Credit deflation and the reflation cycle to come (part 2)

[King Penda]

49 minutes ago, Ma2 said:

Apologies for missing the rest of the discussion on China, some great insights from everyone.

Just listened to the latest End Game podcast which had Peter Zeihan talking geopolitics, fascinating stuff for anyone who subscribes.

Some points from memory, so please challenge -

• Doesn't see China anywhere near as strongly positioned as is the general perception (due to propoganda)
• Chinese navy only ever set up for invasion of Taiwan, not strong enough for anything else
• Believes this invasion will not happen due to Taiwanese know-how and nuclear ability on the quiet
• US Navy alone could blockade and starve China of oil for a month or so which would see collapse
• China has no friends
• Beijing will just keep on down the current road until it starts falling apart, but just keep ignoring it, ramping up the propoganda and control where it can. See no other course of action available to CCP.
• Eventually North and South possible split, unified China being an anomaly historically anyway

Where’s linn Chung from the water margin when you need him

[Noallegiance]

20 minutes ago, spygirl said:

Theres nothing new in what he says - 10% of the population are slack jawed morons.

And the bottom ~20% are  not suited to the tasks that the US army requires them to do - they need to be smart enough to do task but not too smart to think about it too much.

Talk a UK army recruiter and ask them about the state of the people they reject.

 

Thats always been the case. And its pretty obvious if you have to deal with a large number of the general population.

My classic moron filter is 24h time tables. In my train travelling days, before elecstric signs, there was always large nubmer who could not work out the time afetr midday.

 

In my experience - 

About 10% of the UK adult population cannot read anything, Totally illiterate

About another 20% cannot follow written instructions - think TV instructions.  Everything - and I mean every task - has to be shown to them until they grasp it.

This does raise the issue of how much money the UK is wasting in education.

 

 

 

 

Yeah but 82.47931% of facts are unsubstantiated.

[Yellow_Reduced_Sticker]

On 20/05/2021 at 09:01, DurhamBorn said:

Royal Mail are going to be paying 20p a share divi going forward and progressive,those who bought last year in the crash should have a 14% yield on their investment going forward.

 

MASSIVE Thanks mate, they hit an all time HIGH yesterday...£5.41!

 

 

 

Meanwhile, @nirvana is in isle 2 waiting for this particular nurse as she helps traders PULL the trigger just at the RIGHT TIME... as this time he FORGOT to buy the dip in sh*tcoin  ...ONLY kidding mate

 

 

 

I'm ONLY posting cos its bloody pissing down and can't get out... skip scavenging, I've skip scavened 5 water butts in the last few weeks, i reckon i can get my yearly water bill down to £60 quid!

 

Right...I'm off, before i get a BOLLOCKING for posting sexy pics! 

 

[Ma2]

 

Posting some extracts from the transcript, hopefully OK as advertises the strength of the offering. Sorry about the formatting and long post.

If you look at a map of the world, the East Asian rim from the Japanese, from the Sea of Japan going down roughly to the Southern Philippines. So you can think about the Northeast Asian four, Japan, Korea, Tai-wan, China, the Persian Gulf, of course, and then a belt in Central Europe from Scandinavia and Moscow straight down to Turkey. Those three zones, historically speaking, have been the most violent areas of the world since the beginning of recorded history. Just a quirk of geography. This is where the world’s major cultural and economic regions kind of come together and clash.

Peter Zeihan:What the global order under American leadership did is stop that. We forced everyone to be on the same side. And so for 70 years, we have not had the clash of civilizations. Instead, we’ve had global growth and integration in which if you wanted to integrate before 1945, it meant some European or Japanese dude came over and conquered your country and forcibly assimilated you into whatever they wanted. That’s what integration used to look like. That’s not what it is today. I mean, we’ve got container ships that have what? 15,000 containers on them now with products from every country in the world and going to every country in the world. We’ve never been this linked, but that requires stability.

Peter Zeihan:And the first time a civilian ship for whatever reason is challenged by a state Navy, that’s it, it’s over. You raise the marginal cost of transport by 1%, half of the world’s supply chains are no longer viable. So we real-ly are talking a breakdown of everything we know about how we build stuff, how we develop things, how we move things from A to B. It’s all interconnected and it’s all incredibly fragile. And without the Ameri-cans, none of it is possible.

Bill Fleckenstein:Peter, may I ask what you would assign the probability of some state actor taking on one of these cargo ships? I mean, is that something that could happen at any moment or would there be a decent lead up to it? I never even thought about that other than around oh, what’s the name of that place? Djibouti where all that stuff goes on. That’s the only place that I’ve ever seen any of that actions. I had kind of put it out of my mind until you just mentioned it, so.

Peter Zeihan:Well, it’s kind of like let’s assume you’re in a car wreck that involves a train and a cliff, which one actual-ly kills you? There are any number of ways that this can all go to hell overnight. If I were a betting man,

I would say the type of ship that is most likely to get hit would probably be an oil tanker, because that’s where the most immediate vulnerability is, but it doesn’t have to be. You interrupt the flow of energy any-where, for any reason, a really bad hurricane. The Russians move on Eastern Ukraine, the Chinese and the Japanese escalate from just yelling at each other to actually pointing some guns at each other and some-body pulls the trigger accidentally.

Peter Zeihan:Anything that does any of this, energy prices will at least double in a very short period of time. And when that happens, you get these giant tankers carrying a million plus barrels of crude sailing along at a measly 11 notes, countries will act in their own self-interest. And oil is the product that is transported the furthest on average of anything else. And of course, once one of those goes down, the energy markets go down. And you can imagine what that’s going to do to everything else. Oil is not just a fuel, it’s a fertilizer. It’s what we use to make plastics and pretty much everything that you can probably touch in your room right now. Without it, everything stops. And that’s just one bullet. That’s just the cliff. You’ve got the train and you’ve got the other cars.

Grant Williams:Peter, I want to come back to oil in a little bit, because when we get around to discussing China in more detail, and particularly the chapter on China in your book, Disunited Nations, which I will plug for you, be-cause if anybody listening hasn’t read that, it’s just a fantastic piece of work. But let’s start with obviously the big one that’s on everybody’s mind, and that’s the US and China. The escalation so far, how you look at it going forward. And if we can understand the role that Taiwan might play in this, because I think that at the moment is looking more and more like the kind of key piece on the board.

Peter Zeihan:Sure. I mean, the relationship is in free fall right now. And I don’t mean to blame Biden, or even Gi for that, this is something that’s been coming for a while. Obama and Trump did the relationship no favors either. Now, that’s not me saying that if we only we had better leadership in the United States things would be dif-ferent, although that would be nice. What I mean by that is this is structural, the Chinese system is utterly dependent upon the global order in its current form as patrolled and maintained by the Americans. And so if the Americans really want to destroy China, all they really need to do is go home. Geography will take care of the rest.Peter Zeihan:But a few basic things. Number one, demographics. The Chinese have had record declines in their birth rate four years in a row now. And even with the Chinese tendency to muck up the statistics in order to make themselves look better, they’re now publicly saying that the Chinese population probably peaked last year. So we know that by 2070, there will be fewer than half as many Chinese as there are today. China is not the country of the future. China is reverting to its historical mean of being a geographic description and not a country, it’s going to break up. The question is whether it breaks up in the next few years or not? And even odds.

Peter Zeihan:On the American side, we now have sanctions on their equivalent of Chevron Texaco, CNOOC, because of dealings with Iran. We have an energy crisis brewing in the Persian Gulf involving the Iranians, of course.

The country that would get hurt most by that is China. They’re the world’s largest importer by a factor of four. The Chinese because of their demographic situation have seen their labor costs go up by a factor of 12 in the last 20 years, so they’re no longer the low cost producer, and they haven’t advanced enough to be the high cost producer. Their educational system has stalled. The quality of Chinese products has probably peaked about 2007. And we’re seeing countries like Vietnam and Mexico cannibalize their market share, and that’s before you figure it out in things like the trade war.

Peter Zeihan:The US new Trade Representative, Katherine Tai, her entire professional experience is based around suing the People’s Republic of China over American trade law, and her family’s from Taiwan. You can imagine how the Chinese see that. They’re perceiving this as a full court press against their interests, and they’re not wrong. A lot of people say that, “Oh, well, the Chinese can just take over for the US and become the leader of globalization.” I’m like, “Hmm, no.”

Peter Zeihan:To make globalization work, we had to pay everyone to be on our side. Part of that meant running a ginor-mous trade deficit so that people had an economic interest in cooperation. That’s not the Chinese model. They want to force feed products through everybody, down everyone’s throats. And even if everybody signed on, it’s not like the Chinese can control the world. They have one aircraft carrier, the Shandong, that’s about as powerful as... Well, maybe 70% as powerful as an American jump carrier, our Marine Expe-ditionary Units. We have 10 of those. And then we have 12 super carriers on top of that.Peter Zeihan:So the Chinese navy versus the American Navy, it’s like a 50 to one ratio in terms of the American force advantage. They can’t get past the first island chain. Their manufacturing system is dependent upon hyper financing. There’s nothing about this that is sustainable in a world without the United States. And I’d argue there’s really nothing about it that’s sustainable in a world with the United States much longer. And so the Chinese at the top realize that the game is almost up, and they’re opting for a political lockdown and nationalization. Or not nationalization; nationalism, ultra-nationalism actually, and a neofascist corporate structure just to hold the country together.

Peter Zeihan:Because if they lose access to global markets, the lights literally go out. You have mass employment of hundreds of millions of people. And anytime any country has faced anything on that scale, you’ve had civic breakdown. And the Chinese know this, because they’ve been through this 47 times. The whole one China mantra is about finding a political solution to this. And Nixon by bringing the Chinese into the global order provided an economic outlet to make it happen. But those days are gone, and it’s just now a question of when does this system actually break apart? And does it take anyone with it?

Grant Williams:It’s really interesting, Peter, because when I read the chapter on China in Disunited Nations, it was fascinat-ing, and I really want to dig into that shortly. And then when you and I spoke actually about this time last year I think it was, give or take, it was funny, the reaction to it was very much, “Oh, here’s another Ameri-can that thinks China hasn’t got a chance and is waving the flag.” And I found that a very interesting re-sponse. Because listening to you and reading you, there’s absolutely I just don’t come away with that feel-ing. It’s this is analysis, this is not... There’s no tub fluffing here. But I was dying to get this chance to let you address that, right? Because it’s I’m sure that you must get that a lot, “Oh, you’re just too American-centric, and you’re just bagging the Chinese because you’re American.”Peter Zeihan:It happens. Honestly, my Asian clients are probably the biggest buyer of what I’m selling, because they see it up close and they realize that the Chinese system is based on mass exports and overproduction and no consumption whatsoever. And they know that this party has to end. And they’re terrified, because they’ve made a lot of money at that party. And with the Chinese being available for economic access, and the Americans being available for security protection, that has been the best of both worlds for Korea, and Taiwan, and Japan, and Singapore, and Malaysia, and the Philippines and the rest. But all things end.

Grant Williams:Right. So let’s get back to that Taiwan component, because when you mentioned there about them not be-ing able to get past the first island chain. When you look at the world from China, you see that the port in Taipei is a very clear route out into the deep blue, and it does allow them to bypass that first island chain, which just I guess is another reason why Taiwan is so appealing to the Chinese. So talk a little bit about the China-Taiwan situation historically, for those people that don’t really understand it. And also then, how the recent chip shortage, the recent distractions in America, there seems to be a lot more chatter about Taiwan being in play, let’s call it.

Peter Zeihan:Yeah, there certainly is. Taiwan has always kind of played a role in the free news in Chinese history. So the idea of China as a single unified country is actually historically very anomalous. The Han have what? 3,500 years of recorded history. They’ve only been a unified country for about one tenth of that. And half of what they’ve been united under has been under the American lead strategic order, which prevented anybody from preying upon them. And most of the rest is under Mongol occupation. So it’s like, there’s not a long history here of the Han calling the shots.P

eter Zeihan:Taiwan’s role in that is they were always the outland. So if a dynasty was defeated on the mainland, they could always flew to Taiwan and try again. And so when the Chinese are nervous about Taiwan, they’re paying attention to their history. They’ve realized that Taiwan at many times in its history has knocked the legs out from whoever is trying to unify the mainland. So they’re not going to give up at least rhetorically on the One China policy. However, that doesn’t mean that they can get it or they’re not willing to pay the price to get it.

Peter Zeihan:So while the Chinese Navy versus the US Navy would be a hilarious joke, the Chinese Navy versus Taiwan, that’s actually what the Chinese navy was designed for. amphibious assault on a relatively close proximi-ty. In a straight up fight, I have no doubt that the Chinese could conquer Taiwan. It won’t be a straight up fight. Assuming for the moment the United States doesn’t get involved, assuming for the moment the Jap-anese don’t get involved. And if we did get involved, God, we just put our carriers on the east side of Tai-wan, flyover, sink anything that’s coming over. It would be pretty straightforward, and we’d send three or four destroyers to the Indian Ocean just to shut off the oil imports. China would collapse in three months, no doubt.

Peter Zeihan:But if we’re not involved, if it is a more of a straight up fight, the Chinese are going to have to gather forces in order to surge over Taiwan. And the Taiwanese are not blind. It’s like this is the one conflict they’ve been training for since 1949. So, what are they going to do? Well, Taiwan is a nuclear power in all but name. So if they get two weeks notice, they’re going to have a half a dozen deliverable warheads?

Bill Fleckenstein:Seriously?

Peter Zeihan:Yeah. I mean, this is 1940s technology. I don’t know if you guys have met any Taiwanese, but they’re pretty freaking clever. They can manage this. If it’s a choice between independence or subjugation, getting-

Bill Fleckenstein:No, no. I get that. I guess it shows you how clueless I am about what’s really happening in Asia when I wasn’t really aware that Taiwan could stand up that sort of nuclear stuff. Sorry, capacity, if they were re-quired to. It’s a pretty-

Peter Zeihan:Well, there’s a lot of countries that could pull it off.

Bill Fleckenstein:It’s a pretty open secret?.

Peter Zeihan:Yeah, it’s like, there’s a lot of other countries that could do it too. Sweden could do it in a heartbeat.

Bill Fleckenstein:Yeah. Well, that’s [crosstalk 00:21:33]-

Peter Zeihan:Korea is probably the best example. Korea every once in a while is shocked, SHOCKED when one of their interns accidentally purifies some weapons grade uranium. And the IAEA comes in and slaps him on the wrist and the Koreans are like, “No, that was bad. Never do that again. You want a job?” They just make sure that they can dust off that skill set if they ever really need it. Anyway, so if the Chinese are going to do this, and they don’t want to get nuked, they can’t gather forces, they just have to go with whatever they have wherever it is, which means you’re talking 100,000 casualties on the Chinese side.

Grant Williams:Yeah.

Peter Zeihan:It would be really, really ugly. And then what

Peter Zeihan:Yes, technically, you now have a way through the first island chain, but do you really think the American market is going to remain open after you take out Taiwan. And now you’ve gotten out of the first island chain, but at the wrong spot. You now have to go all the way around what, Australia? It’s the geography of East Asia is not conducive to a Chinese breakout. They would need to secure the entire first island chain from Japan all the way to Singapore. That’s the only way this works. And that is just beyond them by a couple orders of magnitude. Peter Zeihan:In addition, what do you think the rest of the world powers are going to do about shipments in and out of China in this scenario? So I mean, you’re talking about the Chinese choosing to sacrifice their economic involvement, their near developed world status, their energy access, the resource access, their market access, everything that makes the CCP survive today, goes away if they make a Hail Mary attack on Taiwan. So if you’re okay reverting to a mere pre-industrial status of feudalism, it’s a great plan. But I don’t think that’s what they’re after.Grant Williams:Peter, let me ask you, because this is what I find fascinating. This is why I so enjoy reading Disunited Na-tions, because when you talk about this it makes all the sense in the world, and yet, the prevailing narra-tive that you read everywhere in the media is never this, right? The prevailing narrative is always Taiwan is vulnerable, the Americans are disinterested, China is going to use this. Why is it that this narrative, the facts of the situation just get completely ignored? I mean, there is an obvious answer. Yes, I think we can all figure out what that is. But away from that, why is it do you think that so few people take the time to look into this stuff ?Peter Zeihan:Well, I would argue that technologically the media has evolved in a not particularly useful direction. Back in the 80s when we got the fax machine, and then later email, and then attachments, and now social me-dia and algorithms, at each step of the process we’ve removed the human touch from information collec-tion and analysis. And so it’s not even collected really any more, much less packaged together with con-text. Obviously the American news agencies have suffered immensely under this process, but I’d say that the CBC and the BBC have probably in terms of absolute quality drops suffered the most. And Al Jazeera is now the only global news agency in my opinion that even tries. Maybe France 24 if it’s something that the French care about, but that’s it. Peter Zeihan:And so, we’re not being presented with information we can use, and that means it all just comes down to tweet opinions. And you can only get with these issues so much with 244 characters, and text change are just so annoying. And it’s like this for everything. And so we develop a conventional wisdom, and that’s all anybody talks about. And anything that challenges it is generally shuffled to the side until such time as it breaks. And then we develop a new conventional wisdom. And it’s just a question of, in that moment of reality enlightening us whether or not we can kind of grab on to the details enough to change your minds? Bill Fleckenstein:I would like to ask this, and maybe you’re getting there, but on the one hand it seems like conflict is inevi-table as Grant was just sort of alluding to, but then when you break it down like you just did, it seems like it’s almost impossible that China is going to be able to take Taiwan. So what’s your best guess? Or is it too impossible because it depends on too many variables moving in those knock on effects of each one? Peter Zeihan:Oh, there’s definitely going to be conflict. I’m just saying that specific one does not actually serve China’s survivability. Bill Fleckenstein:I gotcha. Okay. Okay.Peter Zeihan:There’s any number... I mean, remember, train, car wreck, cliff, there’s any number of ways this can go horribly, horribly wrong, and a lot of them build on one another. So in the case of East Asia, if you remove the Americans from the equation, at some point the countries of Northeast Asia are going to either have a raw materials crisis or an employment crisis, or an export crisis or a financial crisis. And whichever one happens first, will color the rest. Peter Zeihan:If I were a betting man, I would guess energy obviously is the first step. It’s really straight forward. The Chinese navy only has about 60, maybe 70 ships that can sail more than 1,000 miles from Port, and that’s assuming they’re going at slow speed in a straight line under non-combat conditions. Whereas the Japa-nese have two fully capable super carriers that can go anywhere in the world. So if I were to bet, I would guess that you would have a brief naval conflict between Japan and Taiwan that’s not actually in East Asia.Grant Williams:Between sorry, Japan and China? Peter Zeihan:Yeah, that’s not actually in East Asia in which the Chinese lose every hold that is involved, and then China is shut off from everything that it needs to survive. And then the question of course, is what does Beijing do in that environment? Do they nuke Japan? It’s like normally I would say no, but in that specific scenario, maybe. Japan of course is militarily capable of doing everything that the Taiwanese and the Koreans are capable of doing. So we can have a nice little deterrence effect in Northeast Asia. But China as the center of manufacturing and the workshop of the world ends the next day, which means that you’ve had mass unemployment the day after that, which means you have challenges to the Politburo a week after that. There’s no version of this where China comes out looking good.Bill Fleckenstein:Well, again, when you lay it out like this I go back to my prior question. On one hand, it seems like some conflict vis-a-vis China and whichever neighbor you want to talk about is inevitable. But once you lay it out, the end game for them so to speak is all bad, because even if they win, they lose. So aren’t they smart enough to play chess? I mean, they know how to play Go, right? I mean can’t they do that? Peter Zeihan:Well, I would argue that the Chinese aren’t nearly as good as long term planning as everybody in the West seems to think that they are. Bill Fleckenstein:Okay. Peter Zeihan:Their history certainly does not support that. But let’s assume for the moment that they decided to play nice, and roll over and let the United States continue to release Asia. That doesn’t solve most of their prob-lems. I mean, you have to convince the Americans to be involved. And one of the things that we’re seeing right now that became gloriously obvious under Trump was that the days of the US paying you to be on our side are over. And now if you want us on your side, you have to pay us. And for a country like China with 1.4 billion people and a terminal demography, but with utter dependence upon the strategic environ-ment that they can’t shape, what could they possibly offer the United States that we actually want?Grant Williams:Yeah. No, it’s a great question. Peter, let me put you on the spot there. Let me install you as the head of the Chinese Communist Party for a moment. Bill Fleckenstein:Oh, yeah. I’ll love this idea. Grant Williams:We’ll give you one of those... We’ll give you the whole thing, right? You get the whole thing. You get the flag behind you, the whole thing. Eight guys around you. What’s the smart play here? What should the Chinese be doing? Is it trying to prolong the status quo? But obviously that creates tensions at home? What do you do first day on the job? And you can’t resign like Jim Grant did when I tried to make him the head of the Fed.Peter Zeihan:Honestly, I don’t think Xi is that far off ? A propaganda war separating what can be heard and read in China from the rest of the world, instituting an information security state. These are all reasonable steps to take if you know that the bottom is going to fall out of the economic system. Because you have to make sure that people are as shut off from the rest of the world’s information flow as possible, and are as dependent upon your information choices as possible. And I’d probably add in a Boxer Rebellion element which I think is going to happen before long and just start executing a few random foreigners, because that will play very well in the information state that they have constructed. I still don’t think it’s going to work, but I think it’s one of the few things that might hold the country together. Grant Williams:And if it doesn’t work, what does that look like for us outside, a failure of China on that kind of level? What does it look like to the rest of the world? Peter Zeihan:Well, the Chinese history is replete with ways that that all goes to hell. The most likely specific outcome, the one that’s happened in the majority of cases is Northern China drops into pre-industrial status, prob-ably loses quarter of a billion people in the process because they just can’t feed them. The cities empty out as people go back to the farms in an attempt to stay alive. And it just kind of drops into a Neo-Maoists tyranny, which is not too different from where they are right now.Peter Zeihan:Shanghai pretends that nothing has gone wrong and sends unofficial ambassadors to every major capital in the world and says, “Hey, we’re open for business.” And foreign tech and foreign money continues to use Shanghai as a launching ground, using their tech and infrastructure and labor force. And it will become a magnet for the desperate from Northern China. And then Hong Kong and Fujian and all the other coastal cities basically become de facto independent, which is how they have been for most of history. And most of the iterations where China has a unified, the Southern Chinese cities are not part of them. It’s literally a bridge too far, the geography is really rugged, and it’s difficult for Northern power to reach into the South, particularly if the North de-industrializes and the South can find foreign sponsors. Grant Williams:Right. The job’s yours. You’ve passed the first interview, that’s great, that’s great. We’re going to have you come in for a probationary period now for a couple of months, and if you get through there, we’ll get you fitted for your suit. Let’s shift the focus a little bit and move to the Middle East, because there seams again to be so much going on there not just with the seemingly endless conflicts, but particularly I want to talk about Saudi Arabia and what MBS is trying to do, and how successful he’s been thus far ex that little hic-cup.Peter Zeihan:Is Everything transition? Grant Williams:Yeah. Yeah, exactly right. Exactly. So let’s talk a bit about Saudi because that is a big change I think for the region.

 

 

 

[JMD]

38 minutes ago, Cattle Prod said:

I think this subject could be controversial, but in my experience it's true. They are brain circuits set in childhood, and you can't just train them in a fully formed adult brain, I think. It's another limitation of China too, I think. A rote learning culture from a very early age, one where creativity is shut down, and people are forced to conform, fear of failure, does not produce innovation. It's why they steal all their tech, they could never have created a Huawei without ransacking Silicon Valley. I see it in my own field: geoscientists, especially in exploration are creative and adaptive problem solvers, in a different way to how engineers do it. It attracts a lot of Aspergers types, meetings are often hilarious... I haven't read anything or heard anything from Chinese geoscientists that wasn't one equation after another, or boring repetitive computer models. They just don't get it, the best slides I see are sketched with a pencil and scanned. And they can't handle risk and uncertainty, which is the nuts of the job.

Unfortunately as you point out the current culture war is imposing Chinese style learning and conformance on us. I focus on encouraging my son how to think, not what to think. It'll put him in the top 5% in his future peer group (or a subversive on the run, either is fine with me).

I must say - that for me at least - posts like the above are what help make this thread really exceptional, and i think 'extra insightful'. I know we are all here first and foremost because we're expecting social/economic dislocation of the kind not seen for generations. And we continue to visit in order to learn and to share macro-investment information to hopefully help others mitigate/manage what lies ahead... However, as CP's above post very much illustrates, many also take time out to 'interpolate' (CP being a scientist will appreciate that term!) the macro themes - which is something that i personally believe truly sets this blog apart from the rest.      

 

Plus it would be remiss of me to not take the opportunity of giving a big thank you to @Durhamborn, for creating this 'marvelous muster point' in the first place.

[JMD]

1 hour ago, spygirl said:

Theres nothing new in what he says - 10% of the population are slack jawed morons.

And the bottom ~20% are  not suited to the tasks that the US army requires them to do - they need to be smart enough to do task but not too smart to think about it too much.

Talk a UK army recruiter and ask them about the state of the people they reject.

 

Thats always been the case. And its pretty obvious if you have to deal with a large number of the general population.

My classic moron filter is 24h time tables. In my train travelling days, before elecstric signs, there was always large nubmer who could not work out the time afetr midday.

 

In my experience - 

About 10% of the UK adult population cannot read anything, Totally illiterate

About another 20% cannot follow written instructions - think TV instructions.  Everything - and I mean every task - has to be shown to them until they grasp it.

This does raise the issue of how much money the UK is wasting in education.

I agree that there might be 'nothing new in what he (Jordan Peterson) says', but such thoughts are not articulated often enough imho, and that is surely the point in our increasingly myopic world?

On first reading i thought you were talking about your moron filter being the 24 times table, but you were instead referring to the 24h clock (my bad). But my first thoughts were, crikey Spygirl's standards are very high/harsh!! 

 

 

[Castlevania]

@DurhamBorn Who’s going to win Eurovision?

[Mapper]

16 minutes ago, JMD said:

I agree that there might be 'nothing new in what he (Jordan Peterson) says', but such thoughts are not articulated often enough imho,

I agree. It's a great thing about this forum.

[feed]

1 hour ago, Ma2 said:

 

Posting some extracts from the transcript, hopefully OK as advertises the strength of the offering. Sorry about the formatting and long post.

If you look at a map of the world, the East Asian rim from the Japanese, from the Sea of Japan going down roughly to the Southern Philippines. So you can think about the Northeast Asian

/snip

 

 

 

 

this just jumped out at me.. 

The US new Trade Representative, Katherine Tai, her entire professional experience is based around suing the People’s Republic of China over American trade law, and her family’s from Taiwan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Tai

From 2007 to 2014, Tai served in the Trade Representative's Office of General Counsel, becoming chief counsel for China trade enforcement from 2011 until her departure.[12] At the Office of General Counsel, she worked on trade cases at the World Trade Organization.[13] In 2014, she became trade counsel for the House Ways and Means Committee. She was named chief trade counsel in 2017.[12]

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-trade-chief-tai-says-time-is-essence-china-trade-review-2021-05-13/

The United States needs new trade law tools to head off anti-competitive threats from China against key American high-technology industries, rather than reacting once harm is done, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said on Thursday.

[working woman]

Not posted for a while, but following the recent "intelligence" topic with interest. 

My husband works with people with learning disabilities and loves it as he likes how they think in an  unconventional way.

I think they are really clever, because they somehow manage to get all their care workers to do their cooking, cleaning and housework etc, even though they are supposed to do it themselves with support. Lazy little monkeys :)

Re Innovative nations - I worked for a Korean company once and was also an Avon Lady and used to take my Avon books into work for the girls to look at. Several Korean men used to look through the books, one ordered a round plastic scrunchy thing you use in the shower - the reason? Sent back to Korea to be copied as they don't have them there. They were looking through my Avon books for ideas to copy. (Also probably ogling the underwear models)  I was also told by my boss, who was more westernised,  that some of the Koreans looked down on the British society as we weren't progressing economically at the same pace as them, but he explained to his colleagues that we had had our Industrial revolution 200 years ago and in contrast the Koreans were only just going through theirs in the 1990's. Their industrial revolution was rapid and made possible by their Govt. helping companies financially to grow.  Plus they had our experience to learn from and our tools and knowhow to use. 

Styles of learning. I used to train shop assistants and learnt about different ways people learn. For some people it is show me, some tell me, some like to follow written instructions, some like to work it out for themselves, others like to experience it and make adjustments to get it right. I learn via a combination of the above usually depending on how much time I have 

A good example of learning by "show me". I remember my sister was worried that, when little, my niece hadn't started crawling and just rolled around to get where she wanted to go. Pretty obvious to me what to do. I grabbed hold of my nieces arms, my husband grabbed hers legs and we moved her across the floor. Within less than a minute she had learnt to crawl and there was no stopping her after that. She just needed to be shown and experience it for herself. I later also taught her how to walk. Just stood her upright and moved her legs. She had to cling onto the sofa for support to start with but soon got the hang of it. My sister cursed me as she then had to move stuff off of shelves that were now in reach. Ha Ha. 

I find many people have trouble with percentages. I currently work in a shop and often have customers asking how to work out the price on a 25% or 30% off deal. 

We all have different levels of intelligence / skills - I did well at school in exams, but I didn't have great social skills in my 20's and 30's. I also wasn't street wise. I guess too much time spent studying and not enough socialising. I am still uncomfortable in a large group of loud people. 

My husband has just gone to visit his parents, I wished him a nice time and suggested going to the pub with his Dad and Brother now that we can go inside. His face was a picture. I asked why. He said he would hate it as there is never a two way conversation, they both talk at him and he has to sit there patiently and listen. Oh dear, that is the downside of developing good listening skills.

Re the human species, yes we are intelligent but unfortunately we also have emotions such as fear and greed, which drive us and can be our downfall. Many people are also uncomfortable with change. Some people really struggle with change as has been seen with Covid and lockdowns. It has really messed with so many people's mental health. Being able to adapt is a great advantage.

Also been watching as DB's roadmap continue to play out. News of inflation is frequently being mentioned. It all feels a bit wierd at the moment.  Lots of people waiting to see if we can really all go on holiday abroad in the summer and whether the vaccines will work in the winter at keeping people out of hospital.  

 

[Starsend]

2 hours ago, spygirl said:

Theres nothing new in what he says - 10% of the population are slack jawed morons.

And the bottom ~20% are  not suited to the tasks that the US army requires them to do - they need to be smart enough to do task but not too smart to think about it too much.

Talk a UK army recruiter and ask them about the state of the people they reject.

 

Thats always been the case. And its pretty obvious if you have to deal with a large number of the general population.

My classic moron filter is 24h time tables. In my train travelling days, before elecstric signs, there was always large nubmer who could not work out the time afetr midday.

 

In my experience - 

About 10% of the UK adult population cannot read anything, Totally illiterate

About another 20% cannot follow written instructions - think TV instructions.  Everything - and I mean every task - has to be shown to them until they grasp it.

This does raise the issue of how much money the UK is wasting in education.

 

 

 

 

This is true, I've worked with all of them 

[DurhamBorn]

1 hour ago, Castlevania said:

@DurhamBorn Who’s going to win Eurovision?

Italy,France should do well especially with the Jury and is a danger,Ukraine also should do really well,UK will be bottom 3 i think,garbage as usual,

[JMD]

2 hours ago, Ma2 said:

Apologies for missing the rest of the discussion on China, some great insights from everyone.

Just listened to the latest End Game podcast which had Peter Zeihan talking geopolitics, fascinating stuff for anyone who subscribes.

Some points from memory, so please challenge -

• Doesn't see China anywhere near as strongly positioned as is the general perception (due to propoganda)
• Chinese navy only ever set up for invasion of Taiwan, not strong enough for anything else
• Believes this invasion will not happen due to Taiwanese know-how and nuclear ability on the quiet
• US Navy alone could blockade and starve China of oil for a month or so which would see collapse
• China has no friends
• Beijing will just keep on down the current road until it starts falling apart, but just keep ignoring it, ramping up the propoganda and control where it can. See no other course of action available to CCP.
• Eventually North and South possible split, unified China being an anomaly historically anyway

I think those points are all valid (though i've come to view Zeihan himself as very hit and miss). China's future is an interesting subject but for me boils down to whether the Thucydides trap is 'different this time'. Is war inevitable between the emergent and the incumbent super-powers? And what will be the nature of that war, if/when it comes? Would it be a hot-war with Japan fully involved and militarily backing the US... Or will it be my preference, of something very different, a Cold War II, but fought mostly using technology/culture.  

...If only i could write thrillers, this time next year i could be a million seller author!! The story would begin around the time of the failed Tiananmen Square student uprisings (a CIA inspired putsch?), but once thwarted the US sets out on a 'reverse-USSR' policy, i.e. not to bankrupt China but instead to over-heat its economy, and ultimately destroy it from within. Fantasy of course, or is it !! (btw, i'd appreciate at least a citation if anyone here does take my idea and writes that book)

[JimmyTheBruce]

18 hours ago, Transistor Man said:

 

He’s selling that!

Good luck to them, but no chance. On those timescales? No way. 

Ive seen these fusion guys in action. We had the head of NIF visit my work.... 15 years ago.

Gave a talk, said outright: it’s done, “Ignition” (self sustaining reaction) in a couple of months, just a case of turning the knobs up to 11. 

Never happened. Pretty big scandal. Guess what? The modelling was wrong! They left a term out of the equation.

When model and experiment deviated, they went with the model!

After that, it was used for material science and weapons research. 

The materials challenge is not solved. You get 14 MeV neutrons shooting out, which some how you have to deal with. Confining the plasma is incredibly hard too. 

(There are a couple of start ups in the UK doing similar things.)

great research work. Well worth doing. But he’s massively overstating where they are.

 

17 hours ago, Loki said:

@Transistor Man Really interesting  post thanks, couldn't leave it at just a vote

I didn't understand a word of it, but I've given it an Agree so that I look smart 😜

[Castlevania]

33 minutes ago, DurhamBorn said:

Italy,France should do well especially with the Jury and is a danger,Ukraine also should do really well,UK will be bottom 3 i think,garbage as usual,

The U.K. song is indeed awful

[feed]

2 minutes ago, Castlevania said:

The U.K. song is indeed awful

Strong favorite, for last.  

After Brexit and the shenanigans with the vaccines, this has to be the bet..  

 

 

[DurhamBorn]

3 minutes ago, Castlevania said:

The U.K. song is indeed awful

Staging is horrible as well,the BBC havent got a clue as usual.Worst thing is the public will say oh its political when it isnt,its just shit. @stokiescum will enjoy Cyprus and Serbia i expect 

[JMD]

2 hours ago, Cattle Prod said:

Agree JMD. I think interpolating these themes help you come to better investment decisions. For example, I don't invest in Chinese companies as rule because of the system there and what I see in their future. And I should clarify that I'm not attacking the people there, but the system. They are not allowed flourish. In Taiwan you have the same people ethnically who are kicking the ass of Intel with TSMC for example, which I will be buying in a BK. 

Yes, in fact i'll feel very cheated if we don't get that BK!!, as i too also want to go on a similar cut-price Asian shopping spree.

And on your flourishing mind point (China excepted), Asia is epically positioned this century to clean up, not only are its peoples highly intelligent, they are also big adopters of technology. Not mere commercialism either, they also seem to have a far deeper connection with technology than we have in the West (goes beyond games and expensive phones to them)....i mean i can't get my head round a human priest bowing to a robot...

 

 

[King Penda]

23 minutes ago, feed said:

Strong favorite, for last.  

After Brexit and the shenanigans with the vaccines, this has to be the bet..  

 

 

When is it might put a fiver on

[Mooping]

Does anyone have any suggestions for any good coffee stocks or etfs?

[feed]

9 minutes ago, stokiescum said:

When is it might put a fiver on

tomorrow i think

[janch]

3 hours ago, JMD said:

Personally, i never bought into the preper fears.

I didn't but I'm beginning to think maybe there will be increasing chaos and inflation. 

Supply chains are becoming more fragile because people can't get parts/raw materials etc.  There will probably be more shortages and hence inflation.  In the US according to Max Keiser no-one wants a minimum wage job when they get a stimmy check (cheque) for double the amount so if people stop working that makes the supply chains even more fragile.  I know the rest of the world isn't the US but many of us are saying it's not worth working hard when so much is taken in tax etc and this probably applies in most of Europe at least.

What happens when supermarket workers stop working?  Or those who grow food; do the water treatment for clean drinking water; maintain the national grid etc.  These are essential services for the western style of life.  (Never mind the NHS.  We hardly need them if we learn to stay healthy)

I'm beginning to think it might be sensible to lay in a few food stocks at least.  @Harleyhas the right idea of being as self-sufficient as possible and I would grow some food at least if I didn't live in a flat.  My consolation there is that when everyone else is losing as their expensive property goes down in price, I have less to lose.

[planit]

 

Quote

  

Theres nothing new in what he says - 10% of the population are slack jawed morons.

And the bottom ~20% are  not suited to the tasks that the US army requires them to do - they need to be smart enough to do task but not too smart to think about it too much.

Talk a UK army recruiter and ask them about the state of the people they reject.

 

1 hour ago, Starsend said:

This is true, I've worked with all of them 

And I chat with loads of them on here!

[AWW]

2 hours ago, working woman said:

I find many people have trouble with percentages. I currently work in a shop and often have customers asking how to work out the price on a 25% or 30% off deal. 

I'm pretty good at mental arithmetic and always find myself being asked really quite easy sums by friends and family. Mrs AWW will say, "I've got a 30% discount code; what does that knock off £25?".  I used to just tell her the answer, but now I say - "you can work that one out yourself" - and of course she can, even if she does have to imagine three-lots-of-two-pounds-fifty.  I think a lot of people simply lack confidence in their own skills, or are too lazy to work it out for themselves when they can just ask you.

[AWW]

But yes, regarding the discussion about general intelligence levels within a population - a significant minority of people in the UK are terrifyingly thick.