Xi Jinping has consolidated more power to himself than any human in history, including Caligula, making it impossible for him to receive accurate information because people fear his reactions, which isolates him and causes him to believe propaganda on energy policy, tech policy, and COVID, leading to systemic collapse visible in protests and policy failures.

Germany has become so addicted to inexpensive, reliable Russian natural gas that it based its entire economic system on it, not just providing electricity but serving as the base material for the entire petrochemical sector which is exported, and without this gas the electricity sector, petrochemical sector, and entire German industrial model will be gone within two years.

The US dollar is now more powerful than ever before because it is the only currency with a growing population (millennials) creating forward demand, and every other major currency (euro, yen) has been subordinated to the dollar through sanctions regimes, making the dollar the only viable medium of exchange globally and ensuring it can only go up for decades.

Mexico entered serious industrialization 30 years ago with NAFTA, causing its birth rate to halve as people moved to urban industrial jobs, eliminating the source of Mexican migration to the US, and the Central American wave currently being experienced will end in a few more years when similar development occurs there.

Renewables like solar and wind are interesting as part of the energy picture in Europe, but Europe doesn't have many sunny or windy places, so Europeans will need oil and natural gas, but oil and natural gas are the internationally traded fossil fuels that are relatively low carbon compared to coal and wood.

The Russia of 2022 proved unexpectedly fragile, demonstrating that even states with long historical durability can be paper tigers when military capacity has degraded, making it unclear how fast China can actually collapse and suggesting the CIA's historical overestimation of Soviet strength (C+ to C- rating in the 1980s before collapse in 1989) may apply to current assessments of other powers.

The less the US trades with the world, the more attractive the US dollar is as a method of exchange for everyone else because people are less concerned that the US will manipulate it.

Opening the Dutch natural gas fields would cause flooding problems for the Netherlands since most of the country is below sea level, and the country is very nervous about this for good reasons given that earthquakes have been caused by gas bubbles.

After 75 years of industrialization and urbanization, the demographic structure of the world has fundamentally changed such that in most of the advanced world, there are now more people in their sixties than in their fifties, forties, thirties, twenties, or teens, creating a top-heavy demographic full of people on the verge of retirement with insufficient young people to sell to, breaking the consumer-led growth model that globalization depends on.

The United States is uniquely positioned among developed economies because it had suburbs with single-family homes and yards, which allowed Americans to have more children than their European or Japanese counterparts, resulting in the US having a millennial generation that is larger and exists in greater numbers than the equivalent millennial cohorts in Britain, Germany, Italy, Korea, Japan, or China.

The United States will need to roughly double the size of its industrial plant to manufacture goods that were previously sourced from China and Germany, which will be inflationary but will create the greatest economic growth story in the history of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, lasting for approximately a decade.

International transport, which has historically been cheap and reliable at a global scale, is now becoming fragmented and regionally based due to the collapse of US naval protection and security guarantees, which will break down the current systems of manufacturing, energy, and agriculture that depend on global just-in-time supply chains.

About 70% of the electricity generated in Germany in the last month was coal and lignite, and European nations are returning to burning wood for heating and power at a scale not seen since the early industrial age, which is as carbon-intensive as burning lignite, creating a sharp trade-off between global warming and staying warm in winter.

The United States will retain technological leadership over the next 5-10 years compared to the rest of the world, but the pace of technological advancement globally will slow considerably because the US educational system is broadly adequate and capital is available, whereas everywhere else faces capital constraints and worse demographics, and the US millennial class is larger than the millennial class in the rest of the free world combined.

China faces the worst demographic situation in world history, having recently admitted overcounting population by over 100 million people since the one-child policy began, such that there will not be enough people aged 40 and under by 2030 to maintain any version of any economic system yet devised, and there is no theory for what such a demographic collapse might look like.

The American system's strength is its noise—distributed power across federal, state, local governments, business, civic, and academic communities—each with their own legitimacy and power sources, so that if one collapses completely, the others prevent systemic failure, whereas China has collapsed all policy into one person, making it unable to manage a billion-person country and vulnerable to total system collapse.

Large COVID lockdown protests in Chinese cities involving thousands of people in every major city have become automatically conflated with opposition to Xi personally because they oppose his COVID policies, creating pressure-testing of the system that will go one of two ways: either protests continue and spin out of control leading to national dissolution, or the state surges control and implements lockdowns resembling Tiananmen.

American companies that have delayed exiting the Chinese manufacturing and market system have missed a critical window and are now screwed, particularly Apple, which has taken every example of trade disputes or genocides and ignored them while doubling down on Chinese exposure.

George H.W. Bush was the last president to attempt a serious national conversation about the shape of the world Americans wanted to see in the post-Cold War environment, and Americans voted him out for trying, whereas both Clinton and W. Bush were governors who actually governed, but Obama never managed anything in his life (his first grownup job was managing a 12-person campaign office before becoming president), locked himself in the Oval Office for 8 years, and produced only one law (Obamacare, which Congress wrote).

The future world will be marked by dead space—zones with low population density and no industry between the power centers (France, Argentina, Turkey)—similar to the Roman marches, where nation states will remain strong authorities but ethnicity is disintegrating globally in real time, forcing new economic models, though not within 30 years.