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

  1. Peak worker age is also the cohort that drives innovation and adoption of productivity improvements, which would slow down as the worker pool ages. Hence why Japan discusses through their fax machines how robots will salvage their society, while much younger America is the one developing the AI required to make it a reality.
    1
  2. It wouldn't be a utopia though, stagflation was destroying us well before NAFTA and China gave us a permanent outlet on rising costs.
    1
  3. Pronouncing it correctly also helps with the auto-closed captioning some of us use.
    1
  4. Because the God of the Communist Party is called GDP, whose flaws include being a supply driven statistic instead of indicating what real humans actually demand.
    1
  5. Which is useless when the foreseen battlespace is in the air and sea, where technology and technical expertise is the deciding factor.
    1
  6. Because it wasn’t enough to be the entire world’s second most favorite team during the 2018 World Cup 🇳🇬⚽️
    1
  7. But it's sooo efficient, which means better returns to the balance sheet and stock price. Sadly it does come at the expense of resilience.
    1
  8. IT equipment is simple, they follow its programming reliably on only electricity and cool air. Humans need food, bathroom breaks, hours of daily downtime, and easily misinterpret or ignore even the most detailed instructions.
    1
  9. CA uses a unique detergent-laden blend to suppress the smog that gets quickly trapped by the Sierra Madre. It's aggressively "leftist" environmental policies that made the infamous LA Smog more a history lesson than a daily experience after Reagan got buried.
    1
  10. Except those "houses" almost always have an owner already, which without bankruptcy protection means it's guaranteed they'll oversell its true worth just to get a leg up on their own insurmountable debt.
    1
  11. ​ @mysticaltyger2009 Indeed, it really takes extended family to raise a child. This capitalism-driven siloing of families into more easily-moved nuclear units basically nuked the community support that children historically grew up with.
    1
  12. Even more reason to get rid of conservative traditionalists who still act like any high school dropout can still stumble over their "bootstraps" into a well-paid hire-to-retire job.
    1
  13. There's also a big difference in what used to be considered "legal", especially in the past few decades. Most Americans descend from those who merely survived a boat ride across the Atlantic, either came from Europe or Africa (as a slave), and weren't hacking up a lung on arrival; hardly any checks on criminal history or even identity, instead were even offered an opportunity for a legal change of name. Fast forward to the end of the Cold War -- along with empathy for those trying to escape Communist movements -- where the ever-tightening restrictions for a "legal" immigration means that even my own parents -- who both made their own way in before the Soviet collapse and are now retired American public servants -- would find it enormously difficult to get their green cards under the current policies, and probably ending up either stuck at home or someplace that doesn't assimilate new faces nearly as readily.
    1
  14. Changing the facts on the ground involves putting boots on the ground, and the immigration problem isn't an organized mass destruction threat big enough to warrant another adventure in regime change.
    1
  15. Potential for incidents only rise with propagation. There's a reason they're so controlled.
    1
  16. Did he also spend the last three years in the PRC's "walled garden", eating their chemical-filled agriculture, and seeing doctors trained and equipped by China?
    1
  17. It’s the reverse of the US once it separated from Britain: practically inventing its navy specifically to stop paying bribes to Arab pirates for sea lane access.
    1
  18. Quality and quantity are deteriorating though. They’re getting to Korean War PVA status (local numerical advantage stopped by competent combined arms), and goinng further they risk entering native population vs colonizer curbstomp territory.
    1
  19. Gas prices are always high in CA. That's the cost to keep the air breathable, since no other state has so many cars having its smog trapped at the Sierras. It doesn't help either to lack in public transit, whose fares over time are a lot more consistent.
    1
  20. Unfortunately spoiler votes just means the worst candidate for you wins; PZ detailed how independents up until Trump always end up voting against themselves, and it's not likely to change once he's gone. Real change would only happen by infiltrating into the existing setup.
    1
  21. Perhaps having some American crewmembers operating the ship while going between US ports, while dropping the requirement for US materials and build. This would retain our civil seamanship experience while freeing up our limited steel mills and shipyards for more sensitive applications like replacement warships.
    1
  22. ​Sadly, faith is what best provides hope. That faith may be unrealistic and impractical, but it certainly produces prodigy. In the larger scheme of things, having too scientific of a worldview is also self-defeating.
    1
  23.  @daniell1483  It's all about the optics given to us by mass media (both traditional and social) that aims for evermore alarm and outrage to keep customer engagement and ad money flowing. Much like how everyone complains about inflation but are flying (especially in premium class) like they just got a raise and regular bonuses throughout the same timeframe.
    1
  24. What PZ really hints at the end is that businesses must seriously invest in entry-level OJT, as they can no longer count on relying on publicly funded education (both university and military) and poaching from private sector competitors.
    1
  25. Luddites weren't necessarily against industrialization, but more the sudden collapse of wages and autonomy as their careers are callously replaced by unskilled factory workers with government support.
    1
  26. Switching costs, hence why the US keeps getting pushed to add freeway lanes for door-to-door long-haul truckers instead of adding more regional heavy rail that would be more efficient to move on.
    1
  27. That's if they remain totally unchallenged. They carry no real air defense though, so once deemed worthy to target they just become live weapon training aids for even cheap guided bombs.
    1
  28. You would think a China watcher would at least study how to pronounce Chinese names. The "sh" sound does exist in English, it's not like asking for Arabic H's or Bantu clicks.
    1
  29. America doesn't need nearly as many people, especially with the more automated modern factories we'd be setting up. 20x labor costs is worth it when the few factory fab maintainers hired can output the equivalent of 30 Chinese laborers (who really only number that many because of political pressure from the Party bosses to improve employment statistics ahead of production efficiency).
    1
  30. Probably not. They'll likely get sold off to some corporation to pay off terminal life expenses like geriatric medicine and aged care facilities, then rented out to younger folks.
    1
  31. Relying too much on ourselves ultimately isn't that much better, especially if there's a shock in the low-tax interior while most of the demand is along the coasts. Diversity of supply sources is the key, but resilience is always in tension with efficiency and companies got too "efficient" by concentrating on a China that's getting increasingly hostile and expensive and then locked-down.
    1
  32. The lack of competition led to the lack of enthusiasm for the Democrat platform.
    1
  33. It would reduce inflation, but in the long run by mitigating the increased costs of defending against environmental changes. Acting now means not spending as much down the line.
    1
  34. A: A country where millions more citizens are mis-skilled, medically disabled, and increasingly retired.
    1