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If you think the US has a debt problem, the Eurozone is much worse. At least America has economic growth along with debt growth. The EU has slightly less debt

If you think the US has a debt problem, the Eurozone is much worse. At least America has economic growth along with debt growth. The EU has slightly less debt but zero economic growth and almost zero population growth (and negative organic population growth). Africa's GDP is tiny and will not a serious contender for any sort of reserve currency status for many decades. I can't imagine a wave of automation will do anything positive for most of Africa.

toomuchtodo 1y ago
Growth is over globally except India and Africa due to demographics [1]. Developed countries and unions will compete for the last of the world’s young, prime age workers over the next century. Financial stability will be a function of who manages this situation to the best of their circumstances. Can you attract and retain these workers and leverage that for economic success? If so, that’s where investment will flow and capital will remain invested. My thesis is Europe is best positioned to succeed in the near term, based on the above. Sibling comment mentions Europe needs the US for energy; Canada has known fossil gas reserves of ~200 years and LNG export capabilities, and Europe is scheduled to end Russian fossil gas consumption in 2027 [2]. The world is deploying 1GW of solar every 15 hours; like the rest of the world, everyone will arrive at energy independence/sovereignty eventually through cheap renewables (solar primarily, but also wind) and battery storage (LFP and sodium most likely, as of this comment) exported by China to the world. China is also selling inexpensive EVs to as many global consumers as they can find (while internal sales of battery electric and hybrids is already at ~50% this year). This leads me to believe the future of US oil and gas is an internal petrostate similar to Russia, not an energy exporter of relevance far into the future. [1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43506589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43506589 (not investing advice)
- nostromo 1y ago
  Having billions of low-skill "prime age workers" is not a good thing in the AI era. Africa's population surge is a liability as much as it is a benefit, especially considering they already have to import a large portion of their food supplies. Africa is 20% of world population but just 2% of world GDP... Maybe they will turn into China at some point, but I wouldn't bet on it yet.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    AI era remains to be proven to not be bullshit. If it turns on to be something of value and not pets.com and webvan 2.0, prime age workers should be provided training and hiring pipelines for jobs AI cannot do: healthcare, construction, infrastructure, housing, agriculture scaling, etc. Knowledge/white collar jobs are most at risk with LLMs, not work building society up and operating it in the physical world.
    - nostromo 1y ago
      People are turning melted rocks into thinking machines and general purpose robots and you're like "it's all basically pets.com." It's hard to take your point of view seriously after that honestly.
      - toomuchtodo 1y ago
        If you think an LLM is a thinking machine, I don’t know what to tell you. They are great at predicting tokens, but there is no evidence they are thinking in the human sense. They rely on patterns and probabilities, not understanding. Powerful search engines, certainly, but there is much work ahead to see how hard the limits being bumped up against are. https://direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/doi/10.1162/opmi_a_00160/124234/The-Limitations-of-Large-Language-Models-for https://direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/doi/10.1162/opmi_a_00160... https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202408/can-llms-think-like-us https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202... From the piece (which I agree with): > As someone that has sold a bunch of LLM enabled software over the past 6 months, I don’t really buy the AI capex turning into huge productivity gains. Everything to date are just chatbots with RAG and API calls. None of them are going to do my laundry or file my taxes.
        fragmede 1y ago
        Without getting hung up on the definition of the word "think", the fact that anyone can feed an LLM a couple of bullet points and generate a pile of convincing sounding marketing copy, is worth something if you're to someone. We can disagree on exactly how much and to whom, but if you're not willing to see that as fact then there's no common ground to base a conversation on.
declan_roberts 1y ago
Even Europe has huge parts of their economy backed by the USA. NATO funding, drug R&D and subsidized pricing, even sovereign wealth funds are invested in the USA. Their only energy option outside of the USA is Russia. Postwar Europe as we know it does not exist without the USA.
Havoc 1y ago
> If you think the US has a debt problem, the Eurozone is much worse. Not sure I’d agree. Eurozone debt to gdp is around 90 while us is above 120 Specific countries are in trouble (France and Greece mainly) but overall position is somewhat respectable

toomuchtodo 1y ago

Growth is over globally except India and Africa due to demographics [1]. Developed countries and unions will compete for the last of the world’s young, prime age workers over the next century. Financial stability will be a function of who manages this situation to the best of their circumstances. Can you attract and retain these workers and leverage that for economic success? If so, that’s where investment will flow and capital will remain invested. My thesis is Europe is best positioned to succeed in the near term, based on the above. Sibling comment mentions Europe needs the US for energy; Canada has known fossil gas reserves of ~200 years and LNG export capabilities, and Europe is scheduled to end Russian fossil gas consumption in 2027 [2]. The world is deploying 1GW of solar every 15 hours; like the rest of the world, everyone will arrive at energy independence/sovereignty eventually through cheap renewables (solar primarily, but also wind) and battery storage (LFP and sodium most likely, as of this comment) exported by China to the world. China is also selling inexpensive EVs to as many global consumers as they can find (while internal sales of battery electric and hybrids is already at ~50% this year). This leads me to believe the future of US oil and gas is an internal petrostate similar to Russia, not an energy exporter of relevance far into the future. [1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43506589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43506589 (not investing advice)

nostromo 1y ago
Having billions of low-skill "prime age workers" is not a good thing in the AI era. Africa's population surge is a liability as much as it is a benefit, especially considering they already have to import a large portion of their food supplies. Africa is 20% of world population but just 2% of world GDP... Maybe they will turn into China at some point, but I wouldn't bet on it yet.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  AI era remains to be proven to not be bullshit. If it turns on to be something of value and not pets.com and webvan 2.0, prime age workers should be provided training and hiring pipelines for jobs AI cannot do: healthcare, construction, infrastructure, housing, agriculture scaling, etc. Knowledge/white collar jobs are most at risk with LLMs, not work building society up and operating it in the physical world.
  - nostromo 1y ago
    People are turning melted rocks into thinking machines and general purpose robots and you're like "it's all basically pets.com." It's hard to take your point of view seriously after that honestly.
    - toomuchtodo 1y ago
      If you think an LLM is a thinking machine, I don’t know what to tell you. They are great at predicting tokens, but there is no evidence they are thinking in the human sense. They rely on patterns and probabilities, not understanding. Powerful search engines, certainly, but there is much work ahead to see how hard the limits being bumped up against are. https://direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/doi/10.1162/opmi_a_00160/124234/The-Limitations-of-Large-Language-Models-for https://direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/doi/10.1162/opmi_a_00160... https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202408/can-llms-think-like-us https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202... From the piece (which I agree with): > As someone that has sold a bunch of LLM enabled software over the past 6 months, I don’t really buy the AI capex turning into huge productivity gains. Everything to date are just chatbots with RAG and API calls. None of them are going to do my laundry or file my taxes.
      - fragmede 1y ago
        Without getting hung up on the definition of the word "think", the fact that anyone can feed an LLM a couple of bullet points and generate a pile of convincing sounding marketing copy, is worth something if you're to someone. We can disagree on exactly how much and to whom, but if you're not willing to see that as fact then there's no common ground to base a conversation on.

declan_roberts 1y ago

Even Europe has huge parts of their economy backed by the USA. NATO funding, drug R&D and subsidized pricing, even sovereign wealth funds are invested in the USA. Their only energy option outside of the USA is Russia. Postwar Europe as we know it does not exist without the USA.

Havoc 1y ago

> If you think the US has a debt problem, the Eurozone is much worse. Not sure I’d agree. Eurozone debt to gdp is around 90 while us is above 120 Specific countries are in trouble (France and Greece mainly) but overall position is somewhat respectable