Comments by "jeppen" (@jesan733) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics" channel.

  1.  @adurpandya2742  it's often hard for an intelligent man to predict stupid actions. They just seem so implausible.
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  2. The Chinese are building 5-ish reactors per year, which is actually a bit slow and won't get them to French levels of nuclear penetration anytime soon. But they are building and researching very broadly, so they are getting ahead technology-wise. They build, research and improve SMR, district heating reactors, pebble bed, thorium reactors, conventional LWR and much much more. The US can't compete because of ridiculous bureacracy. So "if-if-if" the future is nuclear, it'll likely be using Chinese models. This may give them quite a bit of geostrategic and commercial leverage.
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  3. Just like police, courts and various other authorities. Yet we seem to need them.
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  4. The cost of environmental regulation should be borne by the consumer. There is nobody else, really, since economic activity is done on the behalf of consumers and he pays for it all in the end.
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  5. Disinfo campaigns do pose threats. E.g. lots of people were injured and some died due to Trump's disinfo campaign concerning the 2020 election.
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  6. Ok Ivan. Go listen to Ritter then.
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  7. Same with police, so no police?
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  8. About 25% of new cars in Europe are plug-ins, roughly 50% in Sweden (the latter with no EV subsidies but fairly high fuel taxes). I think Peter vastly overstates the difficulties in ev penetration and understates the environmental advantages. The momentum is huge, but of course now with the wars and high inflation and interest rates, investments are being postponed.
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  9.  @druharper  what else can you say? In September 2013, the Venezuelan government took over a toilet paper factory to "avoid scarcity" while blaming business owners and traders. That was 10 years ago and it has only got worse since.
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  10. ​ @AWAVAVA  Yes, 100 kWh goes 300 miles. And then that's 110 kWh before charging losses. And that's 275 kWh thermal energy in a thermal power plant at 40% efficiency. And 275 kWh is equivalent to 8.3 gallons of gasoline. So 300/8.3 = 36 mpg. And that's not better than highway Toyota Corolla mpg. Thus you have roughly the same fuel energy use in ICE and EV. I love EVs, but fact is they don't save energy, they only give flexibility to choose other energy sources.
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  11.  @davidpnewton  Chernobyl put 400 times more radioactive material into the Earth's atmosphere than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I don't think Russia will do it, but I think that if they do, they'd take weather patterns into consideration and make sure the wind goes toward the west. Its use would make NATO intervene regardless of plume direction.
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  12.  @cemasikoglu9597 I absolutely want to escalate. Ukraine needs more and better equipment and ammo, and they need to be set free to use them on Russian soil.
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  13. ​ @HempAdvocate89 Tulsi is clearly a conspiracy theorist. That has got nothing to do with what anybody says, except what Tulsi herself says. It's just a fact.
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  14.  @DebugMaster1234  the EU including EU countries have contributed about 2x more than the US to Ukraine. It's just the case that the majority of the weapons have come from the US and the majority of financial support has come from the EU bloc. But the EU is a far larger contributor in total aid. It's our home turf and we do take the bulk of responsibility, but you have the military muscle. You're missing that the current security architecture has been designed by the US. You wanted Germany and Japan to be militarily weak. You wanted no nuclear weapons proliferation. You wanted these alliances where you are at the center. You wanted to be the global hegemon, the sole superpower. You wanted us to rely on your weapons industry. So we buy your arms, we let you lead, we support the dollar economy and support most of what you do with what we can in our weakened state. Now you have a populist bunch that complains about the security architecture that you set up and wanted. And yeah, of course it's fine if you want to take 20 years to implement a plan for a new global security order. But it's not reasonable for you to take these random populist complaints as reason to abandon your commitments cold turkey and let Ukraine (and later the Baltics and so on) be swallowed by Russia and in general let the world descend into chaos.
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  15. No, truth isn't relative.
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  16. Saying you're a captive of Rssian prpaganda without saying you're a captive of Rssian prpaganda.
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  17. Disagree. They wouldn't fire them off in panic, they'd wait for the right weather patterns to make sure the fallout go toward Ukrainian positions and cities.
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  18. Lots of manufacturing in the west still. Sure, China is the biggest player with almost a third of global manufacturing, but German manufacturing alone is 3x that of Russa, and US manufacturing is 9x that of Russia.
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  19.  @MarkMcAllister-ni9sf  so you magadonians don't know what you're voting for. What else is new?
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  20. Oh, if we just had an abundant, scalable fossil-fuel free 24/7 energy source, like if we could place pieces of metal next to each other in water and it'd heat up and generate steam. That'd be something!
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  21.  @DeerUNIT42  he has opinions of Trump and his cabinet picks. Is that hard for you to deal with? You know, the election is over, you can relax and stop being a cheerleader for irresponsible and authoritarian governance.
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  22.  @Ray-uf6uc  what's the difference between "civil war" and "regime change"? Also, afaik, the regime hasn't changed.
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  23. Like "monopoly on violence".
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  24.  @AD-mo5sg  it's a bit funny considering islam supposedly bans intoxication.
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  25. Norway's crude production is flattish, though.
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  26.  @hard2getitrightagain314  the elections are honest.
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  27. "Vote. Let us vote. He wins he wins, he gets a L, he gets a L. It's that easy." This has already happened. He wins he wins. He loses, he claims to have won and tell his minions to "fight like h-ll". Then they start to build gallows.
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  28. South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and even Thailand face very, very similar issues despite no one-child policy. A slew of European countries are also going there. And e.g. Iran.
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  29.  @lookoutforchris  your attempt at debunking my argument falls completely flat. Worst Dunning-Kruger I've seen today. It's exactly my point that we've had police and courts for ages, and they're abused and abusive, yet we need them. And it's clearly "actual history". Thus OPs rhetorical "can never be abused" is not a valid argument. Anything can be abused. We need to strike the best balance we can.
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  30. There's little to no benefit in energy efficiency for EVs. If you do fuel-to-wheel efficiency calculations for ICE vehicles and BEVs starting from a thermal power source, you'll end up on roughly the same energy use per mile.
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  31. This isn't hard to understand, if the US supports enough, Ukraine wins. If not, they're dependent on Europe ramping up support and military production fast enough, which is not clear, but probably this also is doable but at a far larger cost of fallen Ukrainian heroes.
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  32.  @Thai-Tanic.  "How do you feel about Elon just slashing the retail prices by 20% (again)." This is great, shows how fast battery prices are coming down. "And therefore trashing the re-sale value for the Tesla's owners, that bought before the price reduction?" I feel the same horror as for the drops in prices and increases in performance of flatscreen TVs.
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  33. This is not Peter's expertise. Thorium is an answer if we want it to be. It's proliferation-safe, not because it's completely impossible to make weapons within its fuel cycle, but because it's hard enough so that any would-be nuclear weapons state would stay clear and instead build a dedicated plutonium-producing uranium-based reactor on the side. It does solve the waste problem, as it uses all of the fuel and not just 3.5% (so the volumes are reduced to 1/20-th or less), and it can eat old waste. Also it is abundant enough for us to never run out of fuel. But otoh, ordinary reactor tech is good enough for the foreseeable future, and the current roadblock is overregulation and extreme safety requirements driving costs, which isn't really what thorium solves.
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  34.  @biblehistoryscience3530  "does" is present tense, and it does nothing. And it's more like $67b. And before jan 2022, it wasn't vast amounts. Specifically, Ukraine got no heavy weaponry at all before Russia's full-scale invasion. To my mind, the US is morally obliged to keep up the support and help Ukraine win. One reason among many is that it pursuaded Ukraine to give its nuclear weapons to Russia in exchange for security assurances. Also, of course, it's in the US interest to do it, and it's very, very cheap. Anyone who thinks the $67b was a lot should have a look at the US run-rate for containing Russia and China through ordinary defense spending over the years.
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  35. Your analysis has some clear merits, but to my mind, new nuclear power was killed by a regulatory explosion while RE has been nurtured by various subsidies.
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  36. Why? It's fairly clear that Russia is very careful to not strike NATO territory or manned assets. They did attack a drone over the black sea, but even that they harassed rather than fired upon.
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  37. Those are all loons, except Rogan who laughed at Trump.
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  38.  @elektrotehnik94  "Cost-effective SMR's are always 10 or 20 years away" This is a misunderstanding of how it works. Low cost comes from series production and refinements of designs during series production. It doesn't come from a tech blueprint.
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  39.  @MA_KA_PA_TIE  I've read 1984. I don't think an emotive name, nor dystopian fiction, makes it clear that we don't need a specific institution. There's plenty of dystopian fiction about e.g. police too.
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  40. What if your leftist university studies (at best) hasn't given you an accurate representation of events? The Shah was already there, and keeping him in power was preserving the constitution of Iran. He was a progressive modernizer, giving women equal rights, did land reforms and much more.
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  41.  @rcircle2008  Biden didn't do an increase. The Fed regulates the money supply. The inflation spike was global because of necessary stimulus during covid (before Biden) and supply chains bottlenecks after covid, plus some Ukraine war effects.
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  42.  @jameshudson169  all reasonable people are nevertrumpers.
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  43. I think most will not unsubscribe and will be unperturbed by content being delayed for a week.
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  44. Please explain. E.g. there's a supermajority that wants to vote for the Ukraine support, but the republican speaker (a Trump puppet) is refusing to schedule a vote.
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  45.  @VioIetShift  not so sure. Range and ability to strike deep Russian asset concentrations may be more important. But both should be pursued.
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  46.  @heyho4770  In 2023, Chinese coal generation increased more (341 TWh) than their non-hydro RE (296 TWh). Nuclear increased just 17 TWh. But nuclear is rather long-lived and doesn't have the same limitations as VRE. What the Chinese endgame is remains to be seen. They still seem to be taking nuclear very seriously. Lots of research, lots of education, lots of workers being churned out.
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  47. I agree with you on the big picture. Factory-made SMRs like NuScale should be built close to cities, but of course politics gets in the way. (I disagree that nuclear is earthquake-vulnerable, and that it necessarily needs cooling water.) I'd add that yes, intermittent power works but needs lots of hydro or gas for balancing, or storage. Gas is cheap for now in significant areas of the world but it's a finite resource. So longer-term and at scale, solar and wind will need lots of storage. Perhaps that's doable. Otherwise nuclear or coal is needed.
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  48.  @AD-mo5sg  lots of khat use in Yemen and Saudi.
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  49. He's not a big left cheerleader though. He's always critical of Obama for doing nothing, for example. But anyone with at least some wisdom and maturity recognizes Trump is unfit for office, and I guess that's why he'll lose in a landslide and why Peter is critical of him.
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  50.  @AWAVAVA  it seems you're not really well. Your arguments in both the previous comment and this are unfocused and aggressive gish galloping. I stand by my comment: There are no significant energy savings with EVs.
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