mamonster

Talk of raising the retirement age is a red herring in this case. The reality is that existing retirees are already too expensive and need to have their pensions cut to balance the budget.

And it won't happen because it will be political suicide. So you can expect it to continue.

>“It’s not hard to see why a vertically integrated company seems attractive,” he said. “Tesla robots linked by Starlink to xAI data centers for control and A.I. model training purposes would give SpaceX an end-to-end advantage that nobody else could replicate quickly.”

Anything is a vertical if you are willing to slop it up like this

My read on this is that Hegseth told him "Hey we have this Palestinian-American Islamist terrorist why don't we execute him", Trump said it was a good idea and bailed out once someone told him that using a firing squad on a paraplegic would be bad optics.

We still have never recovered to electricity prices pre-Covid, and that's despite very little growth in energy intensive industries since then. If I look at the US, then we should also expect any serious datacenter push in EU to also be powered by dirty stuff for expediency's sake.

>China destroyed oil import demand by an amount the UK imports annually in less than six months with rapid EV uptake

China has been working on EVs for like 15 years, we still have German manufacturers begging for exemptions on ICE phaseouts right now. At some point we just need to be honest and say that the Great (EV) Leap Forward won't happen and it will take like 10 years to get there.

I can bet that if in 2 years for some reason oil crashes to 30 USD we will have consumer protection orgs arguing for further extensions on ICE cars "to fight inflation" or something.

>What else do they need to replace to decouple from the US for any needs?

Oil and gas.

We heard the same thing about the Draghi report and not much got done.

The big problem with satellite stuff in EU is that the quickest way to get it done is via France/Germany/Italy, but as you noted the guys pushing the hardest for it are gonna be the Baltics and Poland.

A greenfield satellite program is very hard to do.

Melenchon/LFI are basically showing that they can fabricate a mini Mai 68 on demand. Not good for his election chances but IMO with this the left/center left will be forced to make a deal with him to "control the street".

Alcohol is just in a structural decline. From my experiences in Switzerland:

1. 10-15 years ago it was expected you would have 1-2 glasses of wine at lunch as a front office guy / banker while talking shop. Now you will get a trip to HR unless meeting a client or in a place that still allows it. I imagine similar things in other areas. I still see construction workers drinking a can at 6:30pm however.

2. For good reason, "we were both drunk and X happened" doesn't work as an explanation anymore. Turns out that was a big a part of it.

The only real place people are still "expected" to drink is the army (cos there is nothing else to do) or meeting some boomer client. Younger people just do other drugs/stimulants.

>How profitable a datacenter is, is kind of irrelevant to the convo, if you are unable to power it due to material shortages.

It isn't irrelevant, because they have to make money to be built. The debt for these projects was already issued, so you have to pay the coupons. If Oracle doesn't pay the developer is gonna suffer on their end.

Right, so the presumably the revenue projections aren't increasing at the same pace and the financials don't make sense anymore. Which is potentially a sign of the bubble bursting.

It's all very simple. Islam is a unique religion in that its main prophet had military chops and there are specific surahs that suggest that fighting well gives you a reward and is a sign of being righteous.

So any competent general has de-facto political legitimacy and is a de-facto threat to whatever government is in place. Most of the leaders in the region know this and as a result armies are staffed with insiders (which the article notes).

Saudi airforce is basically a jobs programme for elite families.

Anybody else thinks that this whole Venezuela/Maduro thing is just an elaborate scam by Venezuelan elites so that Exxon and Chevron rebuild their industry only for it to be nationalised 10 years down the line?

>until I read up about the whole "direct to consumer" fiasco it really helped me understand another trend I was a bit confused about.

In Switzerland, every decent sports store now has a whole treadmill with some sort of gait analysis thing and a dedicated guy that is going to pick a shoe for you based on that + your running level.

Anecdotal evidence, but 80% of the time I see someone buying running shoes in Ochsner they end up using the treadmill and getting advice from the guy, and a lot of the time it they end up getting Hokas.

>Ansar Allah isn't even close to a majority of the population of Yemen.

I never said that. The areas they control have about 70-80% of Yemen's population though.