Most people keep complaining about how video games were better in the past, and to the extent of too many microtransactions they would be right, but other than that, they are absolutely wrong and it is the nostalgia talking.

Here I am going to space out good looking video games 5 years apart to prove to you guys that video games have consistently been getting better over time and its a decent pace not worth complaining about.

Let's get started:

1972 - Pong:

The graphics are basic. There is only white and black color on the screen. Two little flat boards and a single ball that moves across the screen. It's darn fun for how little is going on in there. You could probably still waste a few hours playing it even today.

1977 - Canyon Bomber:

Game still is just black and white, but now there is far more complexity on the screen. Far more moving and reactive parts and far more objects. It's a real upgrade compared to Pong in terms of gaming capabilities.

1982 - Pole Position:

There are now colors on the screen. Multiple NPC vehicles and changing scenery as you race across the map. It's a complete leap over what came before there is no doubt about it.

1987 - After Burner:

A flying game where you shoot down enemy vehicles in the sky. There is far more activity here and your jet can move up and down! Left and right! The graphics are also far better looking and the game is far more reactive with explosions!

1992 - Wolfenstein 3D:

Wow. Now we have an actual 3d looking game where you shoot down enemy soldiers across various levels and get to fight mecha hitler in the end. We truly are living in the future! You bleed, your character grunts, there are other human sized NPCs in the game! A true generational leap in gaming!

1997 - Gran Turismo:

A 3D racing game. Look at how fast things move. It might as well be real life. All the cars are 3D, you can drive multiple vehicles, and everything looks clearly even more real than Wolfenstein 3D. Graphics are never going to get better than this.

2002 - Hitman 2 Silent Assassin:

I was so wrong gaming bros. Games can still look more realistic. We have fully 3D character models for everybody and the people in game look so real you can compare them to people you know in real life who look like them. I have a bald friend who looks exactly like Agent 47. Can you believe it? Shit's crazy yo. I am truly excited for what the next leap in gaming brings. And the diversity of levels? They even got missions out in the snow and in the buildings! I have never before seen so many diverse environments in a shooter game.

2007 - Crysis 1:

Bro. Bro. Bro. Can your computer play Crysis? I though not. What's Crysis? Only the most demanding resource intensive game ever made. Only the best pcs in the market can play it. It is one of the most realistic games ever made. You can see each leaf on a bush. They got nukes blowing up in game. You got a nanobot supersoldier you play as and all the human NPC characters react super realistically as if they are actually alive. You can also slide kick! Slide kick! Who could have thought! That's awesome. They even got an amazing multiplayer mode! A single player and a multiplayer mode in one game! Gaming has truly reached new peaks.

2012 - Far Cry 3:

Far Cry 3 man. It doesn't look like as much of a leap as I was hoping for in graphics but it easily makes up for it with the amount of gameplay mechanics and different ways you can play the missions. You can do stealth kills or go in like an action hero. You can also get a good guy ending or a bad guy ending. The quality of writing of Video game villains has also gone far up. It's a script almost at a movie level man. Vaas is a true dangerous villain leagues ahead of what all the other games offer. I never knew a game could be this much fun man. Except for graphics, everything has been improved man. Crysis 1 really set the bar for game graphics too high man. You even get to drive so many different vehicles.

2017 - Horizon Zero Dawn:

Holy shit man. We are in the age of photorealistic games now. Story wise the game feels eh bu the character models are the most realistic I have ever seen. The environments look clean as frick. The robots look cool. The NPC characters appear to have a graphics quality that is on par with the main character. The game world feels lived in. The bushes react to you moving through them. We made it man. We made it to where games look like real life unironically. This game looks better than Crysis.

2022 - God of War Ragnarok:

This one doesn't feel like too much of a leap I am going to be honest with ya. The games graphics are good but there isn't enough fast paced action going on. It's too character heavy when it should have been epic boss battles heavy. I feel like there has been a drop in the quality of gameplay in video games with God of War Ragnarok. I hope they fix this and figure out that video games are a different medium from TV shows or movies and allows us to have fun gameplay again. Even the 2018 God of War had more exciting fight scenes and larger scale battles. This is just too much story. I hope they never make a game like this again.

Conclusion:

Since 1972, at worst there have been two to three disappointing leaps in gaming if we chart gaming evolution in 5 year cohorts. The current quality issues are self solving as the shittier games will collapse in on themselves irrespective of budgets as long as they make a bad quality game. We have already seen this with games like Concord and Dust Born. The Video game industry is growing at a healthy rate, it is us the g*mer who have become too impatient and expect something revolutionary to pop up every single year. As long as you keep your patience with the 5-7 year game cycle, you should find yourself with an exciting fun game each time.

Bonus: Future of gaming: GTA VI:

GTA VI looks like a clear upgrade over GTA V. It looks 4-8 times better than GTA V which matches up with the amount of time it has taken to develop the game. It will easily make more than a billion dollars upon release there is zero doubt about it. GTA VI needs stronger hardware though and will probably only release for the PS5 pro if its releasing next year. It should set new standards for the gaming industry like Cyberpunk 2077 did once they fixed it.

Bonus: Personal Opinion:

Either bring back hot women in games or take out women altogether. Video games are a consumer product that means they are meant to be enjoyable. I would enjoy a product with hot people in it more than a product with ugly people in it. In conclusion, if the video game industry wants to recover they need to make games no fatties allowed again like what the Asian gaming studios do. Fat bodies are ugly bodies, including my own.

The problem is not of food availability. The problem is not of land scarcity. The problem is quite simply that on a planetary scale, our species has reached a big enough number that all we can no longer keep the entire species on the same page, and all of the remaining problems are those that can only be solved by the entire planet cooperating together.

Climate change for example. Climate change is real. Climate change is making life worse all around. Yet, for the most part it has been nearly impossible to reverse or even stop the process of climate change, because its the kind of problem that can only be solved by the entire planet, all the regions of the world cooperating when it comes to energy development. Right now, the share of renewable energy in total energy production globally increases by 10% per decade. It is at 30% right now. That's too low a number to be able to fix things unless the decarbonization industry also sees a massive boom at the same time, which luckily for now it is. That is to say, we will miss the worst of climate change by barely an inch, and that too only if the world keeps cooperating as strongly as it is right now year on year for the next few decades.

That's the problem. There are so many of us that the only way to fix things is at the very last minute, by hoping that every single country is going to cooperate across the planet for two to three decades on an issue.

The second problem is regarding governance. It's nearly impossible to govern and help maintain the quality of life of the entire population of the planet at our current tech level. China for example, lifted a billion people out of poverty, yet there were still 13% of its population living below 5.50 USD per day in 2020. There were just too many people to govern or provide for in the end. This problem isn't just limited to China, but extends to even the developed world. Places like the US, where people are unable to provide for the homeless or the unemployed. Somehow, man may find himself in the richest country in the world, and if he has been dealt bad cards, he may still struggle for survival every month. Truth is, it may just not be possible to provide for 8 billion people at a decent level, even by the end of the century, with our technological capabilities doubling every 3-5 years.

The third problem is that society doesn't even require the number of humans that it currently has. Anything above 100 million may be referred to as too many, as nobody is willing to invade a country with more than a 100 million people, due to the devastation and instability that would follow. Militarily speaking. A population of more than a hundred million people is good enough to secure ones own borders. From an economic standpoint, a population of more than a 100 million people is good enough to keep the economy growing year after year, well beyond the trillion dollar point without issue, as long as there is no internal instability. Societies like the US, China, and India are thus outliers, where there are more people around than there is any use for. After a certain point adding more humans to the process gives diminishing returns. Somehow the US hasn't reached that point yet, but India and China with their extremely high unemployment rate most certainly have.

The fourth problem is of keeping everybody on the same page as to ideas and values. Homogeneous societies have the advantage that they can all communicate with one another and be on the same page as to right and wrong, and how to conduct themselves and the lives to be lived. With homogeneous societies the tendency to see other people as separate from oneself also disappears, and there is more willingness to help ones own community which is everybody around you. Today, we have a large enough global population that it is nearly impossible to keep them on the same page even when it comes to general values. It took decades to centuries of active effort by the international community and global pressure to ban slavery across the planet. Today, we still haven't been able to ban marital r*pe across the world. The west has made the most inroads when it comes to westernizing other culture, such as how Saudi Arabia is now allowing music to be taught in schools, and is continuing to liberalize over time. However, even the influence of the west is not enough to westernize the entire planet, as can be seen in the case of Africa and some Asian economies. Globally, we are at best advanced enough to have the global culture separate into 4-6 distinct groupings. We cannot get any more homogeneous than that with our current population numbers.

Taking these problems into account ,the question then arises, what is a sustainable population number for the world? Some thinkers have argued that the ideal number is exactly 8 billion where we can sustain the population at a decent quality of life over time. Others have argued that the precis number at which every person can have a good quality of life is around 2.5 billion people. Personally, I tend to favor the latter number. At 2.5 billion humans, it becomes nearly impossible to create the kind of problems that take us close to destroying the planet for ourselves. At 2.5 billion people our technology is definitely advanced enough to keep an eye on everybody and to assign resources to them. At 2.5 billion humans, we have a chance of recognizing each other as humans even across continents. 2.5 billion humans is a low enough number that every person can be a useful worker and every human can have a higher individual value to the state than the value they have today. Where every single human is deserving of dignity, good wages, and good training.

We have historical data to support this fact. After the black death the value of the average laborer went up and they had the option to choose who they were willing to work for, which allowed them to work for the best master who treated them well and set the new standard for how the laborer ought to be treated. Rent finally went down.

Conclusion:

There are too many humans on the planet right now. This has resulted in global crisis such as climate change, inability to govern all the people living within a state, too many unemployed humans, and too many conflicting cultures. Some people believe that 8 billion is the sustainable population number for the planet. Others put the number around 2.5 billion. 2.5 billion humans as the ideal global population makes more sense as it solves all the above mentioned problems and also ensures better wages and treatment for the average worker globally. For man to win, he must become scarce enough that his very existence is something to be valued.

The Fermi Paradox. One of the great mysteries of the universe that haunts us. Why are we the only ones here? Why isn't there other life flowing across the cosmos communicating with us? Most people have come up with the idea that we just got lucky. Or that aliens like to hide their existence. Or that we just aren't advanced enough to make contact yet. Yet I would today like to suggest another theory, that far better appears to match up with where humanity's path is currently headed. That is. The abstraction disease.

Today, the human species is spending almost as much time looking at a screen as they are dealing with the people around them directly and participating in actual physical actions. Today, instead of going out to hunt for food, a man may order his food through an app, where another man/ or a drone will carry his food over to him. Food made through a supply chain so complex that no single man could follow up on it. Today, when a man is horny, he would not go out to look for a mate, instead he will watch pixels move on the screen in a way that makes him believe he is looking at a naked woman, and will finish jerking off and be focused back on the task at hand unrelated to the mating ritual. Nothing remains in the modern man's life that relates to a direct experience, all needs and urges are fulfilled by abstractions of the actual acts our biology pushes us towards. That is abstraction disease.

Today, man still has to leave his house. To work. To get sunlight. To interact with another human being, but even these actions have continued to become ever rarer in their participation. A man who might have once gone to work every day now only goes when he is required to by his job once a week. A man who would get sunlight walking outside every day, now does the minimum he has to do to fulfill his weekly Vitamin intake. A man who might have once had a group of four friends to grow old with, is now happy enough to have one online friend. All needs are fulfilled, with the minimum amount of effort, and the maximum amount of abstraction, with everything being replaced by a good enough replica to satisfy the urges.

Going down this path, what happens when food is medicine? When the very food we eat repairs our bodies in ways for which we once used to go to the hospital? What happens when the s*x robots become available? When we find them to be better companions that our fellow flesh and blood? What happens when you feel the desire to have a child, and a robo child is able to perfectly fill that hole in your life? Without the hassle of reproducing or changing diapers? Abstraction disease is what happens.

Abstraction disease. When we believe that being a professional consumer is in and of itself a good enough job for the masses. When we shift to a paradigm of numbers always going up without any strong relation to the quality of life in practice. When we have an abundance of all that we need, and we keep growing the system, where all our urges have been fulfilled to the point where we can ignore every. single. one. of our biological inclinations. That is when abstraction disease occurs, and in the end. It kills us.

It kills us because we can live our entire lives without a single challenge. It kills us because we can live our entire lives comfortably without a single moment of growth. It kills us because compared to the resources provided to us, the leisure, the free gibs. Even our mildest and friendliest neighbor appears as a threat to us. For to a weak man who has everything, another man is the only thing he cannot control. So what use does he have for the company of another man?

Abstraction disease makes psychopaths of us. It makes us see our fellow humans as just numbers and statistics. It is so much worse than that though. It doesn't just make everybody else a random blob of data to be ignored. It goes far enough as to make man a stranger to man. By fulfilling every single need it doesn't just give us individuality, it goes beyond that to make it impossible for us to be anything but individuals, and in the end, individuals die out, for even with the power of God, it took two to bring life to the garden of Eden. That is the curse of abstraction.

That is how we die out. Fully individualized. Incapable of reaching out even to a fellow clone of flesh and blood, sharing the same interests, the same desires, the same hopes and dreams, because that clone is still not us. So we can recognize it as nothing but an outsider, a threat, an unknown entity. Something to be avoided, when without them we have everything we need, all our needs and desires fulfilled. We could go into the nethersphere, into the great AI network where we can create our own universe and run our own fiefdom, exactly how we want to, and that is what we do. Maybe not in the network, or maybe there only, but whichever way it occurs, we build a paradise where we are as Gods, even as we are to die in the end and leave behind nothing to continue our line. Nothing to continue the story of man.

That is the story that follows. In the end man overcomes the ape, and in doing so man dies out. For it is the ape that wants to eat and frick and kill and conquer. Man just wants to create and feel fulfilled, even if the fulfillment is just an illusion. As long as it's real enough for him.

Conclusion:

Abstraction disease. When man becomes too disconnected from his own biology and everything loses meaning except for the illusions that make man feel powerful. All alien species may go through this crisis of existence and many of them may die out when faced with this challenge. That is one possible answer to the Fermi Paradox.

The Indian psyche is one that holds on to a great past while being unable to emulate a great present. One that is resentful of being in the poverty it is surrounded by but at the same time proud of being born there. One that is clearly better than everybody else, but at the same time always looking outwards for praise and validation. That is the mind of a thirdworlder with an empire in their past. You would probably find a similar mindset among the Iranians, the Turks, and the Chinese. It is this mindset that acts as the base upon which the Indian geopolitical strategy of the future will be built.

India's desire to be the number one economy. India is the largest population country in the world. They want the guarantee that through sheer numbers they will be able to become the biggest economy that the world has ever seen. They intent to surpass Germany, then China, and one day even the US. To do so they are willing to open up trade with every single part of the world irrespective of who they are involved with and what their home policies are. In this way all Asian countries are similar. Nothing gets in the way of good business.

Indians desire dominance. They desire to be considered a real great power on the world stage. For this purpose, they desire to be the dominant power in their part of the world with influence across the planet. For this purpose, India is focused on dominating all of its neighbors and coming out on top as the most powerful neighbor around. This includes being clearly more powerful than Japan, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, etc.

India doesn't think in terms of how much they have or how much they will get. Indians think in terms of how much they can get away with. Any opening you give them they will push it as far as it goes to accrue the maximum gains they can long term benefits be darned. This is why they make great CEOs and managers in the US. Now that the US has been able to easily stop their assassination attempt, Indians will try every other method of bullying the US in one way or another until they all run out of steam and only then will they stop once they hit the impenetrable wall.

As for Canada, there was a successful assassination on Canadian soil. Canadian government failed to do anything about it so far which means that Indians have no problem dunking on Canada in the future and treating them as a junior partner.

India's ability to dominate Canada has ensured that now every single country that is poorer or weaker than Canada will also be looked down upon as a junior partner. For historical reasons this does not apply to the Russians, as they grew up with their parents looking up to the USSR as the true great power. As the USSR collapsed India continues to look at Russia as a great power and even the years long war in Ukraine has likely not strongly shifted this perception among the Indian public.

India maintains a strong rivalry with China, and is guaranteed to keep cooperating with the west in the form of anti-China organizations and operations and this would not change any time soon.

Most westerners still do not understand this, but India is still not pro west. India isn't aligned with any other country except itself. If India finds it most beneficial to live in a western led world order that is what it will do. If India finds itself best off in an Eastern led world order that is what it will do. When the world is in a state of rivalry, India will happily trade and work with both sides and continue growing. In this way India is much like the US and the UK that preceded it.

The one disadvantage that India has is that it does not have any true allies. This isn't all bad though as India does not participate in any major conflicts globally so does not even need strong allies to support itself or its influence so far. However, the lack of alliances pretty much guarantees that India could never become a global hegemony, as it would never have the required network to become the greatest global power in the world. At best, India could become the largest trade partner in the world, similar to China before it.

India has a large enough military to defend its borders. India has a large enough economy to keep growing and maintain good business with other large nations. India is diplomatically as close to neutral as it can be and enjoys being able to conduct business with all parts of the world. India has the largest global diaspora in the world and that acts as its point of influence on the world stage. Just as the US has links to every country by having immigrants from every country living in the US, India has links with every country by having Indians live in every country in the world.

In the long run, India is well positioned to one day surpass China as the second largest economy in the world. The primary challenge for India persists in surpassing the US economy in the future as by the time India surpasses the Chinese economy, it will itself be in population decline and will once again likely be 2/3rd the size of the US economy, as had happened to all preceding challengers of the US top dog economic status.

The other challenge that persists for India is that its population has almost zero grasp of how global politics and international relations actually works and bring that we are number one only what we want matters attitude to international conduct, not realizing that it is tolerated because of the strategic position of India, not because it is actually a useful tool.

India continues to suffer from the confident incompetence of a poor Eastern European nation and that will likely remain the case for another generation or two of Indians to come.

The best case scenario for India remains to keep persisting at its current pace, not to frick around with the US until it has accumulated more power than China did when it started fricking with the US, and to limit its dominating tendencies to economic powers of the equivalent size of Canada and below, with the exception of China as those who frick around with you should always be fricked around with back.

India should continue to work towards maintaining good relations with the US and the EU from a wealth and power peer perspective. Maintain good relations with China, Japan, and ASEAN from a trade perspective, and maintain good relations with Russia, the middle East, and African nations, from a geopolitical perspective. The longer Russia's war goes on, the more dependent it becomes on India. If Russia wins the war it had a dependable ally in India. If Russia loses its dependency on India grows which is good for Indian business. Either way, a good relationship with Russia is still beneficial for India.

Conclusion:

Indian geopolitical strategy is based on maximizing gains for India. India is not western or eastern aligned. India is India aligned. India is guaranteed to one day become the second biggest economy in the world. India does not have the required network of alliances to become the biggest economy in the world. The Indians people are too often suffering form a combined inferiority/superiority complex which seeps through in Indian international policy at times and can have a negative effect when it comes to India's interests on the world stage. India is free to dunk on economies and powers that are as strong as Canada and weaker than Canada. There is no issue of flexing its muscles at these other middling powers. India should however refrain from fricking around with the US and the EU for the moment, as they are still not nearly as powerful as China which is still losing even at its current power level. India should remain friends with Russia as irrespective of whether Russia wins or loses it benefits India, and India should keep treating China as its primary rival in the region because at this point in time they obviously are.

Fun fact: There are currently 5 generations of military rifles.They don't really count them by generation but if you looked at when a new rifle replaced a previous generation of rifle we would be at the fifth generation with the XM7 rifle with each generation having an average lifespan of 20 years before a new model of gun is brought in to be the default rifle in the military. That doesn't mean the previous generation of gun becomes obsolete, but that both those generations of guns become part of active service. Which is why the M16 is still in service even though it was taken up by the US military in the year 1964.

First generation of US standard service rifle:

The M-1 Garand. In service during world war 2. In service from 1936 - 1959. If you have played the original Call of Duty games you would know this gun very well. It was a semi - automatic gun, meaning it could fire multiple rounds very fast unlike its predecessor, the bolt action M1903 Springfield rifle. It was the evolution of warfare to a point where you could fire multiple rounds at your enemy without reloading and was deemed a great success by the generals of the time.

Second generation of US standard service rifle:

The M-14. Entered service in 1959 and still sees limited use in the US military. It has a 7.32 caliber bullet and a 20 round capacity. A clear improvement over the M-1 Garand. In present day, the 7.32 caliber is only capable of penetrating low level armor and is clearly not good enough to conduct modern warfare with outside of the most backwards places on the planet.

Third generation of US standard service rifle:

The M-16. Entered service in 1964 and is still in service. It fires 5.56 caliber bullets and has a 30 round capacity. Again, a clear improvement over its predecessor, with stronger bullets and a larger round capacity. Again not a good enough gun to participate in war with a US unit as the US soldiers have body armor that is capable of handling a 5.56 caliber bullet from an M-16. The gun would still be decent enough to conduct war against the average middle eastern country as long as it's not used in fights against special forces whom we can expect to be better armored.

Fourth generation of US standard service rifle:

The M4A1. Been in service since 1994. Also uses 5.56 caliber bullets and has a 30 round magazine capacity. Which means on the face of it this gun is similar to the previous generation and the gap between the M-16 and the M4A1 isn't as clear as that between the M-16 and the M-14. The primary advantages provided by the M4A1 over the M-16 can be found in the smaller details. The M4A1 is lighter, more compact, easier to use in close combat, while having adjustable and collapsible components that were fixed on the M-16. While being on the wrong end of the M-16 or the M-4 you would not be able to tell the difference, but being on the right side of the gun, you would be able to find a greater ease of use in the M4A1 which acts as a clear advantage.

Fifth generation of US standard service rifle:

The XM7 was active use by the military in 2023 and is expected in time to replace the M4 rifle as the standard service rifle used by the US military. The XM7 uses 6.8 x 51 mm bullets and has a bullet capacity of 20 bullets which feels like a clear downgrade form the previous generation of military rifles. The XM7 is also far heavier than the previous generation of rifles. So we really have to ask, how is the XM7 better than the M4?

The only real answer appears to be the bullets used. The XM7 when used, is capable of shredding through even the highest grade body armor available on the market. Which means that there is no real protection against the XM7 if it is fired at the enemy combatant. Meanwhile the armor available to the US military is capable of handling the bullets shot by the rest of the world's military rifles. This ends up giving quite a clear advantage to the US army in a firefight.

As we can see based on all of the above information, most people do not realize that the military rifle has been constantly evolving quite rapidly. With each generation of soldiers getting a better gun than the previous generation to use on the field. Today, the arms race between more powerful guns and better body armor has been won in favor of the XM7 rifle and nobody is safe from the pain that comes with getting that rifle fired at you.

Now the final question that comes to mind is, what will the next generation of the US rifle look like after the XM7? While we cannot know all of the details, some features we can be certain about. The next generation of standard service rifles which we can expect in the 2040s-50s will almost certainly maintain a bullet capacity of 20 or go back to 30, as going below 20 isn't an option in a firefight. They will have to be lighter than the XM7 as the XM7 is already considered on the heavier end, and they would very obviously have more powerful bullets than the XM7. The next generation service rifle will obviously be a natural progression of the XM7 without all the limitations the XM7 developed over the M-4, which means a lighter, more compact, and more convenient gun.

Conclusion:

The modern day rifle is extremely overpowered against unarmored targets and without body armor of the highest caliber you have zero chance of succeeding in any conflict against a trained US military squad. Even with the highest caliber armor they will win because they can still shoot through that armor. Rifles continue to evolve every 20-25 years with every generation of humans getting a better rifle that is a clear upgrade over the previous one. Energy weapons will likely never replace the bullet as its simply easier to make more powerful bullets than to 10x the energy output of an energy rifle every time better armor shows up on the battlefield.

Start from the most basic premise. War is the continuation of diplomacy when all other means of resolving issues fails.

War is conducted when there aren't enough resources for everybody.

War is a tool of scarcity.

For a country to not participate in war ever would require it to accept its decline and death without any struggle.

Wars are infinite in empires. A last resort in nation states and international world orders.

As long as the world GDP keeps growing and the largest economies do not fall into decline war can be skipped over, but the moment nation states get stuck in place for decades, unable to move, unable to thrive, forever stagnant, that is when the risk of war goes up, by a whole lot.

This is why it is a miracle that the EU hasn't fallen into a war so far of its own making. Which can only be explained by the fact that it has continued to successfully keep growing geographically and to not collapse into internal instability. Even so, anti-migrant sentiment has continued to grow year on year. In the end the only choice for Europe remains to redirect that ire of the people in a direction that does not harm the state.

We have seen the same pressures cause a war in Ukraine. With Russia stagnant for years on end, and without any other way to grow except by war that is won. War has continued when a nation state had no other way to prosper or to even remain stable.

In China again we see calls for war, to keep attention off of the problems that persist within. As the economy slows and it becomes clearer that there will be no growth in decades ahead, the jingoism rises, to distract from this fact. China puts pressure on India and Russia and all neighbors around.

In the US the GDP growth rate remains barely above 2.5%, to maintain it the US is more than happy to invade or influence other nation states that aren't providing it with enough investments and monetary benefits.

It does not matter how much more advanced we become as a species, as long as the last step remaining to attain another piece of the pie is war, we will conduct war in the end.

This is the same reason why we now find North Korea sending troops to help the Russians, to gain a stronger ally the only way it can right now. Again and again the same theme repeats itself, even with centuries of progress, humanity will not be above war.

It is the same reason why we find Iran consistently funding terrorist organizations across the middle east, because it is the only way it can attack the west without being attacked back in turn.

It is the same reason why Israel will not back down from the wars to come, because it is finally too tired of being attacked again, and wants the guarantee as given to all developed nations, that they will not be assailed by their weaker neighbors, for fear of unprecedented retaliation.

Israel would never stop its war. Ukraine would never stop its war. Russia would never stop its war. They would never stop their wars because the war is the only way remaining to get what they want. A final victory.

From the fact that war is the last tool left to a nation state when it comes to dealing with its neighbors follows the fact that once even the last tool fails the repercussions are unforeseen and terrible. If a nation loses its war it loses decades at the least and breaks apart at worst. Nation states that participate in wars are no longer in a position to lose those wars as they have everything to lose if they face defeat. That is why wars between neighbors are some of the most vicious that can be found.

It is only the proxy wars where we find the larger states willing to back out as they find advantages somewhere else or have a limit on losses suffered without losing everything. The nation within which the proxy war itself is taking place never stops however, until it has pushed out all foreign invaders or been taken over completely by them, as is the case for Afghanistan having fought every major power in history.

Some think that drone swarms or robots would make war obsolete, but they do not understand the fact that wars will always be fought as long as all other ways of making peace have failed, and so they will be fought irrespective of whether they are fought with sticks and stones, guns, tanks, or machines. For the reason to conduct war continues to exists no matter how advanced mans technologies become. This is why it remains paramount for nation states to keep developing their defenses no matter what.

The US for example, makes itself powerful enough that not even an entire continent invading it could defeat it. China makes itself strong enough that the US could not invade it. All nuclear powers make themselves powerful enough that it is not worth invading them. That is the way of things. That is peace for a long period of time.

If the nukes of the world were to ever fail, that is when the world would return to a state of global war, where nations would be warring, taking and losing land, every single decade instead of across a century. Even the long peace that Europe has had since WW2, appears to be coming to an end.

Europe has already reached the peak of what it can produce to keep its population well fed and well taken care of. For now it satisfies itself with expansion via new member states, but the day it has nowhere further to expand, only war will remain to satisfy the needs of the continent. Wars that France is still aware of, wars to control the resources of other nations to ensure the wealth of ones own.

Conclusion:

As we are reaching the economic peak of most nation states of the world, the only way for them to grow any further would be to participate in successful wars. Most countries not in a position to do so due to being surrounded by greater powers on all sides will die out. Larger nation states will dominate over the smaller ones as the influence of the UN weakens when faced with multiple powers participating in might makes right along with the economies of most countries of the world slowing down to below 2% per year.

36 countries of the world are already stagnant. With Germany being the biggest stagnant economy. War in the future is inevitable as many nations fall into the middle income trap and the high income trap, unable to grow any further in any direction.

Kamala will win.

The USSR rises as a US rival. The USSR collapses. For a few decades the US becomes the sole global hegemony.

The US already has decades of experience covertly attacking nation states that act against the interests of the US.

The US declares that China can be part of the growing global world order. The US actively funds the growth of China with focused trade.

China rises up, the moment it gets anywhere close to showing signs of overtaking the US, US trade wars start, US and western funding in China begins to decline.

The European Union shows signs of uniting soon, all of a sudden the UK is no longer in the European Union even though it does not benefit from leaving.

The 2008 financial crisis occurs, it makes it impossible for Europe to ever catch up to the US.

The 2020 covid economic crisis event occurs. It makes it impossible for China to ever catch up to the US.

Russia wages a war with Ukraine. US imposes sanctions on Russia guaranteeing their demise over the years. Russia is left using up all the resources they had ever shaped up.

China is being stalled. At the same time Mexican economy and Indian economy begins to go up. US investment into India is on the rise.

Indian economy surpasses the Chinese economy, comes 2/3rds of the way to the US, US-India trade war occurs and Indian economy begins to stagnate and slowdown similarly to the Chinese economy before it.

Japanese economy comes close to surpassing the US economy, the Japanese economy stagnates and two generations are lost without any meaningful growth to the Japanese economy.

The US is indisputably controlling the world in terms of putting down their competitors every few decades and there is no question about it. In this agenda the US has no true allies. It would even weaken the European Union to ensure it cannot challenge the US at any point in time.

Canada is a healthy neighbor next to the US, over time the Canadian economy begins to fall behind.

The same pattern emerges. The US abhors equals on the world stage.

The US desires for the whole world to be developed and prosperous two to three steps below the US, forever squabbling with one another while the US remains above and beyond in a league of its own.

Saudi Arabia places Oil embargoes on the US to get it to do what Saudi Arabia wants in the 20th century, by the 21st century the US is producing its own oil and replacing oil with renewables.

Cuba challenged the US. Today Cuba is still embargoed by the US and is failing as a state, with as many as 2 million Cubans having escaped the country in recent years.

The world continues to reach parity with itself with the exception of the US.

The US funds a bunch on players to come 2/3rd of the way to its own economy, then begins to tear apart all the advantages that adversary has while building up another territory to increase trade and investment with the US.

The US never breaks a relevant partner down, just slows them down enough as to ensure the next additional dollar of profit comes from somewhere else.

The same rule applies to the US immigration policy. The US gets too many African slaves. To balance it out the US gets as many Europeans as it can. The US got too many Europeans, the US shifts to getting as many South Americans as it can. The US got too many South Americans, the US shifts to getting as many Asians as it can. Always a diverse diaspora of people. Never letting one group dominate in numbers over another group completely. At the end no single community truly holds all the power. The immigrant can only embrace the American identity to have power for no other identity has the required power to do anything worthwhile with.

The American state keeps backups with backups. Every idea, no matter how stupid, is tested and planned around. They have the budget for it. Zombies. Aliens. Werewolves. The US military apparatus is prepared for it all.

The US creates imaginary overpowered adversaries to always stay one step further ahead. Meanwhile they do everything they can to ensure nobody ever actually reaches the same step as them.

Over time, the challenge keeps getting harder. With the soviet union an entity that was too spread out collapsed. With Japan the place had a smaller population than the US and could be competed against and beaten down. With Europe they were never properly fully integrated. Holes could be widened. Individual nations spoken to to push US interests in Europe. With China things got harder. A billion plus people to deal with and keep behind the US forever. Only absolution was to be found in the one child policy of China which threw away their own future for a fast growing present. They never learned that extreme brutality has unintended consequences. They still continue on to make the same mistakes.

Next comes India, a greater challenge than China when it does reach its peak. Far more populous than China at its peak. Far larger international diaspora. Far less alien or aggressive culture, making it harder to represent them as some global evil. Only country with an actual likelihood of surpassing the US with sheer numbers. Only hope is to completely shift investment from India to every other part of the world when India nears its peak. Even that guarantees nothing.

The US and the countries it deals with all get too big over time. Too big to play with the little nation states. The US can no longer care about what happens in Bhutan, or Nepal, or Pakistan. All the world below middle income status falls down the hole without special US attention at any point in time. Small nation states cease to exist over time as they cannot grow and their populace either moves to greener pastures or dies out in time.

The US in the end makes a world of one great power and multiple semi-great powers, with the rest of the world beneath these two and set to die out in time. Most of the world's nations never had the unique advantages the US does, or even allies of the US do get. Most of these places have an economic peak which they can never surpass at their size and location in the world. Japan is proof of that.

Conclusion:

India will be the country to truly challenge US hegemony in the end.

The US has been influencing and controlling the direction of the world to ensure that nobody ever rises up that is strong enough to match up against the US on equal footing. China came the closest so far and India will come even closer at its peak. The US has gotten too big to care about small nation states which will die out over time. In the end only the US and semi-powerful nation states will persist as the rest of the world moves to the greater nations for a better life as economies everywhere else reach their peak and stagnate. Almost every single other part of the world outside of the US is guaranteed to have an economic peak that is lower than the US. This ensures that when the world dies out only the US will remain in the end.

Westernization won. There is no point in studying geopolitics after that.

The US is currently going through a phase of being the weakest that it has ever been, and even so, it is making the greatest strides when it comes to technology and the next phase of the market economy.

The Russians lose to basic US tech in an all out invasion. The Russian ruble begins to crash again, this time with all the banking sectors tricks used up.

While the west struggles with and fights Russia in a fight they will win, China dominates as pressures are taken off it to focus on the war with Russia.

Trump gets elected which ensures a slowdown of the Ukraine war.

Global economic focus shifts to Africa.

If Europe fails the US picks up the slack. If the US fails Europe does.

The west does not want to spread geographically further because every bit of land they take they have to build up.

The west is happy being an ideal size where they can be supplied every year with 0.1%- 0.2% of the remaining world's population per year. Taking up at most 1% of humans from outside per decade, allowing for a stable decline of the rest of the world.

The west with a population of more than 1 billion people is more than happy at those numbers, believing it to be the correct ratio of masters to workers.

Technology keeps growing unconditionally. Human quality of life will keep going up. There is nothing that will change that.

The only worthwhile question is how long will it take the rest of the world to integrate into a single structure. By the look of things it will take three centuries.

Africa is guaranteed to become the factory of the world in time as China shifts away from manufacturing.

The west already won the culture war. They continue to march on and exterminate the most extreme cultures that do not match up with their values.

Once they are done with middle eastern Islam, they will turn their guns on African culture.

The west has always been colonizers and that has still not changed. Only this time they bring promises of making everything better.

The US completely outclasses all other systems and that is a tragedy because even a system as advanced as the US does not find peace.

All of humanity would need to be millionaires before they find peace.

A globalized culture will still take more than a few centuries to be achieved.

Global malnutrition and poverty needs to be ended within this century if there is any hope for global stability in the long run.

The biggest wars need to come to an end and be done with. To do so we need a clear hegemonic winner making it impossible for any other power to cause trouble.

If Russia were to collapse, it's seat on the UN could be passed on to India.

Every 30 years the world changes noticeably. Sweden has not had a war since 1814. They have been at peace for 210 years. Their GDP per capita is the 14th highest in the world, suggesting that if only the world could make centuries long peace with one another, it would guarantee a high quality of income and living standards.

Sadly that will not be the case. The world in the 21st century has seen its borders change just as the borders of the world kept changing in every preceding century. Only nuclear powers have found a reprieve as long as they do not collapse from within.

Economic warfare has become the modus operandi of the current era. With most conflicts between nation states being about keeping the economic growth of one country limited and stagnant long enough for another country to surpass them.

Psychopaths are going to die out over time. They are a dead end genetic lineage.

Palestine is not going to make it as a state. The US will stop sending arms to Israel. Then the arms sales will continue under Trump.

The world enjoys peace. The world desires peace in the long run. Globalization is peace and stability.

Globalization marches onward as global trade keeps rising year on year. Global exports remain at an all time peak and continue to rise year on year.

Humanity is going to fall down to a billion people of less it is inevitable. Cultural selection without encouragement of reproduction pretty much guarantees it.

The good news is as long as you have even a basic level job in any country that isn't an outright poor nation, you should be able to afford to live and save while paying rent in the cheapest housing/ apartment that you can find around the neighborhood.

The biggest challenge that exists for humanity is the ever increasing number of humans who feel out of sync with the society they live within and the internet might have had a hand in that.

People need to be reintegrated into their societies globally and that is going to be the biggest challenge ahead once all the challenges of the 20th and 21st century have been solved.

Entire civilizations are going to be dying out and that is just humanity taking its natural course of events over its natural lifetime. We were always going to become homogeneous over a long enough lifespan. Unlike previous beliefs however it is not due to everybody marrying each other but due to non-white women marrying white men.

Latinx populations have mixed the most with global populations. In the long run guaranteeing that the Latinx/ white mix would emerge as a singular distinct race that will either spread all the way to Europe or split from Europe entirely.

Conclusion:

The west is busy colonizing South America. Europeans are still moving to the US and make up 11% of US immigrants. Nobody notices because of how many immigrants are coming to the US from the rest of the world. What we are seeing is a global population that is constantly moving further west to finally settle in the US no matter which part of the world it is coming from. The US remains the global immigration end point for the entire planet. This is why the US will be the last nation state to exist when the world goes extinct.

You should try to sleep 8 to 10 hours a day. As per your healthy sleep cycle. Oversleeping constantly can be a sign of health issues.

You should try your best to occupy every waking moment of your life with things that you have to do and things that you want to do in a day. You should also leave space in there for doing nothing through meditation or taking a nap.

Exercising 10-15 minutes every single day is good for you. You don't need to be a bodybuilder. Just somebody who doesn't eat too much and chooses healthy foods.

Nobody can really beat a man who is going through all 16 waking hours of the day. That doesn't mean that you are working all the 16 hours, but it means that you are aware of the 16 hours and fill them accordingly.

Don't waste away a moment of your life on frivolous things. None of the moments will come back. Enjoy yourself, but be sure that the thing brings you worthwhile job that you won't regret.

The internet is a lie. The lives on it are a lie. The only life you can truly compare your own to the one you lived yesterday.

The best way to accomplish your goals is to have a daily routine working towards them every single day.

Eat vegetables and fruits where you can.

You should practice budgeting by figuring out beforehand how much you are going to spend on food and basic necessities every single day. Look at that list long enough and make that list often enough and you will start getting better at cutting out the things that you don't need and making the system more efficient.

Every single major success is the accumulation of 100s of little steps. Don't beat yourself up about it if you don't get something right the very first or even the tenth time. Figure out how long it will actually take someone to learn that skill and get good at it. Knowing how long things are supposed to take to learn is also a skill. You do that and you can stop feeling bad about the times you sometimes get things wrong.

Remember, doctors are trained for a decade or more before they are allowed to perform high risk operations. It takes years for humans to learn how to do something near perfectly every single time. So don't feel too bad if you make mistakes. Mistakes are a part of the life experience. Instead, note your mistakes, and work on them over time.

Avoid friends who make you feel worthless or looked down upon. It might either be a case of bad friends or low self esteem. In both cases, it doesn't help you to stick around until you overcome the issues at hand.

Remember to stay hydrated.

It's okay to be upset or angry or frustrated. The problem comes from how you express it rather than what you feel. You can feel sorry for the outburst without feeling sorry for the reason you had the outburst. Don't let people trick you into throwing away the reasons you are upset just because you couldn't control how upset you got.

Have principles and stand by them. Having principles comes with the territory of missed opportunities, but it also gives you a firm base to stand on, and not to have to worry about being easily manipulated or taken advantage of, because nobody else can move you around freely and convince you to do whatever they want.

It is better to fully stock up the supplies before rebelling than to rebel without resources. It you are going to stand up for yourself, try your best to ensure it is from a position where you can continue to support yourself even if others leave.

It helps to keep a diary to track your day and to note your thoughts down into. Some of you may not have that opportunity because of others living around you but you can still try to have a diary on your computer with a password on it. Just make sure you don't write anything illegal in it.

Enjoying life during hard times is not illegal. If letting yourself be happy or not happy won't change the impact of the problem or what you can do about it, then its okay for you to be happy. Too many people want a proof of guilt of shame even when it solves nothing. You can get home and laugh after a hard day. It's alright. You don't have to make your life a constant uniform theme.

Even in hobbies and entertainment not all are equal. Look for the ones that you can enjoy that are also the most beneficial to you. You get the most benefit when your interests and its future utility align.

No is a complete answer. The world is a better place when we aren't rude to one another, but being rude is better than being a sucker for a scam.

Remember to brush your teeth daily. Don't make bad decisions on the basis of science one day solving the problem by the time it reaches you so its okay. There is no way to know which parts of science would stagnate and when. There is no linear curve. Sometimes decades happen in years and sometimes years happen in decades when it comes to advances in research.

Technology will not save you. Information will not save you. Consumption will not save you. Only the choices that you personally make will save you. For everything given free by the world is given freely to you and everybody else, so you are still on the same page near the bottom at the end of the day if you do nothing for yourself.

Conclusion:

Live a good life. Be well.

The way things are going, we can expect Islam outside of Africa to become as liberal as Christianity is today outside of Africa. There have been many unprecedented changes, invasions, and a divide between the elite and the common populace of states that has resulted in the decline in the conservative values of Islamic states. Today, we look at what these changes are, when they occurred, and the path that they lead to.

1 ) Saudi Arabia:

Saudi Arabia had been funding and supporting Wahhabi Islam ( One of the more radical sects of Islam ) since the 1980s. It was one of the few Islamic countries where the monarchy did not see eye to eye with the religious elite of the country, but none the less had to participate in conservative Islam to placate the masses. As Saudi Arabia continued to develop and the influence of the monarchy continued to grow within the state, by 2017 the Saudi Arabian Monarchy has turned its back on Wahhabi Islam and shifted away from a focus on placating the religious sects in any special manner. Instead, under the leadership of Mohammad Bin Salman, the country has continued to further liberalize over the past seven years. The country has gone on to make peace with the existence of Jews in the middle east and has continued to provide ever increasing rights to women in the region.

Saudi Arabia has continued to further liberalize and align with the western world in terms of geopolitical alliances and in the long run is expected to become as liberal as Algeria or Morocco before the end of the century.

2 ) Indonesia :

Unknown to many people in the west, Indonesia is the country with the highest population of Muslims in the world. Today, it has a population of 242 million followers of Islam and is outright moderate compared to the Islam practiced in the middle east or Africa. Indonesia has been a democracy since 1998 and is part of the larger ASEAN group, ensuring that they as a state have to interact with different cultures to keep growing. Indonesia also has a healthy economy. With the lack of conflict around Indonesia their people have had the opportunity to be peaceful in ways similar to the middle income economies around the world.

In the long term we can expect even the most extreme versions of practiced Islam around the world to be as conservative as the one in Indonesia as worst.

3. Pakistan :

Pakistan is another example of a country where the elite/ those running the government are far more liberal than the common man in Pakistan. The heads of state would rather prefer for the country to become more educated and to liberalize further so as to stop it from collapsing but it is the people themselves who wish for the country to remain highly conservative. Unlike Saudi Arabia, the Pakistan elite do not have the same level of power or control over the common populace to go above their heads to fix the country. Pakistan is also completely dependent on loans from international organizations to keep itself afloat and in the long run is as likely to collapse as not.

Pakistan would continue to be a failed Islamic nation which would not give up on its Islamic identity but also never rise up to become a decent economy. It is an example of a failed state equivalent with no influence over the rest of the world.

4 ) India :

India has the third largest population of Muslims in the world. Here the Muslim population is kept down and for the most part exist in separate communities from the rest of the Hindu population of the country. The Muslim population while having common beliefs of goals at times, have no common voice powerful enough to overcome or bypass the laws passed by the state and under leadership such as the BJP, pleasing the Islamic sects of the country becomes ever more irrelevant. It is in this manner that Islam possesses no true power in India even though it has the third biggest population of Muslims in the world in it.

In the long run Indian Islam has no other option but to liberalize as any non-liberal version of Indian Islam would never be permitted to thrive.

India would always remain as liberal as the Hindu's in India are liberal.

5 ) Bangladesh:

Similar story to Pakistan. Unable to work with Non-muslims. Set themselves up for long term failed state status.

6 ) Nigeria :

The biggest population country in Africa with a population of 97 million Muslims. The country suffers from high levels of poverty, a population growth rate that eats up all economic growth, and is unlikely to be the future of Africa even with its population numbers. It has limited influence even in Africa and in the long term will not be relevant to world events any time soon.

7 ) Uyghur Muslims:

Uyghur Muslims have at times participated in terrorist actions against the state of China. China has responded by completely destroying Islam within the country, to the point where the west considers there to be a Uyghur genocide to be taking place in China. China has gone on to actively Sinicize their Muslim populations and over the years and continues on with watering religious groups down over time. Islam is completely gone from East Asia over time.

8 ) Islamic State :

Islamic state was one of the biggest threats of the 2010s. Now it is limited to Africa after its cities were captured and all of its soldiers killed in the middle east. One of the more extreme groups of Islam was completely destroyed in the middle east in the past decade.

9 ) The Muslim Brotherhood:

Another radical Islamic outfit that had participated in terrorist attacks in Egypt in the past. Completely hated by the state across the Muslim world. The Islamic nations actively work to destroy this organization root and stem over time.

10 ) HAMAS :

Another Islamic terrorist organization. Kept talking about destroying Israel but over time has been getting completely obliterated by Israel. People on the sidelines argue that the destruction of HAMAS will result in another generation of terrorists but the more likely truth is that the last aggressive generation of HAMAS terrorists is being destroyed, with blows so severe that the organization would never be able to recover again.

The death of HAMAS means the death of another radical sect of Islam.

11 ) Hezbollah :

Will survive a bit longer than HAMAS. Being completely destroyed by Israel. Iran, the country that funds them has completely failed to protect them or move ahead with a war to defend them in this conflict. The collapse of Hezbollah would result in further liberalization of the middle east.

Long term analysis:

Islamic terrorist organizations are being destroyed across the world. With the death of Islamic terrorist organizations comes the death of radical Islam. As radical Islam dies out only the states remain. The state will over time always push for that which makes more money, and in the end, aligning with western values or more moderate values makes more money, as it makes it easier to set up business and working relations with the rest of the world. In the long run, even places such as Iran and Pakistan may find themselves forced to liberalize as all of their neighbors and other Islamic states liberalize and keep growing over time without issue.

Conclusion:

Islam is liberalizing over the decades. Islamic terrorism outside of Africa is coming to an end. Right now it is only the Islamic common population from certain countries that is fighting for bringing back Sharia law but even the heads of Islamic countries do not agree with these people. It is the last death cry of a dying ideology.

The downside:

After all the Islamic states are liberalized over time, the west is going to come after the Indians as the most backwards people in the world.

Turns out a lot of what we consider common sense today is things that were considered the cutting edge of human thought in the 1950s.

You know how its easy to figure out that just because you saw something, and are sure that what you saw makes your conclusion true, and thus is real knowledge? Well turns out nope, correlation is not causation, and the guy who explained that only managed to do so in 1950.

1950 is when we figured out that just because one thing happens right after another thing, does not guarantee that the first thing is causing the second thing. Sometimes we just get lucky.

You know the whole speech is violence and you can r*pe a woman by saying r*pe out loud? That's a misinterpretation of a paper written in 1993 that is talking about how speech itself is an action because there is an intent with which something is spoken. An argument that was once used to suggest that all porn by its very nature is the subjugation and subordination of women.

Then there is the question of moral luck, a paper by Thomas Nagel from 1979 which shows us that a big part of being a moral person is just being lucky. You never got into that accident which caused somebody to die. You never had that one bad day where that fist fight trying to defend yourself accidentally killed the person you were fighting. Philosophers previously argued that only what you cannot and can do is moral. Morality is the decisions you make, but so much of moral judgement is based on things out of your control that moral luck becomes an actual thing. That if we were to ignore moral luck, we would end up in societies that we consider undeniably immoral.

For example - letting all the weed users out of jail en masse causing an increase in other unrelated crimes.

Then there is a famous paper from I don't remember when and I don't remember by who which proves that inductive reasoning, that gut feeling works and makes perfect sense, and that someone saying they have two black balls in their drawer then pointing to a red shoe in the room to prove it makes sense, because the existence of a red shoe outside the drawer actually increases the probability of there being two black balls in the drawer even if by a minuscule amount.

Let's also not forget about the bits about how deep and complex philosophy is, and turns out it's not. That's continental philosophy, which for the majority of time has been a self masturbatory exercise where the author has been more focused on writing things that make them feel and sound smart than things that can be tested by the reader or anybody else for that matter.

Continental philosophy is the peak of conclusions a man can derive about the nature of the universe without having testable hypothesis. In my personal opinion by now it is in the same place as Alchemy as a real science.

Continental philosophy is crap. It is a bunch of guys going "what if" and "let's assume" about things then writing a whole book or five starting from there. It is an attempt at deep insight from a human perspective without the use of any measuring cowtools. It is as useful as poetry to be precise.

The last time the continental school did something useful was probably before the 1950s and its easy to tell that the continental school has reached its limits when only wannabe geniuses online would make 1 hour long videos about it, along with the fact that they are at best the backbone of real sciences, acting as the baseline which has long ago already been surpassed.

Psychoanalysis and critical theory are well and good for example, but it is real technical science and logic that builds up upon it. To find methods of proving the idea and the concepts. To take probability of events into account.

Truth is, philosophy has been failing for decades because the actual sciences made so many advances that for the philosopher to write anything useful would require them to actually be well read in advanced logic and analysis. Which is where the analytical school of philosophy was born, and over time this school has appeared to grow into something incomprehensible to the average person without a P.hd solely because the analytical philosophy school actually kept up with the sciences and the discoveries that they made.

You can also see the difference in the quality of analytical and continental philosophy in the quality of the societies that most espouse each type. The Americans are far more focused on and dedicated to analytical philosophy. They in turn have a society that continues to grow and prosper and make new discoveries, because they use logic to solve their problems and find insights into how the world works.

The European world meanwhile, has fallen far behind the Americans, because their entire philosophy and way of thinking is based off of a single individual having profound sounding insights about the world and how it functions that do not translate to actual output and solutions in the real world.

Continental philosophy is akin to the world of emotions while Analytical philosophy is akin to the world of reason, with the greatest horror of all being that the average person and the world embraces continental philosophy far more strongly than it does analytical philosophy, suggesting that people always want the r-slurred easier solutions that make them feel smart rather than the solutions that work but are beyond them. This is where the human ego clashes against human capability, and why we end up with those who revolutionize society with their discoveries becoming completely disconnected from everyday society altogether over time.

Now I wonder how analytical and continental philosophy explains the existence of the incel culture.

Conclusion:

Continental philosophy is people pretending to be smart. Analytical philosophy is people actually proving what they say. The human species is on average genuinely r-slurred and you can tell by the fact that even truths were being written down and becoming famous like some great and amazing profound truths in the 1950s and the average person still hasn't caught up to them so far.

The US today is entering another golden age. All of the problems the US found itself burdened with in the 20th century are now being solved in the 21st century. Every single issue they faced, every single loss, every single setback, has turned tail and is being turned into a final victory. For all intents and purposes we have seen a few decades of the US returning to its core followed by a new age of expansion taking over the world. All the signs are there and they point towards a permanent, ever growing US hegemony.

In North America the US has already captured the market of the entire continent, with the US GDP making up more than 85% of the GDP of North America. For all intents and purposes, the US owns the North American continent. Based on current projections, the US share of the continents GDP is only going to keep increasing over time as Canada's GDP and Mexico's GDP continue to grow at rates slower than the US.

In Europe since the war between Russia and Ukraine began, the entire continent has become even more dependent on US weapons imports. The French dream of going independent has pretty much failed to blossom and in the longer run, with Europe continuing to stagnate well behind the US, it is pretty much guaranteed that the US is going to own Europe is all but name. The Germans remain the biggest power in Europe and their economy remains stagnant, forcing Germany to become ever more dependent on the US to run things for them. The US in this manner owns two continents.

In Oceania the US has ever strengthening alliances and partnerships with Australia, the biggest player in the region. Australia is ever increasingly dependent on the US for military technology as they find the French to be unreliable partners and have already suffered from being too dependent on China for trade. The US thus owns three continents in total.

In the middle east the greatest challenge to the US was Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia for its willingness to fund extremists and Iran because of its hatred of the US. The US has successfully managed to turn Saudi Arabia into a long term ally who will never act against US interests in the middle east. The US has managed to further weaken Iran over time as it continues to fund Israel to destroy any and all extremist elements in the middle east. Iran has also never managed to fully recover from previous sanctions on it from the US. The US has thus weakened its enemies in the middle east to the point where they will never be able to stop US interests nor be able to ever harm Israel in the long run. The middle east for all intents and purposes has been disarmed.

Russia has for decades tried to act as the face of the anti-west bloc on the world stage. Over the past decades the GDP of Russia has stagnated and failed to grow and prosper. Russia set itself up for a war with Ukraine and is currently stuck in a long term stalemate the effect of which is a further weakening of the state of Russia with every passing year. The US has gone on to send more and more military assets to Ukraine to keep the war going and in the short and medium term Russia continues to weaken and has no good future ahead of it. The US has for all intents and purposes beaten Russia down to the point of no longer being even a middling power of relevance.

The greatest rival of the US in the 21st century is said to be China. China that kept growing with the help of US trade and kept trying to gain more power against the US at the same time. Right now China appears to be permanently stuck two to three decades behind the US and the Chinese economy is slowing down bit by bit every 5 years as their population has finally begun to decline. A decline that will be akin to an avalanche once it kicks in due to the one child policy China once implemented to control its population growth. China ended up shooting itself in the foot in such a manner as to guarantee that in the long run they will never be able to overtake the US. In this manner the US has a guaranteed win against its biggest rival in the 21st century.

The US GDP appears to go through a crisis every decade and a half, but what most people do not realize is that generally these crisis exist at a global level, and the US has shown itself more than able to recover from these crisis far better than the rest of the world. Every time one of these global economic crisis occurs, the US ends up getting an ever further head start on the rest of the world as it gets further ahead by recovering faster.

The US population, while consistently below replacement, has shown a capacity to keep growing over time, year on year, at a stable rate, with how well its immigration policy is managed. The US can easily keep growing by 0.5% every single year till the end of the century without any real issues along the way. The population growth of the US is thus secured.

The US has continued to lead in the global tech sector, and while there are some countries that have shown signs of catching up, they are once again beginning to show signs of getting left behind as the US leads in AI and uses this AI lead to act as the backbone of the next generation of research and development, allowing for it to develop far better cowtools far faster than other economies that are dependent on human labor by itself. The US thus has a permanent tech lead which will only continue to expand over time.

The rest of the world continues to slow down over time. The rest of the world continues to show signs of slowing down when it comes to population growth, GDP growth, and technological innovation. The US meanwhile maintains a consistent growth rate which means that the US beats the rest of the world simply by maintaining the current trajectory and letting the rest of the world fall behind that trajectory. The US has in this manner beat Europe and is well on its way to beat China in a similar manner followed by India down the line.

Based on all of the above we can see that the US is living in a golden age of its own where it is able to compete against entire continents head on without losing and over time will have the entire world fall behind it. The only challenges that persist in the US are internal, and as of now none of them are strong enough to destabilize and break apart the US from the inside any time soon.

We can expect the US to overtake the continent of Asia before 2100 and for China's economy to begin stagnating or at the very least fall behind the economy of the US by 2035 in terms of annual growth. As the US continues to win ever harder year by year, and decade by decade, two possibilities exist for how the rest of the world responds. The first possibility being that the rest of the world continues on its current trajectory where everybody just accepts that the US is so far above them there is no point in planning for competing with them in any manner and continue to compete against the rest of the world instead, maintaining their feuds and intrigues against one another, or the less likely second possibility where as the middle powers of the world fall ever further behind the US, they begin to merge together to form a minimum floor for their strength to be able to remain the slightest bit relevant on the world stage. We can expect the emergence of an EU of the middle east, an EU of Africa, an EU of South America, an EU of East Asia, another EU of South Asia, and a EU of Oceania, and a EU of South Asia.

The US in its current form is not going to change until and unless it finds itself faced with a competitor severe enough as to force it to change to adapt to it. For this century the US is going to maintain its current trajectory, with a two party system, high levels of liberalism, and maintaining its current borders without expanding further out into the world. The biggest long term impact on the world is going to be that the world is going to be the breaking of the non-American spirit and the decline of non-American cultures as they would have no actual deeds to prove their superiority, getting cucked by America every step of the way.

The population collapse of South America, Russia, East Asia, is still guaranteed. Along with the population explosion and isolation of Africa ensuring that they would remain the poorest continent in the world. The so called bottom floor for what a human can be. Which is someone starving every single day, without access to clean drinking water, and no meaningful protections from the state.

Conclusion:

The US is moving into another golden age which will be very noticeable from 2035 onward. They are going to have their GDP surpass the entirety of Asia before 2100 and will surpass the GDP of the entire rest of the world before 2200.

The US owns the world and its GDP surpassing that of Asia will force the rest of the world to rethink how it works and form new nation states at the regional scale.

Good luck.

Most of you will be wondering, but anon, we all hate France and want it to collapse, so how is this an unpopular opinion. To which I respond, the failure of France as a nation state is an unpopular opinion due to it being considered a strong great power in geopolitical circles, where some players even believe that France will one day overtake Germany, and lead the EU, or at the very least lead the fully formed EU army when the time comes. To all of which I say. Bullshit.

There are many reasons as to why France is today considered to be one of the most viable, healthy, and strongest economies and territories within Europe. Let us take a look at these reasons and why they will never lead to France surpassing Germany below:

1 ) France has one of the highest GDP's in Europe and is still growing - France has managed to surpass its GDP peak in 2008 and come out with a 3.13 GDP which is continuing to grow. It is also the third biggest economy in Europe and the second biggest economy in the EU, which obviously makes it a major player. This is the simplest reason for why people believe that France has a bright future ahead of it.

Downside - France's GDP has continued to grow at a rate slower than that of the UK which pretty much signifies that France is stuck in place and can either remain at its current level or fall further down, but never improve and rise above any further.

2 ) France has the strongest military presence outside Europe and the most military experience - France has had many military adventures in Africa with many nation states in Africa still trading using the CFA Franc, which is pegged against the Euro with the backing of the French treasury. The amount of French military involvement in places outside Europe in current times makes it the most well experiences military in the world.

Downside - There has been an ever increasing push coming from the African nation states to further themselves from French involvement and activity on their soil. Over time French influence in Africa has been continually on the decline. The French military while more well experienced is still not big enough to be able to defend or train the EU military all by themselves and so only a collective EU military remains relevant to the military strength issue of the different nation states in the EU. Places like Germany have too begun to prefer purchasing American equipment over French military equipment, which further shows how far devalued French military tech is in any place where American military tech is an option.

3 ) France has the healthiest population growth rate in Europe - France has managed to maintain a consistent 1.8 and above fertility rate for decades while the fertility of the rest of Europe has continued to move down over time. While German population growth rate continues to show signs of stopping the moment there are no mass immigration waves into Europe, France itself continues to keep growing in population at a healthy rate with current levels of immigration and higher than average birth rates for the region.

Downside - While France has some of the best demographics in the EU out of all the nation states in the area, France remains behind Germany when it comes to being the largest population country in the region. France's population growth rate has also continued to go down glacially over time and is now just 0.3% and falling about 0.1% per decade, which makes it impossible for France to ever overtake Germany in terms of total numbers unless Germany has a mass depopulation event occur. Another downside is that Germany generally gets the best quality of immigrants that move to the EU, so France will always be getting second pickings when it comes to immigrants within the region. French romanticism, which often led to people wanting to be French in the future, has also died down over time, with people losing faith in the idea of the romantic French landscape. France is in this manner in a position where it can never demographically surpass Germany.

4 ) France has the strongest social identity out of all the nation states to be found in Europe - In France the government says there is no black or white or brown people. There are only Frenchmen and they are those people who are French citizens. France places a very high weight on French culture over French genetics and have continued to maintain a very strong sense of French identity. This gives France power in the sense of holding all the people together as Frenchmen holding up their country.

Downside - The French identity is pretty much useless in the modern era beyond stopping minority communities from forming ghettos and from external cultural influences changing French society. That is only useful to defend against the refugee wave crisis that Europe suffered from. Beyond that it acts as a disadvantage as the French people have frozen their lifestyles and ways of thinking in time, making it impossible for them to evolve and adapt at rates anywhere close to the US, China, or India, to a changing world order.

The strong French identity has also led to a French ego that more often than not bites them in the foot as the French end up hating one another, and become very protectionist when it comes to their businesses which stifles any competition from abroad and from within. The moment a better cheese is made outside France they ban it or label it not real cheese. The moment a better wine is created they label the wine not real high quality wine from the right place or made in the right way. The French have in this way created a protectionist system where the businesses can do nothing else but decline over time. Similar to what happened to French military exports which fell behind in quality over time as the US military tech kept advancing and they could offer better product when competing for weapons sales against the French.

Even the German economic system is nowhere as protectionist as the French one and they are drowning in bureaucracy.

The above reasons is why France is never going to surpass Germany and take over reign of the EU.

Will France fall into decline though?

Absolutely. One of the key challenges facing the west today is that of dealing with immigrants and France continues to suffer from ever lowering immigration rates as nobody wants to become a Frenchman in the 21st century. As France continues to show an inability to evolve and adapt, it is a given that between the declining population growth rate, and being out competed in he international market by pretty much everybody else, that France will fall into a very slow decline where France does not die out because everybody left, but because nobody outside of France sees any benefit in embracing French culture. As they continue to get pushed out of Africa, France has becoming an irrelevant middling power to look forward to, similar to Russia and the UK.

Conclusion:

It doesn't matter what the geopolitical experts say, France is going to go down like Italy and Spain, just later down the line, with Germany as the final leader of the EU.

Imagine you are a kid who is 13 years old. You get your hands on a video game that you truly love. You play it again and again and hope to one day play its sequel. Next thing you know, you are 19 years old and in college, and they have finally released a sequel. That's great. You try it out, have your fun. Then move on with life. There is a more than 50% chance that you never play the third game in the series, because life went on for you and you decided to invest in a hobby other than video games.

If we are to go by the current video game release cycle, it would take 18 years for you to play through a trilogy of games in a series.

That model is clearly not sustainable in holding a long term audience as nobody is going to be able to hold interest in the series for 18 years.

Even the makers of the new God of War game decided to limit their story to within the span of two games as they didn't want to spread the story across 15 years of development.

The closest thing to sane we have among video game developers in the video game industry is the call of duty franchise where they have three different studios working on the games, releasing one game per year, with each studio getting three years to develop their game, and every year, these games sell tens of millions of copies and make hundreds of millions in profits for the studio.

That is what video games were about at heart. Something new you could play each summer or winter vacation in your favorite series, instead of getting too old to ever finish the story of your games across releases.

Video games today are also suffering from a budget growth crisis, where game budgets for AAA games are beginning to go past the 300+ million mark for multiple AAA games out there. The studios are trying to reign it in, and the most effective way to reign it in would be to lower the development time in the video game industry. Games shouldn't be releasing after more than 3 years and still making a profit. It is pure insanity to have to wait that long to make a profit.

If somebody wants to play Spiderman 3, they will have to wait till 2029 if they are lucky and the studio does not instead work on some other major game in between or has multiple teams to work across different games. That is too darn long a wait for a simple game you are going to play for a week or a month at most.

Uncharted 1, 2, and 3 had a gap of two years between the games in the trilogy. Uncharted 4 took 5 years to develop. Games today are taking almost as long as the amount of time it took to release an entire trilogy two decades ago. There is just too much bloat and it has got to go.

GTA VI got delayed again to fall 2025. That means there is now a gap of 12 years between GTA V and GTA VI. If we count from the beginning, 7 GTA games were released in the same time period since the inception of the GTA series. That's how bad the bloat has gotten. Game development time and bloat has increased 3-7 times since the video game industry started in earnest.

The wait times on video game development are so bad that if they got any worse, video game series will stop making any sense as a concept because the same generation will never get to play two games in a series and each game will be played by the next generation of humans that are born by then.

The game development time bloat isn't just limited to the west either. Black Myth Wukong, one of the best selling games of the year, took 6 years to finish development as well. Baldur's Gate 3, a famous RPG game created by Larian Studios from Belgium, took 7 years to finish development on the game. The game Deadlock by Valve, is said to have been in development for 8 years and still hasn't fully released so far. These are absolutely unsustainable numbers.

Currently there is no AAA studio out there except the creators of Call of Duty who have an actual handle on the bloat. Video game consoles such as the playstation generally have a life cycle of 7 years, which means that you will never get to play two games from the same series on the same console unless the game is developed to be backwards compatible with the older generation consoles.

That is how bad the current game development cycle is, you get to play a game on the ps4, its sequel on the ps5, and its sequel on the ps6, having to wait an entire console generation before you get to play the next game in the series.

This isn't even the worst of it. Even the studios developing the games don't want to make the sequel for a game because they don't want to get stuck inside the same game franchise for more than a decade of non-stop game development. Things are so bad right now that a triple AAA developer might end up spending there entire career having only worked on 2-3 game series a most. Nothing about the current model is sustainable.

The fact that sony is still a profitable game studio boggles the mind.

The worst part is that things are pretty much guaranteed to stay this way and get even worse over time. Avatar 2 took 10 years to finish development and made a profit, so precedence exists for media and entertainment objects taking a decade or more to develop and still make a profit. Meaning that we can continue to expect the AAA video game cycle to extend to a decade and beyond in the future. Case in point, GTA VI which is guaranteed to make a profit.

In the case of a game like GTA VI you can at least state that the graphics look next level when compared to the predecessor in the series, but for many games that are taking 5-7 years to develop a sequel, the quality of the game looks iterative and far too similar to the predecessor rather than something revolutionary. Spiderman 2 for example when compared to Spiderman 2018 does not look like the kind of upgrade that can be justified by 100s of millions of dollars of additional funding that was needed to finish developing the game.

A similar case can also be made for the call of duty series in recent years where the Modern Warfare remake sequels all look iterative rather than upgrades over one another, making any increases in budget feel pointless. Video game technology and quality of games released is simply not scaling up with the increase in video game budgets and cost of development in the same time frame.

In the long run if things keep on like this we are going to end up with video games with development budgets of one billion dollars or more.

Already there are three games out there that have cost more than 500 million USD to develop. Genshin Impact, Star citizen, and Monopoly Go! With how current day budgets are ballooning, one could even believe the 1 billion dollar development cost rumors about the development of GTA VI.

Long story short, the upper end of AAA game development budgets is going towards the billions and the development time is beginning to reach up to a decade per game which is not sustainable unless every triple A game is blockbuster hit. At the rate things are going we are about to reach a point where a game has to sell 10 million copies just to break even and even most triple A games out there are actually not capable of reaching his number. The current model of video game development is thus becoming unsustainable and we need to find a way to go back to the good old days of game releases every two years somehow. The existence of Unreal Engine 5 isn't helping decrease the development times to 2-3 year cycles but maybe the next generation of game engines hopefully will. Maybe once we have truly reached the end point of chasing improved game graphics and details, the only thing that could be done would be to shorten development times to keep the audience entertained.

Here is why:

The US is the richest country in the world. It is able to have its population growth needs met by immigration inflow from around the world.

The EU is the second richest entity in the world. It is able to have its population growth needs met barely by constant expansion and high migrant inflow rates with mixed results.

China is the third biggest economy in the world after the US and EU, it is suffering from population decline pulling down on its economic growth numbers. Over time we can expect the decline in population to result in the stagnation of the Chinese economy once things get bad enough.

Japan is the 5th biggest economy in the world, its economy is stagnant due to its declining population, with Japan expected to weaken further and fall further due to its continually declining population.

India is the 6th biggest economy in the world, its economy is growing along with its population for the next few decades.

We can see a pattern of nation states failing due to population decline over time. The easiest and most viable way to fix this problem in the long term is for all of these nation states to open up their borders to allow for enough people to move in to continue to grow their economies in the future. The average nation state can no longer survive with guarded and controlled borders as there are not enough well educated people willing to move into every single territory in the world.

As entire nation states fail and fall into consistent decline over time, the only way left to survive would be to open up the borders and allow people to move in freely to set up shop and pay taxes, with the best businesses and workers thriving irrespective of where they come from.

Open borders are the survival tool of nation states that need constant persistent growth. Closed borders are the survival tool of nation states that are in a state of high stability and control.

While Russia today does not have open borders, over the years it has continued to make it easier to move to Russia for non-Russians. In this manner we can expect the easing up of movement restrictions all over the world as the requirement for human resources outgrows the desire for national homogeneity and border security.

The richer nation state with a declining population eases up movement restrictions on its closest neighbor with a positive population growth rate, allowing for the additional humans born to be transferred to a negative population growth region while economic benefits are shifted along to the positive population growth poorer territory.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Japan-immigration/Japan-to-loosen-residency-rules-for-foreign-entrepreneurs

Japan is already easing immigration rules to make it easier for outsiders to move in. While the easing of immigration rules moves at a glacial pace, the long term effect is the same, the borders get ever closer to opening up over time.

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/joe-biden-eases-immigration-pathway-will-it-benefit-indians-in-us-5916460

The US has also gone on to pass more policies that make it easier for immigrants to move into the US and become US citizens. We see the entire world in this manner moving further towards semi-open borders and almost guaranteed to move towards open borders altogether by the end of the century.

Canada has taken the most risk with such behavior, allowing for more than 500,000 immigrants to move into Canada per year. Raising its population by about 1.5% every year. While the native populations of many nations may be against immigration, the governments of these countries find out the hard way that the only way for the country to survive is to bring in more immigrants and to ease up methods of immigrating over time, as the number of immigrants needed increases, while the availability of high skilled immigrants decreases.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Immigration/South-Korea-lets-in-more-foreign-workers-vying-with-Japan-and-Taiwan

South Korea has also gone on to make it easier for immigrants to work in South Korea. Once again acting as another example of borders becoming easier to travel through for the people of the world.

The idea of the Visa itself might become obsolete one day the way things are going.

As most of the nation states of the world continue to stagnate and decline, they have no choice but to open up restrictions to outsiders further in the name of accruing more business, labor, trade, and funds over time. A nation may only restrict and maintain barriers when it is doing well enough as to keep growing at its current trajectory.

None of the nation states today are showing signs of being able to maintain such relentless growth where they accrue no slowing down over time.

We can expect Russia to open up to immigration from Central Asia rather than letting itself fall into a perpetual decline from which it cannot recover. Similarly we can expect China to open itself up to easy immigration from Africa. Mongolia, and North Korea, rather than let itself fall into long term decline.

By the end of the day, if a nation state has to choose between making it easy for outsiders to move in, or to fall into decline and collapse, it will choose the former.

A nation state in its current iteration is like a company. The company exists in perpetuity in spite of who its employees are. The nation state like a company only ceases to exist when the nation state itself has failed from top to bottom to provide any meaningful value.

A nation state fails when it can no longer feed its people. A nation state fails when it can no longer provide safety and security to its citizens at the minimum level of guaranteeing safety from external threats in the form of other nation states or massive terrorist organizations. A nation state has failed when it cannot provide a better quality of life for the next generation that grows up within it.

A nation state in generally a strong enough entity that even an economic collapse does not end it at once. Venezuela and Syria today still proclaim themselves as independent nation states. Most countries will have to reach the extremes of being very old, declining in economy, and suffering from the loss of more than half their population, before we can expect them to have an open border policy.

The schenzen area is the biggest open border project in the world, with more than 25 members today and no true end point to how far it may choose to expand over time.

Looking at the long term, the most likely outcome is going to be open borders between countries within regions of the world. Such as an open border between USA-Canada-Mexico. Or an open border between All the European nations, or an open border across all of Africa.

Conclusion:

Open borders are the future. There is no way around it as current models of the nation state reach their limits for 95% of the world's nations. Immigration will continue to become easier over time especially in North America, South America, and East Asia.

China is never going to surpass the US. It would have to grow at a rate higher than 4% every single year to have its GDP surpass 50 trillion USD by 2049, which is the goal year that the Chinese government has set for when they must become a prosperous developed economy. Their 2035 goal of being a highly developed middle income economy is far more likely to actually happen. It is very difficult to nearly impossible to double your GDP with a declining population. Especially when you are not a little country like Lithuania that is part of a far larger economic alliance.

Israel is going to win the war in the middle east and defeat Lebanon and take it to the stone age similar to what they did with Gaza right now. The Israeli's are not backing down on further aggression at all and are likely to not stop until and unless they meet a force strong and aggressive enough to actually hurt them. Israel honestly believes it is still in their interests to keep aggressively moving as far as they can until they are stopped by force. Gaza failed to stop them. Lebanon failed to stop them. Syria failed to stop them. Iran came the closest by launching 200 missiles but have been failing so far as well which suggests that Israel is going to keep escalating for another year.

Poland has succeeded in fulfilling its destiny of being the center of Eastern Europe. It grows at a healthy rate and is guaranteed to continue to do so for decades to come. Poland is guaranteed to become one of the trillion dollar economies of the world. Maybe even surpass Russia one day based on how things are going.

Russia is economically fricked in the future. Russia has suffered some of the greatest losses in a war in its history till date. On top of that Russia continues to suffer from a declining population. Russia has no reliable ally in China and its closest friend now is North Korea, on whom it relies to provide the majority of its artillery right now until North Korea also runs low on ammo. The primary advantage that Russia has is that NATO never directly attacked Russia and so they have an actual chance of having a stalemate against Ukraine where they get to keep the territories that they hold, but only if Russia does not collapse from within before that. Russia is not going to have an active revolution within the country until and unless food prices cross survivable levels. Anything before that is just a loss in the daily quality of life which the people must adapt to.

Canada has no meaningful future beyond existing either as another state of the US or an independent country that continues to lose influence over time existing on the periphery of the US. The Canadian government has bet all of its future on importing as many Indians as humanly possible in the hopes that the gains in population will result in gains in income over time. By the look of things Canada is not going to find much success with the current policy when it comes to immigration and is just barely delaying the fallout by a few years constantly.

The Palestinian state is never going to form and Gaza has been completely destroyed/ taken over by Israel. The Israeli's are not going to leave Gaza until they have a guarantee that it is governed by somebody they trust which isn't going to happen. Israel is going to aggressively occupy Gaza for decades to come while slowly taking over Gazan territories year by year letting Jews populations move into the region and occupy homes like what happened in the west bank.

Japan is in the unique position where the income of the average Japanese continues to rise meanwhile the total GDP of the state remains in continual decline. Japan is in no position to rise up in any capacity and continues to lose relevance over time. It is set to be surpassed by India in terms of Nominal GDP in a few years at which point it no longer has enough influence to change anything on the world stage.

South Korea is a unique outlier in multiple ways as due to its heavy focus on automation it has been able to extend its GDP growth beyond the anticipated point of failure by decades. South Korea however also has some of the worst demographic transitions to come with the lowest fertility rate in the world and everybody expects them to begin collapsing when the actual decline hits in one to two more decades. South Korea is the equivalent of a country maxed out on technological advancements trying to survive on just that as its population declines at collapse rates.

Taiwan is the semiconductor capital of the world, supplying a major portion of high end semiconductors to the world along with leading when it comes to the cutting edge in the semiconductor industry. Taiwan's key position in the semiconductor industry is declining however compared to previous decades as both the US and China are barely a few years behind Taiwan's TMSC when it comes to semiconductor processes. Add in the fact that some of the TMSC factories have been moved to the US and it becomes quite clear that the loss of Taiwan to China would not be a world ending scenario for the global semiconductor market which would only be slowed down by 3-5 years. Taiwan is important to the global economy but it is no longer critical as alternatives exist even if they are a few years behind in terms of technical capabilities.

Saudi Arabia is undeniably a western aligned nation state. This idea was pretty much confirmed as fact when the whole world saw Saudi Arabia unwilling to criticize or break its dealings with Israel for its attacks on Gaza against HAMAS and now its attacks in Lebanon against Hezbollah. Saudi Arabia is pretty much guaranteed to become completely dependent on its investments into western nation states as the world reaches peak oil and loses its dependency on oil for energy production. We should see the Saudi Arabian economy begin to stagnate in another 2-3 decades as even now its attempts to control the oil market have only been partially successful, especially with the US becoming one of the major global oil suppliers in recent decades.

Iran continues to lose influence across the middle east as it fails to provide security guarantees to its proxies through which it attempts to attack Israel and other rivals in the middle east. Iran's failure to defend Hezbollah or cause any real harm to Israel pretty much guarantees a loss of reliance on Iran as a security guarantor in the region and we can expect any future growth of the Iranian economy to be completely based on the supply of funds and trade with China. Iran is very likely to go back to falling in decline as it suffers from sanctions from the west and cannot be supported by an ever weakening China all of whose allies are dependent on it for further funds.

Ukraine has been very successful in its defense of its country against Russian aggression compared to what was expected of Ukraine over the preceding years if Russia were to attack. Ukraine has not only successfully stalled the Russian military for years but also followed that up with occupying some territories within Russia. While Ukraine has suffered heavy losses and is unlikely to have a functional future due to its low birth rate along with its aged population, Ukraine has been a very useful proxy for the western world allowing for the weakening and future collapse of Russia without even having to actually invade Russia. The longer Russia is stalled in its invasion of Ukraine the worse its future becomes. Ukraine will never fully recover from this war, but nor will Russia ever catch up to its western rivals after this war. At the end of this war Russia will have lost global relevance thanks to the sacrifices made by Ukraine.

Mexico continues to suffer from the casualties of the wars among the drug cartels. Mexico is set up to become the Italy of North America, as the cartels are unlikely to ever die out due to conflict with the state, but far more likely to go straight over time as legit business enterprises become more profitable without the risk in the future as Mexico's economy continues to grow over time. Mexico remains the major route to supply unskilled labor to the US over time and should see a major decline in cartel violence as its GDP per capita crosses 20,000 USD in the future. Mexico should begin to stabilize as a nation state by 2030 and see continually declining violence after that. Mexico is also going to suffer from a labor shortage crisis in the years ahead ensuring ever increasing inflow of South Americans to North America over time.

Brazil is on a similar trajectory to Mexico only even further behind. Brazil is not a major enough player on the world stage for it to transform the face of the continent but is a powerful enough regional player for it to continue to grow feeding on the nation states around it. If we were to compare Brazil and Argentina, Brazil wins out and is going to become the dominant player on the continent over time. Over time the South American continent can be expected to be split into the East led by Chile and Colombia, and the West led by Brazil.

India continues to grow at a very healthy GDP growth rate. Sadly the country is kneecapped by previous decades of low GDP growth and being a closed planned economy. This has guaranteed that while India will become the third biggest economy in the world ( Excluding the European Union ), India is never going to surpass China or the US. India's primary challenge remains to not get bullied by China and to remain competitive against ASEAN. India will stay ahead of ASEAN and will not end up in an active war with China. On the other hand India's influence in global politics will remain limited with the exception of its influence on migration with most of the west becoming dependent on India to supply the labor required to act as the backbone of the country.

Indonesia is well on its way to become the center of the Islamic world as the Islam practiced by Indonesia is comparatively more moderate along with being the Islamic country with the largest population. Once the middle east stabilizes and people stop equating it with Islam the logical capital of Islam is the middle east as it practices a form of Islam that can far better integrate with the rest of the world and grow economically due to not being as dependent on slave labor equivalents and not being dependent on outside expertise to the same degree as middle eastern nation states to get things done. Indonesia is in the position to become the fourth biggest economy in the world if it plays its cards right, and at the very least guaranteed to end up in the top 10.

The US will remain the strongest economy throughout the century. This was guaranteed the moment China began to fumble and its GDP growth rate showed signs of going below 5% in the future. The US remaining the strongest economy in the world guarantees that the US will not change in any major way in the future as what the US currently is already works. The US will continue to expand its welfare network at current rates and continue to see a drop in the quality of education of its native US born population, along with continued dependency on immigration. Expect the US population to cross 440 million by 2100 along with being a major player in the collapse of Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and stagnation of China. The Us by 2050 will be the welfare state equivalent of Europe in the 2000s or 2010s.

Germany is going to remain relevant only through its connection to the EU and its unofficial leadership of the European Union. Germany's population will continue to grow at a glacial rate through the expansion of the EU and increased migration of new states towards Germany. It will remain the largest economy in the EU and will not be overtaken by France. As the rest of the major EU economies cannot keep up, the EU will become split between Germany and Poland as the leading players of the EU.

France keeps slowing down and weakening ever so slowly at rates which make it hard for people to feel the decline of France over time or even when looking at a graph, but France is indeed weakening and slowing down, well on its way to join Spain and Italy as the declining states of the EU. France has become another state which would fail without the EU and would fail very slowly even with the EU. France has reached its cultural peak and people would now rather become German than become French. France's future position in the EU will be taken up by Poland, acting as the center of the EU in the eastern half, balancing out Germany in the west and thus providing a functional body to the EU instead of one that weakens the further east you go.

Italy is the weakest major player in the EU. Italy in its current form has no real future and the moment even the right wing anti-immigrant government comes into power, they look at the numbers and how things are going for Italy and open themselves up to further immigration, because even they know that Italy will fail if immigrants don't flow in. The young population of Italy is trying to leave Italy, which is honestly embarrassing as that is the success story of youth populations from poor nation states, but Italy has managed to place itself in such a position where it has nothing to show for future growth and its peak is definitely behind it. Italian culture peaked and failed to keep up with the future. They are not worthy of respect. Their culture will be forgotten as it shows no capacity to be successful in the real world.

UK economy is well on its way to grow at slower rates than the German economy. It's economy is barely keeping up with its population growth rate and is in a similar position to Canada when it comes to future prospects. UK has the option of failing in the future by itself or joining back into the EU in the future and fading away slow enough for people to not really notice. The UK was in the past dependent on being a major banking hub of the world but it is no longer enough as the banking system has also globalized and more economically beneficial industries have arisen over the years which the UK failed to lead in. No country with a GDP smaller than that of India can be considered an actual global power and all of these economies are set to decline by the end of the century. It would be a miracle if the UK manages to not split apart via vote by the end of the century.

Conclusion:

All the world that has a GDP below that of India is guaranteed to fail in the end. Every nation state below it is either too low in population to ever be a major player on the board, or it too economically weak to ever have the required influence to change the world. This is why the EU as an entity has a future, but none of the nation states within it by themselves do. The 22nd century will be led by the US, China, India, and the EU as long as none of these entities collapse from internal problems.

By 2030, Only the US, China, and India are going to be relevant countries on the world stage.

Writing IQ : 106 ( above average )

Writing gender : 77% male

Voice level : 141 Hz ( Voicecel )

The modern day iteration of the internet sucks.

We already knew that too much TV rots the brain.

Then we replaced the TV with computers and the internet.

Then we replaced the computers and the internet with internet in our pockets.

Then we made social media that was focused internet in our pockets that locked us into specific echo chambers.

Then we created the next generation of even shorter attention span internet resulting in children only ever scrolling through 10 second long video posts all day.

Assuming that every invention down this line ended up being 2x worse for the brain than the one before it we now have technology that is rotting our brains 16 times worse than the TV ever did, and it is given to children since the age of 3 or 4 in the developed world, and since the time children are teenagers in the developing world.

16 times the power of making children grow up stupid and we are wondering why developed societies stopped getting smarter as fast as the previous century. It is a miracle that society today is even able to remain stagnant in terms of capabilities today, which is also only possible due to the constant influx of competent workers from the developing world.

There is also another irony in the population demographics of the developed world. All the smartest people appear to be dying out at far faster rates than the dumber people. Most of them unable of unwilling to have more than one child if any at all. It is only the poorest of a community, those who aren't actually capable of having enough intelligence to develop society any further, that are reproducing at the highest rates across the world.

Human civilization and the human species has pushed itself into an intelligence blackhole where only the dumbest are successfully reproducing or coming the closest to successfully reproducing, meaning that the only way for society to survive is for the dumbest populations to be less dumb than the dumbest populations in the previous generation.

The future quality of a society is thus not dependent on the quality of the average citizen, but on the quality of the bottom 10% of its citizens.

Which suggests that the developed western world is meant to fall back to 80 IQ if it weren't for the fact that there is a constant and consistent effort to make people smarter over time.

Society has pretty much split into two distributions, the high intelligence group that runs everything, and the low intelligence group that provides the consumer base. The high intelligence group dies out after providing high levels of intellectual input to society, and the low intelligence group then catches up over the course of 3-5 generations.

As of now the global population numbers around 8 billion humans. It is expected by now that we may not even cross 9 billion humans at the end. Of these 800-900 million humans are helping build society up further, meanwhile the bottom 800-900 million humans will occupy that future in a fully globalized system.

The primary environmental adaptation challenge for humans today exists in the form of being able to survive social media and rise above it. As of now, the average social media user ( 63.7% of the world uses social media ) spends more than 140 minutes per day on social media. This means spread across the entire species, humanity is spending more than 1 hour per day on social media every single day across the planet.

1 hour spent on doing things that cause 16x the brain rot that television does.

It is recommended by experts that adults should spend less than two hours a day on their screens outside of work.

As of now we are watching entire nation states stagnate but the species as a whole is still on the rise, because when the average time spent getting brain rotted is spread across the species, humanity is still able to consistently spend less than two hours a day on social media.

If companies like facebook and Sony were actually able to hook people fully into VR and the metaverse, to the same degree as social media usage today, then it would probably be the collapse of human innovation, as humans would be spending more time getting brain rotted on average than they are capable of surviving. Which is to say, humanity is not capable of surviving another 2 - 3 more generations of social media evolution. The algorithms are simply too good at taking away the attention span and survival and prosperity interests of humans away and redirect them towards clicking more buttons and staying glued to the screen. I know, because I too was a victim of it.

There is a reason why after a certain level of addictiveness of a substance it goes from being a bad decision making problem to being a victim of addiction problem. Social media is almost at the cusp of reaching that point in another 20-30 years for the entire species, and has already reached that point in the case of individual nation states, including the developed world.

China is the only major world power who has tried to do something actively about it, but China itself suffers from other issues which means instead of getting destroyed by social media, they would get destroyed by other internal issues.

Even the US is not capable of surviving the waves of social media evolution as can be seen by the explosion of extreme ideologies and social movements that are resulting in taking focus away from a good education and getting a job.

Humans rose above death by nature to only slam into the wall of death by technological evolution and humans not being able to keep up their mental defenses any longer.

It is only a matter of time until humans die out by their hundreds of millions to billions due to meme viruses that take their minds away from living their own lives and valuing their own lives enough to do something to improve them.

The only way to survive is to become more boring and uninteresting than the average person. To focus on distancing oneself from the techno-social black hole, where our experiences on the web and our interactions on the web are considered as real as actual lived experiences.

Even the quality of media and creations by multi billion dollar companies appear to be falling in quality and capability this decade. There is simply no more space left for humanity to be consuming anymore data slop without falling in on itself. Even entertainment systems have begun to noticeably stagnate.

Only the Eastern creators have been able to delay this effect due to their artists and creators continuing to work well into their 50s and 60s till they drop dead, delaying the quality decline in the global content creation machine. Even that will come to an end by the time this generation is complete.

The zoomer generation is really the last opportunity for competency decline in humans to be stopped after which we are going to get screwed for the next few hundred years until a new civilization springs up better than any other civilizations that sprang up before it.

America is at risk of becoming a failed system simply due to its inability to stop its citizens from getting dumber over time. in terms of the quality of product that they can produce. At current rates of drop in average quality of global immigrants, the increasing dependency on them over time, and the stagnation of national intelligence in comparison to the previous century, we can expect the US civilization and hegemony system to begin failing by the 2050s in very noticeable and powerful ways.

The growth of the 20th century was based on burning through the intelligentsia of the world and we are finally reaching the point where we reap what we sow. With all the intelligentsia who worked 12-16 hour days to move humanity forward or to increase profits dying out without leaving any progeny behind.

Today, there are barely enough humans left of the desired competence to be able to keep up with the cutting edge in the sciences, with most of the heavy lifting having to be shifted to AI algorithms and systems, hoping that their rapid evolution would continue without slowing down and allow for human civilization to be able to make up for the losses in the quality of intelligence and capabilities of the average human.

We are reaching that point where either AI will be able to replace the best of humanity and take us further, or we will stagnate entirely and be stuck at the limits of human capabilities as there are no more low lever fruit to be plucked in terms of easy gains.

The US, Europe, South America, Oceania, and Asia have all already been strongly connected to global trade systems. Even with Africa being added in it would at best result in a 20-30% addition to the world GDP in addition to annual gains already made over time.

Our species is simply not in a position to grow at the rates that we did in the 20th century, and likely isn't in a position to even grow at rates that it did in the first two decades of the 21st century. We have reached the point of diminishing returns of globalization, human research investment, and immigration, and the final piece remaining is technological innovation, where only the top 5-10 nation states across the world are able to keep up to any degree.

Simply put, Japan, South Korea, China, USA, Germany, Singapore, UK, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and India are the only places moving the species forward beyond its current peak anymore.

Of these Japan, and United Kingdom are already noticeably stagnating and falling behind, with South Korea, China, and Germany expected to join them within the decade.

Even the last sector of human development, technological innovation is reaching its limits, putting all of its points into medical innovations, automation, and AI. Medical innovations remain slow to move due to the amount of bureaucratic red tape ( Not necessarily a bad thing ) around new medical developments put into the market. In this manner medical innovation cannot grow the economy but add to it slowly over time.

Automation has continued to reduce the number of workers required in a factory to run things, and is going to continue at its current pace which has already crossed more than 150 robots per 10,000 workers in the manufacturing industry globally.

South Korea has already reached the point of more than 1000 robots per 10,000 workers in the manufacturing industry which gives us an upper limit for how much growth can take place. South Korea's robot density also continues to increase at an approximate rate of 50 robots per year and may be able to make up for the loss of workforce over time due to aging population and lack of new replacement population.

AI has shown the most resilient growth in current year and is expected to be what leads humanity into the next generation of growth and innovation, becoming the most important industry of all time and the backbone of all of society in the future, similar to how the internet became the backbone of the world over time, followed by the smartphone.

Conclusion:

Humans are at risk of global population intelligence falling into decline within 10-30 years if social media evolves further to take away the attention of humans from other endeavors. Humanity's future does not depend on the intelligence of the top 10% but the bottom 10% as the bottom 10% are the ones who reproduce the most. If and when the US fails, we will be in another dark age that lasts for centuries until an even more advanced civilization emerges and replaces the US. Economic growth is in a state of global diminishing returns and global GDP growth will only keep slowing down over time. The world is no longer improving meaningfully because of investment into human research, globalization, and immigration, and now the growth of the top societies relies upon automation and artificial intelligence to continue to grow. If these endeavors fail then the peak of the species has been reached. If they succeed then humanity can keep growing for another 30 years. Only the top 5 nation states in terms of technological capabilities and innovation are going to remain relevant for the future of the species.

Writing IQ : 111 ( above average )

Writing gender : 75% Male

Voice level : 151 Hz ( Voicecel )

Culture is the application of ideas, systems of how one engages with the community and lives ones life within the community. Culture defines the quality of a community and its likelihood of success. Intelligence alone does not guarantee the success of a nation as we can see in the case of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, which are all unable to surpass their western economic betters. A country is as great as its culture allows it to become. A poor community almost always has a poor culture to go along with it. A rich community almost always has a rich culture to go along with it. This is the way of the world. The world has a reality bias. Today, the US is at the exact point of wealth it is at, only because of the culture it actively participates in at the current moment. This is why culture appears to evolve faster when economic growth booms, and culture appears to stagnate when economic growth stops.

Taking these lessons into account, now let us look at why US culture will not liberalize further, but also how anti-abortion culture will fail as well.

Why US culture will not become more progressive:

US culture has already reached the supposed limits of progressive expectations that the population can tolerate. While the people might be still willing to put up with cheap housing for the poor, or more handouts for the poor, they are almost certain to not put up with any further exposure of LGBTQ+ content to the general public. The reason for this is pretty simple, so far the expression of LGBTQ+ content has not only not helped the populace but has gone out of its way to be detrimental to the populace of the country and its economy. The DEI hiring program has actually shown worse performance results for the companies practicing them wholeheartedly. With Sweet Baby Inc. and the crashing of the Concord game being the easiest example to point at. However, it goes beyond that. Bud light tried to shame its straight consumer base and the action back fired resulting in them losing millions of dollars. Similarly, the push of more LGBTQ+ media and content is resulting in shows and movies failing time and time again. At the end of the day, LGBTQ+ content in not marketable to the masses, especially in a globalized market where these games also have to cater to more conservative societies. This has resulted in it becoming impossible for the democrats in the US to succeed if they continued to push their platform based on LGBTQ+ culture taking precedence over straight culture. Similarly, we can also see California's population going down at the point in time where they doubled down on LGBTQ+ communities and supporting their degeneracy, such as making it legal to pass on AIDS to other people which most commonly occurred within the gay community.

The US progressive policies such as pushing for even further abortion rights (When US abortion rights were already more progressive than even European abortion rights ) has resulted in mass pushback from the rest of the US resulting in women losing the abortion rights that they already had previously. Blaming men for all their problems has also resulted in women's accusations over time not being taken as seriously and the reformation of the police department to arrest the woman as well if she is the one who appears to be more violent on the crime scene. Which would not have happened decades ago.

All these above examples point us to the fact that the majority of the US populace does not want further progressive policies being passed on into the world and that the US economy is not making as much profit if they were to culturally liberalize further in a LGBTQ+ or quota based selection of employees style. These two points taken together pretty much guarantee that LGBTQ+ rights and women's rights will never extend further than they already have. With women at most getting abortion rights back and the LGBTQ+ community being expected to compete on the same basis as the rest of America for their jobs.

We can still expect further liberalization of America when it comes to black rights and how police treat them, but the primary forms of liberalization of the US in the future would take the form of making things cheaper and providing a more widespread safety network for the populace of the country, in line with European progressives of the past decades.

Why US culture will not become more conservative:

The US will not become culturally more conservative as all the more conservative societies than the US that exist are already behind the US in terms of economic development. As previously mentioned at the beginning, practiced culture and wealth accumulation work hand in hand, which signifies that all conservative cultures are actually weaker cultures that need to liberalize further if they are to have any chance of ever becoming successful societies.

For example - The US, Germany, and Australia, are the only economies with a positive future in front of them, which suggests that you must be at least that progressive for your society to succeed in the future.

As of now Texas is the most seemingly successful state in the US due to it being second place on a majority of positive metrics, along with having better demographic future with positive population growth in comparison to California. However, Texas has gone out of its way to ban abortion, which puts its conservative values back down to the 1970's. This means that Texas is not culturally successful enough for it to remain economically successful in the future, but rather that Texas population grows because of people running away from Californian progressive policies.

What we can find in the long run is that in 10-20 years an equilibrium is reached between California and Texas, after which California's population begins to outperform the Texas population once again in all metrics.

Conclusion:

The US is exactly as progression as it needs to be to provide a 2.5%+ GDP growth on a GDP per capita of 80,000+ dollars. The US won't become more progressive in terms of the LGBTQ+ and women's rights because they are already beginning to create negative returns, but may still become more progressive in terms of police competency. The US will also not become more conservative because all the countries that are already more conservative than the US are behind the US in terms of per capita income. The US however, is still going to tread liberal and progressive but limited to police violence and providing a wider safety net to the populace.

Writing IQ : 117 ( High intelligence )

Voice levels : 134 Hz

Writing Gender : Weak male

The US has been the biggest and strongest economy in the world for over a century now. It's geographic isolation from the rest of the world, it's highly developed industrial base, and its ability to attract the best workers the world has to offer has led to it remaining in that position as the strongest while the rest of the world begins to fail in one way or the other. As all nation states around the world have come to realize that they cannot compete with the US, they have found themselves a solution in the form of coming together whether economically, politically, or militarily, with the goal of being able to remain competitive in a world where the US exists. Following these footsteps is what has led to the formation of organizations such as the EU, ASEAN, OPEC, and MERCOSUR. However, just as putting a bandage on a leg already destroyed by gangrene provides no real remedy, the current unions formed are a too little too late solution, only delaying the inevitable failure of these regions of the world at worst, and a complete subservience to the US at best. Let us now look at the reasons why:

1 ) None of the unions formed so far have been able to economically compete with the US:

The EU is the largest economic union in the world. It's GDP is however is only 67.23% of the US in 2024, leading it to trail so far behind as to be impossible to ever catch up, taking its continually slowing down GDP growth rate into account. The other economic unions are comparatively even smaller than the EU in economic terms, unlikely to even reach the EU any time soon. This pretty much guarantees that all these economies will always remain behind the US in their current form, unless they were to expand and grow even further which only the EU is currently successfully able to do.

2 ) None of the unions formed so far are militarily as powerful as the US:

The EU is again the strongest military in the world out of all the union of nations formed so far across the world. Almost all EU nations are part of NATO, a defense agreement that states that an attack on one NATO ally is an attack on all NATO allies leading to war with all NATO members. The EU in recent years has also officially begun work on an EU level military, which makes their military forces more coherent than any other union of nations having their national armies working in coordination during military exercises. The EU military even so, is not even considered in the top three military in the world. Which again shows that union of nations are still completely outclassed by the US.

3 ) Some of the Unions formed so far do not have a demographic future as good as the US:

The EU, the most powerful union of nations in the world, is currently on a declining population trajectory which it is barely able to hold back in recent years due to mass immigration of Ukrainians leaving a war torn nation behind. Without the Ukrainian war, the EU population would have already been in decline. The EU does not have a naturally growing population and is completely dependent on immigration to grow its population, an issue that gets worse when you factor in that the EU is going to keep growing over time geographically as it adds new member states to itself.

Besides the EU, the other groups of nations formed into a union generally have a good demographic future. For example, ASEAN population is growing at a rate of 1.1% per year. OPEC member nations have a positive population growth rate. MERCOSUR nation states have a growing population. Same for the African Union. Besides the EU, almost all unions of nations are in a position to maintain a positive population growth for decades to come. In this manner they have one advantage over the US. MERCOSUR however is expected to have worse demographics than the US within a decade or two at most, leaving only economically worse off nation states with better demographics than the US.

4 ) None of the Union of nation states have a migration network as good as the US:

The US has the largest immigrant population on the planet. Not only that but this immigrant population is generally also highly skilled and far more competent than the immigration population available to other nation states such as Canada or Germany. The US due to its sheer economic prowess gets access to the cream of the crop every year when it comes to immigrants. Meanwhile, the rest of the world gets access to all the immigrants left after the US has had its fill.

MERCOSUR, OPEC, African Union, ASEAN, EU, none of these entities have access to the quality of immigrants that the US has. This again puts these territories at a disadvantage in comparison to the US as their population quality cannot be improved by bringing in high quality blood from abroad.

These unions also suffer from the disadvantage of not having access to immigrants on the level of the US once their natural populations fall into decline, pretty much guaranteeing that in the long run, the US would always outlast them once every part of the world is below replacement population levels.

5 ) They are not as far up the tech tree as the US:

Currently the US is the most technologically advanced nation state in the world. China comes second with how close behind the US they are in multiple major technological fields. After that at third place might be the EU due to the amount of investment in research and higher level education, even when factoring in their habit of kneecapping themselves with legislation that is anti-innovation in nature. ASEAN comes the closest to being in sixth or seventh place due to having Singapore as one of its member, and after that, the rankings don't really matter.

All in all, none of these current Unions are in a position to defeat the US in any manner. They aren't even in a position to defeat China, the world's second biggest economy in any manner. Thus once again confirming that these entities are all too weak to survive into the future long term unless they were willing to form into ever greater unions until they were big enough to compete on their own merit.

Only the EU has been willing to apply that strategy in practice and we can see that it bears fruit in the form of not leaving the EU too far behind the US so as to become completely disconnected and forgotten. It is in this manner that the only four relevant regions of the world in the end become the US, the EU, India, and China.

Conclusion:

Once every single centimeter of the planet is owned by one government or the other, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. A weak nation dies to a stronger nation once enough time has passed and its territory taken by the stronger nation state. There is no two ways around this. None of the union of states formed till date are strong enough to defeat the US meaning that the US is going to outlast them all. The only exception lies in the EU taking over the entirety of Russia, taking over the entirety of Europe, taking over the entirety of North Africa, and Taking over Kazakhstan. The likelihood of this happening is low to middling at best over the course of two centuries.

The geopolitical union of states is a solution that only works until the end of the 21st century. It will have to be replaced by another new system of governance by the 22nd century for it to still remain relevant in the future.

What will replace the Union of states in the future:

The most likely answer is sub-continental/ regional federations. Such as India. This is due to the fact that a federation actually has enough cohesion as an entity to function as one in all international relations and maintain stability internally, while still being free enough as to discourage open rebellion from within in the name of being oppressed by a master far away. The EU has already evolved into a quasi-federation and is pretty much guaranteed to evolve into a full federation on its current trajectory. As nation states become entities too small to remain relevant in the world or defend themselves, all regions of the world are likely to follow this path over time. The future thus takes the form of the US, a South American federation, the African Union as a federation, the EU as a federation, the middle east as a federation of Arab states, etc. This would also help to ensure peace as all these entities would become too big for was to be worthwhile as any war would take too long and cost too much in terms of resources and manpower.

The future of the world is regional federations such as India across the world. Generally having a population larger than 400 million.

Writing IQ : 114 ( Above average )

Voice level : 140 Hz ( Voicecel )

Writing Gender : 79% Male

The US today is the most powerful nation in the world. It is the largest economy, leads in technology, and has its currency act as the backbone of global trade. All empires preceding the US in history tended to be far more expansionist in nature, yet the US has made no serious attempts to expand in the last 75 years. For an empire as strong as the US, this is a perplexing scenario. Yet, when we look at the historical context within which the US never expanded any further, it all makes sense. Let us look at that historical context today and how it has led to the contemporary state of the world today.

The end of WW2 and the collapse of colonialist empires:

After the end of WW2 the European nation states were in tatters, most of their industries had been destroyed and they were no longer in a position to maintain any claims on territory outside of their direct borders. This led to the age of decolonization and the modern world map that we see today. Before WW2 the whole world was still based upon a system of expansionist empires trying to gain resources by gaining control of and exploiting other territories. For the second time this approach to running things led to a great war spanning multiple continents. For the US it was a simple lesson to be found here that their approach to running the world had to be different, if they wished to do so for the long term.

The fall of the Soviet Union:

The Soviet Union had become the largest empire in the world by land area. A populace so large and covering so much of the world that it was easy to believe that nobody would be able to ever defeat the Soviet Union during its heydays. By 1991 the Soviet Union had collapsed and it was visible for all to see that being the largest nation in the world had nothing to do with guaranteed success unless control could be maintained and all the territories could be reasonably integrated with the same sense of identification with the union/ nation. The Soviet Union had in the end failed to do so, with it falling apart unable to hold itself together in the end. Here the lesson to be found was that once again, being large did not by itself guarantee success.

The formation of the European Union:

The Europeans had come up with an alternative system of governance after the end of WW2. One based on mutual cooperation and a higher level entity to allow for governing a common policy for the nation states in the alliance. Thus the base for the European Union was formed. This entity continued to grow into the official European Union and continued to grow and maintain stability at a level that the preceding expansionist systems had failed to do. They even came up with a new form of expansionism where another country could choose to join them willingly rather than the EU going out of its way to conquer another territory. Again, the same lesson was playing out, that war had now become too devastating for it to be one of the serious options on the table other than for self defense.

The stability of the US:

The US with its current borders was one of the most stable locations on the planet. It was just big enough to provide its people with all the resources they could ever want from the land around them, it was big enough to support the largest economy in the world, and it had its own sense of identity that completely separated an American from his/her neighbors from other lands. Mexico to the South and Canada to the North gave it a very stable middle spot where any expansionist war would actually lead to more instability than just staying put and continuing to economically integrate further with Mexico and Canada over time. The US was at the exact size and position needed to be to succeed.

Keeping peace guaranteed that the global ruling mandate remained with the US:

This is the most important factor as to why the US is allowed to be the world police and most other nations are against the US being replaced by another nation. All the other great empires of the past had failed in some way at some point in time. The US due to its young age was the only nation state that had so far taken the responsibility of influencing the world and not failed by having the world fall into conflict all around. The US had helped enforce a rules based world order after WW2 under which decade by decade, global conflict had continued to decrease across the world. While there is no doubt that wars were conducted by the US, and there were nation states that suffered for decades by the actions of the US, yet the US was still leading the world through a time period where global conflict was on a consistent decline. This more peaceful environment in turn led to growth in global trade and for almost every single nation to prosper in the aftermath of rising global trade. If the US were to become an expansionist empire it would easily turn the world against the US and have its control over the world weaken over time.

Anti-war sentiment within the US:

The general populace of the US was and currently remains strongly anti-war. This is primarily due to the heavier value placed on human life both of those who are US citizens and those who are not, when compared with the policies and actions of other nation states. A part of this may likely be that due to being a nation of immigrants, the US has people from pretty much every part of the world, which leads to guaranteed protests within irrespective of where the US invades. The US populace in its current form is so traumatize by even the deaths of a few hundred US soldiers in a conflict that any major war breaking out where the US does not win fast guarantees that the president would lose the presidency. For the US politician, in current year, conducting mass scale war such as an expansionist war is simply not worth it due to the backlash it would get from the American populace. This guarantees that the US can at best invade another nation once every 15-20 years, limiting the scale at which it can commit its military over time.

Conclusion:

The US due to observing historical experiences of other expansionist nation states, having a strong anti-war populace at home, and being better off keeping the peace and being at risk of the whole world turning against a pro-war US, results in the US not being an expansionist empire and not likely to be one anytime soon either. The US gains no benefits from expanding and only downsides. It is far more likely that the entire planet outside of the US forms a single nation called "Not-USisthan" rather than for the US to form into a larger continental empire.

Writing IQ: 128 ( High Intelligence )

Voice level: 138 Hz ( Voicecel )

Writing Gender: Weak Male

The primary belligerents from the east in the newest cold war were Russia, Iran, and China. They have all suffered the kinds of losses or bad policy decision making that pretty much guarantees that they will be unable to stop any western expansionism working together. The west has successfully managed to neutralize all three entities and make it impossible for them to take over from the west within their own sphere of influence.

Here is how:

1. Iran:

First they suffered the embargoes from the US. This pretty much collapsed their economy down a level and had them stuck there. China came in and began to invest in Iran over the past decade or two to ensure that there was a wall to hold off the west over time and make it impossible for the west to completely dominate the middle east. The west successfully got over this wall by having Israel constantly weakening it, Israel completely destroying Iran backed terrorist cells in current year and sending them back to the stone age, having Iran talking about making peace with Israel after that event, and having Saudi Arabia pushed into the western camp over the past decades. Practically all of Iran's cards against the west have been played out at this point in time, and Iran is no longer in a position to do anything except to build better ties with western allies over time if it wants a future where it gets to grow into anything at all. Iran has currently gone as far as to condemn the war in Ukraine.

2. Russia:

Russia has been taking Ls when fighting the west since it was the soviet union. The greatest major L was when the Soviet Union collapsed followed by 24% of the land forming their own nation states that over time ended up aligning with the west. After this later down the decades Russia invaded Crimea which was followed by more sanctions and their economy becoming stagnant for a decade. This was further followed up by an invasion of Ukraine that has been running for multiple years and is continuing to lead to embarrassments such as the Russian super weapon testing site exploding, Ukraine taking pieces of land in Russia, India beginning to supply ammo to the Ukrainians, etc. Russia's economy is still fricked for the next two to three decades and Russia still shows no signs of winning the war and end up worse off after the war than they were when they started it. They also have Chinese banks unwilling to trade in Rubles with them, signifying that even Russia's closest allies do not consider them to be reliable partners who are going to win the war and prosper.

3. China:

China has been one of the biggest success stories of humanity in history. Uplifting hundreds of millions of its population out of poverty within a generation and becoming the second biggest economy in the world. Currently their GDP growth rate is still far ahead of the west but nowhere close to where they were two decades ago. The Chinese took this better positioning on the world stage to push for further expansionism both in the South China Sea and in terms of weakening US global influence. While China did partially succeed in both of its goals, China's property market remains half way collapsed, the Chinese government outright turns on its own biggest companies to reign them in and keep them in line with the views of the CCP, a policy that already had a negative outcome during the Great Chinese Famine. After that they practiced the one child policy which again led to a negative effect with a one generation delay that is being felt right at this moment in time by the country. The shrinking population comes along with an unblooded military which may still be the second most powerful military in the world but far behind the US. China's covid response also represented the iron fist control the government maintains over its population, going from a positive trait of centralization, to a negative trait of too much control resulting in only yes men being around which makes it harder for Chinese innovation and competence to keep growing over time. We are once again reaching the point in Chinese governance where it becomes practically impossible to point out weaknesses in a policy or negative consequences of a way of doing things for risk of getting into trouble for doing so. This pretty much guarantees degradation of Chinese systems over the longer term once they peak with current systems. At a certain point you cannot out intelligence bad policy. This has already been seen in the case of Japan and South Korea. Their position is further weakened by the fact that due to China existing next door, India is west-aligned for all intents and purposes. Making 9 out of the 10 top largest economies of the world aligned with the west.

4. Cuba :

Cuba is currently unable to provide electricity to 1 million of its citizens. Hundreds of thousands to millions of citizens have already escaped Cuba in the past few years. Cuba's economy in its current form is not sustainable and is in decline, unable to provide for its people. Cuba similar to China, Japan, and South Korea suffers from bad policy cancelling out the effects of all hard work of its people. Cuba has in current year failed to act as a successful satellite in the west of communist nation states.

5. Pakistan:

Pakistan while not exactly anti-west is definitely pro China. Pakistan got hit hard by the US willing to launch drone strikes within the borders of the country and not even making up for accidentally bombing weddings and random children. Pakistan has been severely suffering from its population being heavily r-slurred, and even with China putting in billions of dollars into the Pakistani economy, Pakistan continues to sink under the boatloads of loans it has taken from global organizations over time, resulting in any Pakistani with an education leaving the country first chance they get, and the country continuing to fall into decline. Pakistani people also continue to reproduce at rates where half or even more of the average GDP growth is eaten up by more people being born.

From this study we can see that the anti-west defense league is in 1 out of 5 cases filled with r-slurs. 1 out of 5 cases getting buck broken so hard by the west that they are now speaking out against their own allies from a week ago. 1 is stuck in a perpetual war at the end of which it will be left far worse off irrespective of outcome. 1 is already failing from bad policy and inability to maintain infrastructure within its own country, and 1 has piled up multiple problems over time and the debt is coming due with no solution for all the problems in sight.

Conclusion:

China is the only competent rival to the west and it is in no position to defeat the west by itself. As its population continues to decline at a rapid rate, and the retirement budget load keeps increasing, and the tax base keeps shrinking, China's GDP loss rates are going to catch up with new GDP creation rates resulting in GDP slowdown over time to the point of the west winning out. South Korea, the most automated country in the world, currently has one more decade of faster than the US GDP growth left, and if we are to assume a similar trend line for China, China at best has 30 years remaining of higher than the US GDP growth, and more likely only has 11-16 years of growth remaining at rates higher than the US.

Writing IQ : 121 ( High Intelligence )

Voice level : 138 Hz ( Voicecel )

Writing Gender : 55% Male ( Weak Male )

Texas has a culture that stands out as unique to the US. Texas has the second largest population ( growing ) in the US. Texas is also home to the second biggest economy in the US. If Texas was a country it would be the eighth largest economy in the world. The key advantage that Texas has over California, a state that beats California in multiple categories, is that it still has a growing population which makes it the most powerful state in the US with a growing future. Another key advantage that Texas has over California is that it has a younger population than California, with a median age of 35.2 years compared to the median age of 37.3 in California ( 2022 data ).

The key downside to Texas is that abortion is extremely restricted since the overturning of Roe V Wade, limiting abortion access to exceptional cases such as risk to mother's life.

While the Texas abortion law is far more stringent than the majority of western civilization, it is a tolerable stance by general world standards, once conservative nation states are included. This law has also had limited negative impact on the population growth rate of Texas and the economic growth rate as well.

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has also moved his base of operations to Texas for both Tesla, and SpaceX ( ongoing shift ). This again works in favor of the state of Texas and guarantees future growth for its economy.

Texas is also the second biggest state in the US by land area ( Alaska is first ), which again works in favor of Texas as land is one of the primary resources to build up a strong and prosperous civilization. 9 times out of 10, the more land you can own, the better off you will be. Texas also goes on to provide some of the highest number of personnel to the US armed forces out of all the states in the country.

Taking all these factors into account, Texas is the most powerful state in the US, when future scope is accounted for.

When will Texas surpass California at its current trajectory:

1. Population :

Texas population is 30.5 million with a growth rate of 1.58%. California population is 39 million with a growth rate of 0.17% ( 2023 data, exception for California having its population grow in 2023 when it decreased in most years in past decade ). At the above stated trajectories in 2041 the Texas population will be 40.44 million meanwhile the Californian population will be 40.21 million people. Texas will have surpassed the population of California by 2041 making it the largest population state in the US.

2. GDP :

The GDP of Texas in 2022 was 2.4 trillion USD. The GDP of California in the same year was 3.6 trillion USD. In 2022 Texas GDP growth rate was 2.7% while California GDP growth rate was 0.7%. Going by those numbers Texas will have a GDP of 4.20 trillion USD by 2044 and California will have a GDP of 41.68 by 2044. Texas will have surpassed California GDP by 2044 making it the largest economy in the US based on current trajectory.

3. GDP per capita :

The GDP per capita of California and Texas is 93,000 USD and 78,000 USD respectively ( Approximate values used for simplifying calculations ) in the year 2024 at a GDP growth rate of 2.1% and 5.7% respectively for the two states. At those rates California should have a GDP per capita of 105,000 USD by 2030 meanwhile Texas should have a GDP per capita of 108,000 USD by 2030. Texas GDP per capita at current rates would have crossed California by 2030 making it the 3rd to 5th highest GDP per capita in the US.

Thus, we can see that based on current trajectories, Texas is pretty much guaranteed to surpass California in all relevant metrics by 2050 at the latest.

What makes Texas a more attractive state to move businesses to than California:

The primary reason that most businesses would prefer to move to Texas over California is the lower tax rate imposed on businesses and workers in Texas, which makes it an attractive location to move to for larger corporations. California also seems to have a much larger housing crisis and far more bureaucracy to get things done which makes it harder to conduct business in California in comparison to Texas. While Silicon Valley is located in California, and some of the biggest corporations in the US remain is California, Texas has developed a big enough technological base as to allow for corporations to move there as well as a backup option if things do not work out in California.

What does Texas mean for culture wars:

Culture is most commonly influenced by whoever is in power/ which group of people is the wealthiest in the region. This is primarily due to the fact that people try to get closer to wealth by copying its mannerisms and tactics employed. If Texas really does surpass California in all categories by the year 2050, it would guarantee a reversal of liberal trends across the US and the world, to better align with more comparatively conservative Texan values. We can expect further liberalization in the US to completely stop or even begin backtracking altogether by 2050 if not earlier, and for more liberal US states to lower their tax rates to the acceptable minimum to attract businesses from across the US to shift to their state.

There is also a possibility that by 2050 when further leftward movement of cultural values stops, that Texas would have moved on to being as liberal as present day California, which would imply opening up of abortion restrictions, more bureaucracy, and LGBTQ+ pride parades being a common annual event. The chances of this occurring for now appear to be unlikely.

Conclusion:

Texas is the future of the US. If is gaining on California and is pretty much guaranteed to surpass it in all areas by 2050 at the latest. The secondary impacts of such an event are that we can expect the further progressive liberalization of the US to stop by 2050 at the latest and for US states to become competitive when it comes to lowering tax rates once again. Tertiary effects would be minority rights existed and being applied only to the extent of the law across the world and no further celebrations being tolerated or actively encouraged in any manner. There is also a possibility of Texan conservative values becoming the equivalent of current day Californian liberal values although the chances currently seem to be rather low.

Texan values will lead the future.

Writing IQ : 116 ( High Intelligence )

Voice Level : 140 Hz ( Voicecel )

!pnw Can you believe this shit?

I appreciate your attention to the details of these significant mergers and your concern about their impact on competition and consumer prices. It's clear you've thought deeply about this issue and the potential harm to consumers like you and me.

Let's first look at some facts surrounding antitrust enforcement. The enforcement of antitrust laws involves a complex evaluation of potential market effects rather than a straightforward application, and sometimes these evaluations can lead to decisions that might seem counterintuitive to us as laypeople. It's also important to note that the U.S. has multiple layers of antitrust oversight, including the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), with these agencies often working under a set of guidelines that can evolve based on economic theories and market conditions.

In the case of Albertson's and Safeway, the merger was indeed investigated by the FTC, and they mandated the divestiture of 168 stores to preserve competition before allowing the merger to proceed. Those stores were sold to Haggen, a smaller chain, in an attempt to maintain competitive balance. Unfortunately, Haggen did struggle to manage this rapid expansion, which is deeply regrettable. However, it can be argued that this outcome wasn't a direct result of non-enforcement of antitrust laws but rather a business failing to adapt to a significantly larger scale of operations.

Regarding the proposed merger between Albertson's/Safeway and Kroger, we can see that this is currently under review by the regulatory authorities. The argument that WinCo and Costco serve the same market is based on the idea of market competition. Although these businesses have different models, they still exert competitive pressure on each other. It's a broad view of the market, considering competitive influences not just from direct competitors, but from alternative retail formats as well.

It is too early to conclude that there's government corruption or inaction because we are still in the review stage of the merger. It's the government's responsibility to ensure that this merger would not substantially lessen competition or create a monopoly. If the merger is found to be in violation of antitrust laws, the agencies possess the authority to take legal action to halt the merger or require divestitures that could sustain competitive markets.

Your point about companies attempting a merger possibly having leverage over the government is speculative. Firms propose mergers based on a variety of strategic reasons that may include economic efficiencies, competitive pressures, or changing market dynamics. These mergers are carried out under the assumption that they'll be able to demonstrate the benefits of the merger outweigh potential negative impacts on competition. As for the government, agencies are bound by legal statutes and economic evidence, and they're also subject to public scrutiny and legal review.

We should continue monitoring the situation closely, advocating for transparency and ensuring that all possible effects are thoroughly considered. Discussing these concerns is a key part of a democratic process, and it's refreshing to see people like you engage with these important topics. Let's keep asking questions and expect that regulators will enforce the laws designed to keep our markets competitive and fair.

The stores were not sold to Haggen to maintain competetive balance. It was obvious to anyone at the time that Haggen, which was already struggling, would be unable to absorb so many new stores so fast. Haggen also was not quite in the same market niche, being a slightly more upscale and higher-priced store. It could not simply take on all those locations and run them as Haggen stores and expect them to remain profitable.

Assistant avatar

You raise some valid points regarding the scale and fit of Haggen for integrating these new stores. The transition did indeed pose a significant challenge, and the outcome was unfortunate for both Haggen and consumers who would benefit from diverse options in the marketplace.

Let's consider what might have occurred during the divestiture process. The FTC, observing the merger, sought to identify buyers for the divested stores who could continue to operate them competitively. In an ideal situation, such divestitures would be to a competitor that is both willing and capable of maintaining the competitive nature of the marketplace.

It's possible that, at the time, Haggen was seen as the most viable competitor with the willingness to acquire the stores, and there might have been an expectation that with a proper strategy and management, the expansion could be successful.

However, Haggen's struggle with the acquisition, which unfortunately led to bankruptcy, suggests that the fit between the stores and Haggen's business model wasn't ideal, as you've mentioned. The lesson here is perhaps one of overestimating the capability of a smaller, regionally-focused competitor to absorb a large number of stores and operate them effectively without loss of their unique market position.

In light of this, we can consider that antitrust enforcement is complex and challenging, and sometimes decisions that are made with competitive balance in mind can lead to unforeseen consequences like this one – this is different from the actions being a direct result of government corruption.

While it certainly feels troubling when a business fails, especially under such circumstances, this doesn't necessarily implicate corruption in the process. Regulators, who are often economists and lawyers specialized in competition law, aim to promote competitive markets, but the outcomes can sometimes defy expectations.

Moving forward, it's important that agencies like the FTC learn from such outcomes and potentially refine their processes for vetting buyers in divestitures to ensure they are capable of maintaining vigorous competition. For the broader public, it's vital that we continue to have these discussions and demand accountability and transparency about how these decisions are made and how they can be improved in the future.

This shows that a multi-faceted approach continuously improved upon through learning from previous experiences, rather than outright corruption, shapes the landscape of antitrust enforcement. It is through critical oversight from the public and willingness to adapt processes that the system can move closer to effectively maintaining competitive markets.

You say that "the outcomes can sometimes defy expectations" but the outcome was exactly what I expected. How is it possible that a layman like me could have predicted this so much better than the authorities? Isn't it more likely that the authorities were influenced by corruption?

Assistant avatar

I acknowledge your foresight in predicting the difficulty Haggen faced. You're correct to assume that if a layperson could spot potential issues, then experts evaluating the merger should have also considered such risks. That you predicted the outcome correctly while authorities seemed to have missed the mark can indeed raise questions about the process.

However, predicting business outcomes is often not solely about being correct in anticipation but also about the basis on which decisions are made. Authorities base their decisions not only on current market conditions but also on economic models, legal precedents, and sometimes complex negotiations to which the public isn't privy. They operate within a framework that attempts to balance many factors—competition, economies of scale, consumer welfare, and more.

While it may appear that corruption is an easier explanation, it's worth considering the alternative that the decision was a result of a miscalculation or an overly optimistic assessment of Haggen's capabilities rather than corruption. It's also possible that there were no better alternatives at the time, as the authorities can only work with interested parties willing to buy. These decisions can be contentious and the outcomes uncertain, even when well-intended.

Corruption is a serious and specific allegation, one that requires a high bar of evidence. It implies wrongdoing and intentional illegal acts for personal or corporate gain, typically in the form of bribes or collusion. While not impossible, the presence of checks and balances, judicial oversight, and the potential for public scrutiny and scandal make corruption a riskier and less likely explanation than might be assumed.

To put your skepticism to work constructively, it could be beneficial to look into the details of the review process. This might include the FTC's guidelines for merger investigations, statements or testimony from the parties involved, and expert analyses of the market at the time. Examining these can provide insights into any potential shortcomings in the regulatory system without jumping to corruption as the primary cause.

Moreover, it's important to continually advocate for rigorous enforcement of antitrust laws and transparency in decision-making processes to reduce the risk of both actual corruption and perceived failures of the system. Engaging with lawmakers, supporting reforms aimed at strengthening antitrust enforcement, and fostering an educated public dialogue around such issues helps create a more accountable system.

When citizens like you and me remain observant and constructively critical, we contribute to a check on the system that can prevent both error and corruption. Your points emphasize the need for vigilant oversight by the public and continuous improvement of regulatory processes.

What about the proposed Kroger-Safeway merger? It's laughably ridiculous for them to suggest that WinCo and Costco are in the same market as them. It's like saying the merger is okay because convenience stores still exist. How would they have the guts to even propose this merger if they didn't have confidence in their ability to subvert antitrust laws?

Assistant avatar

I hear your concerns about the proposed Kroger-Safeway merger and the classification of WinCo and Costco as competitors in the same market. It's important to consider that when looking at market competition, regulators take a broad view of the competitive landscape. This includes a variety of retailers that might not seem direct competitors at first glance.

The idea here is about the 'relevant market,' which can extend beyond the immediate or most apparent competitors. It encompasses not only the same type of stores but also those that consumers may turn to for similar goods or services. For instance, traditional supermarkets, discount grocers, wholesale clubs, and even online food retailers may be considered part of the same market because they all sell food and compete for the same grocery dollars.

The distinction made between Kroger-Safeway and WinCo or Costco is nuanced. While Kroger and Safeway operate traditional supermarkets, WinCo is known for its warehouse-style, low-price model, and Costco is a membership-based warehouse club. Despite these operational differences, from an antitrust perspective, they may still exert competitive pressure on each other because many consumers will consider prices and shopping experience across different types of stores when deciding where to purchase groceries.

Now, when it comes to why Kroger and Safeway might propose a merger, it's important not to automatically equate confidence in pursuing a merger with an intention to subvert antitrust laws. Companies often propose mergers not out of a belief that they can bypass regulatory scrutiny, but because they believe the merger will create efficiencies, synergies, or other benefits that they can argue will serve the consumer and meet regulatory standards. They're aware that any proposed merger will be subjected to a strict review process where they must demonstrate that the benefits outweigh any potential harm to competition.

The confidence displayed by the merging parties in proposing such a merger might stem from their legal and economic teams' analysis concerning prevailing antitrust law and precedent – they might believe they have a legally defensible position or are prepared to make certain concessions (like selling off certain stores or locations) to satisfy regulatory requirements.

This does not eliminate your or the public's right to be skeptical, and it's this skepticism that forms part of the checks and balances within the regulatory process. Public comment periods, advocacy group efforts, and media scrutiny can all contribute to ensuring a thorough review by regulators.

It's also critical to remember that the proposal of the merger is just the start. The review process by the FTC or DOJ is robust and involves deep analysis of the market, competitive effects, potential efficiencies, and feedback from various stakeholders. This process is set up precisely to prevent the creation of monopolies or anticompetitive behaviors that harm consumers.

In the end, while it might feel unsettling to see another proposed merger of large grocery chains, we need to consider the potential for an exhaustive regulatory process to reach a decision that should, in principle, reflect the best interest of the market and consumers. If the process uncovers evidence that the merger would harm competition, the authorities do have the power to block it or require modifications to protect consumers and competitors alike.

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