Farmer Diaries

In 1990 Sadam Hussain invaded Kuwait.  His objective, at the time, was to obtain a strategic port in the Persian Gulf better than what it had already  (which was too close to Iran).  The way the war was portrayed was interesting.   At the time I was living in London, and my immediate neighbor was a cameraman for TV Globo of Brazil, obviously, when the war started he was sent with his entire team to cover the war.  First, what we see on TV is heavily sanitized, you never see corps and you never see real battles.   However, the benefit of having a cameraman as my neighbor was to see the raw footage -- not a pretty thing, in fact, the complete opposite.  War is carnage, and this raw footage was just that, total carnage. The only other time I saw such carnage was on TV in Singapore -- it seems that although the country had issues with TV & movie violence it has no issue with the real thing.  The Kosovo conflict was covered in all its gory details on the evening news (however they edite

At the beginning of the war with Russia, there were about 44 million Ukrainians, there are fewer of them now, as the battle with Russia rages on.  Many have left the country, first to their neighbors but increasingly joining the rest of the Ukrainian diaspora all over the world -- often these are the most productive, and its unlikely that they will ever return. The tragedy of Ukraine is that it is insignificant in terms of strategic value, but it's on the way to two strategic barriers for Russia, the reason why the war between Ukraine and Russia must be resolved there is that if it's not, it is almost certain that nuclear confrontation will occur -- Russian cannot use nuclear weapon in a region that has to cross... Like China, Russia has a demographic problem, fewer and fewer young people are around, unlike China, Russia is resource-rich, with energy, material, and food export potential to the rest of the world.  Maybe not the best food, but Russia has been a huge supplier to A

Travel is only now recovering from the pandemic.  Total demand/capacity is still 30% lower than it was before the pandemic, and America's international flight demand is only half of what it was before the pandemic.  Asia Pacific is 1/5th of what it was!  Traffic partners may have been modified permanently.    As an example, a banker friend who is based in NYC, prior to the pandemic would fly to Europe once a month to meet with a specific high-value client, the bank could have been covered out of London, but the clients wanted him.  He would catch his flight, to London and then get another flight to Ireland to his meeting destination.  The truth is that this was all-in-all a three-day trip.  My friend, for a few hours of meetings, would be gone for 72 hours and would return tired and often with a cold, but that was the business!   The pandemic changed that, first off, all meetings are now by videoconference, which gave the client more flexibility in rescheduling and it cut my frien

Airbus was the first, it pushed hard, not that it had a choice; they implemented decentralized component production, so as an example, the Airbus wings we manufactured by the Brits, and various countries within Europe had their own aerospace companies.  My guess is that eventually, Airbus will repatriate this process to mainland Europe, but on paper, the Brits are still partners in Airbus.  There are components manufactured all over the world.   The concept of trusted suppliers was started by Airbus, but Boeing followed, mainly to keep clients (foreign countries) happy.   In America, Mcdonnell Douglas, near the end, tried to expand component production off-shore of its new aircraft (MD95), which eventually became to doomed B717, McDonnell Douglas was right on the aircraft size type (just north of 100 seats) but by then the company had been purchased by Boeing at the behest of the US defense department.    At least two things are amazing in the aircraft business; the complexity of aircr

 Didn't realize this, but Tesla uses open software on all its systems, which means that ANYONE can copy the Tesla systems....yet no one does!  The question is why? The answer is in the question, if a car company uses open software there is a limit to the patent it can then use to protect its technology.  In a sense, what Tesla gives is the right to other car companies to do like them, but that falls outside of these companies' comfort zone. Tesla has been hugely innovative for example the "rear assembly" on the Tesla 3 which used to have 15 different parts (that needed to be assembled), is now only one part.  That cuts costs! However, what does that do to repair costs?  No one knows and no one is asking the question

 In the movie Deadpool there is a scene where one of the bad guys is being crushed by a slow-moving road compactor.  In the scale of human existence, that's what is happening with population collapse in Japan, China, and Italy.  At first, you don't notice because most people live in the city, and it is hard to notice changes in population density, it could actually be increasing!  However, the countryside is different.  A good friend, American Japanese, decided to purchase a house in Japan, it is about 90 minutes from Kyoto, and the cost was 100 Yen (about US$ 10.00) for the house and grounds.  The owner had died a few years before and there was no demand for such a house in Japan anymore.  A very nice house still.  The same story for Italy, where in the countryside you can buy a house for a Euro, but go to the main Italian cities and you will see no changes, the same with the tax base since again the cities are responsible for most of the tax revenues. Tweaking the birth rate

 Nearly on the first anniversary of the war between Russia and Ukraine the US President visited Kyiv, also yesterday the Vice-President announced that the Russians were being investigated for war crimes.  The US announced that they intercepted conversations between the Chinese and the Russians where it appears that the Chinese are looking to provide munitions to the Russians, also the Chinese foreign minister re-iterated that what overflew the US was a weather balloon -- despite the Americans having evidence to the contrary. In a nutshell, and in reverse order; the Chinese government is clearly dysfunctional to claim something that is patently false, providing munition to the Russians says two things; the Chinese are willing to escalate and the Russians are already running out -- which is strange, The use of "war crime" is a big thing from which there is no real comeback, the US effectively are calling for a regime change in Russia, and lastly Biden's visit to Kyiv is a m

It is amazing what legal discovery can achieve!  I mean in the case of the lawsuit between Fox News and the voting machines companies, it is all there, so much so that the lawyers for Dominion, one of the voting machine company, has asked for summary judgment, without going to court because the evidence is so overwhelming.  Every single talking head from Fox knew that the election fraud was false, they knew it was BS and told, in private text and email, that every guest that mentioned "proof" of voter fraud was a flake, and in fact over the past two years, it has been shown that every single case of electoral fraud has been perpetrated by GOP supporters. So Fox is almost certain to be found guilty and will have to pay the $1.6 billion, but it gets worse because there are two voting machine companies so the total bill for Fox may be in the range of $3.0 billion.  That's just money.  Now think of the ridicule, even if you don't care about the news (and most Americans do

The question is will Xi invade Taiwan as a Nationalist project to "change the subject" from economic difficulties at home?  It's tempting to say no, but talking about geopolitical actions assumes that the players are aware of what is going on.  The big issues for China are (a) demographic, (b) energy, (c) food, (d) debt, and (e) globalization. Demographic pressures are even more serious than first thought: One thing Xi is aware of because China made a big deal of admitting it, is that for the past 40 years it has been fudging its birth rate numbers and that China's population is between 100 and 150 million smaller, which means that China's demographic chart (with fewer young people) is even worse than it was projected two years ago in their 2020 census.  Xi is probably not aware that labor shortages have already started and they can easily be extrapolated from the rapid rise in wages (14 fold increase in the past decade -- now nearly three times more expensive tha

In September 2021 a very very good friend got delivery of his long dreamed of Porsche GT-3 RS, basically a street-legal race car.  My friend's wife thinks he was an idiot for buying this quarter-million dollar car and that he will come to a bad end.  Now my friend is used to powerful cars and as a young man even made it all the way (for three races) to the Formula Atlantic level which is something.  He is a very good and generally a very safe driver. Now, the story.  I've never been in his Porsche and have little appetite for sitting in a car that has hard carbon fiber seats with five points attachment seat belts.  As a joke with a common friend, we ran his car through something called carfax, we had seen this thing being used by car buyers to ascertain if their car had been in an accident, and we used this software to scan for his GT3, oh boy were we surprised, since September he's had 7 small accidents with the car -- Yep, small things still on that car we are talking tho

 Since the Americans had no problems dealing with the Chinese, Korean, or Mexican the French language issue in America is a nonissue, it even makes Quebec a nice place to visit... So how does Quebec win in the next decade, how does Quebec make inroads in the growth of the North American "winning" formula, as manufacturing is onshored back? The issue is simpler than most people think:  immigration is the key, as Quebecers don't make babies despite generous government handouts,  The truth is that as a whole these help at the margin.  I would suggest that cheap daycare is by far the most important component because getting 3,000 dollars for a baby is almost an insult when you consider the overall cost of raising children, but having a "guaranteed" daycare is something else entirely!   The new immigrants will need places to live.  It's nice to see that Laval (Quebec's second-largest city now) restricts the construction of single-family homes in favor of apar

 For some reason, the Chinese military launched a spy balloon as Blinken was about the leave for discussions with Xi. It should be noted that this is not the first time a Chinese "weather" balloon has overflown the US territory, it seems that it happened a few times during the time of Trump, and at that time the US government decided to do nothing.  The ballon was very large, around 100 meters in diameter and the payload was the size of a school bus, with lots of antennae and solar panels it could also be guided since it had some propellers to direct it (to some extent). The story that is being repeated is that not unlike many governments the right hand and the left hand are not talking to each other, so the military decided, probably because of certain airflows at altitude at this time of the year that February would be a good time to deploy a sophisticated surveillance platform.  Now, where things get bad is that once the US government started to want to talk to the Chinese

The province of Quebec has two strategic advantages.  First, the province sits just North of New York State, Vermont, and Masschusset, the second is that Quebec has the most attractive and rich green energy resources of nearly anywhere in North America.  Quebec's hydrologic basin is a huge advantage that is already integrated into the US electricity grid. In fact, Quebec's single biggest advantage is the availability of cheap and abundant electric power. As such, Quebec's government has a massive opportunity if it plays its cards right. It was evident many months ago that the CEO of Hydro Quebec and the shareholder had a very different perspectives as to the value of Quebec's cheap electricity.  In the end, the shareholder won and the CEO, although brilliant, had to leave (March 2023). Quebec's economy minister has to make some hard choices and has a unique opportunity; first, the government played the COVID card as well as almost anyone in Canada where the level of

 Everyone assumed that the Americans would have to be kicked out of the world and forced to return home.  No one anticipated that the Americans would lose interest in the world order!  The first "serious" crack in the system was when America abandoned Subic bay in the Philippines.  I was very active in the Manila political circles at the time for unrelated issues and one day was asked when I thought the Americans would reengage with the Philippines, for although they bitched about the American presence it provided the country with money and security.   Out of curiosity, I reached out to a friend in the Air Force who had previously been posted in the Philippines and asked him if he was planning to return soon, he was a good friend.  He surprised the hell out of me when he said the Philippines had been taken out of new rotations for some time now, and that the Volcano activity just accelerated something that was already planned but had not been discussed with the local governme