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

  1. Yeah, I felt more sick and gained over 10 lbs just by living in China for not even a year. Funny thing is I quickly lost the weight and felt better after leaving. And no there wasn't any significant changes in diet or activities. I think there's something with all the chemicals they use in their agriculture.
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  2. Also the more risk of an incident, whether accidental or intentional. There's a reason nuclear substances and technology are the most controlled materials humanity has created.
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  3. More like the better part of a year, since enough U-235 for a warhead still needs to be collected. The US once had to stop Taiwan from building The Bomb because of how provocative it would've been, but Taiwan is a nuclear threshold state along with Japan and South Korea.
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  4. Winner-take-all voting means the results naturally converge on two sides -- the one victor, and the collection of all losers.
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  5. We'd have to break up the corporate dominance of our rural lands, subsidize agricultural education, and also expand infrastructure like municipal internet wiring and more efficient rail transport to maintain crop productivity and profits. As it stands there's not enough incentive to keep rural family plots farming as opposed to making a quick buck by selling off to a conglomerate or urban developer.
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  6. Cheapest to initial operation, but you get what you pay for in terms of health and environmental effects downwind, on top of its inability to quickly adapt to demand surges.
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  7. The narrowing paths of legal immigration over time are likewise a change of definition on paper. My own parents would not be able to immigrate here under current policies, and they're retired American civil servants.
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  8. Even if you study Mandarin, it's not guaranteed you'll be able to communicate with other Chinese as their tongue is Cantonese or Hokkien instead. Then you find out they read in Traditional Script, which further slows down your rapport building writing to them in Mainland Simplified. Ironically I've found Korean and Japanese to be at least as good of a lingua franca because of how many of their people go abroad, and how many foreigners study it out of personal desire (not just for heritage or employment reasons).
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  9. Problem is the rise in costs for retiree maintenance outpaces the gains in productivity, and doesn't look to improve as older folks generally decline in innovation and adoption of those improvements.
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  10. If we don't continue to electrify our transportation, it will be too soon. ICE motors can only burn a specific few types of centrally well-refined fuels at best, whereas electricity can come literally from the sky from solar, the air from wind turbines, and the ground through geothermal.
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  11. He does account for immigrants, that's why he's much more optimistic about the inclusive Americas than the more tribal Eurasian ethnostates. Particularly the US, who still manages to continue assimilating and Americanizing the masses of migrants who in some cases are dying to move in.
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  12. But then it runs into the conundrum of government spending on hiring expensive federal employees and overpriced contractors to effectively staff said wall.
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  13. The way the Chinese state controls its money, there's not really a difference there.
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  14. They already exist, both naturally (America's trucking and rail companies) and policies limiting "8th Freedom" cabotage along with the Fly America Act that prevents even more demand for foreign carriers into the US altogether.
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  15. The government would then be blamed for the accelerating inflation and increasing reliance on imports in a migrant-free American economy.
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  16. Enrolling and maintaining payments isn't so trivial though. Any paywall is a significant barrier even if the price was a penny a year.
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  17. Mainlander Chinese are a low-trust society just with disposable funds. Unfortunately money doesn't buy conscientiousness.
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  18. I'm surprised at the lack of comments about how bad British food (as cuisine) already is 🍖🤢
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  19. Or move to the West Coast, as many people complain many other states' homeless are getting relocated to.
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  20. Trump's promises aligns with more voters, but I'd bet the policies today's Republicans pursue will be ultimately regarded as more retarding than improving to the MAGA dream.
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  21. ​ @steffengustavsen9678  If you believe their numbers, which I'd bet are seriously inflated like the rest of their economic statistics. Most of their strategic granary reserves seems to be filled with rotted grain, or couldn't be inspected due to a recent "mysterious" fire. Plus their agriculture critically depends on constant input of imported fertilizers and feedstock, and then gets further polluted by toxic chemicals (inadvertently if not deliberately) before entering the market. Their agricultural yields and affordability will nosedive if a shooting war scares off the foreign inputs they rely on for "domestic" production. Warships and warplanes don't run on coal or batteries. Their EV infrastructure might relieve oil usage in a land war, but a cross-Straits conflict is not a land war where China's EVs are. Plus most of China's own oilfields are under the sea or near the eastern coast, meaning those facilities are much easier to strike at and cause China's mobile energy consumption to likewise become prohibitively expensive.
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  22. Can't be just housing, but also schools, after-school activities, career development, street security, and transportation that allows kids to get around town without their parents long before they can drive.
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  23. Yet the worst crash in kids is happening in highly communal and self-censoring East Asia.
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  24. Yes, in terms of tons moved each kilometer nothing comes close to floating the payload. Europe's rail network isn't as dominated by freight as America, but its rivers and canals are considerably more utilized to move more than passengers.
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  25.  @jakemontone807  Ask East Germany. Oh wait.
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  26. We need cheap energy, but not necessarily one that's burned. Electrification is democratizing because sourcing it doesn't necessarily require the constant input of a multinational corporation.
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  27. Set the age limit at the current average life expectancy.
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  28. If those productivity and profit gains aren't shared more directly with all of society, we'll still have problems though. It's overall buying power that's important, and advances in automation won't apply evenly across everything we need or want.
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  29. If they're wise they'll be with. All that preachiness about democracy and human rights holds value because the underlying Wisdom of the Crowd provides more accurate and durable governance than "efficient" authoritarianism.
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  30. Not to the same accuracy at speed, as the openly available services are deliberately degraded and more easily spoofed/jammed than their encrypted military grade options.
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  31. At least it's not as critical as if the same happened on the West Coast, where the much fewer deep-draught seaports and even larger volumes with Asia would amplify the economic drama.
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  32. If you hadn't noticed, the American Southwest is far deeper and more mountainous than Israel. So good luck pumping all that water uphill, especially to the more thirsty farmlands deep inland.
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  33. China likely won’t descend into civil war, but I’d bet it will stall into popular anomie and escapism. The PRC would end up again as the Sick Man of Asia as its population shrinks into retirement, while getting outcompeted by the rest of the Global South it proudly says it had led.
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  34. Until you realize nobody wants to spend because they expect lower prices and revenues ahead. Deflation isn't necessarily correction.
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  35. PZ previously mentioned rating Obama among the bottom is his ranking of US Presidents, exactly because he squandered the opportunity to invite and develop the next generation of Democrats in favor of doubling down and cashing in with their old corporatist cohort.
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  36. There was a plan drafted by USGS surveyor Maj. John W. Powell for new states in the West to be delineated based on watershed, but haughty well-wetted East Coast leadership felt no need to deviate from their neat polygon mindset and fired him for the trouble.
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  37. From the individual family standpoint yes, but China is a lot more effective at isolating and silencing grievances. It won't be until the PRC's internal security apparatus becomes degraded that the Chinese people will find each other and create an overwhelming revolt against the CPC.
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  38. More like there were a lot more disenchanted Americans. It's not hard to find a citizen who deliberately failed to vote altogether because they simply didn't like either candidate for President.
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  39. That just means you waive your rights and unconditionally surrender to the results.
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  40. ​ @Likeaworm Thing is many would be happy to surrender to a US officer on sight. That way they can get their asylum claim started because legal paths are so narrow, costly, and overcrowded with applicants.
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  41. Winner-take-all means results naturally converge on two sides: the one victor, and the collection of all losers.
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  42. It means he's not standing on it, he just didn't specify whether he's on the Pacific or Atlantic side of the line
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  43. If migrants have the skills and willingness already, why wait another generation? Besides just having fresh mindsets counteracts the stale ones that brought us to where we are now.
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  44. Probably when they took Mecca from the Hashemites (now just Jordan) back when fighting was primarily by riflemen on camels and horses. Even then the Saudis succeeded because the British were mad at the Hejaz Sharifate and refused to come to their aid.
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  45. ​ @petermarshall6577 You sure you don't mean the Fly America Act? That original law soon got weakened to US codeshares instead of an actual US airline, and apparently both the DoD and Department of State (the two main patrons of government-purchased international airfares) will be getting permanent waivers for their itineraries soon.
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  46. The lack of fairness comes from the widening divide between America's macroeconomic prowess and the microeconomics in our wallets, which the current institutions are failing to bring back together. Trump's autocratic style appeals to the desire to decisively break down these institutional barriers, but considering the interests of him and the Republican Party I'd bet the gap will ultimately just get bigger -- some higher pay might trickle down for a bit, but woe is us when those naturally sociopathic capitalist entities decide to later wield their godlike profit-filled war chests in litigation and lobbying against our communities.
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  47. ​ @scottahermann Deportation requires the receiving end to agree taking them and organizing drop off points. We're not parachuting them over some random spot in some other country, especially a country that the deportees also don't belong to and would also be an illegal in.
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  48. There's also the option of using their warheads as a nuclear mine. I'd say this is more likely as at least they get to decide which outpost or beachhead becomes unusable instead of compelling Beijing to decide a whole city center for them.
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  49. The inhumane shortsightedness of straight "apolitical" capitalism is why business executives should not be leading governments or driving public policy.
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  50. That's just asking for a more devastating nuclear exchange. The PRC made full recognition of it being Russian territory after the Soviet collapse.
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