Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics"
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@somethingelse9535 The US contributions to Ukraine are sunk costs in 22-36yr-old weapons that were scheduled for de-mil, long removed from the modern munitions feed into Active, Reserves, or National Guard units.
We're talking about 1980s-1990s ATACMs, HIMARS, TOWs, Javelins, Patriots, M2A2 Bradleys, etc.
We spent billions on them in the 1980s-1990s, and then are left with the burden of de-militarizing those systems, which is extremely expensive.
Loading them up onto transports is exponentially cheaper and removes a significant burden DoD has to deal with every year.
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@saltmerchant749 Every nation that signed on to the EU surrendered certain elements of their sovereignty. One of the main examples of this was immigration. Most nations in the EU also adopted the Euro as their currency. The Euro is actually the German Deutsche Mark as the bench currency, just renamed and expanded to the Eurozone.
The UK never saw itself going to the Euro, because GBP has always been one of the strongest currencies on the globe.
Another problem I saw in Europe, having lived there on and off since the 1970s, was the EU parliament overriding national parliaments not only on immigration, but food, transportation, and other domestic affairs.
In Finland, there was pushback with the bent cucumber rule, for example. They also banned Finns from their normal dairy box distribution in rural areas because German tourists thought it was free meals for them, and they ate the wax off the cheese.
Silly things the EU Parliament has no business even knowi g about, let alone legislating. But these busy-body feminists see govt as the solution to everything, and keep passing stupid law after law.
UK was smart to get out.
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I was an exchange student in Japan, after my family hosted many Japanese exchange students in our homes in the US. The geography and topography definitely has created a series of practically-isolated urban states, only recently connected by a rail network in history.
Population density acts as a barrier to much travel, so there are identities associated with the different prefectures. I also noticed racial variances, poverty, and brothels that I was not expecting to see.
You could ride the bullet train to go from one city to another, but people tended to stay close to where they're from.
There is no way to compare the culture, geography, demographics, and infrastructure with anything I've seen in the US, and I've been to 48 of the 50 States, lived in 8 across distant regions (SW, NE, Mountain West, Deep South, PNW).
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@mrd-fu9dh In his defense, he's been traveling to various countries for decades for white papers, briefings, and guest speaking gigs. It has been like that since STRATFOR in the early 2000s using Friedman's methods of going away from the capitols into the distant areas and making observations about whether people are at work or not, how much they eat for lunch, how long the lunches are, the condition of people's shoes, men vs women at lunch, ages, and other economic indicators. This is done in addition to an extensive geographic, demographic, industrial, infrastructure, and economic analysis using multiple reliable sources.
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@GenovaYork951 None of those countries are even close to being Central Europe. If Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovenia are Eastern Europe, then Belorussia, Ukraine, and Russia certainly aren’t Central Europe. In Russia, they teach geography differently saying there is no such thing as a separate Europe and Asia, but Eurasia.
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@YAMAHA1 I’ve lived in Moscow and have been all over Western Europe. You’re smoking crack if you think Moscow is even remotely-comparable. Infrastructure, services, corruption, driving habits, thievery, and black market functionality make Moscow a totally-opposite metro area compared to most of Europe. Just basic access to clean water in the Khrushchev-era apartments in Moscow is an issue. We had to resupply people with clean water from countryside wells, filled in large water bottles and tied together with plastic grocery bags so you could haul 2x as many of them up the stairs. The water in the faucets in many apartment complexes in Moscow looks like a mix of urine, excrement, and rust. This is not even remotely the case in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, or the UK. Moscow is a place time forgot, very old and decrepit. The only new things about it came from Germany and the West, which are mere sprinkles of technology and products that would never have emerged from Russia in a hundred years, left to its own devices.
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Germany has gone through several major waves of immigration post-WWII. Germany lost so many prime age males during the war, that workers had to be imported from all over to rebuild under the Marshall Plan. Turks, Greeks, Romanians, Italians, Portuguese, Moroccans, Tunisians, and Yugoslavians came in waves from 1955-1968. Those were supposed to be temporary work permits for 2 years, but companies kept renewing the permits.
Towards the end of the Cold War, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans who had been displaced throughout the Soviet Union returned to Germany. Then came more Yugoslavian refugees from the 1990s ethnic hostilities.
Then came over 1 million Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Kurds, etc. from the Middle East in the 20teens.
Now we have the mass immigration of Ukrainians into Germany since Feb 2022, so Germany will be even more of an immigration welfare economy with millions demanding free rent for apartments, while taking time to learn German and minimal labor force participation. This is happening at a time when older Germans are retiring, many of them with only 1 child born between the years 1964-1980. Those kids are all in their 40s to 50s now, and many didn’t even have kids.
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