Comments by "Doncarlo" (@doujinflip) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics" channel.

  1. Those who already have a lot of liquid cash on hand love it too. It lets them buy the dip on houses while everyone else can't get a mortgage as the banks stop lending.
    66
  2. PZ has been reporting from similar snowy spots in Colorado for a while now. Guess he really did get lost in the woods this time?
    52
  3. Physical labor isn't as much the issue as just having the technical skills to start off, especially as companies continue to resist providing their own OJT and continue scalping universities, the military, and industry competitors for the "required experience" (and subsequently complaining about a lack of candidates).
    44
  4.  @yoyoma17  ​ The last time America tried to draw down globally, it got sucker-punched by 9/11. Similar to how its isolationism dragged it into both World Wars when those threats came to us at home. Much like fighting fires, it's best to handle them while they're small and distant, rather then letting it grow into a firestorm that only evasion and backburning can hope to contain. Also the EU is the largest single market in the world, with things like its pro-customer policies really the only thing preventing corporate impunity over American consumers. Indonesia controls practically all sea access (including for US flagged ships) between the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Venezuela's issues have become America's single biggest immigration problem. Perhaps listen and read up some more on modern geopolitics before throwing out random countries that supposedly don't matter.
    25
  5. Right, they'd have to become more loose on their definition of "pure" to salvage their identity. An ethnostate doesn't have the advantage of an immigrant-driven Western Hemisphere country where naturalizing or simply being born there is considered close enough.
    24
  6. Having been to both Taipei and a half dozen Mainland China cities in the past year, yes Taiwan is doing pretty well 🇹🇼👍
    23
  7. The culture promoted by corporations plays a huge role too, wanting society to be a perfectly modular workforce of individuals who can get hired, moved, and separated at their convenience. Businesses hate dependents, especially if they have schooling or medical needs of any type.
    12
  8. No, supply shocks and profit-price spiral are at least as influential.
    11
  9. ​ @infectioushobo It's "garbage" because there's clearly the resources to provide a better standard of living for the average American, but not the political will especially as corporate and industry support is seen as more valuable than respecting the will of every US citizen (particularly economically vulnerable and often disenfranchised voters like younger adults, homeless, working class, and expats). That's how America has an expensive scatterbrained utility like the healthcare system, and privatized utility monopolies like Comcast. All while so much of our taxes get spent on arcane "breaks" accessible only to those wealthy enough to staff a dedicated legal and accounting department.
    10
  10. He likes how Texas treats businesses compared to California. That said he also mentions corporate friendliness is the only thing really going for TX, which has to rely on adult migrants to keep its economic prestige going like most other petrostates.
    9
  11. In a deflation scenario, the only ones buying property are those who already can afford FULL CASH payments. Banks are going to stop lending, especially for middle class mortgages. So basically just further corporate buyouts of housing.
    8
  12. Like he said, Mainlanders have less immunity, more comorbidities, and a fraction of America's shitshow of a healthcare system. The Economist already estimated a total of nearly 2 million excess Chinese dead as of the Delta strain last year, so chances are this will repeat under Omicron's unstoppable spread and saturated (actual not fangcang) hospitals.
    8
  13. Probably would say it's like India but bigger: plenty of young religious entrepreneurs but cursed with difficult transportation due to lack of navigable waterways -- there's a reason the continent remained largely fractured as small tribal kingdoms until Europe's Scramble for Africa not even 150 years ago.
    8
  14. There's still not nearly enough solar energy production and especially storage to power all that desalination. Then the hypersaline brine still needs to get dumped somewhere, which would chew through pump machinery like no tomorrow if it's going over the western mountains into empty desert instead of going downhill back into the sea and killing all the fish around the outlets.
    7
  15. Deflation isn't a correction a much as a downward spiral. Inflation also occurs when there's few competitors to pull down on prices, which enables a price-profit spiral. The real booms and busts come from basing an economy on limited-quantity media like gold, which has the inherent problem of getting spent/hoarded at exactly the wrong points of the economic cycle. Every money issuer converged on fiat because it allows for countercycling the money supply as necessary.
    7
  16. The enemy we were fighting was a lot more identifiable back then. Even so, things like COINTELPRO, the War on Drugs, and Vietnam showed there was a lot of fighting over "enemies" where the treatment was more damaging than the disease. It's not so much "surrender" as caution and conversation over what battles are truly worth fighting.
    7
  17. I lived in China, and would say that what I learned being there is that the more pessimistic reports about the PRC are closest to the truth.
    7
  18. ​America's autocratic adversaries try to say the same thing about the US... while they wait for the day they can get in line at the American consulate to interview for a US visa 😂
    7
  19. Water they can desalinate and recycle, SG can already generate over half its needs with these methods. The bigger problem is food, as there’s practically nowhere left to dedicate to agriculture and despite their intensive efforts they are still almost totally dependent on fossil fuels (so no industrial-scale indoor farming either).
    6
  20. Nuclear is carbon free, but it’s not cost or risk free. In fact it’s enormously expensive and extremely hazardous like a hydro dam: any spillage easily leads to catastophe. And then nuclear is further only trusted to be handled by those with certain postgraduate degrees plus security clearances, with material that must remain heavily guarded from initial mining to decades after final burial. Thorium reactors are proving uneconomical, fusion is still infeasible, and reprocessing is the fastest way to obtain weapons-grade material. Expanding the installations of nuclear only increases the risk of incidents. Nuclear is like civil aviation: “safe” only through tightly controlled deployment and annoyingly perfectionist regulations. We’d be best to invest in implementations that don’t involve splitting atoms, such as battery storage, pumped-hydro, and deep well geothermal. At least the worst that would happen doesn’t involve exotic long-lived toxins that life on Earth never experienced 🌋
    6
  21. As a Californian, I can say our golf course lawns and sushi-grade rice crops are clearly a higher priority /sarc
    6
  22. If you want government to live within its means, stop voting for policies and politicians who provide more than your taxes can actually pay for. You're asking too much out of Social Security and Medicare when the taxable buying power of America's young and middle age workers keeps shrinking per senior beneficiary supported.
    6
  23. As the latest winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics explained, it’s national institutions that determine the prosperity of the country. Locales rich in easy resources (mined minerals and also constantly-growing tropical foods) tended to install elitist extractive forms of governance, while more hardship ones (which included places like colonial America and Australia) fostered more democratized and socialized political cultures.
    6
  24. I'd wager that will ultimately end up in the American Southwest. Lots of desert land to develop, close to educated labor from the coastal state megalopolises, and plenty of potential wind and solar energy sources. Only limitation would be water, which as the California Aqueduct network shows can be imported a similar distance if we invest in desalination.
    6
  25. I doubt they would be appreciative of it, convincing themselves they were always entitled to reparations instead. Plus it's not in "their" land whose claims ultimately overlap throughout all of Israel.
    6
  26. Sailing combat ships in peacetime is trivial. What really matters is being able to accurately strike targets, perform effective damage control, and keep moving even when isolated from supplies and support. None of these has the PLAN experienced while fighting an enemy who's firing live anti-ship missiles.
    6
  27. It's everywhere in the world. Even the very pro-natal Africa and Middle East are seeing shrinking family sizes.
    5
  28. Efficiency and resilience are competing interests. Democracies trade out the political efficiency of despotic simplicity for a more expensive and convoluted but ultimately more adaptable form of government.
    5
  29. Right, SG would be in mortal trouble without the labor of all the foreign migrants they import. It’s not like other regional examples of respectable rulership like Oman or Botswana or Uruguay where the locals don’t deem themselves above getting hands-on with shit jobs.
    5
  30.  @mntlblok  ”Cutter” I think sounds closer. The Arabic “Q” (and also the “T” in Qatar) is said from deeper in the throat, which is an unusual if existing sound coming from other languages, while the “A”s in the name are the short kind.
    5
  31. Nobody has several million tanks waiting to roll again, there's maybe a quarter million armored fighting vehicles of all sorts globally and Russia would be at best 10k before last year.
    5
  32. But the designs for modern core chips pretty much are just American, increasingly but still very occasionally Japanese or Korean.
    5
  33.  @JonySmith-bb4gx  China might be better than Arkansas, but “crime ridden” California was still a relief after moving out of Beijing last summer.
    5
  34. ​ @adi6293 Poorer families have poorer standards of living, and don't have as far on the socioeconomic ladder to fall from. Educated folks are just as if not more economically productive than entire low-income families, but have to constantly compete on staying there because spending time and money on dependents is a quick way to stall and possibly reverse upward mobility in an increasingly automated job environment.
    5
  35.  @tubage07  Pre-democracy Taiwan had a secret nuclear program going, but the CIA found out and the US told the KMT to knock it off because it'd be far too provocative especially since the US needed the PRC as a counterbalance against the Soviets at the time. But Taiwan is still on the nuclear threshold and would likely be able to deliver a working warhead within a year. This is part of the reason the Mainland must achieve total victory so swiftly at all costs.
    5
  36. That's really a mistake of American urban planning, trying to pack in as much leasable units as possible without providing that necessary next-door space to breathe.
    5
  37. ​ @RogerGraham-pc9nw ...primarily because America's refineries are optimized for imported "sour" (significant impurities) Gulf crude, and retooling it for the "sweet" (fairly clean) US fracked stuff is prohibitively expensive. Especially with rising hostility against fossil fuels and the electrification of transportation going forward making further production uneconomical.
    4
  38. The concern is that the Chinese cores are brand new and haven't undergone that deterioration. The question is how well built is the rest of the warhead to make it go boom as promised.
    4
  39.  @downstream0114 That was my take also, their ability to project and sustain force in places they can’t just truck their troops and supplies into.
    4
  40. Those meds only get sold because the underlying healthcare service continues to recommend/prescribe them.
    4
  41. If the Shànghǎi Police Database Hack is an indicator, they do have some grasp on the true size of their population and it's considerably less than 1.4b
    4
  42. ​They did, but structurally the problem lays with the experimental use of aluminum instead of tried and true steel.
    4
  43. I've seen estimates that when accounting for China's inflated GDP and underreported debt loads, its Debt-to-GDP ratio is more like 3 and possibly upwards of 5. They've only gotten this far because it's propped up by international funding, and a lack of political challenge over how much money it's printed and forced its SOEs start yet another project with.
    4
  44. But then the question is why didn't the Middle East recover? Remember all of China and much of Eastern Europe had also been conquered by the Mongol Horde.
    4
  45. We wouldn't be drafting to deploy far from home. Russia is having a hard time getting new grunts even in an information space that's far more locked down.
    4
  46. The FAB- series is just the bombshell itself. What's alarming is the addition of GLONASS-guided glide wings which both improve range and precision when released.
    4
  47. Right, the timelines might be off, but the trendlines are solid.
    4
  48.  @Withnail1969 I experienced both. Mainland China is clearly in more trouble. You can tell by all the shuttered shops and listless faces on the streets there.
    4
  49. Certainly more productive than increasing our debt trying to keep afloat pricey benefits for terminal retirees.
    4
  50. There's still a lot of savings from maintenance costs, since solar and wind generators aren't full of fluids and their associated seals, pumps/loaders, heat exchangers, and other constantly stressed mechanical systems.
    4