maoistinquisitr

This whole current moment rhymes too well with 2000 and 2008. Who are the Ken Lays, the Bernie Ebbers's, and the Madoffs? I suspect Bezos and Musk are going to fall hard.

A tariff or tax regime indexed on real wages and also environmental protection is necessary.

Selling things in the USA profitably on the basis of cheap labor in countries with weak environmental and labor protection should not be so simple.

A tariff program is probably not even necessary because overwhelmingly American corporations can simply be taxed for their import activities in a VAT manner and the problem goes away.

> Government massively subsidizes the oil industry all the time.

Not true. Even if it were true most of the oil industry is losing money hand over fist.

But not as fast as the phony baloney "renewable" industry is, even with its insane subsidies.

People can't wrap their heads around the fact that sane estimates of the energy supply of the future do not support cars. People will be walking and biking and riding buses. The future is a place with far fewer cars.

Which is fundamentally stupid because the beta-carotene to vitamin A pathway is highly limited. The whole idea is wrong. Vitamin A deficient people need vitamin A. Stuffing extra beta-carotene into them will just turn them orange and have other bad effects.

> US is one of the least densely populated developed countries

None of the other developed countries have vast interior deserts. The east and west coasts and some parts of the Mississippi and Great Lakes watersheds are plenty overpopulated.

Your comparison illustrates my point. Oklahoma is not crisscrossed with efficient water transport and reliable annual fresh water. Oklahoma is probably overpopulated as it is.

The Netherlands is, too, in the long run. But for now it's economically sustainable.

> There is a LOT of room in the country for growth

No there isn't. All the places with viable logistics and water supply are pretty much full up. Urban areas need barge transport, good rail grades, aqueducts, and rivers to carry away waste. You can't plop a city down in the middle of nowhere. The energy economics mean it will never work. All the sites worth building on have been built on. A lot of the places supplied mostly by truck are of questionable viability in coming years.

Probably the only area of the country that could long term sustain a much higher population density is the great lakes region.

Amazon makes weird non-GAAP claims. In terms of GAAP, Amazon had negative free cash flow of $4.2 billion in Q1.

Both German and Russian war production increased throughout the war under command economies and massive bombing. They key factor was fuel.

Well look how communism in Asia played out over the ensuing 40 years. Would it have been such a horrible idea to let Japanese boys die fighting off communists? And why are 50+K American lives still at stake (and billions of dollars in defense spending) policing the region?

We should have worked with the Japanese and had them mostly run the place.

> Hitler’s not so bad once you get to know him

Agreed.