with peasant workers. Check it out.
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  4120. First, I would never buy anything from Temu. One can tell it is a scam. On the other hand, the practices you ascribe to them are precisely the practices that Walmart used which resulted in much production going to China in the last few decades.
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  4121. So, the conflict is the fault of the western press. This is disgusting. Also, the talk about Palestinian voting rights is completely false. They can vote for their own government. What has happened is that the PA has repeatedly postponed elections to the point where their President, who was elected to a four year term in 2005, is still in the post. Talk about a democracy defecit.
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  4122. One flaw in your analysis is that you assume that the conscripts are fully trained. This is not so. The US used conscripts at least through the Vietnam War. They were fully trained before deploying though. That training took about eight months. In addition, we have seen evidence that the conscripts are not being fully equipped by the military. It turns out that their families are raising funds and buying necessary equipment for them. This is not a real fighting force.
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  4123.  @nobody687  Elaborate.
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  4124. This reminds me of the interview with Jordan Peterson and Cathy Newman from 2018. Perhaps Elon was taking notes.
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  4125. I didn't hear much about the shadow banking sector. My understanding is that this sector is highly involved in the property sector. Is this your understanding?
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  4126. Neil, who are you to determine who, or what will "lead" us? Really, it is a matter of evolutionary biology? Never have I heard such drivel. This is like trying to draw inferences on complex systems through the lens of an understanding of how an electron works.
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  4127.  @StoltHD  The economics is another part of it. NATO membership imposes some spending expectations. Good point.
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  4128.  @kyloren3693  Absolutely correct.
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  4129.  @maxmilan5055  Good points. Actually, I think, and I am not sure of this, that soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was talk of inviting Russia to join NATO. If not to fully join, at least to cooperate. Of course, this would have freaked out China. I don't know if you lived through the Cold War and how much you were tied into the whole security apparatus. I was born in Washington, DC, and my father worked for an Army weapons lab in the city. So, I was always well aware and tied in. I also worked for a couple of decades in the military industrial complex. I mention this because there was talk, and concern, about a "condominium" between the US and the USSSR. This was a nightmare scenario, especially for non-aligned countries, in which the US and USSR would split the world into spheres of influence. They had the power, through their nuclear arsenals, to enforce this. Of course, it never happened, and we continued competing. Then the US decided to engage with China to counterbalance the Soviets. I remember, in a satirical magazine, seeing China portrayed as the great big empty spot. I think it was Mad Magzine.
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  4130.  @maxmilan5055  Good points. This is Russia's last chance at being a major player in Europe. Unfortunately they decided to attack Ukraine, which has bult a strong nationalism. The Soviets treated Ukraine horribly. And, yet, the Ukrainians were a major part of the Soviet forces that defeated Nazi Germany. That offer to include Russia in NATO proves that NATO is a defensive alliance. I did work at the Command and General Staff College over a decade. Everyone was trained on the expected Soviet invasion through the Fulda Gap. At that time we deployed nuclear artillery shells that were meant to stop armored formations. The officers I dealt with seriously measured distances in kilotons. It was a scary time, to say the least.
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  4131. Nuclear energy is the answer, you dolt. Renewables, without storage, is a bust. Just look at Europe right now. The wind is not blowing. They are relying on coal and natural gas plants, which they have been deemphasizing. Our society relies on electrical energy. And when all our cars are electric, we will rely on it even more.
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  4132. The media sources you cite are made up of "reporters". They are not analytical organs. They report what the experts say, with little or no analysis. That is not their function. Sometimes you get analysis on the editorial page. So, you can blame the sources, such as the IMF, for the poor quality of their reporting.
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  4133. Of course, the people Girkin criticized are now on the outs. Now even Putin agrees with him on the leadership.
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  4134. My father worked for an Army weapons lab. He told me he worked on the B-52 design, probably associated with weapons delivery. Of course, he couldn't say much more. Things were often like that. When I was studying physics in high school, he had me do some calculations regarding the density of flywheels. Of course, he could have done them himself (and I expect he did) but wanted to give me a little challenge. And, of course, he couldn't tell me what it was for. I found out years later. This was the case with lots of things we sort of talked about. Even in later years when I had a security clearance, he couldn't talk about a lot of things. His clearance was higher.
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  4135. Too bad drawing and quartering has gone out of style.
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  4136.  @JamesKerLindsay  I wasn't comparing the events after WWI to the events after WWII. What I was discussing was the origins of many of the national borders that we now have, and the fact that many of these nations have fallen apart, many through internal conflicts that were inherent to the contradictions of their creation. I hope that makes sense. I just have an editorial comment. I really dislike the term "international law". This is just a pet peeve of mine, and I have no issue with your using it. What we have are various treaties, and countries decide to follow them or not. Without an enforcement mechanism, they are meaningless. For example, a law in a country is enforced by police and courts. In international terms, there may be courts, but the enforcement mechanisms are weak. A good example is China's conduct and claims in the South China Sea. Their encroachment was taken to the CLOS arbitration mechanism. They lost but refuse to honor the judgement. Who will make them? This is just an example of my issue of calling international treaties "law", when there is no mechanism to enforce them comparable to laws as we generally understand them. Perhaps a petty thought, but I just thought I would get it off my chest.
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  4137. What is so crazy about the abortion business is that there are many people waiting to adopt. In addition, there are fertility clinics popping up. In my city, about 10 years ago, a big new building was erected in the center of the city which housed a fertility clinic. What is going on here? The Federal government is funding abortions while people wait for children to adopt, and fertility clinics are being built. This is a gross misuse of Federal funds.
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  4138. Not the first time this has happened. In 2017 the US women's national team competed against an under 15 boys' squad and 5-2.
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  4139. The comments at about 2:25 about leaders doing things for popularity shows a lack of understanding of what representative democracy is. I can understand it from Ukrainians, they have little experience of democracy. In the west, this is a not so understandable. In a democracy the elected officials represent the people that voted for them. They are not like the leaders in autocracies. This is a long topic, but an example will suffice. In many countries there is a green party. The commentariat makes a big deal out of environmental issues. And yet when peopled are surveyed these environmental issues are rarely at the top of the list. In fact, they are usually at the bottom. This is reflected in the green's performance in elections. Of course, many commentators in the established democracies make this mistake as well. That just shows the poor state of our commentariat.
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  4140. Your take on Bosnia is interesting, especially the "federalism" angle. I think what is happening in the whole world is that there are many places where the example of US federalism is taken as the model. For one thing, it was born in a unique circumstance. For another, it has not always been completely smooth sailing, so to speak. One thing the US has never had to face to any real extent is sectarian and "national" divisions. There are many examples of situations where either federalism is desired or might seem a good solution to current problems. Just within Europe you have many places experiencing tensions. These include Spain, the UK and Belgium in the traditional western Europe. It has already failed in Czechoslovakia (now split) and of course Yugoslavia itself. Of course, there is the EU itself. There is a move to be a "United States of Europe" there that I think will contribute the EU eventual dissolution or transformation of the EU. I have even heard about one official in CCP controlled China opining that the country should become a federation with a lot of local autonomy. Everyone seems to have the federalism bug. As for Bosnia, I don't agree with you. The only thing keeping it together today is the interest of outsiders in not seeing another bloodbath. It really has no internal rationale. So, unless some outside power is willing to shed their own citizen's blood to keep Bosnia together and perpetuate this fractious entity, then I don't see it lasting. This outside force in the past was the US. Do you really think the US of today would intervene? If not the US, then maybe the UK? Somehow, I don't think so. Heck, what is Bosnia anyway. How far back do you want to go? By the 17th century it was a directly administered territory of the Ottoman Empire. What are people trying to preserve here?
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  4141. Is she black or white. Considering the target of the arson, this is the most important fact, and you leave it out. Come on man!
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  4142. The Admiral Kuznetsov is a disaster and a piece of junk, literally. Read up on it. It has been undergoing repairs and upgrades since 2017. These are set to last through at least the end of this year. It seems unlikely that it will be ready to come out of dry dock in 2024. These guys have had nothing to do for all that time. What makes this interesting is that naval personnel, sailors from ships, not marines, were instrumental in the Russian revolutions in 1917. Another interesting parallel is the role of sailors in 1918 in getting Germany to agree to an armistice. Could we see something similar now? That would be a kick. Putin portrays himself as such a student of history. That is just a lie, of course. If he were, he would never make this move.
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  4143. Your EV bias is interesting. So, even if I have solar at home, I will still need to rely on external infrastructure (and supply chains) at some time. In addition, using a vehicle involves a lot of infrastructure so you just can't get away from it.
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  4144. China devaluing its currency would be suicide. China depends heavily on imports of raw materials. They also import large amounts of food. Their costs would skyrocket. This would bring down the CCP faster than just about anything else short of war.
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  4145. You know the old saw about economists. Put 100 economists in a room, and you will have 105 different opinions.
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  4146.  @overworlder  Thanks for the info about Australia.
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  4147. Yes, the Russians are serfs. Look at all the videos of troops, and "battle babushkas" appealing to the czar. The czar is good, he will help up when the local officials mess up. Actually, everyone should read Nikolai Gogol's novel "Dead Souls" from the middle of the 19th century. Gogol wrote in Russian but was actually from the Kherson region. In the novel you will read about a society that is eerily similar the Russian society today. Oligarchs, corruption and serfs.
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  4148. I stopped eating sugar, or any sweetener, over five years ago. I did not do this because of any medical condition. I changed my diet because of a life event not associated with health. I lost weight, my blood pressure returned to normal, and my joint pain (fairly mild) went away. It was not just the sugar. I have had no craving for sugar (or honey).
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  4149. A resurgent Russia. Peter, you must be kidding. It took 20 years for Russia to build up the army it attacked Ukraine with in February of 2022. During that time, they had access western tech and capital. They have none of that now. How will they resurge? Come on man. As for the historical parallels, you mention the Russo-Japanese war. That led to the Russians first revolution. They tried to reform their military. In WWI, they lost to the Germans, who were a much smaller country fighting a two-front war. They only gained back territory when the west defeated the Germans. Then they lost to the Poles in 1920. By then they had experienced a revolution on the murder of their previous rulers. Even their industrialization in the 1930s was helped by western companies. None of that applies. The Ukrainians only have to push out the Russians from their territory. Russia's land mass will not help them in that situation. Putin has already reportedly isolated himself in his bunker. The political situation is being driven by people like Prigozhin and Girkin. Russia is becoming unstable, very much like 1917. Geography has nothing to do with it.
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  4150. If you operate in the US you have to follow US laws. If you operate in the UK you have to follow UK laws. If you operate in the EU you have follow EU laws. These are all different regarding online content and data privacy. So, why is following Chinese laws in China any different? I don't like what the Chinese are doing, but it is their country and they can impose any laws they like. The Internet is not something above the law and national governments. Get that out of your head.
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  4151.  @LesliePeter  Not much change of China surpassing the G7 economies. The G7 includes the first, third, fourth, and fifth largest economies. The US and Germany each export about as much as China. In addition, China's economy is in big trouble. It is in demographic decline. It has 600M people living in poverty. The level of poverty in the US would be middle class in many, many other countries, including China.
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  4152.  @LesliePeter  I knew about the NSA and their surveillance long before Snowden. As did many Americans. If the EU wanted to sanction the us, they could. On the other hand, the EU is protected by the US nuclear umbrella. That might be a consideration. As far as Hauwei, they do seem to put backdoors into their systems so that the CCP can spy on people. The NSA surveillance does not rely on this type of technology. They intercept the communications in the network. As for what the US could do to their enemies, that is classified, but I think it would be significant.
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  4153. First, Amazon made that money by providing a service people want. Is that a crime? Second, I generally agree, and so do many others. Several years ago I heard the CEO of GE say that if there was a flat tax he would gladly pay it. He was thinking a 20% rate. The reason is that this would avoid corporations having to spend so much time and effort trying to play the tax laws to their advantage. Those machinations often lead to waste and inefficiencies. GE has always been very good at paying as little tax as possible by using the loopholes in the system. That they would rather pay a flat tax and concentrate on their business really says something about how toxic our tax systems are.
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  4154.  @Cooper906outdoor  So true. Although, one aspect of that "invasion" is the Chinese buying up property. The Japanese did it. They overpaid for property, then as their economy collapsed, they had to sell at fire sale prices. It ended up being good for the US. Who knows, something similar may happen again.
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  4155. These Hollywood and media types, especially the women with their incessant sexism rants, are obviously oblivious to the realities of their industry. Film, TV, radio, etc. are mass market businesses. They make money by providing people with a product they want or desire. People like Roberts are making themselves toxic to audiences. It is good to see studios and media companies starting to wake up to reality.
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  4156. You are literally a socialist. The goal of cities is not to take money to give to people. The goal should be to provide an environment where companies create the jobs. The homeless are there because of a complex set of circumstances, such as mental illness and drug abuse. I predict that Amazon will move out completely. This may be to the surrounding towns, or to a completely different area. They do not rely on the tech talent as they did at the beginning. It is all over now.
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  4157.  @awisin871  I expect the analysis was much more sophisticated than that. As for the FPO, it has been put off. The stock price has fallen to below the offering price.
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  4158. You are wrong about an "unelected" president. The VP is part of the ticket that is elected. They are known to the public and scrutinized. That makes Biden's election all that more worrisome. We have had a VP take over when a president resigned. That would be Gerald Ford in the 1970s. We have also had VPs take over when a president was assassinated. Some examples are Andrew Johnson (Lincoln), Theodore Roosevelt (McKinley) and Lyndon Johnson (Kennedy). This whole process is detailed in our written Constitution, so it is no surprise. In the UK, you have situations where political party members determine your head of government, sometimes in the middle of a Parliament. Didn't this happen just recently?
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  4159. This is all a first world problem. The real point is who cares.
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  4160. The people of China are not citizens, but subjects. The corruption of the CCP is off the charts.
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  4161. I have watched this program for a while and generally really enjoyed it. But, like some other programs in a similar vein I liked, I am going off it. The problem isn't the host or guests, but the topics. This is not really their fault, but a general commentary on the current state of affairs in the UK and US (I am American and have lived and worked in the UK). I am just no longer interested in the culture wars or the foibles of the government. It is all depressing and repetitive.
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  4162. Tucker, I mostly agree with you. What you fail to understand is that the US has treaties regarding Ukraine. At the dissolution of the USSR, we entered into treaties because of the nuclear weapons in Ukraine. We have an interest there. Russia is trying to reincorporate the republics that were created by the breakup of the USSR. Forget Crimea. It was administratively transferred to the Ukranian SSR by the central government at the time, in the 1950s. It had never been a part of Ukraine. The US, at one time had at least 500K troops in Europe to resist a Soviet invasion on Western Europe. We had tactical nukes and nuclear artillery located there. What people tend to forget is that the US and Russia have many more nukes than China. Heck, one of our nuclear missel subs has at least 16 missiles with 10 independently targeted warheads. We have many of these subs. So di the Russians. I once worked for a defense contractor. I went to the corporate training center. We were given flash cards to study before the course. Some had just latitude and longitude. I looked these up and they turned out to be Soviet missile launch sites in the USSR. That was what we were dealing with, and it seems like we are dealing with it again.
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  4163. Protest movements often do not represent the majority of people. I remember back to the Vietnam protests, in the US and the world. In 1972, while all these protests were happening, Richard Nixon won a landslide reelection, and he was no dove.
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  4164.  @gregf1299  Good points. Interesting that you mentioned metaphysics. I am reading Stehen Meyer's "The Return of the God Hypothesis". He mentions the need for metaphysics in understanding these things.
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  4165. I always heard that the first thing that would happen after the revolution is that they were going to "kill all the lawyers".
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  4166.  @sanjitbolina7481  California is a special case to be sure. Its problems are basically political, as in China. On the other hand, its GDP is just short of that of India. There is no good reason for them to have the problems they do.
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  4167.  @sanjitbolina7481  Don't get me wrong. The nations of BRICS have every right to associate themselves with whomever they want. You are certainly correct that the institutions of global governance are not suitable for the 21st century. Frankly, the whole idea of "global governance" is an obsolete concept. The rules-based order we have had for the last 70 years or so will come to an end. That period was an anomaly in history. Governance and laws require an enforcement power. As the world goes back to the days of spheres of influence and what many call multi-polarism we will see something more like the colonial, imperialist era that has characterized most of human history. As for the west not being preeminent, I wouldn't count on that changing much.
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  4168.  @sanjitbolina7481  You may want to avoid San Francisco. It is one of the worst places there now.
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  4169. So, they say there is no discernable trend, but that we should plan for and expect it. Well, that goes against the whole statistical analysis that they performed. If we look at per capita emissions we see a downward trend over the last 45 years. Considering that world population in peaking, this argues that if we have not seen a trend yet, then we will not see one in the future. The question you have to ask yourself is what are the scenarios that would cause issues in the future.
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  4170. Sounds like the stuff we used to talk about in High School, in the third quarter or the last century of the last millennium. I am not exaggerating on this. AI was even a topic of discussion back then, long before it became practical. One thing that is clear is that many of these speculations are not "scientific" in that there is no experiment one could do to prove or disprove the hypothesis.
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  4171. The mineral deal is not giving away everything. Where do you get this drivel? Ukraine does not have the resources to exploit these minerals. If they did, it would have been done already. Ukraine is a poor country and was before the war. An aspect of the Budapest Memorandum process (which was geared toward nuclear nonproliferation) that is often not mentioned was that the US gave Ukraine $300M (over $600M in 2024 dollars) in exchange for giving up their nukes. This is on top of assistance in decommissioning the weapons. To exploit the minerals, they need peace an extensive foreign investment. If they do get those things they get a share of the profits and taxes from employees, etc. The point is, if they could have done it they would have.
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  4172. Wen is full of crap. Not only will China's economy crash but with their demographic decline they have no hope of recovering. Top that off with an economy and political system built on massive corruption, and the output is indeed bleak.
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  4173. I am appalled at the term the woman at the beginning of the video uses. This is not the fault of "capital speculation". It seems that the Chines people have been brainwashed to blame everything on "capitalism". The real issue is the rampant corruption in the CCP. This whole way of financing local governments and the wasteful infrastructure projects used to prop up GDP growth numbers is purely a way for corrupt officials to steal money. The CCP has complete control. If they wanted to create a more sustainable funding source for local government they could have, by decree. This whole thing is the result of corruption, not capital. If this is how the Chines people think, they are doomed. Doomed!
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  4174. This whole discussion on Musk, and "billionaires" is just so much drivel. It sounds more like social media clickbait than reasoned discussion. Musk's Starlink system is a private enterprise. Property rights are one of the most important cornerstones of our western democracies. You also have to understand that neither the US nor the UK is actually at war with Russia. Of course, you would not know that listening to the Russian propogandists who regularly threaten to nuke Washington, D. C. and London. If the US were at war with Russia, or whomever, the government could, and would, requisition (with compensation) any resources it needed. So, to make this about "billionaires" is just plain silly. In the US, during WWII, the government directed all industrial production in the country. The production of private automobiles, for example, was curtailed. Since WWII, the US, and its allies, have had many wars without declaring war. So, get off your high horse about the billionaires. We have always had them. In many historical periods they have had much more of a hold on the economy than the current ones do. Starlink, for example, is not the Internet. In fact, it represents a small percentage of Internet access. By the way, If I owned Starlink, I would not have made the same decision as Musk. On the other hand, he has a right to make decisions for his company.
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  4175. A Chinese student thought "he would HAVE to smoke weed if he studied in Germany" (emphasis mine)? The stupidity of that statement shows that the Chines people are so deluded that they probably should not be studying in Germany. I have been following China for long time and have studied with many Chinese students and worked with many Chinese. The level of stupidity and misinformation in China itself is stunning. It is also disheartening.
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  4176. Xi has a disdain for private enterprises? Who would have thought. Actually, it makes perfect sense. He is a staunch commie after all and the son of a revolutionary.
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  4177. The CCP are a bunch of children. If they can't take the heat, they should get out of the kitchen. Considering what their foreign minister and spokespersons have said about other countries, calling Xi a dictator is outright respectful. They have become a clown show and are constantly embarrassing themselves on the world stage.
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  4178. You do realize that Syria is a fiction. It was created by the imperial powers of France and the UK after the fall of another empire, the Ottoman. Prior to that it had been part of the Ottoman Empire from the beginning of the 16th century. Originally it was the French Mandate which included Lebanon. I recently saw, on a geopolitics site, a map that showed Mandate Syria as a collection of "states". These included the State of Aleppo, the state of Damascus, the Alawite State, Greater Lebanon and Jabal Al-Druze. So now we have a Kurdish area that is self-contained, a Druze area, an enclave controlled by the US and other militias. Oh, and ISIS is still around. As for HTS, while the leadership talks a "moderate" line its fighters in the streets are chanting (paraphrasing) "On to Jerusalem, on to Mecca". They still want a Sunni Arab caliphate. I am also hearing about Druze communities talking about being annexed by Israel. They aren't comfortable with what might come in an HTS led Syria. The reality is that continued civil war is most probably in the cards for Syria. The other question I have to ask is about "self-determination". Shouldn't the international community start the process of decolonization with Syria? There are numerous countries around the world, mainly in the Middle East and Africa, that are similarly imperialist constructions. Many are experiencing, or have experienced, massive upheavals. Many of these situations are going on right now.
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  4179. You have a strange imagination. Love it.
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  4180. Entrepreneurs have a big problem in Europe, or should I say that Europe has a big problem with entrepreneurs. I had a relative from Germany over to my house in the US once. He had done a foreign assignment in the US for his German company just as I had done one in Europe for my US company. His family was an old German family, most of which were in the bureaucracy and government. His father was with us. He had been fairly high level in various Social Democrat governments. The son, one of the few of the family in industry, said he wished he could move to the US. Not long after that a German entrepreneur (one of the few?) in a technical field that I dealt with said the same thing. I know if no entrepreneurs from the US hankering to move to Germany (or anywhere else in the EU). By the way, I was very successful in my first two years in Europe. So, my company gave me a massive budget to massively expand my group. They also gave me a much larger target. Then I ran into the labor situation in the EU. Bad, not good. Many European countries talk about government initiatives to create "Silicon Valley" clones in their countries. The US government did not set up the original Silicon Valley. It doesn't work that way. Until the Europeans figure that out they are doomed to failure.
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  4181. Never a truer statement. I know a high level financial analyst who was hoping that Xi would get his third term. His reasoning was that Xi would tank the economy and accelerate the implosion of the CCP. This is not really an ant-China statement. I have long held that, in East Asia, the Chinese, sans the CCP, are most like the US in temperament and outlook. Just dreaming for a minute, I think that if China were free, democratic and an open economy, the US and China would easily "rule the word". Oh well, one can only dream.
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  4182.  @superduper5514  The US President is not in charge of the economy and does not have dictatorial powers. Xi is a one-man shop. He makes decisions and the CCP cadres try to carry them out. He obviously does not think those decisions through nor does he consider the consequences of their implementation. Three good examples should give you an idea. First is the implementation of the "three red lines". The policy was addressing a real issue (the property sector had become a Ponzi scheme), but he tanked 30% of the economy with the implementation. Second is the abrupt relaxation of COVID restrictions. There was obviously no planning that went into this, and no explanation to the public. Lots of people died, then he covered up the numbers. Third, and this one is for comic relief, is the sanitizing of airport runways. This is the stupidest and most wasteful thing I have seen. Xi said sanitize everything, and they did. Made me laugh.
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  4183. Jessie, as for the cocaine, there are actually medical uses of cocaine. It is actually available to them. That is why it was, as you pointed out in another video, pure.
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  4184. This is silly. Ukrainians are not paying with their lives because of the west. They are paying with their lives because of the Russians. This type of rhetoric is precisely what is wrong with the commentariat. It is the same as all those that protest against global warming in the west, in countries that are bring down their emissions, rather than protesting at the Chinese and Indian embassies, who continue to burn large amounts of coal. You excoriate those that are trying to do something rather than those that are the root of the problem, because it is easy. The weapons the Ukrainians need the most are advanced aircraft. Unfortunately, that takes time. Modern combined arms warfare depends on airpower. The only solution in the short term would be to have western pilots flying the aircraft. Is that a bridge too far? The issue, in the US, is not one of courage, but one of politics and leadership. Ukraine is not a formal ally of the US. The documents we have guaranteeing their security are not treaties, but memos. Such a treaty would never have passed in the Senate. By the way, Russia also signed those documents. In case you hadn't noticed, the US electorate has become more and more populist and isolationist ever since they voted George H. W. Bush out of office. Is that cowardice? He was the last US president who wanted to have a conversation about what comes next after the end of the Cold War (I miss the Cold War). The Global War on Terror was a detour. Bush's son, George W. Bush actually ran on a platform of reduced foreign entanglements and was definitely against "nation building". President Biden has never actually come out and said what his strategy is. He has only said "we will support Ukraine as long as it takes". He never said what "it" was. The latest assistance package requires him to produce a strategy document in 45 days. We will see. The history of the US, from the beginning, is driven by the desire not to be drawn into European, imperialistic, wars. The US acts when it is attacked. This is what drew the US into WWI, WWII and Afghanistan and Iraq. The US also had at least 300K troops (sometimes as high as 500K) in Europe to defend against the Soviets until the end of the Cold War. There are still 50K troops there. The Europeans are another story. The British are showing some backbone. Macron is trying, but the biggest player in Europe, Germany, is paralyzed by its past. In addition, because of the supposed "peace dividend" and the US nuclear umbrella, even the British have let their forces atrophy. Again, a failure of leadership, not courage.
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  4185. Great backdrop. I don't think you told us where it is, though. You are generally quite specific. After reading your books and watching lots of content, combined with my background and experience, I have to say that I can see the days of straight up colonization coming back. As the world breaks into trade blocks, which is coming right before our eyes, the control of natural resources becomes ever more important. This time it seems that the raison d'être (see how I worked in a little French there) will be the green transition. By the way, in following China there is another channel by a New Zealander living in China that I find useful. He presents a lot of good material from within China including CCP mouthpieces. China is so amusing, in a perverse sort of way, when they rail against any restrictions by the west and warn about forming trade blocs (cliques is the term they often use) when that is precisely what they want and are doing.
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  4186. You keep talking about the plan. Are you ignorant? Don't you know the saying that no plan survives first contact with the enemy? Any army command that relies on plans created by higher elements is doomed to failure. Just look at the Russians in Ukraine today. The Russians of today rely on tactics of the Soviets of the WWII era. The Soviets in WWII took many more casualties than they should have. They did not care about their soldiers. In the current conflict they have suffered, as far as we can tell, almost 10 times more deaths.
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  4187. The whole narrative about the Eastern Front is flawed, It was not just Lend-Lease, although that was key for the Soviets. Without it they would have folded. Think about the alternative. What if the west had just decided to isolate Germany on the continent and let the Nazis and Soviets duke it out. They could have done so. There were plenty in the US who would have preferred to do that and concentrate on Japan. At the beginning of 1944 the Germans had about 75 divisions in western Europe and Italy. This would have beefed up the German Army in the Soviet Union by 50%. They lost a further nine in Africa. I think the outcome would have been much different if the west had not attacked. Even the threat of attack tied up many divisions. In fact, in this scenario if Hitler had been a better strategist and left the tactics to his very able generals, I expect that Germany would have won handily. >>ADDITION: I forgot the 21 divisions in Italy. There were also 25 divisions in the southeast, many of which could also have been used against the Soviets. That just enhances my argument.
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  4188. Democratic countries have shorter "terms of patience"? How long was the Iraq War? How long was the west in Afghanistan? How long was the Vietnam war? Oh, wait, all those involved the US. If you are talking about Europe and their coalition governments, perhaps there may be a point here. These comments also ignore that Ukraine is slowly getting the needed offensive weapons. Ukrainian forces are good, but this is not NATO. They have improved because of NATO training, and I believe will win, but just throwing modern offensive weapons into the fray is not the answer. It will take time, but the latest tranche of offensive weapons is arriving. In the Gulf War, the M2 Bradley vehicles actually destroyed more Iraqi tanks than the M1 tank. Another thing to note is that there are Ukrainian pilots already training on F-16s. Wait for it.
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  4189. Great video! You hit all the main points. Well researched. On the invasion, you are quite correct. Bigger than D-Day. In fact, when setting strategy during WWII, the US general staff looked at the invasion of Formosa (as it was called then). This would have given the US a launch point for its bombers to pummel Japan. Their strategic review concluded it would take 500K troops. Thus, the plan was shelved. And this was at a time when the US was highly experienced in amphibious operations and at the peak of its offensive power. China is nowhere near this.
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  4190. Dave, the media has always been a business! Don't you know that? When it was all print, there was competition. That brought us what we now call "yellow journalism" which many believe led to the Spanish American War. It was only when broadcast journalism, with a limited number of outlets, became a major player that we had some regulation on content. As the number of outlets increased after that, the whole thing became the wild west. Then we had the tech giants. Right back to the days of the major publishers. This is not new. You have to support yourself to be able to present this content (which I really like and appreciate). There will always be sponsors.
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  4191.  @Leshic2  Glad you understand.
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  4192. Is this really in Russia's interest at this time?
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  4193.  @PerceivedREALITY999  Pro Russian Ukrainians. You know what that sounds like? The Sudeten Nazis in the late 1930s in Czechoslovakia. This fixation of culture, language and ethnicity in Europe, and most parts of the world is one of primary roots of conflict and division in the world, and Europe is at the center of it because of their economic power. The fact that there are so many Russian speakers in countries like Ukraine, the Baltics, Kazakhstan, and others is a conscious Russian Empire and later Soviet to Russify the empire and repress other ethnicities. How about the Crimean Tatars and how they were treated by the Russians. This is cultural genocide. So, how should the various former Soviet republics react. You need to get off your high horse. You are starting to sound like those 1930s Germans. As for Zelenski, he became president in 2019. By then, Russia had violated the agreements they had signed to guarantee Ukraine's territorial integrity and security and the UN Charter. You need to read more history.
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  4194. Marjorie Taylor Green is seen as somewhat of a joke in the US. Don't forget that members of House of Representatives are elected by local constituencies. So, you get all kinds of people. I see her as mostly entertainment. As for McCarthy, you need to remember that he was the Republican House leader leading up to the recent elections. There was an expectation that the Republicans would pick up a massive majority. Under his leadership, they barely squeaked by. I am a Republican and I am not a great supporter of his. As for the cost of the war, if you look at the US economy and Federal budget, the war is a rounding error. Talking about corruption, figures I have seen with regards to the COVID relief packages show corruption, not of the government officials but private fraudsters, of billions of dollars. The full extent is not known yet, but it is over $5B already. This is out of $5T in relief funds. Considering that Ukraine is destroying the Russian army, this is a bargain. We spent well over $1T in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a bargain.
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  4195. So, why are you wearing a New York baseball cap? Not a very British thing to do, is it.
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  4196.  @QuinnMiss....London.born1965  Not sure what that means. I hope you took my comment as a joke, by the way.
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  4197. Churchill was 78 when he started his last term as PM. Trump is 78. He is doing well health wise and seems sharper than ever. In fact, with RFK, Jr. advising him I think his health will improve. So, stop being ageist.
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  4198. The problems with batteries, at least the ones we have now, are cost and spontaneous combustion. As far as I can tell, piles of coal are not in the habit of self-combusting.
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  4199. I actually worked on ASATs in the 1980s. It is not that easy, but not impossible. Of course, the defense is quite easy for maneuvering satellites.
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  4200. In the UK they have had two female prime ministers. Both were members of the Conservative Party. It is now looking like they are going to pick their third. The left party in the UK, Labor, has never even had a female leader.
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  4201. I really like Tucker, but in this situation, he is being somewhat foolish. Not supporting Ukraine is appeasement. We supported the Afghans against the Soviets. We were both nuclear powers then. We fought wars in Korea and Vietnam where both the Soviets and the US were providing weapons and in our case troops. These were both UN operations as well. If Russia is not stopped in Ukraine they will hit NATO territory, so we will be at war with them, and it will be a hot one. Why do you think the US and the Soviets never went to war directly in the past? The answer is MAD. No Soviet, or Russian leader. would risk the total destruction of the motherland. That is the only reason nukes have not been used. Tucker, you should read some history (I am sure you say you have). I have been involved in the actual Cold War infrastructure, and I have a lot more knowledge than you do about what is likely.
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  4202. Somehow, I think we will survive.
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  4203. The Judge is the best!
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  4204. Garicia Herro should have added the ideological aspect. That most analysts do not mention this is a real flaw in their analysis. They probably leave this out because it is not a major issue or consideration in the western capitalist world. That is a big problem.
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  4205. China was never really a superpower. The last time it projected power was in the 15th century. Then, it withdrew into itself. Closer to today, China was successfully invaded by Japan, which was the only Asian country to project power abroad in a major way. So, Xi is dreaming an impossible dream.
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  4206.  @corinnem.239  Yes. My understanding is that at least 20% of what the Soviets needed was provided by the US and UK. This included everything from planes, trucks and tanks to shoes and food.
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  4207. Forget Mandarin. China is toast.
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  4208. Oh, good, Kadyrov! Not as entertaining as Prigozhin, but close enough.
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  4209. This actually reminds me of the time Nixon resigned. The comparisons then were made to South American dictatorships. That was almost precisely half a century ago. I was teenager in Brussels getting high in an old townhouse with a bunch of locals. It was surreal. Not much has changed. The other point Newt made was a bit "thin". Political parties are not part of the Constitution. It was John Adams who warned against them at the dawn of the Republic. The parties are actually private organizations. In the US, unlike many other places, take the UK for an example, it costs nothing to declare one's party affiliation and become a "member" able to decide who the nominees are. Many people are unaffiliated. Each political party in the US has its own rules. They are not the same. Even saying that Obama and Pelosi would make it difficult for President Biden is curious. Isn't that their right. If they didn't have support, then it wouldn't matter. Remember the polls. It seems a large part of the Democratic Party didn't want Biden to run again. That is not new news. Biden was just too slow to take that in and react appropriately.
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  4210. The best thing that could happen is for the current regime in Iran to collapse, and for the US to withdraw cooperation with the Saudis. Let them buy Russian equipment. Then a new regime in Iran, which is western focused could invade Saudi Arabia. Without US support, the Saudis would fold quickly. Iran would become a more reliable supplier to Europe, and perhaps would cut back on supplies to China. Well, one can dream. As for the conventional response to the use of a nuke by Russia, just look at what happened to the Iraqis in the Gulf War. Remember the highway of death. That was all conventional weapons. Imagine what would have happened to that large column of Russian armor heading toward Kiev at the beginning of the current conflict. American airpower would have taken out the whole thing in a very short period of time. With our intel resources targeting ALL Russian assets in Ukraine is a real possibility. As the current Secretary of Defense has said, one of our goals is the destroy the Russian Army in Ukraine. We see that hapenning.
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  4211. Digital versions of national fiat currencies are not the same as crypto currencies. Get that through your head. All this talk by national governments of digitizing their currencies is just a smoke screen. I personally have not used cash for at least a year now, and prior to that I used very little. Credit cards, and direct bank transfers are the same as digital currency. Such transactions can be tracked the same as these so called "digital" currencies. The difference is that, in the West, the authorities cannot access these transactions unless they show cause in investigations of suspected criminal activity. In China, there are no such protections. That is the issue.
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  4212. The statement that China is pushing the use of their digital currency internationally is ludicrous. The value of a currency internationally has nothing to do with whether it is digital. The value of a currency on the international stage is due to its overall liquidity and to the rule of law in the home country of the currency. So, which currencies are the most used? In order, I believe, the dollar, the pound and the Euro. I am not sure of where the yen stands. China is dreaming if it thinks that their currency will become widespread just because of convenience. Reporting this may be a case of journalistic malpractice.
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  4213. The statement that China is "open for business", meaning private businesses is totally at odds with other statements that have been made and with actual actions.
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  4214. Great update. Thanks for the extra effort. The global south is a joke. It is merely a warmed-over version of the non-aligned movement. The determinants of global power are economic and military power, (which is driven mostly by economics). The global south, while having the majority of population has much less than half the economic power. In fact, if you take North America, Europe, Japan and Australia you have about 58% of world GDP. Add in India, and that pushes the total over 60%. China has about 16%. That leaves about a quarter of world economic output in the global south. I take India out in this calculation because it would not align with China. Of the 25%, or so, many are already aligned with the west. In fact, just today Argentina elected a new president, by a good margin, who stresses alignment toward the US and away from China. Look for this trend to continue. So, maybe China has on its side one eighth of the world's. Considering the woeful performance of Belt and Road projects, in both quality and financial terms, and there is no hope for the CCP leading any kind of global south bloc that could challenge the west. The US and EU are already starting to propose and fund alternative projects. At a time when China is running out of steam, this is not going to go well for them. As with most of what comes out of the CCP, it is just drivel.
    1
  4215. A family friend was one of the negotiators of the treaty. That was his first job in the State Department, and he later rose up the ranks. As for the Noreiga situation, another guy I knew (actually I had bought his company which trained police and military) was a counter sniper sent in to deal with the situation. Ah, the good old days.
    1
  4216. The whole idea that "African" American studies would emphasize LGBT content is really puzzling to me. In Africa, in both Christian and Islamic countries, LGBT rights are routinely curtailed. So, maybe the American aspect of African American studies may touch on it, this is not an African thing, especially the T part.
    1
  4217. This is just plain silly. I read the futurists (e.g., Alvin Toffler) in their heyday. All bunk. If you want to speculate on what the people in 2085 will think about us today, just look at what we think of the life in 1975 or 1925 etc.
    1
  4218. Thanks for doing this, Tony. You deserve the rest, but the effort is appreciated. Wait just a minute. Development of hydrocarbon resources? I thought China was going green. Green energy is the future of China. Chairman Xi said so. Why would they need all that natural gas? I am confused.
    1
  4219.  @fritzbodhi3220 Are you a bot???? If you think Biden knows what he is talking about or doing, then you are either stupid, or a bot. Either way, you are a part of the problem.
    1
  4220. At about 50:00 in. I guess I am too old (in my 60s). I am very well informed. I remember history and read a lot of it. I hope I am not who you are talking about. In fact, my sons, in their 20s are well read in history and well informed. I talked to them about what is going on from when they were young. They have their own opinions and assessments of the world, as I do. Not everyone is caught up in this this crazy culture war stuff. In fact, no one I know is. It is a minority view. I think that your (both of you) making such a big deal of it is a part of the problem. You are influencers, but most of the people listening to you are more discerning than you give them credit for. This is an issue that needs more investigation. Michael, I bought your book a few months back. Just started reading it because of this video. Great stuff. Love the style. Sort of stream of consciousness. Just like the discussions I have with my friends.
    1
  4221. They're all a bunch of commies. Actually, in such situations one problem is that it is hard for a Republican, or a candidate from any other party, to run in these jurisdictions. The stories I could tell about Chicago. It does seem to be changing there though. What it will take is people changing party. Trump might be the one to get that movement going. Until that is solved the people in those cities will get what they voted for and what they deserve. The rest of the country shouldn't have to pay for their stupidity and choices.
    1
  4222. One of the interesting facts about the housing market in the sunbelt is that many people are moving from other areas and not taking out loans. They are using equity in the homes they are selling to buy at the same price or less. These, of course, are the boomers. That said, I wonder if the price to income measure is really as valid in this type of market, which is unique.
    1
  4223. Taliban is unlikely to be a Persian term. The Taliban are Sunnis who persecute Shiites. Iran is a Shiite country.
    1
  4224. China's assessment of global issues is so far off the mark it just makes me laugh. China's rise came under the US led world order. That is falling apart, in part, because it is not needed by the US anymore. They (China and Russia) want a multipolar world, and they will get it. What they fail to remember is how things were before that order was established. The hubris and short sightedness of these dictators is just stunning.
    1
  4225.  @preeyakumari-i2q  I get the humor. On a serious note, we had a bipolar world during the Cold War. Now, I guess what they want is a return to imperialism. I predict, and I am not alone in this, that both Russia and China will fall apart within the next ten years. For China, that would be a normal state of affairs. Even during the imperial period China was often really a collection of waring fiefdoms. After the fall of the Qing dynasty, it fell into outright warlordism. The nationalists, originally headed by Sun Yat-sen, were just one of many factions and prior to the Japanese invasion didn't even control that much of the country. After the war Chiang and Mao were just the last two warlords left standing. Actually, I saw one report, and I am not sure about the veracity of it, that a CCP official thought that China should be reconfigured as a federation. In another I saw speculation that some of the cities in southeast coastal China would want to break away and join with Taiwan. It will be interesting. I have seen many speculations about Russia as well. Some are even specific about who the warlords are likely to and their territories. A good indication of this is the creation of private militaries by several oligarchs. It should be interesting to watch.
    1
  4226. I like and support this guy and his ideas. On the other hand his answer to the question about the midterms and how he would persuade independents, etc. was just such boilerplate and dangerous to his campaign. Don't forget, Kari Lake often said the same thing. Politicians should know that they are not meeting everyone. The people one meets on the campaign trail are in general going to be supporters. So, such statements are meaningless. This points to naivete on the part of conservatives. Even Donald Trump had massive support in the party and great rallies. And yet, he did not win. Get smart, don't just repeat the same electoral mistakes.
    1
  4227. Shut it ALL down!!!! This is a Cold War program meant to "buy" alliances. If you hadn't noticed, the Cold War (I miss the Cold War) ended over 30 years ago.
    1
  4228. The tone I get from you, and many others, is that with this withdrawal, it is Russia that decides what to do and Ukraine will simply be led to respond. What is the motivation for this. Ukraine's officer corps has had western training for years now and are fighting as a NATO army would. If they had airpower, this thing would be over by now. Ukraine also has the benefit of their own and western (especially US) intelligence, and it shows. Why would you not expect Ukraine to drive the train here? One thing to note here is that the situation on both sides is symmetric. Russia will have troops it can redeploy, but so will Ukraine. In fact, Ukraine's position is better, since they have the river as a defensive line, and it is a great one.
    1
  4229. If you don't know anything about a subject, then don't talk about it. Without having any information about these specific incidents, a large number of drones for research purposes is very believable. Swarm behavior, especially for autonomous devices, is actually an active research area that has been around for a while. Actually, I see more video of this from China, where large drone swarms are often used. Sometimes this is for entertainment. There was one incident not long ago, over a city, where a synchronized swarm actually had a failure (that is why we have video about it). Evidentially, something happened to one or a few and this messed up the whole swarm and they started dropping out of the sky in droves.
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  4230. This is a nation that will turn into a liberal democracy after the CCP falls? Dream on. This is not the only reprehensible act that the Chinese people perform. Most of these acts are directed at their fellow citizens. This channel, and many others, has highlighted to utter crap that Temu foists on the Chinese themselves. There is also the issue of counterfeits. This spans food as well as the theft of products from established western firms. And what about the counterfeiting of gold? Chinese people are actually poisoning each other. Is this all a directive from the CCP? Not directly. The CCP tolerates it, and their attitudes foster it, but the Chinese people decide to do this as individuals. There are many, many other examples (tofu dreg construction, etc.) that show the true character of the Chinese nation.
    1
  4231. Is it bonuses, or base wages that are being clawed back? It is never clear from these reports. Perhaps that is because, in China, people assume that bonuses are part of guaranteed compensation. This is silly. Why do you think they are called bonuses. Oh, wait, this is a commie society. People, and the government, do not understand how finances work. In the US, when one is on a bonus plan, or even on a commission plan, or both, those bonuses and commissions are not guaranteed. They are performance based. I have worked for large and small companies and seen many types of plans. In some cases, bonus portion of compensation was based on the performance of both the company and the particular business unit. If one or both did poorly, then the bonuses could be reduced, or eliminated. The idea was that one lives off the base salary and uses the bonuses and commissions for investment. That might entail upgrading a home, without increasing monthly costs, or buying a car for cash. If things are going well, then that is great. If not, then one continues to live within their means (base salary) and should have saved up from the good times to have a cushion. This takes a little thought and planning.
    1
  4232. Kamala was a DEI hire. Go woke, go broke. Literally! She has no future. She was a failed candidate in 2020, and there is no way things would be any different in 2028. The Democratic Party has no ideology and has not had any for decades now. As their labor base shrank, they put together a coalition of groups that were perceived as out of the mainstream. This was basically CRT before that term was widely used. It really all started with LBJ and giveaways to minority groups. The problem is that the coalition of minorities have little in common. Blacks hate Jews, Hispanics and blacks do not necessarily get along. This was always unstable. Carville has no discernable ideology that I can glean. He is just a party man. So, are all the leaders of the Democrats. Do you think Carville gives a crap about minorities or the LGBTQ+XYZ community? Get real. They are just warm bodies to him and the whole Democrat hierarchy. In the past both political parties had conservative and liberal wings. FDR's first VP was what we would call far right, even today. As Ronald Regan drew off conservative Southern Democrats, the party had to dig even further into intersectionalism. What Trump has done is to make the Republican Party a more inclusive force. Even now, after all that was said in the campaign, he is willing to talk to everyone. Actually, he always has.
    1
  4233. The US lost about 7K troops in Iraq and Afghanistan over a period of 20 years of conflict. You may not agree with it, but the US did achieve its initial war aims in both cases. The Iraqi army was one of the largest, and most experienced, in the world when it was defeated. Iraq, although not the most stable place in the world, is now buying advanced US weapons for their own security, including AH-64s.
    1
  4234. If you follow the history of war, you will know that such situations occur often. A town is taken, lost the taken again, etc. What irks me is everyone so fixated on the maps. One channel I saw actually looked at several maps, and they did not agree with each other. Don't forget that all these maps are run by armatures who are using public information. They actually do a good job considering what they have to work with, but that is not decisive. What we don't know is what the Ukrainians are planning. We actually seem to know a lot more about the Russians. The fighting is still going on just outside of the city. Holding Soledar is not strategic. The Ukrainians have inflicted lots of casualties on the Russians, and caused them to use a lot of ammunition and vehicles. Many of the vehicles have been destroyed. Russia has limited resources to replenish these. Ukraine has no such limitations considering their backers.
    1
  4235.  @marresjepie1887  That must be one I missed. I just have a pet peeve on this issue.
    1
  4236. Neary 50K Russian men have lost their lives? Are you daft (trying to keep it clean, but it's hard). Prigozhin admitted to almost that number killed just in Bakhmut. This reliance on these open sources, which try only to publish "verified" is a bit of a travesty. Everyone knows that the number of armored vehicles destroyed is greater than the reports from these sources. Considering indirect sources, as one often has to do when dealing with autocratic regimes, we know that the number of vehicles destroyed, and men killed is almost certainly much higher than these self appointed arbiters of "truth" report. Listen to intercepted phone calls translated by various people. I have lost count of the number of calls, separated in time, where the Russian soldier admits to over 70% deaths. If only half are true, then the number is almost certainly closer to the official Ukranian numbers than this ridiculous 50K number. In fact, the whole topic of this video would tell you that if you just listen to yourself.
    1
  4237. I read that piece in the US based WSJ. The investor being quoted was actually shorting Chinese property stocks. He seemed to be losing for a while, but in the end his position paid out handsomely. He would not say how much, actually. He did express a regret that he didn't bet bigger, though.
    1
  4238. I always wanted one of these.
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  4239. Dave, Michael is great. He has a grasp of history and of politics. Ok, and he is a snappy dresser (although I would not be caught dead is an outfit like that, it works for him).
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  4240. Whatever happened to global warming?
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  4241. @Kieren Summers I don't eat any empty calories, like sugar. I don't eat processed food. I don't eat wheat. I have lost 25% of my peak weight and am back to where I was in my 20s. I am now in my middle 60s. I generally eat pescatarian, although I will eat beef, pork, lamb or chicken (but not at home). Based on what the video says, we could lose half of our agriculture and still feed the planet. It has always been about distribution. These areas of Africa have always been problematic. Why are there so many people there that they cannot feed themselves? Why should I worry about it?
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  4242. @Kieren Summers On the diet, I think it is very interesting. I was once talking to the manager if a high end "fast" food place here in the Chicago area. They provided prepared meals with high end ingredients. When I talked to him he was talking about helping people with a 1,800 or1,500 calorie diet. The government talks about a 2,000 calorie diet. It really depends on what you are doing. I once knew a guy, who when he was in the Canadian military was on the rowing team. When I met him he was still very muscular, but no longer doing that. When he was on the team he consumed 5,000 calories per day. He needed it. Most people do not need even the 2,000 calories. It all depends on your stage of life, activity, etc. As for Africa, we take materials out of there because it can be done cheaply and with no regulation. Take rare earths. We produced most of what was needed in the US before the opening to China. Then the environmentalists shut down our production. That production is opening up now, by the way. China has NO standards (they have written standards, but they are never enforced, I can provide examples). Rare earths are not rare. As for oil, if the industry was let lose here, we would be by far the largest producer and exporter in the world. As for China in Africa, they are debt trapping countries and there is already pushback. Just wait.
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  4243. No one needs pineapples or bananas, good as they are. Russia's currency is not really freely convertible. The ship stopped was flagged in Palau but was Turkish owned and was going to pick up cargo to move it to Turkish and European ports. The place where a ship is flagged is not the same as where it is owned or operates. So, no, the Russians were not depriving Palau of food.
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  4244.  @beachcomber2328  Well put. To say that some of the trends are obvious is, I think, correct, but you have to remember that many of the biggest figures and organizations in finance and corporate America were ignoring these trends. I have a financial advisor who, for a time, was a customer of Stratfor when Peter was there. After a while there was nothing new or actionable. My advisor is a data driven "macro" guy, so he is a natural customer. The fact is that the macro trends Zeihan talks about take time to come to fruition, and you don't need to hear it over and over and over again.
    1
  4245. Europe has been installing lots of wind and solar. Occasionally one hears that a country like Germany produced all their power with renewables. Then, when looking at the details one finds that this was achieved for 20 minutes. The critical factor is energy storage, and that has not been solved. Many years ago (I think it was about 15), I was at an engineering design software conference. In a session showing the software being used in the design of wind turbines I asked about storage. I was basically told to shut up about that. I think one guy in the room actually sneered at me. The problem is that adding storage massively increases the cost. MASSIVELY! Don't ever forget that when you pay for electricity from a utility you are paying for the RELIABLE delivery of electrons to your home or place of business, not just the generation. There is a lot that goes into that. Another thing that I find curious is that the cost of electricity from wind seems to be higher than the cost from conventional sources. There was an article in the US based Wall Street Journal from yesterday title "Why Is New York Paying So Much for Wind Power?" In addition, several wind projects on the East Coast of the US have been cancelled due to cost considerations.
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  4246. Your last segment is interesting. You are either listening to me or reading Zeihan. I personally don't believe that Xi will survive much longer. I also think that there is a force in China that you have not considered and that is organized crime. The CCP has become a totally corrupt organization. Every once in a while, I see evidence of organized crime activity on this channel and others. When those people can't get paid, they will come out in force. You should look into it.
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  4247. Why are you so tied into Windows 10? I have two PCs from the same manufacturer. Both have i7 CPUs. Both have the same amount of RAM. The newer one, with Windows 11 runs much better than the older one with Windows 10.
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  4248. I am not, in any way, a supporter of the current regime in Iran. That said, the Shah was basically, at the end, ruling through one of the larger secret police organizations in the world at the time. I understand, and generally agree with, the aversion to communists, but all was not sweetness and light under the last Shah. As for the situation with Iraq, and Afghanistan, that was totally the Global War on Terrorism (GWT). It was a very ironic situation. I remember discussing the presidential candidates in 2000. George W. Bush was for reducing America's involvement in the world and specifically against "nation building". The 9/11 happened and the GWT. That was a detour. There is another irony. George W. Bush's father, George H. W. Bush was a real internationalist president the US had. He was the last president we had with the background to understand and steer the US and the world to something new after the end of the Cold War. He was voted out of office. His opponent's catchphrase was "It's the economy, stupid". All US presidents since then have been progressively more populist. US defense posture, especially its navy, has shifted to one of policing the seas to power projection. China and Russia want a multipolar world order. They will get it. We had the US led order, but that was only for the last 30 years or so. Prior to that we had a bipolar world order. That was only about 45 years. Prior to that we had imperialism. That is the norm for human history and long predates nation states. By the way, China and Russia did not do so well under imperialism. There are reasons for that, mostly being geographic. Nothing has changed, and they will likely fare poorly in the milieu to come.
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  4249. Sabine, you misunderstand. Trump was joking. In addition, there are real problems with the whole testing regime. Here in the US there are several examples of problems. In one, a couple signed up for a test. They waited in line for 2 hours. They left without being tested and then got a letter in the mail saying they tested positive. In other cases I am aware of, people were tested positive, then negative. This testing process is fraught with error. We don't even know how large the error is. As a scientist, you must appreciate that this us unacceptable. Medicine is not a science like physics. Many things have been done as medical practice in the past that have been shown to be horribly wrong, and ruined peoples lives. I have seen many of these and heard of many more.
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  4250. If you care about this then you are a shallow person. This is not news. It is a family problem.
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  4251. Just a comment on your title. Israel has never been able to afford to defend itself. Don't forget that Israel is one of the largest recipients of military aid from the US and has been for decades. It would not exist without that aid.
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  4252. The most wide scale military confrontation in the post-WWII era? As President Joe likes to say: Come on man! Are you forgetting Korea, Vietnam, the Iran-Iraq War, and for sheer scale both US invasions of Iraq? You can say the largest conflict in Europe since WWII, but that is all.
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  4253. Full self-driving is a total scam. That plus all the electronics are just a way to justify high prices. A friend of mine actually was looking into a large screen that modeled the Tesla screen for his ICE vehicle. It was only a few hundred dollars. If the goal of EVs is to lower CO2 emissions, there are lots of other ways to go. First, and most importantly. reduce the power of the motors. That would increase the range without any new battery chemistry. It would also probably lower the cost. Even in ICE vehicles, the cars have way too much power. You, in fact, cannot use all that power legally. I had an early 2000s ICE vehicle with a 3.5L engine that produced 250HP. That car was very peppy. I replaced it with a vehicle with a 3.6L engine that produces 306HP. Same gas mileage. With the new engine technology, they could have put in a 3.0L engine producing 250HP or so and increased the fuel efficiency by about 20%. No one cares about global warming, no matter what they say.
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  4254.  @Fleshox19-uz3qt  I tend to agree with your comment. China, at least under the CCP, is not worth dealing with in the long run. Unfortunately, the CCP has poisoned the people to such an extent that it will take a long time to rectify attitudes even if the CCP goes away. The Chinese who understand how things should work are all leaving. One thing that cannot be underestimated is the IP theft. I have seen it up close in multiple contexts. This has actually hurt the Chinese people in China. It prevents them from progressing up the value chain, which was the whole point of integration. It is something that has been an issue for a long time, and Trump was not the first to point it out.
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  4255. No! Don't make it shorter. Who are these people who want it shorter? There is a show I like a lot on another channel, a commercial one, that was shortened. The outcry was loud and it is back to where it was. This program is quite informative. I don't always agree, but I do always learn something.
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  4256. The Wagner Group were decimated in Syria by the US Army there. Don't over play them.
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  4257. At about 17:30 you mention Fukuyama. I get very exercised at even the mention of this thesis. For one thing, the term is just plain stupid. For another, the idea that one system will take over everything is just plain stupid.
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  4258. This is Russia. Will we ever know what happened to Prigozhin? I doubt it. Remember the Nord Stream pipeline? We still don't know definitively what happened. And don't make a big deal out of journalists' or intelligence agencies' pronouncements when they have no assets on the ground. It is just analyst speculation. With the plethora of sources available to the public anyone's speculation is probably just as good.
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  4259. It was the CIA that coordinated the Messi situation. It is always the CIA. This whole incident shows why China will never rival the US in particular and the "west" in general. It is a cultural thing. The comment about the civilizational "level" is uniquely telling.
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  4260. The guy from MSNBC talking at about 7:00 is a prime example of the ignorance of the left and most of the MSM. That Trump says Gaza would be better overseen by the US is obviously true. Even before October 7 the place was a mess. When the Israelis left, they left behind a lot of infrastructure and productive facilities that the Palestinians trashed. Prior to the attack it had become a dependent cesspool. That does not even begin to address the horrible things Hamas did to their own citizens.
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  4261. The man at the beginning is hilarious. I know it may be ironic, but it is reminiscent of the videos coming out of Russia addressing Putin. Oh, great and powerful one, I have a problem. Please help me. The local officials are not helping me. They are bad. Better appeal to the emperor or czar. This is why expectations that China, or Russia, will become a "liberal democracy" when their current dictator falls are false. The people neither have understanding nor experience of democracy. They are both basically peasant societies. Recall what happened after the Qing dynasty, or the Romanovs, fell. In China you had Sun Yat-sen who was a socialist. For him elections were secondary to seizing power. He didn't live long enough for us to find out. China was ruled by warlords. In Russia you had the "dictatorship of the proletariat".
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  4262. Love Tulsi. Good thing the Democrats would never pick her as their presidential candidate. No disrespect to her. She would be a tough candidate to beat. Wish she would move to the Republican side. We have a lot of potential candidates for the next presidential election. We have governors, representative and senators that could make a compelling case. Keep speaking out Tulsi, You are one of the good ones.
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  4263. This is NOT worse than the Yom Kippur war. It is bad, but not an existential threat to Israel on a par with that war. This is a syndrome. Everything happening today is "worse" than what went before. Frankly, wars have been getting less deadly, in general. I am not trying to minimize anyone's pain and suffering, but the numbers just don't hold up.
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  4264.  @MuscleKrampus  Well, as to your point 1, that totally ignores the purpose of military action. If a situation gets to a place where military action is needed, then the main purpose of the military is to engage and destroy the other party's military. Once that is done, you can do whatever you want on the territory of your adversary. That means engaging it where you can be successful. Look at the four counteroffensives Ukraine has had. The first two were successful because of subterfuge (a good thing in war) and because of the unpreparedness and incompetence of the Russians. The third (in the south) was unsuccessful because the Russians were prepared, and Ukraine has not been given the tools necessary (mainly airpower) to break through such prepared defenses. Then you have the latest, in Kursk, which to some extent mirrors the first two. On all fronts Ukraine is also attritting Russia's military. With the west cutting off resources to Russia, both financial and technological, it will be only a matter of time before Russia's military collapses. Let's hope that is sooner rather than later. As for point 2, well put.
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  4265. The shared bike and car ideas really originated in the US. I still occasionally see ads for a shared car company. This might have some application in cities, but is mostly useless.
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  4266. I have only one quibble with your comment. To say that NO responsible economist or financial agency ever took China's numbers seriously is to ignore their actions. In fact, many have been repeating the CCP line for years and are only now coming to the realization that the data is all fake. I have seen the transformation over the last six months or so.
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  4267. My understanding is that the German PM has already said that attacks by Ukraine on military and industrial targets in Russia are justified. Where does the interviewer get this stuff?
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  4268.  @operator9858  Could be.
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  4269. What these guys harp on is the price, and that is a deal breaker. The other aspect is the number of vehicles. We have over 200M light vehicles in this country. In a good year 18M new cars are sold. So, if all our production went electric, it would take years. The other aspect is that replacing all our cars with electrics would break the grid. We would need many more nukes to make it work.
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  4270. The idea that there is no place for another phone platform is ridiculous. Apple and Google were not the first platforms. Remember Blackberry? They were the top guys for a long time. This is an industry that is ripe for new entrants. People generally change out their phones every two years or so. Musk has enough of a global presence to pull this off, if he decides to do so.
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  4271. Appears to be coming to an end? What is it with the media. This is not a legal proceeding where, at least in the west, one is innocent until proven guilty. The media supposedly has a lot more information than most of us but cannot make a definitive statement. Stupid. No wonder mainstream media is on the wane.
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  4272. Actually, the first war with Russia (WW1) turned out quite well for the Germans. They gained a lot of territory, which was, of course, lost when the western allies defeated them.
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  4273.  @_hunterz_  The Mig21 is a very old aircraft. That is no feat of arms.
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  4274.  @soulsbourne  Good idea. Actually, this would mirror what we did in the Cold War against the USSR. We based intermediate range nuclear missiles in Europe which made the Soviets very nervous. This led to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Perhaps something like this might happen in Taiwan. Who knows?
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  4275. @Shahin Hossain This is not 1962, in case you hadn't noticed. The vast pars of India you refer to are not economically significant, and it would take a large part of their forces to do so. What do they achieve? This whole situation is just lunacy on the part of the Chinese.
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  4276. You didn't mention one of the most important things differentiating modern wars from past wars. That is population. Even just considering the first half of the 20th century, the main perpetrators of WWII had growing populations that were outstripping the capacity of their lands. This was true of Nazi Germany. Remember Hitler's concept of "lebensraum"? The Japanese invaded Manchuria and then sent over lots of people to farm the land. The Soviets developed their style of warfare in both WWI and WWII because they had a relatively massive and growing population. None of this is true any longer. The world population is about to peak (or maybe has) and is then going to decline. In fact, in Northeast Asia and Europe (including Russia and Ukraine) we are seeing large population declines. In Asia, the only major country with reasonable demographics today is India. China is an interesting case. They claim a population of about 1.4B, but several independent analyses using indirect data claim it may only be 800M. Some common people within China are now starting to believe that as well based on their personal observations. There is speculation that China will be down to 500M by the end of this century, or that the Han ethnicity will effectively disappear by then. The Russian ethnicity, prior to this war, was already on a trajectory to be a minority (albeit still the largest) in the Russian Federation. The war will only accelerate that trend.
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  4277. One constantly sees Russian front line soldiers complaining about not getting food or water for days. The Ukrainians get pizza delivery. Who do you think is going to win?
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  4278. Is Texas getting warmer? Any data for that?
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  4279. Jake, another great interview. I have subscribed to Zack's channel. He seems to be a really well-grounded person. By the way, what is the blue and white flag he has in the background?
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  4280.  @eduardost.  Thanks.
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  4281. When they start feeding school kids MREs, then you know the end is near.
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  4282. What is a "one way attack drone". Do you mean suicide drone? Was it a drone or some sort of cruise missile? A drone is generally understood to be a remotely piloted vehicle. So, after that opening there are more questions than answers.
    1
  4283.  @morganangel340  Problem? I got no problems.
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  4284.  @pablosskates7067  My investment advisor has been out of anything to do with China for a few years now. He is very careful about that. He was saying for a couple of years before Xi got his third term that he hoped Xi would be successful in doing so. His reasoning is that Xi would tank the economy of China, and to him (and me) that is a good thing.
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  4285. All this weather related information is interesting, but to talk about "normal" weather is not useful. In addition, meteorological records in China do not go back very far and are thus not very informative. In any statistical analysis one has to look at not just the expected value but also the variance and confidence intervals.
    1
  4286.  @AskMississippiAskMississippi  You are a fool. If you believe that you are also a racist. When people of color stop coming into the US, legally or illegally, then you can talk. Otherwise, you demean yourself and anyone who believes in liberal values.
    1
  4287.  @brianisaac8613  Farage is a nationalist, not a rightist. He is also free market. If that is right, then so be it. It is also the correct stance to take. Socialist policies NEVER work.
    1
  4288. Tomahawk cruise missiles use terrain matching guidance. This is far more robust than GPS, which can be interfered with.
    1
  4289. Food security was a concern of the CCP well before the typhon season. That is the motivation for the "returning forests to farmland" and the terraced rice cultivation in mountainous terrain. On the forest front I recall that the CCP spent vast sums over long periods of time to create the forests. Now, they flood the grain production areas. The CCP is, how should I put it, stupid. There is no better term for their policies.
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  4290.  @PapaFranku-qe2sc  Sounds like democracy to me.
    1
  4291.  @PapaFranku-qe2sc  That is the problem with autocracies. The same is happening in Russia. Actually, it happens in Cuba and Venezuela as well. They are both turning into aristocracies. This is what the "dictatorship of the proletariat" gets you.
    1
  4292. The quantum internet is basically useless. Sending information over a network, one has to assume that the message has been intercepted. This is the very nature of the Internet. Anyone, with the right equipment (which many hackers use) can intercept messages. Also, many intelligence agencies routinely intercept network traffic. So, in most, if not all cases, you will find the message has been intercepted. In fact, the Internet works by storing and then forwarding message packets at each node of the system. I expect that this will have the effect of "making" a measurement at each node.
    1
  4293. @Shimmy Shai Precisely what I was thinking.
    1
  4294. Talking real money here he says. That reminds me of old saw "a billion here, a billion there, now you're talking real money".
    1
  4295. If, as she says, there are is a preponderance of young people brought up under western values, why aren't they fighting to preserve those values? A number of Afghan soldiers have gone over to the Taliban. It seems that only the elite forces are capable of opposing the Taliban. Afghanistan will have the government they want. If enough of the population do not stand up to the Taliban, then that is their fate.
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  4296. Just on Ben's last point on the march by first responders in NY, have there not been protests like this before social media? Come on. Did we not communicate before that? The issue there is not really about vaccines. Vaccines are great, but not foolproof. I have been vaccinated. Natural immunity, that is having had COVID and then recovering is definitively shown to be as good or better. There are also cases where there are health reasons that indicate that an individual should not get the vaccine. These are rare, but are valid. In addition, there are religious and other ethical reasons people do not want the vaccine. These are all valid. I know this and have not had a facebook account for well over a decade. In fact, I had one for only a short while and there was a problem, so I got off. I have also been off twitter for at least a year. So, to posit that this is where people get their information is an insult to me, and many others. It is really the media that reacts to facebook and twitter that is the problem.
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  4297. Don't hold back Silver Fox. Tell us what you really think of Labor. If you want to understand Labor, its policies and particularly its inner workings, the best example is the Bolsheviks in Russia from 1917 on. None of their major leaders had ever really done honest work or run anything. Party discipline was everything, and I mean everything. Of course, back then, the penalty for not following the party line was death. Fortunately, for current Labor dissidents, they have taken away the guns. Knives and axes are still available, though.
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  4298. The other problem with all these government-to-government talks, especially considering the rhetoric coming out of China (my gawd, the level of communist claptrap coming out of China is legendary; it really takes me back) is that on the western side real decisions are made by companies while in China they are made by the CCP. This should be a red flag for the EU (and US) and it needs to be stopped.
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  4299.  @CharlieBam  Very good points.
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  4300. Very good take on the issue. I am a supporter of Israel, so take what I say with that in mind. I am also definitely NOT a supporter of the Palestinians. Beyond what Peter points out in the current day, this situation with Israel is as old as, well, Israel. This split between "secular" and religious Jews is all over the Bible. It is also one of the reasons (the main reason?) for disasters Jews have suffered throughout history. Layer on top of that the current (last 100 years) situation. One of the differences between the situation of Israel today is that it is... what? Is it an ethnic state? Is it a religious state? Do you see what I mean? What are Israel and the Jews in our modern context? Read the history of modern Israel. It is a set of contradictions wrapped in an enigma with a dose of real tragedy thrown in. So, Peter has it right. Is all of that history, which by the way is what garners support for the state of Israel, going to mean much to younger generations. People already question why we should support countries like the gulf states, which are illiberal, tribal absolute monarchies. This last point is the most important and applies to almost all (maybe all) of our major geopolitical tensions around the world. The Cold War was a conflict between two ideologies vying for world domination. The current conflicts are between two civilizational models, with only a hint of the old ideology left. Over the last 30+ years the US has been open to working with all sides. This has not worked. We see that it has not worked. The Chinese and Russians want a multi-polar world. They will get it. As Peter points out so well, that would result in self-interested imperialism and probably colonialism. Is that what they really want? They did not do so well the last time, and there is no reason to believe that it will be any different this time. Back to the bad old days. I mention all this because, in the case of Israel, as we go forward, the costs of supporting them will be all out of proportion to the benefits. The US, and the west in general, already paid a high price in the 1970s. A very high price. The Holocaust was still fresh in the minds of the electorate back then. Will the west do it again?
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  4301.  @Gridlocked  Gasoline prices tripled. Massive inflation. Reduced GDP growth. Shortages of a critical material that his everyone and every sector of the economy.
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  4302.  @Gridlocked  Well, I was referring to the 1970s. That was not the case then. Go back and read my original comment. As for gasoline and diesel prices in the US, they are up 75% above where they were before COVID. GDP growth is certainly not at its peak. In 2017 and 2018 t was higher. In 2019 it was a little above where it is now.
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  4303. I just saw an interview with Ron Blagojevich in which he seems to have moved over. Looking at what John Fetterman is saying in interviews, I wonder if he may be next.
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  4304. While you are quite correct that Fascism and Nazism are not the same thing, they do share a lot of ideology and structure. Look at the US and UK. Both are representative democracies, but there are lots of differences. On the other hand, the UK was an empire. Don't forget that prior to WWI and WWII there were massively popular passivist movements in the US. This is why the US did not get involved until attacked. In fact, after Pearl Harbor, the US did not declare war on Germany, a Japanese ally, but the other way around. One of the reasons for the passivist movements in the US was the reluctance to support European Imperial powers. It was the imperialism that rankled in the US. After WWII the US successfully pressured the UK to wind down its empire. So, while the systems were similar they are not the same, much like Fascism and Nazism. So, while you are correct, harping on that as the reason for the machinations in Austria and Ethiopia had little to do with the differences in the systems and more to do with geopoitics.
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  4305. This was never really considered a 5th generation fighter India was actually involved in the project, with funding, and they withdrew. The ended up buying French Rafale fighters. Just like their Chinese counterparts, the Russian military is known to be corrupt and incompetent.
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  4306. Georgina. When I lived in the UK. earlier in this century. my sons who were young then, called all pigeons Georgina. By the way, my older son married a girl from Georgia. He met her when he traveled there after he started working.
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  4307. Huawei are among the biggest thieves of intellectual property in the world. They are NOT technically advanced, as their smartphones and now vehicles show.
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  4308. I had a friend who was a Captain in the Israeli artillery. In the 1973 war he was on the Golan Heights. He lost the lower part of one of his legs. He shot the guy who shot him with his 7.62 rifle. He said he was glad he had that caliber, since he only had one shot at it, and the guy went right down.
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  4309. Exactly! Women bear some responsibility when they consent to this. They must know the possibility for misuse of the content. Most relationships do not last. There have to be some moral guidelines.
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  4310. shotguns work. like shooting trap.
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  4311.  @eds5582  I haven't observed more H2O vapor from where I am. If it is a global problem, I should have. I check this stuff all the time, and have for years. Data please.
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  4312.  @geoffwales8646  What. Who are you talking to, Write a cogent comment or refrain.
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  4313.  @geoffwales8646  You have your opinion. Calling someone a liar doesn't make them one. Give an example of a distortion. I have seen this information from other, very reputable, sources. I also happen to know enough, and have been involved in enough projects, where this is borne out.
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  4314.  @TeamAlleiahFamily  Increases from when? Those NASA satellites have not been orbiting that long, in terms of climate. I know, I worked on some. Your mention of your personal observations in the Philippines is no more valid than what you say that i am doing. As for rats covering the planet, that is still part of the natural world, As far as I can tell, we weren't dropped here from space. Successful species always affect their environment. Look at deer (I hunt them so I have studied this). When they are successful, the overgraze their environment. Then the population collapses. They have no tools to avoid this. Humans do. We grow more food than ever. If the climate warms, that will open more land up to agriculture. In addition, human population is predicted to grow a little more and then peak. Then it will shrink, as is happening in several countries such as Germany, China and Japan. As societies get richer they tend to have fewer children. Even India is getting its population under control. It is still above replacement rate, but getting close. This all sounds like Malthus. Predicting the future, especially where human society and technology is concerned, is a fools game.
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  4315.  @TeamAlleiahFamily  I truly pity you i
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  4316.  @geoffwales8646  Well, he has a PhD in Ecology. He has been studying the environment and working on protecting it for decades. I would say that is a good hint.
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  4317.  @TeamAlleiahFamily  How long have they been carrying out these observations? I worked on some of these satellites. In climate terms, the record from satellites is not significant.
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  4318.  @geoffwales8646  Agreed. Have relatives who are farmers. Over the last 30 years I have seen how their practices have evolved. On the other hand, there is data, not from Moore, but from other scientists, that the edges of the deserts are greening because of CO2. I am led to believe that plants that get more CO2 need less water. There is a lot going on here.
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  4319.  @geoffwales8646  Consensus in science is not the measure of truth, especially in climate science. It is a science of models, not experiments. It is much more like cosmology or anthropology. As new data comes in the science can be turned on its head. At present the models do not agree with what has happened in the past. As one who has worked with modeling of scientific processes for 40 years, I can tell you that this field has not matured to the point where it can be said to be settled.
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  4320.  @geoffwales8646  Not arguing for more CO2. Just observing the effects of elevated levels. Extreme temperatures have not been observed where i live. I have not turned on the AC for three years. The year before that i had it on for four days total. I manage the temp inside my home by various means, none being active. Don't go by the average temperature. What should really be reported is the 80% confidence level. I say 80% because temperature does vary widely. Even the range is deceptive. Extremes in places that normally have extreme temperatures are not a good indicator. The best indicator is the temperature in temperate zones. In the early 1970s I spent a summer in Greece. On the islands the temperature in the shade would routinely be 110deg F. That is the climate there, and has been for centuries. This is just an example. To get back to the original point, looking at CO2 levels through history is essential. Understanding the effect on the flora and fauna is also essential. Current levels have been on the low end. This is fact.
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  4321. Why do you mention "clean air, clean water" in terms of a climate debate? CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to life on the planer. How clean the water is has little or nothing to do with climate. In fact, our automobiles put out more CO2 than vehicles made before emissions controls. Because of clean air concerns we modified them to not put out a bunch of other stuff and ended up putting out more CO2. This was deemed a good thing, since, again, CO2 is not a pollutant. The only reason to talk about :clean air, clean water" in the context of climate change is to widen the support base, not for any rea connection between the two.
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  4322. All I hear is cyber, cyber, cyber. What is this? For a nation at war does this matter? The military does not run on the public networks. This does not affect the ability of the military to wage war. It can affect civilian infrastructure, but this can also be mitigated. Cyber is also a two-way street. Initiating cyber warfare can also massively harm the attacker. It is men and weapons that win wars. People who bring this cyber thing up are either ignorant or just echoing the latest talking points.
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  4323. Talk about COVID funding makes me mad. People complain about funding for Ukraine, but that is about what the COVID funding for education which we know was not effective. Ukraine, whatever you think about it, is actually consequential. It's a real war and we have an obligation to Ukraine. On top of that there is all the fraud in COVID funding. That is more than what was wasted in this education line item and more than the war in Ukraine. I only mention Ukraine for context. If you really want to get upset just look at what was spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That is well north of $1T.
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  4324. If I recall correctly, I often disagree with Mr. Mearsheimer. In this case, I completely agree with him. On the Ukranian casualties, I am glad to hear someone like him point out the obvious. I have watched a lot of Ukranian content, especially from some Ukrainian individuals. They inadvertently allude to the massive Ukranian casualties, and sometimes even to the futility of it all. Trump is completely correct that the killing has to stop. Both countries were in demographic decline before the war. Now it is much worse. They may have to bring in polygamy to rebuild their populations. Neither the Russian nor the Ukranian armies are good at offense. To put it mildly, they both suck. I'll leave it at that.
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  4325. Actually, most governments in the EU are center, or center right, I believe. What one has to remember is that Ukraine is not the primary determinant of the vote for most people. There is an old saying, all politics is local. The right, or center right, parties have that have done well have been successful primarily because of the failure of EU immigration and environmental policies. This is not about Ukraine.
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  4326.  @SeanEustace-zk3mc  You certainly have a different view of economics. You really need to enhance your understanding of deflation. I don't know what blockchain has to do with any of this. Perhaps you don't have a grasp of the technology. Bitcoin has been on blockchain from the beginning and just look at the roller coaster it has been through. As far as I know, the US was on the gold standard until 1971, so I am not sure of what that has to do with anything.
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  4327. You say about Blackford that he was either poorly briefed or lying. It does not matter what you are briefed, your words are your words. He lied. If he had any issue because he was not briefed, or poorly briefed (or lied to), then he could always say he didn't have any up-to-date information on the topic. Instead he repeated some drivel about everything being fine and right after that the Treasurer is arrested. Amazing.
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  4328. This is a low information channel. If you hadn't noticed, manufacturing is moving out of China. Some of it back to the US, a lot of it to places like Vietnam, the rest of Southeast Asia and India. Recently I purchased three battery powered garden tools from a company based in China. Two were made in Vietnam. I checked the company website and they were even opening plants in the US. Currently China is in collapse. Demographics has a lot to do with it. The housing market will NOT recover. And that is an outsized part of the economy. Internal consumption is a bust. Don't forget, there is little social welfare support in China. Property was the only way most people could invest. That will drag everything down. The new espionage law has meant that many foreigners are leaving the country, and companies are reluctant to send anyone else. None of this is the fault of foreign governments, but is a result of policies the CCP put in place. I could go on, but this is already too long. China is toast.
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  4329.  @itsnotonepieceitsthatpiece  No they haven't. People have been pointing out some long-term problems, such as demographics, but they have continued to invest. The military has continually been beating the drum of China's rise in that sphere. What is going on now is driven by policies internal to China that have caused a reaction and a reimagining of economic relationships.
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  4330.  @itsnotonepieceitsthatpiece  Well, the causes of the problems in China are actually quite clear. I don't know who you are talking about who has been preaching the demise of China for a decade and a half. There is lots of talk about China because of the central role it has come to play in industrial supply chains. There is no mystery or controversy in that regard.
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  4331.  @itsnotonepieceitsthatpiece  Clear to who? Who has been talking this up for many years? Even analysts who expect China's eventual demise, were talking about a long-term issues. Do you have any examples of people many years ago talking about China's downfall? All the talk in the past has been about when China will surpass the US. Well, that talk is no longer heard. You should look at the relevant history. At the beginning of the 20th century the US was the workshop of the world. Really, the numbers I have seen showed 50% of manufacturing. Then, after WWII, it was Japan. There was talk about Japan overtaking the US. Now the talk, and this is recent, is that China is about to experience a lost decade just as Japan did in the 1990s. And, just like Japan, they are experiencing a massive demographic decline at the same time. The difference is that Japan had become rich before they got old. China did not. Look at per-capita income. China, according to their own figures, has 600M poor (and these are very poor). That's 43% of the population. The highest percentage of "poor" in the US in recent decades is 10%, and a majority of them would be classified as lower middle class in much of the world. I have traveled extensively abroad and lived abroad. That is no exaggeration.
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  4332. The way the CCP is going, it will be Taiwan that controls the mainland, not the other way around. The dreams of the leaders who fled to Formosa to escape the CCP of one day returning may be fulfilled.
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  4333.  @pulsatingsausageboy2076  Come on man! If you are relying on the Russians then you really don't have a clue.
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  4334. @markamiller1970 In my previous replies and the discussion that followed I left one thing out. What the speaker said about Biden having to give direction and a goal is what Hodges, and a host of other former generals, have been saying almost from the beginning. That is how our system of government is supposed to work. Did you ever take a civics class? So, if you hadn't realized all that, then you are either very poorly informed on the issues and the history or our conflicts since WWII, or you are a partisan hack.
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  4335.  @dinovolla9999  You may want to be more specific.
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  4336.  @momwithaplan1287  So, instead of just using the troll trope, why don't you point out what is wrong with what he said. You paint yourself as a low information commenter. General Ben Hodges, and most other senior military retired men (current ones cannot speak out) I have heard from (Petraeus, Keane, etc.) have said the same thing. If the goal is the help Ukraine defeat Russia, then Biden has to state that to the American people. He has to lobby Congress to agree. Then they will allocate the necessary resources. As it is, it is the dribs and drabs approach and restrictions on weapon use are just allowing Ukraine to hold on. Are you an American? Do you have any idea of how the system works? And really, how many of these conflicts broke out under Trump. Look at the record.
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  4337. The Soviets supplied jets to our adversaries in Korea and Vietnam. How is this different?
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  4338.  @giopruneda7266  That is not the point. Those were major geopolitical conflicts in the context of the Soviets wanting to take over the world, much like China today. I lived through the later and have been involved in the systems used to deter the Soviets. So, I don't believe there is any difference. Russia might bluster, but to bring about the destruction of the motherland because of the provision of some jets is not in the cards.
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  4339. So, TIK, I generally like your stuff. This video is very informative. One thing that does rankle me is the democracy comments. So, let's see, you are not a fan of democracy. Do you have any idea of the alternatives? I am sure you do. There is monarchy, where the monarch is the government and the head of state. There is dictatorship. There is oligarchy. And of course, there is anarchy. I think that what Churchill said about democracy is correct. From the way you talk, I expect you are an anarchist. I wonder which type. And don't tell me there were humans in a primeval condition before states and hierarchies. There were hierarchies. Thes were based on family ties and were called tribes. Is that where we should go?
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  4340. Don't make a mistake. The price of oil is not the profit. You have to subtract production costs. For the Russians, that averaged $40 per barrel. So, at $60 the Russians make only $20 each. At the peak they were making about $80 per barrel. This puts a massive crimp in their ability to fund the war, but gives them something to live on.
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  4341. I like this channel, but the things you say you can't show and say are just bull. For one thing, I see and hear these things on other channels. And to claim you can't say Taliban just makes no sense. What is going on? You need to explain it in more detail. You are not the only one.
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  4342. Keep it up. The idea that socialism/communism is a leftist, or liberal, ideology is pure bunk. The Soviet Union and China today are good examples. Even Russia today is a good example. The suppression of individual liberties and the centralization of the economy look exactly like Nazi Germany. The use of patently false propaganda fits right in there with Goebbels' rhetoric. Lavrov was recently laughed at when, at a ministerial conference of the G20, he claimed that Ukraine attacked Russia. I even see reports that the Russians are now idolizing Stalin again. In Russia, the "oligarchs" (they really aren't true oligarchs) simply do the state's bidding. If they don't, they are arrested or fall out of windows of upper floors of buildings. Some analysts claim that to be an oligarch in Russia today you have to give half your wealth to Putin. This does not go to help the state. Again, a parallel with China. It is projected that CCP officials have secreted over $1T (maybe as much as $3T) out of the country. These regimes are based on rampant corruption of the most basic kind. The reason I follow this channel, and many other historical channels, and read lots of history and biography, is that it informs us in understanding current conditions. That and I really enjoy it. So, good work. I don't always agree with you (but more often do), but I always find your content interesting.
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  4343. War fatigue in the US? How long were we in Vietnam? How long in Iraq? How long in Afghanistan? How about Korea? Oh, yes, we are still there, and that war has never officially ended.
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  4344. Looking at the demographics, it was not only white men. Trump got 50% of Hispanic males and 24% of black males. The white male count was 60%.
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  4345. Democracy in China? Citizens, not slaves? Don't these people know that democracy is so passe. The CCP says so. They have a superior plan.
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  4346. I am glad there were no speed cameras around when I lived in the UK. This was st the turn of the millennium I remember going over 130 MPH on the M4 racing Jaguars in my Alfa Romeo GTV. It was thrilling. Once, I was on a backroad near Winchester. I was going about 100 MPH with my sons in back. We had Led Zeppelin on the stereo. I wasn't quite sure where to turn. I asked my sons if they knew, and they did not. Then I said, we're going 100 MPH on an English country backroad, with Led Zeppelin blaring on the stereo, so who cares. They answered back, yeah dad.
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  4347. The comment about Mike Johnson is way off base. First off, there were a lot of political things going on. The Ukraine aid was tied up with aid to Israel and Taiwan as well as the US border. The legislation went through many iterations in both the Senate and the House, some driven by the White House. At one point they were all put together. In the final votes for all of those aid packages, which were overwhelmingly positive, the bills were separated. That is politics in the US, and Mr. Pfarrer should know that. Second, there is a real problem in the US administration. This has been pointed out by people like Gen. Ben Hodges and many others. President Biden does not have a strategic vision for the war in Ukraine. None! His only statement on that is that we will support Ukraine as long as it takes. He never defines "it". A lot of it comes down to Jake Sullivan and Biden's other advisors who are, to a large extent, holdovers from the Obama administration. Look into that and things will become clear. That is a disaster. In the bill that was finally passed there was a requirement for the President to produce a strategy document. I think the requirement was 45 days. I have not seen that or any discussion on it. The administration just keeps reacting to events. This gives the Russians the upper hand. By the way, Speaker Johnson gave a statement, you can find it on the Internet, after meeting with Zalenski. Everything he said in that statement was right on the money. He was not against support to Ukraine, but he did want to know what the strategy was. Why did the Administration want to spend taxpayer money on this? That is actually the main role of Congress (or any legislative body in the democratic west). It all comes down to the strategic goal. If it is in line with what the Ukrainians want (victory including the withdrawal of all Russian troops), and the Congress agrees (that is how the US system works, by the way), then the US government could do a lot more, including perhaps some direct involvement. We need a goal. The US generally does wonderful things when there is a clear goal.
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  4348. How many high-performance single engine fighters are currently being deployed or developed around the world? Not many. Most seem to be twin engine designs.
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  4349. The Pentagon playing cards are a tradition. In Iraq there was a deck of cards with wanted Iraqi officials, including Saddam Hussein.
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  4350. Well, maybe Germany will unite Europe, as the EU has been trying to do.
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  4351. The massive funding for fundamental physics in the US after WWII was a response to the success of the atom bomb, and fear that the Soviets would catch up and surpass us. That was starting to wane as early as the 1970s, and when the US decided not to build a successor to the Tevatron it really was a seminal event. It was a Cold War thing. I actually miss the Cold War. I got to a lot of very interesting research with unlimited funding well into the 1980s. I even met my first phenomenologists back then. This was not however, fundamental physics but applied science and engineering. I think we will find a lot more progress in that direction than in fundamental physics. We have two very successful theories in fundamental physics, General Relativity (GR) and the Standard Model of Particle Physics (SM). GR is over 100 years old, and SM is over 50 years old. The physics community has been trying to replace these for decades now, with no success. I am just seeing reports that, for example, loop quantum gravity has suffered what might be a fatal setback. String theory, as Eric points out, has not made any testable predictions that have been experimentally verified. Eric sees through this "name worship" we are experiencing in basic science. It is toxic.
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  4352.  @NankerPhelge65  I don't know what that emoji means. Use your words, as I used to say to my children.
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  4353. Many decades ago, I smoked weed. So did almost everyone I knew. When they did surveys in our high school, they determined that 85% or more smoked it as well. And this was in one of the best school districts in the country. I actually did not find it hard to quit when I wanted to, and I had been doing it for a while. While I was at university, when we would run out of money and still wanted weed, one of my housemates would get stems and seeds from his dealer. My housemate was a double major in physics and chemistry. He would cook down the stuff on the stove with acetone and alcohol. Dangerous, I know, but he never blew up the house. It got us high but also often gave us headaches afterwards (kind of like a hangover). Ah, those were the days. I wouldn't suggest smoking it, but then I also gave up alcohol. That too I didn't find hard. I know that is not typical.
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  4354. Movies I haven't seen of Soviet troops using these show them holding the drum.
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  4355. China is a communist country. What is all this talk about "private property"?
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  4356. My snacks are either olives or nuts (usually peanuts). I use no sugar in my cooking. There is a small amount of sugar in some of the things I use, such as teriyaki sauce or fish sauce. But I don't use much of these.
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  4357. KT, Chinese technology is utter crap. In the military sphere it is based on rip-offs of Soviet/Russian technology (see how well that is doing in Ukraine). In the commercial sphere it is all based on Western investment. Before the opening to the West, they could barely make pig iron (look it up, Great Leap Forward). Now with the sanctions and the threat to Taiwan, they are going down. China and Russia together are a mid-sized power compared to the Anglosphere and EU combined. Militarily they are second or third rate. Don't forget, we have been training and reforming the Ukranian military for a long time. This is the difference between Western power and Russin/Chinese power. China has not fought a war since 1979, when they invaded Vietnam. They were trounced. Their much-vaunted navy has a majority of littoral ships. Are we going to invade China? Why would anyone? I could go on, as I am wont to do, but I will leave it at that.
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  4358. Your idea of how security clearances work is so naïve that is laughable. Grow up and do some real research.
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  4359. Hivemind (is that what you are called?), you should read George Friedman's book "The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond". I think you would really appreciate it.
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  4360. At about 11:50 Stenger mentions that countries representing a majority of the population of the world (referring, I assume to India and China) are not part of the sanctions. This is a foolish way to think of it. India and China together have less than the GDP of the US. Add in the EU and Japan, and a vast majority of the world GDP is against Russia. This is the right way to consider it, if you want to play the numbers game. It is economic power as opposed to raw population that has always determined the geopolitical situation in the world.
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  4361. Why is this such a problem for you, Sabine? What you are experiencing is a new phenomenon. You are caught up in the information society trap. It is not only the flat earthers. There are lots of people who hold lots of "strange" beliefs, and they have always been there. The only thing is that now you can sit there in Germany, or just about anywhere in the world, and review statistics on them. It all started in the US when the government loosened control on the airwaves. That was the birth of talk radio. I was born in Washington, DC, lived there and in the Northeast and upper Midwest. I have also traveled extensively abroad from my teen years (first trip 51 years ago). So, I had been exposed to a lot of different ideas. In the mid-1990s I was working for a large company and had some customers in the "deep south" of the US for the first time. As I was driving around in my rental car, I turned on the radio and heard opinions and ideas I had never heard before. They were always there, but getting information on them was difficult. You had to be there. No longer. So, don't sweat it.
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  4362. Conflating the delta symbol with the "lines on maps" is brilliant. Annoying, but brilliant.
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  4363. Germany went through hyperinflation in the 1920s. It did not kill them off. Something to keep in mind.
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  4364. The relationship between Russia and China is complicated. China actually has made claims on Russian territory in the far east. They even claim that Vladivostok is historically a Chinese city. As for China leading a new world order, think again. China will not exist in its present form by the end of the decade, at latest.
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  4365. It is really instructive to look at the situation in China in the early 1960s. Mao was not fully in control of the PLA. He decided he needed a war. He invaded India. This was successful and solidified Mao's control over the PLA. By the way, Mao, once he had what he needed in internal political terms, withdrew from the territory he had taken. Fast forward to today. Xi is having trouble controlling the PLA. If he decides, as he seems to have done, that he needs a war, then he has three vectors of attack. One that he seems to favor now is Taiwan. The problem with that is that it is the most difficult and problematic at almost every level. Another is Russia. As mentioned in the video, there are historical claims there. The CCP and the Soviets had many clashes over the years. China has even renamed Russian cities on their official maps with Chinese names. Actually, Putin accepted this. But the other vector is India again. Those same maps lay claim to territories in land that is established as a part of India. The Indians do not accept that. Plus, there is a long border which is not settled. In fact, it is not called a border. Rather, it is called the "Line of Actual Control" or LAC. This is where Mao attacked in the 1960s. In India they fully expect China to attack. They talk about it all the time. The thing is that unlike in the 1960s the Indian military is fully prepared and has moved resources to the expected area of attack. India has also obtained some advanced western military tech. India is also closely allied with Russia who has been their primary source of military hardware since independence. They are slowly lessening that dependence through building up their Indigenous defense industry and buying more from the west. Their bitter rival, Pakistan, is allied with China. You may want to look into the India angle and do a video comparing and contrasting the three possibilities. Maybe you could even apply your game theory approach to giving odds to the three.
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  4366. The pure idiocy of the German plans is breathtaking. Does anyone really think that there were no troops in the Antwerp region? Is that what Hitler assumed?
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  4367. The CAP is a disaster. Beef, for example, is much better for you if it is grass fed. The corn goes into animal feed. Sunflower oil is problematic. Look up the health pros and cons. Wheat is something we should be cutting back on, all over. I have cut it out almost completely and have experienced better health (weight loss, etc.). Many people I know have experienced the same. For our lifestyles, wheat is not a great thing, I even get pasta (an will now make it myself) using red lentils. As for sources, Western Europe could easily grow much, much more. India has enough in storage to make up for the shortfall from Ukraine. They are already negotiating with countries like Egypt. I expect they will expand this. There is no shortage of food in the world. It is a matter more of trade and logistics.
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  4368.  @Qotroz  Increased production would not be for Europe itself, but to sell abroad. The West does not have any major food issues. We have an obesity problem. I volunteered at a food bank for a while. Many of the customers were obese, and a majority overweight.
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  4369. An airborne invasion? Really? Look at the D-Day airdrops. They were massive, but only a part of the whole thing. If that were all there was on D-Day they would have been wiped out without much trouble. As for any response, all the west has to do is stop shipping into China. From everywhere. China relies heavily on oil, gas, minerals and food from elsewhere. That is not a problem. It could be done by a few well-placed destroyers, or by submarines. Look at WWII again. The US, primarily with submarines, had totally strangled all of Japan's commercial shipping. In this case, there is no need, or desire, to invade China. China has nothing the rest of the world needs and there are all those Chinese to deal with. Also consider the difficulty of a seaborne invasion of Taiwan. The US did, in WWII. Taiwan was one of the alternatives to the Philippines. The estimates were that it would have taken a larger force than the D-Day landings. Don't forget that by that time the US had massive amphibious landing capabilities and experience. China has neither. Xi must know this. His military certainly does, and there are rumblings that indicate they are not down with the program. Have you noticed how many high-ranking generals have been dismissed or disappeared?
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  4370.  @chasx7062  Your comment is not that comprehensible. If you mean that Russia could get all this stuff to China, then you ignore the problem. Most of it has to go by sea.
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  4371. The fact is that I was seeing lots of ads on YouTube from Democrat politicians showing their races within a point in the "polls" when the results were totally different. Two examples were Ted Cruz in Texas and Rick Scott in Florida. Cruz won by almost 9 points and Scott won by almost 13 points. This is something else that should be investigated, along with this Iowa pollster. She was off by 24 points. How does that happen? It is certainly suspicious and warrants investigation. I personally don't vote according to polls. I look at the candidates and the issues. How many individuals change their voting intention according to a poll. If this is a real factor, then we should reconsider the publication of any polls. The polls started out as a tool for candidates and their supporters to make decisions on where to put resources. Then the news media started publishing them.
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  4372. Electric cars have two unique parts. The electric motor and the battery. The motor is already very powerful and efficient. Don't see much change there. The battery is not. Until some revolution (and nothing else will suffice) comes in battery technology, we are stuck.
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  4373. Jessica is completely wrong, no matter what the detailed polls say, in the political sense. What you should be looking at is not Ireland, but the UK. In their last general election you had a wildly impractical program from the Labor Party. It was unpopular, but Labor would say that the specific programs were popular. They are, until people realize the cost and disruption they will cause. People primarily vote on the larger issue. They, even Democrats, were not presented with something as big and disruptive as this Biden program debacle. Biden was brought in as the anti-Bernie, then he has Bernie craft the program. The main reason Biden is in is the media and big tech backlash against Trump. Trump was somewhat responsible for that, but on his performance before the pandemic he surely would have won.
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  4374. All those billionaires are in mass market businesses. It is in their best interest that people are prosperous.
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  4375.  @joycestuart9096  OK. I went and found it. I am not sure of how that is relevant to my comment, but it was a good speech.
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  4376. Your exposition is very useful in that it lays out what the statistics really mean. I think many people do not understand that. These types of statistics, population statistics, are really only useful for planning purposes. Organizations such as governments and insurance companies. They are basically useless for an individual. For the individual, if you had the data in fine enough detail, and had data on yourself to the same level of detail, you could get an idea of the probable age you will live to. There is still uncertainty there, as many events could alter the numbers. Another way to look at this whole issue is the actuarial approach. This is much more important for individuals. For example, an insurance executive friend of mine shared the following statistic. If you live to 65 today, you have a 50% chance of living to 95. This type of knowledge is much more useful for, as you say, retirement planning.
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  4377. Why is this surprising? Europeans are some of the most successful imperialists of all time. The EU is a protectionist cartel. Businesses as usual.
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  4378. Oil prices increasing? Sal, have you looked at the futures markets for oil lately? I even saw one long term projection showing them down 2.5% from this month's price by the end of 2025. Urals crude is down to $62.69 at the latest reading. Add to that the higher cost of using the smaller tankers they are using, and the Russians are probably netting close to zero.
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  4379. The Christmas lights are a total contradiction. On the one hand, the Pope calls for action on global warming, uh, I mean climate change. Many of the people putting up these lights are climate campaigners. Do they not see the contradiction? I guess that is hard to when flying around the world and driving a large SUV. I even have neighbors that had to put in extra electrical service to power the lights. At least LED lights are helping. Oh, wait a minute, they are mostly made in China which is mostly coal powered. Never mind. So, don't come down too hard on Nixon. He ended the Vietnam War and opened up to China. Well, maybe you were right.
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  4380. The Democratic Party became the party of intersectionality long before that was a term we knew about. It all started with LBJ. I have seen it up close and personal. That the working class has finally seen it is the due to Trump. We are in one of our periodic political and social realignments in this country. I don't know what the Democratic Party could stand for today. Their leaders have totally lost their way and the only thing they care about is power. They need totally new leadership, or we need a totally new party to replace them.
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  4381.  @SupraJulie  Well, that's one way to look at it. I have lived in Pennsylvania (now in the Midwest, before that in the Washington, DC area) and I don't think one can be so sure of that. I have also been hearing more and more speculation about him potentially switching parties. All conjecture, but interesting, nonetheless. If the national Democratic Party does not get its act together, they risk losing legislators.
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  4382.  @SupraJulie  Yes, I remember Rendell. You may have a point, but my only comeback is that the national Democratic Party is too far left and intransigent. We'll see.
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  4383. Precisely! The Ukrainians, and I am talking the people one sees on YouTube, are getting a big head because they haven't been defeated. They keep saying NATO needs them. Neither the US or any other NATO country would fight a war the way the Ukrainians are doing. What really brought this home to me was Kellogg's comment that they have lost more troops in three years than the US lost in Vietnam in ten years. Look also at Korea, which is a more comparable conflict. The reality is that both Russia and Ukraine were in demographic decline prior to the war. It is worse now. They are both literally destroying their countries. I understand Ukraine's situation, but Russia is something else. By the way, the Russians do fight this way, but because of the demographics, this is not the Russia, or Soviet Union of the first half of the 20th century.
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  4384. It was the CIA. It must have been. They are omniscient and omnipotent. Yes, that's it.
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  4385. What really strikes me is how Hitler misreads the Old Testament. God is the one who fought on the side of the Israelites. When they displeased God, and he did not fight for him they lost. Victory is often ascribed to God. The number of times God is depicted as having a "strong arm" and of fighting both his and Israel's foes are numerous. Where the God of the Israelite differs most is in his strong emphasis on laws. Something to ponder.
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  4386. I do have to take issue with the title of this video. What technology advantage? All the big companies in China are either knockoffs of western (mostly US) technology companies or lower down on the technology ladder. Just look at what they have done trying to build a domestic chip industry. The money comes directly from the government. The first funds set up were a total failure, and several executives have gone to jail. I recently saw a review of a CPU that China supposedly make themselves. It is probably just an Intel i3 chip and may well be Intel chips with the logos burned off and Chinese identifiers added. I have several laptops bought over the last ten years. One is an i5 and the rest i7s. So, I ask again, what advantage.
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  4387.  @Bareego  Agree. Unfortunately, that seems to be where the autocrats want to take us.
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  4388. Your last comment is revealing. India does not have a defense industry that is sufficient to go it alone. Russia, China, the Europeans and the US are far ahead of them. Thus, they are a dependent power. This is tough position to be in. I personally believe they are choosing the wrong path. Their primary adversary is China. With the war in Ukraine, Russia will only become more closely allied with China. This will ultimately alienate the Western powers from any power who supports Russia, even indirectly. Before this conflict, India was seen as an alternative to China for many Western countries. Now, I think they will lose out to Southeast Asia and other areas. Their monetary, and ownership policies are also a problem. India is headed for a tough time if they don't modify their policies.
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  4389. I am a big fan of Anna's as well. I watch her channel daily. On the issue of influencing the Russians directly, though, I have a problem. Aren't people in the west, including Anna, talking constantly, and disparagingly, about the Russian efforts to influence our politics and populations? Should the west run troll farms targeting Russia? This is a hard issue. For one thing, totalitarian regimes can restrict access to information, often very effectively. I am not sure of what can be done in that environment, and without specifics I think it is hard to take the idea seriously. The cost to people of protesting in the totalitarian regimes is onerous. This limits our ability to get a real handle on the situation. On the protests, one of my favorite examples is the Vietnam War protests, which I lived through. Even with those large protests, Richard Nixon won a second term in one of the bigger landslides in US electoral history. The size of protests is often misleading. Look at the Arab Spring. How many of those countries actually changed in the long run? A case in point is Egypt. They threw out the dictator and had elections. An Islamist party (the original Islamist party, by the way) won the elections. Now the military is back in control. Even some of the North African countries where it all started have experienced a backsliding. As for information influence, just look at some examples. Cuba, China and the Russia (as a part of the Soviet Union) have been, were, targeted for decades. Then there is Iran. Absent putting boots on the ground, these efforts are generally ineffective. The other thing people forget is that majorities in those countries are actually supportive of their regimes. Otherwise, they would not have lasted so long. In Russia, Cuba and Iran the people who were against the regime have mostly fled. Often, they had to for safety reasons. In China that process is underway. The thing of it is that this only solidifies the control the regime has over the remainder. This has nothing to do with information warfare. Peoples do not often change. Ukraine is an example, but as Anna has educated us, there was for a long time an independence and democratic tendency. Of course, there were also anarchists. but that is another matter. Germany and Japan did not change because they wanted to. The changed because they were militarily defeated, and the victors kept many "boots on the ground". The US alone initially, and for several years, had 500,000 troops in West Germany. Even the low point during the Cold War it was about 300,000. Look at what happened after WWI in Germany. They elected, and then supported, an autocrat. The sovereignty issue is key to the Ukraine situation. The thing about sovereignty is that it is outside of what is right and wrong. There are many, many sovereign nations around the world that are autocratic. The west deals with most of them, especially if they have something the west wants. Should the democratic west spend blood and treasure to remedy that situation? I think that was done before. It was called imperialism and colonialism. There are some who think we may be heading there again. It is, after all, the pattern of history prior to the end of WWII.
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  4390. Why should the US government send money to a Russian in the west? How does that further US interests?
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  4391. The ruble is rubble!
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  4392.  @huntergatherer7796  Debatable.
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  4393. Hive, the missiles authorized are NOT LONG-RANGE INTERCONTINENTAL MISSILES! They are intermediate range missiles and are the version limited by a treaty that is no longer active. In fact, their replacement with a longer range (going from 300 km to 500 km) is already being deployed, mainly in the Pacific. While you and Rogan raise some good points about the issue, stupid statements like that will just drown out the valid points you make. You do know that all this information is available on the Internet. You are quite literally a totally Internet based entity. Make the connection.
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  4394. They are all commies, after all. Don't have too much sympathy for the Chinese. How did the CCP, or the Soviets in Russia, come to power. The harnessed people's greed. In both cases the peasants (this is important) were offered "free" land, taken from someone else. Of course, they never got the land themselves. It was all collectivized. Well, at least the landlords and rich peasants didn't have it. So, how did that work out? Remember the word "famine". I say it is that they are peasants is important, because these are Marxist-Leninists. Marx especially thought that the revolution would come from the urban, industrial proletariat. He thought that the first countries to experience the revolution would be places like Germany and the US. The peasant societies would come later. Well, he didn't reckon with the greed for land of the peasants.
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  4395. The political realignment is an interesting topic. I see it every day at an accelerated pace. Actually, I have been discussing this for almost two decades. The issue at the end of the last century was low voter turnout. The reason given was that the parties were basically the same, so why vote for one or the other. I also spent time as an election judge. If we got over 60% turnout it was celebration time. I actually saw one off-cycle local election in the very conservative city I live in go to the Democrats. The turnout was well under 20% (perhaps lower, I don't recall the actual number). The local Democrats got out enough votes to swing many local offices to their control. This has a lot to do with the dynamics within the parties. I just saw a video titled "Former Leftists Collabing w/ Right to Confront Establishment". Further evidence of the realignment. Victor Davis Hanson just put out a book titled "Dueling Populisms". Of course, Peter has been talking about this stuff for a while. He is not the only one but seems to be one of the more articulate I have seen.
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  4396.  @dkbros1592  Just making a comment on helicopters. The comment we are all responding to disparages India because of a helicopter crash. Know about this and have seen it happening for a long time. Hope that helps.
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  4397.  Kikilcom 88  Lots of helicopter crashes in the US military. I have heard that there were more deaths in Iraq from accidents than from enemy activity. Many were due to helicopter crashes. Those things are just plain dangerous.
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  4398.  @koushikdas1992  I don't personally. In a military conflict they confer some advantages.
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  4399.  @mikespear5459  Can't agree with you there. China has no recent military experience, and their last experience was and embarrassment. Technology is not what wins wars. It is the troops and their training. The Chinse also have had this one child policy. Family is very important in China. When their only sons starting coming home in body bags, I think it will be the end of the CCP.
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  4400.  @Charlie--113  No it doesn't. That is a misunderstanding. Research on ram jet engines has been going on for decades.
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  4401.  @karunanithin.ramachandran6482  I knew some of them. I just missed the war because of my age. I met many of them after they had come home.
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  4402.  @joem0088  Not sure what you mean or are implying. Accidents happen in the US military far from Afghanistan. They also happen in civilian aviation.
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  4403.  @joem0088  All true. But that does not mean that non war zone accidents do not happen. Not arguing with you here, just pointing out my experience.
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  4404.  @loksoon4734  What about the first and second Gulf Wars? Those are in the last 30 years. Iraq had one of the largest armies in the world. They also had modern equipment and many years fighting the Iranians. In the first war about 500K troops took on about 1M Iranians and won, pushing them out of Kuwait. In the second war, 165K, or so, took on the Iraqi army and destroyed them. This was not asymmetrical warfare as in places like Afghanistan. Many of the leaders and senior members of the military are still around and available.
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  4405. The issue is not that the CCP lacks sincerity, but that they lack intelligence. They are commies, after all. What do they know about capitalism? In an authoritarian dictatorship such as that under Xi, anyone who has a contrary opinion or real knowledge has been sacked, jailed, or killed (sometimes all three in that order). The level of corruption in China is only matched by that in Russia. All of Xi's anticorruption campaigns are shams. The people "caught" are generally political opponents. The people in his clique are just as corrupt. As long as they are loyal, they get to continue their corruption. Otherwise, Xi and the CCP would never be able to rule the country. Another thing I see glimpses of, but that is not covered on most YouTube channels, by think tanks or media outlets, is the role of organized crime in China. I think this will be the next "shoe to drop".
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  4406. I seriously doubt that. Being pre-diabetic at one point, and somewhat overweight, I changed my diet. My blood pressure came down. I have no more joint pain. I have not even had a headache since I did that. I have had one day of fever. This is over a period of five years. I did not eliminate anything but got rid of a lot of things that were harmful. I have become basically pescatarian, but occasionally eat meat. It is diet that determines health. The Indian diet has lots of wheat, not a good thing. I have replaced most of that with lentils. I also do not eat much rice. I have other friends who have had diabetes who have beaten it through exercise. Not massive amounts. I am in my 60s and my body is getting back to where it was in my 20s. My exercise is walking. Nothing intensive. I have a background in statistics, and I expect that these studies are confusing correlation with causation.
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  4407. Another thing, 72 million is 0.05 percent of the population. Considering that many of those could be free of diabetes through diet and exercise, you are overplaying the extent of the problem.
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  4408. A casualty is defined as killed, wounded, captured or missing. So, there were seven casualties in this case.
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  4409. You do realize that the whole idea of autonomous driving pushed by EV companies is at best a marketing ploy and at worst a scam. I tend to see it as the later. EVs are still too expensive and still have major drawbacks (range and charging) to replace ICEs. Autonomous driving features are just a cynical ploy to justify the higher price. On the autonomous driving front, there is no reason that contemporary ICEs cannot implement the same technology. The plain fact is that most use a "fly by wire" approach and could easily be adapted to computer-controlled driving. I have a 2015 American made SUV with automatic low speed collision avoidance braking, for example. There are ICEs with automated parking. This is not that new. Basically, little or nothing would have to be changed in the autonomous driving system to adapt it to ICEs. So, given all that, why do you think ICE vendors aren't jumping on the autonomous driving bandwagon?
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  4410. The thing the Ukrainians lack, and it is the crucial thing in modern combined arms maneuver warfare, is airpower. Another thing is sufficient engineering resources. For example, in the south with the Surovikin Line, the Ukrainians would have to be able to suppress the Russian artillery and missile forces at a point to be able to break through the lines there and then rush mechanized forces through to fan out behind the line. This is basic stuff for NATO. Don't forget that in both wars against Iraq, the Iraqis had built up massive defensive works. The US and its NATO allies used airpower to do just that.
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  4411.  @bobwatson8754  That's my point. It is the average, worldwide, that is the parameter for the climate. Everything else is just weather, and that varies a lot. There was lot of talk about the high temperatures this summer in parts of the world. I looked at it and thought, what are they talking about? I experienced higher temperatures than many places in the Cyclades in the 1970s. In addition, they never talked about those areas where it was not unseasonably hot. I am in the Chicago area, and it was a very, very average to cool summer. This is true of many parts of the world. The doomsayers will say that this snow in China is an effect of global warming, even though it is a cooling effect locally. I say that because I have actually experienced the comments. This is really funny, because the "Whatever happened to global warming." is a bit of a private family joke.
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  4412. The minerals in Ukraine are not "critical" to future development. That is clear by the fact that they are not currently being exploited. If they were critical than we would be screwed. Lithium is not rare. We have it in the US and in other friendly countries. Rare earths are not rare, despite the name. The only reason China is such a player in those is that the processing is very environmentally unfriendly (i.e., dirty) and the Chinese don't care. We were doing it before the opening to China. We just exported the pollution abroad. Currently processing plants are being set up in the US that are clean. What Trump was trying to do is to give Ukraine a way to make revenue and to tie them into the American camp, thus giving the US a stake in Ukraine's protection. We hear a lot about the revenue that the US gets, but the last I heard, Ukraine gets to same amount. In other words, the split was 50/50 and is on the royalties. In addition, it would provide jobs and those incomes would be taxed as well, in Ukraine. Another important thing to understand is that Ukraine does not have the money to exploit these minerals. It will take outside capital, and that will not be available while a war is going on. I remember reading that there were actually western oil majors starting to explore in the east of Ukraine. They, of course, had to stop when the hostilities started. These are massive long-term investments. What I am bothered by is the implications that if we don't have this stuff we can't progress. That is totally false.
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  4413. I am seeing a phenomenon in YouTube videos that bugs me. The question at the beginning about physical theories never being proven to be right is an idiotic one. People who don't know this are obviously not educated at any level of science. Those people will not be able to follow the discussion that follows. So why do the interviewers always assume the lowest common denominator? It is infuriating and a waste of time. In addition, these videos are being watched on an internet enabled device. If one wants to get mor detail on some basic, or advanced, concept, it is a simple matter to pause the video and look it up. For those that do understand, there is no problem. To put the point about physical theories in context, my first physics professor at university once told me, we could find out this is all bulls**t tomorrow. We don't expect to, but it is a possibility. Again, something one learns very early in an exposure to science.
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  4414. Tik, early on in the video you quote the 1949 Geneva Convention in discussing the 1944 repatriation. Since you have admitted that forced repatriation is not explicitly forbidden at that time, your argument is invalid. It is a central tenet of law that laws can not be applied retroactively. The 1949 prohibition was probably added because of this situation, but does not apply to it.
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  4415. Oh, no, Angela can't resign. She is the most entertaining fool in the Labor government. That and I have a thing for redheads (my ex-wife hates them).
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  4416. @@camrobertson1886 That's it!
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  4417. What he says is exactly right. All economic theory agrees. Individuals making decisions for themselves is always more efficient than a government or investment bankers. We need a way to return money to the individual. This includes lower taxes. It also includes an efficient way to return the large profits of large companies to the investors. At present, the only tax efficient way to do that is through stock buybacks. What we should do is to create a way for companies such as Apple and Google, who have huge cash hoards, to get that money back to the investors without a tax penalty.
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  4418. Protest their rights? Don't these people know they have no rights? They are, after all, living in a communist country. The lack of education and understanding among the people of China is staggering. One wants to feel sorry for them, but they keep supporting the system.
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  4419. While I like Tulsi, she is wrong that the concerns she has about foreign and military policy are of primary concern to the voters. Unfortunately they are not. Trump is ramping down our involvement in these conflicts. He is also doing it in a more measured and effective way than Obama.
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  4420.  @LoboalphaMASTER  What are you going on about? What is your problem with this statement?
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  4421.  @LoboalphaMASTER  Ah, now I understand. Thanks for clearing that up. I fully agree with you. I have lots of background with the whole military industrial complex. I tend to see a sea change in how the future will play out. It will involve a lot more conflict, unfortunately.
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  4422. Sabine, I fully agree with you, and have read your book. Wonderful stuff. I was studying physics in the 1970s. I dropped out and switched to computer science. I worked in the High Energy Physics department at the University of Maryland. Interestingly, we never really talked to the theorists. Charles W. Misner, one of the authors of Graviation, with Thorne and Wheeler was on the same floor. I expect I went to at least one of his colloquia, but it never really impinged on us. I did get a copy of Dirac's book, the third edition, from a graduate student. Of course he sold it me so he could buy the fourth edition, which corrected some of the last chapters. I didn't know that at the time. What I do remember is that the writing and explanation of the phenomena were extremely beautiful. I just remember being inspired. Again, I agree with the premise of your book, but Dirac had a way of putting things that really touched me.
    1
  4423.  @jaydee6268  That is an interesting question.
    1
  4424. If the Conservatives replace Boris with Liz Truss before the next general election, the could increase their majority. Otherwise, it might be dicey.
    1
  4425. Squirrel is great. I make a fine squirrel gumbo. They are easy to take with a .22 rifle. I even saw a bumper sticker that read "Squirrel, it's what's for dinner". That is a play on the beef industry's slogan, "Beef, it's what's for dinner".
    1
  4426.  S Ragsdale  Good point. Same with me. One St. Patrick's Day, after partying with my Irish friends. We ended up at an apartment bonging quaaludes. I didn't even know that was a thing. Thats when I stopped.
    1
  4427. No need to cook things alive? Come on man (as President Joe likes to say)! Lobster is, as far as I am aware, always cooked alive. So are hard shelled crabs. Actually, once I was on a Greek island in the Cyclades. This was towards the end of the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium. Some people from a large sailing yacht had caught a very large lobster. They took it to a restaurant in the town, where I was also eating with my friends, and asked them to cook it for them and make a meal of it. Well, the lobster went wild and cut up the chef pretty badly. There was plenty of blood, but nothing serious. We asked for the leftovers (I was with some German girls and at that time they hated to see any food go to waste) and we had a nice meal from the hard to get at bits. I recall being at a Chinese restaurant in Vancouver with a Chinese Canadian engineer I was working with. The menus were in Chinese and everyone there was Chinese and speaking Chinese. They would bring the fish to the table in a plastic tub for the patrons to take their pick. My brother-in-law did a good bit of work in China. He came back with a picture from a restaurant that was quite intriguing. The was a nice young female waitress, black skirt with white blouse, in front of a wall of cages with a whole variety of live animals that were on offer.
    1
  4428. I love it! The banking irregularities, as you put it in your title, are nothing short of outright theft. This is not the first time I have seen this type of thing reported. What do you expect? The CCP is clearly a criminal enterprise. They try to hide behind an ideology. In Russia, a former communist state, they have dumped the ideology, but things didn't really change. We know about the literal criminal gangs in Russia, and their integration with the government. I am fairly sure that there is such criminal activity in China, but almost nothing is said about this. To be credible, you need to address the situation.
    1
  4429. Had a friend who was an F4 pilot at the time. He was at Key West NAS along several hundred friends. He said that the planes were packed so tightly that one well-placed hand grenade would have blown the whole place up. A bit of hyperbolae, to be sure, but they were ready to go in support of the Bay of Pigs.
    1
  4430.  CIA: David Marlowe's PsyOp is Your Mental Issue  So did all the major powers at the time. It was the Cold War. The Commies were bent on taking over the whole world, often by subversion. There were two World Wars, where Germany, then Germany and Japan wanted to do the same thing. Get some historical perspective.
    1
  4431. Tony, these claims are the same as those made by the Russians months ago. Of course, the US has the best defense against this. Diversity of ethnic groups. Recall that in WWII there was a feeling in Japan that they could defeat the US because the Americans were a bunch of "mutts" and the Japanese a "pure" race.
    1
  4432.  @ourfarmhouseinspain  That is a great question. How does one value property and their other assets in China today?
    1
  4433. You know, when Henrry Ford got big, his plants took in raw materials, such as iron ore, rubber and silicon, or sand (for glass). In the beginning, they made everything. So, Musk is emulating Ford. Actually, for Ford, rubber was a problematic resource. It was the only thing he needed not found in the US. So, he tried to create plantations in South America. He was not ultimately successful, and now we use synthetic rubber.
    1
  4434.  @taiwanisacountry  Well, for 2023 the figure Tony gave was $3B. I expect the difference is the oversupply of pork within China. There have been lots of reports of pork prices falling.
    1
  4435.  @taiwanisacountry  Interesting. Thanks for sharing your experience. It is great that you could have that experience. I used to travel all the time. Now I am working on my own startup and don't travel at all.
    1
  4436. The US was a signatory to the Rome Statute that set up the ICC but then withdrew from it for precisely this reason.
    1
  4437.  @mescko  Probably will happen. Thanks for the encouragement.
    1
  4438. Looking at the casualty figures, this war is WWI or WWII in its level of casualties. In the Iraq war of 2003, the coalition side lost about 200. The Iraqis lost up to 45K killed. The Iraqis had 1M men under arms, while the coalition had about half that. What was the difference? Air power. The fact that the west has not given advanced jets to Ukraine yet is a tragedy. This thing would be over by now with a Ukranian victory if they had.
    1
  4439.  @59patrickw  What about it. Its existence just the kind of thing I was referring to.
    1
  4440. The Russian navy has never ruled the seas of the world. What planet are you on?
    1
  4441. I just saw a video from April 3 where Galloway was doing an interview on RT/Sputnik where those logos were prominently displayed. Even if he is not a full-time employee, he is still doing work for them. As you all should know, many on air personalities at outlets such as the BBC, Sky and even GBNews are "contractors", not direct employees. So, if Gallow is using the excuse that the is not paid a regular salary, then he is hiding behind a technicality. After all, he is a literal Commie.
    1
  4442. Watching the "man in the street" interviews I often get the feeling I am losing brain cells. It also reminds me of the Larry David crypto commercial, specifically the part about the drafting of the Constitution. Check it out.
    1
  4443. I have to agree with Rita. The Democrats I have seen in the media are so obviously low IQ that it is amazing that they have a platform at all. As a corollary to that, they have never articulated why their ideas are good or useful. The ideas themselves are bad. We talk about CRT, but the Democratic Party has been pursuing that for decades. Ever since the share of organized labor in the country shrank, they have been playing the racial/ethnic game. Their original constituency which consisted of blue-collar workers and southerners who just hated the Republican Party because of the Civil War and the carpetbaggers, started to fall apart, especially under Regan. They went with minorities to bolster their support. That their ideas have not actually been effective for the groups they have embraced has become apparent. The other thing current Democratic leaders and pundits (and all those wokies) fail to understand in that one is successful in a democracy by building majority coalitions. Trump understands that.
    1
  4444. Looking at this footage reminds me of where I go deer hunting in Central Illinois. It is just the same. We also wear camo, some military camo. Of course, the guns are different. We don't use drones but do use radios. And when there has been a lot of rain, the fields look the same. If there is a plowed field, it is almost impossible to walk across it without picking up pounds of mud.
    1
  4445. Well put. I remember when the Quebec independence referenda were going on. I believe it was on American PBS. There was speculation that the rest of Canada would want to become part of the US. They speculated that it would start with the maritime provinces, as these would be geographically isolated from the rest of Canada. Then the middle provinces would join the US. After that the rest of Canada sans Quebec. Just another thought. I was doing a lot of work in Canada during the first referendum. I would not have been surprised that if there was a referendum in the rest of Canada, outside of Quebec, then Quebec would be an independent country by now. I also got a similar feeling in the UK (where I was living) about the Scottish independence referendum. The only thing I would argue with about calling Canada the 51st state is that it would be several states corresponding to the current provinces. That said, the 51st state terminology is a convenient placeholder.
    1
  4446.  @pefo1674  You are totally wrong on that. Who told you to say that? Either that or you have a bad case of TDS. You might want to get that looked at.
    1
  4447.  @pooheadlou  Come on, tell me what you want to disagree with. It would be good to know and perhaps an interesting conversation. Comments such as yours are one of my pet peeves. I don't know who you are, and you don't know who I am. It is only through our words and ideas that anything meaningful or interesting came come out.
    1
  4448.  @morewi  Do you know where the labels left and right came from? As for American cultural dominance that is not a plan of a conspiracy or whatever you think it is. I first traveled to Europe in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium. I saw some of the local content. That should tell you all you need to know.
    1
  4449.  @bigguy7353  Precisely. He was a collectivist.
    1
  4450.  @StarskyUA  Thank you very much. The feeling is mutual.
    1
  4451.  @StarskyUA  That would be a game changer. The new one has a range currently (planned to be extended) of 500 km. It uses the same launchers.
    1
  4452. Shallow analysis and misses the whole point of why China does not directly support Russia. The main reason is sanctions. China imports massive amounts of raw materials and food. They import most of their fuel. They get some from Russia, but more from elsewhere. If the west wanted to punish China for supporting Russia, they would only need to use a small amount of sea power at critical points. If this happens, then China deindustrializes within months and starves in a year. Even if the sanctions were only economic, China is much more exposed to the global economy than Russia. China cannot directly support Russia. If they do, the CCP and China in its current borders cease to exist. Helping Russia is not worth it. In economic terms, Russia is a small player, 14th by rank and 10% the size of China's. The reality is that China most probably wants Russia to lose. That would potentially cause a breakup of the country, then China can just move in a take the territories in Russia that it claims were wrongfully taken from them by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. As for China's army, they are untested and like Russia's is rife with corruption. They also rely a lot on Russian technology and structures. Their last major conflict was with Vietnam in 1979, and they lost. China's navy is large, but mostly littoral and not capable of securing their supplies by sea.
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  4453. At about 2:45 the statement is made that forced technology transfer is not fair competition under WTO rules. Duh! Many have been saying this for well over a decade. Donald Trump actually did something about it. Fortunately, Biden is continuing to stress this. Chinese leadership is actually very stupid, and that is the nicest way I could say it. They remind me of Japan before WWII. They trade on their racial "superiority". Japan, at the time, wanted to play with the big boys in the imperialism game. China is doing the same now. The thing is, they have not noticed that the 19th century imperialism has gone. I could go on, but I will spare you. Do understand that I am talking about the CCP, not the Chinese people in general. What the CCP must know is that, if they start a war, China deindustrializes within months and suffers mass starvation soon after. This is not in dispute. China is one of the countries most dependent on foreign inputs in the world. This includes energy and food.
    1
  4454. Senator Tim Scott for President in 2024. I have always been impressed with the Senator and have followed him for years. His words and ideas are always encouraging and hopeful. I am not joking about 2024. I think he would be a good choice to bring us out of this morass that the Democrats have dragged us into.
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  4455. What is interesting is that we are constantly hearing about Galicia. Not just in this video, but in many about this region and in many books. And yet, Galicia is not a "nation" or a "state". I see early Ukraine as similar. This also applies to the Czechs and Slovaks. In what became Yugoslavia, there were many "nations", which have now separated. Ukraine is a region, with constantly shifting borders, that existed well into the past.
    1
  4456. So, would this be considered "English" units? Certainly not metric.
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  4457.  @anthonymorris2276  Very sensible.
    1
  4458. What is this crap about spiking interest rates like we've never seen before? Is Dagen so uninformed as to believe this? I am getting tired of all these superlatives which have no basis. Heck, you can look up the official numbers online. It is easy. I happened to live through it. Don't these people have producers that can help? Talk about low information commentators. The Federal Funds rate in the early 1980s peaked at 19.08%. The Federal Funds rate today is 4.58%. Many financial analysts believe that the rate should be higher than the rate of inflation to curb inflation. The current rate is about 6%. That indicates that, according to those analysts, the Federal Funds rate needs to rise by another 1.5%, at least. You are still at a third of the actual peak.
    1
  4459. While offering competitive salaries to the regulators makes sense, it does not align with the communist ideology. In the long run, you can't have both a competitive system and a collectivist system with the accompanying contradictions. Wow, I have been reading too much of that commie ideology. Actually, the contradictions are precisely what the west hoped, in opening up to China, would lead to the CCP either changing of being overthrown. Well, it looks like the beast is fighting back. This is becoming more and more interesting now that it is hitting the government itself.
    1
  4460. Suskind's speculations ignore that black holes grow. If he is right, things get close and due to time dilation never really fall in. So, how does the black hole get its mass?
    1
  4461. I think I have made this case before, but as far as quantum cryptography is concerned, you have to assume that ALL messages are intercepted. The idea of cryptography is to make the message indecipherable. Quantum cryptography does not help in this regard. I know, because it is a field I am currently involved in and have had experience in since the 1980s.
    1
  4462.  @wolfgang743  This whole idea of resources being important is just bunk. Take oil coal and gas. The consumer, either industrial or individua, does not care where it comes from. This applies to both the way it is used and the intellectual understanding. It is the countries that can product finished products that matter The last GDP chart I saw had Russia as the 11th largest economy. Of the ten that rank ahead of it, only the US and Canada have abundant natural resources. Also, one should note that these estimates, like 30% of the world's resources only refers to proven reserves. If you had asked the question on oil and natural gas before fracking, then the number would have been different. In addition, with the West pulling of the Russian oil and gas sector, their ability to exploit what they have will diminish. They just don't have the technology and it would take years to develop.
    1
  4463.  @kiwibob223  GDP PPP is certainly a useful measure. On the other hand, raw GDP is perhaps more important for military comparisons. Just look at all the countries with nuclear weapons that have small GDPs compared to population. I am thinking of Pakistan, India and North Korea. These weapons are expensive to develop. In the case of Pakistan and India it is a case of mutual suspicion and wars already fought. In the case of North Korea, the Kims have literally starved their people.
    1
  4464. RFK Jr. is correct. I know people who had type 2 diabetes who lost the weight and exercised more and now don't have it. There is no advantage to obesity. NONE! Diet is the root cause of many health problems. Just think of the money that would be saved, not to mention the increased wellbeing of individuals if they ate better. Actually, I find it cheaper to eat at home (which I do most of the time), with better ingredients, if one gets away from processed foods. It's a no brainer.
    1
  4465. For Musk and Cook China is a big market. Period! Of course, they would say these things in China. When the US opened up to China they were basically deindustrialized. Heck, even in the 1950s during the Great Leap Forward they could not even make pig iron properly. That seems long ago, but pig iron production is a first step in steel manufacturing and most advanced countries had mastered it at least a century before. This is just one example. And it is a good one because it was socialist ideology that got in the way.
    1
  4466. Recall the words of General Curtis E. LeMay (paraphrasing): If we maintain our faith in God, our love of freedom and superior global airpower, then I think we'll be okay.
    1
  4467.  @elchudcampeador5642  Are you totally ignorant? Was Iraq, with, at the time of the two wars the US and its allies fought there, had one of the largest armies in the world, and one of the more experienced. They were also a rich oil exporting nation. In Ukraine the only nation with rusty AKs is Russia. Get a clue.
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  4468.  @MORGUEZHR  Do you know anything about this stuff? Obviously not. They are actively attacking the first line of defense. Go back and look at the information available online. Then you might understand.
    1
  4469.  @diawannoto  You are singularly ill informed about such matters, both in how these things work and in the specifics of this situation.
    1
  4470.  @Randomhandlename  I think they are using ARs these days.
    1
  4471.  @denisdenisov7623  How do you know what I know. I expect it is a lot more than you.
    1
  4472. Trump was by no means the first US President to chastise European NATO countries on failure to live up to the 2% commitment. Frankly, the EU plus the UK are rich enough to maintain that commitment and provide all the necessary support to Ukraine, without the US. NATO has indeed intervened in places that were not NATO territory. There was, of course, Kosovo. There was also a NATO component to the Iraq war in 2003 and the Afghanistan war in 2001. In both cases, this was a response to an attack on the US by a non-state actor. In the former, NATO allies were encouraged to participate to help the US. In the later, this was basically a NATO operation. Only in that case was, Article 5 invoked, and the country involved did not directly attack a NATO ally. Considering all this, the whole babble about whether NATO would respond if France were bombed is just that, babble. They almost certainly would, especially given the Afghanistan example. The best thing NATO could do now is to deploy significant, not trip wire, troops along Russia's northern border. This would include Finland, the Baltics, Poland and Sweeden. This creates the most serious conundrum for Putin. If he does prevail in Ukraine and then directly threatens, or actually invades, a NATO country he would have to split his forces. Look at what is happening in the region around Belgorod and Kursk. Putin does not have the forces to cover both. He also has China which currently lays claim to Russian territory including Vladivostok. That would be a perfect time for them to strike. As for the German, and UK, responses to Macron's statements, they are not really significant in NATO at this time. Both have let their militaries, especially their ground forces, degrade to such an extent that they are no longer that significant in NATO. Frankly, Germany would be changing its mind rather quickly if Ukraine falls or is in danger of doing so. There are already discussions in Germany and the UK of bringing back the draft.
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  4473. Congratulations! They noticed, and I expect they are scared. I never knew you were a fascist, though.
    1
  4474. Nooo! Not another one. It seems like we get one of these a week. Don't put too much stock in there being a company trying to commercialize it. A little historical background would show a landscape littered with failed ventures doing just that. Just look at nuclear fusion as one example. How many decades has it been just a decade away? Lots. What about flow batteries. There are lots of things you can do in the lab that are many, many orders of magnitude away from providing the power that modern societies need. Frankly, it is getting a bit tiresome.
    1
  4475. I am a big fan of Elvira. I have read some of her books and enjoy them and watched a lot of her videos. It is interesting to see her in a different venue. That said, I think Pyotr is sorely misinformed about what he calls MAGA and the US in general. I get it. He is in the UK. I am American, but I have also lived and worked in England. I was also elected to the board of the school my sons went to. I had to get approved by the Home Office. The thing is, MAGA type movements are arising all over Europe, including the UK. It is most likely that a more populist (I don't like that term) movement will form the next government in the UK. In Germany and in France the populist movements are gaining ground. One thing he does not understand is that the US is done with trying to tell other countries how to handle their own affairs internally. After WW2, as the result of that brutal war, the US engaged in "nation building" in both Germany and Japan. This worked, but the circumstances were very specific. Since then, the only other place where it has worked, to a large extent, is South Korea. Otherwise, it has been an abject failure. While Trump has been the one to make this trend of noninterference explicit, it is something that the American electorate has wanted literally since the end of the Cold War. The whole 9/11 situation and the GWT was a detour. Pyotr's whole worldview is very Eurocentric. Right after Trump took office his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, made it clear that the unipolar world order was over, done. The cost was too great and the benefits minimal to the US. In addition, countries representing at least half the world's population, didn't want it, and were vocal about it. I am also amused at the comments he makes about religion, especially "Christianity". He seems to equate it with Catholicism. That is interesting because he lives in the UK, which is an Anglican country, not Catholic. I grew up Greek Orthodox and married in the Episcopal Church (Catholic without the guilt my in-laws quipped). While living in England I was a good Anglican. I even ran the coconut shy at the church fete. The Orthodox would say that the Catholic Church was a break away sect, hence the name Orthodox. It would be interesting to know about Pyotr's background in this context.
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  4476. True, this is a foolish power grab. But, the apocalyptic language is out of place. With electoral wins we can reverse this stupidity. We need to actually turn out to vote. Even our major presidential elections have less than 70% turnout. That is pathetic! Any if our elections could have gone a different way if everyone turned out to vote. What are those that do not vote thinking. They are idiots. Even my sons, who are in their 20s and do not regularly vote are idiots. Their future will be, at least partly, determined by government policy.
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  4477. Does it take an Elon Musk to point this out? This is a part of the whole ebb and flow of business.
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  4478. Interest rate increases today pale in comparison to the 1980s. So, your comment that this is fastest increase in rates in a century is just plain wrong. Look up the data. It is all available on the Internet.
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  4479. Turkey bought S-400s and were kicked out of the F-35 program. The S-400s are being taken out en masse by drones and US battlefield ballistic missiles (e.g., HIMARS). Meanwhile the US Patriot systems have taken down aircraft and various Russian missiles including hypersonic missiles. As far as I know, one Patriot battery was damaged. I heard that before the Ukraine War the US was talking about retiring and replacing the Patriot systems. Not any more.
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  4480. William, William, William. You totally missed the first post-Cold War "oil war". Using the 2003 Iraqi invasion is not a good choice. There was a lot more going on there besides oil, in case you hadn't noticed. Look back at the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent war to push Iraq out. That is pure. That is simple. It is the most direct example of an oil war in recent times. Better yet, look at British and other European powers and their activity in Mesopotamia, Arabia and Persia in the 20th century after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. How about Japan's activities in Southeast Asia? Oil was a critical factor there. How about China's activities in the South China Sea today? Are you aware of what drives that economically? Go back and do your homework. Then maybe you can release a revised version of the video.
    1
  4481. Don't worry about the American world order. America is withdrawing from enforcing it. The American order was created at the end of WWII to gain allies to fight the Cold War against the Soviets. That ended 30 years ago. America is finally withdrawing from it to its own defensible borders. Europe will soon be on their own. Heck, if the Russians didn't have nuclear weapons we would not even blink an eye at what is going on in Europe today.
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  4482.  @AstroGremlinAmerican  At the risk of sounding too serious, I think they are selling at a $20 discount to the benchmark prices to those two countries. That would actually make it about $60. Another thing to consider is that they need to keep pumping, no matter what the price. In the Siberian fields, the wells would be ruined if they don't.
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  4483. Kevin, you are wrong right from the start on the suggestions about losing weight and avoiding junk food. Not only is that good for your health, but because you have a national health service and the taxpayers are paying for your health, they have an absolute right to say such things. If you had private health, then you could make such a claim.
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  4484. Porn is the answer. That's where the metaverse will go anyway. Just look at Second Life.
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  4485. When I first went to Greece in the early 1970s, there were lots of the toilets where you had to squat. The Greeks called them "Turkish toilets".
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  4486. The US has been training the Ukrainian military for years now. For example, in the case of jet fighters, US National Guard officers have said that with two weeks training, the Ukranian pilots could be flying US F16s. I don't know the answer here, but these guys have worked with the Ukrainians and are experts with these aircraft. I fully expect that they are right. Having worked in the military and defense industry for decades, I think that this is feasible. I think you overplay the training needed on various systems, assuming that the people involved are not raw recruits. You should go back and check on this.
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  4487.  @Rocketsong  You're right. Sorry for the mistake and thanks for pointing it out.
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  4488.  @johngoulooze7804  You are correct there. Talking about stems and seeds reminds me of a guy I knew, at university. When he and his friends were short of money, they would get the stems and seeds from a dealer he knew. Now this guy was doing a double major in physics and chemistry. So, he would take the stems and seeds and boil them down in a mixture of acetone and alcohol, right on the kitchen stove. This would result in a black glop which they called "Dr. Gallbladder's Merry Magic Dope Extender". I guess there was a little THC in it. They would dry it and then smoke it.
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  4489. 300K people is not a major city. I live in a suburb of Chicago which at least half as large. With the next city these two are larger. The whole metro area of Chicago is over twice as large as Kiev. the city I grew up in, on the edge of Washington, DC is larger. Also, you must consider that political jurisdictions in the US are much more fragmented than in most of the world. This is due to local control. In many countries the central government controls this. Not in the US. A good example is Canada. A few years ago, the central government decided that Toronto and its suburbs, which were independent, were all Toronto. This could not happen here. The New York extended region, which is continuous, has a much larger population than Ukraine.
    1
  4490. This issue is going to greatly diminish medical science. The politicians are supposed to make the decisions about what risks are acceptable, not the scientists. Scientists are engineers (and I am one) have knowledge that is way too compartmentalized to make societal decisions. My real fear is that this will also spill over into other sciences. That would be a disaster for our society.
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  4491. A new Cold War is coming. It will involve both Russia and China. I miss the old Cold War. I got to do a lot of cutting edge research with unlimited funding. One thing the US could do is to station a large number of troops in Europe again. At the height of the Cold War the US had 500K troops facing off against the Soviets. Until the end of the Cold War this number was about 300K. The current deployment should be of the order of two heavy mechanized corps. They should be stationed in Poland, the Baltics and Scandanavia. That would present Putin with a dilemma. It would also have the added benefit of making recruiting in the US easier.
    1
  4492. This services PMI must be manipulated. Also, a PMI is an indicator of future activity, not current activity, and is a survey of sentiment, not actual activity. One also has to consider that the services sector is different from manufacturing for which the concept of the PMI was created. I see on other channels and news reports that many brick-and-mortar retail establishments are shutting down due to low demand. The videos had been mostly anecdotal, but I have noticed recently that they have been including lots of data, including official data. This includes the number of enterprises opening and closing and the winner is the latter. A number of very large retail establishments, including foreign ones, are cutting back or closing down. Is this an indication of an expanding sector? Now, if services include things like utilities paid by households, then it is the government raising those fees, and in the case of gas and electricity actually cheating the consumers raising costs artificially.
    1
  4493. Very true. I read a lot of actual science and consume a lot of science related content like this. What I find is that many of the communicators and, and these are often supposed to be leaders in their fields, seem to be stuck. Most of them seem to accept current theories or frameworks while constantly saying we need something more. They are stuck and afraid to have any real, independent thought. Many of the top people pursue a set of ideas that they have not been able to progress in decades. Some of them will die having become famous while not actually reaching their goal. Shouldn't they be smart enough to understand that they may not be on the right path?
    1
  4494. By the way, by the beginning of the 20th century, the US was one of the largest exporting nations in the world. I believe that the percentage of world trade originating in the US was higher than China's share today. After WWII the US share of world GDP was 50%. The US "bought" an alliance to counter the Soviet Union by opening up its markets to partners. That was a special case. The US has lower energy costs than any major developed economy. Many European companies have moved some operations to the US for this reason. There is every reason to expect it to have a favorable balance of trade. Consider the breadth of US industrial and technology activity compared to Russia and China. The whole comparative advantage argument assumes that the goods coming from places like China will be of similar quality. This is patently not the case. You may want to reconsider your argument.
    1
  4495.  @johnridout6540  As far as I am aware it does. Check your sources.
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  4496. The constant overestimate of Russia's capabilities in military matters by the analysts just continues to amaze me. Don't get me wrong, I have read all of Peter's books, and watched a lot of video content. I agree with almost all of it. Onn this one point, though, i have a real problem. Russia is not Stalin's Soviet Union. Remember, Stalin had been on an industrialization drive for more than a decade. Even given that, aid from the US and UK amounted to at least 20% of the material he needed to fight Germany. The example that should be looked at is Israel. It is almost an exact analog. The Arabs using Soviet weapons and training. Israel using western weapons and training. Plus, Ukraine is not Chechnya or Georgia. It is much larger and was fully integrated into the Soviet arms industry. As they have shown, they have the capability to innovate and much greater access to western technology.
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  4497. Allow Putin three years off to rebuild his military? How informed are these people. It took him 20 years to build up the force he attacked with in 2022. During that time, he had access to western technology and significant oil and gas revenues. By the way, he has lost that military, the equipment and men, in the first two years or so of the war. It is so bad that the NATO countries facing Russia have reported that the Russian bases facing them are basically empty. There is also a financial hole in Russia that they will not be able to dig out of. Putin doesn't have the money to rebuild. Then there are the human loses. The Russian population was already in a demographic decline that is fairly severe, and the war has made that even worse. Then there is the issue of what Putin would face if he invaded NATO territory. Ukraine was starting the conflict from a very low base militarily. They still have not caught up to NATO standards. They have been improving, as the Kursk invasion has shown. Their biggest deficit is in airpower. This is not the case with NATO. Every time a Soviet/Russia backed army has come up against a western, NATO equipped force they have come up well short, with casualty ratios well above what Ukraine has been able to achieve.
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  4498. Uranium can be sourced from other places. Australia is one example. There are also sources in Africa. There is also reprocessing, which France is a leader in. I don't think France will suffer.
    1
  4499.  @debbiesherman3215  Maybe some time you will. Would like to read it.
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  4500.  @debbiesherman3215  Good!
    1
  4501. The idea that Russia could invade NATO successfully is laughable. The creation of military districts? Really? This is how Putin is going to do it? If that is what passes for military expertise, then we have a problem. First, it took Putin 20 years to create the military he attacked with in 2022. He did that with western tech and lots of oil money. Guess what? Both are gone. The Ukrainians, not a NATO military, destroyed that army in less than two years. Putin is no longer able to field advanced systems. Where are the T-14 Armatas and SU-57s? How about those "unstoppable" hypersonic missiles? As President Joe likes to say: Come on man! Second, the invincibility of Russia and its threat to the rest of Europe is based on WWII. That war was an exception. It was exceptional because it was the only one they fought where they had outside support, and lots of it. Let's review, for those that do not follow history. In Soviet times, Afghanistan. In Czarist times WWI, the Russo-Japanese wars, even going back in time, the Crimean War in the 19th century. The current Russia is much more Imperial Russia than the Stalinist Soviet Union. Oh, and by the way, the kill ratio of the much smaller Germany was eight to ten Soviet soldiers to one German soldier. Oh, by the way, General Winter and the vast steppes will not help Russia if they attack to the west. If NATO is afraid that Russia will invade, then there is only one valid course of action. Build up massive forces along the borders with Russia and Belarus. These should be European troops primarily. The EU plus the UK have an economy about ten times as big as Russia's. The population of the EU is about three times that of Russia's. In the Cold War the US based hundreds of thousands of troops in Europe, for various reasons. Those reasons no longer apply. The US certainly should contribute, but they should not be the main force. Finally, Russia, unlike European NATO, has a neighbor to the east that they need to worry about.
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  4502. Ryan, same thing just happened in the UK with the Labor party.
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  4503. Silicon Valley's rise has nothing to do with the current tech sector. Silicon Valley's initial rise, driven by hardware. led to the corporate software giants which led to the current crop of tech companies. I am not playing down these new tech companies, but your simplification of this ignores major factors. Many people do this, and that it why it has been so hard to set up similar locations outside of the US. The first phase Silicon Valley was juiced by government spending in Aerospace & Defense. Profits from this helped fund the second phase and so it goes. I have lived through almost all of this, although I have never lived in (or wanted to live in) California.
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  4504. Great reporting. The MSM is worthless. The question of political stamina is one that is quite salient. As I have commented, the idea of the US providing freedom of the seas worldwide is one that has to be considered. Out Navy is not configured for this. There is a reason for that. The global order set up by the US, almost 80 years ago, was intended to counter the Soviet Union. I don't know if people have noticed, but that threat went away 30 years ago. We need to have the discussion about this! As for the Chinese navy, it is a joke. Recently a report has come out about the corruption in military procurement in China. It is bad, really bad. Some of their missiles are filled with water instead of rocket fuel. The covers on their ICBM launchers have not been maintained and won't open in many cases. Don't forget, the Chinese military is mostly using designs from the Soviet Union, often stollen, and generally inferior in implementation. Just look at the situation in Ukraine. The PLA is truly a paper tiger. Add to that the fact that they have no actual combat experience, and the picture is quite different from what has been painted in many circles.
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  4505.  @coreyrussellgaming6330  Makes sense.
    1
  4506. The issue of air superiority is the essential one. People in the west, especially uneducated commentators and interviewers, lament the slowness at the beginning of this offensive. They have grown used to "shock and awe" as General Franks famously said about OIF. The difference is that the US had overwhelming airpower. That has always been a strength of the US military. Because of dissembling on the part of the west, especially the US, Ukraine does not have that. Fortunately, the Russian air force is nothing like the US Air Force. Otherwise, Ukraine would have been doomed from the start.
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  4507. The idea of the west somehow empowering and educating the Russian people is a pipe dream. Russia and China are going through very similar issues currently. In China there are protests, but people are protesting for money. Those protests are ruthlessly put down, just as they are in Russia. Information in both countries is tightly controlled. The leadership in both have made sure that there are no viable leaders on the opposition side. Neither has any hope for the future. For the west to come in and "do something" it would have to expend significant treasure and perhaps blood. That will not happen. I see, in the case of China, a move by the west to isolate them, much like the Cold War (I miss the Cold War). The case of Russia is a bit different because of the resources it possesses. China basically has none. In fact, I can see a move by the west, especially the US, to get Russia on side to counter China. This would be a mirror image of the opening to China by Nixon which was basically a way to surround and isolate the Soviet Union. The sad truth is that both these societies will probably have to collapse before meaningful change can come about. Even with that, it is not clear what will come out the other side.
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  4508.  @jonzero7296  What do you mean? I think there is a typo in your comment.
    1
  4509.  @swiftmatic  A blast from the past. Actually, those factors were the same for all colors.
    1
  4510. The Ukrainians in Bakhmut have done a wonderful job. They have attritted the Russian and Wagner forces significantly. What they should do now is to prepare and action against the pincer forces from the area outside Bakhmut. The Russians will be so concentrated in the city itself that they will be slow to react. It is just too bad that Ukraine does not have massive airpower.
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  4511. This whole thing with the PLA oath is just plain silly. The PLA has always served the CCP, not the state. Always! This is nothing new. The whole idea of the Chinese state is a mirage. Putting "peoples" in the name has always meant nothing. The people have always been there to serve the party.
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  4512. What a bozo. No wonder the Democrats lost. When he said certain people should be disenfranchised, I actually got mad. It is the right of everyone to hold whatever views they want. It doesn't matter if some politician decides they are not good enough for the American people. We have elections to decide which views prevail. That is democracy. That is the will of the people. The Democrats are doomed unless they change their stance on this.
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  4513. Temperatures of 40C do occur at times in the US. The first time I went to Greece (in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium) I remember being on one island in the Cyclades where it was 43C in the shade. Of course, it was a dry heat. As far as I recall, there was no air conditioning, and no one died.
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  4514. What is funny about your mentioning "nation building" is that is what George W. Bush ran on in 2000. I remember discussing the candidates with my wife at the time and that was something, along with reducing American commitments abroad that attracted us to Bush. Then 9/11 happened. If Bush had stopped at Afghanistan, he would have been remembered much more fondly. Iraq was a direct contradiction of his original platform. Trump is taking us back to that.
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  4515. I was interested at first, but when he went on about the US adopting a "two state solution" depending on political party, I switched off. He lives in Israel. How can he even think that. How about a two-state solution within Israel. Actually, make it a three or four state solution. You have the "secular" Jews, the Orthodox Jews, other Jews that don't fit into those two categories and of course the non-Jewish (mostly Arab) Israelis. This is not even really a political party breakdown. Go that route and you have lots of Israels. What the US is going through now is actually quite normal in US history. Maybe Mr. Schueftan should read George Friedman's book "The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond". For an academic he seems ill informed on the topic.
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  4516. Any industrial transformation requires a lot of capital. Just to get from where China was before the reform and opening up period to where they are now required mostly foreign capital. China has now chased away the big foreign capital players. They have also cut off one of the main sources in internal capital formation. I am specifically referring to the trend to dump older workers. This is madness and shows the lack of understanding of how capital works. Where do you think those big investors get the money to invest. It is from people, mostly over 45, whose kids have moved out. In a typical economy, they are making the most they ever will. They are also more efficient than they ever were. They do not have to spend the money on kids. They invest it, trying to get the best returns (taking on more risk) to increase their retirement resources. So, China, laying off the older workers, is making two mistakes at once. They will never be able to generate sufficient internal capital if they continue down this path. Finally. there is the matter of corruption. The semiconductor push was mentioned. There have been at least two major rounds of funding set up by the CCP. In both cases a lot of it was stolen. People went to jail. The money was mostly not recovered. This in endemic in most of the capital allocations made by the CCP. What can you expect. They are a bunch of commies.
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  4517. Next to fall will be Keir Starmer in the UK. Then Putin and Xi. Good times ahead.
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  4518. Do the Chinese people understand that they do not own the land? Are they that stupid? Even all the major residential housing projects are on land that the developer pays for a 70 year "right" to build on. China has not been developing long enough to have to deal with what will happen at the end of those 70 years. Of course, the CCP will not be around long enough to deal with it either. The whole place is a mess.
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  4519. You are too tied in with the Russians. Putin did not wipe out the Wagner Group. They are now setting up shop in Belarus. There are already credible reports that Lukashenko is legitimizing them within Belarus. This drama is not over yet. Good thing too. Prigozhin is very entertaining.
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  4520. I follow the futures market in the US. As of yesterday, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude is trading at $73.25 per barrel. This is about $10 off its recent peak. Brent crude tends to be higher, but they tend to move in step with each other. Your chart at about 13:45 doesn't support the idea that the prices are trending up. Even though OPEC in the last couple of days has just reiterated their decision to limit production there is no massive surge in prices. As for the refineries that take Russian crude, those in India and China have plenty of capacity. That is why they do not want to take Russian refined products. It was cheaper for them to process the oil on their own. So, I am wondering why you even discuss the US refinery utilization. The other point is that Russian crude was never a significant input in the US. I f I recall correctly, Russian imports to the US were well under 10% prior to the war, so cutting that off had no real effect. Gasoline prices over the last week or so have basically remained steady in the $3.50 range. They are not near their peak. I can recall in the 2000s paying over $4.25 for it. Once when I was deer hunting in the 2000s it really hit home. The cost of the gasoline to go and fetch my processed deer was more than I paid to have it processed. That had never happened before. Not too long ago they reached that level again. So, do we have gasoline price deflation. It depends on your timeline. The gasoline price increase through the end of May is about 15%. It is now down almost 6% from the end of May today. This is odd because we are entering the prime driving season. Is that deflation? As I said, it depends on the starting point. As for the price cap, the west did what it could legally without implementing a blockade, which would have been an outright act of war. This causes Russia to use less efficient tankers thus increasing transport costs. At the same time, they are having to provide the insurance themselves, which is risky. As for the Houthis, I just saw a report that they are not, in general, attacking tankers, and certainly not those carrying Russian crude. This traffic has not diminished. Their impact has been primarily on container traffic.
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  4521. This is a great interview. I am very impressed, Megyn. I am pleasantly stunned at how well Secretary Rubio articulates the strategy. Very impressive. A lot of what he says echos what Peter Zeihan points out in his books. What he says, at about 1:35, regarding what happened at the end of the Cold War (I miss the Cold War) is spot on. Zeihan points out that George H. W. Bush wanted to have that conversation and said so in his second Presidential campaign. He was voted out of office in favor of a guy whose campaign's tag line was "It's the economy, stupid!" Bush was the most qualified President we have ever had, especially in terms of foreign policy and national strategy. Look at his background. A Navy pilot in WWII, a legislator, an ambassador (China, UN), Director of Central Intelligence, and Vice President for eight years. The American people didn't want to address the issue, and neither did the rest of the world. What Secretary Rubio said about the unipolar world is also spot on. Multipolarity is the natural state of affairs. The unipolar world situation was only in place for about 30 years. That is a blink of the eye in human history, and as the Secretary points out, it is not natural.
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  4522.  @skipperson4077  That is one way to look at it, but not that widely accepted. In fact, as I stated above, this is the first time I have seen it referred to as a "win" and it sounds like propaganda to me.
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  4523. Difficult job market? That is not what I am seeing in the statistics. Where do you get your information? I have seen statistics that show 40% or more of college graduates are in jobs that don't require a college degree. Frankly, there should be no student loans for degrees that do not contribute to the economy. If people want to study those subjects, they can do it on their own dime.
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  4524.  @KameraShy  Yes, I don't think anyone in the "west" would put up a fuss.
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  4525. Artur, you should read Peter Zeihan's book "Disunited Nations". It has a chapters on Turkey, Iran and Russia among others.
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  4526. This is rich coming from a country in Asia that stills relies heavily on fossil fuels. India and China still put out more CO2 that most of the rest of the world.
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  4527. I find this very interesting in regard to Boris. In my YouTube feed there is a short of Boris talking about Starmer and his backtracking on Brexit. He is truly trying to claw his way back. Don't forget the situation with Donald Trump in the US. He is the only the second president to be elected to nonconsecutive terms. Of course, in the UK this is not that unprecedented, is it. Winston Churchill was voted out of office at the end of WW2 and then was elected again 1951. So, it can happen.
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  4528. RNC last week. The RNC is ongoing. How informed are you?
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  4529. That was going to my observation. So called developing nations do this thinking they will maintain control. In the end it makes it cheaper for the companies from developed countries to walk away. India has some form of this as well. When will they learn? (hint: never)
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  4530. The US looked at invading Formosa in WWII. It would have required over twice the number of troops as the D-Day landings. They decided to go a different route to get bases closer to Japan for their bombers. And that was at a time when the US was at the height of its power and experience of amphibious landings. The US has not lost that capability. China, on the other hand, has no experience of amphibious warfare, and precious little actual military experience. In fact, in their last war they were bested by Vietnam (who hasn't been). Add to that the fact that they really have a lot of Soviet military heritage, and I would certainly concur with the simulation.
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  4531. The Ukraine produces a lot of wheat, but that is not the only grain export. Corn and soybeans are probably much larger. The US could produce more, but corn and soybeans are much more valuable, so the US has turned to those. That is what has led to Ukraine producing such a large percentage of wheat. Frankly, wheat is not a great food for the world. Having limited my intake of wheat products had directly led to a real improvement in my health. I know many others who have experienced the same thing. There is a lot of research to support this.
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  4532. Issuing new bonds to replace old ones, when the new interest rates are lower, is not an issue. In fact, it makes perfect fiscal sense. Where I am the schools are funded through local property taxes, and our school district has used this tactic quite successfully to keep tax rates down while providing top of the line facilities. Any company would do the same. I am not saying that local governments in China are in fiscal good health, but you might want to leave this aspect of their actions out of your narrative, since it actually shows good fiscal management.
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  4533.  @kundankumar-tw5wm  The fact is that the people of China are literal slaves. The CCP is a Marxist-Leninist organization. Ever heard the term "dictatorship of the proletariat". That says it all.
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  4534. Actually, hitting a "bullet with a bullet" is precisely what the US has worked on for going on four decades now. I worked on some of that stuff, and it was aimed at ICBM that are even faster than Oreshnik. As for the Russian's ability to fight NATO, that has always been overblown. The reasons are manifold. Just look at all the wars in the Middle East where a US/NATO supplied country, or the US/NATO actually clashed with a Soviet/Russian supplied country. No wins for the latter. In fact, NATO has noticed this, and the one concern is that the Russians would have to go nuclear very soon if they tried to attack.
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  4535.  @hi4806  Well, I just saw in another video that nine battery companies were either shutting down or scaling back. So, some are doing well, but some not. What is important is the whole industry, not particular companies. This goes for the whole EV market as well.
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  4536. I couldn't agree more on full self-driving. I took an Uber once and the driver had a Model 3. I asked him if he used the self-driving. His response was a curt and immediate no. Now, I have studied this topic off and on for decades and have taught on-line courses on sensor fusion. So, I am not coming from this without some knowledge.
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  4537. The way the left tout's racism in the US and UK, among other places, is just ludicrous. You cannot call a country racist when millions of people of all races are trying to get in. That attitude just doesn't "follow the science". You can't call the US racist when we had a black president for two terms. We have leading politicians in both parties that are of different races and backgrounds. There are two things you have to consider in race relations. First, is the system itself institutionally racist? No for the US and UK. Second, are there individuals, and perhaps civil society groups, that are racist? Of course, there will be. Is this endemic. Absolutely not.
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  4538. I have seen some reporting that these scammer operations are linked to the CCP. Considering the corruption in the CCP, and Chinese society in general, I would not be surprised if this were proven to be true.
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  4539. Interesting. Nikkei exposes authoritarian similarities. This is one of my pet peeves. Any well informed person who thinks about the issue would have known that years ago. Now that Nikkei has said it, we are allowed to believe it. I guess what gets me in media today is the mixture of reporting on events mixed with reporting on analysis. The whole point of gathering a lot of data is to predict what is going to happen. Otherwise you are just doing archaeology or history. Our intelligentsia is all about retrospective analysis today, telling us what happened. For an investor or diplomatic figure what we want is what we should expect and do in the future.
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  4540. Sounds like a shill for China.
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  4541. Considering what you said earlier in the video I was wondering if you were going to get to the comparison between this situation and the Russia Ukraine War. African societies are tribal. In the not-too-distant past I had two friends who were born in Africa. Both are PhD mathematicians. One was a fellow instructor at a professional training company. The other was my professor, advisor and the head of the department I was studying in. Both were reluctant to tell me where in Africa they were from. The first was from Uganda. After he opened up to me about it, he admitted that it was still very tribal. He still owns property there and goes back occasionally to fulfill some sort of tribal obligation. The other is from Eritrea. I got from him that his family fled the communist government there. Ethiopia, from which Eritrea split, is currently undergoing massive tribal conflict. The current national borders are the result of European imperialism. I wonder how long people there will keep up the fiction of those borders. This is very much like the Middle East and southwestern Asia. I know your attitude toward statehood, but what if those nation states are fictions or the remains of ancient empires? As we see with the war in Ukraine and Putin's statements about Russian nationals in other countries, tribalism is still an issue even in Europe.
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  4542.  5Head  WRONG! Rockets are unguided. Missiles are guided, Both have warheads with explosives. If you don't know about these things, then don't comment on them.
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  4543.  5Head  That is not the information I have seen. Wikipedia has an article on this which discusses the explosives used (TNT and urea nitrate). Global Security has an article talking about the larger ones having a 375lb warhead. There is no sense in firing a rocket or mortar shell or any other projectile without a warhead. Where do you get your information?
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  4544. Ian, what did the Hudson H9 do that it was worth spending $1,200 on?
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  4545. The Tomahawk cruise missile was first fielded in 1983. The Storm Shadow come in 2003. It has a lot of the same features but is bigger because its range is at least 1,000 miles. The Storm Shadow is listed at 340 miles. I was working on systems for the Army in the first Gulf War. We had CNN on a big screen going 24x7 in the conference room. There was one time when a CNN reporter was reporting from the balcony of his hotel in Baghdad, and right in the middle of it a Tomahawk streaked down the street going to blow up a military command post. It as magic.
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  4546.  @jaydee6268  Great reference. It was actually just called "Bananas". This may be a bit off topic, but when the rebel leader, Esposito takes over he makes a bunch of silly declarations. My favorite is: "From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish."
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  4547. Peter's TDS is on full display in the first few seconds. Can't manage a government. Is that the role of the president? Of course, it could also be said of Biden and Obama. Obama was a community organizer before getting into Congress. Biden has been a politician since, well, forever. What did he "manage" during his first term? Did he even know what was going on? Peter is way out of his depth when analyzing governments. The fact that he was saying that in terms of Russia, is hilarious. Russia, while Trump was president did not invade Ukraine. Trump correctly identified to the Germans that they were too dependent on Russian gas. He shut down Nord Stream 2. He correctly identified to the Germans that they were not spending enough on defense. Any argument there. They laughed at Trump, by the way. Who's laughing now? And another thing. Managing the government? Really. Trump cut back on regulation, and before COVID hit the economy was doing very well.
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  4548.  @alienelephant4721  Absolutely! Have you heard of survival of the fittest? Do you know why English is taking over? It is a non-inflected language. It is also simpler, and more adaptable than most. In the 1990s, I was studying at university (my second stint). I was taking German. One of my classmates worked for a German company. They adapted their systems to the German language. It was a disaster. If you know German, you know that there are many long words that are combinations of a number of words. Imagine typing them in correctly. Especially in technical fields, these words could be well over 20 letters long. Computer systems at the time could not cope with this. Thus, one character out of place would spell disaster. Needless to say, they went back to Englsh. This is why English will take over as the world language. Chinese, Japanese and similar languages are basically like hieroglyphs. Where did they end up? They are not appropriate for modern communications. What is interesting is that most South Asian languages easily incorporate English terms for things that were not present when their languages evolved. This shows the same flexibility as English, which quite frankly has many French and German terms.
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  4549. I like that you point out that many of the deaths were coincidental, rather than from. In past times (and perhaps today), many older people would die from pneumonia. This was, like COVID today, a coincidental factor, since they were not capable of fighting off the disease because of diminished capacity. Many would have died in the near future in any case of "natural causes". It seems, and correct me if I am wrong, that most older people die of some illness, but are really susceptible because of their age. I had one relative, my fraternal grandfather, who died peacefully in his sleep, in his late 80s. All the others seemed to die due to some illness, but generally when they were quite old.
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  4550. The demographic collapse was already happening before the war. That, combined with other health problems means the eventual demise of the Russian ethnicity in Russia. In fact, some demographers have already projected out that the Russian ethnicity will no longer be a majority in Russia in a few years. This war is just hastening the collapse.
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  4551.  @JamesKerLindsay  Yes, it was the CIA. It's always the CIA.
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  4552.  @danshabash  You have no idea of what you are talking about. Let me put it another way. That is the dumbest thing I have ever read. How else can I say it. What I am really interested in is why you made such an obvious mistake. Asking for a friend. Let us know. Are you unaware of how the breakup of the Soviet Union worked? All the military equipment that was on the territory of the various states was theirs. Much of the stuff, but not all, that could be moved back into what became the Russian Federation was moved there. In the case of Ukraine's nukes much of that could not be moved.
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  4553. Actually, the NATO treaty stipulates that an attack on a member's troops in another country does not count as an attack on NATO requiring a response. The only exception was for some occupation troops present at the beginning. So, Ukraine doesn't count.
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  4554. Of course, Europe had Merkel, and now Macron, to lead them. Better than sleepy Joe, but on the policy side, not by much.
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  4555. Janet Yellen has certainly changed her stance. Some might say she "has grown a pair". First the CCP loses Dalio, now Yellen. Xi is single handedly pushing away all his allies in the US and the west in general. For those that say he is not very smart, this is just another example.
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  4556. Not paying hospital workers. Civil servants unpaid. Workers in many other industries unpaid. The Chinese people are very heavily brainwashed and/or very uneducated in economic issues. Of course, they are commies, so that makes sense. Don't worry about China as a major power. They are going to implode on their own. The best thing the west can do is keep up the pressure.
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  4557. Does anyone really think that Putin's motivation for this was simply NATO membership for Ukraine? Finland, and Sweeden were coordinating with NATO long before becoming members. This was always a problem for Putin. The difference now is the Article 5 component. Putin's grand plan was to recreate the borders of the Russian empire (and Soviet Union) controlling all the invasion choke points. This is, of course, silly. Russia does not have the military power to do anything like that. Putin, like Chainman Xi in China, is pissing all over the rules based international order. That order created their economies. The incredible stupidity of that is that they are destroying their own economies. Never forget, in modern war it is economic power that is key. Russia is dead as an economic power. Few will deal with them considering their actions of the last years. China is experiencing the same thing. All the analysts say, no, we're not decoupling, while foreign investment and trade collapse. There is a new order coming, and it is not the rules based worldwide order. Forget the WEF. They are a bunch of fools playing with other people's money. They have no idea what is coming. Even some of them (e.g., Ray Dalio) are backing off. It is going back to before the Cold War, and that is not good for the many. In fact, it will be catastrophic. As for what Biden said, yes, let's hold the US to it. By the time the war is over Ukraine will have a NATO trained and equipped army with lots of experience.
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  4558. Do people not listen to what the CCP says. The high court has openly stated that it serves the party, not the interests of the people or the law. They openly state that. China does not have rule of law under the CCP. How is that not clear to the people?
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  4559. @Mike Harrison Looking forward to it.
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  4560. Epic! Sabine gets it right.
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  4561. The hats, the hats! I forget who it was, but some historian said history doesn't repeat, it rhymes, or something along those lines. Even considering the two world wars, many historians consider the second an extension of the first. The Prussian militarists were at least as ambitious as Hitler. Heck, Napolean was perhaps more ambitious than Hitler. I mention the rhyme aspect because today there is one big difference between the early 21st century and the first half of the 20th. it is specifically a topic that Peter emphasizes in his work. That topic is demographics. It applies to Japan as well as to western Europe. At that time all those countries had growing populations. That changes everything.
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  4562. The comment on what Pontiac had become (another mid-tier brand) is right on the money. In about 1970 my mother took me to a Pontiac dealer to look at a Datsun 510. I wasn't even driving yet. She even put a $100 deposit on it. I asked the dealer about his selling this Japanese car and didn't he worry about the competition. His answer was that his competition was the Buick dealer down the street, not these little Japanese cars.
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  4563. A new Cold War. Containment. I love it. I miss the Cold War. I got to do incredibly interesting research with basically unlimited funds. So, bring it on. All kidding (well, I really did what I said) aside, the world did just fine without the Soviet Union or Communist China being integrated with the west. Both Putin's Russia and Xi's China should be isolated from the world community. They have made themselves pariahs.
    1
  4564. The thing that the companies that refuse to hire people over 35 are missing is that these people are typically the most productive. They are also the ones that are key to capital formation, in a normal economy. The younger people consume, and older people provide a lot of the capital. China is failing on both ends of this spectrum. I don't see them recovering. I recently heard that the CCP is considering more debt driven, inefficient, infrastructure development projects to keep GDP growth numbers up. What a joke.
    1
  4565. I love it when any European complains about following the US. The only reason they are not all "speaking Russian" is the US. The only reason Hungary is now an independent country is the US. Europe is probably the most blood-soaked place on earth, at least in the last 500 years or more. The Europeans have no place talking about peace or war. Left to themselves they are an unmitigated disaster. Even today, the borders of Europe are what I think of as "artificial". That is why Orban could discuss with Zalenski the Hungarian speaking people who find themselves in Ukraine. Frankly, his issue there is no different from Russia's issue with the Donbas region. And of course, Europe extended this mixing of different nationalities within artificially drawn borders throughout the world during imperial times. We are still dealing with it as a source of conflict. Iraq is a good example. Just a little history, vis-a-vis the US and Europe. Look up the Monroe Doctrine. US policy had always been NOT to get involved European wars, which occurred often. Prior to both world wars the US population was staunchly isolationist. Woodrow Wilson's campaign slogan for his second election was "he kept us out of the war". FDR was elected (and reelected) primarily because of the internal economic situation. If someone else, with a less Anglophile proclivity, was in office, things might have turned out differently. In fact, prior to Hitler's declaration of war on the US, the US was more involved in Asia. The US stayed in Europe after WWII (with 300K to 500K troops) during the Cold War precisely because that was considered better for its own security, in the nuclear age, than dealing with another European dictator starting a war. Those wars always seem to spill over into the rest of the world. So, yes, the Europeans "cut and paste" US security policy. It is their only hope.
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  4566. The real question for Americans is why such bills are allowed. We should have legislation, especially fiscal and policy, that are coherent. Each of these issues should be voted on separately. The issues with illegal immigrants (they should all be sent back) and green energy should NEVER be in the same bill. This is legislative incompetence, or worse. At least the infrastructure bill was about infrastructure. The BBB bill is an abomination. And that does not take into account the inflationary consequences.
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  4567. If you hadn't noticed, the Syrian regime has done a lot of things that the world finds reprehensible. They used chemical weapons against their own citizens, for example. You mention Israel. Well, the Assad government hosts Iranian forces that threaten Israel. The rebel groups in northwest Syria include many radical jihadi groups. Some of these have links to Al Qaeda. Do you understand now?
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  4568. This is a disappointment. For example, AOC is of Puerto Rican descent, not Mexican. Not all Latinos are the same. Comments about other aspects of what is going on in the US are also of a lower level than what is the usual standard for this show.
    1
  4569. The thing about China is that it cannot get out of its own economic death spiral. Things are very, very bad there. Heck, even Ray Dalio just recently said so. Of course, he waited to do so until he could unwind his own investments there. China is also skating on thin ice with their dumping overseas which is antagonizing the rest of the world, even some of their erstwhile allies. They have at least as bad a demographic problem as Russia does, on top of all that. It is only a matter when not whether. China's going down.
    1
  4570. I have little or no sympathy for the residents of NYC. They voted these bozos into power, consistently. They support the idea of "sanctuary cities". They are getting what they voted for and thus what they deserve. Let's hope Trump, Homan and Noem can bail them out of this madness.
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  4571. An individual's experience, in evaluating a mass use treatment, is irrelevant. It is the population statistics that matter. I got the Pfizer vaccine, two doses, and have had NO side effects. I didn't even feel any low-level effects, such as soreness, etc. None of the people I know have had any adverse effects either. And I have talked to quite a few. All vaccines, and indeed, all medications, have a possibility of side effects. Have you ever looked at the materials that come with a medication? It makes you not want to take anything. The reality is that any medication that gets approved has a very small, but not zero, probability of side effects.
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  4572.  @x-latetv-x6816  I share with you the strong immune system. In the last five years I had a mild flu that lasted less than 24 hours. I changed my diet (when going through a divorce), keep hydrated and exercise. I decided to get the vaccine because I am in my mid-sixties. Prior to that I had not even taken a flu shot. With diet change leading to weight loss my blood pressure has gone back to normal. My doctor, and this was 10 years ago, had me on blood pressure pills which really didn't work well and caused discomfort. That is the only time I took a long-term medication. The real solution was weight loss. I really don't go to doctors anymore.
    1
  4573. It takes years to get an economy to be organized in a military industrial way? Really? What about the US in WWII? What about Soviet production in WWII?
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  4574. The statement at the end is way off base. Xi has intentionally poisoned the US China relationship. He wanted what China had before, which was a corrupt economy that stole IP from around the world. I have seen this up close, by the way. China has explicitly stated that they want to break and reformulate the world order in their favor. They think having lots of people gives you power. Well, China has had the world's largest population for centuries. Have they ever dominated the world? Not even close. See my previous comment. They "pulled the trigger" on this ambition way before they had the ability to carry it through. The CCP is toast, and they will bring China down with them.
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  4575. Thanks for the love. Whenever I write or use the phrase "living in the past" I think of the song of that title by Jethro Tull. That may be a reference too old for you, but it is worth a look.
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  4576.  @talkinghand122  It seems more like Bernie Madoff. Actually, I saw one analysis claiming that it did not start out that way, but due to flaws in the system it evolved that way. Seems reasonable considering the evidence given. So, in one sense, the Xi's response with the three red lines made sense. The problem is that it was so clumsily implemented, that it tanked the whole system. Go, CCP!
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  4577. The conflation of different "oppressions" is not new, and not particularly "neo-Marxist". It is, in fact, the basis of the modern US Democratic Party from a while back. It explains why Jews in the US often support the Democratic Party. They were oppressed by the WASPs, as were the blacks. So, they joined forces with them. Blacks, another exploited group were coopted by the white (WASP) Democrats to improve their electability. There were plenty of antisemitic leaders in the black community and incidents in places like New York City in the not too distant past. I have seen it play out throughout my lifetime and have witnessed it up close. It all comes down to the enemy of my enemy is my friend. That explains the clip I saw of an older lesbian marching in London in support of Hamas. She had no idea of what Hamas' attitude towards homosexuals is. Frankly, she would have been thrown off a tall building in Gaza if she ever went there. No, she was just protesting the establishment, in this case the Israeli government.
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  4578. Jake, you are gloating.
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  4579.  @AKCFTW  I think it's great. Funny even.
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  4580.  @theinacircleoftheancientpu492  As long as it is not actually outdated, it is fine. The aging criteria is quite conservative in the US military. I have seen it up close. On the other hand, there are lots of reports, from Russian sources, that the North Korean artillery shells sent to Russia are way out of date and dangerous. Many examples can be found of duds and shells actually blowing up the artillery pieces. Par for the course in the Axis of Evil. I disagree that the general characterization is used is useful. There are many variations of obsolescence. Just look at the Ukraine War. Just as an example, both sides have been using Maxim machine guns. This is WWI stuff, but there is a lot of it. No one would build these now, but they work. Frankly, most of the Soviet era armored vehicles used on both sides are obsolete. The Ukrainians use them fairly well, the Russians not so much. In fact, the Russians have been using older and older tanks, including T-55s. Read about the Syrian attacks in the Golan Heights in the 1973 war. The Israelis, with far fewer, but more modern western tanks, destroyed them by the thousands. If I have my math right, that was half a century ago. Now that is an example of obsolete. The weapon system that is most visible in this context from the west is the HIMARS launcher and the associated munitions. There are follow on missiles for some of the ones being sent to Ukraine. On the other hand, the Russians have had very little success shooting down these "obsolete" weapons even with their most advanced systems. Obsolete, or just not the latest model?
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  4581.  @James-kv6kb  You obviously have no idea of how the system works. You say that the US is always interfering. As President Joe would say, Come on man! Do you have any historical perspective? Obviously not! George W. Bush actually ran on a platform of lessening US commitments around the world and stopping "nation building" efforts. Then the US was attacked on 9/11. Did the US interfere when Iraq invaded Iran? Was the US an ally of either of those? Was it US interference that caused Iraq to invade Kuwait? Was the US behind the many Arab invasions of Israel? Did the US encourage Russia to invade Ukraine? Go study these things before spouting such drivel.
    1
  4582.  @SkyCommanderOverlord  You may not want to mention the Soviet Union if you are a Russian. That country fell apart, to a large extent because they spent so much of their resources on their military. Then, as now, Russia was isolated from the west. So, how did that work out? As for the cities and towns the Russians are "capturing", they are generally very small. No major city has been captured since early in the war, and some that were captured have been taken back by the Ukrainians. You obviously have no background or understanding of the military situation. The KIA ratio, as reported by outside observers and intelligence agencies, is eight to one in favor of the Ukrainians. As for fearing that Russia will invade another country, I am not. This is Russia's last war. If they did indeed try to invade the Nordic countries, Poland, or even the Baltic countries they would be totally crushed. They can't even defeat Ukraine after over two years and have lost territory they gained in their initial attack. Their equipment losses have been massive and are unrecoverable. This war has shown that Soviet/Russian weapons are inferior to western weapons. Of course, that is to be expected. For historical perspective look at all the Israeli wars with their Arab neighbors. The Israelis had western weapons and the Arabs had Soviet weapons. Then look at the two wars with Iraq. Case closed.
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  4583.  @RobertFletcherOBE  What is only partially true? Use your words. Sending stocks to Ukraine that were scheduled for decommissioning and re-conditioning is not an issue. This is in fact how it would be while the US is using these munitions. Use the older stocks fist. That is just good management practice. The other thing to consider is that the criteria for when an item needs to be decommissioned or refurbished are very conservative. I was taught this by my father more than half a century ago as I mentioned above. The situation is that Ukraine will use things like artillery right now and is not going to stockpile it. Contrast that with the North Korean shells being sent to Russia. A lot of it was Soviet stuff sent to them when there was a Soviet Union. How long ago was that? Do you think that ammo was stored properly, and lot tested over time? Come on man!
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  4584.  @scottn1405  You talking to me? You talking to me? Please excuse the bit of cinema humor. If the hypersonics and air defense of the Russians were so good, why does Ukraine with US equipment keep shooting them down? You are obviously ill informed about these matters.
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  4585. The Wagner mercenaries will all be in Africa and the Middle East by winter.
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  4586. Yes, but the activities the investment will go into will require American companies and expertise. A lot of Russia's oil and gas infrastructure was built with American expertise by American companies, especially in the more challenging areas of the country.
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  4587. It is acceptable to protest to make ones views known. But when thwarting the will of the duly elected government, then a line has been crossed. Why should the protestors have the final say? Is that how democracy works?
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  4588. The situation with the oligarchs is interesting and Mr. Binyon's presentation of it is trite and uninformative. I also think that there are errors in it. The oligarchs were not oligarchs before they bought up all the companies. It was their ability to do so that made them oligarchs. His statements seem to imply that there was this class of oligarchs that already existed wholly formed. In many cases these were just smart people, often engineers and scientists, who knew the value of the vouchers. Actually, his characterization of the oligarchs buying up the vouchers before they were given to the workers is not how I understand it. Which brings up the other, and most important, part of the problem. The people in the Soviet Union had grown up under communism. They did not know what markets were and had no idea of what equities were. This is what the vouchers basically were, shares in the enterprises. So, the common man had no idea what this voucher thing was and what it was worth, and the oligarchs, as I understand it, swooped in and bought them cheap from unsuspecting and uneducated (in this aspect) workers. So, a whole different story.
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  4589. Haven't you noticed that there is no move by the government against Musk? Think about it for a minute. As for the government contracts, the US is stuck with Musk. Look at the problems the other government space contractors are having. Astronauts stuck on the space station, perhaps for a year. Their only alternative is Musk. Use the web. You might find out a thing or two.
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  4590. This is great. The SNP will break up. They certainly won't advance the cause of independence.
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  4591. The title of the video is misleading and kind of silly. This is not how things work. Do people need a primer on how strategy drives tactics? Considering this situation and the Ukraine and Gaza situations, I have to conclude it does. If there is not a strategic imperative, then all these "little" actions like convoying operations are just a band-aid, putting off the inevitable. It has to be either an invasion to quell the source of the problem, or just accept that shipping patterns will change. What do you think that the development of western, mostly European navies was all about over the last 500 years or so? It is happening! The whole world order set up after WWII was geared to fight the Soviet Union. Period! It has been the environment that allowed China, Russia and other countries to prosper. It has also been irrelevant to US interests for three decades. Read the works of the geopolitical strategists. Read some history prior to the 1970s. Maybe read about the Barbary pirates. We call them pirates, but they really were state actors considering what passed for a state in that region at the time. The Houthis are not really any different. The nice tidy world of internationally recognized states with settled borders is OVER, in case you hadn't noticed. Was it ever really a reality? Think about it.
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  4592. The comments about hydrogen are a fantasy. About 15 years ago, I had a major construction management and engineering firm working for me. At the same time they were working on hydrogen fueling stations for BP. These are incredibly complicated and expensive. Mind you, this was 15 years ago and noting has come of it. Because hydrogen is the smallest atom and molecule, it is incredibly hard and expensive to store and handle. Don't forget, hydrogen fuel cells were developed for the space program where cost was not much of an issue. There were also not many of them. I expect that hydrogen is a dead end.
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  4593. The comment about losing languages is an interesting one. Yes, it is sad when a language "dies", but that ignores the fact that this has been going on for a very long time. It also ignores the fact that languages evolve. It sort of reminds me of the "issue" with species. Species evolve, and in fact, we don't really know how many species there are. I am talking about all "living" things from bacteria on up. If we don't know how many there are, then how do we know how many there should be? Species go extinct all the time and others take their place. Trying to freeze the number of species is most probably counterproductive and unethical. We spend a lot of time, as in videos like this one, worrying about such situations, when there is nothing more natural. While there are instances where languages are intentionally killed off, many of the situations alluded to here are simply due to the fact that too few people speak these languages to make them viable.
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  4594. What do you mean by win a war. In the first Gulf war, with 500K troops we pushed Iraq out fof Kuwait in about 72 hours. At that time, Iraq had the fourth largest army in the world and had 10 years of combat experience. In the Second Gulf War, with about 170K American troops we overran the whole country of Iraq in two weeks. In Afghanistan we overthrew the Taliban regime in short order. What we did not do, in all these cases, was to impose our will totally on these countries as we did with Germany and Japan after WWII. That was the mistake. We also supported regimes that were not effective or supported by their populations. We won the war part, but not the peace. We still have substantial troops in Germany and Japan. Today these are there to protect them from new threats, not to occupy them. Not long ago we planned to pull more troops from Germany and the Germans were up in arms. Our intent was to deploy them to the Pacific where we face a new threat, so this made sense. Even in Vietnam, we never lost a battle. We did back a regime that obviously did not have the support of the people. This has been our failure in all these conflicts since WWII. Korea is the only sort of bright spot. But don't forget, in WWII we basically destroyed the enemy combatants. Perhaps if we had done the same to Iraq and Afghanistan the outcome would have been different. Leaving the bulk of the population untouched is a recipe for disaster in a war. War needs to be total, or not engaged in.
    1
  4595.  @walden6272  I use the term battle differently than you do. I mean a specific engagement. I get the sense that you are using the term the way I would characterize the war. Just my impression. You do have a point, though. In many cases we won the battle, occupied the space for a short time, then withdrew. There are lots of issues associated with our failure in Vietnam. As to conscripts, you have to consider that at this time we had as many troops in Europe as we had in Vietnam, about 500K. There was also a large presence in Korea. That is what drove the need for the draft. It was our massive commitments around the world.
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  4596. Weather. Interesting. I just saw a report yesterday that from the CME about natural gas futures being down. The reason is that weather projections for the US are for a milder winter here. Yep, weather is variable. One thing this will mean is that there will not be pressure on supply from North America.
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  4597. Your conclusion is just plain wrong! Although the public sector continues to be inefficient, private sector companies, especially in the US, respond to mismatches between labor and output. I have worked for lots of companies, from startups to the largest. The lack of a pricing mechanism in socialist economies is the biggest issue. No socialist country has escaped this. Just look at those that still exist today. Even in China, a top CCP official admitted that 600M people live in poverty. This is about 40% of the population. They are ripe for major civil unrest.
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  4598. This guy should be running the country!!!
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  4599. Ah, the hype cycle. This is endemic in the technology world. Remember "big data". That was another major hype cycle. People were calling for "C-suite" level executives for big data. Data as an asset. Well, the last is true. Big data is essential for AI, by the way. Now that the hype has passed, cooler heads prevail. On the other hand, big data is not cheap, and it is not effectively used for mundane purposes as we were led to believe. Just look at the ads you get on YouTube or in your email and this will become clear. NOTE: at the height of the hype, I taught professional classes on big data. What makes AI useful is a combination of big data and statistical methods. Unlike analytical algorithms, AI is led by the data. This is one of the revelations I discovered studying statistics and probability.
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  4600. Are you surprised? From the tone of the video, it seems that you are surprised by this. Are you just being "woke" or are you just too young? I expect it's a bit of both. The Soviets then, and the Communist Chinese today, really want to impose their brand of Communist ideology on the world. They never made a secret of it. Understand, that they wanted to IMPOSE their system on the world. They never thought it was something people would do voluntarily. It was never voluntary in the Russian Empire or in China. Any attempt to counter this movement is both admirable and necessary. Communism is the most corrupt and dangerous ideology ever conceived. It has killed many more people than the right-wing fascist ideologies, by a long shot. Its core tenants are abhorrent to human society. Don't forget that the NAZIs were National Socialists. They were as communist as the Soviets but concentrated on a national identity. In fact, after Poland defeated the Soviets in the 1920s, the Soviets fell back on Communism in one country. This was an admission of a short-term defeat, because communism is an internationalist movement. I generally like the work of this channel, but often find an annoying trend towards applying current standards to a time when these were unknown and irrelevant. This borders on wokeism, and in a disturbing trend. I am very well read in history, back to the earliest times, and am very experienced due to a long lifespan. I have lived through many of these events and have actually participated in some. Perhaps you are too young to be talking about this stuff. You have little or no perspective.
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  4601. What was all the stuff about the military industrial complex? It was really the DoD that saw the need for low level penetration bombing against Soviet targets because of their successful high altitude anti-aircraft missiles. These were real concerns at the time and not just something dreamt up to create business activity. I grew up under the threat of nuclear war. When the population of the US was about 2/3 of what it is now, casualties of 50 - 60 million were thought to be acceptable. This was a time when there was a real existential threat. Also, in the aviation industry it is especially important to be constantly innovating.
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  4602. Putin's comment about 1917 shows how stupid he is. He can't even get history right.
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  4603. Your explanation of ERA is, I think, incorrect. The ERA does not have any active components or sensors. When the projectile hits, explosive in the ERA block detonates and disrupts the projectile. If I understood you correctly, you implied that the ERA explodes before the projectile hits. While, if the ERA is working as intended, the core of the tank is not reached, the ERA installed is now a part of the tank.
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  4604. This reliance on satellites and cellular communication to guide drones is, as you point out, foolish. There are better systems that are not subject to interference because they do not rely on external networks. This is especially true when the drone is used more like a cruise missile to attack a specific fixed target. The Russians are so far behind technologically that it is stunning.
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  4605. You are wrong about the support among blacks for Harris. Trump went from 8% in 2016 to 13% in 2020 to 20% in 2024. That is basically unprecedented. This information, by the way, is easily available.
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  4606. Earth on fire. Not where I live (Chicago area). Our temps have been right at the long term average. We had three days of low 90deg F. I didn't even turn on the AC. The month of August is forecast to be in highs in the low 80s. The high temperatures being experienced by some areas of the globe are well explained by the fact that we are in a strong El Nino cycle. It is scientific malpractice to bring in another explanation, such as climate change, when a well established cause is available. The burned area chart is interesting. A few years ago, there were lots of highly publicized fires in the Amazon. Then, a scientist decided to look at the figures, and the burned area at the time was 10% below the average. The furore died down after that revelation.
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  4607. I would agree with you that RFK Jr. is bats*it crazy. I heard a part of what he said on Joe Rogan's podcast. Yep, batsh*it covers it. What I don't think you are considering is that, while the Republicans have people who might be attracted, the Democrats have just as many or more, I posit. There is also the name issue. RFK Jr. is the son of one of the most revered Democrats of the last century. To figure out where he will have an effect will take, well, polling. By the way, how did you mean "Take a Hike"? Sometimes that is not meant to be nice.
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  4608. Another UN organization. What would you expect. Tedros supports China because he is a hard core commie, and they bought him.
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  4609. So, Jake, how many Americans would you sacrifice to stop a civil war in a Middle Eastern country? Listen to yourself. In addition, the situation during Trump's first term was much more complicated. ISIS was still in place there controlling territory. Under Trump they lost that territory. That was part of the GWT, not the Syrian civil war. You are ex-military. I would think that you would have a better grasp on these things. Interfering in civil war is both dangerous and costly. According to you, then, we should have boots on the ground in Yemen. How many Americans would you sacrifice for that? What about Sudan and Ethiopia? Let's not forget Myanmar. How many Americans? As President Joe likes to say: C'mon man!
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  4610. Climate is always changing. Why mention it in this regard?
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  4611. The idea that China will threaten Russia to the east, while plausible, ignores the fact that Xi's position is no more tannable than Putin's. The CCP is looking more unstable by the day. Recall that China's invasion of India in the 1960s was a tactic used by Mao to solidify his control over the PLA. China won, and then withdrew. Xi models himself on Mao. It really seems he needs a war for the same reason Mao did. It is also instructive to look at what happened to China after the fall of the Qing dynasty. The country broke into warlord controlled territories. This is a very common thing in Chinese history. One pundit claims that for all but 300 years in its long history China was not tightly controlled by the central government. I don't know how accurate that figure is, but the reality is that this is all too common. By the way, others have speculated that Russia will break up into regions controlled by local warlords, without any central government. Very similar to China. To assume that either Russia or China will somehow morph into a liberal democratic state is stretching it. There is no democratic tradition in either. There are also no democratic leaders of any stature to come in and lead such a transition. In China you had Sun Yat-sen after the fall of the Qing. He was a socialist, not a democrat. Both countries are so corrupt, not just in government but at all levels of society, that once central authority breaks, there will be chaos. How would a democracy deal with such levels of corruption?
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  4612. What has the UK become? Italy.
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  4613. I was waiting to see how much the shortfall would be. So, Peter projects one third. The other important statistic in this calculation is how much we produce now. My understanding is that the world produces about twice the number of calories as humanity requires. Another statistic that is important is that the world population is set to peak soon (if it already hasn't) and then decline naturally. Then there is the caloric input needed by humans. There is lots of talk about 2,000 calories per day. Let's go with that. I was talking to the manager of a high-end healthy eating establishment once. This was premade stuff that just needed microwaving. They had a small seating area, but most of their customers took the stuff home. It was good, healthy and expensive. Why do I mention all this? Because here was someone talking about the details of food, and the two touch points for caloric intake they had were 1,800 and 1,500 calories. Their customers were foodies that had the money and health consciousness to get basically anything they desired. It is important because that caloric difference is between 10% and 25% of the recommendations. The recommendations on food from our governments are wrong in both makeup and quantity. It is a scam and the motivations for the scam are obvious on so many levels. Look at the health problems we deal with. There are lots more people dealing with obesity than with starvation in today's world. The problem with food is what it has always been. Distribution. I remember when I was a kid (half a century ago) reading about starvation in Africa. There was plenty of food available in the developed world but getting it to the people there and distributing it was the cause of the suffering. We will see the age of imperialism come back.
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  4614. If Taiwan is invaded China will die. Literally! Look at the sanctions put on Russia because of their invasion of Ukraine. The US has a much, much longer history of supporting Taiwan. Taiwan is also much, much more important economically to the US than Ukrain. The call for sanctions by the populace, including Chinese Americans, would be deafening. If the US, and the rest of the western world, cuts off China, as Peter Zeihan eloquently puts it, deindustrialization would occur in months with mass starvation coming soon after. My biggest concern is that Xi is too stupid to understand this. This concern is based on Xi's, and the CCP's, adoration of Mao, who killed more Chinese than anyone. To solidify his hold over the country, and the PLA, Mao started a war with India in 1962. China won, then withdrew. In 1966 Mao then started the Cultural Revolution which lasted until his death. This is the only pattern they know to hold onto power.
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  4615. We all know who the big four banks are. You don't need to repeat the list every time.
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  4616. Secretary Noem makes a good point. These liberal Democrat mayors and governors are protecting criminals, terrorists and gang members. I think there should be an investigation of these elected officials. What is their motivation? There is something fishy going on here. Even the "law abiding undocumented" are criminals. I have lived and worked abroad and did it legally. If I had lost my job, which was the basis for my work permit, I would have had to leave that country. I was questioned every time I reentered the country where I was living about my employment. This happened a lot because I traveled internationally a lot. What do these people not get about doing things legally?
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  4617. This is good news, but something you said was not true. During colonial times, and right up to the end of WWII, trade was restricted to colonial blocks that were often widely dispersed across the world. This idea of world trade is not new. It just had a different architecture. The EU is basically a cartel, not much different in practice from those colonial blocks. I read recently about a German industrial firm that had operations in Russia. After the war started they had to work massively to rebuild their supply chain, and also had to find new markets. They were successful. So, to all those who think that EU trade is the most important thing, you might want a rethink. As for NAFTA, and Trump's renegotiation of it, just look up Ross Perot and the phrase "great sucking sound". You might find it entertaining.
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  4618.  @joe2791990  Absolutely! The world was divided into waring blocks. And they fought lots od wars.
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  4619. You are right to point this out. I saw one speculation that it could be $2T just in the last couple of years. Add to that the $1T in emergency offshore funds that CCP officials supposedly had squirreled away prior to that, and you can see what's coming.
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  4620. I love that you reference Gogol the way you do. When I read that book, I had the same revelation. Nothing has changed. China is much the same. Neither Russia nor China is going to turn into a liberal democracy when their current regimes fall. It is the culture, not the individuals. People from both countries do well in the outside world. Take the cases of Germany and Japan. They did not turn into liberal democracies because of internal dynamics. It was imposed from outside after a devastating defeat. No one in the west has any interest in taking over Russia and China. Russia has lots of natural resources, but they are in very inhospitable areas. That and their farmland is poor. China is worse off. They have few natural resources and poor farmland. That and there are all those Chinese and Russians there. The future looks bleak for both.
    1
  4621. With their accents, whenever they saw netball, it sounds like nipple to me.
    1
  4622. What is happening in Russia today is exactly mirrored in China. For "clans" read "factions". Relatives of major figures are pushed for high position. Corruption is what keeps the wheels turning. In both cases there is a nascent aristocracy arising. All of this reminds me of Polybius' concept of Anacyclosis. The other thing that is mirrored in both countries is the dire state of the economy, with increasing state control. Actually, they both resemble the economy of Nazi Germany. Really, the parallels are striking. All the indicators of a dissolution are present in each case. In the case of Russia, we have the breakup of the Soviet Union, which looks to be further developed. In the case of China, we have the example of the rise of warlords after the fall of the Qing dynasty. Let's hope it does not take much longer.
    1
  4623. He might want to withdraw his troops from India's border and redraw the map.
    1
  4624.  @DailyBeatings  See my comment above.
    1
  4625.  @DailyBeatings  I don't know how that applies here. Taking your blocks and going home is not a good look. Love the name and the avatar, by the way. What do you think China and Russia are? They are the last traditional colonial empires in the world. Don't forget, the predecessor state to the USSR was the Russian Empire. China has colonized" Tibet and is trying with parts of India. They are also making inroads into the central Asian republics of the former USSR. They even have their eyes on Russian territory. They don't hide the fact. So, who is neo-colonialist?
    1
  4626. Hot looking gun. It looks like a pimped-up AR-10.
    1
  4627. Tony, we understand about the thumbnails and titles. It is good to see the channel growing.
    1
  4628. No! Not the lines on maps again. The issue is that Ukraine does not have air superiority. That is a cornerstone of how the west fights wars. As for more skeptics in the west, I think you are repeating a trope pushed by the Kremlin. You should be careful about that. A recent survey in the US shows increasing support for weapons delivery to Ukraine. It is now a comfortable majority. As for the west, and I speak specifically of the US, there is little evidence for support waning for various wars. Think of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. These were all long wars. In many cases there were vocal minorities calling for US withdrawal from these conflicts. Don't make the mistake of equating these minorities for majority opinion. It is Russia that cannot sustain a long war. They took 20 years to build up the military they attacked with. That military has been destroyed. During that time, they had access to western technology and generally high oil and gas revenues. They have neither now. Their tank production currently is laughable, and the ones they are producing do not have the systems that make a modern tank formidable. Putin is playing a clever game here, and many pundits in the west are falling for it.
    1
  4629. This is just plain stupid. Russia does not have the forces it needs to win in Ukraine. Their oil revenue is getting close to the point where they actually make little or no profit. Their budget is in freefall.
    1
  4630. You might have noticed that "right leaning" parties have been winning in Europe lately. We have the latest win in Sweden, for example. Even in France, Marine Le Pen's party is the largest party in Parliament, even though Macron won the Presidency. And Macron is a centrist, not a leftist. So, why is this happening? As you say in your books (and I have read, and enjoyed, them all) maintaining the order is no longer necessary for the US and it is expensive. Well, that is the same for all the globalists that want to impose their system on the world. It costs a lot of money, and the US is the only entity that can maintain it. China is already starting to pull back. Their Belt and Road initiative is winding down. Two reasons here. One is the projects are not very effective. Second, they are actually running out of money. Without a very large economy to drive any system that wants to impose itself on the world, the effort will fail. When the US started the order its economy generated about 50% of global GDP. The US is still about 25% of world GDP, and has been for a very long time. I recall many, many times when people were projecting that its share would slip. This never happens. The transition from 50% to 25% did not reflect a shrinkage of the US economy, but a growth of the rest. The summary of what I am saying is that the globalist left is a minority, and generally do not control the resources needed to impose an order. So, the things you write in your books are coming to pass, and it will not be a globalist future.
    1
  4631.  @regular-k2t  You should be. It is not that they are all bad, but it is a well-established tactic to infiltrate some agents with refugees and migrants. I fear that this is what the Chinese are doing as well.
    1
  4632. Konstantin, increased passenger numbers leading to higher prices is just good old Soviet economics.
    1
  4633. Oh, by the way. All the geothermal power generated at the Salton Sea is equal to one medium sized coal fired plant.
    1
  4634.  @steven4315  That this is not a solution. This concept has been around for a long time and is basically making no impact. That is the point.
    1
  4635.  @steven4315  No, I am not saying that. What I am saying is that geothermal will have minimal impact overall. It should be used where feasible, just as any alternative source should be. But, it is limited and can;t be used everywhere. Neither can wind or solar, by the way. On the other hand, you can build a coal, gas or nuclear plant just about anywhere.
    1
  4636. Chad's talk about $300+ per barrel oil is just plain stupid and invalidates everything he says. Get fricking real. This high for oil was about $140. We are well below that now. As oil goes up, we make our vehicles more efficient. I remember, in 1979, when gasoline price tripled. Cars got about 10 miles per gallon. Today, my mid-sized SUV, with more power, gets 26MPG. That is well below the average. It only takes one election to get it back down to $50 per barrel. Chad is blowing smoke. There is no shortage of oil in the world. We are finding more all the time It is only government interference that causes these shortages. This is just what happened in the 70s. It was the Middle East situation with Israel that caused the problem, not any issue with reserves or production. It is the same today. Get real.
    1
  4637. War fatigue? What would this channel have to talk about? British politics. Give me a break.
    1
  4638. I was going to point out that the Germans also used AA guns, especially their 20mm cannon, as anti-personnel weapons on the Eastern Front.
    1
  4639. A trade deal between the EU and Mercosur? In the works for 20 years? Just business as usual for the EU. For reference just look at trade relations between the EU and US.
    1
  4640. WRONG! We did not promise to expand NATO. You are taking the Russian line.
    1
  4641. That people love Donald Trump around the world is an understatement. I even saw, on a Russian expat's channel, a picture of a banner on a building in Russia that read reportedly "Trump, please help resettle the barracks. Give us new homes." It was on a dilapidated old residential building. He claims that it is legitimate, and I tend to believe him. It is the type of thing one would see in Russia by which I mean appeal to the leader. Guess who the leader is?
    1
  4642. The UK, like the US, has an obesity problem. Wheat is a major contributor to that. Pasta is not good for you. Neither is bread. I have cut both out and lost a lot of weight. I know many others who have done so as well. Carbs kill! I actually have substituted red lentil and chickpea pasta for wheat. I am going to start making my own.
    1
  4643.  @tarstarkusz  Wow! Where do you get your information? China has, most probably, less than the reported numbers, and they never got close to 1.5 billion. Some analysts believe that they have overcounted by 100M or more people, and these are those that would have been born while the one child policy was in force. Add to that the dismally low birth rate in China today and there is no coming back from this.
    1
  4644.  @tarstarkusz  Wow! Where do you get your information? China has, most probably, less than the reported numbers, and they never got close to 1.5 billion. Some analysts believe that they have overcounted by 100M or more people, and these are those that would have been born while the one child policy was in force. Add to that the dismally low birth rate in China today and there is no coming back from this.
    1
  4645. What Chinese Man fails to mention is that the Chinese people were behind the CCP in the civil war that brought the CCP to power. Frankly, all the progress made since the opening to the west was a result of investment from outside. None of what he says is incorrect, but it is what the people signed up for. Look at Taiwan. These are Chinese people, the "losers" in the Civil War. Where would you rather live? The people are reaping what they sowed. I feel sorry for what the people in China are going through, but they did choose it.
    1
  4646. These batsh*t crazy projects have been going on for decades. I remember reading about them, decades ago. As Harold points out, Congress has abrogated their oversight responsibility, for decades.
    1
  4647. China's situation is worse, and they keep flooding the financial system with money. By the way, in the US Trump is working on it, on many fronts.
    1
  4648.  @GARYGUYTON-c7i  That would be a great move. I have heard people talk about that as an option.
    1
  4649. @varun prasad That is true, but things have changed in the world.
    1
  4650. "Like all peace loving countries..." This from a country that claims the territories of other countries, has border skirmishes with its neighbors and threatens outright war over an island it never ruled. New Zealand would be a great prize for China in any conflict. It would afford a base that could be used to disrupt US and Australia military communications. Just saying.
    1
  4651.  @silentmajority8365  Really? America has always been diverse.
    1
  4652.  @sepsis111  LGB!
    1
  4653. India and China already get oil from Russia at a substantial discount. Numbers I have seen are $20 or $30 per barrel. So, if the price chosen is $50, they are already in this range.
    1
  4654.  @Apoc2K  Exactly right. China will not back off, and they have the leverage. India cannot pay for high price oil. They live in both camps, east and west. For them, taking Russian oil is a problem with their western allies. To do so without a discount would be madness. Russia has to keep pumping to keep their fields running. They no longer have access to the technology to maintain and extend their oil fields. I would say that they are screwed. Another note regarding setting the price. In government contracting there is the concept of giving the government the best price a company is offering to any other entity. This is what the EU should do, rather than setting a particular price.
    1
  4655. Of course, the CIA could do it. The omniscient and omnipotent CIA, the all great and powerful.
    1
  4656. Train ferries are not unusual.
    1
  4657. So, Dave, do we ignore what Russia has done? What are you thinking. All of the major wars of the 20th Century started in Europe. Do you think Russia will stop? Next stop NATO territory. This is not regime change war. Just the opposite. As for the amount of money involved, don't forget that our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost over $1T and thousands of casualties. Support for Ukraine is a rounding error compared to that. If you want to use the money for domestic purposes, just think about the well over $2T spent on COVID relief. The fraud associated with those funds amounts to over $100B last I saw. It will likely go higher when all is said and done. This just seems like a reaction. The other side is for it so I will be against it. I say all this as a conservative, and I have been so for longer than you have been alive.
    1
  4658. Sadly, the racism in Britian is a real cause of its downfall. I read about a British leader in India who had "gone native" taking on the trappings of the local raj. Just think about it. The British Empire could have been a major force for the melding of cultures around the world. Instead, when the authorities in England found out about what was happening in India they put an immediate stop to it, intentionally separating themselves from the people they ruled. That racism even extended to other Europeans. My first time in the UK (I later lived and worked there in the current millennium) in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, I saw this. One time, in London I saw a drunk Englishman, obviously drunk, leaving an Italian restaurant hurling racist epithets at the owner. While living there we had some friends who told us that they were British, not continentals.
    1
  4659. William, do you really take Russian propaganda at face value? Have you seen pictures of the rail bridge. It will take careful inspection to determine what, if any, capacity is left. We are talking about moving tanks and ammunition across the bridge via the rail link. This stuff is much heavier than civilian cargos. In addition, it looks, from videos I have seen, that they have one lane of traffic available on the road bridge. As for getting out of Crimea, in the short term there are ferries. If you are a civilian leaving, that is a one shot deal and the ferry is not an issue. As for troops, if there is a Ukranian invasion, I expect most of them to surrender. Even in the areas where the current counteroffensives are taking place, where you have the remnants of the Russian professional army, there are surrenders. For those troops in Kearson, who are in a situation to what might happen in Crimea, this may be their only option in the near future.
    1
  4660.  @johnschuring5726  This "debt spending" is a pimple on the ass if US federal spending. For example, there was as much scammed off of COVID relief funds as is being sent to Ukraine. Another example is the Global War on Terror. We are talking TRILLIONS. And if money is so important, why does the US have 50K troops in Europe. Europe's economy is ten times as large as their only adversary, Russia. They have three times the population. Come back when you have something real to say.
    1
  4661. Wait a darn minute. Why is the Labor Party called the Labor Party if they are negativity impacting labor? Never could work that out (and I lived in the UK earlier in this millennium). It is kind of like the situation in the US where the Democrat Party is supposedly the party of the worker, and yet all they seem to care about is trans people. I think that on both sides of the pond we are seeing a major case of false advertising. Seems to me that there might be a case for legal action.
    1
  4662.  @elizabethklein7073  You are obviously ignorant of how government works. So, let me walk you through it. We are talking about a democratic republic here, but it applies to most forms of government with minor differences. So, here goes. Ready? The people vote for representatives, and in the US, they vote directly (with a modification that recognizes this is a federal republic) for the head of government (who is also head of state, not a standard thing). None of these people have to have any particular qualifications to run. That is the essence of democracy by the way. Then, the head of government appoints people to head up different functions of the government. This is where you obviously have to work on your understanding. Those people are in those positions to implement the policy of the head of government. They are NOT bureaucrats. They are policy makers. They are there to control the bureaucrats. In fact, there are a couple of layers of policymakers. This is no different from a large corporation. The CEO does not, and generally cannot, have detailed knowledge of the specifics of the business. He is the policy maker, not the policy implementor. The CEO sets the goals and the measurements by which progress towards those goals can be measured (often called KPIs). So, do you understand now? Lesson concluded.
    1
  4663.  @elizabethklein7073  Oh, like the Russian collusion allegations in Trump's first term? The people appointed by the President, who is the one elected, are there to implement the President's program. If you don't understand that then you are totally ignorant of how government works. This is true, by the way, in any democratically elected government, not just the US, and in the US at all levels. Did you learn nothing in civics class?
    1
  4664. Bill Clinton did lots of other bad stuff. He was behind normalizing trade with China and getting them into the WTO. That is just one of a long list of terrible things that he did. His weak response to Al Qaeda was also problematic. His administration did balance the budget for five years, but only because the Republican controlled Congress and the Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich forced him to.
    1
  4665. Secretary Hegseth missed another example. Abe Lincoln. At the beginning of the Civil War the North had a bunch of generals who were not very effective. Some were just old, some just ineffective. The early results for the North were not good. By changing the generals things got better.
    1
  4666. In the 1980s I was working at an aerospace and defense firm. Although I was already a senior engineer, I did not have a degree. I was taking classes at night (paid for by my employer). I was using FFTs, and had books on them. I wanted to get a more theoretical background, so I took an advanced calculus class, which was about transforms. When we got to the Fourier transform, I was perplexed. I went to my professor and asked when we would get to the FFT. He looked at me puzzled and said he didn't know what that was (he was a theoretician). Now I was concerned. So, next class I told him it was a fast way to compute the Fourier transform. His response was that such a thing was of no interest to him. At least I was relieved that I was totally crazy.
    1
  4667. I have a lot of respect for Browder, but he is way too simplistic in his attitude towards the complexities of confiscating the Russian money. I support doing this, but it must be done in such a way as not harm the financial systems we have. The main thing that distinguishes the west from Putin's Russia and Xi's China is the rule of law. Sacrifice that and we will indeed be in trouble. The fact is that the US, the UK and the EU are not at war with Russia. Let that sink in. Of course, if we were at war with Russia, confiscating their assets would be a no brainer.
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  4668. Diet is probably the most important thing. I have changed mine (unfortunately due to a divorce) to something very close to what you point out. The improvement in my health has been amazing. I am down to my weight that I had in my 20s. I am now in my 60s. No joint pain and normal blood pressure. I do drink, but only in the evening. I smoke cigars. Interestingly, I once saw an interview with a very old (over 100 years) man who also still smoked cigars. I also recall an interview with a very old Russian woman who smoked cigarettes and drank vodka and lived to over well over 100. So, it seems the diet is paramount, and there are variations. Many decades ago, I was a vegetarian because most of my friends at university were Indian. The mother of one tried to teach us traditional Indian cooking. It was so complicated that we then turned to Zen macrobiotic cooking when his parents moved back to India (his father was a diplomat). I did that for over10 years. Now I am pescatarian, mostly. I very occasionally eat meat. Maybe once or twice a month, at most. I also don't eat processed foods or drink sodas or any other type of processes drink. I drink water (usually with a dash of pure lemon juice), coffee or tea.
    1
  4669. Actually, the Senator misspoke. DEI stands for Diversity, EQUITY, and Inclusion (emphasis mine). Equity is definitely different from equality and that is the problem.
    1
  4670. You go on about the working class,. You obviously are not working class. What is your interest?
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  4671.  @YourHineyness  fully understand communism. The comment was meant to be ironic. So, I fully agree with you.
    1
  4672. It's an Alfa Romeo GTV. I had one of those when I lived in the UK. I don't think most people thought the GTV was ugly.
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  4673. The CCP will never admit it. They continue to pursue failed growth policies, relying on infrastructure spending. This has not proven to be effective. Look at HSR. The system is $1T or so in debt, and that debt is growing. This is only one of the many failed projects.
    1
  4674. Don't forget, the Soviets did much worse to their own people and land than these inadvertent incidents. In some cases they weren't inadvertent in the Soviet case. And I am talking weapons, and weapons facilities, not Chernobyl.
    1
  4675. The quote from Kissinger sounds a bit CCP to me. Actually, until the CCP starts communicating normally and truthfully. few in the west will take it seriously. Their whole way of speaking is late 19th century to early 20th century Marxist psychobabble. I have said it before, but the world does not need any particular country. China and the Soviet Union were totally isolated for decades. Did the west grow poorer then?
    1
  4676. Wow. The Democrats in this hearing are hard to listen to. Joseph Goebbels would be proud of them. I am frankly disgusted. And don't get me wrong, I am not a Kennedy supporter, but the whole idea of free speech is to hear all sides. If you don't know what the other side is thinking, how can you engage with them?
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  4677. Let's hope India helps. They should be sensitive to Ukraine's position especially in light of the border conflicts they have with China and Pakistan. That is why it is disappointing that they support Russia at all. Of course, it has to do with their history. They claimed to be a "nonaligned" nation (precursor to this whole "global south" stuff) during the Cold War. On the other hand, they relied on the Soviet Union.
    1
  4678.  @phlm9038  That is true. France should send these people back down the chain, according to the law. What should be done is that they should be interned until their cases are adjudicated. Then would either be let in or sent back.
    1
  4679. He had a chance to explain what it is in the beginning and totally blew it. Is this really an expert? He goes right into the politics. I thought the experts were supposed to enlighten us in their areas of expertise.
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  4680. Another miss by economists! Who would have thunk it. While government numbers are not really trustworthy, it is still important to understand them. They reveal something about what the government is doing and thinking. I appreciate this channel because it gives us a view from inside China that we might not get otherwise.
    1
  4681. Dude, this is not Afghanistan. This is eastern Europe. Major battles and campaigns in the dead of winter are common through history, especially in the last century. Of course, if the Russians wait until spring, the Ukrainians should have F-16s. This totally changes the equation, especially where mechanized warfare is concerned. Based on their performance to date, I fully expect the Ukrainians to be able to competently do combined arms warfare. The Russians have already proven that they cannot.
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  4682. Oh, no, Mr. Bill! Lines on maps again. The problem is much more complicated than the Taiwan situation. Xi's motivation for a war, any war, is to solidify his position in the CCP. There is no existential threat from Taiwan. There is no economic reason for a war, either. In fact, there is no existential military threat from anyone. China has nothing that anyone else wants. It does not have natural resources and trying to take it over is just too costly to justify any such attack. China has two other potential flashpoints. One, on the border with India, is actually hot right now. The other, is with Russia. This is currently low probability but could heat up depending on what happens in Ukraine. Look at the history. Mao fought and won a war with India in 1962. He then withdrew. His reason for fighting the war was not to gain territory, but to solidify his hold over the party. In this he was successful. The India situation is much more like the Russia Ukraine situation. A shared land border. China also fought a war with Vietnam and lost. The issue there was also politics, not territorial expansion. Xi has made an invasion of Taiwan a centerpiece of his policy precisely with internal party dynamics in mind. There is no objective reason for him to do so. He may well decide to pivot to the Indian situation. If he determines that this would satisfy his political goals, that would be the "easier" choice. The Indians are fully expecting this, by the way, and are prepared. Finally, the corruption problem is real. It is also endemic in the CCP system, and is, in fact what keeps the system going. It has gotten so bad that even organized crime is involved. The issues, in any real conflict, would be even worse that what Russia is experiencing in Ukraine. Both Taiwan and India are much more prepared than Ukraine was. Taiwan has allies that will be willing to fight for it. India has allies, but those don't need to fight for them, just provide some support. They also have nukes.
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  4683. I for one do not believe everything I read online. Never have. In fact, when my sons were in school, they were expressly forbidden to us Wikipedia as a source, for example. I even find many experts in ads that are frankly spreading misinformation, including on medical topics. So, I tend to be skeptical. I think we all should.
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  4684. Fundamental reforms to expand the freedom and rights of its citizens? The CCP? Come on man! This whole thing is going to fall apart and top CCP officials who can jump ship will. They have already parked trillions of dollars overseas. Some of them will become part of one of the warlord cliques that could emerge. The rest will meet their demise. The CCP has ensured that no strong democratically inclined leader has or could emerge. Remember Tiananmen Square? That is really what is in store for China, unfortunately.
    1
  4685. The whole issue is one that I find sort of silly. The world changes. Those that don't adapt will "fall". In Europe, witness the Germans. Being a finance hub may not be the best thing for the Brits. As Peter mentions, the reasons for the UK to be one has gone. They need to do something else. Can the UK change in an advantageous way? Who knows. Compared to their EU peers, they have a better chance of doing it. They could also mess it up.
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  4686. Stupis! This is weather, not climate. The fact that you are citing current measurements as opposed to long term trends shows you know nothing about climate.
    1
  4687. Hey, stop bashing the elderly. This is elder abuse.
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  4688. @Buffalo Carlson replacement Do you actually watch Fox News? I don't find the hate speech.
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  4689. You must be kidding me. China is basically broke. Just released information shows that 1% of the working age population is in default. All the local governments are in debt and several should be in default. On top of that, the off book debt of Chinas local governments could be even larger than the official debt. If you want to understand how devastating this is look up Enron. China's foreign reserves are at a low level, and this has attracted Xi's attention. Since you can confidentially assume that China's GDP figures are well overstated. All I can say is, total drivel.
    1
  4690. China as a "security black hole". That reminds me of Mad Magazine in the 1960s and 1970s. When they would have maps of the world, China was unlabeled, featureless and just a white background. It was called the "great big empty spot". We seem to be heading back to those days.
    1
  4691. When I was in elementary school (in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, actually the 1960s), one of our field trips was to a Wonderbread factory. It was cool if you like machines. In the mid-1970s I made all my own bread by hand.
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  4692. Russia doing well under sanctions? You must be kidding. In addition, oil prices are down generally, and Russia is selling its oil either at break even or a loss. You can find all this information on-line.
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  4693. Stalingrad was a turning point in WWII precisely for the same reason that Bakhmut is. It was an attritional battle, destroying one of Germany's largest combat formations. It was not necessary for the Germans to take the city. It's only use was in disrupting traffic along the Volga, which was indeed a critical line of communication. They could have done it anywhere else. But, in this case the role of the Russians is the same a the German's in that WWII battle, while the Ukrainians are in the WWII Soviet role. Even the building counterattack is right out of the WWII situation. So, I think the Dude is correct, the attacks in Bakhmut and Addiivka will be Russia's last.
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  4694. On the cryptoqueen story, Bartlett says he still believes in crypto, especially, it seems, bitcoin. He really gives no reason. He does mention this being outside the regulatory framework of central banks. What does he believe this regulatory framework is? The whole idea of it is to protect investors and customers of banks. What is happening now is that a lot of people are losing a lot of money, without any protections. Their only recourse is legal action, which is expensive and uncertain. Crypto overall is a scam. It is valued in fiat currencies, which it purports to replace. The only people who really need something like this are people trying to hide money from the government. Just think about who these people are.
    1
  4695. No, the caterpillar is a plot by the World Economic Forum (WEF) to get people to eat bugs. It is good for you and the planet. Next step soylent green.
    1
  4696. I find it hilarious the way you bring up "embargo" at about 2:10. You seem to imply that there is something concrete to this. Any law, which is what an embargo or sanction is, must be enforced. Who enforces this between nation states? This is funny to me because a lot of Russians who have left Russia because of the war and Ukrainians seem to think there is some abstract "international law". ALL laws, from local ordinances to the most serious criminal law with a state require extensive enforcement mechanisms. Basically, that means police and courts. In the realm of nation states it requires military and economic power. The application of the former generally leads to war. That can be true even in the case of the latter. Basically, what I am finding is that Europeans seem to have a warped sense of reality. They are very unsophisticated about how the world works. That is most probably why Europe is on the wane.
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  4697. Wow! Someone mentioning that the voters voted for these nutters. Have you been reading my comments?
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  4698. I was thinking about the issue, especially in light of what Trump has been saying about the killing having to stop. As I learned from Peter, both Ukraine and Russia were in demographic decline before the war. So, Trump is right for the sake of both nationalities. One of the brain flashes (farts?) that I had was that what they need to do is reintroduce polygamy. In both countries you have a surplus of women. Have you noticed the massive number of ads on YouTube and Gmail for dating services for Ukrainian women? I even see some for Russian women.
    1
  4699.  @conchfritters01  No, haven't been to Miami recently. Thanks for telling me. I am currently in Chicago (suburbs) freezing my butt off.
    1
  4700.  @conchfritters01  You said it all!
    1
  4701.  @conchfritters01  One other thing. Whenever I think about this issue the Beatles song "Back in the USSR" starts playing in my head. My older son actually married a woman from Georgia who he met there.
    1
  4702.  @thebluemax6801  True. I was not making a comprehensive list, but you make a good point.
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  4703. You mention the anti-vaxers. Well, add the Swiss to that. They have just come out with a policy that states that no one should be further vaccinated, unless a doctor decides that the particular individual needs it. They have published their reasoning and findings. Full disclosure, I am vaccinated. I am not anti vax. I can also see some value to the boosters, much like the annual flu shots, which I have never taken. Frankly, in the last six years I had one day of flu (I actually felt the fever break, it was weird).
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  4704.  @nudisco7882  Russia is a pariah state. Look up the word. As for awareness of the rest of the world's thoughts, that is irrelevant. Ger over it. What matters in world affairs is economic and military power. The whole of the global south has very little of either. Heck, look at the colonial era, which really just ended about 75 years ago. As for Syria, the biggest motivation there is the refugee problem. Russia's involvement has not completely stabilized the situation, and large swaths of territory are not under central government control. So, if that is your standard, they must be pretty low.
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  4705. Trump's threat was what would have irked Putin. What really helped make MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) is that no Russian leader would want to see the motherland destroyed. There was a controversy during the Vietnam War about nuking Haiphong Harbor to stop Russian supplies from reaching the North Vietnamese. I was all for it. There is no way the Soviets would have given up their country for destruction for Vietnam. This is what we have to consider when we look at Putin's nuclear threats. I am not even sure that his military would carry out the order to use nukes when it threatened the whole country with destruction.
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  4706. You are economist. Economics is a data driven science. And yet you make a statement about what your circle thinks. What kind of economist is that? Let me give you an example of how foolish making any statement based on "your circle" can be. Right before Bill Clinton's first election win, I was with a group of people I worked with. There were 13 of us. We took a poll. George H. W. Bush (the incumbent) got six votes, Ross Perot (the third-party candidate) got six votes and Clinton got one vote. How is that for the "power" of informal polls of one's own circle. Any decent statistician will tell you the same thing.
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  4707. Whatever happened to global warming?
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  4708. This happened in the US in the Regan era. Many Democrats in the Southeast were very conservative, as were their districts. As with the US, Labor in the UK has turned hard left. The whole social justice tilt is not in line with Socialist thinking. As many have noted, Labor is not really in line with labor. What working people need and want are jobs. That is what Regan gave them in the US, and that is what the Conservatives are doing for them now.
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  4709. The Wiard of Oz metaphor is one I am seeing all over the place recently. It is amazing. What Musk is doing is simply pointing out what is already happening. It is up to the President and his cabinet, in conjunction with Congress, to deal with what is found. Two things irk me in this exchange. One is that Margaret is basically saying that a little waste is alright. Really? Whose money is it, Margaret? The other thing is that CBS would keep a partisan idiot like her on the air. I have a funny story about this sort of thing from the private sector. I was working for a large and successful software company. I was at a corporate training course at the HQ. I was hired just after they had had their only losing quarter, and the stock had tanked (great for the options for me). One of the financial executives who was brought in at about the same time told this story. The company had grown so fast that people didn't really know where other people were. They were FedExing documents between offices in the same building (sometimes the same floor). They also had been giving out Montblanc pens the way most companies would give out a cheap ball point pen with the corporate logo. When the guy who was behind this was told to stop it, he replied (paraphrasing) "What? You don't want me to give out "pens" anymore." To him anything less than a Montblanc was not a real pen. He was fired, by the way.
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  4710. Biden wasn't protecting his legacy or the US economy by not putting on the sanctions earlier. You don't know how the Democrats work. The Democrats make policy based on polls and identity groups. I have seen this up close and personal. They were doing "intersectionality" and CRT before the terms were commonly used. Just look at the policy choices Biden made regarding Israel, to use another example.
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  4711. The fact that you say agreed with the joke is a part of the problem. It is not a statement of fact. It is an opinion. Heck, it is a joke. This is where things have gone off the rails.
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  4712. A bunch of commies running a stock market? What would Marx say? The whole idea of a stock market in a communist country with a large public sector participating in it is so wrong and incomprehensible that is boggles the mind. The foreign institutions that invested in it should have known better and may well have abridged their fiduciary obligations. There should be consequences for this. I am not the only one thinking this.
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  4713.  @zacklewis342  Well, without the Electoral College candidates would never campaign in large parts of the country. Go back and read some history of why it exists and its importance to the integrity of the US politically.
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  4714.  @preeyakumari-i2q  That is actually normal in much of the world. I just saw a video on why there were parts of Portugal, not a large county, had few people. The same is true of Spain.
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  4715.  @FredPlanatia  The plot thickens.
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  4716. I tend to agree with Posen. Pettis makes some good points, but these assume a rules based economic system. The CCP is immune to rules. Three examples how the "bad king" hypothesis might apply. During the lockdown period, when Xi was pushing for disinfecting everything, there was an incident where people were actually disinfecting a runway at an airport. Another example is the three red lines. The property sector had indeed turned into a pyramid scheme. Something had to be done. So, the three red lines policy was implemented. There was little or no thought on how to deal with the fallout of the policy. Another example is the turn forest to farmland initiative pushed by Xi. Under this initiative, forests that had been planted, in some cases to fight desertification, were torn up for grain production. There are even examples of other crops, such as orchards, being torn down to implement his directive. In general, the CCP leadership under Xi has become so disconnected from the real economy that it cannot make rational decisions, like the ones Pettis suggests. Xi has no real advisors. As Peter Zeihan likes to say, he has shot the messenger so many times (sometimes literally) that no one will tell him anything he does not want to hear. In fact, sometimes they don't tell him about problems for weeks.
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  4717. You are correct about why she doesn't belong in education. but I would add one thing. If you compare her video to her explanation afterwards, she is either an inveterate liar or very, very stupid. Maybe it is both. In any case, she does not belong anywhere near children, especially in an educational context.
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  4718. The mines are one big impediment. The other is lack of airpower. The delays in getting F-16s or some other advanced jets to Ukraine is one of the biggest failings of the western alliance.
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  4719. I am a fan of Starkey, but do not always agree with him. This is one of those times. The idea that we went into Afghanistan and Iraq so that girls could dress as they like is ludicrous and a bit insulting. We went in because of the attacks on 9/11. I was actually living in England (Winchester) at the time. All this stuff we did to "modernize" their societies was just so much claptrap from the politicians. The Iraqi and Afghan leadership we brought in were really only interested in our money. If you contrast that with Ukraine, we spent multiple trillions on those two wars and the nation building exercises we engaged in after that. In Ukraine what we are spending is a rounding error (and we almost certainly lost much more to corruption in the previous two) compared to that. In addition, the Ukrainians are doing the actual fighting, while in Iraq and Afghanistan this was not the case. We can see the pattern repeated in Vietnam with the counterpoint being Korea. Just to drag this on, my wife and I voted for George W. Bush because he was against nation building. Then 9/11 changed everything.
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  4720.  @markdowse3572  Sadly probably true. I worked with a professor who lived through the original one as a boy. He escaped and did very well in the US. Let's hope some can get out this time.
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  4721. I love the talk about the dialectic. Yes, it is used by the Marxists. I follow events in China (and lots of other countries as well) and when any CCP official, especially Xi, talks it is pure Marxist dialectic. As such, it also sounds rather stupid. I think that is why China is in such a sad state.
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  4722. Of course, to get a trade deal you would need to accept "chlorinated chicken". Look it up. That was one of the things that scuppered the trade deal with the EU as well as the UK in the past.
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  4723. Having our planes and pilots go head to head with the Russians would be of great value. Our record over the last thirty years has been great against the planes. Now lets see how the Russian pilots fare against our best pilots.
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  4724. The real reason for all this infrastructure development is plain corruption. As with any project in China, local officials take a cut of the project. That is how the CCP rewards its members. They are raping the country to enrich themselves.
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  4725.  @christopherpekel6096  I understand where you are coming from, but that is not what he was talking about and what I was responding to. It is the immunity from liability that is new and unusual. As for vaccines, there are lots here in the US that we are required to give to our children. I assume it is the same in Australia. Another point I guess I was making is that here we have a comedian talking about an important issue and just repeating talking points. That level of discourse is beneath this channel.
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  4726.  @christopherpekel6096  That is a fair point. On the other hand, that is not what I was reacting to in his comments.
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  4727. This situation also points to the inevitable breakup of the Russian Federation. The demographics are such that soon the Russian ethnicity will become a minority. Russia is truly one of the last traditional empires on the planet. You might include China in that, since they control Tibet, Xinjian and Inner Mongolia, mostly through force. China, by the way, has had lots of warlord periods in their history. I don't know how accurate this figure is, but I heard that they have really only been unified for about 300 years of their long history. Up to the success of the CCP in 1949, they had been going through one of these warlord periods. Mao was just one of the warlords. So, the idea that Putin is basically a warlord makes sense. In these situations, the state becomes unsustainable.
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  4728. Charles, you miss the biggest issues associated with investing in China. For one, the CCP actively interferes with the market. This consists of actually directing state owned enterprises (SOEs) to invest in the market. That is where the spikes upward come from, and their only purpose is to trick foreign investors to buy in. The other thing is that it is almost impossible for companies to get money out of China. It's a rigged system and all those investor heavyweights who go big on China are ignoring that. Could there be some failure in fiduciary duty involved?
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  4729. OBE! A different bill was passed. As for the government shutdown, there have been ten since 1980. Does anyone remember the details of any of them? Who was materially affected? This is a piece of political theatre. It seems that it was created for the news media to have something to talk about.
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  4730. Power transmission is not really an issue. We already transmit power over very long distances in the transmission systems.
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  4731. On a UK news channel (Times Radio) they were constantly talking about Trump in a negative way including his "cognitive decline". They have on a bunch of charlatans to talk negatively about Trump. One American they had on called Trump mentally ill. The TDS is rampant in Europe. This is funny considering their leaders. If the US wasn't there to bail them out (again and again) they would all be speaking Russian. In his last term he told the Germans that they were too reliant on Russian energy and spent too little on defense. They laughed at him. Who's laughing now? By the way, that was when Merkel was the Chancelor. Such a great leader. Didn't she make the decision to shut down their nuclear plants and let in so many unqualified immigrants?
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  4732. Your take on encryption is not correct. Standard encryption, for public use, depends on algorithms that are known. Their protection is the size of the key space. For a 256-bit key, you would have to try 2^256 possible keys. That is a seriously big number. I am not sure of how quantum computing solves that. On the other hand, there other types of encryption that are not public. I think that you might see these used in financial transactions. These are far more powerful.
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  4733.  @anomanderrake96  Well, in Israel's case the countries attacked both deny its existence and swear to wipe it off the map and foster terrorist groups that constantly attack it. That is the standard legal justification for war. The US was attacked on 9/11 by people based in Afghanistan, whose government encouraged them. They refused to turn over the terrorists (who weren't even their citizens) or limit their cross border activities. Again, a legal and accepted cause for invasion. The second Iraq invasion was a bit dodgy, but not completely. There was an expectation that Iraq would support terrorist attacks on the US, and would do it with very dangerous weapons. Considering that they had illegally occupied a neighboring country, invaded and waged war on another neighboring country, and used chemical weapons against that country and their own population, the fear was justified. There were flaws in the intelligence, but that is because Iraq deliberately made it difficult to verify, which was a red flag. Was it the best decision? Who knows. Could it be justified on self-defense grounds. Well, it was. So, yes, ask Israel and he US. You should also understand the circumstances, law and history before equating the situations.
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  4734. Using the Yuan instead of the dollar is suicide for Saudi Arabia. The reasons for the dollar's supremacy are its liquidity, the rule of law as far as it's concerned and the strength of the US economy. China has none of that. China has many issues that will implode their economy in the next few years. Holding Yuan will adversely impact any country that chooses to do so.
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  4735. This Oriental idea of 100-year plans is just plain bunk. When I took graduate business courses from a group of European business school professors in the late 1990s, they were all gaga at the 100-year plans of the Japanese companies. Remember the Japanese. They were going to surpass us. The bulk of the world's biggest and most lucrative companies did not even exist then. I used to go to a private club a friend and business partner was a member of. The walls of the bathrooms were covered with actual stock certificates of 19th and early 20th century companies that are now worthless. To plan an economy out to 100 years is a foolish thing. As for China, they have already started their decline. Many businesses are moving out. The type of manufacturing they do are relatively easy to move. In fact, much of it was moved from countries like the US and Japan. One of their biggest manufacturers, who makes iPhones, is a Taiwan company, not Chinese. These companies are moving back to their home countries, Southeast Asia and India. Believe me, it is not that difficult. China is experiencing a demographic collapse. They are not democratic, and their economy is dependent on the property sector. They have lots of high-speed trains, but many routes will never break even. It is a mess there.
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  4736.  @peace-now  It may or may not. I don't think China will be the one to do it. Their demographics are just wrong. Maybe India. Japan was never going to able to do it because of their demographic and geographic limitations. They will do well, much better than China, but cannot match the US. The US has the land, resources the political and economic system that will keep it in the forefront. Like I said, the only other competitor might be India, but this will take a long time. That is OK, because India is a strong and vibrant democracy.
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  4737.  @tomsuh1362  Well, we have different points of view. As for Japan, they are asserting their own interests. They are freeing their military and growing it. They have also hinted, quite strongly, that they may go nuclear. Considering the challenges they face they are fully justified in doing so. For them, China in Taiwan is an existential threat. Frankly, East Asia has done very well out of US involvement, albeit with many bumps in the road. Japan is "only" the third largest economy in the world, but they have 1/10 the population of China. China still has over 600M people who live in poverty. This is from Chinese government sources. They are experiencing a demographic collapse due to government policies. As for using Asian countries to contain other Asian countries for US purposes, I think you may have a very poor understanding of history. Look at Vietnam. They fought a long war with the US and won. They also fought a war with China and won. They are now a US ally against China. Is this some sort of US plot? Think about it. The US has actually become an ally and friend of most of the adversaries over time. As for China fighting off US influence, you must be kidding. Almost all the industry in China was built by the West. In the Great Leap Forward China was barely able to make pig iron. The US has no designs on China. In fact, by bringing them into the international political and financial institutions, it was hoped that, through that integration, China would become a great contributor to world prosperity. Sadly, their actions have not lived up to expectations.
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  4738. China is in demographic decline. Unlike the US they have insufficient natural resources. They can be strangled at a moments notice. Brandon won't do it, but, if we are talking about 2050, then I am not that worried.
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  4739. Dilomacy is fine, but it must be backed up by strength. One also has to remember that in these situations, the other side gets a say. I do have my doubts about Russia attacking someone else. It took them 20 years to build up the military they attacked Ukraine with. That is not, by the way, they did that. It was the Chechen Wars that goaded them into it. During the buildup they had robust oil revenues and access to western technology. They have neither now. They also lost that military already in the Ukraine War. They also proved themselves to be crap at offensive warfare. One of the problems Europe has is geography. Just think about how many wars Europe has had over the last seven centuries or so.
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  4740. That the princelings harbor dissatisfaction with Xi is understandable. He has completely screwed up the economy. On top of that he has put China in a very disadvantageous position diplomatically. Xi has really screwed China in every way.
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  4741. Your comment at the end is the crux of the matter with EVs. The whole raison d'etre for EVs was environmental. Large, heavy, powerful EVs make no sense. It actually all started with Tesla. I knew a guy who worked there in the early days. He pointed out that Musk was following the product model of high-tech products. Start with the high-end to get the early adopters and then move down market. Well, that is not really working, for lots of reasons. The growth of sales of EVs is slowing down everywhere. The manufacturers are running out of those early adopters and don't really have the mass market products that might entice the rest of the buying public. They probably should have gone for the Toyota approach. Start with the low end, build a good reputation, and then move up market. People seem to forget the massive losses Tesla made for years before breaking even and becoming profitable. In fact, the only thing that kept them going was subsidies. The other thing is the massive amounts of tech in the current crop of EVs. As you mention with the 420, all that stuff is not necessary, and in many cases is not even desirable. Musk put all that in to fool the public into thinking they were getting something better to justify the price. Well, I don't own an EV, but I have yet to ride in one where the driver actually uses the self-driving feature. The whole thing about that is that modern cars (last 10 or more years) are basically drive by wire and can just as easily be fitted to be self-driving. In fact, the earliest examples of self-driving were ICEs. Remember the self-parking feature? Low speed automatic braking is also a feature in some ICEs. My 2015 Cadillac has that, and it saved my bacon at least once.
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  4742. The TikTok legal challenge is so outrageous on so many fronts. My favorite is using the First Amendment. Um, the people had their rights under the First Amendment centuries before the existence of TikTok, the WWW or the Internet, or even phones, radio and television. The First Amendment does not protect platforms or their control. If you look at the history of First Amendment legal challenges it is all about content. The best example of control that does not directly involve foreign ownership or the government shutting down a particular platform, but does involve platforms, is the Fairness Doctrine. That involved regulation of a limited public resource. Then look at the fact that the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated by the Regan Administration. As a result of that we got talk radio and an explosion of alternative communication channels. Of course, the Internet is not a limited public resource like the electromagnetic spectrum. No such doctrine exists. It is a privately funded and unlimited (as far as we can tell) resource. As such there are numerous competing alternative channels for speech of all types. Just look at this platform, YouTube. The amount of completely misleading, and frankly wrong, content is astounding. Then there is the foreign ownership issue. On that TikTok has no defense. Don't forget, the First Amendment is targeted at US citizens within the US. A great counter argument is what China does to foreign platforms. There, I have outlined the Government's defense. There is more, by the way.
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  4743.  @skydragon23101979  Couldn't agree less. On the first point, reciprocity is important in international relations. On the second point, what you say is true in general, but not in relation to media companies. The most famous case is Rupert Murdoch having to become a US citizen before he could buy US media firms.
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  4744.  @skydragon23101979  Well, my understanding is that the Chinese constitution guarantees freedom of speech. It is, I believe, Article 35 of the 1982 revision. The CCP, which really rules the country, ignores the constitution. I should have been more specific. The rule under which he had to obtain US citizenship applies to television stations, which were one of main news outlets at the time. The main issue with foreign ownership in the TikTok, and other new media platforms, is the collection of data and transfer of that data to a foreign country. It should be noted that many US Internet technologies companies have been forced to store personal data on servers within the EU, for example. There are EU restrictions on how this data can be used. Thus, there are international precedents in this area based on privacy and security.
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  4745.  @skydragon23101979  That is not what I have seen reported. There has been testimony that the data has been transferred to China.
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  4746.  @nadaah9  I had my children when I in my late thirties. My wife was three years younger. This is the same as my parents. On the other hand, their parents were immigrants. The men came over and established themselves, usually i their late 20s. Then they sent back for wives who were gnerally18. This worked out well for them.
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  4747. 350MW? That is smaller than a medium size coal plant.
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  4748.  @millevenon5853  Wait until the Indians find out how many birds the wind farms kill.
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  4749. This whole issue of the shifting makeup of the political parties in the US is not new. It is not even particularly violent today or significant in the sweep of US history. Just look at Ronald Regan. Do you remember the time when sitting Congressmen were publicly switching parties? This was mostly the southern Democrats, who were conservatives but were not Republicans because of the lingering effects of the US Civil War and its aftermath. The closest thing we have to that today is Kyrsten Sinema declaring she is an independent but continuing to caucus with the Democrats. Those southern Democrats made John F. Kennedy, an East Coast liberal, fairly ineffective and allowed both Richard Nixon and Ronald Regan to be very effective. Just listen to Peter's description of the electoral system and especially our first past the post system in the US (the UK has something similar). The situation one ends up with is that there are two parties with "factions". In a proportional representation parliamentary system, which is common in Europe, and much of the rest of the world, one ends up with lots of little parties. In many of these countries no party has had an actual majority for a long time, if ever. The coalitions are explicit. I don't want the parties to be too powerful. They are not an explicit part of the fabric of our system of government. John Adams warned about this at the dawn of the 19th century. I have a couple (at least) problems with the proportional representation system. The first I will call locality. I personally want the connection to place and the people in that place to be as local as possible. The parties don't pay taxes. People, who necessarily live in a particular place, pay taxes. The original impetus for parliaments and representative government in the last millennium was that of taxation. The second is that the proportional representative system with governments that are not time limited, gives too much power to small factions. Look at Israel today. That should scare the crap out of you. There is an additional layer of problems when you add in the parliamentary system where the head of "government" (we would say executive branch) is elected by the parliament, not the people. Just look at the Netherlands situation recently. At one point, in the not too distant past, it took Germany six months to "form a government". How about France today? Heck, just look at Germany in the 1930s. Hitler's party never won a majority of the vote even in the last "semi-free" election. We are seeing echoes of fears of that right now in Germany.
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  4750.  @SeattlePioneer  Thanks.
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  4751. Full of crap!!! Climate change is a constant. No disputing that. The causes are very much in dispute. The effects are also in dispute. Is there any verified need for any particular species? NO! The stated goal of the climate change lobby is to stop all evolution on the planet. Do they know what this means? Of course not. They are ignorant. How many species are there on earth? No one knows. What is the optimal number of species (if that is even a thing)? Does it matter if there are coral reefs off Australia? Who knows, and who knows what the impact is? To decide that we will hold the earth's biosphere to some static state is just stupid. Have these people even read Darwin? Have they studied the history of the planet and its biosphere? NO!!!
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  4752.  @ronferguson4379  That is what I have heard. As with many ecosystems, there have been vast improvements in many places in the last century. In North America, where I am, deer are in abundance probably not seen since the arrival of Europeans. Forests are massive. The greening of North America is stunning. Let me run something by you. The areas that are having problems now are the ones that typically have. That is basically the Southwest, and places like Idaho. I mention the later because I have some connection there. In the 19th century and early 20th century there was a concerted effort by the government of the US to populate areas of desert to solidify the claim on them. Vast water projects were constructed. Now, we are overrunning the capacity of these projects, and it is blamed on global warming. There would never be the massive population in Southern California that there is if they were dependent on local resources. This is actually the situation with most parts of the world where there are natural resource issues (water, for example). Where I live the no water problem, and probably never will be. Just an example.
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  4753. Even before this meeting the polling showed Americans supporting an early end to the conflict even if Putin gets to keep what he has taken. I don't know how the Democratics could be so stupid. I expect the numbers will be up further now.
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  4754. The panel is so uneducated on this that it is embarrassing. This is not something that any of these people are qualified to discuss. Yes, they are entitled to their own opinions, as am I, as is Elon Musk. On the other hand, if it is not an issue that they can contribute to, there are lots of other issues on the table.
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  4755. Years ago, my late father had an ulcer operation and they told him to stop drinking alcohol and coffee, and to stop smoking cigarettes. He did all three. Not long after he developed type 2 diabetes and Parkinson's disease. He was not a big alcohol drinker, so that probably wasn't too hard for him. He was a big coffee drinker and smoker. There is research like this regarding coffee (and I assume tea) and diabetes. In addition, although I am not advocating it, nicotine is a brain stimulant. Much medical advice is often just wrong, and treatments that were once common are now seen as flawed. Even the ulcer issue he had is now seen to be caused by a bacterium. Today we take a pill.
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  4756. Putting Bortnikov in charge of the Army in Russia defending the homeland is so much like what Hitler did in WWII. At one point he put Himler in charge of the army defending the Reich. First in the west and then in the east. He failed both times.
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  4757. Some computer scientists believe that they will attain emergent abilities. Some also believe the opposite, and believe, with reasoning, the opposite. In fact, some think that they have already achieved a peak. As for the drop in the test scores not being as bad as it sounds, just consider what level of computing power is behind that performance. It's bad. People don't talk about that enough. Heck, some of the companies involved are reviving nuclear power plants (a good idea, in my opinion) just to power these things. Think on that.
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  4758. The Germans are burning more and more lignite. Very recently they took down a wind farm to expand a coal mine. So, what is this crap from the EU against Poland?
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  4759. She doesn't seem to be aware that the community there voted for the Dems and keep them in power. That is the whole point of the situation. It was a political decision by Pelosi throw this woman "under the bus", yet she cannot bring herself to address it as such. I feel sorry for her and the hit to her business, but the people of California have to take responsibility for this themselves.
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  4760. First, Ukraine has no hope of gaining back their lost territory by military means. Second, the minerals, oil, and gas that could be extracted are not available to the Ukrainians while the war is going on. The Ukrainians also don't have the money to exploit them. The capital investment will give Ukraine revenue that they will need to rebuild. Yes, the US will get some of the revenue, but Ukraine will also get revenue and employment. Third, the presence of US interests will also act as a deterrent to Russia as far as the rest of Ukraine is concerned. This is the best deal Ukraine could get. The only other hope they have is that Russia falls apart, either their military or the whole Russian Federation. These are possibilities, but they are not very high in probability, at least in the short term. In fact, there is also the chance that Ukraine falls apart. Read a history of Ukraine. Even if you only go back just to the 20th century, it has barely ever been a unified country. We talk about Ukrainians fighting against the Soviets in the Civil War, but there were also lots of Ukrainians on the Bolshevik side.
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  4761. If Xi dies and the CCP collapses, it is unlikely that democracy would replace the CCP. China is likely to devolve into a number of competing warlords. This is actually the norm in Chinese history. The issue is, who will step in and take over? When the Qing dynasty fell, China did indeed fall into a period of warlordism. The KMT never controlled the majority of the territory, far from it. Chiang, like Mao, was just another warlord. Even Sun Yat-sen could not pull the country together. He was actually a socialist. So, who, on the scene today in China, has such stature? Who is the democratic leader?
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  4762. I worked on the Space Station design in the 1980s at a large aerospace contractor. When I started on the project, I found that many of my colleagues had worked on it in the 1970s. It was launched in the late 1990s. The NASA bureaucracy involved was stifling and added almost nothing but cost. At the time, the company I worked for had enough cash on hand to build the Space Station (according to the NASA budget). We put together a proposal to corporate management to do it privately. NASA had broken the project up into four "work packages". We would have done it all ourselves and cut the NASA bureaucracy. The idea is that they would pay us a set annual fee, starting at the beginning and running through the life of the project. Cash flow starts out negative and then turns positive. That would have given NASA a much better and more predictable budget situation compared to how the government pays for projects today. Basically, private capital would have been mobilized, much like what Musk is doing today. Corporate management actually liked the proposal but had a couple of issues with it relating to the government's reaction and how it would affect other business we had.
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  4763. Alligator, the other, other white meat.
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  4764. Norway, or Russia. Norway because of the competition aspect. Also, it would be a case of them letting out their inner Viking. Russia because there are contractual issues. If the pipeline is out of commission because of sabotage these commitments would be nullified. They have so far been using the maintenance issue, but this is much better. In addition, they no longer need the pipeline. They have proven themselves an unreliable supplier. No one is going to sign any major contracts with them. Other sources will be found. The UK is now going to permit shale exploration on land and is going to go full tilt in the North Sea. There is a pipeline that has been talked about from the eastern Mediterranean. There are sources in North and West Africa.
    1
  4765. Noone knows why Starmer, an avowed socialist, would kowtow to China, a communist government? Really? Communism is an internationalist form of socialism. Of course, Starmer would kowtow to the CCP. Fellow travelers and all that.
    1
  4766. The British left a mess everywhere they went. Their plan of rule was to put a minority in charge. These would be supported by the British military power. Good examples are Iran and Uganda. Many other African colonies can be included in this list.
    1
  4767. GDP, and thus GDP growth, is a flawed, and some say useless, measure. It is really used to compare economies. The most important use of GDP is to calculate per capita GDP. GDP is only valid, such as it is, when comparing economies in a similar state. Thus, using this measure for an economy at war, like Russia, is totally invalid. This also applies to the Chinese economy, which is centrally controlled and where all the decisions are made for political reasons. One other major flaw when comparing Russia and China to the rest of the world is that the figures used for GDP growth calculations must be publicly made available. In the west, many private investment and economic firms go over the numbers with a fine-tooth comb. Actually, we don't see much about this in the west lately because the financial community and economists have come to the conclusion that it is not important or indicative. They have moved on.
    1
  4768.  @p.d.stanhope7088  Well, he could be the Doctor. On the other hand, he could be the Master pretending to be the Doctor.
    1
  4769.  @steviewonder417  Well, I said almost. I have seen it reported in several videos on China issues. I have also read it in Nekei Asia. One article I found was from the middle of last year stating $900B, so I rounded up.
    1
  4770.  @musaran2  Exactly.
    1
  4771.  @liuchris8888  Then why is it losing $1T? Don't get me wrong, I love taking the train. When I lived in the UK, I preferred taking the Eurostar to Paris as opposed to flying. When I lived in Philadelphia, I always took the Metroliner to NYC because it put me right in the middle of city and I could take 1st class (MetroClub). The same is true of the Eurostar. Some subsidy may be good, but the Chinese built out their system in places where they would never recover their investment and where there was no impact on economic growth.
    1
  4772. Jake, you need to follow events in the US. Senators Graham and Blumenthal have introduced a resolution stating that, if Russia uses a nuke in Ukraine or blows up the powerplant, that the US would consider this a NATO Article 5 event. This was proposed five days ago. There are already discussions going on within NATO.
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  4773. All these countries trying to centrally manage their economies fail. Demand is the only driver of economic growth. Healthy local demand is the bedrock of the economy. Governments trying to manage technological innovation and growth are always doomed to fail. For one thing, predicting which technologies will be successful and important is a fool's game. By the time a country identifies a technology as important, the technologists are off to the next thing.
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  4774. Of course, the modern left you discuss, is a small minority. Look at the result of the latest elections. This is very much like what was called in the US, in the 1970s, the silent majority. How do we fight back against this? We have the same problem in the US.
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  4775. Interesting, but I think a little deeper analysis would have to be done. For one thing, we see all this great stuff being done, mostly by Ukraine, with drones. On the other hand, we see on both sides the need for more and more infantry and mechanized formations. Drones will not take over. The US has used drones for over two decades now. There are more effective weapons, like artillery. There are two things coming on the horizon. One is F-16s. The other is the permission for Ukraine to attack military targets in neighboring areas of Russia. Ukraine has been doing a stellar job with what they have, but they are not nearly up to NATO standards. Just a simple example is instructive. Their southern counteroffensive went nowhere because of the minefields and trench lines the Russians had installed. Take a similar example in the Gulf War, where Iraq had done something similar. The US used air power to suppress the Iraqis near this line so that paths through the minefields could be opened. Whenever you do this, you are vulnerable. This allowed major armored formations to move through and attack. In Ukraine the situation is the same, but the Ukrainians do not have capability to suppress Russian artillery or airpower to clear and path through the Russian fortifications. With F-16s and more mine clearing equipment they could easily do this. In the recent offensive in the north, in the Kharkiv region, the Russians were able to amass forces without hindrance. If Ukraine were able to attack those concentrations, then they would never have been able to launch the attacks. A change in policy, which seems to be coming, will allow Ukraine to defend itself and degrade Russian combat power even faster. I have also said many times that the EU and UK should be able to handle all this themselves. Their economy is ten times as large as Russia's and their population is three times as large. I am not saying the US shouldn't be heavily involved, but Europe should be able to handle this on their own. They relied too heavily on the US for their security and now they pay the price. Some European countries keep acting like they can separate themselves from US policy. That is just foolish. The cost for them to catch up is staggering.
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  4776. Of course the US is putting pressure on African states. Many of them receive economic and military aid. If you take the aid, you are beholden. You lose freedom of action.
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  4777.  @darkcircles1313  You must be kidding me. Do you think that the US precipitated this war to test weapons? That is the implication. If you hadn't noticed, it was Russia who invaded Ukraine, killed many civilians, stole children, etc. They continue to conduct a terror campaign against Ukrainian civilians and there are many heinous war crimes documented including rape and murder of civilians. They even blocked Ukrainian grain exports causing food crises in lots of other countries. As for no end in sight, I disagree with you on that. The end may come earlier than a lot of people think. You may want to get off your high horse.
    1
  4778.  @calikurt9466  Thanks.
    1
  4779.  @finlaymcdiarmid5832  Did you contact the service provider?
    1
  4780.  @lilinee3jeany865  Who the heck are you? Are you the arbiter of truth? This is the comment section on a YouTube video. Last I checked we still have free speech in the US. If you have a specific rebuttal then let's hear it. We may all learn something. Otherwise, you are just asserting that you know the law and the truth. That is a load of crap, to put it nicely.
    1
  4781. Victor, you are wrong about how warfighting will evolve. The Ukrainians are improvising. Their military is not that good. They are only lucky in that the Russians are worse than even the most skeptical of us thought. Both the Ukrainians and the Russians suck at offense. Ukraine has had four counteroffensives. Three went well, primarily because of subterfuge (a good thing in warfare) and the incompetence of the Russians. Even with those successes progress was limited success. The unsuccessful one ran into prepared defenses, the so called Surovikin Line. Funny, Putin sacked the general who created that defense, but I digress. They can't get through a prepared defense. Look at what the US did in Iraq, both times. Look at all the battle reports for this war on YouTube. The unit sizes on both sides are tiny. Again, compare that to Iraq, or the wars Israel has fought. The issue is airpower. Since WWII airpower has been the decisive factor, both on the battlefield and strategically. I don't believe in the quantity over quality argument. General Kelly pointed out that Ukraine has many times more soldiers in three years than the US lost in Vietnam in ten years. It takes a long time and lots of money to build an Air Force at the level that the US has. Ukraine doesn't have that kind of time. On the casualty front, don't you think it a bit odd that Ukraine has been forthcoming on Russian losses, in both personnel and equipment, but nothing is said of their losses. You get a feel for it from independent Ukranian YouTubers. Not actual numbers, but that the number is large and growing.
    1
  4782. I thought the Labor Party was for curtailing the military.
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  4783. I agree with everything you said, except for the last statement about why the FCC exists. The FCC is there because the airwaves are public property and because they are limited.
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  4784. The whole idea of, and emphasis on, income inequality is, frankly, stupid. It has always been there. Always! What matters is the actual, not relative, standard of living of the average person in society.
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  4785.  @gtw4546  I am in the same situation. Actually, I was fortunate enough to pay off my house soon after purchasing it. One thing, though, is that buying everything cash has a funny effect on credit score. When looking at one rating, which was very high, one of the hits on mine was "lack of installment debt" records. Well, duh! I not only own my home outright, but I have also bought my cars cash for a couple of decades. When I went to buy my latest car, once the price was agreed upon, I took out my checkbook and that wrote a check for the whole amount. That really threw off the people at the dealership. It was really weird.
    1
  4786.  @gtw4546  Another thing that makes a difference is a physical attribute of the country. In the US we have lots of land. In the 1980s I saw an article where American and Japanese auto workers were compared. The compensation was actually very similar. A big difference was what one could buy with that. The housing the American workers could afford was much better than that in Japan. In addition, it was not unusual for the American workers to have a cabin in the woods. Now way in Japan. I even had a friend when I worked at an aerospace and defense manufacturer, a lower-level field engineer, who bought a big plot in West Virginia (we were in the Washington, DC area). Even on the East Coast, go a little bit away from the urban centers and you there is lots of available space. Europe's situation is, for example, much closer to Japan's in most cases. One funny exception, though, is property in rural France. When I lived in southern England, earlier in the century, I contemplated buying a country cottage in Normandy. At the time, a fixer upper was going for 25K British pounds, while one in good, move in condition, was 75K pounds. The house I was in was going for 400K pounds (it was a very nice house).
    1
  4787.  @bobwatson8754  That is one of the big issues. I just upgraded all my tech, but the ones I replaced were already very old. For example, I just got an iPhone 15 Pro. My previous phone was an iPhone 7. I went seven years before upgrading (maybe should do it a bit more often). My laptop is six years old, and I got a new one. I don't get rid of the old ones though (I currently have three of similar spec). I did get a Kindle Scribe, which actually adds a great capability (and I got it on sale!). By the way, the only reason I relaced the phone was because the battery was getting wonky. I could have just replaced that. I was not even using the 7 to its full capacity, but the deal I got was good enough to warrant it. I used to be a big Starbucks customer. Now, working from home, I make my own coffee (and tea). I buy big cans from Costco, and it cost me cents per cup. Now that I have caught up, it will be a while before I have to do it again. In the meantime, all the money I spent was there because I was not reflexively updating.
    1
  4788. The idea that travel restrictions are just symbolic is just plain stupid. The fact that China encouraged international travel at the start of the pandemic is what led to rapid spread throughout the world. As the virus spread there was much talk about the failure to impose restrictions. Some said such restrictions were racist. What total post-modernist claptrap. Now we have many health officials and commentators saying that restrictions are not necessary. These are the same people who mishandled the situation at the beginning. The plain fact is that there is no good information coming out of China. The pronouncements from the CCP that Tony mentions are most, if not all, incorrect. We actually know that.
    1
  4789. Sabine, when I was studying physics in the third quarter of last century of the last millennium in the US many of the graduate students claimed to be members of the "church of the malicious divine". Their doctrine was that the malicious divine being would change the rules just as we were beginning to get THE answer. So, trolling. I assume you did not run into this in a serious place like Germany.
    1
  4790. Wow! Jake, you agree with Trump. He has said that the killing has to stop. Both Russia and Ukraine were in demographic decline before the war. This has been disastrous for both sides. The plain fact is that Ukraine does not have the offensive capability to break through the Russian lines. Look at their four counteroffensives. Three were successful and basically were the result of subterfuge and the unpreparedness of the Russians. Subterfuge is good in war, by the way. The fourth failed when it tried to penetrate prepared defenses. The US, by the way, knows how to do this, and has in the past. The critical component is airpower. Drones are not a replacement for traditional airpower. There is a reason that the US service arm that gets the most funding is the Air Force. The critical importance of airpower has been a thing since WWII, at least. You may have noticed that drones are good in defense in Ukraine but have not allowed them to break through. A good example of the difference between drones and traditional airpower can be seen in the recent defeat of North Korean troops in Kursk. They had gathered in a forest. The Ukrainians hit them with drones and then special forces troops. What would the US have done? Massive bombing, perhaps by B-52s. I mean that seriously. The result would have been more comprehensive as well. The problem with western support has been the lack of airpower. As we have seen, it takes a lot of time to build up this capability. Biden, and all the European leaders, failed to act soon enough. Ukraine is paying the price.
    1
  4791.  @barbaral.5980  Nationalizing? Sounds like a communist plot.
    1
  4792. I saw a video on the Times Radio channel titled "Why China could ditch Putin in race with US to be the next global superpower | Superpowers". How is this going to play with the ruble tied to the yuan?
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  4793. Over the last couple of years, a lot of liberals have bought guns for self-defense.
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  4794. I find a lot of the videos on SDSS, JWST and other observational platforms, make the same mistake. To say that "this should not exist" is just plain foolish. What I am reacting to is the way these new observations are presented. Cosmology, and astronomy, are more like archaeology or anthropology than traditional physics. In those fields one can find a pottery shard or a piece of bone, and the whole field needs a rethink. That goes on all the time. In cosmology we have these complex models and simulations and think that somehow is the "truth". As President Joe like to say: Come on man! What it comes down to is something Sabine wrote about in her first book. There is an assumption that just because some smart people decided something that it is true. Anyone out there read about the history of science? How about just Einstein? Finding something new and unexpected is how science progresses, especially in a field like cosmology. We have not had these new and more powerful instruments before. Billions of dollars are spent on them. We should fully expect that the existing models will have to be rethought.
    1
  4795. The burst feature was NOT brought in because of a training issue with full auto. It was brought in because there was a feeling that troops were wasting ammo on full auto. It was just a way to cut down on waste. Through Vietnam all the M16-A1s were full auto. It was only during peacetime that the idea of the burst mechanism was incorporated. I remember one of the first times I saw the M16 in a movie. It was some spy thriller. One character, who had no experience with one was given a M16 and told to just let off a burst. The magazine used was, of course, a 20-rounder. This had to be done consciously. One thing I am surprised is not mentioned is the barrel profile overall. Yes, the grenade launcher cut should go. I can also see a return to 20" barrels. I would opt for a return to the thinner barrels of the M16-A1.
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  4796. The idea of the government controlling markets in this way shows why you can't have capital markets in a communist country.
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  4797. I prefer and find more natural the Mandarin pronunciation.
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  4798. @Booz2020 Who are the Indonesians to tell the US, or anyone else, who to support? I guess you don't care about sovereignty.
    1
  4799. @Booz2020 What does that mean? I am responding to you. I have no idea what the Indonesian government's stance is.
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  4800. @Booz2020 Still don't know what you mean. So are you what? Your original comment said end US support to Israel. That is a violation of sovereignty.
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  4801. What is this "to include" as opposed to "including". Have I missed something?
    1
  4802. Young people are generally more radical in their youth. Even back in the 19th century students often started revolutions in Europe. On the other hand, in US elections young people don't turn out to vote, as a group. So, Bernie was never going to win.
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  4803. YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and social media are the only way to go. Shut down MSM. I have not watched MSM, except for excerpts on social media, for going on a decade now. The idea of being on the WWW, where I can look up things when I have a question, or explore an issue further as you point out, is so superior that I can't believe anyone watches MSM anymore. What is interesting is that, on YouTube, one can see every side of an issue. Look at the suggested videos next to any video and you will see totally contradictory videos on every subject. It is fascinating. For one thing, it makes one think. For another, it shows what a broad swath of people are thinking, not just what some MSM platform wants one to think. The traditional MSM was based on the broadcast model, then the cable model. That was a time when people generally had one viewing device. I have three laptops and an iPhone. I generally have lots of tabs open in my browser. In addition, TV news was originally something imposed by regulators. Frankly, I am reading that a lot of MSM news platforms are losing money. From a business point of view, their owners should be shutting them down or converting them to online, on demand coverage. Many are planning to spin them off. On their own they will die a painful and well deserved death.
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  4804. What the heck does the Supreme Court of the US have to do with any of this, Their recent decisions have been well in line with the written Constitution. If you think these are political decisions then you don't know anything about law or constitutional government.
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  4805. Anti-China panel? Yah thing. Maybe state-run media and government spokespersons should pay attention to their own rhetoric. The many transgressions by the CCP are real. They don't have to call attention to them.
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  4806. Whoopui is just plain ignorant. If she had read any history, including documents written people at the time, she would not have said what she said. If she has not really researched a topic, then she should shut up, if only for her own sake. She has now crossed over into total hierocracy territory.
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  4807. Change in the CCP's direction on the economy? I recently heard that the CCP has created a government version of one of the tech platforms. I think it is a twitter clone. This does not sound like a reset. In fact, the CCP is using the turmoil in the real estate sector to nationalize that sector. I see no letup in that. I also see no pullback in CCP involvement in most companies. So, yes, it is window dressing.
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  4808. Quoting a random Twitter user? Really? Is that reporting? What trash! The whole screed about police protecting property, as if it is something nefarious or strange, shows total ignorance of what society and government is all about. Do you want unbridled vigilantism? That, or total withdrawal of businesses from these cities is what you will get. Then you will complain about "food deserts" and such. Such stupidity is just overwhelming.
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  4809. You really don't want to follow China. Their system is $1T in debt, and there is no way for them to dig out from under that. It is riddled with unused stations and underutilized lines. There are also questions about its safety.
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  4810. OBE
    1
  4811.  @1953childstar  Thanks,
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  4812. As long as the joint defense procurement is not based on the current German model, it might be helpful.
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  4813. Talking about Australians not going to the UK, I have a good one for you. I am from the US. I had a meeting in Winchester with two gents from an Australian business partner in my office. My top technical person was a woman from South Africa. We were representing a US company in the UK. Both of the "Australians" were from the UK. One was born very close to where we were meeting. The other was from London. Go figure.
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  4814. This is a stupid poll. The ones that matter is how she fares against the opposition. In that she beats out the Labor leader, Sunak does not. And that is before she has taken the job. She will be judged by performance on the job, and some time to get some things done. We will see.
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  4815.  @sarahboakes6392  Thanks.
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  4816.  @jadesingleton4110  Which are you offended by? The video or the comments.
    1
  4817.  @jadesingleton4110  Understood.
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  4818.  @robshepherd3782  That's the dumbest thing I have seen in a long time.
    1
  4819. Rayner is the best choice, at least for the opposition. This whole situation reminds me of the Democratic Party in the US. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) is emerging as the leader of the party. Just like Rayner, she is dumber than a bucket of rocks. One US senator recently said of her that "she is the reason we have directions on a shampoo bottle".
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  4820. idiotic! This is not a hostage situation during a bank robbery. The lives of the hostages are at as much risk from Hamas if the Israelis don't go in as if they do.
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  4821. Short of using nuclear weapons there is no evidence that the Soviet/Russian military or equipment is superior, or even on a par with western counterparts. Look at all the wars Israel has fought. It was US and other western equipment and tactics that won out over much larger forces with Soviet/Russian equipment and organization. Then there were the two wars in Iraq. How did that go? One pundit even opined that if Russia today fought NATO the casualty ratio would be 100 to 1, in favor of NATO. That might be a tad high, but maybe not. Another, an experienced armor officer, opined that a US Army armored corps could clear the Donbas in short order. He even named the three divisions he would use. I expect he is correct. Then look at war withing the Russian Federation, specifically Chechnya. There were two wars. In the first, the Russians were defeated. In the second they leveled the capital and then moved in. Chechnya had no airpower or armored forces. In fact, Putin spent the 20 years after those wars rebuilding the Russian military. He had access to western technology and lots of oil revenue. They have neither now. That army was lost in the invasion of Ukraine.
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  4822. Oh, by the way, I see two videos that sort of bracket things. One is that Purin does not like the mineral deal, so it must be good. The other is titled "Ukraine Speed Dating RETURNS to KIEV".
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  4823. What a load of crap. China has been interfering in Russia's exclusive zone of influence (the Central Asian countries that were part of the USSR). China has also hinted that Vladivostok is a part of China. Just look at how Russia has treated China vs. India. They sent S400 missiles to India, but not China, and are cooperating with India in the Indo-Pacific region. Much of this information I have gotten from Indian sources. What is WION playing at?
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  4824. Tony, I am wondering why the CCP reminds me of old, western, cultural tropes. I expect that would infuriate Xi and the CCP propagandists. "Self-sufficiency, that's the ticket". That was the tag line from an old BBC comedy, "The Good Life". That is what always comes to mind when I hear the CCP going on about self-sufficiency. Another cultural reference is in the beginning of the video title. This one is even more obscure. When I hear or see "Not Good" I always want to say "Bad, not good". Sometimes I add "that's what the robot said". This was from a grade B science fiction movie from the 50s or 60s. I think the robot's name was Robby, but I am not certain. I can't remember title of the movie, but that phrase has stuck with me.
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  4825. This whole idea of protecting shipping is not going to play well with the US public. The type of naval power required to protect shipping is totally different from what the US Navy has today. To really protect shipping would require hundreds of destroyers. I think that at this point the US has no more than 100. And of course, those are not all available to patrol the seas. Many are attached to carrier groups. There is no way the US public would support the cost and dangers of such a program. What that would require is for shipping companies to relocate to the US and reflag their ships. Guess what the US would require in that case. The ships would have to be built in the US and crewed by US crews. Remember the Jones act? For another thing, the US is no longer dependent on oil from the Middle East. The sea lanes to China, Japan, Korea, South Asia and Southeast Asia go across the Pacific. US trade with China is actually decreasing and that trend is likely to continue, and indeed accelerate. The countries most affected are European. These are large, rich economies. The EU has almost 1.5 times the population of the US. Four of the top 10 countries in the world ranked by GDP are in Europe. Just those top four have collectively about 2/3 of the GDP of China. The EU plus the UK have a GDP that is over $2T greater than China's. They are the ones who should be doing this. Since you like history, you might be aware that the last 70 years or so have been an exception. China is calling for a return to a multipolar world. That is the norm. What that turned into, form about the 1500s until the end of WWII was a world consisting of empires. Most of these were European. This also meant colonies. That seems to be what China and Russia want. This is somewhat amusing because it is very likely that both China and Russia will break apart in the next few years. It may actually be fairly soon. I have even heard commentators talk about China splitting into various regional warlord factions. I have seen it written that over its long history China has only had total centralized control for about 300 years. Similar speculations have been made about the Russian Federation. By the way, the last time China projected power by sea was in the 15th century, and that was basically to the shores of eastern Africa. At this point in time, the US is completing the containment of China to the first island chain. China, because of its geography is a country that is easy to contain and carve up.
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  4826.  @axhed  Well, you haven't followed the Russian use of gas flows as a political weapon, have you. It is well established that they often threaten to cut off gas, or actually do. In fact, they had already cut back the flow in this particular pipeline. Who knows which explanation is "correct", I don't think we will ever really know, but there are lots of alternative explanations.
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  4827. The whole idea of people saying that America is the most evil place on the planet is belied by the number of people trying, and succeeding, to get here. The other place this happens is the UK. Notice the pattern here. English speaking countries, with a strong rule or law, and a capitalist economy. This is where people want to live.
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  4828. The high inflation in the late 1970s and early 1980s was due to the oil shock of 1979. It took some time to adjust, especially for automobiles, to the higher prices. There is, of course, a monetary policy aspect, but this is mostly in reaction.
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  4829.  @Iamantifeminism2021  You clearly are the bot.
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  4830. I think that Putin is a tool of the military industrial complex, in both Russia and the US. This sounds like the missile gap in the 1960s, etc. Actually, just kidding, but who knows.... As for the SU57, I think it was India that was going to be that partner. They withdrew. They are now buying French jets and potentially US jets. Actually, Pakistan has had good results with their US planes against the Indian's Soviet/Russian planes. The US develops its own weapons, and then tries to sell them. Russia does not have those resources. Add to that the fact that the US systems are actually combat proven, and the Russian stuff looks second rate (as it is). Most of the tanks attacking Ukraine are T72 variants. These are the same tanks that the US forces obliterated, in 1991. In fact, in the Gulf war there was one death among US armor personnel, and he was outside of the tank when the round hit. I have some knowledge of these things, Leave it at that. For better or worse, the US has been involved in conflicts from 1950 to present. The last Russian conflicts were the Afghan War and Chechnya. In Afghanistan they were retreated like we did in Vietnam. In both cases, it was the side we were supporting that was the problem. In Chechnya, the Russians had been thwarted once, then Putin came in and leveled the place. This is what made him, by the way. The point is that the Russian military has nowhere near the experience or command and control systems that the US and allied Western militaries have. In WWII they fought wastefully. They just threw massive numbers of troops in and suffered horrendous casualties. It was pure waste. The reason we did not rush to take over Berlin was that it was going to be in the Soviet occupation zone. The secondary reason was, considering that, why should we sacrifice the troops. This was the right decisions. The Russians, while successful, suffered horrendous casualties.
    1
  4831. Ah, the Cold War. I miss the Cold War. My father worked at an Army electronics lab and was laying out integrated circuits by hand (when they were quite small). I got a lot of surplus electronics parts and breadboards to play with as a kid. I also got the various "transistor books" from the vendors. At about ten I saw my first integral equation. I asked my father what it was and what math class I needed to take to learn about it. Later, I got to do incredibly interesting research with unlimited budgets working for aerospace and defense contractors. Ah, the good old days.
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  4832. The partisan action in the far east of Russia reminds me of the advanced helicopters that were blown up at a Russian airfield in the west of Russia. I think this was very close to Latvia.
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  4833. China also claimed some of Russia's territory. You neglected to mention that. Why? The Cold War was not about big countries bullying smaller ones. Where did you get that idea? The Cold War was about containing Russia which had a stated policy of exporting their system and revolution around the world. Sound familiar? As for Modi talking about a rules-based order, that is a bit rich. We have such a system now. To make it work requires military and economic power. India has made great strides, but it is in no way capable of projecting power in the way needed. Who do you think Vietnam and the Philippines are turning to for security guarantees? It is not India. As for this being the Asian century, that is a load of whatever (trying to keep it clean). India and Southeast Asia seem to be in good shape, but Asia is much more. China is falling apart. Korea and Japan are aging and their populations shrinking (as is China's). Together, the GDP projections for 2023 have the three (China, Japan and South Korea) with a combined GDP of $24T (still smaller than that of the US). India's GDP is $3.7T, about $0.7T less than Japan's. Even with a good growth rate, it will be a while before it overtakes China (unless they collapse, which could happen). Then there is Pakistan. Last I checked it was also in Asia. How is that going? Oh, and don't forget Iran and Turkey. Aren't they in Asia as well? Of course, we mustn't forget Asian Russia, a big part of the land mass.
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  4834. What a clown. Just the title of the video is offensive. Trump won a solid victory, but it was not the most decisive victory in US presidential political history. Not by a long shot. His majorities in Congress are slim. How is that autocracy? As President Joe likes to say, "C'mon man!"
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  4835. Stop with the Narau story already. They are an insignificant nation of 10K people. Get some perspective. Come on man!
    1
  4836. That sound is glorious, to be sure. I remember seeing one or two, but they were not a big thing where I was. Also, the stuff that the owner did to it reminds me of when my friends and I had all these sports cars from the 60s and early 70s. They were mostly British but also included Italians and a 240Z. On that car we installed triple Webers, among other things. Tuning that with synchronizer tool was a bear, at least with just one tool. The first time took a couple of hours to get right. Then we found a fixture that allowed us to mount six synchronizer tools. That made it a breeze. Ah, the good ole days.
    1
  4837. Very interesting take on the situation. I tend to agree with you. I have watched her stuff for a while now. She is now in the mode of making money from YouTube and doesn't talk about actual science that much anymore. The clip you play at about 13:30 is a perfect example of one of the confusions in "science" today. The confusion I am referring to is the split between science and engineering. Science is the description of nature. Engineering is the application of science to solve real world problems. Engineering is a creative process. Science is a descriptive process. They certainly play off each other, but they are not the same. A lot of scientists end up doing engineering. In doing that they are engineers, not scientists. Part of the issue there is that there are many more jobs in engineering than in pure science. That is only to be expected. It is similar in medicine as well. Most doctors are "practitioners" not scientists. Surgeons are basically technicians. Then there are those involved in epidemiology who are basically statisticians. I am not saying this is a bad thing, but I really think that the issues within "medical science" that were exposed by the recent pandemic have tainted "science" in general.
    1
  4838. Kadyrov may have the problems you mention, but look at the example of Herman Goering. He got addicted to drugs from an injury. He went from being a dashing, well built fighter pilot to a real blimp, just like Kadyrov. So, who knows how long he has.
    1
  4839. You really glossed over the reasons for Ben-Gurion's resistance to a constitution. I do not have a definitive answer, but I suspect it has something to do with the nature of the Jewish state. There is an inherent contradiction built into Israel's foundation. It was created as a home for a religious sect but has the structure of a secular state. I suspect that Ben-Gurion was afraid of what a constitution would have looked like had it been created in the early days of Israel's founding. I have been thinking about this for a while now. Don't get me wrong. I am a supporter of Israel but have always had a reservation. Being from the US, I find it uncomfortable to support a state that is based on a religion, no matter how progressive they are. I have the same issue with the Arab states (few if any are progressive). This is also an issue when people talk about India and its current regime. I support that regime, and India does have a strong Constitution. That said, it still has massive issues between multiple religious and ethnic groups. Sometimes the violence there dwarfs the problems in Israel, but it does not garner as much attention. That is a mistake because India is a much more important country geopolitically.
    1
  4840.  @skydragon23101979  From an economic standpoint, these are just two examples of many thousands. The TiikTok situation is one of personal security of US citizens. As I mentioned, the rule about foreign ownership of media companies is a long standing one in the US. I am not familiar about the Alstom situation in this context.
    1
  4841. I really get steamed about the labels left and right. Left parties were originally to be the parties of the people, while right parties were supposed to be parties of the establishment. This was not even ideological in the way we understand that term today. Now, in the UK you have the Labor Party which is the party of socialist (really communist) ideology. We know how that works out. The Conservatives are just; well, I don't know what anymore. Most of what you are talking about is what happened in the US, with the exception that third parties do not do well here. What Trump did was to take over and reform (reshape really) one of the existing two parties. He did not take it back to what it had been. He represents nationalism and individualism, or what some call populism. That later term is just plain stupid, by the way. It is a "dog whistle" term used by the press to obscure the reality. In the US, the Democrat Party is now the party of intersectionality and socialism. That will not go well, it never has. By the way, the uniparty idea in the UK is reminiscent of the way people used to think about the two parties in the US. Voter turnout was dropping because people said it didn't matter which party you voted for. The reality is that both parties had left and right wings. So, over time the parties did separate ideologically. This is what people kept saying they wanted. They said it loudly. Well, now we have it and people are screaming about "polarization". Darn, you just can't please people, can you.
    1
  4842.  @mrnobody3161  What is the "it" in your comment? I am not quite sure of how to understand it.
    1
  4843. The quality of defensive troops is clearly a problem. One of the best examples is D-Day in 1944. The Germans, for obvious reasons, had very poor troops located on the beaches. They withheld their maneuver forces too long, and the defensive formations were penetrated which allowed a comprehensive defeat of the defensive works and troops. Maneuver with proper air support will always defeat defensive works. This has actually been the case since WWII and in some cases in WWI.
    1
  4844. Gas and oil are not only used for power production but are also important feedstocks for chemical and industrial processes. For that reason, many German firms have moved a lot of production to the US, where these resources are cheaper, even now.
    1
  4845. The biggest challenge NATO since its creation? The lack of historical knowledge of these reporters is stunning. Anyway, who cares what NATO knew and when they knew it? How is that even relevant?
    1
  4846. Candace, you are quite right that it is unacceptable that, as a member of Congress she says these things. But you have to understand that she is elected. The original sin in this situation is the with the electorate. This is a part of the bedrock of our system. Political parties distort this. Don't forget that they are not part of the Constitution. The idea is that each Representative or Senator represents a constituency and speaks for the same. She speaks for her constituency, and we should recognize that. Any business that locates there or has anything to do with such a constituency is defrauding their shareholders and should be sued. NYC is a dead issue. There is no reason, in our networked, connected world, to locate in a particular place. Businesses should be looking to disperse their workforces and move to less costly venues. Frankly, the era of the big city in the US should be at an end. One thing we need to understand is that in the US decisions about political demarcations are purely local. I was born in Washington, DC and grew us there and on the edge. It spans three states/federal districts. In any other country it would be one municipality. In most of the US we have cities and municipal areas. None are politically unified. In other countries, this is not the case. I did a lot of work in Canada. I notice that, over time, they decided to merge the suburbs with the city of Toronto into one political entity. They did this at the provincial level, without any kind of local referendum or consent. In the US this cannot happen. The only issue is that it makes comparisons between US cities and foreign cites, bogus.
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  4847. I was getting high in a 400 year old townhouse in downtown Brussels when Nixon resigned. We had the TV on and it was weird. People were saying that it was like the US was becoming a banana republic. I had been traveling across the continent of Europe for a couple of months by then, partying and having a very good time. Hey, I was an American teenager bumming around Europe without a care in the world. Then, all of a sudden, this happens. I should happen now with Biden.
    1
  4848. Actually, Jesse, people do eat smelt. They are a great seasonal delicacy in the Midwest and other places.
    1
  4849. Anyone fooled by the claim that Ukraine is selling western weapons to Hamas is just plain ignorant. Of course, there will weapons captured on the battlefield, or elsewhere. Just look at what the US recently did. A lot of Russian weapons were seized from Iranian sources sending them to the conflict zone in Yemen. There were recently sent by the US to Ukraine since they are compatible with the weapons already being used by the Ukrainians. Does anyone claim that the Yemeni rebels are selling these to Ukraine? Come on man!
    1
  4850. I lived in the UK in the very late 90s into the early 2000s. I ate beef (mainly Scottish beef, which was grass fed) and when I got back to the US I was bared from donating blood.
    1
  4851. HDQ. Ah, bring back the good old days.
    1
  4852. The costs you are talking about make this about as practical as an electric vehicle. That is not cost effective. I have done analyses on the cars, and an EV is not worth it, even at current gasoline prices. So, why are we talking about this?
    1
  4853. Nuke 'em till they glow! My father was slated to be a part of the invasion of Japan. I am very glad they were dropped.
    1
  4854. The thing about many of these goods imported from China is that they are "optional". Many of these products are substandard. Making do without them is not really an existential issue. Sometimes we call these "first world problems". As for the "skilled labor" in China, that is a total falsehood. Most of the labor consists of poorly educated peasants. Remember the demonstrations at the big Apple plant run by Foxconn? What came out of that was interesting. Many of those that left walked or hitched a ride back to their villages. Did you see the images from within the factory. Row upon row of stations where people manually put together parts from elsewhere. Manually is the key. This is like early mass production in the industrial age.
    1
  4855. Just listened to the first minute or so and already I know that this guy has no idea of what he is talking about. Putin more powerful than Stalin? Balderdash!
    1
  4856. Well, at least they have nuclear weapons and modern fighter jets, oh, and yes, a large army. Countries and international financial institutions that give foreign aid need to take all this into account. Before any aid is given, it should be insured that the country is trying to live within its means. So much foreign aid is wasted around the world, often skimmed off by corrupt governments, that it becomes ineffective.
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  4857. China's "allegedly" unfair trade practices? Come on man! They are grossly unfair. China claims to be a developed nation and yet has policies that are only appropriate for early stage developing countries. In many cases their practices are blatantly protectionist.
    1
  4858. The government in the UK, like the Federal Government in the US, seems to be unable to do anything concrete. We have lots of similar problems, exacerbated by a lack of action on the part of the governments. COVID, illegal immigration and inflation are some of the most glaring. Of course, we do not have the Brexit issues. So, in the US, it looks quite likely that in the mid-term elections this year that the Democratic Party will lose control of Congress. In the UK, if elections were held today, there would probably be no majority party. What it comes down to is a lack of leadership. All the conditions to trigger Article 16 have been met. I was a big fan of Lord Frost, and also of Liz Truss. It seemed that as trade secretary that she was decisive. If she does not trigger Article 16 after this next meeting with the EU, she is done.
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  4859. I love Jordan and am quite impressed with John. I do have to disagree with the all people are racist thesis. I think that there is a very strong social aspect to racism. I grew up in a "white" neighborhood. On the other hand, we had lots of Jews in the neighborhood, to the extent that we would get some Jewish holidays off because otherwise over a third of the students would be absent. My father had black friends that came over the house, and they were good people I learned to admire. In university, my best friends were Indian, and we socialized with people from all over the world. We had black girlfriends, and I once dated Japanese girl. My sons grew up with this same ethos. I remember talking to one, when he was in high school, and the topic of the N-word came up. My sons would never even think of using it. In the conversation, he expressed discomfort because his black friends at school would use it among themselves.
    1
  4860. These numbers for unpaid taxes are not consequential. Apple has over $190B is cash reserves.
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  4861.  @charleshennekam8671  Actually, what was not discussed in the video is how tanks are used combination with other weapon systems. You need infantry support, as well as air support and good intelligence. The Russians, in Ukraine, have none of that. As we have seen, they often their armor in vulnerable situations with no infantry to screen them and no air cover. That is what allowed Ukrainians to ambush them with hand held weapons.
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  4862.  @EzraMerr  Well put.
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  4863. Just from the title I can see that this is a biased and uninformed video. How about all the liberals that fell for the fake news about COVID.
    1
  4864. Invoke the 25th Amendment? The panel doesn't get it. Harris would then have been the President. That is why they protected Biden for so long. That is one of the main reasons she was selected, that along with DEI considerations.
    1
  4865.  @lenas6246  Well, we definitely disagree on that. You seem to be ignoring the socialist nature of the system. Marxist socialist is an internationalist philosophy.
    1
  4866. The comments on Europe are spot on. Frankly, Europe, to be taken as a serious strategic player, especially independent of the US, needs to step up. That is going to cost them. Will they spend what is needed? The EU+UK has an economy that is ten times bigger than Russia's. It has about three times the population. It has a much more advanced defense industry, although this is in part because they are part of NATO. They should not need the US. That said, I support US aid to Ukraine and believe that the US should do more. The UK was a signatory to the Budapest Memorandum (as were Russia and the US) and later France joined in, sort of. This is reminiscent of the situation prior to WWI where the UK "guaranteed" the neutrality of Belgium, then couldn't, or didn't, do enough to stop the Germans. The same pattern was repeated in WWII with the French and British threatening to go to war if the Germans invaded Poland. They, again, had no way to make that work, unless they aggressively attacked Germany from the west. Remember the "phony war"? Frankly, Europe is no different today than it has been for about 2,000 years. A battlefield.
    1
  4867. The Chinese news outlets are entirely correct. Trump is trying to "buy Russia". He is doing, in reverse, what Richard Nixon did in opening up to China in the 1970s. At that time the idea was to get China onside against the Soviets. It worked, by the way. It was a second front type of strategy. Now, Trump is trying to get the Russians onside to counter the CCP. This is a brilliant strategy. There is no love lost between CCP led China and Russia, despite their leaders' statements to the contrary. China is making encroachments into Russia's near abroad as well as into Russia itself. Xi has said many times he is unhappy with the unequal treaties with the Russians going back to the Qing dynasty. On top of that the Russian people are not happy buying Chinese goods, especially compared to the western goods they were getting before. One other thing that is of interest here. If sanctions on Russia were to be eased, they could drive down oil prices. This would help with inflation in the US and around the world, and would, paradoxically, help China.
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  4868. Send them to a penal colony. I think the UK has done that before. There is plenty of land there. If not there, then I am sure the UK has some parcel of land some where they can use.
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  4869. The retail sector data is hard to believe. Look at the news coming out of China. The large western retail chains are pulling back and shutting down locations, as are some Chinese based concerns. Images coming out of China show once thriving shopping districts all but abandoned. Is all this fake? Any ideas? I just saw another indication that Chinese government statistics and information are both misleading and often false. In one report, the claim is that Moody's downgraded Evergrande's bond rating SEVEN years ago and suggested against investing in the bonds. The Chinese government disagreed and raised Evergrande's rating to the top level. As for the "indirect" measures you cite, these are not very accurate and can only show broad trends. Even in that, they cannot be verified until well after the fact. I will give one example. Using such methods, some analysts claimed that China may have enough housing to house the population of the whole planet, as an upper bound. Now we see more detailed information that it is "only" about twice the population of China (still a large proportion of the population of the whole planet). As they say, buyer beware. As for measures like the PMI, these are "surveys" and are an index. Don't get caught up in small movements in them. That is not how statistics work. Measures like PMI can show trends but are really only significant and useful when large swings appear. The PMI is just an approximation for the actual measurements, which would be hard and complex to compile, and would often include confidential information that companies would not share.
    1
  4870. Well, I stopped the video at the mention of string theory. The people who say physics is "broken" seem to have it right.
    1
  4871. "Interrogated in a very rough fashion"? Where is the journalistic integrity? They were clearly tortured, even to the point of disfigurement. I even heard that the man whose ear was cut off was forced to eat it. I am not sure of how accurate that is, but it would be interesting to know. When even people at a publication like the Times pervert language there is something very wrong.
    1
  4872. Several decades ago, my father was working on another space launch technology. He worked for a US Army laboratory. When I was a kid (half a century or so ago) he had an opportunity to spend six months in Barbados. He declined, by the way. He would not fly. His first experience of ships and planes was WWII in the Pacific. He developed an aversion to both. I mention that because I never found out from him what it was all about. This was typical. When I took physics in high school, he would have me do calculations. He would never tell me what it was about then either. Often, years later, when I worked in the aerospace and defense industry, I would get an inkling of what was going on. The project on Barbados, I found out later, was to use supergun technology to launch small satellites. This idea of a supergun was first pursued by the Nazis, then Saddam Hussein tried to develop it. The US military was then looking to adapt it to launch a constellation of small communication satellites quickly. I don't know if the launch method did not work, or if the idea of a constellation of small comsats was not developed enough to meet the requirements. This was long before the systems being launched now.
    1
  4873. Made in China 2025 sounds like Hitler's idea of autarky. I mean this is quite literally what the CCP seems to be working toward. Just check the definition. Of course, Hitler was a socialist. He was a national socialist. Xi, with his ideology of socialism with Chinese characteristics is moving China in that direction. The economies of Nazi Germany and China have a lot of structural similarities. The other thing the report does not talk about, as far as I can tell, is the role of corruption in derailing many of the initiatives. For example, two massive funds to develop chip technology have been instituted in China over the past several years. Both failed because of corruption, and many people leading those efforts were jailed. I know I keep harping on this, but it is a key factor that western economic analysts always seem to leave out. When you have at least 50% of project funds being siphoned off through corruption, that is a significant effect. Ignoring it just makes any analysis invalid. You make a lot of good points on the HSR issue. One thing I would point out is that showcasing Chinese technological prowess is a bit misleading. This is akin to the situation with China's first passenger jet. Both actually depend heavily on foreign technology. Because China always seems to steal technology and then turn it against those that originated it, western companies have stopped providing it for HSR. One case I have seen reports on recently is the train wheels. At the speeds these trains go, that is a critical component. They were provided by European and Japanese firms. Now those firms have drawn back, even to the point of not providing the machinery needed to make the wheels. The result is that people have been noticing that the trains shake badly while underway. I have ridden HSR in Europe and this is definitely not the case and would not be acceptable. So much for technological prowess.
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  4874. While I am not necessarily in favor of this, what you miss is that this money is already being spent. We are not adding to the current healthcare bill, just shifting who controls it. The payroll tax idea is not bad, since that is part of our compensation as employees already. This is already a matter of tax policy. So, instead of your employer paying premiums to an insurance company, the money would be paid to the government. I am not saying that is better. Take your pick, government or insurance companies making healthcare decisions. Neither has really done a great job.
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  4875. Actually, Nordstream-2 is damaged, but only half of it. Each of the pipelines is actually two pipes. Both Nordstream-1pipes were damaged. Only one was damaged on Nordstream-1. This makes for a more fragile pipeline system.
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  4876. Don't do it. Don't involve the government. We will just have to bail them out in the future. Anyone who invests in crypto risks losing all their money. So what? Why should the public care? FTX was worth nothing, did nothing and was created out of thin air. So many "smart" hedge funds and VC firms put large amounts of money into this. They must have known there was nothing there. It was a fraud, and the people who invested large sums, thereby legitimizing FTX, should be considered liable, or stupid. As for the individuals, they took their chances.
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  4877. The Bloomberg statement at the end is so ignorant it beggars belief. If the CCP remains in charge, there won't be a Chinese economy by 2030.
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  4878. You need to update this video. The EU has decided to eliminate Russian oil imports, except for some of their smaller economies. China, fearing backlash from the West, has banned Russian civil aviation. Most of their planes are "stollen". The Russian economy is small. It is 12th in the rankings, Italy us eighth. As Russian oil exports decline, their ranking will decline Russia is toast, no matter what they try to do.
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  4879. Must believe in science? Like the science Fauci was spouting during the COVID epidemic? As President Joe often said, "C'mon, man!"
    1
  4880. The comments at the end about what Xi could do are kind of silly. First, the Chinese people are mostly peasants, still. They have no experience of democracy. Even Sun Yat-sen was a socialist. His commitment to democracy was not strong. His successor was a warlord. It took the KMT a few decades to move toward real democracy in Taiwan. The other thing to understand is that there is a lot of counterfeiting and IP theft that is not done by CCP officials. Yes, the CCP tolerates it, but it is the people who actually do it. Just watch some of the videos on this channel, and others, for examples. After the Qing dynasty fell China went through a warlord period. Frankly, Mao and Chaing were just two of many. As an example of counterfeiting, I saw on firearms channel a lot of instances where the Chinese were copying western firearms, without paying any royalties of course. This was 100 years ago. Sometimes the copies were reasonably good, while many times they were not. Nothing has changed. The odds are that China will break up into waring regions. There is even talk about the southeast, which has generally been at odds with the northern plain, even joining with Taiwan. Unified central control in China is actually a rare thing. Finally, why would the US, or anyone else, want to "help" China? They are in terminal demographic decline. Projections are for the population to drop to 500M by the end of this century. They also don't have massive natural resources. Those they do have can be found elsewhere. As an investment destination, they are toast. There are lots of other, better places to put capital, including political capital. The original impetus for investing in China was twofold. One was a large, cheap labor force. The other was a large potential market. That ship has sailed.
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  4881. So, why aren't new vessels made in the US? I assume that is one of the big issues based on what you say. If truck transport is so much more expensive, it seems like it would viable.
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  4882. Good video as usual. I came to the conclusion that Ukraine couldn't win a while back and have been saying so. The Ukrainians have conducted four counteroffensives. Three were successful primarily because of subterfuge (a good thing in war) and Russian unpreparedness. They petered out as the Russians got their footing. By the way, the Russians are no great shakes either. The fourth counteroffensive, the most important one, failed. It went up against prepared Russian defenses. They don't have the equipment or technology to get through. It would take them a long time to develop and train for these things and they don't have time. Another thing that has irked me is that Ukraine does not report their own casualties or equipment losses. They go into great gory detail on Russian losses, but nothing from Ukraine. I have followed a bunch of individual Ukrainian YouTubers, and the scale of the losses comes out in indirect ways. One woman from Kiev was walking in the center of the city where they honor their dead. There are small flags for each death. She let slip that the number is large and growing. When Trump says the killing must stop, he is correct. Both Russia were in demographic decline prior to the war. Now it is much worse for both. They may have to bring back polygamy to stabilize their populations. Finally, Zalenski is either starting to believe his own propaganda or is pretending to do so. The Russians will not get to the US. After Trump shut him down on that he started to bring out the trope of misinformation, etc. When has that not been the case? Look up the Comintern. They have been doing it since the fall of the czar.
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  4883. Megyn, I love your stuff, but whenever you, or anyone else, shows the MSM or the Democrats in general I cringe. It is hard to watch that drivel.
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  4884.  @jaydee6268  Glad you liked it.
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  4885. Zalenski is spewing propaganda. What he said about the threat was "influence". That has been going on since the beginning of the Soviet Union. Look up the Comintern. The Ukrainians are big on this cyber warfare, misinformation kick. I see it from Ukrainians and their American and European supporters here on YouTube all the time.
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  4886. When the revolution comes the lawyers will be the first to go.
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  4887. You talk at about 11:30, about the limited time to plan. Are you kidding? Have you not been following the news from the last year? In a modern military, like the US, it does not take months to plan an offensive. If it did, we would never have any offensives. Your lack of understanding of military planning is amazing. I worked, in the 1980s, on systems that allowed plans to be developed, and implemented, in a very short period of time for combined arms warfare. This included everything from maneuver to artillery to air defense to intelligence to logistics. It also included integration with air assets as well naval assets, where appropriate. If the Russians have not been able to plan this offensive with the time they have had, then it means that their forces are markedly inferior. This has actually been shown time and time again. In the Middle East, Russian supplied and trained forces have never been able to withstand the Israelis, who are Western armed. That is why the Egyptians threw out the Russians and allied the the US. Actually, because of their experience, and our alliance with them, we have fed back many lessons learned. Look at the first Gulf War. Iraq invaded Kuwait in early August 1990. The air war started in late August and lasted until the middle of January. Then the ground war commenced. This was in a theatre hundreds or thousands of miles from where the Western combatants were located. There was not planning before the Iraqis invaded. It went from zero to 100% almost immediately, especially the air war. You need to read up more on modern planning and tactics.
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  4888. The comment at about 4:10 about the west not needing to take actions is sooo true. My investment advisor was hoping that Xi would get a third term. His reasoning was that Xi would tank the economy through his incompetence. How right he was. Of course, this was to be expected. The CCP, after all, are a bunch of commies. They really have no idea of what a market economy really is. Their attempts through direct government intervention in the stock market proves that. Xi, in trying to solidify his rule, has reverted back to a more pure Marxist-Leninist ideology. He adds the term with Chinese characteristics. This is just a cover for a national socialist model, based on ethnicity. Remember that from the 1930s in Germany? He will need another Cultural Revolution (long live the Cultural Revolution!) and perhaps another war, or both, to maintain power. If Xi were to openly send arms to Russia, or start a war, the west's reaction would be sanctions, which would quickly destroy China's economy. Woe to the Chinese people.
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  4889. All this talk about the Ukraine War changing everything is kind of silly. The fact is that neither Ukraine nor Russia is any good at offensive warfare. In fact, both armies are somewhat amateurish. Of the four counteroffensives Ukraine has undertaken three were successful. This was mostly down to subterfuge (a good thing) and lack of preparedness on the Russian side. All three petered out. The fourth, which was unsuccessful, was the most important. It faltered against prepared defensive lines. The big problem for Ukraine is lack of airpower. That is required to breach defenses.
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  4890. Why do you think that untrained, poorly equipped and poorly led masses could be decisive in Russia's favor. When did this happen, after WWII? How long did it take you to train as an infantryman? Think about it. Think hard. The examples to the contrary, including Israel in all its wars, the US in Iraq (twice) and Afghanistan show otherwise. Even in WWII, the only thing that saved the Soviets was the West. The US and UK provided copious amounts of weaponry and material. They also tied down large numbers of troops. If Hitler did not have to worry about western Europe, he could have sent large numbers of troops and could have improved logistics. None of that applies to Russia today. NONE! Iran is not a military equipment superpower. Heck, they just bought fighter jets from Russia. Their government might even fall in the near future. If China supplies lethal aid to Russia, they are done. So, tell me, what do you base this mass vs modern weapons expectation on. WWI showed that this does not work.
    1
  4891. Well, he didn't answer the first question.
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  4892. Russia escalating in Ukraine? Short of nukes, this is just plain nonsense.
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  4893. Didn't AOC say that the Republicans were just frustrated that they could not date her? She does have a nice booty.
    1
  4894. Good take on the crypto situation. There is really no reason why the government should be directly involved in running most things. The military is one of the few. Perhaps some government research labs. Everything else can be private, such as schools, fire, police and even money. What does the government do? it raises money and hires people. What does a private company do? Same thing, As long as the rules and goals are laid out properly, there is no difference. Now I don't think these things have to be private but having the debate on the right mix is worth doing. The main purpose of money for most people is first, a medium of exchange, and second a store of value.
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  4895. All of these high-speed rail projects seem to be over budget or making massive losses. The is a massive debacle in California in the US, for example. Sounds a lot like HS2. Then there is China's HSR system. A few of the early routes between large cities are profitable. Then Xi decided to extend HSR all over the place. The system is $1T in debt and there is no way to reduce it, or ever pay it back.
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  4896. Tony, when you say exports grew what is the baseline you used? Is it month on month or year over year? You also didn't use the term seasonally adjusted. There is another reason the exports number may be higher. That is the dockworkers strike in the US. In anticipation of a long strike, which did not materialize, many businesses brought orders forward to be able to get them in before the strike.
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  4897. The title of the video is a bit misleading. Guantanamo Bay is US territory, therefore it one cannot say people are "DEPORTED To Guantanamo Bay".
    1
  4898. The Democrats have been portraying Trump as a Russian asset, when exactly the opposite is true. It is the Democrats. from Obama on that have been the Russian assets. Even now, Biden has not enforced full sanctions on Russia. He has not mobilized the energy sector in the US against Russia. This is curious, since US produced energy would greatly increase US government revenues. What all this tells us is that the Democrats, including Obama, Clinton and Biden are the Russian assets. It has been proven that Trump was not.
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  4899. I am wondering why the concentration on these insignificant settlements. I have heard their names for weeks now and they are still not taken. There is too much concentration on taking settlements. I could to on at length on how this approach has not been historically very successful (Stalingrad?). Just look at Bakhmut itself. For how many months have we been told it was not, in itself, significant. The Ukrainians used it to bleed the Russians (and they did quite well) and then withdrew. But, in the current situation, one has to step back and consider the goal, or desired outcome. A lot is made of the roads some of these settlements have running through them. What is the goal? Disrupt the road and starve the logistics of the Russians? If so, it does not take the possession of a destroyed settlement to do that. The Ukrainians could do better by staying focused on the military goals and not what looks good on YouTube.
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  4900. I love these grand plans from China. Remember the massive investment in chip manufacturing? Where did that go? Just recall the number of people arrested for fraud in that situation.
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  4901. One thing I do have to disagree with Dr. Starkey on is his statement that Putin has won. He has lost. The second biggest export of Russia, after oil and gas, is military hardware. This is his only manufacturing export. Don't forget that all the wealthiest countries in the world, and Russia is not one of them, depend on manufacturing exports. This is where real wealth comes from. The UK, Germany, Japan, China, the US and others have become wealthy by this. That is why, even with all their oil wealth, the oil exporters are trying to build alternatives to oil. The US has shown that there is more oil and gas to be had through technological means. A resource exporting nation is always more vulnerable than a manufacturing nation. To get back to the military hardware issue, after the 1973 Arab Israeli war, the Egyptians threw out the Russians. They saw the superiority of American weapons and tactics. Ukraine has shown this. Over the last ten years or so the US and its allies have been reforming and retraining the Ukranian military. Their performance has mostly been a result of this, and some weapons, of Western origin. Do not underestimate this. Look at what Israel has been able to do. Russia can be defeated on the field of battle. This brings up the issue of Putin being brought up before a tribunal for war crimes. If he is indeed defeated, he will most likely be overthrown. If he is, then he will be offered up to answer for his crimes so that Russia can be brought back into the international system. China is not a good ally for Russia. Frankly, China has designs on Russian territory, including Vladivostok. They also are taking over territory in the Stans, in Central Asia. China is, in the end, poison for Russia. One last thought. These types of discussions are fantastic. I lived in the UK for a while, in Winchester. I was a governor of my sons' school (had to get permission to run as a foreigner, which the Home Office duly granted, I still have the letter). I still prefer the US, but I really appreciate the English system and culture.
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  4902. No problems with the location. Everything was quite clear. Thanks for taking the time. The Rahm comments are interesting and the whole context and White House statements about them just add to the entertainment. Despite protestations to the contrary, I would not be surprised if the whole thing were orchestrated. Rahm is a major figure in the Democratic Party. I have lived in Illinois, just outside of Chicago, for a few decades now and can attest to Rahm's prominence. I think this is like a "good cop, bad cop" routine. We'll see.
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  4903. I don't see where the 3% growth could come from. You have falling population, falling property values, falling exports (and imports). I expect that the reported growth in the past few years has been overstated. Some analysts believe that this overstated growth may have been reported erroneously for a very long time. Some even think that China's economy is about a third of the stated amount. Whatever the actual case, growth is certainly not in the cards.
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  4904.  @skydragon23101979  Well, if you look at the record of the CCP on poverty, you might not be so optimistic.
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  4905.  @skydragon23101979  Well, that is a good accomplishment. Only 600M left to go. Income inequality in China is massive as is corruption. I don't see this changing anytime soon under the CCP.
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  4906.  @skydragon23101979  Well, if you consider the per capita income of China middle class, then you might want to review the figures from around the world. It is often said that China became old before it became rich. It is stuck in the middle-income trap. China's demographic decline is unprecedented and is a factor in foreign investment moving out of China. Heck, even some Chinese companies are moving to Southeast Asia.
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  4907.  @skydragon23101979  PPP is a sham. If you compare housing in the US, or Europe, there is no comparison.
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  4908. "Modernization in an inalienable right." What a bunch of hogwash. Whenever someone brings up these "rights", as China does in its own case, I have to control the impulse to scream. Sometimes I am unsuccessful. The other thing I find interesting is the UN vote issue. The UN is basically a dead issue. This is also true of most other international institutions such as the International Criminal Court (ICC). Just look at what happened recently. Putin went to Mongolia, which is a signatory to the ICC treaty. The interesting thing about that treaty is that the three most powerful countries in the world, China, Russia and the US are not signatories. Mongolia is bordered by two of those. This is also similar to UNCLOS. China was taken to arbitration by this body over its claims in the South China Sea. It lost and has since flouted the judgement. On top of all that, the total GDP of the global south, depending on how you define it, is probably about 20% of world GDP total. Not all of the nations involved are on China's side. This is not a good place for China to be spending so much of their resources. A reason that foreign aid is falling (and I would like to see it fall more) is the rampant corruption involved. Finally, in the multipolar world we are heading toward, Africa will more than likely experience a new wave of colonialism. I have heard rumblings from people in France, for example. China is also acting in this manner. There are lots of reasons for this, one of them being geography. Africa will be what it always has been, a source of raw materials.
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  4909. Damn! Manufacturers colluding on pricing. That is totally illegal in the US, and I suspect much of the rest of the world. The car market is a "market", and such collusion breaches all types of economic and legal principles.
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  4910. Just a comment, right off the bat. As for whether this is good or bad for Ukraine, or Russia, one only has to look at China and Xi's "anti-corruption" campaigns. Xi ascended to power in 2013 and started his campaign soon after. It is 2024 and there is still rampant corruption at all levels in the government and in the military. He has also sacked (killed?) a number of generals recently. Xi's campaign was a thinly disguised attack on the other factions within the CCP. Considering the parallels between Russia and China, which are many, it no wonder that this is happening. Corruption in the military in Russia is well known about in west. It is not so obvious that the average Russian knows about it. Another parallel with China. The most likely reason for the purge in both cases is one of questionable loyalty. In China, it is the feeling among many of the generals that they do not want war with the US. It upsets their comfortable lifestyle. In Russia they are already in a war, and it is probably clear to many of the generals that they cannot win it with the strategy and tactics they have been using. That can be taken as disloyalty.
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  4911. The rhetoric and propaganda of the CCP makes it hard to have any sympathy for China. On the converse it makes it easy to justify the decoupling moves made by many companies and nations. Japan went to great lengths to ensure that its discharge was within safety limits and involved the international community. When I see the charts showing the discharge levels from Chinese nuclear plants, which are an order of magnitude greater, I just want to scream. Whatever happened to "follow the science". Chinese government rhetoric is getting to be almost as bad as that of Russian state TV and government pronouncements. The Russians are literally bat sh*t crazy (that is the nicest way I can put it). China is quickly approaching them. Maybe they are having a competition.
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  4912. Mearsheimer is obviously a shill for Putin. We don't know what Ukraine's casualties are, but while they are not insignificant, they are certainly not as high as the casualties the Russians have suffered. There are intelligence estimates that have been published on that. As for taking "strategic" territory, you must be kidding me. Their last significant win, in Bakhmut, was over a year and a half ago. They took horrendous casualties to get that result. They have not been able, in the past several months, actually more than a year, to take any of the strategic locations they want to. Neither side is good at offensive warfare. In fact, they are both amateurs. Ukraine has had four "counteroffensives". Three were successful but relied on subterfuge and incompetence on the part of the Russians. The fourth, against prepared defensives failed. Trump and his cabinet are correct. Too many people have died, and Ukraine does not have what it takes to take back all the territory Russia has claimed since 2014. Russia does not have the capability to realize their war aims either. Both sides are basically screwed.
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  4913.  @bobwatson8754  Thanks.
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  4914.  @YourHineyness  You have a good point there. On the other hand, I was thinking about triads. These are kind of like the Chinese equivalent of the Mafia.
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  4915. Why mention Hilary Clinton? What does she have to do with diplomacy today?
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  4916. Just on Glenn's last point on the march by first responders in NY, have there not been protests like this before social media? Come on. Did we not communicate before that? The issue there is not really about vaccines. Vaccines are great, but not foolproof. I have been vaccinated. Natural immunity, that is having had COVID and then recovering is definitively shown to be as good or better. There are also cases where there are health reasons that indicate that an individual should not get the vaccine. These are rare, but are valid. In addition, there are religious and other ethical reasons people do not want the vaccine. These are all valid. I know this and have not had a facebook account for well over a decade. In fact, I had one for only a short while and there was a problem, so I got off. I have also been off twitter for at least a year. So, to posit that this is where people get their information is an insult to me, and many others. It is really the media that reacts to facebook and twitter that is the problem.
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  4917. I meant Ben, not Glenn.
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  4918. Sky News Australia has some of the best coverage of US politics and culture. Who would have thunk it.
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  4919. That figure of 600M subsisting on 1,000 yuan a month is often misstated. It is 1,000 yuan or less. Put another way, no more than 1,000 yuan. This is significant, and the statement from the Economist is surprising and disappointing considering the name of the publication. Sloppy wording from a publication, which by definition makes its money and reputation from words, is just plain disappointing. I knew there was a good reason I no longer subscribed.
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  4920. The assessment of the Chinese property market is very shallow and does not reflect the dire impacts of government policy, demographics and company mismanagement on the sector. Given that the sector is a major driver of the economy, this detracts from the analysis. Property and infrastructure are the ways in which the Chinese have produced growth.
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  4921. Why is humanitarian aid going to the Houthis? I have seen reporting that they actually practice chattel slavery, openly. Why are such people being supported by the international community? Until some standards are imposed on such groups, they will continue to flout civilized values and attack anyone they don't agree with. Look at what they are doing to shipping. in the Red Sea. The problem with the west and its response to these groups is that the west is playing by rules that tie its hands behind its back. Continuing to do so simply makes actions by western governments useless.
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  4922. If the US has such racism, then why are people of color dying to get in. It is the same with the UK. To say that either of these countries are racist is ludicrous. The evidence points in the opposite direction. Rebecca is either very poorly informed, or dishonest. I lean toward the later.
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  4923. Foster is wrong about the involvement of the Federal government being involved in the issue. What the heck is Title IX all about then? I think most people support Title IX. It addresses basic rights that apply to all Americans.
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  4924. Wow! Just discovered this channel. Very interesting. I do whole heartedly agree with you on the Keynesians. I tend to agree about Zeihan. By the way, I am a big fan of his and have read all his books. As far geopolitical trends, he is basically right on the mark. Watching the news on China, for example, it is like seeing his prognostications play out in real time. I do agree with you, especially on the flexibility of the capitalist, entrepreneurial system, and your comments on productivity driving economics. In the case of Zeihan, especially his pronouncements on the difficulty of moving supply chains, I totally disagree with him. Look at how quickly China went from a dirt-poor peasant economy to an industrial economy. Moving that now would take a fraction of the time, and the CCP is giving lots of incentives to do so. Let me give a couple of examples. One involving moving production to China from the dawn of their expansion and another going the opposite way and happening now. The first case is the production of cell phones. I live in the Chicago area. Many years ago, Motorola built a cell phone plant in the Chicago exurbs. It was a great win for the area. Then, not long after building that plant they up and moved it to China. All it took was a few engineers and managers and they were up and running. I was familiar with the US plant as they were a customer of the software company I worked for at the time. I was also familiar with some of the people involved in the move as an IEEE member. In the second case, happening right now, US companies involved in building equipment for AI are setting up shop in Mexico. Their manufacturing contractors, like Foxconn, are a part of the process. This was just reported in the WSJ yesterday. Also, you need to look at the type of production and processing done in China. It is low tech and in the case of materials processing very, very, very dirty. Such processes would never be allowed in the west, and it is a crime that western governments support it. We have just exported massive pollution to save a few bucks. Back to production, look at iPhone production. Look at the pictures and videos of the inside of the Foxconn facilities that produce them. Some plants have at least 100K workers. The plants are giant conglomerations of low-tech workbenches mostly staffed by local peasants. This is not an exaggeration. It really came home to me when, during the height of COVID, at one of the plants many of the workers, who lived in dormitories on-site, became concerned about outbreaks. They decided to leave, and the police tried to stop them. Many left anyway, and as it was put some walked the day or two it took to return to their villages. By the way, some of this production has already been moved and that was done quickly. As for the demographics, Zeihan has admitted that the US situation is not dire. The latest generation able to do so has had kids, so the base is stable and not shrinking. It is smaller than the baby-boomers, but so are all of them. His comments about the effect on capital formation do have some merit. In addition, the US is the destination of many immigrants. This has always been the case for the US. For example, my grandparents came to the US with fourth grade educations and did well. Some of their kids went to university. ALL of their grandkids did with a lot of MS, PhD and MD degrees among them. This is not an unusual case. Keep up the good work, and I will be watching.
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  4925. Hoping to move when the prices went up? Are these people daft? If your house price goes up, it is likely that in the same basic region the prices have gone up as well. In addition, the principle you pay in the first years of the mortgage is fairly small. Unless you have more income, the house in the more desirable area is still going to likely be out of reach. Another example of the ignorance of the Chinese people (and I include businessmen) on economic matters.
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  4926. Jillian, this is not brain surgery. This is a general infection.
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  4927.  @mhvr8508  How would you like it if I told you to shut up? I will admit that Indian culture is very advanced and was from ancient times. I have studied it from when I was in my teens and first at university. My two best friends back then were Indian, and I would spend many happy hours in the university library reading Indian books. I was at the University of Maryland, and we had two massive libraries. In the stacks of the old library there were massive collections of Indian books, both in translation and in the original languages. So, I hope that you do not get me wrong. I am also of Greek descent, so the comparison did jar me a bit. As for Homer, he was transcribing an oral tradition that was, admittedly less sophisticated than the Indian culture of the time. It is just that he did have a very big impact on all Western culture. So, let's be friends.
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  4928.  @mhvr8508  By the way, I subscribe to, and regularly view, news sources from around the world. I really appreciate the different perspectives, although I do not always agree with them. I am very impressed with WION, and other Indian sources. Having lived abroad, I appreciate that there are many other perspectives. I was also born in Washington, DC and have been a political and international affairs junkie all my life.
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  4929.  @Gringo_In_Chile  No Seth in my family. The TR7 in question as white.
    1
  4930.  @Gringo_In_Chile  No problem. I understand.
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  4931.  @cindybetten7573  Sadly no. He lost his space to keep it and had to get rid of it.
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  4932. Actually, China is a threat, but one that might just go away on its own in the near future. Their military is substandard, and a lot of their equipment is a joke. Their economy is imploding. The plain fact is that by western standards most of not all their banks are insolvent. Heck, at many banks people cannot even withdraw their own money. There are lots of protests over that. They have been scaling back their belt and road initiative. Part of this is because about 60% of the loans they have extended are nonperforming. They have spent/loaned about $1T so far. So, even their major foreign policy initiative is in big trouble. China and Russia want a multipolar world. They will get it. Don't forget, the world order that people so bemoan the passing of has only been around since the breakup of the Soviet Union. That is only a little over three decades. Prior to that we had the bipolar world order. Prior to that a multipolar world order. That was called imperialism. That is actually the norm. By the way, China, and to an extent Russia, did not do well in that multipolar world order. China is the most exposed country in the world to imperialism. Japan has a similar problem, but you might have noticed they have allied with the US, and the rest of the west. Smart move. Both China and Japan have relatively few natural resources, especially the critical ones. China cannot feed its population (although that is shrinking). What do you think the whole one child policy was about. It was food, most of all. Finally, the US electorate has decided it did not want the US to be policeman of the world. You fought in the GWT. That was a detour. I remember talking with my wife during the 2000 election cycle. During the primaries we decided for Bush because he wanted to limit US involvement abroad and he was against "nation building". Then 9/11 happened. I was actually living abroad when it happened. Both of us had long years in the military industrial complex, by the way. We were no peaceniks. The last US president who wanted to have a discussion about what the world should look like after the fall of the Soviet Union was George H. W. Bush. He was voted out of office. Remember James Carville, a senior advisor to Bill Clinton? He had a slogan: It's the economy, stupid. Along those lines, US presidents have become progressively more populist ever since. You might also be educated if you look at the US National Security Strategy document. It is put out periodically and is public. You may have noticed that the US Navy is not configured to patrol the oceans and maintain free trade everywhere. It is a power projection force. To maintain world order the US would need many, many more destroyers (maybe ten times what we have now), not aircraft carriers. The CIA director, by the way, is a contributor to that document. He should know this stuff.
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  4933. Labor are a bunch of Marxists, after all. Of course, they would go after the stock exchange. Can't have capital not controlled by the government in a Marxist country.
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  4934. The "rules-based order" was done when the Soviet Union fell. George H. W. Bush saw that there was need for a conversation and a change. He was voted out of office. Any rules-based system requires some entity to enforce the rules. The US electorate is not interested in funding this anymore. What Trump is doing now is just a culmination of what has been happening for going on three decades. Another thing is that what one has to understand is that the "world" does not want the "rules-based order" that the Europeans are so fond of. Just look at the numbers. China and India do not want it. That is about one third of the world's population. The US, over 25% of the world's economy, does not even participate in many of the international bodies and treaties.
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  4935. I love all this talk about China recovering, sometime in the future, and then resuming their march toward overtaking the US. What drivel. That show a total ignorance of the facts. This all reminds me of the situation with Japan in the 1980s. A lot of the same factors were in play then as well. These include a housing market bubble, central management of the economy and a demographic problem. On that last point, both are places hostile to immigrants, both in government policy and in their social structures. The other glaring problem for both countries is the second point. The US economy is the most economically decentralized major economy in world. The US increased its share of world GDP over the 20th century and that has only grown in the 21st. The key problem for China is population collapse. Add to that the insane and frankly stupid economic policies of the CCP and you have an unrecoverable situation. For example, those "future" industries that China is supposedly doing well in are most probably dead ends. China's success there is due to factors that would not be accepted in the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is starting to react. This won't take long.
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  4936. Was there stability in Syria? I constantly hear this from foreign policy "experts". They are delusional, the whole lot of them.
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  4937. Your characterization of China is way off base in many ways. The reality is that most Chinese workers in the industrial and construction sphere are uneducated peasants. That is not much different from India, and most of the other countries where Chinese firms are migrating to. In addition, the recent problems with China have shown a real problem with the whole massively distributed supply chain approach is just bonkers. It really took off when MBAs and marketing types started having the upper hand manufacturing companies rather than engineers. I personally think we will see a swing back the other way.
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  4938. Thank you for the interesting lesson about Cyprus. I was in Greece in 1974. I turned 19 later that month. I had just returned to Athens from an island in the Cyclades where I had met a German girl. We were planning to go from there to Rhodes (there were no direct boats from where we met to Rhodes). When we checked in at my uncle's hotel in the center of Athens it was clear that something was going on, but we initially didn't know what. The city was shut down for several days. The hotel was on main road from Omonia Square to the train station, where reserve troops had to go to form up. My uncle threw open the bar which was on the second floor. We spent the day on the balcony drinking and watching the soldiers driving to the station, waving flags to much cheering. They wanted to go and kill Turks. Since all transport was shut down, we spent three days drinking, eating and, well, partying (it was the 1970s after all), with a very international crowd. After three days there were three trains heading north. We booked a ticket to Trieste. When we got there, we found out that the junta had fallen. When I got back to the US, I was told by my parents that Greek American youths (18+) were being conscripted. If I had been resident there at the time, that would have been me. All in all, an exciting time.
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  4939.  @johan13135  Look, I don't know where you get that idea, it is completely wrong. My father worked at an Army ordnance lab, and I spent many years in the aerospace and defense industry.
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  4940.  @timclemann2318  It's all in good fun, I hope.
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  4941. Tend to fully agree, but there is one point that I would quibble with. That is the situation with the cloud computing. What has happened is that cloud computing move computation from corporate data centers to another platform. So, the net growth in energy consumption is not the current usage of cloud computing, but the net after taking out those corporate data centers. I don't know what the latter is, but it is significant.
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  4942.  @southjerseysound7340  They don't? As for data centers shutting things down, are you kidding? You must be. Corporate data centers do not size themselves for some massive load and then just keep things in reserve.
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  4943.  @SeattlePioneer  No. The corporate data centers, and I was involved in a few, were massive. The issue is to determine the amount of computing power per kilowatt. I expect that cloud computing is more efficient in this regard.
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  4944. You are woefully uninformed. The EU is working on admitting Ukraine. It always takes time, lots of time. That is the EU process, it is not some bias against Ukraine.
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  4945.  @johnnynephrite6147  No problem. Glad to be of service.
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  4946. Racial doctrines of the western powers? Yes, and these seem abhorrent to us today, as they should. On the other hand, the Russian Empire, the Soviets and the current Russian Federation were and are extremely racist. I mean, they are right up there with the Nazis. The Soviets actively moved out whole populations on racial grounds and moved in ethnic Russians. That is part of what Putin is using as a cusus belli in the Donbas, and Crimea. In fact, after the annexation the Russians moved many ethnic Russians into Crimea as well. This is happening in the 21st century. Many of those are leaving out of fear as I write this. The Russians also use this threat against the Baltic states which have large ethnic Russian minorities which were moved in by Stalin. Compare that to Hitler's demands regarding the Sudetenland. Soviet Communism and Nazism have a lot in common. There are books on this and the YouTube channel by TIK has some very good videos on the topic.
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  4947. My economist friends hope Xi will be reelected. He will destroy the Chinese economy and we will not have to worry about it is their idea. I have no angst against Chinese people. I have known Chinese from Taiwan, the diaspora. survivors of the Cultural Revolution and contemporary China. I have been around a long time. In the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, I was at a large state university. We had intramural sports leagues based on departments. I was in physics, and I remember competing the chemistry department. Most of their players were Chinese (of course, at time from Taiwan). On one occasion I took the ball all the way down the sideline and scored a goal by myself. That I did it against a Chinese side was especially gratifying, since they were known to be quite good. I was probably just lucky, but it felt good. From by broad experience, I believe that the Chinese people, divorced from the CCP, would be much closer to the American people, that say the Japanese. And I respect the Japanese. But I think the unleashed Chinese are more entrepreneurial and individualistic, and family centered. This is of course very much in line with American values. Get rid of the CCP and the US and China, as true partners, would be a massive force in the worls.
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  4948.  @johnschwartz8015  That's me as well. I have lived in Europe, and although it was nice, I still prefer the USA.
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  4949. The property sector is toast and will bring down the Chinese economy. Over reliance on the sector by both the government and individuals was always a bad idea. Frankly, the local government funding mechanism, coupled with mandates from the central government, is such a stupid system that it was always slated to fail. The measure that you and other commentators and analysts seem to ignore is the stock of unsold home in the used housing market, along with the sales volumes for those homes. Look it up. In many cases these were investments by individuals. I other cases, due to the property ownership and loan rules, those homes are being sold to remedy a default. I half understand why this measure is not closely tracked, since most of the economic analysts are working for financial firms, either directly or indirectly. The used home market is not something that western financial firms can invest in, so they ignore it. By the way, in the US, being more of a real market, that measure is tracked and well known.
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  4950. Oh, and another thing. Just because Putin says he want to/is going to do something does not make it so. Just look at the Ukraine War. He said they would take Kiev in three days (or at most a couple of weeks). Autocrats like Putin and Xi are not analytical. Frankly, they are just plain stupid. Their skill is gaining and keeping power within their respective systems. This is a far shot from what is needed to be successful in war or economics. Just look at Hitler if you want an example of how a dictator can screw it up.
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  4951. That the merchant shipping industry is that powerful is a result of the world order set up by the US after WWII. That the military would have to react to a commercial interest is not an issue but is common throughout history. Why does the US need all these ships and military power. It is not for protection of the homeland. It is for the protection of US "interests" around the world. The military is beholden to the government and nation. The nation's power comes from its economy. So, not an issue and nothing strange or nefarious here.
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  4952.  @derpina8330  It was crazy. For three days nothing moved. The morning after I got back from the island there were protests in the streets. I had no idea of what was going on. I had just spent a week sleeping on the beach. All transport was shut down. You couldn't even get a bus to the next town. I was staying at my uncle's hotel which was on one of the main streets in Athens. Actually, it was the road that led up to the office where people who were being called up went to be told where to report. When the call up came this road was jammed. It was a large two-way avenue but at that time the traffic was all one way. The first floor was shops, and the bar and restaurant were on the second floor with a full-length balcony. My uncle threw the bar open, and we spent hours drinking and waving to the troops. The drinking and partying that went on is the only thing that people could do to cope. I remember being at an outdoor restaurant with a bunch of people from all over. The host at our table of 12 was a Swede. At one point he had the good grace to announce that he was so drunk that he could no longer speak English. Many people were stranded, and their plans ruined. We had planned to go to Rhodes by ship. Well, that was not going to happen.
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  4953. Money has value because it allows one to purchase concrete things. I don't use gold, or bitcoin, to buy thing, I use currency. Gold and bitcoin are considered assets. But guess what, the are valued in how much currency they can be exchanged for. Marx had another saying. He said money is stored up dead labor. That is a wonderful thing. If I couldn't store up the results of labor with some medium of exchange I can use later, we would be back to feudalism. What currency, and money, measure is the productive capacity an economy. Not how much of a commodity it possesses. Even before the US got off the gold standard, there was never enough gold to cover the currency in circulation.
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  4954. What you neglect is the relative cost of rail vs seaborne transport of goods. Seaborne transport is generally cheaper, and that is for containers. For bulk goods, seaborne transport is much cheaper.
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  4955. I hate to break it to you, but false flag operations are often not proven to be such until a considerable amount of time has elapsed. Even the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow, which are now acknowledged as a false flag attack, took some time to be revealed as such. So, you and all the other commentators are just guessing. Frankly, it is not even very informed guessing, since there is no way for you or others to get solid information about what is going on in Russia. I guess this generates clicks. Don't get me wrong, I do value your content, but on this issue I have seen so much that it seems somewhat redundant.
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  4956.  @nian60  No, I know exactly what he does. I have broad experience in the field. Frankly, I was just venting. Don't take it too seriously.
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  4957.  @gorillaguerillaDK  It is curious. Frankly I think the Russian government is close to falling apart. Just a feeling.
    1
  4958. The English were the last ones to drown Jews. That was in 1290.
    1
  4959.  @laraserviciosca5983  What is that supposed to mean? Educate me.
    1
  4960. Years ago, my father had a cartoon. There was a row of computer cabinets. At the end of it was a button. The cation was you too could be replaced by a button. When computers came into banking and insurance many jobs were displaced. Are these industries running just on machines today? No! The jobs have shifted to customer service from back-room functions. Customer service and the range of products has dramatically increased. This is how things progress.
    1
  4961. Why would any reputable news organization report what the Houthis report? Earlier in the clip it was pointed out that the Houthis are not even recognized by the UN as legitimate. You have to understand that this is a barbaric organization. I have seen reported that they actually practice chattel slavery.
    1
  4962. So much to say here. It is especially interesting to draw the historical parallels. As to Putin pitting his people against each other, that is precisely what Hitler did. I mean there is no difference. This is just another indication that Russia today is the Nazi Germany of the 21st century. The parallels between the two are striking. From the economy to the organization of the state to the fact that both leaders were elected and then continued to have elections that were shams. Even the racial politics in Russia are pure Nazi. Putin truly is the new Hitler. The tactic of using human waves to attack an enemy in the way Wagner is doing is very much like what the Chinese did in Korea. They would send poorly trained troops ahead, then their better troops. I even read that the initial wave troops carried ammunition that was not compatible with their own weapons, but with the weapons the second wave troops had. I wonder when people say that China does not want to see a world where borders change by force. This is not borne out by the facts. They are currently in a border dispute with India. They actually claim whole provinces of India. They also have major disputes with Russia on borders. During the last imperial period of China, they were forced to give the Czar, then the Soviets, large blocks of territory. They still lay claim to Vladivostok and Sakhalin Island. In Russia a directive has gone out that all maps of the far east must include Chine language place names along with the Russian. Using their Belt and Road initiative they are taking territory around the world from poor countries. Great interview, as usual. I watch Artur regularly and enjoy his content.
    1
  4963. Plans, we don't need no stinking plans. Actually, there is a common saying that no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
    1
  4964. So, is this a society that, when the CCP falls, is going to become a vibrant liberal democracy. You show the people who complain, but what about the people who are complicit in the fraud? That is the real China.
    1
  4965. Fiber optic cable is obsolete. So, it will even more obsolete (is that a thing?) by the time you get it. I have already switched to wireless 5G high speed internet. By the way, the 5G seems to be much more reliable. It is also much easier to install. Oh, and it is cheaper.
    1
  4966.  @Kuldirongaze1  Have you ever bought or sold stocks? There is always someone to buy at some price.
    1
  4967. I am tired of all this world war talk. The Cold War was only called "cold" because the main protagonists, the Soviet Union and the United States, did not clash directly. The use of the term thus does not comport with what it meant in the 20th century. Some actually see the Seven Years War in the 18th century as the first "world war" as understood in my statement above. Let's review the Cold War. There was the Korean War. Then there was the Vietnam War. There were all the wars Israel fought against their Arab neighbors. There was the Iran-Iraq war. That war had as many soldiers involved as the current conflict in Ukraine and went on for almost a decade. There was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And don't forget that during the Cold War the US had 500K troops in Europe "declining" to 300K at the end. They also had nuclear weapons in Europe, and still do. How about the conflicts after the end of the Cold War. Iraq invaded Kuwait resulting in the Gulf War. After 9/11 there were two major wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Short of the use of nuclear weapons the idea of the US and China going to war directly on each other's territory is just silly. The US has no interests in China. In fact, China is the last place anyone would invade. It has poor farmland, insufficient natural resources and all those Chinese. What would anyone gain by invading China? Ask yourself that. The only theatres where a conflict between major, nuclear armed powers is really possible is in Asia and Europe. In Europe the Russians are a spent force. In Asia there is a good chance there will be a war between India and China. Many people in India fully expect this. Then there is the possibility of a war between China and Russia. Xi has lots to complain about historically and has shown that such things concern him. There is, of course the Taiwan issue. I personally have seen nothing that indicates that China really has the ability to prevail in such a war. Even at the height of the US's abilities in amphibious warfare during WWII the generals decided that it would be too difficult. Chinas military today is a bit of a joke. It would not go well for them.
    1
  4968. Alternative designs for nuclear power have been around since at least the 1980s. I inherited the IT infrastructure for a nuclear power research lab of a large company then. They had lots of new designs, just waiting to try out. We have the technology. Why aren't we using it? As I mentioned in a previous comment, battery storage is another key. At the substation and premises level, this would be game changer. We have the control systems to integrate all of this.
    1
  4969. In the early 1980s I went from one conglomerate (Singer) to another (General Electric). After I left Singer, they were bought out by one of these firms and pieces sold off. The idea, as I recall, was that debt capacity was a wasted asset if not used. This seemed to be a bad thing, as many of the companies being broken up this way had been successful for a long time. Then I was at GE in Jack Welch's heyday. He was fairly new into his tenure and had really turned around the company with modern management techniques. I got to attend courses at the corporate training center, and it was really instructive. To give you an idea for how well GE was run in the early to mid-1980s, I had two checks to deposit at the bank at one time. One was a government refund check and the other was a check from GE (for an award). I was told that the government check would have at least a three day hold on it while I could get cash for the GE check right then and there. Then Welch got into the finance business. This was not anything like the industrial businesses GE was known for. GE had always had a financing arm, but this was to assist customers in buying GE equipment, which was often very expensive. It also was key to GE not paying corporate taxes. The depreciation expense offset any taxable income. It was brilliant and predated Welch. Well, in the end it was the financing that led to the recent breakup of the company, which followed many years of selling off businesses, many of which continue to do very well. What the GE situation reminds me of is Chinese conglomerates today. If you look at just about any large business in China today, they are in a number of unrelated industries. Take real estate companies building EVs (Evergrande). This is not working out so well. Elon Musk has it right. He has lots of different businesses, but these are all separate. He does not have a holding company, as far as I can tell. Each business stands or falls on its own merit.
    1
  4970. Let the rest of the world rely on China. Their assistance through the belt and road initiative is all in the form of loans. They have reportedly spent $1T. I have seen reporting that 40% to 60% of those loans are nonperforming. In addition, the projects are of very poor quality and use Chinese labor instead of local labor. There have been some large-scale protests against this, and some projects have been curtailed, and western aid has filled in. So, let them rely on China. They will come crawling back on their knees.
    1
  4971. First, I believe that Russia must be defeated in Ukraine and their Army destroyed. This is happening. On the other hand, the idea that Russia could, if there was some sort of armistice, rebuild their forces in a few years to try again is overblown. The army that Russia attacked with one year ago took them 20 years to build up. They had access to western technology and a large export market. Well, they no longer have access to the technology, and their export market is drying up. In addition, the sanctions are drying up their source of funds. As for those who just want the war over so that they could go back to business as usual, this is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard. The thing these people want is access to cheap oil and gas from Russia again. Russia has proven that they are not a reliable supplier, and no matter what, Europe will not be able to use them in the future. The leaders in Europe and the US should be making this clear to their people. If they did, that support number would shoot up.
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  4972. I wonder who is ask all these questions about the illegal aliens and GITMO. Who are these people who have "questions"? My point is, if this is what you are questioning your government on then you are showing us something about yourself, and it's not good.
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  4973. Don't get too caught up in the complexity of deploying F-16s. For one thing, this is true of all complex military and industrial systems. These tasks are performed by different people and will be performed in parallel. Ukraine has shown itself to be very capable of mastering complex systems. The key limiting factor is what is called the "long lead" item. In this case it is pilot training. Another factor is that Ukraine already has an experienced air force. They have, reportedly, four times as many pilots as planes. Heck, even Pakistan operates F-16s. Don't sweat it.
    1
  4974. I am not for all this spending. Real infrastructure for sure. But, nothing for tree equity or illegal immigrants. There should be nothing in the infrastructure bill that is not accepted as real infrastructure. But, I have to correct something. This spending is not for one year. The programs typically go for 5 to 10 years. These are commitments to spend.
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  4975. At about 4:30 it is stated that small warbands could ride their horses to take an enemy by surprise. Fair enough. Then mention is made about plundering. How much plunder could one take on a horse that was also carrying a warrior. I wonder about that characterization. Did they take extra horses to carry the plunder? What types of things might they be plundering that they could carry with them on a horse?
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  4976. The idea that Russia, or the Soviet Union, made artillery a centerpiece is foolish. In WWI and WWII over 6o% of casualties were from artillery. This was true no matter what the theatre or combatants. This is just the nature of war.
    1
  4977. Well, at least they have nuclear weapons. I don't believe that world institutions should support any state that cannot feed itself and still has nukes. Get rid of the weapons and the cost that goes with them.
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  4978. The evil Shannon Bream, as Gutfeld says.
    1
  4979.  @paintfatpurple7394  Well, both sides had them already, but not the good American ones.
    1
  4980. You don't have to say alleged. These people are not in a court of law and presumed innocent until proven guilty.
    1
  4981. The WHO is investigating a case in China. We are all well and truly screwed.
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  4982. You talk about SpaceX haters, but you are clearly a fanboy. Mention of the Space Shuttle having issues with cargo bay doors does not put SpaceX in a favorable light. How long ago was the first Shuttle flight? Let me help you out. It was 43 years ago. As the robot said: bad, not good.
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  4983. The layoffs at Internet giants in the US is also going on. These companies had too much cash and hired indiscriminately. Even as far back as over five years ago I looked at what was happening at Google. I was looking at their R&D projects. Very few had anything to do with their core business. I don't know of any that were commercialized. Now with their high valuations, investors are looking at them more closely. They are also trying to break into new businesses which requires a lot of capital. not just a lot of bodies. Frankly, most technology projects I have been on were overstaffed. This spans the gamut from aerospace to commercial software. I once worked on a large aerospace control system project where our projections were for up to 100 software engineers. The system engineers said we should be able to do it maybe 1/4 of that. I was among the first 15 software engineers on the project. All of us had extensive satellite experience. As we staffed up, we stated to believe what the system engineers had been saying. As projects get large there is a high overhead of communication. Although we hired a lot of good talent, they were inexperienced and frankly would not add much for some time. Of course, these large companies laying off people frees up that tech talent for other companies. At least this is true in the US.
    1
  4984. Oh, yes, all those dumb people at the University of Oxford. I think we now know who the dumb ones are.
    1
  4985.  @davidclason5026  I only put in the term "slave" because of someone responding to a comment I made stating that they were "subjects". This has happened more than once. The commentor said " rather slaves". I don't mean disrespect, but I hope that explains it a little. Thank you for the explanation of the situation. It is what I understand. I have done a lot of government contracting over the decades on the contractor side.
    1
  4986.  @vanessali1365  Yes, of course. Perhaps "slaves" is a valid term. I think I will use leeks in the future.
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  4987. There have been videos and reports of Chinese fighting for Russia for over a year now. These often come from China related channels. As for needing money on the front line as a Russian soldier, you are clearly ill informed. Russian soldiers often have to pay for things there. Look it up.
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  4988. Warm beer is a staple in the UK. Actually, it can be very good.
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  4989.  @TwoBitDaVinci  When I first went to the UK, in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, the pubs had been taken over by two brands, Watney's and Whitbread. Their beer was horrible. I drank Stella. When I went back about 13 years later, there was a movement called CAMRA (the campaign for real ale). When I moved to the UK for a bit early in this millennium, this was in full force. We talk about microbreweries here in the US, but there many individual pubs were brewing their own. Actually, in the early 1970s. we used to go to this great pizza place in a posh hotel in Washington, DC. They advertised 500 beers. Many were independent brewers, mostly on the East Coast. We are just getting back to that, and it is wonderful. By the way, I love your content. Keep it up.
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  4990. American push back against the British was also a factor in WWI neutrality. It was not just the 20s and 30s. The feeling was that any intervention to support the British would allow them to keep their empire. This is a strong current in American thinking. This is why we can support the British so strongly today, since they no longer have an empire.
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  4991. This is what the Labor Party in the UK kept saying before their last general election. The policies (which were all socialist) were popular. Then, when the election came, they had their worst drubbing in seven decades. Let's hope the Democrats continue to delude themselves.
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  4992. This reminds me of the time my in-laws asked me about a hot stock tip they got on gallium arsenide technology company. The technology was good, and I had been working with it in very specific applications, but it was already being superseded by improvements in silicon. Fortunately, they asked and were able to avoid big losses.
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  4993. I always wonder about the phrase Peter uses at the beginning of the video. It is (paraphrasing) "what do we have to worry about?" I know this is a bit pedantic but, in almost every case where I see that used in terms of what is going on in another country my internal response is "nothing". In most cases there is little our government can do, either to prevent it or to encourage it, depending on the situation. I guess my main issue is with the "worry" part. We need to consider the situation, and plan for it, at least in terms of possible effects on us and our allies, but I don't "worry" about it. I would use the word "consider". As for this whole situation in Russia, it happened before (the breakup of the Soviet Union) and that is something we wanted and encouraged. We didn't "worry" about it, we cheered it. This next level of breakup was always going to happen. The Russian Federation is one of the last traditional empires. I have seen videos from people in the region that go into great detail about how it could collapse into a series of warlord run states. They even go into names of the leaders and regional makeup. I believe this is the most likely. There is no democratic history in this territory. The period of democracy after the breakup of the USSR was very short. It was comparable to what happened in the early 20th century prior to the Bolsheviks taking over. On top of that, the Russian people are basically serfs. I once read a book by Nikolai Gogol titled "Dead Souls". It was written in the mid 19th century and reads like a description of contemporary Russia. So, don't worry, be entertained. As an old Cold Warrior this will just be a continuation of something I saw, and wished, coming for decades.
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  4994. In the early 1970s I was studying physics at a large state university with a very good program. Almost immediately I got a job in the High Energy Physics (HEP) department. It was very interesting, and I learned to program and learned a lot of statistics, which is what I do today. I switched to computer science. That allows me to work on lots of different things. One reason I switched was that, even back then, there was an issue with getting academic positions. One year there were four professors who needed to get tenure or go somewhere else. They were all good researchers and professors. My first professor, Dr. Hill was one of these. He did not get tenure. Now, the physics depart at that university paid well. Dr. Hill went on to Pfizer to run their then new CAT scanner division, including the physics and programming departments. I am sure his salary was many times what he made as a professor. One of my graduate student friends finished his PhD and just wanted a $5/hour programming job (it was the mid-1970s and that was a decent salary). His wife had a very good job, and he was not ambitious. When he went to an interview for a new lab being set up by a large defense contractor, he found that they wanted to offer him the lead role. Not what he was interviewing for. He declined. I could go on, but this was a time when the model was being settled. Even in the search for the Higgs a lot of the work was done by statisticians and programmers. What you say about funding is exactly true. Until you got to it at the end of the video, I was wondering if you would. Don't forget that the "golden age" of basic scientific research, at least as far as funding goes, was a result of the Cold War. I miss the Cold War. In the 1980s I got to do lots of very interesting research with basically unlimited funds. Physicists, especially in fields like particle physics and even cosmology need to be cognizant of the reality.
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  4995. I think you will find that the business elites in the US are actually turning away from China.
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  4996. At about 15:20 you neglected to turn all of the US territory red. You left out Alaska.
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  4997. Like just about all science communicators I see on YouTube you seem to convey that if there is a paper and a theory that it must be true. The title of the video should be "New Theory of Consciousness Explains Why Zombies PROBABLY Don’t Exist" (emphasis mine).
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  4998. I have noticed these weather maps and all the reds. This includes the Chicago area where I live. Of course this is all bunk. We just had two or three days of temperatures in the 33C range. That's it. Now we are in the 27C range, with nighttime temperatures in the 16C range to 18C. I look at the weather all the time on a couple of platforms. Our temperatures have been VERY average. I have not turned on the AC yet. The projection for the next ten days is for more of the same we are having today. So, what's with the maps?
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  4999.  @kreek22  Thanks
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  5000. The Serbian conflict in the Balkans was mentioned. Do you have any idea of how long that lasted? It was about nine years. At many points it was intense.
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  5001.  @sinabagherisarvestani8924  Dream on. It takes two to negotiate. What are the goals of Iran and China. They want to take over the world. The one for religious and the other for ideological reasons. They have both stated this. They are both also living in the past. Iran in the very distant past. China wants to play the "great power game". They are acting like 18th and 19th century colonial powers. That was also the motivation of Japan in the first half of the 20th century. If you support such actions, then I fear you are the warmonger.
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  5002. How do we know what the fuel load was pre-settlement times? Do we know there were fewer fires. In the wild, fires are started by lightning strikes (I have seen them).
    1
  5003.  @johnwaterman2525 Since the forests were not managed pre-settlement, the only conclusion is that there was plenty of fuel and plenty of fires back then. Do we know what the frequency was?
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  5004.  @rylanrussell9595  Well, I started out in High Energy Physics and then switched to Computer Science. I think I know a bit about that. So, if you want to compare, look at the situation in Australia. They have areas that are "natural" and often burn. In fact, forest burns have a lot to do with the healthy evolution of forests.
    1
  5005.  @johnwaterman2525  Fully agree.
    1
  5006.  @johnwaterman2525  Actually, from what I have seen, Australia is probably close to California. They have this debate often.
    1
  5007.  @johnwaterman2525  Fair point. I still think it is a comparable situation, but I understand where you are coming from. That said, where do we have similar climate and flora composition that is in a primordial state?
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  5008. I don't see any way the Russians can rebuild their military. There are two dimensions to this. One is equipment. They spent 20 years building up the army they attacked with last February. During that time they had access to western technology and high oil revenues. Today they have neither. The other is personnel. Russian demographics are terminal, especially among Russian men of military age. Many have left the country. Many are dead or wounded. I have even seen discussions on Russian television that they don't have enough people to run their economy. They are talking about bringing in migrants. Where will these people come from? No, this is Putin's last shot.
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  5009. My God, what is this January 6th crap? I was born in Washington, DC, grew up there and basically am a political junkie as a result. Funny, my brother and sister are not. I no longer live in the area but have been back many times to lobby my Congresspeople. There were lots of security people around at all times, with automatic weapons. And this was before9/11. The dweebs that attacked on January 6 had no fricking chance. This was a non-event. I know, because I was a part of the whole government, military, industrial complex. Take over the Capitol. Who the heck cares? That is not where the power lies, Get a fricking grip!!! If the people making a big deal out of this don't know what is going on, then they are not a part of the system. If they are then they are gaslighting you. If you don't know that, then you are the real problem. You are the ones that need to be dealt with.
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  5010.  @imminentthreat2923  What does that have to do with anything, especially Greek style democracy? My background is Greek, and I have read and studied ancient Greek philosophy extensively. You obviously have not, and have no idea of what you are talking about.
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  5011. You really don't dive deep into things, do you. To counter the June jobs surge, the real retort would be that there are fewer people employed than before the Kung Flu. Unemployment figures measure the number of people actively seeking jobs who are out of work. Many people have just not decided return to the job market.
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  5012. I just saw an analysis on another channel putting the timescale for a Russian victory and the number of casualties at astronomical numbers. This is based on territory won by the Russians and casualties taken. Of course, the guy in question is a game theorist and political scientist, so the analysis is pretty much devoid of any military value, but it just goes to show how inferior the Russian military is (tactics, logistics, soldiers and equipment). It also shows that Putin does not have the means to win. This was quite evident when Soviet supplied and trained countries clashed with US/NATO countries. The best examples of this are all the Israeli wars, Desert Storm (Desert Shield was the precursor buildup and air campaign) and the 2003 Iraq invasion. To some extent the Iran-Iraq War could be included, since the revolution in Iran had happened not long before the invasion by Iraq. In case you are not aware, the Soviet stuff did not fare well. The only question was whether having actual Soviet troops involved would make a difference. We now know that it doesn't. In a previous job I dealt with simulations of precisely the conflict with the Soviets that everyone is afraid of. This was at the Command and General Staff College. We gave the Soviets too much credit. By the way, the Egyptian army command visited after their peace treaty with Israel. They wanted to use the simulator (one of the regions modeled was the Siani) but they wanted the colors changed so that they were the blue side and the Israelis were the red. It was funny, because on the old version of the simulator this required a hardware change. In the beginning of this millennium, I was at Edinburgh Castle. In the gift shop I got a book by a British military officer looking at the possible Soviet invasion at the Fulda Gap as a scenario. That was the primary one modeled in the simulators I worked on. Actually, the book was about the western armored vehicles. That author had a much more positive view on the western equipment and chances than most American commentators. In the case of the Ukraine war, it is clear that neither side has the offensive capability to win. This actually comes down to air power. Since WWII it has been air power that has been decisive, in conjunction with an integrated Air-Land Battle doctrine. The best, and cheapest (can't believe I am saying that) thing the west could do is to concentrate on building up Ukraine's capabilities there. Biden has been very bad on that and is thus prolonging the war.
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  5013. America in turmoil? Yes. America in decline? No! Read George Friedman's excellent book "The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond". What is happening in the US is a part of our system and history. If China is so great, then why do they need engagement with the west and access to western capital and markets? That answers all questions. End of story!
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  5014. This guy is an idiot.
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  5015. The Russian Federation, as it exists today, will cease to exist. That has been in the cards for a while now. Analyst predictions put it out at least a couple of decades, but now with the war this could happen very soon. In other words, Russia will devolve into a warlord period, a lot like China has experienced many times in its history. Speaking of China, I have seen speculation that, when it is clear that the Russian military has been soundly defeated, then China will come in a take over the far east of Russia. they have historical claims and grievances. Of course, China is likely to devolve into a warlord period in the next decade or so. This will not be pretty, and reintegration of that part of the world will take many decades.
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  5016. California has not always been Democrat run, so who knows.
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  5017. I generally agree, but one thing I don't agree with is that all these other countries (Israel, Ukraine), in saving their own freedom are saving America's freedom. I guess I have a different idea of where American freedom comes from.
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  5018.  @MohammedAli-hl4mr  @CedarHunt is correct. The EU charter lays out a structure. Specific policies are up to the member states to decide. In the case of the EU charter, many of these policies require unanimous consent. For example, the whole immigration issue was first "decided" by Germany without going through the EU mechanism. Then when it became a problem, the EU imposed obligations on the member states. Look at the havoc that this has produced in many countries in the EU.
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  5019. Government intervention in the stock market is the stupidest thing that I have ever seen. As many in China have said, Xi is an illiterate schoolboy. Of course, he is a commie, so it makes sense. My investment advisor was hoping that Xi would get his third term so that he could tank the economy. He was so right. One other thing, when the SHTF (look it up) and order breaks down the main mediums of exchange will be ammunition and food (mostly canned).
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  5020. This whole thing about debt goes back to the 70s.Major financial players (and that is what they were, players) decided that debt, unrealized, was a wasted asset. That is where the whole leveraged buyout industry was born. Thus, many long standing, profitable, companies went under with leveraged buyouts. That is also what has driven some of our largest industrial companies to divest divisions that are profitable. I worked for GE. Still one of the most recognizable and respected brands. Many of their divisions have been sold off, but continue to use the GE brand name. This is madness. It is financial games played by amateurs.
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  5021. I fully agree with the points made in this video, but one. Free speech demands that all sides are able to give their views, no matter how stupid. Yes, Musk is wrong here, but he has the right to express himself. There are at least two good reasons for this. First, it is a basic right, at least in the US. Second, it is best to have contrary opinions expressed so that they can be confronted and debunked, if appropriate. The points made about the UN charter and how such referenda should and would be conducted is exactly correct. On the other hand, this does not really apply. The areas "annexed" are a part of Ukraine. They did not have any history (at least not for centuries) of an independent existence. This is not like the end of WWI where empires were crushed and new countries created by the victors, with many different groups involved. Finally, a comment on Musk. As with some other issues (e.g., population) he has chimed in on, he comes at it with a commercial point of view. He wants to do business. War is bad for business, unless you are making weapons.
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  5022. Good video and a good application of game theory. My only disagreement is with the prognosis for Russia once the current regime falls. I see a much bleaker picture. The issue is with the society, not individuals. I am willing to guess that you are familiar with Gogol. Have you read "Dead Souls"? It was written in the middle of the 19th century, but it accurately describes Russian society today. We see Russian and Chinese individuals who come to the west becoming ardent supporters of western values. We do not see this in Russia or China. I fully expect both countries to break into pieces, most probably run by warlords. This is actually the norm for China throughout its history. Russia, like China, has become so riddled by corruption, at all levels of society, that a rules-based liberal democracy is not a very likely outcome. They already had one chance and blew it. Why should anything be different today? Heck, the only way the Russian landmass has been kept together from imperial times through Soviet times through the current kleptocracy is by strong and repressive cental power. If you look at the examples of Germany and Japan after WWII, you will see that their current liberal democratic systems were imposed. Who is going to do that in Russia?
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  5023.  @1133saginaw  My comparison had nothing to do with the policies of either man. It had to do with their approach to governing, specifically the handling of Congress. LBJ just trapped millions of minorities to the welfare state. Those billionaires you disparage create millions of jobs and wealth for millions of people. Where do you think the money for the welfare state LBJ vastly increased comes from. You obviously aren't very well versed in history.
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  5024.  @1133saginaw  The tax cuts cover everyone. Most of the growth in those billionaires' wealth comes from the growth in the value of their companies. How is that a bad thing?
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  5025.  @thanakonpraepanich4284  Which country, if you don't mind me asking.
    1
  5026.  @thanakonpraepanich4284  Thanks for the clarification and information.
    1
  5027. Food shortages in the US? Really? Our number one health problem is obesity. I volunteered at a "deluxe" food bank. Most of our "clients" were overweight, some clearly obese. I would talk to them, and many were trying to eat healthier and to lose weight. That was their number one problem. I would even see some of them at the grocery store buying high-end products. I changed my diet, after a divorce, to something closer to what I had before getting married. I spend about $80 each two weeks. Half is scotch. Get over this food issue. It is truly bogus. As for Ukraine, what do you think would happen if Russia is successful. We "guaranteed" their security in exchange for their giving up their nuclear weapons. Remember that? So did Russia I guess they forgot. If you look at the wars we have fought since WWII, there are two types. One is where the people we were fighting for wanted what we had to offer, and those where we they didn't. In the first category are Korea, Kuwait and now Ukraine. In the second category are Vietnam. Iraq and Afghanistan. That is the key. I really love Tulsi and respect her for her service and willingness to have these debates. That does not mean I agree with everything she says.
    1
  5028.  @TheImperatorKnight  Actually, prices have not risen, even with massive expansion of the money supply in many countries. Governments still struggle to get the rate up to 2%. In the US, where the gov't does not control prices (and I expect that the UK really can't either), we still have vey low inflation. Even if got up to 3 or 4% after an opening up after COVID, that would be nothing in historical terms. As for inflation of goods, it has been basically nonexistent here in the US for at least 20 years. Big ticket items such as cars, appliances and computers have either come down in price (especially computers), and factoring in features and efficiency, are much cheaper than they were before. For example, my first real laptop (provided by my employer in the mid1990s cost $10K. My most recent cost about $900, and is much, much more powerful. Another way to look at is that the earlier computer cost as much as a mid-range car (say a VW Jetta). How we measure inflation over time is a real issue. I have talked to some very high level financial analysts and they confirm it. Even taking commodities such a gasoline (or if you prefer, petrol) we see this. Petrol got up to over $4 per gallon here a few years ago. In the last 5 years or so, is has gone between $1.9 to recently $2.5 per gallon where I am. i recently replaced a 2002 vehicle, which was top of the vendors line, with a 2015 vehicle, which was in a similar position in a different vendor's line. Like the computer, it has many, many more features, from power to electronics, than the one it replaced, yet if cost the same in nominal dollars. There is something going on here that the current measures do not capture. I am actually working on a theory on this that takes into account the changes in technology. Of course, these were not so prevalent in the periods you were talking about. That being so, you should not project the issues experienced in the early to mid 20th century to situations we are experiencing now. As always, I value your videos and thought. Keep it up.
    1
  5029. Andrew, your TDS is out of control. You need help. Get that looked at right away. During his first term Trump warned the Europeans about Russia. They laughed at him. Who's laughing now? You Europeans don't like his style (he is different) so you dismiss him. Putin attacking anyone else? Are you kidding. That is pure Russian propaganda. Look at the facts. It took Putin 20 years to build up the military that he attacked Ukraine with in 2022. He had robust oil and natural gas revenues during that time. He had access to western technology. He has neither now. That military is also gone. Ukraine has so degraded his military that they are not capable of facing any type of NATO force, if they ever were. The Russian/Soviet equipment is garbage. Look at what the Israelis did in Iran if you want another example. Andrew, you might want to stick to UK politics where you actually have some knowledge.
    1
  5030. EPIC! Brilliant!
    1
  5031. My God! She is able to bring into the conversation the classical Greeks (from whom I am descended). She is fantastic! She also shows that culture is not all about race. I am very impressed. for what little that is worth. As I mentioned in previous comments, I revel in the multicultural environment when it does not make judgments. Don't forget that it was the Greeks who came up with many of the tenants of our civilization, but it was the Muslims that preserved them, added to them and gave them back to our Western culture. We are all dependent on each other. That is not a bad thing.
    1
  5032. I had a girlfriend at one time who worked at the Brooking Institution. She had a close friend who was very much into the classics. When she found that I was as well, she made sure I never met her friend. The impact of the ancient Greeks on world culture is just incredible. I know of friends, who after reading Homer, would shave their heads. The power of it is just amazing. Chloe's grasp of it is just fantastic for me. Too bad I am too old for her (did I just say that?).
    1
  5033. Nana, I feel for you. It looks like the only choice left is the Monster Raving Loony Party. Might be a bit more sane and organized.
    1
  5034. A centrally planned economy trying to drive "high quality" industries is always bound to fail. We saw this with the Soviets, and we are seeing today with China under the CCP. The US is not a planned economy and in fact, the government has fairly little control over technological development, even when some of the initial research is done through government agencies. Even in that case, it is industry and academia that really does the work. I know, I have worked on such efforts (specifically DARPA projects). That is the whole idea behind the fact that most government projects are done by private companies. The goal is to speed the introduction of technology into the private sector, which will enhance it and make it useful commercially.
    1
  5035. The answer to the question in the title is that the EU is basically a protectionist cartel. There, end of video. Oh, and don't forget the chlorinated chicken.
    1
  5036. Russia (or at least its leadership) being willing take tremendous casualties like they did in WWII is a dramatically flawed strategy. Russia today is not the Soviet Union of the 1940s. It all comes down to demographics. Putin is just hastening the demise of Russia, and the Russian Federation. I also have problems with people using WWII as a "data point". Let's take another data point. WWI saw a much smaller Germany decisively defeat the Russian Empire which also took massive casualties. WWII also saw the Soviets receiving massive amounts of aid which totally dwarf what the Chinese, Iranians and North Koreans are sending to Russia today. I could go on, but I will spare you.
    1
  5037.  @tiagogomes3807  beep, beep. anyone there? beep, beep
    1
  5038. Th whole idea of "fake news" on an opinion site is ludicrous. It's opinion. What don't these idiots not get? Content moderation from people with no expertise is just the most stupid thing in the universe. Couple that with the number of issues where the "fact checkers" have been proven wrong, and harmful, and you get why Musk wanted to buy the platform. What the left forgets is that the business of America is business. Without successful businesses there is no money for anything. Starting with FDR then progressing to LBJ, we have ruined what made America great. Trump started to reverse that. It is only successful businesses that provide the money for the federal government. We need to limit what the government has outside of defense and the retirement programs. Most of the rest is crap.
    1
  5039. There was no treaty. That is all that has to be said. If Russia wanted it so bad, then they should have asked for. We have other security related treaties with the Soviets/Russians, so it would not be unprecedented. They know how our system works. Look at a couple of examples. One was the League of Nations. It was pushed by the US president. It was not ratified, so the US, the force behind its creation, never became a member. More recently, we have the JCPOA. It also was not ratified. Obama enforced its provisions by executive order. When the next president got in, he reversed it. That is all legitimate in the context of the US political system.
    1
  5040. Do you hear yourself? If the US blockades the Straights of Malaca then they would also blockade Myanmar. That would be easy. Actually, it is also just as likely that India would do this as well. Myanmar has poor, if non-existent, relations with both the US and India. India has been fortifying the Andaman and Nicobar islands to be an unsinkable aircraft carrier and a naval base. These are within easy striking distance of both the straights and Myanmar. So, if things get to the point where it is necessary to block the straights, Myanmar will also be blocked. If China is relying on Myanmar they are either dumb or...
    1
  5041. Who is this bozo? American support for Israel has been there since the beginning. Does he suggest that the US should withdraw support and let the Palestinians and other Arab nations do what they want? How is that "stabilizing". As President Joe likes to say: Come on man!
    1
  5042.  @sledshed3488  Have you read his books?
    1
  5043. Xi has to be either stupid or he is doing some very powerful drugs. China's manufacturing is very low tech. Even to get to this point they have relied on foreign investment and IP theft. One other thing that discourages foreign investment is that foreign companies are forced to partner with local companies. In the west this is not the case. The Germans and Japanese can open wholly owned factories in the US with no problem. In fact, tax incentives are also available to such companies for their US based operations. Frankly, I expect that Chinese companies can do the same, and some are. The unintended, I expect, effect of this ownership structure in China is that it makes the cost of decoupling much cheaper. Several big companies have shut down operations in China and moved them without a material effect on their results. There are other markets, after all. Many companies don't even have joint ventures in China. They just use contract manufacturers. They can shift these contracts to other countries much faster than shutting down a joint venture. Finally, the quality of Chinese manufacturing is very poor. I have seen this up close in a role advising smaller companies that have suffered with this. I have also seen the same thing happen to large companies. So, to have some yahoo spout some crap about "welcoming" foreign investment without fundamentally changing the system is laughable. Xi has become toxic. The CCP has become toxic. China has become toxic.
    1
  5044. I love it when they say something is small potatoes in regard to the budget. It reminds me of the old saying, a billion here, a billion there, now we're talking real money.
    1
  5045. When will the people of China realize that they have no rights? The level of corruption in the government and the CCP is breathtaking.
    1
  5046. You overplay the whole youth thing. The Soviets had such programs as well.Where is the Soviet Union now? How did the Hitlerjugend do in the war? The US had no such programs. How did they do in WWII? The Japanese, for one, thought the American soldiers would be too soft, a pushover. How did that work out? Actually, I was in the Boy Scouts in the US in third quarter of the last century of the last millennium. It was quite militaristic. Then, in the early part of this millennium my sons were in the Boy Scouts. We actually had a US Marine Drill Sargent come and inspect our troop once. My son had one flaw in his uniform. The Drill Sargent pointed it out and my son was very upset. On top of all that, Russia doesn't have 20 years. The problems they are having with manpower in the military and the economy will only get worse, much worse. That was true anyway, but the war has exacerbated the situation. This is the last time the Russians could do something like this. They are failing. Don't forget, Ukraine was only supposed to be the start. It will be the end.
    1
  5047. Mahyar, you, and many other commentators, keep saying that the public is brainwashed by the BBC and other MSM outlets. I think you overplay your message. Brexit, Trump's election and the 2019 UK election seem to indicate otherwise.
    1
  5048. Well, maybe then its a good thing there will be fewer and fewer Chinese (at least in China).
    1
  5049. Spies, spies everywhere. Ah, it reminds me of the good old days at the height of the Cold War (I miss the Cold War, I got to do a lot of interesting research with unlimited budgets). At one point, while working for an aerospace and defense contractor we were tracing 15 known Soviet spies targeting our company alone. We dealt with data collection devices they tried to place around the plant. One group, which dealt with particularly sensitive technology, had buildings with no window offices. In fact, the early ones were metal clad. The last one built had windows, but that was where the corridors were. As for the elections, I have great concern here in the US and elsewhere concerning the reliance on digital means of voting. I vote in person.
    1
  5050. Europe is about to experience some major political changes, I think. Their leaders, specifically the EU, do not, represent the people. Just look at the Dutch Parliament. They just voted no on the new EU wide defense fund. The government leadership supports the fund, but three of the four parties in their coalition voted against the government. Look at the protests in France after Macron's pronouncements on European defense and sending troops to Ukraine. Look at how well the AfD did in the recent German elections. They are very anti-war and defense spending (otherwise, I think most US conservatives would applaud their program). I have also found plenty of vloggers on YouTube who are anti-war. One I found, a prepper from Austria, who is very anti-defense spending. She wants to concentrate on citizens' needs. She has 1.15M subscribers. Europe has to decide what it wants to do. NATO was set up when they were unable to protect themselves from the Soviet Union. It became obsolete after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Russia has shown itself to be very poor at offensive operations (as have the Ukranians). The fact is, as VDH has stated, there is no reason Europe cannot defend itself. Their population is three times as large, and their economy is ten times as large as Russia's. They have two independent nuclear states. They don't need as much in military terms as the US since they just need to protect themselves.
    1
  5051. You do realize that ALL rock and roll music is what is called "pop music". That means that it is not "significant", but just popular at the time. Each of us, as individuals, may have favorite groups and songs, but that is just us. There is no universality to it. I prefer classical and jazz music. In the realm of rock, I am more interested in Led Zeppelin than the Beatles or the Stones. But that is because it is all purely a matter of personal choice and experience. In fact, my favorite Stones tune is Brown Sugar. This has nothing to do with the song itself, but with the experiences I had when first hearing it. That would be at discos on Greek Islands in the early 1970s, with women from all over Europe. More than you could imagine!
    1
  5052. Stop equating the US sub-prime housing collapse with the Chinese situation. There are two big differences. First, the US situation was a financial issue exacerbated by government policies. There was also a dose of incompetence in the rating of these securities by the rating agencies and the banks. It had nothing to do with overbuilding. Second, the Chinese banking system is NOT integrated with the rest of the world. On the other hand, the opposite is true of US banks.
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  5053. Get woke, go broke!
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  5054. Russia, like China, will devolve into several warlord run states. There is really no reason, besides imperialism, for these countries to stay together.
    1
  5055. Bateman is wrong. Dead wrong. The goal of the Democrats is to serve the interests of the elites and maintain their own power. What she is spewing is propaganda.
    1
  5056. I wish people would stop dumping on our political party structure. Has anyone who disparages it spent even five minutes looking at other countries, especially those with proportional representation? If you have and you don't prefer our model, then I think you might need help. Look at some "well known" examples. Israel has never had a single party win an outright majority. This means that the largest vote getter must align with small parties, which generally will have some issue they insist be addressed for support. Read up on Israeli politics prior to the Hamas invasion if that is not readily apparent to you. Another salient fact is the sheer number of elections that have been held over the last couple of years. These have not resulted in stable governments no matter what the leanings of the largest coalition partner are. Germany, a supposedly stable democracy is another great example. The current governing coalition is made up of three parties. They are currently, as a group, polling behind a combination of the center right and far-right, as a group. In fact, the largest coalition partner , currently running the country, is polling behind the far-right party. Results in local elections support the polling. Oh, and by the way, it is not unheard of for Germany to take up to six months to "form a government". Then there is the UK. I have lived there, so I have seen this stuff up close and personal. Just look at its history the machinations of the political parties involved. New ones are popping up all the time, and there are "nationalist" parties as well. This means something completely different from what it does here. There are three parties, representing three nationalities within country, each of which has a national legislature. It is as if the Native Americans had their own political parties, voting in the national legislature, while still having autonomy in their own lands. To explain how messed up the system is would take a while. Time to write a book? There will always be factions, either in our system or the others. It is relatively apparent that, for all its faults, it is much more stable than the parliamentary alternative. This is the other side of the coin by the way. There, rant done. I feel much more relaxed. How about you?
    1
  5057. Helicopters are DANGEROUS!
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  5058. This is just another example of the hypocrisy of the green movement. Not that long ago the greens were making a big deal about the "life cycle cost" of all sorts of things, like plastics. In the early days one would get pounced upon at engineering conferences where wind turbines (and solar) were being touted if you brought up energy storage requirements. Storage just drives up the cost. It is necessary, but don't mention it. Now we see this aspect. I am amazed at how short the lifespan of these things is, and it seems to be getting shorter. Recycling, and using waste for energy, is something that has not worked out at scale. I had a project going where we were looking at alternative energy, and most of the systems did not scale. In fact, I lost count of the projects that built demonstrators, and then just folded. Are we seeing something like that here? Hey, maybe they could burn the old turbine blades to produce electricity. How 'bout it?
    1
  5059. The mention of World War again. This is Cold War 2.0. Until the major powers come to blows directly, it is NOT a world war. Language is important. If you use the term World War to describe the current situation Putin is already winning. If you doubt me, just look at the history of the Cold War. Conflict everywhere. It started with Korea. Many more troops, on both sides, were involved in that war than in the War in Ukraine. Then there was Vietnam. Then there was the Cuban revolution which happened in the 1950s. Then there were Soviet supported wars in Africa, like Angola, where the Soviets sent Cuban troops. What about the Israeli wars? Israel's main adversaries were all armed and trained by the Soviets. What I am saying is that this is geopolitics as usual, not something new. The only difference is that part of it is happening in Europe. We had an interregnum after the fall of the Soviet Union that people like to think of as "peaceful". As President Joe likes to say, "C'mon man!" We had the Gulf War and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Was that "peaceful"?
    1
  5060. All this keeps YouTubers like you in business.
    1
  5061. Liberty and justice for all. That is a fine ideal and one I share. The thing you leave out is that those countries that helped the US were generally monarchies where people had fewer rights that the people of England or the American colonies. On the other hand, how much blood and treasure (other's, not yours by the way) are you willing to spend to make that true worldwide? According to your rhetoric in this video that is what is required. You really need to brush up on your history. Given your argument then how do you explain why the US was totally absent in the revolutions in Europe in 1848. The US was pacificist prior to WWI and WWII. How do you explain that? The American people only responded when attacked directly. The US had a policy, the Monroe Doctrine which was specifically aimed at keeping the western hemisphere free from European wars. The US was pulling back after the Cold War from foreign entanglements. That was the will of the American electorate. Democracy, remember. Kuwait was driven by the issue of energy supply security for the US and its allies, not the desire for the freedom of the Kuwaiti people. The GWT was a detour. It was taken because, again, the US was attacked directly. So, Mark, if you are going to use history (obviously not your area of expertise) and you want to sway people you need to use a little (a lot?) more nuance. To say the Ukrainians in the 21st century are the same as the British colonists in the Americas in the 18th century is a stretch. That is both wrong and you will not sway people. You will, in fact, for those that look more deeply into it, raise doubts.
    1
  5062.  @rafflesmaos  Well, you miss the point, for one thing. Do you really want to assign guilt to the US for those wars? Are you really saying that the US caused all that death and destruction? Did you not get what I said about the US electorate not wanting to get involved? Do you have any idea of what democracy means and how it works? Do you understand sovereignty? If you want to assign guilt for WWII, for example, it would be to the UK and especially France. They could have gone into Germany at the very beginning and ended Hitler. Don't forget that they declared war on Germany for their invasion of Poland. At that time, they probably had superior forces. Why don't you talk about that? You would do better to get a good understanding of history rather than just having a knee-jerk anti-American reaction.
    1
  5063.  @rafflesmaos  Your first statement is just plain silly. You clearly haven't read your history. The French tanks at the beginning of the war were considered superior to the German tanks. The problem France had was that they were poorly deployed. de Gaulle had a lot to say about that before and during the war. The Germans would have had a two-front war on their hands. As it was, they were allowed to take care of Poland and then concentrate their forces on the west because of the treaty with the Soviets. Not only that, but they were given a lot of time to prepare (remember the sitzkrieg?). What were the UK and France expecting? Some sort of negotiation?
    1
  5064.  @rafflesmaos  I never said that the UK did not deploy its army. What was the British expeditionary force that had to be rescued at Dunkirk? Do they just get there a couple of weeks before. France had their forces fully mobilized fairy quickly. The attacked into Saarland to weak German opposition then withdrew. They retired to their barracks. You might want to quit while you are ahead. At this point you are just making stuff up.
    1
  5065.  @rafflesmaos  The US by this time had not been attacked. It had no alliance with either France or the UK. Are you saying that it had an obligation to attack in that case? You are saying that the US has an obligation to get involved in all wars, anywhere. That is one of the more perverted things I have ever heard. It is also not something that would be supported by Americans on any part of the political spectrum. France had declared war, went in and then withdrew voluntarily, all without getting any concessions from Germany. So, why did they declare war then? You don't declare war and then not forcefully attack when you can.
    1
  5066.  @rafflesmaos  You are just making stuff up at this point. The Saarland incursion came on September 7 while Germany was still fully engaged in Poland. France did have very good forces, and if they had done a few things differently things could have turned out differently. For one thing, they declined to extend the Maginot Line all along their eastern border. They did not want to upset the other countries, such as Belgium, for example. Considering what had happened in WWI, this was always seen as a bad move. It was never a certainty that the US would have been drawn directly into WWII. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise. It was not necessary for Japan and was based on a scenario that turned out to be incorrect. They knew full well that they had to fully knock out the US Navy in the first blow and didn't. Even Yamamoto had his reservations about the whole enterprise. If Hitler had not declared war on the US, then the US would have continued supplying the British and then gotten on with the attack on Japan. Even in the first months of the war with Germany there were plenty of people that wanted to concentrate on Japan. To say that the US "should have" and that isolationism does not deter totalitarian regimes just shows ignorance of history. History is not about what would of should have happened. It is the study of what did happen. So, to say the people of the time should have done something based on what happened later disregards what was really happening at the time.
    1
  5067.  @rafflesmaos  What does the Munich Agreement have to do with the US and its policies? Who said it was a fantastic proposal? You are just being stupid now. And I wouldn't be throwing around the imperialist label if I was a European. At the time of WWII, the UK and France still had large empires. In fact, let's talk about those empires. One of the reasons for the American people not wanting to support the Brits and French prior to WWI and WWII is that what that such support would allow them to maintain their empires. In fact, after WWII the US pressured the UK to dissolve its empire. Remember the Suez Crisis. As for what I said about what France did before the war, that was contemporary thought, not speculation. People at the time pointed that out, prior to the war. It was a part of the conversation at the time. In other words, history.
    1
  5068. At about 11:30 you say there might not have been enough time to set up coordination between ground and air. That is ridiculous. The have been threatening and building up troops for months, if not a year. Time, they have had. Thus, this is no explanation.
    1
  5069. What is all this talk about slowing down in winter? Where is the historical precedent for it? In WWII, the Soviets made their big push in the November through January timeframe. There were many other winter battles during that war. In Korea there was also a lot of fighting in winter. I am not saying it is easy, but that it is common.
    1
  5070.  @markhedger6378  I thought that extended to beaches as well. Thanks for pointing that out.
    1
  5071. No, their official name is the Democratic Party.
    1
  5072. World hunger being due to the lack of foodstuffs is a lie. I have heard statistics that indicate that we produce twice the number of calories required by the population. Hunger is, as it has often been, a matter of distribution. We have lots of people living in marginal lands. The world order, as supported by the US since WWII, has allowed this. In Africa you have people starving. In the US and UK you have an obesity epidemic.
    1
  5073. This is a great result. I often hear about the increase in trade between China and Russia. So what? What is Russia's GDP? In 2023 it was reportedly $1.86T, less than one tenth of that of the US. It is actually surpassed by Canada, Italy, France, Germany, the UK, Brazil, India, Japan, China and the US. For any country making the decision of who to choose between the US and Russia, the case is clear.
    1
  5074. Don't worry so much about the "world order". That was set up by the US after WWII to combat the Soviets. It worked. Two countries that benefited from it, China and Russia, now want to tear it down. Guess what, both of those countries are in terminal decline. They do not have the resources, human, intellectual or financial to do it. The world we have had since WWII is an anomaly. The world is returning to the status quo ante. It will happen, but for business reasons, not because of what some nutters in the WEF want.
    1
  5075.  @davidsmith8393  Really interesting stuff, That period, when I first went to Europe was still very much affected by WWII. When I was first in Greece, I would be at an outdoor cafe and we would get into a political discussion. Then, my Greek friends would shush me up. I would look over and there would be a guy in a sport coat who would draw it back to reveal his revolver. These were the secret police. Of course that did not stop us from smoking weed in sight of the law courts. What a time. We were reckless and crazy. Talk about disco. Well that would be a very long story. Fun, but long.
    1
  5076.  @sandyrobertson3194  The opening of the bars is an important consideration after such a journey. Thanks for that.
    1
  5077. Tony, I just want to respond to the title of the video. It is China that has declared full-blown economic war, not only on the US but on the world. This is, of course, Xi's doing.
    1
  5078. A funny thing about all the hullabaloo about LNG is that the Europeans, especially the Germans, were saying that Trump's restrictions on the completion of Nord Stream II was just a way to force them to buy American LNG. There are still people in Europe that think that.
    1
  5079. Vietnam is actually the only war the US lost. In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, the idea was that we trained up the locals to fight their own war. They failed. In fact, in both cases, many of the people we trained went over to the other side. In both cases, they (the general population) did not want what we had set up for them. Don't forget, in Afghanistan US troops had not been engaged in direct combat operations for a while. The US had not lost any troops in a while either.
    1
  5080. The more I listen to @Yawleea the more I think about disinformation. I am very familiar with @AnnafromUlraine and @DenysDavydov and I know they are big on fighting disinformation. So, it is disappointing that they did not speak up. As I said in a previous comment, he cannot run again. One count of disinformation. Another is @Yawleea's claims that he is running for president for money. Being president and running for president actually cost him money. I find this a very disquieting state of affairs. I have seen some other disturbing things on this channel as well.
    1
  5081. Not another one. All the time we hear a "breakthrough is closer than ever" as the title of this video claims.
    1
  5082. I find irksome all of these Afghans who lament the lack of support from the world. The US went in because the Afghans we harboring the 9/11 terrorists. Then, the US and many allies stayed to help the Afghans rebuild and to create a functioning state. Many, many billions were pumped into the country. What happened? Much of the funding was siphoned off through corruption. When the time came to fight a resurgent Taliban, the majority supported the Taliban. The people we can talk to are those that fled. Frankly, for them to say the world should do something is insulting. Afghanistan has the government it wants.
    1
  5083.  @blintzkreig1638  Yes they do. I am talking specifically about Japanese corporations. The business professors I mentioned actually worked on them as consultants.
    1
  5084. ",,,these galaxies shouldn't exist." Thai is a curious statement. It is based on models and theories that were based on incomplete data. We now have more data. I say this all the time, but astronomy and astrophysics are observational fields, and not the same as the physics we usually think of. They are more akin to archaeology and anthropology. Cosmology is a similar situation, of course. In fields like archaeology and anthropology a newly discovered pottery shard or bone fragment, respectively, can force a total rethink. The same with the discovery of new galactic structures with an instrument we never had before. We will also most likely never know when we are finished. We can't really do anything with the knowledge, unlike "normal" physics. So, frankly, all the talk about crises is just plain silly and boring (although not Sabine's presentation of them). In addition, I think one of the major drivers of this whole made up controversy has to do with personalities. This is another of Sabine's themes, I believe. The same is often true in archaeology and anthropology, by the way.
    1
  5085. This is a Tory plot. It is a gift to Liz Truss. Brilliant.
    1
  5086. The original Elan was a stellar car. In SCCA racing it competed with the Chevrolet Corvette. Never could there have been more of a contrast. SCCA was road racing, with a curvy track. The Elans had a 1500, or 1600cc, twin cam engine. It weighed about 1,500 pounds. The Vette had a V8 OHV engine and weighed considerably more, although it was lightweight for American cars at the time. The Elans were much better in the turns and the Vettes much better on the straights. Considering that the SCCA tracks had lots more turns, this evened things out. It was a lot of fun to watch.
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  5087. The last quote shows that the western analysts, and most of the Chinese outside of China, have no idea of the real drivers of the Chinese economy and the CCP. They either have no idea, or if they do, they are afraid to come out and say it. The main driver for the CCP is corruption. That, and the indications that organized crime has gotten its hooks into the CCP, explains everything. Some may point to Xi's anti--corruption campaign, but they fail to see it for what it is. Xi uses it to target enemies. He doesn't care about corruption and is most probably as corrupt as any of them. Without understanding this, nothing makes sense. And right now, the pundits make no sense.
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  5088. The Steele dossier has been completely debunked. The fact that he does not mention it calls into question the whole UK intelligence community. Considering the failures of the UK intelligence apparatus, from the Cambridge Five to today, it is clear that this guy is not credible.
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  5089.  @jimfiggerty833  Probably.
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  5090. You are correct that most casualties are due to artillery. This has been true for at least a century in conventional conflicts. The thing about lower tech munitions like mortar shells is that Ukraine should be able to produce these domestically, at least to some extent. For them to build something like ATACMS in the short run is not feasible. Long range fires like ATACMS are not a substitute for conventional artillery and mortars. They are a different type of capability. In modern industrial scale warfare, they are a necessary component. The thread you showed is really not very enlightening (trying to be nice here) and shows a lack of knowledge.
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  5091.  @JeffBrody-w5j  That would be the ideal.
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  5092. Pillsbury says, toward the end, if that's true. It never is for China. My ex-wife stopped eating rice because of the contaminants in it (I believe is was arsenic). China's standard for arsenic was half the WHO's standard. And yet, when rice was tested from a number (I think was over 60) of rice growing regions, the contamination was over twice the world standard in almost all. China sets standards and doesn't meet them. They are still building many, many coal fired plants in China itself. They are the most polluting country in the world as far as CO2 is concerned, and will be for decades to come. China is not a trustworthy actor. All of these economic and financial advisors who advocate for investment in China are disingenuous. They are shills for China because they salivate over the size of the China market, but they don't understand the massive corruption in that market. They put us all at risk.
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  5093. What's with the hair?
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  5094. Of course we don't "exist". The "world" is just a simulation. At least that is what modern physicists say. So, the ancient Greeks were correct.
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  5095. I understand your comment about the preponderance of bad news. I am not thrilled with the situation, especially as it affects the Chinese people. On the other hand, it is a direct result of the system they live under. I have always maintained that the Chinese people, of all those of northeast Asia, are naturally closest to Americans in temperament. By that I mean that they are very entrepreneurial and hard working. That is clear when looking at Chinese individuals in the diaspora. That said, the housing sector is crucial to the situation in China today. As we all know, it drives many other industries. I have recently seen reports of many steel manufacturing companies who supply the housing sector primarily going under because of lack of demand, for example. This also applies to interior decoration and appliance firms. The foreclosure crisis is very bad and about to get worse. This, of course, has a ripple effect throughout the financial sector which is highly leveraged in real estate. I have seen two reports that bode poorly for the banks. First is that many banks seem to be forestalling actual foreclosures. Even when they get a judgement in their favor, they do not follow through. This is because they have to carry the properties on their books as foreclosed and this is a problem for them. Second, many more Chinese people are just giving up, even though the consequences of default can be dire. If this situation grows more widespread than the banks will be unable to hide their problems. Bad, not good.
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  5096. By the way, it seems like the Russians may already be going to Libya. Oh, joy!
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  5097. Just nuke them till they glow (an old Cold War saying) and get it over with.
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  5098. Stop calling them misstatements. They are lies!
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  5099. Baltimore has been corrupt since before I was a teen, half a century ago. The old saw was that Baltimore had the politicians that they do because the rats have the franchise. Remember Spiro Agnew? Look him up.
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  5100. What I don't hear in your analysis, or that of the financial analysts in the west, is that the root of the problem is corruption, and the involvement of organized crime. Yes, organized crime. Every once in a while, one hears of tirad activity. Of course, the government tries to suppress reporting on this. I heard on one of the YouTube channels on China issues, perhaps this one, an employee of Zhongrong Trust mentioning that some of his colleagues had been taken by triads and threatened. I don't know about the veracity of this, but it makes sense. Since there is no rule of law in China, the whole system, from party officials at all levels to organized crime is skimming off the society. Xi's various anti-corruption campaigns are not that at all, but target Xi's adversaries.
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  5101. Actually, as far as the US paying for Europe's defense, the electorate has been questioning that since the 1992 election. Obama tried to redirect some troops stationed in Germany to Asia and the Germans squealed like stuck pigs. Even Eisenhower, when he was President in the 1950s decried the low level of spending of the Europeans on their own defense. Trump has just been the most forceful about it. NATO has been obsolete since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was predicated on the Europeans being prostrate after the end of WW2 and unable to defend themselves.
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  5102. I didn't know that about the eighths. Learn something every day. Thanks.
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  5103. I was struck when someone I followed called AI a data retrieval method. It really is. The funny thing is that this guy is someone I usually don't agree with on technical topics (they are not his main areas of expertise). One has to remember that these are computer programs, written by humans. Actually, the big thing that was going to change everything before AI was Big Data. The original emphasis in Big Data was data storage and retrieval. The original impetus for this was web search. This is also why you will see the terms "machine learning" or "statistical learning" used a lot. Rather than deterministic computation what we have is basically statistical methods of computation where the computation is driven by the data. Really, this is just statistics plain and simple.
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  5104. The whole idea of China having to prepare for a future war is preposterous. This isn't the 1930s. Who would want to invade China today. It has minimal natural resources. Its population is shrinking and aging. Its agricultural land is substandard. Not only that, China under the CCP has so polluted the land that it would only be a liability. The world opened up to China because of the opportunity presented by its large potential market and inexpensive labor. It has squandered both now. China is toxic to the world, not an asset. As for China moving forward to a bright democratic future after the CCP falls, I am afraid that is not in the cards. First, who is going to lead the people to that future? Second, what about all the corruption? It has so permeated the society, at all levels, that it will be hard for any kind of liberal democratic movement to emerge. Hey, maybe Taiwan can take over the mainland.
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  5105. On the cost point at the end, I fully agree. There are a couple of other ways to look at it. First, compare this to what was spent on the Iraq and Afghan wars. We are talking TRILLIONS of dollars. Those conflicts do not even begin to compare to the geostrategic stakes of the Ukraine war. Another way to look at it is to compare what is being spent in Ukraine to the "misallocation" of funds targeted to fighting the COVID epidemic. Some analyses I have seen put this number on a par with the support to Ukraine. This is just Americans defrauding the US government. Think about it.
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  5106. The F-117 was the only stealth aircraft IN THE WORLD. Are you aware of that? Stating that would make a much more powerful statement and would be more informative. Your statement implied there were others. I assume these videos are scripted. You need to brush up on your background research and writing.
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  5107.  @skywise001  To say the CCP is not China is to ignore the facts. We see protests, but very few are call for the overthrow of the CCP. Don't forget who put the CCP in power. China at the time was a peasant society (still is by the numbers) and frankly Mao was offering them free stuff. The culture of corruption reaches all levels of society. All that IP theft (I have consulted with companies that have been affected) was not done by the CCP alone. Everyone did it. All the graft in government spending involves the collusion of the whole society. The CCP sets the tone, but the people play the game.
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  5108. Pettis is right on the money, as usual. If China wants to attract foreign investment and improve the lives of its citizens, then deep structural reforms are necessary. Sadly, I believe that as long as Xi is in power this will not happen.
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  5109. The UK has a far more open labor market than the Continent. I know, I lived and worked there and hired people all over the EU. Look at the unemployment in the EU versus the UK. Workers "rights" don't mean anything if you do not have a job. Opportunity for the workers to better themselves comes from a more open and fluid labor market. The old saying in the USSR was that they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. When the state controls the workers, this is what you get.
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  5110.  @nightspore4850  Yes, Zeihan makes his living off of numbers. When applied to economic matters, these are often the deciding factor. When looking at military matters, these are definitely not. Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of his. I have read all his books and watched many videos. Much of what he has predicted is coming true in real-time in the economic sphere.
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  5111. All these crypto fans you have on are the same. They still think there is something to crypto. What they really want is something nefarious. They want other people to put money in so that their investments grow. This despite there being nothing behind it.
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  5112. By the way, the Amish voted overwhelmingly for Trump and there are claims that he won the state of Pennsylvania for him.
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  5113. This war preparation is all so stupid. For one thing, no one is going to attack China to gain territory. Who would benefit from that? China has poor farmland (look at its food imports), insufficient natural resources (look at how much oil, natural gas and iron ore it imports) and all those Chinese (an admittedly shrinking number). The only countries nearby that have attacked in the past couple of centuries, Japan and Russia, are also in drastic demographic decline. Russia is already the world's largest country by land mass. The Japanese economy has moved on from land-based activity. Would the US invade? As President Joe say, "C'mon man!" The US already has some of the best land on the planet, abundant natural resources (only limited politically) and an envious location.
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  5114. They elected this government. For 12 years! You get what you vote for. If this government is so out of line with the people, then why do they keep voting for them? This is reminiscent of Democrat control of many American cities and "blue" states. As President Joe likes to say: Come on man!
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  5115. Almost all foreign aid should be eliminated. Specifically, USAID was a Cold War program used to combat Soviet influence. If foreign aid does not advance specific US goals and contributes directly to our security, it is invalid. It looks like Trump is headed in that direction.
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  5116.  @rockerdude8000  Didn't know that. I haven't bought a long gun in a while.
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  5117.  @GryphonIndustrial  Well, that is a part of the system. I had an uncle that was an FFL holder for a gun club in Illinois. He kept the records for the required time, and then destroyed them. Most banks do the same. I am not sure that the keep all the information on the purchase. There are some limitations on what they can keep. Please correct me if I am wrong.
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  5118. I like your approach so far. As for Christians caring about particular places, that is one of the big differences between Judaism and Islam on the one side and Christianity on the other. As a Christian I do not feel a need, from a religious point of view, to go to a particular place. This is not to say it would not be very interesting, but it is not doctrinally necessary.
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  5119.  @robertlucas5090  You are truly ignorant. God works in the world through people such as the pastor. He is trying to raise awareness and support for a community center that might help bring some out of the darkness they have fallen in to.
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  5120. Dark what? If science communicators didn't cause confusion, you would have very little to talk about. They are doing you a favor.
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  5121. If companies need to pay a royalty to UNCLOS then why don't land mining companies have to do something similar some relevant organization? International taxes are really kind of silly. The human cost of mineral extraction is quite high, especially in places like Africa and South America. Where is the outcry for these people? One also has to look at the cost of relying for critical minerals on countries that are international pariahs and criminals. As for UNCLOS, the US is not a signatory. The US is also looking at seabed mining off its own coasts. China is a signatory and actively flouts its rulings. China also flouts international fishing rights and its practices adversely impacting biodiversity. This is just another failed UN agency.
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  5122.  @freedomfighter22222  Your understanding of what I said, and UNCLOS. For one thing, the idea of paying to UNCLOS is what the person in the video said. Any "international" taxes are just plain silly. Even the contributions to the UN are called "contributions", not taxes. The countries contributing can change their contribution. Their own legislatures what to contribute, not some international "legislature". You misinterpret UNCLOS. The country that controls an exclusive economic zone does not have to grant the rights for another country to extract resources in that zone. It does not even have to collect taxes, really royalties, from that extraction. Generally, they will want to, but it is not a requirement.
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  5123. At about 3:55 Peter mentions "today's populist era". I may be a bit sensitive to this, but I expect he is using the term in a negative sense. During the Cold War we were facing an enemy that was literally trying to take over the world to impose a political and economic system that was, to put it mildly, antithetical to our own. Oh, and at the same time, they were threatening us with nuclear annihilation. To use the populist label is disingenuous. Peter is an admitted internationalist. That only works when people agree on the rules of the game. In case you haven't noticed, neither the Chinese nor the Russians want to adhere to those rules. So, if that is populism, I will take it any day over a failed "internationalist" approach any day.
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  5124. ​ @agusedyanto3324  Are you trying to restrict my freedom of speech? Who the heck are you to tell me to do anything? Who appointed you the arbiter? Are you a CCP agent? If you want to dispute what I say and have facts to back it up, then we can have a conversation. The reason that western companies, and this is a general thing, work with existing manufacturers is to build capacity quickly. The alternative is to do R&D, which may take years and lots of capital, ensuring that you do not infringe any else's patents to build your own independent product. Even with these companies partnering with others, they can, and typically will, do R&D on new technologies. This is also a common business practice. If you knew anything about business, you would know that, at least. As for smear campaigns, there are many, many videos detailing the problems I mention. For example, from the channel China Observer, watch the video titled "8 EVs Self-Combust Daily, Shanghai Pudong Toll Station Smashed, China’s EVs Troubled". Look at this video, from the same channel, as well: "Vehicle’s Main Beam Twists as Easily as Tofu! BYD’s Luxury SUVs Are Trash". Another one is from the channel China Insights titled "So many design issues! Industry insiders look down on the future of China's new energy industry". There are also plenty of articles in print publications. So, do your research and use your words.
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  5125.  @AlanStone-n5o  They are designed in the US. I don't know where you are located, but Tesla production in China is primarily for the Chinese market. One problem, for example, that Tesla found early on was that the battery, being on the bottom, could be pierced by road debris. They had some bad incidents. So, they armored the bottom and that took care of it. There are videos like this one ("8 EVs Self-Combust Daily, Shanghai Pudong Toll Station Smashed, China’s EVs Troubled") from the channel China Observer, that has an example of just such an incident with a Chinese brand EV. That is just one of the differences between companies like BYD and Tesla.
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  5126. Did the channel need some filler? We know the F-16s are coming. They have been for a long time. Tell us when they actually get there and, more importantly, when they do something. Otherwise, this is not news.
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  5127. I am glad we are hearing about this stuff and getting it under control. The thing is that it pains me to hear some of the examples. I have worked for some large companies that are very well run and had my own companies. People would have been fired for this stuff, and in appropriate cases, prosecuted.
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  5128. Karoline handles this well, but I do have one disappointment with her answers. When asked about when indictments would be forthcoming, she sidestepped the question. For example, those SS checks have been going out to dead people. Have they been cashed? Who is cashing them? Is someone in the SS administration implicated? They can't have been unaware of the issue. If they did not question this fraud they should at least be fired. In a private company someone responsible for spending irresponsibly like this would be, at a minimum. There is obviously a criminal conspiracy here. Someone is taking the money. They should all be looked at.
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  5129.  @Boris275  It was just a rant on how the news is presented. Don't pay it much mind.
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  5130. I got a bot reply to this comment, but it has disappeared. I guess I touched a nerve.
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  5131. Trump is brilliant! His praise for Schumer can be taken two ways. One is that he is genuinely appreciative of the support and believes that Schumer has done the right thing for the country. The other, the more cynical, is that he is "trolling" Schumer to foment division in the Democrat Party. While there may be some element of the later, I tend to believe it is the former for the most part. Trump is truly working for all Americans and is basically nonpartisan in the traditional sense. After all, MAGA stands for Make America Great Again, not Make the Republican Party Great Again.
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  5132. Artur, have you read Gogol's novel "Dead Souls"? It is from the mid-19th century. It was written in Russian and considered a Russian novel, but Gogol is of Ukranian origin. The salient point, though, is the picture of Czarist Russia. It sounds so contemporary. The corrupt aristocracy (read oligarchs), the peasant serfs (contemporary Russian masses) and the corrupt apparatchiks. Nothing has changed in Russia in hundreds of years. By the way, a battleship is a very specific type of ship. What you meant to say (and you corrected yourself) is warship. Actually, a landing ship is not considered a warship either. It is a transport ship.
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  5133.  @commonsense6967  No, I was in Maryland. I was there towards the end of that time. Did you take part in demonstrations against the war in Vietnam? When and where did you graduate (state is fine)?
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  5134. Good reporting, but I have one point of disagreement. The G20, or the G7(8) is not the driver of the world economy. To say that intergovernmental bodies move the world economy is just plain stupid. It is companies that do that. Even the issue of differing standards is a chimera. Companies can deal with this. Standards are not completely unified even before the Ukraine war. All that this effects is the cost of trade. That is something for companies, not governments, to consider. To put too much emphasis on government in economics is to ignore how economies work.
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  5135. Senator Cruz, you mention American jobs associated with energy, and you are correct. What you and all other politicians fail to mention is the taxes and revenue that flows from that oil production. That is more important. Not only would we take away revenue from the dictators, but we would bring it into out treasury. From there it could go to reduce the debt, but to fund research in new technologies. Start talking about that, and maybe you could get some of the "greens' to consider it.
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  5136.  @drezzy5  You need to take a deep breath. Sit down and relax. Look at the polling. He is getting 60% or more agreeing with his actions. He has a higher approval rating than he ever did in the first term and higher than most presidents. Look, talking to people in your circle is not valid statistically. To draw inferences from that is just plain silly. Let me give you an example. I was working for a startup. There were 13 of us in the field and we were all meeting together. This was just before Clinton's first election. We took a straw poll. Bush and Perot tied, and Clinton got one vote. I know about this stuff; I have been doing statistical research for over half a century. Oh, and don't tell me that I am not paying attention. I have been dealing with this stuff for decades as well. Many of the problems Trump has been trying to deal with have been around all that time.
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  5137. What shills for Russia! You report that Ukrainian claims are unverified. Then you report Russia's claims about their withdrawal without qualifier. There are verified claims, with visual evidence, of Russian troops abandoning their tanks and other equipment along with ammunition stores. This at a time when they are bringing in outdated tanks and buying artillery shells from North Korea. This is not a planned withdrawal. It is total rout. It is very disappointing the level to which your reporting has sunk. This is not the only video I have seen that does that.
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  5138. Actually, Wolfram's bio lists him as having a PhD in particle physics. It is true that he made his name in computer science, though. Full disclosure, I started out in physics and switched to computer science. Many of the people I knew in physics went into computer related jobs. This included PhDs and even some professors. Even the co-head of the High Energy Physics department where I worked had a joint appointment with the then new Computer Science Department. He had a massive project doing research in image recognition. We actually used this to detect high energy events in bubble chamber images (yes, this was a long time ago) and automatically measure them. As for the computer science approach to physics, I think he may have something there. I recently bought a book titled "Quantum Computing for Programmers". This makes a lot more sense than all those books (some of which I have also bought) that start out with lots of detail about the physical properties of quantum devices. Most programmers have no idea how the machines they work on operate at a physical level, or even at an organizational level. I actually have that understanding, but that is an exception. Over time the underlying computational systems change in their details, often radically (I have seen most of those changes) and the code keeps working, just better. One way to look at this is to consider computer science as a part of mathematics. As our mathematics changed and improved so has our understanding of physics. They go hand in hand. The same is true with computation. By the way, your friend Brian Keating had several very good discussions with Wolfram on his channel.
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  5139.  @paulryan5984  Thanks.
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  5140.  @patrickpeake3935  Thank you. One has to remember that China started out mostly in low end assembly work. Then there are the construction jobs that go along with infrastructure buildout. That still absorbs the bulk of the workers. If you look at the history of such work it tends to attract migrants. This is true from the dawn of the industrial age. That is worthy of a whole essay. Especially in China, with its household registration system, the degree of urbanization is not the same as it is in the west. This is just another example of applying economic models that do not fit. It really came home to me during the lockdown period. There were news items and videos about an incident at a large electronics assembly plant. This was a large plant; I think owned by Foxconn. The workers got concerned about deaths in the dormitories and wanted to leave. Notice that they live in dormitories, not apartments. The authorities tried to block them, but many got out anyway. So far, a standard incident. Then they talked about the journey home. Some got rides (even on the back of flatbed trucks, very dangerous) and some ended up having to walk. They walked back to their villages. This sometimes took two days. These were all peasant villagers. Have you seen a Foxconn iPhone plant? Do you have any idea of how many workers Foxconn employs in China? And then it might be interesting to watch the videos of those plants being moved to India and Vietnam. The bulk of the industrial workers in China seem to be migrants. We constantly talk about the housing sector and the middle class, but most of these migrants will probably never buy a house in the city. The majority of people in China actually work in agriculture. In the US that number is under 5%. Did I mention the insanity of using models that do not fit?
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  5141.  @bullpup1337  My brother-in-law has done business in China and has actually seen one of those "ghost cities". It is crazy. In the US, many years ago, one congressman got a bridge to nowhere built in his district, and it was a scandal for a long time.
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  5142. Silver Fox, why is this an issue? The party is called Labor for a reason. They don't hide their union affiliation. Everything you mention is baked into their program and ideology and always has been. When you say, "we didn't vote them in", assuming you are talking about the electorate, then you are just plain wrong.
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  5143.  @tonybennett9964  I understand that, but that is not how the system works. Do you live in the UK? Do you understand it? Let me explain. The system, like that in the US, is often referred to as "representative democracy". That means that citizens vote in a constituency for a representative. In the UK those are members of Parliament, and they choose the government. Following so far. Leading up to an election there are many possibilities, although modern polling (not an official part of the process) takes a lot of the guesswork out of it. Once the election is over, the government is determined. This is kind of like the collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics. Oh, I just came up with that. What do you think? One of the issues that you and many other Brits are really struggling with is the proliferation of political parties. That is why in the US we prefer our two-party system. Actually, in the US political parties are not a part of Constitution. We fight out issues within parties then, in the legislature and through the executive, they are implemented. For example, we have a primary system to choose the candidates for the real election. This is totally extraconstitutional. The UK, and actually just about every other country in the world, does not have such a process. If you look at the last presidential contest the Democrat Party decided not to have a primary process after their incumbent bowed out of the race. Many perceive that as a mistake, but they are well within their rights to do so. What your comment seems to imply, and correct me if I am wrong, is that you want direct democracy. Read about ancient Athenian democracy. The US founding fathers did. That is why they came up with the Constitution they did. Please excuse the long-winded answer, but I just had breakfast and am sitting down with my morning cigar and coffee when I noticed your response. This is also a topic I have a lot of interest in and experience of. I have lived in the UK and was elected a governor of the school my sons attended. We had to get permission of the Home Office for me to run, of course. In the US I have dealt directly with all levels of the legislature and executive from local to Federal. By this I mean actually lobbying them (for my own company). I have even been involved in drafting legislation at the State level. Consequently, I have perhaps too much to say on the matter.
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  5144. If you are hired as a contractor and the contract is completed, then you are not "laid off".
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  5145.  @anhnguyenhoang210  Have you worked as a technology contractor (or any type of contractor)? Company directions change. Projects come and go. Not all are completed, or the direction of the project has changed. Using contractors can be a double-edged sword. You get the people you need for the duration you need them. The other side is that you potentially lose institutional knowledge. It becomes harder to develop staff and pass on that knowledge. Contractors need to be used and directed in very specific ways to be effective. Many times, companies have ignored this a paid the price.
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  5146.  @phann860  Yes, that reminds me...
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  5147. Isn't it time for the Conservatives to elect a new leader/PM? Liz Truss might be a good choice. She would also be the third female Conservative PM. Let's see, how many has Labor had? She also seems VERY accomplished.
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  5148. Halperin mentions Pete Buttigieg as a possible candidate. He is not a serious person, and the Democratic Party is not a serious party, if Buttigieg can be considered a potential candidate.
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  5149. You Europeans wanted Biden. You excoriated Trump, but look at what he achieved in foreign policy. The UK only was able to get an agreement with the EU when you got tough in negotiations to get what you wanted. Long gone are the days when diplomacy could be understated.
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  5150. Lock 'em up!!
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  5151. Jonathan, you repeat the trope about Putin gearing up for a long war. You are not alone. But I think everyone who does is just repeating what they have heard, not analyzing the actual situation. Let's just start with an item from this video. The topic is demographic decline. This is real and has been discussed and analyzed for years. On top of what was happening before the war, Russia has faced a double hit to its future population. First, of course, is the number of young men killed on the battlefield. Second is a larger number that have fled the country. Most of those probably won't return. So, where is the material that Putin will use to fight the long war? Not only does he need soldiers, but he needs industrial workers. and lots of them. By prosecuting this war he is killing off those prospective workers. That leads to the second issue, which is equipment. Equipment matters. The military guys like to say, "quantity has a quality all its own". This quality is totally mitigated by superior equipment and organization. Examples of this abound. The most obvious place to look is at any of the Israeli wars. Another good example is the two Gulf Wars with Iraq. In the first, the west built up a force that was comparable to the troops that Iraq had. The ground war took three days. The kill ratio was well over 100 to 1. Remember in this regard that military doctrine also generally says that the attacking force should have a three to one advantage, so the west's forces were clearly inadequate. The second Gulf War, the Iraq War, was even more one sided. Under 200K coalition forces faced off against an Iraqi Army about 500K. In the initial invasion this force was completely destroyed by the coalition as a fighting force in a matter of a few weeks. What made the difference? Quality! Even going back to WWI, the Russians had almost twice the number of troops as the Germans. What was the result there? And the qualitative difference in arms was not nearly as great as it is today. It was quality of training and organization. Getting back to the current conflict, Russia started the war with an army they had taken twenty years to build up, at a time when they had access to critical western technology and lots of money from sales to the west. Today, Putin has neither. Just a rant about one of my pet peeves. I have decades of experience with this issue (from a contractor and engineering point of view), and it is one that always interests me. I really enjoy your content and find that it stimulates the conversation. Keep up the good work.
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  5152. The WSJ announced today that the US is planning to send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. This will give the political cover to Germany that it says it needs. As for Poland, they have ordered 250 Abrams tanks. I do not know the delivery schedule, but I expect it will be expedited. That would make Poland, and US NATO facilities, available to provide logistical support. The US is about to bring out a new version of the Abrams, so there will be older versions (still very capable) to give to allies.
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  5153.  @urkiddingme6254  I wouldn't say unsuited. Perhaps not ideal. Don't forget, these tanks were originally designed for the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union in exactly this part of the world.
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  5154.  @urkiddingme6254  They were used in the desert conflicts but were originally designed when the Cold War was at its height.
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  5155. To say Huawei is coming back is interesting. Elsewhere I have seen that Huawei has been borrowing a lot of money through bond issuance. The take is that they are not in great shape financially.
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  5156. Hey, who you calling crotchetily, young man? Not worried about Germany. In the 1930s they had lots of young people. You need that to have a war. History cannot repeat itself without the same conditions.
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  5157. Hyperbolae. The war in the Israel today is nothing compared to those that they have fought before. Do you remember the Iran-Iraq War? How about the Gulf War? How about the Afghan War and Operation Iraqi Freedom? How about the Vietnam War and the Korean War? Two of the wars I mention were in this century, and one in the last decade of the last century. These were much bigger conflicts. You are falling prey to a concept called "normalcy bias". I have thought about this for a long time but just recently came across a term that succulently describes it. The inevitable decoupling with China will create issues in the global economy, but it will also create opportunities. What makes this potentially less impactful is that China has both insulated themselves, and investors in China, from the outside world and that China has not moved up the value chain. If you look at the foreign bond debt that Chinese companies have, it is small compared to the market.
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  5158. The reason the Blue Dog Democrats are an endangered species is that a lot of the southern Democrats became Republicans. Richard Nixon was much more successful legislatively than JFK. So was, as you point, Regan. Now that there are many more Republicans in the South, like Senator Blackburn (who I really like and admire) the parties really have separated. Throughout most of our history we have had two parties which each represented almost the full spectrum of political opinion in the country. They represented their districts, not a central political ideology.
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  5159. In the US the Federal retirement program, Social Security, has a retirement age, for full benefits, of 67 for anyone born after 1960. One can retire under the program at 62, but benefits are cut by 30%. The retirement age has been adjusted upwards over the years. Of course, private pension plans have their own age limits, etc. Interestingly, the Federal government has no retirement age limit. You can work as long as you want and are able. An important point to consider is that, according to the actuaries, if you survive to 65, you have a 50% chance of living to your mid-90s. The retirement age has to be adjusted to reflect this reality.
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  5160. I have seen some interesting things on the property front in China. Homes (apartments) in some less expensive areas are being bought to store burial urns. Cemetery plots are wildly expensive. The apartments are much cheaper. In Beijing, over the recent holiday period, some developers were offering a "buy one get one free" promotion. Buy an apartment and get a home in a seaside town for free. So, what is the actual price?
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  5161.  @MAXlMUS  Russia is showing itself to be just an inept as it was when invading Finland at the start of WWII. They should have been able to roll over the Ukrainians by now. They are proving that their equipment and doctrine are as ineffective as in WWII. As I have often pointed out, those that could get out of the Soviet/Russian orbit have done so.
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  5162. Jordan, I love you and what you do. I have one request of you in these conversations. Please let the person you are interviewing get more in. In other words, don't interrupt as much.
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  5163. That's rich coming from Rahm. I was watching an interview he was giving as ambassador to Japan, and I was very impressed until the end. Then he spewed some woke transgender nonsense and I went away very disappointed. The Democrats are toast.
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  5164. Britian has not been a reliable security partner since WW2. How do you think the Soviets got the atom bomb? Recall something about Cambridge and the number five.
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  5165. @RocRocket-cl3vc No, not at all.
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  5166.  @alejandrovegarodriguez6422  I think you mean "fusion". If so, I agree. Actually, if a civilization were really, really much more advanced they would find some way to tap into the vacuum energy. Don't forget, you heard it here first.
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  5167.  @koktszfung  Now you are getting into the technical details of a silly idea. If you want technical details, then consider how much heat would be generated withing the sphere. That is not somewhere you would want to live. So then, you have to transmit the energy somewhere. So many questions and engineering problems. Of course, the transmission of that energy should be detectable, shouldn't it? An interesting consideration.
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  5168.  @DominikPlaylists  Inevitable? How so?
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  5169.  @DominikPlaylists  The problem with that argument is that the population of earth, anyway, will not increase. In fact, it is expected to peak very soon and then to fall. Currently, projections are that China may well be down to 500M people by the end of the century. That's about 900M down right there. India is getting its demography in order as well. Meanwhile, in the developed world, the demographics are not so great either. What you fail to take into account is that as civilizations become more advanced and urbanized, they have fewer offspring. I expect that something similar would apply to aliens.
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  5170.  @danielhicks1824  Build in pieces? Are you sure? Have you worked that out? Do you have experience in space systems? The idea of living on the outside is interesting. If it is on the sphere, then you have the heat problem. Don't forget, that is how we detect them, by their infrared emissions. If it is not on the sphere, then there is the power transmission problem. The whole issue that Dyson was looking at was that stars transmit all this energy but a lot of it goes somewhere that is not useful. As for your other point about faster galactic colonization, that puzzles me. How does a centralized power source help with that? Again, as with the transmission problem there is the storage problem. Sufficiently advanced civilizations might solve these problems. On the other hand, they are more likely to come up with alternative solutions, assuming they are advanced enough to make one of these. Finally, don't forget, this is a human concept. As far as I know, no alien came down and told Dyson that this is the way to go. Well, considering all the UFO mania today, that last point is a bit iffy right now.
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  5171. Tucker, i am a big fan. But when I hear you talk about twitter I turn cold. I that is your standard of communication in the modern world, then you have lost me. I see your videos on YouTube. I subscribe to the WSJ, which I get online and in print. I have stopped using twitter as a means of communication. I expect you use it because some staffer says you should. Just let it go. It will free you.
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  5172. You mention the impact on marine life. What about the impact on avian life of wind turbines?
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  5173. As to why Angela is in the position she is in, it is either DEI (just look at Diane Abbott) or the thing you said it couldn't be. Frankly, in the US it people openly say that Kamala Harris was a bit of both.
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  5174. It is indeed interesting that we hear little from the Ukrainian side. All of these map exercises seem to leave out the disposition of Ukrainian forces. Another interesting thing that is not commented on is that Bakhmut is supplied from the west. Taking roads and rail as is pointed out here has no effect on the Ukranian forces. They are not supplied from any of those directions.
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  5175. Dave, your content is getting stale. I say that as a fan. The people watching are already there. They get it. I bought your first book. I stopped reading about halfway through. I had heard it all before and all the detail is meaningless to me and my life. I find this true of most books on current affairs. First, everyone is really just writing down what they say online. Second, I have more life experience than most of the people writing these books. Certainly, different experience, but more and perhaps more significant. Needless to say, I will not be purchasing this genre anymore. This is sad, and a problem for me, since my three vices are boos, whiskey and cigars.
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  5176.  @Xio189  What wars did Obama start. Trump continued the disengagement of the US in foreign conflicts, and Biden's policies in foreign affairs is basically a continuation of that.
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  5177.  @martindier1859  If you have nothing to offer in refutation, then I suggest you not reply. As hominin attacks are not useful to anyone.
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  5178.  @Watchingtheparadegoby  I saw a chart on Statista that showed currencies use for international payments in 2021. According to the chart the dollar was used for 40.51% of transactions and the euro was used for 36.65%.
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  5179.  John  I never implied such a thing. If countries want to do that, then they are free to do so. What they have to understand is that they will not have the liquidity they have with the dollar. For example, I just heard that China paid Russia in yuan and then would not let them take those yuan out of the country.
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  5180.  Kitty Cat  Well, I expect that currently China pays in dollars, although they seem to be discussing using different currency. I just saw an interesting item. Russia was paid in yuan for oil, and China is not letting them take ot out of the country. In other words, they can only use it to buy Chinese goods. So, I don't think you are thinking about this rationally.
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  5181.  @Tabula_Rasa1  You are welcome. While we may disagree, or be on different sides of an issue, it is through discussion that we learn. Yes, changing a currency for international trade is a long-term process. There has to be a motivation for it, and there has to be a real capability. You mention the massive amount the US has "printed", but then China does the same thing. Their government and company debt are through the roof. As the world disengages from China, they will have trouble dealing with that. I expect the only reason they don't have higher inflation is that the CCP controls finance completely. They still seem to consider their current level high though.
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  5182.  @Tabula_Rasa1  You make lots of good points. I was reacting to a lot of online angst about the dollar being the reserve currency, not specifically your points. Sorry for that. As for China, there is a very big problem. They have printed a lot of money, and their debt load is much higher than the US. Their property sector is a real issue. The Chinese were not generally allowed to invest in stocks, and most people, growing up under communism, did not understand or trust them. Property they understood. Now, with the collapse of that market, I don't think it will recover. For one, the demographics are against it. For another, they are overbuilt as it is (ghost cities). In addition, property is such a large part of their economy (twice the US number in percentage of GDP) that a problem in this sector will probably be devastating. Let me know what you think.
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  5183.  @googleuser868  Great way to put it.
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  5184. Tony, with part of the video title being ‘We’ll See 5 Years of Crisis’ keeping it "light" will be a challenge.
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  5185. Attacks on sites in Crimea have nothing to do with the restrictions on the use of US weapons in Russia proper. Ukraine is recognized by the US, and just about everyone else, as Ukrainian territory. They have been targeting Crimea for a long time.
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  5186. It was Clausewitz who famously said war is just politics by other means. The general made another good point about sanctions and the effects on Russia's economy. They are now producing cars without airbags or anti-lock breaks, among other things, because many parts come from abroad. Another area that is being effected is oil and gas. They got to where they are with the help of Western oil and gas companies and service firms. Those are gone now. Expect their production to go down.
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  5187. I just heard recently that all party members and government officials had to study Xi Jinping thought. They are pouring it on. They are doomed. My financial advisor, who is familiar with Peter's work, was hoping that Xi would be reelected. His reasoning was that Xi would tank the Chinese economy, and his feeling was that was a good thing. Well, from what I have seen, from a lot of sources, this is happening, and quickly. It is almost as if Peter wrote the script and China is following it.
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  5188.  @jfverboom7973  You may have a point there, but I still think that counting brands and enterprises is not that significant. That is all I was trying to say.
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  5189. Rights? What rights? Who are these people who think they have the rights under a communist system? As I like to point out, the top judge in China has stated that the role of the court is to support the goals of the CCP, not to enforce the law. There is only one solution.
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  5190. Looks like a 1990s GTV, don't you think?
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  5191. I don't see public backlash in the US against raising the retirement age. The Social Security retirement age (age at which full benefits are available) has been moved up to 67 (for anyone born after 1960). Because many are on private plans, this can vary. Also, since the introduction of 401(K) plans, individuals have a lot of control over their own retirement.
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  5192. Civilization? In a communist country? Come on man!!!
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  5193. You are wrong about the tanks. The fighter jets are another story. Don't lump them together. Just look at all the battles between western MBTs and Soviet/Russian tanks. These include the Israeli wars and the wars in Iraq, including that with Iran.
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  5194. Artillery has always been key. In WWII, 60% of deaths were from artillery. The same is true of WWII. This is not a new thing.
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  5195. Just think about the protest sign that appears in the thumbnail of this video. No one elected the corrupt bureaucrats that are robbing the American taxpayers. The utter ignorance of how government and large organizations work is stunning.
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  5196. This is interesting. On the other hand, constantly comparing the UK to the US seems a bit odd. Why not compare it to, say, Germany or France primarily. Another thing I have been hearing is that the UK economy is expected surpass the German economy within a decade. When I was living in the UK at the beginning of the millennium I was amazed at the budget discussions. The issue seemed to be whether growth was going to be 0.9% or 1.9%. As an American I was amazed. The numbers of the Continent were similar.
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  5197. Sal, what do you think should have been done?
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  5198. There is a comedy/parody channel called Intel Lady. They feature Angela Rayner quite often. Her opening tag line is: "Hi, it's Deputy Prime Minister, proud Northerner, Basic Instinct enthusiast and now fourth sexiest woman in the UK". Now she can claim sexiest in the Labor leadership.
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  5199. Correction. The Labor Party was created as the party of the working class (read unions) and was fully socialist at its founding. It was not set up to help the vulnerable and elderly. One needs to get that straight. Any political party that helps those groups does so only to buy votes (with taxpayer money, not their own).
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  5200. The commitments made will not be followed through. Most, if not all, of the governments making these commitments will not be in power in ten years. The one that is very unlikely to be fulfilled is the "transfer of wealth". There was already a "commitment" of $100B to poorer countries that has not been met. The climate activist leaders will make these noises, but then, at least in the democratic world, they need to get the legislation passed to do it. That is not likely. There is already a backlash in the UK and the US on this. Climate is not anywhere near the top of the list of concerns of voters. In the UK, some have called for a referendum on the issue. I think it would fail.
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  5201. I noticed that. I wanted to respond to one of your comments (not in a negative way) but it is gone. Here is the one I am talking about: Yes, but before we can fight back don't we have a duty to be as clear as possible as to who exactly is spreading the misinformation? And doesn't that make it essential that we don't let our own prejudices get in the way? My response is that being clear about who is spreading misinformation is fine. The issue is, who decides what is disinformation. There are obvious cases, but the ones I mentioned involved "experts". The only real alternative in a free speech environment is to engage and make substantive arguments. People will believe what they want. Trying to hide it from them is a fool's errand. So, I guess I fully agree with you, just said in my own way.
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  5202. The stories about the individual home buyers are really heartbreaking. The government, on the other hand, thinks of nothing but "social stability". This is, indeed, an evil regime. It is the government that allowed the crisis to develop. If anyone has a better understanding of this (Tony?) then please correct me. What I understand is that for the presold homes, the purchaser puts down money and takes out a mortgage for the remaining amount. So far, so good. This money is supposed to be held in escrow by the bank until the home is finished and delivered. What the banks did, in collusion with, I assume, the local government, was to release the money to the developers right away. Then. the developers turned this into a Ponzi scheme and used the money to buy more land from local governments. This is basically a criminal activity and would be treated as such by the US government. It is even criminal under Chinese law. This is not the only case of banks misappropriating customer funds and does not only affect individuals. The whole CCP system is a criminal enterprise. The west cannot, and should not, deal with such an organization. Now, with the Chinese economy doing poorly, being poorly led and with the demographic crisis, investors have their excuse to withdraw.
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  5203. You keep talking about Russia as if they have the only say. If you hadn't noticed, Poland has been rapidly arming, and they get the stuff in quantity that Ukraine has only recently received. As for Russia rearming, you must be kidding. It took them 20 years to build up the military they attacked Ukraine with last year. During those 20 years they had two things that are not available now. The first is western technology. The second is massive oil revenues. I don't know if you have followed the latest data, but it is likely that they are losing a dollar or two on each barrel of oil they sell.
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  5204. The unemployment issue is key. I once saw an interview with George W. Bush, after he had left the presidency. I think it was a Google series. He said that whenever he met a world leader for the first time he would ask them what was the one thing that kept you up at night. Hu Jintao responded finding jobs for millions of people every year. While the youth unemployment situation is dire, there is another one looming that is not talked about enough. People over 40 are losing their jobs left and right. I have seen videos of people lining up for jobs, large crowds of people. The company official would come out and address the crowd and say that anyone under 20 or over 40 (the exact age varies) should just leave. I have also seen reports on layoffs of big tech firms where it was stated that people over 40 would be let go without regard to their performance. This is suicide. It is the more experienced workforce that is generally more productive. China is storing up woes for its economy at all age groups.
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  5205.  @Leshic2  Good to have confirmation. Thanks.
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  5206. Mr. Li thinks the 5% GDP growth was manipulated by government purchases? Wow! This has been known for years. Mr. Li is an expert? This is a big part of the problem. If you look at the content of this channel, and several others that concentrate on China, you will see the "sudden" realization of these well-known facts. You don't need an "expert" to tell you what happened. You are only an "expert" if you can tell me what is going to happen, and why. Otherwise, you are just reporting. Any journalist can do that. It does not require a lot of specific expertise. China's case is especially obvious. I saw, on this channel, or one of the others I mentioned, that one province in China, and not a large or rich one, had more miles of roads than all of Japan. This phenomenon has been well known for a long time. It was done to goose the GDP figures. Where do you think the local debt crisis came from? Another example is the HSR system in China which is almost $1T in debt. That debt is increasing all the time. The system cannot run at a profit, much less break even. The fact is that China's GDP growth figures may well have been overstated for a long time. China's GDP is most likely nowhere near what is reported. Without transparent and accessible statistics, it is hard to judge. All those investors who poured billions into China did so under a false premise. In their home countries they would never accept the statistics under those conditions. I predict that they will pay a price for that, but that is another story. Just suffice it to say that I am not a fan of experts, especially in the economics and financial sectors. Their record is bleak.
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  5207.  @bullpup1337  I meant the content, not the style. I live in the Chicago area and am familiar with Rahm.
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  5208.  @bullpup1337  I see where you are coming from and agree with you. I should have used different phrasing. Sorry to cause any confusion.
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  5209. I have seen anti-matter in physics experiments (and this was in the 1970s). It is real.
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  5210.  @sidvicious6505  I have actually seen these in experiments done at FermiLab. I don't know where you get your information from, but this is real.
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  5211. Georgina. See my comment below.
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  5212. It is interesting to hear people talk about the various missiles used in the Ukraine War. Mentioned here is the maximum speed which the missile fired at Ukraine reaches which is Mach 10. It is an IRBM. ICBMs top out at Mach 20 or above. I have even seen ATACMS being referred to by people who have no knowledge of such things as an ICBM. ATACMS is a short to medium range battlefield weapon. In fact, its range was set by treaty at 300km. Its replacement is already being deployed with a range of 500km. By the way, some of those calling the ATACMS an ICBM are ex-military. Many YouTubers like to talk to such people, especially ex-special forces types. Being in such a position does not automatically give one knowledge of systems used on the main tactical battlefield. This is not to take away from their skills and contributions. I had some working for me at one time. Those are the guys you want in a close in gunfight.
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  5213. Jessie, the dollar is strengthening. Where do you get your information? As inflation goes up, and the expectation of higher interest rates goes up, the dollar strengthens. Get it together.
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  5214. Yes, people who advocate for defunding the police don't live there, but they still vote in these idiots. They are getting what they deserve. Don't forget, the city council and Omar are elected. They, the citizens of Minneapolis, deserve everything they get. Minneapolis is being destroyed, and that is what they wanted by voting the way they do. It is their choice. If they do not change the way they vote, they will sink further.
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  5215. In the US we have been doing this for a while. I got mine at the Costco I shop at regularly. Saw the sign that they had the vaccines and that there was no appointment necessary. Quick and easy.
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  5216.  @samopalvampirenvonbutlegin8603  COVID. I thought the context would make it clear.
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  5217. It's all about the chlorinated chicken! Well, I am kidding, but only by half. Actually, chlorinated chicken helped sink the trade deal with the EU. You know, it's all about standards (and protectionism). Actually, Peter's gloom and doom about the UK seems somewhat out of step with information I have seen. Demographically they are doing better than the continent. Part of that is due to immigration. More people want to go to the UK, and the Brits do a better job of assimilating them. Heck, they have a Prime Minister who is of South Asian descent. Could you imagine a Turkish chancellor of Germany? How about an Algerian President of France? That comes from being a multi-ethnic empire. There are some interesting stories about that. Things could have gone any number of ways. Of course, a lot of it could do with the language. As Monty-Python liked to say, if you speak English loud enough and slow enough anyone can understand. Try that with German. People would be cowering in fear or running away. But really, the projections I see show the UK catching up and surpassing Germany in GDP within a decade. It would be interesting to delve more into the dynamics of that situation vis-a-vis Peter's projections.
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  5218. Russia depending on Chinese manufacturing is a good thing for Ukraine. Chinese stuff, even in the military, is crap. I have seen videos of Russians who had to switch to Chinese machine tools from western equivalents, for example. The Russians were not happy. Chinese jet engines for all their aircraft are inferior to the Russian types they are generally a copy of. A lot of this is well documented.
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  5219. Click bait. To believe that NATO runs as some sort of central command structure in these situations is ludicrous and shows either a lack of education or a deliberate attempt to create division. If there is and actual war, then you will see the central command structure activated. It is very much like situations within the EU. You have many different entities, each with their own imperatives and concerns. That these discussions take place publicly is an advantage, not an issue. Contrast this with Russia and China. Don't forget NATO is not formally at war with Russia. If that were the case, then things would be completely different. To say that NATO is at war with Russia is wrong and incendiary. It is, as I said, click bait.
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  5220. The drug seizures statistics are a joke. This is just a cost of doing business for the cartels. It always has been. The product, at its source is dirt cheap. The war on drugs has never worked. That law enforcement measures themselves this way obscures the real situation.
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  5221.  @Lawrence-sk2os  Thank you.
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  5222. Mahyar, Mahyar, Mahyar. You bang on about the WEF and globalization. It is sort of comical. Any globalist agenda depends on, in the final analysis, a military power to enforce it. I don't know if you had noticed, but the US is slowly withdrawing from that role. It was a reasonable thing when the Cold War was going on. That ended 30 years ago. In the almost 80 years since the end of WWII the world has experienced a period which is, historically, an anomaly. As for countries like the Netherlands, they have been for centuries a global trading power. Of course, so have many European nations, including the UK. That is why they want to see globalization continue. On the other hand, they do not have the military power to do this anymore. The costs for them to develop this power would be astronomical. The only reason it worked for them in the early days (we're talking 17th and 18th centuries) was colonialism. Could we be heading back to that era? Because of rising energy costs several German companies have relocated energy and resource intensive operations to the US. Linde, for example, a German industrial gases company, this year decided to list their shares solely in the US. When Trump told the Germans that they were vulnerable relying on Russia for energy, they laughed at him. There are videos on YouTube. Who's laughing now? The result of all this is that the whole climate lobby and the WEF and other such groups will experience pushback, and they have no real power to resist. The backlash is coming.
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  5223. The WEF is not a real issue. I agree with what Peterson wants to do, but his internationalist vision is just obsolete. They even said it at the WEF meeting. Globalism is threatened. Damn right. It has to do with the two major facts. First, the last 75 years are an anomaly in human history. After WWII,, the US created the system to contain the Soviets. It worked, and 30 years ago it became obsolete. The US is the only power that could maintain the order. The US is pulling back, and the world will go back to a type of imperialism that was the norm through human history. The other issue is demographics. The two countries most vocal in opposing the role of the US are also very dependent on that order. They are also experiencing demographic collapse. These are, or course, China and Russia. Saving globalism is just not something that anyone who has the wherewithal to do it is going to be willing to sacrifice to do. The US did it after WWII, but there is no such event or alignment of forces that is comparable.
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  5224. One real surprise for me is Vietnam. It is doing very well, and not a day goes by that I do not hear about some company relocating from China to Vietnam. Heck, they have even seemingly become a quasi-ally of the US. I fully expect that if China attacked them again the US would come to their aid, at least to an extent. It is good to be a former adversary of the US. Just ask Germany and Japan.
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  5225. You are discovering something that has been an issue for a long time. It is not an issue that it exists. The issue is that people don't understand it. Everything you read, all media, has an expense associated with it. Take the case of traditional media (newspapers, radio, television). They are primarily supported by advertising. So, to assume your news sources are truthful and unbiased is just plain stupid. Look at new media, including social, and the situation is the same. Those algorithms are geared toward making money, through advertising. The idea that social media is built to keep you hooked is sort of true, but that is not the reason they do it. They do it for the advertisers. So. while, like the NHS in the UK, it is free at the point of consumption, it still costs a lot. This brings us to government-controlled media. Even there, it has to satisfy the people who control the funding, and this is the governments themselves, funded by taxpayers (however that tax is collected). So, in the end, you miss the point.
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  5226. Disinformation? Who defines this? For one thing, in the US, the First Amendment protects all speech. it does not require that speech be "correct". For another, much of what Biden has said is demonstrably wrong, especially on inflation. There is no economic theory or practice that would support what he says. So, should he be silenced? In the US, the constitutional answer is no. The people will judge what he says. That is how the system is supposed to work. Any entity that tries to suppress "disinformation" is doing so in total contravention to the Constitution. The best situation for any country is to hear all views, no matter how wrong, and to let people decide for themselves. That is real democracy. The Democrats in the US are firmly against this. They are the anti-Americans.
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  5227. Hannity, you do this for a living. Do you not know what is happening between China and Russia? China has actually claimed parts of Russia. This whole idea of an alliance between the two being real is stupid, China is trying to take over the "stans" in Central Asia, which is part of Russia's sphere of influence. There are more points of conflict between China and Russia, than between Russia and the West. This is a complex situation, and you have two leaders who have no accountability and are basically liars. So, do some real research.
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  5228. What's all this talk about "class" in China? I thought Marxism was supposed to bring about the "classless" society. Of course, the reality is that Marxism-Leninism is just an ideological veneer for oligarch. which morphs into aristocracy, by the way. Just look at all the talk about second generation and third generation reds and princelings. Look at Cuba. Who took over when Fidel died? In Russia, in the nomenklatura and siloviki we also see positions going to the children of the current generation.
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  5229. What is he talking about? The protests were not the reason for the loosening of controls? Was there ANY indication that controls were about to come off? Come on man!
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  5230. Well, on a geopolitical level, he is correct. I have some disagreements about details, and he is poor on military matters, but the rules based international order IS coming to an end. Rules, or laws, need someone to enforce them. Who is going to do that as the US withdraws from that role (as many people in the world seem to want)? The UN? Come on man. Things will go back to the pre-WWII order. There is no choice. There is little desire for the US population to fund such activities, which is natural.
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  5231.  @kimbo99  That' just a platitude. Explain the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. How about the rise and fall of dynasties in China. Now, there things DO fall apart, and there are generally grave consequences.
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  5232. To say that the Chinese are doing well with nuclear is puzzling. The difference between China and the US is that in the US standards are adhered to and in China they are not. It is a question of the two systems. In the US anyone can question the companies or government. They have to prove something in court, and that happens a lot. In China the government does what it wants. People who protest too much may even end up dead at the hands of the government. The end result is that the west has moved a lot of its pollution to China. This is not talked about enough. That is all generic. Let's apply it to nuclear. Not long ago a French company that built a nuclear power plant in China raised major concerns about safety at the plant. Instead of a real investigation the government did its normal nothing to see here, move along routine. We'll see. After the Fukushima treated water kerfuffle there was talk about China's plants releasing even more radioactive water. People bought radiation meters. The devices sold out. It turns out that not only was the normal discharge from the Chinese plants much more radioactive, but people then found that the radiation levels in their houses was abnormally high. If that had been the case in the US, or France, then the situation would be much different.
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  5233. I have never understood the Ultra-Orthodox stance on serving in the military. I read the Bible daily. There is nothing in it that would support Jews not fighting for themselves. The only part of the Christian Bible that could possibly support their non-participation is the New Testament. Frankly, if you go by the Old Testament, monogamy would probably not be a thing either.
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  5234. When a commie starts talking about doing something "resolutely" then you know they have lost it. That this is all Mao era stuff is right on the money. I have seen on other channels speculation of a return of the Cultural Revolution. This even extends to "eliminating" enemies. Reports I have seen show a large number of people in the financial system being eliminated. Several fell off buildings. Note the similarities between this and the phenomenon of people falling out of windows in Russia. I also am struck by the consistent use of "high quality development". It reminds me of another news outlet, very much opposed to the CCP, having an "elite forum". I realize this is a cultural, East Asian (or perhaps all Asian) thing. These labels are eschewed in the US. Calling one's own development "high quality" or using the term "elite" is an attempt to elevate oneself with words, not deeds. It is the outcomes, not the presentation, that matters. That is why the west will be more successful.
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  5235. What the heck is Taiwan doing building submarines? Don't get me wrong, I support Taiwan. What I don't understand is the mix of weapon systems. Submarines would be useless in the Taiwan Strait. The are also unnecessary for defensive purposes. Taiwan, as most countries should be concentrating on defensive armaments to counter the actual threat, which for them is an invasion. Then they should concentrate on alliances with countries for whom they are an important trading partner. In this case, that includes Japan and the US. So, one has to ask, what purpose do these submarines serve?
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  5236.  @jaydee6268  I agree. There is an element of concern regarding the KMT and possible manipulation by the CCP.
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  5237. I find the statement of the ByteDance deliciously retro communist drivel. My, it takes me back to the height of the Cold War. That people can talk like this in the third millennium is amazing. We are indeed seeing the end of the CCP and probably the end of China as a unified nation. This will only persuade more investors to pull out. Note that I say investors, not foreign investors. A lot of Chinese companies are also moving at least some operations overseas. Many wealthy, and now middle class, Chinese are leaving the country and taking their money with them. They can see the end coming. CCP pronouncements about what others should do are so outrageous that even the dimmest dolt can see the problem. This is bad, not good (the robot said) and is rapidly uniting the world against China. Xi is putting ideology over the welfare of the people of China, and the people are suffering. He is also taking the ideology to a dark, nationalist, even fascist, place.
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  5238. You know they tried this before. In the heyday of talk radio (yes, remember radio) when all the top hosts were conservative, they tried to create their own left wing talk radio network. I think Al Gore was behind it. It failed, of course.
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  5239. I am not sure that the Russian people in general support this war. They have been so much manipulated by propaganda that they generally don't know what to think. In addition, the penalties for protesting in Russia are draconian. But, it is not really clear.
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  5240. So, why are there western containment measures, one might ask. This is all on the CCP. Rhetoric from the CCP on the world stage is both incendiary and worrisome. The west, and specifically the US, are the reason China had any economic progress at all. Without western engagement and the US led rules-based world order, China would still be trying to make pig-iron (re: The Great Leap Forward). China's economy is highly dependent on foreign trade. US foreign trade, excepting NAFTA, is about 5% of GDP. With NAFTA it is 15%. China's percentage of GDP involved in foreign trade is 37.5%. The CCP thins it is so powerful. They still have 900M people living on $280 per month or less. They still import 80% of their energy and 80% of the inputs associated with agriculture, including foodstuffs. If they precipitate a war, the country dies and perhaps .5B people starve. It may be prudential to ban all new US investment into China to protect investors.
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  5241. The translations of Chinese state pronouncements make them sound petulant and stupid. As for the WHO, considering the development of this pandemic, it is prudent to ignore anything they say. It seems that they are only willing to raise the alarm after the damage has been done. I would think that such an organization should be urging caution and taking measures before things get out of hand. As many in the US have been saying for a while, the UN (of which the WHO is a part) is not worth funding. It is going the way of the League of Nations. Better to save the money and give it to Ukraine.
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  5242. It is interesting that a population of 500M was considered optimal. Projections I have seen claim that by the end of this century that is what the population of China is expected to be. Of course, it is the distribution of population that is important economically. Younger people consume. People in their 40s and above contribute to capital formation. China has ignored all this. Of course they did. They are commies. They don't know about this stuff.
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  5243.  @dylanthomas12321  Actually, many people have used it. Mark Twain attributes it to Disraeli. Twain popularized it in the US, and it has become a staple ever since.
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  5244. The Europeans need to get a grip on this whole free speech issue. With laws like the one in Finland, there is no free speech. What is most galling is that they do not go after the Muslim community which believes that homosexuality is wrong. In many Muslim majority countries homosexuality is punishable by death. These are being carried out today. Some of the Muslim leaders in Europe have openly called for the imposition of Sharia Law under which these killings take place. In the Christian community there is debate, since the Christian belief is that we are all God's children, no matter how flawed we are. And we are all flawed.
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  5245.  @williamho2940  In a word, NO! In fact, they take the money and redeploy it. It is a more stable asset for them than property, which could default or drop in value. Also, you have to realize that in the US, as in China, the partof your payment that goes toward interest (the bank's profit) is taken up front. After a while, you are paying back mostly principal, and the bank is making much less income. Now, in my two cases, I paid off the loan fairly quickly, but there was no issue. In the US, you don't have to ask permission, and there is no penalty.
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  5246. In the US led world order Egypt switched a lot of their farmland from wheat to cotton, which is a cash crop. Thus, they could afford to buy grain instead of being self-sufficient. Couple that with the population growth in that environment and even if they switched back all the land to growing wheat, they could still not feed their population. Many African countries across the continent are in this state. The reality is that, as the US withdraws from enforcing the order, many in Africa will starve. Their population growth has far exceeded the ability of the land to support themselves. This is tragedy that is already evident in some countries in Africa.
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  5247. Towel made a big mistake. It was not his land. No one owns land in China but the CCP. This man is the type that the CCP was built on. The CCP, contrary to Marxist theory, promised free stuff to the peasants. Just like the Bolsheviks in Russia. Then they took it all away. They were hoodwinked. Now, even those "buying" homes in China only have them for 70 years. There is no real private property in China. So, why are all these people making such a fuss? Ignorant peasants. That is what the CCP relies on, their ignorance.
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  5248. The idea of people being encouraged to turn in any metal they had at home is very reminiscent of the Great Leap Forward in Communist China in the late1950s and early 1960s. It was a total disaster in China.
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  5249. What you say about the Russians is true, and understandable. We call it an oligarchy. It is more than that. It is a gangster state. I am not only talking about government figures, but there are actual gangsters that operate with the blessing of the government.
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  5250. Right at the start of the video, about 0:35 seconds in you mentioned that "...some people thought was disrespectful". Why do people feel the need to say that? Of course, some people will think that it was disrespectful. That's the point of free speech. If we just have speech about things everyone agrees with, then there is absolutely no point, and no point in having videos discussing it. I know that this is a bit pedantic, but these days it is important. Social media sites (like this one) will take actions against individual speech in cases where "some people", which may be two or three, complain. They do this for their own reasons but use the existence of these few dissenters to justify their actions. That is the real threat to free speech.
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  5251. Interesting. What is actually happening, even in the information space, is that a more positive spin is being put on Ukraine's counteroffensive since you wrote the script.
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  5252. You, like many others, keep using this map on a daily basis. You do realize that the map updates are delayed by two days, don't you?
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  5253. It is interesting that Biden changed his policy soon after meeting with Trump at the White House. It may just be that he was waiting for the election to be over. On the other hand, the timing is suspicious. What if Harris had won. She would probably have had substantially the same national security team as Biden.
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  5254. Yeah. What he said. On the other hand, the people have been too corrupted. All that counterfeiting and IP theft and shady business practices are not specifically directed by the CCP. There is also the massive corruption. MASSIVE! No one, not even Xi, is free from corruption. Then there is the fact that China has no democratic tradition. Even Sun Yat-sen was a socialist. His idea was to use capitalism to create socialism in China. That actually follows the standard Marxist line. That is also the line Deng took. He was for state ownership of industry. And he was the most western friendly leader China has ever had. The other thing about China is its devastating demographic collapse. The main attraction of China for western capital was twofold. One was a large cheap labor force. The other was a large market. Well, both of those have disappeared. The end result for China will probably be a situation like that after the fall of the Qing dynasty. Bad, not good.
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  5255. I was okay until the end, when Peter mentioned "this is how they have won every single war in their 1,000-year history". If by that he meant those they have won, then maybe. The thing is they have lost or stalemated in a number of wars over that time. Just going back to the 19th century, there have been many they have lost using these tactics. WWII was a win, but it probably would not have been of Hitler hadn't declared war on the US and the US and UK had not supported the Soviets. Look just before that. In WWI they lost against a Germany that was smaller and was fighting a massive war on another front. The Russians still lost. Don't forget that as the Bolshevik shenanigans were going on in St. Petersburg the Germans were closing in and the Russians had nothing to stop them with. How about the Russo-Japanese war just prior to that. Then there was the Crimean War. Read about it. A lot of the descriptions might seem eerily similar to today's conflict. They also took place in a lot of the same places. The Winter War with Finland is actually the most directly applicable to this conflict. The parallels are striking. A former colonial possession on the border. An overwhelming disparity in numbers. What happened. Russia took some small territories on their border but failed to retake the whole of Finland or destroy the government. They also lost large numbers of troops and massive amounts of materiel. This failure was one of the reasons that Hitler was confident that he could defeat the Soviets. Peter does admit that this may not be sustainable for the Russians this time. Good. The thing is that the effects are already starting to be felt. This latest "expansion" of the military is a plan, an announcement. It seems that Russia may not be able to equip all these new soldiers for a while. Also, it would take a year, once all of the people were rounded up, to train and equip them. If they just throw them in as they do now, they will be gone quickly. Then it will not help them. This is not a plan; it is an act of desperation.
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  5256. It's protocol. The leader of a country typically does not meet with lower-level officials. It seems that asking the question is just ignorance or is an attempt to manufacture some sort of issue. Professor Freedman has it right.
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  5257. Conflating medical history with vaccine status is idiotic! Get off of this kick, or you will completely lose credibility. Sad, too, because I like Dawn.
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  5258.  @MeepChangeling  We will have to see about that. I am not the only one saying this. It is not unheard of. Your last statement is both insulting and stupid. Who made you the arbiter of what should be in a comment? First, if you are talking about learning to write a comment, you better look at your own. Second, comments are just that, comments. They represent opinions. If you don't agree with the opinion, or have something to add to it, that is great. That makes a conversation. So, as old Joe likes to say: Come on man!
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  5259.  @hughmungus2760  There are lots of differences between China today and the US in 2008, to be sure. The derivatives are one. On the other hand, they failed because the underlying assets were not what was represented. The other difference is the one I pointed out which is the amount of the overbuild. That cannot be disregarded, and we have no models for that. As for the foreign reserves, there is some question about that. China needs those reserves to operate. You may recall that Xi went personally to the PBOC to inquire about those reserves not long ago. He was puzzled, as was everyone, that the trade surplus continues, but the reserves do not grow. Of course, we all "know" what the issue is. Corruption. It is speculated that CCP officials have squirreled away over $1T in getaway funds overseas. Putting an actual number on such activity is somewhat difficult.
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  5260. The CCP under Xi is incapable of promoting the private sector. Xi has all his officials study Xi Jinping thought. This is decidedly Marxist and statist model. On top of that, there is the rampant corruption. All the anti-corruption actions have been targeted at political opponents within the party rather than corruption in general.
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  5261. The left cannot call racism in a country where people of all races and ethnicities are clamoring to get in. This is true for both legal and illegal means. When people start to leave because of racism, then you can call systemic racism, not before.
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  5262. This is rich. You Europeans hated Donald Trump and made that hatred clear. You cheered when Biden came in. You hailed a new era in foreign policy. Trump's plan in Afghanistan had a real chance of succeeding. He put conditions on a pullout and would not have gone if the Taliban had not met their commitments. In addition, under Trump, ISIS was defeated in Iraq and Syria. Accords were signed between Israel and many Arab nations. What were you Europeans thinking?
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  5263. I spend $40 to $60 per month on electricity. It may be a little higher now, I haven't checked. Of course, I rarely run the AC. The way my house is set up, I sleep on the second floor at night when it is cool, with the windows open. During the day I am on the first floor, which stays cool. Through the use of blinds (someone I know called this passive solar). The front of the house faces south, so when it hot I am on the north side. It is very comfortable. I only turn the AC on when it stays above about 70degrees at night. In the last three years this was four days. A one day event one year and a three day event the next. Last year it didn't happen.
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  5264. There are only three numbers in computer science. These are zero, one and infinity.
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  5265. Don't believe what the CCP says. They have no ability to build 150 new nuclear reactors. They still produce 60% of their electricity from coal and are building new coal plants at a very high rate. A good example is their standards for arsenic in rice. My ex-wife became very concerned about this, so I looked into it. China's standard for contamination in PPM is half what the WHO has set. And yet, when the Chinse tested rice, by rice growing province, their levels were much higher in 62 of the 64 provinces than the WHO set. So, China announcing a policy and the realization of that policy are two totally different things.
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  5266. Peter, Peter, Peter. You gloss over what European imperialism was all about and the times in which it was operative. There are two major drivers for European style imperialism. One is resources (and markets) and the other is population pressure. The latter was always a problem, one which is no longer in play. You also leave out Asia. Westerners always do. The history there was at least as important and is playing out today. Only today, worldwide, the issue is resources, since demographics have completely changed.
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  5267. What no one says is that if US energy were going flat out, we would provide all our own needs, but we would be exporting. This would reduce the deficit, because we would be collecting taxes and fees locally. It would also change the balance of payments on our foreign trade. We should also be exporting coal to those countries still using it (most of the world). And, our energy, including the coal, is cleaner than the alternative. This current policy is just stupid!!!!!
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  5268.  @122Jeffrey  Wrong! We are a net importer since Biden. Where do you get your information?
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  5269.  @122Jeffrey  WRONG!
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  5270. What kind of bozo is this mayor.
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  5271. Very good. Glad you shared.
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  5272. This is a communist system. Personal ownership is an illusion. Don't they teach these people anything?
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  5273. I tend to agree with Masih, but have a problem with something she said. I also hear this from people in Ukraine. They say something like this is the 21st century. Therefore, this shouldn't be happening. That is a foolish statement. This being the 21st century has nothing to do with anything, If anything, things are about to get a lot more violent around the world. As the US withdraws from being the guarantor of the world order, we will see many more flashpoints. Many in the world speak out against the US led world order. This includes countries besides China and Russia. It includes India, for example. The order the US created was designed to fight the Cold War. It was obsolete 30 years ago. We are now seeing it being withdrawn, and the consequences will be very bad, especially for people in the eastern hemisphere, mostly Asia and Africa.
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  5274.  @markpx  What about the corrupt career politician Biden? You talk racism, but minorities did better under Trump than under Obama. Who is the racist?
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  5275.  @markpx  Can't face the facts?
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  5276.  @telebubba5527  By the way, since I typed my comment an editorial from the Wall Street Journal, came up in my news feed. In it they stress that immigration was the core issue, in a lot of ways along the lines I mentioned. In addition, green parties are mentioned as the biggest losers. Some of the recent initiatives in the EU are frankly bonkers. First, the west has been fairly good at cutting emissions. This is a process that will take a lot of time. What is needed is pressure on China. The EU has made a step in this direction with the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). More needs to be done to ensure that others are doing their part as well. The sad truth is that the west just exported their pollution to China. This is having a massive impact on the Chinese people as well as the planet. I am sorry to hear that you didn't vote. I always do (in the US, of course) and have in the past served as an election judge. For democracy engaged citizens are needed. Although we don't seem to agree, you seem to be at least thinking about the issues. Such voices need to be heard.
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  5277.  @jackmorgan1677  Agreed.
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  5278. I have two children. They were born when my wife was 34 and 37. There was no issue in conception. She even did some reading and decided that the optimal separation in age for the children was three years, and that what she did. We were married for five years before the first one, then, as she put it, the biological clock kicked in. She was a successful professional when I met her and in the first part of the marriage. We made the same amount of money when we met. When one of us got a raise the other would get basically the same (our work anniversaries were different). Then she stopped working. I know that is just one data point. On the other hand, I recall several others in my circle in similar situations. Several of the women, my wife included, went back to work after the kids were finished high school. In some cases, this was necessary because of issues the husband had. Many of these women were very successful, but I also noticed many were not as driven as their husbands. We hear things like 60 is the new 40 (and grey is the new blonde). I wonder if our age expectations are really up to date.
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  5279. One of the best analyses I have seen on this issue. One thing that is interesting to me is the parallels between the current situation with AI and the initial computer revolution. I am not talking about PCs here. My father had a cartoon that was illustrative. It showed a long row of computer cabinets (think old mainframes, for the young among you, look it up). On the end was a button. The caption read "You too could be replaced by a button". Don't forget that at that time many positions in banking, finance and insurance were handled manually. Millions of people were employed in these jobs. These are just the same Peter mentions as being endangered now. Was there massive unemployment because of this? In a word, no. People and resources were shifted to other areas, and the services provided by these industries were improved and enhanced. AI, like the computer in general, is a tool.
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  5280. You are correct that China cannot really afford to throw money at Russia. As it is they are raping the Russians on the oil price. China has its own financial problems. Their local governments have many trillions of debt, much of which it cannot service. At least one province is on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more may follow. A large number of the infrastructure projects they are famous for are losing money in a big way. A good example is high speed rail. While it is efficient between highly active and wealthy regions, they decided to extend it just about everywhere, From what I have seen they lose $1T on this boondoggle. And that is just one. Their only solution may be massive money printing leading to massive inflation. They don't have the cash.
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  5281. The lack of understanding of what drove globalization is stunning. The roots of globalization have nothing to do with free markets. It was a strategic move driven by the Cold War situation. The US opened its markets but did not actually require other countries to open theirs. Japan is a case in point. So is the EU. We still don't have a free trade deal with the EU. Remember TTIP? Scuttled by a chlorinated chicken (sort of a joke but look it up). The EU is actually a protectionist cartel. The only role of free trade that was part of globalization was the expectation that communist countries like China would open up and change their systems to be more compatible with the west and the rules-based order. That failed miserably. In addition, China has proved itself to be an unreliable part of the supply chain. They have also practiced all the things people criticize the IRA for. They have done so for decades. The Trump actions were things that thinking people had been talking about and advocating for long before Trump arrived on the political scene. The FT also seems to have failed to understand that US presidents, and the populace, have become more populist. Biden is even more populist than Trump. The last internationalist president we had was George H. W. Bush. He left office 30 years ago.
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  5282. You got it wrong. It David over Goliath.
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  5283. Most chronic medical problems, which often lead to acute medical situations, are caused by factors such as diet (primarily) and exercise. Obesity is the primary issue. I used to volunteer at a food bank (a deluxe facility) in our city. Many of the "clients" were overweight and many obese. I would also see some at the local supermarket buying high end goods, even though at the food bank they would get 200lbs of product a week. The reality is that the "poor" in the US would be considered middle class in much of the world. But I digress. After a life changing event I changed my diet closer to what I had in my late teens and early 20s. That was four decades ago. Back then I was vegetarian (not vegan). Now I am pescatarian. My weight is down to what it was then. I have lower blood pressure. I do not have any joint pain. I have not zeroed out anything, but I have limited many things. I drink water (usually with some lemon), brewed coffee or tea. I do not use any sweeteners, NONE. I do drink whiskey in the evenings and smoke a cigar. The elimination of almost all wheat products is a major plus. I think this war in Ukraine, which is limiting wheat supply is actually a good thing for humanity. I have seen many people who have eliminated wheat improve their health. Many of these people are older and are living better lives because of this. The real point is that diet is the most important thing in determining health. A medical profession that is based on prescribing pills is doing us harm. For example, when high blood pressure set in for me, I was prescribed pills. They were not very effective, and I didn't feel good taking them. I basically just stopped. The real solution was shedding the weight. I could go on and on, as I am wont to do, but you get the point. In fact, in the last five years I have not taken any medication, not even an aspirin. I have not had a headache. I have had one 24-hour flu. I even felt the fever break. I had a neighbor once who, after he retired, would sit at home and drink vodka (lots) and smoke. He got sick and his doctor told him to stop those things. He did and felt terrible. He asked the doctor how much linger he would live quitting these things, The doctor said six months. He said f**k that, He went back to his old habits and died. Squeezing out six months after a life of decades is a massive waste of resources. That is, in fact where most of the spending in the health industry is spent. This is maddness. Doctors are great when acute situations have to be dealt with, but garbage when dealing with holistic situations. Perhaps this is what the article you refer to is dealing with.
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  5284.  @takeshikodama5671  Great points. The only thing, quitting smoking ups your chance of getting COVID, so I understand from studies I have seen. I mention the vodka guy, but the same thing applies to people with terminal cancer. I have known many people who decided to stop treatment when it became clear that it was not going to work. One of them was my mother-in-law. She was a nurse and her husband a doctor. They made an informed decision. On the other hand, most doctors would keep on treating a terminally ill cancer patient, at tremendous cost.
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  5285.  @takeshikodama5671  Thanks for your kind comments. Actually, the thing about smoking was, while true, said a little bit in jest.
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  5286. I tend to agree with Weidel and like the bulk of what she says. My only concern is in foreign policy. The funny thing is that what she is saying about the EU is precisely what David Cameron said just before calling the Brexit vote. He said that he would try to renegotiate the EU treaties. When he was rebuffed, he was obligated to call the vote. Now Germany has the same issues. Even France is having troubles with the latest EU trade deal. Italy also has major problems on immigration. These are founding members. If the EU bureaucracy can't see this, they are destined for the dustbin of history. The EU is basically a protectionist cartel. It has expanded beyond free trade with disastrous effects. It has become collectivist, which is what fascism and communism are. It is also, as she says, undemocratic. The euro is a disaster, and like so many of the programs of such organizations it was poorly thought out and poorly executed. Germany needs a change.
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  5287. You think you will be effected. What about Greg Gutfeld? He is going to lose out big! Love your content. Keep up the good work.
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  5288. China as a 5,000-year-old foe. This type of thinking is the direct result of Xi's resurrecting old claims in places like the South China Sea, Russia and India. He wants to go back in time to "reclaim" territory. Well, two can play at that game, or maybe three or four or more. I saw one report of a meeting of the Kim "family" where Kim stated that North Korea wanted northeast China. If I recall correctly, Kim wants the border to extend to the Liao River, not the Yalu. I don't know if this is real or accurate, but it is out there.
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  5289. Funds that belong to all taxpayers? What country are you talking about? CCP run China is a communist country. Nothing belongs to the people. It all belongs to the party. Not the country, one should note, but the party. When will people get that into their heads and stop spouting drivel?
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  5290. Brilliant! Thanks for sharing this. You are THE media.
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  5291. Are you kidding me? Your depiction of the Chinese tax system is a lot like the US tax system. Details about what taxes are collected at each level may differ a bit, but those differences are not material. As an American I pay taxes to all three levels separately. I pay Federal and State income taxes. Being in a state where property taxes fund most local activities (schools, police, etc.) I also pay those, separately. Having those multiple levels is not something unusual. Come on man.
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  5292. One more comment, specifically about the "Great Patriotic War". In that conflict, they go t massive support, critical support, from the west. That is not there now. They actually had a massive military industrial complex before that war. Not now. There is no parallel.
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  5293.  @BobTheTrueCactus  Great points, especially the last about corruption. That is talked about enough. And it extends to the activity of organized crime. The same is true in Russia. There are lots of parallels here.
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  5294.  @kazekamiha  Agree. This will also screw them in the arms market. Arms are the biggest manufactured export.
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  5295. Democracy in China? Dream on. China has no history of democracy. It is a kleptocratic oligarchy. Are those people going to relinquish their power? Come on man! The corruption in China extends down to the masses. China most likely will break up after the CCP falls. The CCP has sown the seeds of this outcome with its heavy-handed policies.
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  5296.  @cubablue602  Any country needs equipment. So, that is not surprising. As for Russia progressing, you are seriously out of date. In fact, even Prigozhn even stated that, at the current rate of advance it would take two years to reach the border of Donetsk and three years to reach Kiev. In fact, recently the Russians have been counterattacked in Bakhmut.
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  5297. She should read Peter Zeihan;s books especially his latest. The last 70 years of the American led world order is an aberration of history. We will go back to "normal". There is a reason why neither China nor Russia ever projected power very far. Look at the countries that did have large empires abroad in the last several hundred years. They were all small European countries. Think of it. It was the British, the Dutch, Spain and Portugal. When you consider it, that is amazing and ludicrous. As for China as a market, that is something that is rapidly going away because of their demographics and government policy. If you want markets for the future, you should be looking at India and Africa. Don't forget, China still has 600M people living in poverty. Don't forget, their manufacturing is low tech. For example, many of the people who left that big Foxconn factory walked back to their villages. They are poor peasants. As for the Middle East, I see them as becoming irrelevant. If things really fall apart, they will be colonized again. It won't be China. They do not have the ability to do that.
    1
  5298. International law is a chimera. If you have a law, you need someone to enforce it. Who is that in the case of "international law", pray tell?
    1
  5299. I have been waiting for something like this.
    1
  5300.  @_TheMax_  I am only talking about US politics. As for your second statement, choosing a president on race or ethnicity is just plain stupid.
    1
  5301. There was indeed a lot of misinformation around the use of masks and vaccines (full disclosure, I am vaccinated) during the height of COVID. There were also a lot of very bad decisions made by governments that had deadly consequences. One of the most egregious was sending COVID patients back to nursing homes early in the pandemic. We talk about "misinformation", but who decides. Medicine, which is where a lot of the issues are, is not physics or chemistry. It is heavily reliant on statistical analysis and generally does not involve the kinds of controlled experiments done in those fields. We call it science, but the object of such science is different, as well as the ethical questions involved. On the statistical nature of medicine, statistics only really work after a situation occurs and there is sufficient data. After all, statistics are not analytical. The whole idea is that the data tells you what has happened. We then make conjectures on what will happen. During something like a pandemic, they are limited use.
    1
  5302.  @demoniack81  That is true, but inflation was also much higher.
    1
  5303.  @jonathanj8303  Oh, yes! That's it.
    1
  5304. Trump has been masterful. He has broken the Democratic Party completely. A political party has to represent a group of constituents and a set of ideas. What did Trump run on? His constituency is the American people. His ideas are for a more streamlined government, an end to corruption, American values a strong economy, health and peace around the world just as an add-on. What do the Democrats have? He left them no room either in policy or constituency. How can they counter that? Don't forget the old party alignments. The Democrats started out as the working man's party. This meant labor unions. As union membership declined, they looked around for another way to build a majority. That is when they decided to go all in to include "repressed minorities". They were doing intersectionality before we were conscious of it. I have personally witnessed it with high level donors and operatives. The Republicans started out as the party of business. Trump tore that up and widened the tent He might be the only one who could have done that. Unlike the professional politicians he is a businessman. In business, the largest and most successful companies are generally the ones appealing to a mass audience. Such audiences are typically diverse.
    1
  5305.  @brucetucker4847  Oh, I know that. It was just that, if it had happened things would have been different. I am not advocating for that either.
    1
  5306. Russia doesn't have a long-term future. If he really had a long game, he would have a succession plan and would be building up his cadres. He has none of that going on. The Putin regime is a mafia style kleptocracy. They are simply continuing what the Soviets were doing, because that is where they came from. As for the spies, infiltration, etc. that has been going on since right after the Russian Revolution. Lenin seriously thought that the workers in Germany and elsewhere would spontaneously rise up and overthrow their governments, just as they had done in Russia. Of course. this didn't happen, so they quickly set up organizations to try to destabilize western, and other, nations from within. For example, the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) was funded by and coordinated with the Soviets. Many similar operations were ongoing in Europe. Even recently the Germans were infiltrated, with the Russians coopting some of their prominent politicians, such as Gerhard Schröder. This was done to increase dependence on Russian natural gas which would, it was believed, make it easier for Russia to influence the EU and subvert NATO. You may recall that President Trump made a point of pointing this out to the Germans and they laughed at him. The videos are on YouTube. Who's laughing now? You, and most in the west, seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking that the last twenty years or so represent the norm. There is a term for that which I can't quite put my finger on right now. Of course, we see in the case of Schröder in Germany, that the Russians were openly doing all this during this time. The war changes nothing. It is just an extension of what has been going on in geopolitics for a long time. So, if this is, as it seems, a revelation to you and the rest of the commentariat, then your historical perspective is severely lacking.
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  5307. I have a lot of respect for General Hodges, but his observation on China is, I believe, off the mark. China actually does have a lot of good reasons to want to see the Russian Federation break up. I see no particular upside for them in Russia maintaining its present form.
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  5308. Germany is a complete clown show. They decided to shut down their nuclear plants, which have no CO2 emissions, because of a tsunami in Japan. Their green energy has been a joke and they are now burning more of their "brown" coal, which has among the most CO2 emissions of any coal. They also refuse to use fracking to extract natural gas locally. With nuclear and locally produced natural gas they could become totally independent of Russia. They could then import oil for transportation from places like the US and Canada, while they transition to electric vehicles of the next two or three decades (it will take at least that long). Many businesses in Europe, and other areas, have moved production to the US for energy intensive industries. Even in the current climate, our energy, of all types, is less expensive than most of the rest of the world. But no, idiots like Merkel made political, not scientific decisions. They deserve what they get.
    1
  5309. One thing that really pissed me off was that when I lived in the UK in the early 2000s, I wanted to buy a sportscar. I wanted an Elise, but Lotus said they would never export them to the US, and thus I would never be able to take the car back with me. I eventually bought an Alfa Romeo GTV, which I absolutely loved. On the downside, they were never exported to the US and the cost of getting one to the US was not worth it. Upside was that I was able to sell it for much of what I paid for it.
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  5310. The idea that picking allies and people you trust is a questionable thing is just bonkers. I just saw, on another channel, and interview with a former FBI special agent calling Patel a "Trump loyalist" as if that's a bad thing. The "deep state" problem is not only an American problem. I know they are wrestling with that in the UK as well. We desperately need to address this and to get it cleaned up. Thank goodness that Trump won the election. He, unlike Biden or Harris, will not be manipulated and will get the job done.
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  5311. The PMI is an index, not a percentage.
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  5312. What strikes me is the small number of armored vehicles being used in attacks by both sides. Frankly, neither of them has the capability, it seems, for large scale armored warfare. Just to put it in perspective, when the Syrians attacked the Golan Heights in 1973, they used about 1,200 tanks. In the Gulf war, in the famous battle of 73 Easting the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR) had over 80 tanks and over 100 IFVs. They were just the advanced scouting force for four armored divisions (one British) and an infantry division. As far as I can tell, neither side in Ukraine has, or can, deployed such massive formations.
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  5313. Zalenski (and Ukraine) has not been infected by the EU. Let's hope he, and they, stay that way. What Zalenski is saying is what Trump, in his first term, said. Look up the video where Trump was telling Merkel, and the rest of the German leadership, that they were too dependent on Russia for gas and that they weren't spending enough on their military. They laughed at him. Who's laughing now? Ukraine has lots of natural resources. In fact, prior to the war at least one oil major was planning to develop fields in the east of Ukraine. Of course, with the hostilities going on there, and this was before the full-scale invasion, they had to stop. Once the war is over, that can all start up again. By the way, the Lend Lease terms are generally quite generous and in the case of the UK after WWII, they were given a long time to repay. In fact, they didn't finish repaying until the 2000s.
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  5314. At about 3:15 a statement is made that is patently untrue. Both Macron and Scholz have had direct contact with Putin during this war. The reaction to such contacts was criticized by Zalenski in both cases. The last call by Scholz was in November 2024. This stuff is available on the WWW. Remember that? I was aware of these calls and in under a minute found the details. Education is lacking worldwide.
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  5315.  @HiddenKaiser_  Could be.
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  5316. Green is a stupid term. The so-called threat the environment is CO2. So, let's talk about that. Green encompasses a lot more. Looking at minimizing CO2 emissions. The available solutions have four components: wind, solar, batteries and nuclear. The last two are necessary to provide power on demand at any time. The first two are limited in this regard. Nuclear provides base power at any time. Batteries, at least in the form we have now, can provide bridging power at small scales. Even the largest battery installations are small compared to a medium sized coal fired power plant of 400MW continuous output. As for the issues for nuclear plants in certain locations, this can be engineered. What galls me is that Germany decided to phase out nuclear due to a tsunami on the other side of the world. This is just plain stupid. Germany is not prone to tsunamis or earthquakes. Now, Germany is burning more lignite coal, a particular dirty form, or using Russian gas. Not smart. The final point is that choosing to minimize CO2 emissions by choosing something like nuclear is not a permanent solution. As new technologies come on board, such as fusion, the older ones will be displaced. Just look at conventional power generation. Not that long ago we used oil to generate electricity. We don't anymore. We used to use oil to heat our homes (I had one). We don't anymore almost anywhere. Of course, fusion is still a way off, as it has been for decades. What about deep geothermal? These are technological solutions with engineering and technological solutions.
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  5317. Twenty-two billions left to live? So, which will happen first? The oceans will boil on Earth or the end of the universe. Oh, wait, in 5.4 billion years, the sun will turn into a red giant. So, all irrelevant.
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  5318. The range of HIMARS, specifically the ATACMS, was set by treaty. The US already has a replacement with much longer range. Your experts should keep up to date on developments.
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  5319.  @austenmoore7326  Well, that has not been my experience. As I said, when I see companies talking about cash flow rather than profits I see a company trying to deflect. Stock prices are generally benchmarked as a multiple of earnings, not cash flow. I think you are swimming against the tide.
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  5320.  @austenmoore7326  I just watched a video on the channel China Truths and I thought of you. It concerns Evergrande (but not exclusively) and is titled "GMT Exposes Evergrande’s Profit Deception? Alibaba Continues Equity Transfers For 7 Listed Companies". Look at how much Evergrande invested in all types of companies and how lavishly their CEO and founder (who is now in detention) lived. They had lots of cashflow. In fact, so do all Ponzi schemes, until they collapse.
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  5321. One thing you mention, which is common to so many pronouncements about the "benefits of some new theory or device, is that they will most often be totally made up. I see this in so many areas of science and technology. Of course, no such benefits appear.
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  5322. Everyone keeps saying that this is Russia's war to lose. That is only true if they would do something different or have different equipment. They won't and don't. The Russian/Soviet way of fighting is not a formula for success, especially with peer or near peer powers. Frankly, in WWII, they only lost because the west helped arm them. Some 30 to 40 percent of their equipment and supplies were from the west. Without that, they lose. in this war, it is Ukraine that is getting the western equipment.
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  5323. Wait! Einstein's theory cannot be correct. Isn't that what people always say?
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  5324. The New York Times is anti-American and anti-religious. Frankly, they have been taken over by leftists and communists and this probably predates any CCP effort. The CCP is just leveraging the NYT's inherent biases.
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  5325.  @limkheakwei4412  'Well, if that is true, how come China went through decades of warlords and revolution? That was generations. How about the horror of the CCP? Figures show that they killed more of their own people than anyone. I have friends who lived through the Cultural Revolution. How come the US is still the largest economy?
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  5326. On the first story, yes indeed, there will be a new Cultural Revolution. Another point is the privilege of the children of party officials. Like all authoritarian regimes, the CCP will devolve into a new aristocracy. As for the health code and privacy concerns, do these people realize they are living in a Communist society. There is no such thing as a "right to privacy" is such a system.
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  5327.  @sumiland6445  Well, the CCP is made up of lots of Chinese people. In addition, I have run into the corruption and IP theft by people who were private entrepreneurs and not, as far as I can tell, CCP members. There is also a long discussion about how the CCP came to power in the first place. They needed the support of the people.
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  5328. Don't forget that the Thompson was developed at the end of WWI. It was colloquially called the "trench broom". It was meant for that type of war. The issue is that there was not that much development in the US after WWI of this type of weapon.
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  5329. Some say China has overcounted its population by 100 million. These are serious analysts. Considering the veracity of all Chinese statistics, I would tend to go with that figure. Has China had an outsized influence on global affairs since the 1700s? You need to brush up on your history. China's influence was restricted to northeast Asia, and some parts of Southeast Asia, and never went beyond that. By the 19th century, those tiny European countries, and the US, had greatly influenced China, not the other way around. The last time China projected power by sea was in the 15th century, and they only got as far as Africa.
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  5330.  @wqv5423ln  That reminds me of a situation my neighbor ran into in the UK. I came home from work one day and the neighbor's son was there for dinner, which was nothing unusual. My wife took me aside and said he was staying the night because his mother was at the hospital waiting for a CT scan. She was having major double vision all of a sudden. There were two possibilities. One was a tumor, the other was viral. She waited all night there with her husband and was told she would have to come back in a day or two. Their situation was funny. They were British citizens working for an American company based in the US. They were doing a "foreign assignment" just like I was, in the UK. Just like me they had "private" insurance through the US company. Once they recalled this, they called up a private clinic and got a scan right away. Fortunately, it was not a tumor and cleared up in a couple of weeks. I gather from your last sentence that private hospitals and clinics are still not allowed in Canada.
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  5331. The idiocy of these people is breathtaking. I expect it is mostly the younger generation, used as they are to doing everything online.
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  5332. If we let economists come up with policy we are doomed, DOOMED.
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  5333.  @markgarin6355  A Number 1 (6.5"x44).
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  5334. Well, Times Radio has many videos saying that Trump would lose the election. So, here we go again.
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  5335. Racial theory is not a white thing. The fact that whites have been more powerful for a long time is another matter. For example, in WWII, the Japanese saw the Americans as "mutts". They thought they could easily defeat them in battle, one on one. This proved to be untrue. The Germans, of course, saw the Slavs as an inferior race. They paid the price. The Japanese saw the Chinese, another Asian "race", as inferior. Even given superior equipment, the were not able to conquer them. In fact, if there had not been the divisions in China between the Communists and Nationalists, Japan would probably have suffered a massive defeat. Don't forget that until after WWII, racial theory was the main intellectual trend in the world. Even in the US, there was a strong eugenics movement. The issue of the Jews is interesting. They did have, in ancient times, a strong national presence. It was really only after the 70s AD, when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, that the Jews ceased to have a national presence. Contrast that with the Germans. At the time of the Jews greatest national presence, the Germans were just a bunch of primitive tribes. It took until the 1870s for them to actually form a nation. Just think on that.
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  5336. The Belt and Road is a stupid idea. It always was. The current world trade and transportation system was not created as some sort of conspiracy. It evolved because it was more cost effective. The Silk Road died because it was too slow, dangerous and expensive. The European empires arose because of control of the seas, and thus trade. Thus, China spends all this money on projects others will not touch. It is mirrored within China. They tout their massive high speed rail network. That network is an economic disaster. It is over $1T in debt (that may be per year). Once all the break even routes were developed, they extended it to marginal areas, with no economic benefits. China has no idea of economics, and it is bringing it down.
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  5337. Trump is correct on Europe. The economy of Europe is ten times that of Russia and the population is three times as large. Don't forget, NATO was born at a time when western Europe was devastated and could not defend itself from the Soviets. Until the end of the Cold War (I miss the Cold War) the US had an average of about 300K troops in Europe. Even after the number is still about 50K. The dynamics are completely different from those of NATO's founding. Europe never responded. Macron has been trying for a while to get the EU to be serious about its own defense. Germany has been the problem. The German economy is an export led economy. This causes dislocation within Europe. They dealt with the Russians for years so that they could continue to export to them and get cheap energy. Trump excoriated them on their reliance on Russia for natural gas and oil, as well as their anemic military spending. They laughed at him. Who is laughing now? The Germans seem to be doing the same with China, by the way.
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  5338. Using GDP to compare disparate economic systems is an invalid measure of economic activity. Russia is a country at war. To compare it to western economies is just plain silly. China is another example. In addition to the demonstrated fact that they manipulate their figures, they do a lot of "infrastructure" projects, many of which are a total bust and don't add to the economy in the long run. One great example is the High Speed Rail (HSR). The system has a debt of close to $1T which grows constantly, and which will never be recovered. The waste in HSR, and almost all infrastructure in China is epic. And I am not even talking about the corruption, which by most accounts, takes up at least 50% of the budget of projects. Goosing GDP was what the property bubble in China was all about. That bubble has burst and will take the economy down with it. The same is true of Russia. The percentage lost to corruption is on a par with China. In both cases, it also affects military effectiveness. Most sophisticated financial and economic analysts no longer look at GDP for just this reason.
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  5339.  @TheAngrySaxon1  You make a good point on the intermediate rounds. The original CETME was developed with a 7.92x41mm cartridge. The bullet weight was 6.8 grams. Compare that to the 147 grain bullet in a 7.62x51mm NATO which is 10 grams. It was also a long bullet (ala 6.5 Creedmoor) which would give it a high BC. Being lighter, it would also be more controllable in full auto. Oh, well.
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  5340.  @benfowler1134  As usual.
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  5341. Tucker, they already have "hostile" governments, members of NATO, on their border in the Baltic states. The movement of western leaning democracies is only accelerating. Now, both Sweeden and Finland are seriously considering NATO membership, and they collectively have a long border with Russia. Russia is being hemmed in because of their own policies, not because of something the West has done. You need to study up a little more on the geopolitical situation. Today's Russia is not the Soviet Union, or the Russian Empire. It cannot reliably call upon the central Asian republics or the former central European states, except for Belarus. Even China is not fully supportive because of his declaration of the breakaway of the regions in the east of Ukraine. China has several regions that would break away, such as Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang. The Russian approach to this situation in Ukraine is a real problem for them.
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  5342. It is more likely than not that the later situation will prevail. By that I mean the great powers making the rules. To have a rules-based order one needs someone to enforce those rules. The UN has patently failed, and that is the closest we have to a world government. If you look it up, all the major military powers in the world, Russia, China and the US were either not signatories to, or withdrew their signatures from, the ICC. Frankly, it is the great powers that have "ruled" for all of human history. The attempts in the 20th century to change that all failed. First, there was the League of Nations. How did that work out in preventing WWII? Then there was the UN. Russia, as a signatory to the UN charter has totally ignored it. China ignores a clear ruling of UNCLOS in the South China Sea. We will most likely see various regional blocs develop, with strong nations at their center. For the west, the hopeful sign is that two of these strong nations, China and Russia, are likely to fall apart or are likely to confront each other. The west tried, especially after the breakup of the Soviet Union, to bring China and Russia into the fold. They both have rejected that. Without their participation, the "world order" is not possible. Don't expect the US to step up either. It is not worth the expenditure for the US, and the US electorate is actively hostile to such a role and has been since the election of Bill Clinton.
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  5343. Tony, such up to date information. Good job. I am always amazed at the rhetoric coming out of the CCP ministry of foreign affairs. The childish tones of the CCP are just embarrassing for them. The US being a provocateur in the South China Sea? What about "rule of law". According to the UNCLOS ruling China is acting illegally. One has to remember that China and the Philippines are signatories to UNCLOS while the US is not.
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  5344. I do the same from Illinois. I have my first coffee and first cigar and watch Tony and Peter Zeihan.
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  5345.  @kamra99a  I think the people not being paid can judge their probability of being paid.
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  5346.  @Keep_calm_and_slave_on  So am I! Wait, who are you mad as hell at?
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  5347. It is interesting to hear about all these Russian conscripts. In the Vietnam war 18- and 19-year-olds were sent to fight by the US. Of course, they got a lot more and better training.
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  5348. Believe me, I am no apologist for Putin. On the other hand, Crimea has always been part of the Russian Empire. It was wrested away from the Ottoman Turks in in 1783. It was a part of Russia. It was administratively transferred to the Ukrainian SSR by an act of the Supreme Soviet in 1954. It had, up that point, never been a part of Ukraine. Taking it back, was not necessarily an issue for the international community. There are many issues in Europe that are similar, and borders have generally been drawn arbitrarily. Even to this day, this is an issue. Look at Czechoslovakia. It was created by the Western powers after WWI, but voluntarily broke apart because it was never a thing. Look at Yugoslavia. What a mess. How many countries now inhabit its territory. Borders in Eastern Europe are always a problem. We have all these ancient regions such as Transylvania, Carpathia and others that no longer exist because of the map drawers of the West. And yet these are far more ancient and cohesive than many of the countries that exist today.
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  5349. Maria cites Wall Street research reports. I could go on about the bad and misleading ones I personally have seen over the years, but I will spare you. Let's just say that business is dynamic and will deal with the situation as it evolves.
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  5350.  @HistoryHustle  Fair point.
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  5351. Dictatorship of the CCP? Of course. Don't people in China know about the "dictatorship of the proletariat"? Don't they teach anything about Marxism in the Marxist paradise? The ignorance is astounding.
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  5352. People seem so enamored with the "long term thinking" of Asian countries. Of course, history shows that this is hogwash. Don't forget, it is technology that drives economies, and thus, militaries. Try planning for that. I did, for a large Army program, and we were only going out a couple of decades. At one time I took some graduate business courses and the professors, from the UK and Ireland, were ga-ga over the 100-year plans of Japanese companies, which some of them helped draft. This was just before Japan's slide into a decade's long malaise. Look at China, and most of Asia. From about the 17th century on, they were controlled, either directly, or in their external trading relations, by a bunch of small European nations. Don't forget that it was not even national planning that drove this. It was pure commercialism. India is a case in point, but not the only one. The conquest of India was begun, and mostly completed, by a company bent on economic exploitation. The UK, a small country, actually had the largest empire, by population, and I believe by area, in the history of the world. China last projected power by sea in the 15th century. So, in the end, history has taught us that this type of long-term thinking leads to ossification, not success. By the way, China has been conquered many times. The last Han led dynasty was the Ming, which ended in 1644. There is no incentive to invade China today. The last ones to try, the Japanese, were actually fairly successful, and if they hadn't started a war with the US (who they considered "mutts"), they might well have been successful in a complete conquest.
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  5353. I couldn't watch much of this. In some of her other videos she starts out assuming people at the lectures are primary school students. I find that insulting. I expect that the people in the audience are well educated, and so are most of the people who would want to watch a video on this content. Assume your audience knows nothing. That is a recipe for disaster. I generally like Gresham College content, so this is disappointing.
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  5354. The ignorance of the Chinese system is just stunning. They teach to the test. Take some time to learn what is really going on.
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  5355.  @jakomoto-p9w  Thanks.
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  5356. In the US, an ID that is not a drivers license is much less expensive than 34 lb. It is 20 USD in Illinois, where I live.
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  5357. So, do you think Erdogan will bring back the title of Ottoman Emperor? Frankly, we have no strategic needs in the Middle East. We no longer need the oil. We support Israel because of what happened to the Jewish people in WWII, not for strategic reasons. Iam not saying we shouldn't, but I must point that this is the reason. The US suffered terribly for this support, especially in the 1970s with the oil shocks. On top of that, there was the large amount of terrorism promogulated against the US by the Palestinians.
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  5358. The Ruger P95DC (with stainless slide) was my second semi-auto, which I bought during the assault weapons ban. It came with ten round mags. I have since bought six Ruger OEM 15-round magazines. In the interim I bought some off brand 15-rounders, and they were not at all reliable. The funny story, which goes to the "cost effectiveness" of these guns. is that I bought this pistol (which I still have and like, although I have lots of others now) with cash. My first semi-auto I bought with a credit card, and when my wife saw it (I had neglected to tell her about it) she got upset. So, over the next three months I put some cash away from my weekly cash spending budget and bought it. It was only $350 at the time. So, she never knew. I did have a P89 for a while but sold it. I wish I hadn't, but I was getting some other stuff, and you know how that goes. I like to have pairs of guns with compatible, if not the same, mags. I actually find the double action trigger to be one of the better of my DA hammer fired guns. It is very smooth and consistent throughout. The single action has some take-up but breaks nicely. The reset is very short.
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  5359. One thing I find a little funny (in a perverse way) is all the mania about the inclusion of another country in Ukraine conflict. Just look at the history of the major wars after WWII. First there was the Korean War. The US was already there on the side of the South. Then, when the North was basically defeated the Chinese jumped in. The Soviets were there as well. There were also British troops involved among others. Just as an aside I think you might appreciate this. When I lived in the UK I had a neighbor, who had been a Major in the Regiment of Artillery in both WWII and Korea. From his family name I guess that his lineage is old Norman. He had a pair of cavalry swords on his living room wall that one of his ancestors carried in the Crimean War. He had some great stories. In fact, for his 80th birthday he and his wife took a cruise on the Volga after the fall of the Soviet Union. In Vietnam there were also British and Australian troops among others. After the Cold War we had the Gulf War. There were many countries, including the UK, that sent troops. Remember all the hype about the "coalition of the willing" in the invasion of Iraq? How about Afghanistan? The involvement of other countries was seen as a good thing. My own point of view is that this situation should justify the use of European and perhaps American forces. It should start with airpower. Even if this was limited to skies over Ukraine, and any Russian aircraft that can be reached within Russia by missiles from the planes. But then, I tend to be more aggressive in these matters.
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  5360. You now why they love being stationed in Germany, don't you. I have had many friends who were over the last forty years or more. One of them just came out and said it. If you can't get laid in Germany, then something is wrong with you. During WWII, in the buildup to D-Day there was a British saying about the Americans; “over-paid, over-sexed and over-here.” So, yes, Europe can be a nice billet.
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  5361. Don't hold back now.
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  5362. NATO was created when western Europe was on its knees. Today the economy of the EU plus UK is about ten times that of Russia. Their population is about three times as large. Why do they even need the US. We still have 100K troops there.
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  5363. I still don't see the argument. Most astronomical observations are still dependent on General Relativity. The quantum gravity theories out there (and I have Carlo Roveli's books) are still not proven. We have lots of observations, and they only work with General Relativity. Quantum Mechanics is not on such a firm foundation. As you well know, there are many interpretations. I have also read your book Lost in Math (wonderful book). Perhaps we should be looking in the other direction.
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  5364. Just amazing. The EU is a failed project. The fact is that it will fall apart because of its internal contradictions and because of the makeup of Europe. They want to create a United Stated of Europe. Are they nutters? In the USA, people from those same European countries came (often fled) and created a unitary state. Why not Europe itself. For starters, you have to put your national identity in the background. How will that go in the EU? Then you have to speak one language. So, which language do you choose? Then you have to impose a common currency on ALL. No national central banks. Who will be the first to give up their own? While being aware of the AfD for some time, I am not up to date on their policies. One UK commentator represented their EU policy as something that I think makes sense. Some say it is a ploy, but many have felt that the current EU went too far. The problem is that the EU is stuck halfway to its goal. The hard part is yet to come, and that will break it apart.
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  5365. Please don't take the following personally. I know you and even outlets like the WSJ are reporting what you hear and read. That in itself is important, but probably not in the way you think. In the case of something like the PMI there is not even any attempt to portray it as some sort of precise measure. Just look at the detailed economic data in the US (I am currently working on such a project). It changes over time and is constantly revised as more information comes in. Even data from international sources will change over time. Don't forget that data like GDP and even something like money supply, are statistical measures. No one is out there measuring every enterprise and counting every cent. The resources that would take would be astronomical both on the part of the government (or other collector of the data) and on the part of the companies and institutions providing it. To start, does anyone in the economics world have any idea of what the PMI is or means? Just repeating the statement that the extended holiday might have affected it shows a total lack of understanding. First, it is not based on detailed sales or production data. There are three possible responses from those surveyed. These are not precise measures of output. It is an opinion survey. No one is going back and auditing the respondents to determine the validity of their impressions. As such, a respondent would certainly have taken into consideration a long holiday. They don't sit down and say, oh, sales are down without considering that production was down due to an external factor. The level would be quite normal, and its effects planned for and known well in advance. This is the no different than seasonal fluctuations.
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  5366. Tony, it is cold here (Naperville, IL). High below 20 degrees and low at eight degrees. Brrrr... The attitude of the ASML CEO is just plain bonkers. The CCP will pirate the technology as soon as they are able. The guy is putting short term profits before the long-term viability of his company. Might he be sued for breach of fiduciary duty? I have heard talk of that, not in the case of ASML, but in the investment field in general. Failing to take into account political and legal risks is a problem we have in business. There are companies that specialize in the field. In this age of world spanning supply chains that is just unfathomable to me that one would not take such aspects into consideration.
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  5367. The trade regime we have today is not working, in case you hadn't noticed. I am not only talking about the situation today. This whole system was set up after WWII. On the side of the US, the US, as Peter Zeihan likes to say, bought an alliance by opening up its market to allies. Many of them took advantage of that to the detriment of US workers. I am looking at you Japan, Germany (now the whole EU) and South Korea. We have to recall that at the beginning of the 20th century the US actually exported a bigger percentage of world manufactured goods than China does today. This was not because of any grand plan to take over the world or any of that communist claptrap (I know, crude, but true). The old saying is "the business of the US is business". It was strictly because the US had natural advantages as far as its geography and resources and because of its superior system. I found a tariff chart showing that US tariffs were 20% at the time going up to 30% by 1910 going down to 5% in 1920. I think this is interesting in light of the current debate on tariffs. By the way, I understand that one of the drivers of the Great Depression was that a number of our trading partners could no longer buy as much of our goods. That is the danger of an export dependent economy. Back to my original statement, we have all this economic data about how many people have been lifted out of poverty, etc. Do you know what the levels are that the international economic institutions use for this? The vast majority of people in the bottom 10% in the US (and probably Europe) are middle class by these standards. I have traveled a bit (for half a century) and have lived abroad, so I've seen it. I have recently seen a claim that 1.2M Chinese make $400 or less per month. I thought it was only 900M, but who's quibbling over a 300M Chinese one way or another. The fact is that for economic efficiency and social stability a reasonable distribution of wealth is the only reasonable goal. We know that totalitarian and centrally planned economies always fail on this count. We have to do something different.
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  5368.  @patrikfloding7985  I agree with the first part, but not the second part.
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  5369.  @patrikfloding7985  What does that have to do with the discussion?
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  5370. Let me start out by saying that this is an appalling practice. That said, why would women allow this to be done to them? Why consent to having some photographs or videos be taken? We need to understand that first. This is a big mistake that people make, that they must know, could be abused. What is the impetus for taking part in this? Until that is answered, all the legislation in the world will not prevent the harm. You can jail the perpetrator, but the victim's reputation is still sullied. Also, words matter. Calling it rape is a very bad mistake. Rape is forced intercourse. Revenge porn often is produced with the consent of the victim. The dissemination of the material may not be consensual, but that is not the same. It is just an attempt to call attention to issue and sensationalize it.
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  5371.  @OdiesMama  I did watch it. Why should celebrities be treated any different? Where is that in the Constitution? That is the real question.
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  5372.  @HKim0072  I agree with you that Korea and Japan have become more complementary. On the other hand, both countries still have high barriers to foreign investment, some governmental some informal. Japan has begun relaxing their system and this is partly responsible for the recent good performance of their stock market. That does not mean they are fully open, though. An example of their restrictive policies, one I am very familiar with, involves a semiconductor division of Toshiba. When the parent company was having some difficulties, they planned to sell off this division. An American firm was planning to buy it, but the government actually stepped in and stopped the transaction. Then there are the industrial conglomerates. Keiretsu in Japan and chaebol in Korea. They have lots of political as well as economic power. One interesting thing is that companies from other countries can invest in the US and own their own manufacturing facilities outright. Guess who has the better economy? The US, of course. For all our issues, the more open ownership rules in the US are an advantage. After all, the goal is jobs and businesses activity.
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  5373. Hey, I was going to say that. Good point!
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  5374. Ah, the wisdom of NYC cabbies.
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  5375. In the US there about 300M cars (light vehicles which includes pickup trucks and SUVs as well). No, we are not giving them up anytime soon.
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  5376. Peter, I thought you were up on the data. In 30 to 40 years most if not all of the baby boomers will be gone. That changes everything. That aspect of the debt will basically be gone. The US also has a better story on immigration and the ability to absorb immigrants. Not only will capital flow to the US, but so too will people, with the whole range from low skilled to high skilled. Another thing that is happening is that the baby boomers are not just pulling all their money out of more risky, higher reward investments, as previous generations did. Again, the baby boomers are different. As with most of the issues in this current time we are in a situation where our models do not apply. It will be interesting.
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  5377. Drug abuse in the 60s and 70s? Yeah! Lots in Europe too (I traveled there at the time). I actually went to a high school in the early 70s where, in surveys, 85% of students admitted smoking weed, and 4% admitted doing hard drugs. This was in a wealthy county (one of the wealthiest in the country). Of these druggies 100% graduated and 100% went to university.
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  5378. Does anyone really believe that a society and people so corrupt are going to suddenly going to create a liberal democratic society after the CCP falls?
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  5379. When I was living in Europe, I had a German colleague who bought one. He took it out on the Autobahn and promptly returned it back to the dealership.
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  5380. On the housing market, does anyone see the plan here? Starting from the "three red lines" policy to the current situation, this just seems to be a part of Xi's plan to have the state take back control of the economy. Xi is a Marxist-Leninist, as is the CCP in general. All is in line with the ideology. This also highlights something I have been harping on for a while now. Analysts in the capitalist west have been looking at the Chinese economy all wrong. They have applied western models to a decidedly non-western situation. Frankly, it is not just China. Both Japan and South Korea have financial and company structures, that in the west would probably be illegal. That is why those economies have stagnated. I remember, before the Japanese stock market tanked, watching Louis Rukeyser and seeing the rise of the Japanese market, anxiously waiting for it to top 40K. There are also social structures that are much different and contribute to their issues.
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  5381. Clearly.
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  5382. Guys, the KGB, from after Stain, has "anointed" the leader, often another KGB agent. This is nothing new.
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  5383. The whole lawsuit is so hilarious. We are talking about the RUSSIAN Supreme Court, not the Soviet Supreme Court (if they indeed had one). Don't forget that it was the Union of Soviet Socialist REPUBLICS (emphasis added). The USSR government at the time approved the independence moves. Of course, this is the same Russian government that "annexed" territory of another sovereign state that they did not actually control. Of course, this follows on the statements of the Chinese ambassador to France calling into question the very legitimacy of these breakaway republics. There might be a connection here.
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  5384. Numbers lie. You know the old saying: lies, damn lies and statistics. Most statisticians spend up to 80% of their time "cleaning" the data. Taking any reported numbers at face value is foolish.
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  5385.  @edthebumblingfool  Tell me what you mean? I am not aware of the situation.
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  5386. Love sardines!
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  5387. These are the methods of the rich and powerful. Those without such money and power still want to do the same thing. Their vehicle of choice is bitcoin. The whole idea of bitcoin is that it is a store of wealth that is not controlled by the government. Lot's of people get involved, both to protect their assets from the government, and in many cases to avoid taxes.
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  5388. Thanks for giving us the extended quote from Pettis. This is important for people to understand. That some countries would do trade in RMB makes sense. China is a major exporter of finished goods. The idea that trade with China would have to be conducted in USD is silly. That entails two currency conversions. With direct trade in RMB that is reduced to one. Of course, that only works for trade where commodities or goods sold to China are counterbalanced by goods bought from China. Just try getting RMB out of China. Russia has, and they were refused. With the USD, and the Euro, you can buy anything anywhere without reference to the US or EU. With RMB you can only buy in China. So, if that is what you were going to do anyway, then it is useful and efficient. If not, you are screwed.
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  5389. So, who decides what data to give the AI? Her whole statement about the data fed to the AI is ridiculous and shows an ignorance of the subject. AI, or Machine Learning (ML), extracts information from data in the real world. If you are going to spoon feed it, then you defeat the purpose.
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  5390. China's dominance in rare earths has more to do with processing than mining. Processing is a very environmentally dirty process. Since China does not enforce environmental and worker safety regulations, they become the low-cost producer. This is another example of the west exporting its pollution.
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  5391. I am a bit disappointed. Even Peterson doesn't seem to get it. Everyone concentrates on the message and messaging. They totally miss what is happening. Terms such as left and right, progressive and conservative are obsolete. The parties now represent the two elemental philosophical currents. These are collectivism (socialism) and individualism. So, what does the Democratic Party stand for? Right now, it seems to be socialism and/or controlling the system to milk it for all they can get. They just want power in order to game the system. They have spent decades dividing up the electorate into class and racial groupings. I also have had contacts in the Democratic Party and have seen it up close. It all started under LBJ as the unionized workforce was declining in numbers, and they had to find another source of votes. Now Trump has even taken the unions away from them. He is also making major inroads with racial/ethnic groups. The thing is he is not paying them for it as the Democrats have done.
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  5392. Supply and demand. Imagine that is a commie country. Actually, this fits in with all the reports I have seen about massive closures of retail outlets and eateries.
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  5393. Of course, all this policy drivel about supporting the private sector could evaporate in weeks.
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  5394. Trans people make up about one tenth of one percent of the population. While I am all for letting them live their life as they want, i am not alright with them when they try to affect how I live my life. That is the basis of American individual freedom. Actually, I heard a gay commentator in the UK say that when talking to some trans people he knows, that they questioned who these "activists". They would just like to live their lives. Many of the trans activists on Twitter are probably not trans. This has also been true of the whole BLM movement. Ever notice how many of the activists are white middle class?
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  5395. Big tech is so full of sh*t. They are political and do nothing to suppress hate speech. YouTube has lots of channels that are clearly anti-Semitic. Twitter lets human traffickers use their platform. One the other hand, they suppress a sitting president. What a load of crap. I still watch YouTube, but I am not on any social media platforms. They are all crap.
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  5396. The welfare queens were real. I was around in that era. Geraldo, I sense that you were too. I lived in Washington, DC. I was born there. I saw it.
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  5397.  @CarlosRodriguez-un1ip  Of course, in that case, I would think that the buyer would ask for a discount to cover costs.
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  5398. @Bon-ob8si Thanks. I could not remember the name.
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  5399. Goldman Sachs is dreaming if they think it will be an L-shaped recovery. The only caveat to that is if the prices are at rock bottom. That is happening in some lower tier cities. There are two factors mitigating against recovery or stabilization. First is the demographic decline. Second is massive unemployment and underemployment. I don't see what levers the central government has. I would hope people are not taking investment advice from these guys.
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  5400. What the heck does a military equal to the American military even mean? There are two things one has to understand about the American military. The first is its reach. The second is the fact that, for the last century plus, the American military has been involved in conflicts and is thus highly experienced. On the China side, they last tried to project power by sea in the 15th century. The current Chinese navy is mostly a short-range, or littoral, navy. I even saw a report that the Chinese carriers have to refuel moving from a southern to a northern port. In addition, all this talk about Chinese capabilities in 2030 or beyond are academic. Odds are China, or at least the CCP, will have collapsed by then. It looks like it will happen sooner rather than later s things stand. Two things one has to consider about the Chinese military buildup. One is that they are doing it during a time of economic downturn. The second is that they spend more on internal security (suppression of their own people) than on the military. With the economic situation creating societal turmoil, this is not likely to change. On top of that, there is the corruption in the military itself and in its procurement of weapons. Reports occasionally leak out about this. This corruption is endemic in the CCP system and is probably the only thing keeping it together.
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  5401. Interesting. The statement was made that populist politicians fail to deliver for the economy. Well. Donald Trump is considered a populist politician, as was Obama and now Biden. Now, Obama was not very successful economically, and the jury is out for Biden. Biden had the COVID aftermath to deal with. Until COVID, the US economy under Trump was the healthiest it had been in years. So, the record is mixed, and it does not seem to be a function of populism, at least in the US. I wonder what the feeling is in Pakistan.
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  5402.  @andrew30m  Let's hope they are successful. Just saying that they hope to recover such, and such an amount is no guarantee. I wrote what I did because I know people who set up businesses hoping to make money on recovery. They failed, and it was not the individuals, but the whole sector. As for the recycling of silicon solar panels and composite turbine blades, the processes and outcomes are not clear. We know we can recycle steel and aluminum. We know what it costs and how to do it. In fact, in both cases it is more cost effective to recycle those than to make from new. What do you get out of recycling silicon solar panels? Can you get pure silicon out of those? It is no the same thing. In fact, you might just get trash. The same with composite turbine blades. Can you "melt" them down and recover the materials put into them in a pure form. If not, the alternative is to turn them into some secondary material. Is this viable in an economic sense? These are all questions that need to be answered, and there are literally hundreds of companies that have tried this type of thing and lots of other recycling approaches that never made it.
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  5403. I don't think the Wagner mercenaries in Belarus are convicts. For one thing, a large number of those died in Bakhmut. There are the core Wagner fighters, mostly ex-military and well trained and equipped.
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  5404. Ronald Regan used to tell a story about buying a car in the Soviet Union. This guy was finally approved, and the car would be ready in ten years, he was informed. He asked when it would be ready, morning or afternoon. The official said what does it matter, it's ten years from now. The response was that the plumber was coming in the morning.
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  5405. If you follow Putin's logic about Crimea having been, at one time, part of Russia, then you have to consider Vladivostok. The Chinese claim it and say that it was illegally given to Russia. They want it back. When Russia dissolves, China (or what is left of it) will take it back.
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  5406. AOC would be much more entertaining in that role.
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  5407. Fantastic summary of the situation. Afghanistan is not a real country. The borders, like those in Iraq, were drawn by the British. Thus, lumped together, were disparate groups that frankly hated each other. This will now degenerate into civil war. Inevitable.
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  5408. Peter Zeihan has been making videos from New Zealand recently. He went to school there a while back and is revisiting his old haunts. You should get together with him.
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  5409. don't pronounce the "p" at the end of "coup". It is a word of French origin. The same goes for "corps". The "s" at the end is not pronounced.
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  5410. I know, make Angela the Chancelor.
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  5411. Worrying about the integrity of the Russian Federation is foolish. It WILL fail. It is an old-line empire All of those have disintegrated since WWII. China is also, potentially, on this trajectory. It was less than 100 years ago that China was still in a warlord period where it was not a unified country. This was not the first time. Another issue is the demographics. Russia's are terminal. They have lost several hundred thousand men of both fighting and child rearing age. This just accelerates the collapse. Finally, the Russian economy will not be integrated into the world economy when this war is done. From a purely business point of view, Russia is not a reliable partner. Considering that most of what they export is raw materials, they are making themselves irrelevant. Other sources will be found. Sources that are more reliable. By the way, their only significant manufactured exports were military hardware. Where will that go? The western world got along fine without Russia (Soviets) after WWII. It will do fine without it again. And being an unreliable partner is shown to be a recipe for decoupling, as we are seeing in China. Russia is toast, and it doesn't matter.
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  5412.  @jaydee6268  You are very welcome.
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  5413.  @nifralo2752  Yes, that was a credit for him. He went to take over command. That was not a credit for him. This is another similarity between Putin and the Czar. Neither were good military commanders. It is just that Putin is also a coward.
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  5414. Foreign investors, especially the big banks and hedge funds, are finally waking up to the issues in China. This is really disturbing. The signs have been there for a while. Even if you did not believe that China would collapse, it certainly was not a good place for long term investment. Now, even Ray Dalio is changing his tune. I am more in alignment with people like Peter Zeihan. I have an investment advisor who was a very high official of one of the largest investment banks before he went out on his own. He has been bearish on China for a while, and in fact would not invest in Asian funds that had a direct exposure to China. As I think you reported, those funds not exposed directly to China have done well compared to those including China. This guy is a macro investor and is always looking at trends in a long-term way. In fact, he once came to a cigar night with a chart showing some economic indicator going back 5,000 years. He loves to play with numbers and history. I really have no ill feelings for the Chinese people. It is the CCP and its practices that bother me. I am old enough to have Chinese friends who survived the Cultural Revolution. I have met people born in China who are now US citizens who are just a bearish on the CCP as I am. I have always thought that, among East Asians, the Chinese are closer in temperament to Americans.
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  5415. In the Soviet Union there was a saying, "You pretend to pay us and we pretend to work." In China they don't even make a pretense of paying workers. Welcome to the workers' paradise.
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  5416. What is with the music? It really detracts from the content.
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  5417. The FBI has become a politicized and ineffective operation. This is not a hit on the individual field agents. When they are given a task, they pursue it with efficiency and skill. I have known a few. It is their political leadership. Targeting "domestic" terrorists, such as parents at school board meetings is just the most stupid thing they have done, but not the only thing. They either need to be reformed or eliminated, and perhaps replaced. I say perhaps because having a national police force is not a particularly American idea.
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  5418.  @Cryax2  No, they had so many causalities because of their poor military doctrine. Up to the end of the war, the persisted in frontal assaults against a well dug in enemy. They just had a lot more of them. In the battle of Berlin, they took over 300,000 casualties. For what? They could have surrounded the city and starved it out. Their tactics were stupid and totally ignored their own casualties. Yes, they did take out lots of Germans, but they unnecessarily sacrificed their own people. There were two reasons that Eisenhower did not press the attack on Berlin. One was that it would be in the German zone of occupation. The second is that he projected it would incur massive causalities. As for how many casualties on the German side, that is not what was most important. When the western allies invaded, they were much closer to the German industrial heartland than the Soviets. This was much more important. In fact, the Soviets spent significant resources in places like Courland, when they could have just isolated them and moved on. The real hammer blows to the Germans were the bombing campaigns, the air superiority campaign and the threat against the German industrial heartland in western Germany. As for Finland, have you heard about the continuation war. Finland got a lot back,
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  5419.  @MrJdsenior  Love it! Can I use it?
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  5420. The Chinese population issue is very interesting and important. A while ago I heard you say, and probably read in one of your books, that the CCP had overcounted the population by several hundred million. Recently I saw a video by a Chinese woman living in the US who claimed that China's population was no more than 800M. She did some analysis using ChatGPT. Things in China are indeed more dire than people in general, especially the financial types, want to admit.
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  5421. Just, finally, this war is going to destroy foreign sales for the Russian defense industry. Their stuff is mostly crap. They keep announcing new stuff, but it is nowhere to found on the battlefield. The use of hypersonic weapons is unnecessary and wasteful. The real reason they are using them is because they are running out of conventional precision weapons. They are the definition of a paper tiger. The Chinese must be sh**ting themselves. Their weapon systems, doctrine, etc. are Soviet/Russian. Love your stuff. Keep it up.
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  5422. The UK is well and truly screwed!
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  5423. Very interesting, but how can you call Xi a leader of the right? He is a literal Communist. Last I checked that was an ideology of the far, far left.
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  5424. Jumped to the beginning of the third part and turned it off. The pronunciation of echelon was wrong. This guy makes his living on narrating documentaries, and yet he cannot pronounce common words. I find this in many documentaries. Where do these people come from? It totally detracts from the content.
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  5425. Local election turnout is woefully small in most years. I have a friend who was a local elected official and had been for a while. He is also a lawyer. He lost his last election because turnout was in the single digits, and the Democrats got out enough votes to win. This is in a conservative area. I was an election judge for many years, and during the big presidential election years when our district would get over 60% turnout, we were ecstatic. Just think about that. No major elections are won by 40% (even Desantis, in his last election won by 20%, a record). Which means that if everyone turned out any election could go either way. And just to highlight why this lack of voting is now in ridiculous territory, look at the protests against Trump's election in 2016. In one city on the west coast there were 35 people arrested protesting against Trump. It turns out that few, if any, had actually voted. This also brings up the concept of the political divide. Well, if you look into it (or have been around as long as I have and lived it) you will find that this is what people said they wanted. This habit of not voting was driven by the feeling that there was not much difference between the two parties. This was true. Both parties (we are talking about the US now, but similar ideas apply to the UK) had right and left wings. Thus, both were really centrist. So, why bother voting? The policies really don't change. We are seeing a remaking of the political landscape, it will not be right and left.
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  5426. Artur, these hyperbolic statements about how big the formations are in Ukraine are just not true. The US had 300K+ troops in Europe from the 1950s to the 1980s (with a small dip just below 300K in the 1970s). These troops were mechanized and fully equipped. This is a much larger force than what Ukraine has today in active front line troops. Ukraine would love to have half of those front line forces. I don't mean any disrespect to Ukraine in saying this, but don't forget that at the height of the Cold War there was a real expectation that the Soviets would attack. Every US Army officer who obtained the rank of Captain would go to the Command and General Staff College and one of the main theatres of war studied was Europe, especially the Fuda Gap in Germany.
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  5427. Um, a deep space network (DSN) is actually totally different from the satellite communication networks that are used by the military and civilians. The requirements and physics are totally different. The fact is, Russia has no deep space probes I can think of (anyone?), so they don't need a DSN. No, these are likely the ground stations used by the military for their communication and surveillance networks. To be robust, a system has to have dispersed and disparate means of doing this. I have some experience with this. Is this another example of Peter picking up on a technical term to spice up his presentations? The funny thing is, while I find this a lot, and it is a bit irritating, the basic tenets of his writings and research are spot on. I truly value them. Some of the end game situations are playing out before our eyes in real time. There is no need for him to act like a military expert or a technical expert in some industrial field. Such things are irrelevant to his basic work. A thought just came to me. You heard it here first. Have you ever read the science fiction book "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov? Peter, George Friedman, and other similar geopolitical analysts are like the Psychohistorians. A lot of the details are not important, but the big factors are. This is why I get a bit frustrated by all the China analysts who live in the west who are Chinese, for example. They get into the details of who is doing what to whom in Zhongnanhai and insist that westerners can't really understand what is going on and how things will play out. For another example, just look back at the Kremlinologists. There are even lots of people today who will say that if you hadn't lived or traveled extensively in Russia you can't understand what will happen. As President Joe likes to say, come on man.
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  5428. Let's have a government shutdown. The less they do the better off we are. Let's look at preschool. In Germany they don't really get into the education system until they are six. Are they lagging behind? Preschool is a scam. What matters is the parents. I live in the Chicago suburbs. We spend about 2/3 what the city does per pupil. Our facilities are world class. Our achievement rate are top of the scale. Although not as good as when I was in school. In my high school 100% graduated. 100% went to college. A good number went to top institutions. The rest went to very good schools. Now this was about 50 decades ago. What has happened to our schools? It is not money, but parental involvement. You can't solve that with government money!
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  5429. Russia does use their long-range bombers to attack Ukraine. These bombers are used to launch cruise missiles. They don't fly over Ukraine, that is true. Other speculation I have seen is that Ukraine used Soviet era cruise missiles, not modified planes. The technology to remotely pilot manned airplanes has been around at least since the 1950s (maybe the 1940s), so that option would not be a stretch.
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  5430. What a bunch of crap!!!!
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  5431. America is not in decline! Sure, our government is a mess. The government is not the country. Get over it. Federal elections come up every two years. Change is coming. If they are smart, they will know that. China is the country in decline. This encompasses economy, demographics and technology. They can't produce the advanced chips, for example. The biggest threat to the Chinese military is that their equipment is made in China. Research it. Numbers are not the determinant. The other issue is training and experience. They have not fought a war in over 40 years. They lost that one against a smaller country. If you look at their navy, a majority are costal defense ships. There is no scenario where we invade the Chinese mainland. If it comes to an all out war it will be ICBMs and SLBMs. We have a lot more and better. China is also very vulnerable when it comes to natural resources. Little or no oil. Can't grow enough food. If they start a war, it will be a lot like Japan in WWII. And the only place where they can go to take some of those resources is Russia and the former Soviet republics. That is not China in the 1930s when Japan invaded China. Putin would not stand for it.
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  5432. One thing many people forget about appeasement before WWII by the western powers is that the borders set up by those powers after WWI were, in many cases, arbitrary. The nation states set up were often remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. What has always interested me us that one often hears the names of regions in central Europe that have long histories but are not nation states today. What we have also seen is that some of these have broken up. Some were peaceful, others not. I wonder how the Marxist historians would have weaved this into their narrative.
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  5433. Aren't we supposed to be eating insects now. At least that is what the WEF and their associates are telling people in the west. Maybe these Chinese companies are just following the guidance.
    1
  5434. When I was 18, I went vegetarian (a lot of my friends at university were Indian). I did that for ten years and was very healthy. Then I started to eat a more traditional diet. Just before a life event (about seven years ago; not health related) I had gotten up to almost 200 pounds from about 150. I then changed my diet to pescatarian. I have seafood one out of three days. I don't eat any processed foods (never did much anyway). I am back to where I was in my 20s. My blood pressure is back to normal. I have no joint pain (I was beginning to have some). I drink only water and brewed tea and coffee (the last few years no alcohol). I do eat plenty of fats (butter with my morning oatmeal, cheese or nuts as a snack). I am in my late 60s. So, I am wondering about the meat part. Actually, I read speculation that the first humans that really started developing their brains ate a lot of seafood. This provided fats for their brains, the speculation goes.
    1
  5435. The US did not experience a government shutdown. Even if it had, these are not uncommon.
    1
  5436. Jake, I support Ukraine. On the other hand, I find you and other YouTubers, both Ukrainians and others, schooling Trump a bit irritating and actually kind of funny. You, as a group, have little or no background in geopolitics or international business and negotiations. Trump was president before, remember? He was dealing directly with Zalenski during his first term. During that term he also made some peace deals that no one ever thought would ever happen. He even kept "rocket man" in check. He told the Germans they were too dependent on Russian gas and were spending too little on defense. They laughed at him. Who's laughing now? He also prevented the completion of Nord Stream 2. You may want to get off your high horse. What we have spent on Ukraine is not a large amount. Just think about what we spent on Iraq and Afghanistan. Compared to that, it's a rounding error. Even the fraud in COVID funds is on a par with what we have sent to Ukraine. On the other hand, if the frozen funds are available, and they are, then they should be used first. That would also give Ukraine a known amount that is free from political issues. What Kellog also pointed out in that interview, by the way, in relation to the war not ending kinetically, was that Ukraine has already suffered more casualties than the US did in Vietnam in ten years. He could have added the Korean War, which is much more similar (duration, type of fighting). Ukraine has had four offensives. Three were successful. They all depended for their success on subterfuge and Russian incompetence. That is a good thing in war, by the way. The unsuccessful one was a run right at the Russians. They don't have the weapons (specifically airpower) that are necessary to be successful against an entrenched opponent. They are great at defense, but that will not win them the war. By the way, the Russians are basically the same. The only caveat to all that is if Russia falls apart, either their army or the whole federation, then the war would end. That is a possibility, but how long will Ukraine be able to wait for that to happen? Would you depend on that?
    1
  5437. The JCPOA was supposed to be a treaty, but Obama could not get it through the Senate. He implemented it via executive action. This is why Trump could reverse the deal. There was also support in the Senate for sanctions. The idea of flooding the world with Iranian crude is an interesting one. I had not heard that before. This would, of course, hurt Russia, which is ironic since Russia is becoming closer to Iran.
    1
  5438. Mark made me laugh when he talked about the "the Stalinists and the Trotskyites". Amusing, but so true.
    1
  5439. The Colombian president needs to cut back his consumption of cocaine. He is making no sense.
    1
  5440. Do you think that the US is not ready for nuclear war? I expect that the US force structure and posture is superior to that of Russia. Considering the corruption in the Russian military, I have to wonder how many of their weapon systems really work. Remember their initial invasion. It was so bad that the tires on their trucks were failing because they did not know how to store them. How about the military officers selling tank engines on the side? It is scary, really.
    1
  5441. China is a mess economically. They are going down, and I have reason to believe that it will be sooner rather than later. Their banking system is insolvent in western terms. Being a one-party totalitarian state they are trying to hide the fact. People are not able to get their money out of many banks. Think about that for a moment. The banks have 40% of their assets in real estate, I have seen reported. If they did mark to market accounting, as became the norm in the west after the 2008 financial crisis, they would all be declared insolvent just for that reason. In addition, their large state-owned banks have massive exposure to belt and road projects. Up to 60% of these loans are nonperforming. The scale of these projects is enormous. On another front, they have weakening consumer demand in the country. This will only get worse. So, they are counting on flooding the world with manufactured goods. This is already meeting with massive pushback by the only markets that matter, the US, EU and India. Even Brazil is conducting dumping investigations. Even in the new industry fields of EVs, solar panels and batteries they are facing significant headwinds. Their sales of EVs in Europe are underwhelming. The are massive numbers clogging up parking lots at ports. The solar panel and battery makers are experiencing a bloodbath due to overcapacity. In solar panels they have twice the capacity compared to demand. If you hadn't noticed, lithium prices have crashed. Again, in a capitalist system, there would be a readjustment, but the CCP persists in promoting these companies and even with that many are going under. Their population is shrinking faster than anyone had predicted. Check out this video, "China's demographic catastrophe: Could half the population disappear?" from the Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) channel. We have no economic models for this situation. Actually, all our economic models assume a market economy. So, all the talk about this economic indicator or that is just rubbish from a scientific point of view. The fact that we entrust our money to people who use such data and models is worrying, to say the least.
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  5442. I like the recommendations. My previous comment was a reaction to the belt and road trope. What they, and it seems you, are advocating for is industrial policy. In the changing world order, this is probably necessary. We see it with microchips, we see it with EVs and other industrial sectors. While capital might eventually see this as well, it is time to recognize that the world order is going to break down. For one thing, it is not the natural state of things. The last 70+ years have been exceptional in world history, especially as far as navigation is concerned. It is also massively expensive. People in the US have no stomach for bearing those costs anymore. The systems that resulted (the supply chains) are fragile. As a naval policy issue, the Navy required to continue to keep the sea lanes open is not the Navy we have or are planning for. Ironically, the drivers of this breakdown are two countries that benefited greatly from that order, namely China and Russia. Make no mistake, China is in terminal decline. It will be less than a decade before they collapse. Perhaps only a year or two (optimistically?). Russia, even before the war on Ukraine was on a similar trajectory, but more slowly. They, unlike China, have natural resources and can grow their own food. The war in Ukraine is just speeding up the process. So, I agree we need the policy, but I come at from a different perspective.
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  5443.  @GG-si7fw  You might want to check your facts. I am fairly sure that the use of drones was not a factor at that time. In fact, I don't think lots of artillery was a factor either. The big factor was ATMs. That was what all the talk was about back then. You are making a common the mistake in attributing the current state of play to some historical situation. Technology moves too fast for that.
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  5444. Behar absolutely should be in charge of a political campaign, for the Democrats. That is the best way to ensure they keep on losing.
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  5445. I fully agree with what was said in this video. What I am amazed at is why foreigners talk so much about the USA. In the whole English speaking world, and much of the rest of the world there is a fascination and obsession with the American politics and society. I am very interested in other countries, having lived in one (the UK) and traveled extensively through Europe and the Middle East. I assure you that most of my countrymen are not. When I talk about it, most feign indifference.
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  5446. BRICS, what a joke. Of the original countries, only India has a healthy economy. The others are basket cases. South Africa and Russia are literally falling apart. Brazil is always on the brink. India and China are close to having a war. Of the new ones, only Saudi Arabia has any money. Argentina? Are you kidding me! Egypt can't even feed itself. Don't fear the BRICS. As for dedollarization, give me a break. There is no problem if two countries (actually businesses within those countries) want to trade in the currency of one of them. If, say, Saudi Arabia wants to accept payment for oil in yuan, who cares. The only way that makes sense, though, is if the Saudis then turn around and buy lots of Chinese goods. If so, then great. The US doesn't care. If not, the Saudis are just shooting themselves in the foot. Don't forget the euro. That was supposed to rival the dollar. How has that worked out?
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  5447. Legacy is finished? As President Joe likes to say, come on man! Check out these headlines from YouTube videos: The Imminent Collapse Of EV Market in China! EVs Are Becoming So WORTHLESS that Even Dealers Don’t Want Them Back! my ELECTRIC CAR is now WORTHLESS EVen the DEALERSHIP doesn’t want it back! EVs are DISPOSABLE JUNK!! EV's, How Sh*t are they? - I've gone Back to DIESEL China’s EV Glut: Why a Million Electric Cars Are Gathering Dust! Just a few headlines to show the reality.
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  5448.  @goaway7346  Launching 1,000 missiles at any one target is unprecedented, and probably impractical. The US also has lots of other platforms to launch aircraft in the area as well. Heck, you would probably see B-2s and B-52s taking off from the US launching missiles at China. The new Marine doctrine also includes anti-ship missiles for their expeditionary units. There is also the new system for launching large numbers of missiles from cargo planes. One of the items I have seen, in relation to the rocket force in China, is their fear of being targeted by the US. I am sure that they would be happy to defend the country if it were attacked and would do their duty. On the other hand, they might be somewhat more reluctant if China were to take unprovoked offensive action. The most likely direction of attack on China is from Russia. Actually, it is even more likely that China will attack Russia if that country loses their war in Ukraine, and perhaps breaks up. The US, and the rest of the west and allies in Asia have no motivation to attack China. Your last point is a valid one. The US has the largest number of large attack carriers in the world. What I really expect to happen is that an amphibious attack on Taiwan would fail. It is not an easy thing to do, and China has no experience with such an operation. There, you got me going.
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  5449. His parents were actual socialists, right? I heard him interviewed a few years ago, and he explained his name. He was named after a founder of the Labor Party who was a socialist. So, it comes naturally to him.
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  5450. Darn, I had to buy another book. At least I could do it on Kindle. I am now having to build another bookcase (built-in, I don't like standalone ones). Actually, this was, as usual, a great video and conversation. Thanks.
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  5451. Wow! Chuck gets it. Of course, given his background I would expect that. Worrying about a particular town or village is just stupid. The Ukrainians are actually doing a good job. Sometimes I think they should have pulled back sooner from some of the positions, but in any event the meted out massive destruction on the Russian army. What this reminds me of is the Germans in WWII, with the Russians playing the Germans. Actually, the German problems back then had a lot to do with Hitler. In many, many cases his generals wanted to move back to more defensible positions, often taking into account their available manpower. Hitler almost always refused. This often led to the total annihilation of whole formations. He was also fond of declaring towns and cities "fortresses" and requiring that they be defended to the last bullet and man. He also kept too many forces on the periphery. Just think of what he could have done with the divisions in Italy, East Prussia and Norway in defending Germany proper. How about all those divisions wasted in places like Budapest? Fortunately, the Ukranian leadership is not making the same mistakes. The Russians are.
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  5452.  @melissacorbett4180  Fair point. My counter would be that what Hamas has done in Gaza, putting October 7 aside, would be reprehensible to those protesters. You can find Israels' actions problematic, but I would bet none (well never say none, I guess) of those protestors would accept living under Hamas rule, or probably PA rule at that. When was the last time there was an election in the West Bank. How much western money has gone to line the pockets of Palestinian leaders, from Arafat on down to the present? Another thing I wonder about is a clip I saw about a protest in the UK that was pro-Hamas. There was an older woman being interviewed who identified as a lesbian. She carried a sign which showed support for Hamas from the LGBT community. Do you get where I am going with this? Do you know what is done to gays in Gaza? Some of them seek asylum in Israel to save their lives. I have noticed this, and I am not gay, just a news junkie. This is just the stuff that bubbles to the "surface" without looking for it specifically. What more can there be? This is just one example of the impedance mismatch between the core beliefs of many of the protestors and Hamas. Protestors tend to be single issue focused, often supporting people they would find abhorrent. I have seen this from the time of the Vietnam War. Heck, I was born in Washington, DC. In good weather I used to walk by the White House and Lafayette Square on Sunday morning for brunch at an Indian restaurant (I was a vegetarian back then) and there was ALWAYS a protest going on. I have also lived in the UK and traveled extensively abroad, on and off for the last half century, sometimes for pleasure, often on business. Being of 100% Greek ethnicity I was often not presumed to be an American. This allowed me to have some very interesting conversations.
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  5453. I was reading the first part of John Cleese's autobiography, and he was at one point forced by circumstance to be a teacher in the school he had gone to. This was basically a primary school, or what we would call an elementary school. When he was hired the head teacher told him that he just had to stay a few days ahead of the students and that he already knew what he needed to know. It worked.
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  5454.  @elcastorgrande  You nailed it. I rarely view those "sensationalists", but when I do, I just shake my head. Vapid and stupid comes to mind.
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  5455. While I love your work, I find your estimates of what it takes to get any process done are way too pessimistic in general. As for the battery chemistry issue you are both spot on an off the mark. Spot on because lithium batteries are not the best for everything, but it ends up being the answer to everything. Bad, not good. There are other chemistries that are proven but are not usable in many of the applications we use lithium for today. An example is flow batteries for bulk energy storage at grid level which would be much more cost effective than lithium. But we have Musk pushing lithium batteries for the purpose. How long has he been at it, and it still is not significant and certainly not worth the money spent. Heck, for what he has spent we could use flywheels or supercapacitors and had a lot of money left over for a big party. As for research funding, there has already been lots. I live in the Chicago area, and we have Argonne National Labs here. Several years ago, they got billions (about five, I seem to recall) for just such research. Lots and lots of smart people. Did I say lots. Where is the answer? Or look at nuclear fusion research. How many billions do you want? As far as I can tell, it is still at least a decade away (yes, that is what they are saying in the UK for example today) from practical use, as it has been for several decades. There are some things that may never be practical no matter how much money you throw at them. Sometimes the answer lies somewhere else.
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  5456. No, Harold. If she did not know about the Holocaust and the racial aspect of it and of European society in general leading up to it, then she is just an ignorant person. For someone that ignorant to opine on the issue the way she did was really offensive (and I say that as someone who is not Jewish). Her apologies showed that she did nothing to try to educate herself.
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  5457. Flooding in China is an age-old problem. Look at the history of China going back to the beginning. The success, or failure, of flood control measures has been a factor in building up, or taking down, dynasties. I thought that all the dams the CCP has built since 1949, and the number is astronomical, was supposed to deal with this. Another failure of central planning. Speaking of commies. The idea of bankers making ideological pledges should be all one needs to make the decision to get out of, decouple from, China. How long until nationalization of Chinese firms? Can foreign asset seizures not be far behind? The recognition by Indonesia that their own industries will be harmed is a great step. It is also not in China's interest to keep dumping product. If a country loses its own industry and employment in the long run there will be no one to buy the Chinese products. So much for the planned economy and the idea of a single decision maker being superior. That Canada is using labor, and other practices as a reason to deter Chinese imports, is a stunning development. I have often pointed out that what the west has done is to export their pollution and unacceptable labor practices to China. I have actually seen this up close in dealing with a private Chinese company. How can a country have strong environmental and labor regulation and then ignore it another country while buying products from that country? This, as much as anything the CCP is doing to itself, could mean the end of "made in China". Just look at the number of countries, some erstwhile allies, that are doing dumping investigations of Chinese practices.
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  5458.  @omarzahraoui805  That was a political issue. The Israelis could easily have taken over Lebanon. The issue was the cost and external political pressure. The 73 war was an all out war. The Lebanon situation was a guerilla war where the state of Lebanon was not involved. There was no existential threat to Israel. You need to read up on the history.
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  5459.  @uzeirdautbegovic1148  Well, I wouldn't call Israel an empire, to start. Do you know what the word means. They are a nation state. Your comment about the Christians is way off base. Christians incorporate the Jewish scriptures into their own because they believe that Jesus was the fulfillment of those scriptures. So, it is not really a Christian thing, but a Jewish belief. As for the Arabs prevailing, I think you need to look at history, They were subjects of the Ottomans for centuries. Palestine, for example, was never an independent country. They were a province of the Ottoman Empire. Before that many empires over millennia. The Arabs only won independence because of the British, at least in modern times. Outside of Israel, the only other major conflict involving the Arabs was the Iran Iraq war. Over ten years they did not prevail, even though the Iranians were cut off from weapons sales from the rest of the world. Look at Yemen today. How is Saudi Arabia doing? I would not worry about the Arabs.
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  5460. Just watching the first item and had to stop. It is a recount of a previous story about the Pelosi visit. Journalism is broken in the Internet age. This is not the only outlet that doesn't get it. First, they waste my time recounting the Pelosi visit. Even if I had not followed that at the time, I would just open up another tab, look it up, and would be informed. This is not the old days of live television. They just don't get that. I even see similar things in some of the most prestigious print sources, which of course are mostly accessed online. In fact, I was still getting the print version of one as well. Then I noticed I was the only one on my block still getting a print paper. Whenever I read an article that does not give the "history" of the topic at hand, I give thanks. What does this tell us? It means that most of the people responsible for our news don't understand the medium they are working in. No wonder the MSM, and outlets like this that emulate them, are fading into irrelevance. No wonder people are getting their news from unconventional sources. I am old enough to have experienced the whole growth of the new information space and participated in it. Heck, my father was an early user of DARPANET, although he didn't name it. He just told me a little about what he was doing (I was in my early teens at the time). And yet, here, 50 years later we have people still doing television like it was 1960. Sad.
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  5461. Now I get it, Krystal. You are literally a commie. You go on and on about class interests.
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  5462. Love "Clouneytunes". So apt. Clooney has no legal leg to stand on. If his lawyers don't tell him that he could probably sue them for malpractice. The studios are protected by the very well known and time tested "business judgement rule". There is not even a valid First Amendment argument since that covers government action. And of course, there is no civil rights angle either since Clooney, a white male, is not part of a protected class. This is just another example of a privileged Hollywood actor throwing a hissy fit.
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  5463. Does she understand that a number of teachers who push this sexualization of children have been arrested for child sex offenses? I saw a report that 110 or so had recently been arrested including one who was on YouTube chiding parents on this issue. I know nothing about Qanon except what I read on Wikipedia, but perhaps they are right. Don't forget about the deep state. Not long ago it was reported that a number of CIA operatives were forced to resign because of child sex crimes. I have worked in the deep state, peripherally. I have known several CIA, or ex-CIA types. It is not a good environment.
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  5464. @rempseaheinamies9414 Tofu dreg the world!!
    1
  5465.  @chillxxx241  Great!
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  5466.  @loufrost824  In the US there is something similar to the inactive reserves. After separating from the military an individual can be called up for a period of years. This is not, as I understand it, open ended. So, they may not be in terrible shape if things got to that point.
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  5467. What the Republicans need to do is to pay attention to the candidates they are running. They also need to stop pushing fringe issues.
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  5468. I'm going to miss Girin. Don't get me wrong, he is a reprehensible human being, but like Prigozhin he is very entertaining in a perverse sort of way.
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  5469. The Trump administration absolutely recognizes that we are in a multipolar world. I saw an interview with Marco Rubio on Megyn Kelly's YouTube channel (titled "Secretary of State Marco Rubio on What "America First" Foreign Policy Will Look Like") where he explicitly talks about the multipolar world order. He gets it. Trump gets it.
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  5470. This is crap. I know how they were made and what they were used for. How did this come about? Like many historical channels you have nothing to say about how or why. Frankly, I am well read enough to basically know what you are going to say. That is why I am unsubscribing. Tell me why and how, then you might have something to say. Otherwise, you are just repeating what has been written for decades and widely available on YouTube. If that's all you have, then you are useless. Telling us what is a nothing. Why and how is everything.
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  5471. So, if textiles contribute 8% of greenhouse gas emissions, how much of that can be reduced by changing the system. I personally am not part of this problem. I tend to keep things until they actually wear out, which can be several years for cotton, and decades for a wool suit. I guess I am not a fashion follower. I am wearing Levis 501 jeans as I write this. These are the same type of jeans I first wore over 50 years ago. So, there are two aspects to this. One is on the fashion front. The other is to find a better way to recycle the textiles. The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is likely to be minimal. So, why is this an issue that anyone would be concerned about. If you could cut the emissions by 25%, then you would reduce worldwide emissions by 2%.
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  5472.  @atul_anand  That is not how you solve problems. If everyone has to consider twenty different things, they will be overwhelmed and will begin to draw back from solving any of them. That is just managerial common sense. There is also the matter of resources. You want to concentrate on solving the most pressing and impactful problems first. This then frees up resources to go after the next one, etc. You must also consider that people will not give up their whole way of life for this issue. In most surveys I have seen, climate change is not the top concern. Just look at what is happening in Europe. Due to the impact of the war in Ukraine, the EU has declared natural gas a green source. They have restarted coal plants. Even in Germany they are delaying the shutdown of nuclear plants. Heck, I even saw that Gretta Thunberg has called for extending the life of the nuclear plants. So, a small effect from dealing with clothing is not going to register.
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  5473. Oh, come on, climate change? Ice melts and water moves around. Both have been happening throughout the history of earth. You don't need to bring climate change into the mix. It sort of goes against your view of how science should work, doesn't it.
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  5474. What evidence do you have that the TikTok influencers are being effective?
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  5475. I was heavily involved with the Hispanic Caucus in Illionois for a while (earlier in the century). I am not Hispanic; I am Greek American. All my grandparents came from a poor area of Greece. One of my friends back then, who was a State Senator, described himself as an Independent Conservative, although he was a member of the Democratic Party. I actually ran into many people in that vein, black, Hispanic and others. That was basically a requirement in Cook County. We have to somehow convince the Hispanic community that the Republican Party is a "safe space" for them. The Democrats are screwing the legal immigrant Hispanic population. We need a great realignment. Trump was doing this. If you hadn't noticed, Trump was the most inclusive President we have ever had. He championed many policies that were lifting minority communities out of poverty. These are groups that did not vote for him. He did not care about that. They were Americans, and his whole program was about lifting up Americans, no matter how they voted. The people who voted for Biden are, quite frankly, reprehensible. They picked party over people. Look at the result.
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  5476. I fully agree. My only concern is that the Labor Party will watch this video and correct course. Oh, wait a minute. They won't watch the video, so I think that the UK is safe.
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  5477. Shahed drones "allegedly" used in Ukraine by Russia? Who are you kidding. The Russians don't even hide the fact they are using these drones. What bias. India "nonaligned"? That was never the case.
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  5478.  @distanceismyplastercast  What are you, a communist? That bill would have bankrupted the country and would have almost doubled inflation.
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  5479.  @distanceismyplastercast  You are a communist, aren't you. Giving money to people to buy their votes is a typically communist ploy. Give to the poor. The people who have made it in America mostly came over with nothing. Including my grandparents. They came with 4th grade educations. They built lives and businesses through hard work. Of their children, some went to college. Of their grandchildren all graduated from college, with many PhDs and MDs. They got nothing from the state. You are a real fool.
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  5480.  @hanfucolorful9656  Check out this video from the China Observer channel: "Foxconn Speeds up Exit From China: Workers Kneel, Apologize, Ask Them Not to Leave". Do you have the current levels of employment of Foxconn in China? How does this compare to a year ago?
    1
  5481.  @hanfucolorful9656  Foxconn has also shed more workers in other moves.
    1
  5482.  @hanfucolorful9656  So, why are the bulk of Chinese so poor?
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  5483.  @hanfucolorful9656  I just saw a report that iPhone 16 Pro series will be done in India. My impression is that a lot of the talk about Foxconn in China is propaganda.
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  5484. I am a supporter of Ukraine, but to say that the US needs Ukraine more than Ukraine needs the US is just plain wrong, and stupid.
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  5485. Why? Who is forcing anyone to invest in crypto. Even if the money laundering aspect was not present, this is not something for governments. People used FTX and other exchanges for convenience. They did not do their due diligence. Many of the ICOs are literally nothing, and people invest in them. I am not even ascribing any nefarious intent here. It is just stupidity. Do we really want government regulation to protect people from their own stupidity. These regulatory bodies are there to protect people from intentionally fraudulent activity in cases where a government backed currency is involved, not to protect people from any random product anyone wants to create. Anyone who invests in equities understands (or should) that they could lose all their principle at any time, without fraud. So, why protect crypto investors? Anyone who spent a little time and effort researching FTX, or other exchanges and coins, would know that these were risky, and potentially fraudulent, ventures.
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  5486.  @mikhelBrown  Exactly. Well put, and a lot more succinct than my comment.
    1
  5487. The UK has had a hard left socialist/communist movement from the 19th century. Karl Marx found refuge in the UK in 1849 and died in London in 1883. He wrote "Das Kapital" there. The Labor Party started out as a joint movement of labor unions and 19th century socialist parties. Corbyn is just the apotheosis of this movement. Starmer is just a bumbler in that regard. To the extent that this new party strengthens the center right, or more correctly the genuine conservative movement, in the UK, Corbyn and his fellow travelers will be doing a good thing.
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  5488.  @silencemeviolateme6076  Yes, but not for drinking. They use it for grey water purposes, as I mentioned. That is still significant, and lowers the amount taken out of the aquifer.
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  5489. Love the on-site portion of the video. You were very brave. I wonder if this is the right time to enter the US market with the new MAHA movement. This sounds like something that would be frowned upon. I personally do not use sugar or any sweeteners. I drink only water (sometimes with lemon juice), brewed coffee and tea. I am also more of a savory type of person. Not too long ago I had sweet tea at an event at school. Our professor was from Morocco and brought in some traditional dishes, including sweet tea. I felt really bad after that.
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  5490. @John Brower Goods are made in China, and all this was set up by "western" companies, for two reasons. First, cheap labor. Second, the idea was to then be able to sell into the Chinese market as they grew. India, for its part, had (has) lots of capital controls and other restrictions and bureaucracy, which had restricted their ability to grow. They still have issues there.
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  5491.  INDIA SUPER CLEAN 🇮🇳  Well, India is a great country, but not the only superpower by any means. The US is the largest, followed by China and Russia (based on nuclear power) then India. As for all the other stuff you mention, that is also common in the West, and India is not as safe as you make out.
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  5492. @John Brower Well, I don't see much of what you talk about with Indians in the US. Like many other immigrant groups they set up businesses and work hard. The highly educated ones go into technology. The less educated ones go into business like Dunkin Doughnuts and 7-11. In either case they do well. I don't see any statistics that they are ones who are on benefits. In fact, I know of none.
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  5493. @John Brower So, what does that tell you?
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  5494. Bring on Cultural Revolution II. Long live the Cultural Revolution!
    1
  5495.  @deborahfreedman333  Libel is a totally different issue. There are legal remedies. The fact that you conflate misinformation with libel shows an ignorance of the issue. As for misinformation, who is to say what that is? Just look at all the "misinformation" around COVID that turned out to be true. Are you going to be the arbiter of what is misinformation? Heaven help us.
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  5496. Such ignorance of history is staggering. YES! Might makes right. First, look a the termt International "Law". Are you so ignorant that you do not know how laws work? A "law" is only relevant if there is a way to enforce it. This guy is a "professor"? The academy have fallen so low, it scares me.
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  5497. I have a problem with the idea that gravitons interact even less with matter than neutrinos. Gravity is an intrinsic property of matter. Given that, this statement makes no sense whatsoever. No wonder no progress has been made in 100 years. The theoretical physicists are spouting nonsense. Every time they want to come up with a theory, especially of something that is not observed, they seem to come up with these new particles. Just think about axions and dark matter.
    1
  5498.  @rayparent1  I think you need to reread what I said. As for neutrinos, they are a different thing altogether. My understanding is that axions are, like photons and gluons, a force intermediator. Neutrinos are not. In fact, the person who proposed them, Wolfgang Pauli, said that he had done a terrible thing. He had postulated a particle that no one could detect. Neutrinos are a decay product, hypothesized because of conservation laws. So, what I was trying to say, obviously not very well, is two things. One is that the mention of axions along with neutrinos is irrelevant. They play a totally different role. The other is that they are force mediators, and to say that they do not interact with the stuff essential to the force they are intermediating seems a bit odd, don't you think?
    1
  5499.  @rayparent1  I can't agree with that. Making ad homonym attacks and not addressing the issue is a bad look. You have not contributed anything to the discussion. For one thing, did you watch the video? For another, the fact that no progress has been made in such a long time with so many people working on it should be an indicator. So, let's hear your take on it. Refute the argument. It might be illuminating for all of us.
    1
  5500.  @rayparent1  Don't be silly. Address the ideas. Refute them. That's how it is supposed to be done. To take your approach, what is clear is that you have no background in this field and are just reacting to someone disagreeing.
    1
  5501.  @rayparent1  You are either totally mistaken or didn't read what I wrote or are totally disingenuous. Stick to the details of what I said. I provided a lot.
    1
  5502. The comments by Jim Covello make a lot of sense and get to the crux of the matter. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal on July 22 titled "A Clamor for Generative AI (Even If Something Else Works Better)". The following quote from the article sums it up perfectly. "But as a result, some CIOs say they are aware of pressure to shoehorn the technology into areas best addressed by either older forms of predictive AI, or even something as simple as a spreadsheet." This is so reminiscent of the hype around Big Data. Big Data is useful and important, but not as much as was originally thought. In fact, I see little or no use of Big Data in the areas where it might be useful, such as advertising. Over the years I have been involved in Big Data, even teaching classes on it. I have talked to consultants in the advertising field, and they agreed with me that it is not being used effectively. The problem is the cost. The savings of better targeting of advertising on an individual level (the dream of Big Data) are so low, considering the cost of advertising in the digital age, that it is not worth the expenditure. The same will happen with AI.
    1
  5503. I am getting a bit tired of all this speculation around China's attempt to forge a new global order. Not going to happen. It is not up to China, or Russia. Neither have the power to do any such thing. It is actually quite likely that both regimes will cease to exist in the next few years. Just consider. Elites in both countries are gathering funds through corruption, and then sending them abroad, along with their families, I might add. As for the global south, that is a joke. For one thing it is not some sort of organization or monolithic bloc. It is just shorthand for what we used to call the "non-aligned movement". The total GDP of the global south is no more than 15% of world GDP. I am excluding India here, for obvious reasons. A good number of the nations of the global south have been ditching China and siding with the west after experiencing the belt and road debacle. Considering the very poor decision making of Xi in China itself, some ascribing to him some sort of grand strategy role is kind of stupid.
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  5504. Bussing, and flying, migrants is common in the US. The Federal Government does it. Various border states do it. The issue of migrants worldwide is a pressing one. While there are legitimate refugees, many are economic migrants. In the wealthy west these people take advantage of generous government benefits while often not assimilating into the local culture. Look at what is happening in the UK, France, Sweeden, the Netherlands and Germany, for example. After a recent spate of violent crimes in Germany the chancellor has come out to say that migrants will get minimal support. Don't take from this that I am an Orban fan, far from it. But this is a legitimate issue.
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  5505. @ The assistance to the UK was a loan. It was finally paid back earlier this millennium. The aid to the Soviets came after Germany declared was on the US. Get educated.
    1
  5506. @ True, but look at history. The English have always meddled on the Continent.
    1
  5507.  @ibrahimtall6209  Well, you say basically nothing. If you have a better view, then let's hear it. We might learn something. Otherwise, comments like yours only show ignorance and/or a lack of thought.
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  5508. A new government department. China is doomed! Get out NOW! The end is nigh.
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  5509. "...lines on the map..."? Have you been watching William Spaniel?
    1
  5510. So, 7 million EVs were sold. Out of how many. The percentage is what matters. I had an MGB, one of the better selling British sportscars. They sold an average of about 27,500 cars per year over their production run. I look at vehicles like that because they have some things in common with EVs. They are truly discretionary purchases, and many people bought them as "secondary" vehicles. Also, one has to remember that during their production run, 1962 to 1980, there were far fewer cars sold globally.
    1
  5511. The flaw in Richard Koo's analysis and prescription is that the needed stimulus is of a type that the CCP may well be incapable of providing. One aspect of this is ideological. Another aspect is capacity.
    1
  5512. Saying "...that once an independent state enters a political union with another country, it can't reclaim its previous status at will." ignores a lot of what happened in the past. Scotland entered into political union with England and there is an independence movement there that still persists. Then there is the whole situation with Yugoslavia. In Africa we have the example of South Sudan. In Asia we have the Pakistan Bangladesh example. Then, of course, there is the situation of the Soviet Union.
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  5513. The plain truth is that Ukraine cannot win. Their only chance of doing so is if their military support is at least doubled. The other problem is that to get the capabilities they need they need time. They don't have that much time.
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  5514. Sabine, in the 1970s an earlier form of AI, expert systems, achieved the same thing. I remember actually analyzing one at the time. Perhaps that is one reason why no one noticed. Another reason is that there is no real substance to the Turing Test. So what, a clever program gives plausible answers.
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  5515. I am not particularly against diversity, when it comes about organically. On the other hand, in at least one major sector, technology, the evidence does not support this thesis. I believe it was Scientific American a few years back. They looked at diversity in technology on a national level. Two tech powerhouses, the US and China, had among the lowest diversity level. South Africa had a very high diversity level. Is South Africa a tech powerhouse? Another data point is Sweeden. They have some of the strongest diversity laws around. Yet, when people are free to choose careers, differences between the sexes persist. Hire the most qualified person for the job, period. If you are concerned about diversity, then you have to encourage it at the educational level.
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  5516. I love the meme of the day! Brilliant!
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  5517. The only reason that platforms do content moderation is because of advertisers. Period! End of story! The users are not the customers of the platforms. It is the advertisers, So, if Peter or anyone else thinks they do it for some social good then they are woefully uninformed.
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  5518. You are broadly correct. You are also not the only one saying it. There is a channel I occasionally watch, Joe Blogs, where he has gone into details about this very issue of the national wealth fund where he projected it to run out this year. The problem with the Soviets and now the Russians is that they want to play with the big boys, and they are, at best, second tier. During the Cold War, even during the Viet Nam War, US share of GDP was not over 10%, and generally lower. The Soviet Union, to try to keep up, was spending somewhere between 20% and 40% of GDP on defense (the numbers are hard to pin down). Military power, especially in the industrial age, comes from economic power.
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  5519.  @ronblack7870  True, but Ukraine has support from the west, and will find a way to deal with it. They are also a propaganda asset. As we have seen, they have been allowed to call home.
    1
  5520.  @ЛеонидПушкин-в6ч  What?
    1
  5521.  @maggiereeves2534  What are you talking about? Did you read my comment. I was talking about the Chinese invasion of Vietnam, not the US war, or even the French colonial war in Vietnam.
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  5522. The stupidity of restricting our oil and gas industry is that we lose the tax revenue. This could be used help us transition, in a reasonable way, to alternatives. The only viable long term alternative is nuclear. And for that, we need to get rid of the restrictions on reprocessing fuel that Carter put in place. We also need to accelerate the development of alternative nuclear technologies. These have been around for decades. I have seen them, working for a large company in the 1980s that had nuclear development and research. How do you think we will charge our electric vehicles. They are charged at night. The sun doesn't shine at night. Do you want a lithium ion battery in your home? A big one. They are dirty to produce and perhaps not safe.
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  5523. The only value Joy's show had was as material for shows like Gutfeld. It was all negative value, racism, anti-truth and anti-Americanism. Good riddance. Don Lemon was no better.
    1
  5524. The whole idea of this attack was stupid and flawed from the beginning. First, the western allies, including the Soviets, were united at this point. Second, any setbacks would be solved by superior allied logistics. The US Britian, Canada and the French were not going to stop and negotiate peace because of a German offensive. That Hitler had no generals or advisors that could tell him that was the genesis of his downfall.
    1
  5525.  @aloysiusdevanderabercrombi470  Well, you watch, or you wouldn't have an opinion. The solution: don't watch.
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  5526. If Putin thinks he is going to mobilize now and get troops that are effective in the field in four months, he is dreaming. Basic training generally takes ten weeks. At that point the soldier has no specialty. If can take several more weeks to a year to train for a specific MOS. Tank crews are on the high side of that. Thus, by January he will have nothing but cannon fodder. An additional issue for Russia is that they have lost a large number of their experienced soldiers. There are the ones who would do the training. On top of that, the west is sending Ukraine more, and more types, of weapons and associated ammunition. Ukraine also has better intelligence, thanks to the US and other western allies. The west has also been training Ukrainian officers and men since 2014 to NATO standards, which are far superior to the Russians. Another thing to reconsider is the size of the two countries. Just look at the case of Israel, which is a good analogy to what we are seeing today. In 1967 and 1973 Israel was attacked by countries with a much greater population, equipped with Soviet equipment and trained by the Soviets. How did that go. Don't get too caught up in the numbers game. There are several other critical issues, such as air, communications and logistics. I don't see the Russians winning. I tend to agree with Ben Hodges that Ukraine will win.
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  5527. By the way, I got your book on the war and thought it was very insightful. I also am starting in on your Game Theory101 book. Good so far.
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  5528. A neighbor of mine put an American V8 (i forget whether it was Ford or Chevy, but I think it was the later) in a 260Z. This was back in the 1970s. He had the rear wheel wells beautifully flared to take much larger tires. It was overall fantastic. Then, late one night, he took it out on the highway, and it scared him. The car was so light, and the engine was so powerful. He sold it soon after that. Actually, he would fix up and modify cars as a hobby. It was always fun to see what he was working on. Kind of like you.
    1
  5529. I have personally seen the issue of worker environmental problems in China. I was not in China, but the owner of a number of factories, making fairly low-end stuff, came to the US. I had gotten to know his nephew who the company had sent to the US to build up business. At this meeting, where very high-end liquor was provided, a number of deals were made. I was sitting next to one of the other nephews who was talking to a US customer. He asked whether the customer wanted filtration in the plant for worker safety. The US customer said no. That would have driven up the cost. This stuff is real. What the west has done is to export pollution and mistreatment of workers. Add to that the poor quality of Chinese goods (I have lots of stories on that) and China has become a pox on the world. If one expects this population to suddenly embrace liberal democracy and rule of law, then one is dreaming. That is a fantasy of Chinese in the west.
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  5530. Dave, you are wrong about Title IX as well. It still exists. Obama instituted rules implementing it that Trump reversed. I really like your stuff and am an avid follower, but you need to get more educated on this stuff.
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  5531. In reference to the BLM protests you showed, it seems like the UK is acting as just an appendage of the US. A lot of the commentary on your media seems to do the same. Quite a change from 1776. Actually, I got a book when I was living in the UK called Bring Home the Revolution. This advocated bring a US style Republican style of government to the UK. What say you?
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  5532. I thought it was climate change that caused natural disasters.
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  5533. When I was young.. My sons always hated it when I said that, so I said it a lot. Seriously, though, when I was in my late teens through early thirties both men and women had high body counts. The guy who waited and waited is pathetic. Well, I better not go on because I might get into trouble.
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  5534. There is one answer as to why the US dollar is the reserve currency as opposed to a BRICS currency. If you add up the GDP of all the BRICS countries you just about equal the US GDP. That is five countries with many times the US population and less military power. There are lots of other reasons as well. If two countries, say Brazil and China want to trade in each other's currency, there is no one to stop them. This idea of creating "new" currency, which I hear all over the news and from pundits, is puzzling. Why not just pick one BRICS currency? There are lots of good reasons, but the most important is that of trust. You won't get that in the BRICS.
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  5535. The report on the stock market just reinforces what I have been saying for years. Western analysts and commentators treat China as they would a capitalist system. They are using models that do not apply. The Chinese government are literal communists. It's in the name: CCP stands for Chinese COMMUNIST Party (emphasis mine). Not taking that into account is just plain malpractice. The biggest indicator, one I have also pointed out, is that the government actively intervenes in the market, and not just with regulation. If you are a fund manager from a western country and you are putting client's money into the Chinese stock market under these conditions, then you are most probably breaching your fiduciary duty.
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  5536. As you note, Syria, along with Iraq, Jordan and most of the Middle East, is a fiction with borders drawn up by British and French imperialists after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The territory that is now Syria was conquered very early in the 16th century by the Ottomans. What this highlights is the issue of national borders that were drawn up by imperial powers all over the world, especially in the Middle East (southwest Asia to most Asians) and Africa. The list of wars is long, and many are going on today. We had, in Africa, Eritrea breaking off from Ethiopia. Ethiopia is also currently in a civil war right now and could split up. Somalia is another one that has broken in two. Sudan broke up into two parts and now the part called Sudan in civil war. There are many other such situations in Africa. In Europe there was the Yugoslavia situation. That was part of both the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In central Europe you had the situation with Czechoslovakia. That was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that, for convenience, gathered together two Slavic peoples, who, as it turns out, did not really like each other. Fortunately, their split was peaceful. To go back to the Syria situation, I recently saw a map of the French Mandate of Syria. It consisted of several "states". These include the State of Aleppo. the State of Damascus, the Alawite State, Greater Lebanon and Jabal Al-Druze. Lebanon was soon split off. So, one has to ask the question, why all the blood spilled to keep this fiction together. Whatever happened to the concept of self-determination of peoples? You also are being credulous about HTS. The leadership is talking a moderate game, but their fighters in the street are shouting (paraphrasing) "On to Jerusalem, on to Mecca". They still want a Sunni Arab caliphate. Of course, Turkey, or at least Erdogan, would love to see a Turkish led Sunni caliphate.
    1
  5537.  @victorjcano  Wow! That was a while ago. I wonder what you mean by that last bit though.
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  5538. Russia's air force remains largely intact. Good, because it sucks. Have you ever reviewed the situation between a Soviet/Russian supplied air force and a western one?
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  5539.  @JolaNat  Bro, not sure of what you are talking about.
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  5540.  @ub210  It is clear you know nothing about the issue. The SU-24 is a Soviet attack aircraft which has been obsolete in their air force for a while now.
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  5541. This whole field could be much further along if there were not fears of nuclear proliferation. In the 1970s this was a big deal. Come to think of it, that hasn't changed. US President Jimmy Carter brought in legislation that shut down reprocessing in the US and led us down a path to just trying to manage it. On the particle accelerator front, you don't need something like CERN, do you?
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  5542.  @ChristinaAlvarez-ft5ur  Thanks.
    1
  5543.  @apl315  Good point.
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  5544. The west needs to just stop supporting these criminals with social welfare. Period! The origin of these asylum laws is the situation with European Jews in the years leading up to WWII. Many left oppression in their home countries only to find out that they were not welcome elsewhere and thereby becoming stateless. This was a reprehensible situation. Things are very different today. Now, people come to the west for the freebies. This has to stop. Citizenship has to matter. I worked in the UK, under a work visa, for a US based company. If I had lost my job with that company my visa would have been invalid. I travelled a lot, and often when returning to the UK I was asked if I still had the job. Of course, I could always say yes. That was all well and proper. I thought that in the UK, Parliament was sovereign. It clearly is not if strong measure cannot be taken to solve the problem.
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  5545. You know you've made it when the FSB is after you. Reminds me of the Cold War days, especially when I worked at an aerospace and defense firm.
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  5546.  CommandoVault  So, how am I intolerant. I disagree with the premise and have historical evidence on my side. There have ALWAYS been two main sides/factions in American politics. We call them progressive and conservative today, but they have gone by many names. I listen to a lot of John Anderson's conversations. I generally really like them. I have also listened to talks by Rabi Sacks. I am also generally a fan of his. What I don't particularly care for is the current trope about divides in the US. As I said, they have always been there. I am old enough to remember the 1980s when voter participation was at a low. The reason given was that the tow main political parties were so much alike (each had their left and right wings) that it made no difference who was in power. Well, now we have major differences, that people said they wanted, and it is now called divisive. The Rabi just needs to look to his own country (which I lived in for a while) to see this in action.
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  5547. Yes, I think China will seize eastern Siberia. They are not happy with treaties that were signed in the past, and openly claim Vladivostok. They have also conducted live fire drills on the border, simulating and invasion of that territory. They are just waiting for the Russian army's defeat in Ukraine.
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  5548. Isn't this the channel that had many people on predicting that Trump would not win? You probably need to be a little more careful in picking your guests.
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  5549.  @simplyfoto  The Russians are now fielding T62 tanks because of shortages of their more modern tanks. They have not established air superiority. They have lost lots of planes and helicopters. They have hardly moved the needle after the initial push in the south. They are indeed being ground down. On the other hand, Ukraine is getting the latest equipment from the West, and it is proving effective.
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  5550. Repurposing chips from washing machines. This is precisely what Russia is doing.
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  5551. Why can't you show the footage of the Russian troops on crutches? I have seen it on other channels.
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  5552. The Belt and Road is dying. Is this a recent talk?
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  5553. The pronunciations in this video are horrible. Is there no way to get someone who can speak well? The poor pronunciation is evident not only in the "foreign" words, but in some of the English words as well.
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  5554. The Terminator was developed in response to the Chechen wars. They found that in urban areas their regular vehicles guns could not reach the upper floors of buildings. So, the Chechens just went up high to rain down destruction on the Russian attackers. That is why, in the Second Chechen War, they just leveled the capital city. No high places for the Chechens to shoot down from.
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  5555. Look good for the SNP breaking up. I never thought that I would see a Scotland that was so left wing. It is sad. Do the Scots even know what they are doing to their culture and nation? When I lived in England, earlier in the century, I was talking to one of my English colleagues. We both worked for a large US based corporation with significant operations in the UK. His comment about a devolved Scotland really stuck with me. He said that they should just dig a canal across the border and then, if they (the English) were lucky, the whole thing (Scotland) would just float away. I wonder what a vote in England regarding Scottish independence would reveal. By the way, I don't partake of the MSM. Too many good sources like this available.
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  5556. Artur, I enjoy your channel, but giving military advise is not your long suit. In war, suffering setbacks is a common thing. The successful side is the one that responds well to those situations and prevails. Probably the best historical conflicts to study are those between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The terrain is different, but in some ways not. In neither case was fighting taking place in mountains (with the exception of the Golan Heights) or heavy forests. There are lots of parallels here. Israel was much smaller in population compared to their adversaries. Their adversaries were Soviet supplied and trained, while Israel got equipment and training from the west. There were cases in those wars where the Arabs did well for a short time (and all the conflicts were very short), but the Israelis with their superior tactics and leadership overcame these initial setbacks. In the 1973 war the Arabs had some initial successes. Then, by the end of the war, Israel was even in a position to capture the Egyptian capital, Cairo. The whole thing lasted under three weeks. You need to review this.
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  5557. Matt, we'll know this is real when you install one on your roof.
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  5558. Some of what is said here is valid, but the thing I have a problem with is the "arbiter of truth". Think back to the COVID situation. A lot of what the government scientists said turned out not to be true. Not elected officials or bureaucrats, but scientists. If they can't get the science right, and this was because the scientists were playing politics, then what about people's opinions? This is not something that is going to be easy. In fact, it may not be possible. I would rather hear the crazy ideas so that I know what people are thinking, crazy as it may be to me. When talk radio took off, I was doing some business in the American south. When I was driving around, I would listen to the local stations. It was like another world. Of course, the media where I was (I am from Washington, DC) would never have carried this stuff. But you can't ignore it. People think it. Shutting it down on some platform does not make it go away. That is what free speech is all about. It is basically the right to air and hear any and all opinions. And don't ever, ever, ever forget (see how I did a Zeihanism) the government does not always have the best of motives. They are politicians after all, and many of them crave power over truth. I have seen it up close and personal. And as for the European Commission, if you are looking to them for guidance or leadership then you are either stark raving mad or at least undemocratic.
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  5559. Countering an invasion of Taiwan is even easier than indicated. Simply blocking trade, especially at the Straights of Malaca, would strangle China. Within months there would be deindustrialization, then within a year, mass starvation. And this action would be easy. In a bit of an exaggeration, one analyst said it would take a couple of destroyers. Whose, India's. Japan's of American is not important. In fact, India has also fortified nearby islands that could also do the trick. The Chinese leadership must know this.
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  5560. CCP collecting DNA. So, what is new. What about the companies in the US which provided DNA analysis to individuals. Where do you think that data went. China ahead in AI? Come on man.
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  5561.  @Honorablebenaiaha  So, are you calling him a nazi? What do you base that on. Are you a troll?
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  5562.  @telebubba5527  That is not how it is supposed to work. This has been repeated many, many times. It is also the basis of President Biden's recent executive order in the US. It has been a discussed at the European level as this crisis has escalated. You should get your facts in order.
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  5563. What people overlook is that, if the temp. really rises, MASSIVE tracts of land will open up that have been inhospitable to agriculture. These include Siberia and most of Canada. These lands are much bigger than any lost. As for higher CO2 levels, some studies have shown that on the edges of the great desert there has been a greening. This is supposedly because the plants can take in more CO2 in shorter time and thus don't have to have their pores open so long. This allows them to live with less water. There are going to be lots of changes, or perhaps few, but worrying about food insecurity is not one of them. In China they have had lots of floods. Impacts on food supply are worrying. On the other hand, studies show that the amount of food thrown away is massive. I volunteered at a food bank for many years. There were NO emaciated clients. In fact, a large majority were overweight. I would even run into clients occasionally at the supermarket buying high end products. We have plenty of food. If China has problems in the near future, the US has a bumper corn crop. Russia, having lost the Ukraine, has opened up agriculture in the lower Don valley and is now again an agricultural powerhouse. The list goes on.
    1
  5564.  @franceyneireland1633  Good point. The Chinese equivalents have been doing the same thing. There are massive amounts of money rumored to be hidden overseas so that when the CCP falls (and I believe it will) they have an escape plan ready to go.
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  5565. I have witnessed the rise of the semiconductor foundry business since the beginning. As the cost of making semiconductors rises with ever finer lithography it made sense to pay someone else to build the factory and make the chips. Modern high end semiconductor plants can cost upwards of $10B. That is the repetitive, high-volume part of the process. It is also not sensitive to the design or eventual use of the devices. Those are the high value parts of the business. A good example of this is the automotive industry. For example, in the very early days Ford (while Henry Ford was running it) basically received all the raw materials into their factories and made everything themselves. I am talking about receiving coal, iron ore (or perhaps pig iron) and even rubber. Henry Ford at one time even tried to make rubber production more efficient by creating rubber plantations using modern agricultural techniques. He failed, by the way. Over time it became more efficient to buy steel and tires and glass from others, who could make the same for lots of companies and thus gain advantage from scale. There is nothing magic about the foundry itself. It is the machines in the foundry and the designs that make it what it is.
    1
  5566. What is going on here? No lines on maps? Truly a strange experience.
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  5567. Larry Hu, using the term "softness" in regard to the real estate market in China is obscuring the issue. The real estate market in China is broken, and it will bring down the Chinese economy, especially its financial sector. He should call it what it is. Come on man! NOTE: I am not a big Joe Biden fan, but I am appreciative of his giving us such a wonderful phrase. Can't stop typing it. It just fits so many places.
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  5568. You make the mistake of assuming the Russian government is a real state. Quite frankly, it is a criminal enterprise, a Mafia if you like. Understanding that it all makes sense.
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  5569. Of course, he's drunk. He's Russian. Russia is toast.
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  5570. Metaverse? What a joke. Remember Second Life. It is still around but seems to have lots of porn content. As for Tuvalu, there are reports that it is actually growing. What is the reality here?
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  5571. You keep talking about the gas and oil Europe is buying from Russia. It takes time to change these things. Oil and gas infrastructure is vast and complex. Europe will decouple from Russia, probably by the end of the year. That is lightning fast as these things go.
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  5572. Remember the Powell Doctrine? Think back to the first Gulf War. All our presidents from G. W. Bush on have forgotten those lessons. How can one nation build in a place that was artificially created by the British? Iraq was another one. I think the real solution is carpet bombing.
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  5573. The fact is that slavery is still present in the Arab world. In fact, the Houthis in Yemen open practice chattel slavery.
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  5574. You do NOT want to go back to unregulated banking. Just look a bit at the history. Even in our regulated system, we have problems. It would be worse. As for digital currency, I wonder what they are really talking about. Tracking money digitally is currently trivial. You don't need blockchain. The idea of blockchain is a decentralized ledger. One of the ideas is that it eliminates banks, and their infrastructure, as trackers of money. Of course, bitcoin mining has just as big a technology and energy footprint as commercial banking, maybe more. What makes bitcoin different from fiat currencies has nothing to do with blockchain. What makes it different is that there will only be a finite number of bitcoins created. This is kind of silly when it comes to being a real currency. Over time, populations change, economic activity changes, technology changes. None of this is reflected in bitcoin, or gold for that natter. Notice that these things are valued in fiat currencies. Currency is a medium of exchange, not something with intrinsic value itself. Determining the "right" amount of currency that should exist is something that is not possible to do exactly. Fiat currency in inevitable.
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  5575. Just getting to this. One response to the post modernist claims is to cite the "better bomb theory". It goes something like this. You have two societies that have developed along separate lines. One is based on superstition and their understanding of the world is flawed. The other has developed a reasonable, objective science. The weapons of the first are chimerical. They have little or no effect. The weapons of the later are effective. When the two meet, the second, objectively based society wins because they have better bombs. The post-modernists seem to be like the former. In the end, objectivist thinking will win out. In science I think it certainly has. Perhaps in philosophy, politics, the liberal arts and social sciences will eventually throw off this post-modernist drivel and move on.
    1
  5576. On the Gutfeld show a few days back, they ran a Kamala laughing track. It was hilarious. What Musk's superPAC should do is just run that as an ad online and on TV. Game over.
    1
  5577.  @matthewrice3432  The ones I mentioned. In Vietnam the Vietcong and NVA had many more troops than the US did. The Tet Offensive showed that. Although they had some initial success, they were defeated. In the whole war the NVA did not win a decisive battle for a major city. They did it via subterfuge and infiltration. It worked for them, but it did not require a 3:1 ratio. In both the Iraq wars the US and its allies attacked with, at most, half the troops the Iraqis had. Both of those were very quick campaigns. It was the nation building that happened after the second that was unsuccessful. In the 1967 Israeli -Arab war Israel was the attacker and had half the troops of the defenders. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War. the Arabs had the three to one advantage. How did that go?
    1
  5578.  @matthewrice3432  They took it and then lost it in the same battle. So, pedantically you are correct, but the fact that they were unable to hold it means it was not successful.
    1
  5579. Yes, they fought in wars alongside Americans. They fought in many of those wars more as part of the British Commonwealth than the US. Their government is described as a "federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy". The King of the United Kingdom, Charles III, is their head of state. It is time for them to move on.
    1
  5580. The US has aggrieved China? During the Boxer Rebellion, the US was indeed on the side of the European imperialists. That was at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. In the 1930s, the US supported China, even setting up and sending the American Volunteer Group (also known as Flying Tigers) to help China. In the 1970s the US opened up to China and by the 1980s the US was opening up trade with the mainland. In 2000 the China Relations Act was signed and in 2001 China was granted MFN status by the US. Are those the actions of a nation aggrieving China? What has China done in response? Unfair trading and ownership laws. Theft of Intellectual Property (IP) and rampant counterfeiting. China now wants to displace the US in international affairs and states so often in very aggressive terms. This is curious because China's rise has been fueled by US and other foreign capital, not primarily through Chinese efforts. China's international trade has been protected by US military power. The CCP has also been pushing an overtly racist narrative. Remember the Japanese in WWII. They thought they could defeat the Americans because they were a "pure" race, and the Americans were "mutts". How did that go? China wants a multi-polar world order. They will get it. It is called imperialism. China did not do well in the previous era of imperialism and will do no better in the future one. If anything, the equation has become worse for China.
    1
  5581. The politicians are responsible for the Twitter debacle. They wanted a way to reach the public which was not controlled by the media. They legitimized it. You will notice that many politicians around the world make important policy announcements on Twitter. This is madness. That is what gives big tech its power. Stupid politicians.
    1
  5582.  @fuzzyspackage  Europe yes. Ukraine no. Don't get me wrong, I support aid to Ukraine. I am just pointing out that Europe actually has the resources to do this. They just don't have the leadership. They constantly bridle at US leadership until things go wrong then it is all up to the US to lead. NATO was conceived at a time when western Europe was devastated. There was no way that they could have withstood the Soviets. Until the dissolution of the Soviet Union the US had at least 300K troops in Europe. The US still has about 50K troops there. Presidents as far back as JFK have pointed out that the Europeans were not pulling their weight. Is that enough math for you?
    1
  5583. At about 11:35 you talk about the "risk of rearming". Really? That is the thinking of the late 19th century and early 20th century. Remember the naval treaties of the time? They tried to limit the growth of military power back then precisely because of the phrase you use. On Chinese spending, you have to factor in corruption. I am not joking here. It could be as much as 50% of the higher number you mention.
    1
  5584. In the US in that type of time period, the US will experience about 800K deaths just from unintentional falls. That is just the US, while your figures are for the whole world. So, while I find this video interesting, as I do all of your videos, the issue is not as big a deal as you seem to imply. What it does tell me is that natural disasters are not a big deal. If this is the largest category, 56% of natural disaster deaths, then that means 1.33M deaths over 20 years (did I get my math right?), worldwide for all natural disasters. In researching the numbers for this response, I went to the US CDC web site. Just looking at the unintentional injury deaths, as they call them, the big categories are unintentional falls (as above), motor vehicle and unintentional poisoning. The last is about 50%. Now this is just the US, so projecting out for the 20 years, the number of earthquake deaths is insignificant. And that is worldwide compared to just the US over 20 years. That may be why there is not such a massive research thrust in this area. It is difficult, we don't have complete models and the data sucks.
    1
  5585. By the way, I have experienced some earthquakes, from small the medium. No large ones yet. In one I was on an upper floor of a high-rise hotel in downtown San Francisco. I was calling my wife to check in everything began to sway. Fortunately, it was a very modern building and meant to absorb such shocks.
    1
  5586.  @markdowning7959  So what? By saying that you ignore the basic role of science, and the last sentence of my original comment. The role of science is to describe the physical world. One can't describe anything without language. That is built into our nature as intelligent beings. Without language (and I include maths here) it is all impossible. Just think about it. When we search for intelligent life in the universe we search for signals (information) that are not the result of natural phenomena. In other words, language. Language conveys information.
    1
  5587.  @markdowning7959  Without the map you are lost. Everyone knows language has its limitations. That is high school level stuff. Verbal descriptions are indeed limited, thus math. You may also want to look at Stephen Wolfram's work. He is trying to describe nature in terms of computation. Whichever way you go, there is some sort of "language". So, I ask, what's your point?
    1
  5588.  @markdowning7959  Now you understand.
    1
  5589. All this speculation about the CCP having some master plan for diverting the west so that it can attack Taiwan is just so much drivel. There may be some truth to it, as far as CCP thinking goes, but the effectiveness of such an approach is nil. It is clear that the CCP is bankrupt as far as ideas go. The corruption endemic to its operation has destroyed any semblance of real strategic thinking. Attributing some master intelligence to Xi and Putin to overcome the west is just folly. Look at how well that is working out for Putin.
    1
  5590. Should DEI be legal? What about civil rights law, equal protection and the Constitution?
    1
  5591. Oh, no! The Mongol "hordes".
    1
  5592. Not just that. China is one of the biggest polluters on the planet. Where they have standards, they don't enforce them. I would never buy food from China. I once looked into the issue of cyanide in rice. A small amount is present naturally. The UN has a standard for human consumption. China has an official standard that is half the UN's. When rice from 60 or so rice growing regions was tested, all but two were well above the UN standard. Another example is rare earths processing. This is dirty business, and adhering to western standards is expensive. The US used to mine and process its own. Now the processing takes place in China, and it is horrendous, both for the environment and the workers. This is what our companies have done. They export pollution to China. The EU has recognized this in terms of CO2 emissions. They have come up with a carbon border tariff. Now, if they would do it for other pollution that is above their own standards, then China would be finished. Oh, and one other example I am personally aware of is instructive on how China views these things. I was once at a meeting where the head of a group of factories in was in the US. I was a friend of one of his nephews who was based in the US. They were there to drum up business. I was sitting next to an American that wanted a product made. The Chinese gentleman asked if he wanted air filtration to protect the workers in the plant making the product. This would, of course, increase the price. The answer from the American was no. He didn't care. He couldn't be sued for any health issues as the product was made in a factory he didn't own in another country. Why spend the money.
    1
  5593. I have been to Fredricksburg, TX. Cool town, I was reading a biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, and in it the author stated that when LBJ was growing up, the newspaper in his town was in German. Actually, there was a later migration to Texas by Germans as the state was trying to fill out the land, and they actually recruited people in Germany to move to the state.
    1
  5594. Get out of the UN altogether. It has not lived up to its promise, and in fact has become bloated and irrelevant.
    1
  5595. Wrong about the burst setting! The M16A2 had 3 round burst because of the feeling that troops were wasting ammo on full auto. This was when we still had conscription. The M16A4 and M4A1 brought back full auto because we had a professional army and the worry of conscript troops wasting ammo was gone.
    1
  5596.  @texasoilfields  The China Update channel.
    1
  5597. The idea that US government spending has caused the inflation we see strikes me as either incorrect or incomplete. For one thing, prior to COVID the US was spending massively and inflation was well within the 2% target. In fact, there was talk about deflation. I lived through the 1970s inflation, and it was FAR worse than what we have today. And it was caused by the same problem. Fuel prices. PERIOD. It was aggravated by the government's response. Today, we have a US administration that is hostile to fossil fuels, which are the only reliable energy source we have. We could be producing much more and exporting a lot. Instead, we see rising energy prices in the US, which is bonkers. As we see with the war in Ukraine and the disruptions it has caused, it is energy costs, that feed into everything else, that is the proximate cause of inflation. The excess government spending is not good, but is not the major cause. If that were the case, then how do you explain the previous couple of decades of low inflation.
    1
  5598.  @brucetownsend691  Tosh! The predictions made are for average temperatures. A hot summer with a cold winter still can average out at the nominal temperature expected. Also, you neglect that one year does not make a trend.
    1
  5599.  @brucetownsend691  No, you need to look at the science. One year of data does not make a trend. I have been around long enough to remember hearing about floods and droughts in the areas being affected today from decades back. I have not seen any evidence of increased extreme weather in many areas. Again, one year does not mean anything. From what I have observed, hurricane data shows a relatively low degree of activity. In the Midwest, where I am, tornado activity is lower than normal. Higher than average temperatures, as you bring up, would mean that these phenomena would be widely dispersed. Come back in ten years, and we can figure out if what we are seeing is a real trend or just natural fluctuations.
    1
  5600.  @brucetownsend691  If you believe the "experts", when their models cannot predict what happened in the past, then you do not understand how this works.
    1
  5601. Wow! I used to fly business class and first class all the time. I had memberships in multiple airline clubs. I never saw any of that.
    1
  5602.  @seanmoran2743  Well, the US is doing the same with Chinese securities. As for what China and Japan are doing, it is mostly an issue of the currencies.
    1
  5603. All this talk about the "global south" is so much drivel. There is already a migrant crisis from this area. It is already causing a hardening of attitudes in Europe, and it has nothing to do with the Ukraine war. Increasing the flow will only result in a further turn to the right in Europe. This is already happening. The global south has no real power, either economically or militarily, unless you include India in that grouping. As far as Africa is concerned, the population has grown, with the US backed rules-based order, to more than its carrying capacity. If Africa is forced to go back on its own resources, the population will have to shrink. In the extreme case we might see some form of colonialism returning as one the few things the global south has to offer is natural resources. China has been trying to spread influence in the global south through its belt and road initiative for years. The quality of the projects is poor, they are not well thought out, and many have been shut down. At last count, 60% of the projects and countries participating are experiencing financial difficulties. China is going to lose its shirt over this. If this is what Putin is counting on to help his cause, then we don't need to worry.
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  5604. It is good to see Konstantin again. I haven't noticed anything on his channel for a bit. The future of Russia seems very bleak indeed. Comparing it to Germany, or indeed, Japan, is not quite valid. The big difference is that both of those countries were defeated, and their territory occupied. Not only was their territory occupied, but it had been devastated by the western allies. Their constitutions were actually written by the Americans. At first American troops on their territory were there to keep them in line. Now they are there (to this day) to protect them. The success in those cases really drove the US in the following decades to look at "nation building" as a viable option. The situation in Russia is totally different. No one has any interest in occupying Russia, except for the Chinese. Maybe the Russians will sell eastern Siberia to the Chinese. These types of things are done. The Louisiana Purchase and Alaska are examples that are directly analogous. Maybe the Chinese will just take it. Another factor is nukes. There is also the fact that "nation building" has been totally discredited. It started after Vietnam. Most won't remember this, especially in Europe, but George W. Bush ran on a platform of opposing "nation building". Then 9/11 happened. That was a detour. We are back on track in the US. The other issue in Russia is its makeup. It is actually an old-fashioned colonial empire. It is far more likely that it will fall apart. To keep it together requires a strong central authority. I have seen some scenarios where it breaks up into separate warlord run blocs. There might be some regions which have unique ethnic populations that might break away, much like after the end of the Soviet Union. There is also no guarantee that the resultant states will be democratic. There is no long-standing tradition of democracy in Russia. In fact, it is still basically a feudal society. If you don't believe it just look at the videos of people appealing to the czar, I mean Putin, for redress of grievances. There are plenty of them. I say this all the time, but Gogol's novel "Dead Souls", written in the mid-19th century, accurately describes Russia today. I mean that literally. Not only the feudal aspects, but the endemic government corruption as well.
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  5605. The sad fact is that the people of California voted for these clowns. They are getting what they wanted. It is on them. I just want to see Federal money to California stopped or severely limited.
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  5606. I miss the Cold War. I got to do lots of cutting edge and interesting research with basically unlimited funds. Even at the peak of the memory chip shortage I was able to buy massive memories for my projects. Ah, the good old days.
    1
  5607. Why all this mania about BYD? Look at the chart you put up. Look at it! BYD only surpassed Tesla for one quarter. That is not a trend in statistics.
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  5608. Copying the Ukrainians and Russians is the path to disaster. Neither is any good at offensive warfare, especially against prepared positions. The Ukraine War resembles very closely the Iran Iraq War of the 1980s. How did that go? Look it up. Also, drones are so yesterday. The US military has had small observation drones for a while now. In addition, directed energy weapons are already coming online to counter drones. The Israelis have already demonstrated this capability against drones, mortars and rockets.
    1
  5609.  @TheFirebird123456  Thanks for clearing that up. Of course, Lehman was an investment bank, so the regulation did not work so well in that case.
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  5610. There is probably a lot more going on in the background than we can see. I saw an article which used the term "Kremlinology", which is a Cold War blast from the past.
    1
  5611.  @dongshengdi773  Go for it!
    1
  5612.  @happyzahn8031  Yes, I have seen that. I actually was a bit of a gear head in my youth (a long, long time ago). We did a lot of crazy things. My brother sideswiped a car in his hopped-up Triumph GT6 one time, and he had us all convinced he had swerved to miss a squirrel. I didn't find out till much later that he was racing down a crowded street at a very high speed and lost control.
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  5613. Hey! What's wrong with Brussel sprouts?
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  5614. The CSTO has probably one tenth of the conventional military power of NATO. I think I am being generous here, and I have dealt with this stuff since the late 1970s. In addition, many of these states are in Central Asia, and are irrelevant to Europe. They also have to contend with Afghanistan and China. They are a non-issue. Belarus is a country of 10M people, and is politically unstable. It is really a non-issue.
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  5615. You are spot on about social media. When news outlets report that someone on twitter made a comment about something pushing back against someone, I knew they were lost. I mean how much effort does it take to tweet something. Frankly, it is made to be easy. That means that you will get all sides coming out. That in itself is not bad. I would rather hear what people have to say. That doesn't mean they are right or that I have to agree with them. It's supposed to be a debate, not a diktat.
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  5616.  @christianlibertarian5488  I stand corrected. Brilliant!
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  5617. What the interviewer does not understand, when she makes the statement that the US was supportive in the past in such situations, is that in those times we were fighting a real ideological war. The real threat back then was the USSR. They are gone, and the world order set up by the US after WWII to oppose them is no longer necessary. We have coasted along since the dissolution of the USSR and now are pulling back. As the general rightly points out, the stuff we get from China is low quality. Even higher end electronics we get from there are only assembled in China. All the important stuff is designed and built elsewhere.
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  5618. All the talk about efficiency is valid, but not important to consumers. We have had one type of vehicle for so long that our measure of efficiency is biased toward that. What matters to consumers is not MPG but cost per mile to run (just talking fuel). Gasoline prices fluctuate wildly, as do electric rates (although not as much for the later). The best measure for the consumer is cost per mile. If you have your own solar system (or wind turbine) then your cost may be low. On the other hand, in places like the UK, with minimal solar resources, the cost of electricity is high (actually, this is true all over Europe). I have seen reports that the cost per mile of an EV is basically the same as for ICEs in the UK. The fact is (and I have done this analysis in the past) that the ownership cost of an EV is always going to be higher than the cost of an ICE vehicle, even with high gasoline prices.
    1
  5619.  @theCosmicQueen  Actually, we had plenty of time and took it. We were all grown. We even offered to my brother the opportunity to stay there a couple of years so that he could rebuild his house (which was a classic old house, but in need of refurbishment). He declined.
    1
  5620.  @eyasulegesse6208  There used to be a program in Baltimore where you could get a townhouse for basically nothing. You would have to about $25K to renovate it. I had a friend who did that and it was really nice. That was in the 1970s. When I lived in the UK, early in this millennium, there were places in the North where you could buy one for 50p.
    1
  5621.  @theCosmicQueen  Have seen that. When I moved into my current location, I looked at 200 houses with a realtor. Ended buying a FISBO. Felt sorry for the realtor, but we got a great deal. That was during a recession. Moved into my current house a few years later. Bigger, with more bedrooms and bathrooms and a three car garage as opposed to two cars at the previous house. Was making much more money and decided to upgrade. Less that 1/2 mile away. At the time was able to buy non-contingent. Was the third offer at full price, but the non-contingent made the difference. In selling our first house we had a bad experience with the realtor. Not planning to move again.
    1
  5622. I thought TRW stood for "The Right Way". Old inside joke.
    1
  5623.  @richardclifton4120  I have to agree with you. I refer to this reporter because she us mainstream media.
    1
  5624.  @robertagren9360  Yes, but that service was tied up with an "asset", FTT. Of course, FTT was actually worthless.
    1
  5625. Well, I think the state idea is better. This was actually put forward during the independence referenda for Quebec. It would actually involve creating multiple states, not just one. At least the US has a constitutional process for welcoming in new states, so nothing on that front would have to be done. We even have the example of Texas which was an independent republic for a decade before joining the US. There are issues of regulation and others that would need to be addressed. It needs to be done in a way that is established, not in some new way as Mr. O'Leary suggests.
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  5626. The mandate of heaven has been withdrawn from the CCP.
    1
  5627. The reforms needed will never be carried out. These local financing vehicles are a prime source of corruption. And that corruption is within the CCP. Don't think Xi's anti-corruption drive will have any effect. That drive targeted enemy factions within the party. As for consumer spending helping to pick up the slack, you haven't looked at the actual situation beyond the government statistics. Much of China's growth has been artificially inflated by infrastructure projects, many of which are in the red. With individuals having a limited number of investment opportunities, they will keep their money in cash. Their main investment vehicle, housing, is crashing, and there is no foreseeable way that recovers.
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  5628. At about 7:30 a statement is made about costs for individuals rising. Can this be true. The issue in China these days is deflation, not inflation. As for those doctors (and anyone else who receives bonuses) complaining about not receiving them at the end of the year, it is clear that they do not understand economics. If you create a lifestyle that depends on bonuses, then you will be hurt at some time, no matter what you do for a living. You have to live based on your salary and then use the bonuses for extra things that you might want. Of course, China being a communist country and only opening up not too long ago, this ignorance of how things work is understandable.
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  5629. You know, I am a big fan of Fox and especially of this show. On the other hand (you knew that was coming), with serious issues like this, sometimes the stupidity of the discussion amazes me. First, the Department of Energy is involved because they run the national lab system. Those labs were first set up for nuclear research. So, they bring expertise in running such a system, not in the content of research. Second, and I am surprised the former detective did not understand this, that confidence level in the report is based on how comprehensive the sources are. Because no one can get into China to do on the groundwork, there will never be a high confidence level. All the evidence we have on the virus itself and issues around what China did externally can be "known". What happened inside of China cannot. That is the whole issue. The media needs to up its game. Fox is one of the better ones, but they still don't have enough people who understand how things work. Disappointing.
    1
  5630. He doesn't. The property crisis is of the CCPs own making. Frankly, they had to do something because the property companies had become Ponzi schemes. Now they are trying to recover from their own mistake. As Peter Zeihan likes to point out, China is being run by a cult of personality. All the smart people are gone. We are now seeing many questions China's economic statistics. The latest is from the CSIS. People are increasing looking for proxy data that might shed light on the situation. All of them indicate that China's economy is not as big as claimed. As for the real estate market, there is no way it can recover. It is already overbuilt and the population is shrinking. Then there is the inconsistency of CCP policies. One day it is housing if for living in, the next it is invest, invest.
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  5631.  @johnoktavianus7738  Many of these commentators are financial advisor types. I wonder of there is some sort of collusion going of. Heck, even Ray Dalio has cooled on China. Imagine that.
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  5632.  @richiesd1  You must be kidding. They are threatening Taiwan and India with actual war. We don't hear much in the West about the Indian situation, but the Indians are expecting something to happen, perhaps soon. They also, surprisingly, have lots of issues with the Russians, and are encroaching on their sphere of influence in Central Asia. Of course, there is the South China Sea. They are also overfishing in many areas, going all the way to South America, and ruining fisheries there. In terms of industrial policy, there is too much to cover here, but IP theft, general property theft and an opaque legal system are driving away foreign investment. Just try to get sell your property in China and get the money out. The horror stories abound. Most of this has gone on for a long time, but Xi is adding new twists all the time. During COVID, a health emergency, they restricted the availability of equipment that was needed. Is that the action of a reliable supplier. Is that enough for you?
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  5633. The thing is that in a representative government, the legislators are meant to represent the people of their districts. If you want PR, then you need to get rid of the constituencies.
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  5634. Are the Chinese people stupid? This may sound harsh, but why do they put up with this. A monthly penalty subscription? Are you kidding? This is just mob protection money. The government of China has totally devolved into a Mafia style organization. This is very much like Russia. If the people don't do something soon, they will all be slaves. Maybe they already are.
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  5635. Financial "rectification". The text Tony read out was pure retro commie speak. I was going all weak at the knees. I'll stop now before I make inappropriate comments. Of course, Bishop is correct. What he doesn't say (but I am sure, would hope, he understands) is that ALL of them, that is CCP officials, are guilty, right up to the top. The system runs on corruption. Its only goal is to enrich its members. That is the only way for the CCP to maintain power. Without the graft there is no reason for a CCP member to support the party. None! Do you really think people in the CCP, especially higher-level officials, believe in Marxism-Leninism? In those countries where it has been tried and was not imposed from without (Russia, China and Cuba) the system devolved into a kleptocratic oligarchy. Even among the princelings, those that stayed in government saw the ones going into business doing very well. This is all about money, not ideology. Frankly, from a Marxist point of view, the three countries I mentioned, were not candidates for a socialist revolution. He expected the revolution in countries like Germany, the UK or US. They had a developed industrial proletariat he considered necessary for socialism and then communism to take root. Russia, China and Cuba were peasant societies (China and Cuba are still). The revolutionary leaders got these peasants on side by offering them "free stuff". That free stuff had to be taken from someone, of course. It was a bait and switch, though. They seemed to be giving it then took it away. The only way to maintain power at that point was repression and graft.
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  5636. China actually has collapsed in on itself over and over again throughout history. Don't forget, at the end of the Qing dynasty China fell into another one of its many warlord periods. Mao was just one of the warlords. And don't make too much of the "world's factory" rhetoric. By the early 20th century that was the US. Then, from the 1970s it was Japan. Then it was China. The first two never actually shrunk in their economies but left the low end to China. Labor rates in China are now too high for the productivity level obtained. The expectation was that, like Japan, China would move up the value chain. They haven't. They got old before they got rich. China cannot feed itself. If they do start a war, which it seems Xi wants to do, they will starve. What is the point of all this? I know people who survived the cultural revolution. It was, by all accounts horrendous. These people came to the US and did very well for themselves. China has the human capital if they would use it properly. That is not likely under the CCP.
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  5637. To talk about internal politics in the US delaying aid as something unique, you have to be ignorant of what has gone on in some EU countries. While I support Ukraine and US aid to Ukraine (it should be larger and include "kinetic" elements) the plain fact is that this is something that Europe should have been able to do itself. The GDP of the EU plus UK is ten times that of Russia. The population of those is at least three times that of Russia. It is also about 80% that of the US. The EU plus UK would be the second largest economy in the world. Europe has to get its act together. We constantly hear about Europeans bridling at the leading role of the US in both international relations and business. Well, is Europe able to change that? There is lots of talk but do the Europeans, people and politicians, who advocate for these things have any idea what the economic cost is and what would be needed to be done in reforming their systems? As President Joe likes to say: Come on man!
    1
  5638. Workers' rights? Social fairness and justice? Where do you think this is? We are talking about CCP controlled China here. Come on. They are a bunch of commies. Do the people of China not have an understanding of what that means? I have seen it reported that the chief judicial authorities have stated outright that their purpose was to support the CCP, not to ensure rule of law or fairness.
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  5639. That is not what the temperature in the climate models measure. The mean global average temperature rise, which is the measure that is used in climate treaties is the annual average temperature globally. Reaching the 1.5deg threshold in summer is to be expected. Where I live we are well below the average temperatures. It is not until the year is done that one can measure the average temperature for the year. Kind of obvious, isn't it.
    1
  5640.  @LaurentCarty  Yes.
    1
  5641.  @LaurentCarty  No problem.
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  5642. The whole area of astrophysics is based on models and simulations (the big bang model) that, based on the idea of "dark matter", are invalid. These models depend on quantum mechanics to explain the early universe prior to the appearance of the cosmic microwave background. They do not, in any way, predict dark matter. Dark matter is nowhere in the standard model. So, which is right? If dark matter exists, the standard model is likely wrong. If the standard model is correct, then dark matter is just a fantasy used to fit observations in astronomy. So, which is it?
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  5643. Thank you for the detailed discussion. I do appreciate your channel. We do have different views on foreign relations and policy. I do not see the lack of attention to this, or other, conflicts in Africa as being primarily an information bandwidth issue. I see it as a result of the outside world not being able to do much to stop such conflicts. When looking at what it would take to really resolve this conflict, and the others in Africa, it is clear that the cost in blood and treasure required is not in the interests of just about any outside nation. I personally have been interested in this region since I was a boy. One of my grandfathers was very interested in everything and had a subscription to the National Geographic. The was a lot of coverage of Africa, of course, in the magazine. This was over half a century ago. He was from a poor area in the central Peloponnese, called Arcadia. As was typical, he had a fourth-grade education. As with all my grandparents he emigrated to the US and became a successful. He was the one who got me interested in foreign affairs. Being born in Washington, DC didn't hurt either. I remember following what was happening in Eritrea, as well as Rhodesia, South Africa, Angola, Uganda, Nigeria, etc. That certainly makes my perspective somewhat unusual, I will admit. I have since met people from Uganda and Eritrea, and frankly they were reluctant to discuss their homelands. One even tried to hide his origin (Uganda) from me for a while. Perhaps what the Russians are doing, through the Wagner Group, in Sudan and throughout Africa, is the only rational response. They use Wagner to secure access to natural resources, not to try to resolve any of the pressing issues in the region. That is not to say I support what they are doing. On the other hand, Africa today seems to be what Africa has always been to the Europeans, a source of natural resources. I also have a bit of a problem with making this about civilian suffering. This is typical for people in international organizations. It generally does not resolve anything to concentrate on these issues. Even if a ceasefire can be effected on humanitarian grounds, it almost never resolves the underlying issues and thus things will flare up again, sometimes more violently.
    1
  5644.  @jaydee6268  Thanks.
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  5645.  @boiscooka232  Who are you referring to? Who is "Bro"? I will say to you what I said to my sons when they were young and getting frustrated with something. Use your words. If you have some issue with what I said I would definitely like to hear it. Perhaps one or both of us would learn something. As it is, your comment makes no sense or is insinuating something not nice.
    1
  5646.  @boiscooka232  Why is that relevant? It has nothing to do with my comment. No one denies that there has been massive growth in China over that timeframe. Of course, that growth was driven entirely by foreign investment. What you want to look at is the GDP per capita. China is still stuck in the "middle income trap". Also, I recently read that a majority of Chinese are involved in agriculture. In the US, which is much more productive in that area, the number is about 3%.
    1
  5647. Excellent point. Another thing to consider is that the early theorists of National Socialism, such as Rudolf Jung, looked longingly on Germany's pastoral past.
    1
  5648. In Russia in the next year or two (at most) and China by the end of the decade (at latest).
    1
  5649. NATO is not there to protect American interests. This shows ignorance of what NATO is. It is a defensive alliance specifically designed to protect European countries from Soviet, and now, Russian aggression. It is solely designed to keep the peace, through strength. As the wars in the first half of the 20th century showed, not being willing to stand up against aggression merely invites aggression.
    1
  5650.  @samg6548  You are sadly mistaken. Do a little reading. Why do you think the Cold War never turned hot?
    1
  5651. Remind anyone of soylent green?
    1
  5652. The comment about China is curious. There are other analysts who look at this and say that China is behind it. The idea is that this puts stress on the US and detracts from the Taiwan situation. Assad was just in China and was feted by Xi in a very obvious way.
    1
  5653.  @jrstf  I am talking filtration in manufacturing plants where particulates are present from the manufacturing process. The mask stuff is a result of COVID. What I am talking about predates that.
    1
  5654. You need to look more closely at the China Russia relationship. They have major territorial disputes in the Russian far east. I predict, and I am not the only one, that when Russia's military is degraded or destroyed in Ukraine, they will move to take over all that territory. Russia will have no way to stop them short of nuclear war.
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  5655. Of course, it is the Jews and Freemasons. Isn't it always?
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  5656. I keep saying this, but it bears repeating. The CCP is a gangster state and the police are their enforcers. The people actually have no rights. When will they realize this and do something about it?
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  5657. To say that this is clearly against "international law" is just plain silly. What is "international law"? Who enforces it? Who holds Russia to account for their war crimes in Ukraine? That is even a state-to-state conflict. How about China's actions in the South China Sea, which are clearly violations of "international law". That is far from the only action China takes around the world that violates "international law". What about their destruction of fisheries around the world in other people's exclusive economic zones? As President Joe likes to say: come on man! In the case of Hezbola, we have a terrorist organization (they are so designated by the US and many other countries), despite their political wing. Many major terrorist organizations have political "wings". Remember Hamas? Does Hezbola's attacks with rockets into Israel not count as being against 'international law"? I know Peter is an "internationalist". On the other hand, he has correctly recognized, in all his books, that the international order we have now (which is only about 30 years old) is coming to an end. It is for a reason that is tied up with what I said above, in the first three sentences of this comment. By the way, the US is not a signatory to many of the "international law" treaties that are out there. The US (and China and Russia) are not members of the ICC. The US is not a signatory to the UNCLOS treaty. The list goes on. Consider that when you talk about "international law".
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  5658. Is it difficult to hold an election during a war? Is it unprecedented? In the American Civil War elections were held in the North. Even soldiers voted. You can look it up on the Internet (remember that?). Also consider that there were times when, during WWII, things were not going well, and Churchill was getting pushback in the House of Commons, where there might have been elections in the UK. Elections would have been held. This is another example of the commentariat just repeating propaganda that they hear without any research on their own part. Considering the high level of digitization that Ukraine touts, I would think it would actually be fairly easy for an election to be held. This even holds for the diaspora. When I lived in Europe I voted in US elections, although that was not a war scenario.
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  5659.  @blue24563  Well, if my opinion is of no interest then why did you reply? Kind of stupid, isn't it. I don't understand where your 2% number comes from. Perhaps you could elaborate.
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  5660. Trumps comments about the EU are entirely true. The EU integration project is a sham. The EU is basically a protectionist cartel. The people Mr. Shea says are upset are the people in power. A lot of Europeans agree more with the Trump line of thinking.
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  5661. I just recently heard someone say it. I forget exactly who. The thing that most of the pundits and YouTube defense "experts" seem to forget is that while one side may take a location, the other side may well take it back. If these people had read any history, or even looked at the current conflict, they would know this. Look at the open-source maps. All that green territory is territory that Ukraine has taken back. I think that, perhaps, these people have assumed that wars would be fought like those in Iraq, where there was no such seesawing back and forth. The current war is much more like WWII, where territory was lost and then retaken by the Soviets. Crimea, by the way, is an example.
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  5662. Valuable content, as usual. Well done. One thing the CCP should have considered is that declaring that you want to take over the world and displace the west might not have been the best approach. The last real internationalist president the US had was George H. W. Bush. The US has been turning more populist ever since. Also, since the Soviet Union was defeated 30 years ago, there has been less and less justification for the US to hold up the rules-based order worldwide. The US, unlike China can secure just what it needs, and has far more resources than China, which must import almost everything, including food. So, why the CCP persists in its belligerence I cannot fathom. The only real answer is that they are not really that smart.
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  5663. Hivemind, you talk a lot about the economy indicating you know about these things. You do seem to. So, I find it hard to understand why you do not emphasize that while the unemployment rate is low, this is a misleading number on our current situation. Unemployment only measures the proportion of people out of work who are looking for work. My understanding, and I have not checked the number recently is that labor market participation is down. There are not as many people working as there were before the pandemic. You should be be pounding them with this fact every time they talk about unemployment. So should the Fox reporter in the clip.
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  5664. This yahoo Putin cannot even overrun a much smaller country like Ukraine. Does he think he can overrun NATO? The forces of NATO are much stronger, more advanced, have better weapons, training and doctrine than Russia. The only thing they have left is nuclear weapons. In any exchange, both sides would be devastated. Does he want to be the one who destroyed Mother Russia because of a medium size country in Central Europe? The comment I made about NATO being stronger only gets amplified if Finland and Sweeden join. They both have powerful and advanced militaries which are already compatible with NATO. He is the one pushing them to join NATO. He is, quite frankly an idiot. I mean that. He already has the largest country in the world, geographically. He has lots of natural resources. If he had not done this, he has lots of inward investment from the West. Now, he has no inward investment, and what there was is being withdrawn. It will not return. He is losing top notch talent. What possible advantage does he gain?
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  5665.  @РалинаАбдуллаева-н3к  I hope he fails and believe he will. I have lots of knowledge and experience of military strategy and tactics. The Russian military is not much advanced from Soviet times. I wish the Ukranian people well. If it were not for the nuclear issue, we would have troops in there now. I hope the arms we are sending will help turn the tide and that Ukraine will be victorious. With similar equipment they have stimmed the Russians. The difference is that we have helped to reform their armed forces with western training and doctrine. This is a winning combination. That and the latest weapons should help the Ukranian people prevail.
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  5666. I always heard that meteorites, or shooting stars, were good luck. When I first went to Greece, 51 years ago, I met another American when we were on an island in the Cyclades. The sky was so clear that one would see meteorites every night. I always slept on the beach. He said I should not go sleep until I had seen a meteorite. Some even said that one should make a wish. So, did you make a wish, Vita?
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  5667. I was once out deer hunting with a bunch of guys in the middle of January. I had a water bottle in an insulated pouch. No problem with freezing. When we broke for lunch, we went back to the trucks and all the canned sodas guys had brought were frozen solid. Fortunately, I had two quart containers of water in the insulated pouches, so I could share them out. None of our guns froze (it was a handgun hunt) and we got lots of deer.
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  5668.  @carlcramer9269  Good point. It will be interesting to see how this situation progresses.
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  5669.  @Pan_Z  What did you say that was so bad? Try to say it in a less controversial way perhaps.
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  5670.  @madtechnocrat9234  The US is the world's largest agricultural producer. This is one reason why we don't have a trade agreement with the EU or UK. They are afraid of the consequences in that sphere. Oh, and of course, the chlorinated chicken.
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  5671.  @madtechnocrat9234  Ha, ha! Actually, I don't eat bread. In the end, the UK and EU will have to sign a free trade deal with the US. The terms will not be as favorable as they could have gotten in the past.
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  5672.  @madtechnocrat9234  Well, I don't think you understand. I personally don't eat bread. As for exporting bread to Europe, that won't happen. No one exports bread. Just wheat. As for the US exporting wheat, that is unlikely either, since the US doesn't grow that much. Corn and soybeans are much more profitable. The US exports a lot of those.
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  5673.  @Adyen11234  You misunderstand Putin. He is one of the oligarchs and a member of the siloviki, as are many of the oligarchs. You seem to know nothing of the current structure of Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union and how the oligarchs gained their power.
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  5674.  @Evan490BC  What does Trump have to do with this?
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  5675.  @Adyen11234  Well, we won't come to a meeting of the minds on this. You fail to understand that these oligarchs stole their way into power. They literally threatened, and in some cases killed, people whose businesses they wanted to take over. Putin, as an individual, is unimportant. He is just a representative of the system. In the end, trade with Russia is not necessary for the west. In fact, the west did just fine without the Soviet Union or CCP controlled China.
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  5676.  @samuelbucher5189  Those drinks are bad for you. I drink water, brewed coffee and brewed tea. Much healthier.
    1
  5677.  @samuelbucher5189  I understand. I started as just a tea drinker. Then I went mostly coffee. Now I start with coffee and then switch to tea. My bowels seem to like it.
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  5678.  @8thdayadventist911  Considering the attitudes of the Russian people, in Russia, I am not concerned with that.
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  5679. This should have been updated after the election of Milei.
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  5680. Trump's U-turn on Ukraine? C'mon, man, as President Joe like to say. Trump stated on the campaign trail, very clearly and very often, that he wanted to end the conflict. The reality is that Ukraine cannot win this war. Frankly, neither Ukraine nor Russia is any good at offensive operations. Ukraine's successes have been the result of subterfuge (a good thing in war) and incompetence and unpreparedness on the part of the Russians. The successful ones all petered out when the Russians got their footing. In the one counteroffensive they had to be successful at they failed. This was against prepared defenses. You really need to stop spreading disinformation.
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  5681. The point that Kozyrev makes about the military is borne out by the results in Ukraine. Actually, the Russian/Soviet military has never been that good. You can go back centuries to see that. What this reminds me of is the Winter War with Finland. The eventually "won" with massive loss of men and equipment against a much smaller force. The Finn's dogged defense of their homeland mirrors what we see in Ukraine. This poor performance of the Russians was a factor in Hitler's timing of his invasion of the Soviet Union. No matter what happens, Putin has shown the reality of what his military is, and it is not pretty.
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  5682.  @rohitkoolothabdulsalam4938  Well, if these experiences were what he is going on, then he should not be invading Ukraine. The US experience in war since WWII is instructive. In Korea we had a people we were helping who were determined to be independent. Look at where they are now. In Vietnam, there was little support for the government we were backing. We never actually lost a battle but lost the war because the people were "defending" has no trust in their government. Look at Iraq. That is a shit show. The country was created by the British. It had a majority Shiite population, Kurds and a minority Suni population. So, what did the Brits do, what they had always done. They empowered the minority to oppress the majority. They then stayed true to the British. This, in general, carried on after colonial rule ended. We have seen many examples in Africa and elsewhere. Iraq should not exist as a county. It has no historical basis and is really three national groups that do not like each other. The next example is Afghanistan. It is a mish mash of tribal groups with centuries long animosities. It was created by the colonial powers, including the British, again. The US was able to defeat them, but could not stabilize them, much like Iraq and Vietnam. What Putin is showing in Ukraine is that the Russian forces, equipment and doctrine are no match for the West. This is much like the Winter War with Finland. A determined for, fighting on home soil, is causing massive casualties and slowing his plans. There is even talk about the Ukrainians winning now. Don't know if that will happen, the fact that serious analysts are broaching the subject means that Putin is in deep trouble. The Chechen and Georgian campaigns were not qualified successes for Russia, and Putin. He is not as smart as people make out. I have known many people in the intelligence community in the US. The really smart ones go into private industry, where they make much more money.
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  5683. I think the Ukraine situation is a mess under Biden, but all the WWIII talk because North Koreans are involved is just plain stupid, and did I mention ignorant. What was the Korean War? Was that WWIII? You had the US with a few hundred thousand troops on the South Korean side and China with over 1M troops on the North Korean side. This talk is alarmist, and I hear it from both supporters of Ukraine and those that are not so supportive. This has to stop.
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  5684. Canada as a part of the US is NOT CRAZY. It was a serious thing when the Quebec independence votes were going on. Actually, it would not be one state but probably five or more. It seems the almost all of the Canadian population live close (less than 100mi) to the US border. It is not uncommon for Canadians to go to the US for both shopping (to avoid taxes) and to get medical care. On the economic front American businesses put manufacturing facilities in Canada to take advantage of exchange rates, which typically favor the US. It was first driven by northern states, in the east and Midwest by proximity, especially in industries such as automotive. Many of those industries are moving to the southern US, which was anathema to them in the past. Losing Canada as a trading partner would not, in the long run, be a major detriment to the US. It would, of course, crush Canada.
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  5685. The European countries you mention that said no sending troops are not really a factor in NATO militarily. The UK, Germany and Italy are not military heavyweights. I am not certain about Italy, but Germany and the UK have let their ground forces atrophy. They, along with many other countries, have dispensed with mandatory military service, as has the US. In all cases, as far as I can tell, there is at least some talk about bringing it back. The military center of gravity has certainly shifted in Europe to those countries that are much closer geographically to Russia.
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  5686. Elvira, your analysis is very interesting. You make the mistake of assuming that the west is a government, an entity, or an ideology. That's not how it works. Perhaps coming from a county that has always been ideological and run from the top down the world seems different for you. On what the west could have done to foster democracy in post-Soviet Russia I have to slightly disagree. It is not the west's place to foster democracy. One can argue it is in their interest, but there is no ideological basis for doing so. One can encourage democracy, but there is no analog to the Marxist-Leninist ideology which is internationalist. There is an old saying that goes the business of America is business. What President Trump is doing now is to continue the post-Cold War desire of the American electorate to disengage from "nation building". It may seem strange, but George W. Bush ran on a platform of disengagement and a cessation of "nation building" efforts. Then 9/11 happened. The GWT was a detour. We are now back on track. While fighting communism during the Cold War the US tried, and in many cases failed, to foster democracy. There were some successes, but they took time. Two that come to mind are Korea and Taiwan. There were many that failed. The most obvious was Vietnam. At the same time the US was subverting democracy in some places when it determined that communists were gaining power that way. There are several examples in the western hemisphere. That was not our finest hour. It all comes down to the reality that the US is not the policeman of the world. There is no world government. Don't assume it is the UN. The US is not a signatory to many world treaties, such as UNCLOS and the ICC, for example. One other thing strikes me. Let me know what you think. I read the book "Dead Souls" by Nikolai Gogol. Even though it was written in the mid-19th century, it seems to reflect current Russian reality.
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  5687. The idea that ships can no longer navigate the river is stupid! The lock was there because of the dam. The river was navigable prior to the dam being there. The Dnipro is in fact navigable for about 1,200 miles up into Russia. When it settles back into its natural course, it will be as it was before the dam was built. The lock was built to allow continued navigation of the river. This is common to many large dams. I am a big fan of Peter Zeihan and value his geopolitical analysis. On the other hand, in a lot of the details he gets it wrong. He sometimes mentions that he is scoffed at by intelligence types when giving his analysis. I would not be surprised if it was because he does often get these details wrong. Intelligence analysts tend to put great store in such details.
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  5688. Actually, I do take offense. You are doing what many YouTubers do. You are catering to the lowest level of viewer. It is really kind of foolish, and a bit insulting to anyone who has any knowledge of anything. I find this here, but I also find it in science channels as well. The really stupid thing is that YouTubers who do this seem to forget that they are showing their content on the WWW. If someone has a question about something they can, with a couple of clicks or keystrokes get the background. So, not only are you assuming the lowest level of knowledge, but you are also assuming technology ignorance. You need to get over yourself. I say this as someone who is a supporter of Israel.
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  5689. I think you mean the Nazi V1, not V2.
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  5690. Jessie, the dollar is rising in value. That is the concern, not the dollar collapsing. Global currency markets are much more complicated than you seem to understand.
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  5691.  @stevenmcalister826  Well, on the idea that we need to improve our own health I disagree. As long as we are paying for healthcare through insurance or the government I still have a say in your life choices. As for your second point, in the UK you are correct. I lived there for a bit and saw it. With COVID it is getting much worse.
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  5692. There was a US movie that was shown in the Soviet Union. In it, the characters lived in an apartment, I think in New York City, with lots of rooms. This amazed the Soviet citizens, since their apartments were much more modest. The reality is that the bottom 10% in the US generally live in better conditions than many of the world's lower middle class. I saw this when I started traveling internationally in the early 1970s, and since then. In volunteering at a local food bank, I noticed that most of our clients were overweight, many rather obese. This is not food insecurity. The percentage of the US population that is really, really poor is probably much less that 5%. The issue is the way we measure poverty.
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  5693. The Tories are in a mess, but so is Labor. As I understand it, there is a breakaway faction of Labor that is forming. Both these large parties are failing. The best thing that the Tories can do is to postpone the election as long as possible to give their policies time to work.
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  5694. The woman interviewing Jaishankar at about 0:27 had it all wrong. Jaishankar is quite correct. The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, said quite plainly in interviews right after taking office that we now have a multipolar world order. After WW2 we had a bipolar world with countries like India deciding to be nonaligned. Then, after the Cold War we had a unipolar world, for a short time. The whole span of that was at most 75 years. The natural state of affairs for all of human history has been multipolarity. India, Russia, China and others have called for multipolarity for some time now. Well, now they have it. The US electorate has been uneasy, and then unsupportive, of a unipolar world order since the fall of the Soviet Union. George H. W. Bush, the president at the time, wanted to have the conversation about how things would run after the fall of the USSR. He was voted out of office. The whole history of the US up to WW2 was anti-imperialist and isolationist. The business of America is business, the old saying goes. Just look at the number of international law treaties the US is not a signatory to including the ICC and UNCLOS as examples.
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  5695. Why not? The companies are in it to make money.
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  5696. Blinken is correct. Another way to look at it is to compare the cost of our support for Ukraine with the fraud associated with the COVID relief programs. Just the fraud that has so far been uncovered is on a par with what has been spent on Ukraine. From a US point of view, this war is indeed "cheap". The Ukrainians are willing to fight for themselves. Some of the people the US has supported were not. Vietnam is a good example. Of course, the situation in Ukraine is much more important than Vietnam was. By the way, the US is growing closer to Vietnam. I have even heard talk of selling them F-16s.
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  5697.  @ISeekMANBEARPIG  Could be. But I was talking about the effect on succession. Would we declare war? I don't know. We would certainly disengage completely from China. It is hard to tell.
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  5698. Sabine is not being negative. All the claims, about this topic and many others, are suspect. I follow the energy space as well, and there are lots of YouTube videos and papers and even companies and labs, that claim to "solve" some problem. Then the ideas come to nothing. I have even been involved in energy projects and other related looking at novel generation techniques where at least a prototype had been built. I remember one that involved using trash. The trash was "burned" to produce energy and it left only a fine ash, which had some uses. Things like metal cans were even left mostly. I looked wonderful. The device was built, demonstrated and then disassembled. The whole project just disappeared.
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  5699. I believe that the Russian doctrine on nukes is that they will only be used if the integrity of the Russian state threatened. The loss of territory on the border does not seem to qualify. Russia is a big place.
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  5700. The tech problem is interesting. I am watching this on a platform, YouTube, that is free to me. I have to put up with the ads, but that is also true of TV and newspapers. These things need to be funded. The only answers are advertising or taxes (government provided media). You (Dave Rubin) are a different case. You have a different relationship with YouTube. There are three things going on here. The platform (YouTube), the content providers (e.g., Dave Rubin) and the consumer. The ones having a problem are the content providers. This is where regulation might be appropriate. I am an admirer of markets, a Milton Friedman type of guy, like Charlie Kirk. Even in the free market there have to be some rules, some way to redress grievances. There is another option, which Dave is taking. That is to provide another platform. Again, the free market. You don't have to be on YouTube. The substrate of all of this is the Internet. It is open. It is also funded by access fees, not advertising.
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  5701.  @wendolynmutunhu2866  Excellent point. I will have to check out the book.
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  5702.  @censorshipagainstthemiddle6198  If you are listening to Mearsheimer then you are obviously ill informed. That statement is just plain silly. Both sides have an arsenal far greater than needed to annihilate the other.
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  5703.  @Luredreier  The only country today pursuing autarky is China. They actually have a policy called "Made in China 2025". You have totally misunderstood my point. The US does not need unrestricted trade with the whole world. You obviously did not read my whole comment (I know, it was a bit long). Actually, at the beginning of the 20th century the US share of global manufacturing was actually higher than China's is today. Dealings with China have shown us that trade has to be based on rules and a concurrence of interests. As for the foreign investment in the US economy you mention at the end, a lot of that is driven by favorable conditions in the US. The main one is the domestic US market. Even private Chinese companies are investing in the US. Another is the low price of energy and raw materials in the US. There is also a lot of US investment around the world. The inherent advantage in capital formation within the US, a lot of it based on geography, is a major factor. You last couple of statements are both foolish and insulting. If you believe what you say, then you are obviously ill informed.
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  5704.  @Luredreier  You need to read what I wrote. You are obviously anti-American. The issue of land mass is both silly and irrelevant. If you want to talk about percentage of the world economy, the US and its direct allies, they control about 60%. BRICS controls about 25%. Of the BRICS countries the B and I control about 5%. They tend to be neutral of favorable to the US. I like America's chances in terms of economy. If you are talking about international law broken how come you don't talk about Russia and China? Don't you expect them to pay the consequences? Their actions are actually driving much of the world into the US's camp. You need a serious reality check.
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  5705.  @Luredreier  If you believe that you are very poorly informed. Nothing you say in this comment is correct.
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  5706.  @Luredreier  Well, if you are in a European country, then it is because of the US that you are not speaking Russian now. Don't forget that the Soviet Union was an internationalist, Marxist-Leninist country. And don't forget their Russification efforts. You would today be a "new Soviet man", not a free European.
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  5707.  @edl653  Very well put.
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  5708.  @r_ds8057  I tend to agree with you. My main caveat is that one declares war when there is pressing national interest. This is not such a case. Sal has decided that freedom of navigation on the high seas worldwide is a pressing national interest for the US. To make such a determination one would have to have no alternative. In this case we do have alternative routes. The problem comes down to the national security establishment which has decided that the status quo from the Cold War is necessary and worth spilling American blood and spending American treasure for. The electorate does not agree and has not for about three decades. The US did not support globalization for economic reasons, but for security reasons. Now that the major antagonists have fallen apart, or are falling apart, we need a rethink. Now it is the wildly inefficient supply chains that are the threat to US security and prosperity. Time to change course.
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  5709.  @sagelikea6130  Who is your comment addressed to? I can only speak for myself, but I have not watched legacy media for at least five years now. I didn't watch much before that. As for Russia's ability to fight, that is not something you want to trumpet. At the beginning of the current war in Ukraine Russia had what most considered to be the second most powerful military on the planet. Now people like to quip that Russia has the second most powerful army in Ukraine. They have a point. Russia spent 20 years building up the military they attacked with. During that time, they had access to western technology and lots of oil and gas money. Neither of those are available to them now. They also lost the army they attacked with. Between their outdated equipment, tactics, strategy and massive corruption, they are in it deep. Ukraine still does not have the full complement of arms that a NATO country their size would have. Ukraine is still inflicting five or more casualties on the Russians than they are experiencing themselves. With a full up NATO force that ratio would most likely go up by an order of magnitude. As for their long-term ability to fight I just have for you the words of President Joe: Come on man! Russia has a major demographic problem. They are starting to have kids as young as 14 work in factories. They are recruiting lots of convicts. This last winter (continuing to this day) they had massive infrastructure problems at home because they do not have the skilled manpower there to maintain it. As one geopolitical strategist put it, this is the last time they will be able to do this (invade), and they have done it poorly.
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  5710. Blow these things out of proportion? Are you kidding? Do you actually follow what they say? They make stuff up. They have destroyed, according to their accounts, more HIMARS than Ukraine has. They have destroyed many new MBTs, even ones that have not arrived in theatre. Really stunning that you and the whole media give any credence to what the Russians say.
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  5711. This trans mania is part of what is killing off the Labor Party, and the Democratic Party in the US. Politics is a numbers game. Placating a tiny minority is not a winning formula.
    1
  5712. On the energy front, it is a good thing that India is buying Russian oil at the price it is getting. Frankly, Moscow is actually losing a dollar or two a barrel at the price they get from India and China. They get about a 30% discount to the advertised price. This is also good for the west, and indirectly for Ukraine, since it keeps oil prices down across the board.
    1
  5713.  @stlouisix3  Thanks.
    1
  5714.  @zzagriff  That is amazing. Things must be very bad if that does not trigger massive inflation.
    1
  5715.  @angusmckenzie9622  I am very familiar with Lei and subscribe to her channel. Looks like we may have similar interests in this area. I am also well aware of the CCPs approach through my own work and activities as well as following current events. As I tried to express, I have been a Chinese product boycotter for decades. Actually, I first look for US made products, then go to products from countries that are at least allies of the US. My experience lately with Chinese made products has been very disappointing. To add to that, the reporting of all the horrendous safety issues with Chinese goods, including food, especially within China appall me.
    1
  5716. Of course, on top of all this, as we move to a multipolar world order as desired by Russia and China, there is the specter of Turkey perhaps reforming the Ottoman Empire, at least to some extent. What is ironic about the situation is that the main protagonists of a multipolar world will probably do very poorly in such a situation. Ironically, Turkey, Iran after the mullahs and some other players may do fairly well.
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  5717. Damn! This guy's story is so amazing and powerful I almost cried. Mike, it you read this, you are amazing. A real inspiration. Also, I ordered your book. Looking forward to reading it and being inspired.
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  5718. I say this all the time, but movies are the quintessential mass market business. These actors and actresses who think they can somehow control culture are delusional. Get rid of them. There are lots of people out there willing and able to take their place. They are basically nothing more than a brand, and that brand is becoming toxic. The studios' decisions are just plain business decisions.
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  5719. Not understanding the Bible. Has that person ever read the Bible. Especially in the Old Testament, nudity is expressly prohibited. There are numerous passages that make this clear. As for the Florida bill, I wonder why, beyond basic sex education (which I went through half a century ago), which is centered on biology, the schools would be the place to discuss these things. As for American prudishness, I think it is a generational thing. I was born in the 1950s. Then came the wild time of the 1960s and 1970s. Nudity was not a taboo when I was in my teens and twenties. My sons, who are in their late 20s now, are far more prudish than I am. They didn't get it from me, that's for sure. I have lots of stories about those times. Lots. Actually, I summered in Europe, on my own in my teens. It was a wild time. As for sexuality in Europe, especially western Europe, I can attest that women were much more sexually forward back then. I experienced it many times. I have heard it said by friends who spent time in Germany that if you can't get laid there then there is something wrong with you. I don't know how it is now. Earlier in the millennium I lived in the UK and traveled extensively in the territory I was responsible for (Europe, Middle East and Africa). By then, I was married. It is almost too bad. The opportunities were legion.
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  5720. Tony, do what you think is best for the channel. There are two interesting points on the property issue. One is the foreclosure. This is one where lack of data transparency in a totalitarian state becomes an issue. It is also a risk factor too many financial analysts outside China ignore to their, and their clients' detriment. I have seen reports that banks are often refusing to foreclose in many cases. Think about it. Once they foreclose, they have to recognize the loss. This does not look good for them. The other is something I have been harping on for a long time. The general issue is the secondhand housing market. A property is bought new once but may be bought and sold used many times. I know the Chinese are biased toward new homes for cultural reasons and that the large inventory is different from most places, but the issue still stands. The situation where banks have made loans on property is the main issue I have raised. This is where mark to market accounting might be good for the Chinese banks. There are two dimensions to the problem. One is valuation. The other is the poor business climate in general which increases the likelihood of default. Many of these loans are for investment in business (believe me, I have been through it). Finally, the drops in value of residential properties are, from the anecdotal evidence, much higher than the official figures indicate.
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  5721.  @lindenwatson846  That will take years, and is easy to inderdict.
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  5722.  @lewislane9727  They can't and survive as a state. If it is war, of course all trade will stop. Most of what China exports are lower-level goods. If they precipitate a war, employment will collapse. This will be the trigger.
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  5723.  @imanfateh3261  Well, have to disagree with you there. The Saudis need to ally with the US, otherwise they will be attacked by Iran. Iran is allied with China. Russia's oil is already under threat. Not much comfort there.
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  5724. "Science" is not one unified thing. Medicine is not a science like physics. In fact, most doctors are more technician or engineer than scientist. That is not to diminish what they do but to contrast it with how we think about them. The so-called hard sciences work by proposing hypotheses and then testing them. You can't do that in the middle of an event like a pandemic. As for masks, I never saw an experiment on their efficacy. As for the vaccines, they ended up not preventing all people from getting the virus. In fact, Biden, who was vaxed and boosted got it twice, I believe. I have heard of others who got it twice after being vaccinated. What the vaccine does do is to moderate the symptoms and reduce mortality. That we could only know after doing the experiment.
    1
  5725.  @bobmex5362  That may also be due to social distancing, self-isolating and the vaccine.
    1
  5726.  @bobmex5362  True. But changing three things at once a problem scientifically. We should know the statistics for this period and then do statistical analysis controlling for each variable. The plain fact is that one or two might not have had any effect. We just don't know, and no one seems to have made such a study. If they did, they should have made it public and acted accordingly. Actually, vaccines are meant to stop one from getting a disease. The idea is to arm the immune system to fight the disease so that you don't get any symptoms. Just think back to all the vaccines you have gotten over your own life.
    1
  5727.  @bobmex5362  As we all know, flu season is in the winter. Since most of the southern hemisphere is warmer than most of the northern hemisphere, that makes sense. As for the common flu vaccines, they are developed each year to combat the four most common strains that are expected. That involves some guesswork and is often wrong.
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  5728. Assad stabilized the country? That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. There is still a large Kurdish controlled region in the northeast. There was a large Islamist controlled area in the northwest, that just got a lot bigger. There are "democratic" forces in the south. The US even controls a chunk in the east. If you consider that stable, then you certainly would have missed what just happened. There was no way Assad, even with the Russians and Iranians able to help, was going to ever take control of the whole country again.
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  5729. Mike, CO2 has been much, much higher much less than 4B years ago. The planet is only 4,5B years old.
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  5730.  @henli-rw5dw  Why would they invest in a depreciating asset? In real estate investment the salient measure is price in the pre-owned market, not the artificially controlled new home market. You are buying investment property to eventually resell for a profit. There literally is no market. considering the massive oversupply. The numbers Tony cites are official figures. Actual sales in the used market as reported by people on the ground are running at something like a 40--50% discount from the original purchase price in many markets. Heck, people are buying apartments to keep the ashes of their dead relatives because it is cheaper than cemetery plots.
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  5731.  @alanparsonsfan  Good point. Thanks for clarifying.
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  5732.  @VincentConti-m5j  Well, I am old. I have been through these ups and downs myself, especially when it comes to home ownership. I have had my own house (not the same one) for 44 years now. When I first started out the interest rates were about 18%. My first two were lease/purchase arrangements. Then, my soon to be wife bought a house with money given to her by her parents. By then the rates had come down considerably but would be considered high by today's standards. When we did our next move rates were on the way down. There was a period in the 1990s when rates were falling so much that many of my neighbors were refinancing just about every year. The very low interest rate environment from that time until recently is actually an anomaly. These things change, sometimes rapidly. The house I am in, which I bought in the late 1990s, is a good case in point. From my purchase price it appreciated 78% in less than 10 years. Then the prices dropped. It was down to 69% of its peak but still 23% above the original price. Another ten years. It is now back just above the previous peak. Just as with interest rates, this is a dynamic market. This mania about what people are going through right now in respect to housing is just plain silly. The pundits are trying to do statistics with insufficient data. In fact, statistics are fine at telling one what happened and not so good at what might happen, except in highly constrained cases. I have seen this and have been involved in statistical analysis, in many fields for longer than I have had a house. Does that clear things up a bit?
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  5733. This is not the issue that should see Erdogan ushered out of power. Turkey has almost 100% inflation. It is mostly due to his personal mismanagement of the economy. Press freedom is very important. Economic mismanagement is even more important.
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  5734.  @Shadowcat561  Did not know that. I am not surprised. Another reason. Actually, it is surprising how many Muslim majority countries support China when they are committing genocide against Muslim minorities primarily because they are Muslim. Turkey falls firmly in this camp.
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  5735.  @YourHineyness  You are totally correct. The amount of "click bait" in YouTube titles and thumbnails is, frankly, disgusting. I guess we just aren't the target audience. This is one time where I am glad to be out of the mainstream.
    1
  5736. I am watching this 9 hours after it went live and you already have almost 8k views.
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  5737.  @MinkieWinkle  Well, not all grain is used to feed animals. Wheat generally is not. As for the impact on farmers of livestock prices, I don't see the issue. Are you talking about livestock prices impacting the farmers themselves? For them higher prices for their products are good.
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  5738.  @thepunpolice7932  In the US, the Social Security retirement age is also 67 for those born after 1960. For those born in 1937 and earlier it was 65 but was gradually moved up. At present, there are no plans to increase it beyond that. Actually, this is for the full benefit. One can retire somewhat earlier, with the earliest being 62 for a reduced benefit, or later, the latest being 70 for an increased benefit. The concept of retiring at 80 is not government policy in China. It is just the statement of a demographer. He is not an actuary. There are considerations of the liquidity of any pension plan and the actuarial tables for life expectancy. Today, in the US (last I checked) the odds of living to 95 for someone reaching 65 are 50%. I don't know what it is in China, but it may be less, considering the poor environmental conditions and the food safety issues. One thing that is odd about the Chinese social insurance system is that it seems to be voluntary. In the US it is not. Everyone pays on any wage income.
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  5739. Unipolarity is unnatural. It has only existed for a blink of an eye in terms of world history. It was predicated on a lie. To have such a world requires a set of rules and someone to police them. Many of the international treaties mentioned the US is not a signatory to. The biggest problem for Americans (of which I am one) is the cost. Actually, it is the cost benefit equation. The US electorate has no interest in funding a military to police the world. In fact, and these documents are publicly available, the US military is configured for power projection. The US has a privileged geographic position, so it can do this, and it makes sense from the point of view of the US. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stated in interviews that we are clearly in a multipolar world. It is, indeed, time to get used to it. To "blame" this on bogeymen like protectionism and hyper-nationalism is just plain silly. The power of nations comes from their economies and amount that is dedicated to national defense. I don't see the rest of the world contributing money to funding the US military to play the policeman role.
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  5740. I love that you say the "end of Russia as we know it today". Yes, this is happening. Actually, geopolitical analysts have said it was inevitable in the next ten or twenty years. Putin has moved that timetable to one or two years, in my opinion. Even though Putin is sacrificing the minorities, to try and limit their growth, it is a losing battle. The reason is that the demographics of the Russian ethnicity are so horrible. The others can probably recover, the Russians cannot.
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  5741. Musk is an advisor. Last I heard the president gets to pick those advisors. Consider Tom Homan as the "border czar". Was he elected? The Democrats are spreading "fake news".
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  5742. Peter is doing something at the beginning of this video that I find strange and disappointing. Actually, infuriating is the term I am looking for. Like most YouTubers he is assuming the lowest level of knowledge in his audience. This is endemic in YouTubers in many, many fields, not just geopolitics. This is stupid and frankly shows a total lack of understanding of that audience. Of course, YouTubers are amateurs at this stuff. It shows. The stuff I am referring to here is not their own area of expertise, but communications in general. First, a person seeking information or opinion on YouTube does it because they are aware of the issues. We are not on traditional broadcast TV people. To assume that they need you to tell them what is going on in the world is bizarre. Many viewers also may have more specialized knowledge than the person making the video. We don't come here for tutorials. Second, a lot of YouTubers seem to assume that their viewers are coming to their channel, and their channel only, to get the full story. Who do they think they are? I was recently watching a video on a channel by an economist. It was regarding Ukraine. He mentioned a number of other YouTubers who follow the Ukraine situation. It turns out that I also watched videos by most if not all of those. He is aware of the fact that there are others out there and does not repeat basic stuff. He understands that his audience has the context. Third, we are watching this stuff on the Internet. The frickin Internet! Get it? If there is some context or term I don't understand I can look it up, in seconds, with a few clicks and/or keystrokes, and get much more and better detail. In fact, I can decide what level of detail I want, and I can even keep those tabs open and go back to it later. That's WWW 001. So not only does that show a lack of understanding of the audience, but also of the platform and technology. By the way, there are YouTubers that do not make these assumptions/mistakes. I find it disappointing that Peter does. I am a big fan of his books and have seen him do much better in other venues. As you can tell, this is a pet peeve of mine.
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  5743. Totalitarian countries aligned in ways we haven't seen before? Really? That is ignorance of history and hyperbole. What would you call 1M Chinese troops coming to the aid of North Korea in the 1950s? What about the provision of arms to Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s? No, this is just a continuation of the historical pattern. In fact, the period after the breakup of the Soviet Union has been the real outlier in human history. For centuries it was a multi-polar world. An age of empires. Then, after WWII, it was a bipolar world. Don't ever forget, Nixon's opening up to China was a gambit in that bipolar competition. China was seen as a threat to the Soviet Union, and the possibility of it aligning with the west a major issue for the Soviets. That said, I agree with Stoltenberg that the west has to be remain united. The end of the Cold War was a hit to western solidarity. Russia has brought it together.
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  5744.  @seditt5146  Good question and good points. I was not commenting on the fact that this is reporting on a specific technology, but on the comment @tarstarkusz made about this being a plan, not a demonstrated product. By that I mean demonstrated in space. As for it not being like fusion most people think of, that is fair, but the fusion most people think of has many, many different forms. For an example, I worked briefly on a space nuclear reactor project. That never lunched. My wife worked on the radioisotope thermal generators (RTG) that power the interplanetary flights. Those were launched. So, to say the details are different is, while valid, perhaps not significant. Again, it is not real until it is launched.
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  5745. Of course, there is a very real possibility that Russia breaks up. This may take the form of various ethnic republics breaking away and a warlord period in the rest of the country. I say this because there are now several private armies and that there is a large internal security force. This last could possibly be up for grabs to whoever can pay them, as the Russian state's finances collapse.
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  5746. I have been following this for a long time and have written on it. A few years ago, the US committed $5B for battery research. Where are those batteries now? The idea was to lower the cost. I see little evidence for that. I even once did an analysis comparing EVs to ICE powered vehicles. That was when gasoline prices were a little above where they are today. For a vehicle of similar size, the ICE was still cheaper on a five-year basis than an EV. Much cheaper. In between, gasoline prices have been half of what they are now. The fact is, Tesla is raising prices. The billions in research have yielded little.
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  5747. You are the first commentator who I have heard say something I have written about the North Koreans. I fully agree. They may well be looking for a way to defect. As you mention, they are generally malnourished and poorly treated. I have seen pictures from the DMZ with a typical North Korean soldier next to a typical South Korean soldier. The South Korean was at least a head taller. This is not a one off. The other thing to consider is the rampant racism, especially towards Asian people, of the Russian officer corps. They grossly mistreat the Russian Federation citizens who are not ethnic Russians. Think of how they will react to these North Koreans. I hope we get some video.
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  5748.  @jsEMCsquared  Yes, I mentioned that, but not the amount. It is just the normal working of the market. Something they don't seem to understand in China.
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  5749.  @jessewhittemore784  Exactly! Actually, I have heard that the Chinese don't like to buy second hand homes. Something to do with feng shui. A lot of the houses bought in the ghost cities are not finished inside for that reason. That would make them easier to sell later on. At least that is what some are claiming.
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  5750. How can you hate trig? That was the first class I took in the advanced math curriculum (over half a century ago).
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  5751. DeSantis is so impressive! Trump can campaign on the economy. if he can moderate himself a bit he is a viable candidate for 2024. With DeSantis on tap for 2028, we would be in great shape. If DeSantis were the candidate for 2024 I would definitely support him. And, the Republicans have such a deep bench for futire elections. So, while now things are a mess, I do have hope for the future.
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  5752. We need more guns!
    1
  5753. So, who do you think owns those apartment buildings? Commercial ownership of residential buildings is a major thing and has been for a long time.
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  5754. On the drag queen issue, perhaps Qanon is right.
    1
  5755.  @ThinkUkraine  You are welcome. Stay safe and be careful out there.
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  5756.  @Ungoliant-d5k  See my response to @OrcHunter-yb4ie. Actually, that looks like a bot handle. If you want to respond to a comment and disagree that is your choice and right. Just calling people names diminishes you. Spend more than a couple of seconds. Offer an alternative. Make an argument.
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  5757. Belarus has a small military, and it is not effective. In addition, if the leader of Belarus tried to join Russia in a military operation, there would be widespread insurrection. Russia has lost lots of troops in the Ukraine, and as more weapons come in, they will lose a lot more. They have committed a vast segment of their military to Ukraine and have lost most of their experienced professional soldiers. They still have commitments in Syria. They have no capability to invade NATO. In addition, NATO has the advanced airpower to degrade the Russians very quickly. Ukraine did not. Russia is a spent force. They are starting to use old tanks, like the T-62, which have been in storage. They currently do not have the industrial capacity to heavily ramp up tank production, and many of the advanced electronics, which are critical to tanks, they cannot get, or produce themselves. They are already a spent force. With the addition of Sweeden and Finland, which both have advanced militaries. If Putin tried a general mobilization, he would be overthrown, and Russia may end up breaking up.
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  5758. The General, if he is undermining the President, should resign immediately. He is overstating Ukraine's capabilities. For one thing, they had been in a low-level conflict with Russia since 2014 in the Donbas. For another, neither side is any good at offensive warfare. Ukraine has no hope of pushing Russia out of all its territory. Russia could potentially take all of Ukraine, in a couple of decades, perhaps. The only caveat to all this is that there is the possibility that one side or the other could implode. That is not a basis for strategy.
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  5759. There you go with the "three to one" rule of thumb. Look at the Gulf War and the Iraq War. The attacking side in both cases actually had fewer troops than the defender. Look at the offensive phases of the various war that Israel has fought. In the Yom Kippur war, the Israelis were even at the point of moving all the way to Cairo. They were held back both by the US and by the daunting prospect of what to do when they got there. The real issue is force multipliers. The US has those in spades. In the Gulf War the Iraqis had built massive trench lines and minefields. Using airpower to suppress the Iraqis the allied forces were able to punch through these. If Ukraine had such assets, they could have easily pushed through the Russian lines in the south, for example. Another thing I find interesting about all this drone warfare stuff, again going back to WWI, is that this will not be static. Don't forget that aircraft were initially used for reconnaissance. Then there was a need to shut down the other side's ability to reconnoiter the area from the air. This led to dedicated fighter aircraft. We probably will see something similar in Ukraine with the drones. I expect this is already being worked on by all parties, including the US.
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  5760.  @rorysmith2415  You totally miss the point. This is not about tolerance or inclusion. It's about what the meaning of the whole movement is. Let's take it beyond Scotland. Look at Spain. They have at least two areas with cultures different from the dominant culture. I am referring to the Basque and Catalonian regions. Do you think the creation of a multi-cultural state is their goal? Is their motivation in that direction? Of course not. In fact, the whole idea is to protect their cultural uniqueness from the Central state. If the SNP is all about inclusion, then, they are part of Great Britian, which already includes ethnic minorities at the highest level or politics and business. No, so say it all you want, if the SNP is not about Scotland for the actual Scottish it has no reason to be. I think you will find this is beginning.
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  5761. All pigeons are named Georgina. My boys told me that when they were young, and we lived in England. One even poop attacked their mom in Scotland.
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  5762. China is one of the most vulnerable major countries on the planet. Japan is another vulnerable country. Look at what happened in WWII. Frankly, before the dropping of the atomic bombs, Japan was cut off and starved of any of the necessary resources required for industrial warfare. Xi is dreaming if the thinks he can defeat the combined might of the west. Frankly, he could not defeat the US. Don't forget, no one will invade China (except, perhaps Russia). If Xi attacks the west, or its interests, there will be mass starvation in China. Prior to that will be a shutdown of the industrial economy. What is he thinking?
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  5763. I am a big fan of Esther's. But I do find it funny that she says, at about 2:25, that these are the kinds of things that you wouldn't expect to be happening in Europe now. For one thing, Europe is one of the most blood-soaked parts of the planet, and this has been going on for millennia. The peaceful period they have had in the last 75 or so years is due to the Cold War and the standoff between the US and the Soviets, and then prior to Merkle's refugee decision, thanks primarily to the US security umbrella that has continued. It was NOT the result of the EU, by the way. The other thing that makes the statement seem strange and out of touch is that currently there is a full-scale war raging in Europe. It was at a lower level from 2014 to 2022 and is now at WWI and WWII levels of destruction. So, really it is business as usual for Europe. Another thing to remember is that the period prior to Putin's actions in Ukraine Europe was peaceful and hopeful. This is very similar to the couple of decades prior to WWI. People in Europe were prosperous and looking forward to a bright future. Things were generally peaceful, except for some annoyances in the Balkans mostly associated with the dying Ottoman Empire.
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  5764. If you really want to reverse the decline in birth rates you may need to bring back polygamy.
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  5765. Great explanation, as usual. I have been following this for decades. The other issue, which I am fairly sure is not resolved, is one of engineering and materials. The be a power plant, one needs to run continuously, as you say. Last I checked, the issue is breakdown in the device itself. This is not appropriate for a powerplant. Also, to make it usable, the fusion reactor must take over for the initial power plant that helped it get started. That needs to be electrical energy, not heat. It needs to be subtracted from the energy out. We really don't seem to be much farther along than the last time I checked on these things. The basic processes are know. I don't see a lot of new science here, and am not sure of how well the engineering of the components, and the complete system, is going.
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  5766. Who writes this stuff. Saying that the sun is slightly larger than Jupiter while showing a graphic clearly showing the opposite.
    1
  5767. The US is a diverse country. It always has been. That is one of its strengths. The more we embrace that the better off we will be. In WWII there was a feeling in Japan that we were mutts. Their feeling of racial purity and superiority led them to believe that they could defeat us. This has led many to underestimate the US and we are still the strongest, both economically and militarily. And I submit, socially. Yes, we have problems, but look at the places where people of different races and ethnicities want to come. The vast majority are the Anglosphere. This includes the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. Black Americans have been great contributors to our country. I have known many in both high and low positions that I could look up to as examples, and friends. I am lucky in that my father had black friends at work who I was exposed to. They were good people and made it impossible for me to feel anything against them. Herschel Walker is another inspiration. He did well at school. He was a great athlete and is now a successful businessman. I expect that in future he will be a great politician, serving this country well. What an example.
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  5768. Actually, the Vietnam War was started by and intensified by Democrats. Yes, there were lots of protests, but Richard Nixon, in his second election got what the fifth largest percentage (96.65%) in the electoral college in history. He was trying to negotiate an end to the war, and that was a factor. I attended some of those protests on my college campus. I think most of the people were there for the drugs and sex.
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  5769. I do find it interesting that Hemmer asks a peace negotiator about intelligence matters. He obviously doesn't know much about intelligence matters. That is not meant to be a real criticism of Mr. Hemmer, but a commentary on the press. Perino, having been in the White House, would probably not think to ask such a question.
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  5770. Why is this a government concern? This is stupid, but not really a big issue. These are first world problems. Why is this an issue for an Indian news outlet?
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  5771. The Russian economy has two major exports. Oil and gas and military hardware. The former will be affected by sanctions. The later will be affected by the performance of Russian military equipment in this war. To put it succulently, they are screwed economically. This will not take years. but months. It will also affect the Chinese, since most of their equipment is based on Soviet/Russian designs.
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  5772. Love Jordan's work and his lectures. These podcasts are really powerful. I am a little older. In the early 70s I started university. We were all commies at the time. Literally, I had a professor of philosophy (he was from Harvard and taught ethics) who was very popular. As a member of his inner circle he gave us books by Marx and Lenin to read. We also got high with our professors often. And I was a science student, but with a strong interest in the classics and other cultures. It was a really wild time. We talked to people on the janitorial staff about these ideas. They were mostly black and were generally supportive of welfare or socialism. That was an eye opener. We got over it, though, as we thought about it and went out into the world.
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  5773.  @ChinaUpdate  Always thought provoking and informative.
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  5774. But, Victor, people voted for this. That is what you don't consider. I try to point this out when I comment on these things. I live outside of Chicago. My younger son now lives in Chicago, and I am concerned for his safety. I moved into the city (Washington, DC, where I was born) at his age. It was also dangerous at that time (in the fourth quintile of the last century of the last millennium). In fact, it was so dangerous that when police cars would go down an alley the criminals would throw grenades under them. Then they switched to helicopters with the artificial daylight to scan the alleys (I saw this). We go through cycles of these things. I blame it on the liberal politicians. Politicians, especially executive branch politicians, are elected to uphold the law. They are not doing so.
    1
  5775.  @SUPERPOWERCHINA_  What are you? beep beep. the programming is not up to par but what would you expect? beep beep.
    1
  5776. Is that really what is happening? Is the Chinese government actually directing trade in that way? If you look at the volumes, they have no hope if that is their goal. What is more likely happening is the "decoupling" or "derisking" by foreign entities. The world will split into trading blocks. China is unhappy with the current world security order. This is curious because it is only that order that allowed China to grow. They are trying to circumvent the US led order with their Belt and Road initiative. That is failing. In addition, it is a flawed concept. Shipping almost everything by sea is not a plot by the west to control things. It is the most cost-effective way to ship. You give too much agency to the CCP, They don't have that type of control.
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  5777. Just came across this. I am becoming a real Dave Rubin fan. First, this is one of the best Douglas Murray interviews/lectures I have seen. On the down side, I think one has to consider that there will be a great backlash if the advocates of the pathologies you are exposing are not reigned in. This is left unspoken in the interview. This is the worst case scenario. The other thing that is important is that we are spending so much time talking about the humanities, social sciences and the like, when, for the most part, they are an irrelevance to the economy. It is really the STEM fields that drive our economy. Technology, and all that entails in manufacturing and information, are the main things we consume and derive our material culture from, and that influence the lives of most people. This the future and many people in our educational institutions are involved in these areas. In fact, many educational institutions are abolishing the school of liberal arts and sciences and creating schools of science and health. This is, I think, for the traditional sciences to get away from the craziness of the humanities, which are shrinking rapidly. This is one of the only upside of the increase of the rising cost of education. I have rambled enough, but I think yoou get my drift.
    1
  5778.  @poornimawagh72  You ignore history. In the two World Wars of the first half of the 20th century the US was reluctant to get involved. Being an international trading nation, we wanted to stay out of European conflicts. In the 1930s we had the Neutrality Acts. The problem is that Germany, and in WWII, Japan, wanted to take over large swaths of the world and then to eventually attack the Western hemisphere. Despite our reluctance to get involved we were drawn in. What did the Soviet Union do in Eastern Europe after WWII? Did they allow self-determination in the eastern European states? What was Iraq doing before we invaded? Were they letting other countries determine their own fate? The stated aim of the Soviet Union, and to some extent China, was to impose their system of government on the world. With nuclear weapons they expected they could. I will agree that the US has made many missteps. On the other hand, they never intended to take over these countries you speak of. Afghanistan was justified through their support of terrorists that directly attacked the US. Iraq, the second time, is not so clear cut. But look at what is happening now. Vietnam is increasingly allying with the US. South Korea is a major economic powerhouse. Japan and Germany are allies of the US and the third and fourth largest economies in the world. If people would stop attacking the US, then things would be a lot different.
    1
  5779. It is a good thing people are "reluctant" to make home purchases at this time. In fact, they would be stupid to do so.
    1
  5780. The WEF is a non-issue. The world system is falling apart. The US is withdrawing from its role of the world's policeman and ensuring free trade for everyone. There is lots of material out there about this. The best are the books by Peter Zeihan.
    1
  5781. I want an Ultra MAGA hat!
    1
  5782. Maybe Biden is the Russian agent. Now I remember when oil was $4.25 per gallon. After hunting season that year it cost me more to drive down and back to retrieve the processed deer than to have it processed. Bad times. Looks like we are heading there again. And what is Biden doing. The taxes and fees collected in the US on US oil enrich the treasury. Now we are enriching Russia. What an idiot!
    1
  5783. The competing "stealth" fighters from China and Russia are crap. Actually, just about everything from China is crap. The few items they have sold abroad from tanks to aircraft have been found to be crap. This is not an exaggeration. We also know that the Russian stuff is way overhyped. We can see hard evidence just about every day.
    1
  5784.  @johnathanh2660  All good points, although the Iraqi miliary was one of the better equipped in the world after the US and Russia at the time. The fact that the Russians held the land since 2014 does not make a lot of difference. Building static defenses does not take that long, and there had not been the type of high intensity conflict we have seen since February 2022. As for the softening up, aviation does little for massive trench networks and minefields. I was responding to the whole idea of static defenses being formidable. There are some things to consider, though. The Iraqis, at the time, were one of the more experienced militaries in the world. The US had not fought a war for over 20 years and their last one was in the jungle. In the Ukraine War case, the Russians have fought recently in Syria, but that was against an insurgency, and they had no rules.
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  5785. Don't confuse the issue of the Native Americans with the status of the Jews in Nazi Germany. Native Americans are full citizens of the US. They also have a self-governing status in their various nations within their treaty borders. The law that set this standard was passed in 1924, about same the time all this eugenics stuff was taking place.
    1
  5786. The level of play in the NBA is so high, that i don't think women will ever match it. That's what brings people in, performance. I remember watching the championship game of the March Madness. It was good (my alma mater won). Then I watched an NBA game, and the gap in performance was incredible. And this was just a regular NBA game. Frankly, I don't watch the NBA these days because of the BLM stuff. But you get my point.
    1
  5787.  @TR-xr4ut  It only makes sense. You don't actually own the land, the state does. It is also a brilliant way to keep your construction buddies in business, constantly repairing and replacing. The construction industry is a good solid source of graft for the officials. So, everyone is happy, no?
    1
  5788.  @TR-xr4ut  I am not sure how your comment is relevant to my comment. "No" what? Please elaborate.
    1
  5789.  @TR-xr4ut  Well, that was meant to be a "tongue in cheek" remark. Actually, many buildings that private companies like Evergrande were not able to complete have been demolished. As the private real estate developers fail, their projects are being taken over by the government through SOEs. That is the way Xi is steering the economy in general. So, yes, it might end up being the provincial government.
    1
  5790.  @TR-xr4ut  Your statement about working adult citizens is not relevant. It was always that way including times when things were going well. As for where local governments will get the money, well that is up to the central government. There is a lot that could be done with tax policy. The central government could also stop with the directives requiring local government to build massive infrastructure projects. That last is the biggest problem in the Chinese economy. They were done to goose GDP numbers. For example, in the US local government bonds used to build and maintain infrastructure are supported by local taxes, with some support being supplied by the Federal government in some cases. Of course, the changes I suggest would require the CCP to be rational about its goals for them to change the structure of the whole government. Go figure the odds of that.
    1
  5791. The idea that Roe helped women in minority communities is ludicrous. Just to give and example from many years ago, there was an article in the WSJ about a black college athlete who was killed in, I think, New Orleans. I think he was from Washington, DC. He was in his early 20s, but already had three children by at least two women. Where was the "family planning" for these women? He was considered a "good guy" in the article. Would you?
    1
  5792. Great video. This is a great spin on the situation without having to go into a lot of detail about economics, etc. Classic Peter. The whole irony of why only western systems will be successful is precisely because they are not designed and developed by the government from the top down for some governmental purpose. In addition to a "new" currency regime the Chinese keep talking about and investing in reviving the old Silk Road. There are a lot of things that are involved, and it is a long and complex history, but consider what killed it. It was not a government edict or clever plan. The Silk Road cannot compete with seaborne transport. Period. End of story. Thus, a lot of private merchants killed off this thing that governments (and in some places bandits) controlled. China trying to do the same is just daft and is a waste of their and everyone else's resources. I mention that because in addition to the scale issues involved with a world trade currency, there are the trust and efficiency factors. What makes the whole "western" currency work is the ability to do transactions reliably across borders. This basically means the SWIFT system. That system is basically run by, and was designed by, the banks, not governments. Like all banks they operate in a regulatory environment. The government can sanction organizations and even countries, but typically only after some sort of legislative process. Now think about how that would work if the Xi and Putin were involved. As President Joe likes to say, "C'mon man!" Just a little side note, in the 1980s I worked for a woman who had a math background and was a computer scientist. We were at an aerospace firm. She had been heavily involved in the specification and design of SWIFT with a previous employer (Burroughs). Basically, the higher-level design hadn't changed at that time, and I expect is still valid. Stability is key.
    1
  5793. You know what I hate about the press? First is the detailed facts. How many minutes a phone conversation lasts. How many were killed by a natural disaster or terrorist attack. Precise numbers that, most likely be invalidated by future investigations. And how do we know any of these details are true, Given the track record of the press in recent decades, not likely. Another pet peeve of mine is the pictures. In many cases the same picture could be run for multiple tragedies. And, sometimes, I think it is. After an incident, to show emergency vehicles at a particular location, is absolutely meaningless. I have been around for a long time, and all I see in the media is the same stuff, over and over again,
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  5794. Dave really is all in on the Floridian thing. Fun to see. Rubio is excellent in this role. I see him as an up and coming leader in the Republican Party. This is one thing Trump is doing, and it goes back to his business roots, and that is succession planning. If you look at people who have been politicians all their lives, they tend to forget that. They are basically intimidated by it and often fear it. This also applies to dictators. As for what Rubio is saying about the motivation, he (echoing with the President) is spot on. The Ukrainians, many of whom I have followed, make a big deal out of this whole disinformation and Russian narrative issue. This also applies to westerners outside of Ukraine who have channels supporting Ukraine. People are getting sick of it, even those that generally support and like Ukrainians such as myself.
    1
  5795. Week over week numbers are not a valid metric. You have to look at the current data in comparison to the peak numbers. In statistics, especially for percentage increases, the point of comparison is important. A good example. If you go back far, say 30 years like the mayor of Chicago has, then the story is quite different than if you go back 20 years. You have to ask, what is the goal. Then you can come up with useful comparisons.
    1
  5796.  @Trust_but_Verify  Great point, especially with the pollution in China.
    1
  5797. "Maybe there is another deeper layer..." When I was an undergraduate studying physics many of the graduate students professed to be members of the "Church of the Malicious Divine". The doctrine was that the divine would, just as we were about to figure everything out, change the rules, or reveal something new and unexplained.
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  5798. He is totally correct about the EU. I have heard it called a "protectionist cartel".
    1
  5799. You are actually a socialist/communist, aren't you? You hid behind the "progressive" label. You dismiss the actual choice of the electorate, which is much more conservative than you are, even on the Democrat side. There used to be liberal and conservative wings in both parties. The growth of central fundraising bodies has upset this and diminished the will of the local populations. This is a disaster for our democracy.
    1
  5800. ByteDance spending $12B USD on AI. Well, I can back to this video because I saw in the WSJ today (Friday) that Meta is allocating $60B on AI data centers. The seems to be in addition to the $500B another group is pledging. Considering that a good portion of what ByteDance will spend will go to corruption, that is a drop in the bucket.
    1
  5801.  @Gandhi_Physique  Yes. Over 70. Obviously obese.
    1
  5802.  @jonathandewberry289  Be that as it may, I also am in better health. My joints no longer bother me. My blood pressure is normal. I have had one day of flu in five years, and in all that time have not even taken so much an aspirin.
    1
  5803.  @jonathandewberry289  Not really. I have been thinking about what you said and what you seem to leave out is that many processed foods leave one unsatisfied. This causes people to overeat. I eat two meals a day, and one snack of either nuts or olives. I feel satisfied after i eat and have no cravings. That is not the case with processed foods. It does matter what you eat.
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  5804. As the kids used to say, "Crazy Daisy time". Actually, that was a toy. It was a sprinkler that spewed out in all directions at random. Quite apt for the current situation in the UK. Like you I am loving it.
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  5805. In the US, the minimum monthly wage is just over 8400. Many large enterprises pay twice that for entry level work. Also note that the US Federal minimum is just that, a minimum. Several states set the minimum wage higher, none can lower. From all I am seeing, Xi wants to take China back the Mao era. Maybe that is an environment he feels most comfortable in. He has beaten down the tech giants. He has alienated many manufacturing businesses, so that they are beginning to move out of the country. His agricultural policies are a joke and change week by week, it seems. He allowed the property sector to grow too long, until it became a Ponzi scheme, then stomped it down without a plan, greatly affecting 30% of the economy. This is another area where he has changed policy direction multiple times. Add to the mix his belligerent attitude towards his trading partners, and he wonders why "derisking" is a thing. This guy has no economic knowledge, and he is running the economy. He also has removed or killed anyone who could rationally advise him.
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  5806. Good point at the beginning. Afghanistan was never really a country. It's borders were created by the British. I can think of another country created by the British that became a problem to us. Iraq is another such abortion. We have "states" around the world that were creations of the colonial powers. Please don't call the US one. We NEVER engaged in the type of colonialism that the major European powers did. These states group incompatible "nations" together without any concept of statehood. This is why we have the problems we do.
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  5807. Based on this I am reconsidering my Costco membership.
    1
  5808. The main thing is that no one makes policy in this country by following the "science". Just a couple of examples from other areas. Where I live, and I think this is fairly standard, we have our high school kids going to school earliest, then middle school, then elementary school. There are many studies, and all of us know it from our own experience, that this is opposite of the way it should be. One of the reasons I have heard being given has something to do with varsity sports. Can you believe it. Then there is "daylight savings time". The list goes on.
    1
  5809.  @Craig-g3n  Wow! If you don't know then you are totally clueless.
    1
  5810. Vote out the Democrats. PERIOD!
    1
  5811. DeVory, just found your channel. Seems like good stuff, Your characterization of what populism is hits the nail on the head. The MSM and mainstream politicians in the US and Europe use populism as a slur. The way you define it (and I agree with you 100%) makes it the most rational stance to take in a democracy. Europe, and especially the EU, is wrestling with this now. The EU hierarchy is on the totally opposite end of the spectrum, and I predict this will tear the EU apart. One geopolitical strategist that I follow has characterized the EU as a protectionist cartel. He is spot on with that. He also has predicted its demise. I think we are seeing that starting now. They equate populism with Nazism, quite frankly. They are alienating the majority of their people, and like the Democratic Party will pay the price.
    1
  5812.  Greatwhite Wiggy  If you are going to have socialized medicine, then that might be a good idea. If you let the government provide a service to you, then you must accept measures to modify behavior to control costs.
    1
  5813.  @dawnelder9046  That is very interesting. Thanks for the information. That is not something I had really come across.
    1
  5814. Record breaking low temperatures. Whatever happened to global warming?
    1
  5815. Whatever happened to global warming?
    1
  5816. Why is the military deploying a decades old platform? Are you kidding. I thought you had been in the military. When was your rifle first deployed? Ever heard of the B-52? The F-16 was introduced into service in 1978. That is five years before the F-117. How is the delta wing design an issue? Wha about the F-106 and several French Mirage fighters? The F-16XL prototype was competing with the F-15E but lost out to that plane. This was not because of the delta wing. In fact, the plane was considered a great design. Who writes this stuff, anyway?
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  5817. That's right. China is a commie country. You really don't own anything. Money is something the CCP uses to further their own agenda.
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  5818. I wonder if Mr. Browder has any sense of what the other oligarchs are going to do. There is lots of talk about the army, but not about the real power elite in Russia. Power in the end comes from economics. Without the resources no real power can be projected. In addition, it is my understanding that there are other PMCs, generally associated with the various oligarchs. Why is no one talking about them?
    1
  5819. Yes. And a better example would be Perot. It is more contemporary and actually some of the issues are the same as today. Exactly the same. It was Perot who famously used the phrase about NAFTA "the great sucking sound".
    1
  5820.  @eddiemerc1986  Sorry to disagree with you, but the Allies were not that fragile. In addition, they would never use the tactics of the Soviets. Frankly, I don't know why the Allies did not strike through southern France as their first attack after Italy. That would have drawn massive numbers of German troops. Then a secondary landing across the Channel would have been much easier. Instead, they went the other way. Another issue is the resource issue. The Mediterranean and environs was also a critical transport and resource region. One further thing to remember. Even if the Soviets had capitulated, the Germans would still have had to station lots of troops there to keep the place under control.
    1
  5821. I keep writing this but watching the goings on in the UK (and not only on this channel) I get the feeling that the people there are well and truly fuc*ed. Unless someone like Farage can get in and clean up the system, like Trump is doing in the US, the outlook is grim (to put it mildly).
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  5822. Michael, Michael, Michael. Have you listened to what Prigozhin has been saying. He stressed that there was no justification for the invasion. That is the statement that really got him into trouble. You could be right, but I don't think so. Russia has wasted their military capacity. If this war goes on longer, Russia just gets weaker and weaker, and Ukraine gets stronger. The only thing Ukraine really lacks is airpower, and they should have that by the end of this year. Preparing to "fight this war better" will necessarily take time, lots of time. Prigozhin makes his real money in other countries through his mercenary activities. What he really wants is to get back to that.
    1
  5823. Of course, the BAR was also used by criminals, and law enforcement. These often had cut down barrels. Anything auto!
    1
  5824. These are the people who, when the CCP falls, are going to suddenly create a liberal, rule of law democracy? As President Joe likes to say: Come on man! The CCP has ruled almost exclusively through corruption, and this has corrupted the people. Where are the leaders who will effect this transformation? China has no history or experience of democracy, or rule of law. The whole genesis of the CCP involved turning peasants against the landowners with the promise of free stuff. This is also what happened in Russia. Marx would be appalled. He assumed that the revolution would start in the developed nations driven by the industrial proletariat. He was thinking about Germany, the UK and US. Remember the slogan: Workers of the world unite! Not peasants of the world unite. The peasant-based societies would have to get to the stage of industrial proletariat before moving onto the next level. Even Sun Yat-sen's plan called for creating a socialist state and then, perhaps introducing democracy. Nationalism and socialism were his immediate goals, not democracy. The problem is that socialist systems never seem to be able to make that transition.
    1
  5825. It also gave the nukes up because they couldn't afford to keep them going.
    1
  5826. How does a society come back from such moral degradation? The CCP was just following the Soviet model, where many of the cadres were trained. Look at Russia today. Same thing. Those who believe that such a populace is going to create a liberal democracy after the fall of the CCP are fooling themselves. It took Taiwan fully 40 years to democratize and they had a deep connection with the west. Don't forget that Chaing and Mao were basically two of the several warlords that appeared out of the fall of the Qing dynasty. I don't know the details, but I have read that China, with its long imperial history really only had a few centuries total of true central control. Once central authority weakens the local powers, not democracies, appear. Even Sun Yat-sen was a socialist. Democracy was something that would come after the nationalists cemented full control of the country in his mind. We will never know, but I wouldn't bet money on it happening.
    1
  5827.  @MikeOxlong-  Thanks for clearing that up. Those must be the ones I saw.
    1
  5828.  @abrahamdozer6273  Of course not.
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  5829.  @GairikGhosh  Duh! But actually, up the time I am talking about they were winning.
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  5830. Actually, the current CCP system is much more like the Nazi system. In the Soviet Union and China under Mao there was no private enterprise. Under the Nazis there were "private" companies, but they were controlled by the Nazis. If a company did not do what the state wanted, they were taken away from the owners and given to others, usually Nazi party officials. Compare that with China today. The example of Jack Ma is the most prominent example. He is not the only one. And just like in Nazi Germany, where companies were required to have Nazi Party members in management, all private companies in China are required to have CCP members on their boards. Another parallel is the growth of CCP controlled (i.e., non-private) companies. In Nazi Germany Goering had a structure that was taking over companies that ran afoul of the government and planned in the long run to take over everything. Finally, Nazi stood for National Socialism. Race was the important factor. In China it is Han nationalism that is paramount. That is really communism with Chinese characteristics.
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  5831. Cold War 2.0. Bring back the Cold War. I miss the Cold War. I got to do a lot of very interesting and groundbreaking research with basically unlimited funding. Actually, I told this to one of my colleagues and he expressed that he missed the Cold War as well because he got to kill people. He was F-4 pilot flying off the USS Enterprise. Ah, the good old days.
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  5832. I was in Canada (mostly Toronto) for work quite during the campaign for the first independence referendum. Frankly, if they had had the vote in the rest of Canada, Quebec might be independent today. This mirrors talk I hear about Scottish independence in England, by the way. The rest of Canada is not enamored with the bilingual aspect. In the beginning of this millennium, I was in London (I was living in Winchester at the time) and was talking to a business partner who was from Ontario. There were still calls for another referendum at the time. He pointed out that the ethnic makeup of Quebec had changed and there now a good number of non-French Quebecois. Indeed, my father's brother was married to a woman of Greek descent who was born in Quebec. He pointed this out as a reason a further referendum would not be successful.
    1
  5833.  @AndrewGould-NewWorldByzantine  You are, of course, technically correct. The fact is that the nation state has only existed for a couple of hundred years in its current form. In the area of the world where the orthodox church is present, they have been around for even less than that. I am referring to "nation" in the sense of an ethnic and cultural identity.
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  5834. What they forgot in making this car is looks. This is, without doubt, one of the ugliest cars I have ever seen. Little cars like this are not just about the driving experience, but also about the cool factor, the styling.
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  5835. This is epic. Making Labor a prescribed organization. Brilliant! Totally anti-democratic, but brilliant. As for the IQ test for voters that reminds me of a commercial staring Larry David. I think the ad was for crypto. In it he is always on the wrong side of history. In one segment he is one of the American drafters of the Constitution (a written one, you Brits should try it). He asks his colleagues, so everyone gets to vote, even the dumb ones. They say yes. He then proceeds to run up to the document and rip it up.
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  5836. What is this concern for security by these dictators? No one in the rest of the world has any desire, or need, to attack either China or Russia. Russia, at least, has lots of useful natural resources, but the rest of the world would rather buy them rather than take over the country. China, on the other hand, has nothing the world needs. Even those minerals such as rare earths are primarily just refined in China. They don't originate there. Because of China's lax environmental regulation enforcement, the world has simply shipped all that pollution and cost to China. Everything else an industrial country needs, such as iron ore, coal and oil, China has to import. To destroy China one only has to disrupt shipping far from China itself. It wouldn't even take much and there are several countries that could do it. In Russia one would have to control vast territories. In China, it is the vast population that would present a problem. These dictators are the ones who need war. Look at Mao. In the 1950s with the Korean war the Chinese had almost 200K killed and only got back the original borders. In 1962 Mao fought a war against India to cement his power, which was successful in that. Many in India expect the next war for China to be with India in the same general area as the 1962 war. In 1979 China fought a war, their last, with Vietnam and lost. Now, with almost 1B people living in real poverty, China is spending heavily on their military. They actually spend more on internal security. The only country they really have a beef with is Russia, and that country is no longer a threat to China.
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  5837. Making these comments at about 3:30. The US was reluctant to enter both WWI and WWII in Europe because of European, and especially British colonialism. Germany should have thought about that. I believe that Patton was all for rearming the Germans to attack the Soviet Union. So, there was thought about that in the West. Your comments about Roosevelt are correct. This ties in with the general feeling about European colonialism.
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  5838.  @Ollies2CentsWardill  Did you read my comment? Read the last sentence. I am not talking about a credible strategy in light of their issues with allies, I am talking about sound military practice. Frankly, a reading of the history if the very area in which the war is being fought (I mean the whole war) would show that many similar situations over time. Except in rare cases armies fight with limitations, both in materiel and those imposed politically (which goes back to materiel). That is the reality of war.
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  5839.  @MrPDoff  Thomas Jefferson once said "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
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  5840. Love your channel. I have also been watching more political content since just prior to the election after having mostly abandoned it. The only problem I have is that to make your point you have to show these people in the MSM. I have a lot of trouble watching such drivel. It is so cringe. It makes me want to scream.
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  5841. That is the classic Pantera color. It looks great.
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  5842. I don't know what all this talk about age is all about. Don't those young whippersnappers know that sixty is the new forty. Oh, and I also have it on good authority that grey is the new blonde.
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  5843. The Cultural Revolution? Bring back the Cultural Revolution! Long live the Cultural Revolution! Go, Xi, go! One of the political reasons for opening up to China was to affect the system there by bringing in capitalism. The hope was that this would make China more democratic over time. A China that followed the rule of law, respected private property, including intellectual property rights, could have been a huge success and a great partner in the world. But, alas, China was, and is, a communist country. All communist countries become oligarchies and then morph into aristocracies. All communist countries also become institutionally corrupt. As for fighting China, the west only needs to do very little. Just disrupting trade is enough. China imports most of its energy and other raw materials. Its farmland is very poor, requiring about five times as much in inputs (fertilizer, pesticides, etc.) as land in the US or Europe. As Peter Zeihan likes to say, China deindustrializes in a matter of months and begins to experience mass starvation within a year. Look at the sanctions on Russia. They are devastating that country. The full sanctions have only been put in place gradually over the last two years. And Russia has lots of raw materials and grows lots of food. No one wants to invade China, except perhaps Russia. Well, not even Russia these days. What is that big military for? It is China that is threatening to invade other countries, and not just Taiwan.
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  5844.  @SvensktLejon  The problem for investors is that it is in a war zone. Such investments take a lot of money and time. I was reading about the situation two years ago in articles discussing the causes of the war.
    1
  5845.  @SvensktLejon  My understanding is that there were multinational companies in the oil and gas industry that were involved. If I recall correctly, the main one was a European company, but don't quote me on that. Just owning the mining areas is not enough. You need the capital and expertise to exploit them.
    1
  5846.  @kathy-f2o5g  Do you even know what the function of a the Cabinet is? I assume not.
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  5847.  @MakeAmericaSaneAgain124  Zalenski was spouting nonsense propaganda. I caught when he said influence when Trump brought up the ocean. That is what really made things fall apart. That is completely silly. When has that not been the case? You may be a youngster and if so, I can understand, a little. Have you ever heard of the Comintern? Since the Bolsheviks came to power (and don't forget, Putin and his crowd were a part of the Soviet power structure) the Soviets have been trying to destabilize the US, and lots of other countries, through both "influence" operations and espionage. I worked in the aerospace and defense industry during the Cold War. At the plant I worked at we were tracking 15 Soviet agents. Those were just the ones we knew of. This stuff has always been with us. Another propaganda point that Zalenski and Ukranians make is that the Russians will not stop at Ukraine. What the war has shown is that the Russians could not push farther, especially if the attacked NATO. They can't even take Ukraine. The only vulnerable countries are the Baltic states because they have substantial Russan speaking populations. That is something they, and NATO in general, understand full well. So, you may want to get over your TDS and stop listening to all the propaganda.
    1
  5848. @ Your TDS is showing. You might want to get that taken care of.
    1
  5849. @ Have you ever been in business at a high level? Have you ever actually met with or lobbied government officials? I have done both. You may want to get some life experience before pontificating.
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  5850. It is an American tradition (right?) to have local self-determination. Look at our municipal areas around the country. I was born in Washington, DC and lived between there and the Maryland suburbs. Frankly, the two counties in Maryland that border the city have larger populations and better economies. I now live in the Chicago area. I do not live in Cook County, but if you look at that county you have lots of smaller municipalities that are really integral to the city, and yet they are distinct and have their own governments and schools. Now, contrast that with Canada. Either the provincial or federal government, I forget which, decided that the attached suburbs of Toronto were now Toronto. I remember doing business up there while this was going on. I am fairly certain that there was not a vote by the people affected as is the case in Baton Rouge.
    1
  5851. What this war has shown is that neither Russia nor Ukraine has any real offensive capability. Recent Russian gains have been mostly over territory that is not significant. Both sides have been good at defensive warfare, but with old Soviet equipment, this is about all they can do. What that tells us is that Russia is not really a threat to NATO. They may want to be, but they cannot win a battle with NATO, especially US forces. This has been shown time and time again with clashes between US and western supplied forces and Soviet supplied forces. Think about all the wars Israel has fought. Think about the Iraq-Iraq war. Think about the two wars the US led coalitions have fought in Iraq. The fear on the NATO side is that the Russians would have to go nuclear fairly quickly. In addition, even if the war in Ukraine stopped now and Putin tried to attack NATO, he does not have the materiel or the manpower to mount a credible threat. He does not even have a clear path to get there, even in the next decade or two. It took him 20 years to build up the military he attacked Ukraine with in 2022. He had access to western technology and lots of oil and gas revenue during that time. He has neither now. He has also lost that army in Ukraine.
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  5852. If you hadn't noticed the US has ballistic missile defense capabilities. This applies directly to missiles with the ranges we are talking about here. They were first used in the first Gulf War. There are other more capable systems in use today.
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  5853.  @alexandermenzies9954  I have to, I lived through the Cold War, Actually I used to joke (only partly) that I loved the Cold War. I got to do cutting edge research with unlimited budgets. You would not believe some of the things we came up with. These are just the facts. Actually, I have worked on missile defense. It is something not much talked about, but it is real. In addition to what I worked on, we now have a growing capability in directed energy weapons and rail guns as well as more advanced sensors and computing. I think the situation is not at all clear.
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  5854. The names there are a strange mix of British and Native American. My father is from Chicopee Falls, right next to Springfield and Holyoke and of course Chicopee.
    1
  5855. Jake, you were in the military, and you don't know what the issue with NATO is. Stunning. NATO was created when western Europe was prostrate and could in no way defend itself without the US. Look up US troop strength in Europe. It went from a high of 500K troops at the beginning of the Cold War to "only" 300K troops at the end. Even today the US has over 100K troops there. Economically, the European part of NATO is very strong. The GDP of that group is ten times that of Russia and the population over three times as large. The war is happening in their region. What don't you understand?
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  5856. If the Russians have such wonder weapons and are adapting, why is their progress so slow? Aadvika, like Bakhmut, was a salient in the front. These are notoriously hard to defend. That it took so long, in both cases, to take either of them is not a good sign for the Russians. Actually, I would have abandoned them much earlier if I were in the shoes of the Ukrainians. The purpose of an army is first to destroy the opposing army. Once you do that you can then walk into any territory you want. Holding, or taking, a place for its own sake is not a very good strategy. If you want historical precedents, then WWII is a good one, The Nazis did well at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa when the goal was to destroy the Soviet army. They started out well doing just that. Later, when Hitler wanted to hold on to territory, against the wishes of his generals, things did not go very well. In fact, there were many times when German generals wanted to fall back to straighten their lines. Hitler almost always refused. This often resulted in encirclements and destruction of German forces. Fortunately, the Ukrainians got out in time to fall back to more defensible positions.
    1
  5857. So, how does one prove this? Experiments? Predictions? This seems to be another example of a "finding" in theoretical physics the likes of which we see all the time.
    1
  5858.  @petergray2712  Thanks for clearing that up for me. I really appreciate it.
    1
  5859.  @petergray2712  Thank you for clearing that up. I really appreciate it.
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  5860.  @tasseyko  So, what will happen? Those 1B people will just die out? If you believe that, then you have no understanding of history or biology. It took from the inception of the human race to 1804 (just about 200 years ago) to reach that number. The human race have lived through ice ages, droughts and all manner of climatic disasters. You have no idea of what you are saying.
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  5861.  @aspenrebel  What does that mean?
    1
  5862. Mr. Beebe is very well informed about this situation and makes a lot of sense. There is a channel, @NixonFoundation, that has some very good videos about precisely the issue of dealing with the Russian (back then the Soviets).
    1
  5863. I totally agree with you on Merkel. There is a celebrated clip, I am sure you can still find it on YouTube somewhere, of Trump in Germany talking to German government officials. He said two things that are relevant to today. One was that the Germans, and most of European NATO members, were not spending enough on defense. The other is that the Germans were becoming too dependent on Russian natural gas. They laughed at him. Literally. Who is laughing now? Merkel, by the way, was the one who made the decision to close down the nuclear power plants in Germany. That decision was driven, in part, by the Fukushima accident. Do you recall what happened at Fukushima. It was a tsunami. How many tsunamis are there in Germany near their nuclear plants (or anywhere). Another curious fact was that her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, was on the board of directors of Gazprom after leaving office. The two were from opposing parties. Do you really think that closing down the nukes was a safety issue? As President Joe likes to say: C'mon man. It was, in all probability so that Germany could use more Russian natural gas, pander to the Greens and line their pockets. That is speculation, but it makes sense. On sort of a side note, I have to wonder what Trump would really do vis-a-vis the Ukraine War. Don't forget, it was Trump that prevented Nord Stream 2 from being completed. It was Trump haranguing the Europeans over their defense spending. He was one in a long line of US presidents to do that. I don't think it is clear, especially with support among the US electorate rising.
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  5864. "The CCP officials lack a genuine standard or logical legal system. Their only goal is to maintain their dictatorial rule and the regime's power". Well, duh! We don't need experts to tell us that. The CCP has said this themselves. It may be on this channel that I heard it, but wherever it was, the top judge in China stated quite clearly that the goal of the legal system was to support the party, and that rule of law was not important. It all goes back to what the CCP is. It is a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party. This whole idea of Xi Jinping thought is a bunch of drivel. What did Marxism-Leninism preach? The dictatorship of the proletariat. That is the key concept. The fact that Marxism-Leninism is an imported ideology is a problem for the CCP. Xi tries to put a "Chinese" spin on it, but that is just bunk. There is another, more important, fundamental and related, problem. Marx was wrong. Basically, he was wrong about everything. Take the term proletariat. There are basically three groups in society. The bourgeoise, the proletariat (basically industrial workers) and the peasants. Marx thought that the revolution would be driven by the proletariat. He expected the revolution to start in the industrialized world, typically countries like Germany, the US and UK. Instead, the two largest countries where the revolution was successful, Russia and China, were primarily made up of peasants, with a very limited proletariat. These people followed the party because they were offered "free stuff". This was the land and private property of the bourgeoise. Guess what, they got neither. The only way to control this was dictatorship. It was not an aristocratic or oligarchic dictatorship, although in both Russia and China it is becoming both. So, all this talk about the legal system and laws should be dropped. China should just abolish the state apparatus and just admit that the party rules directly. Drop the facade.
    1
  5865. Hvw you ever heard of Second Life? Same thing with new tech. Not going to be a thing.
    1
  5866.  @jewulo  Globalism is simple. Everyone can trade anything with anyone. What we have experienced in the last 80 years is exceptional in human history. Throughout history, the world has been separated into imperial blocs. That is the natural state of things. The Chinese and Russians are openly calling for a multipolar world order. That is no different from what came before. How did those two do in that environment? Limit yourself to the last say 400 years. In fact, until the last 30 or 40 years there were two blocs. So real globalism is only that old. It has failed.
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  5867. Mahyar, Mahyar, Mahyar. I find the angst about the WEF so cute. Do you really think these people have the power. Look at human history. The commies tried this. When China opened up to some level of capitalism what was the thing most people put their savings into? Property. Many of these people grew up knowing nothing but communism. In the WSJ today there is an article about the Swiss trying to get kids to eat more bugs and less chocolate. How do you think that's going? The societies you are talking about, mostly Europe, are dying.
    1
  5868. People seem to gloss over what I consider the underlying motivation behind Trump's moves on Ukraine. First, if there is peace and sanctions are relieved on Russia, then oil prices will likely go down, perhaps a lot. This will help relieve inflation in the US and worldwide. Second, by tying Ukraine to the US by developing its resources, Trump makes it easier to justify support for Ukraine. While European leaders profess strong support for Ukraine, a lot of their electorates are not so supportive. Look at the AfD's success in the German elections. They are definitely not supporters of Ukraine. I also see lots of individual YouTubers from Europe who are not enthusiastic about Ukraine, to say the least. The fact is that Ukraine cannot defeat the Russians and drive them out of their territory. It would take years and many, many more billions of dollars, to get them up to that level. Both Russia and Ukraine were in demographic decline before the war, now it is much worse. Trump is correct in wanting to stop the killing for the sakes of both countries.
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  5869. Happy new year to you as well, Tony. Enjoy the southern hemisphere. Great timing for a visit. Xi is sounding not so much like a politician, but more like a Wall Street analyst. Those guys talk about markets that are about to crash as "being under pressure", and so forth. By the way, I got a clarification on housing prices for new construction in China. They are indeed state controlled. No free market there. Supply and demand are still in play, though. In Beijing, in the high-end housing market, the prices have been propped up by the government, but there are very few buyers. Thus, the current supply will take a long time to sell. There are lots of reports of people initially contracting for a home and backing out. See how that works. Even the commies cannot escape the immutable laws. This is evidenced by the secondhand home market, which is not as regulated. Price drops there, in top tier cities, can be more than50%. Sometimes a lot more. And people are being told to sell now and not to expect a price rebound.
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  5870.  @jerivaughn3789  Could be, but he is well aware that a lot of his constituents voted for Trump, and he is aware of the toxicity of the national Democratic leadership.
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  5871. This guy is great! Fox is one of my favorite channels anyway, but with this I just have more respect for them.
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  5872. So, you are saying that the Russians did this. Could be. They have done "false flag" operations before.
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  5873. Let me start by saying that I am a stalwart supporter of Ukraine. That said, the reporting on your channel. and many others. about the destruction of a mortar firing position here, a tank there, etc. is, I think, a bit of a problem from a public relations point of view. There are significant losses for the Russians reported such as large air defense complexes and ships, but this is all thrown in with the loss of a BMP. Not good from a propaganda point of view. Not good from an informational point of view either. For one thing, we don't get similar information about what losses the Ukrainians are suffering. So, there is no way of telling, from this reporting, whether the Ukrainians are doing well or not. Frankly, I believe they are doing quite well, but to someone without some background, this will not look impressive. There is also a problem with the reporting of the ground taken or lost. First, the maps are not updated in real-time and yet you and others present them daily. The one you rely on is, I have heard, on a 48-hour delay. So, to try to match it up with social media and other reporting presents a problem. Second is the issue of how the various places are presented. I say it this way because terms like city, village and town have specific meanings and give certain impressions. There are a lot of mix-ups in these labels, and again, this leads to reduction in the usefulness of the information presented. Also, making a big deal of this or that farm field changing hands on a map with delay is not very useful. On the front line this may happen many times in the course of a battle. That is normal but is presented as something of significance. It is not. These are all basically stylistic issues, but they are important in how people perceive the war. In the case of Ukraine, it is very important that the perceptions of people far away are favorable. In this age of instant communications and social media and all of it totally unfiltered it is very hard to control the narrative. The impressions from all the mil bloggers are so fraught with emotions that it is hard to take them seriously after a while. Frankly, the number of YouTube channels spewing nonsense on any number of topics is mind blowing. And some of those channels have lots of subscribers. If the channels supporting Ukraine fall into that trap, then support for Ukraine may well wane. Bad, not good (the robot said). I am just passing on my observations. Everyone talks about the information war, and this is a part of it. Just be aware.
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  5874. Paul, first, I really appreciate your content. That being said, there are a couple of problems with your analysis of the situation. First is the winter thing. If you just want to keep it to Russia, what about WWII and the battle of Stalingrad. The Soviets launched their major counteroffensive, which was successful, in November. There was lots of snow. They did not have the cold weather gear Ukraine has now. Second, the push in the south toward Crimea would isolate the troops in the Kherson region. They would not constitute a major threat to a Ukrainian salient. The Ukrainians would have to deal with their left flank and could then concentrate on totally reducing the troops to their right. Those troops would be totally cut off from supply and their supplies are right now being successfully interdicted. As Ukraine gets to the Sea of Azov, they would bring more of the Crimea into range of their artillery. They also would not be crossing the river in hostile territory.
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  5875.  @briseboy  Brilliant! As for body armor, the US stuff is effective. Even the flak vests reduced casualties tremendously. Don't forget, in wars like this over 60% of combat deaths are from artillery. I saw a video once from Iraq where a soldier was hit by a sniper (who was filming all this). He was knocked down. He immediately got up and started looking around for the adversary, who panicked and high tailed it out of there.
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  5876. The OSCE is a sham. They could not stop this current war and did little after the Russian takeover of Crimea.
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  5877. As far as Iran goes, the western countries have no leverage on them. No, the reason they are starting to pull away is because Russia has supported the Arabs in the matter of some islands in the Persian (or Arabian) Gulf which Iran claims. This is stupid on Russia's part, since the Arabs are certainly not going to provide them with arms.
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  5878.  @jackstraw5527  Used to do that. I used to volunteer at a food bank (a real deluxe facility, by the way) and the volunteers had access to junk food and drinks. I never tried the sodas. Haven't touched those in many years. On the other hand, I did partake of the chips, sweets and other things. As expected, instant gratification, at first, then regret. Only did it once a week, but do not miss doing it anymore.
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  5879.  @jackstraw5527  Hey, weren't you in the UK Government?
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  5880.  @jackstraw5527  Just kidding.
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  5881. The drone threat will be neutralized. Just look at what the Israelis have done in response to short range rockets. That is a hard problem, probably harder than drones.
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  5882. Prigozhin is at least entertaining. Putin is a non-entity when it comes to entertainment. What you say is correct about who and what Wagner is. You just have to look at the guy who is reported to have started it, Utkin, to see that. The man is covered with Nazi tattoos. His call sign was Wagner in the Russian military. That was chosen because Wagner was Hitler's favorite composer. These guys are seriously bad. On the other hand, the atrocities you mention were carried out by regular Russian troops where there was no Wagner around. This is just the ethos of the Russian state, not some fringe group.
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  5883. C. I. A. M. designed the city of the future? Who are they kidding? Frank Lloyd Wright did it long before they existed.
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  5884. Stunt double!
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  5885. The rule of law does not exist in communist countries. Period! We see this in the Soviet Union, Cuba and Venezuela, among others. So, the persecution of Falun Gong is no surprise. It is horrendous, but not unexpected.
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  5886. As much as I like dogs, you should have used a cat. YouTube was, I have heard, created to share cute cat videos.
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  5887. Of the four counteroffensives Ukraine has mounted, three were successful. This was due to subterfuge and Russian unpreparedness in the areas attacked. All petered out. Now the Kursk operation is being pushed back. In the one counteroffensive that failed, they went up against prepared defenses. Neither Ukraine nor Russia is very good at offensive operations. That is why we see trench warfare along most of the front. It resembles WW1 as many have said. Both sides have spent considerable resource on economic warfare rather than engaging the other's army and destroying it.
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  5888. Tony, as I watch this you have 73.8K subscribers. On to 75K, then 100K.
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  5889. Total annihilation? I live in the American Midwest. I don't think the waters will reach where I am anytime soon.
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  5890. Rogan was a Bernie bro at one time. Plus, his podcasts are not news, nor are they presented as such. They are conversations. Long and unscripted conversations. On the radio front, the left tried to create their own talk radio. Al Gore was behind the effort. It failed miserably.
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  5891. The Russians are so poorly equipped at the individual soldier level. I saw on video where they had the equivalent of kid's school backpacks. Many did not have helmets. One had a baseball cap.
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  5892.  @1940limited  They are getting their buts kicked. Their casualties are massive.
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  5893.  @noblefun8904  If they are using these troops in directly confronting the Ukrainians, then they are toast.
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  5894.  @JohnSmith-un9jm  You do not what you are talking about. Russian tanks, with their autoloaders are blowing up spectacularly Wester tanks have the ammo in an armored compartment. This is just one aspect of their weakness. Their equipment is not up to the task. Just look at any war in modern times where western equipment has faced Sovirt/Russian equipment.
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  5895.  @captiancholera8459  Read your WWII history. The Soviets did better, but a look at the numbers shows just how wasteful they were. In the Battle of Berlin they had 340K causalities, including 81K dead. The Germans had 320K casualties including up to 100K dead. The Russians had three times as many troops. Is that a competent military. More recently, look at Chechnya. The first attempts to take it resulted in whole Russian formations being destroyed. They were only successful after they leveled Grozny and got one of the dissident leaders to change sides. I worked on tactical training at the height of the Cold War. Tactics and training are paramount. If you are happy with loosing all your men and equipment, and that is an actual military, then so be it. I can't agree with that.
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  5896. If those Afghans did not want this situation, then the should have fought. They get what they deserve. Why do they have the right to leave and go to another country?
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  5897. Shut down NPR and PBS! NOW! I used to be a big fan of both, as well as the BBC. For many years. But in the last 20 years they have become politicized, and they gone totally off the rails (all three). If you look at why they were created, it is clear that their original raison d'etre is no longer valid. All three, by the way. In fact, in a society with a culture of free speech, such organizations are actually potentially, or actually, destructive and divisive. By the way, when my sons were in school, from elementary school, they were told that references to Wikipedia were not allowed, precisely because it was not trustworthy.
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  5898. The Ministry of State Security fabricating stories? Ya think? That is what all such organizations do. Deception, psychological warfare and propaganda are all staples of security organizations in both the west and the communist spheres. So, no news here. Move along now.
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  5899. All of the commentators I have heard leave out the most important factor, TSMC. While TSMC could be replaced, that will take time and LOTS of money. As for everything else, the west could live without an independent Taiwan. The second most important factor is that Taiwan is an integral part of the first island chain constraining China's ability to project naval power. These two factors dwarf anything else. Not to mention them up front is a real failure of analysis.
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  5900. While I am a big fan of Peter, I find that on military matters I often don't agree with him on the details. This time I think he got it right.
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  5901.  @hjimenez26  Use your words. What specifically do you mean?
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  5902.  @Marvin-dg8vj  Correct. The battery on a Tesla costs over $25K to replace. That is true for any high mileage electric vehicle.
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  5903. Syria is a fiction made up by the imperialist powers of France and the UK after WWI. The current "government" is made up of unrepentant ISIS jihadis. It will be in civil war for a long while yet until something else arises, most probably multiple countries. It will not cozy up to Iran because of their support of Assad and because a majority of Syrians are Sunni, not Shia. The west will only stay somewhat involved because of the GWT implications. Turkey has the best chance of controlling events. From the early 16th century until the end of WWI, what is now Syria was a part of the Ottoman empire.
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  5904. I see that the CCP is down to peddling its standard drivel. This is bad for the Chinese and disastrous for foreign businesses. Companies that have investments in China should get them out, now. As for the multipolar world, and I think I have said this before, what that means is imperialism and colonialism. How has China fared in that situation over the last 300 years or so? The ignorance of history among the CCP leaders is stunning. Prior to the end of WWII and the establishment of the current world order, China's external trade was heavily controlled by outside powers. What do does Xi think Hong Kong was about? Imperial Russia was taking vast tracts in the north. It is unlikely to be any different in the present day. All of the basic conditions are the same. The really interesting thing is that the CCP is pushing this precisely at the time that the US is drawing back from enforcing the "world order". This is happening for good reasons. Enforcing the rule-based order is no longer necessary nor in the best interest of the US. The people of the US don't want to pay for it anymore. It is not worth the cost. At the same time the Chinese economy is failing, at least in part due to Xi's treatment of foreigners in China and his foreign policy in general. The population is shrinking and is projected to shed almost a billion people by the end of the century. The missteps of Xi and the CCP over the last decade or so have been stunning and come hard and fast. The best thing the world can do is to step back, disengage, and be careful in handling the fallout. Long live the Cultural Revolution (V2.0). Hail Chainman Mao.
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  5905. I just saw some information about the follow on to ATACMS. The range of ATACMS, was actually set to comply with the INF treaty. Guess what? The follow on, Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), does not comply. There are reports of it hitting a moving target at sea from a land base.
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  5906. It is not "the NATO". It is "NATO". Stop butchering the language. There was a time when Indians spoke English at a high level. I know, I experienced it in the early 1970s. Now, I see Indian English broadcasts with presenters that have substandard English skills. This is not the India I knew. Where are all the highly fluent English language speakers from India? Is this some sort of conspiracy to convince the world that English is not the primary language of the world. You know, there are objective reasons this is so. Just to give a Eurocentric example, when I was studying German at university, I had a classmate who was working for a Germany based company. The company had modified their computer systems to take German. This was a disaster! If you are familiar with German, there are many words that are compounds. These make for very long words. In interacting with a computer, a small error in entering a word can cause an error. They went back to English. In the subcontinent, there are many "English" words used. I notice this when looking at local news sources. Most of these words are concepts that did not exist before the British came. So, it makes sense. English vocabulary is a mixture of French (29%), German (26%), Latin (29%), Greek (10%) and others. This makes perfect sense because of the influences on English culture. First, the Romans invaded. This also brought the Greek influence, Then the Germanic tribes moved in. Finally, they were conquered by the Norman French (who were basically Viking invaders, it gets complicated). That is one of the powers of English. It is already a mix of many language groups. It is also the least inflected language on the planet, as far as I can tell. This much simpler structure makes it much easier to learn and adapt to. This is why it will always win out. Do you think that either Chinese dialect will win out? Think again. I had a good friend who grew up speaking Cantonese. When he would go to China for business, he would have an interpreter for discussions in the Mandarin regions. Now, I don't know about you, but I have lived in the UK and have traveled extensively in the Southern US. I never needed an actual interpreter.
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  5907. The situation in Burma is reprehensible, I will grant you that. On the other hand, equating it with the situation in Ukraine is just plain silly. That will get you nowhere. By your logic, the world should be actively intervening in Iran and Afghanistan (again). There are plenty of other examples, especially in Africa. There is a real problem in dealing with internal conflicts. How many Brits, for example, should die helping the Burmese throw off this repressive government? You, and the report you cite, ignore the extensive number of sanctions imposed by the US, especially since 2021. There are also executive orders against the military junta going back to 1997. So, I question the report. Sanctions take a long time to work, they are not a quick fix. Military interventions in internal conflicts are generally not successful, unless the intervening party wants to take extreme measures. In the west we have an aversion to "nation building". Look at Afghanistan. There was at least a national security issue here involving the west. As for the airspace issue, that is quite unimportant. It has no effect on the country whose airspace has been violated. Should India start an air war for this? Again, how many outsiders must die to solve the problem.
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  5908. For a video that just came out I am surprised that a key point has been missed. The ruble has just recently collapsed. It only recovered recently because the central bank intervened heavily to prop it up. They do not have a means to do that anymore. Considering the price they are getting for their oil, it is quite possible that they are making little or nothing out of it after paying the cost to produce. The other thing to consider is that all the yuan the Russians have been making in China off their oil is stuck in China. China has draconian currency controls. American businesses that have long done business in China are also finding this out. It's like the Hotel California from the popular song. As for China, they are running out of cash. Their local governments are on the verge of default. One of the only levers the central government has to alleviate this is to print more yuan. A lot more. This will, of course, lead to hyperinflation, and will kill the Chinese local bond market. And, as for a consumer led recovery in China, forget it.
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  5909. Considering that China is not under threat of invasion, and that they have severely limited means to project power, this can only mean one thing. The CCP, and Xi, are making a big mistake. This is the precursor of a breaking up of China into competing warlord factions. This could happen sooner, rather than later.
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  5910. Oh no! More expansion of infrastructure investment? Isn't that how they got into this mess in the first place? Do the Chinese know anything about how infrastructure investment is supposed to work in an economy? Of course they don't. They are commies. I know using that term will offend people (and I am not above gratuitous phrasing) but it is also true and meaningful. That is important, especially for investors and policy makers. The socialist/communist understanding of economics is basically nonexistent. One just has to look at the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, and of course the CCP led China.
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  5911. The US accepted the trade deficits for strategic reasons. As Peter Zeihan likes to say, after WWII, the US "bought" an alliance. That alliance was targeted at the Soviet Union. Guess what? The Soviet Union ceased to exist over 30 years ago. There should have been a shift in policy, but none of the US leaders after George H. W. Bush were willing to have that conversation. All the presidents since then have been progressively more populist. We have even seen elements of industrial policy creeping in since Obama, with it increasing under Biden. The US is currently undergoing a political realignment. This happens periodically. The result will be a change in how the US approaches the world. It will be interesting, and different. Many in the diplomatic-military complex see the world as it is as an essential. They are woefully out of step with the populace. This in part drives the political realignment. A little historical note. By 1900 the US produced 50% of the world's manufactured goods. This really lasted through WWII and in the decade or so beyond the war, the US GDP was half of world GDP.
    1
  5912.  @DoomWar1  Well, you are correct on that, but I think that the added context is useful. In the US it often takes time to build consensus on issues like this. Obama even mentioned the issues but did little about it. He did not see any political advantage in it. That also ignores that what the US, and the rest of the developed economies, expected was that the opening to China would develop along the lines of what happened with Japan and South Korea. Don't forget they started out as less sophisticated economies especially after WWII.
    1
  5913. Chris, television networks are commercial enterprises, as are newspapers and radio stations. There are ALWAYS commercial considerations. That is not a problem. It is just the way it is, and always has been. When you have state funded media, like the BBC, then you get really distorted news. It was not that long ago that the BBC was found to be lying in their mainstream news coverage. Having lived in the UK I would watch it on cable. After hearing that I stopped. It is the same with the National Public Broadcasting in the US, although they get a small amount of their funding from the government (it should be zero, and they should be abolished). I used to listen to their radio and watch their TV programs a lot. Not anymore. Their bias is appalling.
    1
  5914. Financial nihilism may not really be new. I am currently reading Gregory Zuckerman's book about Jim Simons. I have also read other things about Simons. While the details of his investment strategies are closely held secrets, there is one indicator. One thing he stressed was that he was looking for any indicator that could predict the market. He had no interest in why these indicators worked, but just that they worked. If that is not nihilism, then I don't know what is. Let me know what you think.
    1
  5915.  @Dave_the_Dave  Good points. There really are a multitude of investment strategies. To say one is optimal is probably not possible until one has amassed lots of history. The short-term speculator may well make lots of money, for a time, but many of them go bust trying to optimize their gains. That is a fool's errand. They often make a bunch of money on a trade and then bet it all again instead of taking some of that profit and putting it into more mundane investments. I have a friend who told me about another friend who was into bitcoin. This guy would take half the profits he made from any major uptick in the market out in currency. So, over time he did not maximize his profits, but when the market crashed, he had lots (and I mean lots) of profits that were protected. I don't know how many people would remember this, but in the late 1980s when day trading became a thing, many people jumped in, headfirst. They took classes, which they paid for, and started trading. Then, when a crash came, they lost everything. They were always trying to maximize gains, as they had been taught. Their next step was to go to the offices of the trainers and shoot them. I mean with a real gun. This was not a virtual world.
    1
  5916. The issue of the people in the Donbas is a lot more nuanced than you make it out to be. I recall videos and reports coming out of the region from before the full-scale invasion. Based on what I saw and read I had a very different impression of the whole situation. It really seemed that Ukraine was oppressing people there and many were fleeing to Russia for "protection". At least that is what was being portrayed. There are people there, Ukrainian citizens who volunteered (although they are mostly dead now). Now, a lot was probably propaganda, but I expect not all of it. Like many Soviet republics there was a program of Russification. Some of the Baltic countries, for example, have told people to stop speaking Russian or leave. Of course, this is totally different than in the US. Early on there were also lots of German speakers so some historians opined that the language of the US could have been German. Years back there were court cases trying to block the publication of official government documents in other languages (notably Spanish). That is when it was realized. I live in Illinois and yesterday when I was looking up the hunting regulations, I find to my surprise that they are available in English, Spanish and now Polish. At one time, and it still may be true, Chicago was the second largest "Polish" city in the world (ahead of Krackow, I believe). One thing we do see is now that the veil has been lifted in Ukrainian cities with lots of Russian speaking people, like Odessa. Now they are very anti-Russian. The rhetoric and propaganda can no longer cover up the horrible truth.
    1
  5917. To understand Trump, just remember the old saying, "the business of America is business". After WW2 we fought an ideological war against Soviet communism. That was necessary. But that ended in the early 1990s. Trump is the first President we have had who was not a politician before becoming President. He was a successful businessman. In fact, the Founding Fathers assumed that such people would be the ones to become elected leaders of the country. People who had achieved something, and not necessarily just in business.
    1
  5918. Epic! Maybe England should break with Scotland. There obviously aren't any real Scots left.
    1
  5919. Calling it a kleptocracy is doing an injustice. It should be called what it is, a gangster or mafia regime. Kleptocracy implies that people take what they should not. In Russia under Putin, there is thuggery and murder on a grand scale. Much of it can be traced back to Putin himself. He is very much the mob boss one would see in Southern Italy or in the US in the 1930s. He has more in common with the murderous drug cartels of South and Central America than any legitimate national leader. So, to the issue of India and China, I agree with you. They are two different cases, though. China is an authoritarian, gangster and kleptocratic state. Xi has lots in common with Putin. He is threatening Taiwan, whose historical situation is somewhat parallel to Ukraine's vis-a-vis Russia. So, that is not surprising. India, on the other hand, is harder to understand. They have a border dispute with China in which China is claiming several territories in their northeast. Very similar to the Donbas and Crimea situations. They also have a long border which is contested and is being militarized driven by China. What possible reason India could have, considering these factors, for even tacitly supporting Russia, I don't know. I know what their reasons are, but these certainly should be overshadowed by the other points I have made. Love the bites format. A good addition to your wonderful interviews.
    1
  5920.  @andyallan2909  Do you really think that the EU could agree on a common language. You don't have much of a grasp of history.
    1
  5921. Mr. Kempfer seems to be a status quo kind of guy. How has that worked out? The US doesn't need to be in the front seat as far as European security is concerned. Everyone seems to think this is the first half of the 20th century. One word makes a difference. Demographics. The other assumption he makes is that Europe will be able to get together on this. Dream on. At the leadership level that is a fantasy. At the level of the electorate there is a growing number of people who just don't want to get involved in wars. As for getting their act together on defense procurement or development, that is also fantasy. Just look at the programs for fighter aircraft they have tried over the years. What are they buying? F-35s. The biggest fallacy is that the EU was going to evolve into some sort of United States of Europe. Another fantasy. The US will continue to be involved, but on our terms in line with our interests.
    1
  5922. Fact checking is not hard, it's stupid. You gave lots of good examples of how it has been abused. How about traditional media. Go back to old style media, such as newspapers. How do they handle errors and omissions? Think about it. From an American point of view, it is also a free speech issue. I know that free speech does not mean the same thing in Europe, so it may be hard for a European to understand. Free speech in the American context means that you can say whatever you want. Yes, whatever. For one thing, and this was recognized as true at the founding of the Republic, there is no independent arbiter. For another thing, a rational person would want to hear what the other side thinks, even if is repugnant. The problem is that you won't stop people from thinking these things and finding a way to communicate. Then, when the ideas burst out in the open, you are surprised and unable to cope with them. We saw this on the public airwaves in the US in the 1990s. Since the airwaves (TV and radio) were common property of the country and regulated we had something called the fairness doctrine. When that was done away with, we got access to everyone's ideas, many of which were hidden. Some were just silly, but others turned out to be mainstream. Community notes seem to be a good solution. What I think the chattering class misunderstands is that people have agency. I also think they have very little idea of what freedom means.
    1
  5923. Thanks for sharing. Even in the early 2000s there were problems with the IRA. As an executive with an American company living in England, I was advised by our security people not to go to Belfast as there were a spate of kidnappings there of people fitting my profile. I was also warned not to go to Israel and South Africa, both places where I had business. My remit covered Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Our security people were very thorough. I also remember, in the 1970s and early 1980s seeing, and in fact meeting, IRA fighters who were in the US raising funds. These were all casual meetings. It would be friends of mine who were Irish American who knew somebody. They happened in Washington, DC, where I was born, in the Georgetown area (the specific area where I was born). There was a lot of it about.
    1
  5924. James, I really appreciate these Q&A videos. I appreciate all of your videos, but these bring up some very interesting questions. On the Ukraine situation, especially as regards the question about secessionist movements, I find my own evolution in thinking about this is instructive. Part of the issue goes back the Russification activities going back to the time of the czars and continuing in the Soviet Union. First, with Crimea, that situation seemed historically ambiguous, at best. Then there was the Donbas. There were lots of reports and videos about Russian speakers fleeing the conflict with the Ukrainians that elicited a lot of sympathy. Of course, the actions of the Russians and the clear propaganda manipulation belies a lot of what seemed clear prior to the 2022 invasion. Then there is the issue of recognized state borders. Frankly, there are lots of borders in Europe that were decided after WWI and WWII and some that are the leftovers from pre-nation state times (the age of kingdoms, principalities and empires). I have to wonder about the future of many of the nation states around the world. I mentioned the situation in Europe, but of course there are the situations, some of them similar to the European situation while others are the result of European imperialism all around the world. Woodrow Wilson, in his fourteen points seemed to prefigure some of the issues we face today. There was a lot in there about borders and nationalities (not states). Even back then he recognized that this was an issue.
    1
  5925.  @TomTomicMic  Great point! I was reacting to the second sentence. It kind of ignores the concept of sovereignty.
    1
  5926.  @Jason-io9zg  Not sure of what you mean, especially the last word.
    1
  5927. What I hate about these politicians is that they just repeat the litany of facts before they get to the point. Anyone who is half informed and interested knows this. People who are not informed will not be watching. Don't waste out time.
    1
  5928.  @genericscout5408  A big flaw in your logic is that they don't know the specific target. They don't have to. Evidence gathered already shows that the drones are aimed at important targets. Already 40% of their electric grid has been damaged. Many other targets have been destroyed.
    1
  5929. The Labor Party leadership has truly lost its way. I keep drawing parallels with the Democratic Party in the US. All the talk from them is about rebranding and better messaging. No talk at all about what they really stand for. Frankly, and this is the case for Labor as well, if they honestly came out and said what they stood for they would be resoundingly rejected by the electorate. Trump has reformed the Republican Party in the US and has a very clear message and ideology. I get the impression this is true of Farage and Reform in the UK.
    1
  5930. Taiwan's democratic system is slow and cumbersome, says Beijing. That is a feature, and a good one, not a bug. My wife and I used to always say we liked divided government. That way the government could not do too much. Look at Obamacare. Just look at the foolish programs Biden passed in his first two years. Now there are real checks on what he could do. Look at what happened with Bill Clinton when he lost the Congress. He was forced to compromise. He was more of a centrist and the result was that, working with the opposition, we had a balanced budget for a time. During the height of the pandemic lots of people thought that China's draconian measures showed the strength of their system. Now we know better. They are paying the ultimate price for their missteps. In fact, the shutdown of debate in the west, dismissing any questioning of authorities as "fake news" and impacting people's careers, has proven to be a bit of the Chinese system we implemented and that is having negative repercussions to this day. Just a comment on "fake news". Reviewing data from the pandemic, now that the peak has passed in the west, it is clear that many of the measures taken were not supported by "the science". Fauci just admitted that. The problem with labeling "fake news" is that of the "labelers". Who are these people? What expertise do they have? As President Joe likes to say: Come on man.
    1
  5931. My wife and I used to say that we liked a divided Congress because they wouldn't get as many opportunities to mess up our lives, I mean pass legislation.
    1
  5932. Wow! Ignorance of history on full display. One of the reasons the Soviets didn't withdraw from western Europe (labeled incorrectly in the map as eastern) is ideology. The Communist ideology is internationalist. The goal is to spread the ideology. It is a fundamental tenant. Another reason is strategic depth. The Soviets wanted a buffer zone for protection. They forward base troops well away from their own borders. This was also done by the Russian Empire and is a major part of the reason for the current war in Ukraine. Putin is trying to recreate the Russian Empire. He has said so.
    1
  5933. Listened to a podcast a while ago that was germane to this issue. The podcaster followed a group of people going around London, which does not have good weather like CA. The people were trying to get people to go to shelters. NOONE did. Think about that. There is a free resource for these people, and all of the people they interacted with on the street refused to take advantage of it. London has a much smaller homelessness population, probably because of the weather. And yet, people are not taking advantage of the services provided. We need to understand the makeup of the this population. Perhaps we should bring back the state institutions. At least these people would be out of the way and not messing up the whole community for the vast majority. That is a public good, no matter how much you might not like it.
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  5934. I find it interesting that you use the phrase "most analysts agree". Please take this for what it is, but the large number of people who are creating content on this war don't need to refer to the analysts. For one thing, their watchers have just as much access to those resources. What is of real interest is what you think is happening. We all know that this is all opinion. So, referencing opinion in an opinion is not terribly illuminating.
    1
  5935. More ships? Are they going to be as good as Russia's only aircraft carrier? This is a non-issue.
    1
  5936. Vigilante justice is necessary when law enforcement will not do its job. This is not a hit on law enforcement. Typically, what we have seen in the last couple of years, is law enforcement being reigned in by political leaders. This happened in Kenosha. Vigilante justice was common in the old West. It was finally displaced when the government put in place strong law enforcement. Withdraw law enforcement, and people will protect themselves, as they have the right to do.
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  5937. Currency, whether asset backed or fiat, is both a method of exchange and, in Marx's view, stored up dead labor. Be thankful for that. If you could not store your labor for later use, you return to feudalism. I mean literal serfdom. As for the fiat aspect, that is inevitable. Over long stretches of history where there was little innovation and most people lived of agricultural activities, there was no real need for floating currencies. In an environment of constant technological innovation, the question of how much currency there should be becomes quite abstract. Having lived almost seven decades, I have seen a lot of this innovation, and participated in it. Any kind of asset based system, as Peter points out, has no connection to the "real" economy.
    1
  5938. I was born in Washington, DC. So, I know and have tracked the Washington Post for decades. Actually, my brother had the local Washington Post delivery route in our neighborhood. It was quite lucrative. The current editorial content is utter crap. This probably predated Bezos' ownership. but has gotten no better. I am a fan of Bezos as far as his purely business pursuits go. On the other hand, when he turns to politics, I am not so supportive.
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  5939. The Brits used to appoint serious people to the Foreign Secretary position. The UK is well and truly fuc*ed.
    1
  5940. Jet packs? Really. I am actually disappointed that Ukraine is playing with this at this time. Just looking this up, they cost over $400K. I have seen one application that might (although I am still wary) be useful and wouldn't require a lot of them. This is to board ships at sea taken over by pirates. A small number of marines landing, while being covered by suppressing fire, could then allow a larger number of sea borne troops to board. This hasn't been done yet, and these things have been around since I was a kid (we are talking a long time ago).
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  5941.  @pouglwaw5932  Not if he got shot down, or had to move the soldier.
    1
  5942.  @RSCa3218  I tend to agree with what you say. I was not talking about market predictions, but global growth predictions. To say that a particular policy now will result in a particular impact in 20 years is a nonsense.
    1
  5943.  @highrofellos6721  Never said minutes, but this is 24 hours. And yes, if they really wanted to, it could be minutes. We have the technology. I have seen it. We are not really that far apart. My issue is that we have the DoT regulations, and I understand them, but there seems to be no consideration for the conditions. Not arguing with you, but with the regulations. These are dangerous weather conditions for people who may have issues. This is more important, in my humble opinion, than the regulations. Safety of the populace should always trump regulation. Just my humble opinion.
    1
  5944. Excessive competition? You are beginning to sound like a communist. That whole concept is foreign to capitalist economies. Why should any of these companies survive? Who cares if a particular company survives? That is not a valid economic or social goal.
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  5945. The legacy media, especially the far left, is toast. I don't understand who these people are. Who or what is Don Lemon? Where did he come from. Everything I have heard that came out of his mouth has been either stupid, offensive or both. And he is not the worst.
    1
  5946. So, you only got the vaccine because of fear of not being able to go to work, etc. The vaccines are essential to getting the economy back on track. They are effective in reducing the pressure on hospitals and reduce the rate of deaths. We do lots of vaccines for our kids. Many years ago my father-in-law, who is a doctor gave my then wife and I a vaccine for something (can't remember what it was) when we came to visit. We had been vaccinated before a certain time and the science said that the effectiveness had waned for us. It was funny, really. We take vaccines for lots of things. Many diseases have been eradicated through vaccines. Did you, or your parents, determine the effectiveness of the childhood vaccines you were given? Most were required for you to go to school. Most of the people talking about autonomy, such as yourself, have taken the vaccine. I had yet to hear a media pundit who has not. If you have taken the vaccine, then you should shut up about this issue.
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  5947. State run mental hospitals were shut down around the country because of activists. They are needed. Most, if not all, of the homeless are mentally ill. As for what the politicians are thinking, don't forget they were elected. The fault lies with the electorate. PERIOD!
    1
  5948.  @AlfredKriman  Love it! Thank you for the education.
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  5949. It is a bit rich for the Houthis to chide anyone about anything. Heck, they practice actual chattel slavery. They are reprehensible.
    1
  5950. I love it! Neocon hippie. Who would have thunk?
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  5951. Thanks for sharing. The issues you bring up about the state of the field are important. I started university in the early 1970s majoring in physics. I saw a somewhat different set of issues, but there is some significant overlap. I am male and in the US. Women were treated just the opposite here. There was always a push to get them into the field. My experience with women in leadership positions is also very different from most. I was hired, as a student worker, into the High Energy Physics department by a tenured woman physicist. She was very highly regarded, and I learned a lot from her. Even in my first full time job, in a small high tech statistical consulting firm, one of the two VPs was a woman (she was a piece of work). I actually dropped out. I learned to program in my job at the university, and I actually got a job programming, making what university grads were making, in what would have been my junior year. I had planned to go back to finish my physics degree, but things did not work out that way. Frankly, even then it was clear that the field was, in a way, stagnating. Even one of the department heads I worked closely with had a dual appointment in the then new computer science department and a lot of what we did was computing and statistics. I eventually got my computer science degree but not before I had become a high-level engineer and R&D manager at an aerospace firm. I did see all the issues that you talk about with the grants even in those short two years. I also saw the issues with professors using graduate students and post-docs for their own work. Actually, there were two graduate students whom I worked closely with who were very strict about not doing such work. I heard them more than once say flat out no to professors asking them to do something not associated with their thesis research. They pointed out, quite forcefully, that their research assistantships were totally based on their working on their thesis. Period. Another graduate student I knew became cynical and went through a divorce because of the machinations with grants, etc.
    1
  5952. Yes, fever dream. Fundamental physics has well and truly lost its mind.
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  5953. Talking about boys being into weapons, I have a great story on that. We had a family over that prohibited toy guns at home. Now, I have two boys, and they were really into guns, as I am. Well, our visiting boys, when their parents weren't looking, took sticks, with a vague gun shape, and started playing with them. We did not encourage this. They did it on their own.
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  5954.  @qrsx66  That is where we are heading. The US has no interest in these areas. Even in the Middle East, the US is pulling back. Our last internationalist president was George H. W. Bush. They have just been getting progressively more populist since then. That is not necessarily a bad thing for the US, which will be able to form coalitions that suit its needs.
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  5955.  @Leshic2  Thanks. Your manufacturer friend may be a bit shortsighted. I have another little story about IP theft. Another client of mine showed a conceptual design to a Chinese manufacturer and they outright copied it. He talked to his patent attorney who said it would be best to wait until they made at least $50M on the copied design before it was worth suing them.
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  5956. Canada has terrible demographics. They really need the people, but they are also affecting their culture.
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  5957. Wang Yi is spouting a load of nonsense, as usual. As far as Europe is concerned, it is not, and probably will never be a totally independent actor on the world stage. As the Ukraine war shows, for security they are totally dependent on the US. The amount of money they would have to spend to displace the US in the security sphere is stunning and is probably well beyond them by now. To challenge that, or to challenge China, they would first have to become a unified entity (i.e., a United States of Europe). Various European countries have tried to do that over the last several hundred years. How has that worked out? Frankly, the EU is probably not long for this world, at least in their current integrative direction. Of course, China may not want the Europeans to be independent actors. They might want to recall the two hundred years or so before the CCP takeover in China. That is more of what a multipolar world looks like. China does not do well in that environment. Even in the bi-polar world, how did China do? It was not until after the Cold War that China, including Taiwan, was able to flourish. On trade, the US is fast moving to become Germany's biggest trade partner. The amount of cross ownership between the US and Europe is stunning. That creates a stronger economic system than the CCP could ever imagine. China is moving away from this possibility to its detriment. Think about it!
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  5958.  @gtw4546  Fantasies, yes.
    1
  5959. China is not well on their way to becoming the number economic and military power. China is indeed falling apart. Their economy is tanking and is most certainly worse off than the official figures indicate. They are also facing a demographic crisis, for which they have no answer. Their military is a paper tiger, and has engaged with India and Japan, which will not go well for them. They certainly are a threat, but with the right alliances they can be countered.
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  5960.  @charlesvice6713  China will not go to war. They know how bad their military is. It is even said out loud by some of their own military leaders. The one child policy is a big part of it. The lack of innovation in their military industry, and the lack of quality has also been pointed out by their own people. They harass India, Japan and the southeast Asian nations, yet they dare not push too far. The last war they fought was with Vietnam, in 1979. They lost terribly. They have inferior weapons, no experience, and a population that would be very upset if their only sons were lost in a war of expansion.
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  5961. In the quote at about 4:00 the term "resolutely" was used, and this just gets me going. It is the old commie speak and reminds me of the Cold War (I miss the Cold War). That the CCP has not moved on from this type of talk should have been a signal for people and companies that they were dealing with a revanchist regime that did not share their values, even basic ones. A regime that is incompatible with their goals and hostile to their way of doing things. One might say there are other ways of doing things, but we can actually judge the effectiveness of the different systems. China before reform and opening up, in other words before injecting capitalism and capital, was a total mess and a backwater. Its people were dirt poor. That was the normally accepted way of life for them. The same was true in the Soviet Union (and Cuba and Venezuela, etc.). I know what some will say. Sure, they can talk anyway they want (I do), but how they talk can also indicate their intentions. So, I am also free to react to how they present themselves. There are lots of other instances outside of China and the CCP that irk me. One is the financial sphere, which has its own doublespeak. For example, when a sector or company is going down, such as the property sector in China, they say it is "under pressure". This is one of my pet peeves. This is often applied to companies that are basically dead. Language people. If someone or some sector is under pressure than that implies that something can be done to relieve the pressure and solve the problem. There doesn't seem to be a way for them to say it is basically dead, until it actually dies. One would really like to know that is going to happen beforehand. That is not true of the property sector in China, for example. There is no economic or financial model that covers the current situation. There is also not enough money to solve it. Wow! That a single word could elicit all that.
    1
  5962. This is funny. Venezuela? I have seen speculation that Putin might flee to Venezuela. That would be really amazing. As for eastern and western globalists, that is not quite correct. Globalism is done. The system was set up to contain the Soviets. It worked, but the reason for its existence went away 30 years ago. What we will end up with is something that looks much more like what we had before WWII. Back then it was called imperialism. The various imperialist blocks traded internally and very little outside. In Iran's part of the world the major power will probably be Turkey. But, make no mistake, no one outside of the US can guarantee freedom of the seas worldwide. The US does not have an interest in doing so anymore. In fact, since the US is now a major exporter of oil, and could be even bigger, there may come a time when Iran becomes an ally. This is especially true if the revolution there comes to pass. Let's hope so.
    1
  5963. The UK still seems to think they are players on the world stage. Sad, really.
    1
  5964. This is not directly related to what you are saying here, but you have mentioned the topic before. What I am concerned about is that there have been many new strains of COVID encountered in China. In a previous video, concerned with travel bans, I seem to recall you saying that this probably was not the case and that the bans were not necessary. Well, that did not age well. Frankly, for someone with your background, I am very surprised. Just the case of the common flu, which morphs every year, should be an indication. And of course, the experience with COVID to this point shows that this happens and is expected to happen. Don't get me wrong, I value your work on this channel.
    1
  5965. Just from all the online reports of the massive backups at cremation sites and the credible reports of the increase in cremation capacity, it is clear that the CCP statistics are bunk. The COVID policy and the financial Three Red Lines policy reflect the lack of capability in decision making in Xi's China. In both cases something needed to be done. In both cases there was really no public discussion and in both cases the policies implemented made things worse. The CCP is killing China both economically and literally. I think it was Justin Trudeau of Canada who once expressed admiration for China's ability, with its centralized control, to make and implement policies without all the mess of western style democracy. Let's hope he has come to his senses. We only have to look at the most prominent examples of communist totalitarian regimes to understand how stupid this is. I am talking about China, of course, the Soviet Union and its successor Russia, Venezuela and Cuba. Those in the west who embrace socialist principles are either dishonest, or more likely, stupid.
    1
  5966. Interesting comment on fine art. Look at this headline from the Wall Street Journal on September 24, 2024: The Art Market Is Tanking. Sotheby’s Has Even Bigger Problems. External factors do affect the fine are and collectables market. One in this case is the situation in China. I have even seen reports that the high-end automobile market is being effected.
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  5967. ​ @jollyroger6329  Who told you that NATO wants to destroy Russia? Are you daft? More importantly, are you a tool of the Putin government? Countries come into NATO by their own choice. NATO forces no one. Now, because of Putin's actions, Finland and Sweeden are likely to become part of NATO. Talk about stupid geopolitical strategy. Even nutreal Switzerland is joining the sanctions regime. Russia may be a nuclear power, but use of those weapons would mean the destruction of Russia. Is that what you want? Think about it.
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  5968. This is a point I have made many times. In the UK they have a similar debate. They also have massive inflows of people of color. Refugees who land in the EU struggle to get to the UK. They don't want to stay in the EU. As we know, the US has this situation as well. You can only call the US, or the UK, racist when people of different races stop wanting to come. To call a country racist because of a minority is foolish and uneducated. Harris talks about these people like Jon Stewart coming down from the ivory tower. These are not intellectuals, or even very well-educated people, based on what they say. That is my problem with the discourse in this country. The people who are in media are often stupid. I exempt Fox News from this. Frankly I am impressed with the intellectual quality of the Fox presenters and pundits. When they run clips from other networks, I cringe.
    1
  5969. The answer to your last question is yes. I have seen it said that Ukraine has more tanks than they started with. Many Russians have surrendered, and the tanks were taken over by the Ukrainians. Russia has proven itself to be inept. They still do not control the airspace over Ukraine. Their command and control and logistics are no better than what they had in WWII. Don't forget, they had massive losses in that conflict, and did not care. They also had massive inputs of equipment from the western allies, which they do not have now, Today, they don't even have full support from their only real hope of an ally, China. Russia is screwed.
    1
  5970. You mention in the recoil test that the .40 load was not a +P. As far as I can tell, and I have been shooting .40 (and 9mm and .45ACP and .44 Rem. Mag.) for decades now. A better test would have been to time a standard three-shot drill (two to the body and one to the head) and compare the times. Everyone knows the recoil of the .40 is heavier. Recoil is highly influenced by bullet weight. Another testing parameter you missed. There are 155gr .40 loads that are much closer to the 147gr 9mm loads. These should have been used. All in all, not a very impressive beginning.
    1
  5971. A battalion is 1,200 people? Interesting. Most sources show them having up to 1,000. The fact that there are only 80 people, or so, involved in the operation and claim this is not the "battalion" is kind of silly. One does not generally state what company is involved. In the US Army, and in most armies, the battalion is the smallest unit that is considered capable of independent combat operations. So, I am not sure of what the speaker is getting at.
    1
  5972.  @LordbomberD  I looked it up. You are correct. I wonder if it might have a similar effect, though. The problem was that the sparrows ate a lot of insects, which then got out of control. Swallows are also specialized to eat insects. Another thing I found interesting was that the swallows are well adapted to many different climes. They are occasionally seen in Antartica. So, I wonder about the sudden drop in temperature being the cause of the sudden deaths.
    1
  5973.  @j.dunlop8295  Yeah. I think my score would be close to zero. I wouldn't even be allowed to board a train.
    1
  5974. I am a big fan of Douglas, but I think he has a blinkered view of the situation. Regarding Ukraine and the Donbas region, there are some real issues there. At the beginning of this, before the full-scale invasion, I saw lots of videos an reports of Russian speakers in the region fleeing to Russia, or Russian controlled areas, and being given Russian passports. After the invasion I was led to believe that maybe these were faked. Now I am not sure. Also, lots of people who are from the region have fought for the Russians. Look back in history and this is typical of the Ukranians. In the world wars many Ukranians sided with the Germans against the Russians. During the Russian civil war (after the 1917 revolution) there were Ukranians fighting against the Soviets but there were also lots who were Bolsheviks and fought for the Soviets. As for equating this with Hong Kong, that is just ignorance. The situations are completely different.
    1
  5975. The latest Chinese map also show parts if India as Chinese territory. I thought Russa and India were allies. All I can say is, don't fear the BRICS.
    1
  5976. Oh no, line on map! Should have seen it coming. I did a simple analysis on the exports of countries that have not signed the convention on cluster munitions and those that have. Of the top eight arms exporting countries, half have signed and half have not. As for the percentage of exports by value, the signatory countries account for 21.2 percent of the total. The non-signatory countries account for 64.6 percent of the total. We tend to look at the number of countries that signed this international agreement or that. This is, for the most part, stupid. First, countries vary massively in size and power. In international relations and military matters, it is economic power that counts. Take the 100 smallest or least developed countries in the world, and they don't matter in terms of these things.
    1
  5977. The only problem with Rahm is that his time as mayor is not considered so great. He will have a problem similar to Newsom's. Performance.
    1
  5978. I think the Starlink situation is reprehensible. On the other hand, to characterize Musk as a traitor is incorrect. The situation is complicated. Look up the meaning of traitor. Musk is a citizen of the US. The US is not, technically, at war with Russia. Of course, the US government could do something about this. Many sanctions have been applied to Russia by the US. The prohibition of the use of Starlink by Russians could be one of them. I am surprised that it has not been applied. Many US tech companies, on their own initiative, have disengaged from Russia and China because of their internal policies. That Musk does not follow this trend is not good, but absent government action it is his right.
    1
  5979. It looks like the XM5 program is in trouble, from what I hear and read. Basically it would be a lot like going back to the 7.62mm NATO (I know, not exactly). The gun is heavy, and in reality, the reasons or adopting the 5.56 have not gone away. As mentioned above, there are other intermediate cartridges (actually a whole lot of them) that might be better.
    1
  5980. The number of cases is such a stupid statistic that it beggars' belief. There is no systematic testing. This is not the health community going out and doing either a full testing of the whole population, or doing a scientific sample. It is just the positives from people taking the test. This is NOT science and has no place in a scientific analysis.
    1
  5981. Another good analysis. As I have said in comments on some other videos, it often seems that the commentators are just repeating tropes from social media. Prigozhin has said that this war is illegitimate. I think that the oligarchs, of which he is one, want to end the war. They don't care about Crimea and the Donbas. They care about making money. Prigozhin makes his money in Africa and the Middle East. The other oligarchs make money from trade with the west. Putin has killed all that off. Time for him to go. As for Russia breaking up, that is probably the best thing that can happen. It costs them way too much to keep outlying provinces in the fold compared to what they can generate in income. It is kind of like the British Empire toward the end. It was inevitable that the empire would break up because of the cost of maintaining it. Russia is one of the last (perhaps the last) traditional empires. Its time has come to dissolve. Finally, doesn't Putin remind one of Czar Nicholas II. He is short, and not a very inspiring speaker. Nicholas was fighting a smaller country and losing. So is Putin. The economy in both cases was tanking. I wonder what will happen to Putin and his family after the coup. Things to ponder.
    1
  5982. I am always impressed with Peter. I don't always agree with him on military details. One thing he did say, though, that is key, at about 17:40, is about drones not holding territory. Infantry holds territory. Frankly, the use of drones on the front lines by Ukraine is brilliant. On the other hand, having sufficient air cover and using artillery might actually be preferable. Ukraine does what it does because of limitations, and this has to be studied. A good example is the recent statement by the commander of the Indo-Pacific Command. He was talking about a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan. What he said was that, using unmanned systems, the US would create a "hellscape" for the Chinese in the Taiwan Strait until the major, manned, systems could be brought in. Drones extend the reach of militaries, but so did aircraft and missiles. I mention all this because I have heard some people opine that future wars would be fought by drones. Balderdash! If that were so, then why is the west sending all those weapons to Ukraine? Why is Ukraine beefing up its draft? Just let the drones do it. That would be a lot cheaper.
    1
  5983. I noticed at about 13:30 that the stock video had Canadian flags flying next to PRC flags. What event is this from?
    1
  5984. The omniscient and omnipotent CIA. Everything is a CIA plot. Of course, Maidan was a CIA plot. Actually, I saw parts of Putin's speech where he laid out his conditions for peace. He might just want to shut up. He might also want to rein in his propogandists as well. Frankly, he is making Russia look stupid and unhinged.
    1
  5985. Those illegal immigrants going to Chicago must have heard about its nickname. The City of Chicanos.
    1
  5986. The picture says one thing and the quote says another. True. On the other hand, the number of videos I have seen on YouTube where there are images backing up the spoken part and where the images and video have nothing to do with what is being said is countless. It seems to be a plague of our time.
    1
  5987. You are wrong about the global order. It is a creation of the US after WWII in response to the Soviet threat. The US is pulling back from that order. The strange thing is that the global order enabled China and Russia to integrate with the rest of the world, and now they are both pushing against it. Those actions will ruin them.
    1
  5988. I am amused at the lawyer talking about "due process" in regard to security clearances. I have some knowledge of these things. One can lose security clearances just on the suspicion of a potential compromise.
    1
  5989. Casualties on the Russian side ARE having an effect. The issues with heating and energy systems the Russians experiencing today are directly related to the war. The organizations maintaining these systems are mostly state owned or controlled. They were forced to send a percentage of their people to the military. These people have not been replaced, and these are skilled jobs. This can also be seen in the auto industry and aviation industry. As for the imports from North Korea, especially of items like artillery and mortar shells, this is mostly old stockpile from Soviet times. From reports I have seen the failure rate may be as high as 50%. Whatever the specific rate, it is unacceptable. Those items need to be tracked, and artillery shells are routinely emptied of explosive and propellant and reloaded, at least in the US military. These things have a shelf life.
    1
  5990. A political party has to represent a group of constituents and a set of ideas. What did Trump run on? His constituency is the American people. His ideas are for a more streamlined government, an end to corruption, American values, a strong economy, health and peace around the world just as an add-on. What do the Democrats have? He left them no room either in policy or constituency. How can they counter that?
    1
  5991. At about 2:45 you say these "corridors" make sense. Who are you kidding? If they made sense, then they would have been built by now. The current trade routes grew up organically and through mostly private means. Transport, especially of bulk cargo, will always be much cheaper than rail transport. With containerization, long distance transport of all types of goods is made even cheaper. Why do you think the old Silk Road died? Look it up.
    1
  5992. Another inappropriate clip. At the beginning (at 0:26) you talk about interceptors and show a bomber. What gives. Do you look at these videos before uploading them?
    1
  5993. What is India doing?
    1
  5994. Pastor Brooks is an inspiration. I live in an upscale suburb of Chicago. We had a black woman as a pastor for many years. She was from the South side of Chicago. I found her an inspiration. Frankly, it was amazing that she should be a minister in a mostly white church (Episcopal) in the suburbs, but she was a great leader in our congregation. Some of her sermons, where she talked about her early experiences were amusing and revelatory. We all need to come together to solve the problems of our society. Thank God for Pastor Brooks, and for Fox for putting his call on video.
    1
  5995. Yanis sounds like Peter Zeihan in this interview. I wonder what he thinks about Peter.
    1
  5996. What I fail to hear, from Trump supporters as well as his opponents, is an understanding of how large organizations work. Even large companies, the role of the CEO is to set the strategy and then to put people in place to implement the strategy. He also then has to ensure that the strategy is carried out and make adjustments as necessary when he sees that it is not. Trump has indeed signed a plethora of executive orders, but ask yourself, did he write them? Did he do the legal analysis on them? As President Joe was wont to say, "C'mon, man!" The executive branch is called that for a reason. That is so basic but is something that is not talked about enough.
    1
  5997. Those education rankings are based on tests. Most countries in the world teach to the test. Our education, in good school districts is so much more than that, and that is important. In most countries they only test the top students, because they have a two or three tiered school system. The students in the lower tiers never take these tests. In the US we test everyone. I have lived abroad, and been a governor of a school there. I have seen these systems up close. In China they have over 500M people living in dire poverty. And that is mostly rural. Those people never get near the tests used for the rankings.
    1
  5998.  Ashraf Alsahooly  What???
    1
  5999. I love hearing the CCP reaction to US policies. I find it a perverse sort of entertainment. They sound like petulant children. I mean that in the least flattering way. China is losing its attractiveness as a market and may no longer be the low-cost labor producer. Those are the only two things business cares about in regard to developing countries. Don't forget the old saying: The business of America is business. China continues to produce because of a lot of sunk cost and destructive government financial policies. The damage is more devastating for the Chinese than for others, but the damage to others is there as well. As for these long, complex supply chains, the whole concept on which they are based is flawed. From the point of view of design, manufacturing efficiency, product quality and company resilience the system we have now is madness. Trade tensions and the COVID have shown that. The move to pull out of China is driven by CCP policy, but also by a more rational view of business. The term "derisking" is the most appropriate one. It applies at the company level and the national level. China is a risk at both levels. China shows itself to be an unreliable partner just like the Russians. It makes sense, since it was the Russians/Soviets that trained the CCP. What is sad and pathetic is that the CCP leadership is either too stupid or too arrogant to understand this.
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  6000. China becoming the number one superpower. Don't make me laugh. China is falling apart. Their navy is not a deep water navy like the US Navy. They are about to loose access to markets. They import all their raw materials, food and energy. Agriculture in China is taking a major hit, and they are incompetent. On top of that they are experiencing a demographic collapse. Don't worry about China.
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  6001.  @sinan2.71  In the UK there is a limit on what is spent on older people. They have a board in the NHS to implement this.
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  6002.  @ryzezee8543  It might seem so, but all that automation is very, very expensive. Of course, we have had computers for a long time now. They have caused displacement and job losses but guess what. They have not decreased employment. What happens is that new products and services become available and affordable. People move to do other things.
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  6003. All this cyber stuff is just a ruse. If you understand what the Internet is then you will understand. What is not mentioned is that China is just as vulnerable, and US and western capabilities are probably more robust. Just look at the Ukraine situation. Russia early on did some low-level attacks in Europe. Nothing since. Why? Because the retaliation would be devastating. What I see here is that in the west the security experts overestimate our adversaries and underestimate our own capabilities. If I were cynical, and I am, I would say that this is a way to increase their funding. Believe me. I worked for many years in the industry.
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  6004.  @4Fixerdave  It is worse than that. The Chinese infrastructure projects are a major source of corrupt funds for officials. In many cases, these funds are then sent overseas. The big losses in their HSR system come from all the lines to places with insufficient economic activity. The initial lines between top tier cities were actually profitable. Then they decided, without any economic justification, to build lines to everywhere.
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  6005. More examples of stupidity on the part of the workers. They must be desperate to work without getting paid regularly. To accept a job under such terms shows that their prospects at home must be worse. So, this is the country and economy that is going to rule the world? As President Joe likes to say: Come on man!
    1
  6006. The FBI going after parents and monitoring this bill is a gross misuse of power and dilutes their efforts on foreign terrorism. This is a misuse of our law enforcement. If this continues, then calls for abolishing the FBI may become valid. The FBI should concentrate on criminality that causes violence against people. If they are going after "ideological" crime, then get rid of them. Basic law enforcement is a local thing (state, city and counties). If law enforcement is not enforcing the laws, then it is useless, and is just a cost which we do not need. If we get into this chaotic situation, then it is every citizen for themselves. Then we fall back into vigilantism. To get out of that we funded police. You see where this is going.
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  6007. Wait a minute. Banning apps. Treating companies fairly. China just ordered Apple to remove three apps, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram from their app store to, as the US based Wall Street Journal writes, "...comply with censorship demand." TikTok should be banned for all types of reasons, including, but not limited to, national security. There are alternatives. Anyway, if it is such a lucrative business, new alternatives will be developed, or someone will buy TikTok. These are alternatives that don't share information with the CCP.
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  6008.  @buckhorncortez  Great point!
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  6009. Do you have any idea of what you are talking about? No one forces anyone to use the dollar. Do you understand that. The alternatives are much worse. Even the Euro has made little impact. Have you ever inquired as to why? As for debt, no country pays theirs back. There is no reason to. Look at China and Japan, for example. They make the US look frugal. You need to educate yourself on how these things work.
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  6010. Don't hold back now.
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  6011. What the Kodak story shows is that companies are misusing funds, either in their R&D activities or in their acquisition activities. I worked for both GE and IBM. Both companies constantly vied for the largest number of patents. Then they also got into acquisitions, often for technologies that they could have developed themselves. It seems that they were spending twice. Both companies, by the way, have big businesses in licensing patents. Is this a good business strategy? Neither of these companies is doing all that well and have yet to find their way in today's technology and industrial marketplace.
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  6012. It is good, and right, for Israel to take this action. Not only is the UN biased against Israel, but it is frankly a wasteful and ineffective institution. I am one of those in the US that would like to see US support for the UN curtailed, or at least reduced to a minimum.
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  6013. Artur, I hope you are going to do something about the hair before the wedding. The money is not physically in the bank, that is true. It is not expected to be. To be able to operate the bank and its services and to pay depositors interest, the money must be invested.
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  6014. Wow! So, comedians have a "right" to be heard, even if no one wants to listen. So, according to her people don't have agency to decide what they want to consume. As a performer you are selling a product. The consumer has the right not to consume that product. What this seems to come down to is that these people in comedy, Hollywood and the mainstream media in general are just plain stupid. That is the nicest way to put it.
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  6015. The US is withdrawing from enforcing the world order because that order makes no sense, especially economically, for the US to do so. It has not for 30 years. What will follow will not be Chinese or Russian. Both of those will fall apart in the next decade. Europe will again compete for resources in the world, which was the whole point of empire; get resource and create markets for manufactured goods. A diplomat is basically a technician in the whole foreign policy establishment. A diplomat is given a policy and are responsible for managing a relationship. This is not something that will give great insights.
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  6016. Yeah! End of the globalized system as we know it now. Not soon enough for my liking. I either saw in an interview or read in one of Peter's books (or both) something that has stuck with me and which I think is the crux of the matter. The situation has to do with the end of the Cold War. President George H. W. Bush wanted to have the conversation about what comes next, after the bipolar world order went away due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Peter points out, he was the most qualified president in history to have that conversation. He was voted out of office. The American electorate really wasn't much different from those of the rest of the world. They just wanted the peace dividend and wanted to stop thinking about all that geopolitics stuff. As Peter would say "Welll.." On a personal note, I voted for Bush. I was born in Washington, DC, worked in the aerospace and defense industry and was generally very attuned to geopolitical issues. I knew or had relatives in the diplomatic corps and politics, so I am not the typical voter. Once, we took a straw poll of the people in the group I was working with, and the result was a tie between Bush and Perot with Clinton getting one vote (out of 13). There is another reason I don't like the globalization, and it has to do with manufacturing and engineering. In the 1980s and early 1990s the main intellectual trend in those fields was design for manufacturing and increased quality. GM even had a concept for their manufacturing facilities worldwide. Rather than shipping stuff all over their suppliers would build their factories attached to the main assembly plant. Remember, this was also the era JIT. The quality issue was key in the 1970s which was a disastrous decade for many manufacturing sectors and the new movement was a response. Then, with the lure of cheap labor and large markets the MBAs took over and quality suffered. I could go on and on about that, but I will restrain myself.
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  6017. I know this is not your fault, but I am getting tired of the YouTube restrictions on showing violence and dead bodies. What the heck are those people thinking? All of those young people are playing video games in which incredibly graphic scenes of violence are played out, in very high resolution. Often the characters carrying out this violence are controlled by the "children" themselves. So, because of some misguided woke pa**y making a stupid decision we have news, which is important for us to see and understand (after all, it is our money that funds Ukraine's defense). The real reason to exclude this content is totally political. Content by terrorist organizations and drug dealers is seldom restricted, as far as I can tell. Hey, it's just a rant, but this is getting me mad. Actually, I saw the video you say you can't play on the Zindans.
    1
  6018.  @YourHineyness  Well put. The thing is that in China, the one hand might chop off the other hand.
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  6019. Probably one of the best solutions would be flow batteries at the substation level and battery packs (lithium ion, or equivalent) at the premises level. Then could take solar and wind energy and store it for when those sources are not active. I have passed many wind farms here in Illinois where the turbines were idle even when there was plenty of wind. I expect that this is because there was no need for it on the grid. In the Chicago area, we get the majority of our electricity from nuclear (I have heard up t 70%). The rest generally comes mostly from gas fired peaking plants. With a good battery strategy, we could run the wind farms flat out, store the power and eliminate the peaking plants.
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  6020. Dave, we didn't break Syria! This is a civil war. We have always had the stance that we should not get involved in civil wars. ISIS is a not a basic part of the civil war. They took advantage of the mess in Syria. We got involved with the ISIS situation because they were in both Syria and Iraq. The Kurds in Syria were very involved with terrorism in Turkey and many were socialist. After the defeat of ISIS we had no real interest in Syria. The Turkish intervention is actually forcing the parties in Syria to a political resolution. It is a totally brilliant strategy. Don't forget that Turkey is our NATO ally. Your error here is to conflate the Kurdish situation with the Syrian Civil war and ISIS. These are all separate, although related, issues. As for the Kurds, the idea of creating a Kurdish from territories in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran is ludicrous. If this is done, involuntarily, by who (the "international community") then where do we stop. You should realize the only way this happens is by force. There are lots of other similar situations around the world. Two are in China. These are the Tibetans and Uighurs. Who is going to go in to China militarily to sort this out?
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  6021. Larry, I am a big fan of yours, but you are wrong about the Chinese spy balloon. It did not pose a significant intelligence threat. Overflying the ICBM sites would give them NO intelligence. Also, the fact that everyone knew the thing was up there elicited appropriate action. In addition, the balloon and its payload provided a treasure trove of information about the Chinese, both while it was operating and after it was shot down and recovered.
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  6022. The categorization of so many companies as "tech" is so disingenuous that it has become meaningless. Remember WeWork? In the automotive industry, especially with EVs, the tendency toward stressing the software is a ruse. Actually, it is a lie. When you buy anything, you buy a particular result. For electricity, for example, you are not just buying electrons, you are buying electrons reliably delivered on demand at the point of use. If the electric companies were just selling electrons, without any other guarantees, then you would be better off with a generator. This actually often happens in third world countries. it's the same with EVs. Tesla, and many other manufacturers (especially startups) stress self driving features and entertainment, etc. Why do you buy a car? You buy it for tranportation. I took an Uber recently and the driver pulled up in a Model 3. I asked him about the self driving feature. He said he had it but never used it. So, these companies are selling something which is not core. If EVs ever became ubiquitous then the price of electricity would rise dramatically. This is already happening in Europe. I saw recently that on a cost per mile basis, taking into account just the "fuel", EVs cost about as much as an ICE vehicle. This assumes charging at a public charging point. I believe that Tesla stock will tend down to where traditional car makers are. It makes sense, but is, of course, just a guess. The trajectory reminds me of Bitcoin. Totally different things, but a similar pattern. Something to that?
    1
  6023.  @Mopsisgone  How so? Isn't everyone entitled to their own opinion? These commentators are peddling conspiracy theories.
    1
  6024.  @Mopsisgone  Well, I am not a bot, as you accuse me of being. You accuse me of being a bot without any proof. Your response is actually more indicative of bot behavior. Do you actually know what the term bot means? Your first comment was just silly. See my response to it. It sounds like a retort my kids would have when they were quite young, or later when they were joking.
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  6025.  @AstroGremlinAmerican  The title to start with. It reads like this was a classic false flag operation. I know people have said that in various places.
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  6026.  @ibpsupplyman  I notice your profile does not show where you are located. Why is that? Is it because you are... Anyone who disagrees is a troll? You have a lot to learn about democracy and free speech.
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  6027. Wow! Russia never blackmailed Europe over electricity. That may be true, but they have blackmailed Europe over natural gas (much of which goes to generate electricity), so the idea of them cutting off electricity is quite in the realm of possibility. The question is, who are you guys working for?
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  6028. This was noticed in the early 1970s. I was a physics student at a large, state, research university. I also worked in the High Energy Physics (HEP) department. The professor I worked for was wonderful one on one. She was a great researcher. She was not a good teacher. When she taught a physics major course, the enrolment would be way down, because the students in the department knew. Like I said, working for her she would often teach me advanced physics one on one and it was wonderful. We need to get away from forcing researchers to also be teachers. Some are great, but I will bet that many are not. Teaching is a specific skill. The advent of courses on the Internet is fantastic. For example, it seems, that MIT has put a lot of their courses online for free. The ones I have looked at are really great. We should be letting those who teach well do that, and let the researchers who are good at that concentrate on their research. Some will do both well.
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  6029. Sugar is much more destructive of health than MJ.
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  6030. EVs safer than ICEs? You haven't seen the images and stats out of China.
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  6031. What a load of drivel. Do the authors of this video think this whole system is costless? Do they not know how much more convenient our lives are with credit cards? Do they not see how the services provided have constantly improved? As President Joe likes to say, come on man!
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  6032. The American legislation makes perfect sense. The special status that Hong Kong has is based on the freedoms Hong Kong has under the one country two systems commitment. If that commitment is violated, Hong Kong should not have the special status that it is currently granted.
    1
  6033. Your sympathy for Chris Cuomo is just plain foolish. Judge him for what he did, not some relative measure of what was happening at the network.
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  6034. James, I have read that Chinese food shipments to North Korea have been largely curtailed. I have also seen indications that North Korean workers have been sent out of China. Have you seen any indication of these actions? There are indeed tensions between China and Russia, especially territorial ones. These stretch back to imperial (for both countries) times. While China finds is convenient to have North Korea as a thorn in the side of the South Korea, the US and Japan (which have recently signed an alliance pact) it is also a fraught issue for China itself. That is why I believe that China had been slow walking support for some of North Korea's weapons programs. Now that Russia has stepped in this cannot but worry the CCP. Another spanner in the works is the position of Xi in China within the CCP. I have seen indications that he may have lost control of the PLA. These are speculations right now, but the indications are there, What the new leadership might do on the military front is unclear. Will they emphasize the issues with Russia over Taiwan? No one can tell at this point. This is such a complex and volatile part of the world. Thank you for discussing it.
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  6035.  @EbonyPope  Is that something like "cold fusion"?
    1
  6036.  @anthonylosego  "...probably the best approach."? Is there any viable physics behind it? Taking that line of reasoning, perpetual motion would be the best approach.
    1
  6037.  @1JPBelley1  Planes not efficient, what the heck does that mean. They did things that other modes of transportation could not do. Steam locomotives were not as efficient as diesel locomotives, but we kept building them too. That is just silly reasoning.
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  6038.  @annother3350  I think both are true. Just look at the developing world. Look at what Xi in China has been saying about men who act in a feminine way. Look at countries like China and India which are still increasing coal usage. The cabal is involved, but they do not have as much say in outside the "first world".
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  6039. @Duane Barry Not really. It is only the vocal minority on new platforms that are having an impact. The backlash is coming. Even the gay community, which is many times larger that the trans community, is still a small minority. They are not growing.
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  6040. @Duane Barry Well, have at it. Many "trans activists" are not themselves trans. Check it out. Just like many BLM activists are not black. The people who are making the most noise are middle class straight people. They are the ones with the "first world problems". It is all a communist plat to weaken the west. Look at what Xi in China and Putin in Russia are doing about these groups. Get informed, before you go off half cocked.
    1
  6041. This interviewer is absolutely awful. Her delivery is appalling. I would be embarrassed for her even when I was in high school (many decades ago). The poor quality of the interviewers is one reason I almost never watch CNN. I only clicked on this one because of Stoltenberg. I actually have heard all of this in speeches and interviews before. Very disappointing.
    1
  6042. The role of China in this conflict, vis-a-vis Russia is much more sinister than you are supposing. It is much more likely that China is just waiting for the Russian military to be heavily degraded or even destroyed in the conflict. Then China would move into the Russian far east. They still lay claim to large portions of it based on what they see as unequal treaties imposed on it from the time of the Qing dynasty and Soviet times. China makes claims all over the place based on "historical" rights. Remember the South China Sea and the nine dashed lines. Another example is the border dispute with India. No, China is not the type of friend Russia wants,
    1
  6043.  @dimbasz  This is China we are talking about. They are resource poor, and in any conflict with the west would be totally destroyed economically, including starvation. They also have nuclear weapons. I agree it would be a total mess, but don't put it past Xi.
    1
  6044. I live in the Chicago suburbs. This year has been fairly mild. I have only turned my AC on once every two or three weeks. If it gets to 70deg or below at night I don't need to. I leave the windows in the upper floor open, and it cools everything down. During the day I am on the first floor which remains cool. Climate is the global temperature and conditions, not local conditions. The fact that my area is moderate this summer counteracts extremes in other areas. With climate, again, it is the global temperature, and you cannot ignore those areas not experiencing the extremes. Variation is temperature is the norm. Looking at the average and extremes in the weather app on my computer for today, the difference is 10deg. That is normal.
    1
  6045. The comments at round 6:00 ignores the dynamics of the CCP and Xi's one-man rule. As Peter Zeihan likes to point out, Xi has shot the messenger so many times that no one will give him the information he needs. And that is assuming that he had the intelligence to analyze the situation and make an informed decision, which he has shown he does not. Many of the actions that have been taken were necessary but were so poorly executed that they caused massive problems. The three red lines policy is one such example. The real-estate sector had turned into a Ponzi scheme and needed to be dealt with. So, they dealt with it with no plan as to how to deal with the fallout. There are lots of other examples including such events as flood release that damaged crops, just when Xi was sounding the alarm about food shortages. No, this CCP administration and Xi are going to precipitate a crisis. Period!
    1
  6046. The biggest health problem the world has is obesity. The areas that experience hunger are typically those that experienced it many years ago. Wars, populations that the land cannot support and poverty are the issues. Cutting food waste in first world countries is not going to do a thing. For several years I volunteered at a food bank in the city where I live. The clients were able to go through isles to choose what they wanted, and the selection was massive. Most of the food was donated from local groceries and restaurants. I believe it was 2M pounds per year. Some of this was overages, some was food that was still good, but was being displaced for new stock. One thing I noticed was that over half the "clients" were overweight and many obese. We tried to steer people toward healthy choices, and in talking to many clients it was clear that they understood their problems and were proactive. As mentioned in the video a third of food is wasted. Well, that is interesting, because I have also read that the world produces twice the number of calories needed. So, even with the waste, there is still a caloric surplus. So, this whole effort is a waste.
    1
  6047. DINK, in the US, was not generally a permanent thing. I was in a DINK relationship. We got married later than some, and had no children for five years. Then we had two. We also decided not to have any more. What tended to happen to DINKs was when the woman got a bit older, she had the desire to have children. This is known as the "biological clock" calling. In my experience it was almost universal.
    1
  6048.  @Liuhuayue  These have always been around. There are various reasons. It is more of a personal choice, not driven so much by society.
    1
  6049.  @Liuhuayue  Good thing. People in poor countries have children because they need the labor. They also need someone to take care of them in their old age. In rich modern societies, this is not the case. In my generation, I knew few who chose not to have children. Perhaps it is happening more now.
    1
  6050. Russia doesn't have troops "much, much closer". It has been reported, at least for the last few weeks, that the Russian military bases facing NATO countries are currently empty.
    1
  6051. On the article you quote at the end of the video, what is being proposed is either elimination of the CCP or a total repudiation of the policies of Xi. It sounds like Pettis. What is being proposed is nothing less than making China a western style capitalist economy. This is what the west assumed would happen when it opened up to China. So, the net is that this guy has been in the west too long. In contrast, your comment at the end is very sage and realistic.
    1
  6052. Just an addendum on Russian casualty issue. The latest reports I have seen, and these are from MSM sources, not YouTubers, is that the UK Ministry of Defense (MoD) is now validating Ukraine's death toll figures. We hear all the time that both sides are involved in "information warfare". Well, that is easy to do in a totalitarian state, but not so much in an open one. Not only is Ukraine more open than Russia, but for a nation in the midst of an existential war, they are surprisingly frank with information. There are also lots of outsiders in Ukraine reporting. So, I have a problem with the sort of moral equivalence argument we often hear.
    1
  6053. If China self isolates that would solve a lot of problems. The west should help this along. Actually, China and Japan are two of the large economies that are utterly dependent on inputs from outside. The Japanese have allied with countries that could help them. China openly competes with other countries trying to become displace them. China does not have the resources to do this. Actually, Japan tried it once. How did that work out?
    1
  6054. I thought bats use a type of sonar. I also understand that they are effectively blind. So, how does light pollution affect them?
    1
  6055.  @memitim171  I don't see how that would work.
    1
  6056.  @TimboTbagz  Well mate, you totally missed the point of my comment. So let me lay it out again. My issue is with the term "unprecedented". and I offered an example from recent history which I was personally aware of. In fact, at the time the talk was that these things do happen from time to time in the UK and northern Europe. Look it up before you make an issue out of it. The editors of the channel should have before making the video and selecting a title. Again, you miss the point. As for amber alerts across the UK, how does that have anything to do with the headline on the video and my comment? The video mentioned that, and I have no issue with that. Then they went and said it was unprecedented. One data point does not support that. They gave no evidence and I know there is evidence to the contrary. So, at the risk of being rude, again, read carefully. If you want to comment and chide someone for their comment, that is fair. But, if you don't expect a response, you may want to reconsider your action, especially if you have nothing substantive to say.
    1
  6057. It is a well known fact that having lots of individuals making economic decisions for themselves is the most efficient way to allocate resources in an economy. That is why centrally planned economies always fail. ALWAYS! That is why CCP controlled China WILL FAIL! This is why it is imperative for western, capitalistic economies to disengage from China. Western investors need to get out before the whole thing implodes. The CCP has messed things up so much that this may happen very soon. Heck, even a lot of Chinese firms (I assume most if not all private) are moving operations out of China. Some of these are even opting to locate some facilities in the US.
    1
  6058. Chinese fleeing to the US. I thought the Americans were the enemy. What gives?
    1
  6059. The Brits, and this channel is no exception, have a massive and perhaps terminal case of TDS. Just look at all the coverage during the election. Another symptom is having John Bolton, that old NEOCON on all the time.
    1
  6060. These are the people who are going to create a rules based liberal democracy when the CCP falls? As President Joe likes to say: Come on man! These are, as far as I can tell, private companies doing this. Corruption is so endemic in Chinese society that the future, no matter what happens to the CCP, looks dim.
    1
  6061. That is what some were saying after Obama's second election. If you believe that, you are severely misguided.
    1
  6062. Well, Trump was right, that is if his main goal was to get the Germans to build LNG terminals. They laughed at him. Who is laughing now. One thing we are discovering is that he interdependence argument only works for countries with similar political and economic systems. Things started to fall apart when, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the west tried to include them in the wider order. The same with China. Most of the issues and wars, or threat of war, comes from these two countries. These countries were actually doing quite well when they were following the basic rules. Now that they have turned totalitarian and belligerent, they are both suffering badly. The worst effect on the advanced countries is slightly higher gas prices (they have been higher, even a good bit before the conflict in Ukraine) and the predicted shortage of some cheap goods in the stores. Frankly, the west did just fine when the Soviet Union and China were isolated under a containment policy. The west will do fine with both of these countries back in the containment box.
    1
  6063. I think it funny that in all this reporting on this nationalist fervor you end up mentioning 7-Eleven stores. Isn't that an import from the US? In fact, it started in Texas and is now owned by a Japanese company.
    1
  6064. Billstrom has it right. The EU economy is ten times that of Russia and its population three times as large. The European NATO allies have been freeloading for decades. Presidents as far back as John F. Kennedy have pointed this out. The US had at least 300K troops in Europe up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and still has 50K troops there. The Germans laughed at Trump when he pointed out their foolish stance on Russia, both in terms of dependence on energy resources and in terms of defense posture. Who is laughing now? President Macron of France has been trying to get the rest of the EU to stand up forces for their own protection. The EU needs to stop funding roads to nowhere (I have driven on some of those) and get serious about their own defense.
    1
  6065.  @mypeeps333  Tofu dreg.
    1
  6066.  @icekills1  That is just plain stupid. You are paying for services and schools, etc. Property taxes are high in some places, and low in others (I have experienced this). If it were not property taxes, it would be income taxes or sales taxes.
    1
  6067.  @silverioberenguer2446  Please specify what you mean by 9-9 WPS. I am not quite sure of the terminology. Thanks.
    1
  6068.  @LCDqBqA  That is what is so incredible about the whole thing. And the scam is created by the government.
    1
  6069. This reminds me of a time, just over half a century ago, I was eating in the cafeteria at university. I was reading an article about "artificial meats" made with soy, if I recall correctly. The article stated that if you were eating a slice of ham at an institutional cafeteria it very likely was not really ham. Guess what I was eating. Ham.
    1
  6070. Are you guys all crazy? If voters only vote based on media, then Bloomberg would be ahead now. Have you not considered that your progressive ideas are not majority ideas? Do you understand that in a democracy it is the majority that gets to choose? Do you consider that people vote their own interests?
    1
  6071. You see a lot of people saying what a "good politician" Putin is. Hogwash! Russia, like China, is a criminal enterprise. Neither Putin nor Xi is all that smart. Just listen to them. Look at the state of their countries. They rule through naked power and will perish by that as well. I believe that Prizoghin must have had support from at least some, if not most, of the other oligarchs. This will be the thing to watch. Several of them have their own PMCs.
    1
  6072. Wow, as far as I can tell, Kennedy is grossly misinformed. Urals crude is trading at about 56, the WTI is about 70 and Brent is about 73. I just looked it up. In addition, Russia's cost of production, and now transport, is higher than most. By the way, the trend on all crude prices is downward, and futures markets are up and down around the prices I mentioned above on a daily basis.
    1
  6073. Yes, indeed, chemical reactions slow down when it is cold. Anyone who had taken a basic chemistry class would know that. What is with education these days? I took chemistry in high school, in 10th grade. I also took a course at university. I don't think I am exceptional in that. The majority of EV owners are educated and make good money. So, what gives?
    1
  6074.  @Carl0s695  In this case it was clearly the first that was meant. He clearly meant "disarm". Actually, doing a quick search I did not find that "dearm" was actually a word. In fact, what one says in the case you were talking about is to "disable" the firearm. So, where did you get "disarm"?
    1
  6075. Counterfeits and fakes. This is an interesting concept, especially for western consumer goods made in China. The fact is that major brands have become design and marketing enterprises. Manufacturing is all contracted out. In many cases, it may be that they do not even have full time monitoring at the production facilities. I am not talking about complex products like phones and computers, but low/no tech consumer products like clothing, handbags and shoes. This is not to disparage the Chinese workers or companies, by the way. I am being dismissive of the "brands" which people seem willing to pay a premium for. The people who buy these things have money to spare. It is their money, and they are welcome to spend it as they wish. On the other hand, they are also being stupid.
    1
  6076.  @mario4762  Yes. I think Russia is screwed. Apart from the truly Russian nationals in European Russia, it is all conquered territory. The Siberians and many groups of Caucasian nationalities are not "true" Russians. They could easily fall away.
    1
  6077.  @Jeff55369  They would certainly be much stronger and diverse. You have a point there.
    1
  6078.  @lucrtrvl  I tend to agree with that as well. Some analysts have predicted a break into at least four or five parts.
    1
  6079.  @Silver_Prussian  I don't know if you are aware, but the Stans have been deeply infiltrated by China through the Belt and Road Initiative. In some cases, large parts of their territory are effectively controlled by China. Azerbaijan and Armenia are insignificant players on the world stage. Russia can have them. Then what? I know we don't agree, but I am glad you are willing to keep up the dialog and keep it respectful. It is hard to really predict what will happen in the future, so we are both speculating.
    1
  6080. @SarrumSaBabilim That is a very interesting idea,
    1
  6081. Frack! Frack! Frack! I hear anti-Frackers saying that it will bring on earthquakes and other such disasters. Well, we have been doing it in the US for a while and we are still here.
    1
  6082. Good and well-balanced information. As for the weather on the phone, you are correct. I always monitor both my phone and my computer weather apps. They often don't agree. I even find that sometimes the weather radar shows one thing and the detail view shows another. I heard one YouTuber, a theoretical physicist, say that we now can predict the weather at least two days in advance. She is full of it. Not only is that not generally true, but the apps keep changing their predictions and there is no good way to go back and check. I am going to work on that. As to the effect of the fires on other areas, I can attest to that. I live in the Chicago area and we have had many air quality alerts. One day I opened windows on my first floor, and I actually became physically ill because of the smoke. It does seem to hug the ground, and I have had no problems leaving the upper floor windows open. You have to understand for this to affect me is extreme, since I am a regular cigar smoker.
    1
  6083. The wildcard in all this is the attitude of the Russians to Muslims. The shooting incident at a training ground was linked to this. I think that when they see what is being done with the mobilized troops and how poorly the Russians are doing, they will have second thoughts. Another issue is the weather and geographic conditions they will be fighting in.
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  6084. Isn't it the BRITISH House of Commons? There is no ENGLISH House of Commons.
    1
  6085. The description of the video claims "...amidst growing controversy over the use of military flights for deportations." What controversy? Using military planes? That is very uncontroversial. Deportations to Honduras? If the individuals are in the US illegally, how is that controversial. What part of "illegal" do they not understand? This is fake news and misinformation.
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  6086. HIARS projectiles are missiles. The generally accepted difference between a missile and rocket is that the former is guided, and the later are not. Rockets can be aimed (and usually are) but once fired they simply follow whatever trajectory they are capable of.
    1
  6087.  @PeterPete  Are you a bot? If you believe that, then you are a very low information whatever.
    1
  6088.  @RR-et6zp  Well, if that were so then how come there are so many comments and videos?
    1
  6089. The "value" of the market is an illusion. That number does not reflect how much money was put into the market. It is only realistic if relatively small amounts (relative to the market cap) are either put or taken out. Look at the restrictions put on founders of companies that have large stakes. They are typically capped at a small amount each year. This is because if they cash out totally, the stock price (and thus market cap) would collapse.
    1
  6090. Love the "Rs". The propaganda is ridiculous, and the presentation should be also. Great job. I do have to wonder about your pitch to get more people to subscribe. Just a bit of advice. Threatening people with the gulag for not subscribing might not be the best approach. It actually might work in Russia, but in the west, not so much.
    1
  6091. They should disband the campus police. That is what the people want. Let the CPD patrol the campus just like the rest of the city. One of two things will happen if they do this. Either people will get frustrated and reverse themselves, or these institutions, and perhaps whole cities, will wither away. That might be the best thing.
    1
  6092. Putin is "clever"? Putin is an idiot. If you can't see that, then you don't have any idea of what is going on.
    1
  6093. There is no question that the US is a republic. Ben Franklin was asked on exiting the Constitutional Convention "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?". His answer was “A republic, if you can keep it.” There are many aspects to democracy and many forms. One way to consider democracy is to contrast it with aristocracy and oligarchy in terms of where the leadership comes from. This was done in ancient Greece. In an aristocracy the leaders have some claim to a bloodline. In oligarchy it is people typically with economic power. In democracy the leaders come from the people. As for your contention that the voting system in Germany is superior to that of the US that is a bunch of bunk. This topic is well out of your wheelhouse.
    1
  6094. Wow, the analysis of the profit chart is basically silly. This is a time series chart. Inferring a trend from one data point is statistical malpractice.
    1
  6095.  @ngkeam9491  If you can show that it would be interesting. The US has had little or no influence in this area for a long time. This is an Asian issue.
    1
  6096. What's with the background music? Makes one believe this is a documentary, not news reporting. Not a good look (sound?).
    1
  6097. I have none of those things in my pantry or fridge. I do use frozen vegetables. This is a convenience because it is just me. These are not cooked, but fresh frozen. There is even research that they retain nutrients better than fresh. Frankly, since shedding packaged foods I am in much better health.
    1
  6098. The Soviet Union spent, by the end of the Cold War, up to 40% of their GDP in defense. The US well under 10%. This is what brought them down. With SDI, which I worked on, they were just overwhelmed. Without going into the merits of SDI, the sheer scale of it, and the potential to eliminate the USSRs missile force from the international equation, it was too much. In addition, some of the weapons being developed could be used offensively, and there was no countermeasure.
    1
  6099. Dr. Becky, you say Wi-Fi was a result of astronomy. I find no evidence for that. What is your source.
    1
  6100. Fuel poverty. Food poverty. I have had enough of it. For several years I volunteered at a food bank in the suburbs of Chicago. It is a wonderful facility, with many programs beyond providing food. It is all funded privately. It is a deluxe facility. One thing I noticed was that a significant number of the clients were obese. Another is that I would occasionally encounter a client at a local supermarket buying up market products. They were often embarrassed when I would say hello, knowing where I volunteered. I also noticed that they almost all drove a newer car than I did. Now that was my choice. I have, about a year and half ago, changed that, but none were driving very low end cars. Our definition of poverty is just crazy. I could go on.
    1
  6101. When I was working in Europe, I was an executive with responsibility for business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). As such, when I traveled, I was advised by our security personnel. I was going to go to South Africa to see some big clients and business partners there. I was advised against it and did not go. I regret that, but it was probably for the best. This was in the early part of the current millennium. South Africa was not the only place I didn't go to on the recommendation of the security team. The others were Israel and Northern Ireland.
    1
  6102. Sabine, Metatron has an analysis of the conference where these findings are presented. He listened to the whole thing. He is a native Italian speaker, so he is a good one to do this. You should watch it.
    1
  6103. You said it in your intro, and it is the problem with the Democrat Party. You said the members need to "fight for the party". WRONG! They are supposed to be fighting for their constituents. Don't forget, political parties are not a part of the American Constitution. John Adams warned against political parties. In the US about a third of the electorate does not affiliate with any party. Trump was successful precisely because he was not beholden to any party ideology. He was appealing to all Americans. That is what MAGA is all about. It's not MRGA.
    1
  6104. Fraud in Medicare has been going on for a long, long time. Over 15 years ago I was consulting with a group trying to bring some technology to the problem. It was already an established problem at that point. We also know about all the fraud in the COVID relief programs. My understanding is that the number is close to what we have spent on the Ukraine war to date. Speaking about the Ukraine war and foreign entanglements, consider the over $1T spent on the Iraq War and its aftermath. Was that money well spent? Then add in the absolutely stupid spending by many government departments as well as those departments that could be eliminated. I personally have been aware of examples of such programs for a very long time. I don't think that DOGE will have a problem reaching their goals.
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  6105.  @anotherelvis  Well, I think he miscalculated. One result of this war is that Putin's army will be destroyed in Ukraine. Most of his professional units have been. That took him 20 years to build. The US Secretary of Defense once said that this is the goal, and Putin is obliging. We even see the waning of Russian power in the increased conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. There are also border conflicts between some of the Stans. In the past, Russia stepped in to limits these conflicts. Now they have no forces to spare.
    1
  6106. I recently saw an interview with Peter Hitchens where he was advocating for letting Scotland and Whales go. For England, this makes sense. Both of these nations together make up about 10% of the population. They are supported by the taxpayers in England. They really don't contribute much. Getting rid of them would be a net positive for England. When I lived in the UK, earlier in the century, I used to see graffiti on the motorway overpasses on the M25 that read "England for the English". My English colleagues back then would have loved to see the Scots gone. Let them have it, and then they can deal with the chaos. Just remember to put up a sturdy wall.
    1
  6107.  @powershift2025  Thanks. I don't mind people pointing out stylistic issues or disagreeing with my content. It stimulates discussion, and often I learn something. Sometimes I just make a mistake. While this is not, I think, stream of consciousness, it is something that does tend to "pour out". I am stimulated by the video, and I have been following these issues for a long time.
    1
  6108.  @epa2349  They are for jobs, most of which are not minimum wage. Union participation in the US economy is way down, and much of that is in the public sector. Under Trump unemployment was at its lowest. That included all ethnic and racial groups. That is how you support Labor.
    1
  6109. Just getting to this. Your criticism of the accounts you review is somewhat thin. You don't look at what these authors had experienced and knew about their subject. Considering the nature of the Druids, it is quite understandable that there are many different interpretations. As for the human sacrifice issue, you must be aware that many societies did perform human sacrifice. Just look at the Jews and God's admonition against it. It was a major reason He used the Jews to conquer and drive out the Cainites. Many other cultures around the world performed such sacrifices. Eradicating such practices has been a step forward in human evolution.
    1
  6110. Merkel implemented many stupid policies in addition to the migrant issue. She shut down nuclear power plants because of a tsunami in the Pacific. Now Germany burns more lignite coal for power generation. Lignite is the dirtiest type of coal. She pushed for dependence on Russian natural gas. How did that work out? Merkel was a pox on the German people. In terms of the migrant issue, the main problem is "irregular" migration. Call it what it really is, illegal migration. One of the issues is the fact that Germany is a massive social welfare state. In fact, I believe it is the first to implement such programs way back under the Kaiser. The cost of extending this to illegal migrants is too large for even Germany to afford. Another issue is social integration. Look at India. It is a very diverse, multi-cultural society. Yes, it can seem messy at times, but that is the history of India, and they make it work. Have you ever wondered why the EU is not one country? There are those that would like it to be, but that will not happen. Europe is made up of many different cultures, and they have never really meshed. Don't forget that both world wars started in Europe. Prior to that war was endemic, for hundreds of years.
    1
  6111. Vernon comes on and just repeats what was already said. Who produces this drivel? He was asked what we know about the woman involved, not what happened in the incident. This is just amateur hour. I was reticent to click on this because it was the BBC. Now I know my trepidation was justified.
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  6112. Don't ever forget that Planned Parenthood was founded by supporters of eugenics. This was basically the Nazi ideology, and common in the first half of the 20th century around the world. In addition, the US Constitution is clear. Those powers and rights not stated explicitly in the Constitution are to be adjudicated by the States. The US is a Federal system. Over the years, the left has moved to override this with Supreme Court decisions that overrode state law. The current court is very strict constructionist. That means that they are against interventions by the court. Don't forget that courts in the 19th century upheld many segregationist laws. The court changes and precedent is routinely overturned. If not, minorities in the US would have far fewer rights.
    1
  6113. Class? What is all this talk about "class". I thought China was a communist utopia. I saw a talk given by George W. Bush, after he was president. At one point he mentioned that he asked all world leaders he met as president one question: what keeps you up at night. When he met Hu Jintao the answer he got was finding jobs for millions of people every year. Xi seems to have forgotten this. The reason it was so important was to ensure social stability. It is only capitalism that breaks down class barriers and allows for personal growth. This has been true since the opening of the country. I have a relative who is an engineer and was often in China working with a well educated Chinese colleague. What really struck him was that his colleague's less educated brother (only high school) had started several businesses and was much wealthier. He had that entrepreneurial spirit and drive one often sees in Chinese one meets outside of China. This applies to ethnic Chinese both born in China and abroad.
    1
  6114.  @giambi1980  Article 16 allows changes to the protocol if the affects of the protocol adversely affect trade and Northern Ireland. This is clearly the case. So, what are you talking about?
    1
  6115.  @unclem7816  How so? All the discussion so far has been about Article 16. These are treaties, not "international law". To have a law you have to have a state mechanism with law enforcement capabilities. No international "law" has this. It depends on states with police and militaries. Don't ever forget that. Just look at what Russia is doing in Ukraine. This is clearly a breach or "international law". What are the alternatives? The West goes to a full shooting war with Russia. How do you "enforce" it?
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  6116. "Liberal progressives don't like religion..." Guess who else doesn't like religion. Hard core Marxist-Leninist communists.
    1
  6117. While I don't know any more about it than what I saw on Wikipedia, it does seem that Qanon has a point when it comes to this issue.
    1
  6118. Hey, that was going to be my comment. Glad you got it in though, and you are quite correct. The most salient point Zeihan makes is that we don't have models for what is happening in China, and much of the world. Perhaps with discussions like this some progress can be made.
    1
  6119.  @deborahcurtis1385  Have you read Zeihan? He also stresses geography, culture and economics among other things.
    1
  6120.  @bobgriffith1810  Yes! And those concepts predate Zeihan by centuries. He just puts a modern analysis on it.
    1
  6121. Wrong! Battery plants are being built, at a fast pace, in the US and in Europe. Rare earth minerals are available in the US and other places. Their mining is very environmentally dirty. That is why we shut down mines in the US and relied on China. They have no real standards. What we have done with a lot of manufacturing and mineral extraction is to move it to places without our standards. We have simply exported our pollution. Bringing it back will cost a little more. On the other hand, there now seem to be a movement to tax products from polluting countries. This will level the playing field and makes sense, if our pollution rules make sense.
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  6122.  @kate2create738  I generally agree with your comment. It is a useful addition to the conversation. Thank you for that. But there is one point I would like to push back on. It is the first sentence, and I am talking in a US context. From the dawn of the industrial revolution, it has been the industry and commerce that is the major source of power, both socially and politically. Just go back and read about the Reform Act of 1832. Having lived in the UK I actually lived near one of the rotten or pocket boroughs (Old Sarum). In the US Constitution a decennial census was established primarily to determine representation in the House of Representatives to avoid the issues that the Reform Act resolved in the UK half a century later. When rich people, especially those that made their money in industry or commerce, buy land holdings it is a secondary thing, and it adds little if anything to their power either economically or socially. Some do it because they just wanted to. Some do it to diversify their investments. Some don't do it at all. People in the US are generally considered rich or powerful based on their "net worth", not generally their land holdings. I have personally seen examples of old established families (talking about the US) selling or even giving up property. This is often because it is too much of a bother.
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  6123. I had a security subsidiarity that was run by a couple of Seal Team 6 operatives who were active in the Gulf War. All of our employees were ex-military. Many went to contractors in Iraq, because they had not killed anyone for a while. They got off on the killing. These are the people we need.
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  6124. Russia the "greatest country in the world"? Give me a break. Russia has NEVER been the greatest country in the world. Far from it. They have always been behind the much smaller European powers (remember the Crimean War, etc.) and even Japan (remember the Russo Japanese War of 1904/5). In WWI they were easily defeated by the Germans and their whole regime collapsed resulting in revolution (which had already started in 1905 because of the aforementioned war with Japan). In WWII, without massive aid from the US and UK they would have likely lost the war. Then there was the Cold War which they lost spectacularly. Now, you have the Ukraine war where Russia's army has dropped from the second in the world to the second in Ukraine. Then there is the economy. Russia was among the last world powers to industrialize, and it could not have been done without western help. Russia has always been a laggard!
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  6125. We have the nukes. A couple of well placed ones would end the CCP. Has Pompeo lost weight?
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  6126.  @bigrollin  And, it was a lease/purchase.
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  6127. Interesting that this is coming up again. Lived in the UK at the turn of millennium. There was a book published then titled Bring Home the Revolution by Jonathan Freedman talking about reforms and bringing the UK gov't more in line with the US. Another interesting thing to note is that the US Senate was not initially directly elected. They were initially selected by the state governor or state legislator. The term was still six years.
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  6128. Just found this video. Actually, I was watching a video from Shot Show 2023 and this video came up in the related videos list. The reason is that DSA is introducing a reproduction of this exact rifle.
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  6129. An interesting fact is that the latest US nuclear submarines use steam, generated by the nuclear reactor, for propulsion.
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  6130. Does she, or the administration, even know what accurate information is? Have you seen the guidance change? The vaccines have not done what we were originally told. They do not prevent one from getting the disease. The do not prevent one from transmitting the disease. They do lessen symptoms in most cases for vaccinated individuals. That is a far cry from what was originally advertised. So, was the government being inaccurate when they pushed vaccines. Should they be fact checked and have all the posts overpromising the effectiveness taken down? Let's also talk about masks. I am vaccinated. I have no problem with vaccines. I don't watch Joe Rogan. I do not have a Spotify account. I do have real concerns about free speech. I have a real concern about the massive damage the current administration has done to the scientific community.
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  6131. You mean you are paid by the CIA? I thought everyone was. The omniscient and omnipotent CIA runs everything, doesn't it?
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  6132.  @elvirabary  I wasn't seeking an answer. It was a sarcastic comment. I actually made a mistake (autofill/correct). In the first sentence I meant to say "aren't", not "are". Changes the whole meaning. Sorry. I tend to be cynical about these things because I have had dealings with those people and other intel agencies. I also have dealt with KGB spies in the US when I worked for a major aerospace and defense contractor.
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  6133. The Russian Federation looks to be headed to one of the scenarios that have been put forward regarding its future. Warlordism. Frankly, I believe this is the most likely now. This will not be a cartelized country. It will be a breakup of the whole sordid enterprise. The Russian Federation is one of the last traditional imperialist empires in the world. It is destined to break up. China may be next, but that is another story. This will not be a breakup into a number of "beautiful republics" of peaceful peoples outside of Muscovy. This is something I hear from Ukrainians. They are very naive.
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  6134. I was wondering if you were going to mention the Red Terror during the Civil War. I have a book, a very recent one (2022), by Antony Beevor titled "Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921". I started it, stopped reading, started and stopped again. It was too depressing. He had lots of new and detailed information.
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  6135.  @martinmarinov505  Don't know where you get your information. You need to check again.
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  6136. FBI and DOE not known for medical expertise? You must be kidding me. The head of the FBI in his recent interview pointed out that they have, on staff, medical experts. This is because they have responsibility for bioterrorism investigations. The DOE is involved because they run the National Labs. They started, of course, with energy (actually nuclear) and because of their expertise running these large research institutions were given responsibility for lots of other types of national labs, including bio labs. The "intelligence" community probably has the least expertise in this area. When dealing with these issues they would probably go to the National Labs of the FBI.
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  6137. Cruise missiles are a very powerful weapon, and very flexible. During the first Gulf War, I was working on military systems that were being deployed for the first time. We had a tv in a conference room with CNN running 24/7. I remember one of their correspondents broadcasting from a balcony of the hotel he was in. During his monologue a US cruise missile went by very close to the ground right down the middle of the street in downtown Baghdad. Don't forget, Baghdad had probably the most extensive air defense setup in world. That was 30 years ago.
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  6138. Don't overplay the cyber warfare issue. The satellites are not just dumb devices. Shooting one down is extremely difficult, and that is when it is staying in a steady orbit. Internet technology is designed to work in a decentralized manner with nodes and links going on and offline. ICBMs and cruise missiles do not rely on satellite technology. That some newer cruise missiles take advantage of GPS can be a bit of an issue, but again, these missiles were not originally designed to communicate via satellite. They are not drones. The GPS system relies on redundancy and not a fixed number or location of satellites. Unlike Ukraine, for example, the US military has its own survivable satellite communication system. On top of all this, the US is probably stronger in cyber warfare than China, so this cuts both ways. China is not omniscient or all powerful. If you look at what the Soviet Union spent on its military, which was a much larger percentage of GDP than the US or China then you will understand why this is not the determining factor. Another thing to consider is that the US has secure borders, and it is extremely unlikely that it will have to fight a defensive war on its own territory. China, and Russia, do not have that luxury. In addition, it is highly unlikely that the US would invade Chinese territory. There is no need to do so. China is the most dependent country in the world on imports of critical resources. Come on man!
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  6139. I get Brian's attitude on this. What I am disappointed at is the ex-CIA guy. He is obviously not very smart as far as negotiations, either business or diplomatic, go. What is the goal? What are the constraints? In a geopolitical sense what are the other considerations? Just think about it.
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  6140. The mainstream media around the world has been totally taken over by SJWs and let's say it, ninnies. These people are so transparent in their leanings that it is difficult to watch. They try to see both sides, not admitting that one is evil. People like this would give Hitler the benefit of the doubt. It is frankly disgusting.
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  6141. I like that Peter uses the "autark model". What is interesting is that I was first introduced to the term when reading about the Nazis and Hitler's view of the economy. He had the same model. So, the Putin, I would say denazification my ass. Start at home.
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  6142. Let them die. Someone who is doing drugs illegally is not contributing to society. Decades ago, I did drugs (I already admitted it to the DIS). Never heroin, but lots of other stuff. I decided myself to stop and have never regretted it. While the deaths are tragic, what is the motivation? My sons went through drug education at school. They have never even completed a prescription of opioids for pain. They know what that can do. I have a prescription for when I broke my collar bone. That was over ten years ago and there are still pills in the bottle. This recourse to drugs for pain and other things is, I suspect, more cultural than real.
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  6143.  @lf1496  You make some good points. The intent of my comments does not go back that far. I am really only talking about the term, which is used to identify a region. Could it have been something else? Sure. What would you suggest? As for ethnic and racial makeup, this is true for many of the regions in that part of the world. My ancestors all came from the Central Peloponnese in Greece. How many different peoples have been through there, conquering and migrating. That whole area of the Balkans is incredibly mixed. If you are going back 5,000 years, you will find all sorts of influences genetically.
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  6144. Putin is screwed. His armed forces are a farce. In the west we have known this for decades. I speak as one who has done work at the Command and General Staff College. Russian weapons are inferior. His air force has been ineffective. Look at US operations around the world. The first thing the US does is to establish air superiority The Russians have not done so. That is a strategic mistake of monumental proportions. Confronting a determined enemy, he is suffering monumental casualties, is not achieving strategic objectives, and is being turned back in many cases.
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  6145.  @stormryder4305  Looks like it.
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  6146.  @davidpnewton  You have me there. Good point. Actually, the excuse Russia used for taking over Crimea and the Donbas.is basically similar to, say Iraq. Ethnic issues. The Soviets had a policy of Russifying the country. There is talk about issues with Kazakhstan along the same lines. I should have thought of that.
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  6147.  @Ryan88881  Sense or not, I am just reporting what this doctor said. I would not be surprised if the doctor had used it for "recreational purposes" himself given what he believed. As for the comment on alcohol, caffeine and tobacco I don't know where you get that. Of the three, only tobacco seemed to enjoy support from doctors, many years ago, in advertising. We are talking about the 1950s or so. Many, many doctors smoked at that time. But, just to give you a concrete example or how clueless the medical profession can be I will relate the experience of a relative of mine. In the early 1980s he had an ulcer. The standard treatment was to take out part of the stomach. He was told to stop drinking alcohol (which he did very sparingly), stop drinking coffee (which he drank a lot) and stop smoking cigarettes (which he also did a lot). Since then, they have found that such ulcers are caused by a bacterium, and they give you a pill. This person soon after the operation developed both late onset type 2 diabetes and then Parkinsons disease. He was not, nor ever had been overweight, or had any family history of either. I have seen research that coffee, for example, is actually beneficial in the diabetes situation. Nicotine, despite smoking's other effects, is a brain stimulant. That may have also been a contributing factor. Don't forget, the standard medical doctor or surgeon is not a scientist, in general. They are practitioners and technicians. I am not diminishing their importance or contributions, but to understand the effects of particular foods and substances on the body requires scientific study. That bulk of doctors read studies, but do not perform the research themselves. The research shows that it generally takes up to ten years for an effective treatment to get into general practice. I have seen this up close through doctors I have known outside of a clinical setting.
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  6148. Ben, the American people elected Barak Obama twice. That was a disaster. They elected Joe Biden. They gave the Democrats control of the House and Senate. If that is not stupid, the I don't know what is. If they vote based on what they hear in the news, then they are stupid. It is that easy.
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  6149.  @AdrianCalcagnile  I fully agree. I think Starmer's days are numbered.
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  6150. @ Ah, but one can hope, can't one. We'll see. It seems to be the style now for UK political parties to change leaders.
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  6151. At about 1:05 you say "of collecting dead souls". Is that a reference to Gogol's novel?
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  6152.  @aslouie  Love it!
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  6153. The US Secretary of Defense has stated that one goal is to destroy the Russian Army in Ukraine. The battlefield situation and the sanctions are doing that. Fatigue in the West is just plain stupid. Russia will not stop at Ukraine. The next targets for Russia, should they be successful, are NATO countries. That should be motivating all European countries to support Ukraine to the max.
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  6154. Tyrus is the best!
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  6155. Why would anyone want to deal with China? At about 5:00 the video states that China wants others to feel the bottleneck. Is this how you talk to customers and partners? Certainly not to their face. Even outside of all the indicators showing the Chinese economy is going down, this one statement, and the attitude it represents, should dissuade other countries from doing business with China. Actually, there is also the "impedance mismatch" between the CCP controlled economy and western companies. You see, there are no government directives mandating Tesla, Apple, Volkswagen, Toyota or other "western" companies to invest in China. These companies make those decisions for themselves. In China, it is the state, no the party, that directs investments. History and economic theory show that such centralized control is ineffective and bound to fail. It generally ends in catastrophe. Just look at lithium mines. This is not a rare element. In fact, multiple massive lithium deposits have been found in the US and will be developed. Just like Japan buying up high end properties in the 1980s during their property bubble, and then having to sell them at a loss, China is out buying lithium deposits at the high end and then having the bottom fall out of the market. This is why I don't worry about China economically. The CCP is doing a great job of tanking the economy all by themselves.
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  6156. After 30 years my wife divorced me. There was no infidelity on either side (not on mine, and I don't think so on hers). The advent of no fault divorce is the cause of the high rate of divorce. One party decides and you go to court and split the assets. Simple as that. Fortunately, in my case, our children were grown and well established. As you point out monogamy was not the norm in many cultures in the past. Solomon, who had a massive number of wives, at least twice walked with God. He didn't seem to mind.
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  6157.  @gh4534  Good point.
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  6158. Considering what those 31 soldiers did, is it correct to call them "barely elite". Seems like a bit of an insult.
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  6159.  @stunstar4553  That is true. On the other hand, international institutions must evolve to reflect the changing dynamics of power, both economic and military. India's economy is now at least twice as large an Russia's. It has a much bigger population, is a real representative democracy, and has a much more diverse economy. Thus, I would think that India should be included on at least a level plain as Russia. They are both nuclear powers. Given, Russia has a bigger arsenal, India can hold its own. Just as an aside, I am an old Cold Warrior. I was born in Georgetown in Washington, DC in the early part of the second half of the last century of the last millennium. My father worked for an Army weapons lab. I was very in tune with what was going on from an early age. We learned to duck and cover in school. The expectation was, in the event of an all out nuclear war, that we would suffer 40 to 50 percent casualties. That was deemed acceptable. Let that sink in. That was what I grew up with. The UN has not experienced all out nuclear war, but frankly it has not been a part of avoiding such a situation. It really has done little to mitigate conflict. Actually, NATO has done more.
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  6160. Don't worry about China. The country won't be around in its current form by then.
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  6161. India was the leader of the "non-aligned movement" during the Cold War. They are considered a leading nation in the "global south" today. It makes sense that they would do this. It also makes sense that they would buy Russian oil. India is building up its indigenous arms industry and buying more from the west. On the other hand, people in India, especially among former military officers, seem to be very sympathetic to the Russians. This also colors their media coverage of the war.
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  6162. The interviewer just throws out talking points. Very disappointing.
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  6163. The argument on regulation that you use is incorrect. To worry about regulating now because the other side may get into power is specious. If they get into power they can do it anyway. They don't need the other side to initiate it.
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  6164. This didn't age well. Actually, the Times Radio channel seems to have become a source of disinformation. This is a sad thing to see for such an august publication as The Times.
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  6165. This is not nearly the worst pandemic we have experienced in modern times. Of course. the worst was the Spanish Flu which killed from 17M to 100M people worldwide. The Kung Flu has so far killed (if the figures are to be believed, which is questionable), about 5.5M. The world population in 1918 was about 1.8B. The world population today is about 7.9B. In the aftermath of the Spanish Flu the US did not even experience a recession. The odds of dying from the Kung Flu are much, much less than that of the Spanish Flu. So, what are we talking about? Our pharmaceutical industry is now much more advanced. We have quickly produced vaccines. We have treatments coming online to deal with infections. The efficacy of mitigation strategies is much less than the medical authorities have indicated. So, let's get back to normal, and deal with this disease as we would others.
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  6166. Peter is so clueless. Sanctions are working in Russia. Their economy is dying. Their ability to wage war is diminishing. They are not the end all and be all, but they have an effect. What he says about hurting innocent people is a bit disingenuous as well. Nations are made up of people, and if those people tolerate what is being done by their leader, then they are complicit. This is true in Iran, China and Russia.
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  6167. By the way, I found a video on a channel called Sideprojects, an offshoot of a channel called Megaprojects, titled "Just Burn the Money: China's Failed Megaprojects". It is recent and already has over 280K views and 782 comments. The channel has 879K subscribers. The video is a day old as of this morning.
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  6168.  @gtw4546  Yes, and that is not the first time I have heard about the Coca Codo dam. The list is long, and for those that have to pay for it, depressing.
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  6169. Do you not know that China is now Russia's greatest friend? How can India maintain its ties to Russia in this situation? India is stuck between maintaining ties with Russia, a traditional ally, and the West. The West has common enemies, such as China, with India. Russia brings little to the table for India. Their weapons are inferior, and they open India up to problems with the West, which is the biggest economic partner for India.
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  6170. The Viper is not so rare anymore. Not long after your video on that gun Colt reintroduced it. Might we see a repeat with the Boa?
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  6171. Metatron, I was just listening to a historian in a video where he mentioned this topic. It was not the main topic of the video. He was talking about 1939 and why the Allies (Britian and France) did not declare war on the Soviet Union when they invaded Poland. He mentioned the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. When talking about that he mentioned the similarities between the Soviet and Nazi systems because of their totalitarian nature. Thus, he concluded it was not so surprising that they made this pact. Now this is a European based history teacher. So, not everyone thinks of these two ideologies as totally different or really on opposite ends of the spectrum. I read a book a while back titled "How 'socialist' was National Socialism?: A consideration of the ideology of the NSDAP in Germany" by Alan Brown. I was drawn to the book by discussions about this topic, and all my research since tends to solidify the notion that the formal name of the Nazi Party, the National SOCIALIST German Workers' Party (emphasis mine) really did show their socialist, or in current terms, leftist leanings. Really, the whole left vs right thing is just ignorant of the history of the terms. What the Nazis, fascists and Marxist-Leninist communists are/were, above all, was collectivist. I even hear the terms left and right applied to factions, or tendencies, within the Chinese Communist Party all the time. We can do better, can't we.
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  6172. At about 1:50 the statement about small and medium banks is actually NOT unique to China. It is also a description of the US banking system.
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  6173. The Dems railing about this stuff are truly unhinged, and frankly, stupid. I am truly amazed at the idiocy that Lateefah Simon was spewing. If we ever needed proof that our education system is broken, this is it. They have no idea of what democracy is or what the programs they are trying to "save" are all about.
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  6174.  @shermanpeabody6102  China has at least six million people living in poverty. Unemployment among young adults is 20%. They have a big percentage of the population over 60. Their demography is in terminal decline. The birth rate is under one per woman. Moving out of China is the smart move for companies, and it is starting. Don't forget that all these low end factory jobs that China has are staffed by former peasants.
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  6175.  @liewwilliam4334  If you say so. Don't count on it.
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  6176.  @_GOD_HAND_  It is a proper response to the sweeping statements that "our schools" are failing. Where have you been? To judge the education system on what is happening in the inner cities, which are the one Hansen is lamenting, is just false. If you look at any metropolitan area, there are more people and kids in schools in the suburbs. In the 1970s, when I went to high school, the schools in the city at the center of the metropolitan area were graduating people who couldn't read. The county I was in, at the edge of the city, was considered one of the best in the country. Have you really thought about the issue?
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  6177. You didn't mention what Meta is all about. It is an artificial world using virtual reality. We have seen this before with Second Life (SL). I did a couple of conference calls with SL years ago. It was not that effective. Eventually it veered more towards porn. That is what I predict for Meta. It will become a porn site and most people will abandon it. I think that in the long run, Facebook is finished.
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  6178.  @lukebrown997  You're right. Should have thought about that.
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  6179.  @RichardTaylor1630  Yes, that's the one I was talking about. When Wagner shot down the helicopters and command and control aircraft on their way to Moscow, I would say that it was not that much of a challenge. Ukraine has eliminated many of the more advanced attack helicopters the Russians have. In fact, I haven't heard much about them lately. A western military would have sent a couple of fighter jets to hit the head of the column to give them pause. Russian tactical employment is very poor.
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  6180. I am not necessarily comfortable with what I am about to write, but the thought did cross my mind. This is not the first time in my life, and I have been around for a while. I am an old Cold Warrior (I miss the Cold War) so I have seen things evolve over a period of time and it concerns me. Just a little background. During the Cold War there was a real fear in Europe that the US would come to, as it was referred to at the time, a "condominium" agreement with the Soviets. By this was meant that the US and the USSR would define spheres of influence and agree not to contend with each other. I mention this because I think the European elites are afraid of something similar today. Now, seeing what was said after Vance's speech (which was spot on as far as I am concerned) as an American I wonder why we are so hell bent on supporting a Europe that is sinking into an anti-democratic morass. The world is going back to a multipolar state, which, by the way, is the norm. We had a bipolar situation for about 45 years after WWII. After the fall of the Soviet Union, we had a unipolar situation which lasted about 30 years. Compare that to the sweep of history. We are bemoaning the passing of something (unipolarity) that has lasted less than half of the time I have been on the planet as if it were natural and normal state of affairs. That is just off the stupidity scale. By the way, it is not particularly a US decision. Many countries have called for multipolarity including China, Russia and India among others. That covers a significant portion of the landmass of the planet and at least half the population. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated plainly that we are in a multipolar world order. He really seems to get it. What the Europeans don't understand (or refuse to admit) is that there are high costs for security. The US electorate has not been interested in bearing those costs for decades now. George W. Bush actually ran, in 2000, on a platform of reducing US commitments around the world and refraining from "nation building". I remember taking to my wife about it and it convinced us to vote for him. We both had lots of experience in the aerospace and defense industry. Then 9/11 happened and those principles were sidelined. We are just now getting back on track. So, my message to the Europeans is that they better listen to people like Vance, or they risk losing support among the US electorate. I think that is actually starting to happen.
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  6181. Voting for the party actually does not encourage the parties to be broad in their appeal. They are ideology based. That is why there are so many and why most of their governments are coalition governments.
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  6182.  @frankbarnwell____  Well, they didn't tell the rest of YouTube.
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  6183. Hey, these guys have matching ties.
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  6184. Great video. I can certainly recommend the novels. I have read the first one and am into the second one. Riveting reading. It is a time that is very turbulent and significant.
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  6185.  @tomizatko3138  So, what you are saying is that the UK is totalitarian. I think you misunderstand. Look up rotten boroughs in the UK. Moving to a system which is more representative of the population is not a move to totalitarianism. You obviously don't know what that is.
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  6186. You make a statement that the central government is trying to drive growth and employment, and then will hand "the baton" over to private industry. Is that true? Everything I have seen points to more direct government control of the economy, not less.
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  6187. Harald strikes me like one crying out in the wilderness. All those things he rattled off as the key issues are NOT issues the Democratic Party gives a crap about. The Democratic Party has become a party solely interested in enriching its leaders. It has been that for a while now. Even him comments about the Republicans are sort of silly. We are undergoing a sea change in our politics that happens periodically. Read George Friedman's book "The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond".
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  6188. You are too kind to the ethnic Russians, especially those in the military. They are actually very racist. That is no exaggeration, and it has always been so. You can see instances of that in first person reports from WWII.
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  6189. Do you remember the Larry David FTX Superbowl ad? I love the part where his character asks "stupid people vote". When everyone else say yes, he runs to tear up the document. That was priceless. Now we are seeing the result. That people in these sanctuary cities did not understand the results of their stupid liberalism. Now they have to fund the illegal immigrants and put up with them. Gov. Abbot is brilliant.
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  6190. One can say that the US government has altered its approach towards the CCP. Let's not forget that this is a topic that precedes the actions of Trump and Biden. It has been a topic of discussion and angst for at least two decades. Every US President since Bill Clinton has been progressively more populist, and US centered. The US is withdrawing from a period of unbridled globalism and has been since the end of the Cold War. Don't forget that the global order was set up by the US and was primarily a response to Soviet ambitions. One must also not forget that the Marxist-Leninist ideology that drives Xi is an internationalist ideology. In such a case it would not be unreasonable to expect that we could slip into a new Cold War scenario, and it would be totally justified. One also has to remember that the US is not like China. Yes, there are now strong governmental policies in place, but the main driver is capital, and in the US, this is not controlled by the government. With the actions taken by the CCP under Xi American capital would have started to search out other opportunities anyway. US government actions are a following, not leading, indicator. As for the gap with the US, the scenario will be the same as it was with Japan in the 1980s. At that time, it was thought that Japan would overtake the US in GDP. Japan's GDP today is now about 20% that of the US. China has probably hit, or is near, its high-water mark.
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  6191.  @synp9ynir  Thanks for the info. I was not really certain of the status.
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  6192. There are two easy things that could be done to stop this migration into Europe by North Africans. One is to tighten the border. The other is to only provide benefits to citizens and people authorized to be in the country.
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  6193. The comments about the stock market all miss the mark. They show a lack of understanding of how markets work. The large traders, the ones who can actually move markets, are almost all opportunists. I do not say this in a disparaging way. That is the way they make money. Specifically, in this situation, these traders see that there are moves by the government which will draw in fresh money. They don't care about the fundamentals of the economy nor the efficacy of the new policies. They are all about movement. Just watch. Nothing has changed, fundamentally. As soon as people realize this, they will dump the stocks. Frankly, the index shown is still way, way down from its peak. Stock prices are time series. Making any pronouncement from a single measurement is not valid.
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  6194.  @bobs_toys  Checked it out. I see what you mean. Thanks.
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  6195. Well said and well researched.
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  6196. I have done analyses on EV vs petrol ICE cars in the past, and come up with similar conclusions. I did not look at depreciation. The ICE, just based on purchase price difference, and like here, disregarding charging cost, was still more cost effective. The thing is, the cost to charge is FAR from zero. The best way to compare running cost between disparate types of vehicles is not MPG (or some equivalent for EVs) but cost per mile. Just talking "fuel" I have seen reports from the UK claiming that the cost is the same. So, you pay MUCH more upfront for the EV, and you don't even save on running costs. This is not the technology that will take us forward.
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  6197. Richard and Dave, when I was young (in the 1960s) my father worked for an Army weapons lab in DC. He started to hear rumors that the Federal government was going to move to St. Louis to be more centrally located. At the founding DC was fairly central, but things have changed. He was afraid he was going to have to move. He was from western Massachusetts. He didn't relish moving to the Mid-West. I have lived in the Chicago area for 28 years now. Love where I am. If the move had happened back then, I think that it would have made a positive difference, so I support what you are saying.
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  6198. I never thought that you would a shill for the Russians. You are repeating Russian propaganda when there is ample evidence against it. This is not a planned withdrawal. The Russians have left behind massive amounts of ammunition and vehicles, including tanks. They were overrun.
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  6199. The interviewer keeps saying we were taking back Iwo Jima. Where did he get such an idea. We took it, and rightly so, from the Japanese to use as an air base. Talk about ignorance of history.
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  6200. Have any of the people saying that these state canteens are violating market principles been listening to Xi? He is an unabashed commie. He makes no attempt to hide it. He is a doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. The reality is that the CCP is inserting itself into all businesses and many are becoming SOEs. By the way, this mirrors what the Nazis did in Germany. Don't forget, the Nazis were NATIONAL SOCIALISTS. It's in their name. In Nazi Germany the German ethnicity was emphasized. In communist China, the Han ethnicity is emphasized.
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  6201.  @davecross4493  Good point.
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  6202. Everyone talks about the German jet fighters, but the Americans and British had jet fighters as well. If the war had lasted longer, these would have have been put into front line service, if needed. Ignoring these is just plain stupid. The ME 262 had no material impact on the war and really should be ignored.
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  6203.  @ThinkUkraine  By the way, did you ever fix your kitchen cabinets in Kiev?
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  6204. Ian, you talk about China being the number one economy. This is ridiculous. Western companies are moving out of China. China only has its position because of Western capital. My financial advisor, and a good friend, says he hopes Xi wins a third term, because he will tank their economy. I think he is correct. In addition, you have to understand that the gross size of the economy is not the only issue. China has as many people in poverty as twice the population of the US. We have about 10%. Many of those would be considered lower middle class in most of the world. I volunteered at a food bank for several years. All the "clients" had decent cars, some very nice. Many are obese. All have nice cell phones as well. Once I talked to a guy who had just had plastic surgery to remove the bags under his eyes. Sometimes I would see "clients" at a local grocery store buying premium products. We would weigh the carts of people leaving the food bank. The average was 200 lbs. of product each week. Mind you, this was a deluxe operation. We got over 2M pounds of product donated from grocery stores and restaurants a year. We had to purchase very little. The gross size of economies is not generally an issue. Some like to quote the GDP PPP figures. Well, housing in China is nothing like housing in the US. In most of our metropolitan areas, the majority live in the suburbs. Housing there is so much superior to anything in China, that these PPP measures are meaningless. This is also true of most of the West. I could go on and on, as I am wont to do, but to say that China will advance it just plain wrong.
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  6205. The idea of having a fair agreement with the EU is just plain stupid. The EU is, at its core, a protectionist cartel. Relying on Europe for defense is, I'll say it again, just plain stupid. Enough said. And, as is pointed out, Europe is stagnating. There was even an EU commissioned report that came out recently about why Europe lags the US. Meanwhile, the US is growing and getting stronger. The reality is that the US holds all the cards. Everyone wants to trade with the US. This is how we got to where we are. During the Cold War the US opened up its markets to "buy an alliance" and counter the Soviets. Well, that conflict ended over 30 years ago. Trump is the first President to do something about it.
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  6206. Homan is a great guy and a great asset to the country. It was great to see him laugh.
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  6207. Educate me. I get the feeling that the data given by the CCP is of listed prices. In the US, the data that we pay attention to is actual sales prices. While one can get the listing price data, this is only useful for some market analysts, especially to determine at what price to list a property. A property that is listed at too high a price will have to lower the price multiple times, and this can negatively affect its sale, especially if there are a sufficient number of other properties available.
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  6208. Send him to us and we'll put him in GITMO. Perhaps you should have a place like that. Maybe on the Channel Islands or some remote Scottish island.
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  6209. The title is misleading. My house definitely 3D and there are no additive manufacturing parts in it.
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  6210.  @KRYPTOS_K5  What about Brazil? If it size of economy, Brazil's is about the same as Russia's.
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  6211. I am glad that you mentioned the oil tie-in. If Iran can get back up to their capacity, that takes some pressure off world oil prices as a side effect. Which is funny because Iran is one of Russia's few allies.
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  6212.  @carlbates9110  True, but they still seem to be doing plenty of damage with sanctions on. Like most authoritarian countries they will impoverish their own people to pursue their geopolitical ambitions.
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  6213.  @carlbates9110  Valid points, all. The US is slowly (well maybe not so slowly) withdrawing from the Middle East, so yes, it is more of a regional issue. And it is a region the US does not really care about anymore. It really may come down to Biden, being part of the administration that drafted the accord with Iran, is trying to revive a previous foreign policy "success" that Trump reversed. Of course, I put success in quotes since Obama could not get it through the Senate, thus setting it up to be cancelled by some future president.
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  6214. Wonderful as always. What the German people did not understand was that they were fighting the Americans. Look at what happened to our adversaries since WWII. Germany is again the most economically powerful country in Europe. It is the fourth largest economy by GDP. Japan is the third largest economy in the world by GDP. Even Vietnam is being looked at favorably by the US, and would, in all likelihood, be supported by the US in an altercation with China.
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  6215. Consumers not in a splurging mood? What an understatement. Have you seen the situation with cars. The prices have crashed. From what I have seen, you can't even sell a used car. New ones are cheaper. The automotive sector is a good example of the appalling business practices in China. Companies are forced to partner with a local Chinese company and transfer technology. Then the local partner steals that technology and competes directly with the foreign company. This is just plain theft. I would explore the possibility of shareholders of US companies who have participated in these types of suing the companies and their boards for failure of their fiduciary duties.
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  6216. According to the definition of middle class that the CCP uses, most of those in poverty in the US would be considered upper class. Add on top of that the price of housing compared to annual income. The ratio is many times higher in China (and many countries in the world).
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  6217.  @baruasafi5880  What crap! Where are people trying to migrate to today? It is not China. It is not Russia. It is not even India, if you exclude oppressed minorities from neighboring states. It is the US, the UK, Australia and Canada. Even migrants that end up in France are clamoring to move to the UK. Western civilization is, indeed, better than most of the others. We are truly multi-ethnic, while most Asian and African nations are ethnic exclusionary. My older son had a girlfriend at university who is ethnic Chinese Malaysian. Although she was the top student in her town, she was denied scholarship because of her Chinese ethnicity. Her mother moved her to the US, and she thrived. Bringing up past situations is fraught with problems. I don't know where you are from, but in most of the world, the situation with Native Americans, which I do not condone, is mild to what has happened to conquered peoples in much of the world. As for those African slaves, and I no way condone slavery, they were captured by other indigenous peoples (blacks) or Arab Muslims and then sold on the coasts. The Western slave traders did not go inland on slave raids. The did not have to. If you really think Western Civilization is coming to an end, then you are truly blind to history.
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  6218. Russia cab sustain the losses. Bollocks! Modern wars are industrial wars. Russia is already experiencing a shortage of workers in their factories as well as massive losses in their military. They also experienced a loss of prime military aged men, up to 1M, when these people left to avoid the "partial" mobilization. Russia also has a demographic problem with an oversupply of women as compared to men. With the war losses, this is only exacerbated. It seems that the only real solution is polygamy. I wonder how the Orthodox Church will spin that.
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  6219. Soy milk is one of the most common? What do you base that on? I have rarely seen it and never consumed it. Most people consume soy as tofu.
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  6220. Where has all the money gone? The commies stole it.
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  6221. Maybe if she did the workout series naked...
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  6222. The protestors in France are a bunch of idiots. A retirement age of 62. Who are they kidding. In the US it has been 65 for a long time, and is now going up. For Social Security, the ago has been going up. For my birth year it is just over 66. For anyone born after 1959 it is 67. Private companies may have their own age requirements. Actually, Federal employees do not have to retire. They can work to whatever age they want.
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  6223. Refusal to give full details about such attacks and the perpetrators is a real problem. For example, initial reports did not identify the nationality of the attacker or the weapon used. The failure of Sweeden to disclose the reasons for the individual's incarceration in Sweeden is also problematic. In the US that information is a matter of public record. In fact, in the US, any interaction with public authorities from the selling of a home to legal actions taken is a matter of public record and accessible. News outlets sometimes try to obscure details for public relations purposes, but that usually backfires.
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  6224. Um, Putin already has. This is not breaking news.
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  6225. Your pronunciations are atrocious.
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  6226. I think the analysts miss the point. The Russians and the Russians/Soviets/Russians have never had the best of relations. The CCP still has problems with treaties the Qing dynasty was :"forced" to sign with the Russian Empire ceding lots of territory. Just as they are doing in the South China Sea, the CCP is harkening back to historical territorial claims. The Soviets and the CCP also fought many, many border skirmishes. This enmity between the Soviets and the CCP is what prompted Nixon to reach out to China, as a counterweight to the USSR. I expect that the Chinese will wait until the Russian military is either destroyed of massively degraded in the Ukraine War to make a move. It might not be long now. The Russian Federation could begin to break up into warlord run pieces (a likely scenario) which would give the Chinese the opportunity to move on the Russian far east. Then they would have the resources without Moscow. In 2022 Russia had a smaller GDP than Italy. There is nothing the Russians can give but resources. If China can just take them, so much the better. As for doing business in yuan, the Russians have already found out, as have many western companies, that you cannot move that money out of China freely.
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  6227. "Auction houses at lower prices than what they're worth." That is a totally bogus statement. This shows a total lack understanding of what a market is. Supply and demand! Supply and demand! The price of anything is what people are willing to pay. There is no standard or natural price. Even on this channel you give lots of examples of factory owners taking orders at a loss, because that is what the market will bear, and they want to keep their factory open. They are hoping that in the future demand will again rise and they can make up the losses. If not, they will go bankrupt. Their other option is to become more efficient, but that takes capital. In some cases, it may not be possible. So, the price is the price customers are willing to pay, not what some government official says it is. Heck, look at the price wars in the EV market. I once was taking a graduate business course and one of the main modules was on pricing. There are many pricing strategies. I could go on and on with examples, but I will spare you. In the case of housing in China the government has indeed set prices for new homes. They also made it so that real estate was one of the few investments that were open to the average person. They also artificially inflated the prices to entice people into buying. Now they have massive amounts of housing stock and not enough people who can afford it.
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  6228. While I hope O'Leary can pull off his deal, and it makes sense, this is not the apocalypse that he makes it out to be. A good example is what happened in India. They shut it down and within a couple of weeks people stopped complaining about it, or even really talking about it. There are alternatives. There is almost no one who is interested in social media who does not have accounts on multiple platforms. Any business owner on TikTok who has not planned for this situation frankly deserves what they get. I also think Liz is being silly when she thinks that TikTok users will blame the Trump administration. Trump has been very publicly trying to get a resolution to the issue that keeps the platform on. He is not in office yet. She is just another talking head.
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  6229. I tend to think so. Peter makes a big deal about how long it takes to move industries, etc. Well, those that moved to China did not take long, so why would they now take long to move out. Second, the answer is in type of role that China has played. They primarily play in the labor intensive, low end of the manufacturing cycle. Finally, most of their progress, besides that directly funded by outside investment, is minimal. They have survived by IP theft and doing things that have already been done. All their tech companies, mostly in the e-commerce field, are not hard to reproduce. A non-China related example is how quickly Meta came up with a competitor to Twitter. This is not rocket science.
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  6230. Mahyar, in politics the art of the possible is what is important. Not some absolute good. You criticize the conservatives. You sometimes pile on them. Look at the alternative. You remind me of Rush Limbaugh in the elections that brought Barak Obama to power. He was one of our worst presidents. Rush was always criticizing the Republicans, and thus suppressing the vote for the Republicans. He had a much larger audience than you, over 25M listeners. It is alright to criticize policies, but you play into the opposition's hand when doing so too strongly. You should consider that.
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  6231.  @theworldviewers3586  Well, yea. That is another issue. O course you could say euros of yuan instead. All currencies are fiat currencies. They have no value in themselves. They are just a medium of exchange and store of value. Who knows how many there should be? Now you got me started. Not a good thing.
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  6232. Before you disparage the US, just take a look at India itself. You can find the information in the Indian media. Look it up.
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  6233. Peter, I just saw this video, CRAZY History of RUSSIAN Military FAILS, on the channel Modern Historian. You may want to watch this. It is another take on what I said before.
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  6234. What are all these American citizens doing there? Spread across the country. This this thing was announced a while ago. So, we are stuck trying to get them out in an environment which we do not control. I really want to know what is going on here.
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  6235. Pettis talks about the "investment" in public infrastructure without looking at its fiscal as well as physical impact. The best example is high speed rail (HSR). The first few routes between major cities at least are profitable. So far, so good. Then the decision was made to build HSR everywhere (really everywhere and anywhere). There are three things to note about HSR. One is that the tracks are generally not suitable for freight usage, The second is that the cost per mile to build is very much higher than conventional rail (three times is the metric I hear). The third are the high recurring costs, both fixed and operating. The result in China is that the HSR system has almost $1T in debt. They have no chance of recouping this amount. They also lose money on operations each year. Building infrastructure for its own sake, and in the case of China to boost GDP numbers, is just plain folly. For longer trips air travel is both more flexible and cost effective. Even for freight, short trips are much more cost effective by truck. Just look at the Eurostar (which I took a lot while living in England and often traveling to Paris). There is also a service that transports trucks under the channel, but it does not take the trucks to their destinations. Ever wonder why? This is just one example. China abounds with such examples and Pettis should be very aware of them. Don't get me wrong, I am a train guy. In Europe, with its shorter distances, I often took the train, for both business and pleasure (from the early 1970s, so I have seen the whole development of it). In the US, I would take the train between Washington, DC, Philadelphia and New York City most of the time when I lived in that area. The wonderful thing about it was the MetroClub (first class). I could specify my newspaper of choice and my drink. In the Chicago area, where I now live, I take the train most of the time when going downtown. So, I see the value in them when appropriate.
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  6236. The first car I remember my family having was a Mercury Comet. We never had one again. The minivan is interesting. The first Ford and GM versions were made on a truck chassis. The Chrysler products were based on a car platform. I remember one of the Chrysler executives reportedly saying, when he saw the competitors' offerings that he knew that they had "won", and they did. For a long time, they had over 50% of a massive market.
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  6237. I will stop now, but at about 37:00 she just blows me away with her knowledge of culture and history. But that is what I have been on about for the last 50 years. People from around the world have something to contribute. Americans, especially, have such a diverse cultural background. Don't get me wrong, I have lived with women who were DAR (look it up). I have also been with women from around the world. She just impresses me. It reminds me of one of the cigar bars I frequent. Many of the patrons are black. After the Kung Flu hit, i was there buying cigars and saw a black friend, a good Christian man, with whom I had had many great conversations. He gave me a great hug. I was very happy with that. Those who don't appreciate people for their character, rather than some innate characteristic, are just plain stupid.
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  6238. At about 6:00 he talks about criticism. When I worked at GE we were told criticism was fine, as long as you had an alternative. If you just wanted to criticize, without an alternative, then just be quiet.
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  6239. It's easy to lay out a bunch of specs and say that it is wonderful. The fact that it was never built might be a clue. At the time it was being designed, there was no engineering modeling software, no way to predict what it would really do, but to build it. Basically, it is a load of crap.
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  6240. All this stuff that is happening in America has always been there. The thing about the US is that, because we have pretty much unrestricted free speech it gets shown and talked about. I started high school in 1970. There were lots of anti-war demonstrations. Despite that, Richard Nixon, who was no dove on the war, won reelection in a landslide. Look at the wide margins aid to Israel and Ukraine received in the Congress. Veto proof margins. Look at surveys of people about aid to Israel and Ukraine. It has come out in regard to anti-Israel demonstrations today on campuses that outsiders organized at least some of them. A lot of this stuff is organized by outsiders. I saw this in everything from anti-nuclear power demonstrations to anti-war demonstrations in the past. Most of the demonstrators are just clueless tools. Heck, a lot of the anti-war demonstrators in the Vietnam era were there mostly for the sex and drugs. In today's demonstrations I really love the LGBT demonstrators supporting Hamas. Talk about clueless. A good source to understand what the US is going through now is George Friedman's book "The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond". The real storm is coming in China.
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  6241. You mention that the revenues could go to local governments. This is the thing that countries like the UK, US and much of Europe forget. Getting energy locally means local tax revenue. If your long-term goal is to move to something like EVs and low, or no, carbon energy, that will take money. By buying foreign energy you send that money overseas, often to hostile governments. The future really is nuclear, solar and wind. The solar and wind need to be backed up with batteries. All this is expensive.
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  6242. The analysis of what will happen to China post CCP is all drivel. It ignores the history of China and the issues of the current situation. For one thing, China as a centrally ruled unitary state is not the norm. Through much of its history the various regions have been ruled locally by warlords. I saw one analysis that stated that throughout its long history China may have had only 300 or so years of unitary central government. I don't know how accurate that is, but I expect it is closer to the truth than seeing China as a strong centralized state through history. As for the early 20th century, after the fall of the Qing dynasty, Sun, then Chaing, ruled a small portion of China. There were other warlords (Chiang and Mao were just two of many) who controlled more territory and population. It was only the Japanese invasion that sort of united them. Afterwards they then turned on each other again. Let me offer an alternative future. China will break up into at least four parts. Tibet will break off. The cost and difficulty of keeping it makes it unlikely that anyone will bother to try and hold it. Xinjiang will break away. The Han that have been relocated there will flee. This is the only part of China with an organized resistance. Inner Mongolia will break away and possibly unite with Mongolia. What the CCP is doing to their culture is very unpopular. Finally, there is a natural cultural, geographic and political split between north and south China. What you have to understand is that the CCP spends more on internal security than on the PLA. This will no longer be tenable after the fall of the CCP. Have you wondered why no one has attempted to conquer China in the last several centuries? China is vast, has lots of people and is relatively poor in natural resources. Why do you think the European powers, who forced many concessions on China, especially at the ports, never went all the way with conquest when they had done so just about everywhere else? China's vast population has, to some extent, protected it. Now, with its demographic makeup it will sink it.
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  6243.  @Ssssssmmmmmmmmm  What rock have you been hiding under? All such intergovernmental meetings are, at least, partly for show. What do you think the whole UN is? Actually, I would pull out of the UN. In this case it was not, and was never advertised as, a peace negotiation. The goal seems to have been, and it was met, to set the terms for any peace process, and to get countries on board with those terms. In that it was largely successful.
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  6244.  @plonss  Get a clue. If there were no "international" community, then what is the UN? Why do Russia and China participate in the UN? Why do China and Russia spend so much money and diplomatic capital to influence such a nonexistent community? What are there all those treaties and international groupings? As for this being something the "west" always talks about, then why is China risking war to take over this community? Listen to their own ministry of foreign affairs. Your lack of knowledge is breathtaking.
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  6245. Xi's, and the government's use of outdated communist dialectic terminology is a sure sign of decay. Couple that with the unreliability of any statistics coming out of the government, and you have an opaque environment. Any outside investor that advocates investment in China under these conditions is doing his clients a disservice. I wonder if there might even be a fiduciary issue here.
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  6246. Very interesting video. Thanks for sharing. The father of my father-in-law's cousin was an administrator for Germany in Prague. I met him in Bonn, when he was getting on in years, in his apartment on the Rhine. It was very interesting. The family had a history traced back to 1700. In fact, we were shown the family photo album. One picture was the brother of the Prague administrator. He was a captain in the German Army. He was the picture of the Aryan officer, with his Iron Cross. He died on the eastern front. A few years later the cousin was in the US. I was showing him some of my guns, but one I would not show him was a Masin-Nagant made in 1942 as this may have been the type of gun that killed his uncle and would bring bad memories.
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  6247. When considering Michelle Obama, one has to look at Barak Obama's stance on foreign policy. Barak always preferred diplomacy over military action. The disastrous Iran deal was one result. He also set "red lines" in Syria, and then did basically nothing after they were crossed. Finally, he was President when the Russians took over Crimea. Will Michelle be any different? There are many who believe that Barak is still pulling the strings behind the scenes, both within the Democratic Party and the White House. Many senior officials in the Biden Administration are leftovers from the Obama Administration. What will be his influence over his wife? This might not be a positive development for Ukraine.
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  6248. Musk cannot become president of the US. That is in the Constitution. Why are you people discussing this without any real knowledge or analysis?
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  6249. The Internet was created to share cat photos and videos, I have heard. Twenty vehicles. That is the type of number I hear from this conflict all the time. That is lame. For example, when the Syrians attacked the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War they attacked with well over 500 tanks and a lot of other armor. If you look at the Battle of 73 Easting in the Gulf War, there were 200-300 armored vehicles on the US side and 300-400 on the Iraqi side. There were many, many more armored vehicles on the US side following behind. This whole Ukraine War as far as I can tell from all the reports I have seen consists of small unit actions. This is no way to win a war for either side.
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  6250. It's not only on X where people are saying they are the media now. I know of one YouTube news channel from the UK that has used that tag line for quite a while. They are correct, by the way. This is something that has been brewing for a long time, and I think the script has finally flipped. The legacy media, including broadcast TV, cable and movies, was on the way down a long time ago. As for Hollywood and bozos like Ferrell, don't they know they are in a mass market business? The dumbest thing you can do in such a business is to antagonize the masses. If you are a business, then what you want to do is to understand your customers and give them what they want. That is such basic stuff that it amazes me that Hollywood would forget it. Remember Bud Light? That businesses in America are forgetting that is a bad sign indeed. Where are the boards of directors. They seem to be shirking their fiduciary duties.
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  6251. We heard all this talk about other countries overtaking the US for decades. I remember when it was Japan that was going to overtake the US. Also, "other measures" were mentioned. If this means PPP, then Mr. Williams is just spouting nonsense.
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  6252. At about 3:15 I heard "...no one is allowed to have a voice...". Duh! You rulers are totalitarian communists. What did people expect?
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  6253. The Democratic Party has never really been anti-war. Look at the Cold War. Truman was president during the Korean War. Why was it important to keep South Korea? There are reasons, but I am not certain that it was totally necessary given the costs. How about Vietnam? Support really got going under JFK and escalation started under LBJ. Remember the Gulf of Tonkin? Look at the situation now. We withdrew from Vietnam. It turned out that our "ally" in the south was corrupt and heavily infiltrated by the north. All of this was a result of rampant anti-communism which was supported by the Democratic Party even more than the Republican Party. And when Rogan talks about the military-industrial complex, do you know where that term really came from. Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, who was a top general in WWII and key to our success in Europe. He used the term during his presidency. This is nothing new. You many point to George W. Bush and the Iraq and Afghan wars. He actually ran on a platform of reducing US overseas military commitments and refraining from "nation building". Then 9/11 hit. Afghanistan was justifiable. Iraq not so much. What if we had put all our resources there rather than having to fight two wars and occupations? On the other hand, the vote in the Senate authorizing the Iraq invasion was 77 to 23 and in the House 296 to 133. The country was firmly behind it, but the justifications may not be as strong as claimed. In fact, I know an individual who was the politically appointed head of military intelligence of a major European country who did not agree with the assessment. Frankly, support in the US military intelligence community was not that strong. The difference with the Cold War scenarios was that the US had been attacked. By the way, the world, and the western alliance, did not fall apart after Vietnam. It took a long time after the Korean War for Korea to become actually democratic. The same is true of Taiwan. Questioning these things is something we should always do. A lot of times the experts have little idea of what they are doing. That is the charitable view. The uncharitable view is much more sinister.
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  6254. It's a dry heat.
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  6255. Weather is not climate.
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  6256. Trudeau is a fool, true. On the other hand the homeless and people who frequent food banks in North America would be considered lower middle class in much of the world. I volunteered at a very high end food bank in my city. Most of the "clients" had cars newer and better than mine (I have since upgraded). Many were overweight. I would see some of them in the commercial supermarket buying upscale items. Don't be fooled. These were protestors, not necessarily homeless themselves. In addition, Canada has programs to help these people, but often they won't take advantage of them. This is also true in places such as the UK, where studies have been done. Many homeless have mental problems, and unless compelled, do not take what is offered.
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  6257. It is interesting that the leftist media claims that Biden lost because he (they) lost touch with the Democrats working class base. The Democratic Party has not represented the "working class" in a very long time. The Dems have, primarily concentrated on pulling together interest groups (minorities and other interests such as sexual orientation) rather than really paying attention to the working class. They have been playing this identity politics for a long time. I have seen it up close and personal, by the way. The political landscape is in one of its periodic shifts and their whole organizing principle is now defunct. If they are going to recover, they need totally new leadership. The current leadership is mired in the past. They can't go back to their roots as a party of labor either. Trump and the Republicans have taken that away from them. Of course, something similar seems to be happening in the UK, don't you think.
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  6258. I just can't get out of my head the 11B GBP of "wankery". I just keep thinking up strange things.
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  6259. To say Russia is avoiding the price ceiling is a little misleading, and you stated the reason right up front. The price ceiling was brought about by the G7. Most insurers and ship owners are in G7 countries. So, the ceiling, which was primarily enforced through restrictions on insurers was only ever going to work for those ships so insured. Going around these restrictions is going to be costly, since that means that Russia must, in many cases, self-insure. That was always a possibility. It also means that Russia will not be able to use the most modern and efficient ships, thus also raising their costs.
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  6260. Protections for the entrepreneurial class and private property? What's that, says a CCP official. Anyone from outside investing in China today is a fool. In fact, if they are using customer funds, they may let themselves in for legal action for failing in their fiduciary responsibilities.
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  6261. Your attitude about supporting Ukraine is short sighted, at least. Putin will not stop there. Unlike Afghanistan, the Ukrainians are willing to do the fighting themselves. Unlike Afghanistan, Ukraine is a Western country, and if they are successful, they will become a bulwark against Russian aggression. Don't ever forget, we went into Afghanistan because they were hosting Bin Laden. After the Soviets had smashed the country, they had become one of the biggest supporters of Jihadi terrorist movements. So, to equate this situation with Afghanistan or other interventions in Asia, is totally short sighted.
    1
  6262. The latest WTI futures I have seen have prices below $70 per barrel.
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  6263. You hit it out of the park with your explanation. Several years ago, I was working on a data center in a remote area. We were using a variety of power sources. We actually had a contractor with a control system that could handle diverse power sources. We could even set up parameters such as cost of each source to optimize operational cost of the system. This is all doable and it is not static.
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  6264. Cuomo is a total liar. Social Security does have a maximum benefit. It is based on the fact that earnings above a certain threshold are not subject to withholding. Actually, what happens is that they continue to withhold the money and then rebate it at the end of the year. I have experienced that.
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  6265. This is just another example of a desperate attempt by the chattering class to remain relevant. Drivel.
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  6266. I am amazed at all the talk about Russia collapsing from all this. Look at history. Konstantin should know all this. Did Russia collapse prior to WW2 under Stalin? Heck, he was not only doing crazy stuff economically, but he was killing way more people than Putin has. I am not excusing Putin here, but we need to understand the Russian context. The other thing is that there is no alternative. As Konstantin has often discussed on his channel, the "vertical of power" (I believe that is what he calls it) is still firmly in control. As for losing the war, that is not even remotely the case. Ukraine has shown itself to be as bad at offensive warfare as Russia. What this war is most akin to, in recent history, is the Iran Iraq War in the 1980s. Look it up. The only sense in which Russia loses is that they probably won't attain their initial goal of totally taking over Ukraine. That, of course, assumes that the west will continue to support Ukraine. The best outcome for Ukraine is to take some sort of peace deal very soon. Support in the US is waning. Support from the grassroots in Europe is waning. Even some countries, at the government level, are pulling back. If Ukraine waits too long or seems to be holding out for something better, then they risk everything.
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  6267. The assessment was quite correct, but General Jones downplayed, I think, the role of airpower in US and western military doctrine, especially in the concept of combined arms. It is the key, the linchpin. That we have denied that to Ukraine thus far, is a bit of a travesty.
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  6268. You still don't have to worry about a land invasion of the UK. The only country with real capability is the US. The Russians certainly are not a threat in that guise today.
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  6269.  @skydragon23101979  I know that. I explicitly pointed out that the US is a Pacific power. I hope that clears it up.
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  6270. My aunt and uncle had an open relationship. This started back in the 1970s. I didn't find out until after my uncle passed away. When I did, a lot of things made sense. In their master bedroom Playboy magazine was openly displayed on a side table. As was a bowl of condoms. There would be Playboy models at some of their parties. As a teenager, this was impressive. I was very close to them, which is why my not knowing was strange. Their marriage was actually quite good, and some of their lovers were actually good friends.
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  6271. Another technology that will take over the world. Give me a break. Not long ago it was Big Data. While Big Data is useful and important, it has faded into the background. Actually, the first computers in the 1960s displaced many workers in fields like banking and insurance. These people manually processed lots of paperwork. Was massive unemployment the result. No. What happened was that those industries became more efficient and could offer many more and better services. I expect that AI will do the same thing.
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  6272. Wow. Free speech. Oh, no Mr. Bill. The British have become a bunch of pansies. I say this as someone who has lived there. There are a number of reasons for letting people speak their mind. One of the most important is that you then know what they are thinking. Pretending it doesn't exist does not make it go away.
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  6273. It is interesting to see all these politicians who are Brahmins with the red dot on their foreheads. My two best friends when I first went to university (in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium) were high cast Brahmins, as they described themselves. One of the funniest things they would say was that there were push starts and pull starts. Not knowing any Sikhs at the time, it took me a while to work it out.
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  6274. Having "Europe" build a defense industry is a fantasy. Have you looked at all the efforts to date?
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  6275. I had experience with the R51. It was not mine but belonged to a friend. He took it to the range, and then when he went to clean it, it got jammed up. I looked at it (I am fairly handy with these things) and could not get it unjammed. He contacted Remington, and they were not that helpful. Of course, he got rid of it.
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  6276. Of course, this assumes no one else would get involved. Denmark and Norway are NATO members. This would bring in the whole alliance.
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  6277. These people don't have any idea of how branding works. You cannot separate the brand content from personal content, especially if they are on the same platform. There are lots of stories of Hollywood actors caught in some situation (sexual, drugs, etc.) that got them dropped by the studio. This has not been a big deal for a while, but was for a long time. It is not a racial thing. The brand has full control over what they are willing to use. If you don't like it, go somewhere else. Either that, or change your behavior.
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  6278. The assumption that Biden will respond with anything remotely strategic is very flawed. This is the administration that oversaw the withdrawal from Afghanistan. This is a president who will not plainly state that the goal of supporting Ukraine is their victory. This is an administration that has been coddling Iran all along. A good example to expand on is the Ukraine one, I know Peter is not a fan of the Republican leadership in the US House of Representatives, but the speaker made a very correct statement after meeting with Zalenski not too long ago. He made a point of needing Biden to come out and say what his goal in Ukraine is. Biden never has. If Biden had, that could be debated. Say Biden came out and said our goal is for Ukraine to win and to kick Russia out of all its territory. First, the Congress debates that, and say they agree. Then you can debate what Ukraine needs to do that and can justify the expenditures. Can Biden provide a clear rationale for any of the actions we are taking, in Ukraine, the Middle East, the Red Sea or the South China Sea? Look at his national security team. This is one of the weakest we have had in decades. As the president himself likes to say: Come on man!
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  6279. I knew all this because I lived in England (Winchester) in the early 20th century, and had traveled there as early as the mid-1970s. I am also an avid reader of history. I was also a governor of the school my sons went to, and spent lot of time with my British friends as opposed to the other ex-pats. One thing that struck me while I was living there, and this is reference to the fact that there is not an English parliament, was the graffiti on motorway overpasses which read "England for the English". This was part of a movement to have an English parliament, or multiple parliaments, one for each major region of England. You have to understand that England contains 85% of the population of the UK. The situation in the US is much more straightforward because of our written Constitution. In the UK the often talk about constitutional issues, but this is much more vague.
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  6280. Are the Chinese really as stupid and ignorant of history as the talk of "true multipolarity" makes it sound? I mean, as President Joe likes to say: Come on man! In the years after WWII the US created the current globalized world. Who was the biggest beneficiary of that? China, of course. In previous times, in fact throughout human history, multi-polarity produced imperialism. Not what people call imperialism today, but true imperialism with true colonies where those colonized existed only to serve the needs of the colonizers. Is that what they are after? As early as the 16th century, China gave concessions to European powers. The first being Macau. In the 19th century this really got going. China has really not fared well in a multi-polar world. China today is the most vulnerable major country in the world. Its only major ally, Russia is, like China, teetering on the edge of collapse. Their navy does not have the power projection capabilities to keep their trade routes open. The last time China projected power by sea was in the 15th century. To totally disrupt the delivery of essential commodities, like oil, would only take a couple of destroyers, or a moderate number of aircraft. The Indians are currently setting up the Andaman and Nicobar Islands as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" for just this purpose. India is also part of the Quad Security Dialog (along with Australia, Japan and the US) which specifically targets China. Any of those four could disrupt Chinese trade easily. The fact is that we are heading toward that multi-polar world for reasons that have nothing to do with China per se. China will be the biggest loser in that process. Be that as it may, they will get their wish, and then they will regret it.
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  6281. We budget for government ALL WRONG!! The normal situation is that we decide on all kinds of spending and then decide on the mix of tax and borrowing to fund it with. This is ass backward. The first debate should be what the share of government spending in the economy should be and then to fund programs within that limit. That is where real legislative debate both within the legislature and between the legislature and the executive, on the priorities. That would go a long way toward preventing governments from buying votes with taxpayer money. By the way, the UK should ditch the parliamentary system. It was fine when there was a strong head of state, in the case of the UK the monarch, and the "government" was a bridge between them. In the case of a largely ceremonial head of state and the government consisting of members of the legislative branch one gets the kind of muddle the UK finds itself in now. This does not only apply to the UK, in my opinion.
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  6282.  Anya Wale  Well, I was not an immigrant. I was sent there by a large company, which employed thousands of UK citizens, to start up a new technology group. I had a fixed term visa. Frankly, I would not have moved permanently. Loved my time there, but like it better here. What part of my behavior would she be against?
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  6283. Europeans generally misunderstand American politics and history. Foreign affairs have almost never been a primary issue in American politics. In the recent election it was near the very bottom of the list of concerns of the electorate. That said, a solid majority of the electorate and legislators support Ukraine. They just want a strategy and a goal, which Biden has not provided. This stems from the debacle of the Vietnam War. Look into that and the Gulf War and the Powell Doctrine. Prior to both of the world wars of the 20th century America was isolationist and downplayed the military (except for the Navy). Wilson ran for his second term on a slogan of "he kept us out of the war". In WWII FDR had to come up with a workaround (Lend-Lease) to even be able send war materiel to the British who at the time couldn't pay for it. In return he got bases in the western hemisphere on terms unfavorable to the British. The UK war debt to the US was only paid off early in the current century, I believe. President Biden has not been a good friend of Ukraine. His ineffective policies and reluctance to give weapons in sufficient quantity and in a timely manner has been a travesty. His predecessor, Obama, who many believe controls Biden, was all for diplomacy over military power. Obama did not send weapons to Ukraine when he was in office. In fact, it was Trump who sent the antitank and other weapons that Ukraine used to help blunt the initial Russian advance in 2022. Delays in funding to Ukraine have a lot to do with Biden's failures in the area of strategy. Also, to call this a "world war" is disingenuous. The concept of a world war is quite clear. It is when major powers forces actually fight against each other. No disrespect to Ukraine but it is not a world power. Also, just because a second nation has sent troops to fight on the side of Russia does not make it a world war. Just take the Korean War. On the one side were the North Koreans with China sending many troops. The peak number of troops in that case was 1.45M. By the way, China was not a major power at the time. On the South Korean side were the Americans, with a peak strength of 326K troops as well was a British contingent of up to 14K troops and many other smaller contingents. On the side of the North there were a total of about 1.7M troops. On the side of the South there were just under 1M troops. In terms of combatants this was bigger than the Ukraine War. I mention all this because it was NOT a world war and never considered one. There are lots of other examples, such as Vietnam and all of Israel's wars where there were multiple combatants that were clearly not "world wars". I go into this detail because Miriam is concerned with information, and particularly disinformation. Just because Putin (or Xi) says something doesn't mean it is true or considered as such by the American electorate. The Soviet Union was meddling in the US from 1930s. I was involved in the aerospace and defense industry for a many years and saw this close up. Just at the plant I worked at we were tracking fifteen "known" Soviet agents. Our company security guards had automatic weapons. We knew it was happening and dealt with it. I would agree that some methods have changed, but not all. And in case you were wondering, I am a fervent supporter of Ukraine. I do get concerned when the rhetoric goes a bit off the rails, though.
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  6284. All the previous replies have a bit of truth to them. That is what is so interesting about the situation in China. The man shouting out of his window at the beginning of the video is obviously not part of the majority in China. I say that simply from where he lives. Almost 1B Chinese make 2,000 yuan a month or less. He obviously makes more. He probably has had lots of contact with foreigners and is better informed than the vast majority of Chinese. Revolutions do not generally start with the middle class in the modern world.
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  6285.  @level1selamat155  Tell us how you really feel. Actually, if you have anything to actually contribute, we would like to hear it. As we used to say to the kids when they were young and frustrated: use your words.
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  6286.  @meso8848  That's what Xi thinks. China has already laid claim to it in their latest official maps. Actually, it goes deeper. After Jiang Zemin died it came out that he had ceded territory to the Soviets. They had some hold over him for "indiscretions" he committed while being educated in Moscow.
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  6287. What are the odds of Ukraine taking back all the territory Russia has taken? The answer is zero. While the Ukranian army is better than the Russian army and is great at defense, they are not that great in offense. Of the four offensives (often called counteroffensives) three were successful. In all three cases they relied on subterfuge and incompetence on the part of the Russians. In the one case where Ukraine has gone up against prepared defenses, they failed. So, where is Hegseth wrong? The time and resources needed to get Ukraine to the point of being able to push the Russians out is much greater than the resources already sent to Ukraine. I think, actually I am fairly certain, that Zalenski knows that. Trumps's statements that the killing has to stop are correct. Both countries were in demographic decline before the war. Both! While the Russian losses are trumpeted all over the Internet, we don't have good data that I have seen about Ukraine's losses. The main hope for Ukraine is that either the Russian army falls apart or the whole country falls apart. How long will that take. Would you be willing to base your strategy on that? The US tried that with Germany and Japan in WWII. Think about it. Meaning no disrespect to Mr. Pfarrer, being a member of the Navy Seals is not training for being a master negotiator on the geopolitical stage. Trump has been there and did amazing things in his first term.
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  6288. Cosmoline is the term you are looking for.
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  6289. The UK seems to have a growth problem, and it is nothing new. When I lived in the UK, early in the current millennium, I remember hearing about a debate on the GDP growth numbers. The issue was whether growth would be 0.9% or 1.9%. This was important because, like in the present case, it would affect the budget. In Europe we have low growth, but that can be down to shrinking population. The UK doesn't have that problem.
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  6290. I don't think the ABC reporter even knows what she was saying when she asked, "then you go after everybody who is there ILLEGLLY" (emphasis mine). Does she know what "illegally" means? Homan represents "law enforcement". The people she is asking about are criminals. So, why the question? The utter stupidity of the traditional, left-wing mainstream media is stupid. They are DONE!
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  6291. You were have entirely too much fun!
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  6292. One thing this whole topic reminds me of is an ad with Larry David. The setting is the Constitutional Convention. David's character asks, so even the dumb ones get to vote. The rest answer "Yes!". He then proceeds to run up to the document and attempts to tear it up.
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  6293. The original income tax had a minimum threshold. It was a tax on the rich to help retire war debt.
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  6294. Too bad we can't give multiple thumbs up.
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  6295.  @brianglick169  That may be so. On the other hand, I think the most likely outcome will be that Putin is taken out.
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  6296. Efficiency is not important by itself. You have to also consider the weight, which has an effect similar to lowering the efficiency. Weight is the most important thing. Because of the extreme weight of the battery, you need a more powerful engine which lowers the effective efficiency. Your calculation on range assumes, I would guess, the same size electric motor to power the vehicle. If it was just a matter of popping in a new power source, then your calculations would be correct. But, we do not design products like cars that way. The Tesla approach to locating the battery is very like what GM was doing for their fuel cell concept, years before Tesla existed. On the other hand, gasoline powered vehicles use a very different approach, and I expect this new system to use still another. So, what I am trying to say is that this could be much better in range than current EVs with similar performance.
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  6297. The alignment of CEOs with the stock price has had an effect on companies that do not involve fraud. I understand using those examples where outright fraud is interesting, but I think it leaves out the most important aspect. For example, take the case of GE (where I worked for ten years). Jack Welch was the CEO. He ventured into financial products which had nothing to do with the company's other operations. Yes, GE had a capital arm for a long time, but it was created to help people buy its products from washing machines to jet engines and large turbines. It also helped the company basically zero out its tax bill through depreciation expenses. Welch went outside of that alignment, and eventually, mostly under later CEOs, tanked the company. GE was also hurt by being a conglomerate with a number of businesses unrelated to the core electrical generation and consumption competency. One exception is jet engines, which leverage the turbine expertise for an unrelated market. In the meantime, they got rid of the consumer brands which had some of the highest and best brand recognition in world. Go figure. As an interesting side not, I see that in China many companies get into totally unrelated industries, and often fail. Sometimes they fail at both their core business and the unrelated ones they graft on, at the same time. Focus, people, focus. Isn't that the role of the board?
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  6298.  @AutoTrawler  Well, I don't "think" that is what Marx would think. That is what he thought and wrote. As for "postindustrial", that is never quite true. In the end, it is what you can make that matters. One consumes things. I am writing this on a "thing" (a laptop PC). I communicate on a thing (a cell phone). I live in a house, a thing, filled with things. Even the big tech companies that make money mostly from advertising, are indirectly tied to the economy of things, of industry. What, for example, are they advertising? Things, of course. The US is rapidly industrializing as we speak (write). Those countries that are doing well make things, or supply the materials needed to make things.
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  6299.  @AutoTrawler  As far as reading Marx, and Lenin, I had a very interesting experience when I first went to university in the third quarter of last century of the last millennium. I was studying physics (eventually switched to computer science) and had to take some out of major classes. One I took was a philosophy course on ethics. The professor was an interesting guy. He was actually just finishing up his PhD at Harvard but teaching in the state university I attended. His class was always heavily attended. We also partied together, with this professor and several others. It was not unusual to go to a party that lasted all night. In the morning there would be 40 people passed out on the floor including three or four professors. Ah, the good old days. Enough reminiscing. This professor I mentioned was a Marxist-Leninist. He would offer us books to read by both of these authors and we would discuss them. So, that's how I got into it. By the way, I am NOT a Marxist-Leninist. That phase lasted at most a year. In fact, I am definitely a free trader. I get, and appreciate, your second comment about industrial policy. If the Chinese really were free traders themselves and followed basic business rules and norms, this would not be necessary. So, I hope it goes as you say.
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  6300. In terms of the impact outside of China from the property crisis, you and many other commentators are exaggerating the situation. The Chinese financial system is NOT integrated with the rest of the world. The bond holdings of foreign investment firms you quote are, if you would check, a small percentage of their overall holdings. The whole industrial chain associated with property development is located within China. The only ones who will suffer are some raw material providers. While this may have some short-term impact, the thing about raw materials is that they can stay in place. The long-term impact will not be substantial. In addition, those materials will be directed elsewhere as activity in other regions picks up. Another thing to note about the impact of the slowing of the Chinese economy is that it is not countries, but companies that experience these issues. Companies will each adjust their strategies and goals accordingly. For example, you quote Nissan's CEO. On the other hand, I have seen and read that many car companies which have experienced downturns in China have simultaneously experienced expansions in other markets. In addition, most companies doing business in China are working with local partners and do not own a majority of their production capacity in China. Many other companies work through contractors and own no fixed assets in China. China has really set itself up for a much easier decoupling than many think will happen.
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  6301.  @DZ-zc3gi  Well, I will tell you. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at Yale, has been analyzing the situation in depth. It is not good for Russia. The data on oil prices and volumes is available on-line Russia has announced the volume cuts. What KT said about oil was only true near the beginning of the situation. Then there are the reports about things like the Russian automobile industry. It is down over 90%. The technology crunch is so bad there that the remaining manufacturers have stopped installing anti-lock brakes. So, believe what you like, but you should check the data before making statements.
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  6302.  @DZ-zc3gi  Yes, I do trust him. He publishes his data, approach and findings. Bringing up climate change is not comparable. Climate models are predictive. The problem with them is that they claim to be science like, say, physics, but they fail on that point. Models in the hard sciences, like physics, astronomy and chemistry, make predictions that lead to experiments. Those experiments tend to prove or disprove the model. They are not predicting the future. The experiments are done under controlled conditions. Fields like cosmology, climate science, paleontology, archeology and anthropology all suffer from the same problem. They are either projecting forward or backward, but they never have complete data. A theory comes along and then the next week a new piece of data comes along and everything changes. What the Yale professor is doing is to review data that is publicly available but not the official Russian government line. This is something completely different. As for KT, she is a political pundit. I generally like her, by the way. I am just surprised that she is taking talking points and data that is old and applying it to the situation. So, if you really believe what you said, I feel sorry for you.
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  6303.  Joseph Harris  That is becoming a problem.
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  6304. The amount of money sent to Ukraine is insignificant. For comparison, look at what was spent on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. We are talking north of $1T. Look at the COVID stimulus. The fraud so far uncovered is as much as has been sent to Ukraine. As for the tribalism and discord in our institutions, don't forget, that is the norm in the US. There was a short period after WWII where we all seemed united. That was just a result of trying to throw off the effects of the war. Then we had the 1960s and 1970s. Just go back through the history of the US and there are lots of periods of bitter division.
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  6305.  @echobay5040  You are ill informed. You repeat conspiracy theories.
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  6306.  @echobay5040  That makes no sense. I respond because I must.
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  6307. So it goes on. You misunderstand what I say so you respond in your way.
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  6308.  @echobay5040  If you believe that then you are clearly more low information than I assumed.
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  6309. While Zalenski is right that it is imperative to defeat Russia in Ukraine so that no one else has to face the same thing, the item on the bases on the Finnish border belies that fear. It took Russia 20 years, with access to western technology and plenty of oil and gas revenue to build up their military up to the time they attacked Ukraine. That force is gone, and Russia no longer has the external revenues to build it up again. The sanctions will be progressively tightened strangling Russia's ability to raise funds. Heck, they are already running out of money. Putin's only hope is to sell eastern Siberia to the Chinese, for dollars. Fat chance. The Chinese will probably just take it. And don't think the Chinese or North Koreans can really fill the gap in technology and weapons. Chinese weapons are pale imitations of Soviet weapons. If you hadn't noticed, the PLA has a corruption problem at least as bad as Russia's. There is good reason why they have trouble selling their weapons abroad. They suck. In addition, if the CCP did supply Russia directly with weapons the west would come down on them with sanctions at least as hard as those imposed on Russia. China is much more vulnerable. They import the majority of their oil and a lot of other raw materials. They also import a lot of food. On top of that they are experiencing a massive drought in some of their main agricultural lands, and floods in others. These are devastating crops. China is one of the most vulnerable major countries on the planet. To devastate China, it is only necessary to disrupt their ability to get food and fuel. You don't even have to get close to them to do that. Russia will be defeated in Ukraine and will be a spent force. Demographically this is their last roll of the dice. It came up snake eyes. Frankly, there should be NATO troops in Ukraine. The US and other NATO countries should flood the member states bordering Russia with troops. That in itself might precipitate the collapse of the Russian Empire, I mean Federation. I am greatly saddened that the Ukrainian people have to go through all this. In the end, though, they will prevail.
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  6310.  @subham2798  No doubt there will be effects, but I don't think they will be terribly significant.
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  6311. Whoopie is just plain stupid. Look at where she is. You can talk about racism in America when people of ALL colors, ethnicities and creeds stop coming here. Until then the people have spoken. Idiots like the people on the View have no idea of what this country is really like.
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  6312. Because of the number of people from the old British India around the world one sometimes sees swastikas in their original context, having nothing to do with the Nazis. For people in the US and Europe this can be quite a jarring experience.
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  6313.  @texasoilfields  Well, you didn't read what I, repeating Peter, said. If the food were not available, along with the opportunity to trade higher value goods (i.e., globalization), then starvation would result, and the population would not have grown as much even with the overbreeding. There is a lot more to it, including healthcare from developed countries, etc. If what you say is true, then it would have happened centuries ago. Mostly populations had lots of children because many of their children would die from disease or hunger. This was the case throughout human history. From 1950 to the present the world population has more than tripled. There was growth in almost all regions of the world until the last thirty or 30 years or so.
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  6314. This may be a quibble; bit I think you will understand it. You should pronounce the letters, not say "US Aid", which is how it comes across. There is lots of US foreign aid that does not go through this program.
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  6315. You do realize that that money came from the US. Afghanistan has basically not real exports other than opium. You do realize that the Taliban illegally seized the government, has no legitimacy, and stole billions of dollars of military equipment given by the US to the legitimate government, don't you? There are multiple precedents for doing this type of seizure. You do recall that the US went into Afghanistan because they had hosted the Taliban while planning and executing the 9/11 attacks, don't you? The Taliban has no standing in the international community or monetary system. They are a terrorist organization, and many of their leaders are named terrorists. India should be quite aware of this, since these Afghan terrorists were funded by and sheltered by the Pakistani ISI, which has supported attacks on India. What is the point of this report?
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  6316. That poll is not really useful. Not only is the cost an issue, as you point out, but the more interesting question is where does action on climate change rank on people's hierarchy of issues. In the US, it is near, or at, the bottom in every such poll I have seen.
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  6317. Look up what happened to the Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka. I recall reading at the time that they (the last ones) were surrounded by troops in an area the size of a football pitch. You can guess what happened then.
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  6318. On the NFTs and tech platforms, you miss one thing. Someone has to pay for the massive infrastructure. If your NFT scheme was applied, then the platform would not benefit, and frankly your content could not be supported. Everyone seems to miss this. We have all these fantastic platforms precisely because they can make money off them. If you take that away, you kill the platform.
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  6319. The comment about considering a DA pistol is interesting. Of course, the US did go with a DA gun in 1985. Now, they have gone with a striker fired pistol, which is a SA trigger system. They also required that the guns considered have a manual safety, so I assume they require the guns to be carried cocked and locked. Kind of interesting how that happened.
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  6320. 'De Bushmaster, we used to shout. Actually, I have one of their XM15 guns built under the assault weapon ban. When the ban ended, I purchased a Bushmaster AR15-A2 barrel. So now it is up to M16-A2 spec, of course semi-auto. It is a great gun. It was produced before they were sold. I was always interested the M17S, but never got one. I regret that.
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  6321. Congtats, Tony! You provide valuable information and lots of information and insight. I look forward to it every day. Keep up the good work. Now on to 1M!
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  6322. I was in Helsinki in the early 21st century. It was summer. There were three nuclear powered icebreakers in the harbor.
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  6323. Love these "elections" and referenda in totalitarian states. I was in Greece in 1973 when they had a yes/no vote for the dictator Papadopoulos. There were billboards touting the dictator and no campaigning for the no vote. Of course, the yes vote got over 90%. I was out that night in the streets of Athens and there were groups of people around portable radios listening to the returns. They all laughed ironically. None of them had voted yes and didn't know anyone who had voted yes. The polling places, by the way, were guarded by soldiers, many of which were drunk most of the day. It was a scary situation.
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  6324. The idea that Trump's commitment to Ukraine is uncertain is just plain wrong and silly. It was the weapons he sent during his first term (which had been halted by Obama) that allowed Ukraine to blunt the initial invasion. There was a good deal of incompetence on the part of the Russians as well. The fact that he is putting so much into the peace process shows his commitment. The reality is that Ukraine, by itself, without the inclusion of European and/or American troops and airpower, is incapable of pushing the Russians out of their territory. The Russians, for their part, have shown that they don't have the capability to conquer Europe. The reality is that both Ukraine and Russia were in demographic decline before the war and now it is much worse. There is almost no commonality between the situation in Ukraine and Taiwan. Strategically, losing Ukraine would be regrettable, but not fatal for western, specifically European, nations. Ukraine was never part of Europe's security architecture or alliances. If the CCP took Taiwan, on the other hand, China would be able to "break out of" the first island chain, and that would have strategic significance for the US and its allies. Finally, the whole issue of TSMC is a bit of a red herring. I don't want to take anything away from their accomplishments, but they use western equipment. Their whole business is driven by the cost of that equipment and not by anything they did. I have been following the whole foundry business from its inception. Those foundries could have been anywhere, as their new investments in the US and elsewhere show.
    1
  6325. Thanks for the like on my comment. Keep up the good work.
    1
  6326. So, Biden is the real Russian agent. Disgusting!!!
    1
  6327. Hoping that the Chinese people will throw off the CCP and embrace democratic values is pointless. China has no democratic tradition. Taiwan had the involvement of the US and its influence on Chaing. Don't forget that after the fall of the Qing dynasty China fell into a period of warlordism. In fact, Mao and Chiang were the last two warlords left standing. Then there is the issue of the lack of development of the Chinese people and society. This channel and lots of others seem to dwell on the educated and middle class. Over half the country still lives in the countryside and are basically peasants. Then there are the urban poor. When it comes to power struggles this will be more important than people with marketing and hotel management degrees. The warlords that will arise will easily be able to draw in the masses. The urban elites are irrelevant.
    1
  6328. Hope you get better soon. Love the pattern on the pillowcases. Considering the situation, the US should be massively upgrading its export capacity. Trade surplus here we come.
    1
  6329. Pakistan, and India, getting cheap Russian oil is good for the world. Russian crude currently sells for a discount of about $20 to benchmark prices. If countries like India and Pakistan were not buying from Russia, they would be competing in the world markets for oil from other sources. In India's case they are refining the oil and turning around to sell to countries that have sanctioned Russian crude and refined products. This is fine, and meets the goal of the sanctions, which is to limit the income Russia has to fight their war in Ukraine. At the current price India pays, for example, Russia breaks even, or even loses a little on each barrel sold. The profits on the refined products go to India, not Russia. This whole situation with Russia is one reason that the production cuts by OPEC have not had the desired effect. In an environment where central banks are tightening, and economies slowing, producers have little power to set prices. Frankly, the Saudis are getting less per barrel than they need for their government spending plans. They are a one trick pony, so to speak, and everything depends on the oil price.
    1
  6330. The world population is about to peak. In many large countries, it is shrinking. My understanding is that the world is producing twice the number of calories required to feed the population right now. So this seems like a solution to a non-existent problem.
    1
  6331. Assad a "stabilizing force". Have you ever looked at a map of Syria before this situation? Was that stable? As President Joe likes to say: C'mon, man!
    1
  6332. By the way, all my grandparents came from the central Pelonopese in Greece. They all had fourth grade educations. Some of their children went to university. ALL of their grandchildren did, a bunch with advanced degrees, including Phds and MDs. The government cannot change this. It is money wasted. if the parents don't encourage the kids, the government certainly won't. The solution is family, not the government and out money!!!!!
    1
  6333. Your international exposure calculation is probably a bit off. The prices in the rest of the world reflect the current readily available supply and includes transportation costs. The enhanced supply from the US would tend to put downward pressure on prices outside the US. The price of gas delivery is one of the big drivers of cost of LNG for the Europeans, for example. You do need to separate those things out. Russian gas was always going to be cheaper because of the delivery method.
    1
  6334. Germans doing stupid things? A rising trade deficit causing dislocations? Unfair trade practices by China? Guess what? Trump said all that over six years ago. When he talked to the Germans he was laughed at. Who is laughing now? Frankly, the basic issues have been on the table for almost two decades now. Finally, the west is starting to get its act together. China will get what it wants, a multipolar world. They will be in the poor pole.
    1
  6335. It's Common Agricultural Policy. That policy is one of the reasons Norway did not fully join the EU. Their farmland is not great, and they believed that it would be the end of indigenous agriculture. The statement about the EU farmers thinking about Europe as "their captive market" says it all. It is, as I think this guy with a beard who travels a lot is fond of saying, a protectionist cartel. The issue with American agriculture is all of what Peter says, but it is also a "chlorinated chicken" issue. This is real. Chlorinated chicken was an issue in discussions between Americans and Europeans in the debate around TTIP that I participated in (mostly with a German group). It is still brought up today and is, if I recall correctly, an issue in the UK/US trade talks. The odd thing is that they wash some vegetables with chlorine in the EU, I am fairly certain. Of course, it is shorthand for protectionism, which the Europeans are always quick to point out if the US does something.
    1
  6336. Jerusalem was never a city of peace. I am not sure of where you got that moniker. Nowhere in the Bible is it such. Then came the Crusades. Then, of course, the modern conflicts.
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  6337. Tik, could you comment on the WEF, and how it resembles what you are saying about fascism.
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  6338. I am a big supporter of Ukraine and I believe that the west should give them more weapons. I am, on the other hand, getting a little tired of the idea that "Ukraine are giving the West a tactical 'masterclass'". That is just plain silly. Ukraine is doing a great job of innovating because they have to. Just look at Patriot batteries. At present they have three. They say they need 25. Would an American force go in to battle with just three? Of course not. The Ukrainians are using lots of FPV kamikaze drones to good effect. On the other hand, analyze their usage. They are using them in lieu of, and in conjunction with, artillery. If they had sufficient artillery, they would not be using the drones in this way in most cases. Drones can be jammed. Artillery cannot. Just look at their last counteroffensive. This failed, primarily because of the minefields and fortifications the Russians had time to build. Look at Desert Storm, for example. Iraq had set up massive minefields. The US cleared paths through them and then poured in armor and infantry. They could do that because of air superiority which suppressed any attempt to interdict the clearing and use of those corridors. Ukraine hasn't done so because of a lack of aircraft. I am also very unimpressed with Ukraine's lack of use of offensive operations elsewhere after the Kharkiv offensive. That offensive caught the Russians off guard and was brilliantly executed. There has really been nothing since. Again, it is not for a lack of bravery or resolve on the Ukrainians' part. It is a lack of airpower, or the ability to interdict Russia's air assets. As for the drones, the day is quickly coming where they may well become a bit of an anachronism. They depend on communications links that can be interdicted. Both the Russians and Ukrainians are starting to do this. If the US were directly involved, it most likely would have already been done. What I find interesting about all this drone mania is that it has not reduced the need for infantry or trenches or fortifications one bit. Consider that. I could go on. What I would strongly suggest is that the west not tear up the training manuals.
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  6339. What Europe, especially the EU, ignores is that there is not a free trade deal with the US. The attempt to craft one, TTIP, was opposed by European civil society groups. In the US we have been moving towards a more and more populist agenda for a long time. The last real internationalist President in the US was Gorge H. W. Bush. Since then, things have been moving away from internationalism. Biden is more populist than even Trump, especially in trade. This is not likely to change. Energy will always be cheaper in the US, and many German companies have moved operations to the US because of that. The days of the US using its market to buy allies are gone. This was done, after WWII, to counter the Soviet Union. I don't know if you've noticed, but the Soviet Union collapsed 30 years ago. Europe has been taking advantage of the US for a very long time. That really is ending.
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  6340. Everyone gets the rare earth thing wrong. First, despite the name, rare earth metals are not "rare". We were mining and refining them long before the opening up to China. China processes them. The processing is a very "dirty". So, like many other things, we exported our pollution to China. They do not even enforce their own laws, so it is cheaper. Processing is now being built in the US for obvious reasons. Because of our environmental laws it is more expensive and complex than what China does. The same is true for lithium, by the way. What Trump is doing by talking about rare earths from Ukraine is finding something that is of value and can offset any support that the US has given and might give in the future. Zalenski should be jumping on the opportunity. The mood in the US is shifting. It is clear now that the Ukrainians cannot push the Russians completely out of Ukraine. They are also losing a lot of people. Have you ever wondered why we don't see casualty figures from Ukraine of Ukrainians, only Russians? The people there know it is bad. Both Ukraine and Russia were in demographic decline before the war and it is much worse now. I just look at all the ads on YouTube and in my Gmail feed for Ukrainian women, and now more and more for Russian women.
    1
  6341. Mark, I would be interested in your take on the Chinese currency and stock market. The issues are similar. The government intervenes in both the currency and stock markets directly.
    1
  6342.  @chilael6892  It was called Price, if I recall correctly. It was developed by RCA when they were doing a lot of aerospace work. Actually, I was working at GE during the time we acquired RCA. It was quite a ride.
    1
  6343. And another thing. What Konstantin says around 13:00 is spot on. Look at what they (economists, financiers) do when analyzing open western economies. They pore over the data. In the US and the west in general, the raw data is actually available. They analyze it themselves and call out inconsistencies. In fact, the more sophisticated financial analysts don't even pay attention to top line figures like GDP, which is only an estimate anyway and prone to bias if not outright manipulation, even if not intentional. So, why do they accept Russian or Chinese data knowing that it is manipulated? I am not generally a conspiracy believer but heck, something is fishy in Denmark.
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  6344.  @soakupthesunman  Who's talking about Ukranian data? Are they hiding something and painting a rosy picture of their economy? Actually, with their application to the EU there is lots of scrutiny of Ukraine. There is also scrutiny from the US because of all the economic and military aid that has been given. So, I ask again, what is your point?
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  6345. VDH reads the electorate wrong when he says that the administration should not be triumphant about laying bureaucrats off. Most Americans think that's great. His popular vote margin was 3M, so if he laid them all off and they voted against him he would still win. He would even pick up votes in the rest of the population.
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  6346. Great report. Maybe Omar will stay in Pakistan. Most people in the US would not grieve. She is an outlier in our political system. I wonder if she will be reelected.
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  6347.  MrMagOOo  Agreed! The only reason we did not, historically, is that India, though part of the non-aligned movement, still supported the USSR and recently Russia. When the US wanted to open diplomatic channels to China, we went through Pakistan. Not because of any love for Pakistan, but because of ties they had with China, and not the USSR. This has colored our relationship ever since. Now that India is working with us, while not severing ties with Russia, we are in a better place to work with India. The upcoming Quad summit is a good indication of that.
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  6348.  MrMagOOo  We were, at the time, in a great power confrontation with the USSR, which had invaded Afghanistan. I don't think that Al Queda was a group we supported, but the Taliban was one of the groups, supported by Pakistan, that we may have supported. The whole situation was a shit show. We should have let the Soviets alone there. It would have tied them down for decades. Don't forget, at the height of the Cold War the US and the USSR could have destroyed the planet. They still can. It is an intolerable situation.
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  6349.  MrMagOOo  As far as I can tell this is bullshit. Please prove me wrong with facts. My understanding is that the US became involved after the Soviet invasion. This was mostly because of our experience in Vietnam. We just wanted too get back at the bastards and didn't consider anything else.
    1
  6350.  @umeriqbal5406  Don't know about that. Please enlighten me.
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  6351. I get the sense that you are not a Blair fan. As for the technology of robots planting sea grasses, or whatever, you are correct that the technology is there. The issue, as with all automaton, is always the capital costs. Return on capital is the key. For example, we don't "need" China, or the third world, to produce all our clothing or cheap goods. We could automate all that, in theory. The problem is the return on capital. Why spend the money on automation when you can pay people in distant lands low wages and have them work under conditions that would be illegal in the west?
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  6352.  @myronhelton4441  Have it your way, if that is what you believe.
    1
  6353. John should switch parties. I think we will see some of that happening over the next year or so.
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  6354. The Iraq War cost the US, from 2003 to 2013 was $1.7T. Support of Ukraine by the US so far is about one tenth of that.
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  6355. I love it. Everything goes back to the ancient Greeks. I also notice a lot of concepts appearing in the ancient Hebrew texts, ancient Egyptian religion and many others in southwest and south Asia as well as East Asia. These are the seeking of people to understand the world around them. The question is were these truths that are objective (although very muddled) or are they a result of how human brains are wired?
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  6356. Gruel is sort of backward in his approach. It is not for the government to offer an alternative. Ban the red dye and the industry will find an alternative. For someone who does not want the government to have so much say he clearly wants to give government a say. The way it works is not that government gives approval for products to be used, not that the government fins alternatives for industry. It may be that he is just not articulate enough to say what he really means, but I don't think so.
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  6357. Actually, you don't need to match the system within the device. Several years ago I was at Starbucks, where they were offering charging at the tables. My phone did not have that. Not many did at the time. The solution was to give and adapter that plugged into the phone. It looked like it was a coil with the plug for the particular phone.
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  6358. Don't make a big deal out of how much time and familiarity soldiers have with particular equipment. There is little or no history to show that a force using old, but familiar equipment will do better than a force newly trained with newer and better equipment. The people making such assertions are not basing this on any evidence. Just a few instances from history point that out. One is WWII. The US had not been fighting since WWI and came up against a Japanese force with less capable equipment but vastly more experience. Another is Operation Desert Storm. Again, the US had not been fighting for a while, but had drastically modernized their forces and equipment. The Iraqis, on the other hand had a decade of combat using their Soviet equipment. Who won that one? Equipment is a very important aspect, but so is doctrine and training. Who do you think has the edge in Ukraine?
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  6359. I don't agree with the ban, but you have no real conception of what these tech companies are. There are two main points you forget. First, you are not their customers. The advertisers are the customer, and you are the product. Second, these are private companies using private resources. At least in the US, the Internet is paid for by its users, both consumers and businesses. It does not use public resources such as electromagnetic spectrum. It is possible for government to regulate them, but that way lies madness. The solution is competition. As it happens, Trump is starting a social media platform. There is plenty investment money for this and the technology is now well understood. That is the way forward.
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  6360. How many times does it have to be said that decoupling, making countries take sides and a resultant divided world is inevitable? First, the cost of "policing" the world's oceans and "rules" is not worth the effort. In the years after the fall of the Soviet Union there was a chance to come up with something different. No one led such an effort. The last US President to even mention it was George H. W. Bush. The people of the US have never been inclined to act as the world's police. Witness the Monroe Doctrine and American pacificism prior to both world wars in the 20th century. It was only the scale of devastation of the second one, and nuclear fears that moved to US to take on such a role. We are moving away from that already back to a more natural stance. Second, the world did quite well materially for decades with both the Soviet Union and China being excluded. No one is essential. The only thing the Soviets had to offer was hydrocarbons and other minerals and some wheat. The only thing the Chinese had to offer was cheap labor and a large potential market. For the Chinese these are disappearing. All of the other stuff exists elsewhere. Third, the complex supply chains were set up and are managed by western companies or their contractors in Asia. They were set up in record time. They can be moved in record time. China never moved up the value chain like Japan did. The lost their chance. So, in the end, Yellen is just blowing smoke.
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  6361. Himler a "prominent figure within the SS"? He was the head of the SS. What kind of drivel is this? Who writes this crap.
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  6362. China's property sector has avoided complete collapse? That may be technically true, but there is not, as far as I can tell, any way to revive it. Property markets are driven by supply and demand and fiscal resource availability. In China, there is massive oversupply. Demand is weak, and there is no mechanism I can see that will be able to bring it back. The government provides the fiscal resources, but this comes at a cost to the economy overall. If this were happening anywhere else, we would be talking about an actual collapse. Any market, or financial analyst, would see right away that this is true. You, and many other commentators, seem to concentrate on the big-name developers. I do not know the name of the company that built my house. I have been in the same house 25 years. In fact, I don't think I know the name of the builders of any of the houses or apartments I have lived in, and that covers a long time. This has only become an issue in China because of their massive debts. Prior to the Evergrande situation becoming public knowledge, I expect very few people outside of China had any real idea of who these companies were. Even in the US, it is mostly investors who pay attention to who the actual developers are. In the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the issue was not with the developers, but with the financiers in the secondary mortgage market. I mention all this not as a critique of you, but as an observation about the differences in markets, and the need to keep these in mind when analyzing the current situation and making investment decisions.
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  6363.  @angelabuck5491  Exactly right, and the Ukrainians that are interviewed will often point this out. One of the reasons they have done so well is that for a while the West, including the US and UK have been training them on Western style tactics and leadership. I think part of that has been with an eye toward their eventual integration into NATO.
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  6364.  @Adywebb123  Are you kidding? You say attacking parts of their own country that want to remain part of another country and you think that makes sense? How do we know the majority of the people there want to be part of Russia? The referendum in Crimea? Are you kidding? I was in Greece in 1973 when they had a yes or no vote for the dictator. How do you think that turned out. Unless such a vote is run by an outside agency (UN?) then it cannot be trusted.
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  6365.  @zeromodulus1679  I decidedly did not say that. You may need to work on your comprehension skills.
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  6366.  @bobbafett1849  Yes, no that you mention it I remember that. See, it is a grand tradition.
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  6367.  @bobbafett1849  What about the bailouts of the banks in the 2008 crisis? The problem is that there are often industries and businesses that, if they fail will have a detrimental effect of a lot of people. By the way, the government took an ownership in many of those financial institutions. They eventually unwound it and even made a little money. In the case of the car companies those companies went on to make good profits and pay taxes on their profits. So do their employees. So, what would you prefer? A lot of lives ruined an even bigger burden on the government (taxpayers) or corrective action.
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  6368.  @terjeoseberg990  Of course not. That would be included in the "excesses" I talked about.
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  6369.  @terjeoseberg990  It seems that you are advocating the government taking an stake in those homes. Did you think about that? Bailing those people out would not have solved the problem and would have cost more. It would also not have yielded back the small profit that bailing out the banks did. The problem was basically caused by Obama's policy of giving mortgages to people who would generally not qualify for them. For one thing the investment banks packaged those loans with high quality loans into CDOs. These were then traded as investment grade when they were not. We now have regulations to deal with that. I am in favor of such regulation. It contributes to the safety of the system.
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  6370.  @terjeoseberg990  Regulations do not disappear. Generally, they become more rational. As for smog, see my response above.
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  6371.  @terjeoseberg990  I assumed you meant something like that. Do you remember all the talk about moral hazard. There are a number of issues with your plan. First, you are transferring the risk from the banks to the taxpayers who don't have a problem with their mortgages. Second, those people who didn't really qualify for a loan in the first place are not likely to for a new loan. Making loans without credit checks is, frankly, bonkers. By the way, anyone who qualifies can refinance. As rates were coming down in the 1990s, I had neighbors who refinanced with fixed rate loans annually. I did it once.
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  6372.  @JohnSmith-fl6qd  And I disagree with almost everything she says. So?
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  6373.  @terjeoseberg990  Well, I would say the same about you. That is your opinion. Actually, the government would not get the growth in the investments. In addition, you missed what I said about many of those buyers being unqualified in the first place. What are the odds that things will really turn out differently the next time around? So, you are still looking at high default rates. And another thing. Have you ever wondered why something like that has never been tried before?
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  6374.  @jt95124  There is some merit to what you are saying, but you seem to miss two points. The board of directors, and the decisions made by the board are critical to the business. The other thing you leave out as you talk about the similarities is the differences. Look, any complex human activity will have all the things you talk about. Government bureaucracy has been around since time immemorial. What you leave out goals, and responsibility. That is what "they" are getting at not the organizational structure.
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  6375. Can't agree with that. My reasoning is that and emperor is a hereditary autocrat.
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  6376. Trade protectionism? Who are the masters of trade protectionism? China outshines even the EU on this front. See my comment below about the giraffe incident.
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  6377. The professor is dreaming, and such pronouncements are just so much drivel. The big problem is capital misallocation. That is at the crux of many of China's problems and looms as the largest impediment to China moving forward. Pivoting toward a free economy and using honesty to bolster confidence as he says is a fine sentiment. On the other hand, corruption is so endemic, even in the private economy, that I don't think there is any hope of this happening. Just look at all the IP theft and counterfeiting. This is not a new phenomenon. I saw on a channel devoted to firearms that during the warlord period, after the fall of the Qing dynasty, Chinese arms manufacturers decided to just copy European arms rather than develop their own. They were, of course, not paying royalties. Nothing has changed in 120 years. This still applies to weapons manufacture by the way. The theft and counterfeiting, except in the military and some technology realms, is not even state directed. It is standard business practice even in the private economy. Then there is the substandard construction of infrastructure and housing. This puts people's lives at risk. Is that state directed? The real question for all these pundits is who will lead this new revolution of values and honesty? Does anyone in China have the stature to do this? No! To understand what will happen to China after the CCP falls just look at the results of the aforementioned fall of the Qing dynasty. That is what they have to look forward to.
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  6378. Who is this interviewer and why is he on the "radio"/YouTube? He is very irritating to listen to. This reminds me of a lot of the English language Indian channels with many presenters who have poor English skills. When I first went to university, admittedly about half a century ago, many of my classmates were Indian. They spoke wonderful English (albeit with that annoying British accent, just kidding) and represented the country well. I still meet many Indians in the US who speak English well. And yet, like the Times here with this interviewer, the management of to outlets persist in pushing on us people with subpar skills in speech, which really the only thing they bring to the table. There, rant done.
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  6379.  @elhanson5426  I was wondering that as well. Of course, as Monty Python says, if you speak English loud enough and slow enough anyone can understand it. I don't know how that is relevant to signs, but I always liked that line.
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  6380. My only argument with is that most, nay all, have the "luxury" of doing the right thing with their diets. I made a change, in my 60s, after a "life event" (not health related) and my body is back to where it was in my 20s. It is also cheaper, and easier. It is more satisfying as well.
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  6381. Thanks for the rant. I think we need more discussion about this, and not the Eric Weinstein type where he proposes a different theory. Not that I don't like to hear about his issues with current theories. Then there is Stephen Wolfram, who has another approach. But I get distracted, and that is the point. The only thing I am disappointed with in your rant is that you do not bring up the most important word: METAPHYSICS. That is what a lot of what is peddled as theoretical physics today really is. Go back and read Aristotle. Physics is the description of nature. It is not a creative endeavor. The creative endeavor is engineering. The real fear here, and I think it is something you might be concerned with as well, is that public support for theoretical physics might dry up. The reason for the massive support for basic science during WWII and beyond was quite practical. The work being done was practical and applicable. First to weapons and then to consumer goods. If you think that society, as opposed to individuals, is deeply concerned about ultimate questions, then you surely don't know history or social dynamics.
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  6382. Disregarding the health of the people? You don't say. This is the country of Mao and the CCP. This is the land of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen. This is the country that has killed more of its own people than any in history. The estimated total surpasses that of the deaths of WWII. Are these really the comments of actual Chinese? If so, then these people are either stupid or deluded.
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  6383. Lies, all lies!!!!
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  6384. The floods in China are a historical fact. It has happened for millennia. Why do you think the Three Gorges dam was built? Why all the smaller dams (thousands of them) built? This is nothing new, and the meteorological records do not go back far enough to draw any conclusions.
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  6385.  @arfajob4246  Well put!
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  6386. The city should probably be abandoned. They keep voting in these politicians and get these results. Why pay taxes for a dysfunctional government. Your property will become worthless. Your businesses will fail.
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  6387. The interest first, or interest only loans, are a big part of what caused the 2008 financial crisis. China is headed or a cliff. It is a good thing their banking system is not well integrated with that of the rest of the world.
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  6388. In the first story I am reminded of the old saying: To err is human, to really screw up requires a computer.
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  6389.  @VeteranVandal  Great points.
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  6390. WWII was an anomaly for Russia and the Soviet Union. The differences between then and now are very important.
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  6391. Love the statement about the burka, etc. at the beginning. Make me laugh. I can just imagine someone doing that.
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  6392.  @agk18  Well, I am not anti-Hindu. I am very much pro-Hindu and Buddhist. Now, I am very much a Christian, and grew up in that tradition. My best friends at university were Hindus. Now, this was in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium. I was searching for a religious home. We had massive libraries (two of them) on campus. I would spend many hours in the old library going over Hindu and Buddhist texts. I have over the years known many Indians and some Pakistanis. Of course, I met them in the US. These may not be typical. I would hope that the US would tilt toward India. Under Trump that was happening. I don't know what will happen under Biden, but I hope the tilt will continue.
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  6393.  @contactpjoshi123  I wonder. I am very impressed by her. I don't think she could become president in the Democrat party. She would have to move more to the right and become a Republica. It could happen. Heck, she spoke at CPAC. She has also been appearing on FOX News lately.
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  6394. Sal, Sal, Sal. The sanctions are not failing. The scenario we are seeing was always going to happen. The G7, without naval enforcement, can only control insurance companies and shippers that are within the G7 and anyone else who wishes to play. The shadow fleet consists of smaller tankers which are less efficient, thus it is more expensive per barrel to ship. This will eat into the profits Russia gets. So, unless we are willing to stop and inspect all the tankers gong to India or China, this is all that can be done. Russia's shipping costs will be higher and their oil is more expensive to produce. They still aren't making a lot of money off this oil.
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  6395. I watch whatever you put out. I find it very well thought out and stimulating. You have a view that is often different from traditional historians and effectively use your reading of their works to develop your ideas. I voted for the politics, ideology, religion, philosophy option. I have read extensively on these and they are personally interesting to me. But, as I said, I watch it all. Do what you think is best for you. I will be watching. By the way, on the Stalingrad series I sometimes start watching and think this is tedious. But then I always feel compelled to watch to the end.
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  6396. Artur, reporting straight from the front is not new. The US started it with reporters embedded with troops in the second Iraq war.
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  6397.  @nwjh1957  Interesting reading of the situation. One thing that defines socialism is the "social ownership" of the means of production. As we saw in the UK auto industry, this is disastrous. One thing that I have a question about is your claim that Russia had large part in the Brexit vote. I haven't heard that before. Perhaps you could elaborate.
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  6398.  @JohnJaneson2449  Very well put.
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  6399. Varney repeats the junk coming out of the talking heads in the MSM about Trump losing popularity because of the cuts. Very disappointing. My wife used to be all for government shutdowns. Her reasoning was that it would lessen some of the waste (we weren't aware of the massive fraud and abuse at the time). This was at least a couple of decades ago. The cuts are based on rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. They are not coming out of the meat of the programs, meaning the money that actually benefits people.
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  6400. When I lived in the UK, in the early part of the 21st century, I would see spray painted on motorway overpasses the slogan "England for the English". When I asked one of the English execs I worked with about Scotland, he said they should dig a trench all the way across the border and hopefully the whole thing would float away in the distance. It reminds me of the situation with Quebec in Canada. Both of these regions, Scotland and Quebec are net drains on the economy of their respective nations. Let them go.
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  6401. BLM is a radical socialist movement. This is apart from the sentiment that black lives matter. But, if black lives matter, then do other lives not matter? This is the basic contradiction. When you talk about JK Rowling, and her feminist agenda, then you are talking about over 50% of the population versus about 1% of the population. What we are seeing now is the backlash. No one is for denying transgender people the ability to live their lives as they see fit. On the other hand, they are trying to deny the vast majority of the population. If they do not change their tactics, they will be overwhelmed by the majority. This is correct, in my opinion. There will always be minorities clamoring for rights. As long as these do not infringe on the majority, they will be accommodated. Look at the homosexual community. They have been accommodated because their needs did not negate the majority. This idea of lumping them with the trans community is being resisted. The trans agenda is extreme. It will result, if they do not show some sort of reciprocal action, in their suppression.
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  6402. You do realize that the "hybrid warfare" thing and espionage are not new, don't you? It goes back until at least WWII. The Germans and the Japanese had major efforts in this area. Remember Lord Haw-Haw and Tokyo Rose? How effective were these? How about spies and sabotage? During the 20th century the Soviet Union, almost from its inception, was fomenting revolution around the world with propaganda and other more nefarious means. Perhaps you are too young to remember the Comintern. During the Cold War the Soviets had infiltrated many spies into the US and Europe. Many! I worked at an aerospace and defense contractor and the company was tracking 15 "known" agents targeting us at our main location. And that is just what we knew about. I guess the reason I react to these types of stories is that they are presented as if something new. Yes, the technology is new, but that has always been the case.
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  6403. Your Russian bias is showing. Unless Russia is willing to go nuclear, they have nothing with which to attack NATO with. Of course, if they do go nuclear, they will face three capable nuclear powers. They have also been warned by their few friends not to go nuclear. It was noted some time ago that all the Russian bases facing NATO had been emptied. This was before the current Kursk offensive. Now they are even emptying Kaliningrad. In addition, it has been shown time and again that the Russian Army is not capable of modern, sophisticated maneuver warfare. They don't even have the communications necessary for this type of warfare. As for air power, they would lose it all in the first day or two. All the relevant information is available through public sources.
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  6404. That is the right question. Is it our responsibility? That should be asked of every program. During the Cold War we were doing things to counter an existential threat. The goal of the Soviet Union, and world communism in general, was to take over the world and make it communist. PERIOD! In case people hadn't noticed, the Cold War ended over 30 years ago. Now, foreign aid has become a guilt trip by the west, primarily the Europeans. They pushed this insane idea that the rich west must spend some percentage of GDP on foreign aid. If the European people are okay with that, then let them have at it. It is clear now that the American people are not okay with it.
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  6405. From what I have seen and read, there are very few "good" Russians outside of Russia. Most (not all) that I see are clowns. The politicians who have left Russia are also a joke. I see few that openly call for an end to the war and that call the war unjust, a mistake, or something. They tend to concentrate more on opposing Putin. Frankly, they probably just want to replace him.
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  6406. If you are going to defund the police and replace them with social workers (I have known some, don't bother) then two things have to happen. First lower taxes and return that money to the citizenry. To provide for their own security they can do one, or both, of two things. Hire private security and buy more guns. That is what this really comes down to. Police are just employees. They have unions and contracts. I am not against any of that, but that means they are just human. If their leaders won't let them enforce the laws that we fund them to do, then we do it ourselves. You see where this is going.
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  6407. Of course, it was all caused by manmade global warming.
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  6408. I notice a very strong bias against Trump by the Times. That is not a good look for a news outlet. For one thing, few in the US care a whit what Europeans think (I am talking about the electorate in general). This has two components. One is a general opinion. The other is the fact that the US is much more insular when it comes politics. Americans can afford to be. As for Trump himself I would remind you of the time he was in Germany and told them that they were becoming too dependent on Russia for natural gas and oil and that they weren't spending enough on their own defense. They laughed at him. The videos are on YouTube. Who is laughing now? By the way, he was not the first US President to warn the Europeans that they were not spending enough on defense. Just look at the situation with the war in Ukraine. The economy of the EU plus UK is ten times as large as Russia's in GDP terms. The population is three times as large. Why does Europe need the US to support Ukraine? This is a European conflict. Shouldn't Europe handle it? Oh, wait. In the three conflicts in Europe in the 20th century (the two world wars and the Cold War) Europe relied heavily on the US. Even during the Cold War, the US had 500K troops in Europe dropping down to "only" 300K at the end. Just to be clear, I am all for US support of Ukraine myself, but this is a valid question. Another thing to consider concerning American attitudes toward Europe is to look at migration between the US and Europe. The trend is clear.
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  6409. Again, and again, I have to say it. China is run by a bunch of commies. To expect them to allow a market economy and rule of law is just plain stupid. That Chinese people, both inside and outside of China shows a level of ignorance that astounds me. It is either ignorance or an open call for an overthrow of the CCP. Just look at what China did to their Internet giants and the tutoring sector, as examples. If you let capitalism take its course, the power dynamic will change against the entrenched interests. How do CCP officials make their money? Corruption! This is amply shown by this channel and many others, as well as MSM sources. In such a situation, how likely are they to support the rule of law. As an example, look at the UK when industrialization happened. Prior to that, wealth depended on the control of land. This was in the hands of the aristocracy, and they organized politics in their favor. Then, as the industrialists became more economically powerful, the aristocracy was sidelined. They were no longer the driving force in society or economy. Politics underwent a major change. In the current situation in China, the CCP is the aristocracy. They must change or take the whole thing down with them.
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  6410. Insulting the entire military industrial complex of Russia is not incorrect. It may be foolish, but not wrong.
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  6411. Frankly, this is silly. None of the numbers work out. There has been talk of sail powered large container ships for a while. These were typically new designs with modernized sails (look nothing like a 1912 sail ship. I can't begin to count the number of green technologies I have seen come and go. I was very involved with these when working on a large project that planned to go off grid. None of these are in operation today. They seemed really interesting, but nothing scaled, which I expect is the case with this sail initiative. One interesting project I reviewed was to produce ethanol from the stubble left over from harvesting corn. I asked a relative who is a corn and soybean farmer about it. He had looked into it, but the amount he would get from collecting up the stubble was less than it cost to do so. This is the typical case. When I was working on my project, I would have the companies in to demonstrate, or at least describe their technology. They often did not have realistic or complete financial projections. When I would express disinterest in the technology they would almost beg to be included. Sometimes it was pathetic.
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  6412. It is interesting that you have a sponsored segment on a channel about China. In the first Opium War the situation was that China had a trade surplus with Europe and demanded payment in silver.
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  6413. Unpaid for 10 years? Are these people just plain stupid? This kind of thing is why I don't fear China.
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  6414. Are you sure the Ukrainian contractors would say "Yo"? Seems like a Jersey thing to me. Actually, I was working for a large US company at one time. We had an executive meeting to discuss and issue. The meeting took place in New Jersey. We were all in our expensive suits. We sat down at the conference table and the guy who was being questioned started out the meeting with "Yo, what are we talking about here?" Classic.
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  6415.  @jayjaydubful  Don't agree. At about 8:00 she brings up the Internet as a cause. Perhaps she did not express herself well, but she ignored the real reasons people have fewer children, as I stated above.
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  6416.  @MustyUnderboob  I have been in "an internet world" from the beginning. My father was even a user of DARPAnet. I know about this world and its evolution. Whether she meant to say what I perceived or not, it was either poorly put or she was just plain wrong. Either way, for someone with her credentials to make that kind of mistake is not a good sign. Beware of people with credentials. I think that many situations and events of the last few years should teach us that.
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  6417. Peter, a casualty is defined as wounded, captured, missing or killed. In other words, anyone no longer able to fight. In the case of all but the last, there is some chance of the individual getting back into the fight later. So, when you distinguish between casualty and killed, that is not correct. There is a reason for the terminology. I am also seeing more sources giving the number killed on the Russian side as much closer to what the Ukranian Army has been reporting. Ukraine reports killed, not just casualties. The visual and anectodical evidence seems to point that way. Some, like yourself assume that Ukraine is actually reporting the number of casualties as defined above. This war stuff is very dynamic, unlike demographics, and economics in general. Just saying (got that from my younger son).
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  6418. I have often fantasized about that. I once saw, on a channel following China that no longer exists, speculation about that. So, I don't know how valid it is. The channel reported that there were people in some of the big southeastern cities that wanted to break away from mainland China politically and merge with Taiwan. The sad thing is that mainland China becoming democratic is highly unlikely. When the CCP falls, China will most likely suffer the same fate it did at the end of the Qing dynasty. Warlordism. There are too many entrenched interests and too much corruption. The corruption is off the charts and reaches all levels of society. Look at a video on the channel China Observer called "Shocking Truth Behind Chinese Influencers’ Sob Stories: A Woman Carrying 80 Tons of Cement in a Day?" That coupled with the massive poverty is not a recipe for a liberal democracy. There is no history of democracy in China and really no democratic leaders. Even in Taiwan it took decades for democracy to take hold. We can only dream.
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  6419. I am not loving the goatee beard style on Peter. What about the rest of the crowd?
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  6420. If managed well? Xi has, to put it politely, not managed anything well regarding the economy. His record on foreign affairs and social issues is no better. Frankly, the outlook is bleak. As for Zeihan, have you read any of his books? Don't forget, he is a geopolitical analyst, not an economic or political analyst. He touches on these things as they relate to his main topic. Regarding his predictions, he is basically spot on, especially in the case of China. I read and watch lots of content on China (China Update religiously, of course) and the basic prediction and trends Zeihan talks about are happening in real-time. If one looks at the situation in China today, to believe that using western terminology and western assumptions about the economy is the height of folly. This is something Zeihan also touches on. For a financial advisor, it may even be a breach of fiduciary duty. This seems extreme, but I am not the only one thinking this (for a while I thought I was). On the political front this also resembles the waning days of the Soviet Union. Who do you think trained the CCP anyway?
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  6421. Tony, I love that you used the term "Great Games". Historically the term the "Great Game" referred to the imperialist clashes between Great Britian and Imperial Russia in that area of the world. It was later used to include any imperial expansion by developed powers, including the Europeans and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Now China, and more specifically Chairman Xi, wants a multipolar world order. That is a return to the whole era of imperialism that was so bad for China. Things have not changed. Japan's problem then, and China's today, is one of geography. China grew under the umbrella of the unipolar order that come into being after the end of the Cold War. It will be devastated in the struggle to come. Look at Japan today. It is aligning with the US and its allies. It is improving relations with many countries that fared poorly under their rule prior to WWII. As one pundit put it, they were successful negotiating with both the Trump and Biden administrations. They see where things are headed and are acting rationally. China is taking the opposite course.
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  6422.  @aquarius5719  That is the problem with the WEF. The reality is that the whole idea of a "world order" is done with. Like "international law" it needs some power to enforce it. Anyone who thinks China (or Russia) is going to do that is dumber than a bucket of rocks. The US is pulling back and no one has the ability to replace it. We are indeed going back to the time before WWII. To amplify the China, issue the WEF does not understand, it must be noted that China has never projected its power out of Asia, or even east Asia. NEVER. Groups like the WEF are actually stupid fools. Just listening to what they say should make that clear.
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  6423.  @Golfing422  That is an important point. One exception, though, is automobiles. They last much longer now. Of course, they are American, Japanese or German made. I am, of course, talking in the US, not China.
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  6424.  @4376ED  Bull!
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  6425. @DebunkBuster What does that have to do with this conversation? Sorry, but I don't get it.
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  6426. @DebunkBuster I looked back over my comments. I did mention the Chinese diaspora. This is not specifically referring to Chinese students today. It goes much deeper than that. I once worked with a woman of Chinese descent whose family has been in the US for two generations more than mine. I have also met people who fled the Cultural Revolution.
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  6427.  @darksmith7318  The investors outside of China who still encourage investment in China are gaslighting you. China is a basket case.
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  6428.  @deebil8099  Very good exposition, and informative. Stock markets are volatile, but property markets can be as well. The house I grew up in was bought in the early1960s. There were three houses in a row of the same design. The maximum price one sold for was $180K. When my parents died, some years later, we sold the house for $140K. That money invested in stocks would perform much better. My financial advisor is a real student of history. He looks at trends in some areas spanning over 3,000 years (yes he is a geek). One thing he stresses is that, even with stock market volatility, long term gains are much higher than for property. And, as we have seen, property can be a bad investment. Actually, I live in a house I paid for twice. I bought it and paid it off within a year due to stock gains. Then, after a divorce, I bought it again (for less). At the time of divorce, the property values were way down. That was good for me. Now they are way up, but not up to where they were in 2006, when we borrowed for a startup I had. I should recover to that level soon. If the stock market had behaved that way we would call it a disaster.
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  6429.  @deebil8099  That sounds about right. Part of that is the intervention of a government that does not really believe in capitalism. Of course that same attitude is now hitting the property market, for about the same reason.
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  6430.  @deebil8099  Well, I have agree with you somewhat there. That may indeed be the main motivation. Good point.
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  6431.  @shanetonkin2850  Yes. The thing is that the local governments are in debt to the tune of several trillion dollars, and the central government is also running out of cash. I just read a book, the latest by Peter Ziehan, and have watched videos he has done very recently. He is of the opinion that China will not last out the decade.
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  6432. I have eliminated bread for years now. Never felt better. I do occasionally have bread in a sandwich or burger, but that is maybe once a month, at most. The only other wheat I have is ramen noodles. I make that perhaps once a week or two. I feel much better. Decades ago, when I was a vegetarian, I used to make my own bread (I also didn't have much money, so everything was made by me). Of course, I used only whole grain flower and many other flours such as soy and rice. It seemed to be good.
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  6433. Your big assumption is that the ideas of the left are supported by a majority. If this were so, you could win elections. This constant attempt to "capture" the Democratic Party ignores others in that party that might not support your views. What you need to do is start another party that can really reflect your views. Of course, you will find that they are minority views in the country.
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  6434. A good presentation, but I did not learn anything new. Actually, early in this century, I was exposed to the issues of the hydrogen distribution system required for transportation. It was just not feasible on a large scale. In the US, there are 168K gas stations. Switching to a fully hydrogen transport fleet would require replacing all of those. In addition, this will take a lot of time. There are over 250M light vehicles in the US. About 18M new ones are sold a year. Thus, we will need both types for a long time. Changing something so basic and ubiquitous is a costly and long process.
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  6435. Thank you for the information. I have some interest in this topic since my older son married a woman he met while traveling in Georgia. They live in the US. I have not had a chance to talk to her about this. It would be very interesting to hear her take on it.
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  6436. I find your stuff, videos and books, interesting, but I think you are straying from your area of competence. This is a fast-moving situation and is not what I consider to be something that is appropriate for a peer-reviewed academic journal. Just before bringing up this video, I saw that the EU has actually decided to seize the income from these Russian assets and give it to Ukraine, primarily to buy weapons. That kind of changes everything. The concentration in this video on US actions is misplaced. As pointed out right at the beginning of the video, only a tiny fraction of the assets is in the US. As for the issue of Russians seizing American assets in Russia, that is really a non-issue. They have already done it. In some cases, some money was paid for those assets, but in others they were seized without compensation. One good example, but certainly not the only one, is commercial aircraft. Some assets were simply written off by western firms, including American firms. Many of those firms were very large and as far as I can tell no major western firm was materially affected by the loss. Some of the investments were very large, such as interests in oil and gas projects. The real issue is that Russia is not that big an economy. I see lots of talk about the rise in trade between Russia and China. The last figures I have seen on this trade put it at roughly half the sales of one US company, Apple. Speaking of Apple, they have about $160B in cash assets all by themselves. The issue for western governments has always been one of legality. This concern with legality is not an issue about companies who might sue, but about the integrity of the western systems as a viable store of value and trade. Of course, that may be a bit overblow as there aren't really any alternatives. On the legal front, at present, the western countries involved are not formally at war with Russia. It they were the deal would already have been done. The idea of lawsuits based on a foreign policy stance is unlikely to yield much. Russia is already a heavily sanctioned country, which as stated above, has resulted in business losses. Where are the lawsuits from that? Retaliation for losses suffered as a result of the seizure of Russian state assets is equally unlikely to result in lawsuits.
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  6437. I love the reference to "The Great Game" at about 8:15. That was the term was originally coined to describe the rivalry between Imperial Russia and Imperial Britian in Central Asia in the 19th century. The end of globalization is indeed upon us. China will come out the loser, as it has so often in the past.
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  6438. What a load of crap! Another "the sky falling" video. Instead of listening to this drivel read the article in the weekend Wall Street Journal titled "Jamie Dimon and Ray Dalio Warned of an Economic Disaster That Never Came. What Now?". These Wall Street guys are always, and I mean always, selling something. I don't begrudge them that, but if you don't understand that you are making a big mistake.
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  6439. Thanks for doing a video on this. It has long been known that a large percentage of college graduates end up working in jobs not related to their degree. When that is mentioned, people often retort that attending college is a chance to grow as an individual. When college was cheap, that might have been fine. This problem, by the way, is being played out in China, for many of the same reasons. Actually, it is much worse in China. The funny thing is that I have met a lot of Chinese students studying in the US in the last several years. Many were studying in fields, such as statistics, that they really didn't want to be in. For example, some I talked to really wanted study marketing or something else non-technical. I follow China and other countries a lot. I constantly see examples of people with degrees in things like hotel management or copywriting who can't get jobs and are distraught. Well, duh! In China a lot of these people end up in the gig economy working as delivery drivers. The big problem with higher education is that of scale. The institutions in the US grew to educate the baby boomer generation. Full disclosure, I are one. The generations coming after were smaller. So, to keep up enrollment the universities did two things. First, they created all these garbage degrees which had no demand in the workplace. Second, they attracted a lot of international students. The later are really great for the universities because they generally had to pay up front. The other distortion of the whole system is college tuition loans. By not tying the loans to degrees that were needed by the economy, we have created a massive debt problem. I am not saying that the government should decide what degrees to offer. I am saying that any government (meaning the people) support should be predicated on economic benefits to the society. Gender studies does not qualify on those grounds. If you want to study that, then you better have parents with money. This may make young people sick, but when I started college, in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, tuition and books at a good state school was $1,000. For the whole year! I took a part time job in the department I was studying in, physics, doing actual physics and learning some great skills including computer programming and statistics, at minimum wage. That meant that I could make twice what school cost. I lived at home, being close to school. Could you imagine that today? By the way, I dropped out after two years and took those skills I learned to get a job making what college grads were making. I later went back to school to get a degree in computer science. Most of the people I studied with who finished, including some PhDs, ended up in the software field as well. So did some of the professors, who didn't get tenure. They ended up making a lot more money. What is the real purpose of many of the universities in this country. If you look at the history of many schools, you will see that a good number of them were started to give a chance of an education to people of lesser means in fields like engineering which were needed in an industrializing economy. Then, they lost their way, and most started offering unrelated degrees. We really need to have a conversation about this rather than just dealing with the effects, both financial and employment.
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  6440. Just listening to the intro, it's like deja vu all over again (an old joke for you youngsters out there). African debt, and the debt of underdeveloped countries in general, has been a problem for decades. So has the political instability. The two go hand in hand. Moves by NGOs advocating the forgiveness of African debt have been around since the last millennium.
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  6441. The facts do not support that. The one counteroffensive that Ukraine failed at was the most important. It was in the south and was their hope to get to Crimea, or at least cut it off, which would have collapsed Putin's regime. It was against prepared defenses. The other three counteroffensives relied on subterfuge (a good thing in war) and the unpreparedness of the Russians. None of those made much headway after the initial success. You might also note that Ukraine does not publish their casualty figures or equipment losses. Ever wonder why. They report daily on casualties and equipment losses on the Russian side.
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  6442.  @sabin97  The Puerto Rico issue is not as clear cut as you think. Last survey results I saw showed a third wanting independence, a third statehood and a third the status quo. Thus, even the local government has not pushed for a referendum. Being a part of the US has massive advantages.
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  6443.  @goenzoy712  Don't be silly. You obviously have no education in this area. While I will agree with you that GDP is a flawed measure, it is good enough to get an idea of relative size of economies. My analysis does not depend on the exact number anyway. The only thing I am claiming is that the "global south" generates about a fifth of global economic activity. Contrast that with the approximately 31% by North America and about 20% for Europe. My point is that to alienate economies that generate about 50% of world economic activity to go after a part of 20% is madness.
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  6444.  @goenzoy712  The numbers are from the IMF. Look at what percentage of GDP that UK trade deficit with China is to understand how silly your statement is. As for China, the official figures are known to be manipulated (kindest way to put it). The possibility of a crash in their economy in the next year or two is high. China's banks are insolvent by western standards. The assets of banks are heavy in property which is in vast oversupply. There is no precedent for their situation and no known path to recovery. Housing is overbuilt, by some estimates by 100%. People are buying apartments in second tier cities to store the ashes of their dear departed because it is cheaper than cemetery plots. In some cases, even in first tier cities, developers are giving away properties in seaside resorts if you buy an apartment (buy one, get one free). Office vacancies in top tier cites are surpassing 20%. This is all massively significant, since it drives 25-30% of the Chinese economy. Their population is crashing as is private consumption. Private consumption in China is significantly lower than in the rest of the world. They are experiencing deflation which is setting off a vicious cycle. Their industrial policies are going to cause a further reaction from their trading partners. The US and EU are reacting to dumping allegations. Even Brazil, a fellow BRICS member is starting to complain and is set to react as are many other countries. On top of all that, foreign direct investment (FDI) is crashing. Don't forget that China's growth was completely built on FDI (as well as IP theft). Now they are fueling it by debt. This debt is geared toward infrastructure projects and industrial production. The latter is distorting capital markets. This takes resources away from the population and is now fomenting unrest. So, you can put your money into China if you want but count me out.
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  6445. To say that "we" believe, is an insult. What percentage of people believe this crap? You are putting too much emphasis on the so called intelligencia. They are a small minority. As has been shown in elections since Brexit, Trump in 2016 and the 2019 UK elections, this is a minority that has access to the media. But, the media today goes far beyond what the traditional media has had in the past. In fact, I would venture that the traditional media is in it's death throes. This is a good thing. You take yourselves and the traditional media way to seriously. They are dying and it won't be long.
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  6446. Employment is holding up? Are you kidding. It is still not to where it was before the pandemic. That is why the numbers look good. it is not.
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  6447. The stupidest thing you can do is not the pay the army and police. This is so indicative of Xi's rule. Even when he is doing something that needs to be done, he botches it up. And I stress it is Xi doing this stupid stuff. There is no discussion, analysis or planning. He has imprisoned, scared or killed off anyone who could really advise him or do any analysis. The real estate situation is a great example. Something needed to be done. While not starting out that way, companies like Evergrande had become literal Ponzi schemes. So, Xi brought in the three red lines. No thought was put into how to deal with the companies, the home buyers or all the suppliers. Now Xi has probably tanked the economy. It all comes down to the fact that he is literally a hard-core commie. Such people have no idea what an economy is all about.
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  6448.  @Kamalost  Well, they did it in 1989 China. On the other hand, in Russia in 1991 the troops refused to fire. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don't.
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  6449. The policy suggestions at the end are just bunkum. The infrastructure investments over the last 20 years have not been successful. My favorite example is the high-speed rail (HSR) system. The first few lines were viable, so what did the central planners do? They built HSR everywhere. That resulted in many underutilized lines, expensive abandoned stations, and $1T in debt which is still growing. Then there is the whole property bubble thing. Actually, the number of stupid and poorly built infrastructure projects I have seen reported on is mind boggling. As for AI, and all that other high-sounding crap, it is just a waste of money when there are so many unemployed and underemployed. By the way, the AI bubble may already be bursting. There are projections of, between 2024 and 2040 there will be 60M college graduates unable to secure stable employment. In addition, the real estate crisis has put up to 10M people out of work. Those jobs are never coming back. China needs factory jobs and high-end private industry jobs to absorb these people. They also need to increase consumption within China and to spread it more widely. The rest of the world will shut China out. So, what are they proposing? A lot of tech and futuristic stuff, all of which requires massive amounts of capital. I don't know if anyone noticed, but foreign capital is drying up and the CCP is moving to bring more companies under state control. I think that economists and financial analysts throw out these buzz words because it makes them sound smart. This is true in the US as well as China.
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  6450. On the question at the end, I submit the following. The Russian people are serfs, and the Russian aristocracy is corrupt. Read Gogol's "Dead Souls" and you will see that the society has not changed in centuries. The book was written in the mid-19th century. Sadly, the chance of the society changing is low. Don't forget that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were soundly defeated and occupied before they became democratic. After the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of a decades long Cold War, the US and Europe tried to reach out to Russia and bring it into the family of democratic nations. The US especially does not hold grudges. In addition to Germany and Japan, look at Vietnam. We now have good commercial relations with them. On a couple of occasions, a US aircraft carrier has visited the harbor at Danang. The first was on the 25th anniversary of the end of the war. The second was this June to show solidarity with Vietnam in opposition to China in the South China Sea. The Russians, with their resources could have been a great contributor and member of the west, if they had held to a democratic course. Now they are just destroyers. Just look at several of the countries that broke away from the Soviet Union like the Baltic states and Georgia, and of course Ukraine. They want to be democratic and free. Not so the Russian people.
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  6451. Sugar is bad for you. Period!
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  6452. Is Bakhmut really that important to the Russians? I don't think so. It made sense at one time, where, with Russian troops from the north of there, they could trap a considerable number of Ukrainian troops. Well, now that that northern threat has been taken by Ukraine, it is no longer a strategic imperative. In fact, if they create a salient at Bakhmut, Ukraine can attack from the north, south and west to cut it off. I think that the Ukrainians are defending it because it is well fortified, and it allows them to inflict heavy casualties on the Russians.
    1
  6453. Let me start by saying that I support Ukraine. I do this not because of the Ukrainian people, although I have come to respect them because of their conduct in this war, but because of the utter illegality and danger to world order of Russia's actions. On the other hand, Ukraine has a history of corruption since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Most of this I fully understand was "inherited" from the Soviet system. I think they are doing a fairly good job of dealing with that legacy, but it is a reality. Did you forget about Burisma and Hunter Biden? Look at the list of issues that Ukraine must clear up for European membership (list taken from Wikipedia): Reform of the Constitutional Court. Continuation of judicial reform. Anti-corruption, including the appointment of the head of the SAPO. Anti-money laundering. Implementation of the anti-oligarchic law, including recommendations of the Venice Commission. Harmonization of audio-visual media legislation with that of the European Union. Change in legislation on national minorities. Ukraine has a lot to do.
    1
  6454.  @肖宣羽  No, in this case 4.5G. Look at the published analyses. They talk about "near" 5G speeds. By the way, 5G is a lot more than speed.
    1
  6455.  @bd8594  How much do you know about the semiconductor industry or 5G communications? This is not China bashing for its own sake. The fact is well established that Huawei mostly stole, and did not develop, its 5G communication technology. In addition, Huawei received massive government subsidies which distort the market. Basically, they (really meaning the government) don't care if they make money. The reality is that China is years behind in chip technology and did not develop that technology itself. Even as China tries to catch up, the west continues to progress. It is a race that China cannot win. So, if you really think China will get to the top, you are sadly delusional.
    1
  6456. In my experience, and reading of history, Chinese people are very entrepreneurial, and much more like Americans than say, the Japanese. If they had a more open, democratic society, they would be our biggest allies, and together we would rule the world. I know personally people who lived through the Cultural Revolution as youngsters, and were able to leave and did incredibly well in the US. I know people from the Chinses diaspora, from before the revolution, that also did incredibly well. I have studied at university with Chinese students who are smart and dedicated. It is the CCP that is the problem.
    1
  6457. Of course, ICBMs reach two times that speed. They can be shot down.
    1
  6458. The Sahara marching south? Peter, have you read about the greening going on at the edges of the Sahara because of increases of CO2, which is plant food, by the way.
    1
  6459. Equating "public sentiment" on social media with any actual public opinion is both misleading and stupid. That is why the term "netizens" always rankles me.
    1
  6460. Bjorn is correct in what he says at the beginning, but he leaves out the crux of the matter. When you pay for electricity as the end customer, you are paying for a lot more than just the electrons. You are paying for the reliable delivery of those electrons. It is that reliable delivery that makes advanced economies possible. We have become reliant on electricity because it has been reliable, 24x7x365. This leads to a problem with the cost chart he puts up. To make solar and wind as reliable requires massive additional costs in the form of energy storage. Add those in and the equation totally changes. In addition, I wonder if his chart is the cost of generation or the cost of delivery. It seems to be the cost of generation. If so, based on what is said above, that is not relevant.
    1
  6461. Trump should bring back Ronald Regan's quotes on government. I just refreshed my memory on them. Perhaps DOGE should print up a pamphlet with them and distribute it.
    1
  6462.  @MachiavellisThePrince  That's a skewed view of reality. Regan did not have control of Congress, and they continued to spend, spend, spend. To put it another way, there was no fiscal discipline. What would you do to help the majority of people? Asking for a friend. If you hadn't noticed, politicians say lots of things about each other and other people. Trump did not join the Republican Party until 1987. He was a Democrat from 2001 to 2009, then a Republican again. He was also involved in some third parties in between. Regan was a Democrat from the beginning of his political career until 1962 when he switched to the Republican Party. A lot of sitting members of Congress changed parties, after their election, while Regan was President. These were southern Democrats who were very conservative. The Democratic Party had moved left. We are seeing a similar shift today. These are periodic and have happened throughout American history. Frankly, even people like Winston Churchill in the UK shifted parties over their careers, so this phenomenon is not totally unique to the US. I point all this out because political opinions change over time. You may want to consider that.
    1
  6463.  @jaystock9202  I have been following AI since the 1980s.Early research was heavily geared toward the military, as was much tech research at the time. What is your experience with it?
    1
  6464.  @jaystock9202  Good one.
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  6465. What about nuclear artillery shells? The US used to deploy them in Europe at the height of the Cold War. These were in the 1.5 kiloton range. Cynically, US officers used to talk about distances in kilotons, as in two towns were 1.5 kilotons apart. This implies that if you hit one town with one of these devices, the next one would be affected as well.
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  6466.  @Lasse65  Well, there may be some situations like that. Actually, you shouldn't take it too seriously. It was generally said in jest.
    1
  6467.  @grapetree7219  I have to say that doing all that extra work was quite satisfying. At least in my experience, and this holds true for my ex-wife (we met on the job), is that the work was fulfilling. Now, we were very well compensated, and were doing (and still do) very satisfying work. We were actually rocket scientists. I then went on to do very interesting work in the computer industry. I still do very interesting work, although it is mostly startup stuff.
    1
  6468.  @danpress7745  Couldn't have said it better.
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  6469.  @dragonceo5911  No, doing email after work was a good thing for me and my colleagues. I started my professional career well before email. When I was a kid my father told me, with wonder, that he could access computers all over the country. He worked for an Army weapons lab. He was using the earliest form of DARPAnet. I have seen it all from the beginning. As a professional, being able to communicate from an anywhere at any time is liberating.
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  6470.  @DonTeridon  I once, for a summer, worked doing drywall with an independent. I would move 4x12 boards of drywall that weighed five pounds more than me (I learned a trick on how to do that). I also moved large buckets of drywall compound that came in large buckets. At one site I moved over a ton of this into the site. The thing is that I suffered no ill effects from it. In fact, over the last few years, since a divorce, I lost a lot of weight (now close to what I was in my 20s). My joint pain, which was not severe, has gone away.
    1
  6471.  @SriKrsnadasa  Being happy is complex. Being happy is not all about having personal freedom. It is also about having a purpose. That may even be more important. Being part of something bigger than yourself is very liberating. That is why civilization exists. And civilization is much better than what went before.
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  6472.  @mr.uthamaputhiran9790  Am I complaining? No. I like it. I have always worked more than 40 hours per week. Generally, much more. i was always well compensated for it. Even people I knew who worked in fields like carpentry, worked as much as they could when the season was right. I have a friend who made twice what I did in his carpentry job. In the summers, when decks became all the rage, he would work weekends installing them. He made lots of money from that, and it gave him the freedom to do what he wanted.
    1
  6473.  @SamDy99  I always had plenty of quality time with family, even working a lot. Family was always the main thing. My father in law was a doctor. He was often on call when we were having family events. We saw nothing wrong with this. It was his vocation and profession.
    1
  6474.  @DonTeridon  I also did a very physical job one summer while transitioning between jobs. I would sometimes move two tons of material in a day. Fortunately I never suffered such a problem. Actually, only suffered joint pain when I gained weight. After a divorce I changed how I ate, and the joint pain is gone, as is the weight, high blood pressure and all other issues. In fact, I have not had a headache or taken even an aspirin in five years. I have had one 24 hour flu in that time, which I even felt break. My grandfather was a carpenter and lived till his late 80s in good health. He had no major problems, and don't forget, when he was working things were much more physical than today. He died quietly in his sleep.
    1
  6475. Mahyar, on the House of Lords issue, what Cleverly did not mention is that the Commons and Lords will be moving out of the current Parliament building because of the need for refurbishment. So, wherever they go, there will have to be facilities prepared. These two issues are linked. If the Parliament did not have to move (for up to six years), then this would not be an issue.
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  6476.  @sbludba  How does that work? Iran has been fomenting terrorist movements across the region. Is that peace? No one has threatened them with invasion since the Iraqis, another Muslim country (also religion of peace). They have also threatened to destroy Israel because of their religion.
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  6477. The west is vulnerable because its own foolish norms and laws. Immigrants, especially the illegal type, do not deserve any benefits. Period, end of story. Put them in camps and then deport them. That is the only solution. Benefits should only be available to citizens and those that are legal and paying into the system. I lived in the UK, on a work permit, and paid into the system (quite a bit, actually). I didn't even get any type of traffic violation. My wife did get one speeding ticket, though.
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  6478. Good segment. For Vivek to talk about "our" founding fathers is very revealing. I think it is great. We are the most multi-cultural society on the planet. What systemic racism? We have had a black president. We now have a black, South Asian female VP. You see a white presenter glad to have Vivek on his show. And he means it. We have leaders, both political and thought, from every ethnic and racial group. And, you cannot deny the situation at the border. The only other country where so many people are trying to get in is the UK. Also a country which has become very multi-cultural. How many are trying to get into China? And look at France. All those migrants at the northern coast are going to the UK. Senior leaders in all their major political parties are from many different groups. In fact, the Conservatives have had two female Prime Ministers. Labor none. In fact, currently the UK has a Chancellor of the Exchequer and a Home Secretary who are South Asian. These are the two most powerful cabinet posts in the Government.
    1
  6479. You say to watch the video of Harris thanking her supporters. I have seen it before and CAN'T watch it again. She has always been an embarrassment to the US. So, I had to skip over it.
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  6480. The comment made at about 5:15 is just plain stupid. This guy obviously does not know much about the military.
    1
  6481. Again with the chees.
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  6482. We are entering a time of many wars. For Europe it is Russia trying to get back to what it considers secure borders (i.e., the old Soviet/Russian Empire borders). There will be wars for natural resources, especially oil. The US has been the guarantor of the world order and world trade. The US really doesn't need it anymore, especially since the shale revolution and the end of the Cold War. The Cold War was the reason the US created the order. The irony is that China's rise was only made possible because of that order. Now they want to tear it down. They are toast (good for India). As for food, I have seen statistics that the world produces twice the number of calories needed to feed itself. The problem, as always, is distribution.
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  6483. Having lived through the Cold War and working in the aerospace and defense industry I can tell you that none of what Russia is doing today is unprecedented. I saw it up close. Yes, there are new technologies, but they (and the west) always used the most up to date technologies of the time, including propaganda and criminal organizations.
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  6484. Expanding consumption? Are you daft? How can anyone take government statistics seriously in a country like China? Have you seen the pileup of empty containers at Chinese ports? Have you looked at the volumes and prices for international shipping? How about the "job markets" in China? How about the plight of college grads in China? What about the massive price cuts for automobiles in China. Used cars cannot be sold since the new ones are so cheap. The only conclusion that can be made is that all these statistics are plain lies. Is the Chinese economy even as big as they report? I have been questioning this for a while, and now I am beginning to hear it from others more often.
    1
  6485. What is with all the YouTube warriors? For one thing, why are they listening to Russian sources? Have you heard what the Russian media says about the war? The lies and misinformation from the Russian side are epic. Joseph Goebbels would blush. The other thing that bothers me is the reliance on these combat maps. Who makes the maps? Do you really know? Even wasting our time reviewing a sliver of farm field or ruined town is just plain silly. Is it significant? I will never get those seconds back. That is also why I don't subscribe to channels that present the maps.
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  6486. Putin doesn't have decades. He doesn't even have one decade. Look at the demographics of Russia before the war. It is much worse now. Between those killed and those that fled, they have lost perhaps 1.5M men of prime military and working age. That is 1% of the population, and a much higher percentage of that critical demographic. On top of that, it took Putin 20 years, with access to western technology and oil money, to build up the army he invaded with. That army is gone. He does not have the capacity to do it again. He does not have the money to do it again. I have just heard that India is curtailing the purchase of oil from Russia because of disputes over the currency and price. At best Russia is breaking even on oil sales. On top of that, the west, including the US, is moving closer to confiscating the $300B in reserves Russia has abroad that are currently frozen. Guess who will benefit from that.
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  6487.  @JSK010  I am being critical. I have been hearing recession predictions for years now. The only real one came with COVID, and that was totally artificial. If you look at MSM publications and YouTube you will get the whole gamut of predictions, from recession to depression to the end of our way of life. As for times of extreme uncertainty, I don't accept that. I have lived through times of extreme uncertainty, and this is not one of those.
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  6488. The whole idea is ridiculous and ignores the whole point of sports. Sports are entertainment. Where do you think the money for sports comes from? There are lots of sports and athletic activities that people do that have little or no mass entertainment value. Just think of all those sports one sees at the Olympics. Besides that spectacle, and it is an entertainment spectacle, the majority of sports competed in are only seen by the vast majority of people once every four years.
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  6489. Europe is not phasing out coal. In fact, Germany is increasing their production. And German lignite coal is the dirtiest and least efficient type of coal. If they brought back on-line their nuclear plants they may be able to avoid this, but that does not look like happening. As for the LNG infrastructure, Germany has already got it going. There are also programs in places like Spain. Don't talk about decades when considering projects like this. That is just a throw off number, not rooted in reality.
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  6490. Don't the people of China realize that they are living in a commie-controlled country? Everything they have actually belongs to the state. People waiting a year or two and still not getting their deposits. People not getting salaries for months or years. Who are the people of China? Are they so dim as to not understand what is going on? And yet, from this population you get the "little pinks" and people shouting hatred at the US. The bulk of the Chinese population are a bunch of sheep. I guess the preferred term in China is "leeks". I feel bad saying that, but what other conclusion can one come to. China only realized its growth in the last three decades because of the US. Left to their own devices they would still be back in the Mao era. At least clothing would not be a big thing. Now they decide they have to threaten to overtake the US. Good luck with that. The sad thing is that there is a relatively small cadre of people in China who understand things. Chinese abroad that I have known also understand. Some of them even lived through the Cultural Revolution. Many of these are the most vehement anti-CCP people I have met. The Chinese will have to undergo a lot of pain before they can come out the other end. Considering their demographics, exacerbated by the CCP's one child policy, the US may have as large a population as China by the end of the century.
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  6491. For comparison, the B-52 bomber in the US Air Force went into service in 1955. My father worked on the design and was born around that time. The US still fields 72 of them. Of course, they are modernized. The US B-1B was introduced in 1986. There are still 45 in service.
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  6492. Wow, Peter, wow! It sounds like you are a Saddam Hussein fan.
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  6493.  @recondax  You make an excellent point. I think Xi wants to relive the Mao days. I have met people who lived through the Cultural Revolution and escaped. They did very, very well in the US.
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  6494. Zalenski is repeating the propaganda about the Russians coming for America. Trump is correct when he talks about the ocean separating us. The only country that could breach that is the US. The Russian navy, and their shipping in general, is a joke. It always will be. I also have an issue with the idea that Putin will attack NATO. Look at how poorly he did in Ukraine. It took him 20 years to build up the military he attacked with. It is now gone. Right now, the road to St. Petersburg and Moscow is wide open. Why can Putin allow that with confidence. One word. Nukes. The same goes for the US.
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  6495. Lock her up! Lock her up! The Hutchinson testimony is laughable and would most likely have been thrown out of any court as not credible. In other words, it was hearsay. I thought that at the time. Heck, lock 'em all up.
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  6496. Come on man. Drones don't need to come from China. About a decade ago I was a judge, representing the IEEE, at a review of capstone projects at a technical college. The student teams were given modest budget and had to develop a system on their own. One of the best was a quadcopter drone built from scratch. This included the control system, etc. If any parts were sourced from China, they were standard things like motors, etc. No drone specific parts. If there is a need to build these drones and China cuts off the parts, these can be sourced from elsewhere or made in the US.
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  6497. Do better China? China is toast. The corruption is everywhere. There are even hints of organized crime running rampant, often in cooperation with the government. This is underplayed and underreported. What do you think will happen when the CCP collapses? Do you think that China will all of a sudden become a liberal democratic country? Dream on. Who will lead such an effort? When the CCP dynasty (that is what it is) collapses it will be akin to the collapse of the Qing dynasty. It will bring on a period of competing warlords. This is actually a norm for China. Don't forget that the nationalist government of China, initially under Sun Yat-sen, controlled only the southeast corner of the country. Oh, and by the way, Sun was a socialist, not a western style democrat. His successor was basically just another warlord, as was Mao. How long did it take Taiwan to escape the authoritarian grasp of the KMT? The other thing to consider is the population of China. It is mostly peasant and poor, still. It is getting poorer. By all accounts, the middle class is being squeezed out of existence. So, do you think all those peasants will suddenly become enlightened westerners. Just a little history. How do you think that Mao got the peasants to follow him. Were they steeped in Marxist-Leninist ideology and thought? Did they ponder historical trends and class contradictions? As President Joe likes to say: Come on man! No, he promised the peasants free stuff, taken from the landowners and the bourgeoises. How do you think Mao pulled off the Cultural Revolution? More class envy! On top of that there is the demographic disaster that is China, brought on by CCP draconian policies. Have you seen the birthrate figures lately? I have seen some projections of a loss of almost a billion people by the end of the century. Whatever the actual number, it is going be huge, and disastrous. So, who will lead the way forward? No one else in the world would touch China with a barge pole. China has negligible natural resources. They must import most of what they process. Their land is not particularly productive. Again, they have to import massive amounts of agricultural inputs, as well as actual food. No, China will go back to being the "great big empty spot" (old Cold War joke).
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  6498. We are already seeing the shift in the US as far as the labor force is concerned. A lot of that has to do with our experience with the massive move to higher education. What studies have found is that at least 50% of college grads are in jobs that do not require their degree. We also have the problem that many of the degrees people are getting are basically useless. By the way, the Chinese are finding exactly the same thing. It is worse in China. What Peter leaves out is automation. Just an example is a company that makes pens and rubber products. They moved the pen manufacturing to the US and built an automated plant. I even have some battery powered lawn tools that are made by a Chinese company. The majority are made in Vietnam, and when I looked up the company, I found that they have opened a plant in the US. It is their most modern and automated.
    1
  6499.  @OldieBugger  The EU is a cartel. Besides that, the structure of their banking system is one good reason why they will not overtake the dollar.
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  6500.  @kodek1234  I guess it depends on who wins WWIII.
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  6501. The decrease in the value of the ruble against the dollar is indeed bad for Russia. On the other hand, there are two factors that make this less important. First, they are an energy and raw material exporter. The countries around the world that have been hit hard by dollar strength are suffering precisely because they are raw material importers, and that trade is mostly in dollars. Russia does not have this problem. Second, Russia is barred from most trade that would be done in dollars. The actual exchange rate is probably different (worse?) because the ruble is generally not freely traded.
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  6502.  @Leicht_Sinn  The main difference is that socialism is a step along the road to communism. Read your Marx and Lenin. I began in the early 1970s. Looking at Germany, the Spartacus League, lead by Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (who I have read), were initially arguing for implementing socialism first, from within the system, then moving to communism. Socialism is not an end in itself. Luxemburg argued with Eduard Bernstein, in Social Reform or Revolution, about this very point. I suggest that you get educated, and actually read about the topic.
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  6503.  @iszolde154  She would, wouldn't she. There is no way to determine her inner motives. Much of what she has done seems more statist, and perhaps even socialist, than one would expect from her party. Perhaps she was pushed by the election results of the last cycles, but she does seem to be trending more to the left.
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  6504.  @iszolde154  I said that as a bit of hyperbolae because she is from East Germany.
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  6505. The statement by Johnny Lee is so incredibly stupid it beggars belief. It is what people believe, then one can see why China is failing. With beliefs like this they deserve to fail.
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  6506.  @willaimoconnell9430 Good point.
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  6507. It is not new. People talk about it now because the US implemented it in Iraq in the 1990s to protect the Kurds. As usual, you did a good job of informing us about the current situation. You do tend to overemphasize problems. That is just what the equipment, training and personnel are there to do. Considering how the Russians have performed to date, I think the situation would be manageable. I am not advocating it, just, as you are, looking at the tactical details. I had a friend who was in at the beginning of the US Wild Weasel concept. He was actually a Navy pilot but got involved in this new program. He would fly a stripped down F105 down the Red River through the heart of Hanoi. The idea was to get the AA batteries (including missiles) to light their radar. The planes behind him would then destroy the radars. From that beginning we now have dedicated planes and missiles to deal with this. Now, as to the Russian air forces performance, both planes and pilots, I think you have to look at all the conflicts where Western/US equipment and doctrine have come up against Soviet/Russian equipment. In no case have the Soviet/Russian forces prevailed. Why do you think the Egyptians kicked out the Soviets after the 1973 war? A much smaller country with Western equipment crushed them. The Israelis actually were poised to go all the wat to Cairo. Look at Iran vs Iraq (Iran had advanced US planes), the Gulf War and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Look at Libia. Even India is buying French, and potentially US, planes rather than new Russian planes. In fact, one of the new Russian fighters really needed a development partner/customer to make it viable. This was India, which pulled out. So, my message is that the Soviets/Russians have never been at the forefront in actual combat. They have come up with some good stuff, but operating it (training), coordinating it and employing it (doctrine) has always been behind the West. If they try to take on the whole of NATO, they are toast. Just my humble opinion, of course.
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  6508. Are they "American" settlers? They are subjects of the British crown.
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  6509. Europe as an entity is not really a thing. Europe is a collection of nation states, not a single polity. As such it will never be as strong as the US. Frankly, Europe owes its freedom to the US. And yet, Europe often thumbs it nose at the US. Not very smart.
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  6510.  @kadovax6567  True about the American Revolution and France. That is a very well-known fact. What is interesting is that this was pre-revolution France. France then had their own revolution soon after. The US not only "helped" end both world wars in the 20th century, but it was also decisive. In fact, one motivation in WWI for the allies to have an early armistice rather than fully defeating Germany was that the US was heading toward being the most powerful Army in Europe with millions more American troops set to go to Europe if the war had gone on longer. The US not only had fresh troops but were planning massive numbers. This would have allowed the US to completely dictate terms. In WWII the US was decisive. At least 20% of Soviet materiel was given by the US and UK (mostly the US). The UK would have had trouble holding on to territory in Africa and the Middle East without the US, even before direct US involvent. In fact, the UK would probably not have been able to last without Lend-Lease.
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  6511. Well put. What are they mining up there? My sense is that there is almost nothing in the Arctic zone that cannot be found elsewhere and exploited for less cost.
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  6512.  @jfverboom7973  I have seen that as well. Good point in this current discussion. Control of one's own river system is very important, especially in this age when we are all building dams to control and exploit them. Another example is the Nile. Its sources are in different countries not even bordering Egypt which are, as with the Chinese, building dams and potentially disrupting it. Then you have the Helmand River critical to Iran that starts in Afghanistan, which is also building a dam. I mention all these not to show off my extensive foreign affairs interest and knowledge, but to give a background for what might well come next, driven by these river issues. As with many international situations it is natural resources that often drive events. The traditional solution to these problems has been conflict and conquest. Then came the US led, rules-based world order after WWII. The UN was going to resolve all these issues. Well, now that hasn't worked, what happens? We are on the cusp of going back to old order. As China breaks down, I think there might be a need for the affected countries to secure their river sources. I personally don't believe the Chinese military is even half as good as their Russian counterpart. and just look at what is happening to Russia in Ukraine. As the last piece of the strategic puzzle, air power (F-16s are arriving in Ukraine about now) is put in place, Ukraine will win. Russia at least has recent combat experience (lots of it actually). China has none. Some of the states adversely affected by this river controversy do have the experience and are better equipped than Ukraine was at the beginning of the war. I have even heard that the US might sell F-16s to Vietnam (that would be a hoot). The only wildcard is nukes.
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  6513. I have not used cash for a very long time. I got a payout from a company about five years ago and took some of it in cash. I still have half that cash left and have not used it for three or four years. I pay everything electronically either directly or through credit cards. This includes taxes. I think that I am typical in that way. I even got a check for some sort of class action settlement in the mail and deposited it electronically through my phone. This is my first time doing this and it was quick and easy. I was so excited. I really only need to use the bank branch for the safe deposit box, and I can walk to the bank (just over a mile). Earlier in the century I lived in England. I was given a bank account by my company with a large UK bank which was not associated with any branch. I also got a Switch card, which was basically a standard cash card. Even stalls at the local farmers market took Switch cards using a small handheld terminal. Cash may not be dead, but it is increasingly unnecessary.
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  6514.  @abby42525  Excellent points.
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  6515. I tend to agree with O'Leary, but he is woefully uninformed about China. Unemployment is up. Many workers, including some government employees, are not getting paid. Several million jobs have disappeared in the construction industry, especially related to housing. College grads cannot find employment, or what they are offered is about 2,000 yuan per month (about $280) when they were expecting 10,000 to 20,000 yuan per month. There are already lots of labor related demonstrations all over China.
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  6516. These videos are a real source of entertainment. When I was at this woman's age, a long time ago, we didn't have social media and never really saw or heard this kind of stuff. It is fascinating to watch. Now, I was in my 20s, in fourth quintile of the last century, of the last millennium. The environment was quite different. I don't think that people were thinking about relationships in the same way. It was like a merry go round. At some point, you would get off, but people did not obsess about it. In fact, it was not unusual for a woman, or man, to get married, or shack up with a woman, and then to have an active sex life outside of the relationship. I really wonder what the difference is between then and now. Watching these videos, I am beginning to detect a pattern. though.
    1
  6517. How good are they? In 2018, in Syria, the US killed about 200 of these troops without a loss.
    1
  6518. I find it disingenuous when people call the conservatives and/or populists the "hard" right but then don't call the communist, sometimes revolutionary, sometimes anarchist. parties "hard" left. When you talk "hard" right in Europe you evoke the specter of fascists and Nazis. By not applying the "hard" label to the left, especially in France, you deemphasize the radical, generally Marxist, nature of the parties involved. This is an obvious manipulation of language. Is this a conspiracy? Is it just laziness of thought? I mean that. I would really like some answers.
    1
  6519. Interesting. The population of the city I live in, in Illinois in the US, has a population of about 150,000. It was founded in about 1830. Actually, in the 1960s I think it had a population of about 12,000. It has grown a lot since then. Actually, my house in a neighborhood that was, until the 1980s, farmland. I can walk to the downtown. I have a neighbor who is from a small town in Slovenia. When she moved into her house was at the edge of the farm fields. It is a very nice house. She was distraught. Her husband said give it some time and the neighborhood grew up around them. She is alright with it now. No more farm fields.
    1
  6520. While applaud Dorsey's vote of confidence in Musk, his statements on what Twitter should be are just plain stupid. What does he think it is? This statement of a "protocol level" shows no understanding of what any service is. A user of a service does not care what is behind providing it, in detail. The user just wants it to work. A good example is electricity. Bear with me. The general consumer is only interested in energy at the point of use. They are also interested in that service being reliable. Nothing else really matters to them. This is true of telecom, water, sewer, etc. Dorsey can go on and on about protocols, but the Twitter user just wants it to work and be available. In the background there is a lot of infrastructure and operational work. I am in the technology field. So, I know that when Dorsey says stuff like this, he is being ingenuous or stupid. My bet is on the latter.
    1
  6521. The US should be giving lots of ATACMS missiles to Ukraine. The replacement to ATACMS has already been developed. The new system uses the same launch vehicles as ATACMS.
    1
  6522. I only know about Qanon from what I read on Wikipedia. I don't look at Wikipedia as a great source, but it is quick and convenient to get an initial read. With that said, what is happening in schools with the trans community, and other attempts to sexualize children, is right in line with Qanon. Add to that the underage sex scandals with Jeffery Epstein and even CIA officials, and a lot of what they say seems to be happening. In the UK there are grooming gangs, made up mostly of Pakistani men, who were doing horrendous things to young girls for years. Because of fear of stoking community violence, this was allowed to go on by local police forces. Grooming of young people is a real problem, and parents should have all the tools they can get to stop it.
    1
  6523.  @jackholman5008  No.
    1
  6524.  @Slothface  Who are they? By the way, whatever the answer, the comment is good.
    1
  6525. How stupid you people are. Advertisers are not using these platforms to promote free speech. They are using the platform to promote their own products. If they perceive that a personality will hurt their brand, it is their free speech right to pull their advertising money. Don't forget that free speech has two sides. There is Russell Brand's side and his right to speak, and there is the advertiser's side and their right to support personalities and platforms they feel will support their brand. Brand isn't doing what he does out of some sort of altruism. He is doing it to make money. Who the heck are you bozos to decide where someone else should spend their money? I have never heard such drivel in my life. Come on man!
    1
  6526. Ten different mechanics? Again with exaggeration. When you go to an independent mechanic for your car he does not have one guy for each car, or each brand. I have seen lots of shops with three or four guys who work all major brands.
    1
  6527. The idea that drone training takes months is utter hogwash. How long did Patriot training take? How long did training on western artillery tale? How long will it take to train fighter pilots to use the F-16? You, and I mean the pundit community, don't have any idea of what goes into making one of these systems. The whole war has only been going on for 15 months and tens of thousands of these things have been used. Many technologies have been introduced. By the logic of months that seems to be the thing today, none of what we are seeing in this war would be happening. Heck, as far as drones go, I was once helping judge student projects at a technical college (as an IEEE member) and one team had produced a quad drone from scratch in a couple of months. And I mean from scratch. There were no drone kits or drone specific parts. Everything from the structure to the electronics to the programming was done with equipment not specifically made for drones. That was several years ago (at least ten years ago actually). So, if it is taking months to train these drone pilots, then they are poorly designed and the people training on them are just plain dense. Do you believe any of that about the Ukrainians?
    1
  6528. With the Korea situation Trump at least tried. Kim would not comply, so Trump clamped down on the North. What previous presidents had done was to pander to Kim. So, he did not achieve his aim, but he did better than those that came before.
    1
  6529.  @mementomori7825  Oh, I remember. I also remember all the failures in diplomacy before that.
    1
  6530. Africa is not of strategic importance to the US. It never has been and never will be. It is not a matter of being soft or ambivalent. Using those terms shows lack of seriousness. The world, especially the Russians, the Chinese and the Europeans, sees Africa as a source of raw materials, nothing more. If the world does devolve back to where it was before WWII, we may also see a return to imperialism in Africa. I see this already starting with the Chinese belt and road initiative, and European attempts to secure alternate sources for raw materials.
    1
  6531. What a fairy snowflake (trying to tone it down) this guy is. He knows nothing about free speech. Free speech includes anything except for calling for violence (and in some cases that is included as well). it is worth noting that people like this journalist have no problem when people on social media call for violence against conservatives. This guy is one of those who are perfectly fine with censorship. They will change their tune when they are the objects of that censorship.
    1
  6532. Repeating the trope about losing troops on offense is getting tiresome. For one thing, I think it is clear that Ukraine is losing far fewer troops than Russia is. On the other, look at the wars after WWII. In Korea, Vietnam and the two Iraq wars, and the numbers are not even close to this supposed fact. Look at Israel's wars. This is a WWI type of statistic. Even in WWII, the Soviets only lost so many troops at various times because of poor tactics and a total disregard for the value of their own troops.
    1
  6533. I had to give this thumbs up because at about 0:22. That was the best opening to a video I think I have ever seen. And I am not just talking about Peter's videos. Now back to the video. From the title, I think I will like it.
    1
  6534. Well, I don't think US China relations are the coldest they have "ever" been. An amusing manifestation of this is Mad Magazine. In the 1960s they portrayed China as "the great big empty spot". We had no relations with mainland China. In fact, when Nixon decided to establish relations with China of the CCP, he had to enlist Pakistan to make the contacts. And this had to be done secretly. As for the problems within the Chinese (actually CCP) bureaucracy, I have seen speculation that this whole incident was fomented by factions within the Chinese military. There are factions within the CCP, and with, as you point out, Xi's failures these factions are becoming more active and bolder. This might be the beginning of the end of Xi and perhaps the CCP. Xi has clearly lost the "mandate of heaven".
    1
  6535. Starsky makes an interesting statement around 34:00 which I think shows a good level of maturity in the Ukranian polity. Don't forget that when WWII was over Winston Churchill lost power. He actually was elected again several years later for another term. As he said, that is how it is supposed to work. Who knows, maybe Zalenski will run again and be successful. Then again, maybe he won't. This war is obviously a stressful situation, and he, unlike Churchill, is not a career politician.
    1
  6536. The only solution is to expel the radicalized elements from the country. Until the West does that, we will be at risk. What are these people doing here? There are many Islamic countries they could go to. An Islamist in the West is just an insurgent. Their chance of succeeding is nil. They are just causing pain and suffering. Why should they be tolerated. This attitude in the West is a result of WWII and the Nazi policies. This is not the world we live in. Something has to change or there will be a real backlash. Policies that resulted from the persecutions of WWII are not applicable in our current situation.
    1
  6537.  @Fip999  Good point. Probably true.
    1
  6538.  @knoef82  Brilliant!
    1
  6539.  @cliffontheroad  Very good points. I use granulated garlic that is grown and processed in the US. As for garlic cloves and chili peppers, I grow them at home. This also applies to several herbs. Safer that way. I fully agree with you on the Chinese fishing fleet. They are raping the oceans. Bad, not good. I generally get fresh seafood (usually frozen and individually packaged) from US fisheries. I live in the Midwest. I also pay attention to where canned seafood is from. I also look at where it seafood is packaged as well. I found one brand of wild caught US salmon packaged in the Americas. I once accidentally got a package of squid that was from China. It made me sick (I almost never get sick), so I threw it out.
    1
  6540.  @cliffontheroad  Great story. Strange situation though. I avoid plastic packaging whenever possible. My ex-wife left lots of plastic containers and I packed them away. I should just recycle them. I use glass containers whenever I have leftovers, etc. They have plastic lids, but the food does not touch the lids.
    1
  6541.  @cliffontheroad  I typed a detailed reply, but I don't see it here. I must have neglected to press the reply button.
    1
  6542.  @cliffontheroad  In my deleted comment I basically agreed with you. The gist is that I avoid food from China and actually try to source from the US as much as possible. I use a lot of granulated garlic and that is US grown and processed, for example. I even found a really nice olive oil from California.
    1
  6543. Biden calls out Trump's tariff plan. How would be know?
    1
  6544. Um, Peter, how well informed are you about the German politics? The other party that did well, named after its leader, is, as I understand it, a far-left party. The following is a quote from Wikipedia: "... and other like-minded groups within Die Linke, such as the Socialist Left or the Karl Liebknecht circles..." regarding the founding of the party you won't name. Karl, along with Rosa Luxemburg, founded the Spartacus League in 1914. They were a Marxist group advocating revolution. In 1919 Karl and Rosa were murdered by members of the Freikorps (Rosa's body was dumped in a canal). I always thought that the Freikorps was right wing. Maybe I missed it. I thought that Marxist revolutionary parties are on the left. So now you are telling me they are on the right. Wow, things change so fast.
    1
  6545. The sad thing about all this is that 2023 may be as good as it gets for China's people. The CCP has no answers. It is run by a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist economic illiterate. Even if the CCP falls, China is likely to devolve into warlord led regional factions. Who is going to invest in China then?
    1
  6546.  @zacksmith5644  To say that publications and investment bankers have a checkered record is nothing new. It is probably an understatement. In the December 29, 2023 issue of the WSJ there is an article titled "How I, and Everyone Else, Got 2023 So Wrong". This is par for the course. On the other hand, in China today the issues go well beyond what the finance guys cover. In fact, they have generally eschewed talking about the diplomatic, political and other factors outside of finance. That has always been a big mistake. Another thing to consider is how China got out of all those previously predicted disasters. They did it through infrastructure spending and foreign direct investment. The former will just make things worse, and the latter is no longer available. While you are implying that everything will be alright with China, there is actually no support for that view.
    1
  6547.  @YourHineyness  Indubitably.
    1
  6548. You mention a 20M Watt flywheel system near the end of the video. This just shows the inadequacy of renewable systems. A medium sized coal plant produces 400 MW of electricity. A typical nuclear plant produces 1000 MW of electricity. Thus, the renewables are a pimple on the a** of the energy we need.
    1
  6549. The EU is not really doing anything about EVs in China that it does not do elsewhere. There have been many subsidy complaints by the EU against the US and the US against the EU outside of EVs. This is just holding China to the same standards as the rest of the world adheres to. That should apply to climate and environmental pollution as well. Oh, and add in there intellectual property rights. Stop treating China as a special case. If they can't play with the big boys, they should take their ball and go home. Tim Cook and Elon Musk are both smart guys and also stupid when it comes to dealing with international issues. Don't forget that both companies have expanded internationally because of saturation of their home markets. This is actually quite common. For a while there have been people calling for them to get out of China while they still could. Well, they missed the boat. The CCP is fully capable of killing their businesses in China and seem well on their way to doing that. Their shareholders should probably do something about that.
    1
  6550. Wow! The government has leverage on Musk because of some things that might need government authorization. Who are you kidding? Who are his competitors? If you are talking about SpaceX, then you are way off base. They need him far more than he needs them. Privatizing space launch and travel is a real must for the government. He's the one who has them by the balls.
    1
  6551.  @olddog-fv2ox  That is very true. The problem is that they keep doing the stupidest things. Neom is one good example. The other issue is that their human capital is totally undeveloped. They basically pay their people to sit around and keep quiet. All the low end and high-end work is done by foreigners.
    1
  6552. EPIC! Maybe there is a future for the Democratic Party yet. One that is reformed and free of all the left-wing, woke and socialist crap. I say that as a Republican.
    1
  6553.  @two02ful  Well, you are saying that the premier of China is wrong.
    1
  6554. Perhaps body shaming should be required. Obesity is a major contributing factor in many of the health crises we face today. Even COVID. Obesity is a factor in the high cost of healthcare and contributes to stress on the system. There is no upside to being obese.
    1
  6555. They stopped publishing that figure (at around 35:25). What is this, communist China? I mean that in all seriousness. The CCP has been dealing with inconvenient statistics by either fudging them, or by no longer publishing them. This applies to health data as well as demographic data and economic data. I saw a chart once which showed the number of statistical series available from the Chinese authorities. I think that the current number is just above 10% above the peak.
    1
  6556. This is stupid. The dollar is strengthening and the yuan is weakening. That is a deliberate action by the Chinese to support exports. Of course, it also makes imports of raw materials and food more expensive. China is going down, not up. In addition, both the ruble and yuan are subject to currency controls. That is the only thing holding up the ruble. What a crap analysis.
    1
  6557. Tony, great content as expected. Why don't you have many more subscribers? This is valuable information. I find it interesting that China is putting so much into their nuclear arsenal. A nuclear "umbrella" is mainly useful as a deterrent. This is amusing in the case of a country like China. As far as I can tell, no one wants to invade China. They do not have significant natural resources, their farmland is poor (and this summer it is getting hammered) and then there are all those Chinese. Who are they deterring? Another worry I have is the poor quality of their defense systems. On this topic a nuclear ballistic missile submarine of the PLA navy surfaced unexpectedly in the Taiwan strait because of what might have been a problem with the vessel. Considering what we have heard about the corruption in the system, this is a bad sign.
    1
  6558.  @crowbar9566  True on your second point. You can tell where my preferences are.
    1
  6559. @Bluebell Flora Fair point.
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  6560. @Jeffrey Dick Well put. What is happening now in the UK, especially with devolution, makes the need for a written constitution even more important. There have also been calls for a written, unchangeable, bill of rights. The other thing about the US Constitution is that it is difficult, but not impossible, to change, just like a good contract. What happens in the UK whenever there is a sufficient majority in Parliament, is that the basic "contract" gets changed purely by the will of the party then in charge. This is often done in a patently stupid way (and that is the nicest way I can describe devolution) and it has a detrimental effect on the government its operation and public perception. Just look at the Brexit debacle (although I agree with the idea of Brexit). All of a sudden, a major foreign policy and economic policy is put to a binding public referendum. Where in the heck did that come from? So, Starkey going off all high and mighty about how the British "constitution" is so great, he might want to look a little deeper at what has gone on.
    1
  6561. @Moonraker Well, the US has a written Constitution. It is not an ossified document. It has an amendment process, and to date there are 27 of them. As far as working fine for the UK, I would question that. What about devolution, the Supreme Court and changes to the House of Lords? These things were done by a political party, and I submit that they have not worked out so well. When I lived in the UK, I used to see graffiti on the motorway overpasses saying "England for the English". Think about it.
    1
  6562. @Moonraker I appreciate your respectful response. Yes, we do have divergent views on this issue. One thing I will say for the UK system is that it has worked fairly well for a long time for the British. The US was starting from scratch as far as the overall structure of government was concerned, so I don't think there was any one person who could have brought it all together without a written document. My issue with devolution is not that it happened, but that it seems somewhat poorly done. I would have thought that the whole of the UK would be regionalized, not just the historical kingdoms. The idea that devolved entities have a direct say in purely English affairs is a major flaw. Where is the English Parliament? I would have put it to a referendum. Similarly with the House of Lords and the Supreme Court, it seems like it would need a wider remit and more discussion. In the US, the Senate was not originally directly elected by the people. Senators were appointed by the state governments. This was changed by amendment which is a process that requires broad support from all levels from citizens to states. These are two different systems which on the other hand share a lot in common. Neither is perfect, but I think most would agree they are the best the world has to offer right now.
    1
  6563. @Moonraker Thank you for the comment. Actually, on the case of amendments, you have to understand that many of these are concerned with protecting the rights of the minority. This extends well beyond things like the 2nd Amendment.
    1
  6564. @Moonraker Well, that is subjective. I tend to believe it does. What about minority rights based on race. In the US I expect that African Americans will never be a majority. Should their rights not be guaranteed in law? As for firearms, over 40% of the population lives in households with firearms. Of the other 60%, I expect there are over 10% that support gun ownership. So, I would not agree that there is a majority to repeal the 2nd Amendment. By the way, those ownership numbers do not include the people who have guns illegally. That would most likely take the number over 50% of people with firearms.
    1
  6565. The reason for the strict firearms laws and banning of handguns in the UK had nothing to do with criminals. In fact, criminals in the UK still have guns. The reason was gun accidents. Now that handguns are banned, there is a spate of knife crime in the UK.
    1
  6566. My understanding that these labs, and others across the world, were set up to study pathogens found locally. This allows us to track them and characterize them. They are not, as Tulsi rightly pointed out, weapons labs which manipulate them. Even Wuhan was a place to study the bats that occurred in China. The problem in China is that they did manipulate them.
    1
  6567.  @mats8038  The issue with pollution is a sad adjunct to the whole globalization thing. The EU is starting to recognize this in regard to climate change with a carbon duty on foreign goods. On the other hand, the situation you mentioned is interesting. Several years ago, I was in a meeting where a Chinese manufacturer asked a prospective client whether he wanted filtration in the factory for health reasons for the workers. The answer was no. What is required by law in the US was optional in China. If you look at the processes and pollution used in China for refining rare earth metals for example, it will literally scare and disgust you. If you look at the food safety situation in China, you would be never eat there. I wonder if the situations you talk about are more the result of not paying sufficient bribes.
    1
  6568.  @Nh-ok3sg  Typically EV. I believe one large brand is moving to Thailand (I think). I have also heard that a Vietnamese brand is building an EV factory in the US. I don't think you will see too many ICE brands moving. That market is already crowded.
    1
  6569.  JackSmith-mk1ru  And China imports from all those countries. Where do you think the parts for iPhones come from. In dollar value almost all are imported. The supply chains companies have set up are complex. They are only made possible by free and open trade which is very inexpensive. Who set up that order? I'll let you answer that. It might shed some light on how informed you are.
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  6570. I watch your channel, but this begging from YouTubers for subscribers is getting a bit tiresome.
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  6571. Jonathan, finally, you have on someone who is from the other side of the aisle. Ukraine supporters have really shot themselves in the foot, potentially, by bashing Republicans in general. For one thing they show an ignorance of US politics. For another they weaken the support they need, Steven is spot on about the situation with Biden's national security team. They are retreads from the Obama administration. It has been speculated that someone in the background is controlling Biden. There is lots of speculation that it is Obama. It makes sense. What he didn't mention is that Obama always said that he preferred diplomacy over military action. What is worrying to me, and should be to you as a Brit, is that Keir Starmer used the same words in remarks at the recent UN meetings. It sounded like he had lifted parts of an Obama speech. Bad, not good. Concerns about Trump? Who knows. He is old. On the other hand, all these "concerns" are from people with no direct knowledge of the situation and who obviously have a partisan bias. As President Joe says: C'mon, man! You are just repeating a talking point.
    1
  6572. What is clear is that Russia does indeed have a dearth of capable tanks. Since neither side in the war really has air superiority, neither side is using tanks in mass formations, as they are meant to be used. Tanks are just a component of combined arms warfare, and Russia does not seem to be able to utilize them properly.
    1
  6573. What's the problem. Just pee out the window. We're talking about the UK after all. I remember once going to a theatre opening with my wife in Leicester Square. It was my birthday. We were walking to dinner after the show and there were men in suits peeing right into the streets between the parked cars. Not a care in the world.
    1
  6574.  @AstroGremlinAmerican  What is that supposed to mean? Come on, use your words, as I used to say to my kids when they were young and frustrated.
    1
  6575. Temu aside, brick and mortar stores are generally not very useful compared to platforms like Amazon. If you look into how many of the stores are stocked, you will understand that they are not catering to customers, but to suppliers. This is a part of the cause of their downfall in the presence of on-line platforms where products from all manufacturers are available at all times. For over 99% of things I buy, for example, I do not need to touch the product to know what I need. Almost everything I buy does not have to be obtainable at a particular time or date.
    1
  6576. I am watching this on 11/11/2023 at 11:40AM Central Time. I went to Amazon to check out the book (ordered it for delivery tomorrow) and found a number of listings for summaries of the book. I have not looked at them, but I have never seen so many for one book. I might download one to my Kindle, but I won't read it until after reading the book. If you are aware of any particular summary that you could recommend, please let us know.
    1
  6577. Of course Obama is thinking about this in racial terms. The Democratic Party was a party of labor. Then it became a party of minority groups. Believe me, I have seen it up close with power brokers in the party. The vast majority of those crossing the border are Hispanic from South America. This dilutes the influence of African Americans in the Democratic Party, assuming all those immigrants vote Democrat. That is why Obama is speaking out.
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  6578. Good video. I like the content. Do more of these. One suggestion I have is to profile the leaders of the countries around you. Perhaps start with your own country. I would like to know more.
    1
  6579. Epic!
    1
  6580. I love David, but he is not right that Russia is winning the war of international opinion. India is indifferent. China is wavering in their support. The reason is economics. Russia a second-tier economy. China cannot replace the West with Russia economically. Neither can India. Their ties to Russia are historical, but not primarily economic. Economy is what matters. Economic development is what propelled England to empire. If you look at those that support Russia, or at least don't condemn it. and those that do and add up the GDPs of those on each side, you will see that Russia is supported by a minority of world GDP. In terms of military power this is what matters. Population is irrelevant here. Look at what Belgium and Portugal were able to do in the colonial era.
    1
  6581. Regulation, especially of opinion on broadcast media, is very outdated and tends to skew the narrative. In the US we had the fairness doctrine for broadcast outlets (TV and radio). In the early 1980s, under Ronald Regan, that was abolished. Then you had this explosion of left and right wing talk shows on radio, at first, leading into the polarization of cable outlets. This seems to lead to a polarization of opinion. That is getting it backward, and this is the most important point. That polarization existed before it was "let out". Those views always existed. Read some history for crying out loud.
    1
  6582. Apple not playing fair because they lowered the price? Who is she kidding? The Chinese know nothing about markets. The ignorance is breathtaking.
    1
  6583. ESG is silly. The silliest thing about it is combining the three elements. For example, Environmental concerns are more a subset of regulation. As your example of the electric (not electronic) trucks in the Northeast exposes, incorrect actions in this area by individual companies does not meet the goal. In fact, the goals are not even clearly laid out. Again, with vehicles, the goal is the reduction of the carbon footprint, not only at the point of use, but overall. What Social has to do with environmental escapes me. You may contrive some sort of connection between the two. The elements usually considered Social are generally things that businesses should be doing anyway. Here again, the goals may not be advantageous to the business. One example I looked into was workforce diversity. I saw a detailed study of the IT industry. The US and China had among the least diverse workforces. This is a field where real skill matters. The most diverse country was South Africa. Is that an IT powerhouse? You can't force diversity in such fields and hope to thrive. I have seen results. I see Governance as similar to Social. The things considered part of the G in ESG are things one should be doing. The biggest fault of this type of investing is the mashing together of disparate elements. Remember that companies get an ESG "score". Who is really responsible for this? Who audits this score? The issues with the scores that have been highlighted show the problem.
    1
  6584. Do these estimates of amount needed to complete the homes include paying what is already owed to contractors and suppliers? That is a significant amount. Many of those contractors and suppliers have gone bankrupt. Even if they finish all these projects, that in no way solves the basic housing sector problem. You still have massive oversupply and diminished purchasing power for buyers, as well as a falling population. From what I am reading and seeing, the prices of transactions today are much lower than in the past. I am talking about the recent past (just the last two years). This means two things for banks, and it is a situation similar to the US subprime crisis. The banks will have to revalue their assets. The process is called "mark to market". The difference is that the US real estate market had not become highly unbalanced between supply and demand as China's has. Given that and the demographics, there is no hope for a price recovery. None! This imbalance implies that many people may decide to walk away from underwater mortgages. In fact, many may be forced to if they suffer job loss. This, of course, will exacerbate the financial crisis at the banks. Does the CCP have the funds to bail them out? On that, one further point. The US was eventually able to sell their stake in the banks that were bailed out at a profit. Will China be able to do so?
    1
  6585.  @gtw4546  It may get close. For those properties in "ghost cities" this may well happen. I just saw that real estate companies are trying to unload assets to increase cash. One tried to sell a high-end office building. In the second attempt, with the price lowered by another 10% or more, there were no bidders. People trying to sell existing homes are finding something similar and are progressively lowering the price. They often still can't sell.
    1
  6586. On Europe and the US, they would say "citizens", not "subjects". That is the word you are looking for.
    1
  6587.  @pm4898  Its all AI. Some physicists think we live in a simulation or a hologram or both.
    1
  6588. Peter, I know you have a hard on for Trump, but have you paid attention to what Biden is doing (an extension of what Obama did). It is a lot more like what you say Trump did. Outside of COVID, whose economy was better for the US people? Also, your description of fascism completely describes Mao, and all his successors, up to the pinnacle of Chainman Xi. It also describes all the Soviet leaders and the Soviet bloc leaders. It also describes the leaders of Venezuela and Cuba. Last I checked, these were all commies. Actually, you make the big mistake of ignoring that Nazi fascism was actually a socialist, meaning collectivist, project. It's in the name man: National SOCIALIST German Workers Party. Look, I agree that Trump is a bit...different. I think he was needed. You should read George Friedman's book "The Storm Before the Calm".
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  6589. It is wonderful. The Russian Army has become so much of a joke. Ever since they labeled a military "object" blowing up because of "careless smoking", that has become the meme for the Russian military. What is great about it is that it shows the disrespect with which the Russian army is held, and it gets around any algorithms on YouTube. Brilliant.
    1
  6590.  @vikidavis876  We have a very good idea. The science behind after election polling is quite well developed.
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  6591. One has to remember that neural networks were proposed as an analog to the brain. Analogs to natural systems are often very useful. On the other hand, modern digital computers evolved from simple mechanical calculating devices. They are stellar at organizing massive amounts of data. Think of this in relation to the current buzz about AI. Don't forget that the first major computer revolution was really geared towards handling massive amounts of data and was initially most felt in the banking and insurance realms. A lot of jobs were eliminated. What happened? People went on to other jobs and whole new classes of services were created, enriching out lives. Quantum computing is interesting, but really is more akin to the floating-point coprocessor, which was a separate device in early computers. I bought one for the first desktop PC I purchased. There were vector coprocessors that could be added to mainframes. That was when vector processing was all the rage, especially for engineering and scientific applications. Today we have GPUs. In the last three laptops I purchased there was one on the main CPU chip and a separate one from Nvidia. We are not going to be doing, nor do we need to do, quantum calculations all the time on our laptops or servers. Another thing to consider is programming quantum computers. For one thing they are controlled by conventional computers (the coprocessor concept) and programmed in what are basically conventional languages. As a programmer one does not have to know about how a mathematical operation is actually carried out on the hardware. In fact, the system will usually detect the available computational resources and use the most appropriate one. There are some exceptions, but these are definitely at the margins and only an issue in very rare cases.
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  6592. What is with the background images in your videos (and many, many other videos I see on YouTube)? At about 18:00 you have an image of stacks of rifles. They look like hunting rifles, not AKs. You couldn't find an image of AKs? It really detracts from your content. Perhaps a daily video is too much for you to handle.
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  6593. Poppy, at around 5:00, sounds a lot like the AfD leader.
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  6594.  @cristitanase6130  And you have the real data? They use chips in the advanced aircraft sourced from China. If they cut of gas to Europe, then they cannot sell it until they build pipelines to other places. That takes years, even without the environmental lobby we have in the West. You should read the latest book by Peter Ziehan. That is unless you are a bot.
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  6595.  @cristitanase6130  I already knew they sold gas to China. What they cannot do right now, and for some time to come, is make up for the gas they are not selling to Europe. This will drastically reduce their income from this source. Another thing you need to understand is that when they sell to China or India they sell at a 10 to 20 percent discount. As for the chips, you are wrong. If they are using Z80 chips to guide the missiles, then I think they have a problem. That chip is old. As for electronics, in general this is hitting manufacturing as well. I even saw a video, taken by a Russian pilot that showed a commercial GPS receiver taped to the instrument panel of his jet. They use unencrypted radios in the field. I have decades of experience in the A&D industry, working at the cutting edge, and they are not there.
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  6596. Thanks for doing this review. Back in the late 1970s a good friend of my brother's (and mine) had one of these. My brother had a 1968 Triumph GT6, and I had a 1969 Austin Healey Sprite Mark IV. I remember one night we were over the friend's house playing cards. There were five of us. The three cars I mentioned were there as well as a Triumph Bonneville motorcycle (which I later bought and my now ex-wife made me get rid of) and another motorcycle (don't remember which type). At about 2AM we all left. All these vehicles were highly modified, and frankly loud. I wonder what the neighbors thought. My brother and his friend tore down and rebuilt the engine of the 3000 at one point. Of course, they put a hot cam in it and made other modifications. A boyhood friend who went to the US Naval Academy had an Austin Healey 100. Notice a pattern here. Actually, the guy who sold me the Bonneville also had an Alfa Romeo Giulietta, a 1964. He messed it up and my brother bought it from him. He totally restored it and still has it. He also recently tore apart the GT6 and put it back together. You should do a review of that car.
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  6597. Mike, when I travel on business (and I was born in Washington. DC) I always took private limos. That's the way to do it.
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  6598. Here we go with analog computers again. I mean, how many times? In the late 1970s I worked for a simulator company. We built everything from flight trainers to industrial simulators/trainers to military tactical simulators/trainers. The older staff was composed mostly of electrical engineers who were steeped in analog technology. The company wanted these experienced and valuable employees to transition to digital technology. Most resisted. So, at one point they gave all the salary increases to new employees, like me, who had been hired for our programming and digital electronics skills. This was at a time of high inflation (much higher than today) and it was great for me. Several years later I was working at a spacecraft plant. I got to know a guy who ended up there from a company that made analog computers. For a time, well before I arrived, these were often used for attitude control calculations. He had been a field engineer assigned to the spacecraft company, and when they turned away from analog to digital, he ended up staying and learning the new technology. Over the years I have tracked and reviewed many, many novel computer architectures as a part of my employment. I spent a lot of time attending conferences and talking to the inventors. There were technologies like data flow computers to systolic processors (pioneered by the likes of H. T. Kung) and many more besides. I even worked on some DARPA funded projects that looked at how to leverage these. One was for a heterogenous, infinitely, linearly scalable computer architecture. Oh, and it had to be "space qualified". Heady stuff and lots of fun, actually. The big issue was interconnecting all this stuff. We researched two types of connection networks. Both were later used commercially in mid-range (using standard servers as nodes) high performance computers. These were basically the progenitors of most of the supercomputer architectures in use today. Sabine mentions the issue of algorithms. Using a good algorithm can increase computation speed many orders of magnitude in some cases. Many of those exotic processor architectures I mentioned were designed to directly implement, in silicon, specific algorithms. You can see where that might be a problem. If the algorithm changes, you might have to totally replace the hardware.
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  6599. Russia will probably not be reintegrated into the world economy. Their major exports are oil and gas. They have proven themselves an unreliable supplier. Very few countries will do business with them based on that.
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  6600. You must kidding. How much has the US given to Ukraine? Actually, it was Trump, in his first term, who gave Ukraine the weapons that allowed them to blunt the initial assault. Obama had blocked them. Biden (really Obama?) has given Ukraine just enough to stay in the game, but not what is needed to win. The plain fact of the matter is that both sides are bleeding out. Both were in demographic decline before the war. The Ukrainians do not have the ability to undertake offensive operations against prepared positions. All their successful offensives have relied on surprise and Russian incompetence.? Basically, all the new weapons Ukraine has developed and deployed are good for defense. For offensive operations one needs airpower. This has been true since WWII and the war in Ukraine just proves that.
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  6601. On the last story, none of this is exactly new or earth shattering. A trend in the US is for wallets that block the reading of RFID chips on credit and ID cards. This has been around for several years now. Using your smart phone for everything makes it so easy to track everything you do online. Again, not earth shattering.
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  6602.  @jsEMCsquared  You must be kidding me. Did you watch it?
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  6603. Democrats have always been in favor of regime change. I voted for George W Bush, because before 9/11, he was against regime change wars. If there had not been an attack on US soil, none of what happened after 9/11 would have happened. Trump was against such involvements as well. Look at what he did in Syria, pulling down our involvement, which caused a secretary of defense to resign. We could definitely defend Taiwan. Along with Japan, and possibly India and Australia, we would easily overwhelm a Chinese invasion force. In WWII there were many in the defense establishment that wanted to invade Taiwan instead of the course we eventually chose. The reason was to support China. The issue was the difficulty of invading the island. It would have taken more troops than D-Day. That was when Japan controlled it.
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  6604. As you say, these are assessments. Think back to the assessment of Ukranian prospects at the beginning of the war. Don't put too much weight on it.
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  6605. The quote from Hitler at 33:18 sounds just like something Putin said during the current Ukraine war (oops, I mean special military operation). I am fairly sure, but not certain, that he said it to a group of mothers of fallen soldiers he was meeting with.
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  6606. There are 300M cars in the US today. 99% are gas, at least. The average age of cars is approaching 12 years, Cars last. About 18M cars are sold per year. Do the math. It will take decades to replace the vehicle stock in the US. I think the grid can be evolved in that time.
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  6607. Medical research is not science on the level of the physical sciences. Period. The system being studied is far more complex. I have personally seen many situations where the medical treatments used were not based on sufficient research and later reversed. For example, I saw one case where an individual had an ulcer. At the time, in the 1980s they removed half the stomach. The patient was advised to give up alcohol, coffee and cigarettes. The patient did not drink much, so no problem. The patient did consume a lot of coffee and cigarettes. Later, the patient developed type II diabetes and then Parkinson's disease. Now, of course, it is understood that such ulcers are caused by a bacterium, and one is given a pill. Another issue is medical conformity. I had two relatives who were MDs. I read an article in the WSJ highlighting a study, one of the earliest ones, claiming that many doctors prescribe too many tests. This was an issue of cost, and perhaps ethics. I was just asking about it, and they jumped down my throat, so to speak. A few years later the medical associations determined that this was the case, so it became orthodoxy, and my relatives routinely excoriated colleagues who continued the practice. I personally had some fairly minor issues. For one I was given some medications that were not agreeing with me. After a life changing event I completely changed my diet. The problems are gone. Although I am in my late 60s, I am physically closer to my 20s. A lot of the "treatments" we are prescribed are either not really effective or have unwanted effects, whereas there are much easier ways to treat the conditions. So, when they say "follow the science" one needs to be very skeptical.
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  6608. Take the chlorinated chicken you silly buggers. This also sank the TTIP trade negotiations. I remember participating in international discussions on the issue. By the way, I expect plenty people will buy it. This is a mass market item. A lot more people are price sensitive than you would expect. The EU allows chlorine washing of vegetables, for similar reasons, by the way.
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  6609. My father worked at Harry Diamond Laboratories, sometimes called the Diamond Fuse Lab. Harry Diamond was instrumental in the development of the proximity fuse (although not the only person). The IEEE has the Harry Diamond Memorial Award. My father worked on fuses for everything from nukes to cluster bombs. Once, when I was a child, we went to an open house. His office was in a top-secret annex, and somehow, he got us in there. He was working on the first cluster bomb fuse and had an early bomblet in his office. It was all very fascinating. One time, a bunch of his colleagues went out to a nuclear test using a fuse they had designed. My father didn't go because he didn't like to fly. His first experience of flying was in the war in the Pacific, and I gather it was not altogether pleasant. He didn't fly again for 32 years. His friends sent him a postcard, meaning no envelope, of the mushroom cloud from the test. This was in the 1960s and no one thought it odd.
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  6610. The Assads learned to divide and rule from the British. The level of torture was theirs, but the basic structure was standard British colonial practice. The Alawites, which is the group the Assads come from, make up 10% of the population. This is about the same as the Kurds.
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  6611.  @bobohare4825  Yes, after they lost their empire.
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  6612. Sabine, I am surprised at you. Citing government funding for these technologies. Really? If you look at the effectiveness of these efforts, you would not do so. I can think of many here in the US that have come and gone with no appreciable result. Even looking at Germany for example, there has been a lot of money put into green energy (windmills and solar) and yet Germany is burning more and more coal.
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  6613. Can't she sue the hairdresser that did this to her?
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  6614. I really like Douglas and have a couple of his latest books. What I don't see him talking about, though, is the causes behind this. The biggest problem is the organizers behind the revolutions. They would not have happened the way they did without the organizers. I lived through the 60s and 70s with race riots, VN protests, and the revolutionary groups fomenting the violence. We need to concentrate on this. He is smart enough to understand this, but he, like many commentators today do not talk about that aspect enough. It is critical.
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  6615. Actually, it's Norway, not Finland, that is not in the EU. That is probably who you are thinking of. They have an agreement with the EU, which is more like that of Switzerland but not exactly the same.
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  6616. Tony, I actually appreciate hearing your opinion. That said, I do not agree with it. China's economy is in far worse shape than the normal measurements indicate. This is because those measurements are manipulated and many problems just plain hidden. The use of those measurements is also dependent on the type of system. Don't forget, those economic indicators are just parameters in a model. They are valid as predictors in one type of economy, or model, but not in others. China is one of the others. They are stuck in a bastardized system, part centrally planned communism and part capitalist. We have no good models for that. Neither does the CCP. There are also aspects of the Chinese situation for which there are no precedents in history and no models. One is the demographic situation. This is not Peter Zeihan speaking. There is a good video titled "China's demographic catastrophe: Could half the population disappear?" on the channel Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW). The other is the housing sector. There is no model for a system that is overbuilt by up to 100%. In the US, at the time of the 2008 financial crisis, the overbuild in the US was 2-4%.
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  6617.  @donaldkasper8346  So, if you are correct, what are Apple and Tesla doing?
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  6618.  @thanakonpraepanich4284  You seem to have forgotten the two pillars of trade with China. The first was cheap labor, and the second was a large new market to sell into. Chinses markets should have been a growth story for western companies that had saturated their own markets. That is normal business and has been going on for a long time. That is why they always look for new markets. The most important thing is that the companies don't give a cr*p about who you are. The whole debate is debased when we have China on one side being all nationalistic and effectively controlling the whole economy on a national level and then this is opposed to companies who actually do the business and invest the money. The fact that we are just learning, at great cost, is that you cannot mix communism with capitalism. Read the theorists. So, I stress again, there is no reason to stay bullish on Chinese companies. Capital is not national. Capital serves individual investors. If one place ceases to serve them than it will migrate somewhere else. Have I said it enough ways for you to understand?
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  6619. There is a big problem with recycling of electronics. The cost. I had a colleague who had a business doing this. He shut down the business because the cost outweighed the value of the materials recovered. This is most likely still the case.
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  6620. RPGs were used by children in Iraq. They are very simple to use.
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  6621. Good to hear from Konstantin. China certainly will have to react to the secondary sanctions. They are playing a dangerous game. Their economy is imploding. Many non-bank financial institutions have failed. People are having trouble withdrawing their own money out of the bank. Their own money. The reality is that, by western standards, most of their banks are insolvent. I have read that up to 60% of the belt and road loans are nonperforming. That is quite a chunk of change, and it affects their biggest banks. They keep the lid on through various nefarious means. It seems that this may not work much longer. China is also the most vulnerable major economy. The only other one with a comparable problem is Japan. Both have very poor natural resources relative to their needs. No, actually, both have very poor natural resources period. Both have farmland that is not sufficient to their populations. Compared to the US, and many other agriculturally productive economies, their land is very poor. China has to import much of the mineral and hydrocarbon resources it needs. They import massive amounts of food. They are vulnerable in their trade routes. Japan has the same problem, but they have allied with the countries that could hurt them. China openly tells the countries that could hurt them that they want to displace them, both in terms of economic and military power. China is so far from being able to do that. Even bumbling Joe Biden has been able to create a whole new set of alliances to hem in China. What has Xi been able to do? Then, I hear talk that, when the war in Ukraine is over, the west may use Russia to counter China. Despite the declarations of both Putin and Xi, they are not friends. This goes back to Imperial Russia and continued with the Soviets. Part of the motivation of the US opening up to China was to counter the Soviets. Now we may see things go the other way. Both Russia and China are amateurs. Don't fear the Bear or the Dragon.
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  6622. Teacher Cai Zhaoyang is clearly uninformed. Does he not realize that China is a Marxist-Leninist country? Doesn't he know that the Enlightenment is a bourgeoise concept. Don't they teach these people anything in China?
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  6623. Wolf is just spinning things to support his own narrative as far as I am concerned. When I heard that he considered it a good thing to that the major banks were state owned, I was sure that he was on the wrong track. Just think about it for a moment. What will the CCP do with that control? The best indicator of how state-owned banks are a bad idea are the actions that set off this property debacle in the first place. To rein in the property developers, who had morphed into Ponzi schemes, the CCP brought in the three red lines. From what I can tell, this was an abrupt action. There was no thought given to how to address the root problem. This was basically that the state-owned banks were manipulated into permissive lending to the developers by a need to keep GDP growth figures high. This also involved massive amounts of corruption, as we are seeing now. Combine a corrupt system with total control over the economy and you get the massive mismanagement of that economy we are seeing today. It Wolf thinks that is a good thing, then he really has no idea what he is talking about. Finally, the idea that China has lots of room to grow because of the amount of poverty beggars belief. If China had the capacity and the ability of capital formation by itself then it would have grown over three decades ago. As it is, China relied on foreign capital. What Wolf is saying is that being massively poor is a path to growth. No, capital formation is the path to growth. You don't achieve that because you have lots of poor people. This level of ignorance is stunning.
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  6624. What crap. I am talking about the visuals. You are talking about .32 ACP and showing .270 Winchester ammo. You are mentioning ammo availability in Europe. i am pretty sure that .270 Win. is not a common round in Europe. Spend a minute or two to find something appropriate. If you just want to make a podcast, then do it.
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  6625. No heatwave where I am. Are there really more heatwaves? A few years back there was concern about wildfires in the Amazon and Australia. The data I saw showed the number well within the expected range. The hurricane season in the Atlantic is off to a very slow start this year and activity has been low for the last few. So, how can the statement we will have lots more extreme weather events be squared with the data? We hear a lot more about events, but what is really needed is the data on actual trends, not the news.
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  6626.  @msimon6808  Actually from then until the 1960s.
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  6627.  @petrsukenik9266  How do you know that? The issues with ICBMs as deployed by the US and Russia have nothing to do with a ballistic missile per-se. It has to do with MIRV. Look it up.
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  6628.  @lawless201  That was the reporting. Well, how many SCUSs hit targets once the Patriots were deployed? This is a sensitive classified area, and I doubt any hard data would make its way into the press. Another indicator is the countries deploying them. They would not be spending this much if they believed much of what you said. Finally, that was 30 years ago. Things change and improve.
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  6629. The Russians may have to be sending in T34s soon.
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  6630. In Arthur C. Clarke's Foundation trilogy there was a planet, the seat of the galactic government, which was completely covered with building. One of the characters from an outer planet asked about how it was all powered. He was used to nuclear power being used. He was told that, no, there were no nuclear power plants and the whole thing was powered by geothermal energy.
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  6631.  @jacksons1010  Oops! Always get those two mixed up. Thanks for correcting me.
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  6632.  @jacksons1010  Me too. When I started university, I worked in the physics department. There were a bunch of us undergrads working there. We always had a pile of SF paperbacks in the men's room. Those three were well represented.
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  6633. The odds are that the numbers of people killed by these floods is much greater than reported. Another issue is that the directions of the flooding were decided by the government. They had a tough choice. Let cities be flooded or farmland. If you recall, Xi has been warning of agricultural shortfalls (and doing some crazy stuff to address that) and he just ruined a significant amount of agricultural production.
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  6634. An unemployment tax? Are they kidding? Is this a communist country? In a real communist country jobs would be found for all those people, even if it was make work. The whole idea of communism with Chinese characteristics is a fraud. I also find some of the comments about the parking fees interesting. Perhaps the people are waking up. Any autocratic system becomes more like a crime family than a government. There are only three types of governing structures, distinguished by where the leaders come from. These are aristocratic (evolved from tribal chieftains), oligarchic (leaders from economically powerful) and democratic (leaders from anyone among the people). Ideas like communism and fascism or orthogonal to this concept. Specific government structures are generally local in structure (various forms of democracy). princelings<<< YouTube deleted the last couple of sentences of my comment. Guess what they were? This is censorship.
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  6635. The US had elections during the Civil War. That is the most comparable situation. There was none of the technology that we have now.
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  6636. What all the commentators I have heard miss about NATO is the "nuclear umbrella" aspect. This was initially one of the more important aspects. For many years the US forces in Europe had nuclear artillery shells. These were thought necessary to break up massive Soviet bloc tank formations. Then there were intermediate range nuclear armed missiles. These were bargained away for a reduction in conventional forces. There are still nuclear bombs, under US control, that can be carried by fighter aircraft. In fact, all NATO compliant aircraft need to be able to carry these. Another aspect of the whole NATO project is that, as opposed to the situation at the beginning, the economies of western Europe have grown massively, mainly due to the US. The EU plus UK have an economy that is ten times that of Russia. The population of that cohort is about three times as large. Europe should be able to deal with this on its own. They even have a small nuclear umbrella of their own. More of a parasol, but still significant.
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  6637. The wet market is a real problem. I have a friend who travels throughout Asia, and he points out that these wet markets are all over. If there was problem, it would have likely shown up much sooner. This is something to investigate, but as has been pointed out, there is no definitive connection with wet markets in this case.
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  6638.  @surfmanx796  Did you hear what he at 1:00 where he explicitly mentions the bankers and that they were proposing it as an alternative to the dollar. Go back and read what I wrote.
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  6639. Vintage Patrick Boyle!
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  6640. General Hoges, the current our President does NOT think strategically. He thinks poetically ad so do his advisors. You, of all people should know that.
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  6641. Oh, come on now. Misinformation? Have you seen what has happened in China with their vaccines? Such ignorance is beneath you.
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  6642. The thing to remember is that the population voted for this government. Its policies and policy direction have been no secret. Just because you didn't like the chaos that the Conservatives have sunken into doesn't mean that you vote for the other guy without paying attention to their policies. My sense is that the vote for Labor was as much a protest vote as anything else. Let me know what you think? I say this as an American who has lived in the UK. I first visited the UK in 1974 and lived there early in this century.
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  6643. Sal, among the suggestions next to this video is one titled "Could American PIRATES help win a war with China?" on the Sandboxx channel. Just thought you might be interested.
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  6644. Peter, would you ever contact anyone through WhatsApp or Telegram (see comment below)?
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  6645. What kind of communism is this. The CCP has created a class based society. Time for another revolution?
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  6646. China is a joke. That is being mild. They currently have a border conflict going on with India. They even claim whole provinces. They also, interestingly, have major border disputes with Russia. They claim Vladivostok and Sakhalin Island, among other territories. In Russia I have heard that there is a directive that all maps of the Russian far east should list the Chinese spelling of place names along with the Russian. Bonkers!
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  6647. Enacting standards, without enforcement, is a con game. Just to give an example outside of crypto, look at China and food standards. Cyanide naturally occurs in nature. Rice absorbs this from the soil. There are international standards for the amount allowed in food. China's standard is half that. And yet, when China tested over 60 locations for cyanide in rice, all but a couple greatly exceeded the world standards. If the jurisdiction does not have the will, or wherewithal to enforce the standards they set, then, as I said, it is a con game. This is the case in the Bahamas, and to say they are ahead in the game is to be taken in by the con.
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  6648. The two guys at the beginning make me laugh. The CCP, like the Bolsheviks before them, promised the peasantry free stuff. These peasants were ignorant and generally uneducated, so they did not understand the Marxist-Leninist ideology. They were encouraged to revolt by being offered free stuff. Then, the Party, in accordance with the ideology, took it all away. What did they expect? Ignorance is bliss, unless you live in a Marxist-Leninist system. It seems that only when these people get away that they start to understand.
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  6649. All this talk about democracy coming to China puzzles me. Where will it come from? Who will lead it? When the Qing dynasty fell did China become democratic? Of course not. It fell into a warlord period. The nationalist government did not control much of the country. Sun Yat-sen was not a democrat but was a socialist. When the KMT moved to Taiwan there were not democratic elections for the president until the 1980s. The corruption in China goes well beyond the CCP as witnessed by the massive IP theft and counterfeiting throughout the whole economy, not just in SOEs. Is this a populace that truly values rule of law? As President Joe like to say: Come on man!
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  6650.  @AG-ni8jm  You are either very ignorant or very biased toward the "far left". Do you know what "far right" means in Europe? Using that term is just a "dog whistle" tactic. And while I am at it, what has the left, far left done for Europe? Poor economy, war on European soil, lack of preparation for that war and a migration crisis that is taxing the bloated welfare state. They were too busy buying votes with the taxpayer's own money while relying on the US for their security and then lambasting the US. This is not a recipe for success.
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  6651. I think you are a bit off on this one. For one thing, the maximum program for Ukraine is getting Russia out of all of its territories. Also, you forget the WWI situation. Russia literally fell apart on the battlefield and ended up giving up lots of territory to Germany. In WWII Russia has massive support from the western allies. Without it they would not have prevailed. The current situation is more like WWI than WWII. Russia has not always been successful. Other examples include the Crimean War and the Russo-Japanese War.
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  6652. Well, MTG, you are welcome to your opinion. It sounds good, but the reality is very different. If you look at the vote in Congress on aid to Ukraine, you are in a small minority. If you look at the polling, you are in a small minority. If you look at the situation objectively, you are just plain wrong, unless it is peace on Ukraine's terms. Ukraine is not asking for anything beyond the pale. They are just asking for respect for the UN Charter, which the US was instrumental in setting up. So, one has to ask, what is her real motive?
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  6653.  @tracymarquez6875  True. I once saw one of the clients at a local grocery store buy very upscale stuff. She was very defensive when I said hello and she recognized who I was. I expect that there is a lot of that going on.
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  6654. The US is rapidly reindustrializing. The policy is also to stress trade with countries that share US values. China does not fit into this scheme. A lot of people talk about the complex supply chains. They also talk about the amount of low-end labor and labor price differentiation. This is a chimera. Redeveloping those supply chains, changing the methods of production and design of products and automating is something that the US and the developed west excels at. Just look at how quickly the move to China occurred. Do you really think it will take longer to redirect? Come on man! The west, especially the US, opened up trade to other countries primarily to build an alliance against the Soviet Union. Guess what, the Soviet Union broke up 30+ years ago. Another thing about the western ideas of trade with developing countries is that those countries would buy high end goods from the developed countries, develop themselves, and then become more like equal trading partners. Guess what? China did not get the memo. One more thing to recall is that in the early 20th century the US share of world manufacturing was actually higher than China's is now.
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  6655. These numbers are thrown out all the time, but what I don't see is the duration of these expenditures. Some of these are immediate, and spent in a year or two. Some are 10-year expenditures. If you take ten years as a baseline, and assume no economic growth, then the economic output of the US over that period will be about $210T. That come out to 3.6% over the period. If the economy grows, that will be smaller. Don't get me wrong, I do not support the reconciliation bill, and what's in it. What I am trying to get across is that we should be talking about what is in the bill, not the top line number.
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  6656. I love all these pundits who predict what will happen with Putin. You have some, like this guy who thinks Putin will regroup and be successful. If Putin were so smart and competent, then why did his plan and army perform so poorly? Is that the mark of a smart competent leader? Come on, get over it. Putin is a fool. He is condemning his economy to second tier status. I have seen pundits who have come down on both sides of this issue. Some expect Putin to survive, others for him to be overthrown. These have included retired military, intelligence analysts, journalists and politicians. I just saw, on another channel, a former member of the Russian Duma who is now in Ukraine saying that Putin will fall. This is like all those stock analysts that try to predict the direction of movement of the market. Many will say one thing, and there are always a few saying the opposite. The main reason that India has not outright condemned him is their reliance on Russia for military equipment. India is in a tense standoff, which at times has become hot, with China. Their military reliance on Russia stretches back to the Cold War. Before Ukraine, they were tilting slowly to the West. Finally, the size of populations and number of countries is just plain irrelevant. It is economic power, quality of troops and leadership that counts. Look at Israel. Look at Germany in WWI and WWII. Today, the West has and economy more than twice as large as China, India and Russia combined. In fact, the GDP of those three countries combined is about equal to that of the US. Putin has shown the superiority of Western military training and doctrine.
    1
  6657. The employment situation is key to the CCP maintaining power, and Xi is failing. I saw an interview with George W. Bush after he had left the presidency. I believe it was at Google. In it he made some interesting comments about China. In one he talked about how he asked every world leader, upon their first meeting, what keeps you up at night. When he asked this of Hu Jintao the answer was finding jobs for several million people each year. Xi pays lip service to that requirement. He mentions it in his remarks at the study session, so he admits it is there, and then pursues policies that make employment difficult. He has become such a dictator that he thinks he can just say something, and it will be done. Being a commie he has no idea of how a capitalist economy works. We know that state run enterprises are massively inefficient, and yet he is moving the economy in that direction. He also makes a big deal of "new" industries without understanding his population and their skill levels, etc. As for youth unemployment, showing the current figures on the same graph with two different definitions of the data is statistically invalid. Actually, all of China's employment statistics are garbage. Their methodology and definitions are geared to put a positive spin on things. There are some who believe that youth unemployment is close to 50%. This includes at least one academic in China. I wonder if she is still free. On top of the youth unemployment issue there is the problem of unemployment among older people. By older I mean 35 and older. Many white-collar jobs as well as factory jobs specifically exclude people over 35. Losing your job at that age is devastating. This is a disaster for the economy. It is people over 45 that provide most of the capital for an economy. They are more productive and have the capital to invest. In most healthy economies they invest most aggressively from that age until retirement. If you don't believe me that this is a problem in China, there are calls from CCP officials to stop ageism in employment. They see the issue already.
    1
  6658. Snow in China? Whatever happened to global warming?
    1
  6659.  @anonymousme927  I know. That is why all these frankly alarmist videos are a mystery to me. Now, snow in the south of the UK is quite rare (I lived there for a time) and I can see where it would be considered significant. But not in China.
    1
  6660. The target of any North Korean missile launch is going to be LA or SF. I expect that some in the US might look on that favorably. Actually, mother nature might have something to say about that as well. Who knows, she might beat North Korea to it. Before anyone goes off halfcocked, the above is a bit of American regional humor and friendly banter. Although, I did experience a small earthquake in SF once. I had just arrived and checked into my hotel which was on, I think, the 25th floor. I was calling back home to say I had arrived safely when everything started shaking. Just saying.
    1
  6661.  @davidcolley7714  Keep believing that.
    1
  6662. Iraqi training not on par with the Soviet training? Don't forget that Iraq had recently fought a long conventional war with Iran. They had much more combat experience than the Soviets did. They probably could have taught the Soviets a thing or two. I say this because of the Russian experience in Ukraine. None of the actions I see in Ukraine by the Russians approaches anything that was done in both wars in Iraq in scale. Look at the numbers involved. Another example is the 1973 Arab Israeli war. In the Golan Heights the Syrians attacked with several divisions and over 500 tanks. Have the Russians done anything like that? You need to do a little more historical research.
    1
  6663.  @ReSSwend  Good point. Not well. The reason that it did not go well is a whole other discussion. If you are comparing Soviet training to what their clients got, then at least the Syrians were able to assemble the force and attack. By the way, they almost broke through. I had a friend who was an Israeli artillery officer in that battle. He lost a lower leg, but as he puts it, at least he got the guy who shot him (we were having a caliber discussion and he put it down to having a 7.62 rifle as opposed to a 5.56). It was a close-run thing indeed. The point is that there have been few, if any, decisive large scale armor attacks by the Russians in Ukraine. They operate mostly with artillery, and that not as expertly used as one would expect. Even their first attempts in the initial invasion were subpar. We see the result. There is a lot of mythos around what the Soviets did in WWII. By the way, that is one of the few times they were really successful in the last 150 years or so. Look at the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, WWI, the Winter War in Finland, etc. Frankly, if Hitler had not declared war on the US in December of 1941 and brought the US directly into the war in Europe at that point, I think the outcome in the Soviet Union would have been different. Hitler could have done some things very differently, especially regarding his racist policies towards the Slavs. The US still would have come in at some point, but in the US the goal was to defeat Japan and avenge Pearl Harbor. Examples of the incompetence of the Soviets in WWII are just too numerous. Their losses were at a level unacceptable to anyone else, and it still took massive aid from the US and UK and the opening of a second front, first in Italy, then in France.
    1
  6664.  @goforbroke4428  I don't agree with that. I looked into it. The number of divisions that Germany devoted to the defense of Italy at the peak was close to 50% of what they had in the Soviet Union. Those extra divisions, and aircraft, etc. very well could have made the difference. Then there were all the troops in France for the defense against an invasion. Of course this is "alternate history", so we can't know for sure.
    1
  6665. The Taliban has not defeated the Americans. They are defeating the government of Afghanistan. The US spent 20 years and billions of dollars there. By now, the government should have been able to defend itself and the people. They cannot do it. Their troops have been seeing fleeing the country and in many cases welcoming the Taliban and joining them. As for Afghanistan being one country, this is just a chimera. With the ethnic divides there, and a central government that is not respected, and is corrupt, there is no reason for it to remain together.
    1
  6666.  @Floyys_ff  Are you a bot?
    1
  6667.  @DR-oy9wc  Take a deep breath.
    1
  6668. It is so disingenuous for China talking about the international order. That order was created by the US after WWII to counter the Soviets. It worked by the way. No country has benefited more from that order than China. Now that the US is backing off from enforcing it, it is China that will suffer most. Ironic, isn't it.
    1
  6669. Your irrigation system looks like something Rube Goldberg might have thought up. Fun to watch.
    1
  6670. How does that fit in with freedom of association, or is that not a thing in the UK? Don't get me wrong, I am not a big fan of unions. I have never belonged to one and even when I was a manager in Europe, I saw some negative effects on workers that reported to me.
    1
  6671. What I have always found interesting is why Austria was not a part of Germany at the time of German unification (1870s). What I found was that the Prussians did not want it, because that would have brought in a large Catholic population to the Reich. Given that, by the 20th century this is not as big a deal as it had been, and the unification under Hitler just became a natural event. It should probably have happened in the previous century.
    1
  6672. You burn the sulfur? I would like to see more information on that process and its resultant effects.
    1
  6673. Trump knew quite well that the Chinese economy was on the brink of collapse. Their banking system is, by western standards, in default. The housing sector has collapsed and is now taking the banks with it. The CCP has tried to forestall it by means that no sane person would countenance. Now, bank failures are accelerating. There is another angle here and that is the belt and road initiative. They have spent $1T on that and by reports I have seen some 60% of the loans are nonperforming. As mentioned, deflation is here, and the tariffs made it worse. That stuff they couldn't send to the US is being sold by the pound and no one is buying, further driving down prices. China was already toast, Trump just accelerated that.
    1
  6674. Not long after my wife got pregnant I was out with one of my fathers-in-laws' cousins. I told about the birthing classes, etc. He told me that his kids were born they induce the women early in the day to the dad could get to his tee-time, and the dad only came in when the birth was done.
    1
  6675.  @pv2639  What the heck does that mean?
    1
  6676.  @pv2639  That's what I said, one acre is 43.5K square feet. One hectare is 2.47 acres. Use your math. I know you can do it. In any case, how is that relevant to the point I made? Say something that advances the discussion. You obviously have some issue with what I said. Come on now, use your words. As for believing me, you can choose to believe what you want.
    1
  6677. The comment about using the ethnic troops is interesting. I don't think it is a deliberate attempt to lower the numbers of these people. I think it is much more political. One issue is the demographics of the Russian Federation. It was already on track for the Russian ethnicity to lose its majority status. The Russian ethnicity is already shrinking. In addition, a large number of ethnic Russian men of prime childrearing age have left the country. In future mobilizations Putin will have to start bringing in the ethnic Russians. Another factor is that there are many more ethnic Russian women than men. Russia was already screwed. As one analyst put it, this is the last chance they have to do something like this.
    1
  6678. On the housing front, I think there is one thing people underestimate. That one thing is refinancing. I bought my house 25 years ago (paid it off twice, but that is another story). Just before that, rates had started to come down. On my previous house I think I refinanced once in six years, but many of mt neighbors were refinancing annually. So, as was pointed out, the current rates are not bad historically (and I mean a longer history than the last 20 years) AND, as pointed out, unemployment is very low. In the early 1980s the first two houses were lease/purchase deals. I didn't pull the trigger on either of those, but there were personal reasons for that. The main reason was that the rates were about 18%. Actually, in the early 1990s when I moved to the Midwest we were in the midst of a "real" recession with high unemployment. I looked at 200 homes in the city (outside of Chicago) and took notes on 60. Then my wife found a FSBO which we bought.
    1
  6679. The term is "press ganged" not "gang pressed".
    1
  6680. Looks like we are going back to pre-20th century relations with France. Lots of wars. How did the French do then?
    1
  6681. It's not even just left wing. If you are talking about economically successful people, then you have to ask yourselves how Bernie Madoff could have happened. He convinced a large number of successful people to invest in a Ponzi scheme. Enough said.
    1
  6682. The interviewer, who said she had worked at the White House seems ignorant of our system. Congress and the Executive are co-equal branches of government. They can do what they want without reference to the other.
    1
  6683. The flaw in the numbers is that the Russians do not seem to be capable of arming and equipping that number of troops. The 300K they mobilized are underequipped already. They can't even provide real helmets or body armor. Their artillery intensity is already lessening. Their tank production is laughable. Heck, many of the Soviet plants were in Ukraine. Add to that the fact that they are rapidly running out of money, and I do not see a second push beyond Ukraine. Oh, I haven't even mentioned the tech issue. The best way to think about this is to look at Israel vs their Arab neighbors since their independence. It is a good comparison. Soviet vs western arms, leadership and tactics. Size mattered in the Soviet war with the Nazis only because the Nazis were fighting a two front war. You also ignore WWI, which is much closer to this situation than WWII. You had an autocratic regime (which Putin models himself on) and an army poorly equipped and led. The result was horrendous casualties and a revolution. Even going back to Napolean is not viable. There is no way an army at that time could cover that distance. It was always doomed to fail, although it got close.
    1
  6684.  @whenuakitekid  I have a lot of knowledge and experience of these things. So, I am not too worried.
    1
  6685.  @GC-kw1gq  What are you even talking about? Are you a troll?
    1
  6686. Well, you can turn off the water and partially drain the oioes. I had a second home which we often left unoccupied for a time during the winter, and we had a procedure.
    1
  6687. Correction, Laura. We can save TRILLIONS!
    1
  6688. China in chaos. Frankly, that is business as usual for China in the last 150 years or so. Even in communist times it was only after Mao that some bit of normalcy was established and only since the opening to the west was there really any progress. That is only about 30 years. This time will be different, but not as impactful as it is made out to be,
    1
  6689. Boy, it looks like Xi hasn't gotten the memo. The US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stated publicly that the world order is now multipolar. That is what countries like China, Russia and others have said they want. They have it now. Good luck with that China. How did it work out for you before? Oh, not so good. Just look at the 19th century in terms of how China fared. We are likely to see those times come back. China has a very poor geographic situation as well as poor demographics. As for the latter it is just the opposite of what came before. There is no way China can compete with the US on its own. And relying on Russia is just plain stupid. When a new leader comes to power in Russia, assuming the country stays together, things will get very spicy for China.
    1
  6690. You are quite correct. The right/left dichotomy is obsolete. Frankly it was only valid at one point in history. In the US, and I believe in the UK, we are seeing a realignment of politics, which happens periodically. Frankly, I remember the days, not too many decades ago, when the political parties in the US each had a range of conservative and liberal tendencies. This was a turn off for the electorate, and voting participation went down. The reason given was it didn't matter whether you voted for a Democrat or Republican, they were all the same and there was never any change. The hue and cry was for the parties to become less broad and more differentiated. Well, not we have it and there is much gnashing of teeth. But this is what people, when asked, said they wanted.
    1
  6691.  @TheImperatorKnight  Well, having lived through that period, I got the sense that it was not so nuanced.
    1
  6692. McCarthy was the leader during an election where the Republicans performed way below expectations. In any other field that would almost automatically bring change. McCarthy does not inspire. It is time for the party to try something different. In the Senate, McConnell needs to go as well, for the same reason. These leaders have not performed and do not inspire.
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  6693. Li Keqiang is just three weeks older than I am. Scary. At least I don't have a crazed dictator coming after me, just a crazy ex-wife. If Xi does indeed take charge of finance, then China is doomed. DOOMED! Those foreign companies that have not yet left China are probably screwed. I just hope I can get my iPhone 15 before it all well and truly falls apart.
    1
  6694. Wonderful message. One thing I have a little trouble with. This is the arts. Are they really so important? Having gone through a divorce, I have trouble listening to music, because my children were very much into it and it is hard to listen without thinking about them. Not listening does not diminish me. I have lots of original art in my house, although not nearly as much as you do. If I did not have it, I would not really care. In my first house, about 40+ years ago, I had very little. It was more oriental, white walls, wood floors. It was, I thought, quite beautiful in its simplicity. In my current house, which was previously owned by an Asian family, everything was white. She thought it was only to sell the house. I think it was their esthetic. My ex-wife had a different color scheme brought in. Nice, but not what I would like. I will go back to that oriental simplicity and purity. Art is nice, but it really is not what motivates most people. Often, in history, people of high status made the acquisition of art major aspect of their lives. In many cases it caused poverty among their people. Art, especially the plastic arts, are a nice to have, but not a necessity.
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  6695. What a load of crap! fascism is not right wing. In the cases of Germany it is socialist. It is nationalist. Mussolini was a socialist. Their difference from Soviet Communism had nothing to do with right or left. Germany and Italy were nationalist socialist systems. The Soviets were nominally internationalist socialists. Although, after the Soviet defeat in Poland, they decided on socialism in one country, while still supporting socialist movements abroad by clandestine means. Don't get me wrong, I am not supporting fascism, but if the systems they supplanted had been providing for the peoples needs and wants, then they could not have prevailed.
    1
  6696.  @myresponsesarelimited7895  Depends on the job. Two or three subs could take out just about any country on the planet. Actually, the US and the Soviet Union, at there peak, had many more warheads than they do today. Probably at least twice.
    1
  6697.  @myresponsesarelimited7895  Amen to that.
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  6698. What you say about Norway is sooo true. They are still into whaling. One time, earlier in the century, I went over by car ferry for a vacation. We landed in Bergen. In the fish market there were great slabs of whale meat. Another thing they are doing, and this is brand new, is mining the ocean floor. They are getting a lot of heat for that but are ignoring it. Interestingly, the US is also seriously considering this as well.
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  6699.  @vinterskugge907  I think you misunderstood me. I have absolutely no issue with Norway's minke whaling activities. I just mention it as a further example of what Zeihan is saying. I meant no offense by it. I think it is a good thing that Norway considers the issues and am sure that whatever they do they will do responsibly.
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  6700. Just another comment. Today, WION has an article on the Sinovac vaccine. This vaccine was approved by the WHO. The presenter in this article, who is the same, complained that the Indian production of the vaccine was approved by the WHO and should be approved by the EU. Does that make sense?
    1
  6701.  @jayk3383  I got the Pfizer vaccine. The data I have seen rates it as one of the more effective.
    1
  6702. After listening to Harold and some of the other Democrat participants on this show, I wonder how anyone can be Democrat. Democrats are Socialists. Pure and simple. That has been shown time and time again over many administrations. The only good thing is that they cannot always control everything and there is a counterweight to them. Without the MSM, they would be a permanent minority. America is not Socialist. As people move away from the MSM to other forms of information, this might begin to right itself.
    1
  6703.  @nevilletaylor8324  I think you need to think again. What you are hearing is the small minority on social media.
    1
  6704.  @nevilletaylor8324  I pay the taxes. I will use the public services. Having the government collect taxes and provide services is not socialist. The social safety net idea actually started under the German Kaiser. Surely, you don't believe that he was a socialist. The whole idea was necessary once we went from a rural farm economy to an urbanized industrial economy. In the US, does the government control the means of production? Even many government programs and services are provided by private, for profit companies. I worked in the aerospace industry for many years, and just about everyone was a contractor. My father worked for a government lab, and I saw the transition to using contractors. He was not happy with that. But, the contractors were more efficient and made a profit. Does that sound like socialism?
    1
  6705.  @nevilletaylor8324  Bernie Sanders and AOC.
    1
  6706. Yes, it is a dead-end scenario. That previous wave mentioned was driven by the pull back of inefficient state-owned enterprises. The private economy, especially small and medium size businesses, are generally the drivers of employment. This is true in the west as well. What Xi has done is to drive away foreign capital and customers. At the same time, he tanked the property sector, which grew into a massive Ponzi scheme under his rule.
    1
  6707. Very rich people? What AI needs is capital. Capital is owned by people, or in China by the CCP. Sabine is correct that it is companies that develop technologies. Countries provide the environment for these companies to develop and thrive. As for the UK and EU, they failed to capture the microchip trend. Remember "Silicon Glenn"? In a recent EU commission report the problem of overregulation was highlighted. When Ursula talks about "responsible" use of AI, she is talking about regulation. That will scare off capital. Capital is mobile. The reality is that people who want an environment where their business can grow and they can benefit, they will go to the US. I have dealt with tech entrepreneurs from Germany, and they often express a desire to move to the US. I have never encountered anyone who wanted to go the other direction. I could go on with examples, some involving relatives in Germany, and of course, here in the US.
    1
  6708. I feel truly blessed, I was born in Georgetown in Washington, DC. in the early part of the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium. So, I was exposed to people from around the world from early in my life. When I was young, my father had a black friend, that he worked with, who was often at our house. The main reason was to help fix something, because this man, Mr., Dickerson, was on the maintenance crew at the government lab where my father worked, and we did everything ourselves. They got along very well and were obviously close. In high school, there were lots of Jews So many in fact, that we got a lot of Jewish holidays off, because otherwise the school would be half empty. I had a teacher, for Chemistry and Horticulture who was black. He was a great teacher and mentor. Later, when I went to university, I studied physics. About a third of the students were Indian, a third Chinese (of course, at that time, from Taiwan) and third "white" Americans. I had black and Japanese girlfriends, among others, and friends, and it was just a massively multicultural environment. In fact, I became vegetarian because my two best friends were Indian, and they were. When I lived in the city, our local bar, just north of Dupont Circle, was what we called, multicultural. There were blacks, whites and Hispanics. There were straight and gay people. And these were of all socioeconomic groups and education levels. Often the bouncers were black. I got along great with them. I especially remember one, Kenny. Well, I was going to tell a story about him, but perhaps not here. There was also a black lesbian waitress who I was good friends with. We often seemed be going after the same women. Life was good, strange and entertaining. Much later, working for IBM, the head of one of the three main parts of the company, software, was black. John W. Thompson. He was a very good leader, and the brand did very well. So, I saw people from every race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic group from an early age. I never considered race or ethnicity important. I still don't.
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  6709. So, if we have known about this for 70 years, why hasn't it been commercialized yet? Is it some kind of cabal that is stopping it? Come on man! We have been trying to commercialize fusion for almost as long. It is always ten or twenty years off. Yes, this "energy" exists, but as with anything, tapping into it is the problem.
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  6710. The question at 2:00 shows the British media to be squeamish snowflakes. I have been thinking this for a long time. These people are not, I think, serious interlocutors. They really have little or no appreciation of what the real world is.
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  6711. What! Math is not real? Oh, my.
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  6712. The data center comment is interesting. What automation has done over the last few decades is to make everything more efficient. If a computer-based technology is successful, total power consumption will probably go down. Just look at the very early days of automation. The first industries affected were banking and insurance. The first processes were back-office paper processing. Lots of people were made redundant. If you compare the power consumption with that of the people displaced, you have a net decrease in power. Just think of heating and cooling all that office space, not including the transport costs for the worker, etc. By not considering the work output per unit of electricity you are making a bogus comparison. It is the same for just about any process.
    1
  6713. At 37:00 the speaker talked about a digital BRI. This is a completely different thing. The types of digital infrastructure he discusses is what you might call fungible. Take cloud computing. Many companies use multiple cloud providers. Switching from one to another does not have to be very difficult. This is no competitive advantage. The physical BRI actually ties one country to another. The digital world is a completely different environment, where countries compete globally. The GPS example is another one that is kind of silly. GPS just broadcasts a signal. The sat. provider does not know, or care, who receives that signal. In fact, with competing systems out there, it would not be difficult to make devices that use signals from multiple sats. So, the whole idea of a shift to digital is just a fashion in this kind of discussion. More knowledge of this would be helpful to the speaker.
    1
  6714. Very interesting. I had heard about Wu before. Amazing story. The comment by the official to his son about China being a peasant society, in his point six, is so on the mark. What is interesting is that Marxism-Leninism, first appeared in Russia and then China among large countries. Marx would have been amazed, and appalled. His assumption was that socialism/communism would appear first in those countries with a large industrial proletariat such as Germany and the UK. After the Bolsheviks took over Russia, they assumed that the workers in the western Europe would all rise up with them. How wrong they were. What Lenin had done to move his revolution forward was to promise people free stuff. Mao did the same in China. Of course, they took this stuff away from the aristocracy, bourgeoise and rich peasants. Then they took it back from everyone. The CCP leaders learned their trade from the Soviets. This, I believe is why both the Soviet Union, Communist China and now the Russian Federation are so corrupt. The sad thing is that it does not bode well for either China or Russia when their current regimes fall. They are both caught in that peasant mindset. This is not a good basis for a modern liberal democracy as many hope will come after the downfall of their current regimes.
    1
  6715. The big problem with Africa is that the borders have little or nothing to do with the people living there. A related issue is that in most countries, African society is mostly tribal. This a problem in many parts of the world, and is very often a hangover from colonialism. Even Europe is not immune. Just look at the many wars fought over centuries. Frankly it was not until an outside force, the United States, stepped in that the wars stopped. Now they are starting up again.
    1
  6716. Ah, I am disappointed. No "zero-point energy". I have seen it some science fiction series and read it in some science fiction books. I thought it was real. All joking aside, sometimes what one reads in science fiction is on point. For example, Sabine is big on geothermal energy, if I recall correctly. In Issac Asimov's Foundation books, the main city/planet of the galactic empire is powered by geothermal energy. They had forgotten how to harness nuclear energy. On outer planets where nuclear was still used the technicians and engineers had become sort of a mystical class, except one group who knew how to harness it and make things from it. They ended up being very powerful.
    1
  6717.  @johndoh5182  Wow! Someone as long winded as me. Good to see I am not alone. First off, as I mentioned in my comment, I do not want to minimize the competence and good work TSMC does. My point was just that no one company is essential. To say that only they can do it ignores commercial reality. As for EUV, Intel will start using it next year (less than two months away). Yes, TSMC did it first, and that is what has given them first mover advantage. Again, they are very competent and are reaping the benefits. No argument there. On the other hand, many chips, the majority in terms of numbers, don't need these features. The real innovation in electronics comes in areas like the IoT. This relies on much less cutting edge technology. Another example, on the other end, is that IBM had CPU chips in their mainframes that operated at up to twice the speed of Intel CPUs over ten years ago. It allowed them to shrink their mainframe complexes by a factor of at least ten and increase efficiency and decrease power usage. Of course, they don't sell their chips commercially. Technology is a race, and the winner today can be the loser tomorrow. But that is not what has made most of the cutting edge products we use everyday possible. It is distributed computing. Putting processing power as close to where it is needed and distributing the workflow. A term for that is edge processing, and that is what will truly revolutionize things. I appreciate your detailed response.
    1
  6718.  @johndoh5182  I was going off of announcements for the timing. This is for production, so you are correct in what you say, but it does not change what I said. As for the server chips being the bulk of the market, that is true in value, but not volume. I was talking about volume. Your car may have one CPU chip, but up to 100 IoT chips. Even the servers are the same. One to eight, or so, CPUs, but most every peripheral has a chip. This is generally true about any device. Then there are the billons of IoT chips that are not part of any server controlled system. Actually, the terminology is a little bit confusing, because most of those IoT chips have a CPU in them. It is generally an ARM based design. I have been in the industry for a very long time and have seen the development of the foundry business from the beginning.
    1
  6719. The comment about a succession plan is wrong. If the president resigns and the VP takes over, a new VP is appointed. Thus there would still be a VP to break ties in the Senate.
    1
  6720. As one geostrategic analyst puts it, a couple of destroyers in the Malacca Straight would be enough to stop all traffic. India has those, and they are in a low-level conflict with China already. They have also militarized some nearby islands, giving them an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" well within range. As for relations between China and Russia, you must be kidding. China has laid claims to a lot of the land of eastern Russia. The justifications are very similar to the ones they use to claim the South China Sea. Some speculate that China is just waiting for the Russian army to be defeated in Ukraine to make their move. The pipelines you talk about will take many years to complete, and lots of money, which Russia does not have. Thus, China will have to finance that.
    1
  6721. The whole asylum system was driven by what happened to the Jews in the lead up to WWII. Many were made stateless, and you had them wandering around Europe unsuccessfully trying to find a home. The world has moved on, the asylum system has to as well. What we end up with is economic migrants playing at being asylum seekers and destroying the system for those that have a legitimate need.
    1
  6722. "...our universe may have been born out of chaos." That is what the Bible, and most other religious and philosophical systems, believed thousands of years ago. So, it seems that the physics community is just catching up.
    1
  6723. Chinese society has become a dumpster fire. For all those thinking that when the CCP falls that China will become a liberal wester style democracy, think again.
    1
  6724. What a stupid idea. What we should be doing is coordinating with China. They want the Russian far east. Once Ukraine has ground down the Russian army to dust, NATO could come in from the west. Problem solved.
    1
  6725.  @brolisimo  Who are you? Do you have any idea who I am? Read what I wrote. The evidence is clear.
    1
  6726.  @brolisimo  Then why the ad homonym attack? Or are you a bot?
    1
  6727.  @brolisimo  Ah, that explains a lot.
    1
  6728. It is stupid for Australia to be against having nuclear weapons (and power plants). The only justification for doing so is so that your nation will not be targeted by nukes. This is a fools game. I do believe that China has already made veiled threats that they could target Australia. So, your stance on the issue has bought you nothing.
    1
  6729.  @83917Michael  Putin is trying his best. Just give him time.
    1
  6730. Whatever happened to global warming?
    1
  6731.  @theraiderra8798  Well, all this cold weather will bring down the average global temperature, which is how global warming is measured.
    1
  6732.  @theraiderra8798  Then you don't understand averages or statistics.
    1
  6733.  @theraiderra8798  Do you. The name says it all. The measure of change in the climate is the temperature. That is the driver of everything else. If the average temperature remained the same, we would see no long-term changes. All the rest is weather.
    1
  6734.  @theraiderra8798  What are you talking about? Read your own comment. Greenhouse gasses trap heat. That is the primary driver of warming, if there is any. That is why there is such a push to eliminate them. If they increase and the temperature does not go up, then there are other processes at work. Why can't you understand that?
    1
  6735. Oh, come on now. The algorithms on these platforms are not something groundbreaking. They are there only to monetize the free content made by users. This is true of Google, X, Meta and all the others. The only thing that tends to limit competitors is not the technology, but the investment required to build up sufficient market penetration to compete with the current installed base of users. You can see this in the growth of indigenous Chinese tech companies (and I am not dismissing them). Most, if not all, that they have done is derivative and relies on the blocking of foreign technology in China. This is not a question of technology, but one of capital allocation.
    1
  6736. Labor are now Marxist? Where have you been? They have always been socialist. The origin of the Labor Party includes a number of socialist groups, although at that time they were not explicitly Marxist. From the time of Bevan Marxism crept in. Ever heard of Jeremy Corbin? He was very open about it. Marxism is a class-based form of socialism and is often opposed to social democracy. Don't forget that the Marxist slogan "Workers of the world unite!" from "The Communist Manifesto" by Marx and Engels.
    1
  6737.  @NinjaGrrrl7734  Exactly!
    1
  6738.  @khar12d8  Yes, it is just a technicality. He got rid of his wife an married again. That is the salient point.
    1
  6739. In the 1970s the talk was about the coming ice age, not warming.
    1
  6740. Jesse, good report but I find it hard watch the crazies spewing nonsense. I want to yell at the screen. Primal scream time. Either these people are some of the stupidest people on the planet or they are propagandists for a frankly Unamerican ideology. Oh heck, I can't hold it back. AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
    1
  6741. Actually, Peter Zeihan saw it coming a while back.
    1
  6742. I love it when Anne describes how Putin describes his regime to his dictator "clients". I agree with what she said, and the hutzpah required for him to say it as well as the credulity for those dictators to believe it, is just off the charts. That the regime in Moscow will survive longer than the democracies is clearly a lie and at odds with Russian history. The current Russian Federation is only a little over 30 years old. The Soviet regime that proceeded it lasted a little over 70 years. The USA is celebrating its 250th anniversary in 2026. To go further back, the Romanov dynasty started in 1613. The Grand Duchy of Moscow was established in the early 14th century. Now, compare that with the countries and kingdoms of western Europe. The Ottoman Empire, which collapsed around the time the Romanov dynasty did, dates from 1299. Russia is the "new kid on the block" in Europe and has seen more change in each era. I guess the dictators are not fans of history. Either that or they need the money.
    1
  6743. The GDP reduction figures do indeed leave out any retaliation from others. It also leaves out the quite real possibility that there will be a retaliatory blockade and sanctions on China. All the west would have to do is cut off the food imports China desperately needs. Then they cut off oil and other inputs and it is all over for China. To do all that they don't even have to get close to China. China, on the other hand, has no capability to do the same to the west. It also ignores that TSMC and other chip giants, along with the US chip giants are quickly building up capacity in the US. Just another indicator, OpenAI has been looking to raise money to build chip plants in the US for a new generation of AI chips. Nvidia is not the only game in town for AI, and even they could switch suppliers. This is not trivial, but it is well within their capabilities. But don't forget, the whole foundry business, which is what TSMC is, was created and grew because of the cost of cutting-edge plants. Frankly, Nvidia could afford to build their own plants if that became necessary. This is just another example of the CCP's internal politics as far as I am concerned. It is much like the border war China waged with India in the 1960s. Mao used that war to solidify his, and the party's, control over the PLA. Who knows, Xi may try the Indian direction again. He is geared up for it. I don't think the result would be the same this time, though.
    1
  6744. Don't be so sure there won't be any offensive operations in the winter in Ukraine. During WWII, the Soviets launched several operations against Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-1943. Stalingrad fell in February 1943. The Vistula-Oder offensive was from 12 January to 2 February 1945. The Battle of the Bulge took place between 16 December 1944 and 25 January 1945. All these were very major operations, and all took place in the winter.
    1
  6745. The EU investigation is quite silly. Think about it. They come down on their own companies because they can. Then they turn around and buy goods from China, which is the largest CO2 emitter and one of the most polluted places on the planet. In fact, they have recognized the CO2 issue with the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). Of course, this won't be applied until 2026. I still see nothing about all the other pollution, much of it tied in with the "green transition". Frankly, I think the whole concept of carbon credits is a travesty. Many of the problems pointed out in the video are a natural consequence of not having precise definitions and statutes. I find the research by Ronald Coase cited here interesting. As with many scientists, he starts out with a sort of ideal system, one with no transaction costs. That reminds me of the early theories of black holes. The original work on this assumes a black hole with no spin. Of course, in reality, there is spin and this affects the calculations. As for the spectrum allocation example, do you see what the problem is? How long does the interference have to go on until there is a winner, able to pay the others? Will they even get to that point? I think not. There is a time element here. Don't forget, the stations make money by selling advertising. If the signals are being interfered with, who will buy the advertising?
    1
  6746. The Maxim is still in use by the Ukrainians. I have seen video of them.
    1
  6747. @SirBanerjee No, I would actually fight! That is the only rational response.
    1
  6748. Investment is indeed moving out of China. The geopolitical risk is too large. Heck, I even saw one pundit say that investors might have a case against the big investment funds and banks for a failure of fiduciary duty by not taking this into account. It puzzles me why they have not taken these risks into account until now. The risks have been visible for some time. They have treated China like any capitalist country. The Chinese are, to put it crudely, a bunch of commies. Layer on top of that massive corruption, the likes of which we have never seen in the west, and there is no rational reason to invest there now. One of the best indicators of that is that Chinese private companies are moving to places like Vietnam, Mexico and even the US. For example, I recently bought three pieces of battery powered lawn equipment made by a Chinese based company. Two of the three were made in Vietnam. I went to their website and found that they have also opened up a high-tech assembly plant in the US. One of the reasons companies in China do this is to establish themselves outside of China. This allows the management to "get out" when things go south. It also allows them to get their money out.
    1
  6749. I generally tend to agree with Mr. Brower, but I think he overlooks one thing. It goes back to his experience of Russia. He was a big investor and dealt with people of means and power. He is not, I believe, in touch with the Russian populace. First, a large number of the people in Russia who might really want to reform the country and steer it in a modern western direction have fled. The chances of them going back to Russia, no matter what the situation, are rather low. Second, Russia is basically still a feudal society. Read Nikolai Gogol's novel "Dead Souls". It was written in the mid-19th century. It describes Russia today to a tee. This is a cultural, social issue. There is no liberal democratic tradition in Russia. Look at what happened after the breakup of the USSR. Mr. Browder is dreaming if he thinks one will arise spontaneously after Putin and his regime are gone. Just look at all the video appeals to the czar, I mean Putin, from people at the grass roots. Classic serf behavior, and it is in full swing in contemporary Russia. Third, Russia is an old-style colonial empire. To hold that together Imperial Russia and Soviet Russia both imposed strong control from the center. They both also followed policies of forced migration of various ethnic groups and Russification. The thing is, with its demographic problems, the Russian ethnicity will become a minority in the country. The war is exacerbating the situation. This will happen in the near future. The idea of the landmass that Russia is today will remain a nation state in its current form is fanciful. It will, most likely, devolve into a set of competing warlord factions. Another possibility is a new strongman in Moscow, although the warlord scenario seems more plausible. We need to stop hanging our hats on the chimera of a strong democratic opposition in Russia.
    1
  6750. Ah, the omnipotent and omniscient CIA. The statement that the information being spread by the CIA was true is entirely correct. For example, if the housing crisis is not enough to bring on a financial and banking crisis, the belt and road just might. The belt and road is also a way for CCP officials to get money out of the country. I recall, not long ago, that there was talk about $3T in foreign reserves "missing". This was not from the CIA. Even further back, there was lots of talk about CCP officials building wealth overseas as a part of their escape plans. This is not new, and, I think, not controversial. It predates this supposed CIA operation. The real point of all this is that the CCP has curtailed all debate and information within China. That they have intentionally spread misinformation, internally and externally, is no exaggeration. In the current circumstances, any blowback inside China is inconsequential. The timing and the use of "former" intelligence officials is a classic tactic. Nothing to see here.
    1
  6751. Your comment on Edwina and a small number vs. a large number is totally bogus. The measure you have to consider is income vs. house price. Another thing you leave out is that, in the US, it is very easy, and very common, to refinance to a new fixed rate. When rates were coming down in the late 1990s some of my neighbors were refinancing almost every year. I, of course, avoided most of these issues by putting a large down payment on the house, and then quickly paying it off.
    1
  6752. I had a colleague who was a Marine who served in Vietnam. He was a "tunnel rat". He had a custom license plate on his Porsche (we worked in the software industry) that read "Ripper". I worked with him in the early 1990s. He told me he had an M14, registered, that I gathered he had somehow brought back from Vietnam. I don't know all the details of how that worked. He got tired of all the issues with the registration and really had no need for it. He ended up giving it to the local police force in the town he lived in.
    1
  6753.  @0Aus  Well, that may, or may not be, the case. You are assuming that the demand for EVs will hold up. It does not seem to be already, so projections about the need in 2025 lithium demand are probably incorrect. In fact, the best indicator of these things is the current and futures price, not what some pundit says about it.
    1
  6754.  @0Aus  How do you explain the drop in prices? While the agreements are indeed set before mining, it is the futures markets that show the future trends. This will also feed back into those long-term prices over time.
    1
  6755.  @ShubhamBa  Agree.
    1
  6756. Who are the Brits or the Europeans to say that what the US has done is "illegal"? You guys need to get over yourselves. Illegal means some law has been broken. What "law"? Even if there is such a "law", who enforces it. Countries are not individuals or corporations; in case you hadn't noticed. I mean the level of discourse is just in the toilet. Take care of your own continent before making judgements about others. Europe is one of the most blood-soaked bits of land on the planet after all, and that is not just in the distant past.
    1
  6757. I get the impression that you are not a fan of Mr. Miliband.
    1
  6758. Your studio commentor is wrong about Biden. He is no Cold Warrior like Truman, etc. It has been said of him that there was never a foreign policy issue that he has not been on the wrong side of. He is going to the Middle East to beg for increased oil production while he stifles production at home to appease the greens in his party. That is all. If he opened drilling in Alaska, offshore and on Federal lands, the US could easily fill the gap left by Russian sanctions by the West. In addition, he would have lots more money to put into green projects, which most would support, although it will take some time. Just to give an example, I live in the Chicago area. The national laboratory for energy here was given $5B for research into batteries more than five years ago. What happened? Nothing.
    1
  6759. Your last comment, about these protests being no threat to the state, is a little naive. In fact, it is just this type of protest that historically has been a threat to the state. I am not talking just about China. A protest movement with well identified leaders is easy prey for totalitarian regimes. Controlling these is easy.
    1
  6760. Just one thing to remember from history. During WWII the US looked at the option of either invading Formosa or invading the Philippines. When they did the analysis the generals and admirals determined that it would take 400K to 500K troops to invade Formosa Obviously they chose the other option. This was at a time when the US power was at its peak. China has nothing like the capabilities the US had in WWII, in relative terms, including equipment, experience and training. Don't forget, the last war they fought was with Vietnam, and no one came to Vietnam's aid. China was trounced. In fact, I could see the US coming to Vietnam's aid today if another such conflict erupted. Strange times.
    1
  6761. You do realize that this is exactly what QAnon warned about. I know nothing more about Qanon except what I read on Wikipedia. I only looked up QAnon because a friend mentioned one of his friends who believed in it. I know there is more to QAnon than the pedophilia. but that seems to be coming true in this whole trans issue. As Piers mentioned, this is a conspiracy of groomers. This is bad, very bad.
    1
  6762. The statement at the end does not comport with reality. The widespread IP theft, counterfeiting and dumping of poor-quality goods on the international market and within China are not decisions by the CCP itself. A lot of the environmental degradation that China has endured is also the work of Chinese people as much as the CCP. These practices are endemic to the Chinese population. You are superimposing your own views on a people who have been entirely corrupted. The hope that with the demise of the CCP the Chinese people and society will change overnight is just plain stupid. They have never experienced democracy. Ever!
    1
  6763. If you want to go back in history, then Poles did terrible things to Ukrainians. So did Lithuanians. Europeans have routinely done terrible things to each other based on "nationality". Even within countries this happens. Look at what the Spanish government did to the Basques in the 20th century. Why do you think Czechoslovakia broke up? And don't forget the poster child for all this in the last part of the 20th century going on to the current day, Yugoslavia.
    1
  6764. This is so funny. Actually, I am speaking about all the mil bloggers giving daily updates on the situation, talking about individual farm fields. The thing is, they seem to think that there is real significance in this. All they have is these military maps (and who knows how accurate they are) and perhaps some communication with their friends in the military (this applies to both sides). While it can be fun to watch, sometimes, it is often not very informative. For one thing, we know a lot more about the Russian side as far as disposition of their reserves. Their intentions are much easier to read. The Ukranian militarily has been masterful about keeping their intentions hidden, as they should. Which means that we have all this "information" but it is incomplete and asymmetric. I am still not sure of what the point is.
    1
  6765. The absolute stupidity of the CCP and Chinese companies in general, continues to amaze me. They have no concept of how capitalism really works. The case of workers over 35 is a good example. In any real economy, it is the younger ones who consume the most. Then, when the kids are grown, older workers consume less and invest more. They also are earning more than they ever will. They invest more speculatively as well. From 45 to retirement, they are also more productive. That is why, when they retire, they move their investments into less productive, safer investments. This causes even advanced economies to experience some capital shortage as they age. The youth unemployment is a real problem. That stifles consumption. But we are just now getting more and more on the over 35 unemployment situation. For China's ability to invest with limited foreign investment flows, this will be even more devastating. The CCP is failing on both fronts, and you wonder why people do not consume.
    1
  6766. The water situation is interesting. I live in a suburb of Chicago, and all our water infrastructure has backup power.
    1
  6767. What is with all the classes? I thought communism sought to create a classless society. Heck, the CCP are not even real commies!
    1
  6768. The incident at the school is truly tragic and unnecessary. The gross incompetence of Chinese construction workers is epic. The deployment of police to hamper the parent's is obscene. Don't forget that China spends more on internal security than on their military. I feel bad for the Chinese people. On the other hand, I don't fear the CCP. They will be the cause of their own demise. China is what it has been for many centuries, an inward looking power with little or no real ability to project outward.
    1
  6769. Of course, what will really happen is that you will see a resurgence of coal and natural gas fired plants. People will not tolerate a lack of electricity. Unless something like SMRs become viable soon, that is the only way. That will break the back of the climate change lobby.
    1
  6770. What is "fake news"? For one thing, you mention the scientific issue. There are two types of "science". Experimental science, where controlled experiments can be performed and then there are areas like "medical science" where the ability to control conditions is too complex, or unethical. Look at COVID. A lot of what was claimed by "the science" (you know who I mean) was using methodologies (like statistics) that can tell you what happened. This was then applied, incorrectly, to a current situation. There just wasn't enough data to use those techniques. In addition, the quality of the data being collected worldwide varied greatly and was often poor. We still hear lots of different stories about the effectiveness of various measures and treatments. In the west we have seen the virus become endemic, but in China it seems to be going full bore. It is hard to tell since the government there has explicitly instructed their doctors not to report COVID related illnesses. We don't even know the infection rate or death toll in detail. As for the Einstein vs Newton situation, it was not speed but scale that was the main issue. You are thinking about special relativity. General Relativity (GR), which is what displaced Newtonian gravitational theory, is different. Actually, the motivation for GR was a small discrepancy in the precession of the orbit of the planet Mercury. Back to "fake news", there is no way to combat it, except in the types of situations you mention. When visual evidence is used it can be checked. The France24 channel does a lot of good work in this regard. The other thing to look at is the content on YouTube itself. Regarding Ukraine one will often see in the suggested videos area claims that Ukraine has lost, and that Ukraine has totally destroyed the Russian army and the Kremlin. All at the same time. Another one I find amusing is claims that the economy in the US is collapsing while other claim the opposite.
    1
  6771. Russia is morphing into an aristocracy. Frankly, the Russian people will probably accept this gladly. They are, in fact, nothing but serfs. Just look at the videos of "battle babushkas" and the appeals directly to Czar Vlad. A while ago I was turned on to Nikolai Gogol. He is actually a Ukranian writing in Russia. Read his novel "Dead Souls". This was written in the mid-19th century. It comports well with the Russia of today. Nothing substantive seems to have changed in Russian society. Something similar goes on in China. After all, the CCP learned at the feet of the Soviet communists. It was Deng Xiaoping who stressed the promotion of the family members of the first revolutionary generation. These are referred to as the "princelings". He assumed that these were the only people the leadership could trust. A reading of Polybius's theory of anacyclosis is instructive here. This is from the second century BC. Look it up. Fascinating stuff.
    1
  6772. There was never any requirement that the USD be used. The issue was size and liquidity. After WWII the US accounted for 50% of world GDP. While US GDP did not shrink, it has been around 25% for a while. With the advent of the Euro, another reserve currency was created. That currencies like the Indian Rupee should also be included in the mix is a good thing. Again, no one mandated the USD. It was more circumstance than any edict.
    1
  6773.  @manthanpatel6295  Absolutely agree.
    1
  6774. At about 2:50 Peter says that he does not think the Russians and Chinese will be around for all that much longer. Most give the till the end of the decade. Well, I think that the timetable needs to be moved up. I give good odds that both will not be around after the next year. Not great odds, but significant odds. Having read all of Peter's books, I have often run into the comment about Xi not having advisors, having shot the messenger too many times. Well, I was watching a video on another channel dedicated to China news. There was a section on Xi's leadership. A number of quotes were given, and one could have been written by Peter himself. It is "High aspirations but insufficient talent".
    1
  6775. Oh, good, Mark, you are standing on dry land.
    1
  6776. Phenomenologist. Sabine is correct in saying that "no one knows what it is". I was working on a classified project at one point. My studies had been in physics (I later switched to computer science) and one day I was talking to a colleague, and he gave me his business card. The job title was Phenomenologist. I had no idea what that was. I was very puzzled. At school I worked in the High Energy Physics department. We knew about the theorists. In fact, the HEP department took most of the top floor of the building (it was a large physics department) but on the small wing of the floor there was a theory department. In fact, Charles Misner was located there. Funny we never went down to see him since we all bought the book Gravitation, which he was one of the authors of. But I had never heard about phenomenologists. So, Sabine is probably correct in her attitude, except that with her exposure online, people might begin to understand and appreciate phenomenologists.
    1
  6777. The treatment of private companies under Xi, with the CCP bodies in private companies, and the resurgence of state-owned enterprises (SOE), the Chinese economy now resembles the Nazi economy in Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s. There is a concept in China called the "golden share". It gives the CCP a seat, or seats, on the board of the company. The government does not pay for these golden shares. Don't forget that the Nazis were NATIONAL SOCIALISTS. In fact, a lot of what Xi is doing now, with companies like those in the property sector being taken over by SOE he is doing precisely what the Nazis were doing. Herman Goering headed a SOE in Germany buying up all the steel and related companies in Germany and Austria, for example. Many companies that trade on the stock market are actually majority owned by local governments and were many were set up by them.
    1
  6778. The EU auditor report is very revealing. It seems that people on one side of politics (and it is all politics) want to shout "follow the science" as if science is ever really settled. Then they ignore the actual science. This mantra of "follow the science" of course was first applied to one of the least precise areas of "science" and now taints all of "science". The number of examples of policies that don't even follow that "science" is very large. The scientific community needs to push back. The only problem with that is that most scientists have been coopted into the scam. A lot of what Sabine has been talking and writing about for years is just this phenomenon, and she is not the only one. That side of politics, by the way, is not left or right (those are old, obsolete labels), but collectivist. Beware of such ideas. The brought us such wonderful situations such as Germany in the 1930s, the Soviet Union and communist China.
    1
  6779. You make some very good points. On the other hand, people seem to miss what the Democratic Party has become. I won't go into the whole history, but it is dark. The outcome is that the Democratic Party exists only to enrich its leaders. Period, end of story. There is not even any ideology anymore. They got into the intersectional game long before we had that term.
    1
  6780.  @SteveSmith-fp9gn  I haven't seen those. While polls can be flawed, not all are inherently biased.
    1
  6781. Actually, in reference to Harvard, my older son had a black, Mormon friend that was accepted to Harvard, most probably because of his race, Actually he probably deserved to get in because of his accomplishments. He decided to go to Bringham Young University. Harvard is not be all and end all of success.
    1
  6782. Excellent interview and excellent questions by Mr. Diesen. Mr. Doctorow is very knowledgeable and impressive in his analysis. There is talk about "unipolarity" and issues with the world order. This is interesting and brings to mind something I read by Peter Zeihan. As he pointed out, we had a President in the US who wanted to talk about what happens after the Cold War (I miss the Cold War). That was George H. W. Bush. He was the most qualified president we have ever had for this in terms of foreign policy. He had been a Navy aviator in WW2, a congressman, an ambassador (UN and China), Director of the CIA, Vice President for eight years and President for four years. He was voted out of office. His opponent's campaign had a tag line: "It's the economy, stupid." As Zeihan also points out our presidents have become progressively more populist since. Even George W. Bush ran on a platform of reducing US entanglements abroad and putting an end to "nation building". I remember that very well. I had discussions with my wife about that when discussing the candidates. Then 9/11 happened. The GWT was a detour. The Ukrainians, and I have followed several individual YouTubers, are spreading propaganda and seemingly believing it. Sometimes, though, something comes through. They are big on two things. One is international law (no such thing exists without agreed laws and a policeman) and "misinformation". The US electorate is not interested in playing the policeman role, and especially not interested in paying for it. The whole misinformation and subversion thing has been going on since the beginning of the Soviet Union. Remember the Comintern? Interference in elections? Both sides have done that. What do you think USAID was created for. This is something Zalenski tried to bring up. That was stupid. The world is going back to a more normal state of affairs. The bipolar world lasted about 45 years. The unipolar world about 30 years. In the sweep of human history that is barely a blink of an eye.
    1
  6783. The shakeout in number of companies is actually a natural part of the business cycle for any industry, no matter what the environment. Look at the early days of the auto industry in the US (or the UK), Prior to that, look at the railroad industry in the US. Don't forget the computer industry. Software has taken a similar path. How about the social media space. Do you remember myspace? Actually, it seems to still exist but is a non-issue in the marketplace. We now have the push for the metaverse, but has anyone ever used Second Life? I did a couple of times for remote meetings years before Zoom. This is not to take anything away from the issue in China with subsidy corruption. I have seen many videos about this problem, but they all seem to miss an important aspect you pointed out, that being the disassembly of the cars for reuse of parts. You always seem to bring something important to the topic. While Tesla makes money (lots) on the vehicles it sells and thus has pricing power, for many years they lost money, lots of money. Even while they lost money, investors poured in and that is the basis for Musk's fortune today. Warnings about investing in the Chinese market are salient. The subsidies in the west were similar, but the credits accrued to the customer. There were (are) carbon credits, which Tesla has, of course, leveraged. Iif the total carbon footprint of EV manufacturing was included, maybe ICE vehicles would come out ahead.
    1
  6784. At about 12:00 you talk about information. If one is getting their stock "information" from social media, then one deserves what they get. When I look at the video suggestions that appear to the right of this video, for example, I see people predicting every possible outcome for the economy and in some cases particular stocks. A good example is Tesla stock. I have even seen ads on these videos for where Tesla stock will be in the future (up, up, up). Just think of that. Is that not akin to a pump and dump scheme? The other thing I find funny is the mention that these were day traders. Before social media and even widespread Internet access, there were lots of people giving courses on day trading. Lots more people took these courses. Many quit their jobs and did it full time. At first, they made money, but after a crash precipitated by a recession many lost money. It is ironic, and sad, because that precipitated a rash of shootings aimed at the people doing the training and promoting day trading. The Internet provides a way for these people to be isolated from those they defraud.
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  6785. I find the idea of transferring the human consciousness quite interesting. My alumni book club is reading a book about a near future time where artificial friends are created and bought for the children of wealthy people. There is an aspect of one of these taking on the consciousness and mannerisms of an ill child. I mention this because when I was at the university, in the late 1980s, my English Literature teacher got a bunch of her students to attend an evening talk about just this idea of living forever by successively transferring our consciousness. Our little group had coffee with the speaker afterwards and it was a spirited discussion. It is a Catholic university, so the debate had some interesting implications. I personally was studying computer science and mathematics and was an engineer at the spacecraft plant. As a part of my work, I was tracking, and in some cases using, the latest technologies. This even involved working on some DARPA initiatives. This was a time of the rapid introduction of novel computing architectures, including those for neural networks. This stuff is not really new.
    1
  6786. I feel sorry for kids today. What I am about to write might trigger younger people, so if that is the case, do not read on. I started school in the early 1970s. I quickly got a job on campus, doing interesting research, at minimum wage, which was $2.05 per hour. Working part time, 1,000 hours per year I could make just over $2,000. Tuition and books were about $1,000 per year. So, as a minimum wage earner I could pay for school and have spending money left over. I lived close to school with my parents. So, I was set. Well, I moved in with an older woman and then dropped out getting a job paying what college grads were making, after two years of school. I later went back to school, and it was paid for by my employer. So, I made out like a bandit. I have two sons. We started saving, with lots of help from my in-laws. from the time they were born. They also both got big scholarships because they were very smart (I like to think I had something to do with that). The oldest dropped out after a year. He messed around for a year, and then got a very good job working for a cloud computing company. His income has only grown from there He is doing what he loves and is very well off. He has all the money he that was saved for him, and more than half is not in a college savings plan, but in stocks. The younger one finished school, and also has a substantial amount in stocks available. We were prudent, and lucky. They both are in the computer field, as am I. I mention all this because I think we have a great divide in this country, and others, between those in fields that are economically useful, and those that are not. Kat's situation in instructive. She is now very successful. I love her in Gutfeld. Did she really need an advanced degree to do what she does? Of course not. I know lots of guys, mostly who make plenty of money, whose kids took out college loans, in fields that would never allow them to pay them off. The real solution is to make the loans available only for those going into fields that have a good chance of obtaining jobs that have a good chance of repaying the loans.
    1
  6787.  @commonsenseking6386  I surely hope you are right. I have been following him for years. His confidence and voice have improved over time. I think he is ready.
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  6788. The nukes are a chimera. The West has these too, and if anyone uses nukes against the West or their allies, then the West will retaliate. This is the nuclear "umbrella" that has kept the peace for all these decades. Would any Russian leader invite the destruction of the motherland? I think not. This is an empty threat. He would face the US, the UK and France. Any one of them would cause untold harm to Russia. A US nuclear submarine can carry over 20 missiles with eight to 14 warheads each. Of course, we have the land based ballistic missiles as well as aircraft capable of carrying nukes. These include everything from fighters to bombers, including the B-52. B-1 and B-2 stealth bomber. Russia is stupid to threaten nuclear escalation. This proves that they are desperate.
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  6789. Crap report. At one point it is alleged she is here legally, but ICE took her into custody. Which is it?
    1
  6790. So, an "Oriental philosophical value investment theory". Sounds suspiciously like socialism with "Chinese characteristics". When will the Asians realize that the systems like capital investment are not "western" or "oriental". They were not developed with any region, race or ethnicity in mind. The same is true with socialism. Both have evolved and morphed over time, not based on the race or location of the people practicing them, but due to forces and innovations that have nothing to do with race or culture. Marxism is an internationalist doctrine. Concentrating on socialism with Chinese characteristics is actually national (and thus racial) socialism. That has been tried before. It was in Germany, and the party there was called the National Socialist German Workers Party, or Nazi Party. Actually, the current system in China shares a whole lot with the Nazi system. There is the mixed state controlled and private capital economy, with the trend toward more and more state control (the parallels are scary). There is the racial component. There is the threat of war to bring people of the same racial background into the fold. There is total centralization of power in one individual and the elimination of all other political forces. There is the total suppression and control of the population and the heavy use of propaganda. The parallels are striking. So, if you see anyone peddling financial products, or anything for that matter, with some sort of racial, ethnic or regional emphasis, RUN AWAY!
    1
  6791.  @slacko1971  True. The advantage of the V8.
    1
  6792. A retirement age for elected officials? That is not only stupid, but there is also no way it could be implemented. In the Federal Government, for bureaucrats, there is no retirement age. Hence, we have Fauci. The only Constitutional requirements to be in the Congress or the Presidency are citizenship and minimum age, and of course, winning the election Anything else is antithetical to our system. Suggesting something else is Un-American. People within parties need to deal with this, if indeed the party feels it is a problem. Nancy Pelosi is there because of her fundraising, nothing else. Joe is there because was the antidote to another primary candidate, just as old, who was too far to the left for party leaders. None of the younger party members were perceived to have the ability to compete. This is a party issue. In Congress, seniority is the main factor in determining leadership positions. This is considered the least contentious criteria. It helps keep the party together. Does it the produce the best choices? Of course not, but party cohesion is considered more important. None of this is baked into the Constitution or the rules of each chamber. The parties decide on this. It could change in an instant. The fact is that you are trying to solve a problem that you have no right to solve. You ignore the sovereignty of the people. A bunch of pundits trying to decide how we select our leaders is an insult.
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  6793. Don't worry about Xi and Putin. Both Russia and China are in dire straits economically. Both are also in terminal demographic decline. Their "runway" for challenging the west is quickly disappearing. As for the belt and road and the "global south", this is a fool's project. This global south makes up only 1/4 of the world's economy. A good guess is that half of it is aligned with the west. So, Russia and China will give up working with almost 3/5 of the world economy for at most 1/8 of the world's economy. Don't worry about China and Russia.
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  6794.  @bert8373  I have been hearing about that. My older son, when he went to university, dated a girl who was ethnic Chinese from Malaysia. Her mother was a hairdresser. The girl was very smart and was reportedly denied scholarships because she was ethnic Chinese. She went to a charter high school in Chicago. I never found out what was going on there. Where did the money come from? The father was never mentioned and was not in the US. I am a foreign affairs and politics junkie. I was born in Washington, DC. My father worked for an Army weapons lab. I have traveled overseas from when I was a teenager and lived overseas, so I am not typical.
    1
  6795.  @mrsmerily  I tend to agree with your statement. The last part may be correct, but in that case, there should be legal channels, otherwise there will always be questions.
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  6796. A high-end financial advisor I know said he hoped that Xi would get a third term. That way he can well and truly screw up the Chinese economy, and we won't have to worry about it anymore.
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  6797. All these resources spent on "soft power" are a waste of money. I have come to believe that the people talking about it, especially on social media, are doing so because that is where they live. That is their reality. Yet, if you look at the numbers, they are a minority. Vocal, yes, but increasingly less relevant, or actually harmful to their own interests. Just look at what happened to Bud Light and Disney, among others.
    1
  6798.  @wunder1385  Very good point. It is not only AI. Before that it was Big Data. A lot of that was driven by research openly published by Meta. Even today, the research into quantum computing is generally published. It is clear from this why the computer field has progressed more quickly.
    1
  6799.  @EngiRedbeard  Very well put!
    1
  6800.  @ThinkUkraine  You are welcome. I appreciate your sharing your experiences, both in the village and in Kyiv. It is important for people outside of Ukraine to see these things and to get to know the people of Ukraine.
    1
  6801. There is another interesting twist to all this. Peter has assumed that the boomers in the US would pull all their money from stocks and other growth investments and invest in boring bonds when they retired. Guess what, they are not. The capital pool will not shrink precipitously like he predicted. Thus, capital should not become as expensive as he predicts. Just look at this article in the WSJ from June 23, 2024, titled "These Hot New Funds Are ‘Boomer Candy’ for Retirees". You may also have noticed all the ads on YouTube about this one trade you can make on a regular basis that could bankroll your retirement. The boomers (full disclosure, I are one) do not follow the same patterns as earlier, or later, generations. Peter should know that.
    1
  6802. Maths is a means to an end in physics. I think she assumed it, but she should have made it clear. When I was studying physics (a long time ago) I considered switching to maths. I asked one of my mathematics professors, who I had a good rapport with, what a theoretical mathematician does. His response was "think up theorems and prove them". That did not appeal to me since I needed a motivation. Of course, what I didn't know at 19 years old was that there are fields like applied math and statistics. I was too caught up in the "pure sciences". I switched to computer science since there were actually not that many jobs in physics. I actually worked in the High Energy Physics (HEP) department. Most of what I did was programming. Part of the rest was statistics. Many of the professors that did not get tenure went into computer related jobs. So did many (most) of the graduate students. Even the co-chair of the HEP department, who I worked closely with, had a joint appointment with the then new computer science department. Frankly, I think we have too many theoretical physicists. I still follow the field fairly closely. In my reading and watching videos on YouTube and other sources I have noticed a strange phenomenon. We are seeing many, many strange, and frankly non-scientific, ideas coming out. It is all a bit depressing.
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  6803. Jonathan, you mention the "violence" in Russia, especially in the case of children. You really need to get connected with the youth culture in the west. Even when I was growing up, half a century ago, there was a real glorification of the military way in organizations like the Boy Scouts. Firearms training was common, and many of the leaders were WWII vets. Then there was the Vietnam War, and all the people who participated in that. In the latest iteration there are the video game, many, perhaps the majority of which are very violent, and military based. The Boy Scouts have tried to downplay this, but their influence is waning. Many of the video games are played "live" with others. My sons used to (still do?) play games where some of the other participants were ex-military, or even current military, with combat experience. The idea of killing is normalized by these games. We like to make a big deal of the soldiers who come back with PTSD, but the vast majority of the ones I have met, and I have had many working for me, were proud of their service. Some went back, usually through contractors, because they hadn't killed anyone in a while. I could tell some fantastic and sometimes dangerous stories (real ones).
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  6804.  @SiliconCurtain  What you say is true. But consider, does that make them more violent or better soldiers in the future? Young kids really like dressing up in costumes and uniforms, always have. As for the book you mention, that is one person's opinion, as with anything you or I write. Especially when looking at long-term consequences of activities on development.
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  6805. Very interesting. This reminds me of the issues in physics with quantum theory. There is lots of controversy in the fundamentals of physics regarding the building blocks of matter and the interpretation of quantum mechanics. What strikes me there is that we have this detailed theory which actually denies that there is a material reality to quantum particles (or objects, or...). One the one hand other scientists and engineers use quantum effects to build concrete devices like the "brain" in the one I am typing on now. Seems concrete to me. They spend a lot of time trying to debunk a material analogy or reality, and yet they don't explain how we get from that to the world we experience around us. This is analogous the situation Denis Noble describes with genetics and decoding the genome.
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  6806. More wisdom from Mr. Pettis. The comments about Germany are also salient. Frankly, the EU has become a protectionist cartel. Germany uses that to suppress manufacturing in other countries within the EU. It must also export outside of the EU to keep its industries going. To some extent, Japan and South Korea also fit this model. In the EU case, this issue with Germany is a large part of why the countries in the EU's southern tier have experienced the financial problems they have encountered in the last 20 years or so. Another issue, that is often not talked about, but I will bring it up, is that what the world has done by moving manufacturing and processing to China is to avoid environmental regulations in their own countries and exported the pollution to China. This is a MASSIVE problem. China's environmental situation is horrendous and dire. The same goes for labor standards. The working conditions in China, from manufacturing to high tech, would never be acceptable in the west.
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  6807. The statemen by Alicia near the end of the video shows a total ignorance of the situation in China. It looks like it was written by the CCP's central propaganda department.
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  6808. Is the ICC part of the EU? Of course not.
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  6809. Don't get all caught up with what is being done with young children. A good example is the anti-war protestors during the Vietnam War in the US. Your attitudes are not set in those early years.
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  6810. Looking to the EU to revive growth. That is the stupidest thing I have heard in a long time. Look at the EU's growth and growth prospects. Now compare the EU to the US. I expect a trade deal with the US before any deal with the EU. For one thing, the UK would have to abandon its currency. Is that likely to be acceptable to the UK? As President Joe likes to say: C'mon man!
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  6811. All you need to know is that the Biden administration is a bunch of leftovers from the Obama administration. Do, you remember what that was like? Jake Sullivan is an attorney. He is totally unqualified for the job. The National Security Advisor is not a constitutional office like the Cabinet. The role was created so that the president could have a resource within the White House with expertise on national security affairs that was not part of the Cabinet and not part of the bureaucracy. Previous National Security Advisors have had diplomatic, foreign affairs, intelligence and/or military background.
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  6812. Communist China. The Worker's paradise.
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  6813. In most contexts someone like Prigozhin mouthing off the way he does would have been eliminated. Even the troops that put out videos with complaints would have been disciplined. There is no military discipline in the Russian Army. It is amateur hour. If Putin thinks he is going to contend with NATO, he is dumber than I thought. I was looking at figures for the Russian economy. They have quarterly figures that are smaller than individual companies I have worked for. That is why the foreign companies that pulled out of Russia were not materially affected. Russia is a pimple on the ass of the world.
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  6814. An alternative course of evolution? Well, it is, as we can see, a dead end. At the end of the video several reasons are given. To that one should add the capacity for abstract reasoning. All the clever tricks the octopus exhibits are cute, but not necessarily unique in the animal kingdom. Clever manipulation of the physical environment and social skills are not the stuff of human ascendance.
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  6815. The Russian people are a bunch of serfs. I am sure you have seen the appeals to the czar, I mean Vladimir Vladimirovich, on all sorts of issues and problems. The serfs put the blame on lower-level officials and appeal to the wise and benevolent czar to make things right. I have even seen this in some of the appeals of the parents of conscripts. The Russian people are not citizens but subjects, or at best residents. At least the Soviets were trying to build the new Soviet man. Putin has taken the Russians back to age of the czars.
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  6816. One of the projects mentioned is a virtual nuclear power plant. We had that in the early 1980s. I worked for a company that built power plant control room training simulators. We modified the design so that the, in he case of an emergency at a plant, different mitigation scenarios could be tried using the model in the simulator. In fact, we had a network of these, and for any failure scenario several mitigation approaches could be simulated, at rates faster than real-time. So what we are saying is that the Chinese government is working on stuff that private US companies did 40 years ago.
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  6817.  @bruconicinfernon4noplatoon317  Are you a bot?
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  6818.  @traveler142  Are you ignorant? Do you have any knowledge of history? Get real. That is a rounding error on the US budget. Are you a bot?
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  6819.  @4touchdownsinonegame178  There are fewer people working than before the pandemic. Don't forget that unemployment rates consider the number of people looking for work. Minimum wages are determined by labor supply. The fact they are high is that we are coming out of the pandemic and many people are not looking for work. Thus there is a labor shortage. In addition, with inflation these numbers are not all they seem.
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  6820.  @rogerphillips2063  Yes!
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  6821.  @4touchdownsinonegame178  You need to get informed. Learn something about economics.
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  6822. All this money being spent by the west on the third world is a waste. Much of it is stollen. Mugabe in Zimbabwe was estimated to be worth $1B. Where did that come from? Between ineffective foreign aid to concern about "soft power", the establishment has gone bonkers. It's all a bunch of crap.
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  6823. The sea creature might have been a narwhal. I used to see them regularly off the coast of Cornwall and Whales when I lived in the UK. At least that is what I told my young sons.
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  6824.  @inigobantok1579  Yes, but not to a large amount.
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  6825.  @大象大头  That doesn't quite work. The value of that land is going down rapidly, in part because of Evergrandes situation, and that of other property developers. There is a massive of amount of unoccupied housing already. Sales of property have gone down, in some cases I have seen about a third. So , the value of the land is now not well known.
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  6826. Interesting comment on the ammunition. Just listened to an audio book (on YouTube) Titled "In Deadly Combat" by a German infantryman. He was, at one point, issues a MP44 (I think) and quickly found that he was unable to obtain ammunition. At the time he was in Army Group North outside of Stalingrad and then in the Courland Peninsula. He went back to a K98 or a MP40, or in some cases a Soviet sub-machinegun.
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  6827.  @spencergrimshaw  Whoops! Yes, I meant Leningrad. Thanks for pointing that out.
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  6828.  @j.c.4192  The issue with property investments. Actually, even residential property has massive ups and downs. Timing is everything.
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  6829.  @tapsulinka  True, but Japan's economy is not nearly as open as the US, especially concerning investments. Just to give an example, there was a time when Toshiba (I am pretty sure) was in financial straits and wanted to sell a chip making division. There was interest from the US, but the Japanese government arranged for local resources to buy it.
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  6830.  @ssuwandi3240  if what you say us true, no one would ever go into the hotel business. No one would make money at it. How do you explain the Hilton and Pritzker family wealth, just to give two well known examples. I think you need to update your economic education.
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  6831. The statement from Xi on consumption is a total smoke screen. The reason Xi cannot do that is because of the graft and corruption of the CCP. Infrastructure projects is how CCP officials make their money. Give the people the money to consume and the party members will be cut off. How long do you think any leader of such a party could last?
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  6832. In the early 1970s I attended a high school in the suburbs of Washington, DC (where I was born). When they did surveys of the students, 85% admitted to using marijuana. Another 4% admitted to using "hard" drugs. I think the percentages were much higher. The thing is, 100% graduated, and 100% went to university, many to prestigious schools. This was common for the time. In fact. one of my friends inadvertently took four hits of acid (long story). He ended up going to MIT and studying physics. The sex and drugs and rock and roll were real. It had nothing to do with the occult. Although I was a Led Zeppelin fan. One of my first two LPs was a Led Zeppelin album. I eventually got much more into jazz and classical music.
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  6833. Well said, but a little historical perspective would be useful. America did not set out to build an "empire", nor did it set out to the "policeman" of the world order. After WWII the US "bought an alliance" as Peter Zeihan likes to say. There really was an existential threat. Prior to both world wars the US was isolationist. People didn't want a repeat of that situation, especially with the threat of nuclear weapons. The actions in Korea and Vietnam, the two hot wars we fought to hold back the Communist juggernaut, were probably unnecessary from a US perspective. Korea, at least in the south, is free, but what has that done for the US. Do they buy lots of American products? We lost Vietnam to the communists. From an American perspective that is a nonevent economically. After the end of the Cold War George H. W. Bush wanted to have a conversation about the world order. He was voted out of office in favor of a candidate whose campaign tag line was "It's the economy, stupid." So, we ended up coasting along trying to prop up some fantasy of a rules-based order while many countries around the world just ignored the rules. A "police force" has to be paid for and our politicians just kept doing it. The thing is, if you look at our military force posture it has shifted from one that could police the world to one that is based on force projection. That is the right thing to do, but it was not reflected in our diplomacy. I saw an interview recently that brought me hope. It was our Secretary of State Marco Rubio who flatly stated that we are in a multipolar world. This is both the truth, and it is the norm throughout history. The bipolar world lasted about 45 years from the end of WWII. The unipolar world lasted less than 30 years. Now we have a president and administration that gets it and is now aligned with the American electorate. The world doesn't want a unipolar world order led by the US. Fair enough. The Chinese, Russians, Indians and others have said so. They represent a sizeable amount of the real estate of the world and about half the population. The thing our politicians forgot was the old tag line, "The business of America is business." They made it about ideology.
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  6834. Sounds absolutely Trumpian. This kid is a true MCGA patriot.
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  6835. Radioisotope thermal generators (RTGs) were indeed developed for space missions. I am not sure of why you imply that there was some other purpose, at least in the US. They are generally powered by plutonium, but other materials could be used. My wife worked on these in the 1980s. I worked on some early studies for nuclear reactors for space missions, such as space stations, but that is a different story. These have not been deployed. The Soviet Union actually used RTGs for ground installations in places where it would be difficult to get power to, such as in the Artic circle. They deployed about 2,500 of them. These use strontium-90. Thy also use semiconductors to convert the delta-T into a delta-V. This is actually a problem, but for the Soviets, it was no problem. The issue is maintenance, and people finding them and trying to recover scrap metal from them without knowing what they are. Bad, not good. Now the Russians have to deal with them.
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  6836. I am not a big fan of COBOL, but for the technologies available and the pool of programmers available, it was adequate. Looking at the syntax of a language and judging it on that is just plain stupid. Who cares how many characters it takes. Are you that stupid to think that makes a difference. i was once at a weekly seminar at a university I attended for a bit, for the High Performance Computing Lab. Someone put up some Python code. The head of the lab, who was a former Chinese citizen, a survivor of the Cultural Revolution and a Fellow of the IEEE, looked at it and almost threw up. It is that silly. The idea of minimizing the number of characters to do something was really only valid when memory and disk were at a premium. It that is how you judge languages, then you are a charlatan.
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  6837. Julie lost a lot of weight after her divorce. The same thing happened to me.
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  6838. I constantly hear about bonuses. and those not being paid. In the situations described, this is totally correct. I have been at several jobs (and had my own companies) where bonuses are based on performance. These are technical professional roles. A typical plan is based on a combination of unit performance and company performance indexed by employee performance rating. People live on their regular paycheck, and then use the bonuses for "extras". To do otherwise is irresponsible. I am not talking about sales commissions or executive bonuses, which are based on individual performance. The former are generally not applicable to government jobs, as opposed to the latter. One other note about bonuses. In the US they are often used so as not to inflate base pay. They are sized to attract and retain workers assuming the company meets its goals. The money comes out of company profits. No profit no bonus. In a government role, no revenue, no bonus. So, as far as the bonuses go, these people should quit their whining.
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  6839. The government in the US is using dating apps as just one way of encouraging people to get vaccinated. This is not the government deciding who you can date. Your report is a great distortion of the situation.
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  6840. On the Conference Board report I have two observations. One concerns CEOs. They are not always a great indicator of what is going on in the world. They have also often been wrong even in terms of their own business. Frankly, if they were so knowledgeable on such things then how do you explain business failures, CEO failures and hostile takeovers. Actually, I should not say often. They are generally no better at predicting than the general public. On that point, it is all well and good to report these things, but the real question is how accurate they have been in the past. The second concerns the long-term outlook and the rosy picture painted by the CEOs for Chinese consumer demand growth. The only way this happens is if people can get jobs and if many of the structural issues are fixed. The latter requires that the CCP is gone. Even if that does happen, the demographics of China will probably preclude it from becoming a vibrant consumer market. This is something the CEOs discount to their peril.
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  6841. Why can't Brennan just answer the question. The interviewer asks if Putin is stable and he goes off on a bit of a rant. He was just asked for an opinion. Very dissiapointing.
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  6842.  @mohamedtrevino8709  Say what??? I guess you don't speak English as a first language, so you may not understand what I said.
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  6843. Mahyar, you are sadly mistaken if you think the Chinese CCP is "two steps ahead", or even very smart. Have you seen what they have done to their own economy? It is tanking. Have you seen how their foreign policy has been going? Look at the mess that the Belt and Road initiative has become. You British must have a very low opinion of yourselves if you believe the hype about China.
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  6844.  @alanparsonsfan  You are correct, but just look at places like Myanmar. None of the various factions and regions have broken away, but the central government does not rule there. There are plenty of other countries in the world where this is the case, The difference between regions of China is actually fairly large. There are even two different dialects of the Chinese language. I had a friend, a Chinese American, born into the Chinese diaspora, who spoke Cantonese. When he went to China on business, he would hire an interpreter for Mandarin, when necessary, and was trying to learn it himself. The region where that dialect is spoken is probably the most important economically and has also traditionally looked outward. Applying those technologies takes lots of money and people. The CCP spends as much, some say more, on internal security than they do on their military. Recently, there have been many, many instances of government workers either not being paid, having their salaries cut or both. The CCP has even started stealing from their own people, who stole that money from the government. In that environment, as the money flow stops, the technology doesn't matter. Then there is the issue of organized crime. This is much bigger than we are hearing about, and I believe has infiltrated the CCP as well. When they can't get their cut, the CCP is toast.
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  6845.  @junior-fj8ud  Good to know. I have also seen examples of these groups being used to intimidate people in China proper. In one video, perhaps on this channel, a broker from Zhongzhi who claimed that gang members had detained and threatened him over their client's losses. There are other examples I can recall. Of course, we don't get much in the way of information on these activities, but I expect they are quite common.
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  6846. Your bridge analogy is misleading. How do the private interests benefit from building the bridge? They would have to charge tolls. Imagine if every bridge or road required paying a toll. As for the quote at 4:35 by Hazlitt, the thing that this presupposes is that we have a need for all those things he mentions, and that they aren't available. Are you kidding me. Clothes get thrown away. The world grows twice the number of calories required. In the US, that is much higher. Our biggest health problem is obesity. We do not live in an age of scarcity. It almost seems that you are talking about zero sum economics. I recall you criticizing that Hitler fellow for something like that.
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  6847. At about 2:40 you put up a graphic when talking about a common chassis for tracked vehicles. Then you include a wheeled vehicle. Do you actually edit these videos? Do you review them at least once before releasing them? From this point on you are not credible.
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  6848. So, what about all the quantum interactions in the universe that happen without an experimenter? This whole hangup about a measurement and an observer is truly absurd. Did nothing happen before the last century? Asking for a friend.
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  6849. Nordstream-2 was never turned on because of US sanctions. Your reporting on that is just plain false. The reason the Russians want to turn gas deliveries back on is that they are currently burning of the gas at the pipeline head. This is about $10M per day. They have no place to store it. If they turn off the wells, they may not be able to turn them on again.
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  6850. Renewables are not yet a viable option for reliable energy supply. Batteries (or some form of storage) are being talked about now, but in the beginning, the wind and solar advocates were strictly against mentioning it. The reason is that storage technologies are even less viable than generation technologies. What everyone seems to forget is that when you pay your electricity bill you are paying for the reliable delivery of "electrons", not just the electrons themselves. Renewables just can't provide that. Adding up gigawatts is a fool's game.
    1
  6851. Company "worth" is basically an illusion. Also, for many investors, excepting those who are day traders, they have gains even at the lower current prices. Much of the share price drop is individuals, and investment companies, locking in gains and taking their money out until they see what the effects of the new environment will be. One should also note that bond yields have dropped as well, because that is where a lot of the money is going.
    1
  6852. The title of this video is just plain stupid. Biden is not an 'impediment' to the crisis, he caused it. He is an 'impediment' to the "solution" to the crisis. You might want to get someone with a better grasp of the language.
    1
  6853. I found a channel that claims that all the unrest in the US is a result of globalists (probably true, it seems) run out of London.
    1
  6854. I remember, in the 1970s, working in government facilities (not military) that we had many bomb threats. These were mostly associated with the PLA. We had been under threat for decades before 9/11. In all those previous situations the terrorists were interested in trading the hijacked planes for people held by the authorities. Nothing like 9/11 was attempted. It was a new, and deadly tactic. Could it have been foreseen, I don't know. But now we must be on out guard for any possibility.
    1
  6855. China dominating the world? As President Joe likes to say, come on man! China has no power projection power except into Russia and Central Asia. If it came to war with the west, the western powers wouldn't even have to get close to China to choke it off. I mean industrial shutdown in weeks or months followed by mass starvation in a year or so. That is no exaggeration. China has no worries about anyone invading them. They don't have significant natural resources or plentiful good farmland. On top of that there are all those Chinese. All those poor Chinese. And the ones that aren't poor now, will be.
    1
  6856. If the US is so racist, why are all these people trying to get in?
    1
  6857. Moodys has been wrong on everything, as have all the rating agencies. They were wrong in the Lehman Brothers case. They rated the CDOs they were pedaling AAA, until they crashed. They were late to label Chinese property developer debt as junk until too late. Why do you even quote them. They are political, not analytical. The cases I mention were correctly called out by many months before the rating agencies recognized what was happening. They should be shut down.
    1
  6858. Absolutely! Don't forget the Cold War. A period of over 45 years of little or no trade with China and Russia. Did the west suffer?
    1
  6859. Almost all of the demand is coming from the state. It seems to me that is intentional, not a problem. The CCP is a communist party, after all. It is clear that the leadership is no longer comfortable with capitalism. This is to be expected. As they say, this is a feature, not a bug.
    1
  6860.  @preeyakumari-i2q  Well put. You've got that right.
    1
  6861. Of course, poor people are the ones who depend on the government, and vote for politicians who promise more government intervention. The COVID vaccines are free to the recipient. What is the issue here as regards income?
    1
  6862. So, the previous policies must have been consistent. How has that worked out???
    1
  6863. Artur, you are really off today. The 60% referred to effort and materiel in building the line, not the number of forces. The claim was that 60% of the effort of construction was put into the first line, then 20% into each of the next lines.
    1
  6864. This is a very bad idea. You want people to be able to express themselves, so you know what is going on. They will find a way to express themselves in any event. If you disagree, the best thing to do is to engage and refute.
    1
  6865. Gee! We never see this on Chinese state media. Whatever happened to the "worker's paradise"? "Workers of the world unite!" and all that happy horses**t.
    1
  6866. You do realize that South Korea has one of the most serious demographic problems in the world right now.
    1
  6867. Who the heck cares about carbon? That is a chimera. The real reason to favor US energy over foreign energy is economic. US energy produces jobs and tax revenue here. It improves our balance of payments. In fact, if we really let it lose, we would be a major exporter, and that would be great for the world from both an environmental point of view and political point of view.
    1
  6868. KT, look at the history of amphibious assault. China is not a military superpower. Their last major conflict was with Vietnam (now an ally of the US). They were trounced. On the border with India, they have been severely trounced. China is a true "paper tiger" as defined by Mao. Read the little red book. Another thing to consider is the WWII situation vis-a-vis Taiwan. Some of our leaders wanted to invade Taiwan so we could more easily support China. The only problem was this invasion would have required a bigger invasion force than the D-Day landings. Just think on that. China has no experience or the material resources to mount such an invasion. And that is assuming that Taiwan has no allies. China is the paper tiger. For better or worse, the US has been involved in wars, many large, from the end of WWII. NO other country has. When we went into Kuwait to throw out the Iraqis, we had 350K US troops and a total of 500K coalition troops. The battle lasted three days. Don't forget, the Iraqis were the fourth largest army in the world, with a decade of combat experience. China has none of that. In the second Gulf War we went in with 160K or so US troops. We wiped out the national army of the fourth largest army in the world in two weeks. Russia, and China have done nothing like this. They are both paper tigers. The US is the only country that has been in the fight continuously. Even in Syria, there was a well-armed grouped of Russian mercenaries. They were wiped out, with few, or no, US casualties.
    1
  6869.  @ookammi  Probably so.
    1
  6870. Chip, Chip, Chip. Have you seen the videos of the HTS fighters talking about going to Jerusalem and then Mecca? The intelligence community needs to get out more. This reminds me of the situation with the Soviet Union right after the revolution. They went into Poland and wanted to take over all of Europe. Lenin actually thought that the workers in the waring countries would lay down their arms and revolt during the war. That didn't happen. The Polish campaign was a first step in the internationalist revolutionary movement. Again, Lenin thought that class would win out over nationalism. When he was stopped in Poland the Soviet leadership started talking about "socialism in one country", which was antithetical to Marxist theory. Of course, they just decided to take the struggle underground and created the Comintern to foment revolution from the inside. HTS has not really changed. Their leadership is saying things to allay fears in the west. Don't believe a word of it.
    1
  6871.  @shafsteryellow  You need to work on your reading comprehension. I said HTS fighters shouting in the street. What is the problem with giving money to Israel. They are an ally. Syria has attacked Israel, again a US ally, more than once. Why would the US give anything to the Syrians? HTS and its leaders are enemies of the US and have killed US servicemen, as well as lots of Iraqis and Syrians (and I'm not talking government forces). Do you have any idea of the history of Syria? It was part of the Ottoman Empire from the early 16th century. The current borders were drawn by two European imperialists after WWI. The Alawites were put in charge by the British following their usual pattern of putting a minority in charge. This is what allowed them, a fairly small country, to control the largest empire in history by land area and population. It is also the source of many conflicts, especially across Africa and the Middle East. So, no, I am not at all worried about the Israelis bombing weapons, including chemical weapons, that the Syrians developed or that were left behind by the Russians. That is perfectly justified.
    1
  6872. So, why don't these countries develop their own vaccines? Why, because they cannot. Do you think this is simple stuff? These were developed at record speeds to address an unprecedented global pandemic. Without the vaccines developed with Western science the world would be a much worse place. The Chinese vaccines are a joke. The Russian vaccines are questionable, at best. Even in the West, with their much more rigorous approval processes, these vaccines are approved for emergency use. Liability is one of the major costs of all drugs. Why should the companies give up their ability to make a profit. This is a product that all benefit from. Are you a communist?
    1
  6873. Actually, Macron stated at one point that the EU needed an army to protect against countries like Russia, China and the US. Let that sink in. What is really funny about all this is that the EU will probably not survive, at least in its present form, that much longer.
    1
  6874.  @dougsheldon5560  Long time member.
    1
  6875. I have yet to see a Democratic Party issue statement on Ukraine. While the Democratic establishment politicians "seem" united on aiding Ukraine, they don't have a plan for that aid either. No one has come out and said that the purpose of the aid is this or that. Biden says that the US will support Ukraine "as long as it takes" without specifying what "it" is. Does he mean victory on Ukraine's terms? Does he mean just stopping further aggression by Russia? No one really knows. Clarity on this is needed. As for the Republican platform, all elections, as they say, are local. The things the commentariat goes on about are not the things the electorate cares about, in many cases. For example, we have climate change talked about all the time. Have you seen where it places in a list of issues when voters are polled? At the bottom. Ukraine is not on the top of the list either. You participated in a war that needed to be fought. That was successful, but the "peace" not so much. What you may not remember is that George W. Bush actually ran on a platform of disengagement militarily and specifically against the idea of "nation building". Then 9/11 happened. The GWOT was a detour. The US is back on the track that it started the millennium on.
    1
  6876. Marines are always getting into trouble. I had a subsidiary that did security and training at a closed Army base in a rural area in the Midwest. The subsidiary was run by a couple of retired Navy Seals. We trained police and military. There were numerous incidents of Marines getting into altercations at local establishments in the nearby town. Instead of "youth groups" we had mostly biker gangs. This caused me no end of trouble in relations with the local authorities who were generally very supportive of my business. This is just an aside. The biker gangs were a real problem. The retired Sheriff told me about incidents at a local state park where there were biker gangs camping. They would get reports of gunshots. The Sheriff would not go in while the shooting was going on. He didn't have that many officers. He would wait till the shooting stopped and then go in and clear out the bodies.
    1
  6877. Is this not one of the most dishonest politicians you have seen? He would not answer the question on Corbyn. He thinks that a second referendum is the way to go even though the polls show an even greater majority for Brexit than at the first referendum. Who is he fooling?
    1
  6878. Why did you ever think that the Democratic Party was your Party. Look at what progressives have been trying to do. They have been trying to take over the Democrats from within. What about those other Democrats that do not believe in your program? Political parties are private organizations, not a part of the Government. It is up to the membership to decide, not some external movement. If the Progressives could have convinced the party membership, then their candidate would have won the nomination in 2016 and would be on track to win in 2020. It really is time to start another party. Bernie isn't even a Democrat.
    1
  6879. What the UK should be doing is moving its trade to other parts of the world. They are doing some of this but should accelerate it. For example, Australia and Taiwan were hit with sanctions by China in the last year or two. For both, they found other markets for their products, and are doing as well, or better, than when they traded with China.
    1
  6880. I am not sure of the idea that the people moving out of blue states will vote as they did in the states they were leaving. The people who move out are generally more conservative. We will see how this works out. As for Georgia, it has been attracting people and companies from around the country for decades. I don't think Georgia can be considered a trend setter. There is also a large African American population that is typically Democrat. This might change in the next election.
    1
  6881. Great video as usual. This is, as you say, an important debate and I look forward to your future take on it.
    1
  6882. Unless there is sufficient storage capacity, solar will not replace fossil fuels or nuclear. The cost of that storage far outstrips the cost of the solar cells. Just look at places like Germany. They have installed a lot of "new energy" production. Yet, because they shut down their nuclear plants, they are now burning more coal. Their coal is lignite, which is the dirtiest type. On top of that, they already have very high-cost electricity. Many of their industries have moved to places like the US, where electricity is a lot cheaper and where natural gas is also cheap, and abundant. This whole new energy transition is very poorly thought out. The failure of some big players in the wind turbine industry lately has shown this.
    1
  6883. The problem in China is that the peasant masses are the ones that put the CCP in power in the first place. Are they going to suddenly become enlightened and foment a great democratic revolution? Not likely. The other problem is that there are no leaders among the so-called middle class that could arise to lead such a movement. China went from a monarchical peasant society to an authoritarian communist peasant society then to a more developed peasant society (with help from the west). Don't forget, over two thirds of the people in China make 2,000 yuan or less a month. Will people who work for years without being paid their wages suddenly become a politically engaged populace? Come on man! No, the future in China is going to be like that of the early 20th century after the Qing dynasty fell. There is also the elephant in the room that most commentators, including this channel, rarely mention. That is the endemic corruption. It is massive and permeates all levels of society, especially the CCP, but also, by necessity, the middle class and successful people. Will those people give up their gains, or hope of future gains? Not likely. Look at Taiwan. After the civil war they had martial law for decades before they became democratic. They were supported by the west as a counterpoint to the CCP. Without that support, they would never have progressed.
    1
  6884. I love trains. I have also flown, a lot. When I lived in southern England, I had to go to Paris a lot. I could take a short haul flight from a local airport, or the Eurostar. I found the Eurostar superior. Instead of landing at the airport and having to take a cab, on local rail. into the city, I took a train to London, and then the Eurostar to Paris. This let me off in the city center, with easy access to subway transport to La Defense where the HQ of the company I was working for was located. In the early 1970s I traveled as a teenager all over Europe on trains. These were a lot slower than today, but still got me where I wanted to go at a reasonable price. We would often take overnight trains, and sometimes slept in the corridors of compartmented trains. Heck. we were young.
    1
  6885. Oh no. Times Radio has someone on who is not a Trump hater. What changed?
    1
  6886.  @seekerstan  You have it the wrong way around. The media declared war on Trump. Pay attention.
    1
  6887.  @DarrylDriver-zo8bc  Yes. I was trying to limit it to the 100 years, though.
    1
  6888.  @Shaze1  Got it.
    1
  6889.  @scepticalchymist  I knew that and learned it early on when studying physics. My first professor at university once told me something that has stuck with me. He said (paraphrasing) that we could find out this is all buiish*t tomorrow. We don't expect to, but the possibility exists. I was also told by my professors (I was a student but also working in the High Energy Physics Department, so I got a lot of one on one with the professors) that an experiment could only tend to support a theory, never completely prove it. I just went over what I wrote and the only place where I used the term proven I put it in quotes. You obviously have a problem with reading comprehension.
    1
  6890. These were/are great cars. I have a funny story about one. My cousin, who was studying mechanical engineering, was a passenger in one driven by a customer of his father's factory. At one point they were stopped a traffic light and there were people crossing the road. The driver said, see those people there, that is not reality. Then he patted the side of the car and said, this is realty. My cousin wanted to drop out of engineering, but his father made him go back to school and finish his degree. He later took over the factory with his brother, who was also a mechanical engineer.
    1
  6891.  @joelmanning249  I get what you are saying, but there are counter examples. The most important are Japan and Germany after WWII. The circumstances were extreme, but it worked. This is the reason that it did not work in Iraq. The defeat was not as catastrophic.
    1
  6892.  @joelmanning249  Well, I don't think that Japan or Germany have been made part of an empire. They have their own ideas. Indeed. South Korea does as well. In fact, the US have good relations with Vietnam. This is not colonialism or imperialism as understood in the 19th or early 20th century.
    1
  6893.  @joelmanning249  I have to disagree with you there. The most important thing is economy. The Chinese economy has been based on trade with the West. That is going to shrink because of the actions of the CCP. China and Russia together are a broken system. Russia is small market for goods, so no use for China there. China is a market for energy, but will get a much lower price that it would in the rest of the world. In addition, China has many territorial claims on Russian . They also compete in Central Asia. Russia also is a major ally and arms supplier to India, which is in conflict with China. After energy, arms exports are the second largest part of the Russian economy. And, China has illegally copied many Russian military systems. In addition, for better or worse, neither the China or Russia has the military experience of the US and its allies. Their military systems are inferior. I have dealt with this since the late 1970s. Just look at Ukraine.
    1
  6894. The recent (and current) US inflation is not really that bad in historical terms. I lived through a lot worse. We complain about 6% mortgages today. What about 18%? That's what it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As a result of the oil shocks of the 1970s gasoline prices tripled, overnight. The shock comes because central banks had driven rates down to close to zero (sometimes even negative) in response to the 2008 financial crisis. That is not normal. People only think it is because that is what was their most recent experience.
    1
  6895. Wow! ITER. I have been hearing about nuclear fusion from my childhood. That was over half a century ago. The first fission reaction was demonstrated in 1942. The first commercial powerplants were going in the mid-1960s. Just saying.
    1
  6896.  @cattymajiv  Maybe they should hire him.
    1
  6897.  @TonionDuFromage  Nuns are not political. This is a politician calling for other countries to bail out their people. Those that feel threatened should go to the Panshair Valley and fight for their country. This is the same situation as in Vietnam. The South Vietnamese army had been infiltrated by the North and collapsed, even after we had given them much training and equipment. The situation is the same. The US had grown tired of the conflict and turned it over to people who had no faith in their leaders. That said, don't think that the US military is not still the strongest in the world. Look at what happened after VN. Iraq and Afghanistan. We only lose when out political leaders choose to. It is not the military. Look at Iraq. It is actually moving forward. Out presence there will be down to a train and advise role, and they can handle the threats they face.
    1
  6898. China calling anyone racist is just totally over the top. The country is 90% Han ethnicity. They demonstrably suppress, in the most brutal way ethnic and religious minorities. The latest is their demonizing of foreigners on racial grounds. Meanwhile the US has had a black president, and many leaders of states and cities that are not "white". So, they need to come off their high horse, and people in the US need to stop this crap as well.
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  6899. I fully agree with what Trump is doing with the war in Ukraine and his pointing out the money we have spent. There was no strategy, and no way for Ukraine to win the war on their terms. But what I have always pointed out is that the money we have spent on Ukraine was of the order of the fraud, as I could discern it, in the COVID relief funds. Now we are finding that the fraud is even bigger. That does not even begin to approach the fraud in Social Security. What I want to see next is people being indicted for this fraud. This cannot have gone on without active participation of some of these officials, both political appointees and civil servants. If there isn't something in the Civil Service rules that covers this, that has to addressed. Who authorizes payments from Treasury without any traceability? Lock 'em up.
    1
  6900. Trump bad for the economy? You just hurt your credibility as an economist. Compare the economy in Trump's first term (pre-COVID) to Biden's economy. Data, not ideology, remember?
    1
  6901. China befriending the US? What makes the Chinese think the US would want to reciprocate. This is naivete on a grand scale. The original opening to China was a strategic move in the Cold War meant to counter the Soviet Union. The response to the reform and opening up was a financially driven move to take advantage of China's low wages and vast market. Well, the labor costs, on a productivity adjusted scale, are no longer low. With China's demographic and economic collapse, the "vast" market is quickly drying up. With the lack of respect for law and order and personal freedoms it is no longer viable for western firms to do business in China. The base reason China could participate in global supply chains was the US led, rules-based international order. China has openly stated that it wants to overtake the US both economically and militarily. Knowing the history of the US is that something that would play well in Peoria (look it up)? With China's well-known vulnerabilities the US would not even have to breath hard to strangle China. I am not advocating that but remember that there are several other countries who could do that as well. More than one has territorial disputes with China. No, by installing Xi as leader of the CCP, an irredentist Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, China has sealed its doom.
    1
  6902. The idea of a reset in the US Russia relationship is interesting. I have seen speculation over the last months, and this has nothing to do with Trump and is only speculation, that such a thing might happen. The reason is China. Nixon went to China primarily to present a conundrum to the Soviet Union. By China normalizing with the west the Soviets were presented with a threat on their border. By the way, that is still the case, but Xi is supporting Russia to get back at the US. Well, now there might be an opportunity to turn the tables again. We'll see.
    1
  6903. Talking about depressing wages. In the UK, after Brexit, wages for blue collar workers in the UK are up substantially. A while ago, I read that one of the states bordering Mexico, which had stemmed illegal immigration, had experienced a surge in worker income, while having a somewhat lower GDP. GDP is not the measure of success we need to worry about. It is personal income. The sooner we understand that, the better. Stopping immigration, either legal or illegal, puts up the wages for the citizen population. If the workers in these countries cannot see this an still vote for left or center left parties that support immigration, then they are stupid and deserve what they get. The educated, and skilled, will continue to do well. It is as simple as that. Uncontrolled immigration is only useful to business owners and the 1%. Again, if the workers do not understand this, then they are rubes (a mild form of what I wanted to say). In the US, the Democratic Party has become the party of the 1%. If workers cannot see this, then they will continue to suffer. We don't need more workers from outside. Technology, a major strength of the US, will make us stronger. Not importing unskilled workers, who drive down wages.
    1
  6904. @小粉红死全家 You must be kidding. I have a Indian neighbors next door and across the street. Over the years many of my best friends have been Indians and they contribute a lot to the US culturally and economically. The same is true of Chinese in the US. As far as I can tell they do not distort the market. That has a lot to do with the size of the population and economy. Of course, the average Chinese is not richer than the average American. Far from it. In fact, China has a population of people living in poverty that is about twice the total US population. Even their "middle class" jobs pay a fraction of what is paid in the US. Have you seen the property market in China. Apartments in cities are running at 36 times the median income. In the US it is more like six. Let's just say Americans are not "jealous" of successful people.
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  6905. If you are worried about, or offended by, content on a platform, then stop using the platform. These social media platforms only involve a minority of the populace. If people stop using them, then they loose their power. Just get off. I have.
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  6906. When Regan cut tax rates in the US, tax receipts went up. The same thing happened in Trump's first term. When a lower percentage gets taken out, more activity results. Back before that Regan rate cut, I had a friend whose father had taken early retirement. He was an engineer with a great education and background. The company I was working for had a need. He applied. He asked for a very low salary. The reason was that if he had gotten to going rate, the extra would have gone almost entirely to tax (his wife also worked, as a teacher). This was the type of thing that was happening all over with these high tax rates.
    1
  6907. The people who voted for Biden should be walking around with some sort of sign admitting their shame. The US has lost all credibility. China and Russia are on the decline. This is their chance to come back by pushing back against the US. They know that Biden will fold. If Trump were president, the world would a different, and much better, place. Crazy as he is, he is the right kind of crazy.
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  6908. By the way, Peter, I just saw a poll that shows a 59% approval rating of how Trump is handling the transition. As I said, you may want to get that TDS look at.
    1
  6909.  @Nothing-ez6mk  The corruption issue would probably be there even if there were many more parties, don't you think? It is a cultural thing.
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  6910.  @imperialguardsman5929  The issue of collateral damage is the problem. In modern war, the population is an integral part if the war. If civilians are not resisting, then they are part of the problem. They need to fight, or acquiesce. It is their freedoms that are under threat, not ours.
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  6911. At about 30:00 you talk about the three blocks. They existed for the whole of the Cold War. India was indeed the leader of the third. This was the non-aligned movement. So, not much has changed from the Cold War. On the other hand, the case of India is still not clear. They have a semi-hot conflict already going on with China. They have turned to the US to counter China in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. They had counted on Russia to help them counter China. Russia sold their S400 systems to India, but not China. Now, the Ukraine war has upset all of this.
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  6912. I worked for a large company in the UK. The same conditions you discuss at the beginning applied to getting a work permit there. The same goes for work visas in the US, such as the H1B. This later is often abused, but that is the intent.
    1
  6913. I don't know if you have ever been to the region, but if you are on the west coast of the gulf, it is the Arabian Gulf.
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  6914. If this man, and those who think like him, is not removed then we might as well pack it in and fend for ourselves. We should all arm ourselves and use those arms in a preemptive way. Actually, we are well on our way to arming ourselves as a society. Gun sales have massively increased in the last few years, and surprise, many first-time gun owners are liberals. Why do I say this? Well, any government official, who is not a legislator, is pledged to follow the laws as passed by the legislators, who are the representatives of the people. Any prosecutor, or other executive branch official, who claims that a crime is not a crime, is himself committing a crime. If this is what our elected officials are going to do, and this includes the president on down, then we need to seriously consider whether we should pay taxes to our government. We pay taxes, in the first place, for the government to protect us, both from foreign and domestic threats. The next level is public services. If the government won't fulfill those needs, then we will have to procure those services privately, and the government becomes irrelevant. This is not a controversial stance. In many of our large cities, private citizens, in their local communities, are hiring private security. I am outside of Chicago. Fortunately, we are relatively sane here (i.e., not Democrat) and very safe. But, the City of Chicago has fallen apart.
    1
  6915. Oh, by the way, those neighborhoods who are hiring private security in Chicago are Democratic in their politics.
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  6916. Think back to the early days of the automotive industry. There were many, many car companies. Some merged or were bought out (think General Motors), while others just went out of business. This type of ferment is not actually unusual. It is all part of the capitalist system and plays out in industry after industry. What is bad in China is the companies, like Evergrande, that have no background in the industry, but have access to a lot of cash (well, not anymore) that get involved. The Chinese should take a lesson from Elon Musk. He has several major companies in vastly different industries. They are all separate companies and stand or fall on their own. What China seems to be doing is to repeat the mistakes of western capitalism in which large conglomerates were created, which later declined and went out of favor. China should know better. They really aren't as smart as everyone thinks.
    1
  6917. I enjoy the hot takes. They are often somewhat amusing in a sad sort of way. I first visited the UK exactly 50 years ago. I lived there for a bit (in England) earlier in this millennium. Things have just gone downhill that whole time. I do remember seeing graffiti on the motorway overpasses with the slogan "England for the English". This was a response to devolution. Frankly, the structure of the government in the UK is just plain crap. By the way, you left out Cornwall in your list of people who would be upset. I remember seeing a Cornish man saying, "I am Cornish, I am European, I am British, I am NOT English" (emphasis his). There were lots of Cornwall end EU flags flying, but I didn't notice any Union Jacks.
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  6918.  @tl7988  Brilliant!
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  6919. Tucker, you are just plain stupid on this point. I had reasonable, but not stellar, SAT scores. I dropped out of college, and then got a succession of high-paying jobs in the tech industry. I did corporate funded R&D projects at one aerospace firm. I then went on to another and was put in charge of two corporate funded R&D projects (this one of our top R&D firms, by number of patents) associated with SDI. This was cutting edge research. All of this before I eventually got my degree. All the people I had working for me had better academic qualifications than I did, but I was the lead researcher. That is not to say I agree with this nominee. What I would concentrate on is her record on the bench. Take exception to that if you want. Looking at a standardized test is not the way to go.
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  6920. The thumbnail for this video show Putin with a noose around his neck. I hope people understand that the ICC does not recognize the death penalty. In fact, as far as I can tell, the maximum sentence is 30 years. Of course, for Putin this is equivalent to life in prison.
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  6921. I was just reading diary entries by German General Henrici from WWII. This was during Barbarossa. His comment about the Soviet army was that they would throw poorly trained troops at the Germans, but their artillery was good. Sound familiar?
    1
  6922. You would be surprised about what people talk about concerning their health.
    1
  6923.  @ChnesRep中華民國OfTaiwan  I have experience or knowledge of abortions. What I have seen is, in some cases, specific health issues for an individual are highlighted and a program set up to address it.
    1
  6924. You are paying for the infrastructure to be connected to the grid. How is that wrong. What you seem to be advocating is that the other users of the grid pay to enable you to draw on the grid when you need to. Considering that you are in Michigan, that will probably be a thing.
    1
  6925.  @dentray  The campaign is just starting (today, I think). We will see, They still haven't taken Mariopul. They don't seem to be close to taking Odessa. As more weapons pour in from the west, they will find it harder and harder.
    1
  6926. My first physics professors told me one day that we could find out this (our physical theories) is all b**ls**t tomorrow. He didn't expect that, but it was possible.
    1
  6927. I miss the Cold War. I got to do lots of very interesting research with basically unlimited funding. On the EU side, it seems they are using this chance to do something they have been talking about for a long time. This is the setting up of an EU military. I think it was Macron who said in a speech that the EU needed its own military to deal with threats like China, Russia and the US. Yes, he mentioned the US in the same vein as China and Russia. So, don't be surprised that the EU is solidly behind Ukraine.
    1
  6928. Frankly, trying to say anything using the open-source maps and doing daily updates, as many do, is kind of silly. That is not how war works. I could sit here and try to make sense of it, but none of us has sufficient information. Personally, I think Ukraine has tried to hold on to various points too long. They would be better drawing the Russians into disadvantageous positions and then attacking them. Who cares about Bakhmut or Avdiivka now? What use is trying to take them back. Of course, all of this is rank speculation.
    1
  6929. Rights-defending depositors. What a preposterous concept. The people have no rights. I have even heard, perhaps on the channel, that one of the top judges in China stated that rule of law is not important. Rule of the party is. China is run by a classical Marxist-Leninist party. All those poor peasants, whops, I mean all those new communist people, are only there to serve the party. If the people don't understand this, then the party has failed to educate them in the proper ideology.
    1
  6930. International law, in general, is a fiction. Just look at the Ukraine war. As a member of the Security Council Russia should have been one to guarantee Ukraine's borders, not to mention specific agreements they signed. Law, at any level, depends on enforcement. Who enforces international law? States with military power, that is who. Again, look at this war. Say Putin is overthrown. The only incentive for the Russians to turn, and others, over is the sanctions and military power on the borders of Russia. This is not about rules and law, but about power. It is the same with the aftermath of WWII.
    1
  6931. Everyone talks about Tesla cars being amazing. Bullpuppies. These are geared toward performance, not range. With the size of their batteries, if they had 20 or 40 percent less "performance" (e.g., acceleration) they would get 30 to 50 percent more range. Most people buying EVs are not hot rodders. They are building the wrong cars. This is endemic in the whole automotive industry. I had a 2002 Chrysler 300M. It had a 3.5L V6 producing 250 HP. My current car is a Cadillac SRX, with a 3.6L V6 producing about 300HP. I NEVER use that power. NEVER. The car is about half a ton heavier, but still has a great power to weight ratio. It also gets about the same gas mileage as the 300M. Just think about it. A 3L engine at 250HP would get at least 5MPG better mileage and would still be very drivable. This is true of Tesla. They could produce 400+ mile range vehicles with current batteries. Just lower the power of the motors. This obsession on performance is killing us. And I speak as one who started my driving career with small British sports cars which I routinely modified to very high street performance. Then, because they constantly broke down, I got a VW Rabbit so I could get to work reliably.
    1
  6932. Experts being quoted in a medical case? Beware! Look at what happened last time. From at least the initial information, this seems exactly like last time. That is no exaggeration. The problem with medicine, and medical information, is that it is dependent on social support. This is an issue in the west and is greatly compounded in China.
    1
  6933. The corruption in these totalitarian regimes, especially the military, is breathtaking. You mention the Russian defense minister. Well, Xi in China just sacked (and disappeared) his defense minister for corruption. The whole corruption network there is coming to light and it is breathtaking. Frankly, Xi has been purging and reforming the military and it seems like it has not gotten better.
    1
  6934. Oh good! A new Cold War. I miss the Cold War. I got to do a lot of very interesting research with unlimited budgets. It was a blast, literally.
    1
  6935. I am not a believer in conspiracy theories, but I am having trouble keeping that attitude. Several years ago, a friend mentioned that another friend of his was a believer in QAnon. I looked it up. The only thing I know about it is what is on the Wikipedia page. Read that and this whole grooming gang thing kind of fits. Add to that what DOGE is finding in the US and all the stuff around Biden, and it could make one a believer.
    1
  6936. You talk about the bombing of cities as if this was not justified or standard in the war. The Allies were the most successful at this because of their technology and industry. But, don't forget that the Germans did this before the Americans got involved. The Battle of Britain was an attack on British cities and industry with EXACTLY the same goals as the Allies in their campaign against Germany. Later in the was the Germans employed V1 and V2 rockets as terror weapons against the UK. Even in the Pacific, Japan employed such tactics against Chinese cities. This was the norm at the time. To judge this in terms of our current ethics is just ludicrous. And you also ignore that during the Cold War, most the nukes from both sides would be sent to destroy cities. I grew up in those times and expectation 60M to 80M casualties was accepted, and deemed acceptable. And that was when the population of the US was in the 200M range. War is hell, and as a historian, applying any type of current ethics is just stupid and dishonest. It does not advance our understanding and obscures the reality of the history you are telling.
    1
  6937. The Roman Empire lasted over 400 years after Julius Ceasar. I don't think it becoming an Empire had that much to do with it.
    1
  6938.  @atix50  Well, that is not the subject of my comment, but from what I have read and seen it looks like it is true. Of course, I am assuming that you are talking about China. In the US, in the name of anti-terrorism efforts, withdrawing large amounts of cash draws questions, but is not controlled. Interestingly, transferring large amounts of money electronically is no problem.
    1
  6939.  @thomaskauser8978  Not sure of what you mean. Please be more specific.
    1
  6940.  @thomaskauser8978  He did have access to private bankers, so I assume he had ways to get around reporting requirements. In fact, JP Morgan Chase got in trouble for facilitating his activities and had to settle with the victims.
    1
  6941. I generally support Ukraine. On the other hand, Biden has been a disaster for Ukraine. The key is the lack of a plan, or strategy. This is not just me saying this, but a number of retired generals who are supporters of Ukraine have pointed this out as well. The last aid bill required Biden to produce a strategy document. When he finally did, he classified it, so we still don't know, as a country, what the plan is. The only thing Biden has said is that we will support Ukraine as long as it takes. He never said what "it" is. If there was a plan we could have a debate on it. If we agreed that Ukraine should win, on their terms, then we would be obligated to provide the resources they need. As it is, Ukraine gets weapons in dribs and drabs. Ukrainians have fought valiantly and well, but they most certainly do not have the ability to defeat Russia militarily. Frankly, with the incompetence the Russians have shown, Ukraine might eventually prevail, but at what cost to Ukraine and how long will that take? Trump is absolutely correct; the killing must stop. Both Russia and Ukraine were in demographic decline before the war started. This war is just accelerating that tragic trend. Finally, the Europeans certainly should provide the full support for Ukraine. Pompeo hits the nail on the head. It is their territory that is threatened. The economy of the EU plus the UK is at least ten times as large as Russia's. Their population is three times as large. Two of the European countries even have their own nuclear deterrent. This is not the beginning of the Cold War when NATO was created and Europe was on its knees. Then the video ends with Biden's comments about the bombings. Biden does not have a strategic thought in his head, and actually never has. Disgusting.
    1
  6942.  @MrMcguire89  Huh?
    1
  6943.  @FilesdocumentsAndreposit-kr3vb  Interesting observation. Thanks for that. I have met with many Chinese citizens while attending university a few years ago. I talked to many of them, and they were considering whether to stay in the US of go back to China. They had valuable education and skills that would make them valuable here. I don't know how many stayed. Another interesting point is that, in the late 1970s I worked with a fellow woman engineer who was of Chinese descent. Her family had been in the US at least two generations than my own.
    1
  6944. Colby talks about AI as if it is something that wins wars. What a load of crap. It is just another buzzword. I have been involved in AI since the 1980s in the military world. It is not all that the pundits, who mostly don't understand it, make it out to be. Stop talking about cyber and AI as if they make a difference in the battlefield where the bullets are flying.
    1
  6945. Why are all the correspondents and anchors on this English language channel so poor in their English. When I first went to university, in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, the Indian students I knew (two of them were my best friends) spoke English at a high level. Now, all I hear is people who speak English poorly. What gives?
    1
  6946.  @FreeTechCafe  The level I experienced was at least as high as a native speaker. I have lots of neighbors, one next to me and another across the street, born in India, who speak English at least was well as a native speaker. Are there none left in India? This lack of proficiency detracts from the product. For example, Palki Sharma speaks English very well. Most of the other correspondents do not.
    1
  6947. @सनातन That makes no sense.
    1
  6948.  @larion2336  I don't know how you can say that. The ratio of house price to income is 114.4. In the US it is 5.4 today.
    1
  6949.  @larion2336  I looked up some data and did some calculations. The average price per square meter of a housing in Japan is 951,000 yen. I took my home of 297 square meters and based on the current market value I get 316,000 yen per square meter. So, the average price of a home in Japan is three times my home. I am in the Midwest, so the price reasonable, but higher than the median price. I also have a large yard. By the way, the average home size in Japan is 121.7 square meters. The average home size in the US is 187 square meters. The average size of new home in the US 234 square meters. So, how is real estate cheap in Japan?
    1
  6950.  @larion2336  i made that point exactly. As I said, the US blessed in its geography. Geography matters.
    1
  6951. This is good news and a good way to go about things. People get all worked up about US support, and there is some merit to that. After all, the US is a security guarantor for Ukraine. So are the UK and France. So is Russia. Go figure. On the other hand, this is a war in Europe. The EU plus UK has an economy, measured by GDP, of about then times that of Russia. The population is about three times that of Russia. There is no objective reason that the US needs to be the lead in security assistance. I am not saying it shouldn't, but it is not a requirement.
    1
  6952.  @Omega0850  Well, the EU should be in the lead in financial and humanitarian aid, since they have invited Ukraine to join. I do think you miss the point, though. When NATO was set up it was to stop the Soviet Union from taking over the rest of Europe, which was their goal. Europe was devastated and could not fend for itself either economically or militarily. This situation has changed. Europe could afford the necessary military resources, and really should have worked on that, at least from 2014. As for HIMARS launchers, there are other systems that Europe could provide. The European defense industry is very well developed. Part of this is through integration with the US.
    1
  6953. Sun was actually a socialist.
    1
  6954. The comment at the end on what is going on in Mexico really made me laugh. So, considering the issues in Mexico, especially with the drug cartels, I wonder how you would be able to tell the difference between that and Russian interference. Put another way, the Russians are probably wasting resources in Mexico.
    1
  6955. Russian tanks are being destroyed by Ukranian FPV drones. There is lots of footage. Ukraine has a bewildering array of drones. It may take several of the smaller drones, but those are cheap, and Ukraine is making lots. And, as you point out, artillery shells are arriving in numbers, not just from the US. What this reminds me of, now bear with me, is ECM or Electronic Counter Measures. Then there were counter measures to the counter measures ad infinitum. It was hell for the acronym guys. ECM, ECCM, ECCCM, etc. So, they stopped at ECCM or EC2M. We will see lots of innovations and adaptations as is always the case with longer conflicts. There were lots during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and occupations. Heck, the MRAPs, being used in Ukraine right now evolved out of those wars. The way drones themselves are being used is a result of all this innovation. So, no big deal.
    1
  6956. I remember in the 1970s, in Georgetown in Washington, DC., where cops pulled over a car on the main drag (M Street, I think). One got out of the car with his gun drawn and approached the vehicle. The other had his gun drawn and was behind the door of the police car as backup. These were dangerous times. Police cars were being blown up by grenades when going down alleys. That is why they stopped doing that and would bring in helicopters with the artificial daylight in alleys when chasing suspects. I know. I was born there and lived in the city for a while.
    1
  6957. I always had an interest in classics. I was also very interested in science and engineering. My father worked at a government weapons lab. When I went to university the first time (I dropped out and worked) I was a physics major. I planned to take Greek and Latin both for my first two years. I was not allowed to take both, since I was not a classics major. I took Greek, since that was my heritage. When I went back to school, at Villanova, even as a student studying computer science, math and statistics, I had to take two western civilization classes and three philosophy classes (this was down from five, previously). I was very glad to have take all these liberal arts requirements (there we more, such as English and another foreign language).
    1
  6958. At about 22:00 the statement is made that if you repeat a lie enough times, people would believe it. This precisely what Joseph Goebbels did in the Nazi regime. Old ideas never die, do they?
    1
  6959. I say this all the time. Free speech does not mean true speech. There is nothing in the Constitution that says you are only free to tell the "truth". Who determines the truth? Heck, even in the hard sciences we find out over time that something we thought was correct turns out to be wrong. This "truth" issue is a chimera. The whole idea of having an open debate is to understand what people are thinking, not what is "true". If you limit speech to the "approved" ideas, you will never hear the other side. Hearing both sides is the essence of debate. And, as Vivek points out, many things we thought were true during COVID, for example, turn out not the be.
    1
  6960.  @Fleshox19-uz3qt  Completely agree. The thing is that a lot of people in the Indian military are Russophiles. If you listen to them, and I am talking about the recently retired ones who can talk openly, they clearly show this tendency. It makes sense because they have relied on Soviet/Russian equipment for decades. India fashioned themselves as leaders in the "non-aligned movement", what we now call the "global south" (I detest that terminology). Of course, that was a fiction.
    1
  6961.  @markcasila8310  That is an important point that few people seem to understand. My assumption on the Russian jet is that the number quoted is just the initial purchase price, but we don't know.
    1
  6962. In most conventional wars the bulk of the casualties are from artillery. It has been so for centuries. Artillery is colloquially called the "king of battle".
    1
  6963. The US has one of the lowest unemployment rates we have had in a long time. There is also a massive program of industrialization with lots of new industrial plants being built. China is toast.
    1
  6964. Tony, love your comment at the end.
    1
  6965. What is laughable is that Xi's fantasies of China's grandeur are not borne out by history. Even in Asia, if you want to be historical, the Mongol empire was much more extensive than China's ever was. Russia controls much more territory, some of it taken from China. From the early 19th century, a number of small, mostly European countries held sway over China's external trade. Even little Japan conquered large areas of China. Frankly, if Japan had not attacked the US, they may well have conquered all of China. The last time China projected power by sea was in the 15th century. So, where do these dreams of grandeur come from? As for having enough, or not enough, people, Xi is delusional, as usual. China's population is projected to fall to 500M by the end of this century. Most of them will be poor. Coupled with their poor geography China is headed toward third world status, not global hegemony.
    1
  6966. During WWII one of the problems the Soviets had was lack of trained crews. They massed tanks but the experienced German crews often chewed them up. In the end, the Germans were just overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Also, over time, the Russians became more experienced.
    1
  6967.  @r.f.pennington746  Great comment. I tend to be a news and foreign affairs junkie. I was born in Washington, DC, my father worked for an Army weapons lab and I started travelling internationally from my teens. In addition, I have lived overseas and served on the board of my children's school, so I got to see some local politics. I guess that I am an outlier. My brother and sister are not interested in foreign affairs. The big difference is that they have not travelled as extensively. My older son is more like me. He even married a girl he met in the Republic of Georgia, who he met when he travelled there.
    1
  6968.  @r.f.pennington746  Good points. Yes, mid-60s here too. On the point of money, that is always what the news media is about. Remember "yellow journalism"? That term was from the early 20th century when newspapers, to make money, stirred up frenzy in the country. This led to the Spanish American War. Some of the blame rests on the consumer. Back then there was no way to easily look at diverse sources to come to an independent conclusion. Today, the opposite is true.
    1
  6969.  @douglasnovak4584  The food is not all here in the US. Russia is the top exporter. The US is not far behind. Ukraine is number five. So, the best thing to do is to let them walk into Russia and Ukraine. Is that what you are suggesting? I hope your comment is tongue in cheek. Distribution is never about letting people go to where the goods are. It is about getting them to the people who want them.
    1
  6970.  @MommaLousKitchen  Please elaborate. Urine was used for washing clothes in ancient times because it contained ammonia.
    1
  6971. Why would a westerner, especially an American, go to China? With the National Security Law and the mobilization of the whole country to catch spies, no rational person would go to China. FDI includes reinvestment in the country of profits made by a foreign entity. It would be interesting to see how much of the recent FDI is composed that vs. new money from outside.
    1
  6972. One of my uncles was a tanker in Europe in WWII. He had an M3 and loved it. The Thompson was a great gun. On the other hand, the M3 was much cheaper and lighter. The M3 was about two pounds lighter that the Thompson M1A1. It had the same capacity and was handier. In fact, it was used all the way into the Vietnam War.
    1
  6973.  @craigthescott5074  You're right. It was just too handy for tanker use.
    1
  6974. The Democrats and the teachers unions are either stupid, insane, or both. ALL research has shown that parental involvement in education of young people is essential. In addition, offering advanced teaching to students of ability is a big boost to our children and economy. All advanced economies do this. I will make a comment here. I was a school governor in the UK while I worked there. As a foreigner I had to get permission from the Home Office to run. Schools in the rest of the world teach to the test. That is, in fact, the only thing they really teach. Our students are much more well rounded. This has a lot to do with the greater creativity of our people, which contributes to our greatness. When I started high school in 1969 they were getting rid of the track system in all subjects, except English. This was in one of the best school systems in the country, Montgomery County, Maryland. At my school, 100% graduated, and 100% went to college. My kids went to a very good school system in the suburbs of Chicago. They have a very strong gifted child program. In the high schools 20% of the students take AP classes. My sons took almost all of them. They even offered the first semester of college calculus, which they took. This was taught by a university professor, remotely, with the in class teacher being more of a TA. And, there are special schools, such as the Illinois Math and Science Academy. Dumbing down education for gifted students, from whatever background, is pure insanity. If they are going to do that I want a corresponding cut in the taxes I pay.
    1
  6975.  @jwhite5008  Great point.
    1
  6976. Whatever happened to global warming?
    1
  6977.  @yolandabrinkman2653  Great! He's on the case!
    1
  6978. As for the North Korean troops, Europe should not only speak out, but they should be sending troops en masse to Ukraine. All this speaking out and not acting is what got Ukraine into this mess in the first place. Act now! Heck, if the Europeans used their airpower and troops solely on the internationally recognized territory of Ukraine then Ukraine would be free to take over all the provinces of Russia bordering Ukraine. They have a good justification for doing so. That would put an end to things rather quickly and would almost certainly lead to Putin's downfall and most probably lead to the dissolution of the Russian Federation. There would be no foreign troops in Russia, besides Ukrainians, who have a direct reason to take such action. In case you are worried about nuclear retaliation from Russia, don't forget that Europe has its own nuclear deterrent (France and the UK) and are still protected by the US nuclear umbrella. In addition, the US has conventional systems that could rapidly hit back at Russia.
    1
  6979.  @in-my-view  Actually Ukraine has had conflict for at least eight years now. I also heard that there were, before this invasion, about 18K casualties in the East.
    1
  6980.  @in-my-view  Good point. It is also an issue because it is in Europe. The two world wars in the last century started in Europe. This is not to minimize the plight of people all over the world caught up in conflict.
    1
  6981.  @in-my-view  Thanks for those thoughts. The case of Germany is an interesting one. People have been talking about them taking over Europe through the EU.
    1
  6982. Many years ago I went to a rock concert in an old converted supermarket. There were just two bathrooms, one men's and another women's. The line outside the ladies was very long. So, some of the women went into the men's. There were only three stalls, so these were used by the women. The men were using the urinals, sinks and floor drains. It was almost apocalyptic.
    1
  6983. What's all this talk about time. I have seen some well known physicists saying time doesn't exist. So, again, I ask, why are we talking about it?
    1
  6984. Oh, my gawd! Only part way through this video, but if she really thinks this stuff, she is even dumber than I thought. What's worse is that her constituents are even dumber. They are the ones who should be called out. If she was one of your choices for a legislator, and you chose her over almost anyone, twice, you are idiots. New York City is a spent force. It is at this point, a welfare state. Of course, I was born in Washington, DC. My mother is from Annapolis, MD. My father is from western Massachusetts. So, NYC was kind of the bad place in between. I have worked for companies based in NYC over the years and spent time there. So, I thought my opinions would be more balanced, but the last few years have blown that away. NYC is no longer necessary, or viable. Lots of major businesses are moving out, as are many people. Unless there is a major shift, NYC is on a permanent decline. It was never that great to begin with. I live in the Chicago area and worked for a very large company based in NY state. When my NYC colleagues would come to meetings, I was hosting in Chicago they would always say, I love Chicago, it is like NYC without the dirt. Never a truer word spoken.
    1
  6985. I am beginning to get the impression that you are not a fan of "our Angela".
    1
  6986. Unfortunately, the issue with giving jobs to people who receive benefits is something that the unions have resisted over time. As other commentators have said, even if it is digging ditches. The unions are always afraid of it eating into their membership and power. Considering how union membership as dropped over the years, this might be the time.
    1
  6987. It almost certainly has to. There is no economic or societal scenario in which it survives. This is not the 20th century where propaganda could be as effective as it was in the Soviet Union or Mao's China. As for what will takes its place, the short answer is, who cares. Such things are difficult to predict, and frankly it will be what it will be. Why do you ask?
    1
  6988. I am definitely not naive. In fact, I have lots of experience and knowledge of these things. That said, I disagree with your number 2 issue regarding the Russian propaganda. That is not propaganda. It is the new/old reality. We are used to the Cold War. That was a bipolar world. Then we transitioned to the current period, which is unipolar, sort of. It has not been very peaceful. Remember the Gulf War, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? All of that was in just the last 30 years. By the way, that first one involved as many or more troops as the current Ukraine war. A multipolar world order is the norm throughout history. The US has been moving away from being "the world's policeman" since the end of the Cold War. The best indicator of this is the official US National Security Strategy document which comes out periodically. The US military is configured for power projection, not stability operations. This is the will of the US electorate. It is not a Trump thing. Trump was not the first US President to chide the European NATO allies about their lack of spending on their own defense. Far from it. The US has also been actively pursuing alliances around the world to contain its enemies, not to impose some new world order. The last US president who wanted to have the conversation about how the world should be governed after the fall of the Soviet Union and the last one to have the experience and background to do so was George H. W. Bush. He was voted out of office. His opponent's campaign had a tag line. It was "It's the economy, stupid." US politics is generally very insular. Just look at US actions and attitudes in the early stages of both world wars in the 20th century. In the first one, the president, Woodrow Wilson ran on a slogan of "he kept us out of the war". In the second one President Roosevelt had to come up with the kludge of "lend-lease" to provide the UK with weapons. He also had to extract a high price from the UK to do so. Only the threat of another world war with the threat of nuclear annihilation kept the US engaged after the second one. The funny thing about Russia and China wanting this multipolar world is that they did not do that well in such a milieu in the last few centuries. In fact, they had their best growth after the post-Soviet era. Go figure. You might want to read some books by some geopolitical strategists to get an understanding of what is going on and what is to come. You attitude is very Eurocentric, and that is not the reality of most of the world.
    1
  6989.  @mrnobody3161  Very well put. If you haven't already you should read George Friedman's book "The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond". It explains a lot. The other thing, to your second point, is that most people (especially Europeans) misunderstand democracy. Of course, they have reasons to be fearful.
    1
  6990.  @terike9738  You got it. Machine politics at its best, I have a little story from Chicago. A friend of mine, who was going to school in Chicago, and living in a house with three others, all voted Republican in an election. The Alderman (city council) actually went to their house after the election. They were, evidentially the only people who had not voted Democrat in his district, and he knew who they were.
    1
  6991. You are basing your analysis on a tweet? Wow! Journalism? You don't seem to be keeping up with the news out of Iran on their program. Also, you ignore the fact that Iran has called for the destruction of Israel. They have done this for decades.
    1
  6992.  @brienodoyle5137  I have never heard that. Where do you get your information from?
    1
  6993.  @brienodoyle5137  Haven't been able to find it. Give some sources. I have been around since before the 80s and never heard such a thing. It is also not government policy in Israel.
    1
  6994. This classification of civilizations, Dyson spheres and all the rest is just science fiction masquerading as science. I stopped watching at about 2:11.
    1
  6995. So, is India shutting down coal plants?
    1
  6996.  @HemanthKumarJadhav  The climate doesn't care who is a historic emitter. In addition, the technology is not there to do so by 2035. India has said it would do so in 2050 or 2060, I have read. People need energy to live a modern life.
    1
  6997. Maybe Qanon is right. The swamp has been infiltrated by pedophiles.
    1
  6998. The wall in the US was working. Illegal migration was down to its lowest level in many years. Then Biden stopped work on the wall and we see the result. Walls work.
    1
  6999. All of this discussion about the UK and other countries and their importance in US diplomacy is kind of silly. There are three reasons any of them are consulted at all. First, it is useful for the US to have bases around the world. We saw that because of WW2. The second is that the countries we are allied with need our protection (from each other in many cases). The third is American leaders have used to involvement of "allies" as a political tool within the US. Korea and Vietnam were UN operations. The UN was an American creation. Then, for Desert Storm, President George H. W. Bush (why don't we just append roman numerals like the Brits? A lot easier), put together the "coalition of the willing" to make that war more poetically palatable. Later, his son did the same thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The allies certainly were useful, but not necessary. Heck, most of the time we had to provide the transport.
    1
  7000. Dave and Greg, maybe I am too well informed (and have been for 5 decades thanks to where I grew up and some of my adult influences), but you are all in danger of just repeating yourselves and assuming that no one knows what's going on. [yes, that sentence is too long] I tend to think that lots of people have become aware. That, at least in part, explains Greg's ratings. You need to, perhaps, start talking about how we really move forward, as opposed to primarily trying to make people aware. You can't be unaware in this day and age. By the way, Greg, your book arrives today. I already have Dave's book and have started reading it.
    1
  7001. Don't forget that Poland beat the Soviets in the 1920s. That event made them give up the Marxist-Leninist dream of fomenting revolution in Germany and throughout western Europe. It brought about Socialism in one country as a stopgap measure. In WWII the Soviets invaded only after the Germans had mostly destroyed the Polish Army. Today, Poland has one of the most capable and well-equipped armies in the west. It also has allies, including a permanent US presence. Putin and Lukashenko are clowns.
    1
  7002.  @yzstormer  Yes.
    1
  7003. The right of privacy in medical decisions. Give me a break. Most people, and I mean a vast majority will give you their medical history at the drop if a hat. I was once at an activity as a teenager, and my father was asked how he was doing. He gave a full medical history. HIPPA laws. Come on now. The only reason for HIPPA laws was AIDS. Your company knows your health status, as they should, since they are insuring you. I have known one person, peripherally, who had an abortion. She was the girlfriend of a good friend of mine. This was decades ago. After having two kids, and one miscarriage, my wife encouraged me to have a vasectomy. Most of my friends and neighbors were doing so. This was because our wives would not have to be on the pill. It was good all around. It was also covered 100% on insurance. My wife actually bought me a $200 bottle of scotch. I was allowed to watch all the football I wanted all weekend. What could be better. What was really interesting was the conversation I had with the urologist. I asked him about the different procedures and told him about friends who had these. He was appalled that we would talk about it. The reality was that everyone did. Privacy in medical procedures. Come on man!
    1
  7004. Is this guy for real? Basing policy decisions on polls of the German people? Russia has a food reason to want the pipeline damaged. That way they can avoid contractual issues. I cannot say that is the actual case, but it is a plausible explanation. It is at least as plausible as a survey of people who have no more information that any of the rest of us. As for Russia winning, I think there are lots of counterexamples. Israel is the best. A much smaller country with western weapons and training vs Soviet weapons and training. Another is the second Gulf War (OIF). In the first Gulf War the US and allies used overwhelming force with about 500K troops against Iraq's 1M regular troops and 850K reservists, most of whom had recent combat experience in the war with Iran. In OIF the US went in with under 200K troops against a force over twice that size. There are other examples. I mention all this because the only reason given for Russia winning is size. Shallow analysis.
    1
  7005. @lati long Can't agree with you there. While Russia deployed about 150K (more if you include troops from the breakaway regions, Chechens and mercenaries), their total army before the war was almost 1M. So, they theoretically could have pulled in other forces from around Russia. As for the west supporting Ukraine, there are at least two very good reasons for it to do so. First, to facilitate Ukraine giving up their nuclear weapons, Russia, the US and UK signed the Budapest Memorandum. The obligation to support Ukraine's territorial integrity has a solid geopolitical basis. Second, the fact is that Russia, if successful in Ukraine, will not stop there. Because of their population situation, this is their last chance to do anything along those lines. For the western allies it is best to support the Ukrainians in destroying the Russian military on their territory. Cheap at twice the price, and quite possible. I personally do not think that Russia and China will exist in their current forms in ten to twenty years. It may be sooner. They will both likely devolve into a grouping of regional warlords. This has happened in China many times in the past. The last time only 100 years ago.
    1
  7006. My assumption, for a while, is that China would start a war in this region. Xi needs a war. He has been stirring up war fever in China for a while. He would like to attack Taiwan, but there is no way the PLA army is up to it. Their navy is also a joke when compared to their adversaries. They will probably wait for Russia to fall apart before moving in that direction. So, India provides a viable access of advance for them. India should be aware. The Russians will not, and now cannot, come to India's aid with weapons. They have become a vassal state of China's.
    1
  7007. Well, who would have thunk it. Direct state involvement with the capital markets not going well. Does Xi not have any actual economic or financial advisors? Wait, I know the answer to that one. It is NO! Pettis' comment was indeed mild. The whole idea of government VC money is batsh*t crazy. Every time it has been tried in the US, generally in association with "green" technology, it has failed. It failed under Obama, and it failed under Biden. This situation is another indicator that China's development was always due to outside capital, expertise and markets. Xi is quickly returning China back to Maoist times. For those that keep saying China is an essential part of the world economy, I say bunkum. What was the world doing prior to the ascension of China to the WTO? What was happening during the Cold War when both China and the Soviet Union were isolated economically? As President Joe likes to say, "C'mon, man!"
    1
  7008. Conscript forces can be effective in the defensive role? Where do you get that idea? What about Iraq in both the Gulf wars the US was involved in and the Iran/Iraq war?
    1
  7009. The whole idea that China and Russia will define a new world order is ludicrous. Geopolitical analysts predict that China will not exist in its current form by the end of this decade. From what I am seeing, this is a very reasonable expectation. Russia was also predicted to break, although predictions were for 10 or 20 years. Now, with the way this war is going, I think the timeframe has shrunk to one or two years. The world will indeed become multipolar, but you must remember that this is the way it was before the end of WWII. The order that is spoken of was created by the US after WWII to contain the Soviet Union. And it worked, but that was 30 years ago. So, we are heading back to the "natural" state of affairs in international relations. It will not be determined by Russia and China.
    1
  7010. You should read and watch George Friedman on the EU. He is of the opinion that the EU will devolve in the way you say. The EU actually has no real way to impose these measures if, as is the case here, enough countries and population rebel against it. I think that the deemphasis of the EU and the integration process is a very likely outcome. I don't see Germany backing down. The auto industry is too big. The reality is that EVs are not ready for prime time, as they say. It is not even clear if they are more environmentally friendly than ICE vehicles.
    1
  7011. On your concern that the cap on migrants might be raised by a possible future government I think you have to consider your previous statements on democracy. If a future, duly elected, government wants to lift the number of migrants, then that reflects the will of the people. It is not a problem. In fact, is the essence of a democratic process. Let Labor run on the issue. Of course, if the Conservatives do not use that as a campaign issue, then they are remiss in their duty to their principles.
    1
  7012. Biden's whole approach to energy and Russia seems to indicate something else going on here. The whole thing about Trump being a Russian agent is all backwards. It was Obama, or at least his advisors and Hillary. That is where they came up with the idea. I say this, going back to the Obama era, because much of Biden's staff come from that group. If you were a Russian, you could not have played it out better.
    1
  7013. One reason a lot of European capital gravitates to the US is low energy prices. If the US gets its act together again (after the Biden disaster) then the price will go even lower. So, companies that produce steel, petrochemicals, etc. are quietly beefing up their US presence. There is no way Europe can compete with this.
    1
  7014. I tend to agree with Congressman Turner that NATO should respond. The only point I disagree with him on is this idea that North Korean troops have no place in Europe. It seems weird to me. What about all those westerners in Asia over the years? I am talking about after WWII. The US has one of its most powerful divisions in South Korea as well as troops in Japan. The US and the British, among others, also fought in Korea in the 1950s. The US fought in Vietnam, along with other Australians and New Zealanders, among others. So, while I am not thrilled with the North Koreans sending troops, it is nothing out of the ordinary. What do you think?
    1
  7015. Paris is know as the City of Lights, not the city of love. Get it right.
    1
  7016. China does not have access to those resources. They talk as if they do, but look at the chaos in Afghanistan. You can't do large scale mining, and get the product out of the country, if you don't have security. Look at what is happening to Chinese projects in Pakistan. Chinese workers and being killed and projects in unstable areas are running into major problem. The Chinese will have to put a lot of their own people in Afghanistan to run and operate any mines. How will that go with the Taliban, ISIS and Al Qaeda? How will these groups view trying to reign in a Muslim separatist movement for Xingjian? The Taliban itself is not unified. We just need to keep the pressure on and the whole thing will fall apart.
    1
  7017.  @elvirabary  You are very welcome. Looking forward to being able to read the novel.
    1
  7018.  @crackersmcfee2584  Well, that is just fine if these choices did not have effects on the total healthcare system. In the WSJ this weekend there was a long article about people conceived by IVF who wanted to know where they came from. This is of course, a first world problem.
    1
  7019.  @pleco101  Well, that's fine, except that healthcare is paid for by all, no matter what type of system you have. These are not natural processes. IVF is not your child. In most cases it is used to join a sperm or egg with an outside sperm or egg. This is driven by infertility of on or the other of the partners. It is not your child in the way natural conception is. If you cannot see that, then you are very uneducated.
    1
  7020. The division between the parties was endemic throughout American history. You should try reading about it sometime. The convergence between the parties was a product of WWII and the prosperity that followed, when the US was 50% of the world economy (because we and allies had, by necessity destroyed the rest). The convergence you assume was only a small portion of our history. Get educated, why don't you.
    1
  7021.  @uwanttono4012  The US has gone through many periods of instability and realignment. That is what happens in democratic societies. No one ever said it was easy. There is a good book by George Friedman titled "The Storm Before the Calm". You might want to read it. I am old enough to have experienced a period more volatile than today. If you think that Xi's communism will move China forward, then you are sorely mistaken. Xi will tank the system, and there are more and more people saying that. And that is backed up by actual events happening right now.
    1
  7022.  @dvidli4042  The China threat is not a theory. The CCP repeatedly threatens the US and the whole western world. If China is a developing country, then why is it spending so much money on the military (and more than that on internal security)? Who is threatening to invade China (well, maybe Russia)? As for the US wanting to see China backward and poor, you are just ignorant of history and development. The whole idea of opening up to China is to have them develop enough to be able to buy high end American goods. The whole idea of development assistance to any country is to help them move up the value chain. As for the wellbeing of citizens, you must be joking. The CCP has no interest in the citizenry. Their actions in the last few years have proven that.
    1
  7023. Lord Skidelsky is mistaken a bit on the US role. It is not one that the electorate wanted. George H. W. Bush, the President at the end of the Cold War wanted to have a conversation, both within the US and around the world, about what comes next. He was voted out of office in favor of a candidate whose campaign had a tag line "It's the economy, stupid." All US Presidents since them have been progressively more populist. George W. Bush actually ran on a platform of reduced global commitments and avoidance of "nation building". Then 9/11 happened. Actually, I was living in England at the time. In addition, one has to understand that US defense posture (this is published periodically and publicly available) has shifted from "stability maintenance" (the world policeman role) to "force projection" (protecting American interests). Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently has been saying publicly that we are in multipolar world order. Countries like China, Russia and India, among others have been calling for this for some time now. Well, now they have it.
    1
  7024.  @Tzizenorec  As for the standard for NK troops, these were reportedly some of their "elite" troops that were sent.
    1
  7025.  @Tzizenorec  Granted.
    1
  7026.  @paha4209  Fine as far as it goes. Almost doesn't cut it. Look at WWII. In both major theatres the eventual losers won big at first. The primary reason was the same as in Korea. The "western powers" were not prepared for war. When they got serious, it was serious.
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  7027. Tony, I appreciate your including the Dimon quote. China has lost most, if not all, their financial champions in the US. Even Dalio. The fact is that these supply chain decisions were driven by those financial champions. Chinese businesses, prior to Xi, also did a good job of reaching out to US and other western firms. They did the work. I was intimately familiar with one family. They owned thirteen factories in China. They sent one of the younger family members to live in the US to build up their business. This was not high-tech stuff. Mostly finished paper products. He was successful. They gave him $5M as a bonus (he immediately bought a Bently and a nice house). They also came to the US to court customers. I was at one typical meeting. It was held at the men's lounge at a private country club. The head of the family was there. The expensive Scotch was flowing (I went away with a bottle of 50-year-old Macallan). Full disclosure, I was a customer. I had a pallet of glossy brochures printed by them for my business at the time. To contrast this, US companies in many fields, we are talking about business-to-business, advertised their products in expensive product catalogs. I had one friend who had an electronics component manufacturing company and saw this up close. I also saw it in my consulting. These catalogs could cost up to $5K. I remember reading in the US based WSJ about some entrepreneurs at the time wanting to put this on the web and making it much, much cheaper and easier.
    1
  7028. I watched her speech when it was given. I teared up. My grandparents came to US with 4th grade educations at the beginning of the 20th century. All their children graduated from high school and some went on to get university degrees. ALL of the grandchildren graduated from college, with many Masters, PhDs and some MDs. This truly is the land of opportunity. This woman embodies the best of what we are and I hope she goes far in politics. She is a leader we can all look up to.
    1
  7029. The comment at 3:45 by the interviewer is shows ignorance of what Wagner is. Yes, during the Bakhmut (which she horribly mispronounces all the time) campaign they used the prisoners as cannon fodder. But that is not what the core Wagner is, and I don't think that the prisoners were the bulk of the force that went into Russia. Wagner is primarily made up of professional military who have left the official army to become mercenaries. They are generally highly trained and experienced. Prior to this war they were (are) used in other parts of the world as traditional mercenaries. So, repeating that trope about Wagner being prisoners is just bad journalism.
    1
  7030. We have lots of historical data about how humans coped with ice ages and other climate events. Our species did not die out. I would also caution against using the long term climate models we have today. As far as I can tell, few, if any, can account for the past data, so projecting to the future is not really valid. Don't forget that the whole climate change craze started with a prediction of a coming ice age.
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  7031. "Brutal" Stalinist regime. I think the "brutal" is redundant.
    1
  7032. Of course, what you ignore is the 43 votes for the candidates who have already been eliminated. Where do they go?
    1
  7033. At about 9:50, the issue is not only the public sector, but many private sector companies as well. When I worked for GE in the 1980s, Jack Welch said that we did not have to spend all our capital budget, if not justified, and that we would not be penalized the next year, No one believed him. I was the CIO of a plant, and if we were falling short of spending, I was directed buy as many computers as I could to spend that budget. It made for a lot of tense weeks at the end of the year.
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  7034. She is not bad looking but she is kind of skinny for me. I like curvier women. Oh, and I am a Republican, and have had the same attitude towards women for at least 50 years.
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  7035. The issue of bonuses in China puzzles me. If there is a bonus plan compensation is usually divided into base salary and at-risk compensation (i.e., bonus). Bonuses are usually based on some performance measure. Working hard is not a performance measure. It has to be something related to business results. It could be a general bonus based on the organization's performance. It could be a set of goals set for the individual. Often, in my extensive experience, it is a combination of both. The point is that you live on the base salary, and then use the bonuses to upgrade somehow. Perhaps you put the money toward a new car or an upgrade to your home, etc. Or you may use the bonus to pay off the home early or invest. That way, if the bonus is not there or not what you expected, you are still able to live within your means. If you assume a bonus. and spend accordingly, then you open yourself up to disappointment and failure. What I am constantly seeing in China is ignorance of how things work, even by the educated. Between these bonus issues and the workers who continue to work without being paid what I see is a population at a very low level of development. It even comes down to how people look at their mortgages and a misunderstanding of how such things work and why. Don't forget that Japan was expected to surpass the US in GDP. Theirs is now about 20% that of the US. Then it was China. They have probably reached their high-water mark, or close to it. At least Japan became rich before going through about three decades of painful restructuring. Heck, even the EU was set to challenge the US. The EU as an organization is probably not long for this world. The goal is not to compete with the US, or anyone else, but to adapt and grow, not to compete on a national basis.
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  7036. That may be, but I never heard of it mentioned as such, and I have spent a lot of time there.
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  7037. I am wondering why something like the American Volunteer Group (Flying Tigers) has not been set up in Ukraine. The Flying Tigers were actually set up by the US to help protect China prior to US involvement in WWII. In the Korean War, Soviet pilots flew active combat missions. In the Vietnam War Soviet pilots acted as instructors "in country", but don't seem to have flown combat missions. So, the idea that is would somehow be escalatory or unprecedented to have US or other NATO personnel either fly missions, maintain jets, or train Ukrainians in Ukraine is historically unsupported.
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  7038. Yes, the world will break into at least two blocks. The US led west and the "east" centered on China and Russia. Then, China and Russia will implode. That is what Mr. Ellwood seems to lack an understanding of. In fact, China and Russia were only able to develop as they did because of inclusion in the US led order. Outside of it, they are nothing. There will be some discomfort for a while, but after that a new order will be created. The world without China and Russia is actually the world we had before the fall of the Soviet Union. We did fine without them. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. China was admitted to the WTO in 2001. You have to go back before that. After WWII, Japan was the manufacturing powerhouse. Before that it was the US. Both are actually still rather large. There is nothing unique about China being the "world's factory". That changes over time. A lot is being drawn back to North America. Other stuff is going to Southeast and South Asia. China does the labor intensive low end stuff. That is relatively easy to move. So, don't worry, be happy.
    1
  7039. I look forward to your videos, but you deserve some time off. As for the decision making issue, Peter Zeihan and others have been talking about this for some time now. Zeihan also regularly talks to the CIA. So, I don't think US policy makers are as disconnected from the reality in Beijing as stated. As for achieving nuclear superiority, it would require China to increase its number of warheads by more than a factor of ten. If that started to happen, it would be relatively easy for the US to increase its arsenal, at a faster pace than China can. That of course ignores the qualitative differences in the delivery systems as well as defensive capabilities.
    1
  7040.  @jswjr6001  Actually, in Vietnam Hanoi and Haiphong were extensively bombed. It was not carpet bombing but I am fairly sure that civilian casualties were not a concern. As for your last point, I don't get the issue. These are the wars we have, not some theoretical constructs. To each his own, I guess.
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  7041. Just watching a video on another channel that concentrates on events in China. They point out that the central bank of India and the government are pushing back on using the RMB for paying for imports from Russia. The more I see of this topic, the less relevant it becomes. The whole idea of the BRICS is ludicrous. You have one country, Russia, a major arms supplier to two others, China and India, who are waging a border skirmish that threatens to break out into all-out war. This is not farfetched. They have fought wars in this area before. So, tell me, who is going to park their foreign reserves with any of these countries?
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  7042. The price of oil coming down is due mostly to demand. This is partly due to China and its lockdowns. As the price at the pump goes up, demand also goes down. This is what scares the oil producing nations. I lived through the oil shocks of the 1970s. In the 1979 oil shock, the price tripled. Cars got about 10 miles per gallon. Today, even my mid-sized SUV gets over 25MPG, and this is not great. Of course, it doesn't bother me because I drive less than 4K miles per year. What will happen is that vehicles will get more efficient, and demand will go down. If the US changes course, it will produce enough for its own needs, and will be one of the major exporters in the world. This could happen, although it will take about two and a half years. If that happens, Russia is screwed. Their oil and gas industry are dependent on foreign expertise, which has been withdrawn. That is an aspect I do not hear enough about. By the way, I like your channel. Keep up the good work.
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  7043. You make a statement at about 4:55 that is profound, especially considering your own work. The statement is about there being no more than two time derivatives. You go on to say that there is no deeper reason for this except it doesn't describe what we see. Isn't that the whole point of physics and science in general? All the other stuff that theoretical physicists do, such as in string theory and to an extent in cosmology, is basically metaphysics. This may well have an effect on the analysis being done in this paper.
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  7044. Explains a lot.
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  7045. This is not a criticism of you, but when I hear "the new green OPEC" I want to scream. I also hear people say that about hydrogen and other new commodity technologies. These have nothing to do with what OPEC is. OPEC is as powerful as it was (it no longer is so powerful) because they control a commodity that was thought to be declining. What the past decade or so has shown is that this is not the case. Another aspect of this is that comparing a hard to find and process commodity has nothing to do with either a manufactured product (solar cells) or an abundant resource (hydrogen). Aagh! It is just another scam by investment groups to rake in money.
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  7046. Actually, cauldron is German concept from WWII. The German word is kesselschlacht. In the German case, they were intent on destroying the forces in the kessel.
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  7047. I understand that she slept her way to the top.
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  7048. The only problem with avocados is the amount of water they need. They are grown in places where water is a problem. I just got some, but they are very "raw" and the temperature in my house is not high, so they are still not ready.
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  7049. At about 4:00 you mention Pritchard His statement is either ignorant or willfully misleading. I have seen on other channels reports that spending on venues during the holiday was minimal. Yes, people traveled, but they did not spend once they got there. I am beginning to get the impression that many of these analysts in the financial world are making stuff up in order to move markets. Frankly, this borders on the crime of market manipulation.
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  7050. In a normal, capitalist economy this would be a time to buy for those with a high risk tolerance. The problem is that China is not a normal, capitalist economy. The political and geopolitical risks have to be included in any calculation. From that point of view, this is a time to sell and cut losses.
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  7051.  @OrangeAveng3r  Indubitably!
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  7052.  @LK-hy5jz  You are welcome. I chose red lentils for two reasons. One, they seem to be among the highest in protein. Two, I can get them from a US source grown in the US. I am trying to source my food from US sources. Part of this is political, I admit. The other is concerns about food safety. I have seen horror stories about olive oil from Italy. Of course, anything from China is suspect (look for reports of Chinese food practices and endemic safety problems). I mentioned the red lentils, but I have also found olive oil from California which is quite good. I can get soy sauce from a major brand made in the US. Of course, the nuts are easy. The seafood is US sourced wild caught.
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  7053. Jordan, don't keep interrupting your guests. You have then on because they have something to say. They are the ones we watch to hear. You have a lot to say, but perhaps you should make some videos that are not interviews. I have seen some of your recent interviews where you did not constantly interrupt, and they were great. The last one was with Stephen Blackwood. Wonderful.
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  7054. You are all still concentrating on the liberal arts and sociology in out schools. These are increasingly less important in our schools than the STEM fields. They are also less important in the economy. The time has long passed when someone could get a liberal arts major as an undergraduate and then an MBA and rise to the top of our financial firms, for example. It now requires an analytic background. You are in fact fighting the last war. Engineers, mathematicians, financial types are really taking over. The last elections and referenda in the US, UK and Australia show this. The woke (whatever that really mean) are vocal, but the bulk of people who actually vote in elections are not of this ilk. Recall that after Trump was elected there were a number of protestors arrested in Seattle (I think) who had not actually voted. These people are actually irrelevant, and are turning off the bulk of the electorate. This is why most of the media have become irrelevant.
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  7055.  @phonic0photon  I am not saying that the liberal arts have no place. I received a great liberal arts education at Villanova while studying computer science, math and statistics. I was always interested in the classics and even as a boy read widely in them. In high school I was in the top group in English, as well as math and science and actually tutored English in my senior year. I get the value of liberal arts. On the other hand we have too many people in these fields. This can be seen by the debt these people incur, with little chance of paying it back in many cases. Another statistic that is useful to know is that 40% of college grads are in jobs that do not require a college degree. Few if any of these are in STEM fields. If we ever had "free" college education in the US, it would be like the European systems, where the state decides how many places for each field are available.
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  7056. That statement by Twitter is so outrageous on the face of it. Twitter is a money making entity. The users on Twitter are not their customers. They are the product. Their customers are the advertisers.
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  7057. Don't they teach you about the Russian revolutions of the early 20th century. This is par for the course and has nothing really to do with Putin.
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  7058. Jeffrey is someone I generally respect, but his Trump phobia gets in the way. No matter where you stand on Trump, he has not been running the country for the last four years. As I often point out, the Biden administration is a rerun of the Obama administration. You have many of the same players and policies, both in economic affairs as well as foreign affairs. Recall that Obama emphasized diplomacy over all other considerations. This tracks precisely with what Biden is trying to do in the Middle East. Recall that when the "Arab Spring" seemed to be reaching Iran, Obama did nothing to help it along. The US could be doing a lot more to help those in Russia who might want change. To worry about this being seen to be interference is laughable. We know the Russians are doing precisely this in the US. Even in Ukraine, Biden refuses to take decisive action to help Ukraine to win. Compared to what the US spent on the Global War on Terror (GWT) the support to Ukraine is a mere rounding error, for example. The US should equip as many Ukranian brigades as they can raise troops for. In fact, their issue today is that they don't have enough equipment for the ones they have. Then there is the issue of the Russian Central Bank assets, which I agree should be immediately sent to Ukraine. There are so many ways the US could turn the tide decisively in this war.
    1
  7059.  @erikdavies2572  Actually, I am wondering why Operation Dragoon was not a replacement for Operation Overlord. It just seems that attacking into a heavily fortified position such as Normandy is not the best plan. Also, I think that a port in the South of France would be a lot easier to capture early on. I may well be all wrong about that. It is just that I have never seen a justification for not attacking through the south, so I was just wondering.
    1
  7060. In the last 150 years the use of masses of soldiers worked only once for Russia. From the Crimean War through to just before WWII, they were not successful. In WWI, they had many more troops than the Germans, but were defeated. Their soldier were poorly trained, equipped and poorly led. Sound familiar. In the 1920s they attacked Poland and lost. This incident prompted them to strive for Socialism in one country, which was antithetical to the ideology. In the Winter War against Finland, they gained some territory, but that war was basically a draw. In WWII they only won because the western allies kept almost 100 divisions fighting in the west. If those divisions had been in the east, I expect they might have lost. By the way, the kill ratio between Nazis and Soviets was about (depending on the figures used) 1 to 8. That is very similar to what is being reported in Ukraine.
    1
  7061. Gosh, Greg, I thought she was "the evil Shannon Bream".
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  7062. You guys are very ill informed about the US. Trump cannot run again. The 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution bars him from running again. That is a very basic fact. I do agree that Europe needs to do more. A lot more. They may have waited too long, however. As to Putin rebuilding his military and making further attacks on the rest of Europe, I don't see it. First, he took 20 years to build up the military he attacked Ukraine with in 2022. He has lost that. During that time, he had lots of oil and natural gas revenue and access to western technology. He has neither now. Second, and related, Ukraine has caused so many casualties in the Russian military that to attack further he would have to do a general mobilization. He might have to anyway. That really could bring down his regime. Third, also related, the Russian Federation is more and more unstable. It was already on borrowed time before the invasion. Now that has accelerated.
    1
  7063.  @laszlomolnar9091  True.
    1
  7064. A brigade in the Ukrainian Army, as in many armies, is about 4,000 soldiers. So, five brigades is probably about 20,000 soldiers. You do know that all this information is available on the Internet, don't you?
    1
  7065.  @Shineon83  I have to generally agree with you. I believe it is cultural. Russia is a similar situation, I believe. Another way to put it is that to the CCP the Chinese people are not citizens but subjects. My only reason for some hope is that in the current time they have had more exposure to the outside world than in the past.
    1
  7066.  @Shineon83  Excellent point.
    1
  7067. Freedom of expression in CCP run China? Who are you kidding? Do you not know what the second C in CCP stands for? Let me refresh your memory. It is "Communist". Does anyone there know anything about communism? The communist ideology of the CCP is based on Marxism-Leninism. Don't they teach anything in the schools over there? Now, Xi is moving China to a nationalist form of communism, with his "Chinese characteristics". Does anyone in China know what the is? It is National Socialism. For a feeling of what they are in for just look at Germany in the 1930s. The current economic system in China now resembles those times. I mean highly resembles it. I have actually heard and read more and more analysts referring to Xi's rule as fascist. This is quite appropriate.
    1
  7068. You should be able to opt out of having your car "spy" on you in your personal vehicle. On that I would agree. On the other hand, a corporate vehicle belongs to the corporation, not the individual. The owner, in that case, has every right to track the vehicle. The thing about GPS is that it is a receive only system. It is not the GPS that signals back, but some other type of communication device connected to the GPS receiver. There are companies that sell such devices, generally for fleet management. Your cell phone can be one of those devices. If you use navigation software, it has to communicate your location back to the central server so that information such as traffic, etc. can be displayed or routes chosen. So, the solution is obvious. If the jammers only worked within the car it was installed on, then it would not present a problem. Frankly, no one else would know. The fact that it will generally disrupt others is the problem.
    1
  7069. Well, can't argue with the title. Just kidding, in case you were wondering.
    1
  7070. I just want to comment after watching the first 30 seconds. I have seen some of the issues up close, so I am interested in how it will play out. Then I will watch the rest of the video. First, you have to realize that the EU is a protectionist cartel. Second, note that the EU does not have a trade deal with the US, one of its biggest trading partners. The reason is chlorinated chicken. Look it up.
    1
  7071. Tyrus, you have a problem there. Lots of young black people use the N-word. I was talking to one of my sons about this when he was in HS. He was very uncomfortable with it. It is imperative for the black community to stop using it. It is in the music and popular black culture.
    1
  7072. Several years ago, I had a tour of a waste treatment plant in the Chicago suburbs. My son was doing a science fair project and we knew the director of the plant. The reality is that the water coming out at the end of the process is drinkable. We just don't use it here because we have Lake Michigan. So, the last step, before releasing it into a local river, or using it to irrigate a local golf course (grey water), is to remove the chlorine. If we used properly processed wastewater, we could lower stress in aquifers in places where that is the only source of water.
    1
  7073. Are you working class?
    1
  7074.  @johnkoh5207  An you forget, those countries either hosted people who attacked the US or threatened the US directly. Get over it
    1
  7075.  @MrManny075  You clearly don't know what you are talking about. Identifying autocrats is easy, and China has one. Have you seen the current protests? It is finally beeaking.
    1
  7076.  @jiancai969  I don't have those statistics, but I just heard again that China spends more on internal security than on their military. The source was Gen. Jack Keane.
    1
  7077.  @Fr.VeniceLAI  I tend to agree with what you say. In East Asia I tend to see the Chinese people as being closer to Americans than, say, the Japanese. The Chinese I have met (many born in China, some survivors of the Cultural Revolution) are very entrepreneurial. A China that observed the same basic rules and freedoms that we have in the US would be a great economy, and a great partner to the US (and the rest of the world). As it is, the world looks likely to break into various blocks. This was the norm throughout history. The last seventy years is a aberration. The US and China will not be in the same block.
    1
  7078.  @medeliworld  You obviously know nothing about the US. It has been worse in my lifetime (admittedly long) and even before that. That is part of the dynamic of the country. The US is a totally different society as compared to Europe and India. In fact, I would equate India more with the EU. Before colonization the country we call India was a conglomeration of separate states or kingdoms. The British put the whole thing together. Unlike the US, but like the EU, you have nations with a long history, different languages and different levels of development. Here in the US, we are going through one of our periodic political and social realignments. Only once did it spark a war, and the country did not split. I fully expect the EU, in its present form, to break up. This has to do with many things, not the least being demographics. India, I expect, will pull through. They seem to have some strong national institutions, and reasonable demographics. Pakistan, on the other hand is quite likely to split up.
    1
  7079. @Jay Strauss My best friends when I first went to Uni. were Indian. This was in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium. Got to know lots of Indian women. Always liked them.
    1
  7080. @Jay Strauss No, I never said that! I meant just the opposite. I have known lots of beautiful Indian women.
    1
  7081. Well, if the Atlantic is often referred to as "the pond" then the Baltic can be referred to as a "lake", don't you think?
    1
  7082. The Republican Party has to change. Elections are about majorities. The Democrats built a majority around race, ethnicity and "identity". That is now being challenged and that is mostly Trump.
    1
  7083.  @alapaticornell4391  Seems like it. Actually, that question is a satirical one my ex-wife came up with whenever the weather was colder than "expected".
    1
  7084. Just the title is interesting. Considering Ukraine's situation, Russia's tactics and world conditions, I don't know what the chances of a "good" deal even are. Just to give a flavor for these world conditions, the major countries whose leaders have talked concretely about contributing to a peacekeeping force, France and Britian, are experiencing pushback from their own citizens. There are also questions about their ability to do so, in any event. In the US support is waning for Ukraine among the electorate. There are also geopolitical factors in play. The sad fact is that the Ukranians have no hope of getting back all their territory militarily. The critical counteroffensive, the one in the south, failed almost two years ago. Neither Ukraine nor Russia is any good at offensive warfare. Before you go off on me consider that the three counteroffensives that were successful mainly relied on subterfuge (a good thing in war) and Russian incompetence. They were then stopped and have become stalemates. The Kursk operation is now looking like a it is at risk.
    1
  7085. All this mania with drones is getting out of hand. They have advanced, and the Ukrainians are using them creatively, but have you noticed that the Ukrainians have not had much luck with offensive operations. Kursk was an anomaly, since Russia had no real forces there. Even the offensive in 2022 in Kharkiv relied more on subterfuge and disorganization on the Russian side. This is not to take away from the brilliant way that offensive was conducted, but it really has not been repeated. While the drones, and the way they are used, are great for defense, I don't see them being as useful as airpower in offensive operations. I would take aircraft and air superiority with advanced artillery over drones every time. Of course, it doesn't have to be an either or. Send in the B-52, B-1B and B-2 bombers. As it seems that the US wants to phase out the A-10 send those to Ukraine. Of course, this all should have been done a long time ago. Now I am seeing people openly talking about how Biden, and the German chancellor, never sent Ukraine what was needed to take back their country and win, who had refrained from saying such things before.
    1
  7086. These are the descendants of the people who fought for the CCP during the civil war. Thanks for pointing this out. It should clarify for people in the west just what we are dealing with. Marx assumed that the communist revolution would occur in developed countries with a strong industrial proletariat. He was thinking of countries like Germany and the US. Instead, communist revolutions took place in countries with large peasant populations like Russia and China. It is not hard to see why. The revolution promised people that they could take land and other stuff from the wealthy. Just take it, by force. Of course, this makes sense. Marx got so much wrong. His analysis was so faulty that you could reasonably say that anyone who follows his ideas today is either stupid, or a thief. In fact, almost all the 19th century philosophers were basically incompetent, although academia will tell you how brilliant they are. Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx and many others laid the intellectual groundwork for the horrors of the 20th century and now the 21st century.
    1
  7087. The Senator mentioned the "reduction in force", or RIF as I remember it. My father worked at a government weapons lab, and I remember hearing him talk about RIFs when I was a kid. That was about half a century or more ago.
    1
  7088. Pure TDS. It doesn't matter who likes who. First, Trump is totally correct in saying the killing has to stop. Both Ukraine and Russia were in demographic decline before the war. Now it is much worse. Ukraine cannot win the war on their terms, so what's the point. The other thing, and something the Europeans don't get, is the geopolitical aspect. Russia is much more valuable to the US, and the west in general, as some sort of ally. This is in reference to China, the real threat to the west. What we are seeing is basically a reverse of the opening to China by Nixon. That was done primarily to open up a second front on the Soviet Union.
    1
  7089. I am a fan of Diane's, and while she is correct about Putin lighting fires all around to destabilize things, what we have to understand is that this was the strategy of the Soviet Union all through the Cold War. Russia, like the Soviet Union, especially after Stalin's death, is run by the intelligence services, of which Putin was a part. I miss the Cold War. I got to do a lot of very interesting research with unlimited funding. Now, what we are seeing, is Cold War 2.0. If this is world war, then it is the fourth, not the third. By the definition being used now the Cold War was WWIII. We know how to deal with this situation. Dust off the "long telegram".
    1
  7090. I lived in the UK in the early 2000s, Even then there was a fear in the colder months about flu and overwhelming the NHS. From what I saw back then, the NHS is not fit for purpose. It certainly has not performed well during the pandemic. The Kung Flu response is not the only thing. The NHS is supposed to handle all health issues in the UK. Now there is a massive backlog of other treatments that may result in at least as many deaths as the Kung Flu. Waiting times were bad when I lived there, and had not improved much prior to the current crisis. This is a disaster and just goes to show how socialist policies always fail.
    1
  7091. Well, I'll have to throw out that turmeric I bought. Mentioning AI in the image problem is a bit gratuitous. Of the situations I have seen have there is no AI involvement. I actually ran into a situation where the data had been faked. I was doing some research for a statistics graduate degree. My professor gave me some data and a paper to work off of. It was EEG data. It seemed a bit strange, and when I went to get a fresh copy of the paper it had "Redacted" in red across all pages.
    1
  7092. Another example of an AI system gone awry, in a military context, is the test of AI in a drone. My understanding is that one was told to abort the mission and return to base. The AI decided to attack the tower at its own base. As for the Tesla AI, I have taken a couple of Ubers where the car was a Tesla. I asked the drivers if they used the automated driving feature. They said no. Tells you something.
    1
  7093.  @ChadWoolley  Well, first you have an Air Force Colonel saying it did, then a spokesperson saying it did not and the Colonel's remarks were taken out of context. Reading the Colonel's words, I don't see how that's possible. Have you worked with the military? I don't say you can't be correct but be careful of who you listen to in these situations.
    1
  7094. In the US we call such people "neocons". What should we call war mongers on the left. Maybe "neocommies" or "neocomms"?
    1
  7095. While the Russians are doing very badly, the Ukrainians have no hope of winning militarily either. Both sides are dogged at defense and suck at offense. Ukraine has had four counteroffensives. Three were successful because of subterfuge (good in warfare) but they ultimately petered out. The fourth, and most important, failed. It failed because they went up against well prepared defenses and Ukraine does not have the equipment or strategic capabilities to succeed.
    1
  7096. Any investment, outside of simple savings, may result in loss of principal. Period. This disclaimer is on all equity products sold in the US. One invests in such "products" (securities) for a higher return. Higher return is only possible by taking on risk. Outside of US Government Treasuries, even bonds carry risk. That is why they are rated, so that people have an understanding of the risk they are taking on when seeking a higher return. This brings out the lack of sophistication of the Chinese investor. Of course, China being a communist country it is understandable. This is what happened to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The workers were given shares in the companies they worked at. They had no idea of what shares were. So, "unscrupulous" people swooped in and offered them what turned out to be ridiculously low prices for their shares. To the uneducated "worker" this was real money vs. this stock thing, so they took it. Of course, those "unscrupulous" people were generally the ones who were better educated and understood asset values.
    1
  7097. The last segment, and the remarks by the Chinese social scientist, are both telling and, to my mind very accurate. In the US, people who want to get involved in politics traditionally start at lower, local levels of the political system, i.e., local government. I worked with a guy who laid it out for me. He was going to run for a spot on the local homeowner's association, then move up to county government then to state and then to federal. If you look at our politicians, this is not all that unusual.
    1
  7098.  @youtubeusername2254  Biden is isolationist, in the way you make Trump out to be. Just look at Afghanistan. Actually, that debacle is most likely a major contributing factor in Russia's decision to invade in the first place. In addition, Biden has not actually laid out a strategy for US support for Ukraine. The last congressional package of Ukraine support requires him to do so. We'll see. His failure in this is a main contributing factor to the delays in the US Congress. All Biden has said is that we will support Ukraine for as long as it takes. The problem is he never told anyone what "it" is. Does he mean until Russia stops fighting? Does he mean until Ukraine wins on their terms? Something else? No one really knows. As for Trump, he is just doing what all presidents since Clinton have done. The US is becoming more populist and isolationist since that time. Actually, historically that has been the American preference. The last president to have an internationalist point of view was George H. W. Bush. He was the last one to have the experience and knowledge to forge a way forward in international relations after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He fervently wanted to have that conversation. He was voted out of office. His son George W. Bush actually ran on a platform of lessening US entanglements around the world. He was explicitly against "nation building". Then 9/11 hit. That was a detour. The US is now back on track. The current US electorate is not interested in keeping the peace everywhere. Personally, I think that is the right course. You also ignore that under Trump the Abraham accords were signed. Under Trump there were no new wars around the world. Under Biden things have gone to hell in a handbasket, as the saying goes. You may want to get educated on history, politics and foreign affairs before making such statements.
    1
  7099. Actually, CAD stands for Computer Aided Design, and is a lot more than drafting.
    1
  7100.  @LimDul  That is true, but in this case, it really refers to design. Just digitizing drafting does not get the design done fast, as in this case.
    1
  7101. Are you daft? Most of those funds came from the US. The US lost billions in military equipment, which was seized by the Taliban. How are they planning to pay that back? The Taliban is the defacto government but is not generally recognized. It has no real mandate, and certainly is not a valid part of the world political system. So, what is the status of these funds? Are you a Taliban supporter? Are you a terrorist supporter? Sounds like a yes on both counts.
    1
  7102. Merkel was a disaster in so many ways. Her cozying up to Russia and China now puts Germany at a strategic disadvantage. He decision to close down all of Germany's nuclear plants was just incredibly stupid. The impetuous for that decision was a tsunami in the Pacific in a country that sited a nuclear powerplant on the coast. This is a country that experiences more earthquakes than anywhere else I believe and has experienced tsunamis before. How stupid are these people? Merkel is from the former East Germany. If you told me she was a Russian plant, I would tend to believe you.
    1
  7103. Ferrys that carry trains are nothing new. There are at least three in the US, and many elsewhere.
    1
  7104. One time, when living in Winchester in the UK, I was going to London in my Alfa Romeo GTV with the 2,0L Twin Spark engine. I got into an impromptu race with a Jaguar XK and pulled back when we got to the top speed of my car (close to 140MPH). It was insane. I think it was an XKR.
    1
  7105. In my experience in the aerospace industry, we called the high level draftsmen "designers". These guys were great to work with. You could describe a problem you were having and they would come up with solutions that were practical and buildable. My father was this type of designer at an Army weapons lab that did fuses for everything from mortal shells to nukes. He even worked on the design of the bomb bay of the B-52. What these guys did was often incredible. He even did layouts of integrated circuits, up to the maximum size that a human could do. The drawings, that drove the manufacturing process were 35' long. After that it took software to do this.
    1
  7106. I tend to agree with you that banning words is bad. Controlling speech is bad. Actually, it was the English that really started it. My South Asian friends told me that they called people in India the N-word. I do understand the issue with it here in the US. I was talking to one of my sons, when he was in high school, about it once. He, and I, would never use it. On the other hand, he found it uncomfortable when black kids were calling each other the N-word at school.
    1
  7107. Peter, this is prescient. For one thing, this is the last time the Russians could have done something. The WSJ has an article today titled "Russia's Big Economic Problem: Not Enough Workers". Of course, if they had read your books (as I have) they could have written that article a while ago. As for the resilience of the Russian state, I tend to believe that it is much more fragile than you do. The PMCs are proliferating. The oligarchs are getting screwed, and that is a bad thing for Putin. In the current situation there is no real ideological underpinnings to the state. Don't forget that the Soviet Union only lasted a little over 70 years. Considering the time they were in power, and the relative ease of controlling the population and information compared to today, that is not a long time. I don't expect the current Russian state has anything like that amount of time. There is really nothing holding it together except the oligarchs. Don't mention the security services. They will go with whoever can pay them in the end, and the Russian state is running out of money.
    1
  7108. The waste is just stupidity. The fraud and abuse are criminal. Lock 'em up. That includes people who authorized it. Actually, about 20 years ago I was involved in a company that had devices that would help catch Medicaid and Medicare fraud. Just think about that. There was a big up front cost, but these programs would repay that cost very, very quickly.
    1
  7109. Utter wankery!
    1
  7110.  @nothinfancyholic2655  Well, that is one point of view. If you think EV is a technical term that someone who is not "tech savvy"" would not understand, then what must you think of the audience for these videos. Explanations of such basic stuff assume the lowest common denominator. If that is the case, then it demeans the whole audience.
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  7111. There are many great public schools in this country. The issue in minority communities has been a problem at least since the 1970s. When I lived in Wash., DC, there was an expose in the Washington Post about city students who could not read when they graduated. Then, whenever standards were tightened up minority activists, many parents, cried out. We need standards. Politicians who cannot stand up for this are just abrogating their responsibilities.
    1
  7112. China is not a great power. It really never has been. It last projected power, successfully, in the 15th century. Later it was humiliated by pathetically small (compared to China) European powers. Even the last dynasty was composed of "foreigners". Perhaps China should do something about the 600 million people existing on 1,000 yuan (about $140) per month within its own borders before spending trillions on a hare-brained geopolitical project. China is becoming old before becoming rich. It has fairly high outward migration and almost no inward migration.
    1
  7113. You do realize, I hope, that this concept appeared in science fiction decades ago. In addition, Musk's rockets and cars are not exactly earth shattering. There has been talk about commercial space launch for decades as well, from within the industry (I saw it firsthand). On the car front Musk has gone exactly the wrong way. Rather than building basic transportation at a reasonable price, and range, he keeps weighing down his cars with costly electronics and powerful engines. This is also the case for ICEs by the way, but that is another story. Range anxiety is still a driving factor, and the latest reports are that the sales growth of EVs is slowing down. More people are opting for plug-in hybrids, which make a lot of sense. Even Musk has acknowledged this.
    1
  7114. A slower talking Emily. I wonder if she got some coaching.
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  7115. Um, they have been given "defensive" intelligence, as I have seen reported. As for comparisons to Afghanistan, that is sort of silly. There are no active US troops in Ukraine. The US did not conquer Ukraine. It's not the same, or even similar, situation. The other thing is that the Europeans should be able to take up the slack. Their economies combined are ten times as large as Russia's. Their militaries, while too small, are much more powerful than Russia's, or Ukraine's, as far as weaponry, tactics and training.
    1
  7116. BRICS, what a joke. The G7 is a group of the economically most powerful democratic nations. They control the technology because they developed the technology. Ownership is important. One of the key drivers for the dissolution of the Soviet Union was their inability to match the west in technology. China is going through the same thing. No one is stopping them from developing anything they want. The reality is that they cannot even competently copy western advanced technology. During Soviet times this also became apparent. The other thing that makes BRICS irrelevant is the set of nations included. You have, of course, China which is rapidly imploding economically, and perhaps politically. Then there is Russia which cannot even defeat a smaller nation right on its borders. Brazil is vulnerable to trade disruption and is utterly dependent for foreign inputs for its agriculture. South Africa is also falling apart and can't even keep the lights on. Only India is healthy economically, and a good part of that is the fact that they are taking an increasing part of China's industry. They also routinely ban Chinese apps and investments. Oh, and by the way, they are close to war with China. Now, the new entrants. Saudi Arabia is looking for security guarantees but is still tied to the west economically. The US is close to abandoning that part of the world. The country that Saudi Arabia needs security help to defend itself is another new member, Iran. The UAE is in a similar position. Ethiopia is a nonentity. Egypt is still firmly in the western camp and dependent on it. Then there is Argentina. Wow! This is not a country I would want on my side. In addition, there seems to be a move in Argentina to dollarize. How the heck does that fit in? All in all this is good news for the G7. It actually weakens China.
    1
  7117.  @stischer47  Well put. Then they will strain it out for the gutter oil.
    1
  7118. Another European with little understanding of the situation. Europe has been freeloading off the US since the end of WWII. Even Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he was president, said so, and he was certainly a Europhile. There are videos on YouTube of Trump, in his first term, telling the German leadership at the time, that they were too dependent on Russian energy and spent too little on defense. They laughed at him. Who's laughing now? NATO was formed at a time when western Europe was actually prostrate. Don't forget that US troop strength in Europe during the Cold War (I miss the Cold War) was 500K reducing to "only" 300K at the end. There are still 100K there now. Now the economies of Europe are among the largest in the world, and on a per capita basis very wealthy. The EUs GDP is about ten times that of Russia's, their main adversary. Their population is larger than that of the US. With all this they spend too little on defense as a group, even with a war going on at their border. Their politicians used the so-called peace dividend to buy off voters with massive social programs rather than spending on their own defense. That was their choice, and it was only US defense spending that made it possible. The American electorate is no longer interested in that. If European governments step up to their responsibilities the US is glad to partner with them, but they have to show they are serious. As for Ukraine, Trump is correct when he says the killing needs to stop. Both Ukraine and Russia were in demographic decline before the war, now it is much worse. Both Ukraine and Russia are very poor at offensive warfare. Of four "counteroffensives" Ukraine has staged, three were successful primarily because of subterfuge (a good thing in warfare) and incompetence on the part of the Russians. The fourth failed when going up against prepared defenses. Russia's last really successful offensive was more than one and a half years ago and came of a catastrophic cost in Russian lives. We don't even know what the toll on the Ukrainian side was, but it is not insignificant. So, one has to ask, is it right to pump in more and more money to such a conflict? What is the goal?
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  7119. By the way, just after watching this video I saw one on another channel that echoes Pettis's remarks. There were excerpts from videos made by Chinese financial influencers, in China, stressing the need to increase local consumption. People there are starting to get it. Of course, the weakness of the CCP system is that there is no room for real debate that could influence the government, especially under Xi's regime.
    1
  7120.  @ernestkj  You have a point there. I was just thinking about the money they have squired away overseas as an escape fund. Even for that I was taking the low end of the estimate. The high end is $3T.
    1
  7121.  @ernestkj  Great example.
    1
  7122. Spreading disinformation is every American's right. There is nothing in the Constitution that says only "truthful" speech is allowed. When did this become a thing? I have every right, given me by the Constitution, to say whatever I want. There are limits, and these are sensible. They have nothing to do with veracity. The very idea of content moderation is stupid, and more importantly, Unamerican. If you don't understand this, then you are stupid. If you have a degree from an accredited university and still don't understand this, then you should demand your money back. If you still don't understand, then you should get off the internet before you harm yourself.
    1
  7123.  @Andy-P  Good point. Wait until they experience the "tofu dreg" projects China will bring them.
    1
  7124. India teamed up with the Soviet Union because the US supported Pakistan. On the other hand, the US was reluctant to get involved in both world wars because doing so would support the colonial powers of Europe and allow them to keep their empires intact. Thus, India rejected US support for a clearly colonial power, in the traditional sense, the Soviets. They did this not for an affinity for the Soviets/Russian Empire, but solely because of the rivalry with Pakistan. The Russian Empire was pressing down on the subcontinent. and that became a feature of the great power rivalry with Britian. Don't forget the COMINTERN. This was a clearly colonial effort to take over the world under Communism. It was, in actual fact, no different from the colonial empires of the 18th and 19th centuries. India must be considering its option about now. It has grown closer to the West by its participation in the Quad to counter China in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. Of course, now, with the invasion of Ukraine China and Russia are becoming closer. So, their ally and adversary are joining forces. They must also see that the Soviet/Russian equipment they have been buying as inferior. This has also been demonstrated when Pakistani aircraft (provided by the US) have had success against the Soviet era planes the Indians have. In fact, India is now buying advanced French aircraft instead. They actually pulled out of the program, as a foreign buyer and funder, to produce the 5th generation fighter that the Russians were producing. This has stalled the program. Russia sold its S400 AA missiles to India instead of China. How long will that last? India is in a bad place because of its relationship with Russia. Instead of being a part of the democratic West, it is stuck in the middle. Will it become a part of the autocratic east, or will it fully become a part of the West? As the world's largest democracy, it cannot do the former. It must choose.
    1
  7125.  @manoshinandy5180  Well, that's your opinion. I don't think it is born out by the facts.
    1
  7126.  @manoshinandy5180  Look, I have lots of experience with the defense establishment. Your "facts" are just not credible. By the time of Vietnam War the US was transitioning to the F4. In the early days the Air Force was not doing well. The Navy, which had their Top Gun school did much better. The Air Force upgraded their training and began to match the Navy in kill ratios. In Korea, both sides were fairly evenly matched. Since then, the US has done much better against Soviet equipped adversaries. So have the Israelis, using US and some French, aircraft. Even the Iranians, who had US aircraft, did well against the Iraqis in their war with them.
    1
  7127. Good analysis. As I like to say, "Don't fear the BRICS." I think he ignores the current situation in Russia and underplays the structural corruption in Russia. As for what China has done to Brazil, you have to remember that Japan did something similar to the US. It wasn't outright theft, but their government supported large conglomerates called keiretsu. I think things are loosening up there. In South Korea they are called chaebol. Same thing. We need to pressure these countries to dismantle or diminish state support for such firms.
    1
  7128.  @sashazxtt  How so?
    1
  7129. Germany is now permitting new coal (lignite) fired power plants. This in an environment where the Green Party is part of the government. Green Parties are losing support in many places. The UK is officially backing down on net-zero targets. We will see a lot of this soon. We see that backing off of the current technologies is happening, and it will only accelerate. Most of the promise is just a fantasy. What do you pay for when you "buy" electricity? It is not just the electrons. It is those electrons delivered reliably. The cost to do that with green tech is so much higher than the proponents are willing to admit. It was always all a scam. I have seen it up close during the development. Now I am also seeing the back-end problems. Recycling of turbine blades and solar panels will be horrendously expensive and ecologically damaging. Remember all the movements trying to force manufacturers (of just about anything) to cost in end-of-life impacts, etc. Well, guess who they did not do that for. Green tech. I could go on, but it is just getting my blood pressure up (I think).
    1
  7130.  @megggriffin1223  Oh, the horror!!!
    1
  7131.  @Cheesblenders4all  Good point.
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  7132. You make a lot of good points, but I the sociology analogy, while reasonable, is not as good as comparing astrophysics to archaeology or anthropology. In those fields a new pottery shard or a new bone fragment can upend all the previous theories. This actually happens on a regular basis. Working with new scientific ideas, from radiocarbon dating to DNA analysis, the practitioners in these fields often revise their models and theories. This is basically true of any field that relies on observation of past events rather than experiments. Thus, the sociology or medicine analogies are not quite as good. The real issue is the one you ended with. It is the models. These are big, complex and expensive to run. There is also a large dose of the issues you point out in your book "Lost in Math".
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  7133. The EU is basically a protectionist cartel. The US should simply adjust its own tariffs to match that of other countries. There are also non-tariff barriers that need to be dealt with. For example, TTIP and a trade deal with the UK have been stymied by, of all things, chlorinated chicken. Go figure.
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  7134. China controls much of the rare earth minerals primarily because they do the processing. They, as is pointed out, use child labor in mining them in other countries. They also have few or no environmental controls. We used to mine and process this stuff in the US. It is a dirty business (environmentally) so we shipped it off to China. That is already reversing.
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  7135. Guess what? Crimea was taken twice in WWII. First by the Germans, then it was retaken by the Soviets. Yes, it is hard. The thing this time is that Crimea can be totally isolated by the Ukrainians. This is, in fact, their plan.
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  7136. You are correct. The only thing Russia has that makes it dangerous is nukes. Its military is a joke. The distance from Waraw to Moscow is 783 miles by road. Not very far.
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  7137. Peter, I think you underestimate the nativist sentiment of many Canadians, especially in the lower economic strata. I have seen it (not directed at me, I didn't live there, I just did a lot of work there). A funny thing that many might not remember about the Quebec separatist referenda is what serious people in the US thought might happen if the Quebecois separatists had been successful. I actually saw this map on PBS (which I haven't watched or supported in decades, for obvious reasons) which outlined one scenario. Since this would sever the maritime provinces in the east from the rest of Canada, the thought was that these provinces would ask to become part of the US very quickly. After all, we have a well-defined process for incorporating new territory. That part of the map was then colored by an American flag. Then the provinces such as Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba would join the US. The last two would be Ontario and British Columbia (which would definitely have change its name) would follow. Finally, all the northern territories as well. One other thing that is interesting about this separatist nonsense is the attitude of people in the rest of Canada. It reminds me of the attitude of the English towards Scotland. If the vote were taken in the rest of Canada (or in the rest of the UK) Quebec (Scotland) might well be independent by now.
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  7138.  @klnrklnr4433  You must be kidding, right? Have you looked at taxes in Alaska vs. Canada?
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  7139. The MSM, if they don't watch out, is going to make misogyny popular and fashionable. Mark my words.
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  7140. Not just ethnic Russians, as I understand it, they are Russian citizens. They have Russian passports (reportedly). That is an important distinction. There are ethnic Ukrainians in Russia that have Russian passports, but we would not call them Ukrainians.
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  7141. Mahyar, I love your channel, but to say we are losing to China is just plain wrong. China is falling apart. It will not exist in its current form by the end of the decade. Fortunately, Xi got reelected. He will put them under.
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  7142. You people are so out of touch with American politics that it amazes me. Bernie Sanders ran for the Democratic Party presidential nomination twice and lost. He is at the extreme left wing of the party. So are most, if not all, of the people whose tweets you show. We all want to see the violence stop, but it is really up the Hamas to agree.
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  7143.  @garygoodin1426  Hey, they given Gaza The Israelis had built great infrastructure there. They had greenhouses for growing vegetables. This was a major industry. What did Hamas do? They smashed them all. If you talk about apartheid, then you ignore the actual situation. In the current Israeli there is an Arab party. There is at least one Supreme Court judge who is Arab Israeli. What about Hamas and the PLA? They still want to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews. It is in their foundational documents. But, they ignore the fact that there was never a Palestinian state. Palestine, before the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after WWI was just a province. It had never been an independent state.
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  7144.  @SmokeyTreats  Elitist? When I baked and sliced my own bread I spent about $10 per week on food. I had little. Ad homonym attacks are rarely effective. Even when I had much more money we would make bread at home, and rarely brought from a store. A descent bread knife is not expensive and will last decades. Even later we brought a bread machine, which is not cheap, but not very high end as kitchen appliances go. And, they last a long time, so the annual cost is low. That made it simple as popping in the ingredients, pressing a button, and coming back to freshly baked loaves. With kids, that was very useful. Your experience is not typical, I assure you. I have literally been baking bread for almost 45 years. It is not hard to get a consistent loaf.
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  7145.  @SmokeyTreats  Old and weird. That's rich. Well, each to his own. Sounds like you are not too young yourself. When I was a kid it was common for school classes to take a tour of a Wonder Bread factory. While having used a bread machine, I never used a stand mixer myself to make bread. My ex-wife did sometimes, but generally to make things like pizza dough. Sounds like a good idea though. These days I avoid wheat products. Not completely, but I lost about 20% or more of my body weight by avoiding wheat products and most meat. I am back to where I was in my 20s (oh, so long ago). Even in those days I often used flours other than wheat. I have discovered pastas made from red lentils or chickpeas. I am now starting to make them myself. I have a pasta attachment for my stand mixer and can make the flour in my mixer. I don't have a bread machine as my ex-wife took it. Now I won't get one based on your recommendation.
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  7146. Syria is a fiction made up by the British and French after WWII. A lot of the borders in the Middle East were drawn at the same time. What ever happened to self-determination for the various groups. The only way an entity such as Syria can be governed is by a strong man dictatorship. The world community has to come to grips with this, and not only in the Middle East. Erdogan's Turkey, of course, would like nothing more than to recreate the Ottoman Empire, much like Putin is trying to do in Europe.
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  7147. Many years ago, in the last millennium, I evaluated automated code generation systems. These were most often associated with Computer-aided software (and sometimes systems) engineering, or CASE, systems. They, of course, did not use ChatGPT but the idea was the same. There was also a big push for reuse of code. This later has been achieved. The CASE tools were not all that successful. For one thing, your comment about fried food is spot on. For another, the quality and effectiveness of the code was poor. Many of the systems that were being developed required high performance. This would typically be in mil-aero applications. On the other hand, simulations, especially the larger ones, need to be well designed and written. This can be an issue even in physics. They get so big in some cases that a few percent performance gained may determine the level of fidelity of the simulation. In the end, the generated code had to be so heavily modified that people usually abandoned it.
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  7148. Tony, I find the first item in the video very interesting and gratifying (in a sad way). Everyone always goes on about the official data and structural changes that could be made. I have been banging on about the corruption, which is a hidden, but well known problem. By some estimates 50% to 70% of government project funds are taken by corrupt officials and their cronies. Now it seems to be coming out into the open. A lot of this corruption involves organized gangs. I have seen reports of government officials actually using these gangs to enforce various actions such as slum clearance. Even private individuals use them. I saw one report where a broker from a financial firm was kidnapped by gang members when a fund failed. He was held and his life threatened. Of course, this type of activity is endemic in Chinese history. And before you say it, yes, it has happened in US and Europe as well as Japan. The issue with China is that the CCP pretends it does not exist. Now even they can't cover it up, it seems.
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  7149. At about 27:30 you talk about people being bound together by a sense of patriotism. You are also describing Donald Trump. Trump has reformed the Republican Party as a nationalist party. We are seeing now a shift of traditional Democratic constituencies to the Republicans Already, in polling, the Hispanic community going for the Republicans. We are also seeing a major shift of the Black vote towards the Republicans. Trump did more for minority communities than almost any president. They had not voted for him, but they are Americans, and he is for America.
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  7150. Was the area that became Czechoslovakia a single governmental entity under the Austro-Hungarian Empire?
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  7151.  @timo9274  Thanks for the clarification.
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  7152.  @Pidalin  Thanks for that information. I don't think that the US was much concerned about such niceties at the time, so it would not be too hard to "fool" them.
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  7153. Nuclear, small plants or large, is essential to going green. Wind and solar require batteries to work, and these require metals, such as nickel and lithium. that are dirty to mine and carbon intensive to produce. Don't get me wrong, an ideal mix would be nuclear for base power, wind (although that should be limited) and solar, with battery storage at the point of use. Gas powered plants to provide a bridge while we build out the other infrastructure, and probably for a long time for heating. And it will take a long time. If you want electric vehicles, you will need to build a lot of nukes, or burn a lot of gas and coal. That is the choice.
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  7154. Viking ships had oars, and they enslaved people. That the three of you had no idea is somewhat appalling. Especially considering that London was right on the edge of the Danelaw. Heck, when I lived in England, my sons took Viking training in York. Is this a piece of your history that you ignore? The ship, by the way does not really look like a Viking ship. It has the sail and oars of one, but those were common from antiquity. It looks like what I expect it is supposed to be, a merchant ship.
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  7155. The idea of China owning a large portion of the rare earth minerals is a chimera. The US used to produce a massive percentage of them. It is only a product of environmental regulation that the US is not the premier producer today. I seriously believe, because of this current war, the pandemic and China's actions, that this will change. Recently, Elon Musk has said that he will have to get into lithium mining because of these issues. There are solutions to all these things. The reality is that we, in the West, have off shored many of these things because it was cheap and easy. With the events of the last couple of months, this will all change.
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  7156. I think all three are contributing factors. Another thing to consider is that the US, and I believe NATO as a whole, look at this war as a way to destroy Russia's Army in Ukraine. They all understand that Putin would not stop at Ukraine if successful. As Peter Zeihan points out, due to the demographic situation in Russia, this is their last chance to change the strategic situation. The only thing is that, due to the mobilization, Putin has exacerbated the situation. Between the people who have fled, and those called up, he has lost 1.5M people who would have children and power the economy. This is catastrophic. As for the mobilized troops, it seems that most get killed, or surrender. To properly train them, especially for mobile warfare, would take a year. He doesn't have that much time. He also doesn't have the equipment. I have even seen some sent to the front with Mosin Nagant rifles. I think Russia is toast.
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  7157. What? We don't live in a computer simulation? But I thought that is what physicists believe. So, you are saying that the Matrix is not real. Now I will have to reevaluate all those conspiracy theories.
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  7158.  @Ukie88  Yes, quality was not an issue in these situations.
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  7159. Love Cut the Clutter. One of my favorite channels on YouTube. Your book recommendations are very interesting. One of my vices is books. The others are whiskey and cigars. When I moved from Pennsylvania to Illinois, we were informed that 3K pounds of our move was books. That was almost 30 years ago, and I have not stopped. I am especially interested in the Hindi music book, as well as the cricket book. When I was first at university my two best friends (we shared everything, including girlfriends) were Indian. So, while not understanding any of the words I listened to a lot of Hindi movie music. My next-door neighbors are Indian I often hear Hindi music from them. They also like jazz, so I am well satisfied.
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  7160. How about another scenario. With the US no longer keeping things secure in the Persian Gulf (although if you are on the west side, it is the Arabian Gulf), Iran invades Saudi Arabia. Militarily the Iranians are much more powerful. An added wrinkle is the current protests. If there is regime change in Iran, and it becomes more pro-western, they may be able to rally force to their side. I am not sure that the Saudis can put together a strong coalition.
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  7161. Tony, thanks for the extra episode. This is a topic that I find interesting. I am making this comment before listening to the quotes from the article. I am curious to see how it will align. I have said for years that the Chinese people are the closest among peoples of Northeast Asia to Americans in temperament. While I have not been to China I have worked with and even have had investors in my businesses people who were from China. I have also dealt directly with some Chinese industrialists while they were visiting the US developing business. What I have observed is that they are very entrepreneurial and not as insular as many of the other Northeast Asians. What I mean by that, and this was true prior to Xi's reign, is that they are willing to do business without nationalist protection. Compare that to Japan with its keiretsu and Korea with chaebol. Chinese businesses, left to themselves, have quite the animal spirits. There is an old saying about the US which goes the business of America is business. That is very true and is a reason for the rejection of the Democratic Party in the recent election. I believe it would also be true of China without the CCP and all the ideological baggage. On the nationalism front I believe there is a close correlation as well. American nationalism is not directed at conquest, unlike European or Japanese nationalism in the past. Take away the CCP's world conquest ideas and I think Chinese nationalism would be quite similar. The reason the US opened up to China initially had to do with geopolitics. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was due to optimism, especially on the economic front. The idea was that through trade and business development that China would move toward a capitalist, and it was hoped, democratic future. There was some hope of that right up until Xi repressed Jack Ma. Then the mask fell off. The sad thing is the missed opportunity for China. The CCP, and especially Xi, is quite literally killing off China. It saddens me.
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  7162. Two things. One is that coming up with better algorithms is important, and a well-known fact in computer science. One learns that in any graduate level course in analysis of algorithms. A "good" algorithm can be orders of magnitude better than a "poor" one. The other is what you said about AI. It learns from the data. In other words, it is probabilistic rather than deterministic. Add to that an understanding of the rules and you basically trim the tree of possibilities, as you point out. For example, I once wrote a program for my wife for a graduate course in mechanical engineering. Some of her classmates used a brute force approach on a large super-minicomputer (this was in the late 1980s). They actually ran out of virtual memory in a 32-bit computer. With a better algorithm taking into account the constraints of the problem, I got it to run on a 16-bit IBM PC with, wait for it, 2MB of memory. It ran in seconds. The algorithm is king!
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  7163. This has been an issue for a long time. I am glad to see someone doing something about it. Of course, it would have to be Trump. One thing this does remind me of, and it is a humorous take on the situation, is the Woody Allen (are we still allowed to mention him?) movie "Bananas". In it there is a line by the new leader of the country after a revolution. He declares that "From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish." Trump missed an opportunity to say something like that (and then tell people it was a joke, unlike in the movie). Zalenski, being a comedian, in Trump's shoes might have taken the bait. Oh, wait a minute. You do realize that one of the issues in Ukraine after independence was language. Look it up.
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  7164.  @CptJistuce  I expect that your understanding of the world situation is not very sophisticated.
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  7165. The Maxim gun is still being used in Ukraine. The Ukranian Territorial Defense uses them, typically in defensive positions. Evidentially, they still have many thousands of them. I have seen footage of them being used on the front line. Amazing longevity.
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  7166. James, thank you for doing this. I find the channel very interesting and valuable. The world order will, indeed, change. That change has been slowly coming and the Ukraine War has accelerated it. At the end of the Cold War, the US President, George H. W. Bush, wanted to have a conversation about how the world moves forward. He was voted out of office. No one has done that since. Now Russia and China say they want a multipolar world order. So much to say about that. Of course, the first thing is that this is actually the natural state of things. The time since the end of WWII and especially after the end of the Cold War (I miss the Cold War) has been an anomaly. There are two "funny" things about what Russia and China "wish" for. First is that, historically, both did fairly poorly the last time this was the case. China had it worse than Russia, of course. The second is that it now looks likely that both Russia and China will in some way fall apart. Both of their leaders' hold on power are looking shaky at present. In such a scenario, they will be, most likely, as in the past, controlled to an extent by outside powers. Just like the good (bad) old days. As for borders, I think I have commented on this before. The borders of most countries in Asia, Africa and Europe are artificial and lead to lots of tension and often outright conflict. Strangely enough, Ukraine's borders are not so much an issue. Another thing I saw recently was a French official talking about territories in Africa in a "colonial/imperialist" sort of way. I think the continent is in for some very bad times ahead. It never really developed beyond being what it has always been, a source of natural resources.
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  7167. This is not a criticism, but an observation. The commentators on YouTube and elsewhere are always talking about some obscure country (and some not so obscure) supporting peace with concessions by Ukraine or talking against the war. Who cares? That some Balkan country (they are all small and weak) or some African country, that probably is wracked by insurgency, sides with Russia is totally insignificant. Frankly, as the world order that was created by the US after WWII to contain the Soviets falls apart, many of those countries, especially in Africa, will experience much worse. They are overpopulated and depend completely on trade. That trade allowed them to pull many people out of poverty. It is going away. Unfortunately, many have no future. This is not my wish, but a realistic assessment of the evolving world order.
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  7168. The statement that the Chinese have been accused of stealing western technology "in the past few years" is not quite correct. This has been going on since the beginning of reform and opening up to the west. It is both government policy and is practiced by individual Chinese companies, even private ones. As for the Chinese "moving up the value chain", this is also misleading. The west has simply moved pollution and poor labor practices to China. I have seen it firsthand. None of what is done in China would be acceptable in the west. The EU has admitted this in the case of carbon emissions and is bringing in a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which is a tariff, that will take effect in 2026. If they did this for other types of pollution, then Chinese products across the board would be significantly more expensive. This would also make sense. If the pollution regulations make sense in the west, then why wouldn't they apply in other places?
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  7169. A big difference today is the ubiquity of new media, like this channel, YouTube in general, podcasts, etc. That makes it much easier to get a message out to lots of people. The traditional media no longer has the influence they once had. In the US, Donald Trump used this to first capture and then reform the Republican Party and then to win elections, especially the 2024 election. So, to bring it back to the UK situation, it would be like Farage taking over the Conservatives. Of course, with the party structure in the UK this would basically be impossible. The US has a totally different structure. We don't have paid members who make the decisions. We have a primary system in which anyone can declare a party affiliation (or none) and vote.
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  7170. Lei. I just watched a video on the China Truths channel titled "Guangdong Overrun as KP.2 Variant Spreads Widely; A Key to Xi's Grip on Power: What You Don't Know". At a about 6:00 there is a comment reputedly from Mao about the qualities of a successor. It fits right in with the letter from the official to his son. Stunning!
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  7171. Whatever happened to global warming? What is really ironic is that China is a massive emitter of greenhouse gasses. Well, I guess we can throw that theory out the window. Better close it after you do, though.
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  7172. Bill is one of the few commentators who lays out the BRICS concept well. Just to expand on it a little, the C and the I have a border dispute going on which many in the I expect to turn into a war. They actually fought such a war in the 1960s. At this last BRICS summit Xi, the leader of C, backed down. The reaction in his country was very negative. He has stirred up so much nationalist sentiment in C that this seems to be a betrayal. It is important to note that the leader of C in the 1962 war, Mao, went to war primarily to assert his total control over the military. In that he was successful. He also, surprisingly, withdrew from territories he had gained. Flash forward to today and I am seeing reports that Xi may well have lost control of the PLA. We may soon see big changes in C. There is a lot more going on with BRICS. None of it points towards BRICS becoming something to reckon with. Don't fear the BRICS!
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  7173. Jordan, the "orange man" epithet does not refer to his hair, but rather his skin color. Get it right, man.
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  7174.  @garystrankman3841  Not even close. I have never been involved in the consumer electronics business. My experience spans aerospace and defense (with the emphasis on space) and computing technology. I do have an Apple phone. About a year ago I got my second. I got an iPhone 7 when they came out My wife was behind that. She had a 6 from work. I was not allowed to gloat that I had better tech than she did. I had that for seven years before upgrading. Not really a great customer. I really didn't need to upgrade except the battery was getting wonky on the 7 and I was upgrading all my tech anyway. I did get Airpods so that I could listen to podcasts while on my walks. Those are the only Apple products I have ever had. My son was given an iPad when he started university. He sold it because we had given him a Kindle, which was much more compact and convenient for reading, which is all he was going to do with the iPad. My first smartphone was a Windows phone as well. It was Verizon branded but made by Audiovox, I believe. Next, I had a Blackberry and then another Windows phone. So, no, not an employee. Actually, I expect that is too much information for you, but it is fun for me.
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  7175.  @garystrankman3841  I am not and never have been an Apple employee. My first three smartphones were a Windows phone, a Blackberry and another Windows phone. I am now on my second iPhone in a period of at least eight years (I am not their ideal customer). The only other Apple product I have is a pair of iPod earbuds. That is my first pair, bought to go along with the new iPhone. I hope that clears things up. You should respond to the actual content of the comment, not the commentor, who you don't know anything about. That is generally called an ad homonym argument. Not useful. So, having said that, what issue do you have with my original comment? That is of interest.
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  7176.  @garystrankman3841  Great retort. Yes, I do like to get long winded. I am glad you are now enlightened. Not sure about the "lady" part though.
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  7177.  @garystrankman3841  Valid point, although...
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  7178.  @billycarr7446  Yes, and all the videos which are just voiceovers on random graphics. I have unsubscribed from this channel. I have no idea if any of it is real.
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  7179. My understanding is that a country cannot be accepted into NATO if they have ongoing territorial disputes. By acceding to Putin's demands, Ukraine would eliminate this issue, and could then quickly turn around and join NATO. Something to consider.
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  7180. Stranger and stranger.
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  7181. Ryan, love your stuff. What I don't get is how people are swayed by this stuff, and if the people who are really matter. When I look at the YouTube suggestions alongside this and other videos, I get the whole gamut of stuff. In economy, the US is doomed, the US is doing great, the dollar is going to crash. Take your stance and someone on social media is pushing it. Of course, the US economy is growing, and the stock market is doing great, but who cares. Then there is the war in Ukraine itself. Again, the whole gamut. Ukraine is defeated, the Russian army has been totally destroyed (although Putin in working hard toward that goal), Ukraine has broken through all Russian lines, you name it. Then there was the guy who responded to a comment I made under a video claiming that Ukraine had lost 700,000 men. That is the size of the Ukranian army. So, who fighting the Russians? I find it all quite amusing. Having lived through almost the whole of the Cold War (I miss the Cold War; I got to do a lot of interesting groundbreaking research with unlimited funding) and having been in the middle of some stuff, I don't find a whole lot new in all this. So, I just wanted to get that in. I am wondering if we just exaggerate the power of social media.
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  7182. Anyone who thinks that our current health system is working (and not actually killing people) is either uninformed, in collusion or lying. That is harsh, but it is meant to be. The system is broken and rigged. The problem is that there is a lot of good as well, but the risk is that it will be washed out as we reform the system.
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  7183.  @des_smith7658  First I know nothing about the organization you mention. I thin I have heard about it. Second, labeling people without engaging their ideas is really low brow, and indicative of a low information commentator. If you have something to say, say it. I would like to hear it.
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  7184. Another case in point is Russia. Syria is turning into a situation as well. Of course, the whole region of southwest Asia and the Middle East is riddled with unstable boundaries and national groups (as opposed to modern nation states) with territorial aspirations.
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  7185. On the population size issue, I have tended to agree with Peter on the situation. I have seen others who also have analyzed the situation over the last few years and have come to the same conclusion. Now, I even saw, on a channel that often shows conversations with people in China, that say the same thing. On one I watched today the individual opined that the population was under 1B. This was just a Chinese citizen looking at the situation around him and with what information he could get. China will collapse a lot sooner than people think.
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  7186. I think most people have Johnson all wrong. When he first met Zalenski he made a statement afterwards that the problem was that the President had not articulated a strategy. This is true. Ben Hodges, a great supporter of Ukraine and former Army leader, says the same thing over and over again. President Biden has said repeatedly that we would support Ukraine "for as long as it takes". He never defines "it". Does he mean victory on Ukraine's terms? Does he mean until Russia decides to stop fighting and consolidate what they have taken? Is it something else? No one knows. So, the authorization that was passed, with overwhelming majorities, has a clause that the President must provide a strategy document 45 days after the implementation. As for the delay in bringing the legislation to a vote, that is all up to internal US politics. I don't know if you have noticed but we are going through one of our periods of political realignment. This is just bad timing for Ukraine. As for Johnson's comments on micromanagement, and his name is ironic in this context, that is a hallmark of Democratic presidents. Lyndon B, Johnson (LBJ) used to so heavily micromanage the Vietnam War that he would pick individual bombing targets. During the Gulf War a concept called the Powell Doctrine was born. This was during a Republican presidency. The doctrine stated explicitly that the political leaders would set the overall strategy and the military leaders would implement it without undue interference. In the Afghanistan and Iraq wars another Republican president, George W. Bush, son of the president in office during the Gulf War, continued to follow the doctrine. Now Biden and his team are back the style of LBJ.
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  7187. Beautiful, but don't forget these creatures are eating each other. This is not a vegan paradise.
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  7188. In any western country, the banks in China would be declared insolvent. Probably all of them.
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  7189.  @HKim0072  Exports and real estate are two different things. I really don't understand the significance of using the Apple example. Of course, it is an export from China. That is where it is assembled. It uses a large number of components that are imported. I don't know why you would contrast that with real estate. As for everything being a Chinese component, you might want to check that. There are lots of raw materials that are imported. Most of this is in the form of commodities. The money to buy those comes from economic activity outside of housing. Otherwise, you would have a perpetual motion machine. The fact is that the housing market in China had become a giant Ponzi scheme. The way it is structured was never going to work long term. It also had no connection to population requirements. You seem to want to talk about the sectors of the economy as totally compartmentalized. That's not how economies work. If it was, then every country would have as much housing as they wanted.
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  7190.  @HKim0072  Well, we don't agree on how economies work, that is for sure. First, using the iPhone as an example, your impact on the economy per unit is probably too low. Do, you know how much those things sell for? Second, are you aware of how many jobs are involved, or how capital, and even real RE is involved? Look, in you model of economy, a bunch of farmers sitting around anywhere in the world could create a real estate market. Do you really believe that? Why did Hong Kong have so much better real estate than the rest of China before WTO membership? Study that and you might understand how things work.
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  7191. I saw this idea in IEEE Spectrum magazine a few years back. What made it possible was high voltage DC transmission. This in turn was made possible by new DC switchgear. The problem with this is that it is a worldwide system. As we can see from the war in Ukraine, countries will use energy as a weapon. In fact, we have a much earlier example from the 1970s with the oil boycotts. No country would put their energy supply in the hands of another if there was even a possibility of a disruption for political reasons. In the Arab Oil Boycott situation, the issue was that the Middle East was the only source big enough to provide supply. That is changing. What Russia has done, for example, is to prove itself an unreliable energy partner. Donald Trump warned Germany against relying too much on Russia and he was laughed at. Very few countries will make long term contracts with Russia for energy going forward. Now take that to a worldwide grid which would necessarily have to traverse many countries (and indeed continents) and you multiply the problem. It only takes one to shut the system down. Perhaps it would be better to apply your gedanken to other solutions.
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  7192. The environment is, of all the concerns Peter mentions, only mentioned in passing. Forget all the climate change mania (although the Chinese are the worst offenders there) but look at the bog-standard pollution. The conditions in factories are totally unacceptable. Where are the worker's rights advocates? For example, in the lithium battery plant lithium dust is not controlled. Bad, not good. Have you ever seen the pictures of the processing of rare earths and other materials. It is totally antediluvian. They have totally polluted up to 90% of their sources of fresh water for both farming and human consumption. The very land itself is polluted. Remember the treated "nuclear" wastewater fracas. Well, people got concerned and checked on what was happening in China. They purchased Geiger counters. In fact, they bought them all up and the government put on restrictions. The results are that the radiation released by the Chinese nuclear plants, and present in Chinese buildings, is almost 1,000 times that of what the Japanese released. What did we do by moving all this manufacturing to China? One of the primary effects is that we exported the pollution that we would not accept in our own countries. How much of this pollution gets into the products we buy? Think about it. The thing is that I am not an environmental activist, but this is despicable.
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  7193. The fraud continues. I see ads on YouTube all the time about some "new" Social Security benefit. Follow the link and they will want all kinds of information from you. In the most benign case they are adding you to a database which will be used to market products to you that you don't want. In the extreme case they will scam you.
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  7194. You do seem to get it. Surprising for a Brit. Just joking. The China comment is the crux of the matter. The whole opening to China was intended to open up a big new market as well as get cheap labor. What the west ended up doing was to export pollution to China. Look into it. It will disgust you. It goes well beyond the climate change issue. Also, on the labor front, the Chinese treat their workers in ways that are illegal in the west (and most of the world). And that is before getting to the child and slave labor issue.
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  7195. Peter, you are uninformed. In the Oval Office President Trump made it clear that the Arab countries, especially those with oil, would pay for the rebuilding of Gaza.
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  7196. This whole issue of projecting climate from models, which we know are incomplete and problematic, reminds me of something. Oh, yes. Cosmological models. Look through YouTube and you will see loads of videos about new observations. They all start out with something like "new and unprecedented observations". This will upset, upend all our theories. What the heck did they think would happen? Put up new and more powerful instruments and you are going to find new stuff. To be surprised at this means that you think that the "models", which are computer simulations, are somehow ground truth. Who are they kidding. Those models are not the result of controlled experiments, or even observation. Don't forget that all that time before "reionization" is opaque. We will never observe it. Anything before that is a guess. Yes, an educated guess, but a guess, nonetheless. As Sabine, and many other physicists, often tell us, our two greatest and most fundamental theories have "issues". On the other hand, how many times have they been proven correct. How many times have you seen Sabine tap the Albert Einstein bobble head and say, "yes that guy again". So, we use these to say we "know" what happened and how the universe should evolve. As President Joe likes to say, come on man! So, why should we expect anything different in terms of climate science. All those projections back in time are very problematic from a data quality point of view, as well as a model point of view. At least in the case of cosmology we can actually observe things from a long time ago. Not so in climate "science".
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  7197. The waning US influence in the Middle East is by choice. Now that the US produces enough oil for its own needs, there is little need for such involvement. As you may have noticed, there is also a more populist slant to US politics. Actually, the last US president who was a real internationalist was George H. W. Bush. That was in the early 1990s.
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  7198.  @skydragon23101979  Why should the US do that? Syria has Iranian troops on its soil. If they got rid of those there might be something to talk about. Oh, wait, Syria used chemical weapons on its own population. That could be a problem.
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  7199.  @skydragon23101979  If you believe that then you are ignoring the facts. Each country will decide how much they want to be engaged in each situation. The US is lessening engagement because of decreasing need. On the other hand, there are still allies of the US that have needs in the area. So, you generally not see total disengagement. That is just the way geopolitics goes.
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  7200.  @skydragon23101979  China's rise? Don't make me laugh. You can rant all you want about what one has to do. If you think you can plan these things out, then you will be disappointed when something comes along which upsets those plans.
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  7201.  @skydragon23101979  My financial advisor was hoping Xi would be reelected. He is confident that Xi will tank the economy, and Xi is not disappointing him. And he is a high level person. Actually, I have been an executive for a large company overseas and have had to deal with issues like these. There are geopolitical analysts that predict that China will not exist in its present form by the end of the decade. Nothing I have seen contradicts this. They are going through a demographic crisis. They are going through a housing crisis. This is very significant considering that housing is about 30% of their GDP. Their military is large but untested and undertrained (kind of ike Russia). Unlike the US, they have extensive borders they have to defend in addition to their offensive moves. Pretty much all of their GDP growth lately has been driven by infrastructure projects, a large number of which do not produce enough revenue to recover the cost. That brings one to the debt issue.
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  7202. Infrastructure investment is China is the last thing they need. It is what got them into their current predicament in the first place. I just saw an item on Xiong’an. The waste there is epic. Check out the largest HSR terminal in China. Just a few hundred people go through it a day, and yet it has enough capacity for the whole province. Speaking of HSR, the system has close to $1T in debt, and no way to reduce it. Add on top of that the amount siphoned off due to corruption, and you can see why this idea of increasing infrastructure spending will only tank the Chinese economy. The only hope for China is massive privatization. The only problem is that this precisely opposite what Xi and the CCP are doing. There are not enough internal resources in China for their recovery. It is over for China, unless the regime changes its mind or is changed.
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  7203. The size of the Russian attacks, mentioned at about 5:30 is what has surprised me. I like to contrast that with the Gulf War. In one celebrated case, the battle of 73 Easting, the attack was led by an armored cavalry regiment (ACR) followed up by four armored divisions (one British) and a mechanized infantry division. This was an attack through heavy defensive works, which were breached, and resulted in even larger actions by the divisional groups following behind. I find all this interesting since I was involved in the training of US armored forces during the Cold War (I miss the Cold War) whose main focus was a massive Soviet attack through the Fulda Gap in Germany. What the Ukraine war has shown is that the Russians don't have the capability to mount such an attack. Perhaps the Soviets never did either. As for their "success" in using massed troops and suffering great losses, that has only really happened in one case. In WWI, The Winter War and The Continuation War they were dramatically unsuccessful. In the case of WWI, they were fighting a much smaller Germany who was engaged in a massive war on their western front at the same time. The Russians were crushed. In the latter two examples, they were fighting a much, much smaller enemy. They were only minimally successful in those conflicts and never achieved their full war aims. By the way, in WWII, the level of troop losses for the Soviets was astronomical. Just in the final battle of Berlin they had over 350K casualties. If you count the battles leading up to that, the total was over 1M. They were fighting depleted army, and in many cases poorly trained troops, with battle hardened formations. They could easily have just surrounded Berlin and starved it out. The US and UK could have continued their bombing campaign and totally laid waste to the city. But the Soviets went in anyway. Their losses in the war, many have speculated, may have led to their poor economic performance after the war.
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  7204. It is interesting in all this discussion of social Darwinism, etc. there is no mention of the far east. And yet, the formerly largest nation in the world, China, adopted Marxist-Leninist ideology. Of course, before that, Russia adopted it as well. Marx thought that socialism was a movement of the industrial workers, and neither Russia nor China qualified on those grounds since they were primarily peasant societies. Both have morphed into a truly national socialist mode. This includes a healthy dose of racism. It also saw the introduction of what I consider the most massive eugenics experiment in history. In China, the national socialist phase came after Mao. The mix of state-owned enterprises and private capital truly mirrors National Socialism in the 1930s. In fact, the increasing encroachment of the state into once private businesses mirrors what the Nazis were doing. So, it is very interesting that there are now calls in China to abandon socialism because it is a foreign ideology. Xi is currently trying to re-establish Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology, which he calls "socialism with Chinese characteristics". I don't think he is succeeding, even within the CCP. They have become too corrupt, and the only thing they can do now is to try and hold on to power for its own sake and for their own safety. They have truly messed up, and they know it.
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  7205. The reporting I have seen says that this loony did not fire. The way I read it he was spotted, and the Secret Service fired at him. Also, if he was going to take a shot over 200 yards he picked the wrong type of gun. This is not directly related, but I am wondering what Trump would really do in regard to Ukraine. Recall the time he told the Germans that they were becoming too dependent on Russia for their energy? They laughed at him. Who is laughing now? Do you recall that it was Trump who shut down Nord Stream 2 just before it was completed? I think the situation is more complicated than the media portrays.
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  7206. The nuclear war issue is a chimera. No Russian leader, not even in Soviet times, would risk the obliteration of the motherland for any purpose. The only reason for nuclear weapons is deterrence. They are not offensive weapons.
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  7207. What's the problem here? You put a bunch of socialists in charge of a capitalist economy. And people voted for it. What did they think would happen?
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  7208. This is interesting. You have a Europe that is in demographic decline. You have people, many from conflict zones, that want to get in. If you look at the hostory of that part of Europe, it is all about mass migration. You can read about it in texts or today you can watch documentary videos.
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  7209. All of this is true, but what is left implicit is that the CO2 generation is just shifted elsewhere. Often, in places like China, with much greater adverse effects. Along with that is the shifting of pollution and a deterioration of workers' conditions in many of the places where industrial production shifted to. On top of that is a lowering of quality in the goods consumed. This last often leads to increased waste. This is just another example of "virtue signaling".
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  7210. Your initial assumption does not hold in cases like Ukraine, where one side decided to start the war. Are you implying that the party invaded had a choice not to fight. If that is the case, then why spend money on armed forces? I would be very interested in the answer to this question, since it affects the analysis.
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  7211.  @anderspuck  Thanks for the response. I can see where you are coming from. What is interesting in this context is that I can think of no example of a country deciding not to react. Even Georgia reacted, although it did not go well for them.
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  7212.  @user-jy2ci5ox9v  At the rate the CCP is messing things up, we may not have that long to wait.
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  7213. They don't say "we are loyal to you Vladimir Putin", they say "Valdimir Vladimirovich". That sets a different tone.
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  7214. The idea of a European defense architecture has been going around for a long time. Various leaders have (most recently the PM of Finland) pointed out the massive dependence on the US. This is not really a criticism of the US, but of Europe. The total EU population and GDP are at least on a per with the US, and yet Europe is highly dependent on the US for their security. To expect a unified effort in the EU any time soon is not realistic. There is also the reason for this state of affairs. One of the basic tenets of NATO is that western Europe would be brought under the nuclear umbrella of the US. This was the main factor in holding back Soviet power during the Cold War. While France has nukes, their force is a shadow of what the US has fielded. Poland has deep connection with the US. I live in the Chicago area. I don't know if it is still true, but it is often stated that Chicago has the second largest Polish population of any city outside of Warsaw.
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  7215. Of course it's not a real market. The CCP are a bunch of commies, after all. That may sound crude, but it is justified by so many of the actions the CCP has taken recently and over the years after opening up. Their actions in trade, IP and foreign policy have been problematic, to say the least. What is worse is their treatment of their own citizens.
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  7216. Meghan, and almost all the Democrats I have heard, are wrong. The Democratic Party has not been about the working class for decades. They started this whole ethnic/racial division stuff a long time ago, long before CRT was a thing in the consciousness of Americans.
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  7217. The foreign military bill is now in its proper form. Biden thought that by including border security, something he has failed at, would mollify Republicans. For one thing, US border security is not part of foreign military assistance. Bad legislative practice. For another, the border and immigration issues are very contentious and have been for decades. Bad political practice. One also has to remember that in any society as large and diverse as the US, there are going to be a wide range of opinions. Senator Paul, like his father, is a bit of a maverick, and is generally out of step with the country. His ideology is libertarian and isolationist. That is his stance, and he is welcome to it. He was duly elected, and you have to accept that.
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  7218. The whole premise of the CCP being behind religious organizations buying up large tracts of land and setting up compounds, etc. in the US is just plain myopic. This has happened with Indian, Korean and Jewish (Hasidic) groups among others, along with indigenous groups for decades now. Remember the Hari Krishnas and the Moonies? How about the Branch Davidians? The CCP is just following in the well-trodden footsteps of others. They are, after all, just another cult. One imported into China from Germany through the UK then through the Soviet Union.
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  7219. Peter, commenting on a situation like the Donbas is really not in your wheelhouse. Those situations are fluid and changeable. At the time I am writing this, Ukraine seems to be retaking territory around Bakhmut, for example. These things are all connected. There are also troops being pulled from the Donbas, and we will see the effects soon. Also, while the Ukrainians have been showing the ability to do combined arms maneuver warfare, the Russians have not. In fact, their inability is what caused them to fail in their initial invasion. You noticed this and have commented on it vis-a-vis a potential Russian conflict with NATO. Just an indication of how bad it is in the Russian military. The Russian State Duma is about to pass a law outlawing the use of personal electronic devices at the front such as smart phones. There is a concern, genuine, that information is being leaked by the devices, even if mostly inadvertent. The troops are using those to communicate since they have not reliable, encrypted devices provided by the Ministry of Defense. The operative word for all this is "corruption". I remember seeing videos and reading reports about the poor state of battlefield communications in the Russian army from the beginning months of the conflict. It is a clown show. This is relevant because the Russians do not have the capability to go on the way they are and make it to any of the large cities. There have been some analyses that posit that it could take them many years and tens of millions of casualties to get to Kiev using their approach. The Russian state won't last that long. Heck, it might not even last 2024. The whole point of this is that the Ukrainian General Staff knows all of this and is very sophisticated in their planning.
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  7220.  @wilsonli5642  I remember when I saw my first one. I thought it was "cool". It was, at the very least, different.
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  7221. A lot of the comments below totally miss what the House of Lords was and is. It is a leftover from the days of feudalism. Just look at what the other house if called, House of Commons. The Parliament of England actually started out as a unicameral body. The UK does not have a written constitution, so a lot of how the structures work is a bit wishy washy as far as most of the world is concerned. When I lived in the UK, at the beginning of the current century, I got a book by Jonathan Freedland titled "Bring Home the Revolution". It might be instructive to look at that. He was, actually, advocating a republic. Considering how the role of the monarch has evolved in the UK, that might also be something to be considered. Considering the structure of the UK Government, I am not sure of what purpose a second chamber would serve. In the case of the US, as well as countries like Germany, the "second" chamber serves to give representation to geographic regions which have historic significance. In the US, the two are on equal footing as far as legislation is concerned. The "upper house", the Senate, which represents the states, has additional duties not shared by the "lower house". These include consenting to Presidential appointments and approving treaties. So, how would this work for the UK? Representation of the various "nations"? They, of course, could not be on equal footing as in the US. The German model might be better suited. In any case, it would mean dividing England up into regions. How would that work? One reason for the US Senate was that the country started out as thirteen independent states that banded together to fight the bloody English. It also ensures that states with smaller populations get a say on matters of national importance. States in the US have significant autonomy in many matters. This now only works for the devolved authorities in the UK. So, you can see that just having a second chamber that is "elected", not hereditary or appointed, is the least of the issues to be considered.
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  7222.  @jackthorton10  Shadowy war, more like it.
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  7223.  @championknife  Well, if you believe any f that on your own, then I feel sorry for you.
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  7224.  @championknife  Well, if your facts are from the IMF, I hope you are not making any major investments based on that.
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  7225.  @championknife  The Russian economy is going down. The government is actually running out of money including reserves. Putin is taxing the oil companies not on the sale price of their product, but on the benchmark price. He is robbing the oligarchs to pay for his war. If you believe that is the sign of a growing economy, then you probably don't have the real data (no one really does). Indirect measures by reputable economists indicate that Russia is indeed in economic trouble.
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  7226. Zalenski is believing his own propaganda. I have followed this was since the beginning (before 2022). The Ukrainians have woven a web of narratives. They use these narratives to deceive their supporters and themselves. They think they can win the war. They can't. They talk incessantly about "hybrid warfare". When have we not had that? The Soviets/Russians have been doing that since the birth of the USSR. Look up the COMINTERN. His country was in demographic decline before the war. Same with the Russians. They may have to go to polygamy to rebuild their populations.
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  7227. During the 1976 election, when I was studying physics at a large university, in the High Energy Physics department, there was a poster of Jimmy Carter with long white hair and a long white beard with the caption "Only JC can save America". One the professors I worked for, the department co-chair, lamented of the choices in that election and said that he would have to vote for the socialist candidate. This professor was not a socialist. He was joking. I just thought that was slightly relevant and funny.
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  7228.  @bobs_toys  Correct. I stand corrected.
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  7229.  @bluemarlin8138  Interesting take. I expect China, or the northern warlord, will take over parts of western Russia.
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  7230. Woops! Meant eastern Russia.
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  7231.  @bobs_toys  Yes, this is what I was thinking of.in terms of the history between the two. China has also been making noises about taking back Vladivostok, which they claim as historically theirs.
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  7232.  @bobs_toys  Would not be surprised.
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  7233. America has to be more intelligent about how it votes!!!! I was election judge for a long time. If we got 60% participation that was great. Any of our elections could go any way if participation was higher. We don't really know how those 40% would vote. If you look at polling, they talk about likely voters. One time, in an off year election for local officials, in the city I live in, outside of Chicago, the Democrats took over a lot of local offices. Turnout was in the 10% range. What they did was to get a core of people to turn out. This is a very Republican city. Turnout matters. VOTING MATTERS!!!! The country voted for this failure! We have to bear the cost.
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  7234. Peter, the consumer choices you make are individual choices. I guess you could call it a boycott, but that is not what people normally think of. In an individual consumer setting, there are generally lots of choices. So, every time you choose on brand of razor over another, are you boycotting the other brands. I think not.
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  7235. Is this guy for real? We have no real insight into Ukranian military planning. No one predicted the Kharkiv offensive, then it happened. We are in this day-to-day analysis of things and our "experts" are making pronouncements based on that. Better not to give an uninformed opinion than to venture one without any real information.
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  7236. Funny. While it is interesting to hear what he has to say, one has to be critical (in the analytic sense) of all the so-called experts. We often hear from ex-military men. They are listened to because of the positions they have held, so we hold them up as experts in the current situation. On the western side we have heard a lot from former US generals. I have a lot of respect for them (and experience with several over a number of years) but they have consistently said things that have not come to pass. One that you often have on the channel is Ben Hodges. Look closely at what he has been predicting about the war. Little if anything of what he has said has come to pass. Listening to him one would have thought Crimea would have been retaken by now. The best indicator of how this war will progress, absent any peace deal, is the Iran Iraq War in the 1980s. Look it up. The parallels are stunning. Neither side in that conflict, as in the current Ukraine conflict was decisive in offense. Both sides used human wave tactics. Both sides had economies and political systems that were, shall we say, problematic by our standards. Look at how that ended.
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  7237. I agree with Lord Dannatt at about 4:15 that it is appropriate for the west to not want their weapons to be used to directly attack Russia. I don't think he emphasized the salient point, though. The issue is not the propaganda issue, but the fact that Russia is a nuclear armed adversary. That is the crux of the matter and the only reason we don't have more active western involvement on the ground.
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  7238.  @morfeo904  What is your point on the Taliban? Asking for a friend. As for HTS, their members (fighters) are still ISIS. Have you seen the videos where they shout on to Jerusalem, on to Mecca. They want a Sunni Arab caliphate. Don't listen to the leaders, especially when they are begging for money. Syria will most likely go through continued civil war. Syria is a fiction made up by French and British imperialists. The territory that became modern Syria was a part of the Ottoman Empire from the early 16th century. I recently saw a map showing the French Mandate from the early 1920s that split the country into several ethnoreligious states. That is the reality of Syria.
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  7239. Great information, as usual. Throwing more money at research in the problem makes little sense. The US government has thrown massive amounts of money at research already. I live in the Chicago area. We have Argonne National Laboratory here. Within the last ten years, they received at least on tranche of funding, to the tune of $5B. Now here you have a lot of very smart people and a massive facility. I have heard nothing substantive out of it. What this means is that battery storage may not be the way to go. Toyota may have it right.
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  7240.  @Haiti3063  Sounds like you work there. Maybe in public relations. I am very aware of the capabilities Argonne has. Given that, I still have to ask, where is the new chemistry that will both be more efficient and not use critical materials that are either in short supply or not convenient to obtain? The real goal is to have a totally new chemistry. And, it has to be safe. Anything lithium based is not, in the end, safe, especially in large use applications like transportation. It is also still very expensive compared to other storage technologies. Let's hope efforts like Form Energy are successful. At least that would be a big help for the grid. That still leaves transportation, which for greenhouse gasses is probably the more important. I also think that the utility industry barking up the wrong tree with the way they are going about grid storage and management. That, though, is another topic altogether. To spend $5B to "facilitate" is truly mind boggling. The supercomputer was already there. The bulk of the facility was already there. All before the $5B. I guess where I am not satisfied with your response (and it is, of course, just my opinion) is that I was assuming that the whole purpose of national labs, was to do research into speculative areas that would not be commercially viable for private labs. In other words, more basic research.
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  7241. The original deal was never passed by the US Senate. Obama used executive orders to implement it. That is why Trump was able to use executive orders to reverse it. The idea that US presidents would bypass the Congress to implement treaties, as Obama did, is the real threat to our democracy.
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  7242. The F14 carried the Phoenix missile (AiM-54). It has a range of 100mi. These were in service from 1974 and are still used by the Iranians. The F14 could engage multiple targets at beyond visual range. Why is the development of a follow on taking so long?
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  7243. Like most who talk about Iran and the Shah, you leave out the fact that he had a massive internal security apparatus. This was quite oppressive. Don't get me wrong, I am no supporter of the current regime. Have you wondered how, if the Shah was so great, there was such a massive upheaval against him? By leaving that out, you weaken your analysis.
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  7244. Have you considered that the statements by the Ukranian leaders may be deliberate misinformation? Other channels have noted that there is significant progress in the Luhansk region in the last couple of days.
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  7245. Come on man! The man at the beginning who asked, isn't squatting while eating, a custom, a matter of personal freedom. Unless this is a gross translation error it shows the total ignorance of the Chinese people. In a Marxist-Leninist society there is no such thing as personal freedom. Don't these people get any education on the system they live under, and support? The Chinese people are doomed, DOOMED!
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  7246. The whole argument that this will take away from dealing with problems on earth is just plain stupid. First, how are you going to do that? When do you know when you are done? That you have all these so called "smart people" spouting this drivel is just plain disappointing.
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  7247. I just looked up this gun on the new Marlin site. It is a Classic Series Model 336. It has the pistol grip, not the straight grip on the one in the video. It also has the rounded off lever. The ones shown online also have checkering on the stock. So, if this is a .30-30, when was it made? Just wondering.
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  7248.  @suleyman8696  Absolutely. That is the source of many of the conflicts we see in the region. You can add to the list a large number of countries in Africa. One of the aspects of this post-colonial milieu and a tactic that the British used quite successfully in administering many of their imperial possessions was the use of minorities to control majorities. Don't forget that the UK is not a very large country by population and yet they controlled the largest empire in history, both in terms of land area and population. In Syria, they promoted the Alawites to positions of power, even though they were a small minority. That is the clan that the Assads hail from.
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  7249.  @ultonian63  Yes. That's a sad commentary, isn't it.
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  7250.  @willpugh-calotte2199  Now, wouldn't that be a hoot. A return to the good old days.
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  7251. Are the Druze "pro-Assad". What kind of propaganda is this?
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  7252. Well, of course they do have the DIA.
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  7253. My vote is for the Netherlands, followed by Italy then Poland. I recently saw an interview with Eva Vlaardingerbroek on the Spectator YouTube channel where she basically says that she wants to "be the next Farage". The crisis in the Netherlands is more succinct and immediate. In addition, the Dutch have a long history of relations with the UK and are, of course, much closer geographically. In fact, one their princes became the King of England. On the other hand, early in the millennium, when I lived in England, I spent some time in the Netherlands helping out a group of the company I worked for with a customer situation. One time, at dinner with my Dutch counterpart, I got an earful about the British. Being an American of 100% Greek ethnicity, and dressing in Saville Row suits, it was very hard for people to look at me an tell that I was an American. This allowed me to get a real sense of how the Europeans felt about each other. It also led to some hilarious situations. Great fun.
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  7254. The thing is that the Axis of Evil that is Russia, China, North Korea and Iran is a paper tiger. For one thing all of these countries are in dire financial shape. Three of them are heavily isolated from international trade. China, if it does not change course, will be as well. The two largest, Russia and China, are in demographic collapse at the moment. For Russia, the war is just making things worse in that regard. Militarily we have yet another example of how Russian/Soviet equipment, doctrine and tactics are a failure. China follows those. Iran, in the Iran-Iraq war, with twice the population, could not defeat Iraq. China tried an incursion into Vietnam and failed. That was their last foreign military foray. They have an inexperienced military riddled with corruption. Even ranks, down to sergeant, have to be bought. Frankly, if China did try anything it is not necessary to confront them directly. Cut off their imports of food, oil and other natural resources and they collapse very quickly. It would not take much to do so.
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  7255. The Europeans actually stepping up in their own defense. Finally! Wasn't that what Trump was telling them they needed to do when they laughed at him in his first term? Who's laughing now? The first thing is the Europeans have the money. Their combined economy (EU plus UK) is ten times that of Russia. If you look at some of the, as Peter would say, batsh*t crazy and wasteful programs the EU funds, you know the money is there. They only do the crazy stuff because the US has subsidized their defense for so long. And I am just talking about the EU plus the UK. Add in Ukraine, by the way, and they have additional exploitable oil and natural gas. Start fracking and building nuclear plants and they would be in good shape on the energy front. Secondly, they have three times the population of Russia. Thirdly, their weapon systems are light years ahead of the Russians. Oh, and by the way, they have their own nuclear deterrent. Add it all together, and this should be a slam dunk for them. If they acted together, it is Russia who needs to be afraid.
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  7256. Orban is correct. The procedures for requesting asylum outside the country are reasonable. There may be individual, obvious, cases where someone defects from an oppressive regime, and countries can decide to accommodate them. The left is enthralled by the example of the Jews in Germany between the world wars. The Germans had stripped them of German citizenship, and no one would take them in. So, you had effectively stateless people wandering the continent. Asylum rules were meant to stop such situations from being repeated. On the other hand, today, we have nothing approaching that. Even in Syria, refugees from that country can get asylum in places like Turkey. The Arab world has the economic capacity to absorb all the refugees from there. They keep talking about Arab solidarity, so lets see some. I don't mean to say that it is the Arab nations' fault, by the way.
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  7257. Wow, if Dong Chen can actually tell that the economy has bottomed, then he is the greatest analyst on the planet. Of course, if you haven't caught the irony in that sentence, be assured it is there. All indicators are that the Chinese economy will actually crash. Badly! The housing and banking sectors are being kept on life support by the central government and even they are running out of tools to do so. Oh, and I haven't even mentioned the shadow banking sector. McCarthyism lives, in China! The anti-spy propaganda, especially the "comic strip" posters remind me of something from the height of the Cold War. That would be Mad Magazine, a satirical publication. By the way, they used to depict China on maps as "the great big empty spot". It may well become that again. Think about that before investing in China.
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  7258. I have a lot of respect for Senator Scott. I am a great fan. The only thing I have an issue with, and this is something everyone seems to do, is the way he talks about "lower taxes". It is also pointed out, rightly, that the amount of tax revenue increased, with lower tax RATES. It is the rate that was lowered, not the amount of tax collected. This may seem a little pedantic, but the way that taxes are talked about is critically important. Taxation is the most important thing government does. Recall that the cry of the American Revolution was "no taxation without representation". To be clear, this was also the impetus for the Magna Carta. Taxes are so critical because they provide the capital for everything else. This said, it in no way diminishes my admiration for and support for Senator Scott. It is just a reflection of one of my pet peeves.
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  7259. You should not feel guilty that something has to die for you to live. If you have any connection to nature you will know this. Just look at the whole concept of the food chain. This is a neurosis of city dwellers who have no connection to the world of nature. Just look at animals you might have. I have had indoor/outdoor cats (not declawed) for decades. Actually I don't right now, but that is another story. Even though we fed them, they were voracious hunters. They would kill and eat small creatures such as voles and field mice. They would also eat whole rabbits. I watched them. It was fascinating. That is how the world works. I grew up knowing about all this. If you are running into people with this type of abnormal understanding, then they are, by definition uninformed and mentally deficient.
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  7260. Actually, omicron is a good thing. As people get it, they develop an immunity to all variants. Let it rip. As often happens to these diseases, they morph into less deadly stains. This is because, if they kill off all their hosts, they too die. Actually, the death rate, as a proportion of population, is paltry compared to the Spanish Flu of a century ago. That we are so incensed with this situation is laughable, In the US, there was not even a recession from the Spanish Flu. Think about that and the way our leaders have responded to this health problem. The Spanish Flu killed about five times more people than the Kung Flu, with a world population that was much smaller. Get over it!!!!
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  7261.  @chilled_beer821  Thanks.
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  7262. What I find in common across all these sites that give a day by day account of the war is that they seem to assume that the taking of territory is permanent. This is. of course, if one looks at the history of warfare. Many locations will change hands multiple times. This is normal. In fact, this has happened in this war already. Perhaps I am reading too much into it, but I don't think so.
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  7263.  @EmporerGreg  Wow, I thought I was slow to upgrade. When I got the 7 my wife still had a 6, which was a company phone and they had no plans to upgrade anytime soon. I was forbidden to brag that I had more advanced tech than she did as a condition for "letting" me get the phone.
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  7264.  @chuyistheshiz6811  Thanks. It is nice, but since I don't do a lot with a phone I don't notice much difference.
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  7265.  @robejercito2624  Yep, I think it was about seven years. The battery as I said was a bit wonky. It would quickly show depletion down to zero and then work for the rest of the day.
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  7266.  @scammergaming7776  Well, you say that, but it is still difficult to get into phones, especially iPhones. I recently saw the FBI director mention that they got into the Trump shooter's phone, but that it was not easy. Several years ago, there was a celebrated case where a domestic Islamic terrorist had info on an iPhone and Apple would not help the authorities break into it. They found another way. The situation in China is different. When the authorities take your phone and ask for the passcode or passwords people do it. Otherwise, they face prison time without all the messy appeals and legal protections people in the west have.
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  7267. Labor is a socialist party. Of course, Starmer would cozy up to China. Commies stick together. Heck, even the royal family is getting in on the act. The people of the UK voted this government in overwhelmingly. They seem to have thrown their lot in with China. Actually, if the vote was just in response to the failures of the Conservatives, then that is just a bad, maybe worse. The UK's bargaining position vis-a-vis the US is now much weaker. The only reason that the US has not abandoned the UK is shared history and language and the work done through the two World Wars. Don't forget that prior to that the US and UK were adversaries. Considering the dire state of the EU and the resurgence in the US, the UK is in a dark place. Trump will drive a hard bargain. If the UK is cozying up to America's adversaries, then they will lose out in both directions.
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  7268. Just look at the natural world. Murder, if you want to call it that is the norm. Have you heard of the food chain in nature? This vegan stuff is idiocy. I am personally a pescatarian at home. I will eat meat when out, if that is what is available. For well over two decades I hunted, and ate all the game I took. I have no problem with that. I have just lost access to the hunting grounds I used to have. If you look at nature, there is NO humane killing. In many cases, game that is taken down by other animals is eaten while it is still alive. I even noticed that with cats I had as pets. I have seen it in the wild. Veganism is an abomination. It has nothing to do with the natural world.
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  7269. Actually, the new Bud Light as is quite good. As for Jaguar, for a company that goes in for DEI, they are a bit racist. Did you notice that the Asian guy was dressed in yellow?
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  7270. Tony, I have to question the Caixin data. Look at this video from the China Observer channel titled "No Orders! Factories Close en Masse, Industrial Parks Demolished One by One, Shenzhen Turns to Ruins". I see this kind of stuff all the time. Look at the statement at about 3:50. They local government is actively driving away the low-end manufacturing and the high-end stuff has not arrived. The CCP is handling this very poorly, as usual.
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  7271. The type of service in segment three of the video is very common in the west. I have even used similar services which go down to various managers within an organization, as well as the top people. So, why is this news? The cost? The calculation done is not very enlightening.
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  7272. What do you mean by conflict? The only place where China can really get the US involved is Taiwan. Their chance of success there is low. So, please tell me where and how. The US created the world order that allowed China to prosper. The CCP knows full well that if they start any type of military conflict, they will be devastated. All it takes is to block the Straights of Malaca. Then as Peter Ziehan likes to put it, they deindustrialize in three months and experience mass famine withing a year. If the US doesn't do it, India will. They are positioning themselves for just this action already. The west can live without China. The reverse is not true. That is why they are so crazy over the disinvestment movement. Everyone loved China as a market. That has turned out not to be as good as was predicted. With Xi's policies over the last few years, it is unlikely to ever be so.
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  7273. Tony, I hope you enjoyed your day off. On the trade war, China's hand is very weak. The so-called critical minerals are not in short supply. The only reason China became a big player is their lack of environmental controls. In other words, the west simply outsourced their pollution. This is being rectified already. On the drone components, I have to laugh. This is not rocket science. I know, I was a rocket scientist. Almost 20 years ago I was on an IEEE panel judging senior projects at a university. One was a drone. The students were given a budget and had to build it from scratch on a tight schedule. They did a great job. They even managed not to smash into any of us judges. This is just another example of China trying to corner a market which is not particularly advanced. Another way to look at it is to watch what is happening in Ukraine. Lots of people, with no technical background, are assembling drones at home. Lots! I see many YouTube videos about this trend. I am also seeing another trend, reshoring to the US, that is leveraging the country's superior free capital market markets. In many cases, production was brought back to the US using automation and redesigning products for easier automated assembly. Several years ago, I read about one product that was a space heater. Just recently I saw an article about a company that redesigned textile items for easy assembly with automation that could be sold at a reasonable cost. I think one item was men's underwear. Just the think about that.
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  7274. This is a false premise. Just get rid of sweeteners! I have, and have not looked back. I only drink water (generally with some organic lemon juice with no sweetener), coffee or tea (always brewed). I feel no compunction to add a sweetener. I have oatmeal in the morning with butter and cinnamon, again with no sweetener. The only thing I use with sugar is terakihi sauce, which I occasionally use to marinate fish, such as salmon. Sweeteners are never required, and are a cultural thing, not a requirement.
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  7275. The robot story is a sort of click bait. The fact that the device is connected to a robot arm has little to do with what it does. Precise robot arms have been around for a while, so this is nothing new.
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  7276. Sal, the FREIGHTOS data does show a tick up, but nowhere near where it was during the height of the supply chain crisis, and it looks like it is now closer to the rates just before that crisis. I would be nice to see the data from a little earlier. From what you have shown us, it seem to be getting back to where it was before, and that the ultra-low rates we saw recently were an anomaly. Another thing is about the shipping companies. Shipping is a capital-intensive business. So, yes if they make $1B that is still real money. On the other hand, their ability to raise capital is directly related to their profit outlook. If profit expectations get too low, the capital will go elsewhere.
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  7277. High quality production will not save China. Just the opposite. Their products are trash. This will be seen in the market. What China needs is more jobs for their massive poor population. With 900M people living on 2,000 yuan per month (about $280) they need to get those people into what China calls mid-income jobs. There are not enough jobs in the high quality production space to employ these people. The trend of foreign companies, many of which paid well, moving out of China, the situation is dire. China has consistently ignored the development of human capital. They need to spend less on the military and internal security. No one is going to invade China. They have insufficient natural resources, poor farmland and all those Chinese.
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  7278. The comments at about 2:40 show that China will not progress and become a real threat to the west. Education and science do not care about ideology. I have mentioned an investment advisor friend of mine who hoped Xi would get his third term because he assumes Xi will tank the economy and eliminate China as a competitor. This is just another data point showing he was correct.
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  7279. None of this is unexpected. Under the Obama presidency the US pumped massive amounts of money into the sector. Basically, all of that was lost (it was billions).
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  7280. The idea of Europe with strategic and military autonomy is truly frightening, Look at history. The last century was a result of that. Also, consider that the last century was not all that unusual in the history of Europe. Another issue is cost. Look at what the US spends on its military. For Europe to match that they would have to more than double their spending. Actually, to really catch up, independent of the US, they would have to do better than that. Is there really an appetite for such spending?
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  7281.  @patrickbateman529  Well, you cannot be a great power without a great military. That costs a lot. Very recently the PM of Finland stated that Europe was too dependent on the US. This was not really a complaint against the US, but an exhortation to Europe to do more. As for your understanding of geopolitics, you forget the history. This is especially true for Europe. Before WWII, and the US creation of a world order to fight the Soviets after the war, the world was split into empires. These tended to trade internally, excluding others. The European power needed the raw materials and markets for finished goods that the empires provided. Under the postwar order, guaranteed by the US, anyone could trade with anyone without fear of interference. Now, China, Europe and Russia are pushing against that order. What they don't realize is that they are signing their own death warrant. The US, and North America have the resources they need. This is not true of Europe, excluding Russia. Russia's goal is to dominate Europe, not become an integrated partner. So, good luck with that.
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  7282. Don't worry about the voice. It is the content that is important. Get better soon.
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  7283. A European defense community? Well, yes. Europe has depended on the US for too long. If you hadn't noticed the US is slowly withdrawing as the world's security guarantor. That whole idea was based on the threat of the Soviet Union. That threat disappeared 30 years ago. Europe is rich enough to match the US in military spending. You might also recall that Macron gave a speech calling for a common European military in which he identified the threats as Russia, China AND THE US. Just let that sink in.
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  7284. At 7:45 the gentleman states that many banks in the West are collapsing. What? He said he did "research". The Chinese people are so ill informed on financial issues that it beggars belief. It is almost as bad as the crazy propaganda coming out of Russia about the situation in western Europe and the US (no water in the US to wash with and people in the UK eating squirrels, etc.). I recently saw an ad from Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) saying they were open for business. In the US, the government intervenes, and the bank is either liquidated (with protection for depositors) or its assets sold to another bank. In the SVB case it was sold, and the new bank is operating it under its old name. As I often say, I do not fear China, either economically or militarily. A society and government built primarily on ignorance and lies is not a long-term threat.
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  7285. Everyone talks about all the Russian troops that, if they get out with their equipment, can be deployed elsewhere. No one mentions that the Ukrainians can also deploy their troops from the Kherson area to counter them. Ukraine only has to secure the two bridges to stop Russia from being able to come back.
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  7286. Sal, you are so concerned about the insurance and the economics of shipping in the short run that it is sometimes a bit infuriating. This is primarily a geopolitics issue, not a commercial issue. You keep saying you have to get the war risk insurance down. Fine, but how? If you let the Houthis alone, they will shut the place down. What you seem to be calling for is an outright invasion. That is the only way to ensure a total solution. Is that what you are calling for? Send in the Marines?
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  7287. Douglas, your impression of China's preparation of children is woefully wrong. They teach to the test. The vice premier of China visited my son's high school a few years back. It is a magnificent facility (cost over $200M). The range of facilities is amazing. He was impressed both by that and the positive attitude of the students as opposed to China. The problem we have in places like LA has been around since at least the 1970s in many cities. Often, in the suburbs surrounding those cities, the situation is the opposite. We grew to where are with that happening. It is not germane to the overall economy. It is sad and should be rectified, but not gernane.
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  7288. I have been seeing for a while video from China of EVs catching fire. Some while charging, some in accidents and some just sitting there. Actually, many, many years ago I saw articles and even some videos, from a couple of westerners who lived in the Pearl River Delta. This was at the dawn of the current EV era. I distinctly remember one example where there were a couple of passengers in an electric taxi. They were in a fairly minor accident. The car caught fire, and the driver and passengers were burned alive. Actually, it is not the charging points that are the problem. It is just the batteries. The cars do sometime catch fire just sitting there. There was a situation in a car park under a high-rise apartment building in South Korea where a Mercedes EV caught fire causing massive damage. The battery packs were Chinese made, of course.
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  7289.  @AlexV6  It would be interesting to understand what the real impact of the policies was. This would include the societal impact and the issues that China is dealing with. The demographic collapse that China is experiencing is a major issue. China is growing old before becoming wealthy as a country. Yes, they are the second largest economy, but the largest economy has less than 25% of the population. It also has greater natural resources.
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  7290. Who should decide the fate of the government? Simple. Those that pay for it. The American revolutionary leaders had a battle cry: no taxation without representation. Of course, they were echoing the sentiment of the Magna Carta. Anyone who directly pays taxes, and is a citizen, should be able to vote. There should also be a minimum age, which roughly corresponds to those paying taxes. The maximum age should correspond to a person's death. I say this only half in jest. I had a contractor in Chicago who claimed that he still cast votes for his deceased grandfather, as well as himself. I can't verify it, but that is what he told me, and that is something Chicago is known for. Keep rolling those r's.
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  7291.  @lberghaus  Well, the governed are everyone in the territory of the state. For example, I lived in England for a time, working for a US corporation. I was actually able to vote in local elections, since I paid the local taxes. My company paid the central government taxes, so I could not vote in those elections as I was not a citizen. I actually had neighbors who were British citizens. They had worked for a long time for a US company in the US and were on a "foreign assignment" in the UK. They could vote because they were citizens. I was also elected to the board of governors of the local primary school, which my sons attended. But there are those within the territory of a state who you would consider second class citizens. In the UK, many of these were on their way to citizenship. Most I knew were from former colonies.
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  7292. Well, the Canada scenario is not very realistic. We would whoop them in a matter of days.
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  7293. Wow. Are these people not aware of what is going on, or are they walking on eggshells trying not to anger the CCP? It wasn't mainly that the property sector had a lot of debt, but that it had become a Ponzi scheme. It didn't start out that way, but that is what it became. On top of that, the developers were in cahoots with the local governments. This fueled the corruption that is at the heart of the CCP system and was getting out of control. The CCP doesn't really care about the level of debt. Just look at the central government debt. In addition, I heard nothing about the real underlying reason that ordinary people put their money into property. It was first that they had few other options. Chinese people in general can't invest in equities. Second, coming from a communist background, most people did not understand equities, or other financial instruments, but they instinctively understood property. This caused a major distortion in the economy with property taking an outsized role. I could go on. Trying to understand the Chinese economy using western economic assumptions and obviously manipulated Chinese government data is a recipe for disaster. And organizations like Bloomberg are supposed to be the savvy ones. Sad.
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  7294. What did India do when the Taliban was in control before the US invasion?
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  7295. Chicago is joking known as the City of Chicanos. I got that from my Latino friends.
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  7296. I am very disappointed in the CFR. What I heard from the reporter interviewing Gen. Kellog and the questions from the audience was a bunch of talking points that are banging around in the press and social media. I am especially disappointed by Jill Daugherty from Georgetown. She is supposed to be an expert on this stuff. Gen. Kellog is so much more sophisticated than these people are.
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  7297. I don't know what the price to farmers should be for, say beef, bur the animal is just the raw material here. It has to be processed, safely, then distributed and then made available to the consumer. That is a much more complex chain than what the farmer does to get the animal to the processor.
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  7298. So, would she be a lesbian? Bond is a famous womanizer.
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  7299. The use of young conscripts is not the issue. During the Vietnam War the US used 18 and 19-year-olds in combat. The length of conscription was two years. They received at least eight months of real training, just like volunteers.
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  7300. The way Meta is tanking its own stock these days, Musk might be able to put together an investment group to buy it.
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  7301.  @samsonsoturian6013  By the way, I have two things to add. First, it is your fault for getting me going on this. That is the humorous part. Second, and this is not humorous, is that the undercurrent of your comment is a little concerning. It sounds like Xi and the CCP when it comes to technology and trade, etc. There is a hidden assumption that countries and peoples are "entitled" to either food or technology, etc. That is blatantly untrue. If the people who grow the food and develop the technology don't get paid, then it won't be there, for anyone. That is the thing that is often left unsaid.
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  7302. BItcoin? Really? It is like gold, but without any intrinsic value. What really is this decentralized system? is there any regulation? What happens when you are robbed? If you look at any of the Bitcoin scandals, the amount recovered is fraction of what was stollen.
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  7303. Those big American V8s are really something different, especially because of the torque. A friend of mine had a 1967 Pontiac GTO with a 6.6L V8 that only put out 335HP and 441 ft-lb of torque. It had a four-speed manual transmission, and you could smoothly accelerate from a stand still up a fairly steep grade in fourth.
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  7304. The argument about Ukraine not lasting if western support is withdrawn is hilarious. In WWII, both the Soviet Union and the UK would not have lasted if American aid had been withdrawn. Ignore the weapons sent to the Soviet Union. The US also sent boots, cotton, food, petrol products and 400K jeeps and trucks. I once saw in the diary of a German soldier an interesting statement. I think this soldier was in Ukraine, by the way. When he saw the Soviet soldiers driving jeeps, he said, he knew the war was over. Don't forget that the Germans never had enough motor transports. They relied heavily, especially in their infantry divisions, on horse transport. At least they could eat the horses when they ran out of food. The Soviets didn't have to because their "backers" in the west sent them food. So, in a sense he is correct, but the same could be said of Russia today. Without the weapons and other items sent by China, Iran and North Korea, Russia would have to stop the war. It goes both ways.
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  7305.  @secretbassrigs  Good point. That is true as well. I was concerned with the economic aspects. Thanks.
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  7306. The problem with the jamming is that it also jams your own signals.
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  7307. I do not want to condone this action. But, just look at the situation at the end of the war. The Soviets had suffered the bulk of the causalities. This was pre-Cold War. The West had made an agreement. It was not unusual to repatriate people after a war. Where were these people to go? There was no UN Convention on Human Rights. This would only come at the end of 1948. So, what law was broken by abiding by an agreement made by the Allied combatants in early 1945? One of the problem that the Jews had during the war, when there we immigrant restrictions in many countries, was that many were consigned to stateless status. They were trying to find somewhere to go to, but had no status. We have changed our way of thinking about these situations now, but as a historian, you need to look at the situation at the time. This is a rate situation where I will give a thumbs down to one of your videos. Frankly, I really like your content and eagerly await it.
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  7308. You are wrong about the tank. Russian tanks have a fatal flaw. They use an autoloader, where all the ammo is in the turret. Thus, any breach sets off all the ammo. That is why you see the massive explosions. Western tanks use an additional crewman to load the weapon. The ammo is in an armored compartment, so there is no possibility for this to happen. The newest Russian designs also recognize this, but they have few of these, and they have not been deployed. Russia is, I repeat, not a first-tier power.
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  7309. Tony, I get the idea behind the thumbnails but based on them I expect to be reading in the US based Wall Street Journal that the CCP has fallen, and that the civil war has begun (because that is what will happen). Of course this is not limited to your channel by any means. What we need (and I am not talking about you initiating it) is frank talk about why all this is happening in the Chinese economy and society. I have made a lot of these points before. First, the economists and financial advisors are applying western ideas to the Chinese situation. This, as I often say, is scientific malpractice. Second, they ignore areas which are unique to China because of its governance. The system was designed to enrich the party elites. Deng basically stated as much (although not using those terms) when he initiated the reform and opening up. The result is rampant corruption, the driving force of the CCP and now the whole society. The stuff that Chinese do to other Chinese is beyond the pale. This includes everything from tofu dreg construction to food scams (which include basically poisoning their fellow Chinese) to substandard products. The main reason for this is fear. For those in China it is fear for one's own safety. For those outside it is fear of being excluded. Decoupling cannot come soon enough.
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  7310. What Peter says is spot on. On the other hand, there is something generally left out. Bear with me as I point out the real issue, The only thing is that all the analyses assume a model, which, it turns out, does not apply to this situation. As with any type of mathematical modeling (and this is basically what economics and financial analysis are) the challenge is not collecting the data (far from it) but coming up with a mathematical model to run all that data through. Wrong mathematical model and assumptions wrong analysis and conclusions. This is true in the hard sciences as well. So, what are the aspects of the Chinese economy that people aren't talking about? There are two main ones. These are corruption and intellectual property theft (IP). The scale of both is breathtaking. It is rumored that over 50% of funds allocated to projects, government and private, are stollen through graft. Ever hear the term "tofu dreg". There is a reason for that. Another example is that the CCP has set up at least two massive funds to help the country compete in the chip wars. Both I have heard of failed and the people managing them have been arrested for corruption. The list goes on and on and on. IP theft has a similarly corrosive effect. The other thing is quality of goods coming out of China. The quality level of products coming out of China is abysmal. You can blame it on the western companies as well as the Chinese. Examples of this go back well before the CCP came to power. It has been centuries since China as a country has been innovative (I am not talking about individuals). Ever since western companies decided that they would do marketing and design and outsource manufacturing, things have gone downhill. That is a bigger and more complex conversation. The biggest culprit in all this is Walmart. Why do I prattle on and on about this? It is because no one, especially the people managing massive amounts of money in the US, is talking about this. They are looking at opportunities to profit off of fluctuations in purely financial terms. That's their business model. They do not care about (it is not their business to do so) long term issues and solutions. I am lucky to have a top-notch financial advisor. He has, for years, avoided China. He is very analytical. As for not talking about the main differentiating issues, there is one exception. Love him or hate him, that person is Donald Trump. And it is not a new thing for him. Even Democrat leaders have made noises about this at times. We ignore it at our peril.
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  7311. Isaac Asimov predicted these in the Foundation books from the 1950s.
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  7312. Governing the country according to law? Are these officials kidding? They are members of a commie party. Law is whatever the leader says it is. Don't they teach these guys anything?
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  7313. Protests are not always a great barometer of what the electorate thinks. My favorite example is the large Vietnam protests (of which I have personal experience). Despite these protests, Richard Nixon won a second term in one of the largest landslides in American presidential history.
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  7314. I can't agree with that last statement. Ukraine is not the US. The US, if it gets involved, will apply overwhelming airpower. From what we have seen, in past conflicts going back to the Gulf War, is that it will be successful against a Soviet/Russian style of fighting.
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  7315. All you guys who look at these maps daily are missing the point. You show a change, and what is it? Farm fields. You even say so yourselves, but then go on to discuss.
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  7316. At one point the number 650,000 EVs. Do you know how many light vehicles (cars, SUVs and pickups) are sold in the US each year? it is 18M or more. Do you know how many of these vehicles there are in the US? There are 275M. So, the 650K cars accounts for 3.6% of cars sold. This is a pimple on the a** of vehicles sales. Even if all new vehicles are EVs, it still takes at least 15 years to replace all the vehicles out there. If all manufacturers go all EV by 2030, that means 2045 until replacement. This is not actually the time frame. It is much longer, because of the long time frame, there will be some new production replacing early EVs, not ICE vehicles. Thus we are talking about another 10 years for full replacement. Now, I doubt we will get to that 2030 date without some massive lowering of the cost of the batteries. So, most optimistic, we are probably out to something like 2070. Lithium production would have to go up over 27 times. Do the math. It doesn't work.
    1
  7317. The idiots in these cities voted for these DAs. They are getting what they deserve.
    1
  7318. This is a fascinating discussion. I have read books by both Peterson and Penrose. I also started school in physics (a long time ago) but switched to computer science. I have a lot to say about AI, but not here. When I was studying physics, I also took courses in psychology and read Freud, and especially Jung, as well as some others, and found it fascinating. What is most striking is the difference in intellectual temperament between the two. I am very in tune with Penrose's attitude and approach. A real scientist (and I include mathematicians in that designation) is not concerned with the meaning behind these things. the meta-physics if you will. Peterson, by virtue of his profession and intellectual proclivities, is profoundly interested in this. I am not saying one is right or wrong, but they are very different. I really both of these men and am glad they had this talk.
    1
  7319. I think the answer will be immigration. We didn't populate the continent or industrialize using mostly DAR WASPs. The reaction to immigrants in the past was about what it is now. We will get over it somehow. I also wonder if the birth rate will stay as low. I am a boomer (watch it sonny) and my kids were born later in my life than in my parents' generation. I saw one commentary where, I think it was Jordan Peterson, it was stated that if a woman doesn't have kids by 30 it is over. My two kids were born when my wife was 34 and 37. I saw a lot of that going on around me. I think we have the whole age thing wrong. On that front I am seeing statements like 60 is the new 40 (and grey is the new blonde, lucky for me). Also, the actuaries will tell you that if you reach 65 today you have a 50% chance of living into your 90s. There is no precedent for this. I mention this because I think there is a general misuse of statistics when talking about populations. Statistical methods are great when talking about things where the underlying dynamics do not change. Making predictions from statistics when that is not the case is just plain silly. I have been dealing with statistics since the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium (I love to say it that way, drives my kids crazy) so I have seen a lot. Good and bad.
    1
  7320. I am interested in why you have any interest in a decentralized registry. The only reason for this is to avoid government regulation. This is preferred by people who have some reason to do so. Mostly these are wealthy people trying to avoid taxes or people involved in illegal activities such as drug dealing.
    1
  7321.  @ChucksSEADnDEAD  Tell me more. The fact is that crypto is just another asset class. It will be regulated to protect the individual investor.
    1
  7322. Jack Ma got beat down by the CCP for pointing out that China's financial regulation was inadequate to deal with the shadow, or non-traditional, banking sector. He was punished for telling the truth. Why western companies did not begin to pull out right then and there, I do not know. Perhaps the people managing these large funds aren't as smart as we think.
    1
  7323. The reporting of housing prices in China is utterly meaningless. This statistic is a measure of the listed price. In real economies, with real markets and real public records, the number that one looks at is the price of actual sales. That is the real world. Not the la-la land of the CCP. Even in China, with all its restrictions, this almost certainly overestimates the price the home is sold for. Add in the secondhand home market (the most important), and the reports I have seen about the massive drops there, make the government data laughable. Well, that is true of almost everything they report.
    1
  7324. The issue of work conditions in workplaces in China, especially as regards things like air quality is not unique to prison enterprises. I was once at a meeting with a family run business where one of the American buyers of products was asked if he cared about air filtration in the plant. He said no, as that would increase the cost. This company produced low end goods, and the business was very price sensitive.
    1
  7325. Well, this video has been OTB. The WSJ just reported that the rebels have entered Damascus. I am writing this a 9:45 Central Time in the US.
    1
  7326. Ian, did the Swedes actually fight in WWII (or WWI)? You should talk about actual combatants. It takes time away from the real question. When the 7.62 NATO came out, that was almost as powerful as the .30-06, and was used for both rifle and machineguns in the infantry. Then, for the rifle. we went to the 5.56 but kept the 7.62 NATO for machineguns. Flash forward to today, and for machineguns we use 5.56 for squad machineguns (SAW) and 7.62 NATO for more firepower. Of course the answer to the viewer's question is 30.06.
    1
  7327. So, what's new? During the Cold War, while working at an aerospace firm I became aware that we were tracking fifteen Soviet agents attempting to infiltrate our organization. The spying has never stopped, on all sides, and diplomatic cover has long been used.
    1
  7328. The Border Patrol officers should resign, on masse. Then Biden would have to send the military. How would that look?
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  7329. You have fallen into a trap in terms of language that concerns me. You, along with many other people, have been using the term "narrative" when what is really meant is "lie". The problem is that "narrative" has other connotations when what is really happening is that people are being told a "lie". The housing situation is a good illustration. This is the corruption of language that is causing backlash against the traditional establishment. The only silver lining is that if someone comes along speaking plainly then they have a good chance to win. Trump did it in the US. Farage seems to be doing it in the UK. There are others, thankfully. The people who have perpetrated this crime against humanity, all of whom can trace their lineage back to Goebbels (this is not hyperbolae), failed to consider one thing. In the current era, at least outside of China and North Korea, they don't have enough control of the means of communication. They are applying an old formula which was created for old technology. They did not adapt. They really are not that smart. Do you really want such dolts running your country?
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  7330. IBM's most comprehensively structured market outside of the US? Where did you get that. I was on a foreign assignment at an IBM facility in the UK earlier in the millennium. The facility there, and it was one of several in Europe, had 3,500 employees. Another facility I often went to in Germany had several hundred. There were others. You might want to check your facts.
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  7331. That Miller had to give that civics lesson tells a lot about the press. One of two things has to be true. Either their education is lacking, or they are captured by one ideological tendency. I use the word "captured" because they are fond of using that terminology in terms of government bureaucrats that have private sector experience. I also stress the issue of "capture" because the educational level of most of the press is fairly high. I know the schools are in bad shape, but come on man, I learned that stuff in High School civics (well it was a while ago, but it never left me). One other thing Mr. Miller could have pointed out is that what he described is how any large organization works, whether it be civil or military. The leader, CEO or general, sets the policies and goals and is responsible for seeing that his subordinates carry out those policies and goals. He is not responsible, or capable, of doing all the work himself.
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  7332. In the 1980s, a professor at Stanford University developed a chip called the MIPS. This was a reduced instruction set (RISC) computer (one of the first). The ARM architecture is also a RISC design. He leveraged research he had done at the university and then created a company. As late the 2010s I had high speed communications processors using a MIPS processor. That China took so long to come up with something is ludicrous. As for the education system, I can confirm what you say. I studied with lots of Chinese students at a graduate school in a STEM field not too long ago. Also, at the high school that my younger son went to a high-level Chinese official came to visit (he might have been a vice premier if I remember correctly). I was supposed to be there, but something came up. He was so impressed with the school, and the positive attitude of the students. I have to say, though, that the graduation rate was not quite 100% (I think it was over 98%). I mention this because when I went to school half a century ago, we had a 100% graduation rate and a 100% college entrance rate. Many went to prestigious schools. And this was not the best school in our district (which was admittedly one of the best in the country at the time). The Chinese schools are an extreme, but many schools around the world "teach to the test", even in places like the UK. That is why you see angst with US performance on standardized tests used to compare countries. That is a flawed measure. It sort of reminds me of the Confucian system.
    1
  7333.  @MeiinUK  Good point. In the US, people of all types look at the figures and there is lots of talk and awareness of the numbers. The problem is with countries that move from a communist to a capitalist system without educating the population as a whole. A good example is Russia. When the Soviet Union fell people were given shares in the companies they worked for. They basically said, what is this crap. Then, smart people who knew, swooped in and bought up all the shares and got control of the companies. In China, a lack of education and long experience of how markets really work is a problem. I am talking about the general population. There will always be a small number of people who do understand.
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  7334. This guy doesn't understand. There is no desire to make the city safe, or make it work. As with most of the Democrat run cities, people are moving out and the few that move in have lower incomes. The fact is that the cities have become irrelevant. The solution to the societal problems we have is to move the good jobs back to the cities. This is where the people are. You can't locate a factory in the wilds of Iowa and expect the residents of Detroit or Chicago to move there. Why do you think that illegal immigrants are a large part of the workforces of these rural factories? Why should any of the jobs be in the rural areas, or in smaller cites? The reason is that the climate for business is better. But this ignores where the people are. We have to do something about this. For example, NYC, with its large population, should be a manufacturing powerhouse. Forget about the high-end jobs. That is a small part of the population. We need jobs for the majority of people, not the exceptional ones. They will find their own way and will prosper. That is why they are exceptional. We need jobs for the majority. We sent a lot of those to China and look what happened. The people making policy in the US are just plain stupid.
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  7335. So much wrong with the whole devolution project that it is hard to know where to start. David Starkey likes to take the US to task for having a written Constitution. I would damn well rather have that than unchecked Parliamentary power. That is where you got devolution. A whole new set of "nations" created from whole cloth. They had not governed themselves for hundreds of years. They also have representation in a national parliament that decides purely English issues as well. This is both stupid and divisive. Then there is the creation of a "supreme court". Without a written constitution to adjudicate against this becomes a political court. This is the case in Israel at the moment. When I lived in England, early in the century, I used to see graffiti on the motorway overpasses that read "England for the English". The kind of unchecked legislative power the UK Parliament has is actually dangerous. Think Germany in the early 1930s. If Blair had been a really strong, ideological leader, with his majorities, just imagine the world of hurt the UK would be in, even compared to today.
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  7336. Your point at the end of the video about the finite lifetime, etc. applies to basically all guns. With the 1911s in use in the late 70s and after, these were all WWII (and prior) made guns and were showing their age. Thus, the M9 pistol. With the M9 there was a similar problem. Many people who used them in the military were using guns that had not been maintained as they should have. If, when they got home, they bought a commercial gun, they had a finely made pistol that worked well.
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  7337. Take a look at the graph at 3:40. If you believe the projections, then you are ignoring the actual data in the graph. You should go back and take some statistics courses. As for the warmest summer on record, I have to wonder about that. It was actually very, very average where I am. Actually, a little on the mild side. Don't forget, the number you are citing is supposed to be the average over the whole planet. You might also notice that the places with high temperatures tend to be places that always have higher than average temperatures. Using average temperatures is also a bit misleading. If you don't also quote the variance and tell me how many standard deviations from the average the current reading is, then I have no idea of if it unusual. Also, one year does not make a trend. One final word on this issue is that the maps people show have been colored to give the impression that things are getting warmer. I have seen documented evidence of this.
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  7338. I am in a similar situation but did it much sooner. It did cause me a bit of a ding on my credit score, although it is still very high. I bought my last car cash. I was going to buy the one before that cash, but they had a zero interest rate, so I took the "loan". Actually, when I bought my current car, after we negotiated the price (I had a friend help me with that) I whipped out my checkbook and they didn't know how to handle it. Got it done though. On the credit report one thing I get dinged on is no installment debt. Really?
    1
  7339.  @robertedwards4904  Okay. As I used to say to my sons when they were little and frustrated, use your words. In other words, what are you talking about? Are you a bot?
    1
  7340.  @PublicNuisance2K25  What the heck does that mean?
    1
  7341.  @PublicNuisance2K25  Bot Bot
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  7342. Are you kidding? Do you have any idea of who BRICS is? Let's review. You have Russia in a major war, not doing well, with its economy crashing. You have China, which is destroying their own economy. South Africa is quickly imploding, and cannot even supply electricity to its citizens or industry. The only two with healthy economies are India and Brazil. Of course, Brazil has attached itself to the Chinese economy, and that story might change radically very soon. On top of all this, there is the looming threat of a war between India and China. So, are you really advocating for a BRICS currency? Come on man.
    1
  7343.  @Madame702  Yes! It is already known that India has stated it has not interested in joining a BRICS currency. As for worrying about Miles, you must be kidding. I was just commenting on one of the many videos pushing this absurd idea. I, fortunately, have very good financial advisors. On the other hand, many financial advisors and hedge fund managers have been pushing stuff that is not working out so well for their clients, and it is also based on politics, not economics. You really do need to work on your grammar. I am only inferring a response based on my best guess at what you actually meant.
    1
  7344.  @CommodityCulture  Well, if there is an issue with the factual basis of what I have written, then that should be pointed out.
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  7345. The "higher costs" mantra in traditional finance system ignores the reality. For example, my financial advisor. who was a very high-level guy at one of the big investment banks and went out on his own, told me that with the cost structure he was seeing, he could make a profit on accounts as small as $5K. Of course, he does not deal in such small amounts, but he could. So, as I have said in many places, what is the problem that crypto is really solving. Every time I look at it the answer I get is that crypto solves only one problem. That is the transfer of funds across borders without any regulation. The people who generally benefit from this are criminals. Oh, and I just noticed, typing this, that the first three letters of crypto spell cry. I recently discovered your channel and am going back through some of the older material. Golden!
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  7346. This is par for the course in the Soviet/Russian military. Part of it is the autocratic nature of the state. They don't want local commanders who can take real initiative and make decisions. The other thing to remember is the time leading up to and the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in WWII. The Russians had the intelligence. They had some on their own and they were given intel gleaned from Ultra decrypts that the British had. Stalin was told directly, but he did not want to believe it.
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  7347. The whole military spending analysis is flawed. For one thing, on the China side, there is the issue of corruption. How much is siphoned off by that? For another, the navy issue has two big problems. The number of ships is larger for China, but they are not comparable. China's is not a "blue water" navy. I believe that the US Navy still leads in tonnage. For another, US military doctrine no longer sees the navy as a force to ensure protection of shipping worldwide. The US Navy is a power projection force, not a protection force. As such, it dwarfs the Chinese navy. As for dual use technology, this is also a consideration for the US. Most military production, as well as R&D, is done by private firms. One of the reasons to do this is to stimulate the two-way flow of technologies and ideas. I heard this when I was a kid from my father who worked at a US Army research lab. He was actually grumbling. I experienced it while working in the aerospace and defense industry myself when I grew up. As far back as WWII, and even well into the jet age, private companies often developed weapons systems such as aircraft on their own without prior military contracts in hand.
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  7348. China is renaming territory and cities in Russia as well. Russia is an ally of both China and India (still?) and China treats Russia this way. Some ally.
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  7349. You are way too young and uninformed to comment on this.
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  7350. Germany transitioning from nuclear is just plain stupid!!! They did this in response to a tsunami in Japan. Such an event is impossible for the German nuclear plants. In addition, the number of deaths from the nuclear plant in Japan are insignificant. Almost the deaths were the result of the tsunami and its aftermath. This was a policy promogulated by Merkel, one of the worst chancellors Germany has had. It has resulted in higher CO2 emissions in Germany. Natural gas is a transitional energy source that bridges the gap between dirty coal (and Germany's is the dirtiest) new technologies. By relying on Russia, Germany is putting themselves at the mercy of a non-democratic regime with no compunction of using energy as a weapon. STUPID!!!
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  7351. Bring back the Cultural Revolution! Long live the Cultural Revolution! The item about the Fengqiao Experience makes a fallacious statement. Largely incompatible with modern China which claims to be governed by law and constitutional rule? Come on man! This is not true, and never has been. I think I may have heard it on this channel, but the head of the top court in China came out and said that the role of the court was to support the CCP, not to apply written law. Look at all the situations that are constantly appearing on this channel about people with legitimate grievances not being able to get satisfaction in court. Heck, just look at all the IP theft and counterfeiting that goes on in China. Rule of law? Come on man!
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  7352. Love the comment on the Democrats refusing to pick their own cotton. Brilliant!
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  7353. If the elite institutions fall apart because of wokenes, then other institutions will take their place. The society is about the economy, not the culture. Culture is nice, but without the wealth created by the economy, it is nothing. Culture is a nicety.
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  7354. So, let me get this straight. I understand that the route along the Sea of Azov is dangerous. The thing I have a problem with is, if they are moving through there to supply the southern front, and they are already there, why would they then take this stuff to Crimea first before distributing it?
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  7355.  @careylymanjones  Well, it is not as simple as that. If you hadn't noticed, Crimea has become unsafe as a place to store or transport the materiel as well. There is even a bridge involved.
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  7356.  @RIPHitchens  To some extent. Considering what he had done over the previous decades, as I detail above, if he had any desire to normalize relations with the world, he would have cooperated with the UN on the WMD issue. Remember that he was limited in the amount of oil he could sell. That, and maintaining a large military was impoverishing his people. So, you don't think he was at least party culpable?
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  7357.  @preeyakumari-i2q  You must be kidding. Such a statement (and your typing) shows that you are either a bot or are totally uninformed.
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  7358. Wow, Bart! This is quite a departure from cars like your Mark I Midget. How many Mark I Midget engines would it take to equal the power of one of these Bugatti's?
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  7359.  @MrMannyhw  I don't know why you would say that. When I did the analysis I mentioned, I found vehicles with almost the same dimensions (interior room, cargo space, etc.).
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  7360.  @MrMannyhw  Leasing may be a good idea, but don't forget that a lease takes into account the residual value of the vehicle at the end of the lease. I don't know enough about the current market to determine if the pending battery replacement cost is going to drive those lease rates higher.
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  7361.  @pootispiker2866  You really have no idea of what you are talking about, do you? Everything about ICEs and EVs require massive amounts of infrastructure to operate. What about the electricity infrastructure? You are correct on the short trip situation. My lawyer (and friend) recently got a hybrid with a thirty-mile electric range. That seems the perfect solution. On the other hand, I have not seen, in modern ICEs, where the warming up process is a big deal. This was true of older, more primitive vehicles (I am old enough to have had some), but I have never experienced that as a problem with newer cars (say from the late 1980s on). On the other hand, take an EV on a long trip, especially to somewhere where there is not a lot of charging infrastructure.
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  7362.  @pootispiker2866  On the warming up issue, I have actually had vehicles where the manual explicitly stated that warming up was not necessary, or a good thing. As for your example of a long trip, that is because you live on the East Coast (which is where I am from). In the Midwest or West that trip in the Appalachians would be a nothing. It is not unusual to go well over that 200 miles one way and have to refuel at least once. Get with the program. As for hauling 200 pounds of "extra engine" that is the clue that you have no idea what you are talking about. For one thing, the electric motor is not weightless. For another, have you considered the weight of the battery? That is often 750 to 1000 pounds. A gallon of gasoline weighs about six pounds. So, a full tank of gasoline (20 gallons) weighs 120 pounds. At 25 mpg (medium size SUV) that gives 500 miles of range. An electric motor weighs about 70 pounds. So, structure aside, your 200 pound motor with 120 pounds of fuel, or 320 pounds, give over two and a half times the range of your 1000 pounds of battery plus the 70 pounds or so of motor. By the way, the hybrid I mentioned was a larger BMW SUV, not a Leaf. You are the one who needs to get with the times.
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  7363.  @redbaron6805  Well, you are welcome to your opinion. I still stand by what I said. Gasoline is actually cheaper than the rate I used back then. The price difference in the vehicles is not significantly different. What you assume is that there is constant progress in, say, fuel consumption, for example. I was around for the oil shocks in the 1970s. Gasoline tripled in price. A standard large sedan got 10 mpg or so. Then standard passenger vehicles were reengineered to get up to the 25 mpg range (city driving). That was 30 years ago or so. I was recently looking at the current equivalent model of the vehicle I own. The fuel consumption is the about the same. That is over a period of about eight years. The point is that the basic parameters do not change quickly.
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  7364.  @redbaron6805  Talking about what could be done for generation is an old problem. I tend to agree with you on that. The problem is that it takes a lot of time and money to make the change. All of that money comes from the consumers. So, that increases the cost of electricity, which increases the cost of running the EV. Just a note about the cost. The best measure when comparing vehicles of different types is cost per mile, not miles per gallon, of course. Information I saw out of the UK claimed that the cost per mile of EVs and ICEs is about the same. This is primarily due to the high price of electricity driven a lot by the high cost of natural gas. So, until we get nuclear fusion going (which has been a decade away for decades), the picture will not be bright for EVs. Along those lines, since we have started this conversation, the market has come down on my side, for exactly the reasons I talked about. The growth of EVs is slowing. Plug in hybrids with a limited pure electric range are doing well. If you don't want to listen to me, then listen to Elon.
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  7365.  @aperitifs  Thanks.
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  7366.  @redbaron6805  Wrong! What you totally miss is the massive infrastructure and generation buildout that is required. EVs use energy just like ICEs. Only now that has to come from the electric grid. You need to get educated on how the electric grid works and how it is paid for. Especially when you consider "green" energy which is typically not collocated with population centers.
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  7367.  @redbaron6805  Well, have it your way. Even Musk is showing concern. Much of the growth has been in China, and we have seen how that market is manipulated and distorted by government subsidies. The growth rate is slowing. That is a massive concern. Overall penetration in the market is still small. If EV's were going to replace ICEs then that growth rate has to continue to increase. There is an article in the WSJ today talking about Toyota including an interview with their retired chairman Toyoda. In the article they point out that they have a week's worth of Prius hybrids in stock and two months worth of the EVs. You should really read the article. THE MARKET HAS SPOKEN! As for the infrastructure, you are really not very well versed in economics are you. That oil and gas infrastructure represents massive amounts of sunk cost built up over a century. You are going to have to spend similar amounts in a much shorter time frame. What you are assuming is something like if we build it, they will come. Look at the worldwide subsidies required for EV charging stations. They are building it, but at a much slower pace than is necessary.
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  7368.  @redbaron6805  My friend, I don't know if you have access to the WSJ, but there were two articles, one yesterday and one today, concerning GM and Ford. The news on EVs is not good and comports with what I have been saying.
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  7369. Karoline is a big improvement, don't you think? This announcement is amazing. Contrast Trump with Biden. Trump is only four years younger than Biden and yet he is acting like a youngster. This is not only evident in his energy in performing his duties, but in actions such as this, moving the White House into the Third Millennium. We have gone from a president in obvious cognitive decline to one who is at the top of his game. Wow! It makes one's head spin.
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  7370. Europe is a threat to their own peace and to world peace and had been for centuries. I am always rankled when I hear someone talking about the US controlling European security policy. Were it not for that, and hundreds of thousands of US troops stationed in Europe during the Cold War, peace in Europe would have ended years ago.
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  7371. As for good over bad GDP, and the difficulty of weaning the country off it, there is actually no way that it can be done with the centralized system of the CCP. No way.
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  7372. You miss a couple of things. Ukraine has had changes of government through elections, at least a couple of times. As for the corruption and banning of political parties, you don't explain the context there. This refers to people in breakaway regions working with, to the point of violence, with a foreign power. You also miss a similarity. Both Ukraine and Taiwan were, at one time, a formal part of the larger country that they are currently at odds with.
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  7373.  @Robertsmith001  You are thinking about the first Gulf War. In the Iraq War in 2003 the airstrikes started concurrently with the ground war. Drones were not an issue in the Iraq War. While the drones have helped the Ukrainians, they have not been supplied in numbers that would turn the tide. You are correct on the intelligence aspect. Frankly, the public, open source, intelligence data on the Internet is probably better than what was available in 2003. As for equipment, the Russian and Ukranian armies have very similar equipment, except for the anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles supplied to the Ukrainians from the West. As the Israelis found out in 1973, these can be very effective. It took a great effort on their part to overcome them, and they have a much better military than the Russians. The current generation of weapons supplied are far superior to those available in 1973, as one would expect.
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  7374. I find it very funny that you say, "It was unlike anything they'd ever seen before in astronomy". Why would this be surprising? New instruments are constantly being developed and deployed. If the assumption is that we would not see anything new, and thus the surprise, then why spend the money? And it's lots of money. Seeing new things is the whole point. Astronomy, and consequently cosmology, are more akin to archaeology or anthropology than to "standard" laboratory physics. A new pottery shard or a new bone fragment can totally rewrite those fields. The same is true in astronomy. Those discoveries can lead to "new physics". Heck, that's how one makes one's name in those fields.
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  7375. Ah, reminds me of the good old days of the Cold War. It has been many years since I did any government work, but it was sometimes exhilarating. At one facility I worked at we were tracking fifteen foreign spies. Our security was very well armed, including automatic weapons. Sometimes one of our people would be entrapped by a spy and we would find out. Sometimes when traveling with colleagues we would get to a destination, and they would check into the hotel under a different name. Other times we would go to the Washington, DC area and would meet at an Italian restaurant which I knew to be full of spies. It could be very entertaining. The conversations were very strange, and the food was wonderful.
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  7376. China is the most vulnerable country in the world. They import most of their oil and gas. They import a large part of their food and the inputs to grow food. In fact, right now they are experiencing an agricultural meltdown because of drought and floods (in different parts of the country, of course). The fact is, if they precipitated a conflict, the US and its allies would not even have to get close to China to cut it off. What follows is industrial collapse and then mass starvation. Why do you think they instituted the one child policy? They were afraid of the growing population causing a collapse because of the inability to feed it. They have a big military with little ability to project power. The only countries they could realistically attack are all on their borders. Two of these are nuclear powers. On the other hand, no one wants to invade China. As I mentioned above, they don't really have anything anyone else needs and then there are all those Chinese. Economically, they are the second largest economy in the world, but their economy is only 2/3 of the largest economy, while their population is four times as big. Their economy is about the size of the EU plus the UK with three times the population. This is not a formula for world domination. Economically, they have put themselves in a poor position. They require foreign companies to have a majority local ownership in any manufacturing plants they put in China. This limits the detrimental effects of a Chinese decoupling. One Japanese car company quit China and it did not have a material effect on their overall business. Another issue is that many western companies operating in China use contractors. In that model, you can get another contractor somewhere else. Not much leverage there for the CCP. The plain fact is, China is toast, and it is their own doing.
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  7377. Who gives a crap about a professional wrestler/actor's opinion. If you are someone who pays attention to such people, then you are irrelevant. If that is what sways your opinion, then you are foolish, and potentially dangerous.
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  7378. Ukraine will not join before the war is over. The NATO treaty is clear on that. Ukraine joining after the war is over will happen and be a part of the security guarantees that will be given by the west.
    1
  7379. Rare earths are not rare. The only reason that China has such a large share of rare earths processing is because of environmental regulations in the west, especially the in US. As with many other material processing industries the west has just exported pollution to China. Is this ethical?
    1
  7380. In the 1990s I had a customer, a spice company based in the Chicago area, that had operations in Colombia. None of the management went to Columbia. Local management just told them what their results were, and they accepted that.
    1
  7381. Clean air and water have nothing to do with the climate "emergency". CO2 is not a pollutant. In fact, it is necessary for life. This is what gets me. All these pundits and commentators who don't get it drive me crazy. For example, our cars put out more CO2, because at the beginning of the clean air movement it replaced all the other noxious stuff coming out of the tailpipe.
    1
  7382.  @mikewilliams-jw8jd  Good point. At the beginning of the 20th century my grandfathers immigrated to the US. After they established themselves, the sent back to their families to send a wife.
    1
  7383. Working remotely only works i asymmetric warfare situations. Against a first tier, and some second tier adversaries, this is a recipe for disaster. The US, Russia and even Iran, have the capability to disable drones. The communication link is the weak link. It can be interrupted easily in a real war situation. Autonomous operations are also a chimera. Would you want an autonomous AI system next to you which could be fooled or spoofed into attacking you? Get a grip.
    1
  7384. This is the modern face of the COMINTERN. China is still a Marxist-Leninist country. The ideology calls for world revolution.
    1
  7385. Our nation is the best. Just look at the number of people are trying to get into America. How many are trying to get into China or Japan (the next two largest economies in the world)? How many are trying to get into the Eastern European counties of the EU? How many are trying to get into South American countries? How many are trying to get into African countries?
    1
  7386. America has a bad track record against women and minorities. Are you kidding, or blind. Look at Nikki Haley, a Governor of a state and the US Ambassador to the UN. Condelezza Rice, Secretary of State (foreign secretary to you). In the Virginia election we had a black woman elected as lieutenant governor and a Hispanic elected as attorney general (two of the three state wide offices). And these were both conservatives. To compare our presidential choices to your choice of Prime Minister is ludicrous. The leader of the party in the UK is selected by party members, not the electorate. In the US it is by the whole voting population.
    1
  7387.  @vicomte5047  That could be the case. On the other hand, that was the sixth one built, so I don't think so. Maybe he will clarify.
    1
  7388.  @vicomte5047  That does not comport with their actual service in the war. The Yorktown class carriers were all active during the war. The early carriers fielded by both Japan and the US were, in fact, converted from other types of ships. In general, that was done because naval treaties signed years before the war did not in general address carriers. As with most weapons systems during WWII there was rapid development and massive production.
    1
  7389. Ah, squirrel. I saw a bumper sticker a while back. It read: squirrel, it's what's for dinner. This was a play on the beef it's what's for dinner slogan by that industry. As a hunter of squirrel, I make a great squirrel gumbo. I have cookbooks with lots of recipes, though.
    1
  7390. The idea that the UN could really do something is foolish. I also find it rich that WION does even read their own stuff. In the previous video the presenter chides Zaleski about how nation states operate. Then, in this one she seems to imply that nation states should subordinate their interests to the UN.
    1
  7391. Patrick, right off the bat, you misspeak. The US President does not pass legislation, the Congress does. He either signs it or vetoes it. The President may try to influence it, but that is normal.
    1
  7392.  @harukrentz435  Well, this is not "legislation". It can be reversed by the next President. This was done with the Iran nuclear deal. Obama could not pass it as treaty through the Senate. When Trump got in, he cancelled it (with another executive order).
    1
  7393.  @walden6272  Can't happen. It would be unconstitutional, since it changes a statutory power. By its nature, the order you suggest, is also unenforceable. When the next president comes in, he just signs an order reversing that one. By its nature it is not legislation. Don't forget that it is the executive branch that enforces laws. The new president now controls the executive branch. Therefore, the order from the previous president you suggest is unenforceable.
    1
  7394.  @walden6272  Unlikely. The current court is strict constructionist. I really don't think any court would uphold it. Another thing to consider is that the executive would just ignore it. Being the branch that enforces laws, this would be de facto ignored.
    1
  7395. It is not Trump. Get that out of your European brains. As far back as Obama the US has complained openly about European NATO allies not pulling their weight. This has been going on since end of the Cold War. The EU has a very large economy. It is almost ten times that of Russia in terms of GDP. Add in the UK it is ten time bigger. The GDP of the EU plus UK is 73% that of the US. They should easily be able to support Ukraine by themselves. Even Biden's support for Ukraine is lacking. He has never actually stated the goal of US support, and thus has made it hard for those in Congress who support Ukraine to push forward that support. He needs to come out and say that the US is committed to Ukraine's victory on their terms. If his actual goal is just to help Ukraine maintain the status quo (which is what it seems), then there would, perhaps should. be little support for Ukraine from the US (not my preference). If he comes out and says it, then lots more support would be forthcoming. Finally, as far as France is concerned, Macron once gave a speech advocating an EU military. He cited three potential enemies. These include Russia, China and the US. It is amazing how much the US has done for Europe in this environment.
    1
  7396. Assuming that US and European support continues at the current level, it is unlikely that Ukraine could win the war militarily on the ground. I say that as a supporter of Ukraine and its goals. The reason I say that is the actual performance of the Ukrainians in offensive operations. After their initial success they have had four counteroffensives. The success of three of them was due to subterfuge and the unpreparedness, and incompetence, of the Russians. Don't get me wrong, successful subterfuge in war is a good thing. The one failed counteroffensive was against prepared positions. The US knows how to deal with this type of situation. The critical factor is airpower. Ukraine does not have that. Chalk that up to Joe Biden and his advisors (controlled, most likely by Obama). In defense the Ukrainians have done very well. What they have shown, though, is that drones are mostly a defensive weapon. There are other alternatives. Airpower, again, is one which is more effective. So, Ukraine can wait out the Russians banking on their eventual collapse. The question is, at what cost. When Trump says the killing must stop, he is right. Both Ukraine and Russia were in demographic decline before the war. Now things are much worse. The alternative is to send in NATO troops to directly confront the Russians in Ukraine. I don't think that would end well. If anyone can sort this out it is Donald Trump. I am a bit of a fan of Hodges, but he has a bad case of TDS. He is also a military man, and his statements show that. He is not a negotiator. That is what is needed now.
    1
  7397. You need to stop talking about asking prices for real estate. The only numbers that really matter are transaction prices.
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  7398. The comment at about 4:50 describes perfectly the essence of Marxism-Leninism. This is, of course, the ideology of the CCP. In addition to the corruption at the official level, this bleeds into the whole society. Thus, the scenes we see here. Is China a society that, when the CCP falls, will become a liberal democracy? As President Joe would say, come on man!
    1
  7399. I eat two meals a day and I am in very good health. Better than I have been in years. Perhaps they should think about altering what they eat. The whole idea of having 2,000 calories a day is obsolete. I once went into a health food restaurant and talked to the manger. He was talking about 1,800 or 1,500 calorie diets. Many people are not doing manual labor. I once knew a guy in Canada, and he was in a rowing team in the military. He ate 5,000 calories a day. He was very lean and muscular. When I met him, he still was but had reduced his caloric intake. These standard intakes are worthless. I used to volunteer at a food bank. Many of our "clints" we overweight, or obese These people we are coming for food to supplement what they can buy. They got a lot. Many were trying to lose the weight. The worst thing we do is to eat a lot of wheat. Rice is no better. The Indians I know in the US are mostly overweight.
    1
  7400. Putin is going to attack other countries? What, are you kidding? He can't even take Ukraine, which, if you will remember, had a minimal military before the invasion. Specifically, it had a very small and outdated air force. By the way, the army he attacked with is gone. As for China, so what. If they somehow get directly involved the west does not even have to get near to it to shut down its industries and starve it.
    1
  7401. At the end you talk about the "world order that we still inhabit today". That order was created by the US at the end of WWII to combat the Soviet threat. Of course, it has not been an operative threat for 30 years. The US is pulling away from the enforcement of that order. The years since the end of WWII have been exceptional and unprecedented in world history. These conditions actually benefited Russia, and China, and they now want to overturn it, without being able to enforce a new order in its place. This way lies madness.
    1
  7402. Well, when it comes to nukes, you can't help it. You don't get to choose who to negotiate with. The US negotiated a number of treaties with the USSR. Should that not have been done? How many nuclear warheads do you think the two sides would have now if those negotiations had not taken place. At the peak, in the 1980s, the two sides had over 50K warheads. We just have to keep in mind Ronald Regan's maxim, trust but verify.
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  7403. Putin reelected? I heard that he was dead.
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  7404. You are too soft on the illegal aliens. The clue is in the term. They are "illegal", all of them, not just those that have committed crimes once they have arrived in the US. They broke Federal law when they entered illegally.
    1
  7405. The real resolution to the population problem is to bring back polygamy. Healthy men who want to have children would be encouraged to have multiple partners living in a "family" group. Actually, throughout most of human history this has been the case.
    1
  7406.  @gbreslin6635  What's your point?
    1
  7407. Sabine, since you like quizzes her is one. 1) Where is dark matter in the standard model? 2) Do any of the simulations of the early universe have a mechanism that creates dark matter?
    1
  7408.  @douglaswilkinson5700  I understand what you are saying and that makes sense, sort of. But there are physicists who claim definitively that it is a particle. I saw on who claimed that there were many, many zipping through us at this very moment, kind of like neutrinos. Of course, a counterpoint to what you say astrophysicists say is that they claim it makes up about 25% of the "matter" in the universe. The ones I have seen and read are unequivocal on that term. I think they are a smart bunch and find it hard to believe that they wouldn't know the implications of the term they are using. So, my question stands.
    1
  7409.  @douglaswilkinson5700  That is sort of pedantic. What gives me pause on the whole idea of dark "matter" particles is that the same astrophysicists also talk about "dark energy". So, they are postulating a matter particle when they use the term. This whole thing reminds me of Pauli's comment on the neutrino. He said, "I have done a terrible thing, I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected." Of course we have now detected them. The search for dark matter particles is following a similar trajectory. So far, none have been detected as far as I can tell. The one experiment I know of is LUX, which did not detect any. What I am really getting at is that the idea that whatever it is that is causing the effect is a particle may actually be getting in the way of solving the problem. The paper mentioned in this video is one way, and as far as Sabine can tell, it does not. At least it is an attempt to do so and analyzing it may help expand our understanding. But, despite not finding the particles, or really having some way to fit it into theory we do have for particles, they still talk about dark matter in a definitive way.
    1
  7410.  @douglaswilkinson5700  I don't think you know what pedantic means. To say astrophysics is a pedantic scientific field is to say it is a field that cares too much about little details in an annoying way, or something along those lines.
    1
  7411. Good points. I am sure that not too many people remember this, but George W. Bush ran for president in 2000 on a platform of not getting involved in nation building. I distinctly remember talking to my wife about this when we were discussing who to support. Then 9/11 happened. He forgot. Everyone said to the US, you broke it, you have to fix it. That is the height of stupidity. Ukraine, like Israel, is not a situation in which we would have to do "nation building". If that is the fear in Ukraine, then what about Israel. They have been in a conventional war or fighting an insurgency for all of their existence. They get billions in security assistance from the US every year, for decades now. The US did not build the nation of Israel, the Israelis did that. Yes, they had diplomatic and material help from the US, but we were not in there building their country. We also have not been in there fighting. Look at the situation in Ukraine. They aren't asking for troops either. Both Iraq and Afghanistan were imperialist fictions. Those are the types of situations we should avoid. Syria and Libya are situations where the US has little or nothing to gain, and lots to lose. Again, another pair of imperialist fictions, especially Syria. Trump is right to want to get out.
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  7412. Why the heck would Ukraine extend this contract with a country that invaded it? The Slovakians are stupid. Maybe that is actually being too kind to them. Ukraine honored the contract for its full term and has no obligation to extend it.
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  7413. China's reaction to Trump is reason enough to vote for him. To be fair, Biden has also been fairly hard on China, while not going as all out as Trump. All the US presidents after George H. W. Bush have been progressively more populist. The US electorate is less and less interested in maintaining a role as the world's policeman. George W. Bush actually campaigned against foreign involvement and regime building abroad. It was only 9/11 that steered the country in another direction. Now we are back on course. Those not allied with the US will come to regret it, none more than China. In the multi-polar world China wishes, they are likely to become vassals, just like in the 18th and 19th centuries.
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  7414. The statement "...despite the CCP's emphasis on stabilizing employment..." really bugs me. I am only partially bothered by the CCP on this. Everyone who talks about CCP actions on YouTube, the Internet, and mainstream media makes such statements. One I recently read in the WSJ concerned the yuan and China wanting it to be a globally traded currency rivaling the dollar. You do have to realize that the two policy statements above, and many others, are totally bunk, I would hope. What you may not realize is that you, and all the others, are falling into the CCP's trap. Because the CCP supposedly says something does not mean they are doing anything. In the cases mentioned above this is obviously true. If they are not doing anything to advance the policies then to state that they have an emphasis, a plan or are taking actions is a lie. Such presentation of the issue is not moving the discussion forward. It might even be classified as "fake news". Come on man!
    1
  7415. Jake, Jake, Jake. I know that you were in the strategic nuclear field, not the tactical, but you are missing a lot of other stuff. The US had nuclear artillery shells deployed in Europe. There were also Pershing II intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) in Europe until 1991, when they were withdrawn for treaty reasons. The idea of battlefield nukes was to disrupt massive, armored formations which the Soviets were expected to unleash through the Fulda Gap. The artillerymen used to measure the distance between towns in kilotons. For example, a 1.5 kiloton nuke hitting one town would affect the next one if it were in the blast radius. All armored troops practiced regularly operations in a nuclear environment. The reason for all this is that it was expected that if a general war involving two peer powers did break out in Europe there would, in short order, be no planes flying. It would all be ground combat. The thing about the Ukraine situation is that the Russians will not face any type of massed armor formations like those expected during the Cold War.
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  7416.  @brianboye8025  I am not sure of how widespread this is. That may be in the contract where you were. What is typically done in governments where that is the case is to cut the number of workers. Same effect on budgets. When my father worked for the Federal government, they called it a "Reduction in Force" or RIF. He was never affected because of his veteran status, but many others were.
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  7417. Just to put some numbers on it, a medium sized coal plant produces 400MMW of output. A typical nuclear plant produces 1GW. They also do this on-demand and regardless of the weather. Few of the approaches mentioned in this video are really scalable worldwide or cost effective. Solutions will rely on new and developing technologies. For example Li ion batteries were really developed for portable devices and transportation. The issue is weight. This is not an issue for grid systems. In addition, the environmental damage from sourcing the materials used is not taken into account, as is the availability and volume required. Other battery technologies, such as flow batteries, are much more appropriate. With all the research being done, I expect that flow batteries or some other new technology will be the answer.
    1
  7418.  @davidb2206  Hydrogen is scalable, but only using massive amounts of energy. It is also hard to store. In the early part of this millennium I had a contractor, a large construction engineering firm, that was working on hydrogen fueling stations for cars for a large hydrocarbon firm. It never went anywhere, even though California put together a program with vehicles and everything. Do you remember that? Alcohol has been around for a long time. Where is it? Why are so many Li ion batteries being installed instead? Natural gas is a hydrocarbon fuel, so I am not sure what you are talking about there. It has nothing to do with storing the output of wind and solar generation.
    1
  7419.  @davidb2206  Good points. One thing that puzzles me is, it these technologies are viable (and I am not saying they are not), then why haven't they been commercialized. I say this because in the 2000s I was working on a project (a data center) and was looking at many alternative energy technologies. None of them have really gone mainstream. I just mention this to give a background for my comments.
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  7420. I have seen that China has enough apartments for everyone on the planet to have two.
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  7421. She mentions a couple of "influencers" she has developed early in the interview. I have never even heard of these people. What goes here?
    1
  7422.  @Influences  I guess you are correct, but that is still only a small percentage of the population. We all have people who influence us when we are younger who we later repudiate, The issue of socialism on campus today is laughable. I first went to university in the early 1970s (so you know how out of touch I am). We were all commies. I had a philosophy professor (I was studying physics) who had us reading Lenin on the side. The course was ethics, by the way. Even Robert Bork (look him up) wrote opening socialist articles in his school paper in his teens. All that said, I hope you can get back on track and think what has happened to you is appalling.
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  7423. Bakhmut is the Stalingrad of this war. In this case, the Russians are in the role of the Germans to some extent, while the Ukrainians are in the role of the Soviets. Russian troops are being attritted heavily, and it is looking like Ukraine may be gearing up for their own operation Uranus.
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  7424. Bollocks! First, the cost is still substantial, and estimates for such things are always low, often by an order of magnitude. Second, and more important, are the regulatory aspects. Don't underestimate that. Can you imagine the scale of the environmental impact statements that would be needed to do any of this stuff. To be effective these actions would have to be transnational and would thus need the concurrence of many, perhaps all, nations. Finally, I think we have seen peak climate change action. COP29 (and COP28) was a wet squib. Politically we are seeing a move away from the hysteria, and this is primarily in Europe as well as North America, which is where the money and technology are.
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  7425.  @gillis51  Biden's economy is good, to be sure, but the growth rate is not as high as Trump's. This is more due to the Fed than the government. Trump was also concerned about IP theft and the barriers the CCP puts in the way of foreign companies. I do like the current restrictions on products and investments in China. I also like the industrial policy actions. I think this is going to be needed as the we move into a multipolar world.
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  7426. Is Blair "right wing". Correct me if I am wrong, but I think he led the Labor Party.
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  7427. Why do they want a war in Europe? Have you studied European history? The only reason there has not been a hot war in Europe since the end of WW2 until now was that the US had up to 500K troops there. In fact, the lowest level they got to was 300K at the end.
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  7428. Two things on the oil front. First, if the price of oil does spike, those developing nations will just not be able to buy it. They will tank. That will put a dent in demand. Second, the G7 is going after tanker transported oil because that is the only way they can, legally, affect Russian oil. That price cap is enforced by denying insurance (most of it controlled by G7 countries) and controlling the ships. For example, an uninsured tanker cannot transit the Suez Canal. As for pipelines, there are few countries that border Russia that need oil, except China. Even to get to India, the pipeline would have to transit unfriendly countries. They would also take a long time to build.
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  7429. I just have to add that the statements about BYD do not reflect what I have seen, as regards quality and autonomous driving capabilities. A special issue is battery quality. The subsidy issue also distorts the market. If you look at the market for EVs in the US and the west, it is stalled. Dealer lots are filling up with about three times more supply than ICEs. Many major manufacturers have decided to slow down EV production as a result. The growth rate has begun to level off and will likely continue to do so.
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  7430. I generally agree with you, Douglas, but to say they "never voted for this" is a misrepresentation. You know full well how representative democracy works. They vote, time after time, for these politicians. If this is a real issue for the voters, then they have the chance, and responsibility, to ask about it. It seems, as in the US, that this is a critical issue. They need to vote for politicians who take a stance that they can support.
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  7431. The picture of a cow grazing in plastic does not seem real to me. I know farmers who raise cattle, and you never see this. Where is this? The plastic problem is primarily a result of the developed world sending plastic waste to developing countries where there are no really enforced standards. Just as with manufacturing, were we sent industries to places where labor was cheap, but also where environmental standards are lax. I know. I have dealt with these manufacturers. They will ask, do you require proper air filtration in the plant. If not, the goods are cheaper. Most Western companies will say no, in my experience. unless they are pressured. So, we have exported pollution, as well as jobs. As for food production, if you avoid goods that are not made in the West, you should be fine.
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  7432. Love Daisy. You are so correct about the leadership crisis we have in the US. I think things are turning around based on the recent election. I really think that the 2022 mid-terms will make things better. The Republicans have a very deep bench as far as potential candidates for 2024. Trump was the great disruptor. We needed that. I can tell you, from personal experience, that many of our leaders in business, even in the largest and most established companies, are just as weird as our current crop of political leaders. Of course, in the UK you have Boris. In France, Macron. In Germany, Merkel. I would say that each of these is very flawed. Even Merkel. She has made some of the dumbest decisions I have ever seen. The two major ones are closing down nuclear plants because of a tsunami in the Pacific and opening the border to immigrants. In a culture with a long and relatively homogeneous history, this has been a disaster.
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  7433. Oh good, a new Cold War. I had a lot of fun in the last one. I got to do a lot of very interesting research with unlimited budgets. One thing I do find interesting though is the fascination with coups in places like Africa and South America, especially in countries that are not significant on the world stage. Counting countries is a fool's errand. The "global south" contributes at most 25% of world GDP. I am not including India here. Even with India they don't get to 30%. The countries mentioned at the beginning of the video probably contribute under 10%. That 25%, by the way, includes countries like the Middle Eastern oil producers which have little or nothing in common with the rest of the Global South. During the original Cold War Russia was playing this game as well. Revolutions were their specialty. Where did that get them?
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  7434.  @theorixlux  Rare earths are not rare. They used to be mined and refined in the US. The process is very "dirty". As with the processing of many materials, it has been moved to places like China. The mining of these materials is also quite environmentally "unfriendly", so the west exports the pollution. For example, the largest deposits in Europe were recently found in Norway. There are lots of mineral deposits that are now being explored and exploited in Alaska and Canada. Rare earth processing is also coming back to the US. Another example is major uranium deposits found in the US. The real issue seems to be that it is cheaper to exploit these materials and their processing where environmental (and child labor) laws are not enforced.
    1
  7435.  @theorixlux  Keep believing that. I hope you are not making investments based on that. Just look at oil and natural gas. People thought that the US would never be self-sufficient again. How did that work out? Frankly, if the government would change a few policies, the US would be one of the major exporters of oil. It has already become a major exporter of LNG. If the west gets serious about the environment (and I am not talking just CO2) and workers' rights, Africa is done. There are some signs of that. The EU has brought in the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), a tariff on CO2 emissions, which takes effect in 2026. I expect there will be other such measures in environmental and workers' rights fields down the line. Then the true cost of these things will be made clear to the market.
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  7436. Artur, if you want to understand Putin and his regime, you need to understand the Mafia. A great movie to watch is Godfather II. In it revenge is taken for events that happened years earlier. It is, of course, very dramatic, but watch it and you will think Putin is using it as his "instruction manual".
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  7437.  @1powerequalsgod  I am staying in my home, and I am over 45 (actually over 65). My father-in-law has decided to stay in his home (he is much older than me). My brother lives in a home that has been in the family for 100 years plus. My parents stayed in their home until they passed. On the other hand, my sister sold her home and is moving locations. In all these cases, the homes were paid for a long time ago. In the US, where a large portion of the population (perhaps a majority) lives in suburbs, there is not a need to optimize the size of the home to meet some criteria. Some do that, but lots do not. That is because the home is not a speculative investment, or the only investment people make. The idea, which also seems to be operative in Europe, that people need to move out of their homes to make way for the younger generation is based more on factors like limited land, thus population density.
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  7438.  @sushi_wolf  Thanks for sharing that.
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  7439. The funds mentioned at the end of the video are rife with corruption. On this channel, or another, I have seen where executives of previous funds have been arrested. China's chance to "catch up" is minimal.
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  7440.  @MeiinUK  Well, I first I find your syntax a bit confusing. As for China, they are done. There has been so much corruption that Xi really can't change course. Actually, all the attempts to catch up in technology, especially in semiconductors, have been ruined by corruption. Lots of people have been jailed as a result. The people of China are broke. Just consider the housing market. It is down between 40 and 50%. A large number of people are underwater on their mortgages. That's negative equity and represents the bulk of their savings. And now, the banks are often refusing to give people back their money. The banks are probably insolvent because of the housing crisis, and supply seems to about twice what is needed. That sector is not coming back. On top of that, people who would be considered middle class in China are being impacted by the job market driven by the housing market and the withdrawal of foreign investment. Don't forget, it is foreign investment that built China. Xi has chased that away.
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  7441. NASA crashed A LOT of rockets before they got it right. Heck, I remember being at school just over half a century ago. We had a substitute teacher who wasn't prepared, so we were shown a film (yes, real film) of rocket failures. It was cool. Then, they have had several failures over the years leading up to the Challenger disaster. So, here we have the MSM showing their stupidity again. It's just a "little" thing, but they are either ignorant or lying. Maybe it's a bit of both.
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  7442. You know what they say about economists. If you have 100 economists, you will have more than 100 theories (opinions).
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  7443. To call the EU's investigation of subsidies for EVs a "naked act of protectionism" is just too funny. Of course, it is. The EU is basically a protectionist cartel.
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  7444. When Gen. Hodges mentions the need for clarity from our political leaders, he is really talking about the Powell Doctrine. One of the keystones of that doctrine is clear and vital objectives. Given such objectives, the military is very capable of determining what is needed and with communicating that back to the political leaders. If this had been done at the beginning, there would be no issue with American support and the necessary resources would have been available from early on. By the way, another pillar of the Powell Doctrine is the use of overwhelming force. Note that this doctrine was developed in the lead up to the Gulf War under President George H. W. Bush. As Peter Zeihan likes to point out, Bush was the last real internationalist president we have had. Every president since has been progressively more populist. Most won't remember this, but George W. Bush ran on a platform of avoiding foreign interventions and "nation building" activities abroad. Then 9/11 came along and upended all that. In both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars the initial military actions were brilliantly carried out. It was the aftermath and the "nation building" attempts that failed. W was right. Then he ignored his own wisdom on this point. Of course we can really lay the blame on the British, and other European imperial powers, for all these nations that have little or no rational reason for existing. Most of the borders are just lines that those powers drew on maps in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We are still dealing with the fallout of that, and imperialism in general.
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  7445. Whatever happened to global warming?
    1
  7446. Europeans, including Brits, do not know what free speech is and probably can't handle it.
    1
  7447. Toilet revolution? China can't even get this right, and they are shooting rockets into space. This is why I don't worry about China from a military point of view. If they can mess this up, think of what they could do with complex space and military equipment. As we are seeing in Russia, corruption extends to the military, and I am sure it is the same in China.
    1
  7448. If the Chinese are such "strategic" thinkers then why is their economy, foreign relations and just about everything about their country so fucked? Their banking system is insolvent. People can't even get their money out. There is a lot of unemployment, and underemployment, in China. They are starting to gather and go on "long walks" together. So far it has been mostly for economic reasons, but that may well change. As for Trump messing up all the agencies that "keep things going", you must be kidding me. Do you really think that they are doing a good job? As President Joe likes to say, "C'mon, man!" Peter, you need to get that TDS taken care of.
    1
  7449. What the heck do you mean by "house" the debate? Come on. You write for a living. This is total amateur hour.
    1
  7450.  @nfuryboss  No doubt. Actually, the latest and greatest fabs cost about $10B. I still don't understand your last sentence, such as it is.
    1
  7451.  @jn4kp1  I do not quite get your point.
    1
  7452. In the mid-1970s U was working on a project developing a small business computer system. My boss came up with a math library that would allow operation between any two numbers of arbitrary byte length. The CPU we were using was an 8-bit device. As a test to see if the machine would work, sort of w wringing out, we programmed it to find the next Mersenne prime. There was no chance that we would, but it was a test we could evaluate to determine if the hardware and our system software were working correctly. It was actually fun and a bit challenging.
    1
  7453. If wind is producing so much power in the EU, why do they have such an energy problem? Why are they burning so much more coal? I even saw one situation in Germany where wind turbines were torn down to make room for the expansion of a coal mine.
    1
  7454. Trump is not asking for money directly from Ukrainians. He is not very articulate about these things sometimes. The natural resources he is talking about are undeveloped. US and other western countries would develop the resources. As you point out, Ukraine doesn't have money. He is talking about the funds that will flow from the exploitation of these resources. This is not something Ukraine would have without outside investment. He is also talking about the royalties from this exploitation of resources. The other half stays in Ukraine. Another reason he is doing it is to cement support for Ukraine is the US and Europe. If these raw materials are being extracted by western companies, then their governments will have a stake in protecting them, and thus Ukraine. One thing I am seeing is that there are significant numbers of ordinary people in Europe who do not support Ukraine. It is not even about Ukraine, but there is a strong political current that does not want war, any war. They are somewhat misguided, but their numbers seem to be growing.
    1
  7455. Greg, student loans in this country was made a Federal program by Obama. There are private lenders available, but the loan forgiveness only applies to Federal student loans. It would take only one minute to find this out. You could do it from your phone. Such ignorance is amazing. As for the 2008 bank bailout, the money was paid back with the government making $110B in interest. Oh, by the way, I don't support student loan forgiveness.
    1
  7456.  @yossarincatch6051  Well, that does not follow any legal theory I am aware of. If you are in a jurisdiction not party to the legal framework then how does the court have jurisdiction? What legal precedent are you depending on for your statement?
    1
  7457. You're all the descendants of prisoners. Immigration in the western world is a real problem. With our social welfare programs we end up with people who become dependent on the state, not people who contribute to the economy. When the US was welcoming immigrants in the beginning of the 20th century, there was no social welfare. These people came to work and build a better life for themselves and their children. My grandparents came over with a 4th grade education. They became craftsmen and businessmen. Some of their children went to college. All graduated high school. ALL their grandchildren graduated from college. They also became integrated into to the American culture, while not forgetting their roots. Is this what we will see from immigrants today. It did not take generations for those that came to the US (or Australia) to realize that integration back then. Now is a different story. We have to be aware.
    1
  7458. Another ray of hope.
    1
  7459. Mahr is just another left-wing progressive idiot. He is just a bit more nuanced. What caused me to say that you might ask. When he says, "Trump could get into office and blow up the world on day one." Is he a blind idiot with no knowledge of current affairs? Biden is the one taking the world to the brink. In fact, things were under control when Trump was President before. It is Joe Biden (and Obama before him) who puts the world at risk. Such stupidity from Mahr is stunning. So, while his case of TDS is fairly mild compared to some, make no mistake, he is just another shill for the progressives and whoever controls them.
    1
  7460. The core inflation numbers strip out the cost of energy for consumers, but that same issue persists for producers. With factory gate prices falling, this puts even more pressure on profits. Many businesses in China are operating in the red. The government props them up, especially the SOEs. Of course, as the business go bankrupt (or the owner just shuts down and absconds) this puts more people out of work, thus putting further downward pressure on consumption. The situation is much more complicated than these headline numbers indicate, and the models used by the analysts are probably not very accurate in this situation.
    1
  7461. Dagen, I really enjoy watching you, but you are repeating the lie. The graphic you put up belies your 10% statement. You, and all the other naysayers need to give some detail, because nothing you have shown supports the 10% assertion. Power, rail, public transit are ALL infrastructure. And in our modern economy so is broadband. Even electric vehicles and busses are contemporary infrastructure items. It is not called a highway bill. Get that through your head.
    1
  7462. Funny. Scotland is not only a piece of territory, but a nation, an ethnicity. In that sense this guy is not Scottish. It would be the end of the SNP if this guy were to become leader. That would be a good thing, right?
    1
  7463. The C5 is the one I am looking at. Great minds think alike.
    1
  7464.  @ChinaUpdate  I was being a bit pedantic. In idiomatic usage that I am used to the phrase is used to indicate a term used that does not necessarily fit. Just a different point of view. Keep up the good work. I find the channel interesting, and it gives one point of view on the situation in China which I try to fit in with various others.
    1
  7465. Why is this still a thing? Why was it ever a thing? There are situations just as bad, and some worse, going on all the time.
    1
  7466. What a stupid statement, we are a very polarized society right now. You, of all people, should have a sense of history. You are about my age. I have seen much more polarization in both India, and in my country, the US. You basically invalidate anything you might say after this statement, which in any case is just a throw-away.
    1
  7467. BRICS as a counterweight to the west? Come on man. China and India are close to a war. Commentators and Indian officials actually expect this in the near future and are vocal about it within India. There is a lot of speculation that Xi needs a war to cement his power. Well, in the early 1960s this as the case with Mao, and he invaded India. He won, and promptly withdrew. That Xi may try something similar is not out of the question, and seems more rational given the issues with a Taiwan invasion. As for Argentina, one of the presidential hopefuls has actually proposed that they ditch their currency for the dollar. Do you think they would switch that for the yuan? Come on man. The Chinese will soon run out of capacity to contribute anything economically to the others. They talk a lot, but 60% of the countries involved in the Belt and Road initiative are under economic stress and probably won't pay back their loans. Then you Italy, the only G7 member of the Belt and Road withdrawing from it. Add to that the sentiment within China that, during these turbulent times within China, the resentment of all this foreign spending, and China may soon be drawing back, not expanding.
    1
  7468.  @TonySwaby212  What does that mean? Look at the economic and political stability issues in China. Are you investing in China today?
    1
  7469.  @TonySwaby212  Well, don't forget, history never exactly repeats itself. The conditions internally are different this time, and the external conditions are significantly worse. The additional aspect is the belligerent nature of Xi and the CCP. In those earlier situations the developed world was not set against the CCP. We both have different takes on the situation. We'll see how it works out, and I don't think we will have to wait long.
    1
  7470. Putin's reinforcements that are mentioned will only bring down morale. The quality is low and the training minimal. They will be a detriment to the Russian Army because they will have to supplied. The Russians cannot even do that with the force they have. Double or triple it and you have disaster. You will either get mass desertions, mass surrenders or both.
    1
  7471.  @stevenwilson5556  That is what I am hoping as well. The Russian Federation consists of a diverse set of regions that were assembled under Russian imperialism. They have nothing in common. Unlike the US, or Canada, they were peopled by existing populations that have no real connection to the ethnic Russian population. This is an imperial empire, not a nation built on a shared political or national idea.
    1
  7472. If CNN goes back to its roots and gets rid of the editorializing, then it might be a good acquisition. CNN was always more focused on international coverage as opposed to domestic events. That's what got it early traction. I first became aware of it during the first Gulf War. I was working on a big Army project which was being deployed there for the first time. So, we just had CNN running on a big monitor in a conference room. I remember the video of a cruise missile going down the street in Baghdad right past a CNN reporter who was on his balcony. Classic!
    1
  7473.  jaybyhop  Well, he was right in the case of unions. I saw it personally in my family. He did a lot to make America great, both economically and militarily. He was the one who was really responsible for the breakup of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism in Europe.
    1
  7474.  @1133saginaw  Only if you have seniority. I worked for an aerospace firm who had a competitor for engineers in the same area. Our competitor, whom we eventually bought, was unionized. We analyzed the data. In the company I worked for people were encouraged to manage their own careers and to post for jobs that would further their careers. In the unionized company you basically were stuck in your position until your superior either retired or died. Believe me, I saw it. One of my uncles worked for a unionized manufacturing firm in western Massachusetts. He started as a sweeper. His brother, my father, could not get in because he had taken a more academic program in high school. When my uncle made manager, whenever he touched a tool, he was docked pay. Why, because of union work rules? He headed the maintenance crew for the machines in the factory. These were not standard machines. Later, his boss said he could have gone farther if he had a degree. But he would not have been hired if he did. Go figure. Unions in the US helped the precipitate the decline of manufacturing in this country.
    1
  7475. You should go back and study history some more. During the Cold War, while the US still prevented the Soviets from trading in dollars, in fact the ruble was not convertible to any western currency I am aware of, there was a time when barter was used for trade with the US. The US government was allowing some trade to try and lessen tensions, but sill the ruble could not be used. I am fairly sure that was because of the Soviets themselves. So, the reality is that the Russians have experience with that. The other thing to consider is that China is a net importer of raw materials. A heavy net importer. In the example you used, that would not generally be a problem.
    1
  7476. You seem to believe that the Russian people want something different. What do you base that on? I see no evidence of that. Even the Russian dissidents like Navalny were more concerned about corruption rather than any real change to the system or foreign policy. The same is true of China. The protests there (and there are many) are about unpaid wages (not working conditions, which we would consider horrible) and unfinished housing. If the system was just a little fairer to them, they would all be fine with it. The dominant Han ethnicity is fine with what is happening with the Uighurs and Tibetans, for example. I am not advocating for any of these systems, but the issue is that many people in the world are fine with them. There are few places like the US in the world. It represents a unique set of circumstances. Those circumstances allow for the prosperity and freedoms we have. Even western Europe is only the way they are because of the American presence after WWII. Just look at their history prior to that. Look at the EU today. It is an anti-democratic mess.
    1
  7477. A code red for humanity? Give me a break, Humanity has survived ice ages and warming. We have been on this planet for millions of years, and survived it all. The climate alarmists are upset about how successful we have been. In their eyes, a couple of billion less would be a good thing. It is like any species. Deer are a good example. When they do well, they overgraze their environment and populations shrink. Then, as the flora recover, they bounce back. These people have no understanding of the natural world, and how humanity works. They are idiots, and we should not listen to them at all.
    1
  7478. Senator Kennedy is the best!
    1
  7479. The Trump actions vis-a-vis China being responsible for a cooldown in the Chinese real estate market? Bollocks! Whoever wrote that must be working for the CCP. The US had nothing to do with the Chinese real estate market. It was all internal to China. The Chinese real estate market was a Ponzi Scheme and a total distortion of the market purposely designed by the CCP long before any trade tensions. It was a major avenue for corruption. This is really a disappointment.
    1
  7480. It seems to me that you have it the wrong way around. You talk as if the Russians have the upper hand. Of course, you are not the only one. Look at it another way. It is the Ukrainians that are attriting the Russian forces. Ukraine has no logistic limitations in this area, as the Russians certainly do. The wet season is starting. If there is any time to trap and degrade an enemy force, this is it. It is cold and wet, and the Russians have to dig in. Ukraine essentially has artillery parity with the Russians here. In fact, they may already have superiority because they have successfully attacked Russian logistics. There is also no imperative for Ukraine to go directly into Kherson. If the people and civil authorities have already abandoned it, they can just starve it out.
    1
  7481. Your understanding of pricing and inflation leaves a lot to be desired. Price increases force choices on consumers. You might pay more for toilet paper, but you would sacrifice something else. Considering the amount we spend on what are really non-essential items, that is not a big sacrifice. As for food, the number one health crisis we have in the West is obesity. I volunteered at a "deluxe" food bank for several years. Many, perhaps most, of our clients were overweight. They drove cars that were nicer than mine. I kept what was a premium vehicle for 18 years. I just didn't drive that much, so it didn't matter. That said, these were not poor people by any standard in any other country. They all had smart phones and I would see some of them in the supermarket buying premium products. They got lots of stuff from the food bank. And it was good stuff. The whole issue of money is one I would love to discuss with you. I have a theory. The inflation we are seeing now is nothing. I lived through the major inflation of the late 1970s. That was real inflation caused by commodity shortages (artificial) and a restrictive monetary policy. The current inflation is caused by short term issues stemming from the COVID crisis and will be resolved in rather short order. Again, another artificial crisis. People complain about gas prices, but it was not long ago that we were paying $4.25 per gallon, compared to $3.30 per gallon I see today. Is that inflation? Where do you measure from.
    1
  7482. Is the system m there self-sustaining? In other words, does it pay for itself, or are taxpayers subsidizing it? Take the example of High Speed Rail (HSR) in China. The first few routes between major cities were profitable. The Xi decided that HSR should go everywhere. Now the system has almost $1T in debt and growing. There is no way it will pay for itself. I expect you will find something similar in Spain.
    1
  7483. Race, and ethnic (national) hatreds are rife in Europe. All these countries have very distinct and long-lived cultures. When I lived in the UK and traveled all over Europe for my work, I had a distinct perspective. I am ethnically 100% Greek. All my grandparents were born in Greece and immigrated to the US. In Europe my wardrobe was totally English, Saville Row stuff. So, before I spoke, people took me as southern European. Once, flying into Germany, the border officials started talking to me in German (fortunately I had studied German in college). The crux of all this is that people in these countries were quite comfortable talking to me about how they felt about people in other countries. It was generally not complimentary. Even as a teenager traveling in Europe, I saw how Parisian French spoke about, say, Normans (who, after all are just Vikings). So, none of this surprises me.
    1
  7484.  @stefaniebeh706  No, I don't think so. You can have your opinion, but I experienced these things directly, and I can tell you that in many cases these were not jokes.
    1
  7485. Okay, where are these dark matter particles in the Standard Model (of Particle Physics, not cosmology)? The reason I ask is because the standard model of cosmology is based on the Standard Model of Particle Physics and General Relativity. So, if these theories don't predict dark matter particles, then how can the standard model of cosmology be correct? Don't forget the standard model of cosmology assumes dark energy, dark matter, oh, and yes, that ordinary matter stuff. If dark energy or dark matter exist, then any theory, or model, to be valid, would have to predict them, wouldn't it?
    1
  7486. Glad to hear Peter make the statement that Syria is a fiction. That is not said enough. In fact, Iraq is one as well. There are also many "nation states" in Africa that fit in the same category. All of this is the result of European imperialists drawing lines on maps for their own convenience. The biggest problem is that these are areas with long and complex histories with many competing groups. If you look at it, these are tribal societies. Until the international community addresses these issues such conflicts will persist. We need to address the issue of self-determination. Woodrow Wilson tried to address this after WWI and didn't get very far. The sanctity of international borders is the cause of the frictions we have experienced after WWI. In fact, it was a major contributing factor leading to WWII. A lot of people commented it at the time, by the way. The thing about it is that even in Europe we have similar situations, again the result of aftermath of WWI and the breaking up of empires. The two biggest examples Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The former led to war. The latter, thankfully, was resolved peacefully.
    1
  7487.  @johnjamesflashman6856  Indubitably.
    1
  7488. Your assessment of where the troops withdrawn has two flaws. First, those troops withdrawn did leave a lot of equipment and ammo. The T-62 tanks are what the Russians have now. These troops will need to be refitted and reformed before being effective. Otherwise, they too will become cannon fodder. That will take time. Second, there is a very good chance that Ukraine will attack in the direction of Crimea. They will need these troops to defend in that direction.
    1
  7489. Russia presents an interesting situation and perhaps opportunity. Militarily, outside of nukes, it is a joke. They can't even defeat the Ukrainians who don't have nearly what they need for offensive operations. Before you jump on that, look at their four offensives. Three relied on subterfuge (a good thing in war) and the unpreparedness and incompetence of the Russians. Those are the ones that were successful. The fourth went against prepared positions and that one failed. Without air power and more armor, they will not be able punch through. Right now, today, the way to Moscow is open. The Russians have drawn down their troops that would defend the two major cities. In the 19th and 20th centuries Moscow and St. Petersburg have been reached a couple of times. If the current Russian Federation collapses, as I expect it will, sooner rather than later, then the land mass that contains the resources might be easier to deal with. The problem is the Russian people, and I am not talking just the Russian ethnicity. They are serfs, at heart. Just like the Chinese people under the CCP are still peasants. I don't know what the solution to that problem is.
    1
  7490. A "financial culture with distinct Chinese characteristics"? Oh, you mean a failed financial culture. It's back to the Cultural Revolution. Long live the Cultural Revolution!
    1
  7491. Mahyar, don't worry. China is going down. Just like Russia, they adopted some aspects of western capitalism, but perverted others. They are now paying the price. China will not be aa state in their current form by the end of the decade. My personal prediction is that it will return to the warlord model they have often had in the past. Russia should have lasted a bit longer, but between Putin and the oligarch model they have, it may be much, much sooner.
    1
  7492.  @d1492ay  Well, I expect I know more about economic policy than you. What you are implying is that all infrastructure projects are good. Really? First, how are the cities connected by HSR, especially on the unprofitable routes doing? Are they growing? Considering the number of passengers reported on these routes, the answer is clearly no. There are other examples in China of projects that were built at great expense and are lightly used and thus will never reach their potential. Second, infrastructure projects have to pay for themselves, eventually, through direct revenues, or increased economic activity in the area served which results in increased tax revenue. Otherwise, the bonds taken out to fund the project will have to paid out of general tax revenue crowding out other spending. In the US, this is the general determinant of, say, highway projects. There is generally lots of discussion beforehand, and some projects do not go forward. Other projects do and are often disastrous. These are often built for political reasons. A good example, again HSR, is the system being built in California. The initial segment, between two smaller cities, is already billions of dollars over budget, and no actual track has been laid. I expect this project will eventually get cancelled considering California's fiscal woes.
    1
  7493. Offshore dollar holdings and transactions are truly massive. The CCP would have to create/allow something like the Eurodollar to exist. That system depends on government bonds being freely purchasable around the world. The yuan will never replace the US dollar as long as the CCP rules China.
    1
  7494. Company sized attacks being big for the Russians. Wow! If they were facing a full up NATO force they would be decimated in short order. This is amateur hour. Even Soviet/Russian supplied forces facing a much smaller number of western forces have fared poorly. Just look at the Golan Heights in the 1973 Arab Israeli war. They Syrians attacked with over 800 tanks against 180 on the Israeli side. Guess who won. Just look at the GWT. In Iraq, in both wars there, the Iraqis and the coalition forces fielded and maneuvered much larger forces. Orders of magnitude larger. Let's face it, the Russians have not faced a capable (or any) conventional force since WWII. The Iraqis had experience in the almost ten-year Iran-Iraq war. Soviet/Russian equipment is sub-substandard and out of date. Their communication tech is laughable. The main thing holding the Ukrainians back is air power, a crucial component of NATO air-land battle doctrine. One has to understand that the US armed service that get the biggest share of the defense budget is the Air Force. There is a good reason for this.
    1
  7495. The problem with this whole wokeism situation is that it really does not affect the vast majority of people, at least in their thinking. It is mostly people in the chattering classes, like Leo, that are affected. That is why the mention of this as a Bud Light moment is so apt. Let me give you an example from history of something similar. During the height of the Vietnam War there were lots of protests, mostly on university campuses. Then, in the 1972 presidential election, Riichard Nixon won by a landslide. Nixon, if you will recall (you younger ones may have to look him up), was no peacenik. The "silent majority" had spoken. The same happened to Bud Light, and Disney, and others. The majority of people actually ignore the claptrap. What happens on university campuses really does not matter to them. University students have been left leaning from at least the revolutions of 1848. Most of them change over time as the realities of life hit them in the face.
    1
  7496. Clean air, clean water... The net zero madness has nothing to do with that. CO2 is not a pollutant. It is, in fact, necessary for life on the planet. It is a measure of how irrelevant the whole climate change thing is that one has to bring in these other issues. This is not a criticism of Mahyar, but an observation on the whole debate.
    1
  7497. This issue of the reserves is interesting. I have seen other reports of this over the last year or two. The speculation in these reports is that the "missing" reserves are actually funds that CCP officials are accumulating for the day they lose power and have to flee. The numbers in these reports, or speculations, are the same you mention in this latest report. Since in all cases the disposition of these reserves is speculative, I wonder how one can discern the actual disposition.
    1
  7498. 510MW? A medium size coal plant is 400MW. A typical nuclear plant is about 1000MW. In addition, the solar plants require battery storage on the receiving end. This could be at the substation level or at the premises level. The cost of this is massive. There are many interesting technologies here, but none have been proven at scale, as yet. Don't forget what you are paying for with electricity. You are paying for the reliable delivery of wattage to your home or business, not for generation alone. Otherwise we would all have local generation, which would be problematic, and not nearly as clean or reliable.
    1
  7499. I have to say, it seems that Wolf is looking through rose-colored glasses. He has drunk the cool aid. You know it's bad when I start using phrases like these. The CCP system is centralized. To state otherwise seems to show a lack of understanding of the CCP. Yes, there are local party bosses, but they are a part of the central system, and all leaders of the CCP go through this system. It is like the farm system in baseball. In addition, the central government sets the goals, and local party leaders are just implementing those goals. The corruption is a feature, not a bug, in a communist system. Whenever I hear someone, especially a westerner, talk about the CCP and the environment, I almost spit out my cigar. The environment in China has gotten much worse under the CCP and continues to decline. Just look at the air quality, water quality, soli quality, dumping of nuclear waste into the sea at high levels, amount of CO2 emitted and almost any other measure. China is among the worst, if not THE worst in all these categories.
    1
  7500. Russian bombs bigger, oh my. That is also true of nukes. The reason is that the Soviets/Russians are not as accurate, in both fields. If you think the Russians have improved, then I point you to the fact they have dropped about 100 bombs recently on their own territory in Belgorod.
    1
  7501. The reaction from the administration and the left shows that they have NO idea of what American democracy is about. They have no idea of what is in the Constitution. They are, to be kind, complete idiots. Actually, I think I am being too kind. They think party politics is paramount. Are they kidding? Ocasio-Cortez and Omar are only there because of their local base. So is Manchin. That is the point of our system. If these people do not understand this, then they show themselves a both uninformed and stupid.
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  7502. All of this is correct, but the elephant in the room is that the people in these cities keep electing these clowns. It is the peoples' choice. Solve that and you will solve the problem.
    1
  7503. I would pay to see that (the tree and fire and whatnot).
    1
  7504. I know why fundamental physics hasn't made progress since the 1970s. That's when I left it.(just kidding folks, but not about leaving).
    1
  7505. One of the best shows on YouTube. Great guests as usual.
    1
  7506. The planning out decades is something I always rail against. For one thing, China has always been this big country, supposedly so powerful and centrally controlled. Well, if that is the case, then why is it that the last time China projected significant power abroad was the 15th century. The subsequently pulled back, by the way. On top of that, then why is it that, from about the 18th century on China's external trade was controlled by a bunch of piddly little European countries? I get all worked up about this because of some experience with the idea of Japanese companies with 100-year plans to dominate industries. Where have all these plans gone now? If the Asians hadn't noticed, the world is dynamic.
    1
  7507.  @yeyeyeQAQ  That's the standard commie five-year planning cycle. What they are talking about in the video is the long-range plan. Two different things.
    1
  7508.  @yeyeyeQAQ  The video talks about it. Xi has said it out loud. It's not what I think.
    1
  7509.  @Leshic2  Very good points. I envy your experience in Taiwan. Sounds really interesting. The stance of the US government has, as you point out, been stable towards Taiwan. It was based, of course, on the anti-communist ideals of the time. This led to the Korean and Vietnam wars. People seem to forget that Marx-Leninist communism is an internationalist movement. The goal is to take over the planet and establish the "dictatorship of the proletariat" everywhere. Actually, Marx assumed that the revolution would begin in the advanced industrial countries, like Germany, the US and UK. Unfortunately (but fortunately for the rest of us) it developed in two of the more backward large countries. Russia was not long removed from serfdom. I think that explains the attitude of the populace to Putin today. The Russian populace resembles serfs more than anything else. The government resembles a cross between an aristocracy and an oligarchy. A great book to read is Gogol's "Dead Souls". It was written in the middle of the 19th century by a Ukranian who wrote in Russian. The similarities of the society back then, before the abolishment of serfdom, and today is truly striking. Of course, China was a peasant society when Mao took over. It was the peasants that put him in power. Frankly, today Chinese society is not far removed from that. Over 900M people make 2,000 yuan a month or less (600M of those make 1,000 yuan) and, as in Russia the country is run by an oligarchy masquerading as a socialist party. Frankly, Mao was just one of many warlords that arose after the fall of the Qing dynasty. I fear that China will devolve into another warlord period when the CCP falls. Russia could as well.
    1
  7510.  @davidhynes  At least they wouldn't have to provide much electricity to them.
    1
  7511.  @johnmonk3381  Very insightful. Your first point is very important. China is not a resource rich country. They need the outside world for inputs.
    1
  7512. These cities especially in the industrial mid-west. were created by industrial jobs, that attracted many minority communities from the deep south. Over the years, these industries were driven from these cities. Even before the move to China. I live outside of Chicago, and I know people who are my age (I arrived in the early 90s) who worked in the stockyards which were still in operation when they were young. They provided jobs. Now all that is gone, but the population is still there. Not everyone can be a computer programmer, and Chicago is not a great place for that kind of job. We need to bring back the industrial jobs to our cities, or we are doomed. There is no other option. Moving those jobs to the rural areas, which has happened to some extent, is not an option. As those people do well, their children get more educated and move away. Then they have to bring in immigrants, which causes more problems. Get industry into the cities! This is how our economy grew. Not having that is killing the cities.
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  7513. Don't ever forget, the First Amendment does not protect "true" speech, but all speech. Political speech cannot be judged by some standard of "truthfulness". It is, by its very nature, opinion. If the administration tries to do anything with this, they will be overturned by the Supreme Court. The other thing is that we now have many examples of suppression of news that turned on "facts'" that have been proven to be false. This whole thing is unamerican. It is a communist, and perhaps Russian plot.
    1
  7514.  @colby25  Actually no. Farmers do not plow or plant all the way to the hedgerow (as they call it in Illinois). In some cases, farmers I know have been pulling up the trees so that they can plant all the way out to the edge of the field.
    1
  7515. I totally agree, especially on the effect that Humza winning would have. it reminds me of the situation with Xi in China. My financial advisor, a very sage guy, wanted Xi to get a third term. His reasoning was that Xi would tank the economy. Well, he is well on his way to doing that. Sometimes it takes pain now to bring on a cure in the future.
    1
  7516. The belt and road initiative? Really? That project is falling apart. China has invested about $1T, reportedly. By the way, they are backing off on the pace of investment, as announced at their last big meeting on the project. It seems that some 60% of the loans they made have defaulted, or at risk of defaulting. Many, many projects have been found to be of substandard quality. Several have been abandoned. On the maritime front, a good example is the Hambantota port that was leased to the Chinese for a 99-year term. The port played a big part in bankrupting Sri Lanka and Sri Lanka could not service the loan. This is often referred to as "debt trap" diplomacy. Sri Lanka did not need another port, and it was built in an inconvenient location for local political reasons (lots of corruption going on). It is hardly utilized. YouTube, and now it seems the US Congress, just takes what China says it wants to do as fact. This is across many domains. Look at the actual situation and you will find a very different story. It makes me sad to have to say this, but I think it is often somewhat self-serving.
    1
  7517. You actually need less electric power in winter. Most people around the world do not use electricity to heat homes and buildings. Another issue is the cooling of the nuclear fuel. The fuel in the reactor cores and the waste material stored doesn't just get cooled and you are done. It takes constant input to keep it that way. Considering those mistakes, what is this guy an expert on? Why is he being interviewed?
    1
  7518. At about 31:40 she talks about the rural counties that voted for Trump in primaries and their motivations. One thing to consider is that the percentage of the population involved in agriculture today is about 3%. Just let that sink in. At the beginning of the republic, it was about 95%. We are one of the most agriculturally productive nations in the world, and yet only 3% of our population are involved in agriculture. Amazing. Also, it is important in our electoral politics, considering how our system is constructed.
    1
  7519.  @oneviwatara9384  Wow! If you really believe that, I feel sorry for you. Inefficient infrastructure projects sap a nation's finances. As for the military, it is the US military that has enabled globalization that China has benefited from. As that protective umbrella is withdrawn, China will find it much harder to trade in the world.
    1
  7520. This YouTube age related censorship is so over the top that it infuriates me. Doesn't everyone know what these "kids" are exposed to on a daily basis in the video games they play? You could show closeups of the dead on the battlefield and that would be considered mild by comparison. They are really trying to censor content for political purposes and claiming it is something else. YouTube is a sh*tshow.
    1
  7521. I am puzzled by the title. To make a peace deal one must talk to both the Ukranians AND the Russians. Right now, I don't see Putin wanting to talk to any of the European leaders. As for NATO membership, it would require Ukraine to accept new borders. If they were to have a ceasefire but would then contest their borders the NATO charter would preclude membership. As for an EU military, that is a joke. They have been talking about it for a while. The issue is who would lead it. The EU Council? Who has ultimate authority? Unless there is a true Federal European Union this is not possible. It would most likely be an EU version of NATO, only weaker. As for weapons production, just look at the joint weapon system develops efforts within the EU over the last 20 years or so. It is a joke. Pretty weak analysis.
    1
  7522. Well, I lived for a few years in the UK. In all that time, during two of the winters, we had a small amount of snow that lasted a two to three days. I lived southwest of London, not far away.
    1
  7523.  @praisethelegendarymessiahs2617  Is there something wrong with you. This is a comment section on a news video. People will say what they think. Your comment is offensive. People are free to comment on any country they want, at least in the West.
    1
  7524.  @praisethelegendarymessiahs2617  That's the spirit. What got me was the comment "Mind your country!".
    1
  7525.  @praisethelegendarymessiahs2617  Well, you might have a point there. But, such comments don't move the discussion forward.
    1
  7526.  @steepingsheet2684  We tried limiting arms races in the past. In the early 20th century, there were lots of arms limitation treaties, such as the Washington Treaty. Lots of good that did.
    1
  7527.  @BD-bditw  Austin Healey Sprite (I had a Mark III, which was race tuned and a Mark IV, which I heavily modified) and MGB. My brother had (still has) a Triumph GT6. These were all "street racers". Loads of fun!
    1
  7528. Oh, and a Triumph Bonneville motorcycle.
    1
  7529. Who the heck made you the arbiter of who can or should run? That attitude, especially given how our electoral system is set up, is just anti-American. If Gov. Hutchinson had said that he personally would not support Trump, that is perfectly fine and that is his position to take. To say that Trump does not deserve a second term is bogus. No one deserves their position as an elected official. One gets elected. It's in the word. Look it up! So, Gov. go ahead an advocate against Trump and for someone else. But be careful in how you present your opposition.
    1
  7530.  @jerryrichardson2799  Sadly no. I remember one time waking up on the floor in the living room of a house near campus. There were about thirty people. I counted at least four of my professors.
    1
  7531. I tend to agree with the premise of this post presentation. On the other hand, conflating "hard" science with medical science is problematic. In "hard" science, one can do controlled experiments. In medical science, one is doing statistical analysis, which can only tend to prove, or disprove, a hypothesis. Often this is without a testable model. The COVID pandemic has shown medical "science" to be very corrupt. Medical experts have lied to manipulate public opinion and actions. By conflating this with hard sciences, like physics, it brings approbation upon the whole scientific endeavor. Medicine is orders more complex than physics. The systems which we are trying to affect are much more complex than most any physical system. There are also limitations on what we can do to those systems from an ethical standpoint. These biological systems are also generally long lived and the answers we seek are often associated with long term effects. Many times, these answers cannot be obtained within the working life of a researcher.
    1
  7532. I tend to think option 4 will happen. The interesting thing about it is that the far east portions might well be taken over by China. They still lay claim to Vladivostok as a historically Chinese city. They use the same rationale as they use in the South China Sea. They would also love to have the oil resources there. Of course China might be well on its way to another warlord period with the country breaking up into at least four or five parts. Some analysts are predicting that China will not survive in its current form by the end of the decade. In fact, with what I have been seeing while following news out of China is that the timeframe for this may be accelerated. I have a financial advisor(and friend) who hopes Xi is given a third term. His reasoning is that Xi will destroy China's economy from within. Along with that, China has at least as bad a demographic situation as Russia. There are things happening right now that are accelerating the decline. This is a very interesting video. At first I did not think I would like it, but as it progressed I was impressed with way it developed. Keep up the good work.
    1
  7533. Well, Mark, you have given us a lot to think about and respond to. The prognosis for Russia is not good. Look at the history. In the aftermath of WWI, the Germans were left pretty much to themselves. I am sure you are aware of the result. Unlike WWI, where Germany itself was not invaded, in WWII the country was invaded and completely taken over. In the west, the western allies imposed a system on the Germans, and it took, and Germany is now not likely to slip back into its old ways. Those ways, by the way, predated the Nazis. Of course, in the East of Germany one had the Soviets/Russians taking over. Isn't that where Putin did a lot of his work? Japan experienced a similar trajectory. I mention all this because I do not believe that Russia will experience anything like a full-scale invasion (although the Ukrainians might be able to pull it off) and thus will not experience an occupation. The Russians are basically serfs. I think I have mentioned this before, but you should read Gogol's "Dead Souls". It was written in the middle of the 19th century, and it completely describes Russia today. Look at all the videos online of the babushkas appealing to the czar, I mean Vladimir Vladimirovich, for a redress of grievances. Pathetic. This is the Russian polity. As Konstantin states at the beginning of his videos, he is the unusual Russian. You mention Anna from Ukraine. I am a big fan of hers. There is one thing I have a problem with though. It is that she in effect blames the west for Belarus sinking into autocracy and becoming a satellite of Russia. What she, and many others, do not understand is that the only way to change those things is through the expenditure of lots of blood and treasure. She, like many in the west, seem to blame the west for these things. As President Joe likes to say, come on man.
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  7534. Kimchi commando! Love it! I have been saying for a long time that BRICS is a joke. Of the five original members only one, India, has a healthy economy. South Africa cannot keep the lights on. China is destroying its own economy from within. Russia's economy is being destroyed from without. Brazil, well, it's Brazil. In addition, there is the very real possibility that China and India could go to war soon. That is the strong feeling within India. China just published a map showing territories belonging to Russia and India as a part of China. Putin didn't go to the BRICS summit because of the very real possibility he would be arrested. Of the new members, you have Saudi Arabia and the UAE which both have disputes with Iran, including territorial disputes and sectarian tensions. Don't fear the BRICS!
    1
  7535. What about the P47? Did they not contribute. I was aware of the Typhoon, but most of what I have seen shows P47s performing this role.
    1
  7536.  @H0LDENSUX  Well, that is more than a little incoherent. If the case in which your name appears makes you feel like a dead person, then I think you have other problems.
    1
  7537.  @icemann4699  Good points. I actually saw a video where a Chinese man was trying to check into a hotel using his passport as ID. The hotel refused to accept the passport. When he tried to insist that it was a legal ID and quoted some legal document, they still refused.
    1
  7538. Putin probably won't be fighting this war beyond this year. He simply does not have the weapons, and nowhere to source them from. Heck, I have even seen soldiers with Mosin-Nagant rifles, which were originally designed at the end of the 19h century. I expect that the west will, in the near future, give Ukraine MBTs. At that point it is all over. Many draw parallels between this war and WWII, as far as Russia is concerned. The is no such comparison. Their homeland was not attacked. They did not receive massive aid from outside. They were not in the middle of a massive industrialization effort, as the Soviet Union was during the 1930s. Nothing is the same, expect for the way their military is run, and that is not a good thing.
    1
  7539. Not another one. By that I mean a supporter or Ukraine, or a Ukranian, who deigns to "school" Trump on Ukraine. Trump was dealing with Ukraine in his first term. He was dealing directly with Zalenski. He told the Germans, in 2018, that they were too dependent on Russia for energy and weren't spending enough on their own defense. They laughed at him. Who's laughing now? He also prevented the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. He resumed weapons delivery to Ukraine after Obama had paused them. The 5% defense spending figure represents a need for the Europeans to catch up after decades of underspending. That underspending was seen as a "peace dividend" and was used by the politicians to buy votes rather than lowering taxes and bolstering their economies. Let's just put it this way, he knows more about the situation that the talking heads. I see an orthodoxy developing that ignores the reality.
    1
  7540.  @jakomoto-p9w  The same. Trump has a goal that is both realistic and realizable. That is a change from what came before both in Europe and the US. One thing I might add. Trump and his administration have made clear the new reality in the world. For background, we had a bipolar world for about 45 years after WW2. Then we had a unipolar world order for 30 years (actually less). Official US defense posture (this is published periodically) has moved away from stability maintenance to force projection in the last several years. In the last ten years or so there have been growing calls for multipolarity. This includes China, Russia, India and others. The US electorate has actually been moving away from the "policeman" role since the Clinton Administration. Not long ago I heard Secretary of State Marco Rubio state clearly that we were in multipolar world order. That is the natural state of world affairs. Ignoring the reality helps no one.
    1
  7541. @ Please expand on what you mean. I am curious about how you see it.
    1
  7542.  @odderlendsolvang3790  If you are talking about people with disabilities, then that is generally covered.
    1
  7543. What the commentators have not considered is that Trump is doing all this stuff very early in his presidency. The reason is that the real deadline sometime in the middle of next year. If Trump is successful, then the Republicans have a good chance in the House. These things take time. As for the stock markets, they are speculative. That is their nature. If investors are uncertain, they will take out money from the market and increase cash until they see a path forward. This is nothing new.
    1
  7544. I would be interested in your exploring western support for a long term war in west. I see no historical precedent for its waning. In fact, the historical evidence points just the other way. Concentrating on the US, which has borne the brunt of these conflicts, the history shows very long term commitment even with a seeming lack of support at home. Let's just look at that record. We have Korea (we are still there with strong forces, and getting stronger), Vietnam where we spent ten years plus, Iraq (we are still involved, and are selling advanced weapons to their military) where we have been for twenty years. We were in Afghanistan for twenty years. In addition, we spent trillions of dollars on these conflicts, and in the earlier ones, tens of thousands of lives. As for the money, I draw your attention to the scammers cheating our recent COVID support programs. They are of a very similar magnitude to our support to Ukraine. Then you have Europe. They have been jolted awake by this. With their sanctions regimes, direct support to Ukraine and the building up of their own militaries, they have shown a real commitment. I don't see this as short term. So, perhaps you might want to look into this rhetoric. I personally think that it is driven by the Russians in a covert operation.
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  7545. Tik, the whole thing about Antarctica and an new human species is from a work of fiction titled "The Atlantis Gene" by A. G. Riddle published in 2013. I mean it is almost word for word. You should read it. It has Tibetans, Nazis and everything they talk about. Amazing! Good read, too, if you like thrillers.
    1
  7546. I was wondering if you were going to mention the movie "Pink Flamingos". My brother and I (him first) were big John Waters fans. When "Pink Flamingos" came out I was at the University of Maryland College Park campus. It is a big school and had many lecture halls which were large and had stages and projection booths. There was a culture of repertoire movie houses, and on the campus many of the big lecture halls were used this way in the evenings. Even many of our professors would show up. Back then we partied with them a lot. And I mean partied. The cost was only $1. Waters often debuted his films, outside of Baltimore, at the College Park campus. He often appeared in person to give a talk at the beginning of the film. I remember when the next movie after "Pink Flamingos", "Female Trouble", came out he was there. I took a colleague of mine, who was from a very prominent and wealthy Tennessee family, to see it. He had studied film at Vanderbilt. To say the evening was something extraordinary, and well out of his realm of experience, would be an understatement. By the way, on campus, and in the "theatres" one could drink and smoke (not only tobacco), so it was more like being in a bar with a movie showing. To get back to the pink flamingos, my brother and I, from that time on and for the next several decades, traditionally got each other a pink flamingo, or at least a card with one, on our birthdays. This took many forms. We both had them on our lawns. Even before seeing this video, I was planning to get one for my lawn again. Ah, brings back a flood of memories.
    1
  7547. Wrong! Freedom of speech means what it says. Who is going to say what is true? Now, I am no supporter of Russia. I am an old Cold Warrior. On the other hand, when someone mentions fact checking I immediately have to ask, who checks the fact checkers. Just look at the record of fact checking in relation to things like COVID, Trump's Russian collusion and a host of other issues.
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  7548. Well put. One thing to observe is that even the Chinese companies are moving out.
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  7549. Vlad the Impaler!
    1
  7550. I am not supportive of the US giving money to help people in other countries unless they are allies of the US, or at the very least, supportive. That is aside from stopping all the social engineering crap listed here. This whole humanitarian thing started out as a way to buy off countries to keep them out of the Soviet orbit. Then, after we defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War, it became something of a guilt trip. That we, the successful western democracies, are rich because of exploitation of poorer countries is the justification. There was some of that with the Europeans, but the poorer countries have had time to change course, and many haven't. Just look at how many of them spend their own money. It will make you sick. No, all this crap and the whole foreign aid thing is a combination of deep state intel operations and wokeness DEI crap. STOP IT NOW! If it does not materially advance America's interests and benefit the American people, STOP IT!
    1
  7551.  @ИльяСапрыкин-б5е  Ah, we have found the bot.
    1
  7552.  @jamesgornall5731  Come on man! Your ignorance of history is stunning. Go back and read about the 20th Century. I know it was a while ago, but you really should do it. Then you can answer your own question.
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  7553. They probably still have plenty of Mosin-Nagant rifles.
    1
  7554.  @ggggg-h9s  Not only is he paying attention, but he is correct. Currently, surveys of geopolitical analysts show that more than half expect Russia to fall apart. The demographic situation in Russia is so dire that they were already on track for the Russian ethnicity to not be the majority in the near future. Putin is just hastening the day. The other thing is that the Russian Federation is a multi-ethnic empire, not a unified country as is the norm. The only way to keep it together is strong, repressive leadership from the center. This is more likely to fall apart as not.
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  7555. Hundred-year plans are bunk. End of story! Several years ago, I took a series of graduate level marketing courses. Our professors were academics, many of whom also consulted for big companies. Some were the authors of primary textbooks. This was in the late 1990s. They were all gaga over the Japanese companies' 100-year plans, and they were sometimes contributors. How has that worked out for the Japanese companies and economy? Marxist-Leninist ideology had the ambition to take over the world and remake humanity. How has that worked out? The only country left standing is China and they are falling apart. In fact, they might not last this decade. Russia's empire has been shrinking since the end of the Cold War. Their military has proven to be a paper tiger. So, how are they going to recreate the Russian Empire? As President Joe likes to say, "C'mon, man!"
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  7556. The EU is doomed. Geopolitical analysts like Peter Zeihan and George Freidman have been saying this for a while. There are lots of reasons for the EU's eventual demise. Creeping federalism is just one. Actually, from what little I know of the AfD's critique of the EU (some of it gleaned from this channel), they are probably on the right track.
    1
  7557.  @jacobjohnson8900  That's the ticket!
    1
  7558.  @aaronlewis2150  mahi-mahi good for you
    1
  7559. The interviewer brings up the Northern Ireland Protocol. What she fails to bring up is that the UK actions in this instance are fully within the treaty involved. This IS NOT the UK breaking a treaty. It is using a clause within the treaty in question.
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  7560. The situation with shale has almost completely changed from the historical picture. For one thing the technology gets progressively better, thus bringing down the breakeven point. For another, now that it is a proven technology, there has been lots of consolidation and the majors have even bought in, in a big way. Another thing to consider is that the Saudi government budget is totally dependent on oil revenue. They cannot keep up a price war for long. In the US, oil is not the main driver of the economy. Sure, it is large, but not the major source of government revenue. The major oil companies, which are outside of OPEC, have diverse interests all over the world. They are much more flexible in their ability to weather the storm. As time goes on, the Saudi oil weapon gets weaker and weaker.
    1
  7561.  @dedriannehartgers629  You must be kidding. This is like all the doomsayers. The US is always on the verge of breaking down. Maybe someday they will be right? Then things go a different direction. Look at the US share of global GDP. It is actually up. After WWII it was 50%, for obvious reasons. It then settled down to about 25%. Last year it was about 24%, this year it is 28%. The US is rapidly reindustrializing. A lot of this is driven by foreign companies moving production capacity to the US. I see on the Internet ads and videos that claim some measure is up or down and spells doom. DOOM! One is that oil stockpiles are down to historic lows. The actual data is the opposite. In addition, the latest WTI crude futures are now below $70 per barrel. So, keep dreaming.
    1
  7562. The idea that China is the "center of the world" and its "rightful leader" is laughable. From the 19th century to the present day much smaller countries, mostly European but including Japan, have controlled trade between China and the outside world. The last time China projected power abroad by sea was the 15th century. China lost territory to the Russian Empire and even the USSR. Even their rise in the last three decades was completely dependent on capital and other resources from those smaller countries. All I can really say is: Come on man!
    1
  7563.  @darkstrider111  That is the T in STEM.
    1
  7564. While I agree with Victor, there is one other subtext that I think he missed. That subtext is that the American public will be less and less enthusiastic about supporting a Europe that does not share our values. Why should we extend our nuclear umbrella and send troops to prop up antidemocratic countries that do not allow free speech and cancel elections? Think about it. Let me know what you think?
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  7565. Really? Come on man! This whole lecture has been overtaken by events. Who decides what is fake news? We already know, and have known for a while, that social media is infested by bots. We also know that many government actions to shape the information space are basically lies, told to push a political agenda. In the very near future, we will have the Fauci files from Twitter, which will purport to reveal his manipulation of the "facts". We already have some of that information, and it is disturbing. The whole idea that there is an arbiter of "truth" in the information space is absurd. If the lecturer had looked at history, shorn of the social media aspects, she would know that "fake news" has been around for a while. I used to watch BBC News regularly, both before during and after I lived in the UK. Then it came out that BBC News had lied (I forget the specific issue). It was quite a scandal. From that point on, I stopped paying attention to that source. That is just one example. In the current environment, we have the Hunter Biden laptop, the Trump Russian collusion scandal and of course the origin of COVID. We need to understand that there are no arbiters. One has to look at all sources with a healthy degree of skepticism and look at multiple sources to get a reasonable picture.
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  7566. I certainly believe Ukraine will win. I do disagree with you that Russians are not stupid. Everything they have done in Ukraine from 2014 is stupid. What was the real goal? Did they have any chance of accomplishing it? Were their strategy and tactics at all appropriate? All their actions have been stupid. And don't get me going on how they are doing militarily. Beyond stupid. As for the "greatest democracy" not acting right away in supporting Ukraine, that is to misunderstand democracy. Democracy is messy, in many ways. Frankly, that is a feature, not a bug. As for the foreign military aid bill, it was Biden who included the US southern border issue in that bill, mistakenly believing it would make things easier. Even lumping in Ukraine aid in with aid for others (Israel, Taiwan, etc.) was a mistake. It looks like the House may consider each separately, which is probably the better course. The other thing Biden has done, which makes the whole thing more difficult, is to fail to elucidate a goal for the aid. He needs to come out and say that the goal is total victory for Ukraine, as Ukraine defines it (unless that is not his goal). He has not. A lot of Ukraine supporters do not like the House Speaker, but he made a statement right after meeting with Zalenski which laid it out perfectly.
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  7567. This video makes very good points. I have seen this progression over the decades. The example of Afghanistan is a great one. I don't know if people recall, but in the 2000 presidential election George W Bush made a point of abandoning the idea of regime change wars. I distinctly remember discussing just this point with my then wife. It was one of the reasons we voted for him. By the way, we both had many years experience in the aerospace and defense industry and a very good grasp of foreign affairs. Going back a little further, look at the Gulf War in the early1990s. In the US a great deal was made of having a clear goal, or "end state", leaving the military commanders free to prosecute the war as they saw fit, as long as they were clearly pursuing the end state. This was in response to the debacle of the Vietnam War. That was even more muddled than the Afghanistan situation in this century. The Gulf War approach worked brilliantly. It was forgotten in the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts that came later.
    1
  7568. There is a term that describes all those Americans you talk about that are religious and more conservative. Richard Nixon used it first, I believe. The term is "silent majority". The reality is that Harris' character, while different from Trump's, is nothing to get excited about. Look into her background and history. It is not pretty. Also, don't forget that she competed in the primaries in 2020. How many voted did she get within the Democratic electorate? She was the worst choice they could have made.
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  7569. I love that first segment. It is proof positive that China and the CCP are doomed. Doomed! The CCP is a kleptocracy. I have even seen reports of criminal gangs operating in China. In a communist country? Are you kidding. The PRC is no more socialist than Russia, or the Chinese dynasties that went before. I have a friend who is a financial advisor. He said over a year ago that he hoped that Xi would be reelected to a third term. His reasoning is that Xi would tank the economy and China would cease to be a threat to the US economically and militarily. Well, I think he was correct, and this just validates his point. I am glad that he was very careful to avoid investment funds that are exposed directly to China. The bloodbath that is coming is going to be epic, and cleansing.
    1
  7570. The stupidity of the Russians knows no bounds. They use a lot of expensive missiles to attack civilian targets and leave Ukrainian forces alone. Ukraine, on the other hand constantly pounds the Russian military with the same type of ordnance. The goal of an army is to destroy the enemy army. Once that is done, one can then go wherever one wants. In WWII, in Operation Barbarossa, the original goal was to destroy the Soviet military. Until they got to places like Moscow and Leningrad, they were successfully doing so. When Hitler later changed to taking and holding territory the Germans were ground down and eventually defeated. So, who is going to win this war?
    1
  7571.  @ThinkUkraine  ☝
    1
  7572. Gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light in space. You need to get the facts on this. It does not sound right. As for China having the ability to detect gravitational waves, I have to call this into question. Seismic waves, yes, but that is a different thing. So, which is it?
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  7573. Constitutional rights? What, are you kidding?
    1
  7574. The amount of money in the economy is not a fixed thing. Money is a medium of exchange. We have had quantative easing for several years now, but no inflation. I lived through the 70s stagflation. It was caused in the first place by inflation caused by the oil shocks. Then the Federal Reserve decided to tighten the money supply. Interest rates on home loans were 18%. Kudlow, you need to read your economic history. We have fiat money. Money is a medium of exchange. We keep creating new technologies. The first laptop computer I was issued cost $10K. The computer I can buy today, which is much more powerful and functional, costs $1K or less. Interest rates on homes are now at about 2%. Most of the stuff I personally buy has not changed in price. When I shop I find the only things that have gone up are meat products. I don't consume them. The only thing I consume that has gone up is gasoline, and I don't drive much. Many other people don't as well. What I am really trying to say is that we don't really know how much money should be in the economy and we can't keep using old and outdated notions of it. Real inflation in not easily measured. We have lots of choices in what we buy, and whether we buy. This is a much more complicated issue than you present it as.
    1
  7575. What a load of crap. The US does not import Russian or Ukranian wheat. We produce a lot of wheat. I just saw that India has more than enough wheat to make up for the shortfall, by a large margin. The US exports massive amounts of agricultural products. MASSIVE. The US is the second biggest wheat exporter, after Russia. Actually, wheat use should go down for health reasons, but that is another topic. I have relatives who are farmers. They used to grow wheat, along with corn and soybeans. They have generally dropped the wheat because the other crops are more lucrative. The US imports food only because of the novelty. We grow more than enough food here. If it means changing dietary choices, then that is not going hungry. Just because you like something that comes from overseas does not mean you need it. What is one of the direst health issues in the US? It is obesity. I volunteered at a food bank for several years. Many, if not most of our clients were overweight. Many often talked about wanting to lose weight and they would talk to me about their progress. Food is not an issue in the US. Get real.
    1
  7576. The Arab world does not want the Palestinians in their countries because they are troublemakers. For example, after the invasion of Kuwait the PLO applauded Saddam Hussein. Kuwait then expelled a large number of Palestinians.
    1
  7577. @蔡English China does not make most of the world's goods. The US and Germany export about as much as China in value. China is a big factor but concentrate on the low end. The electronics they assemble use parts from other countries, including the US.
    1
  7578.  @rnanerd6505  I don't know about your last point. Labor is probably the main political party that seems to want to rejoin the EU and they are doing quite poorly after winning a big election victory. Actually, the polling I have seen show Nigel Farage coming out ahead of Keir Starmer for PM.
    1
  7579.  @rnanerd6505  I have heard different about Labor as far as supporting Brexit is concerned. The type of headlines and articles I see claim that Starmer wants to rejoin the EU and is selling out to the EU.
    1
  7580.  @ScarScream  Various economists.
    1
  7581.  @mif1118  Not bloody likely, to be sure. But look at Germany. They have had two years of negative growth. This was after the COVID recovery. Their basic economic model is broken. Frankly, unless they can change their model, they are done for. I am not sure of where growth will come from in Germany. The downturn is just starting. So, that is one side of the equation. On the other side is what the UK can do to encourage growth. It seems that Labor is intent on following the EU model. That way lies disaster. The UK's future is still in its own hands, but to be viable it needs decide what matters. Being a democracy my hope is that they will choose a path that works for the people. We quite obviously have a difference of opinion on this matter (and probably a bunch of others).
    1
  7582. I am in the upper Midwest, and ours just ended. To say this is a once in a generation event is just ignorant. These things happen all the time. We had another earlier in my area. Get your facts straight.
    1
  7583. The Russian people are serfs, and the Russian aristocracy is corrupt. Read Gogol's "Dead Souls" and you will see that the society has not changed in centuries. Sadly, the chance of the society changing is low. Don't forget that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were soundly defeated and occupied before they became democratic. After the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of a decades long Cold War, the US and Europe tried to reach out to Russia and bring it into the family of democratic nations. The US especially does not hold grudges. Look at Vietnam. We have good commercial relations with them. On a couple of occasions, a US aircraft carrier has visited the harbor at Danang. The first was on the 25th anniversary of the end of the war. The second was this June to show solidarity with Vietnam in opposition to China. The Russians, with their resources could have been a great contributor and member of the west, if they had held to a democratic course. Now they are just destroyers. Just look at several the countries that broke away from the Soviet Union like the Baltic states and Georgia, and of course Ukraine. They want to be democratic and free. Not so the Russian people.
    1
  7584. I got the BSOD on my laptop a few days ago. I rebooted and there have been no problems since. I guess that it might have been a problem with Crowdstrike, but my machine is strictly a workstation.
    1
  7585. Everything you say is true. The problem is that the Scots keep voting for this group of clowns.
    1
  7586. To say that the quantum computers stand up to our current supercomputers is an exaggeration. No real-world problems, like a simulation of the big bang, have been solved by a quantum computer. The only problems that have been "solved" so far are, as far as I can tell, are "test", or "toy" problems. Until they are scaled up, that won't be possible.
    1
  7587. The women protesting in Moscow reminds me of the "white paper movement" in China. There, the protesters held up blank pieces of paper. You can't arrest someone just holding up a piece of paper, right. Think again. Totalitarian systems are all the same.
    1
  7588. Pre-K education is a total joke. Just look at Germany, They do really start formal education until six years old. Are they deficient in their education? In addition, they do not spend nearly as much as we do, in their top tier education, on athletics, or music, or other aspects as we do. We don't really know what helps people succeed educationally. So, to spend massive amounts on these programs is madness. I like what we do in our best systems. These tend to be suburban school districts that outperform inner city systems, for about 2/3 of the cost. Education is about more than spending. It is also about parental involvement. That is why there is such a disparity between inner city schools and suburban schools. I know, I have lived through it and have followed it for more than 40 years.
    1
  7589. Buying gold at the peak? Are these people stupid? This reminds me of the Japanese, who at their peak, were buying signature properties in the US at high prices. People in the US were upset. Then, as things got bad in Japan they ended up selling the properties at a big loss.
    1
  7590. This is a great discussion. Chris is very articulate and very smart. Who would have thought. One thing I do have to call both of you out on is the characterization of millennials, which I take as a contrast with other generations in this country. The way Dave characterized them is the same way in which the baby boomer generation was characterized. I know, I is one. The fact is, in this country, especially since the end of WWII, we have lived relatively easy lives compared to the rest of the world (and I have traveled overseas since the early 70s and have lived in Europe).
    1
  7591. Mark, you are a bit of a sensationalist. Compare these refugees with those from the Middle East or Africa. Most of the later were young men. In other words, economic refugees. They are not expected to ever go back if their countries of origin stabilize. Now look at the Ukranian refugees. They are women and children fleeing a war zone. They may not go back, if Putin is successful. On the other hand, if he fails, as I suspect he will, they will most certainly go back. Their homes are not desert or jungle, but quite good European lands. It all depends on the outcome, but you are way off, as usual, on characterizing them. Quite frankly, this is the norm for you. Even in your report, you have the counter argument.
    1
  7592. Trump got 50% of the popular vote to Harris' 48%.
    1
  7593. One thing that is interesting here is that, after this was recorded, the Chinese ambassador to the EU said that Russia should withdraw to the 1991 borders. Kasparov is completely right about the Chinese territorial claims. There are so many aspects to this. Several treaties were signed during the Qing dynasty that were unfavorable to China. Then there were all the border skirmishes during Soviet times, and again unequal treaties. After Jiang Zemin died, it came to light that he had signed away swaths of territory. The reason given was that, when Jiang was studying in Moscow he was caught by the KGB in compromising sexual situations, and they later used that against him. Then, you have to look at the South China Sea. The "nine lines" territorial claims are based on imperial maps. This is important because historical claims to territory are important to Xi. Niall is correct in saying that the relationship between the CCP and the Soviets have not generally been good. In fact, that was one of the factors in Nixon's opening to China. He was using China as a counterweight to the USSR in the Cold War. It was sort of an opening a second front type of strategy. I think that Xi is being coy about all this, and that he will swoop in to take territory. It might have been done already if Russia didn't have so many nukes.
    1
  7594.  @MrNajibrazak  Not necessarily. What you say is just platitudes.
    1
  7595. Rand Paul is ignorant on the issues with TikTok and the First Amendment. The issue with TikTok is what the CCP does with the data. On the First Amendment, it is moot on the forms of speech. It only mentions the press. TikTok is not the press. There are lots of other venues for people to say what they want to say.
    1
  7596.  @enigma1000  China will not support Russia. Even if they do, most of their designs are Soviet. Even their new tanks are subpar. India is in a similar situation. They have been buying Soviet/Russian for decades. As for trade in oil and gas, Russia has limited scope to shift all of that trade to China and India. They already get oil at a steep discount. That is not a way to get more money.
    1
  7597. Low information YouTuber! It has just come out that a large volume of explosives were used. This points to a state actor. Who benefits? Russia. They get out of contracts that they have to provide gas. So far, they have used maintenance as ab excuse. Now all bets are off. Another indicator of the lack of knowledge to comment on these issues comes in the description. These are not liquefied natural gas pipelines. None of the pipelines used to carry natural gas over land are. LNG technology is only used when gas has to transported outside of pipelines. So, basically, we ae dealing with a load of crap here.
    1
  7598. I have not been sick more that two or three days in the last five years. I changed my diet and cut out a lot of the things that Dr. Ekberg talks about. One thing that does concern me though is that he sometimes talks about cookies and other concoctions that are not necessary or useful. Many people who discuss healthy eating also talk about healthy alternatives that of of a similar form to the foods that are killing us. Just change the way you eat. You don't have to come up with some substitute. Just eat something different.
    1
  7599. The reason those who purposely withhold wages are allowed to escape punishment is because they are a bunch of commies. Remember the term "dictatorship of the proletariat"? The emphasis is on dictatorship. And the proles, or in the case of China, the peasants, brought this on themselves.
    1
  7600. You are too hard on Macron's early actions. In fact, that he tried to get Putin to negotiate early gives his current actions much more force. What people wanted at the beginning was peace in Europe. That Macron tried, through negotiations, to obtain that peace, and that Putin rebuffed him, makes everything crystal clear. As for countries like the Germany and the UK saying they would not send troops, the plain fact is that they are irrelevant. Both have let their ground forces atrophy. They are both also not on the front lines. Look to those that are on the front lines and have kept their military posture reasonably healthy. The story is very different.
    1
  7601.  @living_well_18  Thanks.
    1
  7602.  @ronaldcadorette4353  Thanks. I have been following this for a long time. I am glad it shows.
    1
  7603.  @hughmungus2760  Well, your first point is interesting, but I think the question answers itself. They did it for thousands of years. They would know where it would work and where there had been problems before. So, over time they would avoid problematic locations. The CCP has no such knowledge. As for the automation in farming, that is coming, but in reality, the widespread application is going to be slow and expensive. I worked on some machine vision projects for agriculture. It is very capital intensive. We will see it, but that is going to be a while. I live in the US and since I moved to the Midwest about 30 years ago, with in-laws that are farmers, I got more in tune with what is happening in farming. Just in the time I have been here the percentage of the US population involved in farming has dropped dramatically due to automation. Just to give some perspective on the capital issue, one farmer I know told me that his 1,200-acre farm was about the smallest (we are talking grain farming) that is economically viable. This is because of the cost of equipment. At least ten years ago he got two new tractors (the larger ones). These had autonomous operation capability back then. He didn't use it. I also notice this with people who have a Tesla with self-driving capability. They often don't use it.
    1
  7604. The Russian Federation will disintegrate. It is in the cards. It always was. Their demographics, if nothing else, mitigate for that.
    1
  7605. WOW! You used the term "fascist state". This is so apt. China, under the CCP and after Mao, resembles Nazi Germany so much it is uncanny. There is government control of the economy, with some private firms allowed to exist. These firms were, however, were under tight control of the government. Of course, there is also the cult of personality and the idea of the strong leader. Don't ever forget what Nazi stood for. It was short for the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The real emphasis is on the first two words. Russia, by the way, has also transitioned from a Marxist-Leninist communist state to a nationalistic state. In this case officially oligarchic in nature.
    1
  7606. Putin is indeed Hitler's successor. When, at about 13:29, he talks about "our people living in these territories" he is using the same racial rhetoric Hitler used when talking about the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia. This man is a racist and a Nazi.
    1
  7607. Finally, a Brit who has a clear understanding and more nuanced view.
    1
  7608. Congrats on episode 1K!👍 You are doing great and providing a valuable service.
    1
  7609. No! Not the dreaded lines on maps.
    1
  7610. What I find interesting is the targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure in the hopes of getting your adversary to surrender. How did that work in WWII? How about Vietnam? It kind of shows your adversary how much of bastard and an existential threat you are to them. Kind of the opposite effect that you are going for. Those resources should be targeted at military targets. In the end, the purpose of a military operations in a war is to destroy the opposing military. Once you have done that you can walk into whatever territory you want. The best example of this was Operation Barbarossa in WWII. The initial goal was to do just that, destroy the Soviet Army. The Germans were wildly successful at that at first. They just underestimated the size of their opposition. They really started to take it on the chin when they tried to hold territory simply because Hitler didn't want to give it back. His generals were constantly rebuffed when they asked for permission to withdraw to more defensible positions. Despite a kill ratio of about eight to one, they suffered defeat after defeat. There is a good parallel here. The world press and commentariat make a big deal out of the few places Ukraine has had to withdraw from (Bakhmut and Advika) recently. Neither of these were significant, and quite frankly the cities and towns along the front lines are no more valuable than the farm fields and forests around them, except that in some cases they provide some cover. Ukraine has done it right and used these situations to attrit the Russians and then move back to prepared positions. What they need now is air power to help them take advantage of situations for counterattack. Soon, right?
    1
  7611. Bring back the Genie nuclear rocket!
    1
  7612. You are correct, but crimes are a legal matter. Mr. Brody is a lawyer, and in legal terms a charge has not been made yet in court. The investigators are there now, and the crime will be brought to a court. Then it will be adjudicated. These journalists and lawyers always have to talk this way. Even for a common crime, until there is a conviction, it is alleged. I know it is infuriating, I have trouble with it, but there are legal reasons, and liabilities that they have to contend with. For example, in the US, there have been cases where news organizations have presumed that a person was guilty before a verdict. Then when the individual is acquitted, the news organization can be sued.
    1
  7613. The move favoring SOEs is not a new thing. The Nazis did it in the 1930s and through the war. Don't forget, the Nazis were "National SOCIALISTS". Herman Goering actually headed a massive state-owned enterprise that was gobbling up private enterprises s their goal. This was typically done when the private company refused to follow Nazi party directives, or when they were in distress. Sound familiar?
    1
  7614. This just confirms what I have been reading. Projections are for the UK to overtake Germany in GDP terms. I forget if it is in 10 years or by the end of the decade. Whatever the case, the UK is poised to do reasonably well, especially compared to the EU. Don't forget, the EU is a protectionist cartel. The euro is a failure as a reserve currency. The UK, along with the US, has lots of crazy stuff going on politically, but both are far more developed as democracies than most (all?) of the EU. The situations in the US and UK are, if one cares to look, actually quite normal realignments which take place periodically. The best thing in both countries would be for the government to "get out of the way".
    1
  7615.  @socarsocar601  That will change.
    1
  7616.  @oliverhardy34  Agreed!
    1
  7617.  @bield7  Well, can't agree with you there. I don't believe the government should be involved in the housing sector, except perhaps in a regulatory capacity. The cheese thing is just silly, on both sides. The UK has wonderful cheeses. When I lived there, we did not eat Continental cheeses. There were too many good British cheeses. Her performance on the trade front was stellar. The UK is now doing more and more trade with non-EU countries and regions. These are growing much more than the EU. They are the future, not the EU.
    1
  7618.  @jrr3613  Well, let's see, who have you had for PM in the last several years? Who is the current PM?
    1
  7619.  @jrr3613  Good point!
    1
  7620. A nation's first responsibility is to their own citizens. We didn't go to war to protect other people. We went to war because we were attacked and needed to protect ourselves. This even applied to the Germans before they declared was against us. Even in WWI, the Germans were attacking our ships before we went into the war.
    1
  7621.  @mito88  They were sinking our ships as well. If they had only sunk British ships we probably have not been involved.
    1
  7622.  @mito88  We first decided to support Germany's enemies with material. The only way to get that materiel to those countries was by ship. The Germans wanted to sink the ships to stop that. I don't see how you can say we were not doing it to protect ourselves. We were losing sailors as well.
    1
  7623.  @mito88  Well, I think we agree it was an undeclared war. But, you are taking away Germany's agency. They could have left the US ships alone. It was their choice. One always has that choice. In the end, the consequences for Germany was terrible. It is akin to the situation with the Soviet Union. It was their choice to invade. The Soviets were even giving the materials they needed to fight, such as oil. It's the choices one makes.
    1
  7624. Tony, the thumbnails are, indeed, different. Some of them with the "wide eyes" are downright hilarious. As for China's stress on large scale, especially the "new high quality" industries are a dead end. China's overcapacity in solar cells and batteries is already coming back to bite them. I have seen credible reports of battery manufacturers going out of business. Many are making little or no profit. What they need is employment for the people they actually have. Previous leaders of the CCP understood that. They also need, as you often point out, a massive increase in consumption. The other thing that this brings out is that Xi and the CCP are crap at central planning. Xi says we need to stress this or that. Then local governments go off and fund and build stuff. Many of the "new" industries are actually funded by, or are themselves, SOEs. The local officials are competing for favor and their own advancement. In the end you have massive overspending and waste in an economy that can ill afford it. Frankly, it is a bit of a clown show.
    1
  7625. If the Russians launched an attack on NATO, their casualty ratio would be north of 40 to 1. Perhaps as high as 100 to 1. Attack by the end of this decade? I think we are being gaslighted. It took 20 years for the Russians to build the army they attacked Ukraine with in 2022. They had robust oil and gas revenues and access to western technology during that time. That army is gone. It was destroyed by an adversary without airpower or the most up to date weapons. If you want a look at what western airpower can do look at the two wars in Iraq. Remember the "highway of death"? On top of that, they have shown that in terms of tactics, leadership and logistics that they are subpar. The Russians are bogged down in Ukraine with all of their forces committed. They are running out of people. They were in demographic decline before the war. That has been accelerated. Today, the road to Moscow and St. Petersburg is open. They have withdrawn almost all forces from those fronts. So, who are they kidding?
    1
  7626. Bring Borris back!
    1
  7627. My uncle was a tanker in Europe in WWII. He had a M3 and loved it.
    1
  7628. Bringing down the Internet? Do these people understand what the Internet is and how it works?
    1
  7629. The only problem with this scenario is that the people voted for these council members. The other consideration, and it may be different in the UK, is that these council members must have had legal advice on the issue. I have been involved, in the US at the state level, in drafting legislation. I was the "subject matter expert". Then there was a writer who had a legal background then there were lawyers who opined on the validity of the law. What is the liability in the UK for these people as well?
    1
  7630.  @boofuu3145  That is well put. What I am reacting to is that fascists and Nazis were called "right wing". They were definitely big government types, as was Mao. Actually, Italian fascists, German Nazis and Marxists were socialists. But that is not the best term for them. The best term is collectivist. There is another dimension on which the political spectrum must be analyzed. That is the social angle. Even the point you make regarding big and small government can be understood in this way. Big government in this aspect means not what percentage of the economy is controlled, but what the government role is in peoples' lives.
    1
  7631. One of the main pillars of the Chinese economy is real estate. This goes back to the communist nature of the state. When limited capitalism was brought in, people did not know anything about investments, such as equities. Property the understood and had not been able to own for a long time. So that is where they turned to for their investments. The sector is grossly overbuilt. It is a much bigger part of the economy than in most other places. With the demographic collapse, this sector will never recover. It can't. Another pillar of Xi's recovery plan is to stimulate consumer spending. Again, demographic collapse precludes that. As Peter has said for a while, China is toast. One thing I am wondering is the attitude of some of the big investors in the west, especially the US. Could they not have seen this coming? To some extent, I am wondering if they have abrogated their fiduciary duty. They seem to rely on Chinese government statistics, which they must know are bogus, and cannot be independently verified or analyzed. Investing client's money in such a country sounds a little underhanded to me.
    1
  7632. The whole problem is very basic. The big cities have pushed blue collar jobs away. So, you end up with businesses like meat packers, and others, moving to rural areas. Do you think a black person living in a big city wants to go the wilds of Iowa to work? Their ancestors fled the South for jobs in the big cities of the Northeast and Midwest. Those meat packing plants, and some industrial plants, are in remote areas, thus raising transportation costs. We need to bring industry back to the cities where the people and the demand are. It is not only meat packing and such industries. I read in the WSJ some time ago about a company that made and industrial item, I think it was fire hydrants, that was in a very rural area. They were very successful over the years. Their people prospered. They wanted better for their kids, so the kids went to university. Well, now the company is having trouble filling the jobs. The children of their traditional workers are going elsewhere. No one wants to relocate to such areas, unless it is immigrants. I mean no disrespect to the immigrants who want to work. They do it because they don't have roots anywhere in the country yet, so they are willing to relocate. This, of course, causes lots of social tension with the people who are already there. These are complex problems.
    1
  7633. Actually, the swap out idea is potentially not such a problem. This has been proposed for lithium ion batteries. I believe that Tesla was looking at this at one point. Their batteries, in their newer models, are on the bottom of the vehicle. The idea was to have a station where you could take a vehicle to and the spent battery would be swapped for a new one. Logistics may be a big issue here. Of course, you could use existing filling stations for this. As for the logistics of having to refresh the electrolyte, it could be made simple to do at home, with a little engineering. Don't forget, you still have to remember to plug in you electric vehicle each night to top up the charge. Not as convenient as a gasoline powered car, but still doable.
    1
  7634. Wow! A run at Moscow. Just think about it. The Poles from the west. Belorussia would join in. I seriously don't believe the population there supports Lukashenko. The Ukrainians from the southwest heading northeast. Finally, you have the Finns from the northwest. Of course, a lot of other smaller countries would join in (e.g., the Baltic states). It might be best to leave the Germans behind on this one. In Russia, to the east and south, this would be the opportunity for many of the ethnic republics to revolt. It might be easy for them as well. In the far east, China would finally grab all the territory Xi thinks was stolen by the Soviets and a whole lot more. The Japanese would resolve their territorial issues with Moscow, in their favor of course. The thing is, looking at how the Russian army has performed in Ukraine, except for the nukes, the scenario is actually quite possible. The forces mentioned have the firepower to do this. And don't give me any guff about needing a three to one advantage in manpower to attack. That is basically a 19th century metric. It assumes technical power parity. Look at the 20th century. In WWI, the Germans decisively beat a much larger Russian army as an attacker. Leadership and logistics were factors. The Russians had trouble feeding their people and they didn't even have enough rifles for their soldiers. In 1921 the Poles stopped the Soviets. This was one of the more significant victories in the post WWI period. It forced Lenin to propose "socialism in one country". Don't forget, Marxist-Leninist communism is an internationalist ideology. To give that up, if only for a time was a great blow. Back to the troop ratios, frankly, if Hitler hadn't been such a poor strategist, he could have taken Moscow. Actually, his best play would have been the southern arc. There he would get lots of food (Ukraine) and oil. Then a march up the Volga, perhaps. This is so much fun to speculate on. One further note, Peter's timeframes for things like the dissolution of regimes like Russia and China are way too long. I follow events in China (and lots of other places as well) and they won't make it 2030. Heck, they might not make it the end of 2025 (at latest). Russia seems to be on a similar trajectory.
    1
  7635. Smith is deflecting. The interviewer asked about Biden's public statements. Those do not comport with the information he was being given. We know that the FBI has been "corrupted" by policy direction given by the White House. Another thing I find interesting is that more and more Democrats are appearing on Fox News. Very interesting.
    1
  7636. What you ignore is that a lot of the business community, especially a lot of Silicon Valley and financial types are going strong for Trump. This is a fairly recent phenomenon. What the business community is looking at is not labor issues, but business climate issues. Business under Biden is being treated very poorly. In fact, they are being vilified under Biden. They understand that under Trump regulation will be loosened.
    1
  7637. Expecting the west to lose interest in a year or so is not supported by history. How long did the US fight in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan? Heck, how long have we been in Korea. On the money front, how many trillion dollars were expended in those conflicts? Ukraine is a bargain in that context. It is also infinitely more valuable and consequential to the west than any of those other conflicts. On the flip side, Russia's economy is dying, and may, by some analyses run out of money this year. I've pointed out before that the army Putin invaded with took him 20 years to build up. In that time, he had access to western technology and generally high oil revenues. He has neither today. There is even some indication that China is not going to bail him out.
    1
  7638.  @SandcastleDreams  Don't know what you are talking about.
    1
  7639. Putting the FSB in charge of the Kursk operation reminds me of a historical situation. Hitler put Himler in charge of the defense of the Oder front in WWII to stop the Russians. How did that work out? The other thing that makes me laugh out loud is that the "military expert" you start with is so full of it. Russia has been brutal in this war. In fact, they have been most brutal to their own soldiers. The talk about hitting the civilian infrastructure in Ukraine is a load of crap. Frankly, the waste of weaponry on this effort is hurting the Russians on the battlefield. If they redirected the weapons to hitting the Ukrainian military, they would have much more effect. Of course, they don't have the intel assets to do this properly, unlike the Ukrainians. And don't forget that the main industrial base for the Ukrainians is outside of Ukraine.
    1
  7640. How can you say that, particularly in the West, our society is an oppressive patriarchy? Compared to the rest of the world, this is untrue. The West is currently the least patriarchal society in the world.
    1
  7641. If a government at any level wants to mandate these things, like EVs, then they should pay for it. End of story. Frankly, I don't know why a court case has never been brought with alleging this. When fuel efficiency standards were brought in, we had just had two oil shocks driving up fuel prices. The need was obvious. Pollution standards are also an obvious benefit. Frankly, the clearing of the skies over North America may actually be a contributor to global warming. Our cars put out more CO2 than before because the mandates on tailpipe emissions necessitated it to clean up the other much more noxious stuff being produced. EVs, on the other hand, according to many reports, require the emission of more greenhouse gasses than ICEs in their construction. And, unless you can guarantee that the electricity used by an EV is produced by a zero-emission power source, any perceived reduction is probably a chimera.
    1
  7642. If you hadn't noticed, China is a commie country. Laws, and especially the people, do not matter. Add to that rampant corruption, this is the result you get.
    1
  7643. The range is still nothing compared to an ICE vehicle. At 25MPG on the highway with a 20-gallon tank, an ICE can go 500 miles. That mileage is for a vehicle that is larger and not particularly fuel efficient. It is also the mileage of my current and previous vehicles, and it is predictable. Add to that the ubiquity of fueling stations, and the EV is still miles away from competing.
    1
  7644. Jake, the US system is different from the parliamentary system to be sure, but it has its advantages as well. The typical European system uses proportional representation, which can be a real bear. There have been times when even Germany has taken months to form a government. The first past the post system, where each district (or in the case of the Senate, state) election stands on its own is my preference. You may feel differently, but I like to directly elect my local representative, not just pick a list. Another thing I think we would disagree on, considering how you are approaching this issue, is that you seem to think speed is the goal. In fact, I have always felt that the less the government does, the better. In the case of the shutdown there are real, substantive issues at play. In that case, I don't see how speeding things up improves the process. Go back and read about the founding fathers and the debates about the structure of the government. The most important thing we have in the US is checks and balances. Another key feature of our system is federalism (hence the Senate).
    1
  7645. You do realize that the areas affected by the current weather situation has always been affected. The government historical records, from what I can gather, only for back to about 1960 or so. On the other hand, historically, this region is known for floods. That is why the CCP built dams like the Three Gorges Dam. The goal was to tame the river and put an end to the cycle of flooding.
    1
  7646. You know what they call Chicago. The City of Chicanos. I got that from Latinos I know.
    1
  7647. A NGO receiving government funding, directly or indirectly, should be illegal. It's in the name of. What part of NON do you not understand?
    1
  7648. Any "trade route" that uses rail or road will be more expensive than purely waterborne traffic. This has been true since the dawn of time. A reasonably modern rail system will be at least three times more expensive than waterborne traffic. This gap can be even larger when taking into account bulk materials. In addition, add in the cost of changing mode of transportation and I think any detailed analysis will show that this is just another stunt.
    1
  7649.  @jaguar2948  Hey, it was the 1970s.
    1
  7650.  @conkon4267  Knowledgeable demographers totally disagree with you. The question to answer is, what do you mean by enough. The issue is sustainability of the economy and population. By those measures, China is in trouble. There are lots of resources on this online. Look it up. It might enlighten you.
    1
  7651. "On its own terms"? That is a logical trap that shows how analysis of China is flawed. People generally want the same things. It does not matter where they are from. This is witnessed by the whole history of the US.
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  7652. Gen. Hodges understands the issue with NATO. The reality is that the people it was created to protect, after the end of the Cold War, have not taken it seriously. Even Obama was deemphasizing NATO. Remember the pivot to Asia. That wasn't Trump. During the Cold War the US had between 500K and 300K troops in Europe. We are now down to about 50K, I believe. The General should recall that there was a move to get that further reduced and it was resisted by, of all people, the Germans. The other thing that needs to change is the distribution of troops. We don't need troops in Germany to protect our European NATO allies. They were in Germany because of Soviet control of East Germany and the fear of invasion through the Fulda Gap. Well, the border of NATO has changed. If we really want to deter Putin we need to station a large number of troops further east. Stationing a couple of heavy mechanized corps in Poland, Scandanavia and the Baltic states should do it. Putin has had to empty the bases facing those countries. That might also help recruitment, by the way. The issue of the Europeans not paying for their own defense is the key one. Trump was not the first US president to point all this out. It may actually go back to JFK. Don't forget, when NATO was formed Europe was still recovering from WWII. Today Europe's GDP (EU+UK) is about $20T. Russia's is about a tenth of that. Europe's population is about three times larger than Russia's. In Russia you have a demographic crisis. The rest of Europe, including Ukraine, does as well. Russia does not have enough people to prosecute this war, protect their borders and maintain their civilian economy and military production (heck, they are letting 14-year-olds work in arms factories) all at the same time. This was, as Peter Zeihan likes to put it, the last point in time where Russia could mount such an invasion. With this action Putin has accelerated the demographic decline of Russia. He is expending precisely the people he needs to potentially rejuvenate both the population and economy. While I have a lot of respect for General Hodges, and many of our retired military leaders who are retired, and can now speak out, I do get the feeling that they are living in the past. Fighting the last war, as the saying goes.
    1
  7653. Protests are not a good gauge of public opinion. My favorite example is the Vietnam War protests in the US. Some of them were very large. And yet Richard Nixon, no peacenik, won the 1972 election with 60.7% of the popular vote and 520 votes in the Electoral College. Frankly, from my experience at the time, a lot of people went for the drugs and the sex.
    1
  7654.  @trucktrucker5043  Well, I am just giving you what was said at the time in Greece.
    1
  7655. Don't get so wrapped up in "supply chains". That is a classic chimera. What companies have done is to contract out manufacturing. This is totally counter to manufacturing theory and practice from the 1980s. At that time, for quality reasons, companies wanted more control of manufacturing for quality reasons. Even when using suppliers, the supplier facility would be collocated with the main manufacturer. Now, with all this contract manufacturing, it is actually easier to move supply chains. They are, after all, dynamic. That is the whole point. As for China, most of the assembly work is done by uneducated peasants.
    1
  7656. Actually too late? Come on man! Those supply chains were set up with US and western money. It is never too late. In addition, such statements show an ignorance of the way manufacturing works.
    1
  7657. In the 20th century, at least the first 3/4 of it, many people had a classical education. Even many rock musicians had classical training. That is why 60s and especially 70s rock groups were so great. So, it is no surprise that the people who created Pinocchio would have some knowledge of that, and would put it into their production.
    1
  7658. Nothing to see here. I am not sure this is news. Look at the early history of any major auto producing country and the story will be EXACTLY the same. This happened in the US and the UK, two markets I am most familiar with. It shows capitalism at work, which is strange in CCP led China.
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  7659. I am wondering when countries around the world will start recognizing Taiwan diplomatically. I think it will be sooner rather than later. I say this in all seriousness. The war in Ukraine has changed long standing stances on foreign relations in many places. Sweeden joining NATO is a good example. They have been neutral for over two centuries. Finland is another one. Their foreign diplomacy had been predicated on being aligned with the Soviet Union, or at least not taking any strong stance against it. Now they are in NATO as well. South Korea is now considering reversing policy and sending arms to Ukraine. Serbia, a long-standing Soviet/Russian ally has allowed munitions to go to Ukraine. Japan provides Ukraine with significant nonlethal aid and diplomatic support. How long until weapons follow? Many countries seem to be willing to change long held stances in response to actual aggression. The CCPs treatment of Taiwan is moving in that direction. In addition, Taiwan is much more important to the world economically than Ukraine. I mean no disrespect to Ukraine here. The CCPs bellicosity, toward Ukraine and almost everyone else, is making a change more and more likely.
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  7660. To say virtually every Biden policy has been reversed is an interesting statement. Biden did the same with Trump's policies.
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  7661.  @portcybertryx222  That hits the nail on the head, so to speak. The fact that the US, and the advanced "west" is so rich that we can pretty much go anywhere to get material inputs drove this mindset. Let's not sully our land so we can have all the things we want. Let's sully other people's lands. This is the colonial mindset.
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  7662.  @Juneisthebestmonth  YES! That's the spirit. We are basically there on oil. The other two are coming along but need to be accelerated.
    1
  7663.  @bobwatson8754  Precisely! The National Security Advisor was elevated to cabinet rank between 1977 and 1981. That was the term of Zbigniew Brzezinski under Jimmy Carter.
    1
  7664. Enlighten me. You use the term "free will" in terms of particles and physical systems, but that has little (nothing) to do with "free will" in terms of conscious beings. One the one hand you are talking about fundamental entities that have no consciousness and yet you use a term that generally refers to conscious beings. This seems to me another example of physicists using words in an inappropriate way. That causes lots of discussion that ultimately means nothing. This is like the use of the term "information". Prior to quantum mechanics and "information theory" this generally meant something more than just the raw data, for example.
    1
  7665. Everybody is talking about the rise of China? That is so 2019. China's economy, and political system, have been in crisis since the start of the pandemic. Actually, there were signs before that. If you believed in the rise of China, then you were being deceived by CCP propaganda.
    1
  7666. I think your comments on the China Russia relationship are all wrong. China has laid claim to cities in Russia. They have also called themselves a near-Arctic power and are trying to insert themselves into that area, which is something Russia doesn't want. China is also medaling in Central Asia (former Soviet republics) which Russia considers its exclusive sphere of influence. Some of this I believe I have heard on your channel.
    1
  7667.  @Martincic2010  I guess you hadn't noticed that Europe has fairly successfully decoupled from Russia. Get a clue.
    1
  7668.  @Martincic2010  Well, energy prices are not 10x now. These things are dynamic. If you hadn't noticed, oil prices are down from their peak. Europe could lower their energy prices, but don't because of ideological problems. This is changing, and I think that change will only increase. As for Europe deindustrializing, that was already starting before the war. It was always in the cards. There are lots of reasons for it outside of energy.
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  7669. "Chip leap forward" movement. Maybe China should come up with different names for their "movements" and initiatives. Does anyone remember how the first "Great Leap Forward" movement turned out? Something akin to the Cultural Revolution is also taking place. Woe to the Chinese.
    1
  7670. I love (hate) the language used in talking about financial topics. First you say "...local government finances under serious STRAIN." (emphasis mine), then you lay out what is happening. That is not strain. In any rational economy those local governments would be bankrupt. Also, the use of the LGFVs is exactly the same as what Enron was doing just before it collapsed. Also, many of the banks, including some state-owned banks, are probably insolvent by western standards. Much of this is related to the crazy property scam that is the Chinese system. I have seen many situations where people could not get their money out of the banks. In other cases, people, and companies, were just plain robbed via outright fraud. A lot of this goes back to the property crisis and a proliferation of companies that were outfight Ponzi schemes, such as Evergrande.
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  7671. Who is going to invade China? They have poor farmland, poor natural resources and all those Chinese. This is not the 1930s. China is even failing as a market for outsiders. That is a part of why so much foreign investment is pulling out. The original impetus for foreign investment was twofold. One attraction was cheap labor. The other was a large potential market. Their spending on the military can only be for two reasons. One is to repress their own people while the other is to carry out offensive operations elsewhere. I really feel that Xi is likely to do something like Mao did to solidify his control over the military. For Mao it was an invasion of India. Xi would like it to be Taiwan, but that is looking more and more difficult and unlikely. He may try to emulate Mao, but the Indian military of today is not what it was in the 1960s. Another thing I have been seeing is that the whole supply chain model involving China is breaking down. There was a recent article in the Wall Street Journal titled "GE Appliances Spins Stronger Sales from Supply Chain Overhaul" with a subtitle "The manufacturer has brought production into the U.S. and changed how it manages inventory". By the way, GE Appliances is a subsidiary of a Chinese company. Many products were built in China with a low-cost mentality using cheap labor. This labor consists, as many viewers of this channel know, of mostly uneducated peasants. That is what China has. There are several examples I have seen over the years where production was brought back to the US. The designs were changed so that production was not so labor intensive. The result was often better quality and higher profits, even with higher US labor costs. This seems to be bleeding over into the military sphere. China has poor quality in its products. I have seen it, both personally and in reviewing many other situations. In the military sphere the Chinese have not even come up to the level of the Soviets/Russians. The thing is, China doesn't have the money to waste on this stuff.
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  7672. Sabine, I love your comment at about 3:30. You have nailed it. Let non-government supported institutions and programs fund this, if that is what they want to do. Many of the universities in the US have large (sometimes massive) endowments and could easily support these programs. That is assuming the donors would want that. I am, and always have been (well, at least since 2nd grade) an avid reader of literature, history and classics. Even though I was taking calculus and physics courses in high school, I was also in the top track in English. In fact, in my senior year I tutored sophomores. The teacher I was supporting had a PhD in American Literature. I don't know what her thesis was, though. There were two of us helping her and the three of us would often stay after school and have wonderful discussions. I was in a wonderful public school district.
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  7673. I rarely use my AC. I live in the Chicago suburbs. I have a large house. If the overnight temperature is 70deg or below, I don't need it. The front of my house faces south. In the summer I leave the insulated blinds in front closed. The center and north side of the house remains cool. I have a ceiling fan in the room I spend most of my time in. That is sufficient for me. If it is warm at night and projected to be hot the next day I do turn to AC on. This does not happen often. Some of my neighbors just turn it on at the beginning of the summer. Even though the outside temperature is ideal (72deg) their system runs. This is stupid. Of course, it is their money. They have also gotten new systems in the last few years, so they are much quiter, so I don't have much of a problem with that. In large office buildings they are necessary. You can't do the type of "passive solar" I do at home (and I work from home). On the other hand, I agree with the person you talk about. It is too cold. It also dries out the air, and that leads to health problems, especially respiratory. So, get off you high horse.
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  7674. Every day the Chinese economy resembles that of Germany in the 1930s, especially regarding state control. Even the idea of the courts being subsidiary to the ruling party is the same. Add in the rampant nationalism, and well, you know where this is going.
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  7675. Everyone is so fixated on GDP. This is a flawed measure at best. If you pay someone to dig a hole and then pay someone else to fill it in, all of that is GDP, even though the effect is basically zero. GDP is only useful in comparing economies that are in similar situations. To compare GDP for a country at war to one that is not is not valid. PERIOD! Also, to compare GDP growth in centrally planned economies (like China) to those that have free markets is also invalid. Most sophisticated financial analysts totally discount GDP and look at other measures.
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  7676. The CCP, Xi particularly. is so unsophisticated economically that it boggles the mind. I hear a lot of people joking that Xi is a high schooler with a PhD. The results really show this to be true. Frankly, Mao was no better. The problem with local government spending is rather simple. Much of the spending is on projects mandated by the central government. Everyone knows that. The silly and immature governance system in China leads inevitably to the current problem as well as the problem of poor capital allocation in industry. The US had a similar issue starting three quarters of a century ago. The Federal government was mandating spending at the local level to comply with various rules and regulations. This was called "unfunded Federal mandates". Over the years this has required the Feds to come up with the funding. I mention this because most of the debt incurred by "local" governments in China is the same sort of thing. In China's case it was setting "GDP" goals to boost growth, often in ways that had little positive economic impact. The thing is everyone saw this coming for years, except for the central CCP authorities it seems.
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  7677. The whole mania over TikTok is just plain stupid. Trey mentions the millions of people on the platform. Guess what, the vast majority of those people are probably on several other platforms as well. One way to understand it is by comparing to newspapers. Yes, the old, old press. How many newspapers have gone out of business over the years? Think about it. There is no compelling governmental or societal interest in any particular platform. If the court intervenes in keeping TikTok around under Chinese ownership, then they will have failed.
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  7678.  @terrybeast  Glad to be of service.
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  7679. I don't know much about them, but Qanon has been warning about pedophilia in the institutions. Looks like they are right.
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  7680. Was that last woman a parody? It's hard to believe it if it were not.
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  7681.  @dieselface1  Russia is in demographic decline. They don't have 20 years or more.
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  7682. You are making this stuff up. Body language? As President Joe likes to say, "C'mon, man!" Actually, a Libyan style solution would be good. This is especially appropriate to the leader. Heck, his predecessor was put into place by the CIA. Why not his successor?
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  7683. The citing of the battle against the Nazis is somewhat misleading. In that situation, they had allies who supplied a large amount of equipment. They don't today. You might want to look at WWI and the Winter War. Those may be better indicators in this case. Heck, go back to the Russo-Japanese wars of 1904 and 1905. Another factor is the pending introduction of advanced western fighter jets on the Ukranian side. This is a game changer, especially in the potential to break through the Russian defenses in the south. Take a look at the Gulf War. The Iraqis had massive minefields. The US blasted narrow lanes through this and could do this because they had massive air superiority.
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  7684. Wankers! Great term for them all.
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  7685. Tony, that is funny about people thinking you are an AI. I have to say, the CSI 300 chart does not look impressive. It is even less impressive when you realize that the government has directly intervened. You are not likely to get foreign money coming in with the current approach. Of course, that is probably not the goal. The CCP is looking to harvest leeks as the saying goes in China. One thing that always gets me when viewing the situation in China and listening to CCP rhetoric (which I must say is a painful thing to do, almost as bad Russian) is that in the end they have to admit, albeit indirectly, that the system is totally corrupt, and they got caught. This is in addition to also being ineffective. Look at the property sector and the whole issue of hidden local debt, which are both tied together. Xi had to act when the property sector was exposed as a big Ponzi scheme. What is different from those in the west is that the Chinese one was the result of government policy and the actions of government officials doing the bidding of the government. So, this was not a case of the authorities catching a criminal gaming the system but of the authorities catching themselves. What this shows is the utter lack of effectiveness of central planned or controlled economies. Not that we need yet another example. Remember when Justin Trudeau or Canada was extoling the virtues of China's central control during COVID? Just think of it. The CCP has total control over the economy. They have no constraints when it comes to managing the economy. They set up this failed property sector that has probably tanked the Chinese economy. Perhaps permanently. I make that last point because China has only grown over the last 30 years of so because of outside investment. There are three reasons for the world to open up to China and these are all areas that have ended in failure because of the CCP. One is cheap labor. Fair enough, but that is no longer an advantage that China has. The cost of labor is not just wages, don't forget. Another reason to invest in China is a large potential market for western goods. The whole idea of this system of development is that the developing country grows, moves up the value chain and thus can buy and sell more valuable goods and the cycle repeats bringing in someone else. The problem in China is that the market is not growing, nor is it likely to. First there are the economic policies of the CCP. Then there is the demographic problem, also exacerbated by CCP policies. China is projected to shrink to 500M people by the end of the century. The US should be at that level as well. The difference is that the China of 500M will be significantly poorer and thus of little interest to investors. The third reason to invest in China, at least for western firms and governments, is the expectation that the system would change and become democratic and capitalistic over time. The idea is tied in with the previous reason. That does not "require" systemic change per se. The expectation though is that such change will come naturally. The model is the transition in economic, then political, power in early 19th century Great Britian. As the industrial revolution shifted wealth from the landowning aristocracy to the industrial magnates it became increasingly difficult to ignore. Look up the Reform Act 1832. We see the failure of the approach starting when Jack Ma was repressed. He was one of the new breed of industrialists. He had to be put down. We now have two major economies where this approach has failed. Russia and China. Some of the former Soviet Republics seem to have made the transition but this is because they were willing to associate themselves with western institutions. The transition was peaceful in the UK in the 19th century because it was already capitalist and democratic (to a degree). Russia and China have not been either for at least the last century. For China it is millennia. The problem in both Russia and China comes down to systemic corruption. That is it. No need to look at ideology or geopolitics. In ancient times it was a built-in feature of aristocracies. Then, as we now can see, it is a built-in feature of Marxism-Leninism. So, basically, all these machinations by the CCP to fiddle with finances is just so much hot air. Without massive external investment which requires openness China has no way to do this themselves. That has been true for at least two centuries.
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  7686. I see no "tension" between not wanting to isolationist and not wanting to be interventionist. Victor, I would think you would know that. At least as far as I know being interventionist implies intervening when there is no direct interest for the US. This applies to conflicts like Vietnam. While the thinking there was that the US must resist communism wherever it is found (the domino theory) resonated at the time, the reality and implementation were in conflict. Contrast that with the Gulf War where the oil supplies of the US (no longer an issue) and our European allies were at stake. Then there was Afghanistan. The US rooted out a terrorist group that had directly attacked the US. On the other hand, the follow-on was disastrous. The Iraq War was a total mystery to me (not really). There are also many other areas such as Myanmar and Syria and a lot of Africa where there is no pressing US interest. I know people will bring up the GWT, but does that mean the US must actively stamp out every group that might threaten it wherever they are? That would be interventionist. Not doing so is not isolationist.
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  7687. The reality is that we have defunded public mental institutions. They were not great, but the kept the most unstable people in our society from being on the streets. We need to bring them back, or we will continue to have these unstable people on out streets.
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  7688. Cats are significant. I have heard that YouTube was created for people to share videos of cats. A picture or mention of cats should be a requirement for all YouTube videos.
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  7689. Your understanding of what financial regulators in the US require is flawed. The data the Chinese are concerned with is personal data and the aggregate trends that can be gleaned from that. What the US regulators require is financial data of the company listing. Totally different thing. You should do more research on this topic before speaking about it.
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  7690. There are two other ways to look at the amount of money sent to support Ukraine. One is to compare this with what was spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is in the trillions. This is a "pimple on the ass" of those expenditures. Another way to look at it is the fraud in the disbursement of COVID relief funds in the US. The latest figures I see put this at $135B. Frankly, military assistance to Ukraine is a "bargain".
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  7691. At about 18:30 you mention the temperatures. This is not really cold. I used to jog in much lower temperatures wearing only compression pants, and a Gore-Tex jacket. I live in the upper Mid-West of the US. When I lived in England, in Winchester, I was surprised at the temperature range. It went from 30degF to 85degF. It was much further north in latitude than where I lived. In three years, it snowed twice. The snow was light and was gone in a few days. I have hunted deer in sub-zero temperatures in a few feet of snow. It got to the point that any non-insulated liquids (water or sodas) would freeze. One day, everyone's drinks but mine (water) had frozen. Good thing I had those to share with the group. We got lots of deer.
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  7692.  @ionbrad6753  Well, that sounds like a place no humans should be.
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  7693. Not only have the Gazans used their funds to build a terror state, but they squandered the infrastructure that Israel left behind. They had greenhouses, etc. that would have been useful for an economy. What did they do? They smashed them. Then, as you say, they built terror tunnels.
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  7694. I have read that Poland ordered 250 Abrams tanks. The tanks seen in Poland may well be part of the pre-positioned armor that the US keeps in Europe. NATO is shoring up their forces in countries bordering or near to Russia.
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  7695. Kerry is a liar, as is Biden. The major greenhouse, CO2, is not a pollutant, and does not contribute to deaths. In fact, it is essential to life on the planet and is at a fairly low level, historically.
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  7696. What? What does the cost of shipping during the COVID crisis have to do with this? The issue was market disruption due to a massive and unprecedented public health crisis. Look at the rates today. They are through the floor. This project has a large overland component via rail. Rail is at least three times more expensive than waterborne transport. Going from India to Europe, there are, it seems two extra modal changes required. All this adds cost. I had recently seen a plan for a canal through Israel which would be an alternative to the Suez Canal. Perhaps it would be good to have two canals, considering that Suez has become a choke point in the recent past. On the other hand, such projects are fantastically expensive. This is just another example of a Middle Eastern infrastructure project which is being used to soak up oil and gas earnings. The current systems of transport grew naturally on a sound economic basis. Look at China's Belt and Road initiative. They say they want to recreate the Silk Road. Why do you think the original Silk Road disappeared? It could not compete economically. This project, if ever completed, will suffer the same fate.
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  7697. There are two issues for letting Ukraine into NATO. One is that of conflict on their soil. With Article 5, it is neither prudent or practical to have a country accede to NATO during a war. NATO is a defensive alliance designed to avoid war, through strength. What should have happened is for Ukraine to become part of NATO after Russia abrogated their obligations under the Budapest Memorandum. The other issue is that all the current members must agree once an ascension memo has been agreed. Sweden and Finland are still not through the last hurdle. Turkey has not yet agreed. I have no idea of how they would react to Ukraine. Don't get me wrong, I think Ukraine should be able to join NATO. The question is in the details. They already have the training and many weapons that are NATO standard. This includes Soviet equipment which is used by lots of for Soviet Bloc nations.
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  7698. I saw one video claiming that this incident with the Turkish ship did not happen. I wonder what the truth is.
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  7699. Is this really science. We have a hypothesis with no way to test it.
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  7700. Not become a pawn for the alliance's confrontation with China. Who are you kidding? India has fought real wars with China. India is currently in a military standoff with China. China lays claim to Indian territory. And don't forget that China now controls the water resources that India needs. Russia is has now drawn closer to China out of necessity. How is this in India's favor? As for strategic independence, once you chose a weapons supplier, that is no longer an option. Having chosen Russia, India is now constrained. Russia will probably not be able to be a supplier in the future. Made in India is a good idea, but to prevail on the modern battlefield India is going to need technology as well.
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  7701.  @TimeGhost  I got it, but I don't like the term "made up". Just my opinion. Love your content. We have had some good discussions in the past, and hope to continue to do so. Thanks for all you do.
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  7702.  @QWERTY-gp8fd  Greece was not a unified country in the 8th century BC. I was still a collection of city states. In fact, prior to modern times I don't think there was really a unified Greek state.
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  7703.  @kiwikemist  Wow! What a stupid comment. You seem to operating at the low end of the Internet. If you have a specific argument with something I said (and there is lots there to discuss) then I would like to hear (read) it, especially as I expect you are not from the US.
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  7704. This whole chip drive in China reminds me of the Great Leap Forward. China tried to go it alone, without the technical knowhow required. They couldn't even effectively make pig iron. Millions died. The chip investment funds from the CCP have all failed, and lots of the leaders of these efforts have gone to jail.
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  7705. Gee, sounds like they would be better off as part of the USA.
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  7706. Sacrificing troops for territory is the worst thing you could do. It is troops that fight the war. Holding on to some bit of territory in enemy territory, which you will not be able to do indefinitely, is madness. At the end of the war, Germany did not have troops in Germany sufficient to mount a real defense. These we in places like East Prussia, Budapest and other territories that they were not going to be able to hold, in any case. Again, sacrificing troops is the height of folly. Trained experienced units the the most important asset an Army has. The inability to understand that is the reason Germany lost so badly, and the reason the Soviets were so badly mauled. If the Soviets had not had the the US and UK as an ally, it is not clear that they could have won.
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  7707. The support for Ireland is very strong here in the US indeed. In the 1970s, in Washington, DC, where I am from, I used to see Provos (Provisional IRA) in Georgetown raising money all the time. At the best Irish pub in the city, The Dubliner, fights would break out if the wrong posters were on the wall. If there was a pro IRA band playing and anti IRA posters had been left up from a previous band from the other side, then it was pandemonium. The US is, and always has been, against the British Empire and colonialism. Prior to both world wars in the 20th century the public sentiment was against getting involved, in large part because we would be seen as helping the UK keep its empire. I personally am not for breaking up the UK. I lived in England for a time. I just mention these things to give some idea of the sentiment here. And, by the way, my heritage is Greek.
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  7708. Rule of law within the market economy? Jing Lan must be living in a parallel universe. The CCP has become an aristocracy. It left Marxism long ago.
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  7709.  @JG-ex9kx  You can see anything on YouTube. There are lots of videos predicting the total downfall of the US economy. That does not seem likely. You need to expand your sourced of information beyond social media.
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  7710. Brazil and India initiating anti-dumping investigations? Wait a minute. I thought that China, Brazil and India were all part of BRICS, the new power center of the world. What's going on? Actually, I just saw a news item stating that India has officially rejected replacing the dollar with the yuan.
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  7711.  @philgiglio7922  They have done a truly amazing job of getting up to speed Of course, war does that. Think of the progression of aircraft during WWII. Even in Vietnam, there were many types of aircraft involved, albeit over a longer time frame.
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  7712.  user-qk1dr6zy3y  What the heck does that mean. Is it just some sort of automatic response you have set up. If you have something to say then say if not, then what are you?
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  7713.  @Journey_Escape_81  Hey, don't blame me. I was just saying it was a great dig, not that it was true.
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  7714.  @Journey_Escape_81  Well, I guess that our sense of humor is quite different. You shouldn't take it so seriously. No offense meant.
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  7715. The guy who says he doesn't care is correct. If an investor is making decisions based on a scientific paper he has no ability to interpret and put into context, then that is on the investor. He should get the advice of someone who does have that ability. For example, many years ago my father-in-law was advised to put money into gallium arsenide chips. Since he knew I had knowledge and experience in the area he asked me about it. I was actually working with these chips and what we were finding was that advances in silicon technology were rapidly making the gallium arsenide chips less attractive in the area they were initially found useful in. He did not invest, and it was a good thing. If you are relying on scientific papers and don't read "Appendix D" then you are setting yourself up for failure. What I find puzzling in Sabine's attitude in this situation. Investor's decisions are a bet on the future. Pay attention to the words "bet" and "future". This is especially true for early-stage technologies. There are plenty of examples where this has worked out (e.g., Apple, Tesla) and a plethora of examples where it has not. The "neighbor" who puts all their money into one of these companies or technologies is just plain greedy. Many of Bernie Madoff's clients had the same attitude.
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  7716. The whole Chinese economic model, that of being a contract manufacturer, contains the seeds of its own downfall. A lot of western companies became hollow shells. They had design, engineering and marketing, and all the actual work was done by contractors. Well, it is not that hard to just find another contractor. I have seen it in many contexts outside of China. As an aside, that might show how this could play out, I relate something I saw personally. I worked at GE when Jack Welch took the helm. We used to joke that his "wet dream" was that the company would be him and a purchasing agent. Everything else would be done by contractors. Of course, we see where that led. Welch had some good ideas on financial management and personnel development. Actually, these were just extensions of a culture that already existed. Otherwise, his whole business management approach has been discredited. I mention all this because the people who go on and on about how decoupling would be so difficult and costly. Are you kidding me? The original buildup in China was done by the west. In some cases, they moved production to China from factories that had been recently built in the US. Especially in the industrial space, where things are always evolving. This is the one area where moving production somewhere else is not an issue. We did it before and we can do it again (remember that?). As for the cost, the reality is that the sunk cost belongs mostly to the Chinese. Because of CCP ownership limitations western companies' exposure is actually limited. They did this to themselves. When a foreign company opens a factory in the US or Europe, they own it fully. I have even seen examples of Chinese companies opening plants in the US. This is both a recognition of where their market is and a way to get money out of China without falling afoul of currency controls.
    1
  7717.  @nandinidesai6326  Thanks. Hadn't thought about that.
    1
  7718. Russia, and perhaps Brazil, might fit your statement but not China and India. I am not sure about South Africa, but frankly the country is falling apart. The only really healthy one in the bunch is India.
    1
  7719. That may be is plan. He probably could buy a controlling stake now. He is stated to be worth well over $200B. He spent about $3B for his current stake. To get up to 51% would probably cost him $12B+. Well within his means.
    1
  7720.  @mr6johnclark  Right on! Creative destruction!!
    1
  7721.  @Old940  Where do you get that? I hear that figure bandied about, but no real backup to it. If you have real information on that I think we would all like to hear it. I hope it wasn't from twitter. The graphic put up in this clip shows programs that are infrastructure as far as I can tell.
    1
  7722.  @Old940  Good to see you are not on twitter. Pork is an endemic problem with spending bills. A problem with both parties. Not all pork is not actual infrastructure. Won't argue with you there. I think the child care is in the House bill, not this bill, which was initiated by the Senate. I have no problem with support for electric vehicles. Don't have one, and have no current plan to get one. Bought a used ICE vehicle about 1-1/2 years ago. Work from home. It should last me ten years. No plan to replace it. Electric busses would be great. They are a good application. No range anxiety. Known routes and consumption. We should be concentrating there, and perhaps on some types of trucking that have similar parameters. Glad to hear your opinion. Good to discuss with you. We need more discussion.
    1
  7723.  @Tsedek_ben_Shimon  Actually, it is now a contract managed by the state. I don't know if it is still the case, but into the late 20th century there was still common law marriage in Virginia. If you lived together seven years, you had all the rights and obligations of someone who formally got married.
    1
  7724.  @robertosnow3841  How do you justify that? Do you not know what the Constitution is? Are you ignorant of what our system is? Before you say something so stupid, get educated.
    1
  7725.  Kat Thomas  You know nothing.
    1
  7726.  @Tsedek_ben_Shimon  You make many good points. Actually, in medieval times most people could not get formally married. They did not have the resources. Marriage has changed over time. The issue today is property. The main issue is what happens when the marriage dissolves. I have been through this, after 30 years and two sons. At least in my case there were no child custody issues. Marriage has become a contractual issue. That is all. I hope all those who get married in our hyper legalistic environment understand that. My ex-wife, who initiated the divorce, at one point tried to get me to go to arbitration. Then she tried to provoke me to violence. Neither worked and I came out of it very well. At her instance we went to marriage counseling. When I tried to bring up marriage vows (she insisted we get married in the church she grew up in) she stated that her family was not religious, and only went to church for social reasons. So much for over 30 years of being heavily involved in the church. The whole thing came down to her mother dying of cancer. A really wonderful woman. I could go into details, but that is what broke up the relationship. It had nothing to do with us. The sad thing is that my parents had died not long after we had our children and her parents were my "family". I really liked them, and the feeling was mutual. That's all gone now, because of a contractual dispute.
    1
  7727.  @Tsedek_ben_Shimon  I fully agree with you. Now I was in the opposite situation. I was working on some startups so had no income at the time. So, I am getting support. I expect my one of my startups to go in the near future. I also got half of the savings we had and got the house (a very nice one). She used what she got to buy her own. So we both made out OK. I expect that I would not get married again. There is no upside to it anymore, especially with "no fault divorce". I never cheated on my wife. I never took money from her. I actually drained retirement accounts. The whole institution, with the "no fault" laws, is just a mockery. Why we have marriages in churches with vows that have no legal consequences just evades me. The whole thing is a sham.
    1
  7728.  @georgelux126  Are you for real? People can believe whatever they want. Who are you to tell anyone that their beliefs are backward. If people cannot express their beliefs openly, then there will be problems. If someone expresses an opinion you disagree with then discuss it with them. You might even persuade them. But first get off your high horse, listen and engage.
    1
  7729. Cats! YouTube was created to show cat videos. Coming back home.
    1
  7730. The comment about whether we become closer to Russia is interesting. Our biggest threat is China. Remember Nixon's opening to China? That was done, in large part, to put pressure on the Soviets by, in effect, opening another front. We were not allies, but the Chinese had issues with the Soviets, and we opened up that split a bit more by just talking directly to the CCP. It was a surround strategy. Nothing has changed, really, in the relationship between Russia and the Chinese. Xi still has designs on Russian territory. I am sure that Putin, and the Russian people, would rather have better relations with the west than with the Chicoms.
    1
  7731. The government workers should be in fear. While there are exceptions, a lot of government workers are not very effective. The other thing is that government is ALWAYS less efficient than private companies. That is even when the private companies make a profit. I could give examples from NASA to the military industrial complex to garbage collection in cities. In the end, the government worker is just an employee, like just about everyone else. There is no reason that employee has to be a direct employee of the government. This applies to just about everything outside the military.
    1
  7732.  @echo005uk  I am getting that impression. I decided to unsubscribe from this channel, but it does come up in the YouTube suggestions, so I look. What happens with so many YouTubers is that they get way out of their wheelhouse and start spouting drivel. For example, in this case he is talking about political decisions he has no insight into.
    1
  7733. The whole premise is silly. What matters about math is not some intrinsic property, but what it can be used for. It is used quite successfully. For mathematicians exploring these things makes sense and is natural. Saying this is a flaw in this venue is alarmist and does not really mean anything to someone using math or benefiting from math.
    1
  7734. Canada is having the same problem with foreign money coming into the real estate market.
    1
  7735. The world looked on in horror? I think a lot of people were delighted.
    1
  7736. Who will rescue 1.4 billion hostages? No one. The fact is though that the video is incorrect. The people chose the CCP. China has NO history of or experience with democracy. Even Sun Yat-sen, the "father" of Chinese nationalism was a socialist with a tenuous notion of democracy. Who will rescue the Chinese people? Why would anyone? That would take blood and treasure, which would not be a good investment. China has poor natural resources and farmland. The CCP has even poisoned what was there before. Then there are all those Chinese. No, there will be no one riding in to help. Like Russia, China has shown itself to be a corrupt society and a bad actor to the rest of the world. Things will go back to the containment policy of the Cold War for both countries. No one will want to do business with them. Russia shed the Marxist-Leninist ideology and openly became an oligarchy. China did not shed the ideology openly, but it has also become an oligarchy.
    1
  7737. These totalitarian regimes often become, in effect, aristocracies. In Russia this is increasingly true of the nomenclature. In China you have the "princes", or descendants of the revolutionary leaders. Mr. Alperovitch points out specific examples, but this is endemic within the system.
    1
  7738. Don't hold back now. Tell us what you really think.
    1
  7739. That is the Chinese way, isn't it.
    1
  7740. I saw an article today stating that China was planning to take over the Russian far east. I have been saying this for a long time. That is probably why the Chinese have not formally supported this new pipeline. They are just waiting for the Russian army to be destroyed or massively degraded in Ukraine. As you point out, this is happening. The Russian Empire imposed treaties on the Qing Dynasty (China's last) that the CCP does not agree with. The USSR and CCP China have fought many border battles over the years. This is one of the factors Nixon used to open up to China. China currently conducts live fire training exercises in the border area. What are they getting ready for? This is all going to end badly for Putin, and Russia. I give the Russian Federation, in its current form, a year or two. It might be less. If Russia loses either the Crimea or the far east, then Putin is toast.
    1
  7741. I love how people talk about the UK not having a backup plane for Brexit as if that is some sort of significant revelation. For one thing, when do governments have real plans? As President Joe likes to say, come on man. Did the Germans have a "plan" when they decided to shut down their nuclear reactors. Did the EU as a whole have a plan to deal with the threat from Russia in the energy sphere (to say nothing of the security sphere)? Why does the EU not have a trade deal with the US? The answer is chlorinated chicken. Look it up, it is hilarious. I participated in the debate at the time. This is the same EU whose plan seemed to be to rely on China for markets. How is that working out now? The EU is pulling back from China. Was that a plan? The UK, specifically David Cameron, tried to negotiate with the EU on some, frankly reasonable, changes. They spat in his face. Did the EU have a plan? There are plenty in the EU that are feeling the same as the UK before Brexit. Then there are the projections I have seen that the UK will surpass Germany in GDP over the next decade. Finally, isn't this the same Peter Zeihan who talks about the EU as a protectionist cartel that is doomed?
    1
  7742. To say that San Francisco is at the heart of America's tech boom is a mistake. The city was never the heart. It was suburbs like Cupertino, San Jose and many others where the actual tech companies are located. The city itself was never the epicenter.
    1
  7743.  @genekelly8467  Great comment. The Theranos situation instructive. Look at all the wealthy "smart" people who were fooled. Look at the Bernie Madoff situation. His "investors" were all successful and wealthy people. They were all conned. Venture capital is an interesting thing. The expectation is that only 10 or 20 percent of the companies will be successful. Having dealt with venture firms, I can confidentially say that they are mostly guessing. That is their right. It is their money.
    1
  7744. Rep. Issa overplays China's capabilities. Much of their weaponry is a copy of, or inspired by, Soviet/Russian weapons. Their organization and tactics are also Soviet/Russian inspired. Their last real war was in 1979 with Vietnam, which they lost. Their conflict with India at the line of control shows a lack of skill. I could go on. I think that what we are hearing is a situation where the intelligence community overplays the threat. These are the same people who overestimated Russia's capability. Why would they be right on China?
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  7745. One reason that leaders can come along and dominate is the people themselves and the societies they live in. Look at the case of the communist revolutions of the 20th century. In Russia, China and Cuba the societies were very unequal, and the elites corrupt. Lenin, Mao and Castro promised the masses "free stuff", which of course was taken from those better off in society. Of course, the joke was on the masses, since those leaders turned around and took it away. An interesting situation was the American Revolution. I read one commentator who lived around the time of the Revolution who was surprised that it had happened. He noted that even average Americans were comparatively rich. Don't forget, at the time most people worked in agriculture (worldwide) and the land in North America was very good. It was also plentiful and easy to obtain. That is why many of the people had emigrated from Great Britian. So, by the time of the Revolution the people were not oppressed. There was ample opportunity. In fact, early on the feeling was that the Americans wanted representation in the British Parliament. One of the early slogans of the Revolution was "no taxation without representation". If the British government had given that representation, the Revolution may never have happened. Of course, while Great Britian was a democracy internally, they were still a colonial power outside of the British Isles. Geography does play a role.
    1
  7746.  @kkittycatkat1990  Thanks.
    1
  7747. Chen's comment about the US goal in the South China Sea is timeless CCP propaganda. The CCP doesn't need to US to help create chaos, they are doing a great job themselves. The comment about China's growing influence is delicious as well. I think we have seen "peak China", especially in international influence. As for the Vietnam situation, I think the pundits you quote have it all wrong. The PLA is afraid of the Vietnamese military. There are several reasons for that, but the main ones are history and the realization that their own capabilities are crap. They know the later for two reasons. One is that their officers are part of the corruption resulting in diminished capabilities while the other is the object lesson being delivered every day by developments in Ukraine. As with economics, we treat the CCP with models and assumptions that are applicable to our own societies. This is stupid and dangerous. Just saying.
    1
  7748. What, no lines on maps. You almost had me at the lines of vehicles, but wisely you didn't go far down that path. As with any line of communication in a military situation, it is not necessary to take the whole thing down, or over. This is what has frustrated me about the reporting from YouTubers about the offensive. They keep talking about this village or that, and often the villages come up for days or weeks, when they are already destroyed. It gives a poor impression of the Ukranian counteroffensive. The first goal of modern, industrial warfare is to destroy the enemy's military. Then you can do what you want. All the talk about this village or that shows ignorance from a military point of view, and is bad for Ukraine. I think a lot of it has to do with the maps people rely on. A small number of military vloggers seem to understand and concentrate more on the terrain. I could go on and on. I will give one example from WWII that is actually relevant and involves some of the same places we hear of today. In Operation Barbarossa the Nazis fist plan was the elimination of the Soviet Army. Yes, they had destinations, but that was the secondary goal. Various cities were just places on the map. Then when they failed that Hitler became enamored with taking and holding territory (his lebensraum), insisting on holding places to the end. His generals disagreed with him, but he was resolute. That turned the whole thing against the Nazis and led to Soviet success. It now allowed them to surround and destroy the German Army.
    1
  7749. I heard that the bribe was F-16s.
    1
  7750.  @marse3468  That is true. Personally, I think it will fall apart. It could well be something like the end of the Qing dynasty.
    1
  7751. @ Well, you are entitled to your opinion. I can't agree with it. You are much too optimistic, and you ignore some massive systemic problems.
    1
  7752.  @marse3468  Well, some of my sources come from financial advisors and analysts that I know personally and have worked with. They generally don't have public presence. For public sources a couple of good ones that concentrate on the geopolitics and economics are Peter Zeihan and George Friedman. They are sometimes wrong on the details and short-term situations and things like technology, business and engineering and even military situations, but they are generally spot on when the stick to their wheelhouse. I always get the feeling that while watching channels like this one I am experiencing what they wrote in their books in real-time. I also take a look at sources like the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs magazine, etc. On YouTube there are a number of different channels, all of which have definite biases. They way I approach them is as data points, not as some sort of truth in themselves. I have noticed on YouTube, and the Internet in general, that all points of view are represented and that they frankly contradict each other. Sometimes they seem to be in different worlds. That in itself is "information". Finally, I have been following this stuff for literally 50+ years. I was born in Washington, DC and have had many connections in the areas that are often in the center of some of these issues. I have worked in aerospace and defense and technology my whole life. I have seen many of the important trends up close and personal. I hope that helps. PS This comment caught my attention just as I was having my morning coffee and my first cigar.
    1
  7753. Wow, just at the beginning I see lots of issues with the analysis. First, the order that we have had since WWII was a political decision driven by the outcome of the war. Many of the economic decisions followed. It is also unique in human history. In fact, those earlier times of "globalization" were actually colonial empires, which were generally disconnected from each other. As for the idea that the greenest sources are used because of globalization, you must be kidding. This is a scam perpetrated by the finance community. In fact, what globalization has meant is that the developed world shipped a lot of their pollution to third world countries where it is really bad. Just look at rare earth elements. Those were mined and processed in the US at the beginning. This is a dirty process, and to meet first world environmental standards is both difficult and expensive. The solution was to send the processing to places like China where there are no effective controls. The environmental damage and human cost are horrendous. The EU is instituting the Cross Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) targeting carbon emissions, for example. I expect more will come. At least they are recognizing the fact that they have shipped all this bad stuff abroad. This is something I have been watching for over 40 years. You might want to look into sources for such issues outside of finance and economics.
    1
  7754.  @Poctyk  My understanding is that they did not trade much across empires. The whole point of the colonial power was to get natural resources, create finished goods, and to have a market for those goods in the colonies. That is how I understand it worked, and that understanding comes from lots of reading of history.
    1
  7755.  @Poctyk  Well, what you say is correct, but only covers the tail end of the timeframe. I was thinking about previous centuries when these systems were started.
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  7756. Who is frick is Patton Oswalt, Never heard of him. Never seen him. I am in my mid-60s and very media and politically savvy. Why are you talking about this guy? Perhaps you are the problem, Greg!
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  7757. I'm with Trump, on this. Higher tariffs all around. The cars and other products they produce are substandard. Look beyond the top line figures. On EVs, you will find claims of eight per week catching fire. There is lots of video evidence that gets out. Some of the situations result in a horrendous loss of life. On the other hand, there is a video of a Tesla Model 3 hitting six cars, flying through the air and finally landing. The air bags deployed, no fatalities and NO battery fire. There are other videos of a new model from one of the manufacturers where the engineering and production are so bad on the EV that the real axle detaches from the vehicle while traveling. This is amateur time. I have lots of other examples, some of which I have been brought in to try to resolve, of products being produced to poor quality standards or where the manufacturer in China substituted components without telling the customer resulting in massive losses if not outright business failure. What really irks me is that the environmentalists are not all over this. The reality is that in moving manufacturing to China we have just exported our pollution. They are killing their own people and the planet. It would actually be a good thing for the Chinese if they changed course. With the real estate bubble popped, there is less employment for the millions of migrant workers. The CCP is moving China in the wrong direction. In the end it all comes down to corruption. Kind of like Russia. Wait, who trained the Chinese commies? Oh, yes, the Soviets.
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  7758. Mark, your characterization of autonomous zones in the former Soviet Union is off base. You claim to have a strong connection with the area, but you seem to have forgotten the history. This is especially true of the Caucasus region. On top of that is the long, long history of Russification and the forced movement of peoples under the Russian Empire and continued under the Soviet Union. Things are a lot more complex than you make out. I also find your characterization of the countries in Africa where mineral wealth is being extracted as "beautiful". That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Look into those "beautiful" countries. They are violent and sick places. A good example is Sudan, where Wagner and its successors operate gold mines. Have you heard of Darfur? It is now as bad as it ever was for the people there. That is only one of many examples. Texas is a bad example. The idea of a free Texas has been around for a very long time. Texas was actually a republic outside of the United States for ten years before becoming a state. The zeitgeist is Texas is different. I remember during the oil shocks of the 1970s when the US government wouldn't do anything about the Saudi expropriation of the oil companies that Texas should be allowed to secede and that they would then "do something about it". That was a joke, sort of. Just because you read something on social media does not mean that it is real or new. You should know that. I tend to support Ukraine and its goals, but it has become clear that they can't win a military victory with the military they have now. Everyone is wowed by their drones and other technology, but it is only good at defense. Think of their successful offensives. They were the result of subterfuge (a good thing in military situations) and incompetence on the part of the Russians. Then think about the southern counteroffensive in 2022 which failed when going against prepared defenses. Ukraine's only hope is that Russia will collapse, which could well happen. The question is when. How much blood and treasure should the west pump into this conflict? Frankly, Joe Biden only gave Ukraine enough to not be defeated. That is not me saying it but many US retired military generals such as Ben Hodges. Trump, during his first term, actually gave Ukraine the weapons they used to blunt the initial Russian offensive after Obama had blocked them. On top of all that, both Ukraine and Russia were already in demographic decline, hence the comments from Trump that the killing has to stop. How that happens will have to be negotiated. As far as the west, why isn't the EU in there with both troops (especially airpower which Ukraine sorely lacks) and money. Think about it. The economy of the EU plus the UK is ten times as large as Russia's and the population three times as large. They are the ones at risk. Why do they even need the US?
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  7759.  @Lyle-In-NO  Interesting take. I was referring to the governments and societies. I assumed that was what Mark was referring to as well. For example, I have met people who were from Africa who initially refused to answer the question of where they were from until I pressed them. I have never run into that with people from anywhere else. I have lived in other countries as well. One was a colleague of mine and the other a professor. Both PhDs, by the way. The former was from Uganda and the latter was from Eritrea. They were ashamed of what their countries had been or had become.
    1
  7760. Ahh! The "global south". I really dislike that term. It is like BRICS. BRICS was actually created by an asset manager at a large investment firm. It made sense as an investment category and strategy. As a political grouping, it is totally silly. Just look at it. China is encroaching on India's territory. India is baring Chinese investments and products. Brazil has opened up dumping investigations against China. There's more, but you get the idea. In the same way, the "global south" is more appropriate as an investment concept, rather than a political bloc. In reality, the "global south" is just the nonaligned movement from Cold War days. China is investing in the "global south" and a lot of those investments are going bad. In fact, I have read that up to 60% of the loans are nonperforming. I just found out that Nicaragua just revoked a hundred-year concession to a Chinese firm for a canal which was meant to rival the Panama Canal. It turns out that the whole thing was a fraud. that is just the latest example of what China and Russia have been doing. Russia has been fomenting coups in many countries in Africa so that they can control mineral resources. Typical imperialist action. They must have studied the British Empire. That is not likely to end well for the Russians. Finally, the "global south" comprises no more than 25% of global GDP. Not all of that is really nonaligned. As pointed out above, it is not a political grouping in any real sense. Hence my reaction to the term when I hear analysts bandy it about.
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  7761. Is this guy for real? Oh, he is a professor of international relations. That explains it. One important goal of the west is to destroy Russia's army in Ukraine so that it cannot threaten anyone again. That is happening. The demographics of Russia indicate that this is Russia's last chance, and they are blowing it. It is being accelerated by the outflow of men of military age leaving the country. Odds are that the Russian Federation will fall apart. Most analysts predicted 20 years or so for this to happen. Now it looks imminent. Russia is an old-style empire. It is really the last one.
    1
  7762. Wait, wait, wait! This is a communist country. A worker's paradise. You have to pay for medical treatment? This whole thing is a scam, and the Chinese people have fallen for it for decades. I want to feel sorry for them, but I am having trouble doing so. They are always willing to shout anti-American or anti-Japanese screeds, but when they finally open their eyes, what do they do? They bug out, often to the US and sometimes to Japan. Disgusting!
    1
  7763. The Mysterious Special Investigation Team. An online comic. Sounds like Mad Magazine. Look that one up. One of the funniest things I recall from Mad Magazine was the characterization of China. There would be maps of the world, and China was a featureless region all in white. In the text it was called "the great big empty spot". On a more serious note, when I was working for a large aerospace firm our own internal security (which was quite active and well-armed) was tracking at least fifteen known Soviet agents and there was some Communist Chinese activity as well. Ah, the good old days.
    1
  7764. The French submarines were not nuclear, but diesel. The project was taking too long and cost too much.
    1
  7765. Well, at least the press room will be quite different.
    1
  7766. Actually, the British monarchs have been "German", from Hanover, from George I (reign started in 1714). They changed their German surnames in 1917 to Windsor.
    1
  7767.  @giuseppezeppelo8289  Poland is also buying massive amounts of US weapons.
    1
  7768. The Europeans should have been spending a lot more on their own defense a long time ago. Trump told them that and they laughed at him. Who's laughing now? Trump, by the way, was not the first to say that to the European NATO allies. As for this conflict in Ukraine, just look at the numbers. The economy consisting of the EU and UK is ten times the size of Russia's. The population is about three times larger. One could legitimately ask why the Europeans need the US at all for a war in Europe. Oh, wait, I guess the events of the 20th century answered that question.
    1
  7769.  @kaboonali5466  Storm Shadow cruise missiles and Challenger tanks come to mind. They are also tightly tied in with the US defense industry.
    1
  7770. I really enjoy Peter's comment that the US was very good at overthrowing the Saddam regime but not at making Iraq look like Wisconsin. Peter really does have a great talent for coming up with great turns of phrase.
    1
  7771. Wrong! Just looking at the title. Read a little. Look at people like Peter Zeihan. Zeihan has actually talked to the CIA a good bit (very recently, in fact). He states that they often do not agree with his assessments. On the other hand, I see in the news, almost daily, the things Zeihan, and others like him, predicted. I have dealt with CIA analysts in the past and have not been all that impressed by many of them. There is also the political dimension. You need to have the same skepticism that you have with financial analysts. There is always an agenda.
    1
  7772.  @grannyannie2948  Yes! China, which I follow a lot, is following his script in real-time. It is amazing. He gives the current system until the end of the decade. He admits that precise timing is difficult, if not impossible. From what I have been reading and watching, I give the CCP a year or two at most. In the last week there have been indications that there are powerful factions in the CCP that want to oust Xi and fundamentally change the party and the system. The crescendo is coming. I say this based on a comment by George W. Bush in an interview he gave after he left the presidency. He mentioned that, when first meeting a world leader, he would always ask, what is the one thing that keeps you up at night. When he asked this of Hu Jintao the answer was finding jobs for millions of people every year. Well, look at how Xi has messed that up.
    1
  7773. Something similar is happening in the US. A lot of smaller private colleges are closing. It just makes sense. Supply and demand at work. In the US the higher education system grew first to accommodate the returning veterans from WWII with the advent of the GI Bill. That expansion continued to accommodate the children of those veterans, the baby boom generation. That was the largest generation in US history. As that generation finished with university the US institutions courted foreign students to keep the numbers up. That has had a detrimental effect. It got so bad that the school my older son went to set up a scholarship fund with tuition totally waived for American students from the state we are in. This is a private technical university. The fund is financed by alumni. I actually know someone who went there under that scheme. My son just missed it, but he got substantial traditional scholarships. In China there is obviously an oversupply of university grads. It is devastating as many of your videos have shown. It seems like a total breakdown of central planning. Who would have thunk it.
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  7774. Not another one!
    1
  7775.  @lambertois11  Yes, I knew all that, but it is good you point out the specifics.
    1
  7776. @fdhgbjsk I find it interesting that there are fund managers in your country (care to share) that are Chinese and are making decisions based on propping up China. Are the funds they work for Chinese or local. If they are local, then you have a problem. Diversifying in investing is key to managing risk. Being ridiculous about it is a problem. Portfolio managers are also responsible for managing risk, as are the firms they work for. One has only to look at the US funds, either hedge or pension for example, that have had losses in China. When you dig into the numbers, as a percentage of their portfolios, in general, it is a small number.
    1
  7777. Your characterization of Roosevelt's actions as a result primarily of his progressive tendencies show an ignorance of the history of those big corporations and their abuses this also comes about in your characterization of Morgan. You seem to be alright with Morgan's attitude towards competition. Really? I personally am very conservative, so don't take this as a left-wing rant. The time we are talking about also saw massive abuse by the trusts, as the conglomerates were known then. There was also serious labor strife. In fact, I read in one biography of Roosevelt about a situation where he pulled in the major business owners who had hired armed guards to break up strikes. There was already violence. Roosevelt said to the business owners how long do you think it would be before the hired guns turned those guns on them. This kind of weakens any further arguments you may have on the subject, don't you think?
    1
  7778. Class based testing? Whatever happened to the classless society promised by communist ideology? It seems that the CCP and China are morphing towards an aristocratic form or government. Bring back the emperor!
    1
  7779. The idea of a symbiosis with a durable electronic system is an old one. My university alumni book club recently read a book about robot "artificial friends" that people would buy for their children. It prompted me to recall a lecture I attended, at the urging of my English professor of all people, regarding just this topic. This was in the late 1980s. This was a Catholic university so you can imagine the "spirited" debate this engendered. Actually, the English professor got the speaker to have coffee with a bunch of us. It was really interesting. By the way, I was an "adult" student studying Computer Science and Math, with some background in physics. I worked on spacecraft (rocket scientist) and was actually working with and researching many of these technologies.
    1
  7780. Tony, we appreciate that you are keeping up your work. This is an artificial rally, and Pettis has it right, of course. I wonder if there is significant foreign money jumping in. I expect not. What do you think? Of course, the China property situation is not, in the long run going to be solved. It was built up over decades of mismanagement. On September 30, 2024, an article titled "China’s Housing Glut Collides With Its Shrinking Population" appeared in the US based Wall Street Journal. Policy changes and adjustments to lending rates cannot overcome the problems. I doubt that any foreign money will jump in, and individuals are now concentrating on building up their own resources since they cannot rely on the government. The Caixin article has it right. Of course, this goes against everything Xi stands for. It will, indeed, be interesting to see how this develops.
    1
  7781. Going on and on about a single howitzer or tank is just plain silly. This is endemic among Mil bloggers on both sides. What is the point? Is it significant? Come on man.
    1
  7782. I can't watch Harris.
    1
  7783.  @davidpawson7393  Do you have proof of anything? The range of speculation on that is astounding. By the way, when the pipelines exploded the gas had already effectively been turned off. As for Russia being an unreliable supplier, as Trump told the Germans (they laughed at him), there were already numerous examples of Russia shutting off the flow of gas for political reasons.
    1
  7784.  @jacobjorgenson9285  You need to check the facts. When, at the beginning of the conflict, the Russians tried to force the Indians to pay for oil in rubles they flatly refused. I think it is you who has no idea about this.
    1
  7785. My father worked at an Army weapons lab. When I was a kid (under 10, decades ago) we went to an open house and he took us to his office. he had one of the bomblets there. He was working on the fuse. This was just as the Vietnam war was heating up. Shock and awe! No one does it better than the US. Too bad we did not give advanced aircraft to the Ukrainians earlier (they still haven't arrived, of course). They could have had their mini version of shock and awe. Considering the state of the Russian army, it might have been decisive.
    1
  7786. Demanding loyalty in party ranks is nothing strange. In the US, the Democratic Party is the most tightly controlled. In the UK, Jacob Ress-Mogg often, when asked about an issue, would talk about his responsibilities to support the government position while he was in a government position. Now that he is a backbencher he is more free to voice his own opinion. That is normal. In the US, cabinet secretaries (our term for ministers) must adhere to the line of the President or they will be dismissed. In all western democracies the general expectation is that appointed government ministers will be loyal. If they disagree enough they resign. In some cases that results in the fall of the prime minister, as happened to Boris Johnson in the UK. Perhaps it is different in Estonia.
    1
  7787. One of the best analyses I have seen about the situation, especially his understanding of what is going on in China. As for his comments on Trump, while true to some extent, they ignore one salient fact. Going back to Sun Tzu, it is best to keep your adversary guessing about what you are going to do. As for his comments about Biden's advisors, the feeling here is that they are not the first team. Many are associated with Obama, and his foreign policy was not one of the best. The main point he makes is about the interconnectedness of trade. That one of the main points of opening up to China. A nation so tied in with world trade would be loath to start a war. That seems to be playing out here.
    1
  7788. CO2 is NOT a pollutant. In fact, it is NECESSARY for life on the planet. So, mentioning it in the same sentence as pollution (and China emits a lot of that) is really dishonest. I know it has become sort of accepted to do this, so you can be forgiven, a little, for following the crowd. On the other hand, when you see the anti-CO2 types conflating that with another issue, pollution, you can be fairly sure they feel they have lost the argument.
    1
  7789. A recent study showed that extreme weather events are not getting "worse". You should stop repeating that trope.
    1
  7790. It is stupid to connect the source of the energy to the device that uses it. A battery, or hydrogen fuel cell, is TOTALLY insensitive to the source of the input. You don't build either of those taking into account the source of electrons or hydrogen. That is just not done. If today the electrons or hydrogen are sourced from large CO2 emitters and tomorrow from some form of clean energy, the vehicle does not change. I still think that batteries will win out. The cost, safety concerns and difficulty of distributing hydrogen are massive. A battery powered car can be charged at home. We do not want hydrogen distribution lines paralleling our natural gas lines spread throughout our communities. This would invite disaster. Hydrogen has a place in large processes such as electricity generation and steel making. I those cases the safety and storage issues can be dealt with at a reasonable cost. Hydrogen fuel cells for cars have been around for decades as a concept. I once went to Epcot Center (over 15 years ago) and the GM pavilion had a mockup of a hydrogen fuel cell car. It was not new. At about the same time, I had a large construction engineering firm, who was doing work for me. They were also working on hydrogen fuel stations for cars. Where are they now?
    1
  7791. I can't believe that i just heard Newsham call for shareholders to bring lawsuits against US companies doing business in China. I have been saying this for a long time. Investment decisions rely on data, and that data is not available or is manipulated in China. The companies and investment houses knew this. I expect that as they have trouble getting their money out, which will happen, that the lawsuits will come.
    1
  7792. To say that China was lending the US money is to misunderstand finance and economics.
    1
  7793. A good thing to throw in their face is that the ideology they espouse was developed by a white man. Marx was also very bigoted. Very! So, next time they are pushing socialism ask them why they are supporting the ideas of old, dead white men.
    1
  7794. Jeffrey, I love your work. The is one thing I do find a bit interesting though is the Donald Trump comment. Trump is a populist (so are Biden and the Democrats). He saw the vote in Congress. He sees the polls showing very high support for Ukraine. He met with Johnson just before the vote. He was also the first president to give weapons to Ukraine. What I am getting at is that I think your analysis of Trump is too superficial. Considering all your other work, that is disappointing.
    1
  7795. Molly from Vanity Fair is either one of the stupidest people on the planet or an inveterate liar. Actually, I think it is both.
    1
  7796. Are you kidding?! There was a major investigation about Russian money and Trump. It has been resoundly been debunked. Clinton was clearly behind that. Perhaps she was on the Russian's payroll. As for Italy and the UK, these situations have NOTHING to do with Russia. If you don't understand that, then you have no understanding at all. What a load of crap.
    1
  7797. Do American children have to learn Biden thought? That would take about a second.
    1
  7798. The Europeans laughed at Donald Trump. Turns out he was correct in what he said about dependence on Russian gas and oil and about NATO. Who's laughing now?
    1
  7799. Pollution, as traditionally understood, has nothing to do with global warming. CO2 is not a pollutant. In fact, it is necessary for life on the planet, which is almost exclusively carbon based. Bringing up plastics pollution etc. is just stupid when talking about global warming, it is dishonest.
    1
  7800. Appeal for their "rights"? Who do they think they are kidding. They have no rights. They are in a country run by commies and organized crime. The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and Trenaman Square should have been a clue.
    1
  7801. Jake, I am amazed. Your TDS is rapidly being cured. Good for you.
    1
  7802.  @seanp9277  You have no idea of what you are talking about.
    1
  7803.  @felixfungle-bung4688  That is just plain stupid. For one thing their surface to air missile systems are not worth much. Just look at how many Ukraine has taken out already. Then look at what the Israelis have done to those systems in Iran. If they have such good systems, then why is Ukraine able to hit their critical infrastructure, often deep into Russian territory, with relatively primitive systems.
    1
  7804.  @paulzx2000  Well, you are woefully ill informed unless you are talking Russian combat aviation. As for Russia not being Israel, you don't have to protect the whole country, just the border regions shared with the enemy. I am also fully aware that many drones are shot down, but it only takes a few to get through to cause damage. The Russians are doing exactly the same thing in their attacks on Ukraine.
    1
  7805.  @paulzx2000  Where did you learn about that? Do you have experience with the military and military planning? From what I read you are repeating platitudes you hear online. The equation is not the relative cost of the weapons but the cost of the thing you are trying to protect. If a cheap drone can take an oil refinery offline or destroy a military weapons depot then you would take it down with whatever you had.
    1
  7806.  @paulzx2000  Oh, and by the way I have decades of experience in this area.
    1
  7807.  @angiesniche  What are you insinuating.
    1
  7808.  @kare7840  That happens all the time in business. The trial is about culpability.
    1
  7809.  @rehab5355  The problem is that we do have a vote. That is what representative democracy is about. The problem is in Congress.
    1
  7810. You mention William Devane at the beginning. He always asked what was in your safe. To which my answer was guns (and some gold, but not lately).
    1
  7811. How can there be a class differential in a communist country like China? This is not communism. This is not capitalism. It is an aberration that cannot survive. The sooner they get rid of Xi and go full capitalist, the better. On the other hand, a financial and macroeconomic advisor I know hopes Xi will be reelected so that he can thoroughly screw China up and stop them from becoming a real competitor.
    1
  7812. What is this crap about nuclear weapons driving around Moscow? Where do you get this idea? I am really wondering because it is just stupid and meaningless.
    1
  7813. You are correct about how BRICS started. You mischaracterize it as "warm fuzzy" etc. It was nothing of the sort. That is not New York or Wall Street. There are no "warm fuzzes" there. What BRICS was meant to be was a group of large developing countries which made sense as a group for investment purposes. They were at similar levels of development and growth. That is it, all there is. It is akin to the Asian Tigers as a group of countries from an investment point of view.
    1
  7814. The statement of Yuan Hongbing is almost hilarious. First, Xi is a commie. He cannot abandon Marxism-Leninism. That is the whole point of the CCP. If he does abandon it, he is just a guy and not likely to survive. If you hadn't noticed, Xi is not a dynamic personality. He has no way to control the people or to convince them to change. Second, the CCP has ruled by corruption. If they abandon absolute power, that will be their personal downfall as well as the party's downfall. Third, related to the corruption, I see here and there the involvement of criminal gangs. They will not let the CCP make a change. If the CCP tried, it would be bloody from this quarter alone.
    1
  7815. On the random keys item, I would hazard a guess that the authors of the study were scientists, not engineers.
    1
  7816. Indians do not migrate to Russia. They come to the US. I live in an upper middle-class suburb of Chicago. I have lots of Indian neighbors. My two best friends when I first went to university, in the early 1970s, were Indian. I was studying physics (I later switched to computer science). Of the students in the physics department at the time, a third were Americans of European descent, a third were Chinese (from Taiwan) and a third were Indian. It was a very international place. It was just outside of Washington, DC. where I was born. India does a lot more business with the US and the EU than it does with Russia. They need to break the defense relationship. It is not in their interest, and the Soviet equipment is inferior. In fact, they pulled out of an agreement to help develop and fund Russia's 5th generation fighter, which basically put the program on hold. They also recently bought French fighters. The Soviet/Russian planes they have did not do well against US planes supplied to Pakistan (F16s vs Migs). When will they realize their mistake? You really cannot be non-aligned in this world. They need the Quad (India, the US, Australia and Japan) to counter China in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. They are playing a dangerous game, and will suffer for it if they don't alter course.
    1
  7817.  @laurieleroy8298  Actually, you are wrong on that last point. Many people start business with amounts like $20K.
    1
  7818. The JCPOA was a treaty and was never ratified by the US Senate. Obama decided to adhere to its terms through an executive order, a very questionable constitutional move. This left it open to being legitimately reversed by the next president. If the treaty had been ratified, Trump would have been bound by it. One does not have to be a Trump supporter to understand that and to understand the reasons he might want to rescind Obama's actions. Your bias and ignorance of the US political system, which is key to understanding this issue, is overwhelming (trying to keep it clean). That is why I unsubscribed from this channel. I only clicked on the video in the suggestions because of the topic. I am sorry I did.
    1
  7819. I love the AI therapy chatbot. In the mid-1970s, while working at a statistics firm where we used mainframes, a lot, we experienced this. Our manager was the one who showed it to us. It was an online therapist using expert system technology, which is an early form of AI. I expect that it would have passed the Turing test if we had thought to go into that much detail. Let's do the math. That was just shy of half a century ago. Progress.
    1
  7820. The use of right and left in talking about political movements really bugs me. For one thing, it does not really correspond to political movements as they are today. As a historian, I would assume you know where the terms came from. Applying the label "right" to the Nazis I think is a big mistake. Nazi stands for "National SOCIALIST German Workers' Party" (emphasis mine). It was a collectivist movement just like the Marxist communists they were contending with. Frankly, there was not a lot of difference in substance, for example, between Stalinism and Nazism in the details of how they were applied to the society. In contemporary terms we have the situation in China where the terms left and right are used for factions in the ruling party, the CCP. This just means those for some private enterprise and those that want total state control. A recent phenomenon is Xi's publishing of books on "socialism with Chinese characteristics". This indicates national socialist tendencies. Ironically it is also a source of wealth for Xi, as all party members have to buy the books. This is another interesting parallel with Hitler in the 1930s. The labels we should be using are, at a minimum, liberal (as in classical liberal), moderate, progressive, conservative or libertarian. This use of left and right and the many gradations thereof is confusing and obscures what is actually going on.
    1
  7821.  @pevebe  Look into it. There are lots of good sources. Nazism and Stalinism used state terror to keep their populations under control. The Nazis controlled industry in much the same way the CCP does in China today, and was heading toward consolidating, under direct state control, all critical industries, as China is doing today. In Germany Goehring was in charge of that. So, a slight difference with Stalin, but the effect was essentially the same. You might want to think before making glib comments.
    1
  7822.  @Sol_Invictus_  You are absolutely wrong in saying that the Nazis privatized everything. They socialized everything. Look up the Reichswerke Hermann Göring, for example. In addition, the Nazis, which was the state, put people in every "private" company to ensure that they followed state directives. When they didn't the state just took over the companies. By the way, this is happening in China today. Xi's goal is to have the state take over everything. So was Hitler's.
    1
  7823.  @pevebe  If you believe that then you are not a serious person. You are also seriously ill informed. One of the problems is the whole label "right wing", as I laid out in my original comment. Opposition to Soviet Marxist-Leninist communism does automatically make one "right wing".
    1
  7824.  @pevebe  Now you are just showing your ignorance.
    1
  7825. That Chinese people have any issue with the vice den in the hospital or any other such activity is laughable to me. Do you know about Mao's sex life? The party elite? Do they understand anything about communism? Do they read the source texts? Do they study the history in other countries, as well as China. People say the Chinese are so smart, but this is another area where I am made to wonder. They live under communism and the rule of the CCP. They support the CCP and disparage the US. Then, on top of that, the "netizens" rail against the resultant practices. This is not the sign of a well educated people.
    1
  7826.  @LD-Orbs  You are probably correct.
    1
  7827.  @Robert-xy4xi  Just keep believing that. Oh, I forgot, you are programmed.
    1
  7828.  @garywinter6149  It is also a problem for Ukraine, but you claim for Russia is not true.
    1
  7829. The whole thing about artificial life existing in artificial worlds is sort of silly. Some external entity has to build and maintain that artificial world. Such worlds are not stable. Basically, we are talking about computers. How many of those exist forever without outside intervention? This is a science fiction scenario.
    1
  7830. Why is the yuan depreciating despite the favorable statistics, GDP growth and trade surplus, continuing to depreciate? The answer is that the statistics are all false. China presents a favorable economic situation. On the other hand, the WSJ has an article reporting titled "China’s Economy Is ‘Failing,’ U.S. Indo-Pacific Commander Says". This is closer to the truth.
    1
  7831.  @Notrusbot  Europe did fine without Russia for decades. There are other sources for the materials they need.
    1
  7832.  @Notrusbot  Your comment is not particularly coherent. India is taking Russian oil and refining it themselves. The same with the Chinese. Russia would prefer they take refined products, but both countries have adequate refining capacity.
    1
  7833. Very interesting list and probably pretty accurate. I have seen and participated in some of these from a technical standpoint. It is always the case that more technologically and industrially advanced countries will prevail. From the time the Europeans mastered long distance sea travel and military technology in the 15th century they, and their offshoots, have dominated. Countries like China are not in that camp, and their system ensures it will not become part of that group. This is also true of the global south. The only wildcard I see in this is India, but they have their own issues. On the AI and computing front, one has to look at the history of computing and its effects on society and economy. The very first areas affected by commercial computing were banking and insurance. Millions of back-office jobs were lost. Was there massive unemployment? No! That is because computing changes the dynamic of the economy. AI will be the same thing. It, like big data and quantum computing is just technology tools that will be applied to business as have all the other technologies. A good way to think about it is to look at the recent phenomenon of big data on which AI depends. When this became a thing (I was consulting and teaching the technology) there was all this talk about companies having to have a C suite position to deal with big data. Two pure play companies burst on the scene and attracted a lot of venture capital. I haven't heard about them for a while. On the other hand, big data is ubiquitous. AI is the same thing. Quite frankly there is a lot of the base technology that is open source. Even the hardware is not that specialized. It is basically a concept that was developed decades ago for image processing and then became big though video gaming. There are some new twists to the architectures, but these are not the neuronal chips once thought to be the way to go. As such there is a massive incentive to invest in this area considering how well the leader in the technology, Nvidia, is doing. There will be lots of competition and that will bring costs down. Again, the China situation is instructive. Frankly all their "technology" companies have developed through IP theft. They are not, and will never be, the drivers of technology.
    1
  7834. If China starts a shooting war, they are done! They import most of their energy and mineral inputs. They also import lots of food, and with their disastrous flooding of prime agricultural land recently, could experience food shortages this year or early next. Don't forget, China is a processing point for many materials, but not an originator of the raw inputs. This is primarily because they ignore environmental concerns and can thus process the materials cheaply. They are utterly dependent on the world trade system developed by the US since WWII. Cutting off access to external inputs to China would not even take much in naval power. Frankly, there are choke points that could be managed by a few destroyers. These are also in reach of land-based forces. If China starts a war, or overtly supports the Russians in Ukraine, to paraphrase Peter Zeihan, they deindustrialize within months and soon after that experience mass starvation. Xi is doing this to try to retain power. As with many dictators, when things are going bad at home it is useful to divert attention through the creation of external threats. Mao did this in the 1960s by invading India. Xi is in a similar situation.
    1
  7835. Sounds like another Mexican-American war scenario.
    1
  7836. Peter's TDS is in full view from about 1:45 on. It kind of diminishes his analysis.
    1
  7837. China has not been a leader in any technology for at least 200 years. I saw a book on Chinese firearms of the warlord era right after the fall of the Qing dynasty. The Chinese were making copies of western arms. Some were made in competent factories, some in back alley shops. All were copies without paying any royalties to the companies that developed them. Sound familiar? It is, of course, not individual people. It is the system.
    1
  7838. You do realize that this is one of the things that Qanon has been warning about. Seemed like a daft conspiracy group, but maybe they have a point. If that is true, then things are bad.
    1
  7839. The first stock exchange in the world was established in Amsterdam in 1602. The second stock exchange was established in Paris in 1724. The third stock exchange was established in Philadelphia in 1790. I would say that the Dutch have been into this capitalist thing for a while. The Russians, hah.
    1
  7840. Trump was a disruptor of the political system, and that is what it needed. Sounds like the UK could use something similar, by the way. You are correct in what you say about Trump's foreign policy. Prior to COVID, his domestic policy was also very successful. Without COVID he would have won hands down. Even right up to the election some of the staunch Democrats I know thought he would win.
    1
  7841. The fact is that, since this is not a treaty, it can be changed by any president at his whim. That is what happened with Obama. I think he wanted a treaty, but it would never pass the Senate, so he went ahead with executive action. This is not the way to do it.
    1
  7842.  @axle.student  Oh, I fully agree with you about the extremes. I never meant to imply that there was nothing beyond GR. What you don't seem to consider is what I said in my first sentence. Based on what we know and have observed it is just as likely that we will find that GR is basically correct (or not?). Don't forget that dark energy and dark matter were conjured up to make GR work. Also, GR is much more than the equations and parameters. It is a way of looking at the nature of space and time. The situation we have in physics today has been well documented by Sabine in her first book. We have two very solid theories, GR and the Standard Model (SM). What people have been doing is to find replacements for them. Lots of people and lots of replacements. What strikes me about all of them is the amount of complex and elegant mathematics with little or no progress. Don't forget that Einstein really came up with his theoretical framework before he had the mathematical tools. Something similar happened with Maxwell, by the way.
    1
  7843.  @axle.student  Good point. Agreed.
    1
  7844.  @YourHineyness  That sounds about right.
    1
  7845. Russians are already leaving Crimea. I don't know what the percentage is, but the reports I have seen seem to indicate that it is a large number. They are afraid.
    1
  7846. This is interesting and something Sabine has something to contribute to. In the video suggestions on YouTube next to this video there is an intriguing video I was actually starting to watch. It is from the Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal channel, which is one on which Sabine has appeared. The title of the video is "Experimenting with "Platonic Space" in Breakthrough Research | Dr. Michael Levin" and the thumbnail has the text "Plato was right?". Funny how that works.
    1
  7847. China built all those high-speed rail lines, but the system has almost $1T in debt and that is only growing. Outside of the lines between the major cities, which are profitable, the expansion has only saddled the country with unprofitable lines. By the way, that debt is approaching 5% of China's GDP.
    1
  7848.  @harukrentz435  You misunderstand. That is 5% just for HSR. Not all rail, but just HSR. That is terrible.
    1
  7849. The reason the wealthy in China are vulnerable to these tax audits is because they are almost always involved in some sort of corruption. I might be convinced that there are a few not involved, but they would definitely be the exception that proves the rule. Even if you want to be honest the system won't let you. Even all the CCP members are involved in it. That is why Xi can always remove someone he comes to dislike or distrust. Everyone is involved. It is a totally out of control kleptocracy. This is why I am not in favor of taking these people in. They could never prove to authorities in another country that their money was clean.
    1
  7850. I saw the headline and I literally shouted out "Alright"!
    1
  7851. The statement at 12:15 doesn't make sense. Perhaps this is true in China. In Europe, Japan and North America the opposite is true. In most economies it is the experienced workers who are the most productive. They are also the most important for capital formation. Workers from about 50 to retirement invest the most aggressively. They no longer have to support kids and want to maximize their investments in anticipation of retirement. This is one of the major flaws in the Chinese economy, and why they don't have enough internally generated capital, thus depending on FDI. China also does not have a favorable geography. Its farmland is poor. It does not have enough natural resources (minerals and hydrocarbons) to generate capital internally. Why do you think China was so weak in the modern era. A China depending on "internal circulation" is doomed. Add to that the unfavorable labor practices and you have a recipe for disaster. Whether it is forced by the external world (a likely occurrence) or pushed by the CCP (they seem to be headed that way) or a combination of both (the trends are mutually reinforcing) we could see a China returning to the height of the Mao era. Of course, it could get worse, and we could see a return to the warlord era after the fall of the Qing dynasty.
    1
  7852. So, how long do you think this new central bank head last?
    1
  7853. Another thing to consider is the much higher birthrate the higher infant mortality rate. This was an accepted fact of life at the time.
    1
  7854. The EU is basically, at its heart, a protectionist cartel. Why is the US protecting it? That is the question people are starting to ask.
    1
  7855. No, I would not invest in this technology. I worked for many years in the aerospace industry and on many space systems. The number of studies done, and even the number of programs started and stopped is amazing. Take the space station. I worked on the design in the 1980s. When I started, I found that many of my colleagues had worked on it in the 1970s. The one that is up there now is not much different from what I worked on. I also worked briefly on a project for a nuclear reactor in space. Needless to say, what a government agency says they will do and what they actually accomplish are two different things. As for all the programs and studies you mention, I hope you understand that this is often not very indicative of the realization of the stated goals. For example, I happen to live near a Department of Energy (DoE) lab. Several years ago, they were allocated $5B to research battery technology. The only thing I have heard of that came out of this is more cost-effective way to recycle batteries. In fact, the latest thing I have heard about batteries is basically a step back. Tesla is talking about using iron-based batteries which are cheaper but have less range. Over the last couple of decades, I have researched and considered deploying many "new energy" technologies. None have gotten out of the prototype stage.
    1
  7856. Europe has announced a cessation of Russan energy imports. Coal imports have already stopped. The rest will be transitioned by the end of the year. You can't just turn off the taps. Now, if the US would just open up its oil industry, then the US could become a major supplier.
    1
  7857.  @ravist8  So, do you think any country would willing destroy their economy. Their duty is to their own people. Just look at India. Not long ago there was talk, and even negotiations, about sending India's surplus whet to countries like Egypt to help alleviate the threat of hunger. Then drought hit and India stopped that. Were they wrong? Of course not.
    1
  7858.  @ravist8  You are correct. Interestingly, Germany is going back to coal to generate electricity. I recall that the EU chided India for using coal. They are also ramping up efforts to get industry to use less natural gas. They should also look at restarting their nuclear plants, or not closing down the ones they have.
    1
  7859. Of course, the real estate crisis is affecting the banks. With the fall in housing prices and the slowdown in transactions, the banks' assets are underwater. The financial crisis has hit, but the CCP is trying to cover it up. They will rob customer accounts to try and forestall the situation. The Chinese people are learning what their support for the CCP is going to cost them. Common prosperity means no prosperity at all.
    1
  7860. The CCP are a bunch of commies. It's in the name. What do they know about raising and managing capital. Financial firms in the west who ignore this fact are opening themselves to potential lawsuits when it all comes crashing down. I have actually seen pundits start to talk about this publicly. I was commenting on it for a while. The west is daft in opening up to countries whose systems are not compatible. The idea that the opening up would nudge these countries towards the western system is a sham. It is not only China and Russia, but all those corrupt regimes in the "global south". During the Cold War (I miss the Cold War) there might have been some justification for such actions. No longer! Disengage, decouple or derisk, but do it now.
    1
  7861.  @YourHineyness  You got me. Yes, I listen to him, but mostly I have read all his books. I started with the latest and then went back to the earlier ones. The madness of Kindle. I used to say my three vices are books, whiskey and cigars. Well, I stopped drinking and then there were two. I do like his daily video. The many other videos with him are excerpts from previous interviews or from his books, so I don't listen to those generally. In the case of China, he was so spot on that watching the news out of China today is like reading one of his books and seeing the results in real-time. While he is great on the overall trends and grand sweeps of history and development, he can be weak on the details, especially in military matters and in the details of supply chains and areas like semiconductors. Like many pundits, when he goes outside of his area of expertise he seeks out and relies on an expert or two in given specific field. This is a trap that has many precedents in history and is even more obvious today. In the historical context I can cite IBMs decision to farm out the OS can CPU of the IBM PC (long story; I used to work for IBM). In the YouTube universe two good examples are Jordan Peterson and Sabine Hossenfelder. I have read books by each and really liked their content and ideas. In Peterson's case it was his first book. I stay away from "x things to do" types of books. Both have basically run out of content they can share with the general public in their chosen fields and are now branching out into fields they have no experience with, or special knowledge of. Thus, they ask someone who they think is an "expert". There are two things wrong with this. For one, they then tend to repeat the "expert's" views uncritically. After all, they are quoting the expert. The second is that if I wanted that particular expert's opinion, in the world of the Internet, I would just go and watch or read that person directly. One often finds that there are lots of nuances and lots of different opinions and ideas on any really interesting subject. Well, you got me going on that one. I apologize in advance for the long rant, but that is my personal cross to bear.
    1
  7862.  @alainlefebvre9860  Yes.
    1
  7863.  @ThinkUkraine  Thanks. I will need it.
    1
  7864. Europeans assimilating newcomers. As President Joe likes to say: Come on man! Even before this immigration crisis, when I was living in Europe, in the early part of the current millennium, I saw how Europeans thought about each other. Sometimes within the same country. It was not kind, shall we say. Being pure Greek in ancestry, and dressing in British suits, I was generally accepted as someone people could open up to. Just a little story. Once I flew from Paris to Stuttgart for a meeting. I was dressed all in black, suit, shirt, tie, shoes. The border guards started talking to me in German, assuming I was just some southern European working in Germany. Fortunately, I had studied German at university and could understand them. These are very old, established cultures. The dream of a "United States of Europe" is a fantasy. In the United States of America, people tend to adopt the prevailing culture. They do it gladly. They go to the US for its culture, including its economy. In Europe, they seem to be going for the handouts. I have met tech entrepreneurs from Germany who want to move to the US. I have yet to see any going the other way. I even had a relative who was visiting with his son. The son had done a foreign assignment in the US. He was an executive with an auto parts manufacturer. While standing my deck he said he wished he could move the US. This was a guy from an old, established family. His father was a high official in the government.
    1
  7865. So, Glenn, how do you determine how much money there should be? It is all fiat money anyway. Tying money to a commodity like gold is foolish. Gold has no relation to the "real" economy. Now, you lived through the 1980s stagflation. That was caused by monetary policy and commodity disruptions (oil embargos). Today we have pumped much more liquidity into the economy, with growth and low inflation. So, who knows how much money is enough? The price controls you talk about I do not see. I am not arguing for socialism (I am vehemently opposed to it), but this idea about money supply is one that I don't think we have a good handle on.
    1
  7866. They said that George W. Bush was going to find some way to stay in office beyond his second term. They also said that about Obama. This is scare mongering, on both the left and the right. It is a good thing that the mainstream media is dying. Thay have lost their mandate and legitimacy.
    1
  7867. Based on what see here, I think that it is time to end the monarchy. It is also time to reform the government, creating a federal system with regions that are relatively balanced in terms of population,. What you have now is 84% of the population in England. In addition, England is the richest part of the UK. On the other hand it does not have its own government. When lived there, early in the millennium, I would see graffiti on motorway overpasses that read, "England for the English". This has been an issue since at least the late 90s when the devolved authorities were set up. Your system is idiotic, and the fact that you do not have a written constitution is a travesty. Get it together.
    1
  7868.  @indiamusically  Fair point. I guess what gets me is that this is all vintage Trump. Observers of his first term should have seen it coming.
    1
  7869.  @paladro  Is he? Do you have examples and proof? Has that been adjudicated? Unless it has it is just your opinion. You are throwing around accusations which you cannot back up. What you have to consider is what if that was done to you? Have you thought about that?
    1
  7870. @ No problem. Glad you cleared that up. Thanks for the response.
    1
  7871.  @rawadosa90210  Thanks for explaining that. Great to hear the story. The Internet allows us to interact with culture and societies around the world but sometimes nuances like that pass people by. The saving grace is that people, like yourself, can help us understand. We all get a little wiser and more connected. I say this as someone who was born in Washington, DC and got to know people from ALL over the world. My two best friends at a local university (we shared everything, including sometimes girlfriends) were Indian. But, still, there were things that passed me by. Like one time I shared an apartment with two physics PhD students, brothers surnamed Patel. Years later when I was talking to other Indians in other places about the experience who were in the same field they would claim to know them. Later I found out this was a common surname, and they were having a bit of a (good hearted) laugh at my expense.
    1
  7872. A lot of what Peter says in this video comports with what I hear on Indian media. Their attitude to the west is still tinged with a bit of envy and derision. The fractured nature of Indian politics is what allowed the Europeans to take over the subcontinent. There really wasn't an "India" before the British created it. Without this unifying force, the Indian subcontinent would indeed be a collection of many more separate countries.
    1
  7873.  @varun2250  The closest thing to a unified India before the Europeans arrived was the Mughal Empire, which did not encompass the whole of modern India. It was already breaking up before the Europeans arrived. As for the name of the "East India Company", that was a typical European approach. In the Americas you had the Virginia Company, etc. Similarly in Africa. In the age of Empire, the expansion was mostly based on economics. As for using the name of the region as some proof of a unified polity, that is just plain silly.
    1
  7874.  @varun2250  Perhaps you should read some more history. Alexander was almost three millennia ago, and he did not penetrate that deeply into "India". That he used one name for it has nothing to do with whether it was a unified country. Perhaps you should go back to school.
    1
  7875.  @ANABOLIC_1105  Precisely. Another indicator is Kashmir. Even up to the breakup of British India, this was an independent "kingdom" whose leader had the ability to choose which part of the resultant countries he would go with.
    1
  7876.  @ANABOLIC_1105  I am Greek-American. All my grandparents came to the US from Arcadia in the Peloponnese.
    1
  7877.  @ANABOLIC_1105  Yes. And supposedly the people from Arcadia were never fully conquered by the Spartans. The territory is so mountainous that the residents would just haul themselves up to the top of the mountains and let the Spartans go by. I have been there, and can understand it. Just a little story. My mother went to pick up a car I was having worked on. The garage was owned by some people from Sparta. She spoke Greek to them and they were pleasantly surprised (she dyed her hair blond). Then they found out where she was from and started cursing her. Some things never change.
    1
  7878.  @varun2250  You have it backwards there. What you point out just supports my thesis.
    1
  7879.  @varun2250  The statement isn't empty. Go back and look at what I wrote.
    1
  7880. The measurement problem is one I have problems with. Quantum processes go on all the time without measurement (correct me if I am wrong). They went on long before we existed to create these measurement devices and will go on long after. Perhaps we have to deal with that before we can move on.
    1
  7881. It is important to hear the other side of an issue. You say, "But it's not that we heard some other truth." That misses the point. Who judges what the truth is? Frankly, outside of some fields of science, it is all opinion. If you don't ever hear what your opponents are saying, then you will never be able to come up with a cogent counterargument. Many years ago, in the US, when the "fairness doctrine" (look it up) was ended, there arose a plethora of what we called talk radio shows (this was before the Internet really took off). I recall once, in the south of the country, while on business I was driving at night and had the radio on. What I heard really surprised, and somewhat shocked, me. It made me think. Just because you hear something doesn't mean you have to accept it as true. Those that do (and there are such people) are what are often called "low information" people. All that said, I find it hard to listen to any of the Russian TV or online sources. It is such blatant self-serving nonsense and vitriol. It is only necessary to get small doses of it to realize that the Russian information space is totally poisoned and biased. That in itself is useful information.
    1
  7882. Typically, if a central bank is going to use interest rates to fight inflation, the interest rate has to be as high as the inflation rate or slightly higher. This implies that the inflation rate is at least 20%. Often, banks have political problems when they get to much higher interest rates. So, in this case, it is most probably even higher.
    1
  7883.  @mariooliveira6780  Many have done over years. Government pensions in Illinois have been in deficit for a long time.
    1
  7884.  @mariooliveira6780  Correct. Saw a statistic a couple of years back that reveals the situation. This refers to Chicago. There was a net outflow of people. The median income of those leaving was in the $50K range. For those moving in it was in the $35K range.
    1
  7885. In the current competition between the US and its Asian allies versus China, Australia is basically irrelevant. This is not WW2, and China is not Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s. China is highly vulnerable because of its poor natural resources (and its total mismanagement of what they have), poor farmland, its geography and geographic position. If they started a conflict, any one of three nations, the US, India or Japan could easily strangle China. As one geopolitical analyst puts it, deindustrialization in a matter of months and mass starvation within a year. It wouldn't even require getting close to China. Australia could do nothing about it. So, who is Australia going to ally with? China, of course. Time for the US to cut ties?
    1
  7886. A Nigerian in Scotland saying he had never experienced intolerance until he moved to Scotland. What a joke! What about the Biafran War. There is ongoing ethnic and religious intolerance which often leads to armed conflict. Where does this guy get off saying such things?
    1
  7887. In the US it was documented that COVID deaths were overreported. Many (I don't know how many) were listed as dying from COVID when that was not the actual cause of death because of government compensation schemes. This ended up distorting the data. As for evidenced based policy making, you have to be kidding. Let me give one small example, not related to COVID, from the US. It has to do with school starting times in the public schools. To reuse the busses, elementary (you would say primary) school students start last, then middle school students then high school students. Of course, the evidence on waking times, etc. shows that just the opposite should be the case. We can all see it in our personal experiences. The reason I was given in the area where I live is that the high school students starting earlier has something to do with sports and after school activities, not science or health. To bring it back to COVID, the move by government in the US to vaccinate young children makes no sense. I think I heard that on this channel as well as other sources.
    1
  7888.  @gribbler1695  Keep believing that. The reporting I have seen claimed that COVID was listed as the cause of death, not a contributing factor. The government was not paying for people who had COVID at the time of death, but for those who died from COVID.
    1
  7889.  @gribbler1695  Be that as it may, the reporting I have seen indicates that such guidance has been ignored.
    1
  7890.  @comicbookninja5268  Good, by scary.
    1
  7891. These people are a bunch of commies. No better way to put it. If the "community" is upset, then why are "community" members committing all these crimes? Why doesn't the "community" come down on the criminals? This kind of thing just sickens me.
    1
  7892. The reality is that a black person is more likely to be called the N-word by another black person than anyone else. My younger son actually talked to me about it when he was in high school. A lot of the black students would call each other the N-word and that made him uncomfortable.
    1
  7893. @disputin9930 Oh, come one man (as President Joe likes to say), it was just a joke. I do hope you took it that way. I do like your example.
    1
  7894.  @PinkeySuavo  What do you think all these quantitative traders are doing? What do you think statistics is all about? It is about predicting the trend and the odds, not an individual next event. Actually, though, the code can influence the share price if it controls enough of the market. This has been a concern for some time, and you should have gotten that from the video.
    1
  7895. The mask decision was a disaster, and that should have been anticipated. You can do that kind of thing once, but as soon as the truth comes out your credibility is shot. What should have been done is to ensure the supply for health workers (lots of ways to do that). Now you have a total lack of credibility for the scientific establishment, at least in the health field. That might spread to other areas as well. And these are the "smart people" making these decisions. We are in trouble.
    1
  7896. The opening reminds me of a book I obtained and read when I was living in the UK at the dawn of the current millennium. It is by Jonathan Feedland and titled "Bringing Home the Revolution". It actually advocates for a republic in Great Britian. One of the ideas is a to have a written constitution. I know people like David Starkey are dead set against this. But you have to consider some of the things that have been done to the British "constitution" when one party or the other had a large majority. These are things you are suffering with today.
    1
  7897. Oh, just listening to the first minute of this I am turned off. This is drivel.
    1
  7898. This going public by Hunter smacks of the actions of Sam Bankman-Fried before, and frankly, after his arrest. Not a good tactic.
    1
  7899. I don't know why Pelosi was discussing this. She is free to do so as a citizen, as an elected official this is not something she has any authority over. Pelosi is a member of the legislature. The Administrative branch is responsible for conduct of foreign affairs. Pelosi's words are meaningless as government policy.
    1
  7900. Determinism in the QM sense, and determinism in the human, and cognitive, sense are two totally different things. We often use the same word for vastly different things. Equating basic physical properties with cognitive effects seems to me to be totally uninformative. We now know about quarks and other fundamental particles. But guess what, that does nothing to change the nature of chemical reactions. As we get more into the quantum realm, we get more into the realm of things that may not matter. We will not really change standard chemistry because of quantum understanding. Newtonian mechanics works perfectly in the many situations. Worrying about the precession of Mercury has nothing to do with mechanics on Earth. Quantum mechanics is fantastic for theoretical physics, or for producing advanced chips. Otherwise, it is irrelevant.
    1
  7901. What is interesting is that the G20 has been pressured to relieve, or forgive, debt owed by poor countries. The latest initiative is DSSI. It does not seem that this is going that well. It is just the latest installment in a move my campaigners in the west.
    1
  7902. The ECHR is not a part of the EU. You people are appallingly ill informed.
    1
  7903. Wow! Someone is going to be arrested. That Caixin Weekly article sounds like it is something written in the west. It also sounds like a very rational assessment of the situation. The mention of the global anti-globalization trend is unprecedented in China. It is also a reflection of the truth. Globalization has failed. China is a big part of that failure and at the center of China's failure is Xi and the CCP.
    1
  7904. His description of it being like Mordor is so apt.
    1
  7905. American money went to fund this research at a time when it was not permitted to do so. Fauci did an end run with Eco Health Alliance knowing full well that what he was doing was illegal. We can only hope that he will pay the consequences.
    1
  7906. Yes, the UK is well and truly screwed.
    1
  7907.  @Leoreoo  I stand corrected. I made an assumption about your statement that was not justified.
    1
  7908.  @Leoreoo  Well, there is an "effect", but whether it is a result of the theory and assumptions or it is a caused by something "real" is still up for debate. That is what this whole thing is about.
    1
  7909.  @Leoreoo  Well, I never said observability had anything to do with seeing it with "our own eyes". It is with instruments we can create in the case of either the very small or very large. Heck, we have even detected neutrinos and the Higgs boson in experiments. As for DM, it is claimed that this is some sort of matter (it's in the name). Perhaps you can educate me on what it might be. Does it fit in with the Standard Model of Particle Physics (SM)? I ask because of our discussion about simulations of cosmology. Those simulations assume the SM (quantum mechanical phenomena at in the very early universe). Where do the models predict that DM came from? Somehow, I missed that.
    1
  7910.  @Leoreoo  You didn't read what I wrote. I explicitly stated that there was a lot we can measure and know about only through instruments, not our senses. Heck, I was working on High Energy Physics experiments in the 1970s, so I know that very well. What scientists have "uncovered" about DM is an effect, not the thing itself. There is still lots of debate about whether it is a "thing" or whether it is something else. The current thinking is that it is a thing, but in that case why all these other theories. That is the whole point of a lot of investigation going on today. There is evidence for an "effect" but not confirmation that it is a material object, or if it is, what it is. We still see claims off and on that it is black holes, for example. Some days black holes are the answer, and others it is debunked. What is interesting is that particle dark matter has not been detected. That is interesting because it is presumed to be everywhere, some physicists even claiming that massive numbers of DM are passing through us all the time. There have been several experiments to detect it. Nothing yet. What I am saying, in a long-winded way, is that there is not even total agreement that "it" is an "it".
    1
  7911. Well put!
    1
  7912. The thing about market reaction, especially in the Chinese economy, is that it is based on how people think others are going to react, not a reading of fundamentals. Look at the comment by @HighMojo below. These are traders, not investors. If you want to follow traders in China as a guide on where to invest and to understand how the sector will evolve, then you might as well just throw your money away. That is what the typical Chinese retail investor has done over the years. I think I have even seen indications of that on this channel. I have definitely seen it on other channels and read about it as well as seen the data.
    1
  7913. This report is wrong in calling the trial in the US as a criminal trial. It is a civil action.
    1
  7914. Dwarfs are indeed mutants. This is not to disparage them. It is not something in their control. It is not something they did wrong. It is just who they are. To give another example, there are people who are autistic. It is just who they are. I had a colleague at an aerospace firm who was. She was a PhD Physicist. I loved talking to her about physics and would sometimes review papers she was writing. She was doing advanced stuff. I mean really advanced stuff. And yet, her boyfriend was also autistic. Their idea of a date was going to the mall (which was quite close to the aerospace plant we worked in) and just watching the people. There are all kinds of people in this world. Not all are "normal". That does not mean that they have nothing to contribute. For Disney to do Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with a Hispanic actress and normal size people as the dwarfs is just plain stupid. That is not the story. Snow white is a white woman. The dwarfs are small people. Is that so hard to understand?
    1
  7915. All I can say is "EPIC"!
    1
  7916. Is it 1848 all over again? Revolution is in the air.
    1
  7917. The training is a bit of a red herring. Look at WWII, especially on the Eastern Front. The Germans had many different types of arms including rifles, submachineguns (machine pistols) and later assault rifles. They did not, when given a new weapon, drop out of the line for training. There are many, many accounts of German soldiers moving from one to the other and also picking up Soviet submachineguns or even Mosin-Nagants at times. There are many accounts of Germans preferring the Soviet submachineguns. On the Soviet side, there were lots of different submachineguns, many of which you have covered on this channel. Again, soldiers picked up what was available and used them effectively. Sometimes the transitions would happen during the course of a single battle. Even on the American side you had the M1903 rifle, M1 rifle, M1 carbine, M1 submachinegun and M3 submachinegun. Along the way there were even some odd ducks tried out, again as you have covered on this channel. I don't recall reading where a US soldier picked up a different gun in the heat of battle and was not able to use it because they had not been trained. When it comes to maintenance and parts there are some issues, but this is not something that is a massive problem. I was breaking down and cleaning a wide variety of guns when I was ten years old. That was over half a century ago. The manuals I had available are nothing compared to what we have today, and sometimes were not available. My father was not that into guns, especially after being in the Pacific war (he carried a M1 carbine and a M1911A1 pistol), but his best friend was a collector of military arms and had a wide variety, some of which he brought home from war in Europe. He had an old pig farm in Winchester, VA and we would go down there and shoot a s-load of guns and then would go home and clean them all. It was great fun.
    1
  7918.  @dpelpal  My understanding is that GLSDB has a range of 150km, while ATACMS has a range of 300km. Check your sources. The payload of the GLSDB is 93kg, vs up to 560kg for ATACMS.
    1
  7919. Russia is becoming a vassal of China. The Russian economy is small, and its only appeal is as a provider of natural resources. Some speculate that China is just waiting for the Russian Army to be destroyed, or at least significantly degraded, in Ukraine. Then they will come for the Russian far east. They already have claims on lots of territories there, including Vladivostok. Along those lines I have just seen that there is a Russian government directive that maps produced including that area must now include place names in Chinese, along with the Russian language.
    1
  7920. Um, Mahyar, are you forgetting history. Your equivocation on whether the Soviet Union was the boss and main villain of communism shows a real ignorance of history. Have you heard of the Communist International , or Comintern? Where do you think the communist leaders of China, Cuba, Vietnam and many others were trained. Who do you think they owed their allegiance to? Where do you think they got their support? Saying "rightly or wrongly" about this really makes me wonder about you.
    1
  7921. The whole idea of celebrities endorsing political candidates is bonkers (trying to keep it clean). They are in a mass market business. You don't want to alienate a large part of your potential market, no matter what you think. Just look at the Bud Light situation, among many others.
    1
  7922.  @danielch6662  I worked for GE. Actually, their issue was not that they were a conglomerate (although you could not say that at corporate level, trust me). They were, for almost a century, a highly profitable and valuable company. What happened was that Jack Welch steered the company into finance. There had always been a finance arm, but this had two purposes. One was to help customers buy the products (from individual consumers to large companies). The leasing portion of that satisfied the second purpose. Minimize the tax bill. The depreciation on large turbines and jet engines, for example, checked that box. Then Uncle Jack got GE into reinsurance, and all kinds of other financial businesses that had nothing to do with the core business. On top of that, the execs after Welch got into deal making and took their eyes off the ball. Don't get me started on that. Oh, wait, you already did.
    1
  7923.  @danielch6662  One other thing. Look at Elon Musk. He is in several different businesses. On the other hand, his businesses are all in separate companies, each of which has its own investors. Most of the Chinese companies I am talking about have subsidiaries that still roll up to a single top-level entity.
    1
  7924. What we need to do is to stop paying taxes to these cities. Public safety is the number one reason we pay taxes, followed by education. If these are not provided, then paying taxes is stupid. But, what really irks is that people in the past have voted for these politicians. If they continue to do so, then those who cannot abide by the situation have no alternative but to move away. This will, in the end, cause these cities to collapse. Then we can build something better. It may take time, although the solution is fairly simple.
    1
  7925. Fake news? The fact checkers said that the lab leak story for COVID and the Hunter Biden laptop story were false. Who checks the fact checkers. Any study using this data, without checking the accuracy of the fact checkers is just so much trash.
    1
  7926. Not only tofu weapons, but undertrained crews. I have seen reports of that situation recently.
    1
  7927. All this talk about AI is so passe. There are already a lot of articles, financial research reports (there is a good one from Goldman Sachs), and YouTube videos about the AI hype bubble bursting. One of the best examples is from the WSJ on July 22, 2024, titled "A Clamor for Generative AI (Even If Something Else Works Better)". This is so reminiscent of the Big Data hype cycle of which I have some good experience. The fact is that Big Data is still useful (especially in regard to AI) but it has not had the impact touted at the beginning.
    1
  7928. In the US there has been a crackdown on immigration and the murder rate has dropped to record low levels. Let that be a lesson to the UK.
    1
  7929. Many years ago, I was working at an aerospace and defense firm. There were federal programs on minority sourcing back then as well. This is nothing new. One project was using a minority firm for a subsystem. None of the units delivered were up to spec. Don't forget, this was equipment for our front-line military. The company simply threw away the internals and replaced them, at their own expense. It was just seen as a cost of doing business. All I can say is, thank God competency is back.
    1
  7930. I was in Greece toward the end of the last quarter of the last century of the last millennium, and they had coins that were a fraction of the drachma. These coins had holes in them. They were so useless that they were used as washers.
    1
  7931. Mayor Johnson, and his message, are very impressive and important. Thanks for having him on. The goal of bringing back industry to our cities is key to our development s a nation. The fact is that the ancestors of the minorities in many of our cities are there because that is where the jobs were. Then the liberal elites decided to push all that "dirty" industry out. I live in the Chicago area. As an example, they bought a number of cars for the CTA from a foreign firm. They insisted that they be made in America. Good enough. But guess where the factory is? It is in the far, far exurbs of Chicago. Why not in the south side where black unemployment is high? I could go on and on about all the stupid moves that city governments have made over the decades, but you get the idea.
    1
  7932. The Democrats with their fake "town hall" protests reminds me of the Vietnam War protests. The media played them up, and some were large. What happened after that? Richard Nixon won a second term in a landslide. He got 60.7% of the popular vote and 520 electoral votes. The reality is that these protests are organized for the media.
    1
  7933. Germany is stupid. Merkel (even with a PhD.) is stupid. They laughed at Donald Trump when he chided them on relying on Russia for their energy. They are now paying the price. A lot of German industry is moving processing that requires hydrocarbon inputs and energy to the US, where both are plentiful and cheap. As for the environmental impact, they are moving backward. I saw recently where some wind turbines were dismantled to make way or the expansion of a coal mine. Imagine that. And don't forget, German coal is mostly lignite, which is the least efficient and most polluting. Germany us also one of the worst places for both wind and solar energy. They are screwed. There are analysts that predict the end of the German industrial model. I think we are seeing the beginning of that process driven by a lack of understanding of the goals and means to reach those goals. I put them on a par with the Chinese, who are rapidly messing up their economy. I have a financial advisor who was hoping that Xi would get a third term so that he could mess up and destroy the Chinese economy. Well that is happening. Germany is going down the same path. Don't forget, Merkel is an East German. Maybe she was a plant from Moscow. Who knows.
    1
  7934. Gutfeld, you are F*ck*ng great!!!!
    1
  7935. Not good for democracy? I hear that in the US as well. As far as I can tell, and I have been around far longer than you, democracy is still going strong. If you are going to use that term, then be careful about how you do it.
    1
  7936. Elon doesn't care. Just look at the controversies he has lived through with his businesses. He has FU money. He just doesn't care. They are treating him like a politician who has to worry about the next election. He just doesn't care. Why do you think Trump chose him, or why he accepted?
    1
  7937. I know that Ukraine fervently desires EU membership, but Orban's statement that the EU is in decline is correct. There are some geopolitical analysts and others who have been stating this for a while. Frankly, the leftist and green policies that the EU has been pursuing for a while now are hurting the people of the EU and pushing them to support the right. Cast your minds back to David Cameron prior to the Brexit vote. He made proposals to the EU to modify some policies. The EU flatly rejected him. We see the result. What he (and we are seeing many now coming to the same conclusion) was concerned about was the tighter integration and control by Brussels. This lessens the sovereignty of the member counties. The dream of a "United States of Europe" is a chimera. In the United States of America, there is basically a common culture. People from Europe come to the USA and embrace the culture there. In the EU there are many different cultures, and the people in those countries don't want to give that up. What is ironic is that France, which wants to lead the EU, the desire to maintain their culture is among the strongest.
    1
  7938. Listening to Putin's statement Iam convinced that this was a false flag event. Either that, or Russian dissidents within Russia were behind this. The idea that the drones pictured could fly all the way from Ukraine to Moscow undetected is ludicrous.
    1
  7939. WOW! The CCP is going full stupid mode. I am referring to the stock market manipulation they are undertaking. They are a bunch of commies. Why do they even have a stock market? Any market? Run by commies? Whoa! Who in the world would be stupid enough to invest in that. The only thing to do is to get out now, before it gets worse, and it will get worse.
    1
  7940.  @YourHineyness  Not sure of what you are getting at. Use your words.
    1
  7941. Larry Elder, the black face of white supremacy. LOL.
    1
  7942. The real strength of F-16s is not shooting down Russian fighters in Russian airspace which are launching missiles. That is not the typical F-16 role. The F-16 is a fighter bomber. The real need for F-16s is to complete the combined arms complement over the battlefield. Ukraine can use air defense systems to protect their civilian infrastructure, as they have been doing. Also, it seems that western missiles have been used to shoot down Russian planes over Russia, so I am not sure that firing a missile from an F-16 within Ukranian territory would be any different.
    1
  7943. You may want to check your facts. Unemployment insurance is a program run jointly by the state and federal governments. It is a tax. The benefit is defined, by state.
    1
  7944.  @johndoh5182  Thanks for pointing that out. I did leave out that the federal government sets the guidelines. I thought that was implicit but see that it was not. The law is a Federal law (Federal Unemployment Tax Act or FUTA) setting minimums. It is overseen by the Department of Labor. The taxes that go into the funding the program are both state and Federal. Another example of Federally mandated but state administered program is Medicaid. Same idea with state and local taxes going to fund the program. There is also the example is the Federal minimum wage. States are free to set a higher minimum wage, but not a lower one.
    1
  7945. The issue of the US provision of freedom of navigation in the seas anywhere on the planet is one we have to discuss. What is the US interest in doing so? It seems that several countries don't want it. The irony is that some of the ones that absolutely depend on freedom of the seas and are not really capable of providing it.
    1
  7946. We only made progress when we went to digital. Analog computers were used in things like simulators and spacecraft control systems, and these had limitations. That work went to digital computers (I was part of that, in both cases). It improved accuracy and speed. Most of what you do on a computer is managing information, not processing images. Analog circuits may become like a co-processor function, just like quantum computers. Even quantum computers need digital computers to prepare the data and the state of the system.
    1
  7947. The Chinese ambassador is entirely correct. Of course, the EU ambassador's response is also correct. To understand this, you just have to understand that the EU is, above all, a protectionist cartel. The EU, by the way, sees the US as a competitor, as well. President Macron of France, when calling for an EU army, listed the US, along with Russia and China, as nations that they might need to defend against. This just gives you a flavor of the way they see themselves.
    1
  7948.  @eirikarnesen9691  Well, if that is their job, they are in for an unpleasant time ahead of them.
    1
  7949.  @eirikarnesen9691  Yes, Europe of all places needs the world. For one thing, the economy of the EU is very dependent on industrial exports. For another, the EU does not have sufficient natural resources. Finally, with a shrinking population, the EU is not a self-sufficient market for their industrial products. Why do you think the small European countries spent so much on colonizing the world of the last few centuries? Raw materials for their industries and markets for their goods.
    1
  7950.  @eirikarnesen9691  Well, that is not my reading of either history or the current situation.
    1
  7951. Boris should be out, and Liz Truss should take over. She has had great success in the foreign policy realm and seems to be a much more grounded person. She would, I think, command respect. Michael Gove would be a disaster for the Conservatives.
    1
  7952.  @pskfry  You nailed it!
    1
  7953. Two of my favorites. Newt has it right. I think Trump will deliver.
    1
  7954.  @neilreynolds3858  Well, I like to be optimistic, but I understand where you are coming from.
    1
  7955. Ukraine will eventually be "at the table". On the other hand, you have to remember that Ukraine is a client state. Without US and European weapons and money Ukraine would have capitulated long ago even given the gross incompetence of the Russian military. The fact is, not all countries are equal. There is no "international law". That is why the US spends so much on defense.
    1
  7956. I find all these prognostications by the pundits and analysts to be, let's say, amusing. The fact is that the economists and analysts did not see what was coming, so why should they be expected to now. They really do not have robust predictive models, and if you look back on their predictions from prior times, they are just following official statistics and using models developed to track western economies (which do not work much better in that environment). The most accurate predictions are from the macroeconomic analysts. You will find that they also tend to have good performance in market investment at home.
    1
  7957. This makes perfect sense. I have seen reports that at least 40% of people with college degrees are in jobs that don't require a degree. Considering the cost of college, this is silly. If someone of means wants to get a useless college degree, then they are welcome to. Anyone who does not have the means would be silly to pursue college, unless it was in a field in demand (STEM, finance, etc.).
    1
  7958.  @zoeherriot  Well, that is the dumbest thing I have ever read. You are taking the text of the First Amendment literally. That is indeed what it says. On the other hand, the courts in the US have expanded this to everything from pornography to corporate speech. Frankly, unless speech is maliciously libelous, it is permitted in the US. Do a little research. Another thing, and it is a practical matter, is that you want to know what people are thinking. Suppressing people, you don't agree with does nothing to stop them thinking it and deprives you of knowing what they think. That is both stupid and dangerous. As I said in my original comment, engaging with their ideas is the best course of action.
    1
  7959.  @zoeherriot  Well, your first point is precisely what I said. Work on your reading comprehension skills. Your second point is correct as well. As long as the government is not doing it, any media platform, from newspapers to social media, can decide not to carry it. In the past, what people did (in the dark days before social media) was just to find another outlet. I never said you are supposed to be heard. What I said is that denying people have those ideas by closing your ears (eyes, mind) is perilous. If you deny that people have those ideas, and turn out to be the majority, for example, you could well be in a lot of trouble. I find a lot of things reprehensible that are said, but you cannot ignore that people think or say them and still be well informed.
    1
  7960. Rob, it is always about money. From the first newspapers to the most advanced modern tech. So, to say that is to diminish the argument. Fox is a about money (this is not a criticism; I am a fan). These are all commercial enterprises. Just look at what is happening at CNN. Fortunately, unlike the days of scarce broadcast spectrum, we have a massive number of choices. If Spotify made the anti-business decision to get rid of Rogan, he would find somewhere else (there are new outlets springing up). Spotify is also a public company, and the shareholders could have something to say if corporate decisions adversely affect the bottom line.
    1
  7961. The PLA is a "paper dragon". Add to that the rampant corruption and poor state of technology, and they don't stand a chance against the US, Taiwan and Japan. They are more configured to control the population than to project power.
    1
  7962. Rapprochement with the west? Separating western Europe from the US? You must be kidding. This war has only solidified European alliances with North America. Russia has also shown itself to be an unreliable supplier of essential commodities, and a poor destination for investment. Russia is toast. Russia is also not very important outside of oil, and the world has moved on in that regard. If you hadn't noticed, the price of oil is well down from recent peaks, even though OPEC is trying to support it with production cuts. Frankly, this is the worst time for OPEC to try this with much of the world's economy under stress. Russian oil sales are at a much lower price and are contributing to the lower price overall. They are also not making profit on their sales. I think the real long term gain for China is for Putin to fall and the Russian army to be degraded or destroyed. China has claims on lots of territory in the Russian far east, including Vladivostok.
    1
  7963.  @kathleenlambert7706  Thanks for the encouragement. That is the direction I am going in.
    1
  7964. Just got directed to a channel that had the same title as this one with the name zeihanongeopolitics7092. Just thought I'd let you know.
    1
  7965. This is interesting to an American who has also lived in the UK. While there, I got elected to the Board of Governors of the school my sons attended. I had to get permission to run from the Home Office. So, I was interested in politics in the UK. Enough about me. What is really interesting is the idea of a new party. In the west in general we are going through political realignments. Conservative parties in Europe are rising to power. Even in the US, there is talk about a third party. The last time we had one was in the 1990s. The problem then was that the driver behind that movement was a very successful businessman, H. Ross Perot, who was, as you would say, a bit dodgy. He did very well though. The talk here is that if a third party had solid people running for the leadership, they might have a chance. That is what I see with a Johnson Farage partnership. It would not be easy, but with both the Conservatives and Labor falling apart, it could just work. Don't forget, the Liberals in the UK were in power in the early 20th century, winning a majority in 1906. The Liberal Democrats won enough seats that the Conservatives went into coalition with them. So, don't count third parties out.
    1
  7966. The First Amendment States: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. You are making the common mistake of assuming speech has no consequences. If one wants to call for private employers to shun students protesting against a particular situation or group, that is just them exercising their right to speech. If Kennedy, or anyone else is calling for legislation in this case, then they are wrong, and any such legislation would probably be deemed unconstitutional. By creating something called "protected" speech we demean freedom of speech, but again, speech can have consequences where private entities are concerned. Perhaps a lesson in civics would be appropriate.
    1
  7967.  @fritz3388  You may want to look at actual figures rather than making them up on your own. The latest table I saw, using IMF numbers, has the US at number 6 with Germany at number 16. The US per capita GDP is 1.5 times that of Germany. The countries ahead of the US are mostly tax havens. So, Ami, copied and surpassed. Also, Americans pay less in taxes and housing is cheaper, bigger and better. I have lived in Europe and done business there for and with some of the largest companies in the world. I have relatives in Germany (in laws) who have held high government positions (appointed) or executive positions in industrial companies. I have had a chance to interact closely with colleagues in Germany over an extended period of time. On the other side of the pond, I have been in the aerospace and defense industry, the software industry and electronics industry for decades. How many German tech entrepreneurs have you dealt with? Asking sincerely. I actually started traveling overseas just over half a century ago as a teenager on my own. That was wild stuff, let me tell you. So, I do have some experience of the place and people. When I was living there at company meetings there would be 20 people from 18 countries on a typical day. Since my background is southern European (guess where) and I was buying my clothes locally, people just thought I was another European. That led to some very interesting conversations. You might appreciate this. In my first business trip to Stuttgart (from Paris; not where I was based) I was dressed in all black (suit, shirt, tie, shoes, etc.), a style not seen in the US. This was early in this millennium. Even with my US passport the border control people started asking me questions in German. Fortunately, I had studied it at university. It was great fun.
    1
  7968. Musk is full of h*t. China by itself could only produce pig iron. It was the opening by the West, in hopes of including this massive country in the world economy to promote peace, that made it what it is. All of the progress that has been made has been from foreign firms investing in China, in hopes of participating in their massive market. How has this turned out? China has ruined their prospects. All of these industries can easily be moved to other countries. The engineering (this is the key) comes from the west. Look at their attempts to set up chip companies. It turns out that the players in this effort are defrauding the Chinese themselves. It has come to nothing. Their products are substandard and this is showing up in China as well as what they export.
    1
  7969. A lot of the actions that "the populace" is supposedly asking for essentially really coming down to getting "free stuff". This is how the CCP started. Marx assumed that the revolution would start in the advanced industrial nations with a large urban proletariat. Instead, the revolution was successful in two large countries with mostly peasant populations. The leaders, Lenin and Mao, used the promise of free stuff (taken from the upper classes) to garner support. So, basically nothing has changed.
    1
  7970. I am already hearing that the princelings want to change the party and want to oust Xi. The proposal I have seen is to change the party to a social democratic party. Some are talking about a coup that failed. One thing interesting about the whole idea of the princelings wielding power, especially because they would be motivated to carry on their ancestor's legacy, is that this is basically the revival of aristocracy. The ancient Greeks understood that there are only three types of government, based on how the leaders are chosen. The oldest is aristocracy. Then there is oligarchy. Finally, there is democracy. All communist governments have been oligarchies. They tend to devolve into aristocracy, as in China. In parallel to this, Russia is moving that direction. The leadership of the nomenklatura and the siloviki is being handed down to the offspring of the current holders of those groups. Putin is really styling himself after the czars. We see the same thing in Cuba. It looks like 2024 will be an interesting year.
    1
  7971. Class bias? In a communist society? How is that possible?
    1
  7972.  @carlosb1  That is irrelevant in a military conflict. You should get more informed.
    1
  7973. Just want to say, while I will point out issues in a particular story, I am a great fan of this channel. My comments are on specific issues and stories, not on the value of the channel. I very much appreciate NTD. I follow China in Focus because I have a strong interest in foreign affairs. After all, I was born in Washington, DC and grew up there. I admit it, I am a politics and foreign affairs junkie. I also follow many foreign news sources on YouTube, including those for the UK (where I lived for a while), France, Germany, Israel, India, Australia and others.
    1
  7974.  @advancetotabletop5328  Amen, brother. I remember well. Prices tripled!
    1
  7975. China is playing the long game. They are just waiting for the Russian Army to be destroyed or fatally degraded in Ukraine. This is likely to happen this year. Another thing to consider is the breakup of Russia into a period or warlordism. This is not an unlikely scenario. Of course, China may experience a period of warlordism itself. China was in such a period from about 1911 to 1949. Mao himself was effectively just another warlord of this period. China has experienced many such periods in the past. Some geopolitical analysts predict that China will not be in its current form by the end of this decade. I heard somewhere that some in Shanghai people wanted to break away from the CCP and ally with Taiwan. I don't know how credible, or widespread that is, but just the fact that is being talked about is interesting. So, both countries may be entering a period of fragmentation at the same time. And the outside world will not have to fire a shot. As for the Straights of Malaca, there are other countries that might be interested in closing this off to China. One is India, which is actively preparing for such an eventuality. They have been fortifying the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to enable this. That and a couple of destroyers would be all that is needed. This is why China was pushing their Belt and Road through Pakistan and the Guadar port. This effort is currently experiencing massive difficulties because of massive political instability in the area.
    1
  7976. I live in the Chicago area. About 70% of our electricity is nuclear powered. If we coupled that with intelligent use of batteries, wind and solar, we could probably achieve 100% carbon free power in the area. And there are nuclear power stations downstate.
    1
  7977. This is all just stupid. I mean really stupid. Did I mention that it was all stupid? You know what is happening here, don't you? They people pushing this stuff just ask someone in each of subject area to come up with something and, knowing what is expected of them, they come up with something. No thought needed. The guidance system example is the first stupid one that I have experience with. We already have inertial navigation systems that do exactly this. Many of our long-range systems use it as one of a redundant set of options. Over time they do get a bit better with better components and miniaturization, etc. Ring laser gyros are one example for inertial navigation systems. I first worked with those in the 1980s. Also, the weapon systems are already very accurate. Do you recall the cruise missiles fired from hundreds of miles away navigating down a street in Baghdad then flying up and going down a ventilation shaft? That was not the result of satellite navigation. Our long-range weapons already use inertial navigation as an option for precisely the reason Sabine gives for the quantum version. What do you think is used in our interplanetary spacecraft? Quantum is not going to improve this enough to make a difference in a war. Perhaps if it could be made small enough and loaded into a self-guided sniper round... On the logistics front that is just plain the stupidest thing I have ever heard. What is the problem with military logistics in wartime? It's not a command-and-control issue. It is a delivery issue. I could go on, but this is exhausting.
    1
  7978.  @gino3286  Of course, the consuming nations would have paid. Since they needed to use the gas, they paid someone else. So, I don't understand your point. The whole point of forward contracts is to guarantee supply and lock in prices. Did you follow the situation at the time? They actively limited the amount of gas provided and then stopped the flow. They became an unreliable supplier.
    1
  7979.  @gino3286  The point is really quite simple. You seem to forget that Russia has used the supply of natural resources, including gas, as a political weapon. Trump stopped the completion of Nord Stream 2, then Biden seemed to be leaning toward letting it be completed. Then the invasion happened, and the completion of the pipeline was again blocked. That still left the original pipeline and Russia's commitments on supply. Since Germany was not siding with the Russians and blocking aid to Ukraine, Russia was always going to try to punish them in some way. This is political. not economic. What you really fail to understand is that the current Russian government and economic system is run, not on ideological grounds, but as a kleptocracy and a gangster state (much like China, although there ideology is used as a veneer). Have you even noticed that there are several private militaries (PMCs) even though these are technically illegal under Russian law? In one recent case it seems that two of them fighting in Ukraine actually came to blows. So, to judge their actions on rational economic grounds is a grave mistake.
    1
  7980.  @poulnrgaard7820  Well, you are incorrect there. Three of the four pipes were disrupted. Both of Nord Stream 1 and one of Nord Stream 2. Since Nord Stream 2 was not actually being used, all of the active pipelines were "cut away".
    1
  7981.  @poulnrgaard7820  Well, they could get some gas if they were able to use Nord Stream 2. They are not. It has never been commissioned, and likely won't be.
    1
  7982. One thing people, especially in Europe, don't understand about free speech is that it has to be unrestricted to mean anything. For one thing, major media in the past, such as newspapers, often exaggerated, or outright lied. For all you youngsters out there, look up the term "yellow journalism". What I am getting at is that you want to know what others are thinking, even if you find it reprehensible. Just stopping them from saying it doesn't stop them from thinking it. You need to know what they think and to debate/refute it. Otherwise, you risk being blindsided. A corollary to that is determining what is "true". For example, take the COVID situation. A lot of what we were told is "settled science" was not settled, and in many cases not science. Even Fauci admitted that, after the fact. In fact, true science is never "settled". Take the two most successful theories in physics, the Standard Model of Particle Physics and General Relativity. Scientists are always saying they are somehow incomplete and yet, when tested, so far, they have been proven correct. Such theories have a very sound foundation. This is not true of our models of biological processes to the same extent. So, be careful of the "fact checkers".
    1
  7983.  @2Dylandog  Very well put.
    1
  7984.  @Chips505  I have to agree with you.
    1
  7985.  @SFNightOwl  Agreed. One would hope that our leaders would discount this blather.
    1
  7986. Musk is not the first. Iridium was launched in the late 1990s, for example. Each new generation of satellites has improvements, for sure. Frankly, although Musk is very good at getting things done, he is not the first in most of what he does.
    1
  7987. Physicists, astronomers, etc. are always claiming that their experiments or observations will have some benefit. That is just a way to obtain funding. It is just public relations. I am surprised they didn't claim it would help cure cancer. All of this goes back to how funding mushroomed after WWII. Since science had helped create a war ending weapon, funding more science might lead to more and more powerful weapons and perhaps along the way energy technologies. So, to keep the money flowing basic research has to be tied back to some practical, tangible result. The problem is the questions being researched now are often of a type that will do no such thing. Why is there something (matter) rather than nothing? Well, there is. That is a fact we can observe. Knowing the answer is almost guaranteed not to lead to anything useful. It is the same with knowing the age of the universe. Just look at the solar system, or even the earth. Mankind's tenure on the planet is just a blink of an eye as far as these are concerned. And those ages are just a small thing compared to the universe. While it is indeed interesting, it should be pursued just because people want to know, not because it will tell us anything about the here and now or help create some great new technology.
    1
  7988. The whole thing is just stupid. Most people are on multiple platforms. It is rare for a YouTuber that is on other social media not to list at least four or five, for example. If you have something to say you will find a way to say it. By the way, the Supreme Court upheld the ban. There is at least one deal on the table to buy TikTok. This should not be an issue.
    1
  7989. Net zero is going away. Countries in Europe, notably Germany are pushing back. The UK is pausing its efforts. Frankly, if the developed west were to go to no economic activity, it would make little or no difference. With the amount of GRG being put out by China and India, there is no use for the west to do so.
    1
  7990. Corruption is not something unique to Ukraine. Just look at what happened in the EU Parliament recently. In the US there was massive corruption in respect to the COVID relief funds. It does not seem that this was government corruption, but commercial corruption. Numbers I have seen estimate $100B of fraud. Contrast this with what the US has spent on or committed to the war at something just over $50B.
    1
  7991. Very insightful and very apt. The thing is that the US is already doing this. The problem is that we have in the west is that many countries are not doing enough (the rearm part). The west and our allies did just fine when the Soviet Union and China were totally disconnected from the rest of the world. We will do just fine after they again disconnect. If you want to understand what the world will be like after this whole process of disconnecting is done just look no further than all of previous human history.
    1
  7992.  @kindGSL  I love your point. Your first sentence says it all! Wonderful.
    1
  7993.  @marionetteworks  ...and you will like it!
    1
  7994.  @carlflaherty2215  Well, it may be as you say but I come down of the side of "quite that bad".
    1
  7995.  @Zei33  Well, the US must be really healthy as well. Actually, your point is very astute. Sort of off topic, but I think is relevant to the discussion in general. This is something the Ukrainians need to learn. I also follow that situation closely and they tend to get very touchy about any criticism or reservation they hear in the west. If they are truly going to join the western democracies, they will need to get used to it. I sort of understand what they are feeling being the country that is actually at war. The odd thing is that none of the countries supporting them are at war, so a multiplicity of voices is heard all the time. Imagine that in China.
    1
  7996. The problem with political parties is that they contravene the intent of representative government. John Adams was a big critic of them. The intent was to have representatives in Congress represent their districts and Senators their states. Now they just tow the party line. At least Sinema and Manchin are planning to vote for the majority of their constituents, nit the party line. Good for them. We need more of that in Congress.
    1
  7997. Oh, and another Biden pick who was eminently qualified is Janet Yellen at Treasury. Wasn't she saying that inflation was "transitory"? She has a PhD in economics from Yale, taught at Harvard, was chair of the Federal Reserve. This eminent economist was either not that smart or was acting as a "toady" of the Biden administration.
    1
  7998.  @Valencetheshireman927  I think they did. But, as I said, Starkey is a rabble rouser. He may be right, by the way. I am an American who has lived in England (in this century). I first traveled in England in 1974, as a teenager. Those were the days. One thing you have to understand is that the US was reluctant to ger involved in WWI and WWII because the people in the US saw our involvement as propping up the colonial empires of Britian and France.
    1
  7999. Kind of a dumb question at the end. Who is asking that question? What did that have to do with Ukraine or any other situation we are seeing in the world today? Nevertheless, I think Gen. Hodges handled it well.
    1
  8000. At 1:00 the comment was made that the US should investigate those who make such Nazi like remarks. Why the US? I agree that the remarks were horrendous, but that the US should "investigate" is kind of silly. It is not for the US to "police" the pronouncements of the CCP. The US may react to them, and consider them in its policy deliberations, but that is all.
    1
  8001. Are you part of a conspiracy? I have seen many comments on many videos promoting AMZP3X. Often these comments have little to do with the video in question.
    1
  8002.  @rhuttrho88  Who is this and what are you saying no to?
    1
  8003.  @possame2  I am assuming this. Thanks for pointing it out.
    1
  8004. You do realize that the atmosphere is 78% of the earth's atmosphere, don't you? Nitrogen is not a greenhouse gas. Nitrous oxide is one. To say that the government wants to cut nitrogen "missions" is silly. Nitrogen for chemical uses comes from the air. Please do some research before publishing these stories.
    1
  8005. The conscripts are useless. Think the Volkssturm in WWII Germany. During the Vietnam War for US draftees (as we call them) the term was two years, and they received six months of training if they were going to be basic infantry.
    1
  8006. Even back in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, when I started studying physics at university computer science was a major component. I worked in the High Energy Department and there, in addition to lots of physics I learned to code, and I learned a lot of statistics. I had to drop out and with a recommendation from the head of the HEP department, I got a job programming at a statistical consulting firm. I never went back. I eventually got a degree in computer science. I did use my knowledge of physics, mathematics and statistics in a lot of projects over the years. What was interesting was that the department head had a joint appointment with the then new Computer Science Department. As a part of that research, he had developed a pattern recognition system that we used to automate the analysis and measurement of bubble chamber film. Almost all of the PhD graduates that I kept track of got jobs in computing. One of my professors, who should have gotten tenure but didn't, got a job running the CAT scanner division at a large company, also heading up the physics and computing departments of that group. If you look at the analyses being done at places like CERN, the majority of it is engineering, computing and statistics. I would be willing to bet that the pure physics involved is probably no more than 25% of the effort. This is quite similar to what it was when I started.
    1
  8007. My thought exactly.
    1
  8008. Why would you even report the numbers reported by the Kremlin? According to what has been reported, they have shot down all the F-16s that will ever be delivered to Ukraine. They have destroyed all the Abrams tanks delivered and just about everything NATO has sent to Ukraine. Oh yes, and they have killed massive numbers of NATO troops in Ukraine. As President Joe likes to say, come on man!
    1
  8009. The possibility of years? Who are these idiots who say this? While the 2014 occupation of Crimea (and Crimea is a special case) that assumes that the situation will be similar to what has come before. Are the pundits that stupid? Frankly, I would say yes. Don't listen to them. They have no idea. More are they journalist? A real journalist is supposed to report on what he sees. Any editorial commentary detracts from the reporting There are other forums where the journalist's output may be evaluated. but in no case should the journalist offer a judgement. This is what happened to journalism in the U S when mainstream newscasters came out against the war in Vietnam. They may have been correct. On the other hand, it was not their purview. That was when journalism was destroyed. It no longer exists as we assume it.
    1
  8010. Tony, I just saw a video on another channel titled "Now You Won’t Dare Buy Huawei! The New Mate 70 Is Already Exposed for Fraud, and the Design Is Ugly". Don't fear the Huawei!
    1
  8011. The British need to replace the Union Flag with the English flag. England is the core of GB. It has most of the population and economy by far.
    1
  8012. Ben Franklin said "Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy".
    1
  8013.  @gilcostello3316  Definitely. I am a whisky man myself. George Washington distilled rye whiskey because it was the best way to handle his surplus grain. By the way, you can still get that at Mount Vernon, I believe.
    1
  8014.  @gilcostello3316  I was born in Washington, DC. Had friends in the diplomatic corps, so even in the 1970s and beyond we were well supplied with Cubans. My brother and I were into Scotch even before the single malts hit the US. One Christmas my brother got me a good bottle of rye. We went back to his house and almost finished that bottle with several Cubans each. Of course, when i like in Europe, all I smoked was Cubans.
    1
  8015.  @gilcostello3316  Glad to hear you are doing well, and congratulations on the grandchildren. Maybe someday...
    1
  8016. You know the old Soviet saying. They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.
    1
  8017. Wow! You young people these days are almost puritanical. In my day, in my teens, twenties and early thirties, we started with the sex. Sometimes that led to commitment, generally not. You all are going back to the mores of the 1950s. Stunning.
    1
  8018. What about all the books of the Ancient Greeks. I don't think they refer back to the Bible. Don't get me wrong. I read the Bible every day. Two chapters. I had committed to God to do this. At a time when I was not following through on this commitment, Iwas going home from a late class at the catholic university I had been attending. While waiting for the subway a man beside me went down on his knees and asked forgiveness for exactly the issue I had. Needless to say, I have not strayed since. But, back to my original point, there were books contemporaneous with the earliest books of the Bible, which had nothing to do with the Bible, and the people who produced them most likely had no connection with the ancient Israelites.
    1
  8019.  @AL-jb1mh  Well, you have your opinion. But think about this. What about people who drive drunk and kill themselves or others? What about someone who takes hard drugs and overdoses (this toll is huge). So, should we rip apart our economy and society and adversely affect our children's development because we don't want people to die? It is a meaningless statement, and frankly something Dave says he doesn't like. That is virtue signaling.
    1
  8020.  @stunstar4553  That is not the information I have. You may want to update your sources.
    1
  8021.  @duckpotat9818  I knew that. Supply chains are flexible things. I think you will see more moving to India and other places.
    1
  8022. Canada bans private healthcare. What happens, when the wait is too long, they go to the US. Since the vast majority of the population lives within 50 miles of the border, this is practical for individuals. I know, since I did a lot of work in Canada before moving to the UK for a while. The stories people would relate were astonishing to me. Then I experienced the NHS. Fortunately the most egregious situation I saw was that of a neighbor. They had private insurance, and got the issue resolved right away, after spending the night waiting at the hospital and then being told to go home and come back later.
    1
  8023. He is ignorant of our judicial system. Just look at a recent case with a similar trajectory. The Rittenhouse trial was clearly a political one. The mainstream media was all against Rittenhouse. And yet, a proper verdict was rendered. There have been some other, slightly less publicized trials recently that have shown the system to be resistant to this issue. I am wondering why you are having this guy on so much when he is clearly biased. He is, by the way, welcome to his bias.
    1
  8024. Biden has always been a gaff machine. He has also been a liar, which has been proven.
    1
  8025. So, MOND posits that the force of gravity in some cases changes from 1/R2 to 1/R. Why? I ask in all seriousness. What is the mechanism? I don't ask this as a supporter of dark matter or MOND, I am just wondering what the meaning behind this is. It seems like, in both theories, there is just a fitting of the data without any real physical understanding added.
    1
  8026. The Marshall Islands is curious. You know what else is that area of Northern Virginia. don't you?
    1
  8027. It is not really a matter of defunding academia. Those scientists, whether in the private sector or academia, have to come from somewhere. Many of the top universities in the US are private not for profit. Then there are state (I am talking about American states) universities that often started out with a mandate to advance agricultural science. They have obviously grown out of that. Other state universities were targeted in the beginning at engineering and technical training. Even many of the private nonprofits started that way. What I can see happening is that universities will become more focused. Many of the engineering and technical focused ones have gone a bit far afield form their initial mandate. The other thing to understand is that we have too many universities and college grads for the jobs available. China is running into this big time. In the US I have seen figures that show 40% or more of college grads are in jobs that don't require the degree they got at university. That is a colossal waste of resources. All that and I have even touched the issue of funding and useless degree programs. The latter were created to keep enrollment after the baby boom generation moved through. The whole university system in the US was sized to deal with soldiers coming back from WWII and their children. A rational business approach would have dealt with that in a more efficient way. As it is many small liberal arts universities are going out of business. This is actually a good thing. A concurrent trend in the US is all the foreign students. That is another way the US used to keep enrollment up. Does that really help?
    1
  8028. You are soooo right. TV is dead. For one thing, watching anything to a schedule is totally bonkers. For another, the bias is sickening, especially when they claim they know "the truth". I haven't had TV for years.
    1
  8029. Wow, allowing people to pull out of a home purchase without penalty. Who would have thunk it. That is something they should have done at the beginning. Considering China is a one-party state, this move, while good, is years overdue. Is no one thinking these things through in the CCP? I guess the actions of the CCP since the outbreak of COVID clearly indicates the negative. The "three red lines" and its implementation are another good indicator. Also, get rid of the household registration system. You do realize that this is EXACTLY how serfdom worked. I have also seen some characterize it as apartheid.
    1
  8030. I am tired of hearing that inflation is a "tax" on the poor. Mark says that and then goes on to talk about entrepreneurs. That is not "the poor". He also uses the term "tax" incorrectly. We know what a tax is and changing prices, in either direction, are not taxes. What he has done is to use a rhetorical device used by politicians rather than an economic term. Makes one wonder about his qualifications as an academic economist.
    1
  8031.  @TommyTCGT  What does that have to do with anything?
    1
  8032. When Martin Rees talks about the gravitational lensing, he misspeaks. These galaxies do not exert a gravitational force on the light. Light is massless, and gravity is a function of mass. What lensing does is actually bend space.
    1
  8033. Very interesting. In the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, my two best friends were Indian Hindus. They were vegetarians. So, I became one too. One friend's father was a diplomat. He was going back to India, but my friend stayed to study. So, his mother decided to teach us traditional Indian vegetarian cooking. It was so complicated and time consuming (everything from scratch). that we decided to go Japanese Zen Macrobiotic. Brown rice, plus sautéed vegetables. In fact, I got my first wok from my girlfriend for my 20th birthday. I still use that wok, over 40 years later. I was vegetarian for about ten years. Then I started eating meat. In the last five years I have become pescatarian. I eat vegetarian most of the time. The other, I will have some fish. I do eat eggs sometimes. My health has improved greatly by not eating much meat (I will, perhaps once a month). The most important thing I did was to cut out wheat. There are lot of ways to go as far as nutrition is concerned. Some eat only meat. Many of those people have had similar outcomes to mine. What I like is that eating mostly vegetarian is much less expensive. It was when I was young, and a struggling university student, and it is now.
    1
  8034.  @faithfood5042  Good point. Actually, un the West we are seeing vegans taking that attitude. More traditional vegetarians do not.
    1
  8035. Not wearing a burka in public kind of misses the point. My understanding is that women covering up goes back to issues women had going out in public in the prophet's time. So, in private, it would make no sense.
    1
  8036. The decorum thing is a red herring. These are the requirements for being elected to the House of Representatives, from the Constitution: No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen. Similarly, for a Senator: No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen. Notice that there are no educational or other requirements, other than winning election. The Representatives and Senators represent their constituents. That is all. It up to those constituents to determine who represents them.
    1
  8037. Come on man! For China, in its current state, to point to the 2008 financial crisis as an indicator of the problems in the west is just the most incredibly ignorant, or most likely dishonest, thing one could say. It shows a stunning ignorance of the history of the west (these things are not all that uncommon) and really ignores the incredible stupidity of the CCP financial system. The CCP is about to crash, and probably disappear. This is not hyperbolae. There has been so much mismanagement of the economy and outright theft that there is no going back. Marxist ideology is dead. That is why Xi is so reverently trying to bring it back. It reminds me of the situation in the Roman Empire as Christianity was catching on. Roman emperors tried to bring back the pagan beliefs, which had mostly been abandoned. This failed. The parallels are actually freaky. And don't forget the facts. In the US in 2008 the housing market was overbuilt about 2-4%. In China that number seems to about 100%. Nothing more needs to be said.
    1
  8038. The CCP reaction to the joint US-Philippines exercises is sooo childish. Another Chinese commentator had a recent video titled " Strategic Stumbles: China's Wolf Warrior Diplomacy and Low IQ Approach under Xi Jinping". The low IQ part really resonates. I was surprised by the title, as this person is Chinese, and his channel offers serious analysis. The CCP makes a lot of noise about history, especially in regard to the South China Sea. Do they have any idea of the history of the Philippines? Then of course there are the provocations that China and Russia commit in the seas around Japan. As President Joe likes to say: Come on man!
    1
  8039. Rights? Chinese people do not have rights. Courts? The top Chinese court has flatly stated that the role of the courts is not rule of law, but support of the CCP. Protesting to the US Congress? What role does the US have in guaranteeing the rights of Chinese citizens within China? NONE! This is akin to environmental protesters railing against western governments, which have been bringing down CO2 while ignoring the real culprit, China. Meaningless! Come on man!
    1
  8040. I gave this video a like in the first 30 seconds. It just got better from there.
    1
  8041.  @nicolaasstempels8207  Another good example.
    1
  8042.  @marymarlow3646  Such as? What they need is more powerful and advanced weapons. On a purely equal footing with the Russians they would be hard pressed. They would be in a situation much like the Fins in WWII (the Winter War and the Continuation War). The outcome of that was much more like what Russia would like now.
    1
  8043. Everyone keeps complaining about the politicians, but then the populations of Australia and the UK keep voting for them. PAY ATTENTION WHEN YOU VOTE!!!
    1
  8044. Don't compare the Wagner core forces, which are the ones operating now, with the forces Wagner used to take Bakhmut. In the previous actions they used tens of thousands of prisoners, many of which died, to perform their mission. The core Wagner troops are probably better than regular Russian army troops, but they are no supermen. Just look at what the Ukrainians have done to "elite" Russian army troops. I believe you and others reported that in the south "standard" Ukrainian troops surrounded and defeated a whole unit of elite troops.
    1
  8045. To take any of what Putin, or any Russian official, as authoritative is just plain foolish. Add in Russian official media, and you have a total s*#t show. Have you watched any of that? Perhaps you should go back and watch Putin's interview with Tucker Carlson, or his recent 3.5-hour press conference. Is any of that believable? As President Joe would say, "Come on man!". I also have a lot of issue with all these estimates by third party non-governmental organizations. You know, the ones that use "evidence" for tracking how many Russian tanks and armored vehicles have been destroyed. At least they do admit that because they require visual confirmation that their estimates are basically a floor. As for the governmental estimates, these are also on the low end I would posit. We actually have some data points from the Russian side itself, albeit not the official channels. First was Prigozhin's admission of the number of dead suffered by Wagner alone in taking Bakhmut. That was, I believe a, about 20K. Then we have multiple front-line soldiers on Telegram talking about whole units being whittled down to a handful of men. These reports talk about many units being decimated down to well under half their original numbers. If only half of them are true, that is a massive number. I fully expect that the Ukrainian numbers are true, or very close to the truth, in terms of the number of Russian troops killed.
    1
  8046. Love the show. But I have to say that Kevin is totally wrong about working from home and hybrid working models. I have been in all three models (office, work from home and hybrid). They each have their place. The private sector has many different types of job, and many can be done remotely. The public sector has few jobs that can be done remotely, but there are probably some.
    1
  8047. Look at foreign affairs under Trump as compared to Biden (or Obama). If you don't believe things will get better, then you have not been paying attention. Trump has a "different" style and way of expressing himself. I am not a big fan. I am from Washington, DC and the gulf between DC and NYC is large, at least stylistically. But that does not matter. Do people forget about Trump trying to deal with Kim in North Korea? I wonder. He met with him. People were horrified. He tried to negotiate. Issues were not resolved, but Kim was a lot quieter than he has been under the Biden Administration. That is the model people should be looking at. As for Putin wanting to go beyond Ukraine, that is a fantasy. Yes, he wants to, but with what army (or air force or navy). If he tries with the forces he would have at the end of the Ukraine conflict, he would be crushed in a matter of days or weeks. Don't forget airpower. There is a reason the service arm in the US that gets the most funding is the Air Force.
    1
  8048. You are totally correct about Iger being the worst CEO. Doesn't he know he is in the mass market entertainment business? It seems not. Catering to an audience that is a tiny minority is the worst thing I have ever seen. Unless the company gets rid of him NOW and changes direction, it deserves to go under.
    1
  8049. Discovered you can fly a light aircraft remotely? People have been doing such things for decades. In fact, the British were doing this as early as 1941. These were target drones. The switch from target drones to offensive weapons is actually quite trivial. So, this is not something new the Ukrainians are doing. They are having to innovate because of restrictions on using western supplied equipment in attacking Russian territory. In addition, the use of drones as one way delivery systems is not something the US typically has done. The US has provided some "suicide" drones, but these are typically short range. The US would typically use something like a cruise missile. These are much harder to defend against, since they do not rely on a data link to an operator. On the other hand, it seems like this is not an issue against Russia.
    1
  8050.  @memofromessex  The situation I was talking about was, as I mentioned, in the early 2000s. To say that any very large city has "bad" areas is just repeating what everyone knows.
    1
  8051. China and "international law". You have to be kidding me. Just look at the South China Sea and China's actions ignoring the findings of the UNCLOS panel.
    1
  8052. How can you say that this is a conflict more than any other has been fought just as hard with economics than any before it. Are you kidding? You also have NO sense or knowledge of history. Go back and do some reading before you try to explain anything.
    1
  8053. On the mobilization front, Ukraine has already done this. They have many more troops than Russia does now. Considering that the attacking force needs three times the number of troops as the defending force, the Russia would still be hard pressed to get to this number and equip them. So, to put a win in that box is not necessarily reasonable. It would also take a long time, and the Russian equipment available is limited, and almost none of it is the "new" stuff. In the meantime, Ukraine has the West behind it, and they can beef up their forces to a level Russia cannot match. In fact, as the war goes on longer, Ukrainians can be trained in using better Western weapons, which further tilts things in their direction.
    1
  8054. This mania for taking territory is a probably the wrong approach. Have you looked at the villages retaken. They are not really worth anything in a tactical sense. Let me give you an example from WWII. Operation Barbarossa started out with endpoints in mind, but the main concept was to engage and destroy the Soviet military. As long as they stuck to that, they were very successful. Then in subsequent years Hitler got a bug up his butt about gaining or retaining territory. How did that work out? Even in this conflict, Ukraine had pulled back from places like Soledar and Bakhmut when the cost became too high. Prior to pulling back, though, they inflicted massive casualties on the Russians. Even in their counteroffensive in Bakhmut, it seems that I hear lots about various small settlements. I hear about the same ones day after day. They might be significant because there are roads that lead through them. But why do you have to disrupt a road in the town? Anywhere you disrupt it puts an end to its usefulness. I think the Ukrainian army has a tactical problem. Now the question comes up, is that impression real, or is it driven by all the well-intentioned YouTubers using the same maps to convey a picture of the battlefield. First thing I will say is that there is often more emotion than sense. Secondly, doing this on a daily basis is often not the best way to determine what is going on. In war things don't happen on a regular schedule or your personal timetable. Another possibility is that some of this is a clever information op by the Ukranian military and Intelligence services. Who knows. This whole information environment is totally new in modern warfare. I am a fervent supporter of Ukraine and full victory for Ukraine. So, it will be interesting to see how this conflict progresses. Perhaps at the end we will find out what really went on.
    1
  8055.  @preeyakumari-i2q  Precisely! Let's hope it is not too hard on the people of China, although I have little hope for that either.
    1
  8056. At this point to think that the Russians have a lot of choices militarily is just ignoring the facts. The news from the latest attack the Russians have initiated is that they just lost a battalion of armor, including lots of tanks. It looks like they are losing something approaching 1,000 soldiers per day. Their productive capacity for things like tanks is laughable. Add to that the inability to produce the advanced electronics for the tanks, and you have a military that is going backward. We talk all the time about how long it will take to train the Ukrainians on tanks, etc., but what about the Russians? They have two to three weeks to make a breakthrough before the rains. Even Prigozhin has said that to get to the Dnieper would take three years and to take all of the Donbas (DPR and LPR) would take 1.5 to three years. They do not have that kind of time. The Russians getting to Odessa is just laughable.
    1
  8057. It's pronounced "keltic".
    1
  8058. The comparison to Israel is very apt. A lot is made about the population difference between Ukraine and Russia. Egypt and Syria have about 130M+. Israel has fought them both simultaneously several times. Israel has a population of about 9M today. Israel uses US and other western weapons and the Egyptians and Syrians used Soviet weapons in their wars with Israel. One big difference is that Israel has western aircraft in numbers. If Ukraine had western jets from the start, the war would be over.
    1
  8059.  @Kodakcompactdisc  I am not familiar with that emoji. Should I be happy or sad?
    1
  8060.  @Kodakcompactdisc  That is what I thought it might be, but I wanted to be sure. Thanks. I am delighted.
    1
  8061. Mark, I for one support using the money for Ukraine. I wish the US and EU would do more, and I am not only talking funding. That said, I think you are going off the deep end in your comments. Bear with me. First, bringing up the 1940s situation is incorrect. At that time there was a formal war situation in effect. Today, only Ukraine and Russia are formally at war. If those assets were in Ukraine, they would be quite justified in seizing them. Since the money is in countries that are not formally at war, moral questions aside, the situation is not clear. Second, especially in the era of fiat currencies, rules matter. The system lives or dies by these rules, not by popular opinion. Those rules can be changed, but that has to be done in a legal and consistent manner. Third, if one is going to treat money differently in one country based on how that money was obtained in another country, then what do you do about China, or many countries in Africa? Absent legal proceedings in the country where the money was obtained, your argument is specious.
    1
  8062. I hope you realize that the "digital twin" is just marketing hype. This is just simulation. This is also not new. I have personal experience with a couple of instructive examples. In the late 1970s I was working on a satellite. Since there were launch delays, it was possible to test out the control system on the actual article and to identify problems before launch. This was a great idea. Then, for the next project I worked on, Dynamics Explorer (DE), it was decided to build a simulator at the same time the satellite was being built to have the same effect. The operators were trained and the control system tested all before a device was available. This was very successful. I leveraged that experience to move to a simulator company. One of their big product lines was nuclear power plant simulators. After Three Mile Island, it was discovered that most operators were not being trained on simulators reflecting the actual reactor and control room design they were operating. Thus, a big business was born. In this case it was human operators that were trained, but the effect is EXACTLY the same. Out of this it was discovered that the simulators could run the models of the reactors in much better than real time. So, the nuclear regulatory authorities set up a network of simulators to run multiple scenarios of potential disaster situations. The simulations were that good. This was in the very early 1980s. So, this idea is over 40 years old. Frankly, even a PC flight simulator is a "digital twin". Some of these are so good that they help people who want to become actual pilots get started. Of course, the company I worked for also had a big business in flight simulators used to train both commercial and military pilots. That's how they got started, and that was a very long time ago.
    1
  8063. What you all miss is that foreign reporters often mispronounce English words, including names. I like to listen to foreign news sources, having lived overseas and being a bit of a political junkie. I like the different perspectives, even if I do not agree. What does bother me a bit is that I have been exposed to people from around the world since the early 1970s. Many of those I met spoke very good english, even if it was with an English accent. Today, it seems that even for their English language broadcasts, they cannot find those people. As for names that I had trouble with, on was Siobhan. I was an exec with a large company, located in England, and was interviewing a potential internal hire from Ireland. I could not for the life of me figure how to pronounce Siobhan from the spelling. It was quite embarrassing.
    1
  8064. The whiole situation is infuriating. The fact that a sheriff is used to escort kids withing a school is a gross misuse of public funds. Someone ought to file a lawsuit. As I have opined in many of the cases where governments at all levels have not followed the law and have failed to provide the service we are paying for, they should all be replaced.
    1
  8065.  @Sue-bekky  That's is what I was reacting to. I did not say soldiers.
    1
  8066.  @Sue-bekky  You may be right. It certainly hasn't taken them that long. I have to wonder if the Syrian Army has much fight left in them.
    1
  8067. The comment about the statistics in the phone call is attributed to Stalin. I think this was prior to WWII.
    1
  8068. The war in Ukraine is NOT a regime change war. It is just the opposite. That is why people like Tulsi Gabbard are just plain wrong. They equate this conflict to the actual regime change wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
    1
  8069. The mania with trade figures concerning China is just plain silly (trying to keep it clean here). Businesses are much more flexible than countries. There are lots of good examples. One is the trade in iron ore and coal from Australia. As the CCP put restrictions and tariffs on this trade, the companies found other markets, such as India. Don't forget that as "decoupling" or "derisking" moves forward, that capacity that was once in China goes elsewhere and the commodity inputs will follow. Another example is one of the Japanese car companies closing down in China. I think it was Mazda but am not sure. Rather than experiencing a drop in their total output, they just found other markets. A non-China related example is that of all the companies from the US and Europe that were affected by the sanctions in Russia. Their assets there were basically confiscated. As far as I can tell, few, if any, were materially affected. Some had large operations in Russia, but these companies are so big that they absorbed the shock and just went elsewhere. Finally, Taiwan's businesses are flexible and very well developed. They too will find new markets. Foxconn is a great example. They are a valuable partner and have moved production for many of their clients to places like India, Southeast Asia, Mexico and the US among others. TSMC is also building chip plants in other countries on other continents. This reduces their risk and shortens supply lines. Just because trade with China is affected, the Taiwanese companies will adapt. This is what mainland China could have been.
    1
  8070. The Democratic Party has no ideology other than power. The leaders use that power to enrich themselves. Trust me, I have known several over the years. They make policy decisions based on polls, not the needs or desires of the people. Just look at what they have done in Ukraine. Joe never elucidated a strategy. When he was finally forced to produce one, he made it classified so the people still don't know what it is. If the idea was to help Ukraine win, then he failed by starving them of weapons, slow walking delivery at every turn. If it was just to "survive" then he has contributed to killing a lot of Ukrainians. Russia has a demographic problem, but so does Ukraine. It is not only Ukraine. Look at what he has done in the Middle East. He was trying to get the Hamas supporter vote over a real ally. It failed in Michigan, by the way. What about the Pacific. If we spent the money on reshoring things like chip production at the pace and scale necessary, then we would have a lot more room to maneuver. The whole Biden administration has been one disaster after another. Is it any wonder that people wanted Trump back?
    1
  8071.  @AstroGremlinAmerican  I am duly chastened. Thank you for your wisdom.
    1
  8072. So, it is news now that one Twitter user says something. This is disgusting. I generally like this channel, so understand where I am coming from. I have the same complaint about any supposedly serious news channel reporting on what a random user says on Twitter.
    1
  8073.  @powershift2025  Sadly, yes. It is the people of China I grieve for.
    1
  8074. This whole thing about shooting the wounded is not surprising. Remember the videos that have Putin talking to the mothers who have lost sons in the war. He said, and I am paraphrasing, that we all die sometime, so it is better to die fighting for your country. There is something radically wrong with the Russian psyche.
    1
  8075. The hundred-year marathon? Give me a break. Japan had such plans. The business school professors loved them. How has that worked out? Xi and the CCP can't even plan their way out of a financial crisis with real estate. They actually caused the crisis. This refers both to the buildup of the crisis and the attempted solution. These are not smart people.
    1
  8076.  @trouserarmadillo8616  No, he got it right.
    1
  8077.  @amajrae  See my response to @Gothiclovesick.
    1
  8078. Um, have you seen the data? Mask wearing was not effective.
    1
  8079. I have also been against this for a long time. I happen to know where I come from. I don't need a DNA test to tell me that. Most people are in the same boat. I always said that the NSA will have your data as soon as you take a test. I also used to joke with friends about their remote start for their cars. Now I have one. All these conveniences come with enhanced exposure, either to our government, bad actors, or foreign governments. On the other hand, there is so much data out there that they would need more than the computing power of the world today to do something with it. As far as medical privacy, give me a break. Once, when I was about 15, one of my father's friends asked him about how he was and we went into a full medical history. This was just a casual conversation, which is why it has stuck with me over 50 years later. The whole medical privacy movement was all about AIDS, and the fact that mainly homosexual men got it. That is what it is all about. Most people are very free with their ailments. Many people get annual medical assessments, sponsored by their companies. When I got a vasectomy I asked the urologist about the various procedures that my friends had. He was astounded. He didn't think anyone would talk about He was wrong. Everyone talked about it. Medical privacy is a myth. Most people do not have strange ailments. Most people do not care.
    1
  8080. Don't overplay the drones. In the conflict you mention, the Russians used advanced technology to take down drones, and they were involved in a peripheral way. The Russians, and Iranians, have taken down US drones. Drones are great against second and third tier enemies. In a first-tier conflict. they will be taken out very early.
    1
  8081. If you notice, the largest group are coastal support ships. No one is interested in invading China. What the heck would you do with it if you were successful. China has a built in defense against actual invasion. They have no significant natural resources others need and have a large population. Why would anyone bother? To draw a real comparison between the US and China one would have to include the US Coast Guard cutters. The US has 243 of those.
    1
  8082. I know this is an old video, and this comment may not be seen by many. On the other hand, the statement at the beginning that it is intended for the watcher to make their own assessment is disingenuous. For one thing, this is history, and we know the results. There is no "judgement" of the individual watcher. That is just bunk! Stop patronizing us. You, as a historian of these things, have much more knowledge of the issue than almost all of your viewers.
    1
  8083. Everything I see from the traditional media, including the broadcast, cable, and even august publications like the Wall Street Journal, is similar. These outlets and those that support them, it has become clear, are the keepers of the status quo. Fox is not too caught up in it, but you still get the questions when someone (Trump) does something different that presume the status quo. I hear media reports about Trump and what he is doing then I hear the President in his own words, and it is two different stories. The media, instead of reporting what is being done questions it. Who the heck are these people to question it? Do people really want to support the status quo in foreign policy, border policy, economic policy, etc., etc., etc.? Is that the hill you want to die on? Really?
    1
  8084. Not as truthful as they should be? Are you kidding? Have you seen Shoigu's latest statement? Come on now.
    1
  8085.  @headoverheels88  That is very well put, especially for one so young. Have you read Peter Zeihan's books? I read them recently. He is very pessimistic about China. He does not expect it to be a going concern by the end of this decade. Now, over the last year, it all seems to be happening in real-time. He may have been too optimistic in his timing.
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  8086.  @knowledgehunter_  I thought the same. Do you know what it means?
    1
  8087.  @irwan3064  How so? I have dealt with a lot of Indian companies and have not noticed this.
    1
  8088.  @deepblue3682  That is not what I have heard or read. Indian fertility is above replacement rate as far as known sources have reported. So, I don't know where you get this information. I get it from Indian sources. As far as the poverty rate is concerned, China's is over 40%, as reported by their own leaders. So, India is far ahead of China. The fact is that China is on a downward path, and this reported by their own government. India seems be managing their situation much better.
    1
  8089.  @rupeshkushwaha1159  What is your source?
    1
  8090.  @PETE4955  That is true. On the other hand, it also means fewer people to staff its industries. Another issue with demographic decline is an aging population and fewer people of productive age to take care of those people. That is the issue China is dealing with.
    1
  8091. China is not "ready" for a trade war or any other type of war. Their economy is in a shambles. Frankly, by western standards their banking system is insolvent. Their property sector (previously 25% or so of their economy) is irretrievably broken. Considering that real estate is the majority of investment for individuals, their people are being devastated financially. Their government borrowing is much higher as a percentage of GDP than America's. Their military is a joke. It is a "toilet paper dragon", or perhaps a "tofu dragon". On top of that their belt and road initiative, on which they have spent $1T (almost all loans) is in big trouble. In addition to the tofu nature of much of the construction I have seen reports that 40% or more of the loans are nonperforming. They talk big but have little or nothing to back it up with.
    1
  8092. "The presidential vehicle". Really? Does having control of the "presidential vehicle" make one a president? We need some more outsiders in Washington. We also need fewer lawyers in elected positions. I say this who has had close relatives who were lawyers and very good friends who are lawyers.
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  8093. You must be kidding! This is the old Silk Road. Why do you think that the Silk Road disappeared as the major trade route from east Asia to Europe? First, was cost and efficiency. Travel by water, especially of bulk cargos, is ALWAYS going to be much cheaper than travel by land. In addition, the routes shown have multiple transport types that must be switched between. This also lowers efficiency. That's the economic side. On the political side, some of the countries shown on your map are the ones who heavily taxed Silk Road traffic as it went through their territory. This actually is what spurred the west Europeans to look for a sea route to east Asia. In addition, while avoiding "pariah" states such as Russia and Iran this new route goes through a number of problematic countries. Additionally, China is allied with the problematic states of Russia and Iran. These comments just refer to the beginning of the video. The lack of historical perspective and understanding of current political realities is stunning.
    1
  8094. Tony, thanks for the extra effort. These are indeed important issues. The PLA needs to be careful. Not only are their actions provocative, and under international law, illegal, but they are in no shape to challenge western militaries. It has long been known that most of their equipment is copied, generally without authorization, and it of questionable quality. On top of that, they have not fought a war for decades and the corruption in their officer corps is legion. Now, Xi is getting pushback from his generals. There is even a piece critical of Xi in the PLA newspaper. This is the stuff of military coups. Don't forget that the US is not, and never has been, a threat to China militarily. In fact, it is the US that was the major source of support to China during WWII including the several years before being drawn in itself. The major territorial threat to China is, and always has been, Russia. India is also another threat vector, but this primarily because of Chinese provocations and the utter mess left behind by, of course, Imperial Britain.
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  8095. I always thought that Wales was a part of the UK. Actually, I am certain of it. Of course, for Italy to invade Spain, or Australia to invade New Zealand, they would have to cross a large expanse of water. Italy could try to go through France, but I don't think the French would take too kindly to that. Maybe if you had Italy invading France, or Sweeden attacking Norway it might make more sense. That said, Russia does not have the resources to prosecute a "100-year conflict". You need people for that, and Russia is rapidly running out of men of military age. Their demographics are very poor, and those damn military age men keep leaving the country. As one analyst puts it, this was the last time that Russia could even contemplate an invasion. No, the most likely outcome now is a collapse of the empire. I predict that the next crisis will be Chechnya. If that blows up, and there is reason to believe it might soon, then the whole thing falls apart. Perhaps the best thing to do is to let this drag out. Russia will exhaust itself.
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  8096.  @bleepblop7394  Where did you hear that?
    1
  8097. To say that a private platform has the right to decide is on it, is just plain wrong. That would mean that you would allow any private business, such as a store or restaurant, open to the public, that could arbitrarily exclude people. That is not the case in US as far as I can tell. In fact, allowing that would possibly lead to discrimination on the basis of race, for example.
    1
  8098.  @djbogz1921  You didn't read what I wrote, did you? Private stores have no right to exclude people for their views, race, etc. Why should on-line companies have the right to do so? If you support this, then you support segregation and racism.
    1
  8099.  @djbogz1921  Some have been fined for doing so.
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  8100.  @scottgordon1781  In the past I would have a scotch, but I stopped drinking. As for the something else to smoke, I haven't done that for 40+ years. My bat is probably some sort of brown bat. We don't have caves where I am in the Midwest, so these are bats that live in trees.
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  8101.  @scottgordon1781  It seems we are the same ago. I never got into cigarettes but started smoking cigars at 10. My uncle would have these great parties. There was lots of booze and the refrigerator filled with beer. There was also a big wooden bowl filled with cigars. We would wait until the adults were on their second drink (did not take long) and then sneak beer and cigars and go up to my cousins' room. For gin, I liked Plymouth gin. When I lived in the UK I was not far away from Plymouth. Got introduced to it on a three master at an event they hosted in the harbor. Had a great talk with the Lord Mayor and some other interesting people.
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  8102. What is this concern for the "global south"? Are they a threat? Are they potential allies of China and Russia? Get a grip. One of the best things to happen is the Chinese Belt and Road to discredit China in the global south. These projects are failing. Chinese financing is driving corruption and destroying economies. What you need to look at is not number or countries or population, but economic and military power. In those term the global south is very weak. That has been the case for centuries and does not look to change. China is quickly running out of money. The global south will soon welcome back US dollars. Otherwise, they will sink further and further into poverty. Plus, the Europeans, primarily, left these countries, especially in Africa, with massive internal ethnic and tribal problems with the way borders were drawn. So, this, to my mind, is just something that pundits like to talk about because it is something new. It gets them more business.
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  8103. I am here in the Chicago area and we have not had excessive heat. In fact, it has been mild. We have had very few very hot days. I mention this because you mention climate change. Don't forget, climate is a measure of the global conditions. Weather is a measure of local conditions, which vary widely by location and over time.
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  8104. Sal, you are sadly uninformed on geopolitical issues. First, what choice do the US and UK have besides military action in this area. You are so worried about commerce, which I get, that you totally ignore the political issue. International commerce depends on military power. It always has. Second, and related, is the Chinese issue. China is allied with Iran. So, of course they are going to go through. Their trade with Russia is increasing (although their overall trade is not), and Russia is also allied with Iran. This is not something the US and other western nations could emulate.
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  8105. Tulsi is someone I do like and agree with on a lot of things. This is not one of them. She is short sighted on the strategic issues at play here and on the obligations the US took on with Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union. As for the nuclear issue, this has come up several times in the past and been very close. During the Vietnam War there was talk about the US nuking Haiphong Harbor to stop Soviet weapons flow into the country. She really needs to get some historical perspective.
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  8106.  @rupamtiwari8031  That is a very good point. The UN does not seem to do this kind of fact finding. After all, it is not a government and has no actual powers. Remember, laws only have an effect when there is a police power to enforce them. The UN does not have that. The UN is basically a joke. It is really no better than the League of Nations. The League of Nations was the brainchild of Woodrow Wilson, the American president. The US Senate did not pass the treaty that established it, so the US was never a member. The UN was meant to perform a similar function, but it has really not. Look at the history. The partition of Korea and Vietnam was a UN action. The mandates in West Asia and the Middle East were League of Nations and UN actions. The Korean and Vietnam Wars were UN sanctioned and involved many countries. Even the Gulf War (expelling Iraq out of Kuwait) was UN sanctioned. We should stop funding this abomination and use the money to really help people in need.
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  8107.  @karsan6018  True. I still stand by my previous comment. If there is even an appearance of conflict, then the party under suspicion should be suspended until they can be shown to be clear of any accusation. A suspension is not permanent. If Russia can be shown to be adhering to the rules and norms, then they will be let back in. Frankly, I don't expect that to be the case. But, at least it is a possibility.
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  8108.  @karsan6018  Not sure of what you mean. Of the three you mention, only China is actively involved in human rights violations at the government level. What Russia is doing now is much different from what, for example, China is doing. The difference is that China is dong this to their own citizens. What Russia is doing is to attack another sovereign nation. I don't understand why you include why you include the US with Pakistan and China. When Pakistan and China have to contend with massive inflows of immigrants, then you can talk about them together. Otherwise, you are just talking crap. You are obviously a shill for the authoritarian Russian state.
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  8109.  @itsmevaibhav7338  I respect India for its non-aligned policy. On the other hand it seems to be aligning with Russia. Not sure if that is really the case, but that is what it sems like from outside.
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  8110.  @karsan6018  The Gulf War to liberate Kuwait was sanctioned by the UN and many nations participated in significant ways. Also, the US stopped when Kuwait was liberated. The mission was clear, and no one went beyond it. The invasion of Afghanistan is one I support. They had been harboring the terrorists that perpetrated 9/11. The Iraq War was not, in my mind, justified. I have a relative, by marriage, who was the head of intelligence for the German Army at the time. We discussed this. He was quite clear that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons, and their other chemical and biological capabilities had been degraded. On the other hand, they were the first country, since WWI, to use biological and chemical weapons. First against the Iranians, then against their own Kurdish population. I still think that war was a mistake. Pakistan, like Iran, is a terrorist supporting state. I agree with you there. US support for them is a mistake, in my estimation.
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  8111. Adam you are wrong as to why we watch sports. We watch them because they are unscripted and the outcome is always in doubt. In fact, many do not watch when the event's outcome is not in doubt. Sports is one of the only things we have where this is true.
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  8112. I have been wondering when the UA would do something like this. Both north and south attack vectors are salients. These could also be attacked from the side away from Adviivka.
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  8113. Metatron, just before moving to England for a bit I was talking to a friend who was from there. She called it "the land of the idiot gardeners". What she meant was that one didn't have to know anything about gardening to be successful at it there. We ended up with a house with a large, enclosed garden and it was overflowing with flowers, trees, etc.
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  8114. Jake, you are so biased it is not even funny. Lots of people, including most of the retired military leaders commenting on this have said precisely the same thing. They, and the speaker, are correct. Get your facts straight. The reason the strategy and goals are so important is that they determine what support will be needed, both in level and specifics. This can then be debated and agreed upon. The administration has been supporting Ukraine in dribs and drabs, and this is not driven by Congress. The current administration position seems to be to give Ukraine only enough to fend off Russia. It is the administration that is contributing to the stalemate in Ukraine. So, you need to get off your high horse and pay attention to the facts.
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  8115. The Israelis blew up walkie talkies, not cell phones. Iran would never take in the Palestinians because most of them are Sunnis. One thing you have to ask yourself is how far has diplomacy gone in resolving the issues in the world today. Obama was a big proponent of diplomacy. How did that go with Iran. Joe Biden's administration is just a continuation of the Obama administration. Look at all the retreads (Jake Sullivan comes to mind). How well has diplomacy and "international law" done in the South China Sea? How about diplomacy in Afghanistan? What about Ukraine and Georgia? To quote President Joe himself, "C'mon man". By the way, you need to let the beard get a bit thicker.
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  8116. Does Biden even have a foreign policy agenda? He just seems to react.
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  8117.  @JohnJaneson2449  Thanks. That clears things up.
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  8118.  @codyshi4743  You totally missed what I was saying about China and the Middle East. Because they have a similar history vis-a-vis the colonial powers and borders is not the type of connection I was talking about. Also, I talked about the situation in my comment, so you haven't added anything there. As for China being diverse and having so many ethnic groups, that is a matter of perspective. At least 90% of the Chinese population is in one ethnic group, the Han. That would not be considered very diverse in most places. As for the struggle being like Iraq, I don't see it. Iraq has basically two ethnic groups, Arabs and Kurds. Among the Arabs there is a split between Sunni and Shia religious groups. There is nothing like that in China. Basically, China tends to split on regional lines. There are three sort of exceptions, but in terms of population these are not very significant and are also geographic. One is the western area of Xinjian. Another is Inner Mongolia. The third is Tibet.
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  8119.  @longdragon88  What type of bot are you? If you were a person you would back up your claim with a real argument addressing something specific that was said. What is ridiculous? If you have something to contribute, we all could learn something. As it is you are basically showing that you operate at the level of a five year old. Actually, when my kids were five, they would have done better. So, let's go back to toddler. Your statement also points to a low education level or to a very poor education if at a higher level. Such comments/argument would never have been considered appropriate at any educational institution I am aware of. For one thing, you have no idea of what I know about China. I have no idea what you know, assuming you are not a bot. On a platform like this you have to address the ideas expressed. Your assumptions about another's knowledge are totally inappropriate. Statements like yours are an unfortunate side effect of social media. Like I said, you could be a bot considering that you repeated the same thing to two people. Between bots and people operating at the level of a small child, the usefulness of platforms like this are diminished.
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  8120. On the WWSD rifle, it is interesting. For a civilian with a semi-auto, the lightweight barrel makes complete sense. The M16A2 had a heavier barrel because of issues with full auto fire. Of course, the M16A2 was three round burst because of issues with troops wasting ammo. This was especially true when the majority of troops were conscripts. I actually was working with an ex-Army officer, a West Point grad, who told me some interesting stories. He had people under his command who were from mob families. They joined the military to get the training. They would often fire their M6A1s full auto in extreme situations. They were great when you wanted heavy covering fire. For civilians, with semi-auto rifles, the light barrels are the way to go. There is no downside. My AR15A2 came originally with a heavy barrel, since it was bought under the assault weapon ban. I later converted it to the original barrel configuration, which dropped a pound off the weight, added the threaded barrel and bayonet lug.
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  8121. So, if true, this will be an incredibly diverse cabinet. Liz would also be the third female PM. How many has Labor had (either PM or leader while in opposition)? None! The Tories have a very diverse senior leadership, and many are impressive. Can't say the same for Labor.
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  8122. The Blackhawk war was fought in Illinois. Black Hawk crossed the Mississippi into Illinois. Iowa contained a lot of Indian territory at the time. The style of war memorials these days is to list the people from the town who died in war, by war. I live in a city that is part of the Chicago area, and the first name listed is gentleman who died in the Black Hawk War. This is true of monuments in many other towns in the whole of northern Illinois.
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  8123. @Rosa-x3y1n That will be epic. Solar panels and wind turbines are notoriously difficult (impossible?) to recycle.
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  8124. Just another comment. You talk about the people in authoritarian regimes not being able to change things. You ignore history, especially in Russia. In 1917 it really was a people's revolution against an authoritarian regime. Don't forget, the Czar was an absolute monarch. In the breakup of the Soviet Union, it was the people who precipitated that event. There was no overt external force leading to it. The people got fed up. That is likely to happen in Russia today. The sanctions are putting their economy back to the Soviet level. Actually, the situation is analogous.
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  8125. Wait a minute there. At 1:00 you state that everything in the "world" is made up of 25 particles. What about dark matter? What is it made of? Can a dark matter particle, usually called a WIMP, be made up of some combination of these 25 particles? Considering that dark matter is much more prevalent than "normal" matter, how can you make a statement like this? Physics has indeed lost its way.
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  8126. Kamala Harris is actually less popular than Dick Channey, the VP under George W. Bush. And Cheeney actually shot one of his "friends".
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  8127. "Is this how we treat human beings?" China is a communist country. Of course, this is how they treat human beings. What next? Forced impregnation. Don't count it out. People should know what the system they live under is about. China wants to export this to the world. Sort of like the Soviets. Will there be the same outcome?
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  8128. James, actually it was Woodrow Wilson who talked about self-determination in his 14-points in 1918. That makes the concept at least 106 years old. One could also make the case that the American revolution, about 250 years ago was about self-determination.
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  8129.  @pio4362  You are applying contemporary norms to the past. That is both intellectually dishonest and silly. There are no "absolutes" in foreign relations. Do you know the reason why? Think about it in an objective sense. You might learn something.
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  8130. This harkens back to the 1970s. i worked at NASA. I can't remember the number of times were were sent home, or to our off-site offices, because of bomb threats. Palestinians, Black Panthers, left wing extremists and right wing extremists. This is nothing new. We equate periods of relative calm with the norm, but that is not really the case. These things come in waves.
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  8131.  @johnpaullyle9995  👍(I just figured out how to use emojis here)
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  8132.  @blisterfingers8169  Didn't know about the bookmarks. Not that I will need that now. Thanks for clarifying.
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  8133. What do you assume the inflation rate is? The "official" rate is, if I recall correctly, around 8%. This is belied by the central bank's interest rate. Generally, when interest rates are used to tamp down inflation they should be at about the rate of inflation or just above it. So, why is the central bank setting the rates at three times the rate of inflation? The answer is that the inflation rate is probably at about the interest rate. So, are the workers keeping up?
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  8134. There are alternatives to China. Some are even in Asia. By the way, Chinese labor costs have already become uncompetitive.
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  8135. Brian is wrong. It is not primarily, if at all, an issue with Zalenski's conduct in the meeting. It is about policy. Zalenski's policy of basically not negotiating with Russia in the US framework without preconditions is totally at odds with American policy.
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  8136. The Border Patrol Agents should start resigning.
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  8137. Peter, in what way were those treaties "imposed"? Who imposes treaties on the US or USSR/Russia? Was it just a slip of the tongue? It is important. Heck, the President of the US can't even "impose" treaties on the US. From Wilson and his League of Nations to the Iran nuclear deal, Presidents have negotiated treaties which have not been ratified. Just from the examples I give here, these are often significant. Just look at some of the international treaties/agreements/institutions the US is not a signatory to or a part of. Two of the biggies are the International Criminal Court (ICC) and UNCLOS. Who's imposing on the US? Inquiring minds want to know. Those treaties you list at the beginning as being "imposed" were actually very useful to the US. The missiles were based there, at least in part, to push the Soviets toward negotiation, or if the Soviets refused, to provide the necessary deterrent. That was successful. This is a case where the very same thing seems to be happening. The INF Treaty passed by a wide margin in the US Senate (93-5). That was in mere six years before the breakup of the Soviet Union. Then you had a Soviet leadership that was trying to reform itself in an effort to stay relevant and keep their country together. Of course, they failed.
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  8138. An investment "system"! My mother, a housewife with high school educations, also had "systems". Actually, she was very fond of the word. I worked, at the time she started talking this way, on satellites, so I found it very amusing.
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  8139. You show black people talking about change. When will they actually vote for their own interests, and not the party line? Black America has been ill served by the Democratic Party, but they keep voting for them. Trump did more to improve Black lives than any other president. They didn't vote for him, but it did not matter. To him, they were Americans, and improving their lives was a part of his program. And yet, they voted foe Biden. How stupid can you be?
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  8140. The second segment is very interesting and enlightening. I just watched a video on the channel Lei's Real Talk titled "Why are Chinese officials so corrupt?". I think it meshes exactly with what is contained here. I actually referenced this video in a comment to that video.
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  8141. I would like to see some information on heat pumps for houses with forced air heating and cooling. That is actually the norm in my experience. So, all the talk about the heat exchangers (radiators) is irrelevant to me (and lots of Americans). I mention this because I am considering replacing my HVAC system. It is the original one. I could just get it cleaned and tuned as usual. It seems to work fine for me, but it is not very high efficiency. The house is well insulated. I am looking at a heat pump because I am slowly going all electric. Once I do that, I am considering going solar.
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  8142. Why do all these reporters keep mentioning China when talking about Ukraine. It is a war now. It is not a geopolitical dance. Let's hear about what is going on in Europe. China invading Taiwan is a totally different thing from Russia invading Ukraine. I mean this as far as the military situation. So, to summarize, talking about Asia does nothing to inform us about Europe. It is a lot more complicated than Xi and Putin.
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  8143. I am just reacting to the title of the video. I will watch it at a later date. Who is this Canadian to be passing judgement on an American President? What cheek. There are only four requirements to be President of the United States. 1) Be a natural-born citizen of the United States. 2) Be at least 35 years old. 3) Have been a resident of the United States for 14 years. 4) Win a majority in the Electoral College, The first three are from the US Government website (based on the Constitution). A minute or less would be all one needs to find that out. As for "illegal behavior" that is just a plain slur. It is stupid and offensive to Americans. Disgusting.
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  8144. The question asked at about 8:36 made me laugh. The answer, of course, is yes. The clue is in the name of the governing party, Chinese COMMUNIST Party (emphasis mine). The individual is just a part of a collective for which they are just cogs in the system. This is the case of all collectivist systems, be they communist of fascist. Frankly, in the life of the individual, those are hard to tell apart.
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  8145. Zaporizhzhia makes the most sense. The fortifications on the left bank of the Dnipro are problematic for Russia. This area is low lying swamp and desert. It would be hard to hold. Breaking the Russian forces in two would also cause massive problems for Russia. The forces to the West would be completely cut off and could be reduced at leisure with artillery. The forces to the north are not much better off. Those at the front line will have supply problems. They are also facing strong Ukranian formations. As soon as they tried to attack the flanks of an incursion, they would be attacked by those forces themselves. That is why they have been creating defensive lines well in from the current front. They know they will be driven back. Don't forget, Ukraine has 70K troops that were attacking Kherson. These are now freed up for the main thrust and are not the only troops available. From what we have seen, Ukraine is very good tactically and strategically. They also have assistance in intelligence and planning from the US and other NATO allies. They have shown exemplary infosec and deception capabilities. They are the pros, and the Russians are the amateurs. This is not WWII. In that conflict, Russia had massive support from the West. Now they are shut down by the West, and even the Chinese are not really stepping in to help. In fact, I have seen speculation from geopolitical analysts that the Chinese are waiting for Russian military power to be decisively defeated which would allow them to take over the Russian far east, which they lay claim to.
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  8146. Back in the third quarter of the last century of the last millennium, I was a teenager tooling around Greece one summer, as one does. On one island I had a deep-dish pizza that I think had a crust more like the one you describe from the 1940s. It was more "bread like" and not crumbly at all. It was divine. I don't remember which island it was, and of course, which restaurant, unfortunately.
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  8147.  @InfoSopher  Yes, it would be interesting to know what the effect of inflation and prices are. The same with imports. Last year, for example, commodity prices were relatively high. Oil, coal and iron ore have come down in price. What is the relative volume?
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  8148. I am a big fan of Gen. Hodges. I especially like that he brings in the historical aspect when analyzing the situation. That is important. So many in the press and the commentariat are either poorly so informed or have an agenda, that we rarely get anything useful out of them. On that general note, everything from AI to big data (remember that?) to EV batteries to almost anything that is significant in the economy or politics is more complex and has more history than the commentators consider. That is to their detriment and to ours as consumers of information. Just a note on the whole idea of, in war, a technology eliciting a response, then a response to a response might be illustrative. When I worked in the aerospace and defense sector we were dealing with electronic countermeasures (ECM). Then there were countermeasures to the countermeasures (ECCM). Then there were... You get the idea. We stopped adding the C's.
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  8149. This woman is fantastic! She is doing something great.
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  8150.  @SP321-z8u  If you hadn't noticed, MAGA is a working-class movement. Get some education.
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  8151.  @Dreamhelmet  Wow! hadn't heard about that. Fertility clinic is the answer. Artificial insemination. Why didn't they just adopt?
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  8152. What? Harry Potter not real? I will have to revise my understanding of the world.
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  8153. To base an understanding of morality or reality on science is a bit odd. Science is the description of the natural world, of what is. The scientific method is dependent on being able to do experiments that tend to verify a hypothesis. There is no absolute proof in science. That point was made clear to me by my physics professors at university. One of them even told me that we could find out is all bulls*it tomorrow. We don't expect to, but that is a possibility. Just look at the quantum realm Mr. Peterson mentions. We have a well-established theory that is very accurate called the Standard Model (SM). On the other hand, the scientific community involved in the fundamentals of physics is constantly searching for an alternative. The main reason is that it doesn't tell us "why". Are these the people who are going to be able to tell us about human morality and ultimate meaning? Their claim is that science is all one needs. Is that credible? On the largest scales we have cosmology which is not at all like the normal physics we are used to doing. The problem is that most people seem to think they are the same. The reality is that cosmology is more like anthropology or archaeology. There are no experiments we can do to prove any of the extant theories. In the latter two, a newly discovered bone fragment or pottery shard could upend the whole structure (it often does). It is a similar story with cosmology. Just look at the history of cosmology. I did once in our department library. There were lots of books there with theories which were proven to be bullsh*it, or so it seems. The funny thing is that every once in a while, some of them seem to come back. What we do in cosmology is to create simulations that embody our theories. These simulations make many assumptions. We use observations of the cosmos, but we know those are not, and may never be, totally accurate and we know that they are not complete. The very early universe we cannot detect. In just a very short time the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a totally new and amazing instrument, has upended many of the old assumptions. We see many phenomena that the simulations seem to indicate should not be possible. What I am trying to get across is that science is never settled. To say it should be the basis of human morality is to ask it to do something it was never intended to do and is indeed incapable of doing. Science, even fundamental physics, cannot, by its very nature, tell one why what is described is. Now one is in the realm of metaphysics.
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  8154. Mahyar, the House of Lords issue is driven by the need to repair the current Houses of Parliament building. So, if they are going to have to move anyway, why not put them somewhere else where there are existing government facilities? There has bee lots of talk about the over centralization of England, including the government, in London. Even in the US government departments are sometimes moved out of Washington.
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  8155.  @SaintFacetious  Who knows. It was definitely arsenal restored.
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  8156. Jake, I am fairly certain that there has never been a time when the US House of Representatives has not had a speaker. Look it up. If there is an attempt to oust McCarthy, then what will happen is that the Democrats might have a say in who the next speaker will be. It could be their guy if the Republicans are that stupid. It would only take seven Republicans to become so upset with the situation within the party for this to happen. Not really likely, but possible. This is not a European parliamentary system. The government does not fall with a vote of no confidence. The way it works is that the majority party caucus hashes it out before the vote on the floor. It may be acrimonious, but someone will become the speaker. This is just politics. It is especially the case when the majority is slim. Even Nancy Pelosi had challengers when she was in the majority by only a slim margin. What Biden is calling for now is something he should have done a long time ago. He has not really shown leadership on this whole issue. He has not laid out a concrete goal, such as helping Ukraine defeat Russia. He has never made that the actual policy of the US Government. He has said some things but has never gone that far. That is why we have all these little bills in Congress. On an issue like this it is really for the executive to lead. It is time to get some education on the issue.
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  8157.  @Topagendadolla  That is true. What we need is a rational engineering approach. Today, any solution will require a mix of wind, solar and fossil fuels. When I saw engineering approach, I mean setting goals (requirements) that are achievable. Then let the engineers design the system with what is available. Those goals have to include not only emission targets, but reliability and resiliency as well. After all, what you pay for in your electric bill is not the kilowatt hours, but their reliable delivery to your premises.
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  8158. Kevin, the Golden Share is no secret. If you had to get that from Lindsey Graham then you are not very well informed about China. Good luck dealing with them.
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  8159. I am not sure about your characterization of people not supporting the war. Every indication is that the Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine dehumanize the Ukrainians, both soldiers and civilians. There is little indication that the Russian populace does not support the war. Modern wars are fought by populations. Just look at the Palestinians. No matter how you come down on the Palestinian question surveys done of Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza still show a massive support for the killing and murder of October 7. You probably represent a small minority in Russia. Whether it is because of propaganda or sincere feelings, or a combination of the two, it still exists.
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  8160. Don't overstate how much money Russia has. For now, they are selling their oil at break-even rates, meaning no profit or contribution to the treasury. At their current rate of spending the government will likely run out of money by the end of the year. I wonder what will happen in Chechnya then.
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  8161. You are correct that some of us will take these statistics with a bit of skepticism. That actually would be an understatement. In addition, don't forget what the PMI measures. It is a month-by-month measure of what the purchasing manager being surveyed perceives, based on the previous activity, the direction of activity is. It is not a measure of the economy. It is just one of many data points that is used to predict a possible trend. It also, as far as I can tell, does not differentiate between industries, or size of company. Thus, it is highly sensitive to the selection criteria. The PMI is also only a prediction of a trend, not an actual measure of production. It is also not a measure of utilization. It is also a lot like percentages in general. It depends on what you choose as a base. A company that has been experiencing shrinking orders for months sees a small uptick in orders this month. They are now in the plus column. Their utilization may still be very low. They may still be losing money. I wonder what the economists use in their predictions of what the PMI will be. Are they just looking at some general trends or are they making predictions about each answer and running the numbers. That would be good to know. It is also important because my impression is that most economists and analysts are seemingly surprised in their predictions, and they are often wrong. This applies to PMI, stock prices, economic growth, etc. For example, with stock prices, how many times have you seen large stock moves when a company reports, and the result does not match the "consensus predictions"? Think about it. I will have to do a study on this. Back to the veracity of the figures, there is little evidence I have seen to support such a view. The property crisis is causing an underutilization in the steel, concrete and related industries. The reports of steel mills and even intermediaries, having difficulties or even going out of business are fairly common. The Li-ion battery companies are cutting back production. Solar panel manufacturing is slowing down (it is grossly overbuilt), as are all the parts of the ecosystem that feed it. Some of the largest players have paused production. If I recall correctly, one announced a pause for six months.
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  8162.  @YourHineyness  Well said. And, no, I don't think there would be any experts left.
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  8163. Oh, I think your hopes about the old days not being back will be dashed. Cultural Revolution II is right around the corner.
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  8164. I thought Trump didn't like black people.
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  8165. Don't be daft. I have seen lots on YouTube. If that is their idea of a blackout, then, as usual, they are not very good at it.
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  8166. Peter makes some good points. What a lot of people forget is that the Japanese, in their heyday when everyone thought they were going to overtake the US, invested in US companies and then shut them down and moved them to back to Japan. China really cannot do that these days. Fast forward to today (oh, no, a Peterism) and the Japanese are building plants in the US. One might also consider the Japanese investing in US properties. They really screwed up there. They bought signature properties at very high prices, and then when their economy started to tank, they had to sell them, back to Americans, at rock bottom prices. We should be vigilant, but most of this hysteria is, indeed, overblown.
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  8167. A lot of dissembling is what I heard. In what scenario does Assad remain in power?
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  8168. Good video, but I take issue with your use of the word "unbelievable". Just saying.
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  8169. China is toast. Even Apple has announced that they are looking for manufacturing locations outside of China. They are ramping up production in India, which currently makes about 4%, to a goal of 25%, in a couple of years. They are looking at Vietnam. Foxconn is ramping up some form of manufacturing in Mexico. I don't know if it is Apple related. The type of stuff China does is low-end assembly. Just look at the recent problems at the largest Foxconn plant. Many of the people who left walked, some for a couple of days, back to their villages. These are rural peasants. I mean no disrespect to them. There are many other examples of companies moving out as well. China has terrible demographics. India and Southeast Asia are much better long-term markets.
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  8170. The mention of fascism on the sign on the red vehicle (about 1:25) is something I have been wanting to see. The association of fascism with "right wing" politics is totally stupid. Fascism, like socialism or communism, is a collectivist movement. It is neither left nor right. In fact, calling Xi's policy shifts a "leftward" tilt, is also misleading. Don't ever forget that Nazi was short for National SOCIALIST German Workers Party (emphasis mine). It was socialism with a nationalist emphasis. Standard Marxism-Leninism is internationalist. I could go on (and often have) about why what the CCP is doing economically and socially today is very much the same as what the Nazis did in the 1930s and 1940s. Xi's "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is, I think, misrepresented. From Wikipedia, "According to CCP doctrine, Xi Jinping Thought is considered to represent Marxist–Leninist policies suited for China's present condition while Deng Xiaoping Theory was considered relevant for the period when it was formulated." This ignores a salient point. That is Han Chinese nationalism. Xi, just as Hitler, uses this to generate support, and it poisons his position vis-a-vis Marxism-Leninism. It is good to see the people of China awakening to this reality.
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  8171. Greg is right. The numbers of people involved are so small that the Democrats are being very stupid in pandering to them. As to Brandon winning back white working class voters, I think he just lost them. With this and the economy, he is thumbing his nose at them. He is toast, as are the Democrats that are following him over the cliff.
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  8172. The Musk comment shows how uninformed he is about the situation inside of China. I really think that there is a good possibility that China will break into warlord factions in the near future. I have seen it written that China has only had full control by the central government for about 300 years of its long history. Prior to the CCP's victory in the civil war, the country was split into warlord factions. Mao and Chiang were just two of the many warlords that came to the fore after the fall of the Qing dynasty. It is also likely that the banking system is already insolvent. The CCP spends as much, if not more, on internal security than on the regular military. They are already running out of money. Civil servants, police, teachers and hospital staff are not being paid in many areas. On top of that their salaries are being cut. That is just the type of situation where warlords can appear in China. If the breakup of China happens, it is quite possible that Guangdong province, Fujian province and Shanghai could ally themselves with Taiwan. These areas have often been tied to the outside world because of their location and have historically been at odds with the central authority in the North China plain. On top of that, the Chinese military is not as good as everyone thinks. In fact, like the Russian army, it is a bit of a joke. And, as Mearsheimer says, they have to cross a large body of water. The US looked at invading Formosa during WWII. They estimated that it would take a bigger invasion force than that used on D-Day in Normandy. And by the time they would have done it, the US had the forces, equipment and experience to succeed, although it would have been costly. China has none of that. They even assume that they will have to use commercial ships to move enough troops in to invade.
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  8173.  @Taber01  As for lithium, there are massive deposits that have been discovered in the US. The alternatives may be better.
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  8174.  @JonySmith-bb4gx  Prove what? Come on now. Use your words.
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  8175.  @JonySmith-bb4gx  It's "rare" not "rate". Look at the comment from @aesma2522 above. Not rare. The tech to refine them was from the west. Again, look at the comments above. Refining them is a dirty process and the west didn't want that, so they shipped it off to China, who doesn't care about those niceties. There is already a large plant being built in Texas that will follow environmental rules.
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  8176.  @EconLessons Chicken, yes. We call it the "other, other white meat". I am in the Midwest. One time while deer hunting a guy brought out a mess of "gator sticks". Just like beef sticks, but with gator meat. They were not bad. I get the impression that gators might be more cost efficient to farm than beef. Is that your analysis?
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  8177. Of course, this type of effect has happened many, many times in Earth's history. Ice sheets have grown and shrunk as a matter of course in the long history of the planet. Many of these "natural" changes are much, much greater than what we pitiful humans have done. This is also true of the tilt of the earth situation. The plain fact is that these things change. Considering the number of humans on the planet, I am not surprised that there are effects. How could there not be? Now, if you really want to make a difference, get your video onto the Chinese Internet. The other thing is that I saw reported that Arctic ice is increasing this year. Reportedly it has hit a 20 year high for this time of year. Of course, you have to realize that there are 31,536,000 seconds in a year. There have been 27 leap seconds added in the last 52 years. So, what's a second among friends in the grand scheme of things? What you did not tell us was the amount the angular momentum had changed. Considering the numbers, I expect not a lot.
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  8178. Heck, the F-16 is nuclear capable. Actually, I believe that there is a NATO requirement that attack fighters be capable of carrying nukes that the US keeps in Europe.
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  8179.  @unsalbulent  You need to understand how air warfare works in the modern context. Your example is irrelevant. The situation was more a question of geopolitics than technology. Turkey and Russia were not at war. That makes all the difference.
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  8180. I have always had a similar understanding of the Chinese people. In northeast Asia, left to themselves, they are the most capitalist and most like the Americans. As for China's population, that is a detriment for them, not an advantage. Their farmland is poor, and they are managing it in an appalling fashion. They depend massively on external raw material and food imports. They are the most vulnerable major power on the planet. They are followed closely by Russia, Japan and Germany.
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  8181. Good video. Informative and entertaining. The one thing that I do find interesting is this expectation that people need all this different stuff in their diets. Is it good to have and tasty? Sure. Is it necessary or important? Nah.
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  8182. You cannot exonerate the people in China. They, as individuals, and private businesses have been stealing IP and engaging in corrupt business practices since the beginning. I have seen it up close in a role advising US companies. It is frankly disgusting. Don't forget why the peasants supported the commies. They were promised free land (yeah, how did that work out?) which was to be taken from those among them who were successful. Mao was just one warlord among many in the period before the Japanese invasion. This is what the peeps in China support. Not really admirable.
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  8183. The CCP are wonderful students and proponents of Joseph Goebbels propaganda techniques.
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  8184. Be careful with that bachelor's party. I don't know how crazy your friends are, but some of mine got the groom, and themselves, so drunk that at the end of the party they put him on a plane from Washington, DC to Miami with no ID or money (it was the 1970s after all), and this was right before the wedding. So, my word to you be careful out there. By the way, when one of the guys involved in that incident was getting married his party ended up at a place where his mother and bride to be were waiting for us. They were awfully afraid of revenge, which was quite possible.
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  8185.  @waynerussell6401  Figures. Guess we know why Elon abandoned it.
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  8186. Are you aware that the US was not only neutral, but very pacifist prior to both World Wars of the 20th century. Woodrow Wilson's second campaign ran on the slogan "He kept us out of the war". It was always the policy of the US and the electorate to stay out of "European wars". FDR had to invent Lend-Lease to get around that pacifism. The Monroe Doctrine was basically a warning to the European powers to keep their wars out of the western hemisphere. Until the Cold War the US generally did not react until attacked. Then we had the Cold War and the fight against communist aggression. It worked out in Korea, but not in Vietnam. After the Cold War the US intervened in Kuwait but limited itself to a very specific and limited goal. After that the US did enforce a no-fly zone over Iraq because Saddam was using biological and chemical weapons against his own people, specifically the Kurds. The US intervened in Kosovo to stop the killing there in the late 1990s. After that George W. Bush actually ran on a campaign of pulling back from foreign wars and conflict involvement and stopping participation in "nation building". Then 9/11 happened and we had the Global War on Terror (GWT). That was a detour. Under Trump the first time we had peace. It will be interesting to see what happens this time around. Biden has been a disaster for peace and stability in the world. A new approach is needed.
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  8187. This is the definition of what the asylum system is meant to do, and not only in the US. Don't forget, the whole thing is predicated on what happened to the Jews of Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s. At that time many Jews fled Germany and were not allowed asylum anywhere. Their German passports were revoked, and they became stateless. Asylum is meant to protect people or groups that are oppressed by their governments because of their identity or politics. This does not apply to people coming from war torn countries or even countries experiencing famine or a poor economy. If you look at South Africa people are being dispossessed of their property and often killed, and this is the policy of the government. It is a clear cut case.
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  8188. By the way, have you noticed that Tulsi is a tall woman? Never got that in pictures I saw of her online.
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  8189. At about 9:00 the issue of the self-driving car comes up. I have studied this and taught about it. On roads, it is perhaps something we will do someday to the degree that humans can. On the other hand, humans can navigate off-road quite competently. We are nowhere near having automated systems to do this. I remember on evening, after a deer hunt, a friend driving me out to a deer I had shot, over rough ground, at high speed. We were in an old pick-up truck he didn't care about, so he drove fast. I was scared of my wits. But. we got there without incident. I can confidentially say there is no automated, AI, system that could have made that journey. I have been involved in and tracking AI since the late1970s. Believe me when I tell you, most AI research is concerned with perception, still.
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  8190. Darn. Trump is raiding Fox News for appointments to his government. Who's next?
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  8191. It's hard to tell about these things. Look at Trump, he came back. Things were better, much better, in Trump's first term before COVID. Frankly, something similar is true in the UK. Considering the alternatives, there is something to be said for Boris coming back.
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  8192. Considering the obesity epidemic, I don't think that less food on the shelves is a real problem. I used to volunteer at a "deluxe" food bank in the city where I live. It was, quite frankly, deluxe, not an exaggeration. I would sometimes see "clients" in a local supermarket buying high end products. Many of the clients were overweight, and a significant proportion of those were obese. They would often talk about trying to reverse that, and some did. That was comforting. We tried to push foods that were healthier. We measured carts at the end of their sessions, and they typically left with 200lbs of product a week. I have, for personal reasons, changed my diet over the last five years or so, I have reduced my intake of wheat products, cut out sugar, and most meat. I am getting down to my weight I had in my 20s (I am now in my mid 60s). My high blood pressure has gone away (without pills). I have no more joint pain. I have not even taken an aspirin in the last five years. I have not zeroed out anything, except sugar, but have minimized many things that are counterproductive to health. We have more food available, at low prices than we need, at least in the West. Food shortages in the west are a mirage. The food bank I mentioned got 2M lbs. of donated food from local grocery stores and restaurants a year.
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  8193. The second woman is just a hooker. I mean this is just a blast from the past. She is pretty, but also a little ridiculous.
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  8194. On the Russian economy, it seems that the sanctions are working. Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld from the Yale School of Management has been using independent information to track the Russian economy, and the western companies doing business there. He has a few good points worth noting. The first is that the statistics being thrown out there by Russia are almost certainly lies. Second, while the ruble seems to be healthy, that is also a lie. No one is converting rubles to dollars, or almost any currency. Thus, there are no independent price signals. So, we just have what the Russian government says the price is. On oil, he points out that with extraction costs (which are high for the Russians) and shipping costs (also high because they have to take the long way around), Russia is probably losing a dollar or so on each barrel. As for gas, the Germans have done a fantastic job of getting the infrastructure in place to handle LNG. Thus, the drop in the price. As for the idea of pipelines to China, that would take years, and he points out that not a single trench has been dug yet. Their auto industry has fallen by 90%. They are cannibalizing refrigerators for microchips. Does that sound like sanctions are not working? This interview appeared today on the DW News YouTube channel. It is worth a listen.
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  8195. Miller is great. He is no nonsense and has no problem telling it like it is. I always watch when I see he is involved.
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  8196. Unless China tones down its diplomacy and refrains from wars, the people will starve. They bridle against the rules-based world order, but it is only that order that allowed them to progress and to avoid famine. There are numerous countries that could cut China off from international trade. Several of them are already allied. So, whether China attacks Taiwan or India, they will be cut off. On top of that, the numerous programs Xi has initiated, such as returning forest to farmland and planting rice on hillsides unsuitable for the purpose and then flooding important farmland to protect his pet project are constraining China's food supplies. Xi and the CCP are truly stupid.
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  8197. Many military coups have been carried out by mid-level (and sometimes lower level) officers, such as colonels (that seems to be the most common). It is correct to say that the higher level generals mostly hate Prigozhin, but I would bet the mid-level officers admire him.
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  8198. More drivel from a European. I have not heard of any plans to completely leave the Middle East on the part of any US president. Deemphasize, for sure. The Asia Pacific region is much more important to the US. The Middle East is far less important to the US than in the past. Frankly, if Israel were not there, and the GWT issues did not persist, it would be possible to leave. It is the Europeans who need to step up and deal with the Middle East. They are the ones that have real dependencies on the Middle East. As usual, the Europeans are sponging off the US in terms of security. Is there any wonder why Trump says what he does. As President Joe likes to say, "C'mon, man!"
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  8199. Why is this an issue for the national news? This is not unique. I have a real problem with these situations that are really not of national importance for national media. That said, I am not without sympathy for those affected.
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  8200. I saw one analysis of the advert and they pointed out that the Asian guy was dressed in yellow. How insensitive and foolish is that.
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  8201. The three shot burst came about because of concerns that untrained, conscript troops were wasting ammo. Frankly, this was a valid concern at the time. As you know, the M4A1 does not have this feature. That is because we have a professional military that is much better trained.
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  8202. What I find hard to take with all these leftie politicians is that they talk about opposing views as unacceptable. That is unacceptable. There really are no unacceptable views. At least in the US this is true because of our Bill of Rights. For one thing, even if I disagree with someone, I will want to know what they think. That is just common sense. How can I deal with opposing views unless I know what they are. Second, who the heck made anyone the arbiter of what is acceptable. Thirdly, the science around this is garbage. Even the CDC in the US is starting to turn. It goes beyond that. You can talk about the "science" all you want, but in making public policy you need to elucidate the policy goal. Then you need to defend that goal and its costs vs the benefits. That is the only valid way to use science in a public policy setting. Looking at this pandemic and comparing it to the last one, the Spanish Flu, we would have to have at least 10 times the number of deaths worldwide to match that one in absolute terms. Then you would have to multiply that by 4.4 to get a similar proportion of the population. The thing to consider is that, in the US, there was not even a recession because of the Spanish Flu. So, are the policies of our governments sane? What is their goal? Has a cost benefit analysis been done? Trudeau is an idiot and has no idea of what he is doing. Tragically, he may be a bit better than Biden. Scary thought.
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  8203. Unless Putin is stopped in Ukraine, a war with Russia is indeed inevitable. If he is successful there, he will move on to NATO countries.
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  8204.  @cullenkehoe5184  He already has NATO on his border. That border is likely to get a lot longer if Finland and Sweeden join NATO, which seems likely. That excuse is a little thin at this time.
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  8205.  @cullenkehoe5184  What does that matter. Sebastapol is only useful for the Back Sea. In any conflict the navy there would be boxed in and useless elsewhere. Russia is very poorly endowed where naval bases are concerned.
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  8206. Squirrel, it's what's for dinner.
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  8207. I love the statements by the health authorities, all over the world, saying that they were playing down any concern. The COVID situation has destroyed the credibility of the health bureaucracy. This is unfortunate. This is not only a comment on the current situation, but a commentary on state of government bureaucracy in general. On top of that, we know from the natural disasters over the last year or two in China that they are not only incompetent but are purely politically motivated. This means that they only care about the "optics" and propaganda aspects of situations. It is no wonder people in China get concerned about the situation. The guy from Australia you quote had exactly the correct response. He seems to be an outlier though.
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  8208. You don't have any idea of what a head of state in a parliamentary democracy is. He is head of state on those occasions that require one. He has limited powers under a written constitution, which, alas, GB does not have. The head of state does not have any more power over the government than the queen does. The US has a different system. Three branches of government, two separately elected, vie in the realm of electoral politics. Our President is head of state and head of government. The relation between the administrative (what you call the government) and legislative is quite different. I happen to like the US system better, but to each his own. In the end, they are all representative democracies.
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  8209. Great point.
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  8210. These are your economic experts? First, he did not answer Neil's first question. Second, he acted like the signs of these things going on in China are new. He is totally ignorant of the nature of Xi's regime, or he is gaslighting us.
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  8211. At 21:35 Sabine says, "we have a lot of those niggly bits". Amazing. This was the attitude just before theories like quantum, special and general relativity revolutionized everything. So, perhaps we are at a similar point now. Just when we think that we have things figured out, a whole new understanding is born. Of course, the real driver behind that revolution early in the 20th century was driven primarily by theory, not experiment. People were thinking that string theory might be that new understanding, but it has turned out to be a dead end. It really was a dreamed-up creation, not really driven by anything fundamental.
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  8212. The government does NOT have to pass the omnibus spending bill. They could pass a continuing resolution instead. This would allow the next Congress to evaluate and set the priorities. No matter what your politics, the omnibus bill is thousands of pages. There is lots of new spending and no time to evaluate it. That is just bad governance.
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  8213.  @xinyangli8505  What? I don't understand. Use your words.
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  8214. They weren't ignorant. They are outright liars. Look at the number of women and people of color who have held high positions who are Republicans. Just to name a few, Nikki Haley (governor, ambassador to the UN), Condoleezza Rice (Secretary of State), Marsha Blackburn (US Senator), Tim Scott (US Senator), and latest, Winsome Sears (Lieutenant Governor of VA).
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  8215. This is not really an issue. Many languages, from ancient times are studied. They do not go away. Even in the case of some languages that are not typically written, there have been projects to document them through audio recordings. While there are instances of a government actively trying to kill off languages (and cultures), which are wrong, this is probably not the situation in most instances.
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  8216. This is a part of a pattern I am seeing in fundamental physics. Physicists are doing metaphysics. Physics, and all science, is a description of phenomena that we encounter in the world. When it strays beyond that the physicist is way out of his or her depth. They come up with weird ideas. The question we have to ask ourselves is why are we paying for this drivel?
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  8217. Andrew, you weaken the case I think you were trying to make by adding busses, for example. Those are public conveyances, in general Since you did not specify a private bus firm, I assume that is what you meant. The public square has two aspects to it. One is based on private ownership and voluntary interaction. The other is based on public, or government, institutions. In many cases, actions and services in this sphere are not voluntary. That distinction is what needs to be considered in this case, and others like it.
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  8218. Gallium is not a rare earth element. It is usually obtained in the processing of aluminum. Since that is being brought back to the US, China is out of luck there. There are alternatives to rare earths in some applications. The US is already building a major new rare earth processing plant. I expect there are others being built outside of China. Actually, a lot of rare earth processing originally took place in California. As usual the west just exported its pollution to China. Major deposits or rare earths have been found in the US and Norway, as well as other locations. A similar situation is happening with lithium. The prices for lithium ore are down about two thirds this year. Major deposits of lithium have been found in the US and Argentina. There are already others in operation. Have you ever seen videos of lithium processing in China? It is horrendous. As usual, China is using economic threats to try and impose its will. China has nothing that the world cannot find elsewhere as far as raw materials go. This just forces people to look elsewhere. Being an unreliable source is never a good tactic.
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  8219. It is good to see "market experts" in the west waking up to fallacy of China's economic statistics. I know people in this area who have said this for years. It is a failure of fiduciary responsibility for market advisors not to take into account factors such as incorrect data and outright lies. Remember what happened in the 2008 financial crisis. Basically, the rating agencies certified the high rating of the CDOs being issued by investment banks. This was, of course, false. Their rating of risks in China is nowhere near accurate. Those investment bankers that keep talking up China are either stupid or trying to manipulate the markets. I know this is harsh, but it is the only explanation.
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  8220. What Laura points out about the size of the European population and economy is the key point. NATO was created when western Europe was prostrate after WWII. It made sense then, but not now, for the US to take the lead in defending Europe. There are two European countries with nuclear weapons, France and the UK. So, why the need for an American nuclear umbrella? What the European governments did with their "peace dividend" after the fall of the Soviet Union was to buy off their electorates with ever expanding social programs rather than concentrating on building up their economies. They needed to hear what Vance was saying. Their elites won't react favorably, but their electorates may well do so.
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  8221. Mahyar, I am a big fan, but you repeat something that I see all the time in conservative and moderate media. At about 5:30 you talk about "them" getting offended. You give them agency by even mentioning it in that way. Who cares who you "offend". If you are having a political discussion about an important and/or controversial topic and you are not offending anyone, then you are not doing your job.
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  8222.  @YOHANNESBEKELE-m5g  That is the stupidest thing I have read in a while. What does a date have to do with it? What I laid out was the reality. We have been coasting since the end of the Cold War (I miss the Cold War). Now things are getting back to normal. The big issue is the world order that is passing is that countries acted in their self-interest and took advantage of the US. That is ending, and it was always slated to do so.
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  8223.  @jamegumb7298  We keep hearing this. He really doesn't. Look at the demographic profile of China. In addition, the population is very likely overstated. Look at Russia. After less than two years of war he is running out of people. If he mobilizes, he won't have enough people to make the stuff the military needs. This is already happening. Modern war is industrial war. China does not have the assets required to get that half a billion to Taiwan. If they do start the war, they get totally isolated and lose all their industrial inputs.
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  8224. NATO should go into Russia. At this point they are weak, and we know their military is a sham. I predict that they would not use nuclear weapons. I have lots of experience and knowledge of this, being an old cold warrior. No Russian leader, even Putin, would really risk the destruction of the motherland. This is a part of what made MAD work for all those years. Putin can talk tough, but the prospect of Russia being destroyed is a bridge too far.
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  8225. Iran is not an Arab state. It is Persian. They are diametrically opposed to each other.
    1
  8226. This retirement age issue in France seems so silly to people in the US. The retirement age in the US (talking Social Security, private plans may be different) is adjusted over time. I am of an age where it is 66 and two months. For people born 1960 or later it is 67. One can delay it to age 70. The thing to consider is that, according to the insurance actuaries, if you reach 65 you have a 50% chance of living into your mid-90s. It is unreasonable to expect that pension plans can be solvent with a 62 retirement age. Even 64 is probably too low, and it should be adjusted to reflect reality.
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  8227. There is an article on the CBC website dated March 5, 2022 titled "How successive U.S. administrations resisted arming Ukraine". It details how aid was blocked or delayed by Obama, Trump and Biden. The aid Trump froze in 2019 was released in September 11 of that year. The issue with Ukraine had always been a problem of geopolitics and corruption within Ukraine. The Ukrainians have been trying to deal with the corruption problem for years now. They seem to be doing a fairly good job lately. A lot of it was a remnant of Soviet times and the chaos of the breakup of the Soviet Union.
    1
  8228. Thanks.
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  8229. Your view of the world order is fundamentally flawed. China assembles things. They do not create new things or the high value parts. All that is enabled by supply chains that are protected by the US. That order was a result actions by the US intended to isolate the Soviets in the Cold War. It worked, and the Cold War ended 30 years ago. The US is starting to draw back from that order and you will see dramatic changes in the world. China, according to some analysts, will not exist in its current form by the end of the decade. Their economy is based on a flawed system, and is utterly dependent of the order. As for computers, my son built his own high performance gaming computer when in his early teens. That is not cutting edge technology. Don't fret about that.
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  8230. It is so funny to hear the idea of moving the FBI, or any other big government agency out of Washington, DC. When I was a kid (we're talking over 50 years ago) my father, who worked for a government research lab in Washington, DC, told me that they were considering such a move of government agencies back then. I believe they were thinking St. Louis. This is actually a good idea, but it seems so hard to get it done.
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  8231. Are you kidding? Two conflicting claims? We don't need claims from either side to see what is happening. There is lots of information from open-source Internet platforms. That the Russians have not been able to take the capitol in two weeks, even though it is close to its borders, is a failure. They have lost thousands of troops and numerous vehicles, including many tanks. They have also lost lots of aircraft. None of this information is from either of the combatants.
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  8232. Well, she shares a pillow with him.
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  8233. This is just like their decision to shut down nuclear power in Germany because of a tsunami in Japan. No scientific basis. And thus Germany is burning more dirty coal. Same leader as well.
    1
  8234. Most of these tech companies are bloated. They have such high profit margins, or cash flow, that they don' t really have to think about what they are doing.
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  8235.  @amc9329  He could be under deep cover.
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  8236. There are lots of things in the Abrahamic religions that are cultural, not religious. Paul, in his letters in the New Testament, says that women should cover their hair (and men should not) and should not be heard. If they have a question, they should ask their husband later at home and not speak up in public. There are plenty of other examples from the Old Testament as well. My understanding is that in Islam, during the prophet's lifetime, there was a problem with women being accosted in public. So, he brought in the idea of covering them up. This was not a divine revelation, but a response to a social situation.
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  8237. Girkin is former (current)FSB. So, it makes sense.
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  8238.  @xehpuk  Well, the road is built in China, but in many cases it is of poor quality. Have you heard of "tofu dreg" projects? I just saw an article on an undersea tunnel in China that is leaking after only a month. The corruption does not only take the form of siphoning off funds, but also ignoring building standards.
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  8239.  @lennox2223  You are way off base there. Racism is the West, especially the US and UK. is not institutional. Two aspects show this. The number of minorities in high positions. The actual reverse racism in many government policies (affirmative action). The other indicator is the number of racial minorities trying to get into these countries. Until, and unless, that reverses, any claim of racism is moot. What Putin has done is to invade a sovreign nation, and killed people, with the intent of overthrowing the elected government and replacing it with a puppet government that is controlled by him. He has also threatened the use of nuclear weapons. If that is not worse, then you have a very warped sense of what is right and wrong.
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  8240. Well, ALL supreme court nominations are political. That is not a problem. Politics is not a problem. It is how we organize our governmental institutions. Just consider the whole idea of Supreme Court nominations. Just consider how many qualified people there are. Many won't consider it. A good example is Ted Cruz. He clerked for the Supreme Court. He has taught law an brought cases before the Supreme Court. He has been considered, but his interest is in the political realm. I actually had a general council for one of my businesses who had argued cases before the Supreme Court. This is a very specialized realm. If the nominee is competent, any political consideration is valid.
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  8241. The comments in the last segment on Xi's decision making are pure Peter Zeihan. For China to think they can split the EU off from the US while an existential war is going on in Europe for which US support is essential is the height of folly. Is Xi really that daft. Well, I guess the answer has to be yes. While I don't believe for a minute that the US is intentionally goading China into a war over Taiwan, I wonder if that would not be a good thing, in a perverse sort of way. It would bring all the issues to a head and allow a clean break from CCP led China. There are all kinds of theories about what comes after the CCP. I believe it will be a return to warlordism. There is some speculation that parts of southeast China would want to merge with Taiwan. This would be the territory controlled by the KMT prior to the Japanese invasion. Who knows, perhaps Taiwan could take over the mainland. That would be the only way that China could become a democracy.
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  8242. Yes! They actually say they want to dominate the world. There is no reason for the west, Taiwan or Japan to assist them in doing that. A democratic and capitalist China would be a great force in the world. Of the northeast Asian peoples, I see Chinese as the most in line with the values of the west, sans the CCP..
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  8243.  @silentwatcher1455  The west and their disciples have no intention of attacking China. China has explicitly stated that they are out for domination. Do you follow what they are saying? No one has attacked China, except for the Russians, who are no longer in a position to do so. The idiotic thing is that their whole rise was facilitated by the US and the west. Without the investment from the west, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, China would be nowhere. Without the freedom of the seas, guaranteed by the US, China would be nowhere. If they start a war, it is a simple matter to totally close down their access to raw materials, energy and food. Doing nothing more than that and they get deindustrialization and starvation. So, what is your point?
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  8244. I would be interested in the figures for the secondary housing market. The rental market is another critical area as well. After all, that is what matters. A house or apartment is new only once, and at least in the west, may well be sold many times thereafter. My understanding is that homes in the used market are generally selling at a loss, as many of the properties were bought in the last few years prior to the crash.
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  8245.  @bernadetten.8751  Lots of jobs available.
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  8246.  xsavaunx  What's it like with the unicorn?
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  8247. Universal pre-K is a dumb idea. I remember when we were having our first, about three decades ago, we went to a lecture at a local university. Not long after that we moved to Europe and our sons started school there. If you look at Germany, kids get little formal education before they are six. Are they lagging behind? What is the push for universal pre-K? What is this all about. Where is the science on this? What is important is what the parents do before the kids start school. Will some government program work to replace that? Look at government programs in education, especially the federal ones. We can't afford this crap.
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  8248. Have you seen pictures of North Korean soldiers next to South Korean soldiers. The population of North Korea is starving. The North Korean soldiers reflect this. They are runts compared to the southern brethren. Remember that before the war, these were one people.
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  8249. Roll those Rs. Yes, it is ridiculous, but it fits so well.
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  8250. Fewer people mean less anthropogenic CO2. Simple. Of course, you Brits voted for these bozos.
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  8251.  @andrelotscher280  No! No! Made in America.
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  8252.  @andrelotscher280  Gosh, I hope not. I love the engagement this comment has generated. All hail the MAGA King.
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  8253. Collateral damage is Putin's mode of operation. Don't forget all the incidents revolving around the Chechen debacle that really gave Putin his first major public exposure and established him as a strong man.
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  8254. This is hilarious. It also shows that Fraser Nelson knows nothing about "nationality". This does not refer to nation states, so it is a bit confusing. In the US we don't have an issue. American refers to a citizen of the nation state, the United States of America. In addition, we can identify with our lineage, or ancestry, or what we generally call it heritage.
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  8255. Not surprising. What nationality was the author of 1984?
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  8256. These types of investigations are common. There have been a number of situations between the EU and the US. One involves aluminum and steel. Another involves commercial aircraft. So, this is nothing new. China needs to calm down and grow up.
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  8257.  @josiechaney9010  Thank you very much. Well, you actually can copy it in a way. If you go to your YouTube home page, select "History" on the left side and then "Comments" on the right side. Since you commented, it will be saved there. You can also select and copy somewhere else.
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  8258. What? All minorities are not the same. The Democratic Party thinks they are. As for gay people playing roles, one the most obvious is the TV sitcom How I Met Your Mother, one of the lead actors, Neil Patrick Harris, plays a VERY heterosexual role. Problem is, he is gay. According to woke theory, this should not be allowed. What would happen to gay people if the woke agenda was applied to them?
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  8259.  @WongPeter-tx7qq  Interesting take on the issue, but you ignore the dynamics, history and national motivation/ideology. First, we have the actual history of the three-way conflict between the US, China and Russia. Let's look at the outcome. The goal of the US was to counter the Soviet Union. In fact, the goal was never to conquer them. The goal was to stop the spread of their ideology. This is the US we are talking about here. You can have any ideology you want as long as it doesn't threaten the US and its interests. Just look at the situation with Vietnam today (more below). Also consider relations with China before Xi took over. How do you think trade with China got so big. Now cast your mind back to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The US reached out to both countries. There was no longer any need to play them against each other. The US supported both. The Chinese ideology at the time was not overtly to try to displace the US, as it became under Xi. At that time, they just wanted to get rich. The US bent over backwards to help Russia and the other former Soviet Republics after the breakup. We bought Russian rocket engines to help keep their space industry going. In the Ukraine everyone remembers the Budapest Memorandum and the requirement to give up nuclear weapons because of nonproliferation concerns, but they forget that this came with substantial economic support. First the US provided funds to dismantle the weapons. Then they provided $300M plus another $300M ($300M then equates to over $640M today) in direct economic aid. This leads into the motivation/ideology of the US and the role that plays in geopolitics. There is an old saying that goes "the business of America is business". That is why we resisted the commies. They wanted to destroy our business interests for their ideology. After WW2 we reformed the Germans and Japanese, helped them rebuild their shattered economies and did business with them. Look at relations with Vietnam today. Earlier this week, or late last week, Xi did a charm tour of Southeast Asia including Vietnam. They signed a bunch of unimportant agreements. Xi also threatened his neighbors if they sided with the US. The Vietnamese then turned around to negotiate with the US. We're talking Vietnam here. On the ideology front, Russia is no longer Marxist-Leninist. China purports to be, but the actual implementation of socialism there more resembles national socialism and the situation in Germany in the 1930s. The parallels are striking. The reality is that Marxist-Leninist ideology always devolves into oligarchy and corruption. So, to put is succulently (not my forte), this is not a simple static situation. Look beyond the simplistic explanations.
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  8260.  @MMM-ep8lc  I don't know how I would rank him, but I do have problems with him. Frankly, the basic ideas in his books are actually quite accurate. I don't know how much is really him, George, or just general knowledge in that community. As for any detailed analysis of a country, and especially an industry or technology, they are often wrong, or at least off the mark. That is not their background. The problem for all these guys is that the trends that they are talking about are sort of baked in and develop over time. Once they have laid it out, there isn't much else they have to offer. And yet, in the world of the Internet, they are compelled to do so. If you look at what is happening in the world, at the level of large-scale trends, then they are quite accurate. What is happening with Russia, China, Europe, Turkey, and many other parts of the world seems to be following the script. I look at the situation in China, for example, and I get the feeling Peter wrote the script. My financial advisor, who is now independent but was at the highest level at one of the top New York investment banks, said something interesting to me that brought this home. He said they used to be a client of Stratfor. Notice he said used to be. That tells you what you need to know. Over time there wasn't anything more they had to offer. If you have a different view, please elaborate.
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  8261.  @MMM-ep8lc  That may be, but I have read, seen, heard some others that make him seem somewhat good.
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  8262. Actually, Mark, China and the Soviet Union, those stalwarts of Communism, killed more of their own people and others than the Nazis did. I am not talking about soldiers. A lot of that killing done by the Communists was also racially and ethnically motivated. That in no way excuses the Nazis and their leadership, and people, but it is an objective fact.
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  8263. The Twitter problem is that the MSM highlights it. As Mr. Reilly points out, it is even a Twitter users are a minority of the population, and a minority of that group drives the discourse. Stop pushing their narrative and they will loose that power.
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  8264. One thing you left out in your discussion of swapping the Unertl scope in is that he did not have time to zero it. What are the odds that this scope, changed out in the field, with the technology of the time, would be zeroed properly. I would venture to say zero.
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  8265.  @joemama.556  The gas expansion propels the bullet. That is the reason for it. The critical parameter is how fast the bullet leaves the barrel so that the gas vents out that way and back at the shooter. You forget about bolt action and single shot firearms. Gas expansion there, but nothing to do with operation of the action. In a self-loading rifle or pistol the thing that is needed is to delay the opening of the action until the gas pressure in the barrel is low enough to ensure safe operation. This can be done many ways. Many early pistols used direct blowback where a stiff spring (determined by the caliber) delayed the opening of the action. In submachineguns, even semi-automatic ones, a spring, plus a heavy bolt, provides the same function. Systems that are classified as gas operated bleed gas from the barrel to operate the action. Generally, there is some mechanism in the bolt to delay opening.
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  8266.  @joemama.556  That has got to be one of the dumbest things I have ever read. You just go on believing that.
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  8267.  @009013M3  First off, you first statement is inappropriate. Last I checked, I am free to say whatever I want. You are free to argue something different, as you have done. Your statement is not incorrect, as far as it goes. but there is the little matter of nomenclature, which is what all the discussion is about. Gas operated firearms are understood to be systems that bleed gas from the barrel. This is precisely to differentiate them from system such as roller delayed and direct blowback, etc. You work on these things and you don't know that?
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  8268. Whatever you think of the war, and it is a full-scale conflict, shutting down the pipeline should not be a controversial issue. You're at war. Do you still do business with your enemy? That would be stupid.
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  8269.  @davidmclean357  Well put.
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  8270.  @darkfool2000  Fully agree with you on that. The critical thing is your last sentence. They can't. Just as an aside and a little bit of a rant (my favorite thing) the whole EU is just an abortion. The EU wants to take credit for keeping the peace in Europe since WWII (well, at least until the situations in Yugoslavia and Ukraine, etc.). They ignore the 500K US troops that were stationed there (shrinking to "only" 300K) during the Cold War. Now the number has started to increase again, reaching 100K now (and growing?). If you are sharp eyed, you may notice that those conflicts came after the Cold War as the US drew down its troops and as the EU would be expected to "keep the peace" according to their narrative. On the economy they have been no more successful. There have been Europeans who wanted to unite the continent in the past, only they had a different approach. I am thinking France in the early 19th century and Germany in the early 20th century. They had some hope of doing it. The EU in the 21st century, no way.
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  8271. When the banks and insurance companies first started using mainframe computers to automate back-office processes, millions of jobs were lost. In that field. Was there a major blip in unemployment? No. I don't even think that there was a major decrease in the number of jobs in those fields. What happened is that people were deployed in more productive activities and new products and services became viable and cost effective. When I was at a spacecraft plant of a large aerospace firm, I was the CIO (we didn't call it that at the time) and we were planning on getting a new, large computer for the engineering department. The head of engineering asked whether we are automating too much. He said this because of the cost of the new computer. The head of the mechanical group pointed out that when we had less access to computing resources, in the early days, the stress analysis group (the one most affected) had two hundred people and could work on a couple of spacecraft at a time. Now they had about 20 people and worked on many times more projects. Overall engineering headcount did not go down, either. This is the usual trajectory of technology in business. The economists' analyses are static. This is not how the economy works.
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  8272. "Pressure" on the property market. That's just a lot of financial gobbledygook. The property market in China is basically dead. It is at least 100% overbuilt and the population is aging and shrinking. There are no economic models for this and no solutions. It will also take the financial system down with it. This is already happening in the shadow banking sector. The regular banking sector is probably insolvent as well. Reports I see show some banks where depositors cannot get their money out. One bank had not allowed access to depositors' money for over 700 days. Being a bunch of totalitarian commies, the CCP has covered this up. They even rough up the people protesting for access to their deposits instead of working to resolve the issue. I even saw at least on instance where a tank was stationed outside a bank to deter protestors. Even with all that, some bank branches have been trashed by disgruntled depositors. One of the best indicators of the severity of the problem is that the national security service (secret police) has been publicly warning people in China against saying anything negative about the economy. There is a credible threat of prosecution. How would it be if MI5 told people in the UK how to talk about the economy? On top of that, the CCP has spent over $1T on its belt and road initiative. Reports are that 60% of the loans are "nonperforming". The reality is that none of the official economic data coming out of China can be trusted. In the recent past it was independents and academics that did analysis and pointed out that growth figures were not reliable. Now I see analysts at major financial institutions openly saying the quiet part out loud. China is in recession.
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  8273.  @AlexAnteroLammikko  Fully agree.
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  8274.  @brianwhittaker3302  You make a good point. I don't think they are war criminals, but people have made the case.
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  8275.  @MrBobsmith34  I think you are not informed about the shells that the North Koreans have. They are actually old Soviet Stock. I have seen projections that they will run out in a year or so. The war makes building the defense industry in Ukraine difficult, but that has been done before. Actually, Ukraine was a center of defense production in the Soviet Union. I remember seeing reports and videos about a major tank production plant in Ukraine which was from Soviet times. This was near the beginning of the problems in 2014 or so. They just didn't have the money to move forward with restarting production at a mass scale. They have started some production if I recall correctly, and there are partnerships with European firms that have been announced. As with US aid, the whole thing is just too slow. It doesn't have to be that way. I agree with you on Europe not sending troops, at least at any large scale. This could change if EU and/or NATO territory were attacked. Frankly, Ukraine has so degraded Russia's manpower that NATO really doesn't have to worry about direct ground attack, at least for now. Just as a wild idea, it might be interesting for NATO to go all in to finish off the Russian military. Of course, that is risky, but is would still not be an attack within the internationally recognized borders. of Russia. What we might see then is China pouring into Russia's far eastern territories (you just know Xi wants to do it) and the Russian Federation falling apart. A bit of a fanciful scenario, but one can imagine, can't one.
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  8276.  @msemakweli-wk3lg  Well, that may be what is required. Trump was certainly not the first US President to chide the European NATO partners for not spending enough on defense. Frankly, the Europeans used the "peace dividend" from the ending of the Cold War to beef up social programs. That was basically politics. Nothing wrong with that or out of the ordinary, but conditions change. If Russia had gone in a different direction both they and the rest of Europe would be in a very different place right now. As it is, there is now a full-scale war on the territory of Europe. Let's see, where have we heard that before? Oh, yes, most of the last few hundred years. By the way, in the early years of the American Republic the Monroe Doctrine was formulated. What it basically said is we don't want you Europeans bringing your wars to our half of the globe. The Seven Years War, in the middle of the 18th century, was considered by many the first truly global war, or "world war" if you like. Americans like George Washington fought in that war.
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  8277.  @MrBobsmith34  You make good points. On the issue of Russia, I fully expect it to fall apart. A majority of geopolitical analysts polled believe that as well. Prior to the Ukraine War this was projected to take another ten to twenty years. With the situation going as it is now, that timeline should be shortened, perhaps drastically. A most likely scenario is that it will split up into competing warlord factions. These will be much weaker, but at least some will have nuclear weapons. The prognosis is not good.
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  8278.  @MrIlleism  Not indicted. Have you looked at what Putin and Lvova-Belova were indicted for. It was crimes related to deportation of children and others, not actually to the war or its conduct directly. So far, there have been no indictments regarding the war itself or its conduct. Bush and Blair were national leaders at a time of war. Frankly, they received overwhelming support from the legislators of their respective country. Should the legislators be indicted as well?
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  8279. Shutdowns are good! Get the Federal Government out of our faces.
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  8280. What great wisdom, master.
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  8281. I find it interesting that when Mr. Thiel mentions the Stanford President and rot in the "sciences". There are differences in the "sciences". There are what I refer to as the "hard" sciences and then there are the biological sciences and social sciences. These are two very different things. I have run into this. I was doing an independent study project in a statistics graduate program and was given a data set by my advisor. It was brain wave data. I was having problems with it. I went to redownload the paper associated with the data, and it had "Redacted" in red across all pages. I contacted a couple of the senior researchers, who had moved to a university near me. They told me about the guy who had faked the data. Last I heard he was being investigated because it was government funded research.
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  8282. She is Welsh, so of course she's a commie. Don't forget she has been making a big deal out of her Welsh heritage lately.
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  8283. Why do you say "so called" father of the modern Chinese nation? That sounds like you have doubts about his role. I wonder if you could explain further.
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  8284. The real question is why the heck is the US involved there in the first place. These countries have little to offer the west. Let China and Russia have them. They will only drain the resources of those countries. China's Belt and Road is already running into both financial problems in Africa, as well as quality problems with their projects (tofu dreg is the term). Frankly, US involvement in many areas of the world is unproductive.
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  8285. Xi is no economist. In fact, his ignorance of how economies work is breathtaking. Of course, that makes sense. He is a commie after all. His idea of internal circulation sounds like autarky. This is the concept that Hitler had in the 1930s and 1940s. Of course, Hitler was a national socialist. Sounds like Xi is going that way as well. The woman at the end of the video also shows real understanding. It is not "China's manufacturing prowess" that is needed by the west, but the low end and cheap assembly "prowess". If you look at the value of components in something like and iPhone, the vast majority of it is from outside China. The fact is, that can, and will go anywhere. NOTE: I edited this comment because I wrote the second paragraph before listening to her whole exposition. The last word of the first sentence was "ignorance". I was just reacting. By the end she sounded exactly like me. Can you tell us who she is? In fact, there are lots of Chinese companies that are moving out of China She also pointed that out. I recently bought three products from a Chinese company (which by the way did not go by a Chinese name). Two were made in Vietnam. When I looked at the company website, I found that they were even opening a plant in the US. I expect that this is a private company. Besides getting away from China's issues, the owners can also get their wealth out of the country. This would be a powerful motivation.
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  8286. You miss one important point. It is the one that Donals Trump has made. The killing has to stop. We often talk about the demographic decline in Russia, but it is also bad in Ukraine. And while we are on the topic of Trump, he will negotiate, but he will not take a bad deal. He has already said that if Putin does not stop the fighting and negotiate that he will arm Ukraine to the teeth. I think he puts it as flooding Ukraine with weapons (which is something Biden should have done). I do agree that sanctions should be kept on Russia, for a very long time. The world doesn't need his oil and natural gas.
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  8287. Good points. Remember the 1980s? Remember the Japanese buying up signature properties in the US? Yeah. If it is state owned and the CCP needs money then they will probably sell at a time not of their choosing, which often means at a loss. This happened to the Japanese in spectacular fashion. If it truly is privately owned, those people are moving to the US, so no real impact.
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  8288. The people in China assemble products like iPhones, but they are just doing the final assembly. Many of the components are made elsewhere. The total value of a product like an iPhone that is made in China is a small portion of the cost of making the phone. China does the labor intensive stuff, some of which could be automated, but it is easier to just hire hundreds of thousands of peasants in China (or other low cost countries) to do it by hand. Just look at the videos of the factories. The quality of many other products made in China is very poor, and I have seen many examples of this and consulted with companies trying to recover from this quality issue. In some cases, the companies could not be saved. I first thought that this was limited to small and medium businesses but found out that some large companies have had similar issues.
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  8289.  @Onion_Knights  I cut it out over 7 years ago. I went cold turkey. I don't use any sweeteners, even honey. No ill effects or cravings. My food tastes fine.
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  8290.  @Onion_Knights  Good point. I understand.
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  8291. Jonathan, are you just figuring out that "the old world rules-based order is crumbling"? How long do you think that order has existed? The answer is just over thirty years. The time since WWII has been an exception to the broad sweep of history. The order you talk about has only really existed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Prior to that we had two blocs, one totalitarian and one democratic facing off against each other with nuclear weapons and trying to destabilize each other. Don't forget, the situation you are talking about exactly describes the whole Cold War (I miss the Cold War) era. Take the Korean War. The peak strength of the armies fighting was about 1M on the South Korean side (including UN troops) and 1.7M on the North Korean side (including Chinese and Soviet troops). There were about 1M casualties on the South Korean side and 1.5M on the North Korean side. The war is still not officially over, but active fighting lasted about three years. In the end, the original borders were reestablished. Sound familiar? Then, of course, there was the Vietnam War and lots of smaller conflicts around the world. How soon people forget. All of this is just old news.
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  8292. For a historian Ferguson seems to be ignoring the history of the 20th century. Maybe his memory is not very good.
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  8293. Mostly agree with Rep. Tenney, expect on the second ruing. The Supreme Court is not involved in setting policy or in assessing the content of an administration. They are there to rule on the legal aspects, especially in reference to the Constitution and the law. On the broad mandate, the administration clearly has no authority to do so. The second ruling referred to a mandate for healthcare workers at facilities receiving Federal funding. That is clearly within the administration's purview.
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  8294.  @p.h.3987  Oh, and you do. Fascism is a collectivist ideology. That is its essence. You may want to do some reading on the topic. Trump is a lot of things, but he is certainly no collectivist.
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  8295.  @ailinofaolin8897  You are so on point.
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  8296. What happens to coed naked rugby? Is that still allowed?
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  8297. This is just an example of how AOC specifically, and the Democratic Party in general, do not have any idea of what democracy is. It is disgusting, really.
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  8298. Hey, in my school district the kids are more than proficient. When are we going to stop talking about "all" schools? My kids were using PowerPoint in 4th grade. They are in their 20s now, but the schools here are not backing off. I also see them exercising the kids year-round. The elementary school my kids went to is right behind me. I see them out there, in almost all weather. I also don't see obesity in the kids. In fact, one of my son's friends who was the only one overweight as a child, is no longer. We can make this work for our kids. It takes parental involvement. In the elementary school I mentioned, in a well-funded school district, the amount of money that the parents add, in addition to their taxes is insane. This one school got $10k per year in funds and an equal amount in services. The extra funds let kids whose family might not be able to afford extra-curricular activities to participate, No one was left behind. And this is all local money. By the way, we are in a suburb of Chicago. Our schools are deluxe facilities. We spend 2/3 of what Chicago spends per pupil. This is true of all the suburban school districts. So, go figure.
    1
  8299. The comment at the end just amazes me. All I have been hearing in the press and the pundit community indicates that Russia has become a vassal state of China. That people see the CCP playing a compliant role in the relationship goes against that narrative. I can believe it, but the leasing deal is not enough to prove it. It is a financial transaction, and it is not unusual for financial firms to take losses today to avoid bigger losses down the line. This is colloquially called "cutting your losses". It makes sense for the party cadres since all of them, from Mao on trained in the Soviet Union, while that lasted. What irks me is your claim about the Chines people preferring Russia over the west. The big difference between China and Russia is that Russia is self sufficient in natural resources and has more nukes and a more advanced military. Any shift away from the west and towards Russia would see China playing the same subsidiary role it does today. Something to ponder.
    1
  8300.  @angelicamarch3407  Shut Up? That is an illiberal thing to say. I have my opinion, you have yours. Why is yours any better? Who made you the arbiter of taste? Considering the grammar of your comment, you are probably not that well educated. If you have some response that elucidates your opinion, then state it. Your comment is both uneducated and meaningless. You are probably one of those woke cancel culture types. Get over it.
    1
  8301.  @leonahamilton5803  Your opinion. I find their music forgettable. Just my opinion. Yours is obviously different, and that is fine. Taste in music is just a matter of opinion. I prefer jazz and classical music. Just my taste.
    1
  8302. Apple has over $200B in cash and investments. They can afford to move anywhere even if they make no profit going forward, and that is not likely.
    1
  8303. Goldman is full of it. Russia only has commodities to sell. They have become circumspect about weapons sales, because China is copying their technology without paying Russia, or asking its permission. For Russia, as he admits, selling to China brings in less money per unit of commodity. This reduces the income they can make. Russia is not a big market. And now, with the Western sanctions, it is a much poorer market. There is no upside China, except for cheaper oil an gas which comes through land routes. One also has to consider that if Putin falls, and a future Russian government tries to mend ties with the West, the results would be adverse. For example, the commodity deals will become less favorable as a reformed Russia would rather trade on the international market where they could get better prices.
    1
  8304. Nobody cares about Poland? Since when. In the US we care. I live outside of Chicago. At one time, and it may still be true, the Polish American population of Chicago would have made it the second largest city in Poland. The US has always supported Poland, and the Poles have been great friends of the US.
    1
  8305. Sounds like you guys are Trump supporters.
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  8306. I love the study that she mentions that looks at patents. Why that should be included in an analysis of scientific research is beyond me. Does she even have any idea of the patent landscape? Companies patent inventions so that they can profit off of them. Especially large companies. I worked for two that, when I was working for them, had the biggest patent portfolios in the world. They both found that they had so many, and that they were not going to use them, that they set up very profitable businesses licensing out the patents to companies that would. I actually had a supplier who had worked at one of these companies and had come up with a patent. It was a technology that was useful but that the company would never commercialize. So, he got permission to use the patent (he was the originator) and started his own business. It was great stuff. Again, what does this have to do with scientific research papers. Most patents are for ways to do something that is useful, not a breakthrough. So, looking at numbers like this is disingenuous.
    1
  8307. How many of Wagner's current troops are convicts? The core of Wagner consists of professional military, generally former Russian army soldiers with training and experience. I expect the bulk of the convicts were killed in Bakhmut. I don't know for sure what the ratios are, but I think that is something that should be considered.
    1
  8308. "Truly screwed". That is the best way to put it. Both Ronald Regan and Donald Trump (in his first term) lowered tax rates and collected more in tax revenue. Labor is truly economically and fiscally illiterate.
    1
  8309. I find that vitamin water makes me feel ill. Most probably because of the sugar.
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  8310. Artur, you completely missed the reference to the bible. Read Genesis, vs. 19 to 24.
    1
  8311. Spies? Really? When did it ever stop? I grew up and started my professional career during the Cold War. I worked in aerospace and defense and even as private companies we were tracking spies. Heck, I have reason to suspect some of my colleagues were US spies.
    1
  8312.  @john-or9cf  Brilliant! I do tend to take things too literally, though.
    1
  8313. Watched this when it came out. Now I see that Colt has reintroduced the Viper. Did Ian know something when he did the video?
    1
  8314. Tony, your statements at the beginning of the video are well reasoned and much appreciated. I have been following China, and many other countries, for some time now. I really started at the height of the Cold War (I miss the Cold War). As you may well have noticed, I like to react to the content of what you present. You do a wonderful job. I am reacting to the content, not you specifically. We don't see eye to eye, but that is fine. I like to gather information from many different viewpoints. This has often been necessary in my professional career. Your contribution is one of the more valuable. Keep up the good work.
    1
  8315. They will go back to coal and nuclear. for electricity production. For their own security that is the only thing that makes sense.
    1
  8316.  @WanWanOfficialX  Don't know how you get that from what I said. Of course, the British might help. Look at the US and its former adversaries. Germany and Japan have been protected by the US for decades. The US even has improving relations with Vietnam.
    1
  8317. Isabel is a bit out of touch on the landmine issue. This covers only anti-personnel landmines. Anti-armor landmines are still allowed and are used extensively in Ukraine. They also pose a problem for civilians. The other thing is that the US landmines have a timer that turn them inert after a certain length of time. Usually up to two weeks. The trouble with landmines always was that they can stay around for years and kill unsuspecting people. Don't forget when the Ottawa Treaty was signed, 1997. The Cold War had been over for a few years, and no one expected a conventional war in someplace like Europe. I fully expect that many countries will soon renounce the Ottawa Treaty and follow the US in the type of mines they can deploy. Either that, or the treaty will be amended. The other thing to remember is that the US is not a signatory to many international treaties and organizations. Some examples are the International Criminal Court, UNCLOS, etc.
    1
  8318. Look at the UK. ALL their female prime ministers have been from the Conservative Party. The Labor Party has never even had a female leader.
    1
  8319. Actually, the presenter does mention that men may be victims as well near the beginning.
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  8320. First, the US has not been attacked. Second, the only way to really stop this is boots on the ground. Does anyone want that? It would have to be an operation that is comprehensive, totally destroying the adversary. When we put limits on our military we blunt their effectiveness. You have to take into account costs and benefits. Third, the South China sea is totally different. In the end, I think we will find it is China that suffers.
    1
  8321. The CCP cannot change direction. The reasons given miss the mark. The CCP is a criminal organization (much like Russia). If it changed direction in the ways indicated, it would implode from within.
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  8322. The stupidity of people continuing to work, often for months and sometimes years, is just astounding. The people bring this on themselves. I am not saying it is right not to pay them, but it is also not right to work while not being paid. What did they think would happen if they continued to work without their pay? Are companies or governments going to deal fairly with such people? Considering how the system is stacked against them, how can they expect justice. To make demands is to go against the CCP. How will that turn out? In the words of President Joe: Come on man!
    1
  8323. Sometimes I get a bit infuriated with Peter, although I like him overall. What he describes of the far-left socialists' plan to take over the institutions from inside, a bloodless revolution so to speak, is spot on. It is also the plan that Hitler followed in Germany. This is well documented, by Hitler himself. In fact, the Night of the Long Knives was Hitler getting rid of the violent revolutionaries in the Nazi Party, led by Ernst Rohm.
    1
  8324. The European increases in investment in the US, especially for companies like BASF, reflect all the things you mentioned, and also include the much lower energy and input costs in the US. The feedstock for the chemical processing used by companies like BASF, like natural gas, are so much cheaper in the US. That, and the fact that they can completely own their factories in the US and that their IP is protected, makes the move a no brainer.
    1
  8325. Peter, I just saw a video on the China Observer YouTube channel. It is titled "All Came Crashing Down, CCP is Finally Next". They start up mentioning you by name and go through all your arguments about China's fate. You should check it out.
    1
  8326. As for the helicopter, I actually saw an ad, somewhere in the WWW, stating that everyone should have a helicopter. That is, assuming you can afford one.
    1
  8327. Excellent analysis and video, as always. The government's ability to deal with capital outflows is an interesting phenomenon. It may actually be a feature, not a bug. Xi quite likely sees this as an opportunity to strengthen state control, meaning ownership, over the economy. He has more than once advocated this. After all, he is trying to steer the country, and the party, back toward socialism (with Chinese characteristics, of course). Considering the poor performance of state-owned enterprises, this is not a good sign for the Chinese people. By the way, you mention the $6T, but I have seen lots of reports claiming it is really $3T. These reports all wonder where the other $3T went. Any ideas about that? On the chip front, Huawei and SMC are not even close to catching up. TSMC is quoted, but don't forget, TSMC is a foundry. They don't make the machines or the software which are critical to their success. They are not the ones leading the technology. I do not want to minimize their importance, but it is an importance of the type of role they play, not a specific company. Your comment at the end of the Huawei segment is correct. I could tell you stories. What always surprises me is the Jack Ma situation in regard to regulation. Do you remember the statements that got him in trouble. What he basically said was that the regulatory structures in place were not sufficient to deal with the financial sector as it actually was. The crushed him for that, and now they are following his advice. Brilliant!
    1
  8328. By the way, the paragraph on Huawei was twice flagged by the YouTube algorithm (turned to red, which means it would be deleted). Let me know if you have experienced the same. I have on multiple occasions.
    1
  8329. What is going on? All these Democrats coming on Fox. Now you will add to the Fox News audience all those moderate Democrats that want to hear something more than the hate, racism and distortion (you know, the woke agenda) that one hears of the MSM cable channels. Fox News, onwards and upwards.
    1
  8330. The Tet Offensive was an important event. The main reason at the time was that old saw about the defender needing three times as many troops as the attacker. Tet showed that the North Vietnamese could martial enough troops so that the US could not meet that number. As for support for the war going downhill, yes there were lots of demonstrations, but don't forget that Richard Nixon won the 1972 presidential election by one of the largest margins in US history. He was no dove. Actually, a lot of those demonstrators were there primarily for the excitement, sex and drugs. I saw that firsthand.
    1
  8331. That is still a high price. Also, you have to consider something else. Availability of magazines and parts. I think Ruger did a much better job with a Glock compatible gun. I look at guns this way, you want to plan for a SHTF scenario. That means Glock, Beretta 92 and 1911 need to be in your collection.
    1
  8332.  @GCarty80  I stand corrected. The situations I was talking about involved Tiger I tanks. These were still quite heavy, but not quite as heavy as a M1. Thanks for pointing that out.
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  8333. The US, and other countries, developed skip bombing to attack ships at sea during WWII. Medium bombers and large bombers, such as the B-17 were used. When they tried high altitude bombing with B-17s against ships, the results were abysmal. As often happens, war accelerates development of techniques, as well as systems.
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  8334. I think one has to assume a leakage around the 10% level. Just think of it. If hydrogen is used widely, then there will be many, many chances for leakage. Hydrogen is notoriously hard to store in any case. If it is used for transportation, then you will have massive numbers of hydrogen storage containers moving around. This just invites problems.
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  8335. The Trump comment is very telling. For one thing, Trump scaled back government and went after the administrative state. He actually targeted some Federal programs to cities with large minority populations that vote Democrat. Trumps voters are not, as far as I can tell, looking for handouts. They just want the government to get out of the way of their getting good jobs. For example, the US would likely have a foreign trade surplus if Biden and the Democrats would get out of the way of the oil and gas industry. Is that a handout? As President Joe likes to say: Come on man! As for the gun toting Lauren Bobert and rural types being violent, you have to be kidding me. Where do the vast majority of the murders occur? It is in liberal cities with the strictest gun laws. Peter, I thought you were into data and facts. My ex-wife's mother was from a rural, farming area. Probably not too far from where you grew up but not in Iowa. While I was going down to her hometown a lot, to hunt and shoot guns, there was one murder. In their history. Mind you I went down there over a period of 25 or more years and got to know the people well. The thing is that this murder was a stabbing. The victim and perpetrator were brothers, and the stabbing took place in the adjoining state. The murderer then drove across the Mississippi where he was apprehended. I have a friend who lives in a large city and has a county place in a very rural part of an adjoining state. I was visiting him there and we were shooting a bunch of guns off his deck. His neighbor, a farmer, came by to join in. During our conversation he strongly suggested that my friend get a gun of his own to keep in the house. The people there all had guns and they didn't even lock their doors at night. I live in a large suburban city near a large city. The people here have lots of guns. I am willing to bet that there are more guns per capita than in the big city nearby, which by the way has a high murder rate. There have been two fatal police shootings, both justified, in city's almost 200-year history. Both fully justified (and both by the same officer). Both assailants were mentally unstable an armed (one with a gun and one with a knife). I can only remember one murder in the 32 years I have been here, and it was a stabbing in a bar. So, you may want to rethink your attitude a bit.
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  8336. Wait a darn minute. I wanted to get this comment in before watching the whole video. I am 30 seconds in. Now weren't we always told, even on this channel I think, that black holes are not dark matter? Come on guys! Make up your minds! Actually, this is a real problem with science communication, and perhaps science in general. There are two classes of science. The traditional where you observe nature, come up with theories and do controlled experiments. Then there is observational science. This comprises fields like astronomy and astrophysics. You can come up with theories from observations, but you are not able to test the hypotheses in a controlled manner. Both use mathematics and simulation, so people tend to think of them in the same way. Astronomy and astrophysics are more like archaeology where the next pottery shard may cause a total rethink, and then once that is done yet another pottery shard comes along, etc. Don't believe me. Just look at what has been happening with JWST. There are lots of cosmic pottery shards out there being discovered. I guess what gets me going on these rants (they are very therapeutic, actually) is science communicators who talk about a study as if it were truth because it was published. Hasn't Sabine opined about that. Heck, the authors of the study might be quite aware of the situation and understand it, but that often doesn't get communicated. Apropos of black holes there was a video on another channel discussing a study that called into question the famous black hole images that have been published from Event Horizon data. So, what we have is one group, going over the same data and getting a different picture. For one thing, who cares. It will be at least a few (nay, a massive number of) years before a close-up observation could be made that would settle the issue. Separating the wheat from the chaff is quite an arduous task.
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  8337.  @BurntRaisinToast  You've got that right. I have lived and traveled abroad a lot (not in Asia, though), so I have a very tolerant attitude for people who are not native speakers. If I feel myself getting critical, I just stop and think about how I must sound in say, German. On the other hand, with all the hype out there, I would have expected more of these AI generated voices.
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  8338. The stock market's recent performance is a total illusion. It was only government funds that provided the support for political purposes. I hate to break it to the CCP, but this is not how a market works. Even looking at Japan, their market crashed and went into the doldrums (along with the rest of their economy) for three decades. One of the main reasons was government restrictions in capital markets. They at least had strong companies and something to offer the world. China has Temu. Frankly, a good bit of Japan's recovery recently was driven by people looking for alternatives to China. So, trying to take cues from Japan's experience is probably not the way one wants to go.
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  8339.  @johnkeck  Not really. She is assuming that all holograms are the projection of a lesser dimensional surface. That is not the case.
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  8340.  @scene2much  No, to both. Love the joke though.
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  8341.  @billr3053  What does that mean?
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  8342.  @billr3053  Well, I saw it as a part at the Media Lab at MIT. I was there with two Army officers as a part of an R&D project into future technologies that might be useful in visualizing the battel space. I assure you that this was the case.
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  8343. Who said the S-400s were the best in the world? The Russians. Do you believe everything you see on the Internet? Other than the statement about the S-400s I think Peter did fairly well in talking about a military topic. Rare.
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  8344.  @gpsfinancial6988  That is not what I saw. It lags the ICE equivalent in GHG emissions for 110K km. As for what they are going to do by 2030, good luck with that.
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  8345.  @gpsfinancial6988  The Polestar report.
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  8346. Musk is a charlatan, and a willful tool of the CCP! And I am striving to be clean here. The CCP on team humanity? Is he joking? Look what they have done to their own people. Start with the air pollution. Then look at the freshwater resources of China. Reports I have seen claim 90% are contaminated. There is basically no clean water in China. Then look at degradation and poisoning of the soil. And if you believe in CO2 driven climate change, look at the contribution of China. Oh, and did I mention a worldwide pandemic that killed millions of humans around the world that the CCP covered up? So, he is either stupid (not really) or in collusion with the CCP. Kind of reminds one of Tim Cook, doesn't it. They have known of these things for a long time now. Musk's primary goal is ensuring his personal wealth. That is fair enough, but then to come up with this drivel about the CCP is just dishonest. As for his energy storage approach for utility type applications, he is barking up the wrong tree. Only if he can bring down the cost by a factor of at least 10 would this be potentially useful. Look at the numbers. The capacity of 3.9MWh is about 1/100th of a typical medium sized coal fire plant (output of 400MWh). Only the coal plant produces that continuously. Rounding up in Musk's favor, for each hour of a typical coal fired plant's output one would need 100 megapacks. So, to cover even half the time in a day would require 1,200 megapacks per plant displaced. That is conservative. For utility grade reliability one would have to double that. So, we are up to 2,400 megapacks. Round up to 2,500 for ease of calculation and safety margins and he could use these, in conjunction with the renewable sources to replace four typical coal powered plants per year. Even halving the requirements, I have laid out and comes to eight. China has 37GW of coal plants under construction this year, with more than that permitted. Frankly, this is pissing in the wind. And if you don't believe that much more massive energy storage is needed for renewables, just look at a recent example from the UK. There was a peak of 42% of electricity needs produced by wind one day, lasting less than an hour, according to reports I have seen. Musk is pushing the wrong battery technology for grid level storage, but heck, that is what he knows how to produce.
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  8347. Xi's statements at about 5:00 are so ignorant of history that it boggles the mind. China has a long history of over two millennia. I have read, but I am not certain of the veracity of this, that they had strong central government for probably only three centuries of that time. In addition, China's isolation led to weakness which allowed a small number of troops and ships from much smaller countries to basically take over China's foreign affairs for their own benefit. Another feature is warlordism. China has gone through many, many periods of rule of warlords (even if there was an emperor). In fact, Mao (and the CCP) was just one of many warlords who appeared after the fall of the Qing dynasty. This self-serving narrative is to be expected by any communist party. The thing is that the people are beginning to wake up. First there was Tiananmen. Then, during the protests at the end of last year, people were calling for Xi to step down and the CCP to step down then they called for democracy. In videos of the many housing crisis situations (and not only those), people call for their constitutional rights and rule of law (in the western sense). What they don't understand is that any authoritarian state becomes a kleptocracy, no different from an aristocracy. There I go, pontificating again. Sorry. It is just that these are things I am interested in you present really important information.
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  8348. The EU is an anti-democratic protectionist cartel. So, what did France expect?
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  8349. Oh, come on now, this is entertainment. I don't agree with much, if anything, Representative Greene stands for, but I think she was brilliant in this exchange. As I said, entertaining. If anything, this is calm behavior, historically. Making a big deal out of the term "lawmakers" is a bit misleading. The members of a legislature are representatives. In the US and UK these are geographic areas. The "laws" they make are varied, and the most important decisions are financial. That is, in fact, why the English Parliament was created. What taxes are to be collected and how that money is to be spent was the driving motivation behind the English Parliament. The King needed money for his wars. This all should be obvious in the fact that being a lawyer is not a requirement for running for the US Congress or the British Parliament.
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  8350. The support for Trump's peace plan has overwhelm support. Specifically, when people are asked is they support peace now that ends up with Russia controlling the territories they have already taken, the support is over 2/3. Yes, among Democrat voters the support is lower, but there are more Republicans in the country now than Democrats.
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  8351. Biden, like Obama, is more interested in opinion polls than policy. They are both reprehensible.
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  8352. What really entertains me is that these pop musicians think anyone cares. I am of their generation. I don't care about Neil Young or Joni Mitchell. I didn't listen to them back then. I was more into Jazz and some rock, like the Who and Led Zeppelin. Pop music is just what the name says. It is popular, in the moment. Then, eventually it becomes less popular, and then it is forgotten.
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  8353. The big flaw in Peter's argument is that if Putin calls a general mobilization he is done. He literally won't survive. That is one reason he hasn't done it so far. As for the Chinese backing him in a meaningful way, that is laughable. Chinese military tech is a pale copy of Soviet/Russian equipment. That means that basically it's trash. In addition, the scenarios Peter always brings up about how China will collapse are immediately brought into effect. You can discount the experience of WWII. Russia had many, many more people of military age then, and as with most of the world, a growing population. They are already having trouble keeping the lights on because they lack the people and equipment to maintain their systems. Also in WWII, the Soviets got massive amounts of equipment from their western allies.
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  8354. @gabaghoul__ Yes, it was. The western governments were actually running out of silver.
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  8355.  @426mak  You need to work on your comprehension skills. He specifically made it about shopkeepers.
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  8356.  @adrianainespena5654  The problem for Escobar is that he is does not run a government. Governments can do all kinds of crazy things that individuals, companies and drug cartels cannot. I think it has something to do with governments having "legitimate" military power. Now matter how rich and violent a cartel is, it will never match the power of a real military.
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  8357. Interesting. At about 19:00 he talks about the US and the British Empire. Now, in the 19th century the British Raj in India started to take on the symbols and style of the Indian princes. This was a true melding of cultures. The home country was appalled at this and put a stop to it. They insisted on the separation from India. Just think of what might have been if these two great cultures had truly merged.
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  8358. This is a great channel. I always watch and just shared it with my investment advisor. Actually, he has shunned investing in China for a while now, but I know he follows these things.
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  8359.  @D-E-S_8559  You are kidding, right. China has full cities that are empty. They have a high-speed rail system with many unprofitable and underused routes. The BRI has nothing to do with what I was referring to. I am talking about the theft or IP, ownership rules and other unfair trade practices.
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  8360. China the new world superpower? Where is the in depth analysis? This is so ludicrous. If China tries to do anything, their whole world can be brought down with a few destroyers. Thei navy is a joke. It is mostly littoral. They are more like Japan in WWII. Japan also imported most of their raw materials. In the end, we may not have had to drop the atomic bombs (although that shortened the war). They were already starving and bereft of industrial materials. China will go through the same thing, if they start a conflict. The other difference is that China has many enemies that are well armed, prepared and watching every move they make. The fact is that if China does start a conflict, the Malacca Straight will be blocked. China will run out of fuel in a matter of months and deindustrialize in a year. They will also starve. Even if they do not start a conflict, their debt situation will limit their ability to project power, their demographics will stifle them and disengagement by the rest of the world will tank their economy. Don't fear China.
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  8361. I think you will find, if you look into it, that the BRI is already turning into a bust. There are so many issues. These include unsustainable debt and poor construction quality. In addition, political instability in areas, specifically Pakistan, imperils any success. There is major instability in Baluchistan where the port of that particular BRI branch is located. Several projects have been cancelled and most are behind schedule. One of the purposes is to avoid the Straights of Malaca through much of China's energy and trade flows. The idea is to avoid the situation where India, or the US, could easily block off this trade. The flaw in the plan is that Gwadar port is actually very close to India, and is just as vulnerable. Another problem with the whole BRI concept is that overland routes are generally much less economical than sea routes. A large part of the success of the Europeans conquering vast parts of Asia (and Africa) stems from their control of the sea. Transport of bulk cargo and containers is generally three to ten times more expensive than ocean transport. In addition, if you look at many of the routes taken by the BRI, there are often multiple transfers from one mode of transport to another. All this adds considerable cost. In short, don't be too impressed by the BRI. It will not enrich China. The work is done by Chinese companies without much local labor. The money flows from the government coffers to these companies and officials. The corruption is as monumental as the project itself. Much of that money is often sequestered abroad to help fund official's escape plans when the CCP falls apart.
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  8362.  @trunkschillman  Russian weapons have never performed well, except perhaps in the case of India. Look at the Israelis. Look at Iraq vs Iran (which had American weapons). Look at the Gulf War and OIF. The Egyptians threw out the Russians because of the inferiority of their equipment, training and doctrine. After they made peace with Israel the US started supplying them. I did work at the Command and General Staff College and the Egyptians were hosted there, after throwing out the Soviets.
    1
  8363.  @Ishant007  Yes, and they seem to be the only ones who have done well with them. That goes to the professionalism of their Military and the bravery of the their troops.
    1
  8364.  @Ishant007  And, as I have said, India is the only Russian armed nation that has done well, although not always.
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  8365.  @Ishant007  I think it has a lot more to do with leadership, training and doctrine. Correct me if I am wrong (I am sure you will). I think that India has a more professional and well led military than most.
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  8366. Very helpful as usual.
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  8367. Charles will be a disaster for the monarchy. He is too political. I truly think it is time to ditch the monarchy. When I lived in the UK, early in the current millennium, I read a book, Bring Home the Revolution. The monarchy is obsolete. Not only that, but what is counted as service is just the continuation of hidebound tradition. I write this as a conservative.
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  8368. @paper plane Yep, great power politics. But, what you forget is that the Soviet Union actually had the stated goal of taking over the world, That is the Communist ideology. This would not be with the consent of the governed. Look at it this way. WWII in the West was started by national socialists. If you look at their actions and methods, they are not much different from the Communists. Look at the referendum in Crimea It was not transparent and is not generally recognized around the world. I was in Greece in 1973 when there was a referendum for the continuation of the junta. The total yes vote was over 90%. As i went around the center of Athens that night, I saw lots of groups of people around portable radios in the streets. They all laughed at the result. You forget that in those times were existential issues. Not only nuclear annihilation, but the right of self determination. Would you rather live under a Communist system or a Western democratic system. That is the real question. Lots of mistakes were made on both side.
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  8369. @paper plane Vietnam was a UN operation, as was Korea. Considering what the North Vietnamese did during the war and in the immediate aftermath, I would not be supporting them. On the other hand, Vietnam is now an ally of the US. They fought a war against China, China's last, in which Vietnam won. Even the wars in Iraq (OIF) and Afghanistan were driven by fears, quite justified, which resulted in attacks on the US itself. OIF was probably not justified, I will admit. Afghanistan was. What you do not mention is the Communist aggressions. These include Hungary and Czechoslovakia. This was a time of great turmoil in the shadow of WWII. Get some perspective.
    1
  8370.  @Alainmontpellier1000  If you have something to say, say it.
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  8371.  @Alainmontpellier1000  You are welcome to your own opinion. If mine is wrong, please enlighten us with what and why. Just making such a statement is vacuous. Who are you? Who am I? This is a social media platform. Why should anyone believe either of us? We can only converse based on actual content.
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  8372. The issue, and your mention of it, of whether Trump, or any President or presidential candidate, campaigns for or against something like a ban on TikTok puzzles and rankles me. Did the TikTok ban in Congress originate with the White House? In fact, it originated with the opposition-controlled chamber. State bans had already been passed in various state legislatures. This is not something led by the US President. There are lots of issues that fall into the same category. It seems that there is too much emphasis on the information warfare aspect of this conflict. Go back and read some history. Especially in WWII, the Axis powers made a big deal of information warfare. How did that work out for them? Even in the Vietnam era, there were massive protests, and yet, in 1972, Richard Nixon won in one of the biggest landslides in US history. Having lived through that period and most of the Cold War, I am puzzled that most current commentators don't know about these things. The only thing I can figure, and it is something I have been thinking about lately, is that the "kommentaclura" is making a big deal about this because that is what they can do. They, and I include Peter in this, have little or no impact on the real policy makers in terms of hard security decisions, etc. so going on about the information war is their only avenue. It is the only space they can really play in. Consider this carefully. Is it not playing into the adversary's hand? These are people I like and respect, by the way. I just think it is an interesting and important phenomenon.
    1
  8373. The term "popularism" is different from "populism". Which did you really mean?
    1
  8374.  @EconLessons  No problem. It is an easy mistake to make. I was just wondering. You do fine. I am very interested in what you have to say.
    1
  8375. What does the UN have to do with sovereign nations legislation that only affects its own citizens? Abolish the UN!!!!!
    1
  8376. The FBI needs to disbanded and reconstituted. In its present form it has become political and corrupt
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  8377. Hurrah! Finally, some sense from a defense expert in the UK.
    1
  8378. We have this mania about international borders. A lot of the borders in the world are leftovers from colonial times and many of those make little sense. Some were drawn after wars, especially WWI. And of course, we have the borders from the breakup of the Soviet Union. Just look at Europe in the later part of the 20th century until today. Where is Czechoslovakia? Now there are two countries there and that breakup was peaceful. Where is Yugoslavia? That breakup was violent and there are still issues. Then there are the various independence movements in the UK (Scotland), Spain (Catalonia), and over time there have been rumblings in Belgium which consists of two regions that sometimes talk about splitting. And of course, there is the situation in Northern Ireland. How much blood and treasure do we want to expend? Whose blood and treasure?
    1
  8379. Whatever happened to global warming?
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  8380.  @lylekmilleson310  Well, thanks for the compliment. A lot of it is just decades of experience, reading and following foreign affairs. I was born in Washington, DC, in Georgetown, and have always been interested in it. This is kind of ironic, because my brother and sister, also born in Georgetown, and my mother are/were never that interested. Being in Washington, DC I got to meet a lot of people in government, including the diplomatic corps. I have traveled extensively internationally, starting when I was a teenager. In my first trip to Greece, I was there when there was a yes/no vote for the dictatorship (guess who won). Things were tense. The next year I was there for the fall of the junta and ended up in a long odyssey across the continent with a German girl I met on an island in the Cyclades. That was very eye-opening as I had to go through Yugoslavia. I went on these trips on my own. I have also lived and worked abroad and was, for a time a Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) executive for a large American firm. I traveled a lot for that job as well in the whole territory. When I started at university, right after my first trip to Europe, there were lots of Marxist influences. I was studying physics (I later switched to computer science). I took a philosophy class, and the professor, who was a great guy and very popular, was a Marxist-Leninist. A bunch of us used to get high with him (it was the 70s, after all) and he gave each of us a book by Marx or Lenin to read. I could go on, but you get the idea. I was later (not much later) cured of all that. I also worked in the aerospace and defense industry and that just fed my fascination with the topic. We were always aware of Soviet spies trying to infiltrate and I sometimes had positions where I was made very aware of this. I hope that's not too much, but you asked. By the way, I really like Tony's videos. I add comments reacting mostly to the content he provides, which I do not easily find elsewhere. I guess I find it cathartic.
    1
  8381.  @robertluong3024  Absolutely. I worked in aerospace for a while and went through some big audits there as well. Same thing. My understanding is that financial institutions have to keep records for seven years. Actually, that seems to be the standard for lots of types of enterprises. I had an uncle who was an FFL holder, and he had to keep records for seven years as well. One interesting revelation I had on this from the past was in reference to early optical storage. One vendor had a system, called a worm (write once, read many times) drive. The media was a large platter, the size of an LP record (you young folks might want to look that up). Because they were so large and spun so fast, they were made of a tough material (actually a bulletproof glass) and could not easily be destroyed. At the presentation where these were announced some guys from a bank asked, then how could they get rid of the data after the statutory seven years. It turns out that you had to send them to the vendor who would dissolve them in an acid bath.
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  8382.  @petercofrancesco9812  That may well be true. The reality is that the law is not strictly there to protect us from ourselves, but from unscrupulous actors. Frankly, just about everything about crypto is unscrupulous. How do you think Hamas got a lot of its funding? Have you heard about "pig butchering". And what's with all these made-up tokens? This whole thing is just speculation. What SBF did was outright fraud and theft. FTX is not the only crypto enterprise that engages in such practices. They got caught. Others are being investigated as well.
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  8383. The real crime is with the Supreme Court. Affirmative action, racial quotas and the like should NEVER have been deemed constitutional. PERIOD! I once worked at a large aerospace firm. At one time we had a new hire who was black. He was smart and a good addition to the team. He was brought in at a pay grade above what his education and experience would normally have been given. He knew it. We talked about it. He wasn't very comfortable with it.
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  8384. To say that there is an anti-Jew bias because Orban is against Soros is disingenuous. There are lots of people who dislike Soros, and in some countries his organization's activities have been proscribed. This is not because he is a Jew, but because he is using foreign money to influence internal politics and culture of many countries. He is one of the foremost globalists out there. The Print doesn't take money from him, does it?
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  8385. I love how many the pundits have their list of what one side or the other has to do. At least he is starting to show some humility. For one thing, the Ukrainians are using a NATO style of planning and operations. This explicitly is designed to react to specific conditions at the time of action and allows for going outside the plan. The Russians can't do this. I was going to say won't, but I truly believe, given their history, that can't is the right term here. The Ukrainians are using this to totally disorient the Russian forces. They have them running scared. In fact, yesterday the Russian force literally ran, and this was from a small unit action. There is lots of talk about the fortifications of the Russians in the south. Are you kidding me? What do you think all this armor and weapons the west has supplied is good at dealing with. Go back to the Gulf War and the Saini in the Arab Israeli wars. The OPFOR were dug in in both cases, and were overrun in days, if not hours. Russia is toast.
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  8386.  @krishnapillai2595  Thanks. Another story along those lines concerns the Japanese, who I have a lot of respect for. Prior to WWII their leaders thought that the US could not fight, or prevail. They said that because they considered us "mutts".
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  8387. The trope that "all wars end in negotiation" is so clearly wrong that I have to discount the pundits that constantly repeat it. Let's just look at the last 100 years or so. WWII did not end in negotiation. The Korean war never ended. Vietnam had negotiations, but the North violated them and took over the South anyway. In Afghanistan there were negotiations which were never completed. The Biden administration ignored them and just left. So, where did this trope come from?
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  8388. It's all due to global warming, of course.
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  8389. Is our economy down? The stock market is not the economy. You have the understand that stock valuations are fictitious. Frankly, it is no different with commodities. If more than a small percentage is bought or sold, the "value" can change dramatically, without any fundamental issue driving it.
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  8390.  @lindaphillips4246  They assaulted it, but it is still there. What happened in 2012 that makes you say that? Really curious.
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  8391. This is fantastical. To claim that a sovereign state must support an organization is a total violation of said sovereignty. This is just, as stated in the report, a distraction. I am glad that the US is not involved with the ICJ.
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  8392. Wow! Someone in National Security who speaks with authority. This new administration will be a refreshing change from the Obama holdovers and DEI hires of the Biden administration.
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  8393. I think that if Harris had gone on Rogan's podcast Trump would have gotten even more votes. She was probably the worst candidate the Democrats could have had. Look at her performance in 2020.
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  8394.  @michaeldavis3819  A new meaning for the acronym BDS. Love it.
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  8395. You left out the shortbread biscuits and the cheeses. I miss the Wensleydale. I actually took the family to the plant when we lived in England.
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  8396.  @rootaficationism  You should have.
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  8397. Think of the frequent flyer miles.
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  8398. Very interesting topic, and well presented. I am actually reading a book entitled "Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails: by Nassim Taleb. One question I have on the climate models is, how many of them correctly predict the past? I have heard that none of them do. Can't determine if that is correct. In my first introduction to modeling, in high energy physics (this was many years ago), one produced various models from theory. Then the experiment was run, and the statistics produced by the experiment were compared to the same statistics produced by the various models. The one closest to experiment was then said to be supported. I have also seen this approach used in economics and "other" fields. If the model cannot properly predict the past, it cannot be used to predict the furure. This is more similar to astronomy, where we can take measurements, but not do controlled experiments. If a computer model of the cosmos is developed, they run it back and then forward to see if the model predicts what we have today. If not, the model is changed or discarded. If it does, then it can be run forward to make predictions. So, the real question that has to be asked first is how good the models are. Then we can talk about extreme events.
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  8399.  @yukiyu6241  Show some respect? Who are you to tell me how to react. Get a life.
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  8400. You should note that the Ukrainians now have more tanks in Ukraine than the Russians do. This is due to two factors. One is that the Ukrainians have captured more tanks than they lost. The second is that they are now being heavily supplied by NATO with tanks. In addition, the Ukrainians have more troops in the country. This is only including fully trained troops. They also have masses of militia that make it hard for the Russians to take major cities. I also wonder how the ground conditions will affect all aspects of tank warfare. We have been having a wet spring here in the US Mid-West, where I am. The farmers have trouble two times a year with this. In the spring at planting, and in the fall when it is time for harvest Their equipment is similarly heavy. I have a cousin who got two new John Deere tractors. When I looked at them for the first time, I noticed the counterweights on the front. One was the weight of my first car, the other was the weight of my second car. The ground will only be really favorable for cross country tank warfare in the summer. It will be interesting to see what happens.
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  8401. You need to dig into the news some more. The "epidemic" is not localized in China. It has been reported simultaneously in cities 800 kilometers apart. That does not sound localized to me. By the way, I appreciate your channel. You provide lots of good information and food for thought. Keep up the good work.
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  8402.  @Campbellteaching  Thanks for the response. I literally just saw this information on a channel called China Truths. There are probably other sources as well. I really appreciate your channel and the work you put into it. You provide lots of information that we would probably not get elsewhere. Keep up the good work.
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  8403. Sun was basically a socialist as well as a nationalist.
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  8404. The issue with Evergrande is that it had become a Ponzi scheme. It did not start out that way, but that is what it became. And they are not the only ones. Then, Xi brought out the three red lines, and tanked the sector. That coupled with the reduced foreign investment, and outright flight of many major companies, some Chinese, as well as the falling population and an already overbuilt property sector means that the sector is not "pressured" but dead. Housing was an investment vehicle for many Chinese, who did not have access to other investment vehicles. On top of that, there is the unemployment issue. There is lots of talk about youth unemployment, but a rarely mentioned phenomenon is the over 35 unemployment. As sectors like tech cut back, many of these people are let go. They have already bought homes. Now they face ruin because no one will hire them. The youth are not at the point where they can buy homes, typically, so they are not a factor.
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  8405. What a load of crap? These plans have been knocking around for a while, as you say. The money is not really committed and thus will probably never be allocated. The other issue I have with this is the goals. Infrastructure means something you can use, like telecommunications. electricity, and transportation. The goals mentioned at 11:45 are meaningless woke crap.
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  8406. It is hard to feel sorry for people who buy unfinished properties, especially with the banking a personal bankruptcy rules of the CCP. The risks are just too high. A lot of the issues the Chinese people are experiencing are due to cultural attitudes as much as anything else. As for Evergrande, the red flag was when they started branching out into businesses with no relation to their core business. A good example in the US is General Electric. Jack Welch was an admired executive, and yet he put the company on the path to ruin. Beware of any company that does this. Look at Elon Musk, for an example of how one might do this right. Now, Musk is quite a controversial character, but a successful one. He is in a lot of businesses, but these are all separate companies. They stand or fall on their own.
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  8407. What I don't understand is what all the dam building has been about. The main idea of dam building is flood control, with hydrometric generation a close second. Seeing all this mayhem year after year in China, I have to wonder what they thought they were doing. Blaming it on climate change is just plain silly. For one thing, you will not know if the climate has actually changed until well into it. All measures I have seen show most indicators well with the statistical norms. I do occasionally see scientists who point out that structures like the Three Gorges Dam do have an effect on the local climate. This is more likely and easier to measure.
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  8408.  @sallyjune4109  Good point. That is where I saw it. Thanks for reminding me.
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  8409. Diet is more important than anything else for our health. I have seen it in my own life, and in that of many others. The whole processed foods industry is a travesty. The medical establishment is great when it comes to dealing with acute situations, but clueless when it comes to health and lifestyle issues.
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  8410. Of course, all those countries that tried to militarize their kids didn't do too well. I wouldn't get too bothered by it. From my experience, meeting Chinese (from China) at universities, many of them want to stay in the US. So, it doesn't seem to be working. The Japanese had the attitude towards Americans during WWII that we were mutts. Their superior race would overcome us. How did that work out?
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  8411. It is clear you are not a fan of Trump. You totally underestimate him, and your TDS is very advanced. For one thing, the current administration has been a disaster for Ukraine. They have slow walked arms and support for Ukraine and put on many restrictions. Biden also has no strategy. I am not the only one saying that. Many stalwart supporters of Ukraine have said that as well. Since Trump met with Biden and the transition has gotten going things have loosened up considerably, I saw an interview with Trump's pick for National Security Advisor and he indicated he was already sitting in on meetings and was fine with loosening restrictions. I think you totally misread the situation because of your syndrome. You also underestimate Trump's negotiating capabilities ignoring the facts from his first term. Look at the Abraham Accords and the renegotiation of NAFTA as well as the pressure Trump put on Iran. There are lots of other examples from his first term. Putin is in a very bad place. The US has lots of leverage if only it had a leader who would actually use it. You really need to get that TDS looked at.
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  8412. Very interesting video. I usually cringe when I see you doing a non-physics video, but this was very well researched and presented. I hope that doesn't sound wrong. On the other hand, it will all become a moot point as we will all be replaced by robots soon.
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  8413. Unless the European leaders listen, they will lose the support of the American people, and they depend on the US. They used the "peace dividend" to gut their defenses and put that money into buying votes. It is time to step up. Europe beware.
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  8414. Wonderful analysis. The political considerations were quite important. Don't forget that the US did not voluntarily get into WWII (or WWI) early (until attacked or declared war on) partly because of the American public's view of the British. The feeling in the US was that supporting the British would only allow them to retain their empire, which was not something they wanted. As in WWI, in WWII the US would eventually field the larger and better equipped force. This is not to minimize the British (or French in WWI) but was a result of larger population an industrial capacity. Don't forget that in 1900 the US was producing half the industrial goods in the world. In WWII, I expect this was probably of the same order. Monty was actually a good general, but as you (and many others) point out, he was hard to live with. I think Eisenhower did the best he could. Still, the outcome of the war was never really actually in doubt by the end of 1944. Between the allies there more than enough force to finish Germany. It was only a matter of when.
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  8415. You people are so young and childish and uninformed. When one of your guests brings up the issue of how this reflects on the left's ability to run healthcare, etc. you ramble on about how this is outsourced to a private company, not government. Do you really believe that the government actually builds ANYTHING? There are few, if any, areas where government employees actually do the work. This is especially true of the development of complex systems, including military hardware. Even infrastructure is contracted out. The government merely "manages" the process. Almost everything is contracted out. One area where this is not true is the VA health system. How is that working out.
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  8416. Wonderful analysis. For those that don't think Peter is on the mark with these analyses, I encourage you to consider China. I have read Peter's books. The Chinese situation is playing out as close to Peter's predictions as possible. I am even hearing the term "warlord" being used. It is like seeing a script being played out on a stage. It is all happening in real-time. So, in Europe I feel sorry for the Ukrainians. They are putting their hopes and dreams on EU and NATO membership. The EU is a protectionist cartel and who knows what the future of NATO is going to be. The only thing that is in their favor is that Russia's demography and economy are in at least as bad a shape as Germany's. Both have to export to survive. In both cases this will become more difficult. This also applies to Russia's ability to project military power. The thing that is going to hurt Russia (and potentially the Middle Eastern oil states) is the discovery and development of oil fields in South America. Just add more confirmation of the predictions, there is an article in the WSJ today about Argentinian shale oil finally starting to take off. This is in no small part a result of Milei's policy direction. If South America could get its act together, OPEC would be toast. Then there is Sub-Saharan Africa In fact, Angola just signaled it is pulling out of OPEC. OPEC is only useful to the Saudi's and their Middle Eastern allies.
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  8417. "Does not adhere to market principles". Who are these people saying this? Are they not aware that the CCP, their rulers, are commies? Come on man!
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  8418. Don't worry. The post 1945 world order, led by the US, is collapsing. Europe, China and Russia are in demographic decline. China has a debt to GDP ratio of over 250%. They are running out of money for local government.
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  8419. Well, Iran has been run by Islamists since 1979. Someone must have supported them. Actually, the Shah's Iran had a massive and repressive security apparatus. The Islamists did have support of the population at first. Another issue in terms of the Afghanistan situation is that Iran is 99% Shia, and the Taliban are Suni. So, for the Afghans this is a religious war. You just have to look at the repression on non-Suni minorities in Afghanistan to get a sense of their attitudes. To blame this on Joe Biden is also a bit of a stretch. No one in the US believes that he made the right decisions during the withdrawal. It was a totally botched operation. On the other hand, the bulk of the population seemed to support the Taliban. Many in the Afghan army actually defected as soon as the Taliban showed up. Nation building rarely works. When you look at where it did, say Germany and Japan, those countries were devastated and defeated in a war and then occupied with the victors running them for years and setting up their constitutions. Short of doing that, there was no way to reform Afghanistan, a far less developed country.
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  8420. I don't know if you have looked into the EV market in China, but it is a mess. Subsidies have been cut or eliminated. Sales have tanked. Many cars were "sold" and then warehoused to get the subsidy money. New cars are so cheap that used cars simply aren't selling. Even Tesla has had to cut prices.
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  8421. I once had a security training firm. The guy who headed it wanted to expand into Europe. He found that Gestapo headquarters in Vienna was available to rent. He wanted to, but I dissuaded him.
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  8422. I thought that the idea of any state support was to help those in need. What you are implying is that these are universal rights. Does that make sense? As for the man making 60K whose wife does not work, where is the need for child allowance. I thought the idea was to help people working who have no one to care for the child.
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  8423. The title of this video is misleading clickbait. It almost doesn't matter what is done, as long as it is not more of the same for Argentina. Milei got into the presidency because Argentina was a true basket case before. Actually, doing a video about Argentina's situation at this point is pointless. You need to wait until Milei has been in office at least a year.
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  8424. When, at about 6:45 you say "what a lot of people missed" you must be kidding. I see and hear this all the time on YouTube channels. You should stop it. I expect that most people have heard about the Russian failure. It was big news everywhere. Are you, and those other YouTubers, assuming that your audience is ignorant? It really makes your content less interesting. You should really edit your scripts and be realistic. If you do so much research to make these videos, then how could you miss that.
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  8425. This whole myth about the Russians prevailing even through massive losses is based on one event, WWII. If you look at the Russian military history from the Crimean War to today, you will see that WWII was the outlier. In WWI the Russians had more troops than the Germans. How did that work out? In the Winter War with Finland the Soviets had massive losses. They were unable to take over a small country on their borders. The list goes on. The big difference with WWII is that the Ukrainians have not invaded Russia. The Russian leadership is delusional.
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  8426. We may not have elections in four years? Really? This is just the same stuff the far-right talk show hosts were saying at the end of Obama's second term.
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  8427.  @HellBot-gi5si  Excellent and important point.
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  8428.  @history_repeats8201  That is the sad reality.
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  8429.  @janeannkilgour6853  Well, we should have gone because of the threat from Al Queda. We should not have stayed. On that we agree.
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  8430. On the YouTube restrictions you are barking up the wrong tree. A lot of the combat footage you blur is available on lots of other channels uncensored. I mean the exact same footage. You need to find out what the real reason is. I expect it is politically and driven by the Russians in the background. I have not done any detailed analysis, but my impression is that the channels impacted are smaller, independent channels like yours. Those of major news outlets seem to have no such problems.
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  8431.  @MrSupergibs  Are you following the actual news coming out of the world? Since COVID and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the things he has predicted have been happening in real-time. For example, in today's Wall Street Journal, on the front page of the Business & Finance section the headline is "Cargo Shipowners Cancel Sailings". One of the major factors is factory shutdowns in China. The list goes on. Frankly, his view of the bigger picture is about as spot on as I have seen. In addition, there are more and more analysts that are echoing him. I am not sure of whether they are following him or are looking at the same data and coming to the same conclusions. I would like to know what you think the bigger picture is. I mean that sincerely. It is good to have different viewpoints.
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  8432.  @brandongonsalves3615  Have you read any of his books?
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  8433.  @troypeterson7943  How do you know? Are you informed about what is going on in the world? Seems not.
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  8434. I was with you until the green energy stuff. If you hadn't noticed green energy has been a disaster for countries like Germany. They shut down their nuclear plants (which are green, by the way) and invested heavily in wind and solar. As a result, they have some of the highest energy costs in the developed world. It is killing their industry. The UK is going through a similar situation. These are among the richest countries in the world. The thing you forget is that billions upon billions have been spent on research and development in the green energy sector and we are still nowhere near being able to replace fossil fuels. It's physics, not economics.
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  8435. Politics should be kept out of the Olympics. The original Olympics were held between states that were frequently at war. The idea of the Olympics was a competition that was held in spite of these wars. Politics at the Olympics is totally unacceptable. Air your opinion after, or before, but not during. Otherwise, you are denying the Olympic spirit.
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  8436. Kennedy, you are telling us that just because some on the left are labeling Israel and apartheid state, that everyone just accepts that. So, what you are saying is that we are all just sheep and follow the narrative. So, we are ALL just dumb. If people in the media didn't just parrot each other, then we would have a much better conversation about the issues of the day. It is the media that is pushing these "narratives", both left and right. Let's talk about issues, not narratives.
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  8437. Brilliant!
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  8438. The US is not choking off Chinese technology. They are limiting US technology transfer to China. Those are two very different things. There is a good reason for the US to do this. China has stated openly that it wants to overcome the US militarily. The fact is that they don't have the capability to do this, and probably never will. China has also already taken as much military technology from Russia as they can. The fact is that they can't even reproduce this to the level of the Russians.
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  8439. Glad to see the beard back.
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  8440.  @justme1524  I have a beard, and have had one for almost 50 years. So, I like beards.
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  8441. China as a country may not exist in 2027. They are literally falling apart as we speak. This includes finance, demographics and economy. They have so many crises happening at the same time that they will likely be fighting internally before they can get around to Taiwan. There is a whole lot more to discuss along those lines. The other thing is the corruption and incompetence in their military. You have to buy your position in the PLA, from Sargent to General, and the prices are well known. Is that really the army that will undertake one of the most complex and risky types of operations ever attempted? The other thing is that they are so dependent on imports from oil to industrial raw materials to food to the inputs to grow food that they are the most vulnerable major country on the planet. And guess what? Most of the most critical commodities flow through one straight, Malaca, and this is easy to interdict. The US or India could do it with, as one analyst likes to say, a couple of destroyers.
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  8442.  @-whackd  No. I think they are rare to non-existent. On the other hand, CNN reporter Jeffrey Toobin exposed himself to his colleagues on a Zoom call. I don't think he meant to, but it was very embarrassing and is still talked about. What I was really getting at is that Zoom is a real time image of a real person (although you can play with the background). Second Life and Meta are synthetic characters in an artificial environment. People hide behind those avatars. This is not good. It has no positive social value. You hear about people hiding behind their on-line personalities. A 50-year-old man pretending to be a 15-year-old girl. Frankly, it is that type of stuff that makes the Internet toxic.
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  8443. There is a big Theosophical Society library quite near me in Illinois. I have frankly always resisted going there, although it looks very interesting, and imposing. In fact, this is the national center for the Theosophical Society in the US. The international headquarters is in actually in India (home of the Aryans?). Spooky.
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  8444.  @looke3392  In WWII, the Allies insisted on unconditional surrender. No negotiations. None! In Sri Lanka, it was just the elimination of the enemy. No one left to negotiate with. In Vietnam, the US "turned over" the war the South. The North infiltrated them and just took over. There had been negotiations, but the North did not abide by the terms. In Afghanistan, there were negotiations, but the US backed government and army folded The US just decided to cut its losses and leave. It was done poorly.
    1
  8445.  @looke3392  Now you are just being silly. What timeframe are you talking about? How many wars has Europe had since, say, 1500?
    1
  8446. Peter, you're TDS is out of control. You need to get that looked at. So, Trump is bad. What was the situation with Putin, Kim and Xi under Trump. Now, for your homework, compare and contrast that with the situation under Obama and Biden.
    1
  8447. I often say I miss the Cold War. I say that because I got to do a lot of very interesting research with basically unlimited budgets. Two of those research projects were part of SDI. The things we were doing were considered fantastical at the time. When we did demos and simulations, we made them very visual. The generals loved it. When the Patriots were first used against ballistic missiles in the Gulf War, there was a lot of doubt about whether the systems were actually effective. There may have been some issues, but these things evolve. Frankly the research never stops. The naysayers are always out there. By the way, the WSJ has an editorial today titled "Ronald Reagan Just Saved Israel From Iran’s Attack". Worth a read.
    1
  8448. The polls I have seen show strong support for Ukraine in the US. Cherry-picking polls is beneath you.
    1
  8449. Interesting analysis. Amortization over ten years for AI chips is unreasonable, though. Amortization over three years is probably more reasonable, even for standard CPU based systems. Do you have a source for the ten years, or is it just a standardized assumption? I fully believe that all the hype over pure play AI companies will be very much like those of a related field, big data. The hype is so similar. People were saying that every major company would need a "C" suite executive for big data, remember that? I do. I was teaching professional courses on big data at the time. Where are the pure play companies in the big data space now? Can you name any without looking it up online? In fact, if you do look up Hadoop vendors today, you will get those players along with many large, more diversified companies. There are many parallels here. For one thing a lot of open-source software is available in this space. Thus, the barrier to entry is low. Even considering the cost to train and run models, the barriers are only going to come down. Those cloud services vendors have to keep up their utilization to make things profitable. This is where the computing industry is most like any other industrial concern. If you build an automobile plant, much of the cost involves the upfront capital. If you run one shift, you might just cover your investment. You really need to run two or three shifts to make money. The cloud computing industry works in the same way.
    1
  8450. Japan, like Nazi Germany, was a racially based totalitarian state. It would never be able to integrate these peoples in synergistic way. it is much like what happened to the Nazis in Soviet Russia. At first the Nazis were hailed as liberators, especially in places like the Baltics and even Ukraine. Then, because of their racism and ideology they alienated the people they had "liberated". No, it was never in the cards for them to prevail.
    1
  8451.  @newagetemplar6100  I have lived in the UK and saw examples of the issues with the NHS. Fortunately it was not something that happened with my family, but with friends and neighbors. Actually being an ex-pat I had private insurance, if it came to that. As for the purpose of government, I agree with you. The less they are involved with the better.
    1
  8452.  @newagetemplar6100  Thanks.
    1
  8453. Lies! The US Congress decided that the embassy should be moved to Jerusalem. Various presidents used a clause in the legislation to delay it, for years. Trump just carried out the will of the Congress, finally.
    1
  8454.  @densonsmith2  They are just able to maintain a sort of status quo. I am assuming that the "bad consequences" means something more.
    1
  8455.  @ilonkastille2993  Well, duh. What is the biggest concern of Ukrainians? It is that if the conflict is stopped in place and/or territory is given up, then the Russians will just try again later. The solution is some sort of security guarantee or alliance with the US and western Europe. What that does is to commit other people's blood and treasure to opposing Russia. I for one do not think that Russia could attack Ukraine again. Why do you think that Putin has not done a general mobilization? Because the minute he does that he is done. This is not the 20th century. There is a huge difference between being attacked by an outsider and trying to expand your territory when you are already the largest country on the planet. Putin doesn't even have an ideology like the commies of the Soviet Union. Unless there are other major consequences, such as reparations, etc. then there will be instability. After WWI the allies did not directly impose their will on the Germans. After WWII they knew better. Something fundamental has to change in Russia and I expect that it will mean the end of the Russian Federation.
    1
  8456.  @timrider1224  Thanks from my friend. While the collapse is a "solution" this is rarely something that can be counted on to end wars. Look at Japan toward the end of WWII. They were prostrate. They could not get any materiel from outside (and they needed a lot) and were systematically being destroyed before the atom bombs were dropped. And yet it took those weapons to convince them to surrender. Even the Germans in WWII fought to the end. The current Russian population are a bunch of serfs. Read Gogol's book "Dead Souls" from the middle of the 19th century to get an understanding of Russia today. I fully expect the collapse to happen. Even a majority of geopolitical strategists, when polled, expect that as well. The question is the timeframe. Between Russia's mismanagement, Ukraine's actions and external pressure, that is probably going to happen sooner rather than later. The same is true of CCP led China and Iran. The problem in the Russian situation is the dire consequences for Ukraine.
    1
  8457.  @donnadixon289  Greenland is a colony of Denmark.
    1
  8458. Who the heck is the CCP to oppose the use of any issue in US elections? The CCP is both uninformed and stupid. They only go from one stupid statement to another. The US should isolate China NOW!
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  8459. GDP is a flawed measure of an economy. If you want to compare economies using GDP, you have to assume their economic profiles are similar. Many economists and financial analysts have abandoned GDP as a metric they follow because of this. It might be viable comparing North America and Europe, but there are better measures that can be used. Take China, for example. They goose their GDP with lots of unproductive infrastructure spending. A good example is the high-speed rail (HSR) system. The first few lines between first and second tier cities were profitable and viable. So, what did China do, it doubled down and decided to connect every Podunk city, town and village with HSR. The result is underutilized lines and abandoned stations and a debt for the system of about $1T. That's dollars, not yuan. The operational losses of the system continue, and that debt grows. They actually have no hope of being able to reduce the debt. So, a big bump in GDP to begin with and now a drain on the economy. That is just one of many, many examples. As is mentioned here, we are comparing an economy on a war footing with countries that are not. That is a totally invalid comparison and should not even have been mentioned.
    1
  8460. Like a lot of gun content creators on YouTube, this guy is incredibly uninformed. Beretta submitted the APX, not the M9A4 for the XM17 program. In fact, Beretta made an unsolicited proposal to the US Military to adopt the M9A3. It was rejected. The M9A3 failed on one of the main requirements, which was modularity. The Glock, which did well in the first phase of the trials, was not further evaluated. The speculation was that this was due to a low cost from SIG. I think the modularity issue was a factor, but that is just my speculation. The M9A4 is a newer gun and is an evolution on the M9A3. The pistol trials started in 2015. The M9A3 was debuted in 2015. The M9A4 was released in 2021. A couple minutes of research would have revealed all this. Considering this guy is posting on the Internet, the lack of research is puzzling.
    1
  8461. Agh? Not another one. What happened to flow batteries (I like those)? How about super capacitors, or better yet, ultra capacitors? Maybe giant flywheels. My father worked on those half more than a century ago. He actually gave me a physics problem while I was in high school to come up with a parameter. Of course, he couldn't tell me what it was for because it was classified. Thirty years later I bought one for a highly reliable, diverse power system I was designing.
    1
  8462.  @UncleLouigisfamousyt  Good point. Of course, if they did what you get is graft and corruption.
    1
  8463. Have you ever lived abroad? I have, in this millennium, and I saw a very different situation. The only thing interesting was the water heater situation. Of course, you know what the genesis of that is, don't you? It has nothing to do with efficiency, it is a result of not having a lot of space.
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  8464. It is all good. We live in a simulation, anyway. That is actually what some physicists believe. Imagine that. Hard science going back to spiritualism.
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  8465.  @adrianseanheidmann4559  @Siriuhan What you don't seem to understand is that everyone was doing it at the time. The American natives did it to each other long before Europeans got to the Americas. The Europeans were doing it to each other. Even on the subcontinent, if you go back not too far, it was the norm. Nation states with fixed borders are a relatively recent thing.
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  8466.  @adrianseanheidmann4559  Actually, that is a myopic, Eurocentric view. There were lots of total displacements as well as outright genocides. Just look at central Eurasia and the Khans. They conquered and made subservient many peoples from China to what we now call Russia.
    1
  8467. Flee, flee for your life.
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  8468. The EU policies Poland is resisting are also being resisted by a number of other EU countries as well. Frankly, the EU is dysfunctional, and some geopolitical analysts do not give it much time in its current form. The attempt to create a federal system across Europe like the US has is doomed to fail. The EU is different both historically and in its development.
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  8469. I grew up in Washington, DC. All the strip clubs I frequented (and I did, frequently) have either burned down, been closed for drug violations or been built over.
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  8470.  @yankee2666  Don't worry, there are new one.
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  8471. Looking at the first sentence of the description, I am struck by how the whole drone issue became a thing. I think I understand it. First, warfare is always changing. This is especially true of the technologies used. One could go back to gunpowder, but that is a long road. How about steam power vs. sail. How about airplanes. Why did first the Germans, then Allies (US and UK) bomb cities, including lots of civilian targets? There were those that thought that an enemy could be brought to heel through bombing alone. As far as I recall, there was one such example in the Middle East in the early 20th century. Then there was the atomic bomb. Another example where war was ended by a new weapon that the recipients did not understand. Of course, there were lots of other things going one in all these cases. There is generally not one technology or action that is involved. Frankly, with Japan, we could have just isolated and starved them. There was never any need to invade. Through history this was done more than once. So, even with those massive bombing campaigns, both sides were forced to put up many millions of soldiers. Just look at Ukraine right now. Lots of drones on both sides. Are either cutting back on the number of soldiers? Think about it. In the end it is the man with the gun that shows up at your door that controls the situation. One further note. When I was working on military systems there was an acronym associated with countermeasures. There were countermeasures, the countermeasures to the countermeasures and the sequence could go in indefinitely. So, we just went with counter-countermeasures once and understood that these could go on and on.
    1
  8472. Yanis, my friend, the EU is a protectionist cartel. It is also clearly anti-democratic. Of course, Trump has an agenda concerning the EU.
    1
  8473.  @boxdreper  That is what I meant. Well put.
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  8474. Many, many years ago (half a century to be precise), I was living in a house while going to university. We were all into healthy eating. Frankly it was not only healthy, but cheaper. Someone got hold of a Twinkie and nailed it to the wall (remember, college students) in the kitchen. After six months it still showed no change. Even the mold wouldn't touch it.
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  8475. What's funny about the "Kremlin watchers" is that it is just the same as the "China watchers" I see proliferating today. Oh, that and I remember both from the height of the Cold War. One of the few good things you can say about it is that it provides employment for people who probably wouldn't have great opportunities otherwise.
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  8476. Just a typical day for Brandon.
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  8477. Why the heck should the US take in anyone just because the situation in their home country is unstable. Where does it end? The US is NOT responsible for the safety and security of everyone in the rest of the world. To open our borders to everyone from a country in turmoil is just plain nuts.
    1
  8478.  @garethnewfield  As a part of TPS? I cannot find that requirement on the government TPS website.
    1
  8479. The UK is fuc*ed. The UK is done. If this is what they are going on about and legislating, then they have nothing in common with their ancestors.
    1
  8480.  @alanwhite6293  Great point! Actually, I love these long-term predictions and plans. Just look at one short-term prediction. First the US was going into recession. For sure. It was just a matter of when. Now the consensus is that the US will not go into recession in the short term and medium term will grow nicely. Reminds me of a joke about economists, who are the ones making these projections. It goes something like if you ask 100 economists their opinion you will get at least 103 answers.
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  8481. Sugar is bad for you. Tax it to the sky!
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  8482. Spacetime is a fluid? Are we bringing back the ether?
    1
  8483. Threaten grain exports? That grain is not carried on Ukranian ships. They would be destroying ships from other nations. That is a real problem for the Russians.
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  8484. I was wondering when something like this would be shown for Xiong'an city.
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  8485. What is with the title of this video. We have had wars and insurrections around the world non-stop for a while now. This is mostly since Biden became president. Have you heard of Sudan or Ethiopia? The Syrian civil war has been going on for over a decade. The timing may be opportunistic, but war there has never stopped. Other long term internal conflicts include Yemen, Myanmar and Somila.
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  8486. This whole thing about democracy not working is just bunk in the case of France. The fact is that the leftist grouping is not a political party. It is a coalition as is Macron's group. the reality is that the biggest party in the French Assembly is The Republicans. The fact is that such groupings, declared before the election, is what perverts democracy, especially in a proportional representation system (which I know you like). Coalitions are only valid in the parliamentary system after an election when the parties try to form a government. When I say bunk in my first sentence, I am referring to the fact that everyone knew what was going on. Nothing was hidden. Everyone knew about the tactical withdrawals and voted as they saw fit. They got what they wanted.
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  8487. While the comment about the US telling the UK that all the colonies had to "go away" is correct, there is another factor. That is the cost/benefit equation. The monetary cost was one factor, but so was the societal cost. There is every indication that the Brits would have given up their colonies over time, but without prodding from the US it might have been a longer and bloodier process. Or maybe not.
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  8488. The reason ICE vehicles put out CO2 is that they do not put out a whole slew of more noxious chemicals. CO2 is not a pollutant. In fact, it is essential to life on the planet. In the late 1990s, when taking a car to get an emissions inspection, we used to get a report breaking down the specific emissions the vehicle was putting out. The bad stuff, like NOx were down to just about zero. Today, we just get a pass/fail indicator.
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  8489.  @johanmetreus1268  You are ignoring reality.
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  8490. You are so ill informed that it is breathtaking. Harris is not a leader in the Democratic Party. She had to drop out of the primaries because she was polling in the low single digits. She was chosen to be the VP because of "box ticking", not because of anything she brought politically to the party. There is even talk about getting rid of her before Biden's term is up. Her current approval ratings overall, and withing the Democratic Party are abysmal. She will not lead the party in the future.
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  8491.  @eyevoyeur  No, it didn't.
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  8492. The CCP are a bunch of commies. Some may look askance at the term "commie" as derogatory, but they make no bones about being commies. Their leader, Xi has written whole books about "socialism with Chinese characteristics". He makes money off of forcing people to buy and study them. Wow, that sounds like a capitalist to me, but I digress. Actually, he is doing what another national socialist did in the middle of the 20th century. By the way have you seen Xi and everyone in China, standing with their fists clenched and held close to their head? You have to take this stuff seriously. Actually, I guess it is hard to take people with a clenched fist next to their head in a lame salute seriously. One should expect massive subsidies and government direction of the economy in such a system. What did people think would happen? The EU has been very strong on combating national subsidies both within their borders and elsewhere, including the US. The US has done likewise. China is just getting equal treatment here. They should take that as a good sign. They have achieved equality. What about those European companies that bet on China being the next big market for their high-end goods and food? Did they really ignore the details of the market they were selling in to? Well, the answer is, yes. Everything from enterprise ownership in China, to weak legal systems to IP theft has been obvious from the beginning. The fragile supply chains were set up by these titans of industry and finance. Did they not see the demographic catastrophe coming? This is actually my biggest concern in the whole matter. The people leading our industrial and financial institutions are really not that smart. You know what this reminds me of is the western companies and banks investing in and selling to the Russian Empire just before the revolution. The banks, of course, lost everything, and some of the biggest had to be bailed out. Fortunately for some companies they had goods they made for the Czar that hadn't been delivered. At least they could sell them elsewhere.
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  8493. Wow! Powell finally says out loud what I have been saying for a long time. The issue for China is that the rest of the world does not have much of a stake in their economy, especially the financial sector. That has always been the CCP''s choice. That is the reason for the National Security Law in China. It is not to protect sensitive data in the sense of actual national security. It is meant to cover up the extent of corruption, most of which is attributable to the CCP itself. Those bond amounts owed to foreign entities are not exactly trivial, but they are generally a small portion of the affected portfolios in the US. A typical example I saw was a large pension fund that took a big loss on their China investments. Looking deeper, that China investment proportion of their portfolio was no more than 5% of the total.
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  8494. Actually, very few people watch CNN. They are the worst performing cable news network. More people hear about them on other networks when they do stuff like this. As for Lemon, there is ample speculation that he is on his way out. He actually did not appear the next day, with no explanation. Give it a month, at most. As for women being sexually active in the later years (much later) all you have to do is "Google" the Villages. That is a retirement community in Florida. People are always joking about the rampant sexual activities there. It is quite a hoot.
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  8495. You are so biased and uninformed it is stunning. Ukraine is not using NATO tactics. They don't have the equipment. Like the Russians they suck at offensive warfare. As for wargames, they are not about "winning". They are about training and practicing coordination. Why don't you get a clue and talk about something you may know something about.
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  8496.  @fred4687  I do. I worked on simulators for combat training at the Command and General Staff College (in the US). Ten years later I worked on the fully computerized tactical command and control systems that were first used in Operation Desert Storm. I actually got to witness a division level exercise where the simulators I had worked on previously were still in use with extensions we had envisioned. Almost got sent over (as a civilian) to deal with any problems, but the war was too short. As for the simulators, they were part of a system that prepared personnel for actual live training exercises.
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  8497. @ Oh, by the way, a more respectful way of phrasing your comment would be to ask if I have any knowledge or experience with the topic. Just saying.
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  8498.  @fred4687  So, if that is drivel, what are your qualifications?
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  8499. @ Don't be childish. It has nothing to do with the "respect". Look at the results.
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  8500.  @fred4687  Actually, this is a lot like the Iran Iraq war from the 1980s. Look it up.
    1
  8501. You have the polls all wrong. Trump is ahead of Obama at the same time in his presidency. The other thing to consider is the enthusiasm gap and the results of primary elections. Trump has received more votes, in uncontested primaries, than the Democrats as a whole. it all depends on who show up. I was an election judge for many cycles, and peak participation was in the low 60% range. Any election could go any way. Trump supporters are much more likely to show up than Democrats. Polls show that 33% of the Democratic party would like a different candidate than Biden. Even 15% or more of Sanders supporters are indicating that they would vote for Trump. Support in the black community is growing for Trump. It does not have to be massive foe Trump for him to win. When Biden said that you are not black if you don't automatically vote for him, he lost lot of black votes. You are not looking deeply into the situation.
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  8502. I notice all the examples you use in the beginning of your video are people who have what I consider to be useless degrees. Even in the west people with such degrees have a small chance of doing something interesting. Even the music student would, if he stayed in the field, in the US, would probably end up teaching, either in a school or giving private lessons to kids. What I am trying to say is that these examples are not representative of most of the work force, so I have to wonder what the motivation for using them is.
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  8503. This notion of Canada becoming a state is hilarious, and not new. Remember the two referenda on Quebec. I remember seeing on a news program, I think it was on PBS, speculation about what would happen if Quebec split off. First the maritime provinces would request to join the US. Then the western provinces and finally Ontario. Too bad it didn't happen. The English speakers don't really like having all their airline announcements in both English and French. This also reminds me of the situation in the UK with Scotland. I expect in both cases that if the vote were held in the rest of either country, the split would already have happened.
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  8504. They lie. Yes. That is the Obama model. In Obama's second term, I could not listen to him, because almost all the time he was repeating some lie. It disgusted me. Joe is just picking up where Obama left off. Many of the same staffers as well.
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  8505. TIK, what is this issue you have with debt? The world's governments have been running at a deficit since WWII. In that time, we have seen the greatest increase in personal wealth and decrease in poverty the world has ever known. The issue is the nature of money. We have what is called fiat money. It is an agreed medium of exchange. What it is really worth is not actually clear. Look at the major things you buy. Typically it is better than what you bought a couple of years ago and is often cheaper in terms of currency. A good example is the laptop (although TVs and any appliance are also good examples). The first true laptop I carried for work cost $10K, The one I am typing on now cost under $1K. In inflation adjusted terms the difference is much greater. In addition, the new one is orders of magnitude. So what is the unit of currency worth? It needs to be adjusted to reflect this change in real value, but it is not. Don't sweat the debt. It is now greater than ever and we have little or no inflation. How do you explain that?
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  8506.  @matthewnikitas8905  You must be very young. Inflation today is nothing like it was in the 1970s and early 80s. It was 11% or so back then. Home mortgages were at 18%. Don't get caught up in the absolute dollar amount of the debt. It is the percentage that matters. Even then, in a regime of fiat money, it is not all that clear what it means Interestingly, in those years of massive inflation, the national debt as a percentage of GDP was much smaller than it is today. The debt started to soar after the 2008 crash, when Quantitative Easing (QE) was brought in. What is surprising is that from 2008 to 2020 inflation was at or below 2%. That is 13 years of rising debt with almost no inflation. It only started to rise after COVID hit, as you point out. That indicates that direct fiscal stimulus was the culprit. So, trying to fix the situation with monetary policy makes little sense, don't you think?
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  8507.  @matthewnikitas8905  I fully agree with you. That, and let oil and gas exploration expand in the US and we would be gushing cash. The government collects fees and taxes from oil and gas. We could pay down the national debt, grow the economy and solve our foreign balance of payments situation all in one go.
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  8508. Stop with the Crimea crap!! The Russian Empire took Crimea from the Ottomans. It was ADMINISTRATIVELY transferred to the Ukraine during Soviet times. In fact, through much of its history Ukraine did not extend to the Black Sea at all. This part of the world, and the borders that exist today are an abortion. You only have to look at the former Czechoslovakia. That country was made up by the West after WWI as a result of the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It had never existed before as an independent nation. It VOLUNTARILY broke up into two parts after the Cold War. Even Ukraine has rarely, if ever, been an independent country. For most of its history, Ukraine has been a part of other nations. First, it was part of the Kievan Rus empire. Later it was part of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. This whole area of Eastern Europe is made up of many waring groups. The names we often use for countries here are, in many cases, recent inventions. Every once in a while, you hear the traditional names for regions here that are no longer nations. To sanction, or go to war, over borders in this part of the world is just plain stupid. Read some history.
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  8509.  @chuck-jy7mz  Not really. You have to look at it this way. And this reason has been a driver of policy since at least the 1970s. Move low tech manufacturing overseas. Then those people have more money and they can buy more of our higher tech goods (I am not using tech as we tend to use it now). One result of this is the drive to get as many people in the West as possible to go to university. This has been a disastrous policy. Because of the cost of university, some are seeing this and are looking to institutions, such as community colleges, for more focused vocational training.
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  8510.  @Behappy11231  Fully agree. I am the opposite. In the past my wife volunteered at a thrift shop attached to our church. A lot of my clothes are from there. When our children were you we would often by them stuff from there. We are not poor, by any means. The thing was that, because they were growing, as they all do, there would be things like a suit for band or orchestra, that they needed. We would buy these and then, when they outgrew them, donate them back. I have a number of expensive suits I bought in the UK when I was an exec at a large company living there. I actually put on weight and outgrew them. Then I lost the weight and they now fit. The styles really don't change, at least for men. A good suit, properly taken care of, can last a lifetime.
    1
  8511.  @almostafa4725  Wrong.
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  8512. Where I live, people outside have been taking off the mask for many months. I have only worn a mask when going into places where they are required. I have a large park behind my house, where I walk for exercise. I have never worn a mask there and note that almost no one has either for most, if not all of the pandemic. We have relatively low rates of infection and death. I have met a few people who have been sickened. One was badly affected for two weeks, but was not admitted to hospital when he went there. All the others I have met had a mild case that lasted a few days. The odds of dying are actually very low. If 3M (or 6M) have died worldwide, this is very small. The are over seven billion people in the world. That is less than 3E-4%. The Spanish Flu killed about 1% of the world population. We need some perspective here.
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  8513. You can always tell when the Chinese foreign ministry is spouting nonsense when they open their mouth. They say the US is trying to undermine regional peace and stability. Who are they kidding. China is openly trying to displace the US both militarily and economically. Well, they have failed at the later, and probably have no hope of doing the former. China is also actively destabilizing the region. On top of the Taiwan situation, they are also being belligerent on the border with India. Frankly, the Indians expect an attack in the not too distant future. They don't like the rules based international order, and yet their whole prosperity is utterly dependent on it. In the long run the US is backing off from policing the order. Each successive president after George H. W. Bush has been more populist than the last. This is especially true in international relations. As for Japan, they have multi-billion dollar program to help companies move out of China, either back to Japan or to other countries. They have made their decision. Korea has to contend with a China backed North Korea. Only the US can guarantee their security.
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  8514.  dedede9664  Very astute observation.
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  8515.  @seekeroftruthandjust  The WTD was not applied in the UK the same as it was the EU.
    1
  8516.  @seekeroftruthandjust  The EU employment situation is not strictly due to EU rules. My best employee in Germany saw his pay rise, which was much lower than expected, set by a union that he did not even belong to. What you are forgetting is employee mobility. Having a fluid employment market is at least as much a benefit to the worker as it is to the company.
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  8517.  @notch7139  Looks like FDI is on the upswing this year in the UK. It has been judged one of the best places to invest in the world.
    1
  8518.  @seekeroftruthandjust  Just looking at UK-EU trade is folly. Take the example of Australia. When China slapped massive tariffs and bans on some major Australian exports, Australia found other markets for those goods, and their trade thrives. Same with the UK. Trade is flowing to other markets.
    1
  8519.  @notch7139  Well, you are entitled to your opinion. On the pound is stronger than the Euro. The big new projects I have seen, mentioned on this channel as well as other sources, are for new projects making new products.
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  8520. Europe having a problem with food security? What a bunch of tosh.
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  8521. The title says it all. It is a joke. There is no such thing as world governance. The Soviets tried it. Hitler tried it. Now it is China's turn. This is more Marxist-Leninist claptrap. Through the land route of the Belt and Road initiative China wants to recreate the historical Silk Road. What a joke. Review the history. The original Silk Road died because it no could no longer compete. The sea route is stupid, and China does not have the naval resources to secure it. The last time China projected naval power beyond the South China Sea was in the 15th century. It will be no different today.
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  8522. This is just a propaganda ruse. MIRVs have been around for decades. They are even faster than these vehicles. They were impossible to defend against already. I worked on missile defense. If you could not shoot down the ICBM before it launched its payload, then all bets were off. Not only were the MIRVs capable of independent and maneuverable operation, but there were always decoys as well. This is not actually an increase in capability.
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  8523. The dollar is not the world reserve currency by some sort of fiat. It is the world reserve currency because of the size of the economy, the market and the legal system. The second currency, by the way, is the Euro. It is a distant second. Its use seems to have leveled off. Another thing to consider is that, if you trade in RMB, that money is in Chinese banks. The only thing you can do with it us to buy Chinese goods. China will not let you take it out of the country. Russia, and many western companies, have found this out the hard way. I wonder how the Saudis will feel when they want to take out some of the oil profits, paid in RMB, to invest somewhere else. They, at least, have some leverage. To say the ruble will become any kind of reserve currency is laughable. Best to leave it at that.
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  8524. Don't forget that Sun Yat-Sen was a socialist who advocated for state control of large enterprises. He was also a nationalist. His economic program for China was not much different than Deng's, so the CCP's use of Sun's thoughts is actually legitimate. Sun's heir, Chiang Kai-shek was effectively just another warlord, as was Mao. The KMT never controlled the majority of the country. In fact, prior to the invasion by the Japanese they didn't even control the largest territory among all the various warlords.
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  8525. "His" forces? The way you frame this you seem to make a distinction between the US military under different Presidents. That is an ignorant statement, and does not reflect how the US works.
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  8526. Why are you against Modi? India is much better placed on the world stage now. The opposition has nothing to offer. Modi is setting India up to advance in the future. In politics, as I assumed you would know (perhaps wrongly) is a choice between alternatives, not some absolute thing. When it comes to elections, it is a choice between two visions. I really like your channel, but you are moving too far away from reporting, into advocacy. This is not good.
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  8527. TEMU is, indeed, a pox on humanity. They sell some of the worst quality products on the planet, and they force the issue with the suppliers. The thing is, we have seen this before. It is called Walmart.
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  8528. Russia has battle hardened soldiers. So the F what. Saddam Hussein had battle hardened soldiers when he invaded Kuwait and when Iraq was invaded. Remember the Iran Iraq War?
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  8529. The copying and IP theft in China is off the charts. In my consulting I have seen many examples of it. Add to that the poor quality of the engineering, which is driven by the copy culture, and you have a recipe for disaster. This even extends to military equipment. Don't fear the PLA.
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  8530. I have two meals, but these are breakfast and dinner. I do not feel hungry between these meals. I have a snack about half the time. My preferred snack is feta (or some other type) cheese and olives. I am mostly vegetarian, with fish some of the time (once or twice a week). I have also cut way down on carbs. I feel satisfied when I eat. I do sometimes skip a meal, usually not breakfast. I have lost the weight, blood pressure down and no more joint pain (probably from losing the weight). Since I started doing this, over five years ago, I have not had any illness. I have not even taken an aspirin. Even my poops are good. Now, I will have meat and other things I would never have at home, on occasion when I go out. The other day I went out with some relatives and had a big, fancy burger with fries. I had no cravings for anything else after that, and went back to my normal routine the next day.
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  8531. Diane makes a good point, one that I believe is true and that most people ignore. Putin is most probably a "one off". He is the head of an oligarchy. Before 2014 the oligarchy was doing quite well. Since then, and especially since the 2022 invasion, they have not been doing so well. Frankly, I could see, and have seen speculation about this, Russia breaking into a bunch of little oligarchies. Because of Putin the central government has become irrelevant, and actually detrimental to the interests of the oligarchs. I don't see Russia, or many of its pieces, becoming democratic. The Russian culture is basically feudal. Just watch the videos of Russians making appeals to the czar, I mean Putin, for redress of grievances. I am reading Antony Beevor's book "Russia" about the Russian revolution and civil war. The cruelty of Russians directed at Russians is very disturbing. In it I read the following. "The peasants may not have benefitted from much education, but they soon suspected that the Bolsheviks were turning them into the serfs of the industrial proletariat." Read, Gogol's novel from the mid 19th century, titled "Dead Souls" and you would think you are reading about Russia in the present day.
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  8532. Breaking news. The US based outlet, the WSJ, has an article today titled "Steven Mnuchin Says He Is Putting Together a Group to Buy TikTok". Actually, the stated goal of the Chinese government about using the power of media to tell China's story well with Chinese media, is the crux of the problem. That is state propaganda. All of the US tech platforms mentioned are private companies and were not set up by the US government to tell any particular story. Allowing any foreign state actor to propagandize in your country is a direct threat. China understands this and has banned many US based apps. Others have withdrawn precisely because China has required them to censor content at the direction of the CCP. So, we have another example of the CCP wanting to do things in the US it would not allow in China.
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  8533. I recently saw a report that the price per mile to run an electric car in the UK was within on pence of a typical gasoline powered car. The price of electricity has risen along with petrol prices. Then, there is the cost of disposal of the battery. Has this been figured in. If you run an electric car until the battery "dies", then someone will have to bear that cost.
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  8534. Whatever happened to global warming?
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  8535. Peterson's comment on oil and gas are short sighted, an ill-informed. The idea of $300 a barrel oil is ludicrous. Not that long ago the cost went below $0 (there was no place to put it). Before the current administration it had often been $40. The US is the largest producer of oil and has massive reserves. One change in policy is all it takes, and I think that is more likely than not. Heck, Germany is back to burning coal for power generation. The EU has reclassified The EU has reclassified natural gas and nuclear as green. I lived through the oil shocks of the 1970s. That too was political. If you think that it is bad now, the price of gasoline actually tripled. That is a bigger increase than we have seen today. Actually, the price of oil has eased in the past couple of weeks. Supply and demand. Finally, the world had no Russian oil or gas all during the Soviet era. Oil is a fungible commodity.
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  8536. Eric's a smart guy, but that intro (that's all I have watched so far) is kind of silly. Probably the only thing I agree with him on is that Trump is different. WE NEED DIFFERENT! We couldn't go on the way we were, either on the domestic or the international front. Actually, I guess Eric is either younger than I thought, or he has only recently become politically aware. First, we had a president who wanted to "renegotiate the world". That was George H. W. Bush when he was running for his second term. He was voted out of office. His opponent's campaign had a tagline: It's the economy, stupid. Our presidents since them have become progressively more populist. Bush, in one way, was uniquely qualified in American, and perhaps world, history to handle the task. He had been a Navy aviator in WWII. He had been a Congressman, an ambassador (China and the UN), head of the CIA, Vice President for eight years and President for four years. No previous or subsequent president has had such a resume. Second, the whole nuke thing shows his age, or political awareness (or lack thereof). I grew up with Cold War. I was born in Washington, DC and my father worked at an Army research laboratory. I later worked in the aerospace and defense sector. People at the time firmly believed in the possibility that a nuclear war could happen. Does Eric not know about the Doomsday Clock? Look it up. The Russians and Chinese want a multipolar world. Frankly, so do the Europeans. While hiding under the American nuclear umbrella and massively increasing taxes and social programs they bridle at American leadership. Well, they will get their multipolar world. We had that prior to WWII, then we had a bipolar world then we had the unipolar world order. Both Russia and China did poorly in the multipolar world and did well under the unipolar world. Things will go back to the way they were, and they won't like it. The US, and those that choose to throw in their lot with is, will thrive.
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  8537. Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, tea totaling (mostly), non-smoking socialist.
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  8538. Why do people keep talking about the idea that Putin, if there was an armistice, would take five years to rebuild and then go again. What makes anyone think that this is possible, or that it could happen? Look at this objectively. It took 20 years to build the army that Putin attacked with. During that time Putin had two things that he will not have going forward. The first is access to western technology. The second is money made from natural resource sales, primarily oil and gas. At present they are either just breaking even or losing money on their oil sales. Natural gas sales are in the tank. A third factor is demographic. Not only were Russian demographics bad before this war, but the war has created a catastrophic situation. About 1M Russians have left the country. About 0.5M to 1M, when all is said and done will be dead or disabled. These are all men in their prime who will no longer be able to contribute. This is a critical demographic, both for the economy and for the military. So, Jake, I think you are just repeating a trope that you heard on YouTube.
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  8539. wasn't it Yellen who said that inflation was transitory? Actually, Decoupling is probably the right thing to do at this time. Let's review why the US opened up to China. The initial opening by Richard Nixon was purely a Cold War play. The later opening Clinton opened up further with MFN status for China. The end result of all this was that the US, and the west in general, exported environmental disasters and poor labor practices to China. If you believe in manmade climate change then this is an unmitigated disaster. Much of the materials processing that was transferred to China is quite toxic, and in China there are basically no effective controls. It is harmful to the environment at large and to the people of China. As for labor practices, these are akin to what we would not have tolerated in the west even in the later 19th century. And that does not even include the slave labor. There is a lot more that could be said on this topic. I recently saw a video claiming that a large number of Chinese workers have gone to Vietnam, as have many Chinese companies. Evidentially the labor laws there are more favorable to the workers and are strictly enforced. One of the main reasons for the opening was the large market and a new avenue for investment. Well, considering how the Chinese conduct business, this has been a bit of a bust. Considering China's horrible demographics, this is the time to leave. Redirecting investment to other countries is the best thing that could be done by the west at this time. This includes bringing back manufacturing to the US and the rest of North America. This is actually happening. Don't forget that it was the US that was once the workshop to the world. I have read that by the beginning of the 20th century half of the world's manufacturing took place in the US. After WWII, the US generated half the world's GDP. China is a terrible place to invest, and some of the reasons are the same as those for the dollar being the world's reserve currency. What galls me is that the ESG crowd is ignoring China. What a bunch of hypocrites.
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  8540. The Blackhawk is a troop transport and utility helicopter. Comparing it to a KA-52 is invalid. The KA-52 is comparable to the Apache, which is the premier US attack helicopter. Russia would lose in that comparison as well.
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  8541. The idea of a major country producing hydrogen for anyone but itself is really silly. Whit the current technology it is still way too expensive, even for rich economies. If a way is found to produce it cheaply, then just about anyone with access to water would just produce it themselves.
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  8542. All the dictators will get together and end democracy? That is not bloody likely. In the first place, the countries mentioned are all already under sanctions. They depend on trade with the western democracies. China and Russia are likely to fall apart. They have horrible demographics. There is no solution to that. Projections are for China to fall apart, at least in its present form, by the end of the decade. I have seen no evidence that this will not happen. Quite the contrary. What are the protestors calling for in China? Step down Xi. Step down CCP. Democracy now. China has a history of warlords. Mao was a warlord in his time before the invasion by Japan, and picked up from there after Japan was defeated. They are likely to see something like that again. Russia is in the same boat. Private armies proliferate. There is unrest in the non-Russia ethnic provinces. The Russian ethnicity will soon be a minority. The sanctions are killing their economy. This is not the USSR. Iran is seeing multiple uprisings. What should the democracies do? Send in troops? Perhaps covert agents to help? How would that go? There is a limit to what one country can do to another short of war. In the case of the countries cited, this is being done.
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  8543. This is something that has been debated for a while. There is a tension here. As for letting all animals live, that ignores the natural world. We are part of that nature. We are not space aliens (at least I don't think so). In the natural world animals kill each other constantly, and in particularly brutal ways. They will often start eating another animal before it is dead.
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  8544. The hype cycle is a standard thing. It happens all the time. Sometimes the technology hyped proves useful, but not as significant as projected. Other times, of course, it fails. Big Data is an example of the former. Still important, but not the total game changer people thought it would be. It got so hyped that companies were being told they needed a "C" suite executive to deal with it. I guess the CIO was not enough. Quantum computing, if it ever works, will become another co-processor. An example of these is the FPU, which on my first desktop, was a separate chip. Another example is the GPU. Neither of these is useful for a majority of tasks actually handled by computers. We made progress because we digitized data.
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  8545. Well, if Biden's actions are essential to Ukraine's future, then they are screwed.
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  8546. Pettis makes some good points, but he leaves out a very important factor. That is corruption. China's transportation infrastructure has obviously improved, but a lot of the spending on that is wasteful and will continue to be a problem. I am thinking particularly of high-speed rail (HSR). The first lines, between major cities were profitable. So, China having a centrally controlled economy, decided that HSR was needed everywhere. Few of the lines outside of the initial ones are profitable. The whole system has about $1T in debt, which grows year by year with no way to repay it. There are many terminals that have been abandoned, having been put in inappropriate locations, for example. Some of these never even opened, after a lot of money was spent. This is where the corruption comes in. As with all public investment, and a lot of private investment, there is a large percentage that goes toward graft. This is well documented. The anti-corruption cases that come to light are often massive. MASSIVE! The issue is that the CCP does not follow economic principles in making decisions. It is a communist government, after all. So, trying to apply models of economics or finance to the Chinese situation is fraught at best.
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