Imagine if Trump pulled young men's name from a lottery and forced them to go shoot people on the other side of the Earth in defense of "capitalism".
That is literally what my father and his friends dealt with as young men after dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis as children.
I only dealt with this one time in 1st grade. Air raid drill, get under the desk kids and cover your head to practice in the event the Russians drop a megaton h-bomb on the school.
Or the stability of WW1 or WW2?
1990 to 2020 was a wonderful time, I feel so lucky to have lived my life then but that was a completely abnormally calm time in history.
Disrupting global alignment creates risks and unpredictability. Especially when driven by a cult of personality. Things that had 1% probabilities in 2010 will have 25% probabilities on 2030.
Zeihan lives in a 1960 worldview - oceans are not a meaningful barrier now as space and nuclear technology proliferates.
Withdrawal from the world was stupid in 1920 and doubly so now. There’s a lot of magical thinking that humans who live in places that aren’t in North America lack the ability to think or plan.
I also imagine this is maximum negative sentiment.
I follow the Chinese economy pretty closely and I just can't imagine 2025 passes without a deal.
Of course, neither Trump or Xi were going to back down here before a big meeting. I don't see how this is sustainable on any real time frame though for either economy.
Some people seem to be framing this as some kind of win for China. That is crazy. Chinese stocks had been in the toilet for a while, got a slight bump and that was mostly erased last week. I am far more confident in my US bets than China bets here.
It is a huge amount of various goods. So much so that even if you look up a breakdown, 25% will be in other.
Chemicals, base metals, stone, glass, etc etc.
What doesn't China export? Basically everything. So everything minus these exemptions.
This is exactly the strategy but it is failing miserably.
The reason for the pivot was because the 10-30 year yields didn't come down, the price on the 30 year got crushed. The 30 year almost went back to the lows.
There was literally no flight to safety. Completely the opposite.
Great stuff. My prompts are falling behind after seeing what you are doing here.
I find OpenAI annoying at this point that it doesn't output a pdf easily like Perplexity. The best stuff I have found has been in the Perplexity references also.
Google outputting a whole doc is really great. I am just about to dig into Gemini 2.5 Pro in Deep Research for the first time.
If you haven’t already, you might want to try metaprompting, that is, having a model write the prompt for you. These days, I usually dictate my metaprompts through a STT app, which saves me a lot of time. A metaprompt I gave to Claude earlier today is at [1]. It’s sloppy and has some transcription errors, but, as you can see, Claude wrote a complete, well-organized prompt that produced really good results from Gemini Deep Research [2]. (I notice now, though, that the report is truncated at the end.)
It is like how I am not impressed by the models when it comes to progress with chemistry knowledge.
Why? Because I know so little about chemistry myself that I wouldn't even know what to start asking the model as to be impressed by the answer.
For the model to be useful at all, I would have to learn basic chemistry myself.
Many though I suspect are in this same situation with all subjects. They really don't know much of anything and are therefore unimpressed by the models response in the same way I am not impressed with chemistry responses.
That is literally what my father and his friends dealt with as young men after dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis as children.
I only dealt with this one time in 1st grade. Air raid drill, get under the desk kids and cover your head to practice in the event the Russians drop a megaton h-bomb on the school.
Or the stability of WW1 or WW2?
1990 to 2020 was a wonderful time, I feel so lucky to have lived my life then but that was a completely abnormally calm time in history.