Comments by "Bob" (@bobs_toys) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics" channel.

  1. That's all they've been doing for the last few decades. Infrastructure is easy gdp. Unfortunately it also has diminishing returns. Those first things you built? Absolutely fantastic. A real game changer. The stuff you built thirty years later? If it was that important, it would have been higher on your list. Plus they've been trying to get away from the growth model to a consumption lead model for two decades.
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  2. Because it's not illegal for him to analyse it and talk about it.
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  3. When they do that, they lose the things that pay for imports of food and raw materials.
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  4. Can you be more specific on what he's wrong about in this video?
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  5. ​ @jameshobby1525 so what's difficult to understand about ratios and that people who aren't working (such as the elderly) still require resources to survive, even though they're no longer contributing these resources? Only an incredibly simple person thinks the only thing that matters is total numbers
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  6. ​ @jameshobby1525 also, what in this video do you think you're contradicting? Can you give timestamps?
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  7. If it helps, I'm not actually expecting you to give anything more than what's in your imagination.
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  8. Lots of people disagree with this. Although none of these ever give examples of these friends.
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  9.  @trendel13  I'm someone looking at the aggregate numbers instead of cherry picking. Yes. Inflation was high. Now it's lowering. No, it hasn't affected everything equally. And the big thing is, as is pointed out in the video. This pain is coming anyway. Dealing with it ten years ago is better than now. Dealing with it now is better than in ten years. Unless you don't plan on being above ground in ten years, it should be sound logic.
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  10. So where's he wrong?
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  11.  @Phemruto  I get the impression he's not really the sort of person who should think for himself. It seems like a thing that's extremely easy to improve on.
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  12. The PRC has a gdp per capita of 12.5k. Automation needs highly skilled, highly paid engineers who are in demand globally. Not just to build a system, but to improve and maintain it. These people will follow the money and what's best for their families. The scale of the problem is also massive. Basically, the places that need it most (like any part of China outside of tier 1 cities) are the places that'll get it last.
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  13. The best time was over a decade ago
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  14. ​ @brianniegemann4788 they wish it was a similar drop to Japan. What took Japan three decades took the PRC three years.
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  15. The collapse in births isn't a prediction. It's a thing that's been happening for five years.
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  16.  @EireHammer  don't call me pal, friend!
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  17. I wouldn't have believed how bad it was if I hadn't seen it in the global times. Now I know that no matter how bad it seems, the reality is worse m
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  18. How many robots of the type that can actually replace an entire person do you own? I don't own any. Mostly due to the expense and the lack of things that exist that do what I want. And my income is vastly higher than your average person in the PRC. If I can't afford one, the masses there definitely can't.
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  19. ​ @jphwacheski if you're not looking at robots that have this kind of ability to replace individual people in their entirety at a price someone in the west could afford, you're looking at a wide variety of interconnected parts forming part of a complex system that's requires highly skilled and expensive people to design, build, maintain and improve for each bespoke system. Those people will follow the money. Which isn't in the PRC.
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  20. ​ @gagaxueguzheng interesting. I've never picked up that ch in it. Need to listen harder. But in the end, we can all agree it's not Zee.
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  21. Right before autumn. In a place that normally goes to minus 10.
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  22. China's big thing, which it hasn't moved away from relying on, is cheap labour. It doesn't have the money to address the scale of the issue. Automation is basically really, really difficult and needs people who are highly trained and experienced to do it in a useful, sustainable way. The people who can do this (I'm a Linux engineer. Automation is 90 percent of my job) are going to follow the money and the places that can offer their children the best opportunities. This isn't the PRC. Which we can see from the continued emigration and the collapse (which pre-dates the virus) of births over a short time period (over 40 percent in five years, according to official numbers) For contrast, the gdp per capita is about 12.5k usd in the PRC vs 70k in the USA. Yes, cost of living is lower in the PRC, but it's not that much lower. There's also a pretty firm maximum it can add to your pay. If my day to day living expenses were 100 percent paid for in the PRC (as they were in Hong Kong with the taxation difference) financial reasons alone say I still wouldn't move there. So not only is it not going to fix China's problems, but by giving alternative methods of getting cheap labour, it's going to make them worse.
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  23.  @ThePhoenicianDoctor  an example was I was going through a tour of the Mekong with a person from Lego who was in Vietnam to do the groundwork for starting a factory here. China's loss is Vietnam's gain.
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  24.  @gingerlicious3500  Korean war. Sino soviet war. Falun Gong. Fentanyl exports.
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  25.  JackSmith-mk1ru  found me? And you don't know things legally exported can also be illegally smuggled?
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  26. "found u. This is going to be good" disappears. Again
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  27. ​ jacksmith6015 I'd ask if that was meant to be relevant. But we both know it wasn't. All the whataboutism in the world won't change what's happening.
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  28.  jacksmith6015  I like how you felt a need to delete your post
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  29.  JackSmith-mk1ru  counter to what? What dare?
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  30.  JackSmith-mk1ru  you want me to counter my co bot? You dared my co bot? What? You'll need to start being specific. You've stopped making sense. Quote the thing you're replying to.
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  31. The fact is you can watch that collapse happening at the moment. The birthrate crash and the housing bubble bursting are two bits of history you'd be witness to if if you weren't in complete denial.
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  32.  @Amerinamericaextent . And assuming all was as rosy as you say. 1. Why, then, is the birthrate crashing at an unprecedented rate? (the Chinese people aren't wealthy, so that's that reason gone. The birthrate declined in three years to a degree it took the Japanese 32 years to achieve, and last year they had the lowest birthrate in the world. With this year looking so much worse) 2. How long do you think any of this will last with a new generation that's a fraction of the size (the birthrate of the people who are looking at retiring was about 4x the current birthrate) of the one it's replacing? This is all under a government whose accomplishments are all based on: 1. Not being Mao (he was pretty easy to improve upon) 2. for Mao, having better conditions to work with than when the country was literally being invaded by the Japanese. (although he tried super hard to change that) For bonus questions, how do you think a country wide retirement plan that relies on real estate going up in price will fare when the country's population is going to go down at an increasing rate for the rest of everyone's life?
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  33. I'll put it this way. (there's a lot in there and I'm on a phone) It takes 20 to 25 years to turn a newborn into someone useful. Raising a huge amount of kids (if you can convince people to have them) is expensive. The current leadership will be in their 80's and 90's before they begin to see a benefit. And the scenario that justifies Australia's nuclear submarines, and a general anti PRC alliance is to stop them doing something disastrous to keep the party's leaders in power a little longer. When you're thinking about this, don't ask what's good for the PRC. No one cares. Don't even ask what's good for the party as a whole. Ask what's good for the party's leaders. That's the only context anything will make sense in.
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  34. Long story short, no. Not to remotely the extent they need. I've put more detail in a half other copies of this exact question.
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  35. That's the big danger. They'll attack Taiwan when it's more costly to the CCP's leadership (no one cares about China or the CCP as a whole) to not attack than to attack.
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  36. ​ @DilAbadyi particularly after the reaction to Australia asking for an investigation into how the pandemic started (something that shouldn't have needed to be asked for) showed that China will (ineffectually) attempt to use trade as a weapon.
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  37. They've also been farming that long. As well as building and working with metal. That massive amount of history doing it wasn't enough to make them collectively think Mao was absolutely bonkers and avert the largest famine the world had ever seen.
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  38. ​ @superserioes up 50 percent from tech companies (special thanks to nvidia) in one lot, plus 30 percent from the S&P500 and nasdaq 100 over the last year. I'm Australian. I refuse to invest in my own country. We're far too tied to China.
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  39. Those (generally) aren't agents, they're people who've decided they prefer to live in other places and systems than those the CCP controls. They're not going to be much help as the economy there grinds to a halt. And the children currently being born overseas are far less likely again.
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  40. ​ JackSmith-mk1ru are you trying to make a point here?
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  41. Everyone else who could take his place is dead or in prison.
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  42. Is he wrong? If so, where?
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  43. ​ JackSmith-mk1ru you run away from sources.
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  44.  @KLRJUNE  he's a wumao of standard quality
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  45. The US birthrate is still twice the PRC's. 14.7 per thousand in 2000 to 12.023 in 2023 The PRC was 14.03 (with one child policy) in 2000 and is 6.39 (with more than half of costed children being second or third children) in 2023.
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  46.  @jimluebke3869  that's a slight decline over two decades. 19 percent. Vs 55 percent. In this context, that's not a plummet. And last year, officially, the PRC lost 10 million workers.
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  47. Why is this click bait?
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  48. You don't need to just clone, you need to grow and educate them.
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  49. This is On the edge of a high cliff. He's a full-on god. Men write him love letters, and women name their vibrators after him.
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  50. This is the problem with being a native English speaker. Anyone who you'd want to speak to for work, etc already speaks English. If you don't speak english, you learn English. If you do speak English, you learn......?
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