Comments by "Doncarlo" (@doujinflip) on "Patrick Boyle" channel.

  1. America’s “temporarily embarrased millionaire” libertarians pitch for the same, thinking a competent government can be somehow achieved without public spending or vital reliance on foreign markets.
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  2. Obama is our youngest living president being born in 1961, meaning the age gap between all the other guys could make any one of them his teenage dad
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  3. AED is pegged to USD, so it’s a straightforward way to launder dirty or overvalued currency into one that’s more respectable 💱
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  4. CEO probably had some sketchy sentiments of his own to go ahead using his employer's money without proper formal authorization.
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  5. Also lucky to grow up in the Cold War West, where barriers to obtaining housing and decent entry-level jobs was considerably lower. Automation and globalization has made these economic fundamentals way harder to reach, splitting modern societies into basically tech-related haves vs non-tech have-nots.
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  6. 4:43 The lack of sewers in Dubai is over a decade out of date. Getting piped sewage to everyone was the one megaproject that didn’t stall following the GFC, with a second treatment plant going online in 2011 and the last communities should be hooked up later this year. I’ve yet to see a poop truck in Dubai in all the time I’ve been here. After the Great Downpour of 2024, it sounds like flooding and rainwater capture will be the next grand project they’ll be quietly digging.
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  7. Depends on point of view: expat to the donor country, immigrant to the receiver. Either way still a migrant.
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  8. ​ @VainerCactus0 Mining tailings and fixed power plants are a lot easier to implement and enforce pollution controls on, compared to recalling every vehicle for emissions tests when they're not dumping dioxides straight into the air we breathe.
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  9. Road taxes based on weight make the most sense, as weight is the dominant factor in road wear. EVs are surprisingly dense and so would pay more, but it would likewise discourage oversize SUVs and crew cab pickups, while favoring gridlock-breaking motorbikes.
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  10. If they last on the market long enough to develop a decent after-sales reliability and maintenance record. Which considering Mainland Chinese attitudes toward quality of service will likely grow much slower than they expect.
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  11.  @001-z9e  Ironically may be the opposite: technical specialists with no humanist or artistic education which could differentiate them from each other... or an AI that could do similar for much cheaper.
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  12. ​ @marshalLannes1769 Continued growth and controlled inflation, which reduces all our previous debt loads the longer we sit on it. Macroeconomics don't have the same interests and vulnerabilities as households on the micro level, like how deflation would short-term benefit consumers but on the larger scale is a doom loop that will ultimately devastate us all.
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  13. Ironically anti-immigrant attitudes and policies scare off exactly the migrant workers we need to keep our food affordable, and we end up with more political refugees whose skillsets and motivations are more like the average American.
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  14. Right, public blockchains once decrypted readily transforms evidence from invisible to irrefutable.
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  15. ​ @ole86 Battery pack production could use more scaling up. Right now it's still dominated by China whereas oil refining is widespread globally. Same with the equally important production of chargers.
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  16. Senior benefits is pretty much the biggest set of drains on America's budget. So if young Americans thought we lack usable public-funded support before, what few programs we have will be even more strapped for cash with the surge of Peak Boomers who failed to develop a post-career financial plan.
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  17. Because the value-added from tech is outpacing the fall from everything else. It’s been that way since PCs started replacing typewriters, and it shows in the growing divide between productivity and wages.
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  18. ​ @EclipseCircle Yeah they're called property owners. Much of the Transcontinental Railroad went through land nobody owned (discounting Native American claims), so the government could just give away an enormous right of way and allow the rail company to basically fund themselves off the sales of the excess land.
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  19. Sucks that plug-in hybrids were produced at niche rates and always sold at near luxury market prices. I would have bought one a long time ago had they been more available and affordable.
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  20. At least until globalization slows down and you find these city-states literally cannot afford to live let alone remain safe without vital cheap imports from abroad.
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  21. Google has been actively making all searches worse. Putting the answer they know you actually wanted at the bottom or second page lets them insert more ads.
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  22. A lot less urbanites then were business owners, entirely reliant on big industries for pay. The democratization of self-proprietorship opportunities through the internet and digital banking likely won't make the next one so totally devastating.
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  23. Looking at air and water quality metrics, as well as paychecks, overall it is still cleaner and richer in America, even if daily life isn't as "efficient" as it could be like back in China. Efficiency and resilience are competing interests, and since the Frontier closed America has largely been committing towards the resilience of preserving as much as practical the nature that remains. Unlike in China where their impressive growth comes at the cost of deeply polluting its waters (including underground) and paving over its farmlands permanently out of production -- and it shows who now depends on imports for vital vs luxury foodstuffs.
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  24. CEO probably had some sketchy sentiments of his own to go ahead using his employer's money without proper formal authorization.
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  25. That advantage doesn’t necessarily last forever though, and switching costs are a real concern depending on how quickly jurisdictions can change policies.
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  26. Especially when the state dictates an artificially low price of electricity, leading to power plants suddenly going offline for "maintenance" when the unregulated price of coal gets too high.
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  27. People must be buying if >$20k is the asking price you keep seeing.
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  28. Not as much as overdrawn existing water rights and NIMBY politics preventing denser car-optional developments.
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  29. Which is why the German economy is in deep trouble with the cutoff of Russian gas and the stalling of exports to China -- they failed use their savings and state loans to set up resilience through alternatives. Remember that macroeconomic policies don't have the same interests or liabilities that retail consumer borrowers face.
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  30. ​ @XXTerminator-ih4yr I owned a Niu electric motorbike. It spent a surprising amount of time in the shop (front wheel dealigning, sticky throttle, quickly worn shocks, etc). I doubt a Chinese cage will be any more impressive.
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  31. You're not wrong. Unlike every other EV manufacturer, Chinese brands overstate their expected range. And then they self-immolate frequently enough that its discussions online are a top item for censorship and punitive actions.
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  32. The Panic of 1837 was supposedly as deep of a downturn as the Great Depression, but mostly limited to America because of Jacksonian pro-cyclical policies, and the resulting deflationary doom spiral wouldn't fully reverse until additional gold started entering the market from newly-admitted California.
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  33. Georgia was too small and too far away, whereas Ukraine is a major agriculture supplier who's on the doorstep to the EU.
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  34. We might not Na-ion batteries in all our cars, but its production for static applications (buildings and camps) and already-heavy movers (ships and trains) would free up capacity for EVs.
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  35. 13:30 Small is the way to go on BEVs, ideally as motorbikes (which a lot of "freedom-loving" Americans ironically fail to license for). We can see this hint in the massive popularity of electric-assisted bicycles. I had an electric motorbike and when I wasn't riding the Beijing metro the e-bike (which I modified to 125cc performance to roll with regular traffic to avoid the untrained riders and parked cars in the "bike lane") was the only way I got around town in all four seasons. Easily charged off a standard wall plug at home and the office, and there was always a charger with the bike since it's only a common power brick.
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  36. For America at least. Europe didn't wake up until last year.
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  37. ​ @MrRedsjack The risk is if they assert being other than American (i.e. entry on another passport) when they're in trouble, the US has no obligation to support them. So no evacuation offers or jail visits when their trip goes tits up.
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  38. ⁠But didn’t you hear that liberal arts, humanities, and any majors that appreciate and develop creativity are a waste of tuition and how you must do STEM instead?
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  39. ​ @kenho-wr5ul2rh7m Every developed industry is trying to manufacture Na-ion batteries. China is just trying to scale up before anyone else.
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  40. The US is arguably the peacekeeper, providing Europe the space to enjoy that peace dividend through all the "wars" that contained threats away from their homelands and global sea lanes. Now they're realizing that an alliance of one isn't a credible enough deterrence, and that they need to invest in their own capabilities in order to contribute and benefit from the actual mutual support that an alliance promises.
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  41. Consumer-driven "recycling" itself was a marketing campaign by plastics producers who both knew their products was economically unrecoverable, but didn't want to take responsibility for all the waste and damage they were creating. Hence they shamed us into thinking we can do something about it, instead of sticking to the more containable glass, metal, and paper packaging we had been using before.
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  42. The US tried to stay neutral and open in WWI, and cut off oil to Japan who was undergoing its own offensive imperialism into China by that time.
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  43. It's more intense because the domestic market saturated as the average Chinese consumer's buying power shrank during and after Zero-COVID. The sudden availability of Chinese EV exports are largely due to lack of demand at home, not a surge of quality production.
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  44. If anything African millionaires moves their assets out to places like Dubai, Europe, or America as fast as practicable. At least that’s what I noticed and heard about while I lived there.
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  45. We’re not very good at choosing the “merits” though. Being too selective for high-earning college-educated professionals can make the hosting community more expensive, inconsiderate, and artistically bland as the place gentrifies and homogenizes.
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  46. There's some spectacular builds in China's backwoods too. Though they are more spectacle than durable, and likely won't be in such great shape if demand ever picks up to its stated design capacity.
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  47. When Chinese citizens tested for radiation following the Fukushima coolant release and found alarming amounts of radiation coming from their own plants, I'm not sure how badly you'd really want to follow the Chinese model of nuclear power production. There's a reason cancer is such a massive issue there.
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  48. Dubai makes even Hollywood seem super chill, the lack of petty crime in public areas makes the people (migrants included) even more selfishly obnoxious. South Korea and Shanghai aren't too far behind in their form over function mentality -- apparently a bit of personal danger keeps people focused on what's real.
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  49. China is more worried that the US could blockade China. They depend on open sea lanes for affordable food, fuel, and foreign revenue. An invader would need to disable like half of the US to stop its self-sufficiency, whereas an invader into China doesn't even need to step foot on its soil.
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  50. Lack of housing limited by a policy preference for detached single-family homes, already occupied by long-lived owners with a well-established occupation/pension who don't want to let go of their low Prop 13 property tax rates.
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