251–260 of 496 posts
The end of the Petro Dollar? Soviet-China-Iran - Petro Yuan? /edit for the pedantic. Russian Federation.
Russia and Iran are irrelevant in the global economy.
Also I am surprised that China is so close to US (20 Trillion vs 31 Trillion). The gap is less than 2x now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28no...
It will be interesting to see how much of Thucydides Trap plays out in currency and trade as opposed to military conflict. I am hopeful that economic and financial warfare absorbs the brunt of the power struggle.
China has some internal documents that address the Thucydides Trap with a Chinese idiom, "There are no just wars in the Spring and Autumn Period."
The US wields incredible negotiating power and hegemony because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Like the British pound and the Dutch guilder before it, if that loses reserve currency status it will be harder to borrow on favorable terms, which would affect the entire US economy. This is a big step in that perhaps starting to happen over the next few decades.
One consequence of the transition to renewable energy and electrified transport, is that oil imports will start to decline. And the dollar is of course the currency of choice for that. The US economy and other countries that export fossil fuels will feel the impact over the next decade or so. The energy transition might go a lot quicker than people seem to expect. Currently about 20% of global car sales is electric.…
The transition to EVs is key to the national security of many countries that currently do not have energy security like China and even most if not all member countries in the EU.
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One consequence of the transition to renewable energy and electrified transport, is that oil imports will start to decline. And the dollar is of course the currency of choice for that. The US economy and other countries that export fossil fuels will feel the impact over the next decade or so. The energy transition might go a lot quicker than people seem to expect. Currently about 20% of global car sales is electric.…
> In some countries it's well over 50%. China of course being one of them As always with these stats, I like to check whether that includes plug in hybrids, and it does. Those are still mostly dependent on fossil fuels, although they use less. Pure BEV adoption seems to depend on your radius from Norway: https://www.autonergy.co/blog/global-ev-adoption-leaderboard... (France should really be doing better, after all m…
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But, how much of the extracted oil becomes ICE fuel? Because other transports cannot be converted that quick (air, sea...) and most if not all petrochemical industries will still need to exist even if all cars drive electric. So how big will be the effect of crashing fuel demand?
25% of oil production is for cars 16% for trucks and buses 7% for aviation 4% for shipping 2% for rail and domestic waterways 25% + a chunk of the 16% (city buses, shorter distance or smaller trucks, etc) is a good amount. https://www.statista.com/statistics/307194/top-oil-consuming...
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Saudi Arabia needs oil prices at ~$86.60/barrel to balance their budget, per Bloomberg. It is not the marginal cost to pump a barrel, but what a country needs to support their sticky spending from previously assured energy exports. Governments will collapse long before we approach low single digit oil prices on the global market. The World Is Awash With Oil and Prices Are Poised to Keep Falling - https://www.bloomber…
But China is already in decline before reaching this ascendancy. I think new models will result in new structures, not just a switch from the US to China.
The US has coasted just about as far as it can go on it's exorbitant privilege while failing to invest in the future.
TLDR China builds, and will continue to build long into the future, the US prospers (for now) from financialization but cannot build, nor has the will to attempt to.
China Makes AI-powered Robots Core of National Strategy: China´s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) marks pivot to innovation - https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/china-makes-ai-power...
> Frankfurt, May 05, 2026 — China has launched its 15th Five-Year Plan by placing robotics at the heart of its modern industrial system. The aim is to pivot its AI research towards physical applications with robots as main drivers for economic growth. This is a next step in the country´s strong automation development: China´s manufacturing industry already has an operational stock of around 2 million units — approximately 4.5 times more than the global no. 2, Japan. 54% of annual industrial robots installed worldwide were deployed in China. This is according to the World Robotics 2025 Report, presented by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR).
General Dynamics Failed to Build Artillery Shells for the Army - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49281711 - August 2026
Wikipedia: Exorbitant privilege - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege
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I, for one, would appreciate if we could just move on past these incessantly destructive power struggles as humanity.
It's a fundamental attribute of reality. Take it up with mother nature, because power struggles exist everywhere, even in dumb systems with no intelligence. Weak things go away, strong things stay around. Weak things need to become stronger than strong things to displace them.
We can just not fight. There is enough room and resources,we can get more of them and build more efficient tech, and we are all more alike than different.
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It's as much "human nature" as being a slave was once the nature of some (chosen) peoples.
Being a slave isn't human nature, but wanting to be a slave owner is. "Human nature" is, more often than not, a shorthand for "the parts of game theory that evolution distilled into humans"
(To be clear, not targeting you personally here, but targeting the rhetoric and fallacy)
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Saudi Arabia needs oil prices at ~$86.60/barrel to balance their budget, per Bloomberg. It is not the marginal cost to pump a barrel, but what a country needs to support their sticky spending from previously assured energy exports. Governments will collapse long before we approach low single digit oil prices on the global market. The World Is Awash With Oil and Prices Are Poised to Keep Falling - https://www.bloomber…
Indeed. Electricity will be the only abstraction layer of energy, all end uses (transportation, cooking, heating, cooling, appliances) will switch to electricity. Electricity can be generated from any source (dirty + clean), but the abstraction layer of electricity will allow the grid to continuously increase the clean fuels. It helps that the cleanest is also the cheapest. Solar panels are cheap as dirt. In 1975, a…
China for sure. The rest will come as they replace the last of coal and fossil gas with anything low carbon, solar, wind hydro, as well as the necessary battery storage and transmission for energy orchestration and agility. Like Norway is already at 100% of EV sales and other countries are still close to 0%, we're simply observing a global energy transition horse race. Exciting time to be on the timeline imho.
Ember Energy: Global Electricity Review 2026: Solar surge halts fossil generation rise as clean power meets all demand growth and renewables overtake coal - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-... - April 21st, 2026
The ‘profound’ global impact of China’s rise as an electrostate - https://www.ft.com/content/013e8a27-ade5-48ed-8f2e-ffbf70cc5... | https://archive.today/J0bew - October 10th, 2025
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Conflict between humans is much much more nature than slavery was. Just look at animals. Flock animals often have conflicts which others. But none of them have ”slaves” (at least no how humans understand it)
There is a different between a conflict and a war. Humans are uniquely violent and cruel to each other, there is nothing even close in the animal world