Putin wouldn’t be President of Russia if the US and the USSR had been able to settle their differences without a 60 year long series of proxy wars and regime changes. Neither would Trump, for that matter.

You played yourselves.

Doesn’t seem like years of sanctions on Russia, Iran, or North Korea had a sufficient impact to cause any change.

Seems like it made them more insular, more self-sufficient, and more hostile to future diplomatic entreties.

Change by force can have negative results, and change by economic means can have positive ones

What if, instead of trying to extort or kill a nation’s residents in order to force them to adopt your preferred foreign policy, you simply afforded them an opportunity for peaceful coexistence?

…made in 2018 by a Russian team. Way before the whole Ukraine war thing, you understand

Flipping through a history book on Russian/Ukrainian relations in the 21st century

Closing the book, putting it back on the shelf, whistling, and walking away

More seriously, I’ll never understand folks who hear “So-and-so is from Nationality X, so now I must/must not purchase products from them because of their bloodline.”

Have a friend who was a sort-of perpetual grad student - bouncing from Sweden to Italy to Australia - over about ten years, pursuing a degree in marine biology. Along the way, she contributed thousands of hours of labor to various research teams. Eventually, she got burned out, married a neurologist, and moved to a small house in Queensland. Now she mostly just gardens and raises bunnies, which she is extraordinarily good at thanks to her education.

Was this money wasted or did the universities get exactly what they paid her for? Idk. But it seems a far better way to employ people than what we’ve done with The Pentagon or ICE.

“I graduated high school, got a good job at the Mill, married my high school sweetheart, had five kids, bought a second house with a boat, retired at 60, went insane reading Facebook memes and watching FOX News, then decided to shoot up the Harvest Music Festival in 2017. Why can’t you young people do that?”

My wife graduated law school in 2010, Summa Cum Laude, and just barely got a job at a low rent firm.

Five years later, she’s earning twice the money at a much nicer place for not much more work, because the glut of students from '08-'10 caused grads in '11-'14 to look elsewhere. Suddenly there was a huge supply gap and you could write your own ticket.

Moral of the Story: Get good at something and stick with it. Markets go up, markets go down, but skills pay the bills in the end.

Reminds me of the movie “A Serious Man”

Larry Gopnik: A divorce-what have I done! I haven’t done anything- What have I done!

Judith Gopnik: Larry, don’t be a child. You haven’t “done” anything. I haven’t “done” anything.

Larry Gopnik: Yes! Yes! We haven’t done anything! And I-I’m probably about to get tenure.

Judith Gopnik: Nevertheless, there have been problems. As you know.

chinese companies are notorious for stealing IP

American companies sell the ip to China in exchange for access to capital and labor, then claim they’ve been robbed when the Chinese firms innovate and expand on the patents they’ve acquired.

The end result is a car company that produces better vehicles than anything an American or Japanese or German company can manage.

Curiously, these superior vehicles are “stolen” while the Teslas keep exploding under home grown technology.

Mamdani’s Jihadist plan to open municipally run grocery stores will destroy NYC with Shari Onions.

A lot of these subsidies (both in the US and China) are implicit. Chinese state rail networks operate at cost, allowing cheap transportation of materials and labor. American borrowing is heavily subsidized through the Fed Credit Window, which keeps rates in the low single digits while corporate bonds and consumer loans can be 2x-30x as high. Both countries cut corners on environmental enforcement and subsidize waste management. Both countries subsidize education and incentive R&D through their university systems.

The real benefit BYD enjoys - even above its Chinese peers - is vertical integration. They own everything from mining interests to technology patents to dealerships. This is a deliberate consequence of Chinese trade policy, which requires foreign investors to partner with Chinese nationals in order to own and operate capital. Consequently, Berkshire Hathaway - a large early investor in BYD - cannot dictate Chinese vehicle manufacturing policy from a private office in Omaha. Chinese locals benefit from the innovation, the domestic capital, the experienced labor force (which can migrate to local competitors), and the increased economic activity it produces.

China is insourcing it’s wealth aggregation, which has a cyclical compound benefit over time.

I will answer this question with another question. “If I don’t take the blindfold off and find out who is doing the Lord’s work, how do I get this person to do it again?”

Unless you work in this sector and have detailed knowledge, youd be delusional to believe to be able to answer that question

The decision by Intel to forgo investment in next-generation chip fabrication for over a decade and coast on a spec that capped out at 7nm was something techies and investors had been ringing bells about for a long while. Similarly, the swell in demand for future high performance chips has been ongoing since the pre-COVID days. You can read the briefs on Intel and make an informed guess as to whether they will be able to outperform a company like TMSC, which is hedged in both politically and geographically, but riding the cutting edge of chip fabrication.

The great thing about making investment decisions is that you don’t have to be exactly right every time. You can be marginally right, or even wrong, and still see your portfolio grow. The baseline you’re competing against is the index returns. And - especially with Blue Chips in a heavily monopolized environment - the difference between the index and the individual business isn’t particularly large most of the time.

Also i’d say Palantir isnt as much of a secret tip but rather capitalizing on wanting to live under Fascism.

That’s not investing, that’s wishcasting. If you think betting for or against Palantir is the difference between Liberty and Tyranny, you’ve got bigger problems with your portfolio than diversification.

Avoid individual stocks.

If you’re a new retail investor, sure. Putting all your chips on the S&P is probably the safest bet. But these indexes are, themselves, often overweighted by the MAG7 anyway. So you’re still heavily exposed to certain sectors and even individual firms. Tesla, for instance, is explicitly 3% of the NASDAQ composite. And because of the way it is interconnected with NVIDIA and Toyota and a few other large cap companies, a sudden downturn in Tesla value can drag down the rest of the index quickly.

Don’t try to time the market, in or out. DCA. Don’t touch the money.

That’s fine from a very rudimentary savings strategy. But as you learn more about individual equities, you’ll see opportunities. Palantir is a great example. It was trading at $10/share a year ago, despite Thiel having a direct line to national security spending budgets and a very friendly relationship with both Trump and Harris. Severely undervalued in the security sector in a way that a simple S&P or NASDAQ investment can’t take advantage of. Meanwhile, domestic natural gas is severely hindered by the US trade relations with China - which is the fastest growing market for petrochemicals. Simply having a chunk of the DOW won’t yield growth consistent with specific areas of the international market.

Watch P/E ratios. Watch EBITDA. Watch what the economy is doing, generally speaking. Fuck day-trading and options plays. But you can absolutely find opportunities in the market long term with a conservative buy-and-hold strategy, if you can pick out equities that are undervalued and positioned for future growth.

Solar is a great growth sector atm, as energy prices rise and O&G supply chains become overexposed to international conflicts. Bank stocks are enjoying a new wave of deregulation that promise high growth potential. Meanwhile, certain sectors in the MIC are stumbling - Boeing and Raytheon, for instance - because they can’t actually produce units to meet global demand for killing machines. There’s an arbitrage opportunity in smaller competitive startup firms - particularly in drone and electronic warfare.

If you’re serious about investing, it’s worth asking the question “Is Intel in a position to compete with TMSC?” rather than just dumping all your money into an index.

You should have really looked into it while the 30% fed discount existed. I

The real return on renewables is in the industrial facilities. Your house isn’t going to have the location or the hardware to optimize sunlight collection like a multi million dollar facility.

Economies of scale can get the price of generating solar down into the low single digits. And then there’s industrial batteries/transmission.

That’s what is boosting utility. Not home units.

Same thing happened in Texas. ERCOT’s sky high wholesale electricity rate cap was an enormous windfall for gas power, but also for Wind and Solar which just got to draft behind.

And since there’s not variable cost to Solar/Wind and you can just keep rolling your profits into new capital, we get more and more infrastructure rolled out year after year.

if people stop flying they will go out of business

They won’t. That’s the rub. We have played this game over the decades. Whenever the industry is on the verge of bankruptcy, the feds bail them out. When the profits are flowing, the executives/shareholders are free to cash out without concern for the future of the company, and the people who need to travel are never given any kind of alternative even as the process of flying becomes more expensive and emisserating.

It’s not that complicated.

The central arterial system for civilian and commercial rapid mass transit is enormously complicated. Just shouting “Don’t use planes!” doesn’t address logistical alternatives.

There is no “floor” to air travel

There is. I just linked to it. We had empty planes flying because airlines were not contractually permitted to run fewer flights without having their routes monopolized by their competitors.

Some of the most powerful and influential men in America fought tooth and nail to protect the railroad industry

They didn’t. They fought to consolidate the industry decades ago. But more recently they’ve turned it over to vulture capitalists to scrap for the real estate value. One of the biggest jokes of the modern era is how Union Pacific and BNSF Railway have fumbled the bag or straight up handed it off, so a handful of senior executives could reap a few enormous windfalls.

market forces (and, yes, to a lesser extent government policy, but mainly just people buying cars) eventually led to the near-collapse of the industry

Freight rail has never been more profitable, in large part because the number of routes and the regulations on transport have hit rock bottom. Firms are charging record prices, paying minimal labor costs, deferring maintenance, flagrantly ignoring the law, and absolutely cleaning up in the free market.

They’re eating their own seed corn. And in the end, the system will fail. But when you’re an executive making tens of millions in compensation, with an eye towards retirement in years rather than decades, it’s Not Your Problem.

A knock-on consequence of this management style has been to hold up passenger rail (specifically, Amtrak, a federally owned company also plagued with underinvestment and technical debt), as points at which freight and passenger cars share lines are choked with traffic such that passengers can’t arrive in anything resembling a timely manner. THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT.

Corporations can resist change but that doesn’t mean they are always successful.

Civilians boxed into a failed mass transit system who are told “Just stop using the system” are not being provided with functional alternatives or support to leverage those alternatives.

Worm eating the powdered bones of a dead animal: Am I a joke to you?

That’s a bit of a gimmick related to airlines betting (correctly) that flight demand would rebound after covid ended and wanting to keep their spot in line.

It’s an illustration of a market incentive that doesn’t reflect consumer demand. It was also a prelude to a bunch of federal and state bailouts for the industry (much like after the crashes in '08 and '01), intended to keep businesses that can’t stay profitable in the black.

If there was a true societal shift and people flew less

The societal shift would need to be a reduced demand for travel not a reduced desire to fly on a plane. That’s what COVID created (temporarily) but it still didn’t drop plane flights to the point of consumer demand, because of these private contractual arrangements intended to keep airports profitable.

I fucking hate flying. I know lots of other people who hate flying. It’s stressful, it’s expensive, it’s obnoxiously bureaucratic (especially as we switch to Real ID / tighten security at borders / etc). But it is also the only practical way to get between big states in less than a day.

If you want a True Societal Shift, you need to present alternatives to air transport. HSR was supposed to be that alternative, but it never got delivered. For some mysterious reason, passenger railroad companies that had crisscrossed the country a century ago just evaporated. Cities grew increasingly hostile towards municipal bus depots and rail terminals. Highway expansion and airline construction dominated the priority of municipal and state governments.

Also, there WERE a lot fewer flights during covid, ghost planes notwithstanding.

There was a floor below which the number of flights could not drop due to - what are functionally - political reasons. Similarly, there were restrictions on travel that were lifted far too soon, and reignited the rapid spread of the virus, for political reasons. And there was further M&A of smaller airlines intended to monopolize the supply of travel, because finance capital demanded air travel receive priority over other civilian alternatives.

These are not personal consumer choices. These are corporate and state policies.

Corporations aren’t evil

At least from the perspective of “evil” as an all-consuming selfishness that comes at the detriment of your neighbors, Corporations are explicitly designed to be evil.

The airline industry as it exists today - a poisonous, clumsy, alarmingly fragile, wasteful, gluttonous dinosaur of a mass transit system - is the consequence of a few cartelized industrial leaders bribing and strong arming key public sector bureaucrats into subsidizing itself, as the senior executives and investors plunder the cash flow on the back end.

Announcing that you will be bicycling from LA to NY in protest does not change any of their economic calculus.

I bought it and really tried to use it, but the reality was just too clunky for primary use. It has no dpad, a single crappy convex analog stick, terribly placed ABXY buttons, horrible shoulder buttons, and just a bit too much input lag on the trackpads.

Hard truths.

Why did they feel the need to replace analog controls with these weird, inconsistently responsive, difficult to map touch controls when every other console platform had already demonstrated why that’s a bad idea?

Was the SC innovative, bold and ahead of its time in many ways?

NO. It was kitsch and poorly engineered and obviously not play tested sufficiently before release. It was a hobbyist’s attempt at reinventing the mousetrap that got shoved into a major distribution pipeline when Playstation and Nintendo and XBox had already demonstrated why you don’t build controllers this way ten years earlier.

If you can provide her with 1960s health care and living costs, she might be willing to sell you her house for 1960s real estate prices.

Would you be replacing her hip for an authentic 1973 mint edition Jefferson Nickel?