Comments by "Rune of Svalbard" (@vladimirofsvalbard9477) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics" channel.

  1. I tend to rag of Gen X as (the worst parents ever), but I largely think it's because Boomers and previous generations gave them absolutely no roots to feel grounds to. On top of that, you guys got screwed in 2000, 2008, and 2020 the biggest. All while Boomers got to expand their wealth (simply due to life stage during the same event). If you have no money; you can't exactly buy-low lol
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  2. I've been saying this for years. The most radical and ardent supporters are going to be constantly pumping the polls, while nobody else participates. This explains Donald Trump's current polls in the primaries and on the national stage. If you put it to a vote tomorrow; Donald Trump would lose in a landslide. Democrats hate his guts and Republicans are exhausted from 8 years of him.
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  3.  @hereticalgames3695  I wouldn't say AI is a bubble, but tech certainly is. I think the next recession is truly going to show how much these tech companies are worth; basically 0. If nothing else, Elon buying Twitter should have taught people that these companies are WAY over-valued.
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  4. I would imagine that a lot of the demand will go towards producers that are already outside the US; Ecuador, Brazil, etc. I think many smaller US farmers will go out of business instead of prices rising due to (increased wages and/or supply shortage from lack of workers).
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  5. Well, in the end (you're either going to export GOLD or export DOLLARS). In order to maintain a strong economy; you have to export more products than you import. Eventually, the most productive nations will outcompete your domestic economy; you will import their products and export your gold to them. Historically, whenever a country runs out of gold; they must go to war and acquire new resources to enrich themselves.
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  6. To sustain the Keynesian model. Plus, none of your social safety programs would function. It's basically one giant pyramid scheme. The pyramid needs a growing number of people to support the older ones.
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  7. I'm rather ignorant; so if someone could elaborate. The internet claims that Peronists basically believe in economic freedom, trade independence, and sovereign nationalism. Is this different or does it have a hypocritical history compared to Milei?
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  8. My wife and I are 31; dog, child, home. We live in central Ohio. We have 25 houses on our street. There is one couple; 38 and 40. The other 23 of our neighbors are 54 or older. Owning a home isn't everything it's cranked up to be. I'm a millennial that grew up during the last family-housing boom of the 2000s. Pools, kids, parties, cook-outs, etc. I never thought that the scariest thing in the world would be that residential areas don't have children anymore. It makes me fear for my own child.
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  9. Politicians have always been boring, people foolishly conflate social media coverage with non-boring. Turn off your social media and politicians will become boring again. What I find most annoying is that people can't figure out that their own tech habits give them their current perceptions. Yet they blame others for it.
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  10.  @gregshan  Dividend stocks are a waste of time. That dividend gets paid to you by a distribution of stock equity. So basically the stock is almost never growing. People should be putting their assets in index funds; not bonds or dividend stocks.
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  11. Rate cuts have already made a recession inevitable. I've been around the block enough to know that the media will try to make this Trump's fault regardless. If Kamala had won, we'd still enter a recession and FOX News would be blaming her. People need to stop being led around by the carrot on the stick.
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  12.  @IloveDoubleD  Well, yes, but I think it's exacerbated by social safety nets; seeing as they are asset bubbles dependent on population growth. I'm not sure we'd be in the same boat if they weren't stifling the cost of living for average people, which is why many people go deep into debt to afford basic life.
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  13. Job exports are a symptom of dollar devaluation; not a causation.
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  14.  @billobrien4680  Exactly - to reduce cost (profits are a rather redundant reason) everybody is chasing profits. Chasing higher products in the current business design was incentivized by the high inflation from 1977-1981. 1-2% annual was the model before that, but how can you sustain a business model with inflation that far outperforms those margins? One thing always leads to another. It's easy to blame businesses, but at the root you will always find government incompetence or power-lust.
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  15.  @lonpfrb  Thanks! Three questions though. Do you think a partnership with BRICS can alleviate this imminent collapse? Do you think that imminent collapse is bound to cause implosion or radical outward expansion (in desperation)? Also, wouldn't their currency devaluation also give incentive for an even stronger export economy? And could this affect the outcome?
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  16. @ Thanks for the info!
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  17. Smaller is better when it comes to economic stability on a global stage. Unless of course you get bombed or invaded by a larger country.
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  18. Democrats have shown to have a very strong voting block in 2022 and 2023. Democrats decimated Ohio Republicans 2 months ago in the General Election. You're forgetting who elected Trump in 2016; which was 8 years ago. Many of those voters are dead, have retired, or are working as slaves to stay afloat in an economy that Trump produced thru more Reaganomics. Putting interest rates at 0% for the last two decades was insanely dumb. It didn't give good business incentives; it gave incentives for get-rich-quick scams and further devaluation of the USD.
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  19. Personally, I think it's worth it. It will be like ripping a band-aid off, but still. One of the reasons American food is cheaper than any other first world country is because of low labor costs. Something that other nations are not as accustomed to.
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  20. You're going to vote for a man that appointed Jerome Powell and pressured the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates at 0%? All that domestic inflation and you are going to vote for him again?
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  21. Is the US nuclear stockpile in similar shape? I've heard from many sources that both Russia and the United States military arsenal is (essentially) rusting away and lacking maintenance.
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  22. Is the US nuclear stockpile in similar shape? I've heard from many sources that both Russia and the United States military arsenal is (essentially) rusting away and lacking maintenance.
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  23.  @donparker1823  I've heard that our arsenal is 5-10 years behind on routine maintenance and replacement parts. Considering how bad the labor shortage is (in every industry); it sounds legitimate if I'm only using deductive reasoning. We can't maintain prisons, we can't maintain the border, we can't maintain infrastructure, but we can maintain all of our nuclear armaments with a -30% shortage in military personnel? Look, at the end of the day; I don't know the specifics. My area of knowledge is finance and logistics. I'm just claiming that it sounds fishy with everything else falling behind.
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  24. Not technically; positive GDP and a bull market. Of course that doesn't mean a healthy economy, but it's all in the fundamentals. I think a recession though is actually imminent in 2025 due to rate cuts.
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  25.  @yournickshere  Depends though. Here's what I have a problem with, these media channels have millions in resources and data. But I can sit in my garage and use 2020 election data (early vote) to predict the outcome for 2024 pretty accurately? This is why people believe in controlled opposition. I deduced that mail-in ballot requests were down -27% and 18-39 age demographics were down -34% for early voting. Those two pieces had me come to the conclusion that he would win the popular vote by a 6% margin; it ended up being 3.5%. Regardless, I'm not sure how anybody thought Harris could win with such a big drop in necessary voting blocks.
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  26.  @JayEmm-ty9se  Blue collar 'origin industries' are NOT coming back to the Mid-West pal. It is a greying demographic with one of the largest elderly populations in the entire United States. The labor shortage here is unreal; no Americans to be found from CDL schools to welders. Green-cards are the only demographic even remotely humoring the industries.
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  27. It's a trade off though. You get lower agricultural and manufacturing prices, BUT you pay for it with stagnant wages and fewer jobs in those industries.
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  28. Democrats took the Ohio 2023 General Election by storm. I have NO doubt in my mind that Republicans will lose in a landslide come 2024. The only exception is if we end up with a Ross Perot situation, given RFK is running as an independent.
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  29.  @jaymonkey1456  Problem is that people need to have a realistic standard of judgement for political leaders. Most people are completely blind to their perception problem, which is that Trump has 100 times over (video footage) than any President before him had; largely due to technology. It's probably not foolish to assume that every President here on out will be excessively criticized because people have more access to outrage material. Those that don't have a solid pillar of perception (historically) will be more gullible to algorithm manipulation as we are already seeing.
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  30. I don't think smart people indulge in the President Elon narrative. I think those are typically people that didn't learn the first time that media is controlling their minds and villainizing anyone they choose.
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  31. People should go on Google Maps and check out the (Ohio Intel ONE Campus) The building site is enormous!
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  32. Boomers got to ride a nice wave because they were in the prime working years long before 2000 and 2008. By the time 2020 came along, they all had large amounts of cash to buy-low when the market crashed. Everybody else simply got screwed.
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  33.  @alexgreen6678  Best scenario we could have gotten with Trump's inflation running the country into the ground. If he's elected again, I'll guarantee you he'll pressure the interest rates to be 0% again under the FED and inflation will go nuts again.
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  34. According to what? If you keep giving yourself vague expectations, then you'll always come to vague conclusions. Making it easier for complacency.
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  35. @warfarenotwarfair What do you mean; never had millions of men fighting? Operation Citadel in and around Kursk alone yielded some 750,000 combat casualties on the Soviet side. By late 1945, Soviets had nearly 2.5 million fighting men on the eastern front; those aren't logistic and clerical jobs.
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  36. As usual, Europe and Asia will pay a heavy price for changing times. The Western Hemisphere will be fine. If anything, I expect Central and South America to see a massive growth in GDP over the next decade.
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  37. Gen X was never forgotten; they just love to claim that people forgot about them. We didn't!
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  38. @ Recessions are not caused by negative GDP growth (this is simply how they are calculated); it's more or less a symptom. Recessions are created during a refinancing phase; money leaving the stock market and re-entering foreclosures/services/real-estate; or being held as cash. This is caused by lower interest rates after prolonged stagnation.
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  39. Problem is, insurance companies won't cover them; so the US government would be solely responsible for anything that should happen. Paranoia is the reason that they're not getting built, but ALSO because there's a shortage of specialists that can actively build and run them (almost all of them are educated in the US) and virtually nowhere else in the world. We have the programs, but nobody really goes into the field because the ones that do either already live over-seas (as exchange students for the US) OR (they are US citizens planning to work abroad).
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  40. 17% rates in 1980 compared to 2024 with current housing costs isn't laughable. Boomers like to flaunt those numbers, but people would be stupid to take the current rates and prices over 1980.
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  41. CBO office has claimed for a while now that Social Security will need a -23% cut in order to function after 2034. That's assuming we don't enter another nasty recession before then. To my memory, millennials were the first generation to be told that they would never get SS. I'm really starting to think Gen X could have used the advice instead. They've been screwed by basically every recession while Boomers exploited them.
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  42. You're misunderstanding what he said. Inflation is self regulatory in that is naturally forces out demand due to high prices. So it naturally has to come back down if demand cannot be maintained. That is, if the US Government isn't manipulating the demand and using the banks to cushion it.
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  43.  @MrThisischris  Well, thank the current Keynesian/FED model that we have. Most people don't know that 'by law' the Federal Reserve cannot allow the markets to deflate. They are forced to slash interest rates and print money to stabilize markets at the cost of higher inflation. If the nation dies; it will die by hyperinflation.
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  44. It's all in interest rates. The FED cutting rates by 100pts in September has pretty much guaranteed a recession in early to mid 2025.
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  45. It'll probably hurt prices and supply, but most of the demand will probably turn towards outside producers that already exist. Instead of farmers keeping demand and being able to raise prices and have lower supply.
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  46. SCOTUS will never undo this ruling in Colorado; nor do I think they will make a ruling in general. If the Supreme Court rules against Colorado's removal of Trump under the 14th amendment; they will have to argue why. The most likely reason being (you can't implicate the 14th amendment without a formal charge and conviction). If any of you are watching the Georgia legal case with Trump surrounded the election; this argument was already used. It fell flat on it's face.
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  47. Could the fentanyl crisis affect the water supply in any way? I've heard that it's excessively hard to get those traces out of the water supply. Do we even know if there are side affects in the case of mass delusion?
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  48. I don't really think so, people that watch Zeihan seem to have a relatively health skepticism and more reasoning skills than jerks on other channels. Most people don't really think climate change is fake. The two issues that concern MOST people on this subject is 1(What exactly is causing most of the change and can anything actually be done about it. 2(What would be the economic and human cost to doing anything about it, which includes transferring more power to the Federal Government. I'm well aware that temperatures are rising, the problem is that I've also lived thru enough public eco scams that I'm hugely skeptical about the motives that thee politicians have. On top of that, you can't really use 25 years of climate data to project hundreds or thousands of years. 1899 - 1928 saw the worst series of hurricanes and tornadoes in the Western hemisphere ever recorded. Yet 1930 to 1990 were extremely calm in comparison. Human cost is also the issue. If you raise energy prices (you create an upward slope of poverty for the most vulnerable demographics). Nobody cares about eco-issues when their standard of living goes down; thus you start all over again.
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  49. That was 8 years ago now. Voters are under entirely different circumstances than they were in 2016. 2016 was about re-envisioning the Reagan Administration thru Donald Trump; bringing us back to the 1980s. The voting block that got him elected (Gen X and Baby Boomers) are either exhausted in the workforce or retired. None of what they had hoped for produced any fruit; things just got harder under another Reaganomics style of fiscal and Federal Reserve policy. This is where 0% interest rates have gotten us. A nation full of scams and dwindling wage values. Younger generations are VERY political oriented and they've shown us their capacity for turnout each year since 2020. In 2023 alone, Democrats took the Ohio General Election by storm; Republicans were nowhere to be seen.
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  50.  @victorygarden556  Ohioan here, changes in age demographics and turmoil within the Ohio GOP have severely damaged Republican voter turnout and state issues. I would know, I've voted GOP most of my life. DeWine's Governorship absolutely killed faith people had in the party here. If you were watching FOX News; you'd believe that the entire country was about to go blood-red in a swarm of Republican politics; absolutely laughable. It's not just Ohio though. Millions of registered Republicans sat home on Tuesday. This first became apparent during Mid-terms and then in the special and general elections of various states.
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