Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics" channel.

  1. AUSTRALIAN HERE: I wrote to Peter at the start of this series and spoke about some of this. I hope he pins this comment sorry if its longish - On the Chinese - Peter is 100% right. We are way too heavily invested in China buy our raw materials. I have worked in our mining industry for most of the last 20 years and when the Chinese hit the wall we will be screwed and their construction industry has been so out of control that it won't be able to do anything but collapse and with that the demand for our raw materials will vanish. We got a taste of it when the GFC hit and as Peter said we didn't learn from that lesson. Luckily we have the rise of India that will compensate for the loss of China. The question is what happens as China falls and India rises as in how much overlap there'll be. - On the value adding thing and manufacturing - Peter is 50% right. Before working in mining i worked in manufacturing for over a decade BEFORE OUR ECONOMISTS killed it. We used to make steel and smelt alumina and make cars. We do make flour but only for our market which isn't unusual because transporting flour is a hassle compared to grain. We do make sugar locally and export tons of it. We also export staggering amounts of dairy to Japan and Korea. What killed our manufacturing was our version of NEOLIBERAL ECONOMICS. America called it Reaganomics, the Brits called it Thatcherism and we called it Economic Rationalism. We had treasurers on both sides of politics who loved it (Paul Keating & Kevin Costello). They privatised everything they could promising "Competition would provide better services and lower prices" and it DIDN'T. They have spun everything that's gone wrong into "Its awesome because investors won." and yes its been awesome for INVESTORS but the other 90% of us have been smashed, screwed and thrown under the bus. - On the subprime comparison Peter is again 50% right. None of our home loans are guaranteed, its the banks who are guaranteed. Its another part of the Economic Rationalism -> Protect the investors and make everyone else pay for it. The effect is that our banks have been way too open handed at supplying money for home loans. that's driven prices to idiotic levels and when that bubble bursts it will be volcanic and we might not recover. - On the American links the main reason America will protect us before protecting a lot of other places, IS NOT just because we've been joined every fight America has invited us too. Its because of American has 2 of its most important bases in the world in Australia. There's Pine Gap and Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt (also known as Northwest Cape). Both have Wikipedia pages but neither really portrays how significant they are. FIRST - Because of where Pine gap is, its the ground station for the main US Security/Military satellites in geostationary orbit that look down on Russia, China and the Middle East. as well as being the ground station for any other satellites as they fly over Russia, China and the Middle East. Since 2000 the number of satellite antennas has basically doubled on the site. The YT channel RealLifeLore did a great video on this. SECOND - there's NSC Holt, which is much smaller than Pine Gap but no less significant. Its where the antennas that let the American Navy communicate with all of its submarines in the Indian Ocean are located. There's rumours that both these bases are nuclear powered, but there's NOTHING to substantiate those claims. So please don't bother me with that crap. The ACTUAL SIGNIFICANCE is these 2 bases in a "global exchange" is they are ZERO STRIKE targets. In other words they come BEFORE FIRST STRIKE TARGETS. Many Australians are under the delusion that if we have US bases with B52s we'll be a FIRST STRIKE target. So what - the fact is we have not 1 but 2 far higher value targets than 99.999% of Australians realise and have had them since the 1960s. If Russia, the Chinese or a few others really want to do something huge they have to take out BOTH Pine Gap and NSC Holt BEFORE THEY DO ANYTHING ELSE. That's because Pine Gap is the optic nerve for the "Eyes in the Skye" and NCS Holt is the auditory nerve for the "Ears in the Sea." Basically they are the 2 most important US bases for communications NOT IN AMERICAN territory. Hope that explains some stuff. Hope 2024 is better for everyone.
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  2. AEROSPACE ENGINEER HERE: Simple answer - NO, Peter's quite right that hypersonics are NOT replacing anything. They'll just be another weapon in the inventory. Longer answers below based on Peter's 3 main points. 1) Hypersonics are expensive: The Americans have flown a number of hypersonic vehicles deployed from jets at altitude. The X-43 flew twice at a cost of $230,000,000 or $115 million each. The X-51 flew 4 times for around $85 million each. When you look at what it took to get the SR-71 to fly at Mach 3.3 people think going over Mach 5 is just a matter of more bang. The reason the F-22 was so expensive to operate was because whenever it went fast it would burn the radar absorbent paint off. Going that fast is hard and its expensive. If it was easy and cheap we'd all be flying around in 2nd or 3rd generation Concordes. 2) Speed, fuel, payload: First to go twice as fast you need 4 times the energy before you even consider drag. Its called kinetic energy. So just going from Mach 1 to Mach 5 requires 25 times the energy. Go and look at the X-43 and look at how big the booster was just to get the X-43 model up to a speed where its SCRAM jet could start working. So yes Peter is very very right when he say s they need a lot of fuel and therefore have very small warheads. But they do arrive with a lot of kinetic energy and that does enhance the effectiveness especially when it had to penetrate things like several meters of reinforced concrete. 3) Air defense: One of the great myths about hypersonic missiles being promoted by idiots in the media and snakes in the military industrial complex who want nice juicy contracts is that hypersonic missiles are manoeuvrable. They are NOT that manoeuvrable as the pretty graphics like to show. At those speeds things go very straight and at best make some adjustments. A such they were always going to be vulnerable to systems that could detect them early enough. Back in WW2 flak shells weren't so much meant to hit planes they were meant to blast in front of the planes and then let the planes fly into the wall of shrapnel. If you look up the modern CIWS (see-wiz) systems they create a wall of metal for the missile to fly through. Go and look up how the Rheinmetall GDM-008 Millennium Gun and the Advanced Hit Efficiency And Destruction (AHEAD) ammunition air burst ammunition it fires works. There's videos here on YT showing it. Kh-47M2 Kinzhal was always going to be vulnerable to that method of defense if it could detect the Kinzhal early enough, which clearly the patriot can. ON AI selecting targets. This entire narrative of AI being actually think and reason is utter nonsense. AIs are just complex software algorithms that can mimic what a person can do but very fast especially when the task is data analysis or the task can be done as a data analysis task. If they can't get a car to drive down a street and NOT kill people crossing the street then they are nowhere near as the hype suggests. Go and see the reports on how many people the AI in Teslas have killed. PUT IT THIS WAY does anyone want weapons with software written by overrated clowns like the ones who did the software in the Boeing Max-8 that just decided to fly the planes into the ground. These are things are actually designed to strike and kill targets. I write real time software for industrial systems as a control system and automation engineer. I write software that reads information in real time from sensors and makes decisions based on that information. Sensors aren't perfect and they can give spurious data. that's what happened with the Max-8 and look what happened when their software didn't detect the anomaly. Most software people from outside my corner of the software world have NEVER DONE that type of software AND ITS DAMN HARD at times. Most who try to do it either take the easier jobs or they do something else. if the Tesla deaths, Boeing Max-8 and other accidents aren't enough to convince people that this stuff is very hard to do and very easy to get wrong then nothing ever will.
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  3. AUSTRALIAN HERE - Please do not forget where South Korea gets all of the raw materials they need to make stuff. ALL of their iron ore, coking coal, alumina, nickel, copper comes form other places and the place they get most of it from is Australia. HOWEVER almost all of the raw materials Australia exports to South Korea (and Japan) especially iron ore comes out of Australia's WEST and it goes via the South China Sea. A few things like coking coal and food comes out of Australia's East Coast. So if the Chinese get "upitty" and block access to the South China Sea via their bases in the Spratly's then all that stuff has to get to South Kore via another route and that can get complex because some of the routes that might seem possible by looking at google maps are not viable because the water is too shallow and there's reefs and ships with 80,000tons of iron ores are not that manoeuvrable.
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  4. FRIENDLY AUSTRALIAN HERE: Guess what we produce in monumental amounts?? Zinc and Alumina. We'd like a better deal regarding some submarines!
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  5. AUSTALIAN ENGINEER HERE: This is NOT an American problem but it is caused by the adoption of American economics in the 80s and 90s. I first became aware of Australia's issues from a small consulting job in 2016. I found we had a fleet of ageing power stations and NO PLANS on the table. There wasn't even a single proposal being spoken about and there still isn't to this day. Our ID0TIC media will put a microphone in front of anyone EXCEPT an engineer leading to the general public being badly informed. When I started to dig further I found that the same or similar situation existed across the developed world. Ageing fleets of power stations and no plans to replace them. Because of population growth the moment you finish 1 power station you should at least start planning the next ones AND THAT PROCESS STOPPED in the 1990s. MYTH #1: The energy transition is being driven by a move to green energy . WRONG - it was always going to happen because power stations wear out and need to be replace. On top of that populations grow and they need new power stations to keep businesses operating and the lights to work. The only question is "What do we build next?" In this case there are competing technologies who hate each other along ideological NOT technical lines. Its also a 4-way battle not a 2-way battle and inside those 4 groups are factions who don't always get along. There's fossil fuel made up of the oil & gas factions. There's renewables made up of wind & solar factions. There's nuclear which has a bunch of factions with different technologies all fighting each other for venture capital. Then there's the natural resource people which is 99% hydro but also geothermal, tidal, wave., ... etc. The biggest issue right now is the fighting going on between the Renewables and Nuclear promoters. They both know coal is dead and are fighting each other which is stupid because there's so much to do they'll both be fine. I actually suspect the fossil fuel people have infiltrated some of those groups to stir the argument into the morass it now is. MYTH #2: This mess was caused by the Greenies. WRONG - It was caused by the economists restructuring the energy markets in the 80s & 90s. It just took a couple of decades for what they did to finally come to where we are. BEFORE Reaganomics, Thatcherism and the neoliberal way, Governments built large power stations and kept the energy markets in OVER SUPPLY. That guaranteed new businesses access to CHEAP power. Its was great for employment and GDP growth but as Milton Friedman said businesses don't exist to create jobs or drive GDP. Private companies exits to make PROFIT and as much as they can. So when the bought up the energy sectors they DID NOTHING in the way of new power stations and simply let population growth catch up and flip the system into UNDER SUPPLY. They did this to make profit and they made boat loads, but now we are all left with ageing fleets of power stations that need replacing and NOBODY has that much money.
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  6. Dude that is so cold., but damn hilarious. We could ask the Americans: Is the real reason the Americans want slavery back so the NFL Owners can go back to actually owning their players?
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  7. As an Australian this freaked me TF out because if you change the words to Australian and Australia and swap Trudeau for Albanese and you are 100% factually describing Australia. His description of Vancouver is practically identical to Melbourne and especially Sydney with respect to housing. We are idiotically addicted to foreign investment. I'm an engineer and was actually in Canada late 2017 through early 2018 for a project. Other than the temperature inversion Canada was like another version of Australia. I was in Saskatchewan and it was like wheat belt of Western Australia, the Western 1/2 of Victoria and the Murray Darling section of New South Wales. A vast area of endless flat farmland, with exactly the same kinds of people. We even hate Canberra the EXACT same way Canadians hate Ottawa.
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  8. As an Australian I love how you put as "America's Deputy" we prefer to call ourselves the "51st State" although we might have to change that if DC or Puerto Rico gets statehood. There is one major difference we have in the South China Sea. China has become our top trading nation mainly because we export a staggering amount of iron ore to China. In the year 2000 we were the #3 producer with 169 Million tons that year. By 2010 we had jumped over Brazil to 416 million tons. In 2017 it was 870 million tons. Almost all of that growth is to China. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emm5aHAifMg On the other hand South Korea and Japan are our #2 and #3 trading partners. So that Sea Lane up the middle of the South China Sea is pretty damn important to us. And for reference India is #4 and America is #5 on our trading partners list. So if anyone tries to start some sort of SHlTFEST in the South China Sea its at the top of our agenda. In a twist to that. America's foreign policy (as Peter has pointed out numerous times) was ridiculous under Bush, almost non-existent under Obama and completely off the rails with Trump. Mid-2017, around 18 months after trump took office it was reported here in Australia that we had a major problem. Since the end of WW2 our #1 foreign policy was basically "What does America want now?" With Trump even that didn't exist, so DFAT (pronounced dee-fat, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) which is basically our equivalent (in some ways) to the US State Department, had to start thinking for itself. That was a serious problem because DFAT hadn't had to think for itself in decades. The report at the time (mid-2017) was that DFAT had made it past the worst of that as was starting to actually do its job. So yes Australia is still America's deputy in SE Asia, BUT America better not be of the mindset that we will just do what America wants. As for those subs wait for the shitfight that is about to start. Despite the current government we have in power having partisan support the cost of that program is so idiotically ridiculous that IT WILL BE MODIFIED or CANCELLED. Once the Australian population realises that the American Military Industrial Complex is trying to take us to the cleaners EXPECT a backlash.
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  9. The most interesting aspect to this is that here in Australia we have just had some very dirty secrets revealed about our gold trading AND SOME OF IT INVOLVES RUSSIANS operating via Cyprus. The bulk of it seems to be money laundering but the Perth Mint has been caught selling gold that's deliberately tainted with silver. Note that this story was aired on TV at almost the exact same time that Peter posted his video. This is from ABC Australia -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko_ZmxGBaB4
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  10. I'm Australian and I totally agree on NOT getting involved in Indian politics. We have a lot of Indian students here, as well as many ex-pat Indians living and working in Australia. We also, due to our common links to the British have a lot of sporting ties to India (go look up cricket). Occasionally we have been drawn into Indian politics and you are dead right it is a maelstrom of pain and should be avoided at all costs. Having worked with a number of Indians ONE of the major issues is the basic structure of Indian Society. Its not simply that there are a number of tribal groups with issues going back centuries but there's also the Hindu caste system, which even if it gets explained to you does not register with Western brains. They are actually great people and their food is awesome and their love of sport even more awesome, BUT THEIR POLITICS is a place nobody should want to go.
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  11. As an Australian I 101% applaud what your country is doing and hope you do well out of this. I have watched a couple of stories recently about Chile's lithium industry. if your nation manages this properly your great great grandchildren will thank you. I'd suggest your nation puts as much as it can afford into a sovereign wealth fund like the Norwegians have done. DO NOT do it like AUSTRALIA has. Go and hire some Norwegians, don't let the Americans, Swiss, Australians or anyone else tell you how to do a sovereign wealth fund. I really do wish the best for your country in this. Be better than us.
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  12. AUSTRALIAN HERE: I'm an engineer and did a water treatment plant is Saskatchewan back in 2017-18 so I got a front row seat to Trump tearing up NAFTA and some of Canada's infrastructure issues. ALMOST everything Peter is saying about Canada has an equivalent in Australia. We have the wealthy mineral states that are at the moment howling and screaming about paying for other states. We have a monster set of coupled problems with immigration, power, water and housing. Australia's big problem with all of these issues are the ECONOMISTS and CONSULTANTS (many of whom are economists) that now dominate the decision making processes of government. In that I don't think we are much different to many other nations. The main problem with economists is they all study the same market fundamentalism that came out of the University of Chicago (Chicago School Economics). They are all taught to believe markets solve everything and can magically fix things like infrastructure. The simple fact is this is an ideology. There was no data, no analysis or anything else to base it on. Its a belief system that at its core is based on Milton Friedman's infamous "Greed is good" BULLSHlT. Its been fantastic if you are in the higher strata's of Western Society and been a nightmare if you aren't.
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  13. Me too. I have a degree in aerospace and work in industrial control systems and when it comes to engineering topics Peter is FULL of BS. He simply does not know or does not care. Peter is a100% wrong about the differences between solid fuel and liquid fuel rockets. Its liquid fuel rockets that are far more complex than solid fuel. In simplest terms solid fuel rockets are tubes with a nozzle. There are no pumps or valves or any of the fueling systems required. Its an idiotic claim and it shows YET AGAIN that when it comes to engineering topics Peter does NOT KNOW what he's talking about.
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  14. Yeah, big fan of PZ's geopolitical analysis but I think this is one of those times he just got his information wrong and in hindsight might change it. When he sticks to his strengths (like geopolitics) he's great when he gets away from them he can miss and sometimes miss badly. I'm an engineer and his engineering assessments can leave a lot to be desired. The other day his comments on the difference between wind/solar and nuclear/coal type power projects were wildly off. But then I find almost everyone who's NOT and engineer getting anything engineering wildly off these days. I actually blame techno-promoters who are trying to raise capital and get so hyperbolic its ridiculous. And yeah a guy named Elon is the worst of that crowd.
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  15. I'm an Australian engineer with 30+ years of industrial control systems, robotics and automation and what you are describing is now rampant across the entire world. Its now so bad to be an engineer I can't recommend to ANYONE to be one. My actual degree in in aerospace and I have watched the Boeing debacle go on for several years now. EVERYTHING I hear about that SHlTSHOW is almost identical to the things I have seen in manufacturing, mining, and the other industries I work in. Things like "Standards don't matter" and "Test, Check & QA doesn't matter." Unfortunately we have allowed the economists to take over everything and that manifests itself across the engineering professions with COST CUTTING. People from the economics profession are obsessed with cutting costs anywhere and everywhere they can. They talk about productivity but have so little understanding of what productivity means that they think cost cutting means improving productivity. They have NO RESEPCT for ANYTHING and especially engineering experience. They will sack senior engineers in a heartbeat and replace them with junior engineers they can bully about or "YES MEN" who just sign off things without considering anything.
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  16. Same reply I just gave to another comment. I'm an engineer and have pointed out on a few occasions that PZ doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to engineering subjects. I have repeatedly advised him and others to stop pumping out garbage, STFU and let the engineers explain what is and isn't engineering fact. My degree is in aerospace but I work in industrial control systems, robotics and automation. In 2005-06 I did a water treatment plant on a Uranium mine and as part of that we did an extensive nuclear induction. A normal mine site induction is 1-2 hours (max) this induction went for 2-1/2 days. the first 1/2 day was normal mine stuff and the other 2 days we covered uranium from when its in the ground to when its back in the ground. When it got to the subject of enrichment someone asked WTF the Iranians were up to. It was around that time that everyone was getting very anxious about what the Iranians were up to. The trainer doing the induction laid it all out and explained how EVERYONE across the World's nuclear industries KNEW 100% that the Iranians had a weapons program. It was the number of centrifuges that gave it away and we knew how many centrifuges they had because of how many high speed electric motors to spin them that they had bought along with the electronics to control those motors. The actual motors and electronics are NOT restricted tech because its stuff used in many other industries. Certain materials are restricted because they allow making the centrifuges much easier. I have explained that so many times.
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  17. I'm Australian and I've left a comment about the issue Peter is NOT discussing regarding American politics its copied below. As an engineer I have worked with many Germans over the years. I work in control systems and automation and have used a lot of German products and had to deal with German engineers. I think Peter has missed that the German people are NOT what they used to be and see their place in the world quite differently. Or at least most of the Germans I have met think and behave that way. I think in a way there are Germans who realise that they are lucky that after what happened in WW2 that they weren't completely wiped off the map. If there's a fear its that current generations forget the past of get a skewed version of it. We aren't immune to that in Australia. In WW1 there was the dreadful Dardanelles Campaign where the British simply sacrificed a generation of Australians and New Zealanders that made up the ANZAC contingent. They also sacrificed 1,000s of Scots and Irish. We now celebrate ANZAC day in Australia as if it was a triumph. Most younger Australians actually think we won that campaign instead of it being a tragic failure. So if there's a danger its in NOT learning from past mistakes AND I HOPE that in these discussions the Peter also has an HONEST look at American politics because right now its a SHlTSHOW and way too many Americans are living in a weird form of mass delusion AND THAT forces the rest of us to act. Below is the other comment which is about the issues in Washington that so far Peter has either ignored or just not done a video on yet. ----- THERE IS ONE THING that Peter is completely leaving out of this discussion is the dysfunction in Washington. I'm Australian abut went to college in America (late 80s) and I have had a lot of contact with American's over several decades. I have NEVER SEEN them divided politically like they are now. Sure the Dems and GOP disagreed on any number of issues, but when it came to FOREIGN AFFAIRS Washington was PREDICTABLE. Yes many people may not have liked what America did and how it behaved especially the CIA and coups across the world, BUT AT LEAST THEY WERE PREDICTABL and the Dems and GOP never saw each other as their mortal enemy and that they had to save the country from the other side. This is a major problem for all of America's allies including Australia. We have just made this massive commitment to nuclear submarines called the AUKUS agreement. Although I agree in principle Australia should go nuclear I think the Virginia-class is a massive mistake. The bigger issue however is: How can we be certain of stable politics in America when the place is now infested with reality denying clowns dominated by geriatrics who wont let go and retire?
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  18. Another Australian here. I think he's 1/2 right about the WA Wheat belt, in that its vulnerable to changes in the weather. But I think you have a better handle of the soil issue than he does. I'm from Victoria but lived in Perth for 7 years. My mother's family is from Western Victoria and are farmers. That's also a soy and wheat region and its also vulnerable to the weather. Its also got marginal soils but don't think they are the same as WA. Its odd he didn't mention the salinity issues we have. I know Peter has also commented that we don't have any Potash. I know that's wrong. I lived in Perth working on mining projects and one proposal I came across circa 2008 was a Potash mine being proposed in the NT by a Perth Company, who's office was next door to ours in the same industrial complex. I know that Queensland also has some deposits and several off those are now operating again because of world prices. Most of the time I think Peter is very good, especially on the geopolitical and demographics side but there's times he hasn't quite got his specifics right on the details. I tend to notice things he says on engineering because I am an engineer.
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  19. Just so you guys know this is what Peter means between Biden and Trump. Deluded (as in Biden) means "believing something that is not true." Demented (as in Trump) means "behaving wildly and irrationally on account of anger, distress, or excitement." YES I WILL AGREE with all of you that BOTH of them show signs of BOTH those descriptions. But Biden is (by definition) more deluded than demented while Trump is (by definition) more demented than deluded. If you look at how BOTH have behaved over the last couple of years. Biden still believes he's in full control of all his faculties and that's delusion rather than dementia although he occasionally throws out the angry comment. Trump on the other hand is simply demented in the way he responds to any provocation or even implied wrong doing or even implied disloyalty. The way he goes after people with vicious attacks is simply demented. The fact he makes statements like he never slept with a porn star when we all know that he did and expects people to believe it shows that he's also deluded. On a similar but slightly different tack the people who still think that EITHER Biden or Trump is fit to be POTUS are just plain farking crazy.
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  20.  @elektrotehnik94  I'll pay that.
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  21. Australian here: Just so you Americans know. The Australian Electoral Commission that runs elections in Australia sent a bunch of observers to America in 2020. That was nothing new or dramatic. The AEC does it all the time and not only sends people to America but all over the place. When we have elections there's Americans and many others who come here just like they go other places. This happens all over the world and in most cases it has NOTHING to with catching cheats or interference it has to do with people LEARNING HOW TO RUN THEIR OWN ELECTIONS BETTER. So there were 1,000s of foreign observers from all over the world in America in 2020 and NOT ONE HAS SAID A THING. Its not just the American's who ran the election who said it was done properly but 1,000s of foreign observers also agree that it was one of the best run elections in human history.
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  22.  @JP-iq7pu  Peter might be an expert on geopolitics and demographics but he knows fark all about engineering and often gets basic things WRONG.
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  23. ​ @joelobryan1212  Sorry for the story but you'll get it at the end. In the last semester of doing my degree I needed to fill in with a couple of extra classes to be considered full time. One of those classes was Nautical Navigation hosted by the US Navy as part of the ROTC program. It was open to all students and they often had non-ROTC people do that class and I was the one that semester. I ended up having several interesting chats with the instructors. One of those conversations was about "Operation Nimble Archer" which was when the US Navy shelled a couple of Iranian Oil Platforms in the Red Sea for being used against commercial shipping during the Iran-Iraq War. It was reported the USN had fired an astronomical number of shells into those platforms. So I asked why didn't they simply press a button and fire a missile. One of my instructors simply said _"A missile costs at least $1 Million while 100+ artillery shells costs less. Besides the opportunity to have gun crews fire under real combat conditions is too good to pass up." Yeah I know that conversation was 35+ years ago and I might have the exact words a bit off but I remember that answer very distinctly.
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  24. HEY PETER - CAN YOU PLEASE HIRE AN ENGINEER: You cannot just stop the methane release from a coal mine but just stopping the digging. Once you have exposed a coal seam to the air the carbon in the coal seam will begin to react. Carbon wants to naturally react with oxygen in the air. In fact if you are not careful coal stockpiles can simply ignite. Its why they have to be doused in water almost constantly. Coal itself is porous and if the coal seam is also laden with methane like we have here in parts of Australia (my country) then once you give that gas a way out it will leave the coal seam and go into the atmosphere. This is just one of the issues with fracking and it can also make underground coal mining extremely dangerous. Methane in the right amount in air is highly explosive as happened at the Pike River mine in New Zealand in 2010. What keeps the gas in the coal seam is the layers of clay and dirt above the seam similar to oil & gas fields. When you dig the coal mine you go through that layer to get to the coal and in doing so give the methane a way to escape into the atmosphere. So its not simply a matter of shutting down the coal mines you also have to seal the whole thing. That can be quite difficult if the mine is an open pit which many of the mines in China are. There's a German documentary (which I saw 12+ years ago) on the poor practices the Chinese employed in their coal mining industry and they had many in seam fires which was what they brought the Germans in to help with. For almost 20 years (all through China's growth spurt) the Chinese burned as much coal in the ground as they did in their power stations. That's part of why they had those smog problems and also why there's now even more CO2 in the atmosphere than expected. Those fires are now mostly put out or under control. The last report I saw said they had contained or put out around 80% of those fires.
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  25. I'm an engineer and that's actually a really great observation based on actual data gathering. As an engineer I encounter way to many people who think opinions are more important than conclusions based on actual observed data and verified information and gathered experience. This is one of the things I find so frustrating these days as an engineer. There's a 1000 voices in the room all screaming at the top of their lungs and whatever reason and logic is there to be heard just gets drowned out in the cacophony.
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  26. May be we could try French Polynesia After all the French just nuked that place again and again. Or we could ask the New Zealanders about the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior?? Or the Algerians where the French also tests a few nukes. Put it this way if it wasn't for croissants some, decent wine and girls with that sexy accent we might have let the Germans just keep the place back when.
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  27. Good comment. I'm Australian and we have sizeable communities of most of the SE Asian cultural groups. The thing I feel Peter has gotten totally wrong is the old rivalries that do exist. SE Asia never had those large semi-organised uniformed militaries with cavalry and pikemen and other various troops because as he points out the geography didn't allow for it. But as you'd know there's been a lot of clannish or intertribal conflicts across many centuries. I think your right, in that those countries that have gotten on top of the tribal/clan issues will do extremely well like Malaysia and Singapore. But those who haven't will struggle. You better understand the Myanmar issues than I ever will but there's also some incredible rivalry between Sumatra and Java in Indonesia as well as some serious issues in the Southern Philippines. I am also aware there is a huge rivalry between Cambodians and Vietnamese that goes back centuries. I think this is a subject Peter needs some better information on. The stuff he's right about he's very good but on other points he's way off.
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  28. I'm an Aussie but one on my best mates is a Scot and my advice to him on this would be Look at how the Europeans negotiated with Britain after the Brexit vote then imagine how the English would treat the Scots??????????? For reference go and look what they REALLY DID to William Wallace not the family friendly Mel Gibson version and then put that into a financial frame of reference. One thing Peter does not count in here is that Scotland does have a fantastic energy resource if its smart enough to LISTEN. The North of Scotland and its islands are WINDY, very very WINDY. The wind in the north of Scotland doesn't blow it howls like a banshee in heat and it rarely rarely stops. Use the wind to create hydrogen and build a bloody pipe down to England and keep that going all the way to France. I did my degree in aerospace engineering. Back in the 1990s when we all thought we'd have to swap from Jet A-1 to hydrogen companies like Rolls Royce, Siemens and GE did all the work for making gas turbines run on hydrogen. All the technical issues were solved 20+ years ago. As soon as someone connects a wind turbine to an electrolyser that's connected to a pipe then the person who owns that wind turbine and electrolyser wont need to work again - EV_ARGH. Think of it like an oil well that doesn't run dry. Once its built its low maintenance and the cost of producing hydrogen becomes bugger all. All you have to do is check the gearbox for lube, the turbine blades for wear and replace the electrodes in the electrolyser when they wear down. The only reason it hasn't been done is there hasn't been a substantial hydrogen market. the reason why nobody has been buying hydrogen turbines is there hasn't been a requirement or a fuel source. THAT"S ALL CHANGING. You Scotts have an energy gold mine on your North Coast. All you need to be is smart about it.
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  29. Yeah - Australian engineer here. I work in control systems and automation and I've worked in the mining industry for most of the last 20 years building new mines. This is yet ANOTHER example of people in the media who think they know what they are saying about technology. Don't get me wrong on geopolitics Peter is fantastic but when it comes to STEM subjects he needs to improve A LOT. For all the people who think Australia are just producers of Bauxite you are only 1/2 right. The first stage of Aluminium production is to produce Alumina (which is a white powder) using the Bayer Process which is what made the Bayer family rich before they moved in to pharmaceuticals. After producing Alumina it then goes to smelters where they process the Alumina into Aluminium. Its actually a process that needs huge amounts of electricity. The 2 main refineries for that in Australian were at Gladstone in Queensland and Portland in Victoria because both had access to the power needed. One of the main buyers of Australian Alumina is Iceland because they have, via hydro power, enormous amounts of very cheap electricity. How do I know these things? I did a project at Alcan Gove and this was all covered in the inductions. In those years I worked out of Perth and Honeywell (the giant American Company) had their specialist center for minerals in Perth because there's all the Alumina industry south of Perth. I didn't work for Honeywell but knew people who did.
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  30. As an Australian this freaked me TF out because if you change the words to Australian and Australia and swap Trudeau for Albanese and you are 100% factually describing Australia. His description of Vancouver is practically identical to Melbourne and especially Sydney with respect to housing. We are idiotically addicted to foreign investment. I'm an engineer and was actually in Canada late 2017 through early 2018 for a project. Other than the temperature inversion Canada was like another version of Australia. I was in Saskatchewan and it was like wheat belt of Western Australia, the Western 1/2 of Victoria and the Murray Darling section of New South Wales. A vast area of endless flat farmland, with exactly the same kinds of people. We even hate Canberra the EXACT same way Canadians hate Ottawa.
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  31. He's still got feet and meters confused like many American's do. The Tallest turbines in the world are about 1,000ft high NOT 1,000m
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  32. Engineer here - great observation and the answer is YES. I have a degree in aerospace but have spent over 30 years in industrial control systems, automation and robotics. Control systems are what engineers call the combination of computer (or circuit) and sensors that run things like factories, power stations, mine sites, water treatment plants,...... Its also in the same area of engineering to the technology that runs the engine in your car, the electronics in your washing machine, microwave, air conditioner and thousands of other things. Basically everything from the simplest thermostat in your house to the international Space Station. Its the least understood area of engineering even by other engineers and NONE OF IT REQUIRES AI. We already have algorithms that can self-tune a process to work better and have had them for decades. The entire AI productivity thing is just the latest piece of hype-tech from the IT industry and trust me EVERY Engineer worth more than a dime KNOWS 100% how FULL of SHlT the IT industry is. Yes there's a bunch of them who are insanely clever but MOST of them are overrated garbage people.
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  33.  @EnteiIsDoge  John Paul Jones doesn't meant that we shoudl not support Ukraine. He is pointing out that Peter is, in the AMERICAN CONTEXT left leaning. He's also pointing out that Peter does have a bias towards the general American narrative, but then why wouldn't he as he is American. FYI - I'm Australian but went to college in America. So I am used to Americans being American centric. We have plenty of people here in OZ who are very OZ centric. Its pretty much the same everywhere.
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  34. I'm an Australian engineer who did his degree in America. That is a bit of a fallacy. Western nations are just as vulnerable on the infrastructure side as anywhere else. Remember that blackout in 2003 that put 55 million Americans and Canadians in the dark? Look where it appears on the list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages That was just from a main power line fault that was mishandled. Because of events like that most sensible countries know they have vulnerabilities they just like talking about it. Other key infrastructure that's reasonably vulnerable is gas, water & sewerage. But then who bothers to listen to engineers anyway.
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  35. EXACTLY - I'm Australian and have worked in Canada and the moment any Canadian has US Health Care System explained to them they will not waste a second on this. POP QUIZ - people from which nation cross a border to get cheap affordable medications.
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  36. I'm Australian and there is one thing Peter has kind of missed in this analysis. When China stops (and we know it will) then Australia is going to want another place to sell its iron ore, metallurgical coal and other resources. So I think there will be deals made. There's already a lot of wheeling and dealing going on already with companies like Tata and Adani (although they might be in trouble). There's already a sizeable Indian presence in Australia. At the moment outside of resources there are vast numbers of Indian University students here in Australia. Maybe Australia's big advantage with dealing with Indians is that we play Cricket, which the American's Russians and Japanese don't. In fact trying to explain cricket to an American is like trying to explain Quantum mechanics to a puppy.
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  37. AUSTRALIAN ENGINEER HERE: You're right the problem with the entire EV situation is that NOBODY has really thought through what it will take to swap out 1.5 billion cars and 500 million trucks, because that's basically how many there are. I did my degree in Aerospace in America but have mostly worked in industrial control systems and automation for 30+ years. For over a decade a lot of my work was in manufacturing and that included projects in the automotive supply chain. One of my bosses was into car racing and one of his mechanics drove this late 60s American big block V8 gas guzzler. One day I asked him when he would upgrade and get something better? He gave me this interesting reply that I have never forgotten. He said "Because I care about the environment!" He then asked me how much energy went into manufacturing a car (any car) and the think about how many machines we worked around making bits for cars. I have since that time worked in the mining industry and the amount of energy that goes into MAKING A CAR is MORE than most cars consume in 20 years. Simon Michaux (another Australian Engineer) has been looking into how much stuff we'd need to replace 1.5 billion cars and that way we do it now would consume 2-300 years of Lithium production. Simon has a great line: Its not impossible but we need a better plan.
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  38. I'm an Australian engineer (EI&C) and most of our Alumina is exported to Iceland, where they have incredible amounts of hydropower. I have actually worked on a project at was then (Rio Tino owned) Alcan Gove. Its currently shut down but that was over energy supply. The existing power station was heavy fuel oil and the wanted to swap to natural gas, which Darwin has lots of. Rio Tinto wanted the State Government to build a gas pipeline from Darwin to Gove and they got told "Do it yourselves." Rio had a dummy spit and closed it, but I can see it starting back when the prices are right. Where countries like South Africa and Australia are about to enter a golden age is the massive task of new power infrastructure around the world. FORGET the energy transition for a moment. The bigger problem is that because of the squabbling between the Greenies and Fossil Fuel clowns everybody stopped building big base load power stations in the 1990s. Every one is littered with rapidly ageing power stations. The Fossil fuel clowns thought they could play a delay game until people go so desperate that they'd have to build new coal fired power stations. The problem is there are countries who no longer have the time. Countries like Australia can't wait 7-10 years to build a coal fired power station and we need 5 power stations replaced in the next 3-5 years. YES - we have a bunch of power stations so old they are almost falling apart. When I checked around other countries its a similar story. This is what's actually causing the energy crisis. Its all these old power stations that can't keep up. So there is about to be a mad spree of power station projects across the world. To supply the raw materials needed is gonna keep several nations in business for the next 2 decades.
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  39.  @ticarot  Here's what I already knew about Australia and Canada BEFORE I knew Peter even existed. Sorry if this is longish. Here in Australia we have had people warning us for years about our birth rate was falling. Its been hidden by a huge immigration program, which actually causes a lot of friction. Some people, like the bankers, are all for it because it provides a lot of business for them. The 450,000 immigrants each year need houses and that means home loans and home loans mean profit. They don't care if those loans are for investors or owner occupiers. More people to a banker means more profit. What the bankers don't care squat about is where the electricity, gas or water comes from. And they care even less about the waste water systems needed. All those things are somebody else's problem. In the last 20years Australia has gone from 20 to 26 million that's more than a 25% increase and yet we haven't built any new BIG bulk delivery power stations or major dams or major waste water treatment plants. We have a elephant sized infrastructure issue that nobody wants to discuss. I was in Canada 2017-18 on a waste water treatment plant project. At the same time Australia went from 20 to 25 million Canada went from 25 to 35 million. Canada is fine on energy but they have a major issue on waste water. Those extra 10 million flush toilets. That's exacerbated by their snow melt each year. It tends to overflow their waste water pond systems into the rivers. . Its the opposite to Australia. We don't have enough water (normally) and and when all the snow melts every year Canada has too much. So I am coming at these issues from an engineering perspective because its going to be engineers who have to design and build all this stuff. peter is coming at this from a demographic perspective. Yes, Peter has shortcomings on engineering, BUT IF I DON'T LISTEN to people like him I will miss parts of the conversation that are important. This is where so many engineers have failed to get the message across. They try and put everything in an engineering context and that's pretty boring to a lot of people. I ended up spending a lot of my COVID downtime listening to people like Peter and Mark Blyth who talks to a lot people about there area's of study. The world is a very complex place and if we are to solve these issues we have to be willing to listen to stuff from outside our area of expertise.
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  40. I an Australian engineer who works in industrial control systems. I have spent some time in oil & gas industry and can recognise from the way you speak you've spent time in and around drilling crews. I'm also skeptical about the claims often made about geothermal. Its worked well in a few places where the hot rock was close to the surface. Places like California, New Zealand and Iceland. We've tried it in a number of places in Australia and its failed every time. Typically they found that after a while they just couldn't get things hot enough to create what they needed to drive turbines efficiently. Apparently they were surprised that when you start removing thermal energy that things get cooler.
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  41. I absolutely agree with you. Peter needs a lot better advice on engineering subjects than he's been getting. I did a degree in aerospace but work in industrial control systems (PLCs & DCS) and automation. I'm also certified in functional safety. I haven't done a lot of oil & gas as I mostly work in mining and water treatment these days, BUT what you have said makes absolute sense. I do a lot of risk assessment work and identifying key items is part of that. I don't know the exact items you are describing, because my time has been limited to gas plants but I know that things like oil refineries do not like being shut down and can be a monster task to get re-started. In my Functional Safety course we covered the Piper Alpha accident and that type of offshore platform normally takes a month to restart after an emergency shut-down. Its not the only area where shutdowns can be difficult to handle. I have been saying similar things about energy grids in recent years. These are big complex systems and if the wrong thing goes down the entire system goes down and doesn't come back easily. Water treatment plants can take days to get stabilised, in the meantime you just pump water from nowhere to nowhere.
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  42. Go look around YouTube America has lots of EVERYTHING. Its what you have form being physically a damn big country. I recently saw a video on Lithium and they had showed there's some massive deposits in Montana (I think?) The issues are can these reserves be mined without doing more damage than is acceptable and sadly when it comes to NOT GIVING A DAMN about screwing up the local landscape American corporations are among the worst in the world. Don't take that the wrong way. I'm Australian and we are almost as bad and at times certainly worse.
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  43. Australian here: We are also getting Tomahawks for our navy and for BOTH surface vessel and submarine launching. As well as that we have placed an order for 20 HIMARS Systems As well as HIMARS we are participating in the PrSM development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Strike_Missile Its also rumored we are first inline for the B21 that was just unveiled.
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  44. AEROSPACE ENGINEER HERE - AND YET AGAIN Peter has shown his ignorance in engineering topics. I work in industrial control systems and in 2005-06 I did a water treatment plant at the ERA Ranger Uranium Mine in Australia. As part of that we did an induction course in the nuclear fuel cycle and it covered everything from in the ground to back in the ground. This was at a time when the Americans were kicking up a storm over Iran's nuclear program which they claimed was for domestic power production. When we asked the instructor what was going on he simply asked us to look at what he had just told regarding enrichment and the different grades produced. He had told us regarding gas centrifuges that for fuel grade uranium (3-5% U235) you needed 5,000-10,000; and for military grade fuel (8-19% U235) (like that used in submarines) you needed around 20,000; and for weapons grade (>80%) you needed 40,000 or more AND WE KNEW THE IRANIANS HAD 55,000 YES I KNOW that you can make bombs with less than 80% but they don't work reliably. Go and read about the yields of early A-bombs. When we asked how anyone could know how many gas centrifuges they had he simply said "they bought that many motors to drive them." Gas centrifuges have to spin quite fast and not even the servo motors used in robots go that fast so they use what are called spindle drives. These are the high speed motors commonly found in CNC spindles, hence the name spindle drive. So they are not classified technology but it gets noticed when somebody buys lots of them. The Iranians DO NOT have a CNC machine tool industry so when they bought enough motors and drives to operate 55,000 gas centrifuges everyone across the World's nuclear industry knew EXACTLY what they were doing. It was NOT a civilian power program. ALSO - It is simply not possible for ANYONE to to extend a fuel grade production plant into a weapons grade production plant in a few weeks that sort of thing takes months just to plan let alone execute. NONE of the countries Peter mentioned have WEAPONS GRADE fissile material and NO spent fuel rods are NOT weapons grade unless you are talking about a dirty bomb. There's a major difference between having fissile material and weapons grade fissile material. That's the sort of thing high school kids can understand.
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  45. There's a YES and NO on that because its not just the USN but Brits and French and Russians too. There's a significant distinction between what technology in the reactors used in navies and what these companies were proposing and that was the fuel pellets. The CURRENT reactors in submarines and aircraft carriers (which are the same units) use fuel pellets (the small lumps inside the fuel rods) the same way they do for normal power reactors. That's because most of the American and British power reactors which are PWRs (pressure water reactors) were developed from the early submarine reactors. The new SMRS were going to use Highly Enriched Uranium but in lumps the size of a grain of sand and encased in ceramics. So instead of a stacks of long thin rods that got hot enough to create super-heated steam there would be these round balls that got hot enough to create superheated steam and once finished and the Uranium was burnt off it would already be packed wrapped in ceramics ready for burial.
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  46. That's a fairly nuanced comment and I agree. The real threat from China isn't military its subterfuge. There's an interesting interview from way back in 1984 with former KGB Agent Yuri Bezmenov. There's a fairly crappy right wing channel offensive freedom but its got an excerpt from that interview focussing on the Russian strategy. Its title is "KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov's warning to America (1984)" and its 6:49 long. You can find the full interview elsewhere but this short part is interesting. Bezmenov is 100% wrong on how effective the Russians were. After all the Soviet system collapsed and the West rolled on. That or they had very low expectations. What 's important is the reason they weren't effective back then. It wasn't the strategy. It was the lack of a delivery system. BUT THESE DAYS we have social media which is the perfect delivery system for what the Russians wanted to do. Here is where it gets scary. What do you call a lump of technology that tracks everywhere people go and who they talk to? Most people would call it a surveillance system but these days we call it Tik Tok. YES Tik Tok tracks where you go so it can be very helpful and point out places you might like. Part of loading it up is allowing it access to your photo album which means YOU HAVE GIVEN IT ACCESS past any firewall you have AND YES the Australian DSTO announced that it can access things OTHER THAN the photo album including the call logs and messaging systems. This is WHY the US Government banned it for all government employees. And the craziest aspect of Tik Tok is that the Chinese Communist Party didn't have to force it on anyone. Millions of sheep just uploaded it for free AND voluntarily allowed the CCP to start tracking them.
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  47. Go tell that to a neoliberal economist and watch them freak out. As far as they are concerned the only place where economic value happens is in the markets. Yes its a ridiculous concept but its what they actually believe.
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  48. I'm an engineer have been critical of some of Peters engineering analysis at times. I think he's totally wrong about the Russian oil & gas wells freezing because after being there 20years at least some of the American expertise will have transferred to the locals. That happens quite naturally because as engineers we always have to deal with the locals and they naturally pick up experience. However in this case he's dead right. I have watched a couple of the videos on the ASML photolithography machines and they are at the very top end of microchip technology. Even if the Chinese or Russians or anyone else could get their hands on one its only part of the technology needed to make high end microchips.
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  49. Along with that BS about the Israeli air force Peter is also 100% wrong about the differences between solid fuel and liquid fuel rockets. Its liquid fuel rockets that are far more complex than solid fuel. In simplest terms solid fuel rockets are tubes with a nozzle. There are no pumps or valves or any of the fueling systems required. Its an idiotic claim and it shows YET AGAIN that when it comes to engineering topics Peter does NOT KNOW what he's talking about. FYI - I have a degree in aerospace engineering.
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  50. That's an incredibly valid point and its exactly what the British did for centuries and extensively during WW1 and WW2. I'm Australian and they got so many Australian and New Zealanders killed in WW1 that it crippled Australia's growth until the post WW2 Baby Boom. You can go to almost any country town in Australia and there's a memorial with the names of those lost in "The Great War" as it was called at the time. If you look at those names you can see the names of families where they lost an entire generation of sons. I have a good friend who's Scottish and he says the Brits did the same with the Scots, Irish and Welsh for centuries.
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  51. That's a pretty good way to describe it.
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  52.  @FullCircleTravis  And don't forget our animals are different. Our ones that eat people stay in the water where they belong. Polar bears get out of the water and hunt you down.
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  53.  @Seany06  I think Peter may have covered Djibouti in another video some time ago. I know others have. Its not only an interesting place but in the current situation in the Red Sea its even more interesting.
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  54.  @FrikInCasualMode  Your 100% right which is why those reefs & islands are of such significance.
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  55. ​ @robertblue3795  SORRY BUT YOU ARE WRONG and I only know because I have worked in the Australian mining industry constructing new mines. Coal is not simply black stuff that comes out of the ground. Like all minerals there are grades. For starters there's thermal and metallurgical coal AND THEN there's grades within those grades. Coking coal is graded on its lack of impurities and calorific value (how hot it burns). Australia's coking coal is not only cleaner than Canadian coal but also has a significantly higher calorific value. The only other coal that is of similar grade comes from New Zealand but they can't match us in volume. There's some high end coking coal available in other places but they are small deposits and none of them come close to Australia's reserves. In terms of just coal as in all types combined. YES there are places like China and Russia with massive reserves but most are lower grades. Indonesia despite being small has massive reserves of coal BUT those reserves are mostly thermal coal. Basically you CANNOT just switch the Japanese and South Koreans over onto Canadian Coking coal as its the wrong grade. We didn't realise this until until the late 90s when the Japanese threatened to switch to Canadian Coking coal which they did at every negotiation. Eventually we told them we'd had had enough of those threats and if they wanted to use Canadian Coal then they could go use and F--CKING use it. When they backed down we found out their steel mills were set up to take advantage of Australian coal and could not use Canadian coal. The South Koreans followed suit. FYI - Most Australians are not aware of any of this. I only know from working in the mining industry.
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  56. Engineer here and I can tell you that there's a METHODOLOGY behind this when it comes to human interaction with machines. I work in control systems and that includes the control screens you see in news stories. You might the term SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) and part of my work is programming SCADA systems. What your talking about is something that has become a huge issue in engineering and it has to do with human machine interaction and necessary information versus less necessary information. We have to be incredibly mindful of information overload to operators. About 20 years ago they worked out that the process industries in America were losing more than US$20Billion a year because control room operators were being overloaded at critical times. There's been plenty of aircraft accidents happen for similar reasons of information overload during emergencies and instead of handling the situation pilots got overloaded and crashed. On cars there was a push in the 1990s to have digital dashboards. The problem is drivers don't need detailed displays. They don't need to see the exact speed or water temperature. Just seeing that your below or above the speed limit is enough or that the water is in the green zone is enough rather than overheating is enough. So analog gauges are actually a lot better for drivers as they give relevant information faster rather than detailed information that then has to be processed. The same applies to many other things, even household appliances.
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  57. Yeah that's a good summary.
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  58.  @NathanPK  I absolutely agree. I actually have spent most of the last 20 years in Australia's mining industry. I went looking for experience when it turned out we might be going back to the moon to mine Helium-3 AND YES I know. One day one of the people I was working with told me how Logistics was going to become EVEN BIGGER and more important. He'd done logistics for many years and explained how logistics people were going to become some of the most important people in any and every company. That was circa 2010 and before Amazon, which is basically a logistics company, had become what it has become. In hindsight if you ga back to consider what went wrong with the invasion of Iraq, it had a lot to do with logistics. If you look at the massive disruption of COVID, it had a lot to do with logistics. Its odd how you remember those odd conversations that never seemed important at the time suddenly seem important years later.
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  59. It depends if they are present in the ore. Like any of these by-product resources its dependent on the ore body and also the concentrations in that orebody. I've spent most of the last 20 years in the mining industry doing control systems and EVERY ore body is different. Germanium isn't present in all zinc ores. According to Wikipedia its most prevalent in what's called Mississippi Valley type deposits. Mt Isa the worlds 3rd largest zinc mine isn't that type but MacArthur river probably is looking at the maps. There's the refinery in Tasmania but who knows what type of ore they process. I checked for Gallium and there's a real possibility Australia does have some capacity because we have a number of Alumina refineries. There's a bunch in Western Australia south of Perth and one in the Perth area at Kwinana. We also had one at Gove in the NT where I spent some time for work.
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  60. Yeah this is ANOTHER in a growing list of Peter doesn't know SHlT about Engineering videos. All anyone has to do is go and look how much Lithium is needed to do things like convert all the cars to electric and then check that against the Lithium Reserves which you can get on Wikipedia. Answer at about 63kg per car (based of a Tesla) the 1.5 Billion registered cars in the World need about 95 million tons of Lithium and there's less than 30 million tons in known RESERVES. AND for those wondering if they look at Wikipedia and see the number for Resources the difference between resources and reserves. Resources are what people think is out there. Reserves are what the Geologists and miners KNOW they MINE.
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  61.  @nrotko  I think your mostly right. Where Peter usually gets it right is when he sticks to his strengths of history, geopolitics and demographics. Where he gets it wrong is when he gets away from the areas he knows or gets into a country he doesn't know as well as he thinks he knows it. He also has an American centric view of the world, which gets him along with EVERY OTHER American into trouble. Having gone to college there I have seen the American Centric mentality up close. It can be fixed, but it takes an American to live outside America for 2 years or more and then go home. They need that time to acclimatise to different information. It actually happened to a really good friend of mine. Doug was in Australia for about 3 years after an ugly divorce, went home not too much different, BUT THEN when he visited a year later he was a different person. He'd had enough time outside America to see when he went home just how much of a bubble the American people live in. That was back in the late 90s. I see Peter's mistakes when he speaks about technology but then I'm an engineer. Some of the things he's said on the energy transition are just plain wrong, but I have noticed that MANY OTHER COMMENTATORS making the same mistakes. For an engineer its an infuriating time because there are a bunch of persistent meme's and its like playing whack-a-mole trying to correct them. I do think he's right in that America is going through a major political realignment and that its going to be messy for a couple more years. The thing I see is just how different it is this time. Its nothing like after the Great Depression of what happened in the 1970s & 80s. There's NEVER been a time when Americans were so divided along religious and secular lines where the "other side" isn't just the "other side" they are mortal enemies and think the other side is out to exterminate them as if they are from another planet. I actually think the US Constitution is one of humanities finest achievements EXCEPT that it needs a people who actually care about it rather than what they can exploit from it. That's part of the change that I don't hear Peter or any other American talk about much. American's used to value the Constitution and now its a club to bash the other side with. And that's why I am really concerned.
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  62. As an Australian this freaked me TF out because if you change the words to Australian and Australia and swap Trudeau for Albanese and you are 100% factually describing Australia. His description of Vancouver is practically identical to Melbourne and especially Sydney with respect to housing. We are idiotically addicted to foreign investment. I'm an engineer and was actually in Canada late 2017 through early 2018 for a project. Other than the temperature inversion Canada was like another version of Australia. I was in Saskatchewan and it was like wheat belt of Western Australia, the Western 1/2 of Victoria and the Murray Darling section of New South Wales. A vast area of endless flat farmland, with exactly the same kinds of people. We even hate Canberra the EXACT same way Canadians hate Ottawa.
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  63.  @harrymaurer7984  That's a great point. FYI - I'm Australian and one of the underlying issues with the whole AUKUS Submarine deal is: "How are we supposed to trust America as a partner in our future security when Americans don't trust America?" I actually went to college in America in the late 80s. I was there for 87 campaign season and it got bonkers at times but it was nothing like this stuff. I think 9/11 had a bigger effect than most people realise. That was followed by the invasions of Afghanistan & Iraq, then the GFC and then Trump arrived. There's moments I'm amazed America is still 1 country.
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  64.  @beccawoodhouse  I'm an engineer and his opinions on engineering are often terrible and factually wrong. But on geopolitics and demographics (which is actually his background) he's better than most pundits.
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  65. I'm Australian and we have been hearing off and on for years now that we have a similar problem. Its just gotten so expensive to have children that its now very difficult for people to have them. COMPOUNDING that is the explosive cost of housing in Australia. Basically our entire nation got drunk on property prices over the last 25+ years. Its been great for the investment orientated baby boomers and an utter disaster for the rest of us. We have tried to make up for a falling birth rate with immigration but that has brought its own set of issues.
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  66. ​ @SamiKotiranta  You are 100% right, but sadly International Lawlessness has been what humanity has done for its entire recorded history. These days we hear the term "Rules Based Order." I am yet to hear a single person explain in any sort of coherent fashion WTF that means. There MIGHT be a number of treaties including things like the International Criminal Court (ICC or ICCt), but if you have a look at the Wikipedia page for the ICC there is a map (RHS near top) showing the places which are and aren't in that system. NOTABLY - The United States of America and Russia which were 2 countries instrumental in that courts founding because of the Nuremberg trials ARE NO LONGER signatories to that treaty. China and India, the 2 largest nations on the planet HAVER NEVER SIGNED. Combined those 4 nations are over 40% of the World's population. So WTF are any of them talking about with this "Rules Based Order?"
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  67. ​ @macalister8881  I like Peter he's very good on geopolitical stuff but occasionally gets his information wiring crossed. I'm an engineer so pick up that he gets technical stuff wrong at times, but they also tend to be common misconceptions. On practical math & stats here's my best advice for everyone. If you put 2 circles either side of a line like this -> "oIo" its basically a dick symbol. If you tilt that symbol to the right you get this symbol "%" or as I like to call it the dick symbol of math because it f-cks anything and everything it can. For starters it can make any number equal any other number. Like when does 1 = 25? When the interest rate goes from 4% to 5% that 1% equals a 25% increase. That's why bankers like it so much because with it they can f-ck who ever they want. Just remember whenever you see this symbol -> % if you aren't careful you will get f-cked.
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  68.  @jacobtaylor7506  Its not often mentioned that the reason PWRs became the mainstay of the nuclear power industry was because the tech had already been developed for the USN. Its like all the stuff that eventually trickles down to our cars from the racing industry. Those guys sort all the bugs out of the technology to where its reliable. The USN had similarly sorted out all the tech and operating and maintenance details of PWRs, which made it easy to scale up for the power industry. Plus the USN supplied a steady stream of skilled operators to the power industry. In some ways it also stifled other tech like molten salt. Why spend the time on that when you have PWRs all sorted out? Similar for the CANDU reactors which the Canadians have sorted out. For a country like Australia (my country) its not a matter of IF but WHEN we have nuclear. The actual discussion needs to be WHAT TYPE. I was pro-MSR until recently when James Krellenstein was talking about CANDU and he pointed out the experience they now have operating CANDU. He said MSRs look very good but at the moment NOBODY has any real experience operating and maintaining them year after year. So for Australia right now I'd say CANDU is the best option because the Canadians speak English, behave rationally and we get on really well with them.
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  69. EXACTLY - I'm Australian and have worked in Canada and the moment any Canadian has US Health Care System explained to them they will not waste a second on this. POP QUIZ - people from which nation cross a border to get cheap affordable medications.
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  70. I'm Australian but went to college in America (late 80s) and that is a VERY GOOD way to summarise the American concept of "Biparisan." To be fair it wasn't as obvious then as it is now but the signs were there to be seen if you looked. in my experience Iran-Contra should have been a major wake TF up warning. I was there during that episode. The girl I dated at the time expressed it an unusual way. She said she hated how "it made the Office of the President look bad." Its one of those off-handed remarks that keeps echoing in my head these days. Even in Australia we now have a majority of politicians who see themselves and their policies as IMPORTANT rather than being the person who's been GRANTED BY "WE THE PEOPLE" to look after that office and care for it.
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  71. Yeah too many people who re-post don't do that. Or if an interview is a few weeks in the past. I agree its incredibly important we know when people produce a video.
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  72. As an Australian who went to college in America an watches British politics a reasonable amount. You might want to add in that British politics is a SHlTSHOW its just not as much of a SHlTSHOW as America but damn you guys tried hard with Brexit. And before you ask - YEAH I know Australian politics isn't much better but at least we rejected our Trumpist billionaire and we didn't punch ourselves in gonads like Brexit, but then we have also let the Americans con us out of several hundred billion for submarines.
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  73. HUGE FOLLOW-UP COMING. Just after this was posted the news started coming in - Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in prison. How he died is unknown.
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  74. AUSTRALIAN here. The one thing I would say or ask is what the effect of the incredibly powerful Jewish Lobby in America will play in this. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee better known as AIPAC has an incredible amount of influence on American Foreign Policy as we are seeing right now with Biden being UNABLE or UNWILLINGING to condemn the insane over response of the IDF that has caused so much harm to the civilian population of Gaza. Its one thing for Israeli forces (the IDF) to go in after the Hamas terrorists and NOBODY can blame them for seeking justice for what they did on October 7th as it was an act of bastardry, but more than 20,000 civilian dead including more than 10,000 children SHOULD BE CONDEMNED and Biden had been unable or unwilling to publicly step up and face the ire of groups like AIPAC shows just how influential they are politically in America. FYI - There's also a fairly influential Jewish Lobby in Australia which also explains the similar reluctance of Australian politicians to condemn the Jewish assault on the civilian population of Gaza. The Jewish Lobby in Australia is not as open in its influence in Australia as it is in America. There aren't the large high publicity conferences that groups like AIPAC hold, BUT if a matter like Gaza comes up there are Jewish leaders here who are very quick to grab the microphone and let their views be heard. There is also a section of the Australian Jewish community who are staunch supporters of the Settler Movement in the West Bank who are also quick to grab the microphone when that subject is broached.
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  75. As an Australian this freaked me TF out because if you change the words to Australian and Australia and swap Trudeau for Albanese and you are 100% factually describing Australia. His description of Vancouver is practically identical to Melbourne and especially Sydney with respect to housing. We are idiotically addicted to foreign investment. Your specific comment on students is IDENTICAL to here. The industry we have developed for students from Asia, India, China,... etc is almost identical to what's happened in Canada. When our news services do stories about the issues almost all the comparisons are with Canada. I'm an engineer and was actually in Canada late 2017 through early 2018 for a project. Other than the temperature inversion Canada was like another version of Australia. I was in Saskatchewan and it was like wheat belt of Western Australia, the Western 1/2 of Victoria and the Murray Darling section of New South Wales. A vast area of endless flat farmland, with exactly the same kinds of people. We even hate Canberra the EXACT same way Canadians hate Ottawa.
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  76. He's quite right about a couple of things but also a questionable on others. I am an engineer who works in industrial control systems and automation. I have worked in both manufacturing and mining and know both industries quite well. In the short. He's quite right we simply do not have enough supply of certain raw materials to go to a full EV system. In particular Lithium and a couple of the other ingredients just aren't there in the quantity needed even if the Ruskies were being good boys. On manufacturing he's NOT as right. Other than the drive train (fuel system, engine, gearbox, drive shaft,... there's actually NO DIFFERENCE in making and EV or any other car. The body shell, doors, glass, seats, seat belts, sound system, steering wheel, suspension, chassis, wheels and tires are still the same stuff. Depending on the manufacturer something like 80-95% of an EV is the same as a normal car. In the longer story. On the mining of some of these metals like Lithium and Molybdenum those projects can take many years to go anywhere. There's a Molybdenum mine in Western Australia and a company I worked for did the electrical design for the processing plant. That was around 2007-08. The GFC smashed that project. But they did get it done and mined the site from 2010 to 2014. Its now in care and maintenance. So there's at least 1 Molybdenum mine that can be brought back into production fairly quickly. The company that owns it has a good coper & molybdenum ore body nearby but they have not yet developed it. At that's one thing about mining, they wont spend money digging stuff up unless there's a market to sell it to. So they don't look at what the markets are today they are looking 3-5-10 years into the future. Plus to actually mine some of these minerals can be damn hard. Sometimes the percentage of what you want is tiny. They measure gold in grams per ton of ore. Copper isn't much better. And getting it out can be seriously hard. They dissolve gold with cyanide and copper with sulphuric acid. So a lot fo the processing gear is fairly serious stuff. Right now there are people scrambling for finance for projects but these thing take time to plan, procure build and get operating. Typically from the first time an ore body is found its at least 5 years until first dirt. Some projects go for about decades until first dirt because the markets aren't right or there's other mines producing what's needed. Even when everything looks good there's still that fact you are hoping to dig dirt and turn it into money. Its quite a difficult thing to get a full appraisal on an ore body and it can be horribly expensive if you get it wrong. I watched BHP, 1 of the biggest mining companies on the planet blow over $3 Billion on a Nickel project because the geologists did not check properly and guessed wrong. So I'd say Peters quite right on the supply of raw materials, but depending on what the Chinese and Russians do next that can change rapidly.
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  77. Another Aussie here and you're fairly close to my view. What I'd add is that the illegals who do get caught trying to get here consume resources. A lot of them are NOT political refugees they are economic refugees and that consumption of resources means we are NOT spending money on people we should be helping. Part of the problem is that we have advocates who just wont accept the judges decision and just move on. A staggering amount of money and resources is spent on appeals. Those same advocates relentlessly howl we need to discuss the issue but then wont allow anyone with even the slightest counterpoint to be heard. Every person or group of people who have ever emigrated anywhere have arrived with baggage. My Anglo-Saxon ancestors arrived in Australia with Anglo-Saxon baggage and some of that is still haunting our nation today. The real problem with trying to have any sensible public discussion on immigration is there are so many people who will instantly turn it into a howling screaming shite-fest knowing full well what they are doing.
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  78.  @alexandermckay8594  I am well aware of that, but Peter keeps repeating that its a MATTER OF EXPERTISE. Its actually easy to stop them freezing, don't stop them flowing for too long. You do know that wells heads can both open and close. So open one of them one day and another the next and keep cycling them. Peter has this bug, that's typical of Americans and that's American technical superiority over other nations AND ITS JUST NOT TRUE. I'm Australian but went to college in America so I am aware of how technically advanced America is. the University I went to was at the time the world center of supercomputing technology. But I also know that Americans have the flaw that they think they are the worlds best at EVERYTHING and that they are so far ahead of everyone else that nobody could possibly solve any problem the world has without them. Its called American Exceptionalism and it gets them into a lot of trouble because they keep underestimating other people.
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  79. There's a quote that I believe is attributed to Warren Buffet. "When the tide goes out we can all see who's swimming naked." Its his way of explaining that when capital leaves like when people shift their money to safer more secure places we can all see which companies are operating with real profit making activities and/or systems and those that are just clever at PR, marketing and tax evasion.
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  80. HUGE FOLLOW-UP COMING. Just after this was posted the news started coming in - Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in prison. How he died is unknown.
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  81.  @nrotko  You have just perfectly described the problem with the American Centric view of the world. They are completely oblivious to consequences. They are almost childish in their view of the world. You know how a young child can't see the consequences of their actions. But eventually as we grow older we know what to do and what NOT to do. On foreign policy Americans just don't seem to get that lesson EVER. I think Peter's right on China because that's a demographic issue and nothing can fix demographics except time. As Peter once said if you want a 25 year old it takes 25 years and 9 months to make one. We also have a similar issue in Australia. It was only 2 days ago I checked out bureau of statistics and found a bizarre thing. There's an interactive population pyramid and it has this noticeable notch for 16-19yr olds and that's factual because we just had a major census in 2021. BUT in the forward projections that notch just disappears and its something like 40-50,000 people. NOBODY IS EXPLAINING where they are coming from. Somehow the bureaucrats are magically going to pull 40-50,000 high school graduates and university students out of thin air.
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  82. Engineer here - 100% RIGHT. This is just Peter being pathetically like 100s of other commentators and just regurgitating PR from companies trying to raise money. I really like Peter when he's explaining geo-politics but as an engineer I think he needs to either employ an engineer or just STFU on engineering topics. Because every time he's either 1/2 Wrong, 3/4 Wrong, or 100% WRONG.
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  83.  @hughjass1044  That's a valid point.
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  84.  @deahelkcunklaer2180  I went to college in America mate. I love the place and the people, but your politics are toxic, your economics are a nightmare and your health care system is a sociopaths wet dream.
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  85. AUSTRALIAN HERE: I went to college in America and the most fundamental way to see this is that America REACTS while others have to PLAN. America with its incredible resources with the water ways & farming coupled with some of the worlds best mineral resources allows Americans to REACT rather than plan because almost everything is in over supply to demand. On minerals Americans often forget that they have some of the richest mineral deposits every found. They might not be as large as those found in Canada and Australia but the quality of its deposits makes gives America a huge advantage. Australia (26 million people), Canada (36 million people), New Zealand (3.5 million people) might have some amazing resources (minerals, oil & ocean) but none of us has the population to take a "we'll do what we need to when we need to" approach. We have to think ahead a lot more than America and its something we don't always do well. In fact MOST of the time Australia, Canada, New Zealand..... try to operate like America and wait until they MUST do something and that gets us into some staggering trouble with things like infrastructure, water management & power grids.
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  86. Great point and 100% accurate, but the Cubans were not alone. As an Australian I can tell you that the Brits used Australians, Canadians, Scotts, new Zealanders and any other "colonials" they could throw into a fight for that last 100+ years. And lets not forget the Americans did the same in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
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  87. As an Australian this freaked me TF out because if you change the words to Australian and Australia and swap Trudeau for Albanese and you are 100% factually describing Australia. His description of Vancouver is practically identical to Melbourne and especially Sydney with respect to housing. We are idiotically addicted to foreign investment. I'm an engineer and was actually in Canada late 2017 through early 2018 for a project. Other than the temperature inversion Canada was like another version of Australia. I was in Saskatchewan and it was like wheat belt of Western Australia, the Western 1/2 of Victoria and the Murray Darling section of New South Wales. A vast area of endless flat farmland, with exactly the same kinds of people. We even hate Canberra the EXACT same way Canadians hate Ottawa. AND we have the same brain drain of younger highly educated Australians to America, particularly in tech industries.
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  88. ​ @pondering1716  As I just said to Obcane if China goes away as Peter predicts its a massive issue. If the timing is right the we might be in trouble and the Indians can screw us on any deals. Right now some of their big players already have stakes in Australia. I actually spent time on a copper mine that was Indian owned and yes the food was awesome. So they already have a serious footprint here, but who knows where it will actually end up.
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  89.  @skippertunes  Yeah sorry. I went to college with a Kevin Costello and flipped the names. And there was the Kevin Rudd vs Peter Costello rivalry. My mistake.
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  90.  @JRay2113  I agree on the basic description but they are messy for very different reasons and those reasons have a lot of history. Italy as we know it wasn't a country since the fall of Rome in the 5th century. Its been a lose collection of warring states that occasionally united against a common foe but usually just assassinated each other. Italy as we know it is quite recent, but that history lingers. India has some similarities to that in that it has been a number of semi-autonomous kingdoms and even to this day has some large cultural groups who don't always get along. But while Italy has had a population of Catholics controlled by Catholics, India which is majority Hindu has been controlled by the Islamic Moguls and then the British. So its had long periods where the control was by people of another religion and culture than the bulk of the population. Then there was the split where they literally split India into 3 chunks - India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Then there is the whole Kashmir thing and the India versus China issue. I'd agree there's similarities but also some major differences.
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  91.  @rishisingh3408  The Hindu caste system is almost unique in religious ideology. There is nothing like it in Islam, Christianity or Judaism for that matter. I suggest you learn about other people and their cultures before making such stupid remarks.
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  92.  @TanyaCumpston  Firmly within the sphere of U.S. influence?? We actually kind of don't like that but its way more than 100% true. We actually have a couple of incredibly important US bases in Australia. The most significant is Pine Gap. There's a lot of "Ooh Ah What If" vids about it but this one is fairly good. Note the graphic on satellite coverage at about 8 minutes to see why its so important. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FUVwC-B1k4 Its what should be labelled a zero strike target, because before anyone tries to do a first strike they need to take this place out.
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  93.  @SP-po5qg  There's parts of Australia around our major universities where you can say exactly the same thing, except its about 50% Chinese and 50% Indian students. Its causing some very serious issues with our universities but the "business people" who now run our Universities don't care. More students = more money, and that's as far as things are discussed. As far as I know New Zealand has similar issues but not yet as bad as ours.
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  94.  @projectgolio  That's exactly the thing I have found everywhere I look with few exceptions and the few exceptions aren't that clear either. There's actually 2 business cases for large base load power stations. 1) If the government built them they are insanely profitable because if you don't do anything but keep them running then eventually population growth will flip the system from over supply to under supply. Prices go up but costs remain the same and especially for the coal plants where the coal mine is right there beside the plant. At that point profits skyrocket. 2) If private industry tries to build large scale then there is no viable business case. It takes too long to pay off. How do you ask a CEO who's probably 55 or older that if he spends this monster pile of money that he'll break even when he's 75? So its only viable with massive government subsidies, tax breaks and forward profits/bonusses.
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  95. Another Australian here and that's one of the great questions NOT BEING ASKED RIGHT NOW. How this has come about is anyone's guess, but I would start with the ECONOMISTS because they have influence over pretty much everything. I'm an engineer and have some VERY SERIOUS questions on energy for our leaders. They are all basically standing around waiting for someone to do something. The biggest problem is that ECONOMISTS now have so much control that we can't get anything done or have anything discussed WITHOUT their interference. And this is not simply and Australian issue. Its rampant across the entire Western developed world as well as having way too much control over the rest. Its basically hardwired into economics DOCTRINE that they have to be in control because as far as they are concerned "the rest of us don't know what we are doing." I've been looking into this for a couple of years now and there are a loose collection of fringe economists who have bene trying to sort out the rest of the economics profession for some time without any luck. One of the more prominent people in that is Australian economists Steve Keen who hosts a weekly LIVE podcast that's also shown here on YouTube for free. Sadly it starts 3:00am Sunday Mornings.
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  96.  @awolffromamongus875  Yeah - agreed. The thing for geothermal will be the same as it is for oil & gas - GEOGRAPHY. Geography is also a major issue with wind solar and hydro. Its arguably the least understood factor in the energy debate.
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  97.  @jamesspry3294  No these are new holes in a different place that have been specifically drilled to geothermal power. The difference is they are using the same fracking techniques the shale oil people use to great the wells and instead of extracting oil & gas they are extracting heat. I don't know how they have actually done this system but a few years ago a system was tried in Australia that sounds similar. In Australia the hot rock was actually granite so it was very hard but also brittle and could be cracked. In that system they'd drill 2 holes and frack the hot rock between them. They'd pump water down one hole and as it went through the hot rock via the cracks caused by the fracking it would get hot and then come up the other hole. That system failed in the end to deliver as much power as they thought they could get and it wasn't economically viable. I suspect this new system is working because its a significant improvement in how much they can frack the hot rock and access the energy.
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  98. HUGE FOLLOW-UP COMING. Just after this was posted the news started coming in - Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in prison. How he died is unknown.
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  99. Australian here but I was working in Saskatchewan in late 2017 on a waste water treatment plant. Little known fact is that Saskatchewan is sitting on top of one of the worlds least developed onshore oil fields. Its South West of Saskatoon sort of centered around Kindersley. The difference is that its deeper than Alberta's oil fields - about 1000m. I know this because the accommodation I had was shared with oil people. The reason I was doing a water treatment plant was so the town where it was could expand. Canada's problem is that its population has gone from 25 to 38 million and that means there's an extra 13 million people flushing toilets. Its another part of the infrastructure issues plaguing the Western Hemisphere. In some places its roads, in others bridges, others power stations like here in Australia. But in Canada its waste water treatment. Plus their roads are crap, but they do have really good rail out that way to service their potash and ag industry. That field has been marginal because its deeper, lacks a pipeline out to the world and not much else. Because of changing world politics the locals were telling me they expected Sask to boom through the 2020s if they could get past their infrastructure issues.
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  100. Aerospace engineer here: fabulous comment. There's been a few times Peter has gotten close but missed the mark on technology issues. Sounds like he missed a bit on the battery tech. Which begs a couple of questions. What do you know about the Sadoway Battery? What do you know about the Lithium Air batteries the U. off Illinois Chicago team did a couple of years ago. I will say this about Peter - this time he's actually dead right on the mining side for a change. Because I thought we'd be going back to the moon to mine it I went off to Australia's mining industry for some work experience. One thing I learned is that until you do a proper drill test program and confirm an ore body NOBODY should take any claim seriously. No serious investor with the kind of money needed will touch it NO MATTER the potential and that's because they have all been burned at some point by someone making a claim that turned out to be NOTHING. Peter is dead right. At best its 8 to 10 years away.
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  101. You're not alone. I'm an Australian engineer and I had this odd little consulting project back in 2015. I was stunned to find out the ACTUAL state of Australia's power stations. I watched a video today on California's looming crisis, so I did a quick look at their power stations AND ITS THE SAME STORY. When I look around the world its the same story again and again. Sorry to all if this is long but I have been on this for almost 7 years. Others have been trying to warn about this for a lot longer and nobody listens - we're just engineers. This isn't a German an Australian problem its everywhere. In simplest terms we all stopped building large baseload power stations in the early 1990s. So we are clear what I call a Gigawatt class power stations is one that can deliver in normal operation at least 1 GW (or >1,000 Megawatts) 24/7. California currently has 6 gas, 1 geothermal and 2 nuclear Gigawatt class power stations and only 1 of them was commissioned after 1990, the La Paloma Gas plant at McKittrick in 2003. In the time since they commissioned the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in 1980 California has grown from 24 to almost 40 million people. Here in Australia as our population went from 15 to 17.5 million in the 80s & 90s, we built 7 Gigawatt class power stations to meet the expected growth. The last of those was commissioned in 1999. As we went from 17.5 to almost 26 million we built NONE. Like another places we built a few smaller power stations and installed heaps of solar and wind. That's great and i love it but it DOES NOT solve the bulk supply that modern societies need. Its help mask the problem, but like the Titanic we are going to sink. It doesn't take any genius to understand the basic economics of supply and demand. If your population increases the demand for electricity increases. If supply doesn't grow to match population growth prices go up. When they used to build big power stations it was with growth in mind. In Australia we built those stations with 20 million in mind. So there's a delay between when we built those stations and when we hit the limits of their supply. Once that happened our prices haven't stopped climbing and have risen over 400% But it gets worse. Now those stations are reaching the end of their useful life. Its doesn't matter what type they are they all have an expiry date. California turned off San Onofre and Australia turned off Hazelwood along with some older small stations. We have 4 of our Gigawatt class power stations scheduled for shutdown due to age in the next 3-5 years and the rest not long after that. RIGHT NOW we haven't a single proposal to consider let alone approve let alone begin constructing. In Britain Hinkley Point C was announced in 2010, approved in 2016 began construction in 2017 and is expected to begin operating in 2027. At £26 Billion ($44B AUD) Australia would need 2 of those and 2 more 1/2 size ones to replace what we are shutting down at a cost of $132 Billion AUD. At best we might have 1 built by 2032 if we started tomorrow. CAN YOU SEE THE PROBLEM. Does rising power prices, power shortages, power outages all sound familiar? You are not alone. Does your government seem to have no answers on what to do? You are not alone. HERE'S THE REAL REASON FOR THIS. The time it takes to propose, approve and built big power stations means that no existing government (state or federal) that starts the process will still be in power when its gets approved or if they approve it when its built. So there's NOTHING for any politician to gain from asking for or approving new power stations. In fact for many politicians making no decision is their re-election strategy or "We will work on it!" is the way to win an election. If Britain had fast tracked Hinkley and maybe another 1 or 2 when they knew what the situation was back in 2010 and just got going they might be turning one on right now and avoiding the crisis. The rest of us are in an even worse state. To all, sorry for the long answer but no matter where you are its pretty much the same problem. Its not the fault of one particular politician or party. Its not the fault of the Green movement or the coal companies or the nuclear proponents. ITS THE COMBINATION OF ALL OF THEM.
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  102. NO PETER - we don't need reliable sources of information. 1) We need an educated public who can actually discern between fact and fiction. 2) We need some from of enforcement that is acceptable to all that can warn people about UNCONFIRMED INFORMATION.
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  103.  @invaderjoshua6280  Oh you have to be a farking zoomer with that sort of comment. WTF is an "older millennial"? 30 isn't old. I'm an Australian Gen-X who went to college in America. I was raised on metric and had plenty of fun explaining it to my Gen-X class mates. FYI - I did aerospace engineering. And yes I know all about a couple of space probes where they got metric & imperial confused. How did Jim Gaffigan put it? "Metric is so hard. Dividing and multiply by 10s is so confusing." In future be careful with metric comments until you know which country people are from.
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  104. As an engineer speaking as calmy as I can. Can people like you STOP regurgitating the PR and spin coming out of the fusion community. For the last 70 years they have been saying that fusion was only 20 or 30 years away. Yes there is progress being made but the facts don't indicate ANYONE is near to commercial operations. The ITER project is years behind. The Stellarator which has shown some promise is only experimental. If we really did make the giant push and did an Apollo like approach where a deadline was set then maybe we might see something in the next 20 years. Also don't ignore one of the biggest facts regarding nuclear fusion - its NOT as clean as the proponents suggest. The main mechanism it generates heat is with high energy neutrons and high energy neutrons are among the worst forms of radiation known. high energy neutrons tend to fly off like atomic bullets and in a human those bullets tend to smash DNA and that either kills cells or causes cancer.
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  105. Not unless its escorted. If you go back to the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) the Americans and others escorted tankers into and out of the Persian Gulf. Look up the "Tanker War" that's a subsection of the Wikipedia page in the Iran-Iraq War. But Taiwan would be totally different as people would not be protecting their energy supply they'd be blocking a large part of China's energy supply and certain key raw materials.
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  106. Along with that BS about the Israeli air force Peter is also 100% wrong about the differences between solid fuel and liquid fuel rockets. Its liquid fuel rockets that are far more complex than solid fuel. In simplest terms solid fuel rockets are tubes with a nozzle. There are no pumps or valves or any of the fueling systems required. Its an idiotic claim and it shows YET AGAIN that when it comes to engineering topics Peter does NOT KNOW what he's talking about. FYI - I have a degree in aerospace engineering.
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  107. AUSTRALIAN HERE: Who's also worked in our nuclear industry on the mining side, but as part of that we were fully schooled on the entire nuclear fuel cycle. Peter makes a series of horrendous mistakes in this the worst being that Plutonium is the end result of Uranium fission and that's just NOT true unless you are talking about breeder reactors. Peter's #2 egregious error is that Thorium produces Plutonium. Totally 100% UNTRUE This is a myth that started a few years ago and keeps getting repeated.
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  108. AUSTRALIAN HERE - Calling Australia America's Deputy is not quite accurate. The correct term that the rest of the Asians use is "America's Little Bitch!" We just call ourselves the 51st State but apparently that upsets the Puerto Ricans. Here's a couple of points that Peter doesn't mention with respect to the region and the countries he talks about. 1) There are 2 CRITICAL American bases in Australia that few people talk about. There's Wikipedia pages for both. - There's the Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt at Northwest Cape and its used to talk to the US Submarines operating in the Indian Ocean so for all that stuff going on in the Red Sea with Iran and Houthis all of the comms to the submarines in the area is done via this station. - There's Pine Gap in Central Australia that is the primary ground station for American Satellites watching Russia, the Middle East, Pakistan, India, China and most of Asia. Its what I'd call a "Zero Strike" target rather than a First Strike target because BEFORE tries a first strike this place needs to be dealt with because other wise America will see your first strike coming. 2) Besides 4 small Aircraft carriers the Japanese have 6 large destroyers (over 9,000t) and 29 smaller destroyers (5,000-7,000t). The 6 larger destroyers are similar size to the American Arleigh Burke-class destroyers Of the 6 larger destroyers the 2 Maya-class (Maya & Haguro) carry the AMERICAN MADE SM-3 anti-ballistic missile. The SM-3 is a major upgrade to the RIM-161 family of surface to air missiles. The main difference is the SM-3 is an anti-ballistic missile capable of intercepting missiles at greater than 100km of altitude. They have much greater range and their speeds are greater than Mach 8 with the latest Block IIA capable of Mach 13.2. For perspective the SR-71 went Mach 3.3 and Hypersonic is regarded as greater than Mach 5. Both Maya and Haguro have successfully hit targets at over 100km altitude during their commissioning. All those details are on Wikipedia. 3) BOTH Japan and Korea import large amounts of food and raw materials from Australia. Most of the food comes out of Australia's East Coast as does the coking coal for steel production. HOWEVER all of the iron ore comes out of Australia's West coast along with significant amounts of other raw materials and goes via the South China Sea. Go and have a look at WHERE China has been setting up bases in the South China Sea. The Spratly Islands are a long way from China and China has NO history of being on the Spratly's like they do with the Paracel Islands. So WHY ARE THEY THERE? Peter has often spoken about the 7 gaps the Russians want to control for their security. Look at map of where the Spratly Islands are they are not just a long way down near the Southern edge of the South China Sea but they are at a narrow point between the Philippines and Vietnam. So these bases are in a strategic position where multiple countries could interfere with trade. Basically if you want to put a toll gate on the entrance to the South China sea the Spratly Islands are the location to do it. This is one of the main reasons Australia wants (or needs) nuclear powered submarines. The South China Sea is where a lot of our critical Exports go. Its a long way from our main naval bases and nuclear powered submarines are significantly faster than conventional powered subs and don't need to surface every day or 2.
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  109. Yeah mate but who owns the majority of stocks on our stock markets? The Dow, S&P 500 and other indexes are great gauges of how the Top 10% are doing and to a lesser extent the middle class. But when it comes to the Bottom 50% of the economy the stock market is a SHlT indicator because NONE of the wealth on it flows down to them.
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  110. And of interest in the fertilizer issue just yesterday the YT algorithm flagged me a story from the Financial Times titled "Fighting agricultural pollution in England’s waterways." There's a 2019 Report that says only 14% of Britain's rivers are in good health and farm run-off is a major contributor. And I didn't mention it but farm run-off is a major problem in parts of Australia too.
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  111. Aerospace engineer here - 3 points 1) Kinzhal is spelt with an 'i' not an 'e' 2) Calling anything ballistic only means it follows a ballistic trajectory for some or all of its flight and has NOTHING to do with the speed at any point in the flight. 3) Saying something goes hypersonic only means that it can go faster than Mach 5 for part of its flight and has NOTHING to do with the type of flight path taken.
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  112.  @parrmik  I remember once seeing the cars leave the Dandenong plant for GM. It was like watching an army charge into battle or a massive herd of animals suddenly move. It was one of the most bizarre things I ever saw.
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  113.  @SolaceEasy  Yeah so I did apologise for the length right at the start.
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  114.  @krisushi1  On AUKUS, I am NOT (and keep saying it) against it in principle. I am against the terms of it. Here's an allegory. Imagine you are selling the next generation of giant dump trucks to BHP or Rio Tinto and YES your trucks are the best. They use less fuel, they require less maintenance and they have all round better features. Plus your company has a long history of making good quality trucks. As part of the contract that you put in front of BHP/Rio Tinto you ASK B.H.P./Rio Tinto to PAY YOU MONEY to fix YOUR factory because after years of neglect by your management its starting to break down and cannot deliver the trucks its supplying to other people. Do you think that's a contract BHP or Rio Tino would sign knowing that among their shareholders are smart people who would understand how stupid that is? We (as in Australia) are sending $3 Billion to upgrade the Huntington Ingalls shipyards at a time when they can't even deliver submarines (as well as ships for that matter) to the USN Navy on time. If that makes sense to you then I have no answers for anything else you might ask. Then there's the fact we hired a pack of Americans on monster pay packets starting at about AU$1.2 Million a year to tell us this garbage plan made sense. Here's an additional point of grievance I have. I recently found that one of the Australian Think Tanks (ASPI) not only gets money from the Australia Government to advise it, but also gets money from the US State department. Its there on their website which they have to do by Australia Law as a think tank & lobbyist. SO WHY TF is the US State Department funding an Australian Think Tank that's consulting to the Australian government even if its in unrelated material? More importantly WHY TF hasn't anyone in the media made a fuss about it?
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  115. You need to be clear what it means by WINNING. Because in a War the usual way you win is to defeat the enemy and there's simply no way Ukraine can actually defeat the Russians. Its a simple matter of numbers and Russia's numbers are simply bigger than Ukraines. Peter has explained this several times. HOWEVER if you consider that Ukraine can SURVIVE in its own right and NOT a conquered state like they were during the Cold War, then that is an entirely different matter. History tells us that America with all its might was pushed back out of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Their best post WW2 result was a stalemate in Korea. What Ukraine can do is simply grind the Russian military down to the point where they just can't continue, because there is nothing to be gained. This is what the Vietnamese, Iraqis and Afghanis did. They didn't really win, BUT it did put a NOT win against the mighty American War machine. So what I would say is Ukraine MUST NOT LOSE. Because as Peter has said so many times look at what Putin's real goal is. Its to recapture the strategic positions the Russians had during the Soviet Era. If Ukraine LOSES then Putin will keep going and that really is a disaster for everyone.
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  116. FOR FARK SAKE CAN YOU JUST GO AND WATCH ROLLS ROYCE'S OWN VIDEO BY ONE OF THEIR ENGINEERS. Its here on YouTube. He said it would be 2035 before they could be ready to start deliveries of SMRs. And that was provided they started back when he said it. These constant claims that its just a few years away ARE NONSENSE.
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  117. HEY PETER - I'm Australian and saying this out of friendship. I completely understand your stand on Qasem Soleimani as he simply was America's enemy or at least a foil in Iraq, BUT you can't simply say he was a bad guy because of his actions and leave out the fact George Bush and his Neo-con goon squad LIED about WMDs and got at least 10 times as many people killed. You especially can't say it when Benjamin Netanyahu has just bombed around 30,000 civilians to death in Gaza WITH THE BLESSING of Joe Biden. Everything you are describing about Soleimani's actions (and you hint at it) is what America has does all over the world. Americans are always howling about -> "Why do these people hate us so much?" More often than not I have heard Americans answer that with -> "Its because they are jealous of our success!" NO IT ISN'T and THIS IS WHY -> You point the finger at someone like Qasem Soleimani and say he's a bad guy for doing the same thing YOUR 3 letter agencies do all the time. Its called hypocrisy and the reason hypocrisy is not an Olympic Sport is because NONE of us can compete with America. I love American culture and the people. I went to college there and it was awesome. BUT Americans have this vile habit of pointing fingers at people for doing exactly the same things your government does.
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  118. And while he's there can you ship shuggers net tuch hum inee uv ya kunkee unimal hibits.
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  119.  @TanyaCumpston  You right on the minerals, but out major problem is that we no longer actually process that much. There's lots of angst on that subject in various parts of Australia. There's a few places where you can say the simplest thing and go to hospital. The biggest problems with our wind and solar is that a lot of it is nowhere close to the existing power grid. Added into that are some seriously stupid people with way too much to say and the media keep handing them the microphone. We have enormous potential in a number of areas and too many selfish clowns getting in the road on all fronts.
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  120.  @juniorjames7076  Just remember Australia might be trying to escape its past but a sizeable chunk of the population still wants to deny everything. I am Australian and our corruption might be different to South Africa's and we might have some ways to handle it BUT DO NOT THINK we don't have some huge issues. Chunks of our banks and real estate markets are fundamentally part of the global money laundering system. Our lobbying industry is atrocious, maybe not as bad as America's is but seriously bad none the less.
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  121. I'm an engineer and have pointed out on a few occasions that PZ doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to engineering subjects. I have repeatedly advised him and others to stop pumping out garbage, STFU and let the engineers explain what is and isn't engineering fact. My degree is in aerospace but I work in industrial control systems, robotics and automation. In 2005-06 I did a water treatment plant on a Uranium mine and as part of that we did an extensive nuclear induction. A normal mine site induction is 1-2 hours (max) this induction went for 2-1/2 days. the first 1/2 day was normal mine stuff and the other 2 days we covered uranium from when its in the ground to when its back in the ground. When it got to the subject of enrichment someone asked WTF the Iranians were up to. It was around that time that everyone was getting very anxious about what the Iranians were up to. The trainer doing the induction laid it all out and explained how EVERYONE across the World's nuclear industries KNEW 100% that the Iranians had a weapons program. It was the number of centrifuges that gave it away and we knew how many centrifuges they had because of how many high speed electric motors to spin them that they had bought along with the electronics to control those motors. The actual motors and electronics are NOT restricted tech because its stuff used in many other industries. Certain materials are restricted because they allow making the centrifuges much easier. I have explained that so many times.
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  122.  @thefisherking78  Agreed. I watch Peter every chance I get because on the geopolitics he's fantastic. Even on points you might find out later he's a bit off on you'll find that at least he's giving a perspective. ON ENGINEEERING how ever he is getting some damn bad information at times and I have commented a few times on things he's just been plain wrong about.
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  123.  @borag  Great question. I think its going to be more significant than some do. UP front I will say Sorry if this is lengthy but I have looked at Hydrogen and there's things many have NOT looked at or are aware of. Most notably many don't realise that hydrogen can be used in gas turbines. My degree is in aerospace and back in the 90s when they thought jet fuel was going to be done away with companies like Rolls Royce and GE did a lot of work on hydrogen as a fuel for gas turbines AND they solved many of the problems. These days GE and Siemens offer large gas turbines at 800MW (with combined cycle) that can use 50% hydrogen WITHOUT and modifications. The also say they have a path to use 100% hydrogen. FIRST (and this is very important) EVERYTHING has efficiency issues. If we'd used efficiency as the arbiter we would never have had the industrial revolution and possibly would never have made it out of the cave. We do need massive investments in energy storage research, but for the immediate future we need to use what we can. We can't rely on hope or maybe and have to use what we can and in ways we can. That means hydrogen will be huge, but there are some misunderstandings being bandied about. Simon Michaux (another Australian engineer) has done some really great work on the energy transition regarding the issues of just how much stuff is needed versus what's actually available. Once you realise there's 1.5 billion cars and 500 million trucks in the world, its a mind numbing task. Just to do that many cars with the same Lithium based tech Tesla uses you need in excess of 94 million tons of Lithium and according to the US Geological Survey there's about 21 million tons in reserves available. Other sources put that at 26 million tons (See Wikipedia). So there's some major problems to over come with energy storage. As Simon says "Its not impossible we just need a better plan." One thing I know Simon is wrong on is hydrogen. I have watched several of his videos including one only a few hours ago that he gave for the University of Queensland. In that video his models uses PEM cells for BOTH the hydrogen generation and power generation. Plus he insists it needs to be stored at 700 Bar which might be true for some cases BUT NOT ALL CASES. All up he gives an efficiency of 18% making Hydrogen unfeasible but I know his method is WRONG. If you use PEM cells on the generation and current generation gas turbines those have a combined efficiency of 45% with the PEM only at 70% efficiency. PEM can be as high as 80% and its believed they can get it up to 94%. At that point its over 60% without the losses for storage. Simons problem is that using PEM for generation only gets about 40% efficiency which combined cycle gas turbines are over 64% RIGHT NOW. What people forget is that if you have to flip the power from AC to DC and back to AC which you have to with these lithium based battery storage because its DC and that causes a lot of losses. A hydrogen gas turbine just produces AC directly. Now is GE and Siemens are BOTH pushing these turbines I think that means they know something. They are selling lots into SE Asia. The first couple have gone into Malaysia already and I saw a report that said one country might be buying 23. Here in Australia, we have 2 old gas thermal plants (Torrens island & Newport). Torrens is already past its "end of life" date. Based on their age I doubt if either gets better than 30% thermal efficiency. If I simply replace Torrens with one of these turbines it would be almost identical in power output but use less than 1/2 the gas. If we add in a hydrogen supply that comes down even further meaning there's more gas available in the gas market (i.e. lower prices). Based on age I'd estimate its running less than 30% thermal efficiency which is less than 1/2 the 64.7% these new gen gas turbines run at. So even without Hydrogen they'd be a massive saving on gas. With hydrogen there's an even bigger saving on gas and reduced emissions although at this point emissions reduction is only a fraction of the problem. FYI - I did my degree in aerospace and back in the 90s Rolls Royce, GE and others were flat out trying to run their turbines on 100% hydrogen because they all thought Jet-A1 was going to be phased out of the aircraft industry. So I know they've worked out the issues with using Hydrogen in gas turbines.
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  124. The other thing he talks about which is very rare for an American is that he recognizes that the rest of the Western World has had as one of its key foreign policies since WW2 is "What do the American's want us to do?" About a year into Trump's presidency it was leaked here in Australia that our Foreign Affairs Department (DFAT) was in unchartered waters. For the first time in decades they were having to think independently of America. The problem was its been so long since any Australian government has actually had to think for itself that NOBODY knew how to write policy outside of the "What do the American's want?" framework. What America is yet to accept is that a lot of countries have now had 4-6 years of thinking for themselves outside the "What do the American's want?" framework.
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  125.  @awolffromamongus875  There's talk of that sort of thing but no matter what's done you still have to get the rock out of the hole and when they go deep its a lot of rock. On top of that issue to stop the hole collapsing they have to put down a liner. You only have to spend about 30 minutes with people who drill to realise that its quite different to what's shown on TV. Its one of those odd areas of engineering where experience really does matter.
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  126.  @peakz8548  World demand, but mostly the Chinese construction boom. People seem to forget that the Chinese have lifted around 500 million people out of the peasant class into the lower middle and middle class. India is also moving in that direction. Then there's the rich oil states of the middle east, they have also been building over the past decade. Back around 2002/03 I was told the Australian iron order industry was planning to double from around 200 million tons to 400 million tons a year. In 2017 we produced over 885 million tons. I think that's backed off a little to around 820 million tons. There's a little heard of economic indicator called the iron consumption rate. Its so rarely heard of I might even have that name wrong. Back around 2003 the Western world consumed between 70 and 85 kilograms per person each year of iron. It was through stuff we bought but also through construction. At that time China was around 8kg and India 7kg per person per year. You don't have to move populations that large much to have a big effect.
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  127. Wagner - its the Russian word for Blackwater.
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  128. That's a really interesting point on the gold price. An interesting aspect to this is that here in Australia we have just had some very dirty secrets revealed about our gold trading AND SOME OF IT INVOLVES RUSSIANS operating via Cyprus. The bulk of it seems to be money laundering but the Perth Mint has been caught selling gold that's deliberately tainted with silver. Note that this story was aired on TV at almost the exact same time that Peter posted his video. This is from ABC Australia -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko_ZmxGBaB4
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  129. SORRY BUT PETER IS 100% WRONG on the project costings of renewables. FYI - I AM AN ENGINEER (Australian) I don't know where he's getting this nonsense from but he is so wrong and its infuriating. This is the sort of crap that drives engineers crazy. 1) The capital out lay of coal, hydro and nuclear is now multiple times higher than Wind and Solar. In Australia we have 22.7 Gigawatts (GW) of coal to replace and IT HAS TO BE REPLACED because most of it is old and worn out. In fact we have already turned of 6 coal fired plants NOT because of emissions but because they were so old we couldn't keep then running. BASED ON the Hinkley Point C nuclear project in Britain, the basic cost of nuclear is £10.3 Billion/GW based on a project cost of £33 Billion for 3.2GW. That £10.3 Billion is AU$19.8 Billion/GW. The current cost of wind and solar in Australia ranges from a low of AU$1.55 Billion/GW to a high of AU$1.86 Billion/GW. The Capital cost of replacing that 22.7 GW with nuclear is AU$450 Billion. Building the standard 2.2 times for Wind and Solar to make up for night time and wind not blowing the capital cost of 50 GW of wind and solar is between AU$77 Billion and AU$93 Billion. Even if we double that cost to include power grid upgrades we are still less than 1/2 the cost of nuclear. And before anyone says hydro we are also doing the Snowy 2.0 project that started at AU$4 Billion and went to AU$5 Billion before it started and will now cost at least AU$12 Billion with some estimates putting it at AU$14-15 Billion. The main reason for the cost blow out was because SOME CLOWN DID NOT include the power lines to connect it to the grid. At 2GW full capacity it will cost AU$6 Billion/GW or more than 3 times the cost of wind and solar. Because we are such a dry continent hydro is actually getting more and more expensive because it has to go into even more remote places. SO when Peter's talking about raising capital HIS FACTS ARE WRONG. 2) The actual project expenditure model Peter is are talking about is TOTALLY WRONG. When you are building coal, nuclear, hydro you CANNOT produce any power and start recouping costs until it is 100% complete. You cannot turn on 1/2 or 1/4 or any other fraction or percent of a coal, nuclear or hydro project. BUT YOU CAN WITH WIND AND SOLAR. The moment you put up the first array of solar it can be connected and start recouping money. The moment you put up the first wind turbine it can be connected and start recouping money. That money from a partially completed wind or solar project can help finance the rest of the project. The only reason people need to find 100% of the capital for a wind or solar project is they're INCOMPETENT at project management. 3) The problem with wind and solar has always been and will always be that it is cannot supply ON DEMAND and needs to have a buffer system. This has also been a huge problem with coal, nuclear and hydro power because although they can run 24/7 they do NOT RESPOND quick enough for the daily swings of modern society. This is why many modern societies have smaller gas turbine plants scattered about. They can spin up and shut down as needed. Hydro plants also use IF THE GEOGRAPHY ALLOWS to have small pumped hydro systems up higher in the hills. Because those pumped hydro systems are smaller they have smaller turbines that can be spun up and shut down as needed. Solar and Wind actually needs 2 systems in the future. The large batteries that people like Elon Musk sell are great for very fast response to changes in demand that happen every day, BUT when it comes to storing energy at one time of year to use at another time of year those batteries are almost useless. This is where hydrogen fueled gas turbines which already exist can be used. Before anyone says they don't exist BOTH GE and Siemens offer gas turbines that can run on up to 50% Hydrogen RIGHT NOW. This is not future tech needing development it EXISTS RIGHT NOW. I did my degree in aerospace back in the 1980s and when it looked like we'd need to move away from jet fuel (kerosene) they started doing research into hydrogen. By the late 1990s that technology and all the issues were worked out except for one thing. Storing enough hydrogen on a passenger plane to get it to fly anywhere was a nightmare and made it unfeasible. PETER REALLY NEEDS TO START SPEAKING TO SOME ENGINEERS.
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  130.  @SA-hh9mv  Soon as you tell all those Canadians what will happen with the seriously nasty toxic leftovers from the refining process you can start. Or did you miss the part where he mentioned that Albert crude has lots of sulphur?
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  131.  @bluerock4456  Yeah the Sask people told me about their roads. In a weird (and kind of fun way) they seemed almost proud of that fact. There's a road between Kindersley to Saskatoon which I drove several times and its regarded as one of the worst. So I do have experience on that subject. I think they joked about their roads as a way to deal with their frustration. Oddly the attitude of Saskatchewanites to Ottawa is identical to the attitude of most Australians to Canberra. Its very similar to the way Brits feel about London and Americans to Washington. We all see those places as bureaucratic cesspools where good ideas are eaten, digested and shat out by highly toxic swamp beasts.
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  132.  @bluerock4456  That sounds EXACTLY like the road up to Saskatoon from Kindersley. We have similar problems in parts Australia. The joke used to be you knew when you crossed the border into to New South Wales because of how much the car would start to shake. These are just symptoms of a much wider problem with infrastructure everywhere. It manifests itself differently in different places. In some places its roads, others bridges, other schools & hospitals but its really noticeable in energy if you know what information to look up. I first became aware of Australia's issues when I did a small energy project about 7 years ago and found out how old our major power stations are. Everybody thinks the energy crisis is a green energy transition issue, buts its NOT. The green transition is just a part of the issue. The real issue ECONOMICS. Many places have NOT been keeping up with their energy demands and everyone is told the same story about investments that cannot be guaranteed to earn money. That's all a misdirection. What I am talking about are the big power stations that supply bulk power 24/7. I call these Gigawatt class power stations because they supply at least 1GW (1,000 Megawatts) 24/7 except when they are shutdown for maintenance. When Australia's population went from 15 to 17.5 million we built 7 of them. As our population increased from 17.5 to almost 26 million we built NONE. California has 9 Gigawatt class power stations 8 were built before 1990. La Paloma at McKittrick was commissioned in 2003. France has not built a new power station since 1999 and since then its population has increased 12%. Its all been caused by some fundamental economics. If you own power stations the easiest way to make MORE money is don't build any new power stations and in particular big power stations. YES it sounds bizarre until you realise how supply-demand markets work. If you let the population growth increase demand then by basic supply-demand economics it drives prices higher. Since your power station has not cost increase (why would it) your profits increase. This is why new Gigawatt class power stations are NOT economical. They would increase supply and drive prices down which might be economically good for you an me but lousy for the people who own power stations. This is why the privatisation of infrastructure around the world has been so awful and why have things like: - bridges collapsing in Italy or failing in America; and - bad roads in Canada and Australia; and - water supply issues in America, Spain and other places; and - an energy crisis. I am amazed Peter doesn't talk about this more.
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  133.  @bluerock4456  More point is that its more or less symbolic of how developed nations just aren't spending what they need to on infrastructure. I agree with many people that governments have become so bureaucratic that most of what they do attempt they mismanage. But on that front I have seen private industry make some monumental management blunders over the past 20 years. And I mean multi-billion dollar blunders. In engineering project management is arguably the least understood and worst practiced activity. How some of the people I have met ever got their position in senior management defies common sense and practical reality.
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  134.  @nrotko  On America's ability to sort out its problems. There's a famous line by Winston Churchill "You can depend upon the Americans to do the right thing. But only after they have exhausted every other possibility." My way of describing America is: If procrastination was an Olympic sport America would win all 3 medals even if they weren't competing. Other than climate change which is a big issue America is 1) 24.5% of the worlds economy so if it sneezes the rest of us catch a cold and 2) the US dollar ($US) is still the World's reserve currency and that isn't going to change no matter what the BRICS do because its simply impractical. So the bottom line is the rest of us just can't afford to have America act like a drunk, belligerent, spoilt Ivy League frat boy who's never been told "NO" and who's daddy has bailed him out of every stupid thing he's ever done. Most of all NOBODY can afford another such person to be President again.
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  135. Peter is quite right about how NATO accepts new members and that Moscow has only itself to blame for those nations wanting to join NATO. Moscow treated those nations like SHlT for decades. BUT There's no doubt that America went back on the assurances that NATO would NOT EXPAND Eastwards into the previous Soviet block nations. It was never written down as a formal treaty but there is NO DOUBT what the Americans promised Gorbachev because its there in the records from those meetings regarding the German Reunification. PLUS America and Americans need to be careful with this stance because Washington (and I say Washington quite specifically) has treated many of its allies with contempt and as well preaching democracy to the 3rd world before supporting some of the worst dictators the world has seen in recent centuries.
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  136.  @dennishassler605  Buddy I am an engineer and don't be stupid. You have to compare like for like. Houses are affected by land prices so the same house in different locations are different costs. Different cars cost different money. These aren't different anything THEY ARE THE SAME ITEM. Estimating projects and managing them IS WHAT I DO FOR A LIVING. Nothing makes sense in this stuff unless you include staggering incompetence and Everest sized fraud. We are being taken to the cleaners, like we are with other projects. The Frigate contract we have with BAE has just jumped 50% form $30 to $45 Billion without any explanation. There hasn't been a 50% change in the cost of anything. What we have are clowns going down the options list ticking boxes and the sales monkeys laughing as the costs explode. Its not just military projects either its civilian infrastructure and private industry projects that are blowing out. I am aerospace engineer but have been working in the mining industry because we looked like going to the moon to mine it a while back. I have watched world class mining companies waste money by the billion all of it on stupidly poor management and mountains of advice from greedy consultants. We have a plague in BAD project management in Australia. Mostly caused by consultants, but also by the Think Tank brigade.
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  137.  @FullCircleTravis  And we both like shootin and eatin 'em. One of my favorites is "kanagnaise" which is bolognaise made with kangaroo mince. I use port instead of red wine and plenty of chilli and its awesome. Gotta be careful with most Australian wild meat. Its very lean with not much fat at all so if you get it wrong it becomes stuff so tough you can make mountain climbing boots out of it. So its either a quick sear served rare or a very slow vey low roast or combined. Kangaroo also makes for great leather. Super soft and super long lasting.
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  138. Your right but then Peter's not always on target with technology & engineering issues. He's close on most things but typical on non-engineers he gets his information twisted around at times. On things like political strategies, politics and demographics he's a wiz.
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  139.  @goncalovazpinto6261  That happens. I remember that after one of the San Francisco earthquakes there was a baby boom 9 months later.
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  140. WHY? Its a part of Western culture so ingrained its almost a genetic trait.
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  141.  @Crusde  Your spot on, and there's a lot of people here who have been warning for years that we had/have become too dependent on exporting raw materials to China. if the Chinese property market crashes and with it the Chinese construction industry then Australia is screwed. But if the CCP put some sort of restriction or blockade at the southern end of the South China sea then it would be major league chaos for Australia, Japan, South Korea and a several others.
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  142. We have very similar issues in Australia. FIRST - fire is a natural part of all forest environments and many species of plants and trees REQUIRE fire to germinate. We have a number of plant species that can't germinate unless the fire gets hot enough to crack the seeds. WHAT'S CHANGED is the size and ferocity of these fires caused by fuel build up AND how often we have bad fire seasons. Its not just mismanagement its a combination of factors. What climate change does is amplify the natural swings between wet and dry conditions. When its wet its really wet and when its dry its really dry. After years of drought we had the wettest of wet years in Australia, while Europe where its normally wet had the driest of dry summers. So here in Oz we should also expect incredible growth in the next year or 2. When the next drought comes it will dry all that growth out and build a massive fuel load. Combine that with another of our issues - being able to burn off safely and we have trouble ahead. The "Goldilocks" period when we can set things on fire because its not too damp and also not too dry that our forests are like rocket fuel is getting shorter and shorter. I expect our next fire season or the one after it to be the worst of the worst.
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  143. ​ @Cincy32  To back up what you've said my brother and his family went to to Vietnam for a holiday years ago and came back telling everyone just how much we misunderstood their situation. The Vietnamese dislike of the Chinese goes back centuries. They might not like America (and with good reason) but the Chinese thing is huge. AFTER the end of the Vietnam War the Chinese actually invaded Vietnam in the first of several conflicts. In the west we don't hear much about this because what we do hear is from the American view. The Chinese don't talk about it much because the Vietnamese stomped on them. Its all wrapped up in the Sino-Soviet split. the Soviets backed the Viets and the Chinese backed the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Viets and Cambodians were already at war. So rather than being a Capitalist West versus Eastern Communist conflict it was a Commie versus Commie conflict. Its just one of the things we don't hear much about. Its like asking a Dallas Cowboys fan if they care who wins a game between the New York Giants and New York Jets.
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  144. I'd agree with that but Obama was "the straw that broke the camels back." I just saw some of his public campaigning over the last few days and there's no doubting he's an incredible public speaker. If you compare him to the Democrat candidates it really makes you wonder what's happened to talent in America. That says a lot because the GOP has even less talent than the Dems. Therein lies one of the biggest issues in world politics right now. The money men behind the candidates have spent so much getting ignorant puppets in place that there's not much for anyone to be inspired by let alone vote for. Its even worse in some of the less than democratic places like Russia and China where they have actually jailed and in some cases killed any talent off. If Putin goes tomorrow who's left to make a deal with? If Xi goes tomorrow who's left to make any sort of deal with?
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  145.  @george2113  Really baseball & softball are tedious?? WTF do you call golf then? Even the commentators in golf sound like they start the day by dropping half a dozen quaaludes.
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  146. I'm Australian but went to college in America and I agree. Peter is far less pragmatic and filters a lot with respect to America than he is with other countries.
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  147. As an engineer who has looked at this Peter has actually done a very good job of summing up where this is headed. What AI already does are tasks that are repetitive and well defined. If you think of something out of the image matching field like fingerprints. Any person can look at a finger print and then start comparing it to other finger prints on file. The task isn't to match it perfectly but to match it well enough. So that's a well defined task that has to be repeated. In stead of a person taking a couple of seconds to do each comparison you have a computer running an algorithm and its comparing 1,000s of images per second. Facial recognition is similar just a bit more complex. Another area which is also a well defined repeatable task is personal tax returns. Irrespective of how many receipts a person might have or how much they earned they all have to do a 401K or what ever your country uses. Another area that's similarly well defined is stock analysis and its bedmate economic analysis. As an engineer who detests accountants and economists because they just can't stop interfering with everyone else's business I look forward to seeing them wiped out as professions. 👍😅
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  148. Nice gaming reference.
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  149. Engineer here: On the base load side of the energy equation its called nuclear. On the load following side of the energy equation its called wind and to a lesser extent solar. A major problem is the pro-nuclear people and the pro-wind/solar people keep whining and finger pointing AT EACH OTHER instead of realising that BOTH are needed. Part of it comes from an odd fact I heard recently. Through the 1960s and 70s nuclear was steadily growing and REPLACING fossil fuel power stations as it did. When the Green transition started RATHER then replacing fossil fuel it started replacing low emission nuclear. Despite all the wind & solar installation there's been very little reduction in emissions because its been replacing nuclear or just increasing the supply to meet demands from growing populations. PLUS into that mix ahs been the stupidity of the nuclear industry with accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima which have been used by the fossil fuel industry to scare the crap out of the general public. One of the most notable examples is Germany where they spent a reported €1.3 Trillion on renewables then TURNED OFF the low emission nuclear and TURNED UP the old high emission coal fired power stations. The result was that after spending €1.3 Trillion emissions went UP not down. IT WAS IDIOCY AT A STAGGERING LEVEL. We can do the energy transition, but the first thing we need is for all of the special interest megaphones to STOP so that us engineers can explain what we NEED to do and I emphasize the word NEED.
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  150.  @marcob.7801  Yep there's some great quotes about the cost of war going a long way back. Here's one from 2,400 years ago. “War is a matter not so much of arms as of money.” - Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
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  151.  @careylymanjones  Actually you can make a critical mass device from plutonium because like Uranium it also has a critical mass above which it can chain react. You can also (theoretically) use Uranium in an implosion device its just much harder to achieve. The fundamental reason they do implosion with Plutonium and critical mass with Uranium is that its just easier and more practical to make those types of devices work.
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  152.  @arthurcarr7364  I didn't say it was the same country. I said its got so many similarities its freaking weird. Like we both think the other has freakishly dangerous animals. When I was there they kept telling me how dangerous Australia was with snakes, sharks and spiders. We have koala's and they are good for tourist photos, while Canada has polar bears and they eat tourists. Everyone else has deer or antelope or gazelles and like Bambi they're cute. Canada has moose and they are the animal kingdom's equivalent of a bad tempered ice hockey player with 4 legs and 2 sticks, one mounted out each side of the ugliest head in the Northern hemisphere. There is one major difference our neighbors are New Zealand, who in general are pretty good. Canada has 330 million gun totting psychos with nuclear weapons for neighbors AND they like starting fights.
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  153.  @arthurcarr7364  The country you didn't grow up in also perfectly describes Australia. Change is one of the things the older generations are handling very badly. if you look at history you'll see that society has always changed no matter what people did. What bothers people is uncontrolled change because it creates uncertainty. If you want to talk about what's causing all the stress of how societies are changing let me know. In a nutshell its due to how a very small number of hyper-wealthy people in their late 80s & 90s who refuse to concede their power and influence to anyone are behaving.
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  154.  @macalister8881  I wouldn't say he's wrong more than right, what he does is repeat certain things that he's just wrong about. For example he's said repeatedly that the Russian Siberian oil fields have a huge problem because all the American experts have left. That totally ignores the common practice that engineers TRAIN THE LOCALS. He's right, that losing the American expertise makes things hard, but to think it leaves the Russians helpless is just wrong AND HE'S REPEATED THAT A LOT. Where he's very good is on demographics and how that affects things, but then that's his real area of expertise.
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  155.  @macalister8881  The other thing to be aware of is there are a bunch of channels that cut and paste excerpts from his talks. Some of those are months or years out of date and they are posted as if he said them last week. I only spotted it after hearing some of his older talks. There's a couple of very sneaky and very shitty channels and its not just Peter's work they do this with. They do it to people who have given longish (1/2hr or longer) public talks with Q&As afterwards. Remember every time you click on a video the host of that page can earn money from the YT advertising. So there are people profiting from this cut & paste game and they don't care squat if what they are posting is accurate or not or if its out of context. They look for people. 1 I came across posts videos where he talks and asks questions and then pastes in comments other people made publicly to make it sound like its a real interview. Its very devious and misleading. SO CHECK OUT THE PAGES YOU ARE GETTING THIS FROM. They might be reposting old information that's out of date.
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  156.  @macalister8881  Do you know or remember which specific video of his has peeved you so much? I don't know any commentator of I agree with 100%. Another person I've taken to listening to is Prof Scott Galloway, who's primarily an economist and he's agreed with some of Peters work but arrived at the same conclusions via economic and social analysis rather than demographics and geopolitics. I can say similar things about him especially on technology, but them I'm the engineer and they aren't. I've spent 30+ years doing automation across various industries and I know there's so much being said about automation, AI, robotics and engineering in general that is just hype or narrative that people keep repeating. There's so much stuff being said at times and nobody checks. Its only spotted if someone who actually knows what's true hears it. I'll give an example. Just recently there's the big news about a breakthrough in nuclear fusion. Out of dozens of reports I have maybe seen 4 that are close to accurate, because as an engineer I know how long it will take to build the power stations. For sure its a positive step but its just one step in a million step journey. So I'd advise you keep watching peter Zeihan because he's pretty damn good at the things he's good at. BUT be mindful that just as you should with all these commentators go and check things out. Ad doctors say, "get a second opinion!"
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  157. Great quote. I started reading "the Prince" a while back. Niccolo was pretty astute at a time when narcissism was currency. It'd be damn interesting to hear what he'd say about our time.
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  158.  @goodo4668  What do you think is wrong with the Costello remark? He and Keating weren't that different. They might have described things differently but they didn't act differently. labor and Liberal have been very close on economics since the 80s. Did you forget that Keating once railed against John Hewson's GST and then brought it in himself. Keating never once stopped a manufacturing sector go under. and then Costello came along and declared manufacturing was a sunset industry and we would be moving towards a service based economy. Labor with Keating kicked of the privatisation era and the Libs with Costello finished the job. Costello just put a different colored badge on the same policies. About the only difference was Costello didn't hide the fact he didn't care about the unions.
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  159.  @stylembonkers1094  Did you ever take a class in even basic economics? The market price is what people are agreeing to buy and sell things at a given moment in time. It changes with supply. It changes with demand. Sellers always want it to be higher. Buyers always want it to be lower.
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  160.  @lostbrewerycavesrecoveryte3423  Actually Elvis Costello would have done a better job or even Lou Costello for that matter. In fact that party even had an Abbott (Tony Abbott). I never knew why nobody made the connection.
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  161.  @krisushi1  I think your right on most points, On the ownership of the bases, maybe not. The land might be Australian but most of and maybe NONE of the hardware on those bases is NOT. Especially the base on the North West shelf that has the coms for the US Subs in the Indian Ocean. That base is one that most Australians are simply not even aware of. On the first strike and what I call zero strike. That tern zero strike is one I came up with to describe to people just how high of a priority Pine Gap would be in a US v China or US v Russia event. I don't know if you have seen it but the YT channel Real Life Lore did a great video that highlights the importance of Pine Gap. Just search ""real life lore pine gap" and you'll find it. About 7 minutes in they chow a diagram of the area that 3 satellites cover and that region goes from London to Alaska. So it covers all of The Middle East, all of Russian and all of China AND Pine Gap is the ground station for those 3 satellites. So if the Turks, Saudis, Iranians, Russians, Pakistanis, Indians or Chinese do anything. Pine Gap is the first place that knows. So for any of them especially Russia and China that if they want to do anything they need to deal with Pine Gap. Sorry but that's something anyone should understand and why I call Pine Gap a Zero Strike target.
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  162. Yeah your Canadian and you have the opposite issue to Australia where I am. I'm an engineer and was in Canada for a water treatment project in Saskatchewan (late 2017). I fell in love with Canadian football but that's another story. What Canada's water issue is, is the snow melt each year that dumps all that snow into the Canadian landscape. Since you have also grown by over 10 million people recently you also have an extra 10 million people flushing toilets and washing cloths. So there's a lot more water for the local waste treatment plants to handle. Because the tradition method is large ponds where the water moves every slowly allowing mother nature via sunlight and bacteria to break it all down to where it can simply be discharged into the river systems. The problem Canada has is those systems are not having to handle too much inflow and the water in those ponds is moving through them at a higher flow rate and that means mother nature hasn't had time to clean it. So when the snow melt happens its now flushing those ponds with only partially treated water into the rivers. Sorry but Canada need to do more of what I was doing, which was increasing the capacity of those waster water systems with newer technology. I made the most advanced waste water plant in the world work in Sask and within 6 weeks the local clown in charge let it freeze and wreck the whole place. I hadn't been fully paid when the plant was finished and NOBODY wanted to pay me to fix it because they were all too busy blaming each other. So I understand the Canadian issue quite well. Having been caught up in the middle of it.
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  163. Actually its not that new. Sanctions on Japan was one of the key factors in what drove them to attack Pearl Harbour.
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  164. That's a very valid point. One of the odd things is how rarely strategic missiles of ANY KIND have been used by developed nations. Yes there's been lots of bombs and rockets but not a lot of what might be called strategic missiles where they are targeting from range a specific thing like the Ukrainians are doing at ammo dumps right now. There's been a lot of RPGs and in a few cases missiles like the stinger that are fired from MAPADS or off the shoulder. There was a lot smart bombs dropped in Gulf War 1 and a few other places. Other than the Falklands where the Argentinians used the Exocet to great effect the only other times I can think off hand where a lot of missiles were used was Gulf War 1 where the Iraqis shot SCUDs at Israel and Gulf War 2 where America used a lot of Tomahawks for strategic strikes before sending in troops. Because of air combat there's been a huge number of air-to-air, surface-to-air and air-to-surface missiles used, but in terms of surface-to-surface tactical missiles there's not been that much. There's probably a few other cases but I can't remember when 2 sides with lots of missiles faced off. In Ukraine BOTH sides have lots of missiles and they also have guided artillery shells which have been used to devastating effect. HIMARS has been staggeringly effective. In fact so effective quite a few nations are now ordering it or increasing their order. I'm Australian and we have lots of Navy issues being discussed right now(???) and what sorts of missiles we are wanting to get like Tomahawks and LRASMs. In looking into that discussion one of the very odd things I found was how little there's been of naval conflict since WW2. Other than the Falkland's when 5 ships (4 Brit & 1 Argentinian) an older sub were lost by the Argentinians and a few other smaller boats were lost there hasn't been much. There's been a few missiles like the USS Stark in 87 and the Moskva. One of the really odd things is how few torpedos have been used. In WW2 torpedos were fired off by the 1,000. Since WW2 the number is 10 fired by submarines and I only know of 1 fired by and aircraft. There might be more. Wikipedia only lists 7 on its main page fired by submarines. I found 3 more fired by an Argentinian sub during the Falklands at what they thought was a ship and they think it might have been a whale. And just now when I was looking for details on that I found a British Lynx helicopter launched a Mk 46 torpedo at the ARA Sante Fe but failed to hit.
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  165. GREAT VIDEO PETER Z I'm an Australian engineer who's been highly critical of Peter's takes on various technologies, BUT THIS VIDEO is why I put up with that stuff BECAUSE this is where his real expertise is - EXPLAINING geopolitics and geopolitical strategies combined with demographics. I actually went to college in America (late 80s) and was there for the 87 primary season which was bonkers. I love America and the people and especially college sports, but American politics has been on a long slide into dark place for several decades. Having studied Orwell (1984 & Animal Farm) in high school, part of my education was (paraphrasing my teachers) "If you don't look after your society and maintain the functionality of its institutions then ANY NATION can collapse into a totalitarian dictatorship." To be clear they weren't saying all collapses end in totalitarian dictatorships, but they were saying it was a likely outcome because that was what Orwell warned us about.
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  166.  @Brainfryde  What's your background, because you sound like an economist. An awful lot of blah blah blah about things you clearly don't understand. Do you even grasp what I am actually saying? Myth #1 is a myth because we were always going to have to build new power stations BECAUSE THEY GET OLD & WEAR OUT. No amount of maintenance will keep them running forever. The current need to build new power stations has NOTHING to do with environmental issues. Its simply a matter of relacing them. The only question is what with. One thing that has to be considered is population growth. The US population was 180.7 million in 1960, 205.1 million in 1970, 226.5 million in 1980, 250.1 million in 1990, 282.2 million in 2000, 309.3 million in 2010 and 329.5 million in 2020.
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  167. Engineer here - You are right but this whole story gets more complicated than that. As usual Peter is right about most geopolitical things but when it comes to engineering he makes mistakes and makes them often. I wished he'd hire an engineer to help with these things. For those interested I have left a rather lengthy comment on this page that includes things I was told back in 2005 when I was working in the Australian Uranium industry and at that time Iran and its program were in the news.
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  168. I remember Simon Sharma in one of his History of Britain Series pointed out that every British Town on the Eastern Half of Britain that ends in the letters "by" was settled (or named) or taken and then renamed by the Vikings. Apparently it means "village" so Whitby is White village, Northby is North village, Southby is South village,...... etc. There's also the Shetlands which still have various Scandinvian festivals was once Pictish but the Vikings took that as well. And they now know as Peter describes traders as well as raiders and set up trading posts all across Britain and Ireland and traded with people as far away as Spain and North Africa.
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  169.  @ExpectDragons  We hav'em in Australia too mate. Worse we also let them vote, drive cars and breed.
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  170. HEY PETE, Love the troll advice and love the update - great points on the dam. I'm an engineer and I have disagreed with some of your engineering assessments but this time I think you are 100% right. It broke right in the middle of the turbine house. Can you also get one of your staff to help get YouTube to shut down the channels that plagiarize material you did 2 or 3 years ago and post it as if you said it yesterday. I'm tired of trying to block those channels.
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  171. I'm Australian but did my degree in aerospace at U. Illinois (2hrs from Indianapolis). I ended up working the Australian iron ore industry. Back around 2002 I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) and at that time he was a proponent of Helium-3 mining on the moon. So I went off to our mining industry for experience at building & operating remote mining sites. Around 2010 there were people trying to fund a pig iron smelter in Australia's lesser known iron ore region - the Gascoyne in Western Australia. The Kimberly region further north is where most of those Japanese, Korean and Chinese cars start. The Kimberly is known for very high grades of iron ore while the Gascoyne has lower grades. This company had come across a new version of pig iron manufacture that was suited to lower ore grades and they were telling people that the future of pig iron looked very promising because they predicted a shortfall in supply particularly in high quality pig iron which this new process was for. So I know there were some people talking about the future of pig iron at least 12 years ago. The problem was it was during the aftermath of the 2008 GFC and the industry was trying to deal with the issue of no money for anything and low prices. There were several major projects (port & rail) in the Gascoyne that died. On growth when I first went into our mining industry (circa 2005 - yeah it took time to get there) there was a growth spurt going. They wanted to increase the output from about 200 Mta (million tons per annum) to around 400 million tons. By 2005 they were up to 250+ so it finally made it possible for me to get my chance. We are now producing OVER 800 Mta. In fact in 2017 it was 885Mta. I think its back around 820Mta at the moment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emm5aHAifMg So on growth you're 1/2 right. People thought it was bonkers when they wanted to double our output. We are now more than double that and showing no signs of stopping. In fact with Ukraine off line its the best we have ever had. This is the first I have heard anyone discuss pig iron in a while. It does and doesn't surprise me. It surprises me that nobody listened 12 years ago because it made sense and doesn't surprise me that nobody listened because who listens to common sense. And yes I do have some very blunt discussions with the clowns who want to mine asteroids. They're so dumb. They really can't tell the difference between science fiction and science fact.
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  172.  @joythought  I think you meant defund not refund the boat operators. Actually they don't care about those boats. One reason why so many of those boats are in bad condition and sink is because they are the older boats that are ready to retire. A boat load of refugees is an easy way to pay for a new boat. Since the money is paid upfront they are guaranteed that new boat even if the one they put refugees onto sinks or is taken by authorities. The whole boat smuggling thing is that insidious.
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  173.  @andreasgregorfrank9057  You are so right on that. ASML is the main ticket, but I doubt the Chinese can simply gain the experience in 24 months for the really advanced chip designs. Its like so many things in science and engineering that last 10% is harder than the first 90% and the last 1% is harder than the first 99%. Remember the Americans have decades of experience at solving problems in chip design. Experience like that is hard to replicate in any area of technology. For a comparison look at how companies with incredible levels of technology go into Formula 1 and just can't match the top teams. That's always been the problem for the Chinese. They can buy or steal or the technology they like but you can't buy or steal experience.
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  174. ​ @bionicloaf  At the time I was there over 700 cities and towns across Canada, not just Saskatchewan need to upgrade their water treatment facilities. On top of that there were 100s of smaller 1st nations settlements to get better waste handling. The people I worked with spelled it out to me (when I first go there) how much of a business opportunity there was. I was 100% in and at one point ready to relocate. Unfortunately my boss in OZ was an idiot and only had eyes for China. He just couldn't get how difficult it is to do work with people who speak another language. He ended up screwing the Canadians about and didn't pay me either. Then the local engineer wrecked the plant by letting it freeze. The 6 or 7 Canadian Insurance companies involved then spent a year screaming at each other. I did some of the best work I have ever done only to see it trashed. I really like Canada and Canadians but the whole experience left me very bitter with just being an engineer.
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  175.  @segalliongaming8925  I'm Australian and what you just said about America is IDENTICAL to the attitude we have in Australia. The problem is there's - 1) Not enough skilled tradesmen being trained across the globe. 2) We have all these people who are against immigration. 3) When Western nations do take tradesmen from poorer countries we are actually stripping those countries of the very people they need to develop and grow their economies.
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  176.  @dennishassler605  If you are talking about America's Foreign Policy then go back and watch Peters commentary on that. If you're talking about Australia's foreign policy then sorry but that was how it was reported back in 2018. As for the submarine deal that we have been massively screwed on. That backlash is coming no matter what you think. The US Navy pays the equivalent of Australian $5 Billion per Virginia class sub plus operational costs. We are being asked to pay over $20 Billion per sub before we even get to use them. Yes there are people on our side who need to be charged with treason/fraud/piracy but we'll deal with that. Would you buy a car for 4 times the price you can get it down the road? Would you pay 4 times the price for ANYTHING if you can just go down the road and get it somewhere else?
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  177. ​ @jeffyoung60  I spent 4 months in Saskatchewan building a water treatment plant back in 2017/18 so I am fairly well aware of how Canadians feel about America. They especially made those feelings known when trump tore up NAFTA and smacked them with tariffs. YES - I was there when that happened. But I agree on the 51st state thing. Its a joke Australian's like to tell regarding Australian foreign policy. A few years ago when Australia was nominated for a 2 year stint on the UN Security council those who opposed it simply said "Why should we bother they'll only vote how America tells them to vote!" Our answer to that was "That's outrageous the American's never tell us how to vote. Our diplomats sound out suggestions and then wait for the Americans to nod." Actually we knew full well we had been annexed during the war. There was actually a lot of tension at times between American servicemen stationed in Australia and the local population. There were a lot of Australian men overseas fighting and a lot of American's here chasing their wives and girlfriends. It didn't go down well. Its not something you hear much about these days except from older people. As for NOT bullying Canada and Australia please go and check out trade negotiations. When NAFTA was re-negotiated the Canadians were very seriously bullied into accepting the deal. It wasn't that Canadians were against re-negotiating the deal. When I was there and Trump tore up NAFTA they weren't upset with that. They were pretty logical abut it. They knew American industry was hurting and their needed to be re-negotiation of the trade agreements. What they objected to was being made the scapegoat. Right now if you are not aware of it there could be a monstrous backlash from the Australian population against America. There's a lot of American soft influence going on. Its mainly through consultants like McKinsey, EY and KPMG. Right now PwC has been outed as having screwed Australia and that should end up in criminal convictions. On top of that its been revealed that a bunch of retired American Navy men have been here since 2012 consulting on the submarines and other Navy purchases. Most of them have salaries over $$$ million and their advice is turning out to be the same sort of worthless shite that American 60 Minutes recently showed regarding the US Navy procurement system. Right now it feels like every Australian issue involves overrated overpaid American consultants for crap advice. We do need to accept responsibility for hiring them but the backlash is coming.
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  178.  @chiefgilray  Yeah I agree. One thing we do need is to tell the Americans to back off a bit and the biggest problem I see us having with American's isn't their culture or their people its their politics and economics (as a combination). Sorry if this is another long reply, but it will explain part of why everyone needs to tell America to back off. I actually went to college in America and did aerospace engineering (U. of Illinois). I was there during the 85 (mid-term) & 87 election (POTUS) election seasons and it drove me so nuts I never wanted anything to do with ANY politics again. BUT these days we don't have that luxury and we need to consider how American politics and economics function. Its one reason why I think a lot of people are watching people like Peter. They want to understand this stuff. Right now one of the biggest issues in the world is that there's a difference between How America is supposed to work and how it is working. No matter how much we might like or dislike America, its still 1/4 of the worlds economy and the US Dollar is still the worlds reserve currency and America still has so much military firepower it can smash anything it wants. The SOURCE of that problem is most American's no longer have a good understanding of: 1) How their own country actually functions versus how they think it functions; and 2) How the rest of the world actually functions. When I was there in the late 80s EVERYONE had studied (what they called) Civics in high school. It was where they learned how America functioned and I wished Australia had its version of that. It used to embarrass me how well informed they all were on things like the US Constitution and how their system worked. I did engineering but a bunch of my friends were pre-law and were right into that stuff. They dragged me into their discussions all the time. So even though I didn't like their politics I did got informed on how America was SUPPOSED TO FUNCTION and yes I love to catch up with a few people and ask a few pertinent questions. What none of us knew at that time was that a group of people out of the U. of Chicago (UoC), Harvard and Yale formed what we now know as the Federalist Society. People are starting to finally working out who these people are and what they have been working on for almost 40 years, which is tearing down and then re-building America into THEIR VERSION of what America should be. Its very much like what the Ayatollah's did in Iran but from an economic standpoint. People need to realise that these 3 Universities are PRIVATELY OWNED. So they make their own rules. Plus UoC was founded (in part) by John D. Rockefeller and although I can't say with 100% certainty, my conclusion is UoC was set up to find ways to re-build the entire world into a Rockefellian system. One its most prominent professors, Milton Freidman, basically said "Government is hopeless and we (the private sector) should run everything." Out of UoC also came James McKinsey (professor of accounting) who founded McKinsey Consultants and kicked off the consulting industry after which is now a cancer on our governments. From UoC's political science department we got wonderful things like "Offensive Realism" and the Neo-conservative movement that gave us the 2 longest wars (Iraq & Afghanistan) since WW2. But most of all out of UoC came Neoliberal Economics (Friedrich Hayek, Milton Freidman, Ronald Coase,....) that's dominated world economics since Reagan gave us Reaganomics and Thatcher gave us Thatcherism. Its resulted in the greatest wealth transfer in history and if you doubt that go and look up the report Bernie Sanders got the US Congressional Budget Office to update on "Family Wealth." Almost nothing has been said about this report in ANY media including social media. Just look at the 1st Graph on that report and it tells you that 50% of the American population has GONE NOWHERE in the last 30 years, while the Middle 40% has had some gains the TOP 10% have gained about $60 Trillion dollars in Wealth. That thin brown line across the bottom of that graph now represents 165 million people who are not only impoverished, but to get out of that poverty need to spend staggering amounts to get educated enough to get out. I have checked the Australian data which is presented a little differently but it tells the same basic story. Go an watch some of Gary Stevenson the young British Economist. In his 20s he became a multi-millionaire and became Citibank's top trader in the world and he did it betting AGAINST the Brits recovering from the GFC. He's now saying the same sorts of things about Britain. Sorry for the long reply, but its stuff I think people should know about and be discussing. The American people are NOT the problem their politicians, economists and the people who back them ARE the problem.
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  179.  @shafsteryellow  You've basically described what the Europeans did all over Africa. The problem is HOW would you go about fixing all the African borders back to their pre-European tribal boundaries AND NOT START a series of Horrible Wars? This is a fundamental issue with the entire world right now. Every patch of land in the world has been claimed at times by various peoples, tribes and nations. How far back do we actually go to redress things? I'm Australian with British ancestry and that includes parts from all over Britain. Then there's the Roman, Viking, French, Spanish and German heritage in that mix. Go anywhere in the world and its actually quite rare to find people how DON'T have a mix of racial heritage mostly because in the past people moved about a lot unless they had reliable water and land to cultivate like the Egyptians did beside the Nile.
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  180.  @TheLocoUnion  I'm Australian and you are almost right. Without doubt we'd back the Americans but how far we'd go is another thing because China is our biggest trading partner. BUT THIS IS WHERE It GETS COMPLEX - Japan and South Korea are also 2 of our 5 largest trading partners depending on the season. There is no doubt the South China Sea is CRITICAL to Australia's economy and at times I feel like the Americans and others do not get that. Most of what we export are commodities - iron ore, coal (both thermal and metallurgical), LNG and food. Everything that leaves via the East Coast goes straight North and none of that goes via the South China Sea. EVERYTHING out of the West Coast of Australia and a lot of what goes out of the North goes via the South China Sea to China, South Korea and Japan. Through that sea lane 100% of our iron ore and most of our LNG as well as a lot of food travels to those countries. This is actually the real reason we need nuclear powered submarines. Freedom of navigation through the South China Sea is critical to our economy. Our current subs just can't be there and offer anything. Its more to do with range and speed than anything else.
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  181.  @kazupemaruta6990  He probably means the thick lined pants that they only wear outside when its 20below.
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  182.  @goncalovazpinto6261  Yeah there might be quite a few around the world for that matter.
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  183.  @nicklanfear4303  Go look up McArthur’s Universal Corrective Map of the World You're the ones who are down under.
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  184.  @dixonhill1108  FYI - I am an engineer and did a project in Canada in 2017-18 in Saskatchewan and loved Canada. Other than the cold it was so like Australia in many ways. Canadians are as sports mad as we are, just in a Canadian way. One of the weird things is that Canadians talk about Ottawa and its bureaucracy the same way Australians talk about Canberra its bureaucracy. There's an Australian show called "The Hollowmen" which was a spoof on it. I bet if you ran the same scripts but with Canadian actors and Canadian place names nobody would spot it.
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  185.  @dixonhill1108  I forgot to mention my favorite Canadian joke. What do you call an American who is polite, can think and understands basic geography? A Canadian.
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  186.  @dixonhill1108  That looks like your trying to explain parts of Australia with different names. The most significant difference is we don't have 330 million clowns with nuclear weapons for neighbors. Although we do supply those clowns with their most important satellite base that lets them see most of Europe, the entire Middle East, all of Asia and importantly all of Russia.
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  187.  @gregallen485  yeah Illiza's pretty awesome. The world needs more girls like her.
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  188.  @LRRPFco52  Good point - Peter has explained that numerous times. They just don't have the range. What I am talking about is the ability of the PLN to block the southern part of the South China Sea where there's the sea lane between Vietnam and the Philippines. Go look at where the Spratly Islands are.
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  189. Great points but Americans don't like to discuss them much. Bottom line is the country that has promoted itself as the great leader in "Freedom and Democracy" has denied all of the people of those territories there basic democratic rights. None of those people have any representatives with voting in congress or have any senators and they do not vote on the president. Puerto Rico has a population of almost 3.3 Million and that's more than the populations of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Idaho, Nebraska, New Mexico, Kansas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Nevada, Iowa, Utah. Each of those states gets 2 Senators and at least 1 and as many as 4 House of Representatives. The combined population of North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska and Wyoming is less than 3 million people and yet they get 8 Senators and 1 representative each in the House. While Puerto Rico, just like DC and a few of the territories gets 1 representative in the House who can't vote. By Population alone Puerto Rico should get 2 Senators and 4 House Reps. USVI, Mariana, Guam and American Samoa and DC has a combined population of just over 1 million and Each of them get 1 House Rep who can't vote. Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Delaware each have less than 1 million people and each of them get 2 Senators and a House Rep who can vote. And if you want the more satirical view of this look up the YouTube channel juice media for the Honest Government ad on Puerto Rico.
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  190. Well if you actually look at it Peter hasn't been all that flattering about Vladimir Putin and he does take out people. He's also been less that flattering about Xi Jinping and he doesn't just take out people he takes out entire cultural groups. "fun times ahead" might be the understatement of the decade. My suspicion: If MBS tries to mess with global supply he'll get a dose high velocity lead poisoning very quickly. The more interesting question is who's finger will do the squeezing, because that's a long list.
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  191.  @Zackaryyrakcaz  AND YOU WIN TODAYS MOST AWESOME COMMENT.
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  192. What rhymes with burito?
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  193. ​ @qiqi2692  I think you are mostly right. Peter is certainly biased towards America but considering how many Americans think he's NOT as biased as most Americans are. He certainly doesn't promote American Exceptionalism BUT he does avoid a lot of American issues. I'm Australian but went to college in America (late 80s) and America has certainly slipped in terms of education and I saw some early signs back in the 80s. I'm just surprised that so many American's just don't get it and they certainly don't get what the long term effects are. For example I used to be amazed how well Americans understood their constitution and how the government institutions worked. These days I fell like I know more than the average American does. It stuns me how ignorant so many of them are when they speak. Its NOT the America I went to college in OR AT LEAST it seems that way. PLUS In a well educated society Trump (78) and Biden (81) would NOT be competing to be President. Younger more energetic types with a some sort of future vision would be there. Keir Stammer (Britain) & Anthony Albanese (Australia) are both 61. Emmanuel Macron (France) is 46. Justin Trudeau (Canada) is in between at 52. Claudia Sheinbaum who just won the Presidency of Mexico is 62 and the outgoing President Andrés Obrador is 70. Americans can be so IGNORANT (as they ignore things) when it comes to problems within America. Its a lesson to other nations.
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  194.  @richardpatterson302  Yeah but they are much smaller than the CANDUs. The video "Small Misunderstood Reactors" with James Krellenstein has some great info on that particular site.
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  195.  @kevinrusch3627  Your 1/2 right the Russians initially needed outside assistance in WW2, but once they got their industry up and running in Siberia the Germans were done, because they just couldn't stop the Russians from supplying the front lines. I'm an aerospace engineer and the Russians didn't have the best planes but what they did have was numbers and reliability. The Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik might not have been brilliant but in the ground support role it was outstanding. The Yaks and Migs might not have been as advanced as the P-51 and Spitfire but they got the job done. Also the German pilots had to be very careful with which Yaks they encountered. The Yak-3 below 5,000m was lethal and the Luftwaffe ordered pilots to avoid them. I remember a documentary on WW2 tanks and there was a German General who after examining a T34 noted that if the Russians could build enough it was over. The T34 had many common parts to their trucks. It was simple while the Tigers were complex and needed a team of mechanics to keep running. Simplicity was also what made the Sherman effective. I'd agree that early on the Russian's were in trouble, but nor so much later.
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  196.  @louisgiokas2206  Further to that. I have been writing industrial code for 30+ years. Its completely different to the code for a PC or the internet. In that sort of work you are reading real world data from sensors in real time and responding to that information in real time. I've seen a lot of people from other fields try and FAIL. The difference in programming for data processing and programming for real time real world is radically different. The only other people I know who do that sort of stuff work on things like avionics and medical systems where they are also dealing with real world sensor input and responding to it. The channel Real Engineering did a great video explaining respirators early on in the COVID pandemic when there were lots of people from all sorts of backgrounds slapping together all sorts of stuff to construct makeshift respirators. He pointed out some fundamentals that I understood because of the similarities and I could easily see why these people (however well meaning) were going to kill people with makeshift respirators. I think this is a major problem with the AI people. They're very smart, very clever but they have almost zero experience outside of their field. As such they're going to get stuff WRONG and in the real world getting stuff wrong kills people. Its NOT X-box or Playstation where there's do overs and resets. Its real people.
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  197. ​ @louisgiokas2206  Your example sounds like that probe they sent to Phobos the moon of mars where they got metric and Imperial mixed up. The big problem that IT people have when the come into control systems is they are taught and trained to think that global variables are WRONG because you can have multiple software blocks writing to the same data variable which for analytics is a disaster. Unfortunately all almost all control system programming is done with Global variables and that's because the sensors and actuators are connected by wires and those wires are connected to a specific addresses. PLUS a massive amount of our work is BIT logic as in things that are either ON or OFF. PLUS and I can't stress this enough when we turn ON or OFF a BIT in a word it can have damn serious consequences. That bit might be a software interlock that prevents something in the real world turning ON or OFF or it can be an actual device in the field like a valve or electric motor that suddenly starts or moves. IT people can be extremely dangerous in my field because they just don't get that when they do something real things in the real world MOVE.
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  198. ​ @emceeboogieboots1608  My brother called us the 51st state every chance he had. On being aligned with America has kept us safe for 70+ years. Yes we have had to go to the occasional war but security is never free. I don't think Australians think we are better than Americans on a person by person basis but most of the Western World is better than America on things like labor standards, gun control and superannuation. On education and Healthcare its a split decision because for those Americans who get both they get fantastic in both. But for the majority of the US population we beat them by several miles. Its actually the greatest risk there is with America at the moment - the cultural divide. Eventually they are going to work out that the real divide is NOT between Left & Right which America actually does NOT have. American has Diet-Lite Right and Hard Core Right. The real divide in America is the Rich and the Rest. Right now its easier to go from being a millionaire to billionaire than it is to becoming a millionaire in the first place. They've geared the economic system in favor of those with money and they keep everyone else trapped in a fictitious culture war hoping they don't wake up. As George Carlin famously said "It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe in it." The saddest thing is Australia is so hell bent on following the American lead we are in serious danger of ending up like them. We have seriously well funded think tanks and lobbyists here pushing damn hard to do EXACTLY what America has done.
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  199.  @emceeboogieboots1608  Absolutely correct. Politics has become even more tribal than sports and a whole lot more vicious. Its not an American thing either. Its being played out all across Europe. Brexit being the most notable case.
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  200.  @JacobiMeyers-z1y  There's actually a bunch of similar quotes like that. Von Clausewitz had a bunch like "War is the continuation of policy with other means." He also said "war is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means," There's web pages dedicated to discussing it. There are people in the military who make careers out of discussing these things.
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  201. That's a great point. I'm an Australian engineer and work in our mining sector. I followed what Lynas Corp our biggest rare earth producer was doing. I was working out of Perth when they made their announcements for mining and the construction of a processing plant in Malaysia. The plant in Malaysia was built because the Malaysians subsidised it. It was built was going to cost a lot more in Australia because we have environmental laws. The local Malaysians are trying to close the plant because its so bad and there's a lot of arguments going on. When Lynas were pushing their promos for investors they described a lot of what had happened. One of the biggest and richest RE deposits in the world is the hills behind Los Angeles. But it ended up in temporary shutdown because of low market prices, which is very common in the mining industry. The Chinese bought the processing machinery from that mine and took it all too China. That's also not rare in mining. Quite often people buy mines so they can move all the hardware to another mine. There are people who specialise in dismantling mine sites and selling the stuff item by item. So the Americans let the Chinese take the hardware, because they knew full well how worn it was and that the actual reserve in California would still be there for a future time. So Peter's quite right about most f this, but he misses a few details, but then I 'm an engineer and he's not.
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  202. I'm Australian and have had no real contact with Finnish people but as an observation there's a few of note in car racing and they make for an interesting analysis. In Formula 1 Finland has had 3 World Champions and arguably a 4th and a bunch of other successful drivers. Their world champions are Keke Rosberg, Mika Häkkinen and Kimi Räikkönen. The sort of 4th is Keke's son Nico Rosberg who was born in Germany. The one thing that commentators noted about ALL OF THEM was their ability to tactically out think others and win championships with strategy rather than outright speed. Eddy Irvine who was Schumacher's team mate at the time talked about it in several interviews with respect to Mika Häkkinen. Another point of interest is the Rally of Finland also known as the 1000 Lakes Rally. First run in the 1950s it wasn't until 1990 when Carlos Sainz won that a non-Scandinavian won. It never seemed to matter what the cars were or what rules they raced under non-Scandinavians always struggled. I remember a driver (sorry I forget who) saying that they grow up in those conditions and just understand what it takes to do things there. Also there's a video here on YT about an incredibly successful Finish sniper from the Winter War. He didn't use a telescopic sight because they fog up. He just used iron sights and was a nightmare to the Russians. So if you add this up (and YES its limited information) what you have is a nation that can think strategically at a high level and know their environment in a way nobody else seems to.
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  203.  @nickj1968  I 100% agree when he talks technologies and engineering subjects, but on geo-politics and demographics I am yet to see anyone prove him wrong on anything. I have seen had people claim to me that he sucks at both geo-politics and demographics but when I have asked them on what part they never reply.
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  204.  @PirateRadioPodcasts  great question and its needs to be dealt with
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  205. As an engineer I can say that's so damn true. I'm Australian but did aerospace at U. Illinois just over the border from Indiana. By chance in 2002 I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) and he was pushing to mine the moon for Helium-3. So I went off to Australia's remote mining industry for experience. One of the major learning lessons from that was how to do basic engineering in remote places. One of my personal is "How do we build a workshop & foundry on the moon?" The simple fact is we never built a moon base because its just to damn hard to fly everything there. Its at least 10x the cost to land anything on the moon. It really comes down to some incredibly simple things like How do you make pipe on the moon? How do you make electrical cables on the moon? How do you get the raw stock from local ore to make pipe, cablesand other stuff? To actually get information on the subject I have taken to watching the amateur machinists here on YouTube, because they have to make do with less than what the professionals have. I watch the pros as well because they show how to do stuff properly, but its the amateurs with little hobby lathes & mills I watch the most. At the start of off world their will be people doing things like black smithing because we just wont be able to take the processing hardware. We just wont be able to take an industrial lathe or mill or the tooling or a blast furnace. All the skills the amateurs with help from the pros have kept alive will enable a moon base. NASA are skull stuffed on the subject, while Musk & Bezos are so far into fantasyland it makes you wonder what drugs they're on.
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  206. WHAT PETER and EVERY other person who thinks the countries that gave up their manufacturing to China does not get is that manufacturing NEEDS ENERGY. As countries like Australia (my country) allowed manufacturing to end we didn't need the energy things like our (then 4) car plants and all the component suppliers needed wasn't needed so among other things people STOPPED building power stations. The last time Australia built a new power station capable of over 1,000MW (megawatts) of base load was 1993. I suggest you look up the list of power stations for your state or nation on Wikipedia and look for power stations over 1,000MW. Note that things like the Alta Wind farm in California don't count because even though its 1,400MW is wind which is great but its NOT baseload power, its intermittent power. So the real problem with things like Bidens Chips Act is not building the chip factory its powering them and the same goes for any other manufacturing. Yes this is a major issue in Australia where we have NOT THOUGHT through the issues.
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  207.  @macalister8881  I don't know where you got those numbers from but they are totally bogus. China is actually the largest wheat producer and Russia produces more wheat than Ukraine. Even if you look at export numbers your numbers are not even close to realisy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wheat_exports
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  208.  @macalister8881  You know about the FX swaps????? Your the first person I have seen comment on them. The YT creator I heard from was George Gammon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLGMxH9KFa8 I checked that BIS report and found ANYONE can freely download it as a pdf without even having to sign on. Its that easy to get a hold of. Actually George did make a mistake he said the paper is on page 76 when its actually 67. But then nobody's perfect. What's bugging me is that 4 weeks after that report and *NOBODY is speaking about it AND I really mean nobody. None of the usual business channels none and none of the commentators. You really are the first person I have encountered to make a comment on it. But then until I saw George's video I had never heard of the BIS. How is it that this thing exists and NOBODY outside of the central banking system knows about it? Its like the BIS doesn't exist and yet its where all our central banks do their stuff.
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  209.  @macalister8881  Oh yeah when we talk about energy its in Joules with a Capital 'J' not the little 'g' that's for grams. and the little 'm' is for milli as in 1/1000th. Its the big 'M' for mega which is for 1,000,000 (million). I'm Australian and grew up with metric. When I did my degree in America I had to explain metric so many times I should have charged money. Oddly I am also one of the few Australian engineers left who knows how to work in imperial.
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  210.  @macalister8881  Yeah that whole bit on fusion was BS. Its an important step, but its 1 step in a journey of a million steps. Go get some sleep. The world wont end because you or anyone else gets 8 decent hours, but it might if someone is sleep deprived and they make a mistake.
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  211.  @k53847  Your close. Its only been the recent generations of nuclear powered Navy reactors that use the HEU fuel. Older generations like those in the LA class can go 10 years between re-fuels NOT 18 months. The 18 months applies to the civilian power generating systems. It all depends on the fuel grade (% of U235) they use. That's one of the major unanswered questions on SMRs which also plan to use HEU. WHERE ARE THEY GETTING IT?
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  212.  @jaeger251  Just as valid a point as anything
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  213.  @jaeger251  Look at America and ask what's missing? Its on the list in the subsection "What civilised nations do!"
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  214. Your 100% right. I'm Australian and despite having an extraordinary amount of space most of our farmlands are not very fertile and require vast amounts of fertilizer. But then we also have some staggering issues with river management and there's no way to get into fixing that because there's too many vested interests with staggering amounts of money behind them. To deal with the shortages in potash that Peter has mentioned on several occasions we have re-opened several potash mines here. We also have a massive deposit in the Norther territory that's untouched. I know about that deposit because I have worked in our mining industry and the company with the rites to that deposit was at one time in the office next to where I worked. Overall Australia's land management is an ongoing cluster f*ck that we should be ashamed of and instead we do the collective ignorance routine and just hope someone will magically fix it. On the New Zealand side I don't know that much other than seeing a story a couple of years ago about how their rivers and creeks are suffering a huge amount from their intensive dairy industry. The ground is so lush there they can put a lot of cows in paddocks and cows pee and all that cow peer filters down and ends up in the rivers & creeks which now have very high levels of ammonia that's causing huge amounts of damage.
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  215. SORRY PETER BUT YOU DESERVE SOME OF THE CRAP YOU GET WHEN IT COMES TO SUBJECTS LIKE THIS I have pointed out some of your faults on engineering previously but you keep repeating the similar mistakes. First - as an engineer who does projects I can tell you that you can't talk about percentage of life time costs when the technologies are so different and the construction costs are so radically different. You DO NOT NEED 100% up front capital for a Wind Farm or Solar Farm. This is because they are fundamentally different to something like a Coal or Gas fired plant and especially a nuclear plant. You have to build 100% of a nuclear, coal or hydro plant. You can't build part of one of those plants BUT YOU CAN build a fraction of a wind farm and get it making money before being 100% finished. Yes you need a higher percentage of the life time costs up front but its a much smaller number. Its like 99% of 10 (as in 9.9) is a smaller number than 50% of 50 (as in 25). 99% of 10 is even smaller than 10% of 100 because 9.9 is less than 10. You might be right that the percentage is higher but the actual capital cost is much lower. In terms of a real world comparison for plants under or near construction RIGHT NOW. Vogtle in Georgia and Hinckley Point C in Britain are 2 nuclear plants for which data is readily available (see Wikipedia). Vogtle has 2 x Westinghouse AP1000 reactors with a CONSTRUCTION cost of of US$34 Billion for 2.2 GW (Gigawatts). Hinckley Point C in Britain with 2 x EPR 2s has a CONSTRUCTION cost of £32.7 Billion (US$ 41.5B) for 3.2 GW. THESE ARE UP FRONT COSTS Vogtle has up front costs of US$15.46B per GW and Hinkley has US$12.97B per GW. SunZia at US$11B for 3.5GW is US$3.14B per GW. For comparison Snowy 2.0 In Australia which is a massive pumped hydro plant with estimated costs (so far) of AU$15B for 2.0GW. That's about US$5B per GW but I'd also warn that those costs might blow out. I am Australian and despite that I think it will eventually prove worthwhile that project is a dumpster fire in terms of project mismanagement. NOW BEFORE ANYONE SCREAMS - Yes I know 3.5GW of wind is NOT the same as 3.5GW of nuclear, gas, coal or hydro. The general rule is that it takes 2.2 times as much capacity to produce the same effect as coal, nuclear, hydro,..... The Germans proved that with a better mix of wind & solar that number can come down to as low as 1.7. It might come lower with bulk storage and by bulk storage I don't mean batteries even mega batteries. Bulk storage is when you can supply from storage at least 1 day if not 2 of reliable. Australia has a planned Mega battery on the site of a recently decommissioned coal fired plant. At 750MWH it sound impressive but the power station was 2,000MW and that 750MWH is about 22.5 minutes worth of power. So by current general practice SunZia has costs more like $6.9B per GW, but that might be lower with the right balance of wind & solar coupled with a bulk storage system. Irrespective US$11B its a lot less money than the US$34B that's been paid for Vogtle for a similar amount of power.
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  216. Scrolling down the list of comments yours is the first one I have seen with any sort of balance or nuance. Well done.
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  217. Aerospace engineer here - GREAT COMMENT.
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  218. I love Peter's work but there is something in this he has gotten tragically WRONG. The part about Asian nations NOT having a history of going to war is 100% WRONG. It might not have been like Europe with large scale uniformed armies on open battle fields with cavalry and pikemen where its semi-organised but there are rivalries and blood feuds going back centuries. I'm Australian and because we have sizeable communities of these people we occasionally get to see it first hand when groups of particular cultural descents clash. Plus we trade with all these nations. These rivalries and feuds are not talked about a much because it can get sensitive. Go and look through the Asian news services and you will find story after story of fighting between various clans. Sometimes those clans are in different countries and it drags others in and sometimes its within a country. In recent times we have seen that with the Rohingya crisis in Burma, but there have been similar feuds in the Southern Philippines, Sumatra versus Java (in Indonesia) and between Cambodians, Laotians and Vietnamese.
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  219.  @nicholasmaude6906  Yes and I just watched Peters follow up.
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  220.  @jiancao1523  Yes and no. Its damn hard to get to either but then its also damn hard to protect them as well.
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  221.  @brendanalfo411  And one of the few operating mines outside China right now is in Western Australia (Lynas Corp) in the same region we dig up all the iron ore.
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  222.  @daniangoodman-jones3931  Your right my mistake. Sorry. I do remember Keating doing something that he'd railed against in that almost bizarre contest he had with John Hewson who pushed for a GST. There was that debate where Keating just Howled 15% at every comment Hewson made. It might have been that he didn't bring in the GST but he flipped on part of it. Let me know if you know what it was.
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  223. ​ @dilligaf8349  Your 100% right that its all a game - an economics game that nobody asked for. Do you know the new head of the productivity commission is an economist? Do you know the guy put in charge of rebuilding Australia's skill base is an economist? Do you know that the guy who designed the system for how our water is distributed is a Harvard Trained Economist? Gigi Foster the famous UNSW economics professor proclaimed on ABC QandA she had the "empirical data" that proved the government's efforts only saved at 10,000 lives during COVID. SHE LIED the real number was at least 50,000 and if you want I can explain what she did to create that lie. Can you see the pattern? Economists can't stop lying and they can't keep out of everyone's business and we (the general public) are the ones paying for their games.
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  224.  @edbalboni  Absolutely correct. That's something Jim Comey pointed out when he was here in Oz in 2017. He said the trust in among a lot of the security people went very, very deep and NOT even Trump would be able to mess it up.
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  225.  @daniangoodman-jones3931  Yeah the more I look into economics the more I realise that economists don't understand economics. They are like those sports administrators who don't understand sport.
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  226.  @evanburrows1697  Thanks there's also some really good other comments in this too. So check them.
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  227.  @LackofFaithify  Yep, that's almost identical to what someone said to me about it way back in the 90s. I think they said something like "what's rational about sacking people and telling them they are now better off because they can by cheaper stuff made in other places." There's a really great point made Nick Hanauer in his TED talk "Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming" when he talks about Henry Ford bringing in a $5/day which was DOUBLE the prevailing pay rate of the time. Henry Ford pointed out to others that his workers could now buy what they produced. His factories were more productive. His workers were better off. His sales went up and he made lots of money and for a while the Rust Belt wasn't the rust belt it was an economic power house.
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  228. ​ @krisushi1  While I looked for something the a story from ABC News In-Depth titled "The United States' growing military footprint in Australia explained | 7.30" Listen to what they say at the start when America first started deploying to Australia. Also when they say Perth is getting $8 Billion that's ALMOST DOUBLE what the original proposal was ($4.3 Billion). I have spent a lot of the last 20 years in the mining industry building new mines. When I compare what's proposed in Perth to the sort of works needed for a mine there's some similarities because MOST of it is the infrastructure to support the main activity. Things like power, water, offices , accommodation, workshops,....... etc. I've spoken to people I know and asked if we did A, B, C, D,..... would it cost $4.3 Billion and NOBODY has said anything other than "WTF are they doing?" Remember how the Victoria Government cancelled the Comm games when the costs blew out? Remember back to the Schools program Julia Gillard funded in the aftermath of the GFC. They spent over $4.5 Billion and over $2.5B of that vanished in management fees. In engineering there is NOTHING more profitable than a clown with a pile of other people's money doing a PR exercise as they strive to put their name on a brass plaque attached to an edifice.
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  229. Oh Sh*t dude - do you really want to open up that can of worms????
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  230. SORRY PETE I love your work, BUT I disagree on the conclusion it was the Russians who blew up Nord Stream. Gas and oil pipelines are giant money pumps and you know that. They might be expensive to install but once that's done they just pump money from one place to another. Rockefeller worked that out over a century ago. Even if the explosives are Russian it would prove nothing because there are so many places in the world that anyone could get tons of Russian explosives. Just look at all the countries they sell military stuff too. In any crime there's a thing called MOTIVE. Nord Stream is owned by a combination of Russian state enterprises and the Russian Oligarchs. Its a huge money earner for both. On the other hand the biggest critics of Nord Stream has been the America government. As you have highlighted repeatedly America has lots of gas out of North Dakota but can't sell it because it requires infrastructure. To sell it to Europe means liquifying and the shipping and that can't compete with a pipe. Then there's the German nuclear industry that was shutdown by the German Green Party. Funny how the Germans are now recommissioning those nuclear power stations to make up for the gas shortage. Then there's opportunity. To plant the explosives and blow up 50 meters of pipeline at the bottom of the sea requires underwater demolition skills. Yes the Russians most likely have those skills but so do the Germans and Americans. And lets not forget something else. America due to its recent 20 year war now has a number of Private Military Contractors available full of ex-US Military people who probably have the necessary skills. Plus PMCs are great for "plausible deniability." SO WHO'S GOT MOTIVE and OPPORTUNITY to blow up Nord Stream.
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  231. Looking forward to what you have to say on AUSTRALIA. Since getting the gist of what you mean by demographics and how that plays out I know Australia is in serious deep crap. But even with that there's some other mind numbing issues the top 2 of which are energy and water. We don't have enough of either because we have stupidly done some idiotic things. The most stupid thing we did which has caused both of these issues was following what we called Economic Rationalism which was the Australia version of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. We (all of us around the world) now collectively call this NEOLIBERALISM but its also called Chicago School Economics after the University of Chicago where Milton Friedman, Ronald Corse and other plotted the "Greed is Good" Era. ON ENERGY - we privatised everything back in the 90s under the standard claim that "competition would deliver better services at lower prices" and like everywhere else that PROVED FALSE. The real reason economists preached that nonsense wasn't because they thought that privatising everything would actually be better it was just standard neoliberal ideology. In the time our nation went from 10 to 20 million people we built more than 10 power stations across the nation with output power greater than 1,000 Megawatts (1 Gigawatt) with the largest over 3GW. These are the large bulk delivery power stations that supply the bulk of what's called BASE LOAD POWER. In the time our population has gone from 20 to 26 million we have NOT built a single power station over 1GW. So the backbone of our energy system is not only old but also smaller than it needs to be. So not only do we need to start replacing the older power stations but we need to replace them with even larger power stations. THIS IS ACTUALLY COMMON ACROSS THE WESTERN WORLD and if you bothered to be more engaging with engineers we'd tell you about this. The problem is we have about 22.6 Gigawatts of coal fired power stations to replace. This actually has NOTHING to do with climate change its just a fact that things get old and worn out and eventually need replacing. Right now people are sayin go nuclear, but based on the cost of Hinckley Point C in Britain (because its useable data) that would cost over AU$440 Billion. But based on population projections we'd actually need to double that and then almost triple it to supply all the electric cars, buses, trucks and airplanes that people want us to have. By the time you add in all of the required power grid upgrades that easily jumps to more than AU$2 Trillion AND THAT'S for a country that currently has only 26 million people. What's the bill for Europe, North America, Asia, India,.......? ON WATER - Australia is even in a worse state than most people realise. We are a dry nation and water is simply not as free to use as when we were 10 million which we only reached in 1960 and we were only 15 million in 1980. We are now 26 million and we haven't built any new major water supplies in decades. The projection is that we'll hit 30 million in about 2030 BUT NOBODY knows where those 4 million are coming from OR HOW we'll get them enough water or how they will be able to turn on the lights. He's what I really like about your work Peter. You've opened my eyes to demographics. If you look up the Australian Bureau of Statistics there's a page for the population clock and pyramid. Its got an interactive pyramid where you can see what's been going on since 1981 but with projections going onto 2071. When you use the interactive features of that page there's a really interesting thing that happens and I wouldn't know about it if it wasn't for YOU - so big thanks. Here's what I found In the data for 2022, which is based on the last census in 2021 (so its real data), there's a noticeable notch in our population pyramid for older teenagers (16-19). According to the projections (notice how the color changes) that notch magically disappears. That would mean Australia thinks it can magically pull 40,000 teenagers out of thin air. Which is odd because I thought to make a 20 year old took 20 years 9 months and 5 minutes if your quick and 30 minutes if you have some endurance.
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  232. You haven't been watching. YES the Brits can provide protection cos they still have a Navy and an Army, but they sure can't provide money. Brexit has all but slammed their economy into deep deep hole from which they haven't a clue on how to get themselves out of. Rachel Reeves, their latest Chancellor of the Exchequer which is the equivalent to the Head of the Fed (Jerome Powell) is a complete Thatcherite nutter who's going to dig that hole deeper and deeper. Back in the 70s & 80s the Brits bought in so hard to the whole Thatcherism (what Americans call Reaganomics) so hard that it became utterly ingrained to both sides of politics. This is sort of what's happened everywhere and is why it feels like nothing changes no matter who wins an election. I'm Australian and its happened here.
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  233.  @zibbitybibbitybop  good point They might have the reserves but NOT the production facilities and that would take years to put in place.
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  234. That's NOT Peter that's every main stream economist on the planet. They are all taught and believe in what's called equilibrium economics where supply and demand end up balancing to an equilibrium state. ITS UTTER BULLSHlT BUT THEY BELIEVE IT ANYWAY because it makes their modelling easier. It also explains why their models all break down when a shock like COVID comes along.
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  235.  @milesharbord9339  Your 1/2 right the really heavy crude that goes into making things like bearing grease and bitumen comes from Canadian Tar Sands but all the light stuff that makes gasoline, jet fuel and lighter fluid comes out of the shale deposits in places like South Dakota. America STILL has extraordinary reserves in places like California, Oklahoma, Texas and the Gulf of NOT Mexico. Its just down deeper than in the past. Its like the massive reserve Canada has under Saskatchewan which is also deeper than the fields in Alberta.
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  236. On the last question ZIP because its gold that is NOT being traded on the normal markets. If that gold does hit the markets through the countries that Russia has sent it to then that might be another story all together. On the production thing just remember this war started with America ALSO IN TRANSITION. One of the most noted cases was the Ukrainian consumption of Stinger missiles early on. Even though America sent them their oldest stock which in some cases was already marked for disposal - the Ukrainians blew through it. The problem is America was between generations of the Stinger missile and notably the guidance chips needed to make them operate. The old production line was already gone and the new one wasn't ready. So it wasn't simply a matter of making missiles there was a shortage of guidance chips that was expected to take 2-3 years to solve. Where that is right now I have not heard. The same sorts of production issues exist for EVERYTHING because everything just like the medical supplies during COVID and all the consumer goods after COVID has all been exposed - has gone to JIT (just in time) production.
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  237. WTF - DOES ANYONE EXPECT. This stuff is going on EVERYWHERE because people have finally had enough of the very top 1% and to a lesser extent the next 9% pocketing ridiculous amounts of money and paying no tax because they can afford to hide it. The middle and working classes HAVE HAD ENOUGH of executives taking multi-million dollar bonuses and pay-outs while the rest of us suffer. Here in Australia ONLY WEEKS AGO Alan Joyce the out going CEO of QANTAS got over $20 million as a final bonus. By his own words QANTAS would not have survived the COVID Pandemic had not the people of Australia bailed them out. Worse his actions in dumping employees during that crisis has since been deemed illegal. Back in 2008 there was Branko Milanovic's infamous Elephant Graph that showed how the Top 1% had won huge while the rest of us suffered. After that there was the 2019 RAND Report that showed the TOP 1% in America had made almost US$50 Trillion since the mid 1970s up until 2018. In 2022 Bernie Sanders had the US Congressional Budget Office update its family wealth report and it now includes data up until 2019. That Report shows that not only have the Top 10% who caused the GFC and were bailed out HAVE RECOVERED and are now over 21% UP on where they were in 2007. MEANWHILE the BOTTOM 50% of America have not only NOT RECOVERED from the GFC they didn't cause they are still DOWN over 21% from where they were before the GFC. MAYBE and it sonly a suggestion that some of you analyst types NOT ACT SURPRISED when people finally go nuts after being treated like crap for 30+ years.
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  238.  @benji-pj4dp  I agree there's almost NOTHING being said about the atrocities in Yemen. If I didn't watch a few channels here on YT that do report on such things I wouldn't even know there was a war still going on in Yemen. I think the world is about to pay of staggering price for pandering to the worlds oil industry and the maniacs who control various chunks of it.
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  239.  @douglassantet647  WTF are you talking about????? In what way have I insinuated in the slightest that America intends to invade Russia? I've seen and heard some stupid people lately but your one of the worst. Please get some medical help for whatever condition you have.
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  240.  @matthewgaudet8001  Yeah Peter has made that clear a number of times. I just find it amazing that for all the conflicts there have been since WW2 how little of it has involved navies other than in support roles. For the amount of money spent and for all that various people have shot at each other its pretty amazing that only 11 torpedos have been fired in 78 years and 7 of those were during the 1 conflict - the Falklands. I'd be surprised if there's not a few more that just aren't in the common record. I know the Russians came very very close to launching a nuclear torpedo during the Cuban Blockade. 2 of the 3 guys on the boat said yes and the guy who said no could easily have been on one of the other subs in the group.
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  241.  @martinjohnson5498  good example, and 1 I had forgot, but the theatre was a lot smaller and the combatants far less technically capable than today.
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  242. The other thing Peter misses out here are the other steel producers like Japan, Korea and India. Everyone should have a watch of this to get some real perspective on steel production. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dnM-RQI23Y If you ever want to see how things have changed over time this is a great channel to look up stuff.
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  243.  @jamewakk  What have I said about Germans? NOTHING.
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  244.  @jamewakk  WTF has that got to do with anything I said, you ignorant racist?
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  245.  @raam1666  Buddy that's so stinking racist its ridiculous. Your forgetting that most cultures borrowed, inherited and stole from other cultures through history. We got engineering from the Romans, who got stuff from the Greeks who got stuff from the Persians, Indians and Egyptians. Just remember most of Europe were nothing more than scavengers and hunter gatherers before the Roman empire. And AFTER the Roman Empire, European society got Math from the Arabs, Astronomy from the Indians and printed money from the Chinese. The when the Europeans divided up Africa among them they made sure the Africans stayed uneducated and underfoot. You are ignoring a lot of nasty shite that went on.
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  246.  @timstewart2468  Sorry for the long replay. The whole subject of bringing processing back and manufacturing back always comes down to one single thing - ENERGY. The single biggest difference between modern society and previous societies in ENERGY. No matter what anyone wants to claim it all comes down to energy - how much is available at what cost. Access to raw materials, education & labor all matter but nowhere near as important as energy. The claims about labor cost are pathetic as labor cost hasn't mattered in decades. All the talk of labor costs are just lies and misdirection. I have been looking at the energy thing ever since I did this small consulting job circa 2016. I thought Australia had serious issues and then started looking around. Its serious everywhere. The biggest problem by far are people called economists. Its a long story and it actually goes back to a very small group of radical libertarians in the Bush White House in the late 80s who stalled everything and ran interference and ran scare campaigns. Its actually had nothing to do with climate. These were (and still are) people who believed that ANY government program except the military was a bad thing and needed to be stomped on. Bottom line is, YES we can do what's needed problem is due to the stupidity of these economists its now going to cost stunning amounts that will be measured in double digit Trillions (no joke). Australia with all of 26 million people is facing a cost of between $200 billion and over a trillion if its managed badly. Imagine the costs for bigger populations. Then there's the Greenies, who do mean well, but are insanely ignorant of engineering reality. They're right, places like Australia have some staggeringly good geography for both wind and solar. The problem is those places are inconvenient. We have the Great Australian Bite which is exposed to the Roaring 40s where the wind varies between gale force and cyclonic. Its like the Orkney's (off the Scottish coast) have so much wind they don't know what to do with it. We need mechanisms to transport & store energy and that has been stalled for over 30 years because it wasn't convenient to a few people with influence. Plus and the Greenies need to eat this one big time, NOT every country has great geography. In fact most countries suck for wind and solar and they are going to need to get the energy from other sources and that includes the 'N" stuff (🫢 shhhh!). Because of their ignorance the Greenies are their own worst enemy. My favorite gag on other engineers (mech, chem, civ,...) is to ask them how electricity works. Its how I get rooms full of engineers to shut up by making them look stupid. The Greenies are levels of dumber than the lowest of engineers who are the civil engineers. I call them "shovel monkeys" because other other than digging holes to fill with concrete they don't much else. They get confused when water wont flow uphill. So consider where the Greenies are. So imagine what its like trying to explain to politicians what needs doing when they economist screaming in one ear and greenies the other ear? Its a shitfest and when the media get involved it goes from shitfest to hyper-shitfest faster than any of Einstein's predictions. As for a safe place to discuss any of this, I believe there's a small town way out past the town of Burke NSW called the "Back of Burke". It has a sister city named "Idontknow" in a country called Biddleonia.
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  247.  @bcanuck  No - Russia is one of the main countries for PRODUCING nuclear fuel. its one of the very few things that has never been sanctioned because 1 in 20 American homes is powered by Russian nuclear fuel. If you go and look up the channel decoupled and look for a video on enriching with James Krellenstein he goes through the history of enrichment and where it is today.
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  248.  @calc1657  Because his assessments on geo-politics and demographics where he has actual expertise are really good. I just get pist off when he keeps repeating bad science and engineering because he has no excuses. He can afford to hire and engineer or just ask one.
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  249.  @calc1657  And besides his fans need to know he gets stuff WRONG.
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  250. On manufacturing Peter's again right about a couple of things and totally wrong on others. Yes Tesla is making the chassis (the frame of the car) out of Aluminum, but the casting process they are using is is state of the art and very cost effective. I watched a video where it was explained and even though I am not an Elon Musk fan in any way some of his engineers know their shite and know it very well. The original concept for the Tesla Roadster came from a couple of very smart guys who knew what they wanted. They were not restrained by the business practices of the major manufacturers and were incredibly innovative. Elon himself has, despite his claims, had fark all to really do with the car, which is why its pretty decent. The same can be said about SpaceX. I have had a ride in one and it was excellent. Elon himself is a shite engineer but what he is utterly brilliant at is identifying technical opportunities and exploiting them. Where peter is misunderstanding some of the manufacturing is that thing engines and gear boxes and differentials are not cheap items in a build process. There's precision castings, precision bearings, cam shafts, valves, head assemblies, crankshafts, pumps and gears and all sorts of stuff to make a drive train. Teslas have a battery and an electric motor. So it has more expensive materials but its also a lot simpler to make. and install the drive train. But I also think Peter is dead right and that because of the available supplies we wont see a lot of long haul trucks or farm machinery go electric for a long time. He is dead right that its a massive task that a lot of people have badly misread.
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  251.  @jesan733  New nuclear has only been killed in a couple of countries like America and Australia. If you want to complain about any of the subsidies that the Renewable Energy sector has got then FINE. But I want to know what you are going to tell the Coal, Oil & Gas companies who get something like $3 TRILLION in tax breaks, subsidies and other incentives each year. Hear in Australia our gas companies have stated on there yearly reports they have made over $400 Billion over the last decade and NOT PAID A CENT IN TAX because they all got insanely good concessions. I don't mind anyone commenting on the subsidies and grants to renewables BUT FOR F*CK SAKE STOP IGNORING WHAT THE FOSSIL FUEL COMPANIES GET.
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  252.  @dwayne7356  Great comment on all points. Another Australian Simon Michaux has looked at how much stuff is needed and in terms of things like Lithium at current production we can't do it. There's 1.5 Billion cars registered in the world and 500 million trucks. (that data is on Wikipedia). A Tesla model 'S' needs 62.6kg of Lithium. Just for argument say we only need 50kg for a car on average (to make the math easy). Those 1.5 billion cars need 75 million tons of Lithium. It took me seconds looking on Wikipedia (under Lithium) to find "The US Geological Survey (USGS) estimated worldwide identified lithium reserves in 2020 and 2021 to be 17 million and 21 million tonnes, respectively." The KNOWN reserves are a fraction of what's needed. Also current Lithium production is about 80,000t and at that rate it'll take around 1,000 years. As Simon Michaux says (and I don't agree with all he says) "Its not impossible but we need a better plan."
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  253.  @britefeather  YEP - if you let rapacious greed drive energy prices up it effects everything in society. The dumbest thing we ever did was listen to Milton Friedman and his clown brigade.
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  254. ​ @sharemyjoys  I watch Rosie often and she's very good for a University based person. I rarely disagree with her and its usually on things I have industrial experience on that she doesn't. On those coal fired power stations. I agree they are uneconomical to maintain but it depends on what you replace them with as to whether the replacement is economical or NOT. Those sites still have the grid connection and if the replacement can utilise that connection then it can be very economical. Hazelwood in Victoria was 1,600MW and so it had a 1,600MW grid connection. The European EPR is also 1,600MW so could be very economical. Although I'd be more inclined towards the Canadian CANDU because its quicker and cheaper. Even if they've pulled down that connection there's still the alley way it ran through and land costs money. So the economics relies on the planning and what you are doing.
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  255. He's still got feet and meters confused like many American's do. The Tallest turbines in the world are about 1,000ft high NOT 1,000m 1,000 ft is still damn impressive - that's the standard circuit height for light aircraft.
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  256.  @Antropovich  meticulous is spelt with a 'e' not an 'a' but then am I being facetious meticulous or both?
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  257.  @Antropovich  Good clarification anyway.
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  258.  @Antropovich  Take note of the little red line under words. At the very least it means that spell check doesn't recognise the word. (It just did it for me. I hit ; instead of ' in the word doesn't) Fair call on the languages. Whenever I do use another language, which isn't often, I'll use google translate. I know its not perfect so I always include my original English. If I am translating someone else's comment I'll ask if the translation is what they meant.
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  259. We actually don't export bauxite we export Alumina (Aluminium Oxide). The first step in producing Aluminium is the extract Alumina from the bauxite. That's fairly high energy process but no where near the next step which is smelting the Alumina into Aluminum as well as making the alloys needed for various applications. We export Alumina to places like Canada and Iceland both of them have access to very cheap hydro.
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  260.  @jerryrichardson2799  I agree the insane concept of telling girls to stay home and make babies isn't going to pass muster and likely to get a huge backlash. Then again the stupidity of emasculating young men and telling them their all shite hasn't worked either.
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  261. See the lengthy comment for Peter the second point covers something in addition to the F35s and P-8 you mention - both of which are great points to raise.
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  262.  @nagasako7  Do you by chance watch the YT channel Sub Brief? Its hosted by an Ex-USN Sonar operator and his vids on various ship & sub types is very good. In recent months he has also done a couple of videos on the state of US Shipyards. Regarding the contracts for US Drydocks he described them as criminal. FYI - I'm Australian and believe we are being ripped off on the Virginia-class deal and for several reasons. 1) The costs are utterly ridiculous. 2) We are paying Several billion to upgrade Hutting Ingles shipyard in Maine which is BULLSHlT. 3) Most of all we simply can't use them because they have a massive crew size and our navy can barley operate subs with 1/2 the crew size now.
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  263.  @ExpectDragons  Please tell me its NOT something stupid.
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  264.  @daniellarson3068  Buddy I was in Canada late 2017 in Saskatchewan when they had a cold snap that lasted 3 days. I'm an engineer and was on site for a project. The other guys had gone back to Regina for a couple of days over Xmas. I woke up 1 morning and EVERY channel was flashing a severe weather alert. The numbers for they day were morning -30C, afternoon -28C and evening -32C with anywhere up to -50C. I switched to the news and they said "Don't go outside unless is absolutely necessary. Hospitals are already reporting the first amputations." I called the guys I was working with who were about 400km away in Regina. They said don't touch any metal that is connected to the outside like the front door knob or I could lose my hand. At those temperatures skin sticks to metal like its coated in super glue. There was a young cop living across the street and he checked on me each day. Yeah Canadians really are that polite. In those 3 days 14 of the 15 coldest temperatures on the planet were all recorded in central Canada and I was right in the middle of that zone. It was colder than the North Pole. So yeah buddy I do appreciate what our weather is like in Australia.
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  265. Mark Blyth has an interesting take on this. its from the Q&A after a lecture on Global Trumpism in 2019, but its as relevant now as it was then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGuaoARJYU0&t=4795s If you have time the whole thing is worth watching.
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  266. ENGINEER HERE: One thing I wish Peter would be more clear about is that we would be doing the energy transition ANYWAY. Forget green or anything else for a moment and realise that modern societies need energy to simply function. You need energy to turn on the lights, supply water to your home, store your food, cook your food and take away your crap when you flush the toilet. Then when you leave the house you need energy for everything else. One of the consequences of privatising so much of our societies following the Reagan-Thatcher revolution was that we STOPPED spending enough on certain parts of the infrastructure to keep up with the needs of our societies. Just population growth alone increases the demands on energy supply. Forget how you generate energy, if the population goes up 50% then the energy they need goes up 50%. The only way to change that is with more energy efficient end user products, but that only goes so far. Right now the entire developed world is suffering from an energy crisis that started in the 1980s when Reagan and Thatcher started to privatise everything they could and then everyone else followed. We don't generate enough energy and the energy generation systems we have ARE OLD and NEED TO BE REPLACED. There have been dozens of power stations turned off for the simple reason they got old and wore out and now they need to be replaced. We now need to replace a lot of hardware and we were ALWAYS going to have to replace it. Things don't last forever. Its just happening at a time when we are also changing HOW WE GENERATE and distribute energy.
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  267. Here in Australia we got told about Tik Tok and the Chinese Legal system by the head of one of our security agencies several years ago when the 5G discussion was raging.
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  268. I'm Australian but went to college in America. I wished our government here would have a similar attitude. We also got stuck in that Reaganomic/Thatcherism neoliberal globalist B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T. It has been devastating to our industries. There's a string of economic leaders from BOTH SIDES of our politics and they are HATED FOR IT.
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  269.  @TheAngelOfDeath01  Ouch! I'm an Australian so I see Brexit from the outside looking in. Initially it looks stupid and to some extent still looks epically stupid. Although there are some starting to wonder if its not bad as Europe has some very serious issues. The most stupid and ridiculous aspect of Brexit and its a lesson for everyone. If you get what you wish for you better have plans on what to do with it. The most obvious person who has NEVER BEEN held to account over the whole Brexit fiasco is NIGEL FARAGE. How crap of a person is he to set Brexit in motion and once he gets what he campaigned for just walks away to leave others to clean it up? Currently he trapes around the world asking people TO PAY to hear him speak. I think the subtitle to his life is "Here's how I screwed my country over. Now please pay me money to tell you how fantastic I am!"
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  270.  @TheAngelOfDeath01  Its not just the Torries its pretty much the entire Western Democratic political system. Its just that the Torries are doing it a bit worse than others right now. Even the Left wing parties aren't that left anymore. If you think about British Labor, Australian Labor and any of the other Leftist parties they are mainly full of lawyers, and other professionals who just lean left on social issues. Sorry this is a long reply/comment. You are dead right it goes back to Reagan & Thatcher, but its worse than you think. I'm actually an Australian engineer but I went to college in America where they don't have a Left at all. They just have one of their right wing parties not as far right as the other. A few years ago I started looking into economics because I got fed up with clowns with economics degrees interfering in engineering projects. When I mean interfering I mean billion dollar interference too, not just million dollar simple stuff. One of the things I found out is that ALL ECONOMICS CURRICULIUMS have at their core the same neoliberal economic ideology. In case you didn't know - what started as Reaganomics and Thatcherism is now called neoliberalism. Its all centred around Milton Freidman's "Greed is good" and "Corporations have no other responsibility than to deliver profits to their owners & shareholders."_ That's driven this incredible 45+ year wage stagnation that's highlighted by Branco Milanovic's famous "Elephant Graph." BECAUSE even the left leaning parties are full of people who did the same economics classes with the same ideology AND all the central banks are run by people who also learnt the same economics, we now have this insanity where there is almost NOTHING NEW in economic thinking. They all know there's something wroing but they can't conceive of any solutions other than interest rates and deregulation. If you don't know who Mark Blyth is then you need to start there. He's one of a lose collection of maverick economist or people associated with economics who's trying to bring this to light. He's coined the term "Angrynomics." What he's saying in a nutshell is we should have had a system UPGRADE after 2008. Instead what we got was a reboot and patch. The result of that are system glitches like Brexit and the current energy crisis which I can tell you as an engineer who has learnt about economics is about to crash the entire global economy and it has NOTHING to do with climate change or the war in Ukraine. But that's another very long comment Here's Marks intro to Angrynomics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXJD5rE4omY Here's to longer explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJoe_daP0DE
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  271.  @warfarenotwarfair5655  The snarky anti-American attitude isn't towards you or the American people its aimed at the American government and in particular unelected American bureaucrats who do stuff around the world. I'm Australian but went to college in America on a sports scholarship. So I love America and the people and the culture. BUT when it comes to understanding the rest of the world Americans are very poorly educated. Do you ever bother to ask what it is that people don't like about America? Australia has exactly the same problem with respect to the Pacific Island nations. We treat them the same way America treats Mexico and the rest of central and south America - LIKE CRAP. We interfere in their governments and use their people as cheap labor AND THEY DON'T LIKE IT. We spend lots of money in those countries. It never seems to do anything other than fuel corruption which annoys Australians, so we complain about it and tell them not to be snarky as they're wasting our money. This snarky attitude isn't about you or any other American in general. Its about the attitude of your government, which just like mine is run by unelected manipulative self righteous a-holes. Did you or any American ever vote for people like Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Miller or John Bolton? How about John Yoo? He was the Lawyer who told Bush and Cheney they could torture people so long as they called it "enhanced interrogation techniques." He was the guy who approved all the stuff at places like Abu Ghraib. You know the stuff other Americans went to jail for. Did you or any American ever vote for him? Do you ever hold any of those people accountable? Its not about you.
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  272.  @jasonfuller499  You also missed all the stories from around the world where geothermal energy FAILED. YES in the right places it works and works well but most of the time IT FAILS.
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  273.  @nobilismaximus  Really and WHAT drilling experience do you actually have. I'll admit I have NONE but I am willing to listen to people who have got experience. I can tell you one thing for certain. Its NOT Bruce Willis on an asteroid.
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  274.  @raymondrumsey1097  yep and right now its a matter of which of the worlds super powers will collapse first or start a real war to avoid collapsing. Russia is already 1/2 way there. America is involved in Ukraine which is a great distraction from other things. China is trying to fix more leaky holes than they have fingers to stuff in them. Meanwhile Europe doesn't know if its speaking German, Italian, French or Spanish and the Brits don't know if they will still be able to launder Russian money next week to pay for the soccer players..
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  275. For Peters NEXT tank video he needs to CLARIFY WHAT HE MEANS, because as an Australian I know we have been operating the M1 Abrams for over a decade (since 2007) and I am pretty sure we don't send them back to America every time they need service. Australia has 59 of the M1A1 variant but we have ordered more and there is an upgrade plan in place as well, but that is NOTHING. The Egyptians have 1,130 M1A1, The Saudis have 373 M1A2S, Kuwait has 218 M1A2 and Iraq 321 M1A1M just to name a few. I am fairly certain NONE of those countries send their tanks back to America for servicing either. HOWEVER. The US operates the latest variants. These are the Systems Enhancement Packages (SEP) variants which are now up to up to version 3. America has 1,605 M1A2 SEPv2 and 154 M1A2 SEPv3. There are some 3,700 A1M1 and other variants in storage. Plus the Marines are dropping the Abrams all together as part of their "Force Design 2030" program. So my bet is America will pull some of its OLDER M1A1 variants that have NOT been upgraded and send those to Ukraine. That will still be a challenge as the Abrams uses a gas turbine NOT a diesel engine.
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  276.  @60degreelobwedge82  Another BULLSHlT comment from yet another bot. We can spot you all from the types of names you have.
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  277. The 30 Years War was called the 30 Years war for a reason. The 100 Years War was called the 100 Years war for a reason. Forever Wars are called Forever Wars for a reason.
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  278. Back in the early 1700s when the British were going head to head with the Spanish in the War of the Spanish Succession and they needed more men and more ships they started enlisting and paying what they called "privateers." This wasn't the first time in history that a state or nation had employed mercenaries, but it was the first time a major global power had done it at that sort of scale and over such a vast area. It worked really well right up until the British and Spanish signed a peace treaty and ended their war (1715). In a heartbeat all those "privateers" became unemployed BUT still had their ships, cannons, pistols,... etc. It didn't go well for anyone and the "privateers" found new employment as pirates. Most people know about the pirates in the Caribbean but they also rampaged across the Indian Ocean, the North American eastern seaboard, and the West African coast. They go so bad that these once loyal defenders of the British Empire became labelled Hostis humani generis (Latin for 'an enemy of mankind'). Note: the American's also tried this style of war in Iraq and Afghanistan with outfits like Blackwater. It didn't go well and bad things happened like the Nisour Square massacre in 2007. One day governments will work out that todays "privateer" is tomorrows pirate and end up costing a lot more.
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  279. Aerospace Engineer here - You are 100% CORRECT This is Peter YET AGAIN proving that he DOES NOT know a damn thing about engineering. Its NOT just Peter its lots of people who just regurgitate what they hear without thinking. I have personal interest in energy these days because there's a genuine crisis emerging in Australia (my country). In just the last few days I have seen Peter, Scott Galloway and Patrick Boyle who are all intelligent and well educated people make complete idiots of themselves with comments on nuclear energy. One of the dumbest was Scott Galloway saying you can "recycle nuclear fuel." Its idiotically wrong. You can reprocess fuel pellets to recover unspent fuel but that's NOTHING like recycling. In the past I have heard Peter say things about other energy sectors (oil & gas, solar & wind and nuclear) that are SIMPLY WRONG. Its so frustrating to watch people who are smart and very good in their areas of expertise make stupid mistakes and claims in engineering topics.
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  280.  @HerpesTom  great tag and it aptly describes your stupidity. Is 6000 a reference to the level of your stupidity. Is it on a score out of 10 or 100? WTF does Bill Gates have to do with anything??
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  281. I'm Australian and if an Indian is confused and doesn't know where India will end up then its a genuine concern for the rest of us.
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  282.  @theboringchannel2027  On geopolitics he's good but then that's his area of expertise. I'm angry because he has no excuse for checking with an engineer before doing these shite videos.
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  283.  @crosslink1493  Go and look how its done. Its a technology that's incredibly well developed. The manufacturing was sorted out decades ago. A lot of the propellant combinations were sorted out decades ago. Think about all the air to air, air to ground, surface to air and other missiles. Then there's the boosters used on the rockets that launch satellites. From the smallest of hobby rockets all the way to the giant boosters for SLS its a technology that's incredibly well sorted out. One of my favorite systems is the Pegasus system first developed by Orbital RTK that's now owned by Grumman. It uses a very similar propellant to that used in the Space Shuttle and SLS boosters. Its incredibly reliable and they can mold it in to various shapes to control the burn. Xyla Foxlin has a great channel here on YT. She's done several rocket videos and gives good details on the motors she uses. One of her rockets did over Mach 2.
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  284. Actually this issue of purging in China and that Peter has also pointed out in that Peter has done in Russia does have a Western equivalent. Boris Johnson cleaned out any competition from the British Tory party which is why they were left with Liz Truss. The Australian Libs (funded by Rupert Murdoch) did similar to the Brits and is why they are pretty pathetic right now. BOTH the American Democrats and Republicans have purged themselves. The Democrats got rid of anyone who would not submit to their corporate interests and the Republicans got rid of anyone with a functioning brain. I suspect people will be able to tell us about all sorts of other parties that have similarly purged their ranks of independent brain function so that certain people can maintain control.
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  285.  @AeSyrNation  Don't forget all the prisons they emptied in the first year of the War.
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  286. Yeah and it never works out as planned. Remember back in the 1980s and and a pack of those geniuses in Washington thought it was really good to train a bunch of hillbillies to shoot down Ruskie choppers with stinger missiles and use other neat stuff to blow shit up? You remember that other time America got itself involved in Afghanistan. How is that working out these days? Right now an awful lot of Russian moms & dads have buried their sons. Does anyone really think they will blame Putin? Which message do you think they are hearing "Vlad got Yuri killed" or "Yuri is dead because the Americans supplied the missile/artillery shell/bullet that killed him." If America doesn't think that's going to come back and bite one day then America hasn't learned anything form the last 100+ years. Forget who started this shitfest. Those moms & dads aren't going say that Vladimir got my "Yuri" killed. They are going to blame G.I. Joe Biden and his buddies in the Pentagon.
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  287.  @bighands69  I am hoping that you are trying to be sarcastic and just missed the mark. Just a a couple of Historical questions. If America won in Vietnam then how come the Communists got to run the country afterwards and are still running the country to this day? If America won in Afghanistan then how come the Taliban are back in charge?
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  288. ​ @JohnElizondo  Buddy 46 might have some Chinese money in his bank BUT DON'T TAKE THE REST OF US FOR FOOLS Trump (45) has 100 times more Chinese money than Biden (46) ever had or has got now AND that's before we ask about the Russian and Saudi money Trump's got. For F*CK sake at least Biden didn't give Hunter a F*CKING job in the Whitehouse. If your going to throw SHIT at the Bidens fine just do it for the right reasons and not some ignorant hypocritical crap.
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  289.  @zacksmith5963  SHlT-4-BRAINS which part of giving Tik Tok access to your photo album did you miss. Once its past the firewall it has access to the rest of the phone. WHY DO YOU THINK governments everywhere have banned it from official government phones used by government employees? Its one thing to be ignorant its another thing to be STUPID.
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  290.  @zacksmith5963  Next time you start calling people bots try using your brain first. I know its hard when your stupid but its not a crime to try.
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  291. Follow up on PART of Petes analysis which I think he has wrong. It would be correct to say the Russians might struggle in those Siberian oil fields as the Americans go home and leave them short handed. But other industries face that all the time and get past it. PLUS - The Americans have been there for 20+ years and in that time there is NO WAY the Russians have not been developing their skills. It does not matter what type of engineer you are or what plant and machinery you provide you TRAIN the locals to look after it. OTHERWISE YOU CAN'T GO HOME. PLUS - when you're the owner of several billion dollars of stuff and the people you rely on just leave town. You will offer serious money to anyone who will help. You can bet that people have already received phone calls and with the right number they will just get back on a plane. Don't forget oil people DO NOT VOTE DEMOCRAT. So if Biden says "NO you can't go," they will just wave the middle finger and go make heaps of money.
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  292.  @bluerock4456  Yeah dude I know what sulphur is used for, I've spent most of the last 20 years in mining where its used as the raw ingredient for sulphuric acid to leach minerals from ore. That process is actually pretty clever. They burn the sulphur the same way the burn coal to generate electricity. They capture the SO2, put it through a catalytic converter to get S03 and then mixt with demineralised water to get 100% pure H2SO4. AND YES I have done projects using 100% pure H2SO4 and so long as the people involved know what they are doing is quite safe. As for the crap that comes out of oil its not really used for that sort of stuff. A lot of its pumped back down wells or dumped in Africa. And yeah a couple of guys from Switzerland got caught doing that a few years back. Except they were doing it with Mexican crude not Canadian. Out of the oil industry comes some really nasty shit.
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  293. If they are analysts that are speaking on social media then they are NOT analysts who are speaking to people in power. Whether that be in America, Europe or Russia.
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  294.  @SkyRiver1  We have the same problem in Australia all over the place and in every industry. Its one of the collection of economic policies that comes out of Chicago School economics that we now call neoliberalism. It started with Reaganomics in America and Thatcherism in Britain and has infected the entire developed world while screwing the non-developed world. There was a damning as all hell report by the Rand Corporation a couple of years ago into wages and an even more damning report September 2022 by the US Congressional Budget Office into Family Wealth. Once you start to get your head around how much money the Top 10% and in particular the Top 1% have taken in the last 40 years then its pretty easy to see why so many people think the world is F⋃CKED. If you want to see something really interesting on HOW they get away with it. There's a brilliant documentary called "The Silent Killer of the Middle Class" which is about tax evasion. Its amazing how they do it.
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  295.  @chickenfishhybrid44  Do people like EVER bother to read what people are saying before you act like a complete M0R0N? Have you ever stopped to think about who owns the companies doing the damage across Africa, Asia, Central & South America? Its mostly a collection of European and AMERICAN companies. Yeah sure I know the Chinese are among the worst - they have damaged or destroyed over 20,000 waterways in the last 30 or so years. Then there's their coal issue. Yeah sure I know the Indians do stuff like pump raw untreated sewerage into their rivers by the cubic meter per second. I've seen the footage and its pretty ghastly. Hey why don't you check out what the AMERICAN oil companies did in Central and South America. Look up what Texaco (now part of Chevron) did while drilling in the Lago Agrio oil field of Ecuador. That's part of the case where Chevron had a lawyer (Steven Donziger) imprisoned in America for refusing to hand over confidential client information.
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  296. ​ @chickenfishhybrid44  And for the record go and look up Superfund on Wikipedia its about the CERCLA act which is the EPA program clean up illegal waste dumps. Currently the program has over 40,000 sites on its books. Sorry buddy but American companies suck when it comes to environmental damage BOTH inside America and outside America. The only difference is when they do it INSIDE America there's still a chance the victims can get compensation in the courts.
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  297. SORRY PETER, but your economics of construction is a giant pile of BULLSHlT and if you bothered to ever talk to an engineer who actually understands project engineering and project management you'd know why. The rest of this is pretty good and your points on people NOT budgeting for the resources needed to construct this is spot on. Unfortunately on that subject if you try and tell the Greenies about the materials issues they freak out and respond in some pretty ugly ways. Here's some basics on construction versus operation. 1) When you are in construction YOU DO NOT BUDGET for operational costs like fuel and maintenance that is the job of others. 2) If you are going to compare construction costs then COMPARE construction costs not a mix and match with operational costs or you just confuse things which you have done. 3) When you build any power station you can start making money as soon as you have any of your generating units commissioned and connected to the grid. COMPARING SOMETHING LIKE A BIG NUCLEAR/COAL PLANT VERUS A BIG WIND FARM IS PRETTY SIMPLE With large nuclear or coal plants you have to wait until it is 100% complete before you can start earning money. That can be a huge amount of capital spent over several years (or even a decade) paying interest or not paying dividends before you even start earning money and even THEN YOU HAVE TO PAY BACK THAT CAPITAL BEFORE you actually break even. If you are building a 100 turbine wind farm (it makes the percentage sign easier to use). When you have the first turbine up you are 1% finished but you can start earning money to help pay for the rest of construction. When you are 10% complete you can earn 10 times the money you earned from when you are 1% complete. When you are 50% complete you can earn 50 times the money you earned from when you are 1% complete *AND YOU PROBABLY DON'T NEED ANY CAPITAL TO FINISH THE PROJECT. This is also part of the business strategy behind the Small Modular Nuclear Reactors. As soon as the first reactor is in it can start earning money and help pay for the other reactors. I love your work on geopolitics and strategies BUT PLEASE TALK TO SOME ENGINEERS. YES I know we are pains in the butt, but then do you want to be called out by one of us?
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  298. I think you'll find that every time he's said Biden would win and win by a long way there were conditions and a few times Peter mentioned his age but NOT as the number 1 item on the list AND ITS NOW number 1 on the list. So it would be interesting to see Peter do a thorough review of Bidens current state because I don't think anyone outside of the Whitehouse knew how bad Joe had gotten. The debate was a catastrophe and the interviews since disasters. In a very short time Biden went from "He's viable because he's NOT Trump!" to He's not there and he is NOT fit to do the job. The jokes about Biden not realising he was trying to change TV channels with the nuclear football aren't so funny right now. The major issue is how do the Democrats deal with it and so far their campaign of denial, denial and more denial is only making things worse.
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  299.  @jnc07res  I'm Australian and from the outside looking in Kamala is the Dr Phil candidate. You know when Dr. Phil says "WHAT were you thinking?" Have they forgotten just how awful she was as a campaigner 4 years ago in the primaries? She could NOT even win her home state. She was picked as another "DO nothing, SAY nothing, THINK nothing VP" who's only task was to wave, smile and make Biden look good (or at least better) in 2020. For Trump the only thing that might be as good as Joe refusing to go would be the DNC stomping on everyone else to give Kamal the nod. The one thing I have seen NOBODY suggest would be someone like Gavin Newsom running and Kamal staying on as VP because that would freak Trump out. But I doubt her ego would take that.
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  300.  @saamohod  Well we don't now exactly how he died YET. I just watched Peter's vid on Navalny and he mentions is that Navalny wasn't being treated well. I'm certain there'll be many claims, but there'll only be 1 fact everyone agrees on and that's Navalny is dead.
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  301.  @segalliongaming8925  Sorry but countries like Australia have placed skills requirements on immigration from developing nations. That's been copied by many countries. Sorry mate but I am in engineering and I see it all the time. There is a cancer that came out of economic policies in the 1990s that has had terrible consequences for the engineering industries AND its lead to us stripping those few skilled people from countries that can't lose them. PLUS a major reason why those people leave their countries is because of the economic and political crap we have dumped on them.
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  302.  @sunspot42  You're clearly NOT and engineer and have no idea what it actually takes to make a modern technological society FUNCTION. You obviously have no idea how energy is produced or consumed by a modern society because you can't see beyond your own front door. Don't panic most people have NO IDEA of where their electricity or water come from or where their waste water goes. Domestic household consumption of energy and water is nothing compared to industry. Most people cannot even begin to comprehend what's needed just so you can have a bottle of milk in your fridge. This is one of my giant bugs with economists. They know how markets work and what societies consume, but they have no idea how things are produced or delivered. This is why our energy grids are failing, fresh water systems are failing, waste water systems failing and all the rest of our infrastructure is breaking. None of the people making decisions or those holding the microphone have a clue. The idea that we can put solar panels on everyone's rooftops and the worlds problems will magically vanish is a fantasy. You forget we still have to dig the minerals out of the ground, process them into raw stock, process them into solar cells and then install them into solar panels. After that they can be installed on your roof. BUT THEN there's the system to get it into your home. That includes multiple supply and manufacturing systems for the wires to the inverter, the wires from the inverter and all the rest of the energy system in your house. Because people don't see the wires in their walls they don't even realise they exist most of the time. I live in Australia. Do you know how many products I can by here that have no industrial energy or water input? ONE and that's our genuine native arts & crafts. Everything from the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the car you drive, the bike you ride, the computer you use has to be dug from the ground, processed in to raw materials and then made into stuff you buy. Anything in your life that has metal, glass, plastics, paper,...etc involved industrial processes that requires energy. For an engineer its actually infuriating how ignorant the general population is of what it takes to provide all these things the rest of society takes for granted. I don't blame the Morlocks from eating the Eloi.
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  303. Actually he called Mearsheimer's assessment as "horse shit" 53:44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdP01go8wdQ And I checked the population of the countries he lists is 263 Million. Add in Finland and its 268 million. Russia's population is around 140 million. I think you're in part right Peter is underplaying Western provocation, because he places more importance on demographics and resources while Mearsheimer is purely political. Ukraine is complex and there's bits of both. Plus and I have argued this with some of the Mearsheimer fans, Mearsheimer's side of politics (American Realists that also includes the Neocons) have done some nasty shite over recent decades. They all claim Mearsheimer was against the invasions of Iraq & Afghanistan, but they ignore it was his side of American politics who started BOTH. The Neocon ideology came out of U. Chicago where Mearsheimer teaches his "offensive realism" which is one of the most narcissistic philosophies in the history of the planet.
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  304. Actually that's exactly what the State SC for Michigan just did. They dismissed the case they were presented with had and told Michigan's Sec State to follow the law and for a PRIMARY vote that means you put every name put forward by the party on the ballot irrespective of eligibility or not. But (and its a big but) that ruling only applies to PRIMARY ballots which DO NOT decide the actual office. Glenn Kirschner did a video on this and he gave the example that in Michigan the Dems could put Obama's name on the PRIMARY ballot even though he is ineligible because he's already served 2 terms. Colorado and Maine are is different because their state laws on elections are NOT the same as Michigan. This is going to go through all the states 1 by 1 FOR THE PRIMARIES. For the actual FEDERAL ELCTION it will all depend on HOW the question is put to SCOTUS and how they rule on the 14th part 3.
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  305. Don't brag too much my grandfathers sheep dog was also (by these standards) Presidential material. I bet there's a guy in Iowa right now trying to get his favorite pig on the ballot just to see what happens.
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  306.  @fee1776  And another of the Chicago crowd Ronald Coase wrote this brilliant piece for the RAND corporation which you can still download if you try hard enough. I heard about it when Elizabeth Popp Borman was interviewed by Mark Blyth about her book "Thinking like an Economist." You can find interview on the Watson Institute as one of the Rhodes Centre podcasts and Brown U. In that paper Coase argued that America should Auction off all the radio & TV bands. He was laughed at by the RAND corporation and then laughed at by Congress because they all knew that it would lead to MONOPOLIES where those with enough money would just outbid everyone. They eventually gave Ronald Coase the the same FAKE Nobel prize they gave Freidman and his auctions became the flavor of the era for governments all over the Western World and its been a disaster EVERYWHERE.
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  307.  @GaryBickford  Sorry but I am calling BULLSHlT to your comment. ESPECIALLY the remark about very few economists in government being Freidmanites. They are almost exclusively Freidmanites BECAUSE they were all taught classical and neo-classical economics which is the polite way of saying they are all Freidmanites. Its most notable when you listen to the people in charge of places like the US Fed or Australian Reserve Bank or European Central Bank. You'll hear them refer to the "market adjusting" in some way and how they need to "show restraint." That's the give away they are a Friedmanite as it shows they believe the market will self adjust to a stable state. You might have gone to one of those odd little colleges most people haven't heard about OR one that is Left leaning like Brown U. (the ugly duckling of the Ivy League) OR one of the ones who had people like Richard Wolff who taught Marxist economics for decades. You should go and look up Prof Wolff's story on HOW & WHY he became a Marxist economist despite going to Harvard. Its actually an interesting story. He also did a series on Marx's contributions to Western Economics a few years ago. I'm no Marxist and actually think like Smith he was WRONG about wealth only being created by labor, but it was an excellent series to give perspective on how we got here. FYI - I think Prof Wolff is right about many things and 1,000% utterly and totally wrong about others. On post-Keynesianism I doubt you would even know what a post-Keynesian looks or sounds like and suggest you go and look up Steve Keen. He genuinely is a post-Keynesian and has NOTHING good to say about the economists in government anywhere on the planet. He hosts a weekly podcast Steve Keen & Friends and if you actually want to understand this stuff I suggest you join in.
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  308.  @rejvaik00  If you are going to criticise another country for what ever reason GET YOUR FACTS RIGHT. YES - we have compulsory voting BUT that does NOT MEAN you actually have to vote for anyone. As you said people can simply mismark the voting form. I had a family member who used to draw an extra box and write his football team's name beside it and tick that box. Same thing. The only thing that is compulsory is that you turn up and fill out a voting slip. How you fill it out is your choice. If you don't turn up then you get a please explain letter and so long as you give a reasonable explanation NOTHING ever happens AND I have never heard of anyone being fined. SECONDLY we DO NOT have first past the post like America and Britain. We have what is called preferential voting which I think Alaska has now adopted. It encourages more people to step up as candidates and provide more options. If the main parties get slack and put up crap candidates then it leaves the door wide open for other people. Its a system that keeps our parties a lot more honest. This is how the Teal Independents won so many seats at the last election. The main parties got slack. A lot of swing voters who had voted Right at the previous election did NOT vote LEF but voted Teal. Just as the Democrats have issues accepting that 2020 wasn't that good of a result Australian Labor doesn't accept the last election wasn't that good of a result for them. A lot of of swing voter didn't swing to them but swung sideways. So please in future GET YOUR FACTS RIGHT AND NOT BULLSHlT PEOPLE.
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  309.  @rejvaik00  Well you need to be clear when you take a jibe at another country. Its gets people damn upset when you leave things out or get things wrong. The bit I hated was your remark that it makes our politicians lazy. Our preferential system makes lazy politicians vulnerable even the ones at the top. When Prime Minister John Howard got his ass handed to him it was by an independent with no party at all behind her. The Teals in the last election handed both parties a slap across the face and in the next one could easily sweep then away if they do things a little better. Their biggest issue right now is being heard and that is a problem with our media.
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  310.  @TheMrgoodmanners  LISTEN DlCKHEAD AND ACTUALLY LISTEN ITS NOT THE SAME TECHNOLOGY MOST OF THESE COMPANIES ARE PUMPING And I really do mean to be SCREAMING THAT AT YOU. Because these things have been said and said and said and no matter how many times you stupid clowns wont listen. I know about the reactor in Russia and there's another in China because all the SMR projects are listed on Wikipedia. I know about the reactors in submarines and aircraft carriers. I'm an engineer and used to work with ex-US Navy Nuclear Power plant operator/technician who served on Aircraft Carriers. He told me about his training and the way they are operated. You simply can't just use military reactors in domestic installations. Then there's other realities. If you actually go back and look at the history of reactors many would now be classified as SMALL. Many of this new generation are completely different technology and want to use things like TRISO fuel pellets. NOBODY has yet proven TRISO works short term or long term let alone if it can be manufactured at scale. Almost all of them want to use HALEU fuel grades and there's NO PLANTS that make HALEU for domestic use. You stupid clowns are driving all the engineers crazy BECAUSE YOU JUST WONT LISTEN. All you do is keep repeating the same stupid SHlT again and again.
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  311.  @re1v3r  Yeah but getting a score of 2 out of 10 might be better than 1 out of 10 but its still a fail. And a score of 49 out of 100 might be even better but its still a fail. You can get a score of 98 out of 100 and it can still be a fail if the passing grade is 99. I'd take Australia over many other places but that doesn't mean we get a passing grade on anything.
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  312.  @InformedKiwi  It never ceases to amaze that Kiwis think arrogant stupidity is a virtue. Listen and you might learn something. History is littered with better technologies that were never adopted. Example 1: VHS tapes. Sorry but BetaMax was better in every way but 1. Better picture, better re-record, better in almost everything except they were more expensive to make and Hollywood wanted cheaper. Example 2: Molten Salt Reactors were better and more efficient and produced less waste than Water cooled reactors but were developed second and NOBODY held the patents that they could control. If Chernobyl or Fukushima had been MSRs then there would have been NO ACCIDENTS. Do you know the coal industry developed a new generation of boilers for power stations that would have reduced world CO2 emissions by several billion tons a year? Rio Tinto was one of the main players in that. They even had advertisements on TV at one stage telling everyone about their new technology. They even built a power station in Japan that used it. It was a technology that wasn't adopted, because Rio Tinto and others would have lost billions because the amount of coal they sell would have dropped significantly. The issues with producing and using Hydrogen from wind were solved years ago. The issues with using it in gas turbines were mostly solved in the 1990s BUT nobody wanted it at the time especially the jet fuel industry and the natural gas industry. The jet fuel guys didn't need to worry because they might have worked out the engine issues but not the fuel tank issues. Try coming down of your self imposed arrogance high chair WTFU. Being good at rugby means JACK SHlT about everything else. Just be grateful there's something you clowns are good at. And just because Scott Dixon, Scott McLaughlin and Shane Van Hamburger can drive doesn't mean the rest of you farking can.
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  313. ​ @Battleneter  Yeah don't remind us about how much money our politicians have in their pockets. What I will say as an engineer is we need to be clear about what type of coal are those mines producing because there's 2 distinct types. As an engineer I hate the fact that none of this is rarely explained so here's the basics. ONE is THERMAL COAL and its only good for burning to generate heat, hence the name "thermal coal." Its what's burned in power stations and other heating applications. Thermal coal is a zombie industry. Its dead but refuses to stay dead and who knows how many times we have to shoot it to finally be rid of it. As I like to put it to the pro-coal clowns "If burning coal is so fantastic then why don't we go back to steam powered trains and have coal powered trucks?" THER OTHER is METALLURGICAL COAL and that's what is used to process iron ore into steel hence the name. What makes it different is the lack of impurities. Its almost pure carbon so when its used in making steel you get good quality steel with few impurities. That's really important when you want to make things like stainless steel and you want bridges not to fall down. Because its got few impurities its also good for other applications like water filtering and for manufacturing carbon fibre to make lighter cars, boats and air planes. The metallurgical coal industry which Australia is a leader in is NOT GOING ANYWHERE because we need steel. If you want wind turbines they need steel towers. If you want public transport then trains, train lines, buses and boats all need steel. Then there's the millions of other products that are made from steel. Yes there's lower emission systems but to replace the worlds entire steel production industry will take years and cost $$ Trillions. These just aren't things we can simply buy from K-Mart or Amazon.
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  314.  @moy_moy85  I'll pay that one mate. 👍👍
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  315. ​ @tsubadaikhan6332  Sort of yes sort of no. Like almost everything in Australia's mining game it comes down to 2 companies BHP & Rio Tinto because they are both into iron ore and coal. Of those 2 Rio Tinto has substantial Aluminium assets in the North of Australia at Weipa and Gove, where I have worked on a project. That has since been spun off in to a separate company called Rio Tinto Aluminium. BHP Spun there Aluminium assets of and founded the company South 32 (2015) whose assets are in the far South West of Australia. The company you are thinking of is Alcoa who are 100% American with their headquarters in Pittsburgh and yes they quite big in Australia's Aluminium industry but nothing else so we don't hear as much about them. They own 2 mines and 3 Alumina refineries in the South West of Western Australia in the same region as South32. Alcoa also has some other Australian assets like the smelter at Gladstone. Its the South32 and Alcoa interests in Western Australia that are the main reason Honeywell setup a major mineral processing division in Perth. I never worked for Honeywell but did work with their people a couple of times.
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  316.  @idesofmarchUNIAEA  No Russia is only number 8. Production & Reserves (kilotonnes) as of 2018 (source Wilipedia) 1Australia 110,000 6,000,000 2 Guinea 82,000 7,400,000 3 China 60,000 1,000,000 4 Brazil 35,000 2,600,000 5 Indonesia 23,000 1,200,000 6 India 22,000 660,000 7Jamaica 7,700 2,000,000 8 Russia 6,100 500,000 9 Kazakhstan 5,800 160,000 10 Vietnam 4,000 3,700,000
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  317.  @mabamabam  If your going to ask my opinion on economists I'll warn you up front that I think they are a clueless pack of insanely overrated clowns to put it as simply as I can. I started looking into economics a couple of years ago because I go tired of clowns with economics degrees interfering in projects. They are like seagulls the fly in, flap their wings make lots of noise and SHlT on everything before flying off and leaving a mess behind for others to clean up. The biggest issue is that economics education has become an incredibly narrow field of academia. A lot of very wealthy people started funding the leading universities to teach what they wanted taught and to publish papers that favored their profits. It really started a long time ago when John D. Rockefeller helped fund and create the University of Chicago to produce "more of him." Its also where Milton Freidman taught for decades and also where John Mearsheimer currently teaches. I really can write pages on them. I can explain in detail how Milton Freidman's acolytes have caused the current energy crisis. The War in Ukraine didn't cause it, but it did exacerbated the issues already present. We are actually in a situation that's been almost 30 years in the making and will take 10-25 years to fix depending on which country and how bad you have screwed up. I'm Australian and we have screwed up badly but we might have a way out, but its going to be damn hard work.
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  318.  @mabamabam  I don't know what's happening at your end but I can still see it here. there is some real insanity with the YT algorithm. It hides all sorts of stuff. I go accused by someone the other day of deleting my own comments which wasn't true.
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  319. It could be I mention specific people and one specific university in Chitown that was in part funded by a rather ruthless person who thought the world needed more of him. He was a rock fellow sort of person. Bottom line is we (as in every developed nation has some very serious issues with energy that are the direct result of economics ideology mostly formulated by a person who thought "greed was good."
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  320.  @mabamabam  In a nutshell when the economists told every one that privatisation would provide competitions and competition would provide better services at cheaper prices - THEY LIED. Because uncle Milton said corporations have one duty and that's to provide profit to owners and that does NOT EVER produce better services or lower prices. SO THEY LIED
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  321.  @mabamabam  But worse than that it also stifled any new investment in base load power ANYWHERE. its pretty simple if you did Econ 101. If the population goes up then energy demand goes up. If you DO NOT build any new baseload power stations to cover the increased demand then prices go up. So if you were lucky enough to buy a 1/2 used power station from a government there is zero incentive to build anything else. because if you build additional power stations then supply will go up and prices will go down. So from a corporate perspective you run that old 1/2 used power station as hard as you can with the least amount of maintenance you can until the day it drops dead. And then you move all the money off shore and claim there's nothing left to clean up the site. That buckaroo has been going on everywhere and there is now a lot of very old poorly maintained power stations that will over the next decade simply die and when they do you will see energy prices go bonkers as they have done in a few places already.
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  322.  @mabamabam  One of the reasons I say the acolytes of uncle Milton have caused the energy crisis is based on the fact that they have no idea what it takes to physically generate and distribute energy as well as make the equipment to use it. It doesn't matter if we are talking about electricity or gas or even coal when people used it to cook with and heat their homes. Worse when you put it to them they don't care because all the care about is their farking "sophisticated markets!!!!!!" They have no idea what it takes to build anything or maintain it. They see numbers on a page and they do is ask 2 questions. 1) How do we get certain numbers smaller? 2) How do we get certain numbers bigger? And they are experts in everything else - just ask them.
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  323. Never forget that the acolytes of uncle Milton promised everyone that privatising state functions would provide better service at lower prices. Name a country where that actually worked? There's a Rand Corp report that says the top 1% of America made $47 Trillion. When Time magazine wrote about it they simply rounded it up to $50 Trillion and by some estimates its now up to $55 Trillion and climbing. More recently the Congressional Budget Office released a report on family wealth. So far the only person who I have seen mention it is Richard Wolff. You can find it easily by googling "congressional budget office family wealth." Go look at the main graph to see how well the bottom 50% of America has done. I checked on Australia's data. Its presented in quints (20% increments) so the numbers are different but it tells exactly the same story. The people at the top have made of with vast sums of money while the rest have paid for it.
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  324.  @mabamabam  If you are interested a really great channel to watch is Gary's Economics here on YT. Gary Stevenson (a Brit) comes from the lower end of the spectrum but found his way to the LSE. He graduated top of his class and went to work for Citibank where (by his mid 20s) was their top trader in the world. He made billions and got paid millions. These days he's explaining how economics actually works. He's got a brilliant take on why so many commentators are wrong all the time.
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  325. Engineer here and I have worked on mine site construction in Australia and you have hit the 3 magic words. SMART PROJECT MANAGER Forget just being in the snow and ice it matters in every industry. Like Messiahs there many claimants and most are frauds.
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  326. YEAH SURE - SOON AS THEY ARE AVAILABLE. Go look at the websites of the companies all promoting SMRs and they are all trying to raise money to get going. AT BEST the SMR industry might be what the envision sometime in the mid 2030s. The SMRs being proposed ARE NOT the same technology that's in Submarines and Aircraft Carriers. The YT Channel "Decouple Media" has a couple of good videos on the subject. I can't say I agree with everything that's said on Decouple but its mostly sound because he talks to actual engineers and I am an engineer.
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  327.  @jesan733  Quick point nuclear IS NOT FAST. Hinkley Point C which has 2 EPRs (European Power Reactor) and will take 10 years to complete. It will also take at least 20 years to break even on construction costs based on current British energy prices. Yeah I calculated all that out a couple of months ago. Finland which recently commissioned an EPR took 18 years to complete. That said once constructed and if they run them at 90-100% then they are very cheap for BASE LOAD. But is you check the IEA data the moment you start trying to throttle them back the cost per kilowatt climbs and at a certain point which varies for reactor types it skyrockets. There's a great talk on the YT channel Decoupled about the Canadian CANDU. They are not only cheaper but quicker to build and of the reactor types so far used they are the only one not to have a melt-down. All the talk about SMRs being quick is utter crap and garbage from companies looking for investors. The best any of them claim is that they'll be ready for shipment to sites MAYBE in the mid 2030s. Yes there's a couple under construction but go check the details. They're prototypes.
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  328. I'm Australian. If California, Oregon and Washington state got fed TF up with all of their money going to the red states then they might just consider it.
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  329. And don't forget Australia, Canada, New Zealand and all the others who'd jump when POTUS says jump. I'm Australian and we have joked that we are the 51st state for decades.
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  330.  @jrmint2  Damn good point and I love your description of NK.
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  331.  @grzegorczyk1983  Actually we are starting to slip down that list. There's DC, Puerto Rico, Alberta, Taiwan, Guam, Diego Garcia,... heck even the Philippines have rejoined the list and might even be higher than us. Although we still have Pine Gap and that keeps our ranking up.
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  332.  @TheLocoUnion  The other thing everyone seems to have forgotten is that the Chines, Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese and Philippinos have been fighting each other for several 1000 years. There's some seriously old grudges among them and sooner or later someone will do the wrong thing. How that pans out is another thing with so many possibilities they can't be listed.
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  333.  @icorcka76  Beach shorts outdoors in -20C????
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  334.  @ktg8030  That's way more difficult than it sounds, but there are some ways to screw it up. Go look at a map and look at just how big Russia actually is and look at Ukraine. Striking at infrastructure is a lot easier with smaller chunks of land. BUT if you hit infrastructure in just the right place then its chaos. If you go and look at the 2003 Blackout that smashed the Northeast of America and a chunk of Canada that was just a basic fault in a local part of the grid in Ohio. However it caused a cascade event. Kind of like dominoes falling over. So the real question for Ukraine isn't if they can take down the Russian power grid, that's unlikely, BUT they might be able to hit a couple of key places and cause enough chaos that the Russians stop doing what they are doing. The Ukrainians wont touch any of the gas infrastructure because they know this war will end and those pipelines are how Europe functions. They have probably been told already that if they want support don't touch the gas. Major power plants are probably also out and that leaves power lines and substations. Both are soft targets, are reasonably easy to repair. I doubt they hit Moscow but you might expect some of those cities near Ukraine to get the main substations hit.
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  335.  @antoncarmoducchi6057  Good comment more nuanced than the clown who started the thread. And I say clown NOT because of the pro-renewable stance he makes BUT BECAUSE of the ridiculous SIZE of the claim. I am an engineer and YES we have an abundance of wind and solar. THE PROBLEM is that most of it is a long way from where we need it and IT COSTS MONEY to transmit energy. The OTHER PROBLEM the wind & solar brigade wont accept let alone acknowledge is what it takes to have a 100% wind & solar system for an entire nation. Like many other things up to a certain point its fine but then starts getting harder and harder. One of the major things is grid stability which few people are talking about even among engineers. Its been a growing problem since the 1990s when we started connecting more and more computers. The switch mode power supplies cause noise back into the grid. In some instances that noise can collect into nasty harmonics. Its just something few are aware of unless they are right into that sort of thing or (like me) you've encountered people who are into that stuff. All these people who just think its a matter of just throwing up wind turbines across the country and/or plonking solar on roof tops are ignorant clowns.
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  336.  @dixonhill1108  I hadn't heard that term "Cantrailian" before but I got it. And yeah we are basically the 51st and 52nd states. The only question is which of us is the 51st and which is the 52nd. Or maybe Puerto Rico thinks its 51st and we are just the 52dn & 53rd. Do you know when Australia was pushed to get its turn at the UN Security council the main objection was that it would just guarantee America a second vote? Which is sadly true. In early/mid 2018, about 18 months into the Trump Presidency I read a report on its affect on Australian Foreign Policy. They basically admitted to a major problem. For about 50 years AFP was basically "What do the Americans want?" But nobody had written any FP without American input in so long they didn't know what to do at times. I forced a lot of our diplomatic corps to think for themselves. Its one of the odd positive things about the Trump presidency. By accident it made a lot of countries think for themselves for the first time in decades. This is something the Biden team are yet to grasp fully. They now have allies who aren't just followers and will just do as they are told to do like all through the cold war and war on terror.
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  337.  @dixonhill1108  Closely followed by a John Oliver like observation. Canada, everyone else's favorite American State. Closely followed by: Why do Canadians say "Sorry" so often? Its their way of telling the rest of the world, "Sorry about our neighbors!" in just 1 word.
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  338.  @dixonhill1108  You're right we don't have a specific state like Quebec with its ridiculous sense of self importance that the rest of the country can't stand, BUT we do have New South Wales with its ridiculous sense of self importance that the rest of the country can't stand. The difference is the Quebecois speak French and New South Welshmen speak SHlT!
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  339.  @dixonhill1108  I spent 4 months in Saskatchewan in 2017-18 and I got that there's huge gulf between Eastern and Western Canada. Australia has some of that but not quite the same either as we also have significant rivalries going north South as well.
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  340.  @kwazhims3lf  Every country has at least one ASSH0LE they wished would shut up, even Canada the politest nation in the world. It was a waste water treatment plant that was destroyed by the local CANADIAN engineer less than 2 months after handover because he let it freeze solid. After not getting paid for getting the plant finished and operating the first time around. And then keeping me on hold for over a year. The Canadian insurance companies expected me stop and drop everything on a whim and at MY EXPENSE fly back and fix what a CANADIAN BROKE without guaranteeing I'd get paid. 99% of Canadians are fabulous people. You're NOT in that 99%.
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  341.  @agaragar21 You make about 1/10th of valid point 1) There was no genocide but there certainly were some very ugly incidents. The stolen generation was also not a genocide because despite being incredibly ugly and misguided it targeted children of mixed heritage. 2) The subject of native reserves was done away with the establishment of native title laid down by the Marbo decision. ALSO since we are on the subject of invading and taking land can you please tell me which Italian I should hold accountable for the invasion of Britain in 55BC and then which German, Dane, Swede or Norwegian I hold accountable for for the Germanic and Nordic Invasions that happened after the Romans left Britain OR do you expect me to hold the French accountable for William the Conqueror who was actually 1/2 French and 1/2 Norwegian? The point is don't be so simplistic about such complex things. Also there's a fair amount of evidence that the current Aboriginal peoples of Australia were NOT the first people of Australia. This is most evident in the distinct styles of rock art. Its not spoken about much because although there is evidence is a fairly sensitive topic and not enough evidence to be conclusive. Finally there is no doubt that the European settlement of Australia was a disaster for the native population, but that has been the case with every mass migration in history. What I hate about people being so simplistic is they IGNORE what has been done to redress the situation in Australia.
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  342.  @mrspaceman2764  That's also a distinct possibility.
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  343.  @invaderjoshua6280  If you want to know where its just bonkers. Try aviation (I have a pilots license) Altitude is in feet. Speed is on knots or miles per hour. Weather is in kilometers of visibility. Navigation can be in almost anything including parsecs. Fuel can be in gallons, litres, pounds and/or kilograms depending on the plane your flying.
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  344.  @JR-N-TX  Go and type "tallest wind turbine" into google and it will come back that the largest are 1,000ft NOT 1,000m. I just checked and the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai is (according to Wikipedia) the worlds tallest structure at 829.8 m (2,722 ft)
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  345.  @robhoffman510  AND DO YOU KNOW WHAT?? AND YES THIS IS THE SOCIAL MEDIA VERSION OF SCREAMAING AT YOU *THE HOLE WORLD IS TIRED OF THAT SECTION OF THE AMERCIAN POPULATION WHO HAVE IT GOOD THINKING THEY REPRESENT THE BEST OF EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD* Google "congressional budget office family wealth" and you'll get a report that cannot be refuted that shows 50% of America is WORSE OFF now than they were before the 2008 GFC. The Top 10% who caused the GFC and got bailed out with $4 trillion from Bush and another $4 trillion from Obama and are now over $20 trillion better off. The sooner America deals with the hyper-welfare queens on Wall Street and starts looking after the other 90% of the nation then the rest of the World might start listening to your crap.
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  346. ENGINEER HERE: EVs make a lot of sense if you want the human race to survive on this planet. We simply can't keep abusing it the way we have for the past 250 years, BUT WE NEED A BETTER PLAN. There's 1.5 Billion registered cars and 500 million trucks in the world. It took decades to build all of those as well as staggering amounts of ENERGY to dig the raw materials out of the ground, process them into raw feed stock and then process that feed stock into the things we all take for granted. Its not just the Lithium, Nickel, Cobalt and other less common metals its also the steel, copper and aluminium needed for making the cars and upgrading the power grids. We are about to start paying the price for having let a very small number of people have way too much say in how our nations function.
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  347. @Darth.Augustus EXACTLY - go have an actual look at where the Spratly's are on a map. They are no where near China but they make blocking the South China Sea a real possibility.
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  348.  @mikeryan2802  Thumbs up
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  349.  @brianniegemann4788  What trade are you talking about? We trade with SOUTH Korea for raw materials to them and finished goods back. As far as I know we DO NOT trade much at all with North Korea. There was a case a few years ago when a North Korean cargo ship was caught dropping boxes of drugs in our waters for our criminal gangs. We are one of the very nations anywhere with a North Korean embassy. I only know about that because it came up when the drug ship was caught. As far as I know that's about it.
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  350.  @brianniegemann4788  No prob - easy mistake.
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  351.  @davidbrown8536  Yeah - so what part is confusing to you?
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  352. ​ @TorontoSaurusEx  I agree on parts of that. Russia is one of the super rich nations in terms of resources, but you have to look at which resources they have and don't have. Australia is far richer in iron ore and Uranium but Russia is richer in Nickel, Titanium and other things while Chile is the richest in Copper and also has huge amounts of Lithium. The Cheaper energy is dependent on if you can either sell it or use it. I think the mega untapped opportunity is Russia linking its main gas reserves into China. As an engineer I know that every coal fired power station the Chinese have can be switched to Russian Gas. That would be massive for the world because it would dramatically reduce global emissions and it COULD rescue Russia from financial collapse and lower those tensions As far as "poking the bear" I'll agree that the Americans need to stop aggravating people like they do. Everyone who understands what happened knows it was the Americans who blew up Nordstream, but then the Chinese and Russians also do stupid stuff. On AUKUS I'll simply tell you to WAKE UP. The simple fact is that Western technology OVERALL is more advanced that anything the Russians, Chinese and North Koreans have. If it really broke out in the South China Sea MOST of the Chinese Navy would be gone within 48-72 hours. The American Submarines are simply that much better than anything the Chinese have and the Russians (who do have excellent subs) just don't have enough. North Korea is a joke. It has lots of soldiers, lots of guns, lots of cannons but so little food that they can barely feed their people. On the world front the Israelis scare me more than everyone else combined. They are lead by a maniac who started a war so he could avoid facing court and going to jail. The Egyptians and others warned them that Hamas was ready to do something and they either didn't listen or just let it happen. Either way that maniac got his war and now wants to spread it. That's way worse than anything else because the chances it could erupt are so much higher.
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  353.  @emceeboogieboots1608  Then they should know better than to spruike maybes as if they were fact. There are plenty of people in the fusion are NOT making grand announcements because they know how sceptical people have become and they know there are enough engineers out there to ask questions.
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  354. Don't get me wrong I'd love to see nuclear fusion working and the rest of us building power stations as fast as we can. Its just that I know enough to take these claims with a handful of salt and a bucket of scepticism.
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  355.  @williambaikie5739  Yeah they have the neutron to an extent. its not the ones they catch I worry about its the ones they don't. And its good to see I am not alone in realising that its not as clean as they claim. But I also know that contaminated parts can be dealt with but that also has to be costed in. if you go look at the clean up of the Sellafield processing site in Britain they started with an insane budget that just kept growing until it got so high they stopped publishing information. its the one thing I find annoying in the cost analysis for nuclear power is they down play the financial costs AND I AM PRO-NUCLEAR. If you do an honest analysis its all but impossible to meet the worlds needs with renewables so we need a low emission base load system. If you run through the options you get back to nuclear most of the time. Not all but most. Lying about or hiding the overall costs is NOT gong to endear the general population who already have next to zero trust in the energy sector. The same goes for the solar people who totally ignore the issues over what happens to damaged or degraded cells. Nobody has a recycling system yet, which has to happen but they are all hoping someone else does it for them. The same goes for the wind people and some of their issues. they are all hoping someone else will solve the problems.
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  356.  @bpoladsky  Go and get a new brain the one you have is malfunctioning. Alex Epstein is nothing but a narcissistic LIAR. He's not a scientist or engineer. He's just another funded by the fossil fuel industry TO DELAY any actions on climate by keeping the debate going round and round in circles. He lists Ayn Rand and Thomas Sowell as influences and they're sociopaths. He worked at the Ayn Rand Institute. As an academic Sowell is a pathetic hypocrite who criticised the scientific community for earning a living as he promoted his latest book. He's praised by few and disregarded by many as a sad pathetic joke. As for Ayn Rand she's a nightmare that promoted being a narcissistic psychopath as a positive thing. She was a maniac and her followers are similar maniacs.
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  357.  @joefish4466  On the personal slander stakes GO F⋃CKYOUR SELF. I have actually written self tuning software for control algorithms and was first doing that work in the early 1990s. It was nothing worth the hype and plenty of other engineers did a lot more than I ever did. I was mostly on the final application side of getting stuff to work. There were 1,000s of engineers doing incredible work back in the 80s and 90s and its all been pushed aside for this overrated over-hyped garbage. I actually went to college at U. of Illinois where people like the founders of YouTube, Oracle & Tesla went. It was where Marc Andreessen the guy who helped create the first practical web browser went. I have known all about the IT brigade and their nonsense and vacant promises for a couple of decades. We were used as lab rats for the first (of what were then called) Expert Systems (and you know as AI) that the IT people back then claimed was going to design aircraft and all sorts of stuff. We knew almost straight way they were full of SHlT and would always be full of SHlT. But try telling a hype-merchant that they are selling hype.
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  358. ​ @oa5779  That's a great comment with great information and I wished more people would explain things like that. If you think about how people cost things. I'm an engineer and as part of projects we build costing models based around quantities, costs and options. Usually done in a spread sheet and we can quickly answer things about project changes. What your pointing out is something similar but in another environment where you have a pile of data and its needs to be fed to a model that calculates an answer. I know about enterprise software in the engineering space and sadly its been often over-hyped and badly deployed by people who didn't know what they were doing. I once saw a major mining company spend $600M deploying SAP and not do it well. About 7 years later I was on another mine site for the same company and using the SAP system was hopeless. So I expect it will be like any other software or calculation tool. If its DONE RIGHT it will be great and the companies who get it right will do well, but if its done wrong then the companies that get it wrong will fail and fail disastrously.
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  359. HEY PETER You have completely missed an aspect of New Zealand and that's Australia. Way back in history when Australia first looked at becoming an independent nation the first meetings INCLUDED New Zealand. That didn't happen for many reasons but it also made Australia and New Zealand very close. Until recent times nobody needed a passport to travel between Australia and New Zealand. Things like healthcare, education and unemployment benefits ($$$) were available in both countries. Australia being larger and having more industry and more resources (like mining) has always provided more opportunities for younger New Zealanders and they came by the boat load and then the plane load. Even when we stopped providing unemployment benefits to them they still kept coming. So you CAN'T look at New Zealand's and Australia's demographics separately. In fact you need to consider some of the pacific as well, because New Zealand has an open border policy with several island states in the pacific. Most of all you need to realise that Australia drains many of the best & brightest out of New Zealand and the rest of the South Pacific the same way America and Europe takes many of Australia's brightest. Plus like Canada we have many Asian and Indian university students and many of them stay on in Australia (like they do in Canada) after they graduate.
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  360.  @davidsteed7278 I'd pretty much agree to that. Look at the boat building people New Zealand has and don't get me started on aerospace as I am an aerospace engineer by degree. Your probably right we don't take many of the very best of New Zealand but we do take a staggering number from among the better people. I actually work in industrial control systems and automation and in that I encounter a staggering number of Kiwis across our industries - engineers, sparkies, machinists,... etc. For example your dairy industry is actually better developed than ours in some ways and a lot of Kiwis are now in our dairy industry, especially in the processing area where you need food technologists. And you are quite right we have lost a staggering number of our better people to America and Europe, especially in technology areas like aerospace and computers. I did my degree in America and should never have come back. On those occasions I wanted to go back I couldn't for a variety of reasons. Your also right on the unskilled New Zealanders in Australia. Its one thing I wished as many Australians do is that we should never have allowed New Zealanders automatic unemployment benefits through the 70s, 80s & 90s. That's caused no end of issues, that still linger to this day. But overall the drain Australia has put on New Zealand has to be seen in the same light as the drain American has put on Australia. And similar (as far as I know) New Zealand is draining talent from the the pacific islands.
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  361. Along with that BS about the Israeli air force Peter is also 100% wrong about the differences between solid fuel and liquid fuel rockets. Its liquid fuel rockets that are far more complex than solid fuel. In simplest terms solid fuel rockets are tubes with a nozzle. There are no pumps or valves or any of the fueling systems required. Its an idiotic claim and it shows YET AGAIN that when it comes to engineering topics Peter does NOT KNOW what he's talking about. FYI - I have a degree in aerospace engineering.
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  362. HUGE FOLLOW-UP COMING. Just after this was posted the news started coming in - Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in prison. How he died is unknown.
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  363.  @LewisPulsipher  Like a few others he's good on geopolitics. I just hate when he gets into subjects he DOES NOT UNDERSTAND like engineering.
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  364.  @alireza5546  Agreed on all of it. As I just said in another reply - I like Peter when he's talking geopolitics because he knows his stuff on that, but when he starts talking technology he just sucks. He needs to hire an engineer (or 2) and get his facts right.
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  365.  @johnhughes2124  Or yeah the technology for enrichment is totally understood. All of the countries with nuclear power have the capability of developing nuclear weapons. BUT (and here's the point) EVERYONE and I really do mean everyone in the nuclear industry is going to know exactly what they are doing. There's not that many enrichment plants in the world and most countries get their fuel from other countries with that capability. So if they suddenly start buying the sort of gear needed its going to be noticed just like we knew what the Iranians were doing. Its just not the sort of thing that can be done an nobody notices. That's what we got told back in 2005. Plus the actual world trade in Uranium is incredibly well documented. So everybody knows who's getting what in the way of raw energy. So if a country was to buy X tons of Yellow Cake (Uranium oxide) then we'd all know how much fuel that should produce. Say if a country has 2GW of nuclear power and they bought enough YC to power 3GW then we'd know they are holding extra. The more frightening aspect to this is spent fuel which doesn't have that much fissile material (U235) because that's what got burnt up in the reactor. The problem is what can be done with spent fuel. First its useful if you want to make a dirty bomb which is low tech but would be utterly devastating to a city. That's low tech. The really scary aspect of spent fuel is the "other stuff" in the fuel pellets like Plutonium. That's because plutonium can be used in compression bombs. They sound really simple but compression bombs require ultra-high quality explosive triggers of you don't get even compression and it simply doesn't go off. Trying to develop those triggers would also be very difficult to hide. So the reality is that no matter what anyone tries its going to take a lot longer than Peter thinks and everyone is going to know what you're up to.
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  366.  @kozlovskyi  Not certain what you mean about choice? Nuclear weapons are not a matter of regulations they are a matter of treaties. Specifically the non-proliferation treaty.
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  367. See the lengthy comment I left - the 3rd item covers part of where they fit.
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  368. THERE IS ONE THING that Peter is completely leaving out of this discussion is the dysfunction in Washington. I'm Australian abut went to college in America (late 80s) and I have had a lot of contact with American's over several decades. I have NEVER SEEN them divided politically like they are now. Sure the Dems and GOP disagreed on any number of issues, but when it came to FOREIGN AFFAIRS Washington was PREDICTABLE. Yes many people may not have liked what America did and how it behaved especially the CIA and coups across the world, BUT AT LEAST THEY WERE PREDICTABLE and the Dems and GOP never saw each other as their mortal enemy and that they had to save the country from the other side. This is a major problem for all of America's allies including Australia. We have just made this massive commitment to nuclear submarines called the AUKUS agreement. Although I agree in principle Australia should go nuclear I think the Virginia-class is a massive mistake. The bigger issue however is: How can we be certain of stable politics in America when the place is now infested with reality denying clowns dominated by geriatrics who wont let go and retire?
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  369. I'm an Australian engineer and work in our mining sector. I followed what Lynas Corp our biggest rare earth producer was doing. I was working out of Perth when they made their announcements for mining and the construction of a processing plant in Malaysia. The plant in Malaysia was built because the Malaysians subsidised it. It was built was going to cost a lot more in Australia because we have environmental laws. The local Malaysians are trying to close the plant because its so bad. When Lynas were pushing their promos for investors they described a lot of what had happened. One of the biggest and richest RE deposits in the world is the hills behind Los Angeles. But it ended up in temporary shutdown because of low market prices, which is very common in the mining industry. The Chinese bought the processing machinery from that mine and took it all too China. That's also not rare in mining. Quite often people buy mines so they can move all the hardware to another mine. There are people who specialise in dismantling mine sites and selling the stuff item by item. So the Americans let the Chinese take the hardware, because they knew full well how worn it was and that the actual reserve in California would still be there for a future time. They could easily build a new plant at that mine and get back into production. Why should they when they can let the Chinese chew through their reserves? So Peter's quite right about most of this, but he misses a few details, but then I 'm an engineer and he's not.
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  370. I'm Australian and the interesting thing he said about Obama killing of pathways for people to come into the party and rise through the ranks is that its also a major issue in BOTH Australia and Britain. Its more obvious in Britain than in Australia where Boris Johnson simply killed off anybody with functioning braincells that he could. That's how they ended up with Liz "Who needs a brain" Truss as Prime Minister. The only reason Rishi Sunak survived Boris's purges was his money. Here in Australia its less obvious but where it can be seen is with elected officials on the fringe of the main parties at the federal level and away from the executive people at the state level. At the federal level we have some really crap people who only got elected because they were chosen by the party hacks and were in safe seats. At the state level in almost every state other than the people immediately around the Premier (our equivalent to a Governor) the rest of the people are mostly incompetent. When I mean incompetent I really do mean INCOMPETENT. Every time some of them step in front of a microphone its an embarrassment to be an Australian. There is a couple of common factors to all 3 countries - America, Britain & Australia: 1) The insane level of influence of the media and especially the Murdoch family. 2) The insane level of influence of the super rich on government policy AIDED by the Murdoch family and lobbyists. 3) The insane level of influence on government policy and government programs by UN-ELECTED CONSULTANTS.
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  371.  @Darhan62  Obama started his presidency with a Supermajority. Other than the drone issues. - He failed to get Medicare through. - He failed to deal with the disaster of Iraq and hold certain people accountable. - He failed to get out of Afghanistan. - He continued with the same basic economics of Reagan that set America up for the Trump Presidency. Other than the fact he was a fantastic public speaker and manged to get elected as America's first black POTUS he didn't do that much. Go ask the people of Flint Michigan.
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  372.  @chriscoyle342  NICE GAS LIGHTING. Peter has said NOTHING about any specific governor so DO NOT go and start cherry picking specific governors and equating it to what he means. Especially when he's talking about governors who show some form of brain function and De Sanctimonious is very, very short on brain function as you point out.
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  373.  @fvr765  Yeah what rhymes with "boron" 🤷‍♂🤷‍♂
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  374.  @JudeMalachi  Yeah, PZ has said several times that America will survive and I think he's being hopeful of certain things NOT happening. Charles Koch the psychotic fossil fuel billionaire and some of his friends are trying to hold a Constitutional Convention. They need 34 states to agree to such an event and reportedly have 31 Governors on board. At such a convention each state gets 1 vote irrespective of their population. At such a convention it only takes 26 votes to make changes to the Constitution. America's future isn't in the hands of the majority so much as its in the hands of a small group of billionaires with their owns views on what America should be and that's a robber Baron paradise. Its not so much I think America will actually fall apart but that I think its going to go through some serious turmoil in the near future because there are these agitators. FYI - I'm Australian but went to college in America. I have many friends there and am pretty concerned about the future. I am also seriously worried Australia is becoming even more dependent on America for security at a time when America can't even be reliable for American's. On of my favorite sayings is: "If America saw what America is doing to America then America would invade America to rescue America from America!"
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  375. Peter has also said MANY TIMES that the Russians also see this as a fight for their national existence. AND THAT makes this a profoundly dangerous situation. Its made even more dangerous by the opportunists who see this as a way to make money.
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  376.  @GaryAJMartin  You are absolutely right except that dirt provides the plants that provide food and those plants ALSO take the carbon dioxide we breath out and put back the oxygen we breath in. From dirt comes life and the means to sustain it and that's why people have fought over dirt since the dawn of civilisation.
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  377.  @GaryAJMartin  Agreed and some of those specific bits of dirt have the stupidest myths that somehow become things to kill and die over. The Ukrainians need to let go of part if not all of Crimea. It was never really part of Ukraine it only became part of Ukraine during the Soviet era for administrative reasons. There's parts of the Donbas that are similar. BUT THEN the Russians ALSO need to do the same thing and get their noses TF out of a number of places. They also need to realise that Stalin swapped groups of people about to create these enclaves. It was part of the Soviet system to break up cultural links to certain regions. Putin knows this and has spent the last 20 years fermenting all sorts of stresses in those places.
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  378. Just remember the Russians didn't strike infrastructure first or has everyone forgotten that the Yanks blew up Nord Stream. Lets not bother arguing that one because once you consider who could actually do it there's only 1 answer. All this proves is that the Ukrainian people are the meat in an American-Russian shit sandwich.
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  379.  @shostako1284  Hey SHlT-4-BRAINS if you Ruskies want to make a point then point out that it was America who blew up Nord Stream. Everyone with a brain knows Russia didn't do that. It was making too much money. However you guys did do this dam.
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  380. AEROSPACE ENGINEER HERE I have been highly critical of Peters reporting on technology and urged him to get some decent background supplied by engineers. I don't know if he's noticed my comments or the comments of others, but this is certainly one of his better (if not the best) take on a technology he's done YET. The real problem that's going to hit the AI people is the energy. If you consider that some of the proposed server centres that are around the US$2 Billion mark they need the equivalent of a Westinghouse-Toshiba AP1000 Nuclear Reactor. That reactor gets mentioned (more than others) because its one that's already been built and has all of the approvals which are 2 things none of the SMRs or other options can say. The other 2 things we know are how long it takes to build an AP1000 and how much it costs thanks to the Vogtle Plant in Georgia and that answer is 9 years and US$18.4 Billion for each reactor. Now the advantages of an AP1000 are: 1) They are designed to last 60 years, which can probably be extended and that means that no matter what the technology becomes in future you can keep using the same site to power your server for a long time. Plus if the next generation of chips that Peter described use a lot less power then you can sell the excess power into the local grid which will help pay-off that US$18.4B. 2) The AP1000 was designed to be built in modules. This is different to the SMR concept where each module is the same and you simply keep adding modules until you have what you want. The AP1000 modules differ in that each module is a piece of an overall plant that can be built off-site and shipped to site on a barge. There's nothing new to that concept I have seen it done for mineral processing and seen modules the size of office blocks. There's a massive advantage to this in that you end up with a module construction site that keeps developing its skill and knowledge bases allowing for manufacturing improvements over time. Once you sort out the module construction and site construction issues this method allows for more efficient or cheaper or quicker construction or a combination of all 3. The disadvantages of the AP1000 are the same as every other nuclear design: 1) They still take almost a decade to build. Sorry but like every other large complex engineering machine they take the time that they take. There's just no way to get around the time required for certain things like constructing the foundations. No matter what the "nuclear island" the reactor sits on needs a foundation to sit on. that and all the other things TAKE TIME. 2) If your construction site is not close to where the barges can deliver the modules the building advantages can go away. This was an issue at Vogtle. 3) What do you do with the spent fuel. Engineers have put forward proposal after proposal on what to do with spent fuel and its like cutting off the head of a hydra. For every proposal put forward 2 new objections grow out of it. We are engineers NOT mythological Greek heroes who can kill a giant multi-headed snake. So the AI crowd are kind of trapped right now. They want to build these monstrous server farms to support the LLM Systems but they can't find spare capacity in the energy supply for it and they can't build anything fast enough and their new chips wont be ready for deployment for at least 5 years. AND YES if Peter wants to give me or another engineer a job he's free to ask.
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  381.  @MichaelPlatson  MAYBE By pointing out the fact that on this subject Peter doesn't have a damn clue what he's talking about there's also other things he's got wrong???? I like Peter when he's discussing geopolitics BUT DAMN he's a clown when it comes to technology.
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  382. Great comment - have you seen the video with James Krellenstein on Decoupled Media about SMRs which is titled "Small Misunderstood Reactors"? James has done 4 videos on Decouple all worth the time but the one on Enrichment is a must watch for anyone who thinks nuclear is part of the energy future. When I saw it I was stunned by some of the information. There's also another great video by Elina Charatsidou who is a nuclear physicist and she explains what SMRs are and aren't. That one is titled "Nuclear Physicist EXPLAINS - What are SMRs? Small Modular Reactors"
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  383.  @richardpatterson302  Yeah the Canadians now lead America in nuclear development for civilian power. I have known this for a couple of years. Kirk Sorenson like me is an aerospace engineer and he got into the MSR development while working at NASA on solving how to power a Lunar Base. Kirk's been pointing how Canada has kept their development programs going for years. Leslie Dewan who was famous for the WAMSR told congress a few years ago that the biggest problem in America was the lack of government development funding. Its why all the nuclear tech development including SMRs, Gen 4 PWRs and MSRs whether fueled by Uranium or Thorium are all not where they need to be. AND THEY ALL point at Canada saying "look what they are doing" and they have been saying it for years.
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  384.  @richardpatterson302  On those SMRs in Ontario I highly recommend hearing what James Krellenstein said to Decouple Media in the video Small Misunderstood Reactors. I can tell you what he said but its best you go watch for yourself.
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  385. Yeah I sort of agree. I'm Australian but went to college in America which is 1/2 my interest in such things. The other 1/2 is the fact our government is trying its hardest to become the 51st state before Puerto Rico becomes the 51st. Peter's problem is he's using strategic analysis rather than with political and mob psychology analysis. He completely missed the effects of Citizens United on campaign finance. what ACTUALLY got changed with campaign finance laws and the Super Pacs and is instead focused on what Obama did with millions of small donors to beat Hilary which is also what Trump has been doing except he treats it all as his own piggy bank. He's also missed something Thom Hartman pointed out. In the last midterms America's billionaires spent over $900 million via Super Pacs of which over $800 million came from about 25 people. I'd suggest he go back and watch the 2012 PBS Frontline on Citizens United. Even today that doco should be mandatory if you want to know these people.
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  386. @ That's a fair comment and I HAVE HEARD IT BEFORE and every time I ask people to explain what Peter gets wrong about geopolitics or demographics I get CRICKETS
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  387.  @JustBill82  Are you really trying to claim Rubio is competent??? WTF is he competent at other than being another of the spineless, gutless, pathetic Trump suck-up brigade????
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  388. I am no Trump supporter, in fact I consider him a corrupt pig of the worst kind, BUT I was challenged by a Trumpist recently to say 1 good thing about his presidency. I gave him 3. 1) He didn't start a new war, as in he didn't deploy America to a new theatre, even though he came close and was urged on by people like John Bolton. Also he failed to end Afghanistan. 2) He tore up NAFTA which just wasn't working although how he went about it wasn't good. Yes it needed to be renegotiated or replaced but he didn't need to give Canada the finger or call Mexicans rapists. 3) He proved beyond all doubt that if the political establishment takes their position for granted they can get their butts kicked right out the door into the gutter. This is maybe the one truly great thing he did and its been needed to smack the establishment parties EVERYWHERE out of their ignorant arrogant drug induced alcohol fuelled haze. I'd list his bad things but I don't have 3 weeks to spare let alone 3 months.
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  389. Reagan said a lot of things that sounded great BUT IN PRACTICE America trampled all over those ideals whenever it was convenient.
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  390. HEY PETER Can you please hire an engineer to help you out with this stuff so that none of us keep having to call you out on this stuff. 1) This is NOT a 5 minute 36 second issue. 2) There is going to be a massive double digit possibly triple digit $$$TRILLION build outs ANYWAY. 3) Thanks to all of the microphone hogging clowns with vested interests with big money backing NOBODY has done anything close to what they needed to do over the last 30 years. Those IDI0TS have tied everything up in endless discussions. AND my scorn for those people is aimed at BOTH SIDES. I hold the Greenie CLOWNS just as much contempt as the Fossil Fuel M0R0NS. 4) The easiest way for anyone to see the problem is to go and look at the lists of power stations for any state or nation. You can find them on Wikipedia. What you need to look at are the LARGER power stations and particularly those rated at 1,000MW or more. I call these Gigawatt-class power stations because 1GW = 1,000MW. BUT WHAT is most important is that these are BASE LOAD power stations. They supply the power that keeps everything going 24/7. You'll find that we all pretty, much stopped building them in the 1990s as we privatised all of our energy markets. THE REASON IS SIMPLE - there is no viable business case for building large scale energy plants any longer. Gone are the days when you could just slap things together BECAUSE our populations have grown and we need plants that are much larger. 1GW sized power plants were once considered huge now they are average at best. My country of Australia has 22.6 GW of coal fired power plants to replace because NO MATTER what they are old and wearing out. EVEN WORSE is that they were built well before our population reached 20 million and we are now 26million with plans to be well over 40million by 2050. So we not only have to DOUBLE that 22.6 GW by then as well as add more to that so that we can power all of the electric cars, trucks, vans and busses we want to use. If you take the costs of Hinkley Point C in Britain the cost to just build the power stations is over AU$1.2 Trillion but if you then add in the costs of upgrades the power grid will need that goes past AU$2 Trillion very quickly and may push it past AU$3 Trillion. Go look at your own country (or state) and check out your larger power stations and then check your population growth. What might save us a lot on costs will be the sort of POPULATION DECLINE that many countries are facing and Peter is better than me at explaining. YES PETER and FRIENDS we are in some seriously deep crap when it comes to energy and you all need to start listening to us engineers because we are the ones you are all expecting to solve this.
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  391.  @cavaleer  thanks. I'm actually very upset with the Australian government being sucked into to spending billions of dollars on sci-fi fantasy stuff that I have known for 35+ years is BS. I actually put up a proposal to the government for an AU$720 Million civilian space program focused on water and land management. I got told there wasn't enough money for anything like that. They then gave the RAAF AU7 Billion with a 'B' for "Space Defense" including soft satellite kill technologies - as in a revitalised Ronald Regan/Donald Trump Star Wars/Space Force system. 🤦‍♂🤦‍♂🤦‍♂🤦‍♂
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  392.  @SeruraRenge11  Yeah - have you asked Elon about that???? I think he calls it the Tesla-ille or Teslille??? I think its being made in the same lab as the Tesla-bot???
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  393.  @dylanthomas12321  Please STOP believing the crap and nonsense you keep being told in the media. They are NOT engineers. MOST if not all of what they say is produced for them by special interests. Often its from think tanks who are funded by the military contractors who want the contracts to "do stuff." Its the portrayal of what these hypersonic gliders can do that annoys me as its so misleading and the only intent is to get some juicy contract. There's incredible amounts of money in weapons development contracts. things don't even need to work they just need to have the appearance they might work to get the development contracts. How do you think those "gliders' get to that height and get to those speeds? They're just a development of what's been available since the 1950s when the first ICBMs were made available. All those gliders are is an upgraded version of those systems. Its just told to the public as something new and fantastic. The first warheads from ICBMS were guided during the final stages of flight. They have manoeuvring but its nowhere near the ducking, dipping and weaving shown in the graphics. This notion of doing that at speeds above Mach 5 is simply nonsense. To glide you need air thick enough to glide and manoeuvre. If you have air you also have drag and at Mach 5 that means a lot of heat from air friction. the problems just mount and mount once you start going supersonic and particularly after Mach 2. Its difficult to explain how extraordinary the SR-71 really was without a series of lectures and it only went Mach 3.3. The Russians tried to match its speed with the Mig 25 and for it to go that sort of speed it wrecked the engines. It was something the Russians kept secret for many years. At full speed they threw the engines away afterwards and in some cases the entire aircraft. These guys want to go faster than Mach 5. Think of it this way. Just as lift and drag are functions of velocity squared (v²), the difficulties of supersonic flight are a function of the Mach number squared (M²). Mach 1 is hard Mach 2 is 4 times harder ... Mach 5 is 25 times harder and it just gets worse after that.
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  394. ​ @kilpatrickkirksimmons5016  Yep you have it right. At those speeds they fly straight and very little else. To any pilot who's done aerobatics its not dissimilar to rolling-g. I've done aerobatics and there's upper speed limits to things like flick rolls or you can rip the wings off. There's an old story about the SR71 the day it broke the transatlantic record. The story I heard was it was going so fast that as it went past Britain it just kept gong and was 1/2 way to Russia before it made the turn back to Britain. How far it really went is debatable but the fact it couldn't simply turn around at Mach 3+ should tell people heaps. These are the sorts of things that drive engineers and scientists crazy all the time. The media no longer care about facts - its all narrative.
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  395.  @Redmanticore  And for the record NOBODY uses sensors to recognise things like uniforms they use vision systems AND since you clearly don't know the difference between sensors and vision systems then its obvious you're NOT and engineer and haven't a damn clue what you're talking about. Ask questions why these things wont happen don't tell people who do know this stuff garbage - WE ARE TIRED OF IT.
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  396. ​ @chriswatson1698  No it doesn't. As Peter has often pointed out urbanisation has far more to do with lowering the birth rate than anything, Following urbanisation the next biggest factor in falling birth rates is the education of women. Yeah I know it sounds incredibly patriarchal but the fact is the more educated women get the fewer children they have. Every time somebody analyses census data and shows it the feminists go nuts. Go watch the start of the film Idiocracy, its actually very close to the truth. As for Australia's housing issues its NOT so much an immigration issue but a collection of idiotic economic policies. Its like a disease that has slightly different symptoms in each patient. In Australia it shows up mainly in our housing market. In America it shows up in their health care. In Britain its currently showing up in their electricity market. Make no mistake they are all symptoms of the same disease. I'm, an engineer and a few years back started informally studying economics because I got so frustrated with interference on projects by clowns with economics degrees. I just wanted to be able to push back at their nonsense. I've watched and listened to a lot of pretty smart well credentialed people here on YT. Its how I ended up watching a lot of Peter Z. His explanations of geopolitics helps explain a lot of this stuff at the macro level, especially when you add it into what some of the economists have been saying for a while. Go watch the channel Gary's Economics here on YT. Gary Stevenson graduated from the LSE and went to work for Citibank where he was there top trader in the world for a couple of years. But he comes from a working class and could see how things were affecting people. So he went of to Oxford and did a masters. His explanations of why economics is failing are brilliant. Go watch his video titled "Why are economists always wrong?"
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  397.  @chriswatson1698  Just stop being stupid and wasting people's time and just google "fertility rate versus education" You'll find dozens of studies from all over the developed world. If you take a country like Bangladesh and start educating the girls then you will get exactly the fall in fertility rate that's seen and they will start asking for contraception BECAUSE THEY'LL KNOW WHAT IT IS. Go compare Bangladesh to India and Pakistan. India started educating their girls then Bangladesh and Pakistan have barely started.
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  398.  @emceeboogieboots1608  I have heard that "51st State" line for over 50 years. Maybe not in those exact words but its there. Remember when we had that seat on the UN Security council and basically the entire UN called us America's second vote. Even when we were trying to get that seat the criticism from many was that all we'd do is be America's second vote.
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  399. The 30 Years War was called the 30 Years war for a reason. The 100 Years War was called the 100 Years war for a reason. Forever Wars are called Forever Wars for a reason.
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  400.  @AWAVAVA  WHICH NUMBERS??? The 1.5 billion registered cars and 500 million trucks is there on Wikipedia. YEAH there really are that many cars and trucks AND They will all eventually wear out and need replacing ANYWAY. AND the same goes for all the power stations. As for the several hundred years of Lithium production. Simon Michaux who's an engineer from the mining industry calculated that. Its fairly simple. He just looked at how much lithium Elon puts into his Tesla's and his trucks and looked at current Lithium production. I didn't make those numbers up. This is what infuriates engineers. We tell people much stuff needs to be done and then people throw SHlT at us.
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  401.  @calc1657  Good question and the answer is YES. One thing I hear so few mention is that there's not just one sort of reaction going on in a reactor, Its NOT like burning coal or methane where there's a specific chemical reaction. In a reactor you get a range of reactions going on that can include neutrons being absorbed, different types of radioactive decay and atoms splitting. The reactor design and how its operated affects what happens and what's available in the fuel rods. Many of the first generation of British reactors were purposefully designed (breeder reactors) and operated to get as much plutonium as possible.
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  402.  @careylymanjones  YEAH I KNOW ALL THAT - please read what I said.
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  403.  @jfarm30  that's as valid of a question as it gets. What bothers me is that NOBODY is publicly stating HOW WE KNEW they had a weapons program. Most of the people claiming it was a weapons program are just making an assumption based on their own personnel beliefs & bias. I was in a group of ~20 people and we had it explained HOW WE KNEW and that was 2005 (19+ years ago) and I have not heard anyone stand up and say "YES WE KNEW and this is HOW WE KNEW." 🙅‍♂🙅‍♀🙅‍♂🙅‍♀🙅‍♂🙅‍♀
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  404.  @jfarm30  There's something that scares me way way worse than nuclear weapons. The chance of someone using a nuclear weapon is low because everyone that has them knows the consequences if they one. Even the craziest North Korean or Iranian knows if they throw 1 then 10 more will come back. What worries me is some clown in a lab playing God with genetics. During COVID when the whole Gain of Function hysteria was going on DW (Germans) did one of the very few decent honest vid stories on the subject. In it the mentioned Ron Fouchier a Dutch researcher who in 2011 announced he'd cooked up a version of Bird Flu that turned out to be the most dangerous virus in human history AND NOBODY KNEW HE WAS DOING IT. He went to tell the whole world how he did it by publishing his work. The Dutch government slammed that door shut but Ron Fouchier took them to court because he wanted his Nobel Prize. Thankfully the Dutch Courts agreed with the Dutch government and said "NO!" That's what scares me. Someone doing something insane in a lab somewhere and there's no supervision and nobody knows what they are doing.
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  405.  @jaydugger3291  Yeah if you watch some of his longer presentations they are mostly just variations of the same thing. Its not that I find that egregiously wrong cause most of those things need repeating. Its more a case people need to be aware that Peter's knowledge and analysis has limits and in the case of engineering its very limited.
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  406.  @Tre-77  That's a great question. My initial response is: Like everyone else with any interest in the matter the only people who EXACTLY know what the Israelis have is the Israelis. I doubt even the American's know exactly what they have. So I did a quick check: Start reading the Wikipedia page for "Nuclear power in Israel" when you get down to the IRR2 there's a link to the Wikipedia page for the Negev Research. Read through that page and not what's said in the section on construction and then down further for what Mordechai Vanunu told the world about that site. Also take note of what the American's have said.
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  407. Go watch Kyle Kulinski and other left commentators talk about him. They savage him every time he pops his head up and for the lack of stuff he got done. Particularly when he had a super majority.
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  408.  @nicholascarter9158  In terms of the planet its tiny amounts of nothing. But in terms of upsetting the natural systems its a different story. The oxygen used in iron ore smelting isn't destroyed. The oxygen still exists, but its shifted from being part of Fe2O3 (iron Oxide)or one of the other oxides to CO2. CO2 isn't a problem so long as there is enough plant life to consume it back into O2. Here's the longer story. I did my degree in aerospace and way back in 86 an alum who worked at NASA gave us a special talk one Friday. We were kinda exited because his last project was on terraforming Mars. The news wasn't good. He introduced us to what I now call "planetary mechanics" which is simply calculating how much stuff is involved. Making things like water cycles and oxygen cycles and carbon cycles work is what I call "planetary dynamics." Its sort of the difference between how many car parts and what they all weigh versus assembling all those parts into a working car. To give you an idea of the sorts of numbers involved the surface of the earth is roughly 500,000km² If you consider just the 1st kilometer of air above the surface of the Earth its pretty close to 500,000km³ in volume. In engineering there's HVAC (heating, ventilation & air conditioning) and HVAC works in meters cubed because that's practical for a house or an office block. That 1st kilometer of air in which 90% of humanity lives is roughly 500,000,000,000,000m³ that's 500 quadrillion cubic meters of air. At that's just the 1st kilometer there's at least 99 more on top of it although most of those are fairly thin. But then there' the oceans and water being more dense the weight of water is another damn big number. Bottom line is we live on a very big object with an insanely complex biological system powered by a big giant ball of plasma. Unfortunately science fiction (which I do love) has badly misrepresented science in many ways and the media have been no help either. In short we are NOT going to run out of stuff, which is good. The problem is we have upset the balance of that complex system we depend on for life. Added to that we don't understand enough of how that system works so that we can help nudge it back into balance.
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  409.  @nicholascarter9158  That's a great question and I don't have an answer. The thing with refining most minerals is that they are net oxygen producing processes not oxygen consuming. Most minerals like iron are oxides and the problem is getting rid of the oxygen. The reason they want pure oxygen for a blast furnace so they are not adding impurities. The reason that metallurgical coal is 2-3times the price of thermal coal is that it has almost zero impurities. Most coal includes sulphur sulphur when it burns produces SO2 which tends to become S03 and that likes to combine with water into H2SO4 better known as sulphuric acid. That's what caused the acid rain crisis in North America that was killing off their forests. They burned cheap coal from places like Southern Illinois that had a very high sulphur content. It was fine for power stations but lousy for steel manufacturing. For that you needed that nice clean black coal from places like West Virginia and Pennsylvania. hence why there were so many steel mills in Pennsylvania. Similarly if you just pump air into a blast furnace 80% of that is Nitrogen and Nitrogen does form compounds with metals (nitrides) including iron. Its great using air if that's what you want but lousy if you want just straight steel. For many other metals they dissolve the ore with acid (or similar) into a solution. Depending on the metal they will then get it back out of solution by various methods. A common way is electrowinning which is basically electrolysis in reverse. On a place like the moon all of that goes away. If you can get any compound hot enough it will breakdown. If done in a vacuum then the gases will just boil away and leave behind the metal. On the moon there's no shortage of direct sunlight and vacuum. It might be as simple as putting ore into a crucible and focusing light on it with mirrors. Its also know with lunar regolith (moon dust) that at around 800C before it melts that it tends to release oxygen and hydrogen that then forms water. So the whole, "how you do stuff" is a bit different on the moon because of what's available. Its really no different to various places here. Why do some countries have lots of Hydro power or lots of wheat farming or lots of fishing? Its what they have.
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  410. I think Peters assessment on the microchips was very good but less on this. The Russians didn't damage Nord Stream (why would they when its a cash cow) and the Americans made no secret they wanted Germany to not become reliant of Russian gas while Putin was in power. Plus America has staggering amounts of gas that it simply burns. Go watch one of Peter's longer talks where he shows satellite photos of America at night. The Americans don't want to keep burning that gas they want to sell it and make money. Its a pretty damn simple thing to understand why America or "certain Americans" with a lot of influence didn't want Nord Stream 2 to come on line. I think this will be a rough patch but Germany will get through it. FYI - I'm Australian and I know we can send you a few boatloads of LNG to get you through the winter.
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  411. AUSTRALIAN ENGINEER HERE ATTENTION ALL Engineers like Simon Michaux have been trying to point out these issues for several years now. Currently Teslas require slightly more than 60kgs of Lithium. There are (according to Wikipedia) 1.5 Billion registered cars in the world and 500 million registered trucks. 1) The amount of energy and production required to fully replace those 1.5 Billion cars exceeds what we currently have. Its not generally well known but MORE ENERGY is consumed in making a car than it consumes 20-25 years depending on how much its used. So to fully replace those 1.5 Billion cars is a massive task in energy and resources. 2) EVEN IF we just re-life all the internal combustion engine (ICE) cars as EVs we need between 80 and 90 million tons of Lithium. Currently the worlds know reserves are between 21 and 26 million tons (See Wikipedia). As Simon Michaux likes to say. "The energy transition isn't impossible, but we need a better plan." WE NEED to as Peter says, spend huge on material science and come up with better solutions and then plan how we implement those solutions.
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  412. AUSTRALIAN HERE: I have been saying for months now that the GREATEST THREAT to the entire Western developed world are these culture war M0R0NS in America who think that ANYONE who does not agree 1,000,000,000% with their latest whim is the worst human ever and needs to be locked up or exterminated. If the security issues affect America it ALSO AFFECTS AMERICA'S ALLIES like Australia, Canada, Japan, Britain,.... BUTas Peter has pointed out the US$ is the worlds reserve currency AND ITS NOT CHANGING because its simply impractical to change. SO NONE OF US can afford America to become either unreliable or unstable because some rednecks want to play chicken with BOTH America's security and America's economy at the same time. I have heard all of Peters arguments about why America DEMOGRAPHICALLY is fine going forward while the rest of us are in serious trouble (including Australia and yes Pete thanks for the heads up on that because NOBODY here speaks about it) BUT THIS ISSUE IS ALSO OUR ISSUE. What happens to everyone else if the crazy faction of American politics, who believe in anything but actual facts, gets even more power than they have now and start doing some really bonkers stuff like cancelling all support for Ukraine as they're threatening? Yeah they'll do stuff that sends America into a spin but this sort of stuff affects the other 7.7 Billion people on the planet in ways that ARE NOT PRODUCTIVE.
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  413.  @jimgraham6722  I can see CANDUs going in where Hazelwood and Liddell were. Both already have the Grid Connection and BOTH have the water needed. If the grid connection has been removed for Hazelwood the alley is still there. Plus if needed Hazelwood could repurpose the pit as extra cooling storage. The same can also be said for future potential sites like Yallourn North. Does that mean we should just start and get going? Almost, but at the least we need a SENSIBLE public discussion where all the ratbags are DENIED the microphone. By ratbags I mean the ratbags on BOTH sides. Some of the pro-nuclear people are the WORST. Their arrogance stinks and makes sensible discussion impossible. The Greenies are so deluded they aren't worth wasting time on.
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  414. ​ @jimgraham6722  Portland doesn't have the Fresh water but could use sea water but in its favor there's high powered energy link to Melbourne that was put in for the Aluminum smelter. Its possible but not as practical as the La Trobe valley. Liddell is next to Lake Liddell, near Muswellbrook in the Hunter Valley of Australia. Maybe you're thinking of one of the other soon to be decommission coal fired units in NSW. Almost any coal fired power station is reasonably good for nuclear because: 1) The cooling water is available. 2) The link to the grid is available. 3) You already have a workforce trained in operating and maintaining the steam side of the system right there. They just need to swap the coal skills for nuclear skills which in Australia's case will (long term) come via the Navy.
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  415.  @davidjknell  That's a nice lateral thought but its just not that simple. For starters how many reactors and how much power do you think they bring for this task? Second you can't just connect any generator to a power grid. You have to sync the generator to the grid or its damn ugly when you close the breaker.
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  416.  @jaeger251  In what universe do you live???? Look down the comments list and see how many Canadians and others are mentioning health care.
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  417.  @BeAsOpinionatedAsOpenMinded  Nice tag shame your opinion is idiotic and your mind is so closed Danny Ocean can't find a way to open it.
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  418. Before anyone gets too many ideas just remember here's the list of major American conflicts since WW2. Korea - Draw Vietnam - LOST Grenada - WIN but it was against a tiny Caribbean island Desert Storm - WIN but did not knock out the bad guy. Afghanistan - LOST to the Islamic equivalent of Hillbillies. Iraq - LOST more men than in 9/11 and spent over $1 Trillion. That puts America since WW2 at a win-loss-draw record of 2-3-1. If America was a football team you'd sack the coach and look for a new QB.
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  419. Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait America invading Iraq The Russians invading Afghanistan in the 1980s The Americans invading Afghanistan in the 2000s The Germans invading Russia in WW2 The Italians joining the Germans in WW2 The Germans listening to an Austrian before he started WW2. The Japanese bombing Pearl Harbour and not getting the Aircraft carriers. The Australians and New Zealanders trusting the British in WW1 and WW2 that they had a plan. That whole Korean thing. That whole Vietnam thing. That stuff that happened in Mogadishu. ALL that stuff in Israel & Palestine. YEAH that list just keeps getting longer and longer the more I think about it and that just the last century and a bit.
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  420. There was no pipeline sabotaged in Poland it was in the Baltic in Swedish waters, Please stick to the facts.
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  421.  @peterblood50  LOOK AT WHAT YOU WROTE - THESE ARE YOUR WORDS "You also predicted the pipelines going through Poland would be sabotaged. We don't know yet if that's what happened but it's a possibility." How is anybody meant to read that other than you have just said that the pipeline that was sabotaged was in Poland or Polish waters?
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  422.  @rajahferrier7475  No not all of them, just an awful lot of them.
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  423.  @tribalismblindsthembutnoty124  I think you missed the point of the quote. Go read some of the other comments on this page.
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  424. Bullsh1T, horsesh1t, crapsh1t and every other kind of sh1t you care to consider. It was always about 1 thing - getting Europe to buy American LNG instead of Russian LNG. Go look at Peters discussions where he shows the satellite photograph of America at night where it shows the Bakken shale oil field and all the gas they just burn off. Off all the stupid things Americans do its one of the worst, but they've woken up and now know they can sell it for money. What they need is a willing market wanting to buy boat loads of LNG. If America gets the Germans to get off Russian gas then America gets a market to sell gas into. As usual American foreign policy is first and foremost about oil & gas.
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  425.  @RyTrapp0  Obviously you aren't paying attention to the child labor laws being pushed in several states. But then Americans seem to be proud of their ignorance and by ignorance I mean the fact you IGNORE stuff.
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  426.  @Mr_Fairdale  As I just said to the other clown go check the child labor laws several states are enacting.
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  427.  @USandGlobal  I know it hurts but try thinking. Its not a crime.
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  428.  @Mr_Fairdale  Fark you lot are sensitive toady aren't you. Did I hit a raw nerve or something. I actually like lot about America. I love things like college sport, NASCAR and the NFL - go Niners. BUT your farking politics and economics that you have rammed down the throats of the rest of the world is wearing thin. The BS and fantasy about America being true and righteous annoys the hell out of the other 7.7 Billion people on the planet. Its made worse by the idiotic IGNORANCE Americans have about the rest of the world and in particular what American corporations get up to.
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  429.  @ricoismydaddy2232  Then open your eyes and look SOUTH for the burning crosses. Yes they are a small minority but don't try and deny that they exist. FYI - EVERY society has them. It might not be that obvious but they're there.
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  430.  @Paint-brigade1776  I got 2 words for you. One word is OFF see if your lizard brain can guess the other!!!!
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  431. yeah that crowd know EXACTLY what a woman is. She's the big girl who does what she's told and gets on the bed.
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  432.  @BigSnipp  Yeah that's a common problem for that crowd. Triumph the Insult Dog summed them up well when he asked "What's more likely? Haitians eat cats or Republicans eat Pussy!"
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  433. At 53:44 in this vid posted the same day he called John Mearsheimer's assessment as "horse shit" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdP01go8wdQ And I checked the population of the countries he lists is 263 Million. Add in Finland and its 268 million. Russia's population is around 140 million.
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  434.  @USandGlobal  Yeah I'd agree but that's only because its so rare that the Americans actually do what places like Australian and Britain do. Forget the elections our parties rip themselves apart on such a regular basis its hard to know who in charge today let alone tomorrow. We used to have jokes about how many New Zealanders were coming to Australia. They ended up throwing that back at us with - "Which one of you is in charge and will you still be in charge tomorrow?" I'm certain if there was a Far Side for Australian politics it would have aliens landing and saying "Take us to your leader" and the Australian asking "Which one - today's or tomorrow's?"
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  435.  @USandGlobal  Just wait for the Brits to finally stop howling and work out exactly how they were conned into Brexit. Plenty of them know but few have ever listened. It wasn't the Russians although they did their bit of meddling. It was actually an American billionaire doing a Beta Test of his public manipulation systems. His name is Robert Mercer. He's a reclusive tech billionaire with some weird views on how the world should work. He's most known for funding Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica and Brexit was a Beta Test of what they had at Cambridge Analytica and because NOBODY has held him accountable he's still out there with a lot of money, people, skill sets and technology. He actually did his PhD at the same university I did my degree at.
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  436.  @thelonerick  The French subs aren't outdated. They are the latest development. The version we were buying with had what might be considered an outdated power plant but that was all. What also might have been questionable is were we getting the latest versions of all the electronic surveillance and weapons systems. If you want to talk about something that is outdated go and look at the Sub Brief (here on YT) about the German 212 CD from about a year ago. He talks about the outer hull shape which has changed from the earlier versions and how that shape is consistent with stealth aircraft. he notes that the British Astute also incorporates similar design features BUT the American Virginia DOES NOT. So if we are talking about being out dated the we possibly should be talking about the Virginia HULL DESIGN.
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  437. Funny thing is the Russians aren't in any better of a place in terms of manufacturing than America is. A while back (and I believe Peter talked about this) the Ukrainians were consuming things like Stinger missiles so fast that it was going to be impossible for anyone to supply them. What they were getting was older stock that was close to being sent for destruction which you have to do with older munitions because things like the explosives become unstable or just have no bang at all. I remember Peter talking about the Russians and their issues with that. At the start of this war America was in the process of moving from one generation of Stinger to the next, but there was a screw up in the logistics. They were running out of the older guidance chips and the new production line for the next gen guidance chips would not be ready for 2-3 years. Minding that if you're the country that starts a war and you don't have enough bullets to get the job done and have to go to a country like North Korea then YEAH - YOU'RE HOSED.
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  438. Cheeky Australian here - 👍👍😉😉🤣🤣😅😅🤷‍♂🤷‍♂🤔🤔🤦‍♂🤦‍♂ So many emojis and not enough time to put them all up for that comment.
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  439. YEAH - Go watch Jeff Daniels famous "Why America is NOT the Greatest" from the Newsroom. Why do people hate Liberals? Because they're losers. If they are so damn smart how come they keep losing.
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  440. What do all these places have in common. Public discussions dominated by economists, lawyers, charlatans, con men, consultants, greenies AND geopolitical strategists while very one tells the engineers who can fix these problems to go sit in the corner and shut up. There are many things we can do but first of all the rest of the "I have an opinion based on nothing" brigade need to shut up.
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  441.  @davidanon1568  Regarding Epstein: Now you need to visualise 4 people. One standing on a chair. One standing next to the chair but lifting up the 3rd person up so that persons head is about chest level with the guy on the chair and the 4th standing by the door. Q: What did the CIA assassin say to the MI6 assassin? A: You're tying the knot wrong! Q: What did the MI6 assassin say back to the CIA assassin? A: Just shut up and hold him still. Q: What did the Mossad assassin say to both of them? A: Will you 2 just get on with it. I only paid the guards to be gone for 1/2 an hour.
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  442.  @sampainter8151  As I have said to others I went to college in America in the late 80s at a time when people still did things like Civics at high school. So I have been around long enough to know what happened with de-regulating the American Savings & Home loans industry. When it was properly regulated I think it was one of the greatest things any nation has ever done for its people. I remember seeing a documentary on the 90s S&L scandal and they went right into the history of the S&L system so that they could explain what happened when they de-regulated it. The brilliance of that system was that it not only secured the banks form bad debts it also protected the home owners from bad times. It also meant that they didn't need to pay home loan insurance every year like we do in Australia. AND SO WE ARE CLEAR him loan insurance in Australia does NOT protect the home owner it bails out the bank. If we had a similar system here people would be putting that extra money each month into their home loans instead of into the pockets of some seriously greedy people. Because Australia has had this insane housing bubble caused by some stupid policies all geared towards protecting investors we are now at risk of having so many loans fail at once that NOTHING can prevent a massive collapse. Not only will people be unable to sell the banks wont be able to sell the repossessed homes because NOBODY will have money for them except the billionaires who'll screw everyone down to pennys on the dollar. It will be a death spiral of epic proportions.
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  443.  @stylembonkers1094  Well SHlIT4BRAINS let me explain it this way. There is the market price and THAT'S ALL THERE IS because market price is called REALITY. There is no such thing as what it should be. There's projections, estimates, guesses, desires, controls, manipulation and even hope BUT THERE IS NO SUCH THING as what it should be. So NOBODY not even the God of free market capitalism Milton Friedman can answer your ignorant question. And yes I did take a class in economics that's how I know this.
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  444.  @stuartstibbs2069  Why am I supposed to specifically talk about Lima DlCKHEAD when the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), NAFTA, the European Common Market and other free trade agreements have done a lot more damage to Australia and for a lot longer. Lima was nothing but something for ignorant clowns like you to squeal about. It wasn't even a real agreement like the FTAs. The loss of Australian manufacturing had NOTHIGN to do with UNIDO or Lima or the declarations. We lost our car industry because Australian economists like Keating and Costello didn't like manufacturing and wanted to re-model Australia into a service based economy. So go waste someone else's time.
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  445.  @davidmallender7878  I think you'll find that Gough was just another link in a very long chain. Its just some of those links are more problematic than others and trying to figure out which link was or is the weakest link is almost impossible.
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  446.  @dougdownunder5622  I think I get where your going but can you give some more details rather than trying to assume what you mean because I think your comment might apply to a lot more than just migrants. For example what about first home buyers and even those who have moved to a larger home because they now have a family or people who've down sized because the kids have fled the nest. Plus right now we know Australia has a lot of household financial distress and a lot of home loans are in distress. So my gut says YOU'RE RIGHT but there's indicators that don't agree. On Wikipedia there's a page that lists countries by wealth per adult. On MEDIAN wealth Australia ranks 4th and on MEAN wealth Australia ranks 6th Interestingly Iceland, A country that was bankrupt beyond bankrupt after the 2008 GFC is. On MEDIAN they're 1st and on MEAN they're 5th. Of real interest on that page is the column for GINI which is a measure of wealth distribution and is indicative of wealth inequality and on that Australia drops to 9th while Iceland is 6th. I think there is something wrong that these indicators don't show. So I'm honestly asking what it is that you know or feel about this?
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  447.  @krisushi1  And finally I really do appreciate your comment. You brought up a lot great material.
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  448.  @phillipphil1615  Have you ever heard of the The Marshall Islands in the Pacific?? Be warned if you go checking it out because some of what was done has been described as a crime. The native populations of of Rongelap and Utirik atolls were basically used as lab rats. Go look up Castle Bravo.
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  449.  @damianpeterkelly1234  That's a good description of what most of the Europeans did during the colonial era and have kept doing since. The Pacific Islanders have in recent years taken to reminding Australia and New Zealand on a regular basis that they are NO LONGER colonies and NOT a cheap supply of rugby players.
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  450.  @danielbecker4365  Nice way to prove your an IDIOT with racist tendencies. My first comment was sarcasm. Sorry it hit a raw nerve with the ignorant red neck crowd and they needed some reality thrown back. And right now America needs a giant dose of reality or did you miss that SHlTFEST of a GOP debate that the rest of the world is shaking it collective head at. If you look at that pack of clowns do you really think the rest of the world want's them in control of nuclear weapons? Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy are arguably 2 of the best educated among that crowd and I wouldn't trust either of them with a box of matches let alone anything that can go bang.
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  451.  @ivancho5854  Your right, except its a combination of YouTube and the main stream media to blame for the misrepresentation of engineering and technology in general. The Greens are in the majority badly informed and for too many a religious like movement, BUT NOT all of them. Back around 2005 there was a monster split in Greenpeace. The practical people said that the way to replace coal fired power stations was a combination of wind, solar and nuclear. They reasoned that you needed nuclear for base load stability. They were screamed at and driven away. There was a great observation attributed to Jonathan Haidt that went basically "There's a cacophony where the radical Left and Radical Right just scream at each other while the rest of us trapped in the middle are exhausted!" It highlights how difficult it is to have any public discussion these days because there's always somebody from one side or the other who will just snatch the microphone and start screaming. Their view is very simple "Either you're on my side or you are the enemy." As in there is no middle ground. Its not helped by a media landscape that feeds off conflict and rage. Its also not helped by armies of PR people who see inflaming any and every public discussion into a rage fest as a way to do business. Best wishes to you too. Where ever you are I hope you and your family are good.
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  452. I SUGGEST EVERYONE go and watch the YT channel What's going on with shipping host by Sam Mercogliano. Sam's actually a genuine Subject Matter Expert on commercial shipping and the issues with commercial shipping. Sam's been the best person to explain the issues with the Red Sea and the Houthi attacks and how they are effecting things. On the issue with Baltimore, he just did a vid on the insurance issues and how the insurance for shipping is completely different to normal insurance. Peter has pointed out the insurance issues with shipping a few times but Sam understands it and can explain it at another level. Peter might be right on a lot of things but there are a number of subjects where there are better people to listen to.
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  453. I'm similar, I think Trump was an utter catastrophe but Biden is also NOT a step in the right direction. America and the rest of the Western hemisphere needs forward vision not backwards. But this is an interesting turn of events considering the number of claims that he and his son Hunter did huge deals earning millions of dollars with the CCP. The only question I'd have to Peters' assessment is how much has he factored in that the Chinese have already bought or stolen an incredible amount of technical information and that maybe behind this move. The Chinese might have finally taken something that's forced the US to say "enough." The other thing is they have had people at Western Universities for over 20 years learning how to do a lot of stuff. So I'd agree this will smash the Chinese manufacturing industry in the short term, but they do have the people with at lease some of the skills recover down the line. As an engineer I'd tend to put the issue in terms of project management Because if the Chinese want to build a midrange semi-conductor plant their problem will be finding someone capable of putting it all together.
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  454.  @borisbadenov8613  Have a look at what I wrote DlCKHEAD I said Alumina NOT Aluminium. Learn to read.
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  455.  @xiaoranmo7308  Hey I have explained it so many times its getting tired. Australia is the 51st State BECAUSE WE PAID FOR IT. Canada didn't pay for it and Puerto Rico didn't pay for so they can fight over who gets to be 52nd and 53rd.
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  456. ​ @njartvideos7694  That's not a bad way to put it. I think half the worlds problems are actually cultural misunderstandings. One of the great mistakes of the British was the policy to "make the whole world British." Just as bad is the current American policy to "make the whole world American." Which is matched by equally stupid policies out of Russia and China.
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  457.  @karandullet380  Like so many other societies India is NOT free of politically inspired murder (assassination). Go back to Roman times they almost made it the national pass time in between gladiator contests. They spread that to every part of Europe they went. If you read up on English history and especially the Tudor period it almost looks like there was another political murder each day. I'm certain you'll find it in almost any society that develops a competitive political structure.
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  458.  @rishavkumar1250  WTF are you talking about. I know the Bible very well and there's NO CASTE SYSTEM anywhere in Christianity. I covered Islam in high school and there was no mention of a caste system. I have worked with a few Muslims and they've NEVER mentioned a caste system. So WTF are you on about?
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  459.  @person1858  Somebody else said similar. However NONE of the Indian people I have worked with or known socially have ever mentioned anything about it and there's been a few have ever mentioned it. In a wat it doesn't surprise me if it happens in some odd way because Catholicism in particular has always let local peoples adapt some of their practices into Catholicism. In fact I have heard people claim that Catholicism is so riddled with older European pagan practices its barely recognisable as Christianity. The most notable example of this is Santa Claus which is a Nordic pagan thing.
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  460.  @person1858  All that said there is NOTHING in the texts or practice of European Christianity that includes any sort of caste system. And to the best of my knowledge there's nothing in Islam about any sort of caste system either.
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  461.  @Skunk106  That's a valid point, but America in every case wanted to and tried to install its own puppet regimes in those countries. Underneath it all Putin's a Soviet era goon and the Soviets used to invade and install puppet regimes the same as America did. I think you're right that this time its a bit different, but who knows what Putin's actual aim really is. Is it take over and absorb or is it invade and install a puppet regime.
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  462.  @Skunk106  I also think you are 100% idiotically deluded to think that America only ever installed independent regimes that treated their people well. Sorry but that didn't happen in South Vietnam and it was even worse in places like Iran, Guatemala and Chile where America installed some of the Cold War era's worst and most vicious dictators.
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  463.  @lorizoli  Good points.
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  464.  @johnhargreaves3620  YES I AM WELL AWARE that many of the SMRs proposed are based on the military units out of subs and aircraft carriers. Its one of the main reasons I tell people they should take what Rolls Royce, GE and Framatome say seriously and the rest of the SMR crowd as just people trying to make noise to raise money. So if one of the engineers from Rolls Royce is saying that it will be AT BEST 2035 for the first production SMRs then that's the best date and everyone else can STFU.
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  465.  @Withnail1969  What you are talking about is called HALEU fuel, which stands for High Assay Low Enriched Uranium. For uranium the dividing line between low enriched and highly enriched where it can be used for weapons is 20% U235. Natural Uranium is around 0.7% U235. Typical fuel grade is 3-5% U235. Military grade was typically around 8% but it varied depending on reactor type and how long they wanted to go between refuelling. That changed with more modern military reactors which use HALEU and is why they can go 20+ years without refuelling. HALEU is around 19-19.5% as in just below that 20% value. On that 20% value as far as I know its theoretically possible to make a critical mass device go bang with 20% but as far as I know nobody did that. Hiroshima was a combination of 50% and 80%. If you want to read up on it Wikipedia is actually very good on the subject.
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  466.  @Withnail1969  Agreed. On a basic level you need 2-5 times as many gas centrifuges depending on what your normal U235 fuel is. that alone costs a lot of money to build, operate and maintain. Then there's the TRISO fuel many are claiming they want to use. NOBODY has yet made enough of it to run a real test and prove it works. There is a real chance SMRs will find a niche but its not going to be in the next couple of years. That's just pure nonsense. I just saw Peter's latest on the Israeli attack on Iran and that's even worse than this one for basic technical facts.
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  467. That is kidnapping thing is going to end up the worst PR in Russian history. I saw the interview the Russian Minister gave a few weeks ago and she did the classic "Its not what you think" standard political reply. When they were the Soviet Union and did all that bat crap crazy stuff it was ostensibly to their own people. BUT they let all these other states become SOVEREIGN nations and what they used to do no longer applies. Putin and the clown brigade around him think they are going to reclaim a Soviet Empire that he himself once described "Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain." We really are stepping into dangerous times.
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  468. @Jon Little Yeah but Peter included it in part of his commentary. Peter's pretty good on many many things, but he's occasionally off the mark with some of the details. Like he's wrong about silver being well supplied. A lot of people might not realise it but there's less silver available to mine than gold. Its just been that historically speaking there has been enough silver. In fact ancient Athens rise as an economic power was based on a nearby silver mine and they could mint coins and trade.
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  469. @Jon Little I'm an Australian engineer and work in our mining sector. I followed what Lynas Corp our biggest rare earth producer was doing. I was working out of Perth when they made their announcements for mining and the construction of a processing plant in Malaysia. The plant in Malaysia was built because the Malaysians subsidised it. It was built was going to cost a lot more in Australia because we have environmental laws. The local Malaysians are trying to close the plant because its so bad. When Lynas were pushing their promos for investors they described a lot of what had happened. One of the biggest and richest RE deposits in the world is the hills behind Los Angeles. But it ended up in temporary shutdown because of low market prices, which is very common in the mining industry. The Chinese bought the processing machinery from that mine and took it all too China. That's also not rare in mining. Quite often people buy mines so they can move all the hardware to another mine. There are people who specialise in dismantling mine sites and selling the stuff item by item. So the Americans let the Chinese take the hardware, because they knew full well how worn it was and that the actual reserve in California would still be there for a future time. So Peter's quite right about most f this, but he misses a few details, but then I 'm an engineer and he's not.
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  470. @Jon Little DlCKHEAD Don't preach to me. I work in the mining industry.
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  471. @Jon Little WELL THEN GET YOUR FACTS RIGHT Its not a crime to use your brain before you open your mouth.
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  472.  @AUniqueHandleName444  LOOK at the comment that started this thread. Just because you think there is a LOT of something doesn't mean its over or under supplied. I can tell you have never doe a day in mining or manufacturing just by how you speak. Don't panic most people have no idea what it takes to make the world work. Even some of the smartest and wealthiest people can make stupid mistakes when it comes to the world's supply chains. My favorite of not understanding was Jeff Bezos saying he wants to move heavy industry off world so they can take advantage of unlimited solar power and not worry about pollution. A noble and wonderful idea and also utterly ridiculous. One of the iron ore mines I've worked at is Tom Price in Western Australia. It produces 20 mta (million tons per annum). Its a great place to consider because that the math is easy to follow. Good iron ore on average is about 70% iron by weight. So 20Mta of decent iron ore produces about 14 million tons of steel. The space shuttle is (to date) the only vehicle capable of bringing more than a few 100kgs back down and it could bring 14tons back down. 14 million divided by 14 is 1 million. So if Jeff Bezos wants to process that 20mta from Tom Price at his orbital refinery it will take 1 million space shuttle flights to bring back down the 14 million tons of steel. HERE'S THE PROBLEM Australia does around 815mta these days and China (internally at its own mines) does over 1,200 mta and the rest of the world does almost another 1,000 mta. All up world production of iron ore is just over 3,000 mta which would take around 150 million space shuttle flights to bring the steel back down. Even if we made a shuttle 10 times better that would still be 15million flights EACH YEAR. In 30 years the shuttle flew 135 times. Yeah what Jeff Bezos said sounds really good until you do the basic math. And its exactly the same for the rest of what the human race burns through each year and most people have no idea what any of it means.
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  473. Australian here - go see my longer comment. I clarify that point.
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  474.  @awf6554  Thanks.
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  475.  @awf6554  Have you seen the cost of the submarines. There's no limits being set their. And there weren't limits on how many F35s we could have. So what limits are you talking about.
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  476.  @awf6554  I'm Australian but went to college in America. I was there in 1985 when the David Lange said "NO Nuclear anything" to America and caused a huge stir. The Yanks blew a fuse over it. They were incensed that NZ had the audacity to say NO. More than a few of them asked me (and very bluntly) Who TF these people are to say No to America. It actually freaked them out. Whenever I replied something like "Its New Zealand. Its their country and they get to decide what happens in their country." It only freaked the Yanks out more. They really couldn't handle an ally saying "NO." So I'd say NZ has had far more separation from America than Oz has had.
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