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

  1.  @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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  2.  @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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  3.  @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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  4.  @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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  5.  @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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  6.  @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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  7. 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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  8.  @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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  9.  @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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  10.  @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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  11.  @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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  12. 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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  13. 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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  14. 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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  15. 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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  16.  @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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  17. 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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  18. 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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  19.  @ExpectDragons  We hav'em in Australia too mate. Worse we also let them vote, drive cars and breed.
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  20. 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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  21. 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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  22.  @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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  23.  @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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  24. ​ @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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  25.  @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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  26.  @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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  27. ​ @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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  28.  @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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  29.  @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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  30.  @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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  31.  @kazupemaruta6990  He probably means the thick lined pants that they only wear outside when its 20below.
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  32.  @goncalovazpinto6261  Yeah there might be quite a few around the world for that matter.
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  33.  @nicklanfear4303  Go look up McArthur’s Universal Corrective Map of the World You're the ones who are down under.
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  34.  @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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  35.  @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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  36.  @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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  37.  @gregallen485  yeah Illiza's pretty awesome. The world needs more girls like her.
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  38.  @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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  39. 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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  40. 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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  41.  @Zackaryyrakcaz  AND YOU WIN TODAYS MOST AWESOME COMMENT.
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  42. What rhymes with burito?
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  43. ​ @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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  44.  @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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  45.  @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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  46.  @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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  47. ​ @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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  48. ​ @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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  49.  @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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  50.  @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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