Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics"
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Wow. Way to push The Narrative(TM), Peter. California is screwed for a number of reasons, many of which really are based on bad decisions they've made.
- Dehydration -- California is already at just about carrying capacity as far as water is concerned. Water is too heavy, necessary at such enormous volumes, and California too isolated, to significantly increase supply. The Southwest is in the same predicament; it has nowhere to go but down, from here. Unless Humboldt County dredges their Bay and starts being growth-friendly, California is as big as it's ever going to get.
- Got Woke, Went Broke -- California, being so isolated from the rest of the country by a huge mountain range, increasingly convinced of its own rightness because of its billionaire status, and more than a little weird in the first place, became increasingly out-of-touch with the culture of the rest of the country. This disconnect caused Hollywood to destroy itself at the box office. See: Disney, Lucasfilm, Marvel, Lord of the Rings.
- Utterly incompetent governance -- Or rather, far better at accruing power, than at wisely using it. California House Speaker Willie Brown, the most important politician no one has ever heard of, gathered so much power he basically ran the state for decades. This, in accord with corrupt and ineffective Leftist policies that ranged from unsustainable to self-destructive, funded by the tech boom. Nancy Pelosi took lessons from him, about what kind of power a Speaker could have, ossifying the Federal government as well. Kamala Harris is Vice President (indeed, has a political career at all) specifically because Willie Brown thought she was attractive, to put it delicately. Gavin Newsom is an empty suit full of platitudes and policy ideas that have turned out disastrously in every jurisdiction he's gained power in, starting with San Francisco and spreading out to the state at large.
- Tech is mined out -- Moore's Law hasn't been true for most of a decade now. This means that big new crazy ideas remain crazy, rather than becoming feasible. Another set of advances could bring another several branches of fruit into "low-hanging" territory, but there have been several "next big things" that simply haven't panned out.
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Just looking at a map of "good guys" and "pirate-type bad guys", there's a conspicuous lack of "bad guys" between the US and Japan / Korea, US and Australia / NZ, US and England, and really the entire Western Hemisphere.
The pockets of pirates and other bad actors seem to be Malacca, Hormuz, and Somalia / Bab el Mendeb, which mostly serves to isolate India. It seems to me that a lot of the impact here only lands if India fails to make the jump from where it is now, to a regional power capable of fielding a navy that can secure those choke points.
If Peter ever reports the headline, "Navy of India moves carrier group to secure the Straits of Hormuz", and he does so with the assumption they will actually be effective there, that's the first step to securing all of the choke points around the Indian Ocean.
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@jayethompson3414 Except, that the conclusions he comes to are not in line with outcomes.
For example, according to his logic, North America is rightfully three countries -- but the borders should go North / South along the Rockies and the Appalachians, rather then east-west along rivers or latitude lines.
And, the dominant power of North America should be the immense river network of the Midwest -- the fact that the relatively small and isolated Hudson Valley has our country's main financial center is an accident of its Dutch roots European ties.
California, similarly, (at least the relatively tiny Sacramento basin) should be an agricultural backwater; only the historical accident of World War 2 and the Cold War defense boom (along with a single Massachusetts judge's decisions to enforce non-competes, and Terman's insistence on incentivizing engineers with equity) allowed Silicon Valley to form.
Similar individual decisions allowed the deserts of southern California to be inhabited at all, seeing as how they don't have any reliable local water supplies.
Peter does a good job of describing what cards countries have to play, to some degree; history is still to a great extent about how those cards are played.
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@MarcosElMalo2 Sorry, your picture of me is exactly wrong.
I'm central California born and raised, educated in the University of California system (which was in the process of going broadly insane even when I attended), worked on the CA coast most of my life in a very specific, highly technical field, now working in that specific field in Massachusetts (God help me) because California has gone straight down the shitter and MA is one of the few places that does what I do.
I'm part of the "creative class". But, some people I actually care about are not and never will be, and I want them to have lives of dignity and independence, complete with families of their own. I want my family to be large and thriving, because unlike Peter I don't consider children a nuisance and I think people who do have something wrong with them as human beings. I'm content not to say much about other people's stupid life choices like that, until they make life difficult for me to NOT choose the same way they did.
(Seriously, Zeihan talks so much about demographic collapse, but then seems to respond "Nope, can't think of a single thing to do about it" probably in spite of his mom asking when he's going to give her grandchildren. In a sane word, she'd be considered right for asking and he'd be considered wrong for declining.)
This puts my priorities completely at odds with globalist policy wanks, but it matches up nicely with recent political movements that have recently demonstrated they provide a broad-based solution. I think we're going to see progress on that, soon.
Peter, on the other hand, is explicitly worshiping large wage differentials, i.e., vast gulfs of income inequality. He bemoans that those gulfs are not available within the United States, and eagerly reports opportunities to exploit foreign cheap labor. Yes, his is the point of view of the globalist "Establishment", the entrenched politicians of both parties, and elites worldwide.
I'm not a Lefty by nature (Central CA is basically a multicultural version of the Midwest) and living in California has just proven to me that government "services" are more likely to disastrously exacerbate problems than solve them.
You might well call me a populist, though; traditionalist probably fits too, both by upbringing and ratified by experience, having seen my family devastated by recent "innovations" in social mores.
I think that our situation with China is demonstrating to us the drawbacks of unfettered free trade and abandoning tariffs (i.e., unilaterally disarming in a trade war). I think that for everyone in the country to thrive and live lives of dignity and prosperity (not to mention keep our strategic logistics from being taken over by rivals / enemies) economic hyper-specialization is exactly the WRONG route to take.
"I sold out my country's working class to China and all I got was this slightly cheaper t-shirt" sarcastically sums up the problems we're facing rather well.
I don't give a damn if an iPhone costs $2000, if that's the consequence of a better quality of life for other Americans. (Not to mention those FoxCon employees). Just make cell phones that last a few years, and your quality of life won't see any degradation at all.
I respect the way Peter tries to come up with honest data. I wish he'd stick to that, instead of trying to propose policies, because those policies have a ghastly effect on the lives of most Americans.
Who, by the way, aren't going to take it much longer.
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Exploration is not commercially viable at this point. No material is valuable enough to make the trip up and down the gravity well worthwhile. There's a reason that the only thing we trade with space is modulated photons.
On the other hand, there's still a market for station-keeping fuel in Geostationary orbit. Back when it cost $10k to move a pound of goods to GEO, the market value for station-keeping and end-of-life graveyard boosting fuel was $3B-$4B a year.
It's entirely possible that within 10 years or so, we could research a way to get fuel out of asteroids. $3B-$4B a year would be a healthy market to pursue.
Unfortunately for that business model, now that Elon Musk has entered the market, the cost is down to something like $800 / lb to GEO. This drops the max revenue from $3B-$4B to $300M - $400M or less, which is unlikely to be enough to capture, return, and deliver fuel from asteroids to every satellite in GEO.
If instead of modulated photons we wanted to deal in bulk photons (Space Solar Power), that might be possible, and might even be profitable if the power satellite floated from one time zone / market to another, delivering power at peak prices. Rectenna farms for receiving power are currently prohibitively large and expensive, though.
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"Climate change, which suggests what the Sahara will be marching south"
Except it isn't. The amount of green space in the world, particularly in arid regions, has increased by an acreage equivalent to the entire continental United States.
You see, with greater CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, plants don't have to keep their stomata (pores in the surfaces of leaves) open as long as they used to, to take in CO2. This has the advantage of helping them lose less water while the stomata are open, making them hardier in drier areas.
The advantages of CO2's increase are making themselves felt, even as the hysterics regarding its downside continue to humiliate those clinging to conventional wisdom.
Guys, for decades now researchers have been paid by agenda-driven government agencies to confirm their priors. If you want to "follow the money", this is where it leads.
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@jeanlamb5026 Mostly it's just weird, because it has little or nothing to do with this conversation thread. Were you intending to reply to a different one?
As for its goodness or badness, trying to make every conversation about at best tangentially irrelevant historical grievances, is a bad thing.
We're probably going to see some rebalancing of "rights" in the near future. Most countries suffering from demographic collapse are heavily committed to prenatal infanticide.
The rights of those babies to live, are going to be prioritized. The cultural practices necessary to support that (advocating for strong marriages, continence, and the like) may look "Victorian" to some, but I don't think women are going to be denied credit cards or medical school acceptance on the basis that they're women, though.
The 1960's sexual revolution has been around long enough, chalked up so many failures, damaged so many people, and benefited so few, that we're going to see those "rights" disappear over the next few election cycles.
Into the recycling bin of history it goes!
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Interest in cleaning up "space junk" (including debris from shattered satellites) is climbing a bit, but apart from auxiliary propulsion units to haul end-of-life satellites into junkyard orbits, it seems to be mostly in the thinky-talky phase.
Imagine a B-17 raid over Germany. Imagine the flak, the fighters, etc. Now imagine that instead of all that debris crashing to the ground, it stays up there in the air for the next several centuries or more.
Now imagine that debris traveling from one airspace to another, shattering the planes in those airspaces, until all of the airspace over every country is full of flying debris.
This could easily happen in space, where you have satellites instead of aircraft. It's known as "Kessler Syndrome". People worry about a single satellite's destruction setting off this cascade.
Without a robust junk removal program in place, the United States stands to lose the most from any space warfare, be it in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Medium Orbit (MEO, where GPS lives), or high orbit (Geostationary).
The worst part is, Russian spacecraft are in what's called a Molniya orbit, as Peter pointed out, which swings from Low to High so that it spends as much time as possible over high-latitude Russian territory.
This traversal means that any debris cloud from a shattered Russian satellite could potentially move through just about all of the orbits we care about.
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@northernstar4811 If Russia were more famous for being concerned for the safety of its soldiers, (or civilians, or anyone else for that matter) I'd give more weight to that argument.
Personally I think that a strategy that would work (and just as importantly, that the Russians would understand to be an effective strategy) is to trade land for time to develop insurmountable defense-in-depth.
Let Putin have the eastern provinces, which have been drained of (presumably) their most Ukraine-friendly residents anyway. Then stuff Poland, the Baltics, and Romania full of the kind of armaments that have been so effective against Russia until now. You don't have a slippery slope when the next step is astronomically more painful and difficult.
If you want to get out of this situation minimizing not only the death and destruction we're seeing now, but also the risk of planetary-level death and destruction that is very much on the table, this is the way to go.
Add to this the opportunity to split Russia off of China, and you're also serving our national strategic interests. Give Russia a chance to develop a sphere of influence that includes newly independent or augmented countries like Tibet, Greater Mongolia, East Turkmenistan, and maybe even Manchuria, and you'll have a Russia that's too busy in the East to be troublesome in the West.
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@HellBot-gi5si They've work together based on checkerboard diplomacy, and the fact that they're both (mostly) allied with the United States.
Put them at each others' boarders, and I suspect we'll see the Israelis attempting to wreck their traditional northern conqueror (Hittites, Ottomans, Assyria, etc) just like they've wrecked their traditional southwestern conqueror (Egypt) and helped wreck their traditional eastern conqueror (Babylon, Iraq, whatever you want to call it).
Israel's overall problem is that it's a middling size region big enough to support a unique culture, but smaller than imperial-core-sized regions on three different continents. It's not even big enough to reliably hold off the coastal / oasis countries (ancient Assyria).
I didn't used to see the problem this way, but Peter's geographic point of view is fairly sensible and even influential, on this score.
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@mikemush9741 Lol, nothing the fake "influencers" can do are going to stop this.
They need to give up their shenanigans and figure out how to negotiate with America First, and be willing to lose some ground. Probably a LOT of ground, on positions like immigration.
The good news? America still has the kind of spirit that can be set to work staving off the threat of great power naval competition and the world wars it leads to, but the Deep State needs to do two things:
1. Take Americans' needs seriously. Go back to Pericles' funeral oration. Are regular Americans as well-off for our time as regular Athenians were for their time, or do we need to concentrate on our own prosperity for a while?
2. Make the case to Americans. The question "Why do we have to be the world's police?" has gone unanswered so often as to be considered a rhetorical question now.
Used to be, Mahan was everywhere, you can't read a book on global strategy from a couple generations ago without his being referenced like everyone knew exactly who he was and what he was about. Maybe he got so overexposed that everyone just assumed he would be everywhere forever.
But a funny thing happened, and his thesis about great power competition just simply fell off the edge of the map, seemingly a victim of his own success.
If we want Americans to know why we're doing all this, we have to tell them. I'm happy to help out with this. This is part of the solution.
Only, Trump and America First is the other part of that solution. If we don't put America First, we aren't going to be able to maintain our posture as world police and guarantors of peace.
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"As globalism collapses, Europe might not be the best bet... instead Thailand, or Myanmar, or Malaysia"
Peter, if these pirates you so fear are going to be rising to disrupt global shipping, where are they going to be rising -- in the North Atlantic, or in Polynesia / Malaysia?
As far as birthrates go, the question is not "where are there good birthrates," the qustion is "where are current trends going to be reversed", because they're all headed down.
If you don't think they can be reversed, I suggest that you open your mind about the fact that there are historic (Western) models of public morality we can return to.
If the West is to survive, our outlook will have to change: when your elderly relatives say, "Peter, you should find a nice girl and settle down and have a few kids," and you say, "No thank you," we must have a culture that says you are wrong and your relatives are right.
The culture you seek to maintain, cannot and will not survive a generation.
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"Nobody votes for the Vice President"
Peter, you're old enough to remember when the VP was supposed to bring something to the ticket -- voters from their home state, usually. Was California really ever going to vote for Trump? No. So we have to look at the OTHER reason(s) Kamala could have been chosen. Appeal to minorities and women because Biden's the oldest and whitest of the old white guys? Sure, but there were better candidates in that lane.
Kamala was chosen to unite the East Coast and West Coast wings of the Democrats' donor base. West Coast donors have nothing but contempt for democracy, and for just about all of them going into politics would be a massive step down in terms of money, power, and influence. Just ask Meta Vice President (and former leader of some major British political party) Nick Clegg about his 2017 promotion.
To Silicon Valley techies, going into politics is something like running off to join the carnival, for mediocrities like Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, who can't hack it in tech like actual intelligent people (or finance, if you're intelligent but morally bankrupt.)
I think you underestimate the chance that Silicon Valley boardroom class and the San Francisco political machine will push an empty suit who is tall and has all his hair, into Biden's spot. Maybe being in SF isn't just a layover and you've heard something salient, or maybe you still have so much faith in the system that you can't believe the Democrats would run such an ignorant mediocrity (bless your heart), but it doesn't sound like you're nearly cynical enough here.
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@aaronbaker2186 Er, in fact we (the United States) insisted that Ukraine stay in the war despite the fact that they wanted to negotiate shortly after the war started.
I'm not in favor of fighting to the last Ukrainian, and that's where it looks like we're going, here. "It's always been Russia's war to lose", as Peter has said.
Fighting in the West can only have one outcome -- the benefit of the East. Disruptions in Germany's industrial exports benefit China. Russia selling petrochemicals East instead of West benefits China (and makes it less vulnerable to the piracy Zeihan goes on about). Russia draining the West's military coffers and boosting our war weariness makes Taiwan more likely to fall, not less.
And, to top it off, if Russia "ceases to exist as an entity", China will be able to gobble up half of Asia, securing them a lot of the raw materials they need to avoid any sting of Western sanctions.
I think that offering Russia the DonBas and Crimea is not great, but if we also offer them East Turkmenistan, Greater Mongolia, and Tibet for their sphere of influence, that could be a win-win situation.
Certainly better than the lose-lose we're in now.
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@TheMasonK I look at our energy options now, and everything I see I also saw in the educational filmstrip "Our Mr. Sun" from 1956. (Check it out, it's a lot of fun.)
You'd think that 70+ years would be enough time to make these technologies pay off, if they were going to. (I still have hopes for nuclear, myself.)
(But, the truly insane environmentalists are against it. Almost makes you wonder whether our entire energy regulatory apparatus is run by people who aren't so much interested in energy for people alive today, as how to rebuild civilization after a collapse.)
(We'd need as much fossil fuel still in the ground as possible, and nuclear power plants could be incredibly destructive if the industrial civilization around them got wrecked. Maybe that's why every US politician that's supposedly against fossil fuels, is okay with importing massive amounts of other countries' reserves instead of building out our own.)
Oh, and I've kept hearing "peak oil" since I was old enough to start paying attention, decades ago. I stopped hearing it a few years ago, when the fracking revolution expanded our fossil fuel reserves dramatically.
I'm glad that at least you haven't made any arguments that are based on computer models that are utterly inadequate to the task of making accurate predictions of where the climate is going.
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@theyux1 A terrible housing market crash happened in 1992, for starters. Increasing environmental regulations sapped the vitality of the agricultural sector. The peace dividend started the fall of the aerospace industry. Much of Southern California has never recovered from that, by the way.
A lot of this was masked by the tech boom, driven by that peace dividend's shifting California's high tech workers from aerospace to computers. Why do you think Silicon Valley happened in California, and not, say, along Massachusetts' Route 128?
While Moore's Law was in effect and fiber optic networks were built out, more and more amazing things could be accomplished with computers and networks.
However, connectivity has gotten about as good as it's going to get (to the point that it's clogged mostly by video nowadays), and Moore's Law hasn't been true for most of a decade. The miracle factory has stalled out. The low-hanging fruit has been picked.
California rose with tech, now the hollowing-out of all its other economic sectors -- which probably won't come back, barring an anti-green, pro-defense revolution in California politics -- California will fall with tech.
The only way California can keep from collapse now, is if vote-counters start seeing a lot more Republican ballots. Do you see that as likely? I don't.
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@Adi-bo5do Yes, democracy isn't quite dead here yet. =)
Even better, there is a sense that we are embarking on a new Cold War, led by a country that is legendary for its expert class, (mandarins) and its glorification of groupthink over freedom -- China.
I suspect that in the same way the Industrial Revolution posed the question, "What is the best way to produce and distribute the most and the best material goods?" our new Information Revolution is going to pose the question, "What is the best way to produce and distribute expertise?"
Freedom is going to be the answer. Bhattacharya was right, Fauci was wrong, and our system is going to have to be reformed into a more distributed model, to take that into account.
Currently our legacy institutions have been taken over by ideologues seeking the power of the cultural high ground. This has caused the collapse of their credibility and will soon cause their financial collapse as well. Whether they can be preserved or whether they will be replaced, remains to be seen.
Forgive me if I'm misinterpreting you, but you're on the wrong side of history here, it seems. Look into the people who are critiquing climate models. Look into the people who were right all along, about our recent global medical scare.
Actual evidence leads interesting places.
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If the Mississippi system is the core of American power, why isn't the Midwest the dominant political force in the country?
I suspect that once the Midwest starts to see the Rockies and the Appalachians as bulwarks against the Coasts, the US is in trouble, and Canada too. The fact that we aren't still (east to west) English - French - Spanish countries, seems to be an accident of history that pure American geography would not have predicted.
Seriously, if you rotate the US 90 degrees counterclockwise, you get a very similar profile to China. Starting at the bottom and again going counterclockwise: First you get a large mountain range separating coastal cities (with Hong Kong roughly equivalent to San Francisco). Then a major river or two (New Orleans sort of like Shanghai). Finally a highly internationalized connection to the outside world (land-based Silk Road vs. Maritime-based New England).
The fact that historically speaking a huge chunk of the American population immigrated here through New York, explains why our nation's financial system is at the mouth of the modest Hudson watershed rather than the gargantuan Missouri. Our capital being smack dab in the middle of the Eastern Seaboard rather than somewhere on the Ozark plateau, is a similar accident of the time.
Also, if you think that the transmontagne cities of the American West coast are less independent-minded than those of the Chinese south coast, you haven't been paying attention to Seattle, or Portland, or San Francisco. If the political power of California wanes (as it will, with its economy and population falling dramatically) we may see a case similar to Scotland, which only seems to be in the UK because a Scot gets to be king or PM most of the time.
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@rositasultana3958 There are personal narratives, and then there's The Narrative(TM) which claims that masks don't work against Covid then they do then they don't, and claims that the Hunter Biden Laptop story was Russian disinformation (except it wasn't), claimed Russia blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline (despite its not being in Russia's best interests, and in fact benefiting China more than anyone)...
I kind of take it personally when I've been lied to, then accused of being "bot or troll" because now I'm (justifiably) skeptical.
That said, Peter's too in love with being right, to tell too many big ol' obvious lies. His ego (and good sense) won't let him be wrong too often, he knows that his whole life comes crashing down if that happens.
You have to wonder, though, whether the people he's getting his information from would sacrifice that for their own agenda.
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“If," ["the management consultant"] said tersely, “we could for a moment move on to the subject of fiscal policy. . .”
“Fiscal policy!" whooped Ford Prefect. “Fiscal policy!"
The management consultant gave him a look that only a lungfish could have copied.
“Fiscal policy. . .” he repeated, “that is what I said.”
“How can you have money,” demanded Ford, “if none of you actually produces anything? It doesn't grow on trees you know.”
“If you would allow me to continue.. .”
Ford nodded dejectedly.
“Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.”
Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed.
“But we have also,” continued the management consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut."
Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down.
“So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and. . .er, burn down all the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a sensible move under the circumstances."
The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for a second or two until someone pointed out how much this would increase the value of the leaves in their pockets whereupon they let out whoops of delight and gave the management consultant a standing ovation. The accountants among them looked forward to a profitable autumn aloft and it got an appreciative round from the crowd.”
- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
OR you could just replace your entire population with immigrants and transform your society beyond recognition, because your economic mode gets, like, really hard, if you don't have constant GDP growth.
Peter, most people find children endearing rather than annoying. You should probably work this into your understanding of the world.
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@wisenber Yeah, the "Apollo generation retirement" problem was big when I started. I don't think the passdown was handled well. Now we've got the "Cold War generation retirement" problem, and it's not going much better as far as I can tell.
If defense contracting starts to be the best game in town again, that could change. If Peter's right about venture capital drying up -- and San Francisco's fall could well be symptomatic of that, although its Covid, shoplifting, homelessness, and drug use policies are largely a self-inflicted wound -- then the wining and dining of prospective customers in the billionaire-playground of SF, just isn't going to be as important anymore.
I hope Peter's right about the re-industrializing of America, although there's still so much talk about "favorable labor cost profiles" in places like Mexico and Columbia, I'm suspicious that all his talk about on-shoring is just gaslighting.
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Hey Peter -- get in touch with a YouTube journalist named Tim Pool, and get on his show to pitch your books. He and his audience (mostly youngish America-first isolationists) need to hear about and understand World Systems Theory, and the consequences of the US withdrawing from its strategic overwatch role. Otherwise they're just going to follow some wacked-out conspiracy theorists regarding US motivation for our international entanglements.
If you're interested in a showdown with one such wacked-out conspiracy theorist, go on the show when Luke Rudkowski is also there. For a hippie naif who is only somewhat wacked-out and would rather see the world give itself a great big hug, go on the show when Ian Crossland is also there. There are a couple of other co-hosts, like Seamus Coughlin (creative mind behind the excellent FreedomToons) and some fairly levelheaded journalists like Libby Emmons or Hannah Claire Brimelowe, who would be more ready to ask intelligent questions.
Seriously, Tim's young audience is keen on people telling them the truth and genuinely curious, and needs to have its horizons expanded and its misconceptions corrected by the mainstream insights you can share. Even if it's not your usual honorarium, it will broaden your audience significantly, and in a critical demographic.
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@cloudpoint0 Please stop making claims like that, failing to back it up with action costs you a massive amount of credibility, and you have none to spare.
The fact that you're led by an actor with his own TV production team, and the fact that some of your loudest cheerleaders in the US shout the loudest about how good you are with "Information War" -- i.e., lying to everyone, including your theoretical friends (especially your friends) -- makes it very difficult to take anything you say seriously.
Honestly, Americans love a good underdog story. Why in the world are you not telling the truth and appealing to Americans' habit of sticking up for the little guy? If the Americans who are most interested in supporting you are the ones telling you to lie, lie, lie, lie, because that's all they know how to do, then you've go the support of the wrong Americans.
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Peter, please carefully consider the possibility that it's not that we necessarily like Trump so much, it's that the Washington establishment is of, by, and for the "urban creative" class. They have been pursuing World Systems Theory to the severe detriment of 97% of the country, who prefer suburbs / rural life, industrial work, tradition, family, actual democracy, etc.
I know that would require you to be critical of your own kind, but please consider -- Biden's real constituency is maybe 3% of the population. The rest are useful idiots.
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It's good to hear Peter talking again about an American-centric plan for strategy and logistics. Global "advantageous labor-cost profile" thinking is great short-term, but it's a hothouse flower (dependent on a global security and diplomatic position that is far more fragile than economists take into account), and a transient one at that.
Countries will climb the value-add mountain, and any general tightening of capital hampers spending on non-recurring engineering essential for research and development. Once NRE is spent, technology transfers (through political force, guile, reverse-engineering, or familiarity) will erode that value-add mountain until it's mostly flat. Tech transfer is about 10x cheaper than tech development, so staying ahead in a world of near-instant global communication is a long-term challenge that may ultimately be impossible to maintain.
There's a huge amount to be said for a country investing in processes and procedures that transfer technology internally. Passing down expertise from one generation to the next, is something Peter has criticized the Russians for failing at, but I'm not sure Americans are even half as good as we should be -- high tech companies did VERY little to transfer knowledge from the Apollo generation to the Late Cold War generation.
The Late Cold War generation is now passing from the scene, and the transfer to the Post Cold War generation could not even be considered ad hoc in most cases. So we aren't just seeing a case of technology transfer leveling the value-add playing field (and thus any potential for "advantageous labor-cost profiles") we're seeing generational expertise loss leveling that as well.
This isn't just a Russian problem.
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