Get rid of your car. They are insanely expensive. Not just to buy, but also taxes, insurance and other operating costs. At the same time bicycles are nearly free.

China is following the playbook of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and similar countries. The all used window guidance to quickly grow targeted industries, which actually worked very well. All of them are wealthy countries today. However that dependence on how good the window guidance is. They take on a lot of debt to invest and it only works as long as the investment is actually smart. If not the debt increases and that causes massive problems down the line. So it creates a bubble and when it pops it hurts badly. After decades of growth those bubbles probably are nasty.

Is Trump working on Making America Great Again, by turning it into a European colony again? A massive trade war with China, is obviously going to hurt both countries and Europe is the largest economy left.

Shrinkflation is when somebody sells you less of a product for the same price.

What you mean is stagflation. That when you have high inflation and a shrinking economy.

At any rate this is really great news for the environment.

Ukraine is working on anti air drones…

Putin needs Saudi Arabia to not start an oil price war, which Russia would loose.

The US support of Israel is making the US less popular around the world.

A government is not a union.

The rebellion is mostly demographics. We are at a point, where globalization reached most countries. At the same time births are around 138million ± 5milliion since 40 years. China itself even has population decline.

The problem is Hungary. Orban transferred ownership of the government share of the oil and gas company MOL to non profits. Those finance his own propaganda and support far right groups across Europe. Obviously the oil and gas comes cheaply from Russia.

So vetoes from Hungary all the way.

People are always born with the same age namely 0, but they do not all die at the same age. In fact getting older increases chances of death. Hence 2 babies per mother ends up in a pyramid too.

Even if you presume people all die at the same age, things will be stable. If say people all get childten at 30 and only work between 30-60 and then all die at 90. If we then assume 1 child per couple and everybody has a child at 30, we would get a stable dependency ratio of 2.5 dependents per worker. Obviously those numbers are not realistic. Btw that also is not a pyramid, but a trapezoid.

It is not an inverse pyramid though. The older humans are the more likely they die. So you always and up with a pyramide at the top, at least somewhat. With low birth rates a society has to care for fewer children. That results in an actually fairly stable ratio of working age population to dependents.

A shrinking population also means build infrastructure is already built. They just have to keep things running.

They currently elect leaders to a board of directors using what seems like a more complex system to allow for different groups to have a say in it.

Power to control women and force them to have sex with you. A bit like rape, but less crude.

China uses debt differently. Local governments are not allowed to borrow money directly, so they use companies to borrow money for public works. The system is called local government financing vehicle(lgfv). They usually get land, which they sell or lease to get some money or to secure loans. It is usually understood that local governments would bail lgfv out. The issue with lgfv is that they owe more money then the GDP of China and it is secured with mostly real estate, which is somewhat on the edge of crashing. Chinese real estate is crazy overvalued, so popping that bubble can hurt China badly.

The difference is that China is in a trade war with the US. The US is in a trade war with the rest of the world.

Elon Musk obtained $213billion last year. Given a 40 hour work week, that means the $25million is about 15min of work. I kind of doubt he actually works that long, but I do not want to be too mean.

For the first two months 19,046 Teslas were sold in the EU. So per capita sales are a bit below average in EU terms.

Russia was not healthy when it applied shock therapy. The Soviet Union was collapsing, massive political instability in Moscow, all sorts of countries moving out of the Russian sphere of influence, the first Chechen war started and so forth. It was fairly obvious that big decision had to be made, but unfortunatly Russia choose poorly.

Not really. Tesla sold 3469 cars in Italy last quarter. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/teslas-new-car-sales-italy-down-7-first-quarter-despite-51-jump-march-2025-04-01/

Does not seem like it. March sales were up 12% yoy. However the quarter still saw a decline.

The economy is growing, but the wealth of the rich is growing faster. That obviously means the poor get poorer…