I'm Polish, but this is such a pessimistic, overdramatic take. The visualisations are impressive, but you're living in Poland's golden age. See this Hacker News story with 1,000+ upvotes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062117
The war in Ukraine is a tragedy, but it has proved that Russia is weak. The price shock will speed up the transition to renewables, and Iran is losing its grip on Hormuz. So many of the other issues are solvable.
It's easy to be a pessimist, but there's a bright future ahead of us.
Remember this is a war that Iran has spent 40 years planning for.
Netanyahu has been doing the same "two weeks away" stand-up comedy since 1992.
Netanyahu asked every single US president. They all took advice and then went back with a polite "thanks, but no thanks".
You don't need to have access to super-secret intel to know going into this frivolous war was a very stupid idea. You just need to look at a standard map and use your brain.
Finally Mr Netanyahu found a stupid enough US president.
And the problem with the current US president is he won't accept a loss.
He is not the sort of person willing to accept he has bitten off more than he can chew.
Nor is he the sort of person who is willing to sit down and have a proper negotiated discussion. Infact he's the very person who just tore up the JPCOA seemingly just because he doesn't like Obama.
Nor is he the sort of person willing to learn from Iraq or Afghanistan.
So we have a stalemate. And a US president who doesn't believe in diplomacy, old-school politics or anything else.
And this stalemate is not one that is going to be resolved with more military firepower. Again, just look at the map....
Its not my area of expertise by any means, but I would perhaps point out the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve chart[1] which is at its lowest level since 1982.
Also do not forget the oil and LNG needs to be transported and that is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive.
It may well be that the artificial party cannot go on forever.
The US Petroleum Reserve is governmental, not done by the oil industry. The US government buys and stores oil when prices are low to provide a buffer for volatility in the markets or for things like natural disasters. The reserve being low means that the oil companies are very close to having a market that has no alternative but to pay whatever price is asked for oil.
To your point about oil and LNG being expensive to transport - that just means oil corps can turn down production at the locations impacted, and jack up the prices for whatever is produced in the locations that aren't. Lower operating costs + higher revenues = profits.
It really is a perfect storm for massive returns for the major players. As a bonus, it's impacting the Saudi and Russian national players, which are their toughest competition since they don't need to file any quarterly reports. I agree that it can't go on forever, but the oil industry is rolling around in money like Scrooge McDuck in the meantime.
This is probably the worst thing oil corps could ask for, and I can guarantee you with every ounce of my being that they are furious over this.
It might check the phantom "short term profits" box, but anyone with any modicum of business sense (and the oil boys are no amateurs) see this event as probably the largest nail ever driven into the oil coffin.
Trump could not have given a bigger gift to the anti-oil crowd, making every human on Earth think "Damn, this shit is getting expensive and unreliable, what alternatives are available?"
The more likely hyperbolic step would be to blow up outgoing pipelines and apply secondary sanctions. Or, as threatened, blow up power and water treatment plants killing large swaths of the civilian population. Nukes wouldn't be necessary to cause mass death.
My understanding is that the US's longstanding evaluation is that their strategic goals in the region can't be accomplished by brawling with Iran over the strait, and their best move is to avoid it. The actions of every previous administration align with this view.
Where Iran's strategic position can be improved by drawing the US into an open conflict. Disrupting global petroleum markets, forcing the US to spend disproportionate resources defending its regional allies or withdraw and admit it can't, weakening the US's influence as a diplomatic power, all are achievable (or, frankly, achieved) with this conflict.
The US has no comparable strategic wins to even aim for here. At this point their only reasonable goal is restoring open trade through the strait, the status quo before the conflict. Fighting a war to successfully reclaim the status quo that was disrupted by entering the war is, strategically, losing a war.
What do you mean by open conflict? I don't think you're taking in to account the costs to Iran and Iran's current capabilities. Iran's GDP has already contracted by 10%. We've already seen the most Iran can do.
> I don't think you're taking in to account the costs to Iran and Iran's current capabilities.
The US has incurred plenty of costs though....
Those very expensive billion-dollar THAAD radars of which there are "not many" in the world ? Those are not getting replaced any time soon. IIRC following the destruction they have redeployed the one they had stationed in South Korea, much to the annoyance of the Koreans.
All those very expensive fancy missiles that have been used ? Expensive to re-manufacture and long lead-time.
The jets, helicopters and drones the Iranians shot down ?
The cost of running those ships they have parked off the Iranian shores ?
Those AWS datacentres ?
And that's before we get to the broader indirect non-military economy impacts.
That's the whole point of this war and Iran knows it.
Yes, Iran's GDP might have contracted 10% but that's nothing compared to what the US has incurred and the impact on the rest of the world.
> We've already seen the most Iran can do.
Except as Iran has demonstrated with the entirely predictable Part 2, the Houthis enter stage-left and disrupt Bab.
So now the US have the mess they created in Hormuz, plus a second front in Bab.
The only way out of this is going to be the US accepting old-school diplomatic resolution. More guns won't fix anything.
yep - very few know or acknowledge the damage the Iran war has done to the US GDP and war fighting (i.e weapons, industry) etc
largely due the us gvt hiding information, suppressing. e.g all the bases in the Middle East are toast in range of missiles or drones. that means the us will withdraw from them silently.
weapons stockpiles are almost depleted. and replacing them takes years.
> So has the US (spent 40 years planning for conflict with Iran).
True, but also worthless - the USA fired or retired people who knew the plan (1), and didn't listen to the warnings. It's more "Everyone knows the plan until they punch themselves in the face"
>>You don't need to have access to super-secret intel to know going into this frivolous war was a very stupid idea. You just need to look at a standard map and use your brain.
Would that be the same Mark Rutte who referred to Trump as "daddy" during an alliance summit and sent him a flattering text message which Trump published[1] ?
Yeah. Erm. I think we know what side of the bread Mr Rutte butters his toast on.
Very brave take. Still, I hope that your kids, should you have some and grow wiser, won't grow up in a world that russia or iran shapes. The united states doesn't negotiate with terrorists.
Make the oil less relevant to the point that 1/5th of it not being present doesn't affect the rest of the world. We are not there yet, but when we get there, there will be no reason to hold the Strait of Hormuz. Of course the impact on the Gulf states will be enormous, economic or otherwise, so it's hard to say if they will let this be.
Houthis used to only attack Israeli ships, because of their truce with the Saudis. Now that their diplomats got bombed at an airport, they are attacking Saudi ships, including tankers, too.
Against GP point though: the Houthis probably won't attack non-saudi, non-israeli vessels anytime soon, so it shouldn't change the route so much.
The US very much has been trying to get Ukraine to surrender to Russia since Trump was elected. Quite nothing would seemingly please Trump more than Ukrainians rolling over and clearing the way to a fat kickback from Russia.
Trump recently signed a Russian sanctions bill and the State Department just cleared a $2.7 billion military sale to Ukraine. So, I don't know how you've arrived at your conclusions.
Yep, he says a lot of stupid stuff, but I care more about the actual actions that are being done. Despite what Trump says, the US has not stopped supporting Ukraine.
I’m hoping they don’t grow up in one the US shapes if it continues to be run by a dictator loving sexual predator who thinks corruption isn’t just ok, but a mandatory part of government.
It’s also rich saying that the US doesn’t negotiate with terrorists while watching Trump verbally fellate Putin at every given opportunity.
I agree. My grandmother was not allowed to make decisions over her body, own a bank account, or work after marriage until the late 60s. For many of us, it's definitely a golden age of rights and possibilities.
Yeah I struggle to think of a time in the last three hundred years that Poland was in a better position than it is today. Maybe like 2019 or so? And that is basically still the same era.
Yeah, we're new rich, but we're also old poor - the majority of millennials and the entire gen x have seen what a proper 3rd world country Poland was back in the 90s - that's the bulk of the current workforce. We've navigated worse crises.
How? Russia is successfully fighting the entirety of NATO on a front that it is continually pushing further west, with about 20% of Ukraine now lost. If anything NATO and the promise of US security is what has been shown to be weak. And I don't think the idea of US/Western superiority is ever going to come back to what it was given what has happened in the Ukraine and Iran theaters in recent past.
Do you mean a metaphorical front? Because on the ground, it's been a stalemate for the past year or so. Ukraine is often taking back chunks of territory.
Russia is claiming to fight NATO, but NATO hasn't even shown up yet, but Russia is struggling. If NATO were to go to war with Russia, there would be very little that Russia could do. The one thing they might be able to do is the reason NATO has been holding back.
Russia is on equal footing with a country third of its size that is supported by a small fraction of NATO's GDP. You can barely tell the difference between a territorial control map from 2023 and 2026. Neither side is capable of achieving its goals through military action.
Ukraine us unlikely to get back most of the territory it lost in 2022, but Russia is also unlikely to even finish capturing the remaining parts of the Donetsk oblast, let alone the rest of Ukraine. It's taking Russia months/years to capture settlements with just thousands of prewar population. Donetsk oblast still has a heavily fortified urban area with a prewar population of 500k under Ukrainian control.
Russia employs modern ballistic and drone warfare to fight Ukraine. USA can't have its way with Strait of Hormuz and Iran because it can't fight against ballistic missiles and drones effectively. And Poland position is... USA will fight against Russia and their drones and their ballistic missiles while at the same time... USA hasn't been able to do it with much smaller and weaker Iran for 7 months now. Iran got control of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran still has the control of the Strait of Hormuz. For 7 months now USA can't do anything about it. How come you are so sure if they can't protect their allies in the Middle East to export oil through the Strait of Hormuz they will be so successful protecting say... Suwalki "Strait" from much stronger and nuclear strike ready opponent? Reality check? I think we will get one.
The US can absolutely conquer or decimate Iran and has explicitly avoided targeting energy infrastructure or doing so (understanding that doing so gets us another Iraq or Afgahnistan) but it's not as if the US can't "take on" Iran it's that the US expected regime change in Iran rather than a dragged out war.
Iran doesn't need to conquer or hold Hormuz they just need it in missile/drone range - it's not symmetric.
As for the impact on the global economy - the entire world is letting Iran hold its gas/oil hostage because of something the US did. I'm not sure why those countries don't pressure Iran more they're not at war with them they shouldn't be embargo'd.
Not really raised to hate the US, but they do learn in school that the sarin Saddam Hussein used on their parents and grandparents were from US stocks. Which is factually true, even if used as propaganda.
In all fairness, the US by itself is fighting someone else's war on the other side of the world, in a region that's generally not super friendly to them.
Russia is fighting its own battle at its own border against an enemy which receives some support from NATO countries.
US leadership fights to not lose face, Russian leadership loses a lot more than face if they back off.
I am curious how Russian people feel about this propaganda line that they're fighting NATO. It's obviously nonsense, along the lines of "war is peace." Russia borders NATO and there is no front there. Russia invaded a non-NATO country and immediately bogged down against an army that does not fight according to NATO doctrine. I have to believe this is something the average Russian realizes.
Russia is reflexively anti-NATO as NATO is reflexively anti-Russia.
NATO is an alliance that was created in opposition to the Soviet Union. NATO has absorbed parts of the former Soviet Union.
Western companies pillaged Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Rightly or wrongly, Putin owes a lot of his original popularity to dealing with the aftermath.
Russia, rightly or wrongly, sees colour revolutions as intelligence operations, and territorial conquest.
Russia cannot accept NATO forces on its borders.
NATO is providing decisive material, political, logistical, financial and intelligence support to Ukraine, precisely to bog it down and drain it.
These are all pretty normal perspectives for most Russians. They're arguably pretty based, and not necessarily a product of internal propaganda campaigns.
The thing that westerners don't get about Russia, and the reason we're stuck in this Godforsaken conflict, is that we personalise things around Putin. We think that if Putin dies, everything will magically improve.
The decision to invade was Putin's, but the rationale goes much deeper and will outlast him.
> The decision to invade was Putin's, but the rationale goes much deeper and will outlast him
Not Russian either but also spent a lot of time out east.
Putin declared the war as a means of personal survival. The negotiations are possible only if he gets out of the way, and then, it's really important to make a Marshall plan for Russia because indeed lots of reputational damage has to be repaired by the "winners" in the Cold War.
> Russia cannot accept NATO forces on its borders.
This is such obvious bullshit. Russia already has NATO on its borders, and is attempting to expand it's borders so they will contact even more of NATO.
If Russia was fighting the entirety of NATO, they'd lose the war in a week. They're fighting the entirety of Ukraine, with NATO dribbling in supplies to help out. NATO help is absolutely tiny compared to what they could be doing.
Russia is successfully fighting the entirety of NATO
It is not. The primary reason that Russia can even keep up is that it has many more citizens that can be thrown in the meat grinder and can work in arms factories and it has a larger industrial base than Ukraine. If you would tell most experts before the invasion, that it would've ended up as it did, they would have laughed their heads off. They would have told you that the Ukraine army would not be a match for the Russian army and they would have told you that the response of the West would have been divided.
Russia has ~146M citizens, Ukraine has ~29M citizens within land that it currently controls. Russia's estimated GDP is $2.66 trillion, Ukraine's GDP is $225 billion. That's 5x as many citizens and a 10x larger economy.
A real conventional war against NATO would be a completely different story. Sure, NATO countries would have to catch up with drone production and defense, but a lot of knowledge transfer and co-development is already happening. But NATO's economy and population is several times larger than Russia's. If NATO countries switched to a war economy, it would not be a fair game.
Of course, Putin knows this and he also knows the real weaknesses: there is a change that not all countries will uphold Article 5 and coordination might end up in a mess if the US would bow out, because command & control has always largely been handled by the US. This is why he is constantly testing how strong Article 4 and 5 are on an escalating ladder. The other weakness are disinformation campaigns through social media, which are working really wel for them, both in the US and in various European countries.
(I don't think it's useful to talk about nuclear war, it will end up badly for everyone in a population center. There will be no winners, only losers.)
golden age was precovid we are passed the peak even thought we got into G20 I suspect GDP increased a lot of because inflation.
Been living a lot in SE Asia in the last 12 years but ever yeah in poland for few months. There has been really big inflation in the last 2-3 years and everybody notice it.
Been twice this year in Italy, one time in alps and last week in puglia and there is a reason so many Poles go there for holiday - its cheaper or similar price but better than taking a holiday in poland.
This is living in denial. Lots of Ukrainians didn't believe there's going to be war either. There are already Russian drones flying into Eastern European countries, while the US is lifting sanctions on Russia - you don't have to be a fortune teller to predict where this is going.
In 2016 I spoke with an Ukrainian in Germany. He was saying the war is in the easternmost regions, he's safe because he's from Kiev area. That's how war works, uninformed civilian never believes it's coming.
That is just hope-believe, i.e. it ain't happening.
> It's easy to be a pessimist, but there's a bright future ahead of us.
I lived through the 1990s here in Romania, the future does not look bright in the slightest. Yes, materially speaking we do have more stuff compared to the 1990s, a lot more stuff, but the opportunities in front of us are as slim as ever (which wasn't the case back in the 1990s). But maybe things look different for the Polish.
> I lived through the 1990s here in Romania, the future does not look bright in the slightest.
Why? Inflation was much higher then. There were almost no highways. Very little foreign tourism. Towns were ugly. Industry was barely functioning. Etc. Things are way better now. Just because Romania has high debt is no reason to be pessimistic. Everybody has high debt.
I was talking about the perspective on the future, we had that back in the 1990s, it is sorely missing now. No-one even dares mentioning about any “light at the end of the tunnel”, it’s everybody for himself (and for his/her family/clan) right now.
I would wager Iran is barely hanging on. The question is which side can hang on longer. Its like their both dangling off a cliff with their fingers on the edge - one due to politics, the other because they weren’t as strong as they projected from the start. I suspect Iran might hang on to after midterms.
Worth noting mid east is all looking for other routes now 3-5 years from now Iran will be in a weaker economic situation on reduced flow. Hopefully Theocracy has been ended.
> I would wager Iran is barely hanging on. The question is which side can hang on longer.
I think this applies to both sides, and the issue is that the people in power are not affected by the crises that cause hardship to ordinary people. " Iran is..." does not distinguish between the two, they are different. Fanatical leadership can live by "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make" .
The problem though is that people in the USA do have one lever to pull on their government, in the form of approaching midterm elections, that the people of Iran do not. And the leadership of Iran knows it. They may be fanatical and awful but they're not stupid - causing fuel shortages causes economic pain to ordinary people causes political pain to the USA. They have this weapon and are using it heavily.
Notwithstanding that, this assessment of blame is correct ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49907371 ), the missteps that put us in this mess with no clear way out all come from stupid leadership in the USA.
Yes, I knew all along that I agreed with what you said, I was not trying to dispute what you said. Apologies if that wasn't clear to you, I should have started it with "yes, and" so that you would not take mistaken offence.
I don't agree that the consequential points are just "more language". I said things that you did not.
No offense taken - I always find most people try and take an opposing view for debate sakes. I was merely hoping you didn't think that was the case. Glad to see we agree.
Dzień Dobry :-) Poland is very modern on the surface. Very clean. Very safe. And an economic success story. As long as private sector goes and its citizens ambitions it is doing fantastic. However the society is a bit anachronistic. The same goes with the public sector. Yes, you get mObywatel app, and so many public services can be done online nowadays including court proceedings. The problem is quite subtle, not easily seen on the surface. I.e. once you hit issues like, say, divorce, or taxes, or the army mentality, politicians, local government, out of sudden you are transported back to 1960s. Not even 1989 when the communism in Poland collapsed. Like two decades earlier than that. You need to persuade the court you can have divorce. Not like in any other Western country. It isn't sufficient you want one. You need to persuade the court you can have one. When they wrote the law in 1960s it made sense. In communism the Party decided if an individual can have a divorce (in a sense). Not the individual. In the West if an individual says, I want a divorce, they file the paperwork and they will get the divorce. In Poland, nope. You need to persuade the court the marriage can't be repaired. Doesn't matter what you want, the state (the party) knows better when your marriage is over. So they will drag you for months, years every time the judge asking: "are you sure you don't want to go back to her?". Because the state knows better and many people will go back just because in 1960s divorce was the end of the world. Today, in 2026, it is an administrative task. As long as the society lives in 2026 that is. The same logic still persists in polish courts for other cases. Not really anything got reformed in polish court system since 1960s. Other weird things, like lawyers inheriting positions in courts by birthright. Your dad is a judge? Well, you will be too. Your dad works in Ikea as a clerk? Well, good luck! That's not 1960s anymore. That's Middle Ages. The same with Medical Doctors, other public professions. They are inherited. Honestly, the whole public sector stinks. Never reformed. While the private sector -- built from zero and world class. Just saying, it is different deep down than on the surface level. And there is a much deeper problem to it. Historically, Army, in any nation, has been a product of public sector. Not private sector. Anachronistic, corrupted public sector won't produce modern army. It will produce corrupt public servants buying tanks as if it is... 1960s. And that's the real problem that Poland has now with Russian jet drones hitting targets in Ukraine mere meters from the border check points.
Agree, with UA stopping Russia western capital will finally flow into Poland because previous strategy was to defend on Vistula river which blocked a lot of heavy industry investments that are starting now.
That is actually an interesting point to consider. I have been living without reading or watching any local media. I also do not follow any politicians on "social media". I do not use Facebook. I get my tech news from Mastodon and HN, some of the world news trickles through to the tech world, and I get my world news update from The Economist, mostly Leaders section (and Science&Technology).
I don't care what scandalous thing a politician said on any given day. I do not want to be advertising or voting material, to be riled up and pitted against others.
That means that I can judge the state of things by simply living in the country and watching what happens around me, comparing it to other places I visit. And that paints a very positive picture of the reality that surrounds us. Even on a practical level, living in a city that is safe and clean with good public transportation is something I've learned to appreciate. There are very few places in the world where I would consider living at this point, and in summertime at least, when the weather is nice, I simply wouldn't want to live anywhere else.
As to the OP and the blog post (impressive, btw!) — I largely agree. I don't think this is fear-mongering, these things are genuinely happening and are real risks. The OP didn't panic, and neither do I — but I do take these risks into account.
"Golden age" doesn't mean that everything is perfect and we've reached mythical utopia. It merely means there wasn't a better period in history, to date. Please, name one period, where you had more freedom, more rights, more money earning opportunities, bigger food abundance and variety, longer life expectancy, more safety, less wars (speaking locally about Poland) so on and so forth.
Hard to tell people, who feel the world goes to shit, that it doesn't. When you look at statistics we are living in the Golden Age truly. Worldwide even. But people feel it's worse than ever. One of the big paradoxes of our time.
you can pretty much say the same about many countries like italy, greece or even developing one. But we should be comparing to last 1-2 decades rather than 1-2 centuries. And in my opinion precovid era in poland was better than current one.
I am very well aware. Again, the question still stands: when was that the public healthcare provided more services, for more diseases, better medications, better care? When was that there was no wars in Poland for longer than it is currently?
I'm aware of all the issues we're dealing with, with the horrible war in Ukraine, but that's still unspeakably better situation than it was in 1945 or in 1965 or any other time before that. I hate any war, I'm not happy with the one in Ukraine, but I will take any war happening in the country next to the one I am in, over a war happening in the country I am in.
You ask about healthcare? I get the impression that you're a bit clueless on this topic.
Of course, there's more money in healthcare than ever before. Yet somehow hospitals are being closed, and waiting times are longer than they were three years ago. These are facts that may not be obvious to you if you have private healthcare through Medicover or Lux Med.
Access to private healthcare can make it easy to overlook the problems in the public system, but for many people those problems are very real and affect their daily lives.
You can take a tiny fraction of any good image and find it lacking. The OP wasn't talking about "golden age of public health care" but about "golden age" in general. I'm still waiting for anyone to answer the questions I've asked above, when was it better to live in Poland if not now?
Not "when it was absolutely perfect to live in Poland" not even "when was the public health care 100% ideal". It feels that the day to day life issues (of which there are plenty, sure) are stopping you from realising how good you have it compared to generations before you.
I don't know for sure, but I think it's a safe bet that should you be from your own parents generation, you could've been prosecuted for complaining publicly about "the state of the state", not to mention obtaining a computer for your personal use would be next to impossible.
Mate, I'm saying that as someone living in the UK (with friends and relative in Poland so I have close ties) - Poland has much better healthcare than many, for example the UK.
If I need a doctor who actually listens, or the consultation in less than 2 years, this is the way, and it's a world-class care as well.
Sure there are subpar parts of the healthcare in Poland, but until all you can get is 15 minutes phone chat with the GP (two days away if it's urgent) instead of in-person visit, or 47 minutes wait for the ambulance in case of stroke or heart attack (in Poland it's ~10 min in cities, ~20 in the villages) you really don't have anything to be ashamed of.
Complain, if you can improve it, yeah. But it's a good service. Just overworked and underpaid.
Medical professionals in Poland overworked and underpaid? Doctors work simultaneously in multiple places with no obligation to be physically present at any, their salaries have been for few years now at Swiss and US levels. Yes salaries of high hundreds thousands EUR annually from the public healthcare system with tax rebates and total taxation somewhere around 15% (!!!).
World class care? No you are not getting urgent in-person visit in Poland either. There are cases of people dying in ER with dislocated shoulder (because no anesthesiologist present), after quite standard C-section (no doctor present), or intubated into esophagus (and dying afterwards).
The availability and attention you are writing about are alien to me. Private visit costs 400PLN for five minutes of attention. Most important thing you'll learn is that they don't have the time (for you).
For instance: it's mentioned that EU gas storage is at 67% and Germany's at 56%.
What is not mentioned though is that Poland's storage is at 97% because the previous administration, for better or worse, was paranoid enough to invest in a sizeable marine gas terminal and the current one stocked up early.
Regarding real estate: adjusted for inflation prices peaked 2.5 years ago, interest rates are also much lower than back then. Nobody is buying because all the Ukrainian refugees who were moving to Poland are here already and that's the last bump in population this country will see for the foreseeable future.
Also there's the threat of war on Polish soil, which affects investor sentiment.
Every period of history is dramatic; sometimes I rewatch old episodes of a UK satirical news quiz, Have I Got News For You, and even in the best of years there was plenty of drama.
For instance, Italy has more storage capacity per capita despite very similar consumption (~10TWh/1mln population) and they're already at 86%+.
Meanwhile indeed Poland has much less storage (about a third of Germany per capita), but it also uses it less (half the consumption of Germany per capita).
I must ask: what the hell are the Germans waiting for?
Our minister responsible for energy is Katherina Reiche, a lobbyist for fossil companies. She has been suspected to dawdle on refilling gas storage to make it easier for her former employers to make a quick buck when gas becomes scarce in winter. She's also botched the transition to renewable energies by removing the incentives for state and industry to build out electric infrastructure, so it would not be out of character.
Plus, our chancellor has zero experience in governing anything (he's not even been mayor before) and is firmly stuck in thinking like a Blackrock executive.
So, to answer your question: We are waiting for a government that is not entirely in the pocket of those that want to stick to the status quo and profit from crises as long as possible.
Which former employer is going to make a quick buck? The grid operator or the grid operator lobbyist? Besides, who is going to profit from a price spike when the whole point is that the summer-winter spread is inverted, so no one expects to make money from injecting?
> Which former employer is going to make a quick buck? The grid operator or the grid operator lobbyist?
Well, both. Katherina Reiche was CEO of Westenergie until she joined the current government; and was, at the same time, listed as a lobbyist. She also caused controversy when she presented a plan for energy politics that was _very similar_ to plans by major electricity providers (including the parent company of her previous company). Or when she directly asked the electricity provider EnBW for better arguments why we should build more gas power plant (directly violating lobbying laws). That's just a small excerpt; the list of controversy is long.
But tbh, I don't think there's a big conspiracy about the empty gas tanks. Yes, Reiche is most likely corrupt (which is a huge deal), but afaiu, the gas tanks are empty because nobody wants to pay for the gas right now.
PS: Just today, Reiche ordered Sefe GmbH to stockpile more gas [1]. Sefe is conveniently a public company. So private companies don't have to buy expensive gas, because the public is going to take care of it.
Just because the numbers might be small if germany doesn't has enough gas and some old fragile human being might die of this or because they cant afford the gas, its still no way to die in a country like germany.
Real estate in Poland is the only investment option without capital gains tax. You only have to keep it 5 years, extremely simple. A condo is tax free, risk free brokerage account. Even if drones start hitting these mostly empty buildings, the prices will keep rising.
They are massively increasing their medium sized drone capacities (ie Geran) while improving on those drones too. Faster, harder to detect and shoot down, no GPS/Glonass navigation necessary so jamming won't do much.
A country that is rained on by 500 drones daily delivering 125KG explosives (so like a proper standard bomb dropped from airplanes) can overwhelm local military defense capacities quickly, leave infrastructure in crumbles (as in no water, electricity, gas, heating, gas stations working and so on) and at least in dictator's mind local population may crumble in weeks. You don't need to put a single foot in the country to reduce critical infra to rubble.
I can't imagine Polish folks would ever bow to russians after horrible things they repeatedly done to them, but ie in Slovakia it would be a very quick victory even if country wouldn't be ruled by ultra corrupt folks who would just give whole country to russians for some more corruption promises for later.
If puttin' will try anything in eastern Europe now is the best time. But I would expect more something along Moldova or baltics, Poland is far from russia and any extra force concentration in Kaliningrad would be easy to see.
The baltics have even more vivid memories of soviet life don't they? And nato trip wire troops so any attack would be killing french and uk soldiers (nuclear powers). Trump was talking about taking Greenland by force right up until the trip wire forces arrived. It is an odd job as a soldier to be a hostage I think, but it seems to work. It would be more reliable for Poland to obtain its own nuclear deterrent, along the lines of the buffers vs dependencies argument in the post. There has been talk, but that seems difficult.
Poland barely had any oil. If you want to go "historical", Romania was the source of oil for Germany during WW2 (and Austria-Hungary also wanted to take over Romanian oil fields in WW1).
The fact that you have time to "xD"-reply to some comments but won't address the other ones basically marks you as a troll. Good to know, shame HN doesn't have ways to block/mark users as ignorable.
Your comment implies Germany can just somehow command Poland to please hand over their gas, which obviously makes no sense, so I think you either forgot to include some key detail or you’re just talking out of your ass.
Unless you mean nazi invasions ofc in which case you’re just a troll.
On the ad absurdum: They'd also go the other way. The integration with the Dutch gas fields and system in Groningen is good enough and there is at least two decades of gas left in the fields. While closed, they can be reopened within a relatively short time and there are storage fields abound there (Groningen and Drente storages account for half the Dutch supply). And since it's ad absurdum, the earthquakes do not matter.
> Every generation believes it is living through the end of something.
Many generations are. Last century saw the collapse of the British and Soviet empires - titans by any measure - through mismanagement. Europe as an international power was also broken (compared to how they used to be). I can easily imagine 1900s me fleeing to America in fear of the end times and feeling quite justified in his choices with hindsight. Less obvious where to run to these days as the US not-an-empire looks like it may crumble.
Most of the people who died didn't get an opportunity to complain, so we live with some serious survivorship bias on how bad things got.
While there's no magic land of opportunity to flee to, there are still many safe and stable places where one can raise a family and lead a simple life. Especially if you remove the abstraction of countries and look at cities and towns instead. It does depends on what you want and what you're willing to give however, as moving may mean learning a new language and assimilating a new culture. And then there's differences in wealth and earning potential as well, so I guess leaving the USA is more 'bugging out' than 'economic migration'.
OTOH, mobility is a privilege, and it's usually the least privileged who are the most affected by war. So I'm not exactly sure how I feel about my own advice, since it's most useful to those that need it least.
We made it a priviledge, but for a biological being, it's the most natural thing to do when you find yourself in a place that is shitty. There is a reason so many risk truly awful things to get a chance (chance!) at a better life: going to where food and safety is, is just what living beings do.
Sure, but I think what they mean is that when you do move somewhere, how you are treated by the humans already there depends on your socioeconomic status. Who may be disinclined to let you have food or safety.
> Less obvious where to run to these days as the US not-an-empire looks like it may crumble.
Depending on what you're running for China is in some senses kinda what the US was back in the day, except there's no land so no easy way for them to accept migrants. These day and age migrants also aren't very accepted anywhere.
I agree in a sense, and the writing for this has been on the wall for some time. In my circles, many learned some Mandarin at one point or another.
The difference from the past is that the US has always been a melting pot, while China is pretty much a closed society. If you’d emigrated to the US, you always had a good chance of blending into that diverse society no matter where you came from. Assimilating into the homogeneous Chinese society will take generations.
For me it’ll be either the westernmost end of Europe or one of the better parts of South America, in the hope that they will prosper modestly in the shadows of the upcoming conflicts.
I'm very curious how China will adapt over the next couple of decades. Their population has started contracting, and it's clear the government has seen the fertility rate as a problem for some time. There's no obvious way for them to keep economic growth going without either finding a solution to something nobody else has managed to solve (getting the fertility rate back up), or opening up for more immigration. Either will take significant changes.
PRC growth now based on educated population, which exploded, not total population. Reality is every tertiary median to upper middle class wage is more productive than 10 undereducated peasants... the ones first to age out. There's like 200-400m+ bluntly useless mouths dragging down productivity/per capital metrics, the only saving grace they did NOT get rich before old, i.e. poor old so it's cheap(ish) in terms of resources (but not labour) to support them. Put it this way, PRC is generating OECD combined in tertiary, disproportionately STEM, they have backlog of 200m births from last 20+ years that still haven't got their masters/phds... at 60% and increasing tertiary we're going 100m+ high end talent, aka the greatest high end human dividend in recorded history who will be in workforce for until 2060s, i.e. so far out its hard to project based on present realities, only they have no shortage of advanced economy growth potential. Like if you throw all projected US newborns + immigration into STEM... PRC would still come out FAR ahead. There is no contest, unless AGI displaces everyone.
TFR real issue probably 30 year out. There will be some rebound, current crashing TFR because so many entering tertiary last few years = delay family formation. Women going to turn 35-40 and realize they want kids... and have them, especially considering 1:4 dependency ratio also = 4:1 wealth transfer + property going other way when previous generation (with high savings rate) dies. But won't get to replacement level. Then it's matter of what bad levers PRC willing to pull - pro natal fertility policies does not incentivize 2.1 TFR... and no one has tried punitive policies, i.e. limit wealth/property transfers to families with 2 kids... all sorts of inducements liberal societies haven't... or politically can't try. Or immigration, test tube babies, who knows. But IMO they try punitive policies first. That's really the only thing that no one has tried, and we know from wealthy Muslim countries with oil money, religious incentive, domestic help... aka every support imaginable, TFR is below 2 or trending towards it.
Fertility is a right now problem for China - it's population has started dropping - its largest cohort is just a few years from being out of child-bearing age, and its fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, and it will take decades to reverse that even if we knew today how to do it.
This isn't just a question of dropping labour, but also a question of the consequent reduction in economic demand.
Which is why China started reacting to the low fertility rate already in 2013 by abolishing the agency responsible for enforcing the one child policy, followed by ending the policy in 2015, replacing it with a 2 child policy, which failed to have the desired effect, followed by a 3 child policy in 2021, followed a month later by removing all penalties for having even more children.
China's workforce also is at most years from starting to contract excluding any immigration - the cohorts retiring are close to the size of those entering the workforce and the cohorts retiring will be increasing for another 20-30 years, while the ones entering the workforce will be decreasing for the same period even if they somehow figured out how to reverse it today.
The question is how high that price is, and whether it is viable. We don't know. And secondly, whether or not the consequences will be workable for a cohesive society whether because women choose to have children only for financial reasons or get coerced into it for the same reasons.
It could get very dark very quickly if it turns out to be too hard to induce enough people who actually would want children under the right circumstances to choose to have them.
That's a capitalist solution; China has that option if they want it, but also they have those "reeducation" camps so it could get very Handmaid's Tale.
China's population is dropping, so to the extent they had housing for their peak population, they will have increasing capacity to accept migrants. Their fertility rate has dropped to 1, one of the lowest in the world, despite having now lifted all restrictions on number of children and actively encouraging larger families, so it will become a precarious problem for them soon.
China's migration policies have been extremely strict, so to what extent they will be able to loosen that up without political upheaval is still an open question. So far they've only loosened up the restrictions on internal migration.
Those problems could be solved with a careful migratory policy (ie what America did back in the day because it was economically impossible for the entire third world to fly there; today, this could be enforced with laws)
The issue with demographic decline is not just quantity of people, but also quality of people. China (and any country) will want individuals that speak the language, are culturally compatible, with useful skills, and so on. The limited number of people any country can draw on once you consider this starts to make it clear that migration doesn't solve anything.
And even with migration, if those migrants don't themselves end up with high fertility rates then you've done nothing but kick the can, and not especially far. Because of all of these issues, I think there's approximately a 100% chance that China will do the equal but opposite of the one-child-policy should their demographic issues fail to start reversing more naturally.
"The equal but opposite of the one-child-policy" is easier said than done. A brute-force approach worked for stopping more babies (I don't know if it's true, but what I heard back was that back in the 80s Chinese officials literally killed unauthorised babies moments after they were born - that's probably exaggerated, however they really did carry out forced sterilisations and forced abortions). It wouldn't work so well for creating more babies. You can't force people to have more children. Many countries are offering financial incentives for producing babies right now - cash at birth, free house, free childcare, etc - with limited success. I don't see how China could deliver (hahaha aren't I punny) a significantly different result if it goes down that same road.
I don't think it'd be especially hard. Ban contraception, economic coercion, mandatory family planning at a certain age and you're probably already there. For the economic coercion part there are endless forms it could take. An obvious one would be a 'national sustainability' tax assessed on the number of children one has (adjusted for minimum age) - 40% for 0, 20% for 1, 0% for 2, - 10% for 3, and so on.
Another way would be to fine companies and local jurisdictions if their average number of children per employee/resident is below 2.1 or whatever, similar in spirit to Japan's 'metabo laws.' You could also require companies prioritize employment, beyond a minimal standard, based on the number of children per employee, and so on.
"People" here means women, and womens' rights are a very recent thing in world history. With a sufficiently evil and authoritarian government, it might be possible. It certainly has been tried in the 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Honour_of_the_German_...
(That said, I don't know how up to date such maps are, and have no way to verify laws; don't suggest machine translation from Chinese to English, it is bad).
I assumed there would be plenty of land in China, is just completely remote or do I just have a completely incorrect perspective on China (generally speaking I’m sure I do, I’ve live my life on the other side of the planet)
There is .. with the last of the subsistence farmers already living on it. There is basically no good unoccupied agricultural land in the world. The American settlers never appreciated how much work disease did in creating a seemingly empty space for them.
There's plenty of land in China. There aren't plenty of empty plots that would be attractive for people to farm. I'm not so sure that has much relevance to modern immigration, though.
Well, not the kind of land where you can just massacre the natives and steal it for free without ever seeing consequences for that abominable behavior. Which is what I suppose they're referring to.
I also sometimes think how people don't realize how good they have things; while Poland is no longer a poor country, it would take an absolutely colossal disaster to reduce the average living standard of America to that of Poland. America hasn't even reached the 'terrifying' level of European petrol prices.
It also depends who you are. A very large fraction of American trans people (not a large absolute number, only a few hundred thousand) have moved from R states to D states recently due to repression, such as Kentucky revoking their driving licenses.
I do think the best political-economic era of my life was 1997-2001: election of Tony Blair until 9/11, covering the first internet boom. That was the closest to "world peace". That includes the Israel-Palestine peace process and the reconciliation of the post-Soviet states into Europe. If that had worked better, with a democratic Russia, the world would be a very different place today.
I'm sure you can throw out statistics that prove otherwise, but I think the average living standard of Poland is already better than America. Again, anecdotally, but I'm American and I've lived in Poland for about a decade. Food, healthcare, housing, access to parks, public transport, etc. are all better quality here at the average-person level than most places the US.
Americans just end up paying for a lot of things that are either undesirable for many Poles (e.g., a huge McMansion in desolate suburbs and the car to drive there) or paid for via other means (e.g., healthcare.)
Which country has a better average living standard depends on if we are talking about mean, median, or mode. The American mean is higher and since most of the HN crowed works in higher-paying jobs in urban centers they tend to look at their own experiences to think that the US is a high standard of living country. If you look at the median or mode of living standards across a country then places like Europe are where you find more people experiencing a higher standard of living.
Oh, best of luck convincing Americans that paying twice as much for shitty health insurance than you pay in 'high' general tax levels is somehow a bad deal for them. Until they actually live the experience they just cannot comprehend the second and third order benefits of a real social system.
In terms of nominal GDP per capita, the US is around $85k with Poland at $25k, so US GDP would need to fall around 70%, which would be an unprecedented fall, the kind historically only associated with mass bombing or extreme hyperinflation.
GDP is irrelevant when discussing the well being of the ordinary person. A more relevant measure would be median income together with purchasing power parity.
US median income is just over 19 k international dollars, Poland is just under 9 k. Still a big difference but just over a factor of 2 instead of over 3.5.
America has not just a lot more people, but a lot more immigrants, refugees, and more.
In a more homogenous society, such as Poland’s in comparison to the United States, it also in my observation trends to be easier for wealth distribution to flatten.
Maybe the US has more kids per capita too which would also affect that value depending on how it is being measured. Not to say that anything is being hidden there, just something to think about that may make you interpret the data differently or think about it differently.
Petrol prices mean nothing for standards of living or overall desirability of given country. If that would be true, then I have 2 random samples which have supposedly way higher standard than US - Venezuela and russia.
US folks have more money on average, but are forced to spend them in ways ie europeans don't have to - top notch education and healthcare costs are huge in US for large part of population and compose big part of expected savings of parents and older folks, while an afterthought in Europe. How do you compare that.
Plus places in Europe like Switzerland have long term way higher living standards by any measure than even good places in US. Europe is big and diverse in ways US simply never was, it would do you good to travel the world a bit and see and experience it with your own eyes.
Last century saw two world wars, followed by the cold war which could have lead to the end of the world. Also a wave of communist revolutions and their aftermath (famines and purges in the Soviet Union, The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the death of a quarter of the population of the world).
I think mismanagement is not accurate. The Soviet system was flawed and inefficient and could not compete. The European empires were made untenable by the world moving on: economic, technological and political changes.
I think Europe and America had a golden age when they were at peace and dominated the world economically from the 80s to this century, and forgot neither of these is a given.
> Less obvious where to run to these days as the US not-an-empire looks like it may crumble.
How are you supposing that it looks like the US may crumble? I don’t understand where these kinds of comments come from, aside from perhaps verbalizing something one might want to see instead of what is factually true.
The world bought only 20% as many treasury bonds in the past year as in the year before that. This is what a slow decoupling from the US reserve currency looks like.
The US is the most oil-dependent country (although all western countries are quite dependent on it) and it cut off its own supply of oil.
The US has canceled all military guarantees and aligned with two different fascist states, so military cooperation is unwinding.
It's been unable to manufacture anything effectively for a while now as all the money gets siphoned off corruptly (identical to Russia in the Ukraine war), not even the weapons used in Israel.
What else is there to being an empire? Its nuclear aircraft carriers - with no aircraft since they run on oil?
> The world bought only 20% as many treasury bonds in the past year as in the year before that. This is what a slow decoupling from the US reserve currency looks like.
That's not what a decoupling looks like. Investors are probably just not buying because they know rates are going to go up. The Federal Reserve already strongly signaled another rate hike by end of year. Why would you buy something today that you can wait and buy for a better price later?
Second, if you want to make an argument about interest rates or the debt, you first have to make that argument and resolve it for the UK, Italy, France, and others.
Third, the USD is just the dominant reserve currency. It's not the only one. A reserve currency is just one that banks hold in reserve. The reason the US is involved in the Middle East is to protect the Petro-dollar which generally "requires" oil purchases to be settled in dollars. The trade off is we keep Iran in check from destroying the gulf countries.
> The US is the most oil-dependent country (although all western countries are quite dependent on it) and it cut off its own supply of oil.
This doesn't make any sense. The US is also the largest oil and gas producing country in the world. Even for the Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea you can read for yourself that the US has been able to break through and Saudi Arabia has quickly repaired the east-west pipeline and 3.5+ million barrels are flowing through there now (IIRC 60% or so of pre-attack volume). Either way, most of those flows go to Europe and Asia, not the US. So while the US is oil dependent (all countries are) I don't think your assertion is entirely accurate.
> It's been unable to manufacture anything effectively for a while now as all the money gets siphoned off corruptly (identical to Russia in the Ukraine war), not even the weapons used in Israel.
That doesn't make any sense either. We manufacture all kinds of things, including incredibly advanced equipment. We make airplanes, we make semiconductors, pharmaceutical goods.
> What else is there to being an empire? Its nuclear aircraft carriers - with no aircraft since they run on oil?
If we don't have oil neither does anyone else. Except that we do have oil so our nuclear powered aircraft carriers would just use our own oil for the jets.
Blame too much connectedness. Humans are not designed to be affected by things that happen 100's of miles away. They shouldn't even know the names or those far away places or people. They shouldn't have dependency on things that are produced far away.
Tribal populations lived isolated lives. Most of human life on Earth involved only small-sized settlements with occasional visitors from the far away places.
Connectedness opens the flood gates . You get inundated with news from every corner as if it is happening in you neighborhood and as if those are your people.
What a bizarre statement. Of course you are not designed for anything. You have adapted, genetically and socially. And you keep doing that. Modern society would collapse if change to a state of the world that you describe would quickly come. If it comes slowly, no matter what change, humans will adapt. Not all of that will be pleasant, but it eventually works out.
>> Modern society would collapse if change to a state of the world that you describe would quickly come.
That means the modern society is not sustainable and cannot adapt to long-term changes. It's like those cities, where all traffic and power supply would be affected for every rain. That's not adaptation. That's just living precariously on greed and assumptions.
The drastic changes, if any, themselves would be purely man-made, not like asteroids that killed dinosaurs. A proper evolution or adaptation would not have drastic changes. Changes would be gradual in synch with the pace of biological evolution.
Adption is not just genetical. A person can move from northern Europe to southern italy without problem. Its genetics don't need to change for that.
> That means the modern society is not sustainable and cannot adapt to long-term changes.
I don't see that connection. As long as change comes sufficiently slowly, adaptation is no problem. It's mainly that the quicker change comes, the more painful adaptation is. This it unrelated to how sustainable society is.
> That means the modern society is not sustainable and cannot adapt to long-term changes.
Why? I, as the poster you replied to, do not see it this way at all. Any society, modern or not, can adapt to slow changes. And rapid changes would be at least as damaging several centuries ago, when for example 2-3 consecutive years of bad harvests meant a major upheaval.
Things can look a lot smoother after a few centuries. My 2c.
Things are toppled a lot higher now than several centuries ago. Population is orders of magnitude higher, and we all get our food from far away places in the world. Those things make a very fragile global ecosystem which is very different to the very localised ones centuries ago.
Back then 2-3 consecutive years of bad harvests meant a major upheaval for a few affected areas. Now that those areas supply food to the whole world the problem has grown in scale and fragility.
Connectedness also stops us from waging war. Or, I should say, it does not stop us, it makes us less likely to start one. But we still do it evidently. And then we all suffer.
Do we? If you read something like guns germs and steel or read some Harari, we may not have had big wars with big guns like today, but we sure had a lot of smaller conflicts.
The author writes: "This time I do not need the research, because I have spent the past year looking for a house. (...) And the Polish loan is the worse product."
I wrote a piece comparing what Poles and Americans say about the housing crisis in social media, you might find it interesting, especially that I tried to compare affordability as well [0].
In short, it seems that:
- Warsaw is even slightly less affordable for its residents than Manhattan
- but the Americans seem to be more pissed off by the situation.
I normally just lurk, but this is one of the cooler and actually functional website designs I have seen in a while. Sceptical at first, but it's innovative, and serves to elevate the content, truly chef's kiss.
In this instance, the price cap is working exactly as intended. The state pushes Total to introduce a price cap by threatening a windfall tax on the industry as a whole. Total accepts, and introduces a voluntary price cap, selling at the below-market rate in a first-come-first serve regime (which it can afford to do, as it's an integrated producer). Total serves fuel to the majority of motorists at the below-rate price. When Total runs out of fuel, motorists who do a lot of travelling then need to pay the above-market rate at E.Leclerc instead.
Without introducing an unpopular tax regime, the French govt has found a way to progressively increase prices for higher mileage motorists. Supplying most motorists at a reasonable price, while having high-mileage motorists pay the unsubsidised price for most of their petrol.
And zoning and giving landlords great benefits (some countries not taxing wins from rents, others allowing changing rent easily, etc.) really solved the problem? Multiple major countries (in which rent control is not a thing) have huge housing issues, so something should be done. For some places I would much prefer reducing regulation required for new constructions, but this is very situation dependant.
Why does this might not apply to other cases? Paris is very dense already, not a lot of places to build anyhow. What other policies are required? Ensure people do not buy only for investment and leave things empty - they raised the uninhabited tax to discourage that, will see if enough to make a dent.
Also in countries where rent control is a thing. About 20 years ago the government decided it was "good enough" and stopped nationally planned housing projects (which resulted in decentralized planning and mostly expensive, high profit, housing being build), 'motivated' the market by providing tax breaks (giving higher profit and less investment in non-controlled renting) and as a bonus taxed the subsidized housing market a flat rate on top (result: hardly any new construction or investment in subsidized housing).
Almost all measures since have been detrimental to new housing, great for real estate owners, extremely poor for renters and allowed house prices to skyrocket. None of these things are on their own and it's a more-or-less global thing but they've done a great job making it worse.
And as a bonus: this was projected to happen by the governmental planning agency and rejected as fearmongering.
There is no real win for any city that becomes an eye candy for the entire world. Removing rent control without completely revamping your zoning restrictions achieves basically nothing.
People bring in Tokyo as an example, but there’s even a rent control-esque thing here - right to refuse. Technically landlord can increase the rent, but you can challenge and refuse it, to keep paying the original amount. Like rent is going up heavily over here (my neighbourhood is about 10% YoY). You can’t really even build up fast enough to accommodate demand.
Rent control is nonsense. We need to control the renters. Because they are doing something incredibly harmful at the moment. The reason *I* am now far from a city with offices is directly related to rents being unbearable and own housing unobtainable outside of 10% best paying jobs in the city.
I feel you... the situation is more or less the same for Greece (and many other countries).
Things are not looking very good and I don't know how all this situation is going to stabilize or even better come back to normal.
It's true, but things are not as bad as 2015. Just not as good as 2007. In general things seem to be going in the right direction, cost of living excluded.
True. Certain things changed and improved but many remained the same. Having corrupt politicians doesn't help at all.
We're caught in-between bigger players and we're just following along. As the OP stated, many countries are suffering from consequences of the actions by some "great powers".
This is generally a great article. I just wish the author would also mention how Poland (among other EU countries) is also hyper focusing on populist policies that benefit the older generations while heavily burdening the younger generations with a cost of these policies.
This is even a bigger problem than all these named external dependencies (which may or may not hurt us).
I think that's a problem in almost every European country. The politicians are creating policies to make their voter base happy so they would get elected on the next term and due to the aging population and low birth rates for decades the biggest voter base is the older, mostly boomer generation.
Calm the fuck down. We outnumber them three to one. Militarily even without the Americans, their active military is 1.2 millions according to the IISS the collective European one, not taking into account British, Turkish, Canadian or American is about 1.5.
We have a significant numerical advantage in kit as well a lot more tanks, apcs, etc, more and better airplanes, double or triple their navy, their only advantage is a larger ammunition production which makes sense because they are at war.
Their only advantage is our disunity and our lack of cohesion, that's the main thing the Americans provided to European defense on a conventional level, a singular command infrastructure through NATO's headquarters, on a secondary level they brought along significant logistical capabilities. But lets not forget that Russia does not have these logistical capabilities either.
I am sure someone is going to say but these are all obsolete cold war platforms that won't survive a second in the modern drone dominated battlefield. Sure, but the main advantage of drones is that they
are cheap and easy to manufacture fast. European militaries do not stockpile significant amounts of
these because they become obsolete in a matter of months. There are experiments going on across all of
Europe on using small drones for all purposes and yeah if shit hits the fan the EU industry has to step
up on production.
It would be incredibly foolish for the Russians to engage any European country, the balance of conventional power is incredibly tilted against them the only thing they can bet on is our fragmentation, and while the war in Ukraine is going on I don't see this as possible either since
the bulk of their combat ready forces are bogged down there.
The real threat would emerge only if that conflict ended in their favor.
The visual design is beautiful and the maps are illuminating for some of the points. But a good number of the map elements feel pretty superfluous, in a 'data for data's sake' kind of way.
Overall I think this would be more impactful if it were ~50% shorter or if there were more navigation - this is a ton of content to scroll through one panel at a time.
Potato prices increased 15 fold!? Is that not a typo? From €10 per tonne to €150 per tonne. I can't help but wonder if a zero wasn't dropped somewhere. If not, this is insane. I hope I'm missing some context somewhere.
> Every generation believes it is living through the end of something.
I'm not sure my generation thought that (I was born in 1955). Not in the South of England at least. Growing up there in the late fifties, sixties, seventies, I feel that most of us were looking forward most of the time and anticipating good times. At least most people I knew at the time. It was a time of accelerating change and a great deal of it was undeniably positive.
Same in the 90s (born 78). The Berlin wall came down, Russia seemed to be on a path to real democracy, the US still had a pretty awesome reputation around the world, social progress was being made. It was a pretty good time to be alive.
Maybe it was just something about the South of England though eh?
This is a way over dramatized pessimistic perspective. If you think this is bad, then look into world from an eye of a pole during 1772 (where Poland was even wiped off of the world map) or 1939 or any year during the Soviet rule.
Poland has become a rich country within one generation after the fall of Soviet Union and one of the safest countries in Europe at the moment. There's always gonna be crisis in the world but at the same time you have to admit that we're living in one of the most comfortable times for humanity in general compared to past generations.
Nitpick: Poland was wiped off the map after the Third Partition in 1795, not after the first one in 1772. There was a Polish "Constitution of 3 May 1791."
Sure, but that's also the point: the current status quo is/was mostly good, especially for Europeans and North Americans, but the multitude of global crises - the war in Ukraine, the war in the Middle East, the Trump administration's (and the far right's in general) war on sanity, the AI disruption (both by the technology itself and by the financial upheaval it causes), not to forget the climate crisis - might just induce you to worry how long this status quo can be upheld.
> AI disruption (both by the technology itself and by the financial upheaval it causes)
If it wasn't for the AI we wouldn't even be having this discussion because the linked vibe coded site wouldn't even be built
Also learn to choose your battle. If you focus on everything that's going wrong in the world and spend all your energy on that, you're gonna have mental problems.
- To maintain fellowship, the empire spreads money to buy influence
- eventually this starts to cost too much, so the empire reduces spending
- wars ensue and independent voices emerge
- unable to establish order, the empire loses its influence and collapses
You can see this patterns as the US is overspending (high debt / trade deficit) while reducing its diplomatic influence on international programs. Not sure how they can save the USD value over time.
The only conclusion I get is that the UN is a joke and if the US keeps printing money to buy oil and political submission there won't be any change in the foreseeable future
It is extremely urgent to push for a new Allied Nations organization not headquartered in the US and for them all to drop the dollar and put USA and Israel in check. For Europe to grow a spine, and for China and Russia to step up and stop being complacent with all the bullying going on
Once again the top submission of HN is an LLM-generated article. I know we're not supposed to speculate on people reading past the title, but I incur you to read 3 paragraphs and tell me with a straight face that you did not eyeroll at every short, empty phrase stated with enormous confidence.
Be careful with this, you'll get burned sooner or later. Short sentences and breaking up the rhythm are often taught as good writing style. The people will also pick up some LLMisms, especially the non-native speakers. I enjoyed this prose, I felt like author had a very personal perspective to share. My AI BS detector didn't spike and I think your post is the over-confident one.
No, this is 100% written by Claude. It reads exactly like it, with all of the same phrasing, awkward sentence construction and other annoyances I have to deal with all day long.
Maybe you don't interact enough with Claude? "Underneath it, three slower clocks are running, and they set the terms on which we meet the next shock.", "A gauge reading is a level against a reference mark, not the depth of the river.", "Two official statements frame everything below.", "where a number rests on a vendor, an advocacy group or an industry estimate, the text says so" were not written by a human.
I vouched for your comment. HN's automod agrees that the OP is LLM text; and it's so high-confidence in its assessment, it flagged your comment, for quoting three lines of it.
I did not eyeroll at every short, empty phrase stated with enormous confidence. :|
It was a pleasant, concise and informative read. I actually read it from beginning to end. Unlike many of the artisanal articles starting with how the author experienced the crema of the morning's espresso.
* Lots of its points are subtly (or not that subtly) blaming the issues on support ting Ukraine in defending itself against Russian genocidal invasion.
I am Polish as well although currently living abroad.
I am way more optimistic than the author of the post.
It's true that a lot of negative events happened in very short time but we are still doing pretty well. Economy is growing, standards of life are growing.
Polish people are hard working. The culture pushes back against entitlements and class warfare. Poland didn't succumb to socialist populists (at least not too much) so there is a good chance for further growth.
On the immigration front we got Ukrainians who work and assimilate well so at least for now we avoided problems a lot of other EU countries face.
It would be nice if we had more competent politicians trying to solve problems and make things more efficient though but that's a problem no democracy in EU solved. We are paying for years of kicking the can in the energy department now but on the other hand maybe that will speed-up transition to EVs which will be both great for standards of living and significantly more efficient.
Geopolitics is hard to predict but I am also in optimist camp when it comes to war in Iran. The oil is flowing again and Iran can't do much about it. Workarounds will be found. Ukrainians now have a way to really hurt Russia which may result in peace at some point as well. If anything it's clear Russia is not dangerous in conventional war. They have sabotage but that imo is going to be less and less efficient as infrastructure and intelligence improve to handle it.
Overall - a lot of things went wrong and we are still standing. Once the environment improve we are in great position to be one of the best places to live and work in EU.
The world always had problems. It's like software, the work is never done. Sometimes new times ask for new solutions, and people need to find them. Adapt or die.
I do think though it's a little dishonest to be this alarmed now just because the crisis is at your doorstep. There is continuous misery all around the globe which everyone should acknowledge. The wars in the middle east brought destruction for generation and for entire regions. I am not sure those people are worried about the interest rates in Japan as much as they are about surviving. Including the current war. Think about Iran and its government what you will, but when a school gets bombed, innocent children die. I am not sure I find this less concerning than the state of natural gas capacity in Germany. And I live in Germany.
As for the energy crisis, the solution is in front of us. If you don't want to depend on foreign fossil fuels start electrifying and switching to renewables and batteries. You can do it cheap and fast. In fact, this is already happening in parts of the world and they are much more shielded from the current issues than elsewhere.
> Half of its six biggest diesel plants cut or halted output this month
Claude chose a weird turn of phrase here. Does this mean "the smallest of the three was the sixth largest"? If the Ukrainians hit a tiny plant, will it now be "three of its hundred biggest diesel plants"?
Every thread has a cynical AI accusation from someone looking for an excuse to dismiss long articles, so I tend to gloss over them, but this one's mind-boggling.
Literally how did you come to the conclusion this was written by ChatGPT? The text is clearly written by a polish person that speaks fluent english as a second language - I know cause I am one. Telltale signs are sentences like "Meanwhile, shares are at records" which is an overly direct translation of the polish equivalent, where the word "rekord" by itself implies a record high whereas in english you'd make it explicit.
> Literally how did you come to the conclusion this was written by ChatGPT?
You tell me:
> Scroll to follow one closed strait into fuel pumps, harvests, bond markets and my own country’s winter heating
Or:
> France: a run on the pumps. [...] drivers fleeing record prices elsewhere emptied its tanks faster than trucks could refill them. [...] A price cap meant as a cushion, in a system with no slack, turned a price shock into empty pumps.
A cursory check on Pangram returns 100% AI written just from the first 4 paragraphs.
Every writer has a style and if their style is strong enough you can identify the writer by reading enough of their works. AI style is very easy to spot.
There may have been some human involvement with this website but they certainly didn’t edit it for style. Unfortunately if you don’t edit for style then people will default to the assumption that it’s entirely vibecoded.
- "But the same closure that empties a granary fills somebody’s brokerage account." Claude is obsessed with comparisons linked by "the same". There are several instances, like "Poland made the same swap, with oil" (but that one is odd because "the same" isn't referring to anything).
- "Europe’s potato belt tells the story in a single season": Claude also loves this "noun verbs the noun in a single noun" phrasing.
- "A country that loses its regular supplier does not only pay more. It ends up dealing with people it does not know." Claude's classic "it's not X, it's Y" constructions.
- "Strategists do not describe a stampede home. They describe Japan quietly ceasing to be the buyer everyone could count on, and long-term borrowing costs rising everywhere as a result." A variant following the pattern "it's not X, it's Y, and Z as a result." This is an interesting pattern, one that I don't think I've ever seen a human write. A human would likely write "...leading to rising long-term borrowing costs" or similar.
- The use of a verb (rising) there in the third part is typical Claude, as it really likes to verb when a noun would read better. Other examples: "markets price another rise"; "volume freezes, prices stay put and sellers wait"; "after five years the rate floats".
- "The test Tusk describes is a test of belief, and it arrives just as the Pentagon decides how many Americans stay." The juxtaposition here (a test that arrives) is very odd and typical of Claude.
- What's also generally striking is the proliferation of "X becomes Y" phrasings, which is something Claude loves to do. Price shock turned into empty pumps. A story is told in a single season.
I'll stop there.
What's fascinating to me is that I personally find this kind of text exhausting to read, but apparently other people don't notice it at all.
If we ignore the AI stuff, I will still say this is not good writing. What's so grating and noticeable for me is the monotonous style. The short, clipped sentences like little stabs of information. It never varies; the tempo is just fact, fact, fact. It's absolutely exhausting to read pages and pages of this.
Good non-fiction writing is enjoyable to read for a myriad reasons; authors use metaphor, juxtaposition, tempo, humor, irony, allusion, and all sorts of techniques to make an article enjoyable to read. Just throwing down facts one after another with this kind of breathless, staccato noir voice is not that, in my personal opinion.
I don't know how much AI is to blame, maybe the Polish version is different or if this is a deliberate style.
I'm not able to pin down the one-screen text on my mobile device without the page forcing me to go to the next one-screen text. This problem reminds me of https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/.
To the content:
Don't count on IEA's reports, they are just as subject to propaganda as any other media.
"When the world pays more, our grain can simply leave, so the price at home has to match" Not a fact.
At the moment as I see it some warmongers want really to escalate the situation to outright war between NATO and Russia so don't pay attention to Tusks words or any of the hawks from USA.
Criminals and medical doctors are funnelling a fortune into domestic and foreign real estate, and into premium cars. Polish public healthcare basically doesn't exist. Nearshoring and outsourcing centers are fleeing the country. Polish army expenditures are at the level of Israel and South Korea. The budget is spent on 40 years old military retirees while Russian drones and missiles are freely entering and penetrating the airspace. I'd say so long Poland, a failed experiment again. Polish elites don't even have to flee this time, they're already watching from their 10th or 20th real estate in Spain, Switzerland, US, or Italy (their real estate in Dubai is a bummer).
This technical analysis is really futile and counterproductive, there exists only vicious greed which will be followed by a catastrophe.
- what action specifically is the west pushing Zelenski away from Minsk?
Both Minsk and Istanbul accords would have been signed if the west did not encourage Zelenski not to sign. The BoJo visit is widely quoted.
- why is the Ukraine war a lost cause if it is tying up Russian military resources?
Ukraine itself it lost. Maybe the west-coalition still finds it useful. But the country is now conscripting women. They do not have the men anymore. No airdefence. Losing land at an ever increasing pace. Attack on russian industry are countered with 10x harder attacks on ukrainian industry. Supporting coutries less willing to give to Zelenski. Country is in shambles.
- how does Merkel wish for a stronger Ukraine defense indicate a wish for confrontation instead of a deterrence against it?
If you are a guarantor country for a de-escalation peace deal, it is dirty to merely hold up appearances in order to buy Ukraine time to strengthening them for the confrontation that you know will come. That's two-faces guarantorship.
- how does northstream, which seems to be Ukraine going against “the west”, an evidence for the west wanting a confrontation with Russia?
As long as the NS is operating, Germany and Russia have strong economic ties. Breaking those ties by an act of industrial terrorism (by Ukraine on Germany -- which should trigger a NATO-art5 in normal situations) is bringing NATO more together. Germany has to buy energy from the US now. Lol.
No the west did not want a confrontation with Russia/Putin. Merkel tried to reign in Putin with Gas.
Putin wanted the confrontation and started to attack Ukraine, killing people for no other reason than his ego.
US has expensive fuel and not the right one and also still trades its oil internationally and facing a huge price increase for millions, it also has to pay a lot more money for fertilizers.
The oil of venezuela is the wrong kind of oil and can't just be bought and processed by the USA with a snip of a finger. They have to build/change their refineries for it.
Minsconstrued in the media? Russia will not attack Europe because Putin knows he is gone the moment he starts attacking Nato.
Yeah lets have a PROPER discussion and not some right-wing telegram magic group thinking wanna be intelligence experts. After Ukraine, Moldovoa, Belarus and others would have fallen.
This proxy war is a realltive good outcome especially after what russia was doing the last 15 years: Propaganda manipulation in the west and killing of people with toxins and intervening / playing armsdealer to Africa with conflicts against France.
I think the Odessa Union house arson clearly shows that Ukraine is not protecting it's ethnic-Russian population. Also Ukrain and the baltics trying to ban Russian as al language is a big indicator to me (does not fit a free-democracy with freedom of speech).
Russia invaded Ukraine. Yes. In geopolitics these things happen. You need to know eachother's red lines. Ukraine in NATO is such a line. The west also did it: Turkey (NATO) is still in Syria, US topples Venezuela, US attacked Cuba, Israel is currently outside of its border -- all in the name of security. But Russia cannot do it. No Russia is bad and policy is Putins-ego driven.
NATO can attack Russia (though Ukraine) so it's not a direct confrontation and not on NATO soil. "To the last Ukrainian!" the shout. It's really horrific. Ukraine is ravaged by West/NATO policy. And then remember that Zelenski said he wanted to keep the peace and stay neutral during his election campaign.
"This proxy war is a realltive good outcome" -- nearly made me puke. It looks at Ukrainians as cannon fodder. Is you do not want to fight the war, but just pay from the sidelines, you are IMHO an evil manipulator.
> I think the Odessa Union house arson clearly shows that Ukraine is not protecting it's ethnic-Russian population. Also Ukrain and the baltics trying to ban Russian as al language is a big indicator to me (does not fit a free-democracy with freedom of speech).
There is no ban or ban attempt on speaking Russian in those countries, you can hear spoken Russian on the streets of Riga, Tallinn or Kyiv. Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Odesa_clashes, nothing to do with Russian ethnicity or language.
> So why did the right sector burn down a house with people in it?
It's such a loaded question. You have to give us some credible evidences of that. At least the wikipedia article you've linked directly contradicts this statement.
One of the attacking groups is the "Right sector", see their OUN links. These guys are basically neo-nazis, and they were killing ethnic Russians. Wikipedia frames this information as Russian propaganda, I see it as what actually happened.
The people that died where Unionists -- you know those groups that got us 8h workdays, weekends, holidays and sick-leave.
NATO supporting Ukraine in their defensive war is horrific in your opinion, but Putin sending hundreds of thousands of young Russian men to die isn't? Your moral compass sounds deeply flawed.
Perhaps Ukraine should have agreed to never join NATO, but I'm not sure whether this would have prevented the war. After all, Putin seems to genuinely think Ukrainians are not real ethnicity, and that the land thus belongs to Russia. From a Finnish point of view, Russians have again and again proved they cannot be trusted. Even during the good period between collapse of the Soviet Union and invasion of Crimea, Russian air force regularly violated our airspace. Intelligence operatives kept buying property that made no financial sense, but was located near military installations or critical infrastructure. Why would a friendly nation do this?
I believe in negotiations and diplomacy with Russia, but ONLY when all that is backed by enough military force. Because that is what Russians ultimately respect. The Soviet Union annexed or enslaved its weaker neighbors into puppet states, and that is what Russia ultimately aims to do. Ukraine is only the first step.
It's both horrible. But Putin is now fighting a was on land with predominantly ethnic-Russians on it. He's doing it now so he has all Russians consolidated, and never has to fight again "over Russians".
This "Ukraine is only the first step." narrative is no-were seen IRL. All superpowers use their force to advance their interests. Hence Venezuela got toppled, Iran is attacked, Taiwan has independence issues, Cuba could not build missile silos on their "sovereign land".
I believe the west helped Ukraine to get in this war in the first place.
Odessa Union house arson is not any indicaton at all. Putin wasn't the rescueer of his Russians in Ukraine and this doesn't allow an attacker to overtake a government and a country.
I'm shocked on how you don't care or mind at all that a whole country is getting attacked at all and you don't care apparently that Putin has killed 500.000 OF ITS OWN people to protect its ethnic russian population?
NATO is not ATTACKIng RUSSIA through UKRAINE. NATO is PROTECTING UKRAINE FROM Russia.
And you either are compeltly clueless or ignorant. Russians main strategy is to overtake a country and the first thing they do is to remove the local people and put russians in their place to break their culture.
Ah wait you are a russian bot or so. Go back to your propaganda telegram group.
"Ah wait you are a russian bot or so. Go back to your propaganda telegram group." -- and so the namecalling starts.
Ukraine is not at war with Russia. If that was the case this was over in 2023.
NATO/ the west is in a proxy war with Russia: that's why it takes so long.
Anyway. Now the reality get clear. Russia is winning. The break away regions/oblasts (that followed a similar path to how Kosovo was broken off of Serbia by the west) are almost under Russian control. And let's see where it goes from there. Russia is crazy to trust the west on its word at this point.
They joined an illegal war, and co-invaded an sovereign country. And no-one batted an eye back then. Because it was a invasion "the west" started: then it is okay!
The Russian war correspondents deserve to be informed of this. They are currently in utter despair over Ukraine's advancements near Lyman.
The fact alone that this "three-day special operation" is in its fifth year with over 1.5 million casualties places it among the worst disasters in the entire Russian military history. There is no credible way to spin it into anything else.
Stop this and start talking to me about the points i made:
You said Putin is rescuing the russian people in Ukraine. I say: Putin sent 500.000 Russians to die in Ukraine for rescuing russians? That doesn't make any sense at all.
And again: You do remember when Russia put its Troops on the Ukrainine borders for an excersise lying to the west and then taking over crimea and later on trying to overtake the Ukrainine Gov without any talks to the west?
Russia is not winning anything, russia lost already A LOT of Humans/man, restructured its industry to produce war items and they just announced themselves to reduce social spending by 7% for its own people to burn even more money on military.
The decision of Putin to fight this war out will hurt Russia as a country for decades and through its show of weakness, no one takes russia serious anymore. The military parades? man a joke. They even reused their tanks (the old ones) because they can't show anything anymore.
We'll see. I think we are not told what's going on on the ground in the west. Once the Kramatorsk-Slaviansk conglomerations falls, the annex-Donbas-mission is basically done.
And that leash was NorthStream? C'mon, it's not a leash when (1) both parties can stop the flow if they want, and (2) if both parties seem to be doing just fine with the leash/pipe no longer functioning.
Man you sure like russian propaganda from A to Z, the logic is simply not there as russia doesn't operate on logic but oligarchic mafia power pyramids with their own selfish goals.
Most of things you write are bullshit to be polite, lies and more lies directly from petrohrad's GRU troll farms. Its aimed for folks with below-average IQ and it works surprisingly well (given it uses psychology us-vs-them to split given population into similar silos for further processing and attack on negative emotions which is not rocket science).
Just an example of your bullshit - if Germany's half of industry is directly depending on that gas, there is no way they can turn it off just like that. It took them significant amount of time to find other sources and increased their final prices, and part of current industry decline making them less competitive. So much for who owns that leash, but those are facts, so just secondary topic for such folks.
You know, lies can be put out eloquently so they work at least a bit. Definitely not what you put here.
This is classic whataboutism. Tethered caps and energy security aren't competing for the same budget or the same people. Nobody delayed a gas pipeline to write a cap regulation. You can think the caps are annoying (they are) and still see that they have nothing to do with a closed strait.
Actually, some of the current designs are not annoying at all. Some are even nice in that you don't have to worry about where the cap is. I am looking forward to everyone adopting those eventually.
The most sensible thing the EU could do right now is make peace with Russia and stop this confrontation before it is too late. NATO has been deaf to Russia’s security concerns for decades, so maybe it is finally time to listen.
And before the NATO zealots, warmongers and NATO wannabes come here crying that you cannot trust Russia and that war is the only way (provided, of course, that you are not the one fighting), let’s address that right away.
You cannot trust Russia
Russia has maintained good relationships with a lot of countries, but none of them are NATO members or NATO wannabes. And, as a reminder, it was NATO that broke promises about not expanding eastwards.
You cannot deal with a country waging a war.
Yes, you can. Just take a look at Israel or the USA. One is committing a genocide in real time, while the other has been waging wars of aggression for ages. European leaders have no problems dealing
lol what a hypocrite. when he was getting uncle sam's money and security umbrella, he was happy and not questioning anything then now facing a bit of the reality scared my poor poles
The war in Ukraine is a tragedy, but it has proved that Russia is weak. The price shock will speed up the transition to renewables, and Iran is losing its grip on Hormuz. So many of the other issues are solvable.
It's easy to be a pessimist, but there's a bright future ahead of us.
Remember this is a war that Iran has spent 40 years planning for.
Netanyahu has been doing the same "two weeks away" stand-up comedy since 1992.
Netanyahu asked every single US president. They all took advice and then went back with a polite "thanks, but no thanks".
You don't need to have access to super-secret intel to know going into this frivolous war was a very stupid idea. You just need to look at a standard map and use your brain.
Finally Mr Netanyahu found a stupid enough US president.
And the problem with the current US president is he won't accept a loss.
He is not the sort of person willing to accept he has bitten off more than he can chew.
Nor is he the sort of person who is willing to sit down and have a proper negotiated discussion. Infact he's the very person who just tore up the JPCOA seemingly just because he doesn't like Obama.
Nor is he the sort of person willing to learn from Iraq or Afghanistan.
So we have a stalemate. And a US president who doesn't believe in diplomacy, old-school politics or anything else.
And this stalemate is not one that is going to be resolved with more military firepower. Again, just look at the map....
It's at everyone else's expense, but so is everything else they do.
Its not my area of expertise by any means, but I would perhaps point out the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve chart[1] which is at its lowest level since 1982.
Also do not forget the oil and LNG needs to be transported and that is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive.
It may well be that the artificial party cannot go on forever.
[1] https://en.macromicro.me/charts/41674/us-strategic-petroleum...
To your point about oil and LNG being expensive to transport - that just means oil corps can turn down production at the locations impacted, and jack up the prices for whatever is produced in the locations that aren't. Lower operating costs + higher revenues = profits.
It really is a perfect storm for massive returns for the major players. As a bonus, it's impacting the Saudi and Russian national players, which are their toughest competition since they don't need to file any quarterly reports. I agree that it can't go on forever, but the oil industry is rolling around in money like Scrooge McDuck in the meantime.
Might be the case, but that doesn't refute the argument? Maybe an empty reserve is even better for the (US) oil corps, financially.
It might check the phantom "short term profits" box, but anyone with any modicum of business sense (and the oil boys are no amateurs) see this event as probably the largest nail ever driven into the oil coffin.
Trump could not have given a bigger gift to the anti-oil crowd, making every human on Earth think "Damn, this shit is getting expensive and unreliable, what alternatives are available?"
At least he hasn't yet gone nuclear (metaphorically but also literally)
Maybe the only possible bit of credit we can give the guy is he said no when the Israelis wanted to use theirs.
Isn't it after all supposedly the world's worst kept secret that they have some too ?
But I'm also kind of concerned what happens in the unlikely event he does well in the mid-terms, and the same after the Israeli elections ....
So has the US. But as the saying goes: Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.
My understanding is that the US's longstanding evaluation is that their strategic goals in the region can't be accomplished by brawling with Iran over the strait, and their best move is to avoid it. The actions of every previous administration align with this view.
Where Iran's strategic position can be improved by drawing the US into an open conflict. Disrupting global petroleum markets, forcing the US to spend disproportionate resources defending its regional allies or withdraw and admit it can't, weakening the US's influence as a diplomatic power, all are achievable (or, frankly, achieved) with this conflict.
The US has no comparable strategic wins to even aim for here. At this point their only reasonable goal is restoring open trade through the strait, the status quo before the conflict. Fighting a war to successfully reclaim the status quo that was disrupted by entering the war is, strategically, losing a war.
The US has incurred plenty of costs though....
Those very expensive billion-dollar THAAD radars of which there are "not many" in the world ? Those are not getting replaced any time soon. IIRC following the destruction they have redeployed the one they had stationed in South Korea, much to the annoyance of the Koreans.
All those very expensive fancy missiles that have been used ? Expensive to re-manufacture and long lead-time.
The jets, helicopters and drones the Iranians shot down ?
The cost of running those ships they have parked off the Iranian shores ?
Those AWS datacentres ?
And that's before we get to the broader indirect non-military economy impacts.
That's the whole point of this war and Iran knows it.
Yes, Iran's GDP might have contracted 10% but that's nothing compared to what the US has incurred and the impact on the rest of the world.
> We've already seen the most Iran can do.
Except as Iran has demonstrated with the entirely predictable Part 2, the Houthis enter stage-left and disrupt Bab.
So now the US have the mess they created in Hormuz, plus a second front in Bab.
The only way out of this is going to be the US accepting old-school diplomatic resolution. More guns won't fix anything.
largely due the us gvt hiding information, suppressing. e.g all the bases in the Middle East are toast in range of missiles or drones. that means the us will withdraw from them silently.
weapons stockpiles are almost depleted. and replacing them takes years.
so 10% of Iran GDP vs that --
True, but also worthless - the USA fired or retired people who knew the plan (1), and didn't listen to the warnings. It's more "Everyone knows the plan until they punch themselves in the face"
1) https://fortune.com/2026/04/05/doge-fired-state-department-e...
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte disagrees with your assessment: https://x.com/clashreport/status/2102671513337856357
Would that be the same Mark Rutte who referred to Trump as "daddy" during an alliance summit and sent him a flattering text message which Trump published[1] ?
Yeah. Erm. I think we know what side of the bread Mr Rutte butters his toast on.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/trump-rutte-text-message-nato-sig...
I'm perfectly open to people posting opposing points of view as long as they are made from an independent mindset perspective.
Don't just post a pro-war view from a man who we know is pro-Trump.
Its a bit like saying JD Vance disagrees with me. Well duh....
>>Don't just post a pro-war view from a man who we know is pro-Trump.
If you are going to discard people who are pro-someone you don't like then you end up with a recipe for an echo-chamber.
I have Google maps open on another tab. Could you clarify what should I be looking at?
United States decided that our children shouldn't have the right to grow up in this world.
So that, I say, I would rather not take part in any world that United States shapes.
What makes you believe this great exaggeration? If it was true USA would have nuked Iran and Iraq to kingdom come ages ago.
Hormuz was yesterday's problem.
Today's problem which was entirely predictable to anybody with a map and half a brain is Bab El Mendab now being heavily disrupted by the Houthis etc.
It was always a case of when, not if.
Which now means the old ~20 day alternative-route transits via Bab are now ~50 days becuase you have to go via Suez and Cape of Good Hope.
This is exactly why all the other US presidents said no. It was a Pandora's box that was not worth the risk poking with a sharp stick.
Against GP point though: the Houthis probably won't attack non-saudi, non-israeli vessels anytime soon, so it shouldn't change the route so much.
Fair point. But one word .... Insurance.
2025 November: "Trump’s peace plan is a demand for Ukraine’s surrender What makes this plan different from all the others?"[1]
2025 October: "Donald Trump Wants Ukraine to Surrender to Putin"[2]
2025 September: "Ukraine's refusal to give up territory to Russia stalls peace deal, Trump envoy says"[3]
2025 Feb: "Trump Gives Europe 3 Weeks to Accept Ukraine’s ‘Surrender,’ Says European Lawmaker"[4]
2025 January: "Trump says Ukraine should have surrendered to Russia and blames Zelensky for war"[5]
2024 September: "Harris meets Zelensky and slams Trump's 'surrender policy' for Ukraine"[6]
1. https://www.vox.com/politics/469993/trump-ukraine-peace-plan...
2. https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/donald-trump-wants-ukrai...
3. https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/ukraines-refusal-terr...
4. https://www.kyivpost.com/post/47574
5. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
6. https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20240927-harris-meets-z...
It’s also rich saying that the US doesn’t negotiate with terrorists while watching Trump verbally fellate Putin at every given opportunity.
I'm not discounting the value of the good things you mention, but is there anything else to add to the 'golden age' description?
No one in the West has had the Eastern European experience of queuing for bread for hours and discovering there isn't any.
In the West we have exceptionally strong normalcy bias and can't imagine a world with severe scarcity.
In countries like Poland that's still lived memory.
They are not, and this is a good thing long term.
How? Russia is successfully fighting the entirety of NATO on a front that it is continually pushing further west, with about 20% of Ukraine now lost. If anything NATO and the promise of US security is what has been shown to be weak. And I don't think the idea of US/Western superiority is ever going to come back to what it was given what has happened in the Ukraine and Iran theaters in recent past.
Russia is claiming to fight NATO, but NATO hasn't even shown up yet, but Russia is struggling. If NATO were to go to war with Russia, there would be very little that Russia could do. The one thing they might be able to do is the reason NATO has been holding back.
Ukraine us unlikely to get back most of the territory it lost in 2022, but Russia is also unlikely to even finish capturing the remaining parts of the Donetsk oblast, let alone the rest of Ukraine. It's taking Russia months/years to capture settlements with just thousands of prewar population. Donetsk oblast still has a heavily fortified urban area with a prewar population of 500k under Ukrainian control.
Russia is about 28 times larger than Ukraine and 10x GDP.
Russia is also not pushing, they actually lost occupied territory in 2026.
Iran doesn't need to conquer or hold Hormuz they just need it in missile/drone range - it's not symmetric.
As for the impact on the global economy - the entire world is letting Iran hold its gas/oil hostage because of something the US did. I'm not sure why those countries don't pressure Iran more they're not at war with them they shouldn't be embargo'd.
Decimate? Sure. Conquer? Absolutely not.
Iran is a huge country with dispersed command and control and generations of people raised to hate the U.S.
Russia is fighting its own battle at its own border against an enemy which receives some support from NATO countries.
US leadership fights to not lose face, Russian leadership loses a lot more than face if they back off.
Russia is reflexively anti-NATO as NATO is reflexively anti-Russia.
NATO is an alliance that was created in opposition to the Soviet Union. NATO has absorbed parts of the former Soviet Union.
Western companies pillaged Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Rightly or wrongly, Putin owes a lot of his original popularity to dealing with the aftermath.
Russia, rightly or wrongly, sees colour revolutions as intelligence operations, and territorial conquest.
Russia cannot accept NATO forces on its borders.
NATO is providing decisive material, political, logistical, financial and intelligence support to Ukraine, precisely to bog it down and drain it.
These are all pretty normal perspectives for most Russians. They're arguably pretty based, and not necessarily a product of internal propaganda campaigns.
The thing that westerners don't get about Russia, and the reason we're stuck in this Godforsaken conflict, is that we personalise things around Putin. We think that if Putin dies, everything will magically improve.
The decision to invade was Putin's, but the rationale goes much deeper and will outlast him.
Not Russian either but also spent a lot of time out east.
Putin declared the war as a means of personal survival. The negotiations are possible only if he gets out of the way, and then, it's really important to make a Marshall plan for Russia because indeed lots of reputational damage has to be repaired by the "winners" in the Cold War.
This is such obvious bullshit. Russia already has NATO on its borders, and is attempting to expand it's borders so they will contact even more of NATO.
Has anybody told NATO yet that they’re fighting the Russians?
If only we had known, right?
Ukraine is taking back terrain currently:
https://www.reuters.com/world/ukraine-has-retaken-745-sq-km-...
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/85252
Russia is successfully fighting the entirety of NATO
It is not. The primary reason that Russia can even keep up is that it has many more citizens that can be thrown in the meat grinder and can work in arms factories and it has a larger industrial base than Ukraine. If you would tell most experts before the invasion, that it would've ended up as it did, they would have laughed their heads off. They would have told you that the Ukraine army would not be a match for the Russian army and they would have told you that the response of the West would have been divided.
Russia has ~146M citizens, Ukraine has ~29M citizens within land that it currently controls. Russia's estimated GDP is $2.66 trillion, Ukraine's GDP is $225 billion. That's 5x as many citizens and a 10x larger economy.
A real conventional war against NATO would be a completely different story. Sure, NATO countries would have to catch up with drone production and defense, but a lot of knowledge transfer and co-development is already happening. But NATO's economy and population is several times larger than Russia's. If NATO countries switched to a war economy, it would not be a fair game.
Of course, Putin knows this and he also knows the real weaknesses: there is a change that not all countries will uphold Article 5 and coordination might end up in a mess if the US would bow out, because command & control has always largely been handled by the US. This is why he is constantly testing how strong Article 4 and 5 are on an escalating ladder. The other weakness are disinformation campaigns through social media, which are working really wel for them, both in the US and in various European countries.
(I don't think it's useful to talk about nuclear war, it will end up badly for everyone in a population center. There will be no winners, only losers.)
[0] https://www.oilandgasmiddleeast.com/news/strait-of-hormuz-oi...
Been living a lot in SE Asia in the last 12 years but ever yeah in poland for few months. There has been really big inflation in the last 2-3 years and everybody notice it.
Been twice this year in Italy, one time in alps and last week in puglia and there is a reason so many Poles go there for holiday - its cheaper or similar price but better than taking a holiday in poland.
>Iran is losing its grip on Hormuz
citation needed
That is just hope-believe, i.e. it ain't happening.
> It's easy to be a pessimist, but there's a bright future ahead of us.
I lived through the 1990s here in Romania, the future does not look bright in the slightest. Yes, materially speaking we do have more stuff compared to the 1990s, a lot more stuff, but the opportunities in front of us are as slim as ever (which wasn't the case back in the 1990s). But maybe things look different for the Polish.
Why? Inflation was much higher then. There were almost no highways. Very little foreign tourism. Towns were ugly. Industry was barely functioning. Etc. Things are way better now. Just because Romania has high debt is no reason to be pessimistic. Everybody has high debt.
Worth noting mid east is all looking for other routes now 3-5 years from now Iran will be in a weaker economic situation on reduced flow. Hopefully Theocracy has been ended.
I think this applies to both sides, and the issue is that the people in power are not affected by the crises that cause hardship to ordinary people. " Iran is..." does not distinguish between the two, they are different. Fanatical leadership can live by "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make" .
The problem though is that people in the USA do have one lever to pull on their government, in the form of approaching midterm elections, that the people of Iran do not. And the leadership of Iran knows it. They may be fanatical and awful but they're not stupid - causing fuel shortages causes economic pain to ordinary people causes political pain to the USA. They have this weapon and are using it heavily.
Notwithstanding that, this assessment of blame is correct ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49907371 ), the missteps that put us in this mess with no clear way out all come from stupid leadership in the USA.
I don't agree that the consequential points are just "more language". I said things that you did not.
I don't care what scandalous thing a politician said on any given day. I do not want to be advertising or voting material, to be riled up and pitted against others.
That means that I can judge the state of things by simply living in the country and watching what happens around me, comparing it to other places I visit. And that paints a very positive picture of the reality that surrounds us. Even on a practical level, living in a city that is safe and clean with good public transportation is something I've learned to appreciate. There are very few places in the world where I would consider living at this point, and in summertime at least, when the weather is nice, I simply wouldn't want to live anywhere else.
As to the OP and the blog post (impressive, btw!) — I largely agree. I don't think this is fear-mongering, these things are genuinely happening and are real risks. The OP didn't panic, and neither do I — but I do take these risks into account.
I'm aware of all the issues we're dealing with, with the horrible war in Ukraine, but that's still unspeakably better situation than it was in 1945 or in 1965 or any other time before that. I hate any war, I'm not happy with the one in Ukraine, but I will take any war happening in the country next to the one I am in, over a war happening in the country I am in.
Of course, there's more money in healthcare than ever before. Yet somehow hospitals are being closed, and waiting times are longer than they were three years ago. These are facts that may not be obvious to you if you have private healthcare through Medicover or Lux Med.
Access to private healthcare can make it easy to overlook the problems in the public system, but for many people those problems are very real and affect their daily lives.
You can take a tiny fraction of any good image and find it lacking. The OP wasn't talking about "golden age of public health care" but about "golden age" in general. I'm still waiting for anyone to answer the questions I've asked above, when was it better to live in Poland if not now?
Not "when it was absolutely perfect to live in Poland" not even "when was the public health care 100% ideal". It feels that the day to day life issues (of which there are plenty, sure) are stopping you from realising how good you have it compared to generations before you.
I don't know for sure, but I think it's a safe bet that should you be from your own parents generation, you could've been prosecuted for complaining publicly about "the state of the state", not to mention obtaining a computer for your personal use would be next to impossible.
If I need a doctor who actually listens, or the consultation in less than 2 years, this is the way, and it's a world-class care as well.
Sure there are subpar parts of the healthcare in Poland, but until all you can get is 15 minutes phone chat with the GP (two days away if it's urgent) instead of in-person visit, or 47 minutes wait for the ambulance in case of stroke or heart attack (in Poland it's ~10 min in cities, ~20 in the villages) you really don't have anything to be ashamed of.
Complain, if you can improve it, yeah. But it's a good service. Just overworked and underpaid.
World class care? No you are not getting urgent in-person visit in Poland either. There are cases of people dying in ER with dislocated shoulder (because no anesthesiologist present), after quite standard C-section (no doctor present), or intubated into esophagus (and dying afterwards).
The availability and attention you are writing about are alien to me. Private visit costs 400PLN for five minutes of attention. Most important thing you'll learn is that they don't have the time (for you).
For instance: it's mentioned that EU gas storage is at 67% and Germany's at 56%.
What is not mentioned though is that Poland's storage is at 97% because the previous administration, for better or worse, was paranoid enough to invest in a sizeable marine gas terminal and the current one stocked up early.
Regarding real estate: adjusted for inflation prices peaked 2.5 years ago, interest rates are also much lower than back then. Nobody is buying because all the Ukrainian refugees who were moving to Poland are here already and that's the last bump in population this country will see for the foreseeable future.
Also there's the threat of war on Polish soil, which affects investor sentiment.
https://energiedashboard.admin.ch/gas/eu-gasspeicher
For instance, Italy has more storage capacity per capita despite very similar consumption (~10TWh/1mln population) and they're already at 86%+.
Meanwhile indeed Poland has much less storage (about a third of Germany per capita), but it also uses it less (half the consumption of Germany per capita).
I must ask: what the hell are the Germans waiting for?
Plus, our chancellor has zero experience in governing anything (he's not even been mayor before) and is firmly stuck in thinking like a Blackrock executive.
So, to answer your question: We are waiting for a government that is not entirely in the pocket of those that want to stick to the status quo and profit from crises as long as possible.
Which former employer is going to make a quick buck? The grid operator or the grid operator lobbyist? Besides, who is going to profit from a price spike when the whole point is that the summer-winter spread is inverted, so no one expects to make money from injecting?
Well, both. Katherina Reiche was CEO of Westenergie until she joined the current government; and was, at the same time, listed as a lobbyist. She also caused controversy when she presented a plan for energy politics that was _very similar_ to plans by major electricity providers (including the parent company of her previous company). Or when she directly asked the electricity provider EnBW for better arguments why we should build more gas power plant (directly violating lobbying laws). That's just a small excerpt; the list of controversy is long.
But tbh, I don't think there's a big conspiracy about the empty gas tanks. Yes, Reiche is most likely corrupt (which is a huge deal), but afaiu, the gas tanks are empty because nobody wants to pay for the gas right now.
PS: Just today, Reiche ordered Sefe GmbH to stockpile more gas [1]. Sefe is conveniently a public company. So private companies don't have to buy expensive gas, because the public is going to take care of it.
[1] https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2026-09/gasspeicher-deutschla...
Bureaucracy, most likely. That and in-fighting (I count NIMBY as an example of that, but not the only thing).
Here's a train station in Berlin, whose upgrade is currently 20 years behind schedule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Köpenick_station
Just because the numbers might be small if germany doesn't has enough gas and some old fragile human being might die of this or because they cant afford the gas, its still no way to die in a country like germany.
What does your comment add to this discussion?
We should stop caring? You decide how others can live because you are well off?
The other thing is: If a few cold days kill you then your health wasn't much to begin with after all.
Old people die. It's not always a heart attack or a stroke. It's the flu at a high age that gets them.
I don't know if Putin is crazy enough to chance it, but I wouldn't put it past him to do so.
But even then, Russia would need to mobilize hundreds of thousands of troops and that is not something you can pull off in a week, or even a month.
A country that is rained on by 500 drones daily delivering 125KG explosives (so like a proper standard bomb dropped from airplanes) can overwhelm local military defense capacities quickly, leave infrastructure in crumbles (as in no water, electricity, gas, heating, gas stations working and so on) and at least in dictator's mind local population may crumble in weeks. You don't need to put a single foot in the country to reduce critical infra to rubble.
I can't imagine Polish folks would ever bow to russians after horrible things they repeatedly done to them, but ie in Slovakia it would be a very quick victory even if country wouldn't be ruled by ultra corrupt folks who would just give whole country to russians for some more corruption promises for later.
If puttin' will try anything in eastern Europe now is the best time. But I would expect more something along Moldova or baltics, Poland is far from russia and any extra force concentration in Kaliningrad would be easy to see.
Unless you mean nazi invasions ofc in which case you’re just a troll.
Many generations are. Last century saw the collapse of the British and Soviet empires - titans by any measure - through mismanagement. Europe as an international power was also broken (compared to how they used to be). I can easily imagine 1900s me fleeing to America in fear of the end times and feeling quite justified in his choices with hindsight. Less obvious where to run to these days as the US not-an-empire looks like it may crumble.
Most of the people who died didn't get an opportunity to complain, so we live with some serious survivorship bias on how bad things got.
OTOH, mobility is a privilege, and it's usually the least privileged who are the most affected by war. So I'm not exactly sure how I feel about my own advice, since it's most useful to those that need it least.
We made it a priviledge, but for a biological being, it's the most natural thing to do when you find yourself in a place that is shitty. There is a reason so many risk truly awful things to get a chance (chance!) at a better life: going to where food and safety is, is just what living beings do.
Depending on what you're running for China is in some senses kinda what the US was back in the day, except there's no land so no easy way for them to accept migrants. These day and age migrants also aren't very accepted anywhere.
The difference from the past is that the US has always been a melting pot, while China is pretty much a closed society. If you’d emigrated to the US, you always had a good chance of blending into that diverse society no matter where you came from. Assimilating into the homogeneous Chinese society will take generations.
For me it’ll be either the westernmost end of Europe or one of the better parts of South America, in the hope that they will prosper modestly in the shadows of the upcoming conflicts.
PRC growth now based on educated population, which exploded, not total population. Reality is every tertiary median to upper middle class wage is more productive than 10 undereducated peasants... the ones first to age out. There's like 200-400m+ bluntly useless mouths dragging down productivity/per capital metrics, the only saving grace they did NOT get rich before old, i.e. poor old so it's cheap(ish) in terms of resources (but not labour) to support them. Put it this way, PRC is generating OECD combined in tertiary, disproportionately STEM, they have backlog of 200m births from last 20+ years that still haven't got their masters/phds... at 60% and increasing tertiary we're going 100m+ high end talent, aka the greatest high end human dividend in recorded history who will be in workforce for until 2060s, i.e. so far out its hard to project based on present realities, only they have no shortage of advanced economy growth potential. Like if you throw all projected US newborns + immigration into STEM... PRC would still come out FAR ahead. There is no contest, unless AGI displaces everyone.
TFR real issue probably 30 year out. There will be some rebound, current crashing TFR because so many entering tertiary last few years = delay family formation. Women going to turn 35-40 and realize they want kids... and have them, especially considering 1:4 dependency ratio also = 4:1 wealth transfer + property going other way when previous generation (with high savings rate) dies. But won't get to replacement level. Then it's matter of what bad levers PRC willing to pull - pro natal fertility policies does not incentivize 2.1 TFR... and no one has tried punitive policies, i.e. limit wealth/property transfers to families with 2 kids... all sorts of inducements liberal societies haven't... or politically can't try. Or immigration, test tube babies, who knows. But IMO they try punitive policies first. That's really the only thing that no one has tried, and we know from wealthy Muslim countries with oil money, religious incentive, domestic help... aka every support imaginable, TFR is below 2 or trending towards it.
This isn't just a question of dropping labour, but also a question of the consequent reduction in economic demand.
Which is why China started reacting to the low fertility rate already in 2013 by abolishing the agency responsible for enforcing the one child policy, followed by ending the policy in 2015, replacing it with a 2 child policy, which failed to have the desired effect, followed by a 3 child policy in 2021, followed a month later by removing all penalties for having even more children.
China's workforce also is at most years from starting to contract excluding any immigration - the cohorts retiring are close to the size of those entering the workforce and the cohorts retiring will be increasing for another 20-30 years, while the ones entering the workforce will be decreasing for the same period even if they somehow figured out how to reverse it today.
In the 21st century, that is definitely something I'd bet on China for being able to do. Across all sorts of problems.
The solution is going to be paying people. No, more than that. No, keep going. Higher. Market-clearing price.
It could get very dark very quickly if it turns out to be too hard to induce enough people who actually would want children under the right circumstances to choose to have them.
China's migration policies have been extremely strict, so to what extent they will be able to loosen that up without political upheaval is still an open question. So far they've only loosened up the restrictions on internal migration.
And even with migration, if those migrants don't themselves end up with high fertility rates then you've done nothing but kick the can, and not especially far. Because of all of these issues, I think there's approximately a 100% chance that China will do the equal but opposite of the one-child-policy should their demographic issues fail to start reversing more naturally.
Another way would be to fine companies and local jurisdictions if their average number of children per employee/resident is below 2.1 or whatever, similar in spirit to Japan's 'metabo laws.' You could also require companies prioritize employment, beyond a minimal standard, based on the number of children per employee, and so on.
"People" here means women, and womens' rights are a very recent thing in world history. With a sufficiently evil and authoritarian government, it might be possible. It certainly has been tried in the 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Honour_of_the_German_...
There's a difference between "it would be evil to" and "it is impossible to".
Barring medical issues, it is absolutely possible force this. There's even some jurisdictions where it's not a crime.
If I read these two maps right, China's the only place, out of those where marital rape is not a crime, that abortion is not also prohibited:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marital_rape_laws_by_coun...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Abortion_Laws.svg
(That said, I don't know how up to date such maps are, and have no way to verify laws; don't suggest machine translation from Chinese to English, it is bad).
"Quality of people". Spoken like a true tech person.
Would you choose an employee, or worse, a spouse, with no positive qualities? If no, you are judging people by their qualities too.
Tech people look at things in terms of - is this true or not.
And "Quality of People" is perfectly accurate description.
How it makes you feel about it completely irrelevant.
It also depends who you are. A very large fraction of American trans people (not a large absolute number, only a few hundred thousand) have moved from R states to D states recently due to repression, such as Kentucky revoking their driving licenses.
I do think the best political-economic era of my life was 1997-2001: election of Tony Blair until 9/11, covering the first internet boom. That was the closest to "world peace". That includes the Israel-Palestine peace process and the reconciliation of the post-Soviet states into Europe. If that had worked better, with a democratic Russia, the world would be a very different place today.
Americans just end up paying for a lot of things that are either undesirable for many Poles (e.g., a huge McMansion in desolate suburbs and the car to drive there) or paid for via other means (e.g., healthcare.)
Oh, best of luck convincing Americans that paying twice as much for shitty health insurance than you pay in 'high' general tax levels is somehow a bad deal for them. Until they actually live the experience they just cannot comprehend the second and third order benefits of a real social system.
How do you define "average living standard", so that it would take a colossal disaster to have US reduced to that of Poland?
US median income is just over 19 k international dollars, Poland is just under 9 k. Still a big difference but just over a factor of 2 instead of over 3.5.
See https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
In a more homogenous society, such as Poland’s in comparison to the United States, it also in my observation trends to be easier for wealth distribution to flatten.
Maybe the US has more kids per capita too which would also affect that value depending on how it is being measured. Not to say that anything is being hidden there, just something to think about that may make you interpret the data differently or think about it differently.
US folks have more money on average, but are forced to spend them in ways ie europeans don't have to - top notch education and healthcare costs are huge in US for large part of population and compose big part of expected savings of parents and older folks, while an afterthought in Europe. How do you compare that.
Plus places in Europe like Switzerland have long term way higher living standards by any measure than even good places in US. Europe is big and diverse in ways US simply never was, it would do you good to travel the world a bit and see and experience it with your own eyes.
I think mismanagement is not accurate. The Soviet system was flawed and inefficient and could not compete. The European empires were made untenable by the world moving on: economic, technological and political changes.
I think Europe and America had a golden age when they were at peace and dominated the world economically from the 80s to this century, and forgot neither of these is a given.
Too late to edit now.
How are you supposing that it looks like the US may crumble? I don’t understand where these kinds of comments come from, aside from perhaps verbalizing something one might want to see instead of what is factually true.
The US is the most oil-dependent country (although all western countries are quite dependent on it) and it cut off its own supply of oil.
The US has canceled all military guarantees and aligned with two different fascist states, so military cooperation is unwinding.
It's been unable to manufacture anything effectively for a while now as all the money gets siphoned off corruptly (identical to Russia in the Ukraine war), not even the weapons used in Israel.
What else is there to being an empire? Its nuclear aircraft carriers - with no aircraft since they run on oil?
That's not what a decoupling looks like. Investors are probably just not buying because they know rates are going to go up. The Federal Reserve already strongly signaled another rate hike by end of year. Why would you buy something today that you can wait and buy for a better price later?
Second, if you want to make an argument about interest rates or the debt, you first have to make that argument and resolve it for the UK, Italy, France, and others.
Third, the USD is just the dominant reserve currency. It's not the only one. A reserve currency is just one that banks hold in reserve. The reason the US is involved in the Middle East is to protect the Petro-dollar which generally "requires" oil purchases to be settled in dollars. The trade off is we keep Iran in check from destroying the gulf countries.
> The US is the most oil-dependent country (although all western countries are quite dependent on it) and it cut off its own supply of oil.
This doesn't make any sense. The US is also the largest oil and gas producing country in the world. Even for the Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea you can read for yourself that the US has been able to break through and Saudi Arabia has quickly repaired the east-west pipeline and 3.5+ million barrels are flowing through there now (IIRC 60% or so of pre-attack volume). Either way, most of those flows go to Europe and Asia, not the US. So while the US is oil dependent (all countries are) I don't think your assertion is entirely accurate.
> It's been unable to manufacture anything effectively for a while now as all the money gets siphoned off corruptly (identical to Russia in the Ukraine war), not even the weapons used in Israel.
That doesn't make any sense either. We manufacture all kinds of things, including incredibly advanced equipment. We make airplanes, we make semiconductors, pharmaceutical goods.
> What else is there to being an empire? Its nuclear aircraft carriers - with no aircraft since they run on oil?
If we don't have oil neither does anyone else. Except that we do have oil so our nuclear powered aircraft carriers would just use our own oil for the jets.
It leads nicely into a conclusion that, even without the preface, seems reasonable: build personal buffers of water, electricity, and cash.
Tribal populations lived isolated lives. Most of human life on Earth involved only small-sized settlements with occasional visitors from the far away places.
Connectedness opens the flood gates . You get inundated with news from every corner as if it is happening in you neighborhood and as if those are your people.
You are not designed for this.
What a bizarre statement. Of course you are not designed for anything. You have adapted, genetically and socially. And you keep doing that. Modern society would collapse if change to a state of the world that you describe would quickly come. If it comes slowly, no matter what change, humans will adapt. Not all of that will be pleasant, but it eventually works out.
That means the modern society is not sustainable and cannot adapt to long-term changes. It's like those cities, where all traffic and power supply would be affected for every rain. That's not adaptation. That's just living precariously on greed and assumptions.
The drastic changes, if any, themselves would be purely man-made, not like asteroids that killed dinosaurs. A proper evolution or adaptation would not have drastic changes. Changes would be gradual in synch with the pace of biological evolution.
Adption is not just genetical. A person can move from northern Europe to southern italy without problem. Its genetics don't need to change for that.
> That means the modern society is not sustainable and cannot adapt to long-term changes.
I don't see that connection. As long as change comes sufficiently slowly, adaptation is no problem. It's mainly that the quicker change comes, the more painful adaptation is. This it unrelated to how sustainable society is.
Why? I, as the poster you replied to, do not see it this way at all. Any society, modern or not, can adapt to slow changes. And rapid changes would be at least as damaging several centuries ago, when for example 2-3 consecutive years of bad harvests meant a major upheaval.
Things can look a lot smoother after a few centuries. My 2c.
Back then 2-3 consecutive years of bad harvests meant a major upheaval for a few affected areas. Now that those areas supply food to the whole world the problem has grown in scale and fragility.
The author writes: "This time I do not need the research, because I have spent the past year looking for a house. (...) And the Polish loan is the worse product."
I wrote a piece comparing what Poles and Americans say about the housing crisis in social media, you might find it interesting, especially that I tried to compare affordability as well [0].
In short, it seems that:
- Warsaw is even slightly less affordable for its residents than Manhattan - but the Americans seem to be more pissed off by the situation.
That was very surprising to me.
[0] https://rudolf.observer/en/posts/who-complains-more-on-housi...
It's almost s if economic theories actually describe reality! Given that it's economy 101 predicting that this would happen.
Still, people do it again and again. Rent control proponents for housing should take notice.
Without introducing an unpopular tax regime, the French govt has found a way to progressively increase prices for higher mileage motorists. Supplying most motorists at a reasonable price, while having high-mileage motorists pay the unsubsidised price for most of their petrol.
Rent control working depends on multiple other policies and on the characteristics of the place. For Paris for example it did seem to have a positive effect: https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-05315123v1/file/Morin%20et%20al.%20...
Why does this might not apply to other cases? Paris is very dense already, not a lot of places to build anyhow. What other policies are required? Ensure people do not buy only for investment and leave things empty - they raised the uninhabited tax to discourage that, will see if enough to make a dent.
Almost all measures since have been detrimental to new housing, great for real estate owners, extremely poor for renters and allowed house prices to skyrocket. None of these things are on their own and it's a more-or-less global thing but they've done a great job making it worse.
And as a bonus: this was projected to happen by the governmental planning agency and rejected as fearmongering.
People bring in Tokyo as an example, but there’s even a rent control-esque thing here - right to refuse. Technically landlord can increase the rent, but you can challenge and refuse it, to keep paying the original amount. Like rent is going up heavily over here (my neighbourhood is about 10% YoY). You can’t really even build up fast enough to accommodate demand.
Calm the fuck down. We outnumber them three to one. Militarily even without the Americans, their active military is 1.2 millions according to the IISS the collective European one, not taking into account British, Turkish, Canadian or American is about 1.5.
We have a significant numerical advantage in kit as well a lot more tanks, apcs, etc, more and better airplanes, double or triple their navy, their only advantage is a larger ammunition production which makes sense because they are at war.
Their only advantage is our disunity and our lack of cohesion, that's the main thing the Americans provided to European defense on a conventional level, a singular command infrastructure through NATO's headquarters, on a secondary level they brought along significant logistical capabilities. But lets not forget that Russia does not have these logistical capabilities either.
I am sure someone is going to say but these are all obsolete cold war platforms that won't survive a second in the modern drone dominated battlefield. Sure, but the main advantage of drones is that they are cheap and easy to manufacture fast. European militaries do not stockpile significant amounts of these because they become obsolete in a matter of months. There are experiments going on across all of Europe on using small drones for all purposes and yeah if shit hits the fan the EU industry has to step up on production.
It would be incredibly foolish for the Russians to engage any European country, the balance of conventional power is incredibly tilted against them the only thing they can bet on is our fragmentation, and while the war in Ukraine is going on I don't see this as possible either since the bulk of their combat ready forces are bogged down there.
The real threat would emerge only if that conflict ended in their favor.
The visual design is beautiful and the maps are illuminating for some of the points. But a good number of the map elements feel pretty superfluous, in a 'data for data's sake' kind of way.
Overall I think this would be more impactful if it were ~50% shorter or if there were more navigation - this is a ton of content to scroll through one panel at a time.
I'm not sure my generation thought that (I was born in 1955). Not in the South of England at least. Growing up there in the late fifties, sixties, seventies, I feel that most of us were looking forward most of the time and anticipating good times. At least most people I knew at the time. It was a time of accelerating change and a great deal of it was undeniably positive.
Maybe it was just something about the South of England though eh?
Poland has become a rich country within one generation after the fall of Soviet Union and one of the safest countries in Europe at the moment. There's always gonna be crisis in the world but at the same time you have to admit that we're living in one of the most comfortable times for humanity in general compared to past generations.
If it wasn't for the AI we wouldn't even be having this discussion because the linked vibe coded site wouldn't even be built
Also learn to choose your battle. If you focus on everything that's going wrong in the world and spend all your energy on that, you're gonna have mental problems.
Which would be good - we don't need AI propaganda slop like this page.
- To maintain fellowship, the empire spreads money to buy influence
- eventually this starts to cost too much, so the empire reduces spending
- wars ensue and independent voices emerge
- unable to establish order, the empire loses its influence and collapses
You can see this patterns as the US is overspending (high debt / trade deficit) while reducing its diplomatic influence on international programs. Not sure how they can save the USD value over time.
Capture rain water.
Have a buffer of food and medicine.
Build a fireplace an store some wood.
It is extremely urgent to push for a new Allied Nations organization not headquartered in the US and for them all to drop the dollar and put USA and Israel in check. For Europe to grow a spine, and for China and Russia to step up and stop being complacent with all the bullying going on
The whole world should say enough is enough
It was a pleasant, concise and informative read. I actually read it from beginning to end. Unlike many of the artisanal articles starting with how the author experienced the crema of the morning's espresso.
* Clearly AI written text on vibe-coded website.
* Heavily focused on doom and gloom.
* Lots of its points are subtly (or not that subtly) blaming the issues on support ting Ukraine in defending itself against Russian genocidal invasion.
It would be nice if we had more competent politicians trying to solve problems and make things more efficient though but that's a problem no democracy in EU solved. We are paying for years of kicking the can in the energy department now but on the other hand maybe that will speed-up transition to EVs which will be both great for standards of living and significantly more efficient.
Geopolitics is hard to predict but I am also in optimist camp when it comes to war in Iran. The oil is flowing again and Iran can't do much about it. Workarounds will be found. Ukrainians now have a way to really hurt Russia which may result in peace at some point as well. If anything it's clear Russia is not dangerous in conventional war. They have sabotage but that imo is going to be less and less efficient as infrastructure and intelligence improve to handle it.
Overall - a lot of things went wrong and we are still standing. Once the environment improve we are in great position to be one of the best places to live and work in EU.
I've grown skeptical of all those "witch! burn her!" voices, but I'm open to evidence.
I do think though it's a little dishonest to be this alarmed now just because the crisis is at your doorstep. There is continuous misery all around the globe which everyone should acknowledge. The wars in the middle east brought destruction for generation and for entire regions. I am not sure those people are worried about the interest rates in Japan as much as they are about surviving. Including the current war. Think about Iran and its government what you will, but when a school gets bombed, innocent children die. I am not sure I find this less concerning than the state of natural gas capacity in Germany. And I live in Germany.
As for the energy crisis, the solution is in front of us. If you don't want to depend on foreign fossil fuels start electrifying and switching to renewables and batteries. You can do it cheap and fast. In fact, this is already happening in parts of the world and they are much more shielded from the current issues than elsewhere.
Claude chose a weird turn of phrase here. Does this mean "the smallest of the three was the sixth largest"? If the Ukrainians hit a tiny plant, will it now be "three of its hundred biggest diesel plants"?
Literally how did you come to the conclusion this was written by ChatGPT? The text is clearly written by a polish person that speaks fluent english as a second language - I know cause I am one. Telltale signs are sentences like "Meanwhile, shares are at records" which is an overly direct translation of the polish equivalent, where the word "rekord" by itself implies a record high whereas in english you'd make it explicit.
You tell me:
> Scroll to follow one closed strait into fuel pumps, harvests, bond markets and my own country’s winter heating
Or:
> France: a run on the pumps. [...] drivers fleeing record prices elsewhere emptied its tanks faster than trucks could refill them. [...] A price cap meant as a cushion, in a system with no slack, turned a price shock into empty pumps.
A cursory check on Pangram returns 100% AI written just from the first 4 paragraphs.
There may have been some human involvement with this website but they certainly didn’t edit it for style. Unfortunately if you don’t edit for style then people will default to the assumption that it’s entirely vibecoded.
- "But the same closure that empties a granary fills somebody’s brokerage account." Claude is obsessed with comparisons linked by "the same". There are several instances, like "Poland made the same swap, with oil" (but that one is odd because "the same" isn't referring to anything).
- "Europe’s potato belt tells the story in a single season": Claude also loves this "noun verbs the noun in a single noun" phrasing.
- "A country that loses its regular supplier does not only pay more. It ends up dealing with people it does not know." Claude's classic "it's not X, it's Y" constructions.
- "Strategists do not describe a stampede home. They describe Japan quietly ceasing to be the buyer everyone could count on, and long-term borrowing costs rising everywhere as a result." A variant following the pattern "it's not X, it's Y, and Z as a result." This is an interesting pattern, one that I don't think I've ever seen a human write. A human would likely write "...leading to rising long-term borrowing costs" or similar.
- The use of a verb (rising) there in the third part is typical Claude, as it really likes to verb when a noun would read better. Other examples: "markets price another rise"; "volume freezes, prices stay put and sellers wait"; "after five years the rate floats".
- "The test Tusk describes is a test of belief, and it arrives just as the Pentagon decides how many Americans stay." The juxtaposition here (a test that arrives) is very odd and typical of Claude.
- What's also generally striking is the proliferation of "X becomes Y" phrasings, which is something Claude loves to do. Price shock turned into empty pumps. A story is told in a single season.
I'll stop there.
What's fascinating to me is that I personally find this kind of text exhausting to read, but apparently other people don't notice it at all.
If we ignore the AI stuff, I will still say this is not good writing. What's so grating and noticeable for me is the monotonous style. The short, clipped sentences like little stabs of information. It never varies; the tempo is just fact, fact, fact. It's absolutely exhausting to read pages and pages of this.
Good non-fiction writing is enjoyable to read for a myriad reasons; authors use metaphor, juxtaposition, tempo, humor, irony, allusion, and all sorts of techniques to make an article enjoyable to read. Just throwing down facts one after another with this kind of breathless, staccato noir voice is not that, in my personal opinion.
I don't know how much AI is to blame, maybe the Polish version is different or if this is a deliberate style.
To the content:
Don't count on IEA's reports, they are just as subject to propaganda as any other media.
"When the world pays more, our grain can simply leave, so the price at home has to match" Not a fact.
At the moment as I see it some warmongers want really to escalate the situation to outright war between NATO and Russia so don't pay attention to Tusks words or any of the hawks from USA.
This technical analysis is really futile and counterproductive, there exists only vicious greed which will be followed by a catastrophe.
- what action specifically is the west pushing Zelenski away from Minsk?
- why is the Ukraine war a lost cause if it is tying up Russian military resources?
- how does Merkel wish for a stronger Ukraine defense indicate a wish for confrontation instead of a deterrence against it?
- how does northstream, which seems to be Ukraine going against “the west”, an evidence for the west wanting a confrontation with Russia?
- what action specifically is the west pushing Zelenski away from Minsk?
Both Minsk and Istanbul accords would have been signed if the west did not encourage Zelenski not to sign. The BoJo visit is widely quoted.
- why is the Ukraine war a lost cause if it is tying up Russian military resources?
Ukraine itself it lost. Maybe the west-coalition still finds it useful. But the country is now conscripting women. They do not have the men anymore. No airdefence. Losing land at an ever increasing pace. Attack on russian industry are countered with 10x harder attacks on ukrainian industry. Supporting coutries less willing to give to Zelenski. Country is in shambles.
- how does Merkel wish for a stronger Ukraine defense indicate a wish for confrontation instead of a deterrence against it?
If you are a guarantor country for a de-escalation peace deal, it is dirty to merely hold up appearances in order to buy Ukraine time to strengthening them for the confrontation that you know will come. That's two-faces guarantorship.
- how does northstream, which seems to be Ukraine going against “the west”, an evidence for the west wanting a confrontation with Russia?
As long as the NS is operating, Germany and Russia have strong economic ties. Breaking those ties by an act of industrial terrorism (by Ukraine on Germany -- which should trigger a NATO-art5 in normal situations) is bringing NATO more together. Germany has to buy energy from the US now. Lol.
Putin wanted the confrontation and started to attack Ukraine, killing people for no other reason than his ego.
US has expensive fuel and not the right one and also still trades its oil internationally and facing a huge price increase for millions, it also has to pay a lot more money for fertilizers.
The oil of venezuela is the wrong kind of oil and can't just be bought and processed by the USA with a snip of a finger. They have to build/change their refineries for it.
Minsconstrued in the media? Russia will not attack Europe because Putin knows he is gone the moment he starts attacking Nato.
Yeah lets have a PROPER discussion and not some right-wing telegram magic group thinking wanna be intelligence experts. After Ukraine, Moldovoa, Belarus and others would have fallen.
This proxy war is a realltive good outcome especially after what russia was doing the last 15 years: Propaganda manipulation in the west and killing of people with toxins and intervening / playing armsdealer to Africa with conflicts against France.
Russia invaded Ukraine. Yes. In geopolitics these things happen. You need to know eachother's red lines. Ukraine in NATO is such a line. The west also did it: Turkey (NATO) is still in Syria, US topples Venezuela, US attacked Cuba, Israel is currently outside of its border -- all in the name of security. But Russia cannot do it. No Russia is bad and policy is Putins-ego driven.
NATO can attack Russia (though Ukraine) so it's not a direct confrontation and not on NATO soil. "To the last Ukrainian!" the shout. It's really horrific. Ukraine is ravaged by West/NATO policy. And then remember that Zelenski said he wanted to keep the peace and stay neutral during his election campaign.
"This proxy war is a realltive good outcome" -- nearly made me puke. It looks at Ukrainians as cannon fodder. Is you do not want to fight the war, but just pay from the sidelines, you are IMHO an evil manipulator.
There is no ban or ban attempt on speaking Russian in those countries, you can hear spoken Russian on the streets of Riga, Tallinn or Kyiv. Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Odesa_clashes, nothing to do with Russian ethnicity or language.
Maidan related? Is Maidan not also Russia-related?
It's such a loaded question. You have to give us some credible evidences of that. At least the wikipedia article you've linked directly contradicts this statement.
One of the attacking groups is the "Right sector", see their OUN links. These guys are basically neo-nazis, and they were killing ethnic Russians. Wikipedia frames this information as Russian propaganda, I see it as what actually happened.
The people that died where Unionists -- you know those groups that got us 8h workdays, weekends, holidays and sick-leave.
Perhaps Ukraine should have agreed to never join NATO, but I'm not sure whether this would have prevented the war. After all, Putin seems to genuinely think Ukrainians are not real ethnicity, and that the land thus belongs to Russia. From a Finnish point of view, Russians have again and again proved they cannot be trusted. Even during the good period between collapse of the Soviet Union and invasion of Crimea, Russian air force regularly violated our airspace. Intelligence operatives kept buying property that made no financial sense, but was located near military installations or critical infrastructure. Why would a friendly nation do this?
I believe in negotiations and diplomacy with Russia, but ONLY when all that is backed by enough military force. Because that is what Russians ultimately respect. The Soviet Union annexed or enslaved its weaker neighbors into puppet states, and that is what Russia ultimately aims to do. Ukraine is only the first step.
This "Ukraine is only the first step." narrative is no-were seen IRL. All superpowers use their force to advance their interests. Hence Venezuela got toppled, Iran is attacked, Taiwan has independence issues, Cuba could not build missile silos on their "sovereign land".
I believe the west helped Ukraine to get in this war in the first place.
I'm shocked on how you don't care or mind at all that a whole country is getting attacked at all and you don't care apparently that Putin has killed 500.000 OF ITS OWN people to protect its ethnic russian population?
NATO is not ATTACKIng RUSSIA through UKRAINE. NATO is PROTECTING UKRAINE FROM Russia.
And you either are compeltly clueless or ignorant. Russians main strategy is to overtake a country and the first thing they do is to remove the local people and put russians in their place to break their culture.
Ah wait you are a russian bot or so. Go back to your propaganda telegram group.
Ukraine is not at war with Russia. If that was the case this was over in 2023.
NATO/ the west is in a proxy war with Russia: that's why it takes so long.
Anyway. Now the reality get clear. Russia is winning. The break away regions/oblasts (that followed a similar path to how Kosovo was broken off of Serbia by the west) are almost under Russian control. And let's see where it goes from there. Russia is crazy to trust the west on its word at this point.
Also it is said that Ukraine is a peaceful country. I beg to differ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_involvement_in_the_I...
They joined an illegal war, and co-invaded an sovereign country. And no-one batted an eye back then. Because it was a invasion "the west" started: then it is okay!
The fact alone that this "three-day special operation" is in its fifth year with over 1.5 million casualties places it among the worst disasters in the entire Russian military history. There is no credible way to spin it into anything else.
You said Putin is rescuing the russian people in Ukraine. I say: Putin sent 500.000 Russians to die in Ukraine for rescuing russians? That doesn't make any sense at all.
You are sending WIkipedaiarticles but you don't read the one telling you its a war? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_war_(2022%E2%8...
And again: You do remember when Russia put its Troops on the Ukrainine borders for an excersise lying to the west and then taking over crimea and later on trying to overtake the Ukrainine Gov without any talks to the west?
Russia is not winning anything, russia lost already A LOT of Humans/man, restructured its industry to produce war items and they just announced themselves to reduce social spending by 7% for its own people to burn even more money on military.
The decision of Putin to fight this war out will hurt Russia as a country for decades and through its show of weakness, no one takes russia serious anymore. The military parades? man a joke. They even reused their tanks (the old ones) because they can't show anything anymore.
It's rein.
It's also nonsense, Russia had Germany on a leash, you cannot seriously believe Merkel was playing Putin.
Most of things you write are bullshit to be polite, lies and more lies directly from petrohrad's GRU troll farms. Its aimed for folks with below-average IQ and it works surprisingly well (given it uses psychology us-vs-them to split given population into similar silos for further processing and attack on negative emotions which is not rocket science).
Just an example of your bullshit - if Germany's half of industry is directly depending on that gas, there is no way they can turn it off just like that. It took them significant amount of time to find other sources and increased their final prices, and part of current industry decline making them less competitive. So much for who owns that leash, but those are facts, so just secondary topic for such folks.
You know, lies can be put out eloquently so they work at least a bit. Definitely not what you put here.
And before the NATO zealots, warmongers and NATO wannabes come here crying that you cannot trust Russia and that war is the only way (provided, of course, that you are not the one fighting), let’s address that right away.
You cannot trust Russia
Russia has maintained good relationships with a lot of countries, but none of them are NATO members or NATO wannabes. And, as a reminder, it was NATO that broke promises about not expanding eastwards.
You cannot deal with a country waging a war.
Yes, you can. Just take a look at Israel or the USA. One is committing a genocide in real time, while the other has been waging wars of aggression for ages. European leaders have no problems dealing
Let Russia leave Ukraine and have your peace.