IanGould

 Contrary to what many people like to believe Musk isn't actually stupid. Stupid people don;t get into doctoral programs at Stanford. He actually has a record of founding and running highly successful companies. Tesla is the first successful new mass market automaker in decades (outside China). But his biggest achievement has to be convincing investors to value Tesla as a tech company not a car company. Even after a recent 70% fall in the stock price, Tesla is valued twice as high as Toyota, four times as high as BYD and nearly ten times as high as any of the Big Three US carmakers. That;s despite the fact that Tela makes far fewer cars than Ford, GM or Stellantis and is far less profitable. Supposedly, it's a "growth story", - except it has the oldest model line-up of any major carmaker. The Cybertruck and Semi will supposedly be released in 2023 - years late. The updated Roadster will also supposedly be released in 023 but isalsolikley to be dleayed. Best scenario ...

 In the 1920s, the briefly indwpendent West Ukrainian Republic used paramilitary police to deport Poles to the newly independent Polish republic. After the Poles, with the support of the western allies, occupied western Ukraine. they used paramilitary police to deport Ukrainians and Jews from the Ukrainian-majority area of Galicia - at first deporting them to Ukraine then to eastern Ukraine then after the Soviets took over the rest of Ukraine, to other parts of Poland where they were dispersed widely and prevented from forming communities. At te same time, the Soviets were deporting Poles from Ukraine to Poland. Then after the Soviet-German partition of Poland, the Soviets occupied Galicia and started deporting ethnic Poles to German-occupied Poland - where many of them were delivered straight to labour camps. Here's the thing when the Germans started deporting Jews from Poland occupied Soviet territory, they were largely using mechanisms already in place for up to 20 years. In fa...

 We've been here before. The Cominc War with China: https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FThe_Coming_Conflict_with_China%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR1DhxbdNbWbMrLdCf8FIWnCcotILmTievQRkz3ZnY6M-neac28l7fHjPKc&h=AT1H-Y2_r17rBGSSIpz0LBeRxvN0VXXEIo4SYIW0_lthf9040HB-ExzIfkBII04HnF8mRma_JBab0rIEr6Ex2J9L16tuzjFIOY1yhXaaQZK0LHVLX8XlZTrlgLFWPDG4pA&__tn__=R]-R&c[0]=AT2R4W9w06T4CYxSI6lfTciYOVKy9nJ8QXLko_34wYnY0-wBoFgmLKkpsuMzHGZETeJy1e7G2kdydlIJc73DxEQUqWJ3_bj8ENrvLVmm678iFashhorpEyLYGUBBixy-tysbnCUBoCm2Apz4n_uWWntjl_A-gxqfHX0fgOh2eweea8cE9KUbElPdpG_rQC_cqA The Coming War with Japan (1989):  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_with_Japan?fbclid=IwAR3Vh1U8HyTDj2VAZ0gfDsyH_pMtT3cgn2H63a7J5tJymPmvI7hOEBhd02g#See_also The Cominc War with the Qing Empire: https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2F8%2F87%2FYellowTerror.jpg%2F450px-YellowTerror.jpg%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR0T52iCMqmBQ1vYxI7iLfCdG62Qw...

  It's sort of tangential to the main point of the article but there's a very important point to be made about deficits and debt from the data here. In 1945, Australia's national debt was around 120% of GDP. For the next 30 years, we ran continuous budget deficits for the whole period. At the end of the period our national was 20% of GDP. That sounds illogical but there's a very simple explanation: the debt was growing more slowly than the economy. Also, the real value of the existing debt was reducing due to inflation. A really extreme example of that last point: Germany borrowed heavily during World War I, mostly from domestic lenders. After the war, Germany experienced hyperinflation. So someone who had invested their life savings - say 100,000 Reichsmarks - would receive a letter with a cheque for the amount owed. Only catch was the stamp on the letter would have cost 1,000,000 Reichsmarks. That's how Germany paid off its war debt. To take a way less extreme exa...

  Some people seem to think I'm a defender or supporter of the CPC and PRC. I'm not but 30 year of studying them have demonstrated one thing: they're depressingly durable. Countless predictions of China's imminent economic collapse have proven incorrect. But currently the Chinese economy is starting to look more and more like the Japanese economy at the start of their "lost decade" of the 1990's. Back in 1979 when the Dengist reforms started, China had a massive deficit in almost every form of physical infrastructure. Much of China's economic growth since then can be attributed to building infrastructure -ports; airports; railway lines; power plants - that increased economic efficiency. But that deficit has been largely made up and the economic returns on further investments in physical infrastructure have fallen sharply. This is why, for example, the expansion of the high speed real network has effectively been halted. Xi and the Presidium know all ...

John Mearsheimer's lecture "Why is Ukraine the west's fault" has been getting a whole lot of attention lately mainly because of its title and because it appeals to the narcissistic and solipsistic worldview of many westerners. - it's from 2015 so it's 7 years out of date. Simply put, if you actually listen to the lecture as opposed to simply waving a link to it around in lieu of an actual argument, events since then have proven him catastrophically wrong. - Mearsheimer starts out by giving a backgrounder in which he feels the need to explain that France is next to Germany and Ukraine is next to Russia. That pretty much sets the level for the rest of the lecture. (He also completely omits Great Britain from his discussion of European geopolitics.) Oh good now he's describing the massacre of peaceful protesters in 2014 as "an overreaction" and "messy" "What they're doing is not trying to conquer Ukraine. That's not going...