Comments by "Cross Link" (@crosslink1493) on "Australia, After America || Peter Zeihan" video.

  1. I think you missed the point on that segment of this video. Peter's focusing on Australia turning to processing those commodities into a final product (or multiple products), thus producing jobs/income/taxes at home from that business; think processing iron ore or bauxite ore into different grades of steel or aluminum at an Australian steel/aluminum mill, maybe even casting or forming a final metal product, or processing wheat harvested in Aussieland into a cereal grain ready for baking, or even a grain product like wheat germ cereal for a breakfast table. If the economy falters and those raw products were not desired any more, then Aussieland gets shut down. If they had steel mills/bauxite mills then those mills could shift to producing a new, more desirable grade of steel/aluminum that the world wanted.
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  2. The iron and bauxite situations reminds me of Bolivia and silver and the country's fear of outsiders. All the easy-to-mine silver has been taken out of the ground and all that's left is a lot of low-grade stuff that requires mechanized and sophisticated machinery to extract profitably. But Bolivia, in its nationalistic fervor, won't allow outside countries to come in and do that so it loses a lot from not partnering with foreign companies to mine and process the low-grade ore on a profitable scale. Thus the country has lost a valuable source of jobs and income. They do have other minerals (lithium being the most notable these days), but its the same situation with those minerals, too.
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