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Cake day: August 23rd, 2023

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  • Much of Russian oil production is going offline and is never coming back anyways. Since the fall of the USSR they haven’t been training engineers at a rate to maintain their own infrastructure. Many of the engineers they do have are nearing retirement age.

    As a result don’t have the technical expertise to maintain their own infrastructure oil fields in Siberia. Those fields require oil to flow constantly otherwise the oil will freeze and expand and burst the pipes. The last time this happened was during the fall of the USSR and those well heads took 20 years to come back online and required Western expertise to repair.

    They’ve depended on Western companies to build out and maintain those tracts ever since. When those go well heads go offline either through lack of maintenance or through Ukraine attacking storage centers where this oil is kept before its shipped, they won’t come back on again. They will still have tracts of oil fields in the Western part of the country that they can pump, but they will permanently loose a lot of capacity. Your likely to see a Venezuela style gradual drop off in production over the next ten years if they don’t change course and bring back Western expertise.

    It doesn’t really matter to the US, we produce a ton of oil domestically and have been switching over our refineries to process it. Europe, China and India will be the ones to really feel the squeeze when Russian oil goes offline.


  • While I do try to buy direct on some items that I am confident I’ll keep. The return policy and ease of use are why I’m still with Amazon. I just don’t want to have to deal with thirty different companies and their return policies.

    But if I’m buying something like replacement parts or something that I’m not sure about if there isn’t significant savings, then I’m going with Amazon for piece of mind that I can return the item at no cost to me.










  • The pace of technological change and innovation was always going to slow down this decade. But Covid, Ukraine and a decoupling from Russia/China has further slowed it.

    You need three things in abundance to create tech. First an advanced economy, which narrows down most of the world. Second you need lots of capital to burn while you make said advances. Finally you need lots of 20 and thirty something’s who will invent and develop the tech.

    For the last 20 years we’ve had all of those conditions in the Western world. Boomers were at the height of their earnings potential and their kids were leaving home in droves letting them pour money into investments. Low interest rates abound because capital was looking for places to be utilized. China was the workshop of the world building low to mid range stuff allowing the West to focus its excess Millennials age workforce on value added and tech work.

    Now in the USA boomers are retiring and there aren’t enough GenX to make up the difference. Millennials and finally getting down to household creation or their oldest cohorts (Xennials) just now entering into their mid 40s and starting to move up in their careers but they probably still have kids to support. So it will be some time before capital becomes plentiful again. Gen Z is large but they aren’t enough to back fill the loss of Millennials.

    Ohh I made a point to highlight that this was a US demographic phenomena. Europe and Japan do not have a large Millennial or GenZ populations to replace their aging boomers. We have no modern economic model to map out what will happen to them.

    China is going through a demographic collapse worse than what you see in Europe or Japan. Only they aren’t rich to compensate add in the fact that they decided to antagonize their largest trading partners in the West causing the decoupling we are now seeing.

    The loss of their labor means the West has to reshore or find alternative low wage markets for production and expend a lot of capital to build out the plant in those markets to do so.

    Add on top geopolitical instability of the Ukraine and you have a recipe for slower tech growth.