Europe had been moving towards the slaughterhouse for years, and by 1914 a conflict was all but inevitable—that, at least, is the argument often made in hindsight. Yet at the time, as Niall Ferguson, a historian, noted in a paper published in 2008, it did not feel that way to investors. For them, the first world war came as a shock. Until the week before it erupted, prices in the bond, currency and money markets barely budged. Then all hell broke loose. “The City has seen in a flash the meaning of war,” wrote this newspaper on August 1st 1914.
Apart from this, nothing in the article is worth reading.
Investors have their heads buried in there arses or rather in the charts and balance sheets. I think they delude themselves into believing that by buying selling what essentially amounts to promises, they think they are doing important work.
The only reason all that industry exists is because the government keeps devaluing and taxing our savings. The day we create an asset with easy transactions and that doesn’t devalue, with ease of exchange, they’ll be out on the street.
I vote we force anyone whose incomes is more than 35% of their income is investing to be either sent to the front lines or be used for military testing.
One could imagine that already with all the human loss we have lost some technology maybe for decades. Like some of those fallen to the hands of ruzzia could have been the only ones in the world who understood a particular scientific problem. There’s probably technological loss already that will affect the world.
If China attacks Taiwan, the first thing I’ll do is to buy a high end graphics card and CPU. These parts will be impossible to buy for at least a decade. (should Taiwan be actually occupied)
As a German it’s also one more reason to hate Hitler. Supposedly he liked Germans. But what he actually did was fuck Germany so hard, we would not recover for decades. Just imagine the advancements if Europe were not destroyed in WW2! So much value was lost. Most importantly the knowledge of people who died or were forced to flee.
I don’t know if it’s a decade, aren’t new next-gen (or maybe it was next-next gen) foundries being built in Europe and the US? The actual machines to make the machines that make the hardware is made in Europe IIRC.
Jup, Magdeburg will get a fab and I think TSMC is building one in the USA as well.
But Taiwan is currently supplying 90% of high end chips in the world. This will not be compensated for by a few new fabs (that are yet to be built). It’s not like there won’t be any new computer hardware, it’s just that the supply/demand ratio will make them exorbitantly expensive.
Furthermore, to get a working part you need the other stuff too, like PCBs, capacitors, resistors, etc and a factory that combines all these parts into a working product. I’m not sure where exactly these factories are, but I’d reckon 90% are in south east Asia as well. So they may be heavily impacted as well.
I’m not shocked by the article focusing on trade. It’s just the tone it has when discussing global nuclear war is a little bit too much on the blasé side for me.
Yes, I remember the emotional end to the directors cut of Planet of the Apes well, in which Charlton Heston bemoans the loss of value in his portfolio.
It would mean permanent disruption of asset integrity, a new kind of revenue flow where the only thing that matters is your physical access to scarce freshwater, and adjusting to market conditions where you are being physically welded to the hood of a car owned by the warlord leader of a gang of what will be known as “mega cannibals”.
…Just like I assume the article in The Economist says.
There is an archive link to the article. If you want to say something smart, read that. Otherwise, just assume that you’re going to say something uninformed.
If this is the kind of smart thing I’ll be saying after reading the article I’ll just assume that I’m going to say something uninformed, thank you very much. I would expect this kind of casual aggression from our future mega cannibal overlords that I am still sure the article speaks about at length, but not from a new internet friend and “thread buddy” like you.
Reading the actual article instead of just the headline, here’s a summary of their arguments. There are multiple powder keg situations around the world that are either exploding or simmering. Iran and its proxies, Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan. They could all turn into an interconnected war at any moment. Yet markets, which supposedly factor in these possibilities, are still very high.
What this is not saying is that another world war would be secondary to investor yields. They make that explicit:
This scenario would of course place financial damage a long way down the list of horrors.
Don’t confuse The Economist for dipshit right wingers in the US. They’re center-right Brits, which are their own breed. Not that I agree with them all the time, mind you.
Having had a subscription to it for a decade, I would say they’re hardcore neolibs, which would make them straight Rightwing (maybe even Hard Right) in an economic sense, though liberal when it comes to non-economic subjects since any true neoliberal couldn’t care less about things like people’s sexual orientation.
Even though the Overtoon Window in the UK is a lot more to the Right than it used to be and more than most of Continental Europe, it hasn’t lead to the kind of raging near-theocratic autoritarianism in the moral space that you see in the US (there is some of it but not anywhere as extreme: for example being anti-immigrant is common on the rightmost segment in the UK but being anti-LGBT is not) - the shift to the Right is mainly about how resources are distributed in society and the “moralism” angles you see more commonly are things like spreading the idea that the Poor are just lazy to justify reductions in the Social Safety Net and to further reinforce the idea that Wealth is the product of merit (which is quite funny given that the UK has the lowest Social Mobility in Europe, hence there wealth is mainly the product of luck of birth)
Yeah I’m not seeing the outrage on this one. It’s The Economist. They discuss the economy. If Animals Monthly did a piece on the conflict, I’d expect it to be pretty focused on the impact to animals, and I don’t think that means they’re minimizing the humanitarian aspects of the conflict.
I really want a prescription to Animals Monthly. That’s sounds fucking sick. I love animals. I love months. Edit:don’t you dare correct me. This ain’t fucking Reddit.
Holy shit. I forgot all about zoo books. I’m 38. I remember those goddamn things and they were just as awesome in person as they were on the infomercials
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