Egregoros

China Professor just dropped a new video...

* No regime change has ever been achieved by air power alone

* Iran's goal is to destroy critical infrastructure all across the Gulf, b/c stopping the flow of oil stops the flow of Saudi investment into the US

* The US economy is a ponzi scheme which survives on Saudi investment (this makes a lot of sense, because as bad as the real economy is, the stock market always manages to have money)

* One choke-point is water, because it all comes from a handful of centralized desalination plants (terrifying)

* "Shock and awe" only works against enemies who fight like Saddam Hussein, if your enemies fight like the Taliban, it's utterly useless

* Missile interceptors are orders of magnitude more expensive than the missiles themselves, and you need to fire multiple to have a good chance of hitting one missile

* Even if the war is not good for America, it may still be good for Trump personally

* Powerful end-times fanatics will push for war, even if totally irrational, because they're trying to fulfill prophecy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXe9DZdTbGM

I still find it plausible because GDP is such a misleading number.

You know the famous comic with two economists paying each other to eat shit and then saying they've increased GDP and created 2 jobs...

At the beginning of the Ukraine war, it was famously quipped that Russia has a smaller economy than Italy. But I don't think Italy would have managed to do what Russia has done - so clearly energy export GDP is worth more than "service economy GDP", or (heaven forbid) regulatory GDP...