Richest man in 2030?
— Anatoly Karlin (@powerfultakes) February 17, 2021
Currently jostling in the top rankings: Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Elon Musk (Tesla), both at around $200B.
Amazon is a mature company that dominates the US e-commerce market and has substantial fingerprints abroad (about a third of revenue). Also not to be underrated is AWS, which accounts for a third of the global cloud computing market.
There’s nothing on the horizon that could conceivably undercut his position. Amazon is a very good company and, short of the Democrats’ leftist wing seizing control of the party, there’s no obvious political risks to its quasi-monopoly. Scope for foreign expansion is limited, as the big markets will see their own e-commerce giants consolidate (e.g. Ozon in Russia). But there’s still plenty of scope to grow out e-commerce within its core territories of the US and Western Europe through further technological progress in things like drone deliveries and AI. Although brick and mortar stores will recover come the end of the Corona saga, there is no reason to think it will be anything but a very temporary reprieve.
Bezos is leaving Amazon to focus on Blue Origin, the main competitor to SpaceX. This can either explode or stay where it is. But I believe that Amazon by itself should see Bezos get steady gainz to at least $0.5T (inflation-adjusted).
Tesla has established itself as the Apple of electric vehicles. Elon Musk is such a cult figure – the Steve Jobs of our days – they he doesn’t even need to spend any time on advertising his car, so eager are people to buy it. Musk Tweets, “Doge jump!”, his adoring fans reply, “How high?” Brian Wang, who predicted Musk would emerge as the world’s richest man for years, says Tesla still has a quintupling ahead of it. Certainly a bold call, considering that many skeptics are calling even today’s valuations grossly overestimated. Then again, Tesla isn’t just the cars, but also the battery business and self-driving suite. And with his record, you’d have to be bold to bet against him. If that happens, Tesla will propel Musk to the trillion dollar mark just by itself.
Musk doesn’t actually care very much about money (it’s clear he views this entire things with stocks and crypto as only so many ultimately meaningless numbers) so this makes him much bolder about pursuing bold pie in the sky visions. This is a high risk, high reward strategy that will either knock him off his perch or send him into the trillions in a way that I just don’t see happening with the more “normie” Bezos.
The ur-example of this is SpaceX, which is tentatively valued at $70B. It already dominates (60%) the $10B a year space launch market, in the process eating Roscosmos’ lunch. It is currently being used to set up Starlink, a satellite Internet constellation that will IPO at a likely market cap of $30B. Space tourism will follow. Currently costs $20M and you need connections. Starship flight to LEO could be as low as $20,000. That’s less than the cost of an Arctic cruise on a Russian nuclear icebreaker. There are 6 million HNWI in the US and more than 20 million in the world. Air cargo market is $140B a year. Starship transport could take away a chunk of that in areas where value / unit mass is sufficient high and just in time delivery is a priority. Commercial air traffic is $600B/year. Assume its $2M per Starship flight (half of it fuel, half operating costs). Yes, expensive, for the 100 passengers that a Starship is designed to take to Mars. But that’s for a trip lasting months. If you pack a Starship like you would a commercial airliner, you could get something like 500 people on board. 2M/500=$4,000 per ticket for a 40 minute trip from New York to Beijing. That’s exactly the price of a 3 hour TransAtlantic Concorde flight. There was big demand for it in the 1980s and there will be much bigger demand for it in the much richer and more unequal 2030s.
I have long been a Tesla skeptic. While I did not explicitly endorse the outside article published on my blog that Tesla is “going to zero” back in 2019, I did not exclude the chances of that happening. Certainly I did not invest in it. However, I have always been quite bullish on SpaceX, extremely so once they demonstrated rocket reusability. I ask you, if Elon Musk can wring $800B out of Tesla, what can he do with SpaceX? Do you feel comfortable betting against him? This is potentially trillions of dollars of future value, military dual-use capacity, political influence – this is scope for then getting into seriously into things like nuclear propulsion which you need for extra-terrestrial expansion.
But even if SpaceX doesn’t pan out, there are multiple other ambitious projects in which Musk can strike it big, creating the equivalent of a second Tesla or even bigger.
The Boring Company promises to dig tunnels at a rate 10x faster than existing TBM’s. High hurdles, as these are mature technologies, with well established materials science limits (mainly to do with heat dissipation). But if successful, there remain plenty of tunnels to be dug out in traffic-congested American cities, and subways to be built in the urbanizing Third World.
Neuralink is another interesting concept that I remain skeptical of in the short-term. But if it pans out, that’s IRL Sarif Industries for you.
OpenAI is considered the second most advanced AI company after DeepMind and probably ahead of Google AI. The potential ramifications need hardly be spent out.
Not all of these projects need to succeed. Just a couple or even one of them going parabolic could easily propel Musk into trillionaire status, if Tesla is insufficient.
“Satoshi Nakamoto”, the anonymous inventor of Bitcoin, has 1.1M Bitcoins. That translates into about $50B today and trillionaire status if/when Bitcoin goes to a million.
Just matching the world’s total amount of gold assets, which are valued at $10T, will already see Bitcoin at $500,000.
But #DeFi is going to eat most of traditional finance and will pull Bitcoin as the default “flight to safety” asset within the crypto ecosystem. I expect to see $1M Bitcoin within the decade.
Running bitcoin
— halfin (@halfin) January 11, 2009
Only problem is that we still have no idea who Satoshi Nakamoto is or whether he is even still alive. As such, should he count? Unless he credibly outs himself as Satoshi, he is not appearing in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Mark Zuckerberg is #5 thanks to Facebook (and Instagram) at $100B.
However, the younger generations no longer really use Facebook, which is becoming increasingly unwieldy. It was very hip and cool in the mid-2000s, to get one you needed a US academic email and it was considered highly prestigious relative to the likes of MySpace or Bebo (Britain). Now it’s the preserve of boorish and overly politicized boomers. (Not cool)
The Winklevoss twins bought $11M of BTC at $120 a coin (Apr 2013). If preserved, that investment would now be $4.5B. $1M BTC around 2030 means they converge with Zuck.
Or overtake him entirely, if decentralized alternatives (urbit?) cardinally replace Facebook.
Funny if so, then the Winklevosses would end up having the last laugh.
That said, Zuckerberg does have big exposure to VR (e.g. Oculus), so depending on how that pans out I wouldn’t write him off completely just yet.
It could be some currently little known Chinese techie. Chinese consumer market is half the size of the American one and Chinese e-commerce market is already much bigger than the American one.
Considering that the Chinese tech ecosystem is “self-contained” from the American/global one, then if Chinese GDP indeed comes to drastically exceed America’s – as simple human capital/population comparisons would suggest – then the world’s biggest tech companies will become Chinese. Taiwan’s TSMC is already in the world’s top 10. Imagine what China’s what look like – even bearing the political “discount” given to companies operating in a space with lower rule of law and property rights protections. (Not that this American advantage may hold indefinitely, given SJW infiltration of institutions).
Main argument against Chinese trillionaire is that CPC really doesn’t want to see emergence of such wealth concentrations and has aggressively pruned oligarchs that got too big for their breeches.
The richest current Chinese billionaire, Zhong Shanshan, is a bottled water tycoon… Says it all.
That said, if I had to nominate one totally “dark horse” candidate…
Changpeng Zhao runs Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange by far. (The second biggest, Huobi, is also Chinese). His 2021 net worth was $2.7B and that was before the TENfold explosion in the Binance Coin this week. Now, he’s probably at least $10B.
Many things have to go just right for him to go up another couple of orders of magnitude.
Most important, BNB needs to flip ETH as the dominant smart contract token and for that to happen the Binance Smart Chain needs to topple Ethereum supremacy. I don’t think that is happening because Ethereum has first mover advantage, is too well established with its own ecosystem, and BSC is also highly centralized, which undermines the main raison d’etre of crypto (and if BSC was to decentralize, it will bump up against the same scalability problems that Ethereum is struggling with).
But should that happen then BNB would have gone up another order of magnitude.
Then he will be in the driving seat of the next crypto explosion and however many more orders of magnitude there is still left to go there. Controlling the world’s dominant CEX will also provide unlimited arbitrage possibilities.
This would easily propel him into the trillions of dollars.
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What’s more interesting is if there would be a trillionaire with significant assets on both sides of the divide.
Will the great bifurcation actually impact business?
Where will countries like Brazil, South Africa or Nigeria fare?
How will US control of institutions play off against Chinese control of trade?
How will this comment, obviously a plug for the essay, survive the great Karlin comment purge?
Find out next time on ****** **** Z
Important:
Amnesty International retracts its designation of Navalny as “prisoner of conscience” because of past anti-immigrant statements. It seems that Kremlin’s PR campaign against Navalny is bearing fruit.
https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1364242460742942723
Shouldn’t that be 1.1 million? If he had a billion BTC he would have been a trillionaire years ago.
Well between you writing this and me reading it, the $800bn market cap Musk created has fallen to $650bn.
And of course the whole point of Tesla and Bitcoin, is that the likes of Musk and Satoshi are not spending their money, they are just sitting on it. Just as soon as ordinary folk start trying to exchange dollars for goods paper money crashes (=inflation). And just as soon as Musk tries to cash in on his Tesla stake (or Satoshi exchanges his Bitcoin for something usable) Tesla and Bitcoin crash as well. Together probably.
Too right – if he did Tesla would be trading about 50 as he exits. Neumann at Wework is an example.
Do you really not know who the Rothschilds are?
Previously purveyor of quack ED cures. Bring back Mao
Out of the potential candidates right Musk seems most likely. But like I wrote in the other thread: Starship launch cost will at best in the 10s of millions. That would still be a great success.
Maybe Larry Page? Can Google market cap go into 10s of trillions?
Surprising. And really retarded since it has nothing to with why he is imprisoned.
If it is possible ( and it may not be) but any company that develops a reliable way to extend the human lifespan and, better yet, reverse aging, will have the most valuable technology of all time. Think Warren Buffett wouldn’t pay half his net worth to be 40 again or have a reasonable chance to live to 120?
Of course if the technology were restricted to ‘ability to pay’ there would be social consequences. The ‘mob’ has come to accept inequality in wealth but if elites did not age or lived significantly longer than others it could create ‘guillotine time’.
Trillion of what exactly?
Try to imagine how much real wealth would any of these gentlemen have without virtual fiat money. The truth is that the easy creation of fiat money by the Central Banks is a way to create huge virtual wealth for the few lucky and well-connected people. Without it, their wealth would be orders of magnitude less. As it is in reality. When Fed dumps another $2 trillion, about half or more will eventually end up with a few oligarchs. Nice game. The issue is that at least in theory all that new wealth is based on debts that nobody will – or can – ever pay back. So what is it really?
The money-creation pump that liberalism invented is nothing else than a gift of enormous wealth to a few oligarchs, who then in turn sponsor modern liberalism. A bizarre virtual-money circle.
The way AI representative phrased it implies that if Russia imprisoned Navalny for old racist videos, AI would be totally ok with it. As it is, they are still calling for Navalny’s release, but they no longer see him as Mandela-like figure, they imagined him to be.
What about the fellow who made Urbit?
Doubt – though DeepMind is a wildcard. Google already has most of the world’s search market and only major growth sector it seems to have exposure to is self-driving cars. Global Internet likely to become more nationally fragmented (China already, increasingly Russia, probably India next) which will be bad for Google.
Does anyone really care? I can’t see why anyone except Guinness book of records should be interested. It’s all virtual money, even if the owners believe otherwise. E.g., Musk allegedly lost ~15 billion in one day, which suggests that these 15 billion did not exist.
I have thought about it.
As readers know I’m a big fan of life extension. But I don’t think it will be one company or one key breakthrough, but many companies and many interlocking breakthroughs and different approaches. Also, pharmaceutical companies don’t tend to benefit from the massive network effects that tech giants enjoy. So I don’t expect to see vast wealth generated here, even though the utility created may indeed be vast.
Moldbug left himself with a few dozen stars so will become very rich if average star increases by an order of magnitude (as we might expect to see if market cap of Urbit approaches that of Facebook), but “only” billionaire tier at best. This assumes that Moldbug hodls, that decentralized social networks actually win (I think they win), and that urbit in turn dominates in that sector (also plausible thanks to first mover advantage but far from certain).
Indeed. This wealth is mostly virtual. If Musk tries to sell a small portion of his Tesla stock on the market, its value will implode. Some central bank will have print money and buy it from him.
Being in need of a kidney myself I note there is a major effort to ‘humanize’ pigs kidneys for transplant purposes. Not only would I get the pigs kidney I could also get the bacon and ham too, so animal to human transplantation will probably come first.
The rejuvenating of the vascular system is a lot more complex than popping a replacement part in and keeping the brain young is the real hurdle. Looking 40 and having a 120 year old brain might not be such a bargain.
And there is excellent evidence to support this. One method of life extension, or at least life quality extension, has been replacement of NAD+ in blood after excellent results in worms(and if one would believe Dr. David Sinclair, in human beings).
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/pdfExtended/S1550-4131(16)30482-X
The problem is that it seems the creation of a NAD+ replenishing agent is not particularly exotic, such that when a company named ChomaDex is synthecizing nicotinamide riboside for anti-aging and is releasing it under their Tru Niagen label, it hardly prevents another company, Elysium from creating the same thing.
The two companies have since been suing each other for as long as they exist, which probably quite cuts into any monopolistic profits that could be earned. I imagine the same will apply to any other anti-aging discoveries found.
https://observer.com/2021/02/elon-musk-spacex-gave-119k-to-republicans-who-opposed-biden-win-after-capitol-riot/
I wonder if the wokestorm can drive Elon from the US, likely suspending any quest for wealth at that point for him. While I don’t think that Elon himself that anything that special, the cult following he has built is, and if he is unable to exist, then the significant contribution to technological adoption and eagerness that his followers represent may also be lost.
I suppose Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum, Gavin Wood of Polakdot and Ethereum, and Andre Cronje of all kinds of DeFi stuff could also be potential trillionaires if the stars align.
I have no personal interest in Navalny but Amnesty has been a bullshit social justice organization for two or three decades now.
Actually this link is more relevant:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3753670/
Space colonization is just escapism from the problems here, and any society on Mars that will number in the tens of millions or millions will be large and complex enough to get the same social problems on Earth.
If you live in Europe, you should be aware that Ukrainian to human kidney transplantation is way ahead of everything else.
That’s only natural: Soros funding does that to any organization.
With a name that can be mentioned by (((the media)))?
Blue Origin are a joke right now, they started before SpaceX and 20 years later they have yet to send payload to LEO. but maybe thats the plans, let SpaceX do the hard work and then just copy them
So if Blue do the same as SpaceX, just 5 years behind them, what will Blue be worth five years from now and how much does it cut from the SpaceX $70B value
A video for Musk fanboys, I don’t agree with it BTW, and his voice annoys me
Probably higher status in China, where many consider tap water to be undrinkable.
At this point the Bezos divorce settlement suggests a significant non-zero probability (.1-.3) that Mr. Jeff is a tool of a hidden hand that could hold a gun to Mrs. Bezos’ head to get her signature. And holds a gun to Mr. Bezos head.
Musk and Gates may not be independent actors either.
Moldbug is selling subscriptions to his writing on the internet. He claims he doesn’t have any dollars or euros or yen in the bank.
Isn’t Queen Elizabeth’s real estate portfolio the biggest publicly documented asset of value?
This article in the Independent is restricted to her land holdings in Britain. Nothing about the land she owns in Canada, Australia, Borneo, &c.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/royal-family-how-much-land-own-crown-estates-wedding-meghan-markle-queen-a8352401.html
Putin
Master tsar of the Poutine Empire
AK does not believe in conspiracy theories.
LOL. All of us would be too, and soon, … when the dollar collapses.
I was going to write something along these lines, but you beat me to it. You are absolutely correct, fiat money trillionaires are fake and gay. What is important is the control of real tangible natural resources and productive assets. People who control them prefer shadows to the spotlight. They have been rich before Musk was ever conceived by his shady father character and they will still be wealthy after Musk has departed to Mars.
Please, the Bogs put them all to shame.
Problem is control of physical resources changes and so does technology. There was time in the United States when Vicksburg, Mississippi was the richest city in America. Cotton traded hands here and the need for it for the textile mills in Britain and New England made it king. Today it only has some old mansions built by those former millionaires
The silver strike at the Comstock load in Nevada made the Flood and Hearst families as rich as Croesus. All they had to do was pull their ore out of their mine and send it over to the Carson City mint and the US government turned it into Silver Dollars.
Coal had its day too. Not so much anymore though.
The longest lived modern technology that I can think of was the wired telegraph and telephone system. It reigned supreme for about 150 years. Its a dinosaur now to the extent that young people have no idea how to use a rotary dial telephone.
No, just not in idiotic ones, that in this case discredit one in the face of anyone vaguely familiar with the history of the Rothschilds (once huge wealth whittled down by a century of inflationary defaults and dilution by inheritance) or the modern financial landscape (own a few boutique investment banks orders of magnitude smaller than the giants in the industry).
But yes, rightoids will be rightoids, and will continue losing and getting ostracized and whining about nobody taking them seriously on anonymous comments boards.
Sure. There were lots of trillioners in Zimbabwe until they got rid of their currency.
Maybe, we should be counting the kids of billionaires, finding out which of them has the most, and who will pass the wealth through their familial lines, with it possibly growing beyond their deaths. Clan wealth, as opposed to individual wealth.
Or who will be granting the biggest bequests to NGOs – imagine the first NGO with a trillion!
He is clever so he takes the rambling of Jews like Scott Alexander very seriously
the Biden-Harris people are clearly going after Elon now, for the usual leftist reasons. but the US military really wants Starship, ostensibly as a cargo ship, but really they want to use it as an orbital bomber.
so there are 2 conflicting, official government forces about to have a big effect on his fortunes. this makes it harder to predict what’s going to happen.
as for Satoshi, how confident are we that he has the most BTC? i’m under the impression there might be other, very old wallets all owned by 1 or 2 people which total over 1 million coins. coins that almost never move.
Musk is the inventor of the cave-rescue submarine. Bill Gates is the inventor of the $1,000 residential toilet for the third world. In the parlance of physicists who question string theory, these guys are “not even wrong.” Bezos, on the other hand, has provided a highly practical and helpful service.
Joan Didion once wrote about how the style of the con-man, the snake-oil salesman, appeals to the American sensibility. Today, ask yourself who is the leading Covid expert in the United States, and who was the leading nursing-home Covid expert in New York. For the first trillionnaire, my bet is on the con man.
That’s adult stuff you describe. The cool kids of this blog gonna find it boring. Let them have some fun. I mean that’s a generation who’ve grown up reading Harry Potter and following Musk’s antics.
If you had a few trillion dollars invested accross the world, would you brag about it or would you do your best for people to ignore about that?
Are you certain that those who are in the media spotlight today are the “Masters of the Universe” ?
And who told you that the moneys of the PR billionaires are really their own?
So many simple questions, and yet I am not sure that you would have a firm answer to any of them.
https://i.etsystatic.com/18067561/r/il/a28b76/2800701961/il_1588xN.2800701961_of6j.jpg
What do we really know of the structure of ownership of the most important TNCs ?
https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150229212286479&id=7746841478&set=a.10150228477601479&refid=13&__tn__=%2B%3D
Some people worked for hundreds of years to get where they are today. And they didn’t do that to just gently walk away for the pleasure of the novelty loving folks…
Could do a gradual drip of the stocks. And also find private investors or funds who wants in.
There is nothing wrong with a sound exit strategy as long they aren’t zynga. as long as the company is healthy. and as long as the person in question isn’t looking to dump it all in one go.
https://news.bitcoin.com/pablo-escobars-descendants-claim-to-have-known-satoshi-nakamoto/
We should ask these guys.
As much as I’d love to see the Winklevoss twins get the last laugh (think of how Zuck and Larry Summers would feel); I don’t see Bitcoin being dominant over the long term. I don’t see how the first mover advantage is so strong, when third generation cryptocurrencies are more energy efficient, faster, more private, and more secure.
Gold doesn’t require electricity, doesn’t have a password that you can lose forever (making your wealth vanish), is cheaper to store given how often cryptocurrency exchanges get hacked, people’s computers get hacked, etc., and gold has actual non-currency uses.
Hilton alone makes more than 9 billion a year in revenue (4.5 only, for the Year of the Muzzle). The 6 billion “space” industry is BS propped by a few vain governments.
Lots of other industries described here are even less relevant. DeepMind? At least Palantir knows how to get government funds.
Possibly the most irrelevant asset is bitcoin. States across the planet forbade private ownership of gold for most of the 20th century. FDR attempted to confiscate the gold held by his poor. Conversely, when Gordon Brown sold the gold of England, the Treasury ordered all its client “national” banks to buy gold and prop it up. As soon as bitcoin will have any relevance, national banks and in particular the US Fed will establish exactly where it is allowed and where it is forbidden to use it. As usual, this will mean only a few rich people will have their wealth protected. Musk, on his own, is not going to get any protection.
Zuckerberg has an outside chance of holding on to relevance, because advertisement seems to work, generally speaking. But everybody else (most notably Google) is going to offer advertisement avenues, so the market will be diluted.
Truly rich people will always be in Lindy industries, such as food, hydrocarbon, maybe pharma. The big four that control most of the food supply chain in the West don’t even sell their shares, because there is no money or asset that would make up for the loss and they never need outside investors. You can’t even guess how much money they are really worth.
Even the family who runs Ikea is safer than the “tycoons” of the web, since Ikea does not request outside investment.
I went over the old cypherpunks FAQ a few months ago and there was one item in there that really jumped out at me. I believe the latest updates to it were made in the mid 1990’s. They said that cryptocurrency was only really a possibility in liberal western nations. That there were a lot of places on the globe where the secret police could torture you and extract your password. Although that could never happen here.
Some of us used to be so innocent.
I’ve known some people from old wealth and I generally agree with Karlin that wealth is good at dissipating; the idea that a wealthy family can keep their wealth forever and build it to sky high limits is a nice fantasy, but in practice, children born into such circumstance take their wealth as a status quo and are surprisingly good at dissipating it. That’s why contracts and trust funds exist but there’s many an enterprising lawyer that’ll be happy to help you sue your parents to unlock your millions sooner rather than later.
Its kind of like the dysfunction and intrafighting of noble families, of which I come from one, in fact – I could share various stories and I think I’ve told Karlin a few ones of rather epic degeneracy, but its just easier to sum that fortunes don’t really just wax through the ages. As the Chinese adage goes: 富不过三代 .
Saudi royalty probably has indeed collected literal trillions in oil profits, for one example, and has invested into the high yielding results of whores, yachts and whores on yachts.
Do you remember where did Joan Didion write it?
I’ve often thought about the consequences of life extension. Unfortunately, I think I’ll miss out. Its a real pity as I have a very nice CPI+ retirement package that funds me until I die rather than running out after a few decades.
As a consequence, I would happily pay 90% of my annual retirement income in return for annual immortality treatments, and I think offering such a pay-as-you-go model would be a pretty good business opportunity for those in the immortality business. In fact, I’d probably invest heavily in it.
With time being on my side, the magic of compound interest would have me living an increasingly better life as the years roll by. After a few decades the cost of my annual immortality treatments will be pocket change.
My risk/reward behaviour would radically change in favour of playing the long game because all risk – even global risk – becomes personal risk. For example, while I’d obviously sell my motorbike, I’d also fully support climate change efforts on the off-chance that the worst predictions come true.
“Do you remember where did Joan Didion write it?”
(I attributed style of the con-man to Didion. )
“Garry Gilmore had a highly developed kind of con style that caught the national imagination.”
-Quoted from Didion’s review of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.
Perhaps the old wealth families are like animals : they’re all equal, but some are more equal than others. Also, some old wealth families might be like onions, that is they have layers.
In general I see the world as a web if causal interactions that allow for the transfer of information along a hierarchical network. Some nodes become attractors, others don’t.
But of course everything is impermanent. Although impermanence for me is not defined on the same scale as the impermanence of His highness Otto Von Habsburg (may he rest in peace).
Finally, when one population loses their historical elite, I think it might very well end up working for some foreign one. Perhaps even without noticing it.
Our world is full of distractions and human attention span is short.
Do you have other moonshot picks along with Urbit and the group of Russian stocks you tweeted about?
How right you are, Beckow!
These wealth numbers are premised on the continuing bonfire of fictions capital (ie central banks)
And Lord — I have a dream!
A dream in which existing antitrust laws (or new ones) are used to break up some of these “Standard Oil” monopolies — Google & Amazon are RIPE for such publicly profitable dissection.
“and any society on Mars that will number in the tens of millions or millions”
I wonder what a realistic guesstimate of such would be?
100 years?…. A 100 years? That’s already into the realms of fantasy…. Short of some kinds of “miraculous” Tech advances such thoughts are interesting fictions.
Add the King of the KSA to Queen Liz’s in the money stakes.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/85/Tamim_bin_Hamad_al-Thani_2015.jpg/200px-Tamim_bin_Hamad_al-Thani_2015.jpg
BTW, why have they all recently started wearing purple ?
Your word salad doesn’t change the fact that the Rothchilds are irrelevant and rightoids are getting distracted by fantasy LARP tales about them instead of worrying about actual problems
The other big concern is if it’s used for transport of rich passengers that need to get somewhere quick, it’s not really a great improvement over the Concorde in time needed if the rich people need to go between places like Beijing and New York. This is because I doubt that this thing can use normal airports. It would need a special launch area that is bigger than an airport, so it would have to be located some distance away from a major financial center for logistics and safety reasons. It would probably take an hour to travel there from the city center, cancelling out any time savings and comfort from not having to use different types of transport to get where you’re going on the total trip. The Shinkansen is so good because it stops in the middle of Tokyo and Osaka. You just take a metro line to a central station and change platforms to get on the Shinkansen. Domestic flights which are on paper faster, can’t compete, even if the time spent in security and baggage check-in in a Japanese airport is less than in the US.
Liberast and Jewish-antisoviet-western diaspora reaction to Amnesty’s decision to demote Navalny’s status, because of his comments on kavkaz & central Asians?
Accuse Amnesty International of being ” anti-semitic”!
Lol….. seriously. Always make it all about themselves
She only owns the Crown Estate in the most technical sense, since control over its revenues has been in the hands of the British government for the last two hundred and fifty years
How long before every American is a billionaire thanks to Helicopter Cash?
It is indeed useful to have Russian nationalists live in Galkovsky’s манямирок. Just not so much for Russian nationalists in particular.
Is Livejournal more popular in Russia? No one uses it here anymore afaik.
Yes indeed. It’s virtual money even if you own free and clear a thousand square miles of Iowa farmland. All prices can fall, but an asset like farmland that reliably yields a product that is a necessity, rather than being epiphenomenal foam on a huge wave of fiat expansion, is enduring wealth.
And then there is the horrible technical structure of the U.S. stock indicies compared to the 2000 peak. It looks very ominous. And an article like this one of Karlin’s is in itself a sign of a top. Back in the 80’s there were analysts who tracked Time magazine for euphoric cover stories as contrary indicators, and the approach worked.
Never in a carbon-based economy.
It was very popular a decade ago for blogging, but then most of the edgier politicals got banned off it and it has declined rapidly since then (helped along by social media). A number of good blogs remain there, but it’s no longer the center of gravity of the Russian blogosphere that it once was.
ngmi
https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/assets/4204611/United_States_With_Slavery.png
Tatyana Bakalchuk, the Russian-Korean owner of Wildberries which is the largest Russian online retailer, now has a net worth of $11B according to Bloomberg.
That possibly puts her as the richest self made woman outside of China. It’s not a trillion but it’s not bad. She’s also a mother of four. Girl power.
It will be fascinating to see who wins out between Wildberries and Ozon to become Russia’s Amazon. (I think Yandex got too late into that game to be a serious competitor).
I suspect it will be Ozon, but if I’m wrong, Bakalchuk could well become the richest woman in the world period, increasing her wealth by up to an OOM.
Looking at the numbers I can find it seems like Wildberries is among largest online retailers in the world outside of China and USA. Not counting China+USA the largest ones seem to be Rakuten (Japanese) and Coupang (Korean) but they still only have about twice the revenue of Wildberries.
The march towards Russian IT self reliance continues. Bakalchuk being of Korean heritage only adds to the powerful Juche flavor.
Insurance?
You are correct about money being just a fun meme these days, and Central Banks will be printing lots more of it.
But people will keep accepting it because nobody wants end up like Quaddafi. If you refuse, Elon Musks’ orbital bombers will blow up your cities and Hillary Clinton will giggle ‘we came we saw we died’ over your mutilated corpse. You will need USD to buy insurance to avoid such unfortunate outcome.
Anyway, my money is on Musk. His publicly stated ideas will not work (there won’t be a large Mars city in his lifetime, he will not take over civil aviation, and space tourism will be limited for the next few decades until we actually build luxury O’Neill cylinder style hotels up there). I mean, Raptor is a good engine but rocket ISP (fuel efficiency) is 330 seconds and turbojet ISP is 6,000-7,000 seconds. Just on fuel efficiency, turbojet can’t be beat.
But none of this matters. Musks Starlink is a battlefield command and control system and Starship is going to be the best military vehicle for robotic deployment. Those things are worth $trillions in military contracts.
Bezos left Amazon because Blue Origin lost Space Force contract. Bezos knows where the action is, and its not obese housewives clicking on tablets to buy flip-flops. If Bezos restores himself in good graces of US military, he will get another chance at Musks’ $trllions.
Your graph is not relevant. It illustrates historical trends over two and a third centuries during which an industrial revolution occurred which generated a huge base of capital in factories (many of them now defunct and probably overvalued in the data graphed) and financial capital (which has become inflated fiat propped up by consumer debt). This graph has nothing to do with the best wealth-conservation strategy at this time, which while it will not make anyone a trillionaire is what I was commenting upon. The question is whether a family office that aspires to conserve wealth for another century will be better off with a staple-oriented business model or owning high PE stocks. This graph supports a preference for the former.
Appreciation of Iowa farmland.
https://www.card.iastate.edu/images/ag_policy_review/winter-2014/11-1.png
Frankly I am surprised that you believe that the current bubble has any resemblance to the real-world building of Industrial America illustrated in your graph. As a speculator who makes money every day, fortunately I use it philanthropically and don’t have to seek safe long-term places to put it, because there are hardly any.
NGMI yourself.
https://www.foodandwine.com/news/bill-gates-privately-owned-farm-land
Just saying…
What are the ABCD grain traders worth in total?
$BG is publicly traded, and worth about $10 billion.
Assuming that the sizes of the firms are distributed roughly according to Zipf’s law, and that $BG is the smallest, the total value of ABCD should be about $85 billion, give or take $10 billion.
Your theory may be correct. Here is a different one:
https://stateofthenation.co/?p=49576
This is how I felt about Steve Jobs.
That’s a very interesting point.
Do you think that particular risk prevents Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, from taking off in a big way in China?
If I were to hold a lot of cryptocurrency, I would put most of it in a wallet or wallets that I didn’t use day-to-day, and I’d put the password in a safe deposit box, in encrypted form.
It’s not a question where your password is and how encrypted it is. It’s a question of the amount of waterboarding it would take to get all this info out of you.
Countries that crack down on crypto just encourage their own citizens to “exit”, which is easily accomplished through VPN.
Crypto will over the next few years eat TradFi so short of imposing Communist-tier capital controls states will have to bow before the inevitable.
Interesting. Suggests farmland increased 5x over past 20 years, whereas this source says just 2x: https://www.acretrader.com/resources/farmland-values/farmland-prices
Any ideas as to why the discrepancy?
There’s two uses for farmland that I can see.
(1) Food. Good correlation with resources. Good investment if you put a high chance on “resource shortage” scenarios such as climate change which can put crimp on global food production.
(2) Luxury. Number of US horses fell from 20M in 1900 to low of 2M in 1970, but have since risen against to 7.5M and continue increasing. Because people are wealthier and society is more unequal, hence more demand for horse-riding, as well as hobbies like horse-riding. More generally, living a kind of rustic existence (but with Internet) is an ideal that some moneyed people aspire to – see all the Californian rich decamping to Montana – so from this perspective a farmland investment could, in more globalized/richer world, translate into same thing as investment into artwork.
Probably not the worst thing to put money into. Certainly better than gold.
But Bitcoin is giving you 10x the returns in the next decade. Certain coins, 100x. Things like Russian tech, probably 10x. You can now also stake cryptos for high yearly returns and stocks pay dividends. Farmland requires a lot of work to be of any use.
If the password were in a safe deposit box in Vancouver, rather than in my head, water boarding would be a waste of time.
They could get my day-to-day money password, though.
You are naïve. First, they wasted 20 years in Guantanamo, so won’t balk at wasting some more time. Second, Canada is an obsequious imperial vassal, so they will transport you to Vancouver (while Canadian authorities look the other way) and make you retrieve your deposit.
Gotta love every supposedly “independant” and “respectable” institution eagerly burning down it’s own credibility to signal today’s fake and gay pieties.
Literally “we thought his human rights were violated, but his internet comments reveal he’s a rayciss nazi, so it’s fine”. Also gotta think somebody at the cuck island amnesty office is gonna get smacked for signaling against an american intelligence asset like that.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to mean; accumulated wealth, in my experience, largely dissipates. The idea, for example, that land won’t dissipate on you is surely a surprise to every single hereditary landowner who’s been expropriated in a revolution, like my family was.
What lingers is mostly genetic quality, a certain personality style, and the like which often can be helpful and the elite do tend to remain elite in that sense – despite basically losing almost everything, for example, my family rebuilt relatively promptly over the decades. And then fell to intracrine quarreling, perhaps almost on clockwork and this seems to be mostly my familiarity with other elite families as well, sometimes more extreme, and sometimes less so.
Some degree of wealth might linger(and I think that’s noticed in the Vanderbilts, etc) but I think’s that distinct from the compounding to become the wealthiest, which really requires a kind of living liquidity of capital and a certain hunger for maximalism that people born into money tend not to have. Wealth just doesn’t have a lot of utility once you have enough of it, and that’s when they slip into virtue signaling as another form of capital.
This is true for most people, but it is still useful for those who exert power. Wealth itself is just a token of potential to impact change. Money is not enough if there’s no hierarchical organization of information transfer and decision making.
Those who are outside of such a hierarchical network dissipate their wealth. Those inside such a network can keep or accrue it if it increases the overall system agency. If they are useful they will be rewarded.
All you need is the right “ideology ” (for lack of a better word) that would counterbalance the dissipative effects that you have described. This ideology must justify the stratification of the network (layers) and its organization into hierarchical nodes some of which would have more power than the equally or even more wealthy families (that would be the attractors).
Of course the network would be dynamic and impermanent in its states, but the overall structure would be antifragile. Think of a protein – protein interactome and the regulome in living cells.
The network should not be known about by the masses and importantly the middle class who can collectively prevent its functioning. The network must be hidden. And the best hidden networks are those which are hidden in plain sight.
And yeah, revolutions, drastic social change and wars are perfect tools to prevent the emergence of competing power networks and keep the middle class distracted.
And if the middle class becomes too numerous to handle, it must be culled.
I enjoy hearing good conspiracy theories, they give vent to creative authorship. I haven’t heard the one about Крым наш and Yatsenyuk, Turchinov and company. Please indulge me…
Surely, you mean “cackle.”
I think there was some study of lottery winners that found that richer people had a little higher TFR, but it is curious to think about how rich people, who are often friends with each other, or have the same social circles, haven’t managed to develop a more effective culture for passing on their genes and wealth.
No doubt, there is some culture, especially when you consider class, but just nothing very extraordinary.
If you ask me, that is possibly a worrisome consideration for anyone speculating about the future of fertility in places projected to have super-advanced multiculturalism. It might be harder to come up with a pro-natalist sub-culture (within a multicult environment) than anyone can imagine.
I am sure he referred to that famous mad witch cackle that for some inexplicable reason mad witch did not use in ads during her 2016 campaign. For all his failings, Alzheimer Joe did not do that.
http://resfed.com/article-426
Voilà.
Also Turchinov has signed the executive order to the Ukrainian troops to leave Crimea without combat. It was basically high treason, but he faced no consequences whatsoever, except for him being promoted.
Russians transfered from Crimea all the weapons that Ukraine cared to take back to Ukraine. They did it as the war in Donbass was already raging and people were dying in the thousands.
And to add even more spooky atmosphere to it all, shortly after the annexation, Ukrainian electric grid company signed a contract for the selling of electricity to Crimea as a Russian territory. Despite all the “war” between Russia and Ukraine the electricity for the peninsula was supplied according to the contract. When the Krymchak Tatar nationalist militants sabotaged the grid, EU ordered Kiev to restore the flow of electricity.
https://reddevol.com/articles/kryim_i_nemnogo_faktologii
Read about the dates in the comments below the main text.
Basically, the whole Maidan/Donbass/Crimea affair and the ongoing fighting in Donetsk and Lugansk are just a tool to definitely separate the two branches of the Eastern Slavs from each other and to weaken both of them. Both Kiev and Moscow mafias are guilty of deaths of the people who were killed in this dirty affair, both civilians and the military. None of them acts in the best interest of the concerned populations.
I used to think that Bill Clinton laughing was kind of disturbing – he could really turn it on and slap his sides while he was doing it – though I suppose Yeltsin created a comedic atmosphere. But that was before HRC was given the spotlight.
https://youtu.be/mlz3-OzcExI
This one. “We came we saw he died”.
While its true that the whole Libya madness got started in France (and in general, Arab Spring benefited French telecoms, look up 3G licensing rights auctions in Tunisia and Egypt etc around then) when Sakozy attempted to dodge corruption allegations, it was US that dropped 90% of bombs and cruise missiles.
French by themselves wouldn’t be able to bomb their way out of a paper bag. Hillary Clinton is a very powerful psychopath lady however, it was her political machinations (with Rice and Power as sidekicks) that led to the destruction of a more or less normal tribal Arab country.
Libya was more than just a normal tribal Arab country. It was the richest country in Africa, where numerous African migrants used to find work. So, it shielded Europe from the stream of rapefugees. Naturally, those who wanted to destroy Europe had to destroy Libya first. Which they did. RIP, Europe.
There is one difference, though: nobody was killed in Crimea, whereas thousands of people were killed in Donbass. The carnage in Donbass continues.
If Crimea and Donbass remained part of Ukraine and voted in the elections, do you think an ultranationalist evolution of the Ukrainian society would have been possible?
The loss of Crimea and the war in Donbass gave the Ukrainian ultranationalists the much needed justification to attempt the final amputation of Ukraine from the cultural and economic links with the RusFed.
Even despite all the violence that has been unleashed in the last 6-7 years, the final separation between Russian and Ukrainian peoples is not done yet.
It could certainly have been avoided if the Kremlin would have chosen another way of dealing with the Maidan insurrection.
Yes people are still dying in Donbass and it is as much Moscow’s responsibility as it is Kiev’s. They share the blame for this tragedy.
Who do you suppose shot down the Malaysian passenger jet?
The only way to deal with Maidan coup decisively was to send Russian troops into Ukraine. Maybe that was Putin’s first impulse, as evidenced by his rescue of Yanuk and his coterie, who certainly did not deserve to be rescued for their own sake. Occupation would entail feeding Ukrainian population, which at the time was likely ~40 million. That would have costed a lot. Besides, that would have given the population a reason to blame all their woes on Russia. Putin chose a cheaper, possibly better in the long run strategy: take over strategically important Crimea with overwhelming support of its population, support anti-Nazi Donbass, and leave the rest of that failed state to rot. We know how many lives his choice cost: several tens of thousands so far, mostly in Donbass, but hundreds to thousands of victims also died elsewhere in Ukraine at the hands of its secret police and wonna be Nazis (considering their quality, real Nazis should sue Ukrainian impostors for defamation). We don’t know how many lives would the decisive move cost, as in sharp contrast to natural sciences, there are no proper controls in historic experiments. We can speculate, but it’s all hot air. The real results will be clear maybe 20-30 years from now.
It’s unfair to the people of Donbass (I feel for them, I grew up in Lugansk, have lots of friends and acquaintances there; I had to organize evacuation of my 92-years old mom from Lugansk after Ukie shelling damaged her apartment). However, I have to acknowledge that Donbass is not Putin’s primary responsibility: he is the President of Russia, not of Donbass.
Romans had a sure-fire way of answering questions of this kind: cui bono?
I think it were most probably Ukrainians who fired at the jet. That doesn’t mean that it was a purely Ukrainian operation or solely an Ukrainian initiative.
Sure, and the elite can be like prizefighters, in that they are capable of attempting to effect the change they want(as opposed to the masses, who have no real ability to influence at all). But as the saying goes – everyone has a plan until he’s punched in the mouth, and the overall events of the world are vast enough that even when one sees coordinated response, you can see that it its often to unanticipated or reactive to events that have happened organically. Take, for example, the universal condemnation of bitcoin:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/22/yellen-sounds-warning-about-extremely-inefficient-bitcoin.html
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-uses-more-electricity-method-104051222.html
https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-has-no-intrinsic-value-asset-is-too-volatile-says-bank-of-korea-governor/
And so on. Its a coordinated message from the “elites” of the world, but its also clearly reactive to the existence of something that threatens the stability of finance for them. Will they succeed in controlling it? I doubt it. Even if they do, it is through substantial effort and cost, with a patchwork of elite often tempted to defect on each other. The natural migration of wealth toward the gerontocratic also makes them less capable of comprehending technological change or much that’s creative, so they respond with blunt forces.
I think that the theories of having someone in control can be almost reassuring, the idea that there’s an elite that’s in the driver’s seat. But while there is certainly a lot of skullduggery and manipulation in the world, ultimately, we’re all on the bus without a driver. Nick Land’s theories of endless accelerationism and the Unabomber’s awareness of increasing human surrender to his own tools of progress are in my experience, more true than any stable background control.
Well, a lot of natural feedback mechanisms have been broken. Normally, lack of birth control and the drive toward mating would more or less solve it in an elite, even if there was an intense tendency to infight, as I’m sure anyone with a sibling would have had discovered.
The human mind is just not the best software for the world we’re in now.
Why, do you feel that separatists working on their own weren’t capable of misfiring? As I recall, it was separatists that were first caught on social media outlets announcing that they had just shot down a large plane, only to later have their communications removed after it was determined that the plane was not a Ukrainian one.
Well, i would ignore social media outlets because that’s the easiest source to fake but yea, it does look like Donbas rebels shot it down by mistake. Most likely using Ukrainian Buk though.
All evidence we have seen shows a single Buk TELAR (rocket launcher) which makes no sense at all. A real Buk is a battery of several TELAR launchers, a target aquisition radar vehicle, and a supply train with extra rockets. A single launcher is next to useless, so if Russian Army sent it, they wanted the operators to die, not help them.
Launchers do have guidance radar, but its a measure used if the main radar vehicle is unavailable (such as destroyed). MH17 spent less than 2 minutes in the Buk radar range, which is very little time for the system to react. Single launcher is a very poor air defense.
Rebels were desperate though, so if they were unable to steal a radar vehicle and supply train, and only stole a launcher, that would explain it.
I think that most neutral and unbiased sources see it as you do. At least the court in the Netherlads assigned guilt to the separatist side.
Even if the Ukrainians had been responsible and made it looks as if the separatist side was responsible, I don’t see any big dividends that accrued to the Ukrainian side? With little or no benefit to the Ukrainians, the risks to try and pull off a stunt like this would not have warranted it. It looks like a case of human error, pure and simple, assigned to the separatist side of the equation.
I agree. To the best of my knowledge, neither the rebels nor Kiev government had anything to gain by upsetting Malaysia. I don’t think anybody in Ukraine (or the region) hates Malaysia to the point of blowing up their plane.
As far as false flag to blame Russia, well, it seems poorly thought out. Ukraine came out of it looking bad too – it was their air space and they have responsibility in the “ATO” zone as a sovereign government. They should have closed the airspace but they were greedy and wanted transit fees. If Kiev wanted a false flag, you’d think they would come up with something that didn’t ruin their own reputation.
So honest mistake is more likely. While Ukrainian Army does have a record of blowing up civilian airliners, the location and direction of the plane makes it very unlikely. Ukrainian air defense was expecting air attack from the east. MH17 was flying from the West, in communication with air traffic control. Ukraine had no reason to fear planes flying from the West, unlike the rebels. Rebels however had a very good reason to fear planes from the west. And without targeting radar, they were freaking out watching random airplanes without ability to tell if they were military or civilian.
If the Netherlands court was unbiased why did all the participants have to sign non-disclosure agreements? Something had to be hidden. Why shouldn’t we presume the number one object of concealment was the court’s bias?
http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=5404
Nobody likes to talk frankly about MH17 because it was a public relations disaster for everybody involved.
For Russia, it keeps spotlight on weapons delivery to Donbas, and even though i don’t think Buk was a part of it, Russia doesn’t like to talk about it for diplomatic reasons.
For Ukraine, it shows them to be greedy and irresponsible.
For rebels, it shows them to be incompetent idiots pushing buttons without understanding.
For US, it raises awkward questions that US would rather not answer.
It is a very simple math problem. Without main radar, Buk TELAR radar has range of about a dozen miles. Passenger airplane was hit in the face at about 500 mph at 33,000 ft. So from detection to impact, that’s about 86 seconds or less.
This is next to impossible to accomplish from a cold start (radar off).
This means Buk had radar on for extended period of time, which is a death wish for the crew and unit. But it makes sense if the crew is clueless.
Ukraine is shy about it and says its Buks and radars were down for maintenance. US admits to having the area under heavy radio electronic surveillance, which again, is expected and makes sense.
Basically, that Buk radar was lit up like a Christmas tree on a dark winter night, and at least US, and quite likely Ukraine, knew about it and chose to do nothing.
If US knew that there was a rebel heavy air defense launcher in operation, why didn’t it warn civilian aviation to stay away? This is the question US doesn’t want to answer.
It wouldn’t be the last time US would pull a stunt like that. For all US concern about civilians and ISIS in Syria, John Kerry is on record saying that he watched ISIS advance West to Damascus and didn’t interfere so that ISIS would put pressure on Assad.
US has a habit of letting some questionable things play out while it stands aside as long as it is for US perceived benefit. But US doesn’t like talking about it. In Ukraine, US wanted to flush out Russian arms transfers. If some Dutch and Malaysians had to die in the process, too bad. Now go back to watching TV and don’t ask any questions.
You are aware that there was also a fully equipped and operating Ukrainian Buk battery in the same area the day the Boeing was shot?
That a Russian passenger plane was supposed to be near by at nearly the same time and that the colors of the Malaysian and Russian airlines are similar?
Did you hear of the Ukrainian fighter jets shadowing the Boeing ?
One of these was possibly downed by the rebels, the other returned safely to its base. The pilot got a hero of Ukraine medal, got promoted, retired from military and become the director of a local Airport before suddenly committing suicide just when the questions about his possible involvement in all this murky affair started being asked. His wife received a brand new apartment from the Ukrainian government and refuses to talk to journalists.
After reading all of the above are you still sure that it’s the rebels with their supposed semi-functional Buk who downed the Boeing?
And yeah, Girkin/Strelkov was not the one posting under his name on FB. He had a PR team working for him. He was a Malafeev man, paid by Malafeev and of course he is an ex-FSB officer.
That is why I believe that it is the Ukrainians who shot the passager plane, but that they were not operating alone. In this situation, just like with the Crimea and the Maidan it takes two to tango.
And the Netherlands’ process was a sham, Malaysian prime Minister complained about it.
It’s amazing how several people can discuss MH17 at length w/o mentioning critical facts.
First, MH17 on that day was flying hundreds of kilometers to the North of the usual route of this flight. Its flight plan was approved by the airport of departure. Could Donbass freedom fighters or Russia have influenced European flight planners?
Second, Buk missile leaves long lasting smoke trail that nobody saw.
Third, several witnesses saw a second airplane. This was reported first by the BBC, which promptly removed this report from the web. Could Donbass freedom fighters or Russia make BBC remove that report?
Fourth, before MH17 debris cooled down, US Sec State Kerry stated that the US has satellite photos showing what happened. These alleged photos were never released. Could Donbass freedom fighters or Russia prevent the US from releasing those photos?
Fifth, Almaz-Antey made an experiment blowing up Buk missile next to an out-of-service Boeing. The number of holes and the number of characteristic Buk metal elements were huge, and did not match what was found on MH17 by orders of magnitude.
Sixth, the parties “investigating” this incident excluded Malaysia (airplane owner) from investigation and signed non-disclosure agreement. Could Donbass freedom fighters or Russia make them do that?
Seventh, the round hole in the pilot cabin that could not have been inflicted by Buk is ignored, it was never investigated by electron microscopy, as is customary (whatever makes a hole in metal leaves traces). Could Donbass freedom fighters or Russia make Netherlands ignore this obvious piece of evidence?
I can continue in this vein, but these facts are sufficient to be sure that the whole “investigation” is a sham. The time it is protracted, many time longer than any air crash investigation in history, says the same thing.
Finally, all international airlines know what happened, but won’t say it. But their airplanes do not enter Ukrainian airspace since MH17. Sapienti sat. The rest are welcome to believe whatever BS they want.
Why would they be shooting westward? To make Russia look bad? Its still their airspace, they would make themselves look bad.
Radar doesn’t really see colors. Russian and Malaysian electronic codes are presumably different.
This is on a lot firmer ground. Ukrainian jets didn’t shoot it down, but they could be hiding in its path. So rebels locked the wrong target. Yes, Motorola’s wife complained about this in Slavyansk a few weeks before the incident. It is possible that’s why rebels were freaked out. But that still means they pulled the trigger. Though its a good explanation why.
I have heard all the theories from all sides. Confused rebels with partial equipment still makes the most sense. Why they were confused is a different story.
Iowa farmland is at the top of productivity. Prairie soil. And good neighbors, lol, not interspersed with cracker meth heads renting a trailer on an acre, as in the Carolinas for example. In this context, you might enjoy learning about a niche property class, the recreational plantation of the longleaf pine belt of the South. Check out Jon Kohler’s website.
https://jonkohler.com/
My expectations for equities are different than yours. A simple example is Tesla. Its rally was what I term a 1-2-3, meaning that one can draw three lines along the lows and each line is steeper. Such a pattern always results in a reversal, usually after a retest of the high. Compare the Tesla parabolic shape to Gold in September, 2012. Gold with its large and diverse set of buyers stabilized after a few years and rose again. Tesla cannot maintain a PE in the high hundreds. The stock price must decline greatly, or impossibly the company must capture vastly more market share at once. Amazon also shows the 1-2-3 parabolic rise, though over a longer time span, and with far better fundamentals. BTW, my methods are more sophisticated than this little geometric technique; it simply illustrates the likelihood that the equity bubble is ready to burst.
In fact, there is a good chance that the U.S. equity bull market ended this week. Tops are harder to call than bottoms because they typically have multiple quasi-horizontal waves rather than the panicked selling that characterizes a bottom, but if I am correct Tesla will get beaten up badly.
Protecting the Central Banks was the most probable reason for destroying Gaddafi and his country.
Gold Dinar: the Real Reason Behind Gaddafi’s Murder
https://millenium-state.com/blog/2019/05/03/the-dinar-gold-the-real-reason-for-gaddafis-murder/
https://medium.com/@evantaxi/6-years-ago-today-the-us-helped-murder-gaddafi-to-stop-the-creation-of-gold-backed-currency-275c2c57509c
It’s too bad that Russia didn’t feel any compunction to clear its name of any charges and didn’t take a part in the legal proceedings in the Netherlands, the best chance that it had to clear its name of any complicity. As it stands, not only was the Russian military unit identified that moved the buk missile launcher into Ukrainian territory, but also the names of the four individuals intimately involved with the handling of this weapon.
As far as the opinion of the Malaysian PM is concerned, he offered no convincing reasons why he disbelieved the finding of his own top prosecutor, and has a history of shilling for the Russian government since soviet times. I found nothing at all convincing at his ill attempts to grandstand for Russia.
I tend to agree with your analysis. I’m going to wait for the next big correction before moving more cash into equities. What segments of the market would you be looking to move into once this big correction occurs?
Separatists probably did it but Russia would be blamed no matter what happened. There is always evidence “found” that supports the desired narrative.
Good enough reason to let Russia off of the hook over this?…….
I don’t think I can help you with a choice of market segments. I concentrate entirely on trading the three main indicies via futures (NQ, ES and YM). Were I buying stocks after a major selloff, I would probably go with companies with unproblematic business models that pay a dividend and whose stock got down to much lower PE ratios. In other words, looking for some appreciation and some dividend yield. I don’t like to worry, so my comfort zones are futures where I can see immediately that a trade isn’t going to work and get out, or staid dividend-paying companies for riding an uptrend. I don’t look for the next Amazon, nor try to do cyclic investing.
Well, look at it this way. Sanctions on Russia are coming regardless of what Russia does. Excuses will be found, airplane or no airplane.
Kremlin government doesn’t like Girkin and the feeling is mutual. So Putin is high fiving and shaking hands with Dutch prosecutor as we speak. The Dutch are doing good work for Putin.
Malaysia, the only country that actually has legal standing in this case (Malaysian Airlines are in Malaysia) is pissed off at the West and stands by Russia.
And Ukraine is the biggest loser with airlines thinking twice before flying over there.
I dont know about “letting off the hook”, but overall seems like bad situation got more or less salvaged. Putin is a pretty effective statesman.
Any good reasons that Malaysia seems to be shooting itself in the foot over this?
Important reasons are palm oil sales for Russian candy and fighter jet sales the other way. Trade matters.
But fundamentally, everybody understands it was a tragic accident. Even if Buk did come from Russia, it was just an arms transfer, something the West does routinely to the tune of $billions, so it is very hypocritical to make a giant stink over it.
Everyone in Malaysia knows that Russia doesn’t hate it and didn’t shoot the plane down. So why play Western geopolitical games and lose trade?
Well, I don’t know what world you live in that the downing of a large passenger plane with close to 300 people downed can be dismissed with a wink and a nod? There are, after all, large financial reparations to be made to the families of the deceased passengers.
Will Malaysia be collecting from Ukraine? It was Ukrainian airspace, Ukrainian “ATO” military operation, Ukrainian military, and Ukrainian rebels. Even if I’m wrong about Buk origin and its somehow from Russia, suing weapons transfer agents for the damage those weapons cause is not the precedent US and EU will want to set.
As far as families go, i wouldn’t be surprised if something was worked out quietly with palm oil prices.
Median expectation is for Tesla to produce 3.4M cars by 2025: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6601/2025-tesla-vehicles-produced/
At those rates, at least by Wang’s estimates, even if p/e collapses to 40, its valuation would still increase 3x to 2T. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/01/tesla-mostly-beyond-car-hardware-by-2024.html
Still depends on a lot of things going just right for them ofc, but I would estimate the probability of that happening a lot higher than gold going from current near record highs to $5,000 per ounce. (Gold also doesn’t pay dividends). I lost a massive amount of (potential) money by dismissing Tesla.
I suppose it’s not impossible, if the 2020s are a period of high geopolitical tension as many now expect them to be. OTOH, there’s now a strong competitor to gold in that particular category (Bitcoin).