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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