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I don't think it would offend, Americans are the first to bemoan what happened to Detroit as far as I have seen. What will probably offend more is the fact that

I don't think it would offend, Americans are the first to bemoan what happened to Detroit as far as I have seen. What will probably offend more is the fact that the USA is not really in decline, as much as that has long been the highbrow narrative. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=CN-US-1W https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=AU-US-1W-CN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... It has lost ground in some industries, it has also invested and pioneered in high tech design and manufacturing, aerospace, computers, software, internet, etc. which has kept it strong. And I know GDP doesn't give you much picture, but it gives you something. Australia is doing well too as a coal/LNG depot and iron ore mine for China, after giving up their manufacturing industry and any pretense at technology. The "Education" export sector has looked good on paper, but the penny is beginning to drop that universities have been allowed to be hollowed out and turned into degree mills chasing short-term profit like some wall street quarterly results whore, and when there is very little investment in science and technology in the country, "higher education" can never be at the forefront. I guess that's good, the world will "always" need iron ore, bauxite, uranium, and coal/gas (until it doesn't). But when it runs out or stops being bought, are we going to be any better off than the Saudi post-oil? Australia has so little of its own capability that if something serious happened to our maritime trade (I'm not talking about the tiny blip in the Persian Gulf just now, but a serious conflict involving real players), they would all starve to death in the dark, surrounded by vast fields of food and energy. America has its problems, but it always has something on the go there. There's an energy in the air over there. Like China. People are determined to do something, reminds me of stories of the Australia that died before I was born. Australians aspire to work in a mine or in a worthless government bureaucrat jobs they can't get fired from, and accumulate rental properties. "But it's so 'laid back'", "but we don't have gun crime", "we have government healthcare" does not mean the road it is going down is not a dead end.

dyauspitr 6mo ago
> they would all starve to death in the dark, surrounded by vast fields of food and energy. What does this mean? That Australia is self-sufficient in food and energy but exports all of it or does it mean Australia is incapable of processing the raw materials into finished goods?
- marcus_holmes 6mo ago
  yeah, basically. We export iron ore and import cars. If the global trade system shut down we'd be sat on a huge pile of ore with absolutely no way of turning it into anything useful. It's similar with food: our Wheatbelt produces vast amounts of wheat. Which is great but kinda useless without global trade; we can't turn all that wheat into actual food ourselves.
- stinkbeetle 6mo ago
  Australia does not have the ability to manufacture enough fuel or fertilizer to feed or harvest or transport its crops and livestock or dig minerals and fossil fuels out of the ground. Is also incapable of making any of the machinery to do any of those things either. All of it has to come on boats. Australia ships thermal and coking coal and iron ore and bauxite and uranium and lithium to China, Japan, Korea, and buys cars and steel and batteries and machinery back from them. It's not high-tech, smart, forward looking. It extremely extremely lucky (cursed by its luck, really) to have the natural non-renewable resources that it does, and it is hell-bent on squandering them all as fast as possible and having nothing to show for it by the end of it.
decimalenough 6mo ago
While I agree with your overall assessment of the Australia economy... > But when it runs out or stops being bought, are we going to be any better off than the Saudi post-oil? "It" is not going to run out in the foreseeable future. Australia is unimaginably huge and has deposits of pretty much everything somewhere. The state of Western Australia alone has 29% of the world's known iron ore, more than any other entire country (Brazil is #2 with 19%) and more than Russia and China combined.
- marcus_holmes 6mo ago
  Yeah but when they automate all the mining jobs away and the existing policy of bribing our politicians to not tax them gets to its logical conclusion, what's the point? We're just throwing away irreplaceable natural resources.
- stinkbeetle 6mo ago
  It really isn't hard to "foresee" 50-100 years into the future, and that's when iron ore could run out. Could even be sooner if production increases significantly.

dyauspitr 6mo ago

> they would all starve to death in the dark, surrounded by vast fields of food and energy. What does this mean? That Australia is self-sufficient in food and energy but exports all of it or does it mean Australia is incapable of processing the raw materials into finished goods?

marcus_holmes 6mo ago
yeah, basically. We export iron ore and import cars. If the global trade system shut down we'd be sat on a huge pile of ore with absolutely no way of turning it into anything useful. It's similar with food: our Wheatbelt produces vast amounts of wheat. Which is great but kinda useless without global trade; we can't turn all that wheat into actual food ourselves.
stinkbeetle 6mo ago
Australia does not have the ability to manufacture enough fuel or fertilizer to feed or harvest or transport its crops and livestock or dig minerals and fossil fuels out of the ground. Is also incapable of making any of the machinery to do any of those things either. All of it has to come on boats. Australia ships thermal and coking coal and iron ore and bauxite and uranium and lithium to China, Japan, Korea, and buys cars and steel and batteries and machinery back from them. It's not high-tech, smart, forward looking. It extremely extremely lucky (cursed by its luck, really) to have the natural non-renewable resources that it does, and it is hell-bent on squandering them all as fast as possible and having nothing to show for it by the end of it.

decimalenough 6mo ago

While I agree with your overall assessment of the Australia economy... > But when it runs out or stops being bought, are we going to be any better off than the Saudi post-oil? "It" is not going to run out in the foreseeable future. Australia is unimaginably huge and has deposits of pretty much everything somewhere. The state of Western Australia alone has 29% of the world's known iron ore, more than any other entire country (Brazil is #2 with 19%) and more than Russia and China combined.

marcus_holmes 6mo ago
Yeah but when they automate all the mining jobs away and the existing policy of bribing our politicians to not tax them gets to its logical conclusion, what's the point? We're just throwing away irreplaceable natural resources.
stinkbeetle 6mo ago
It really isn't hard to "foresee" 50-100 years into the future, and that's when iron ore could run out. Could even be sooner if production increases significantly.