porkpiehat
14hr ago
Not to comment on whether this war is a good one or not, but it is much cheaper to keep doing what we're doing in Iran (i.e. not much) than it was in Iraq and Afghanistan which we were able to keep up for 8 and 20 years respectively.
porkpiehat
14hr ago
Just for a little perspective, 2.7 million men were deployed in Vietnam and 58,000 died. At the war's peak in 1968, we spent about 10% of GDP on our military.
porkpiehat
16hr ago
China is a quasi-fascist state. They practice state capitalism, not communism. They put Uyghurs into camps and prevent them from spreading their culture to the next generation. They are a Han ethnostate that bans nearly all immigration. Speaking on certain topics is forbidden. They execute political prisoners and harvest their organs. Need we go on?
India is a patchwork of different tribal, ethnic, and religious groups with a variety of practices that are entirely foreign to westerners including honor killings. Women are generally required to dress modestly but still face harassment when traveling alone (as any woman who has ever been to India can attest). Women are raped as punishment for the transgressions of their kin. Widows are stigmatized. Caste discrimination is rampant. People are murdered for rumored offenses against cows.
Note: this is far from a complete picture of either country, don't @ me.
The government China is far to the right of any western government.
The people of India are culturally far to the right of any western culture.
The voter is never wrong. Do data centers use too much water? Of course they do and I will ban them. Are eggs too expensive? Of course they are. Grocery stores are greedy and I will make them pay. Is gas too expensive? Yes. You deserve cheap gas. The cheapest gas.
porkpiehat
16hr ago
Yeah, a lot of their culture doesn't map into a traditional left-right axis which places primacy on ideas and not on identity.
For example, in the West, a leftist might support redistribution from the rich to the poor. A rightist might be against redistribution. But there's another perfectly legible viewpoint which is to support redistribution from you to me, regardless of who is poor or rich. I think a lot of Indians land here.
The idea of couching policies in terms of universalism is WEIRD. "Why must a policy benefit all of society?", the Third Worldist asks. "I vote so the government will give me money"
porkpiehat
17hr ago
Seems to me that all 4 goals are accomplished with the important caveat that they are not permanently accomplished which would require Iran acquiescence or regime change.
Trump likely believed, after Venezuela, that Iran's regime was likely to collapse immediately after the attack. It certainly seemed possible at the time that a new dictator would rise and sign a deal broadly favorable to U.S. interests in exchange for being left alone.
I think it's clear now that didn't happen.
But nor did the histrionic predictions of the so-called geopolitical experts come true. Iran didn't shut the Hormuz. Iran hasn't caused more than a couple dozen U.S. casualties. Oil didn't go to $250. We didn't send in ground troops. And, to the best of my knowledge, not one of these people have come out and said they are wrong.
Why does Iran even matter anyway? Probably it doesn't except that it makes the Republicans less likely to win the midterms. As the party in power, they will be blamed for the crime against humanity of gas being slightly more expensive.
The dissident right view on this conflict seems to be that Iran is not worth the squeeze because domestic electoral victory is more important than foreign policy goals. For the record, I agree. But at the same time, Trump has never thought like that, and that's why he's where he is. Mike Pence would have been happy to sit on his hands and let Iran develop nukes to keep his poll numbers in tact. But there's a reason he's not around anymore. For better or for worse, Trump acts rather than reacts. Will this be his undoing? Maybe, but so far he has kept getting away with it.
porkpiehat
17hr ago
Agreed. I'd put that in bucket #2, I think. Identity >> policy.
porkpiehat
17hr ago
Perhaps, the immigrants assimilated America to themselves, and not the other way around.
I think that's a fair assessment. The gravity of each group pulls itself towards the other.
What people often get wrong about Italian immigration is the presumption that nothing was done about it and it all worked out in the end. That's not true at all. People were extremely upset about it and that's why we passed the National Origins Act in 1924 which all but banned further Italian immigration. We shut the border for 40 years. By 1970, the foreign born population of the US had fallen below 5% and most of the earlier groups were finally assimilated.
Even in 1965, when we opened the border again, it wasn't because people wanted more immigration. It was just assumed that is was no big deal and the overall composition of the immigrants wouldn't change much. And wow were they wrong about that.
Immigration advocates want to skip the step where we struggled for decades and move right to the part where everyone is assimilated. That's not going to happen with continuous waves of new migration.
porkpiehat
18hr ago
Yes. The key factor for cyclicals is the capital cycle. For shipping, this is the order book. Fortunately we have some visibility here. We know how many ships are coming. Any orders placed now won't arrive for 5 years.
Longer term, I'm bullish about bulk shipping (coal/iron) because the order book is empty.
Tankers are in a medium position.
The container ship order book is full.
So we know the order book. The question becomes how much profit the tankers can make and distribute before the cycle ends. A company like Frontline will pay dividends equal to at least 30 of its share price in the next 18 months. Since everyone in shipping has been burned a million times, the good companies don't rush to buy new ships. Companies like Frontline, Starbulk, Hafnia, and DHT pay out almost all their profits as dividends. This is good behavior in a cyclical industry.
Memory chip investors, on the other end, will likely end up poor. The windfall profits these companies make are not being distributed, they are being reinvested into new capacity. (Note, that I am not an expert on this sector so I am less sure here).
While your statement about cyclicals is true on a general level, its important to understand the dynamics driving each sector.
porkpiehat
18hr ago
That does raise the question of why Chinese and Indians are so far left in the United States. Naively, we might expect the opposite. India and China are far-right places. They are so far right they could fairly be called fascist or theocratic by western standards. I'll propose a couple possibilities.
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Indians and Chinese assimilate well and correctly recognize that leftism is the high-status choice in the US
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Indians and Chinese care more about racial solidarity than about other things like abortion, taxes, and crime
porkpiehat
19hr ago
Yeah, it's a big concern. California was a solid red state until the early 1990s. For a long time is was the Republican state. If you were to poll white people born in California before 1960 and their descendants, it's likely they'd still break strongly Republican, meaning the political changes in the state are not people becoming more liberal, its just demographic replacement and evaporative cooling.
Despite everything, there are still more Republican voters in California than in every other state, even Texas.
Not sure this was your intent, but it reads like you are framing this as "white people less likely to actively build community" when data suggests the opposite is the case.
Domestic migration patterns in particular bear this out. People of all ethnicities constantly move towards white areas and away from non-white ones.
porkpiehat
19hr ago
Not OP, but there is a perception that Indian-run companies discriminate against non-Indians. If they are doing this despite being a tiny minority, imagine what a country with an Indian majority will look like for white people. Canada might find out, lol.
What's crazy is that Texas really isn't like this. Only 2.7% of people in Texas are South Asian. It's similar to the Somali thing in a lot of ways. It's a very small absolute number, but it's concentrated, so the changes seem huge.
It's basically this quote, but for ethnic spoil systems:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
Now obviously its unfair to compare these Texas fans to Somalians. They are probably, individually, quite lovely people. And, when voting, they are going to fall somewhere between Dennis Kucinich and Mao.
Almost all recent immigrant groups have voting patterns which are far to the left of longtime populations. It doesn't matter how "good" Indian and Chinese immigrants are if they vote for open borders. Our institutions won't save us. Even low single digit numbers can tip the scales. If Texas goes blue, the Republic will fall.
porkpiehat
1d ago
I have to admit you've given me some interesting food for thought.
What are the fiscal problems we're looking to fix? Trying to get inflation back down to roughly 2%, and optimistically try to get unemployment down a bit more, to like 3%?
Unemployment and inflation are low, so no problems there.
The bigger issue would be a sort of economic constitutional crisis. Government services are supposed to be paid for by taxes. When taxes are inadequate to cover expenses, then Congress is supposed to raise taxes or cut services. At some point debt grows to the point where Congress is forced to confront this. No one ever voted on "let's just keep printing money forever to pay for it".
Using only taxes to pay for services, then there is a hard cap on "Boomer luxury communism". Using taxes + money printing, then this cap is much higher. This money printing is a form of tax, and the government spending is a form of non-productive consumption. In the end, higher taxes and greater non-productive consumption will lead to lower economic growth.
porkpiehat
1d ago
I'm willing to believe. What concrete predictions should one make if this model is correct?
On the surface, it would seem this model implies our fiscal problems are easily fixable by monetizing the debt and lowering interest rates. Once interest payments are removed, the deficit to GDP falls to reasonable numbers.
What do you make of Japan's currency devaluation over the last 15 years?
It's never been a better time to be a Greek shipping magnate with some balls. Oil tankers are making unheard of profits.
The break-even rate for a VLCC (very large crude carrier) is something like $30,000/day. Last year, the market was already tight. I was pretty happy when a tanker company I invest in signed a year-long contract at $74,000/day.
Now, I really wish they hadn't. The rate for a year long charter has more than doubled. But what's really crazy is what tankers are earning when they sail from the Gulf of Oman (just outside the Hormuz) to China. The rate is now over $400,000/day. A round trip voyage takes over 40 days. They can make $20 million for a single voyage. A newbuild VLCC costs $130 million and lasts 20-30 years. Ship owners can earn this back in a single year.
But back to the big balled Greeks.
There's another market that is even more lucrative: The Hormuz trade. This involves sailing a smaller ship into the Hormuz, grabbing oil, and then out again, doing a ship-to-ship transfer in the Gulf of Oman. I have no idea what they are making but it's obscene. It's possible they are paying for their vessel with every voyage. Fuck insurance. What's the point? And Iran's attacks are pretty weak. When a ship is attacked, it rarely does serious damage. They haven't sunk one in ages as far as I know. People are making generational wealth. I hope the crew is compensated adequately.
porkpiehat
2d ago
Argentina is a basket case. Let's focus instead on a closer comparison: Japan.
Japan's debt-to-GDP is much higher than the US. And they grow slower. And they have fewer children. And they are older. So any problems the US might have in the future, Japan already has today.
How does Japan handle its debt? They monetize it. The central bank of Japan owns roughly 42% of Japan's debt. That means they created Yen out of thin air to buy the government debt. And it doesn't stop there. Another 40% of the debt is held by banks, insurance companies, and pension funds that are legally mandated to own it.
You might think this is bad for Japan's currency and you'd be right. Its value against the U.S. dollar has declined by 50% since 2012. That's a common theme. Almost all currencies decline against the dollar over time. Some decline slowly. Some decline quickly. But, except for the almighty Swiss Franc, decline they must. .
The U.S. will monetize the debt. The consequences of that might be hard to predict. But there is enormous capacity for the U.S. to do that given our extremely strong currency and extremely large trade deficit. It's likely that the damage will fall mainly on countries that rely on U.S. exports for their economic growth.
Long term, the health of the US economy will depend on its economic productivity. The important thing is not to take actions that curtail economic growth as they have done in Europe. Fiscal concerns are secondary.
porkpiehat
2d ago
Here's a modest proposal I think you can appreciate.
Let's send every person of child bearing age in Africa an iPhone with satellite internet. TikTok, Instagram, and Bumble will come pre-installed. Birth rates won't be a problem for long. If treatment ineffective, free college education through grad school for every girl.
Secretly based. Economic development has done far more for the people of Africa than all charity, probably by multiple orders of magnitude. The tycoons should focus on what they are good at instead of blowing it on conscious-assuaging causes in distant places.
It turns out you can just keep growing GDP and helping people without giving your money to grifters along the way.
I'll go further and say we'd be better off as a society with fewer charitable donations. Billionaire deaths and divorces have been a disaster for the human race. The unprecedented cash bazooka that is about to hit SF will be even worse.
Maybe this time the billionaires will something good with their charity. But I doubt it.
porkpiehat
2d ago
You are mad because Trump didn’t bring in deflation, which has only happened during a deep recession or depression? No, you really don’t want deflation.
porkpiehat
2d ago
Yes. The root cause is data center buildout and reshoring industrial jobs.
porkpiehat
2d ago
Somewhat related but I was thinking the other day about how a lot of EA people have gotten obscenely wealthy but none of the EA problems really got solved. Shouldn’t bed nets in Africa be fully funded by now?
The premise of many EA ideas was that you can “save” a life for extremely cheap, from hundreds to single digit thousands.
Given the insane wealth of EA people, the tech sector, and US progressives more generally, we should have made extreme progress in solving problems in Africa by now. As far as I can tell, we haven’t. All the progress in African is from catch up development and trade. The charities are just a hole into which money is poured, sometimes relieving suffering, sometimes causing harmful effects, but rarely solving any problems. (I will give credit to the guinea worm people).
I think the central premise of EA charity is wrong. You can’t save lives on the cheap. Many problems are intractable and can’t be solved by just giving money. You actually have to be in the trenches. Giving money to charities is mostly just waste.
porkpiehat
3d ago
Core CPI is at 2.9 percent, lowest since 2021. Total CPI is at 3.4.
This is only high compared to the anomalously low inflation of the ZIRP period, driven by the replacement of western goods with cheaper Chinese ones.
We are also doing a trillion dollar data center buildout which is pressuring prices.
The main cause of “high” inflation is higher wages for working class Americans.
Yeah. If Dario cared at all about AI safety the first thing he would do is step down, or at least stop making public appearances. His bad comms have done untold damage to the AI safety movement.
So what's up with him? Does he lack the wisdom to see the damage he is doing? Or is he power-seeking?
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