Incomes are dramatically higher in the US than in Japan. Their economy has imploded so badly due to debt + currency destruction that they're now just barely above Lithuania (which has come a long ways of course) on economic output per capita.
Japan is no longer a primary economic power and their (perpetually falling) purchasing power + incomes represent that.
US GDP per capita is estimated at $92,000 for 2026. Norway is $96,000 for comparison. 340 million people vs one of the world's richest nations at 5 million people. The UK is $60k, and Japan is a mere $36k.
Read that again. US GDP per capita will soon be 3x that of Japan.
Doing a direct comparison of healthcare costs is silly accordingly. At a minimum you need to 2x to account for the drastically higher US incomes vs Japan, and at least 50% higher vs the UK.
I don't agree with your framing but let's accept it for the sake of this conversation.
The UK and Japan are not the only countries with more efficient healthcare systems than the US. We can look at a variety of countries, some of which have a higher GDP per capita than the US.
If we look at a graph of 'healthcare spending per capita' by 'GDP per capita' [1], we can see that the US is a massive outlier spending ~2x countries with comparable GDP per capita.
In fact, the US has a higher healthcare spending per capita than every other OECD country. By a large margin.
Japan is also way thingger than America, which the article points out:
> The US spends ~$14,570 per person on healthcare. Japan spends ~$5,790 and has the highest life expectancy in the OECD. That gap is roughly $3 trillion per year.
Need to have people go in for checkups and get shamed for unhealthy habits, not really a money question.
Japan's economy imploded because it was doing better than the US and Japanese were buying big American names like Rockefeller Center, so the US forced Japan to destroy their currency, which popped the Asian miracle.
No it won't, that's merely fantasy projection (a personal desire for the US to suffer for what it's doing). US hegemony ended with the rise of China's economy into superpower status over the past 10-15 years. There was no scenario where the relatively brief US hegemony from the late 1980s to the late 2000s was going to continue no matter what the US did. China was always going to build a military to match its economic might. That military will gradually project globally.
US hegemony lasted for a mere ~20 years. Today it does not possess hegemony, China is able to stand-off fully with the US both economically and militarily (at least in Asia).
Iran is a regional conflict. It will matter less than the Iraq war and occupation did.
Maybe. But the Iran conflict also ties in with the Ukraine war, which is an assertion of Russian power into that US-Europe/China duopoly. And it's happening at the same time as the former alliance is breaking.
It's possible that it will be a regional conflict the way the Serbian/Austro-Hungarian conflict was regional. Or the way people pretended that the Germany/Sudetenland conflict was regional.
I don't wish to catastophize. But I also think it's important to realize that this does have the potential to become much worse very suddenly. That doesn't make the decisions easy, but they shouldn't be easy.
Nonsense. China remains unable to project power much beyond the first island chain. They're building fast and that will change in a few years but as of today their conventional military capabilities remain very limited and defensive. When was the last time a Chinese carrier strike group deployed to the Middle East?
There has never been any such thing as "total" hegemony, so that's a strawman argument. The US doesn't get much oil from the Strait of Hormuz and so while starting another war with Iran was a stupid move, the consequences are largely someone else's problem. I agree that depending on other countries for strategically critical manufacturing was a bad move. Fortunately that's now being rectified but it will take some time.
China's attempts at hegemony have largely consisted of making loans on bad terms to corrupt developing countries and then trying to foreclose when they don't pay. This has not worked.
> Is there an active, bloody conflict occurring due to any of those
The Congolese Civil War and the ongoing M23/Rwanda-led War [0], as well as the Myanmar Civil War [1]. Even the Russian Invasion of Ukraine has a critical minerals component [2] as does the ongoing Central African Republic Civil War [3][4] and the Oromo insurgency within the Ethiopian Civil War [5].
This does not mean that we shouldn't invest in building renewable and battery capacity (we in fact need to further enhance capacity), but we need to recognize that hard power trumps soft power in a multipolar world.
Renewable power doesn't imply pacifism. It is powered by critical minerals that all regional powers are rushing to control either with ballots [6], bribes [7], or bullets.
Renewable power will be covered in blood, but less blood than will be caused by anthropogenic climate change. If we need to make deals with devils, so be it. Such is life.
It's extremely common for people to be unable to project into the future when there is a bias in the way. Anytime you see a blatant failure to look beyond the tip of their nose by a person, it's almost always due to their own biases getting in the way (ie it's irrationality, they're giving up reason in exchange for not having to challenge their own position/s).
The other side of that irrationality coin is 2D extrapolation: a thing happened (or a context is such N), so therefore I shall extrapolate it happening again (once or many times) into the future on a smooth line, so as to fit my bias.
There will be continued hyperscale AI in the datacenter for some use cases, and AI in the smartphone (or PC) for other use cases. It is guaranteed to split that way. Apple's remarkable capabilities around custom chips will enable it to continue to stay out in front in smartphones.
Your response is over the top. Oracle isn't going to fire 30,000 employees to fund anything.
That's the story for Wall Street. Oracle went on a huge run in the market, that it did not deserve, and they're going to attempt to hold on to as much of that gain as they can. Wall Street will applaud slashing jobs if you can give them a good reason for it (and sometimes with no reason at all).
Amazon, Meta, Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google are producing $700+ billion per year in op income. They have nothing else to spend it on. They will continue to fund a gigantic AI build out.
It does end well eventually, just as the dotcom era build-out ended well over the following decades. It ends with continued US dominance. Yes, the dotcom era saw a crash. The build out continued.
Browsers? The US won.
Ecommerce? The US and China won.
Search? The US won. China didn't win the search war, Baidu was supposed to be a serious global challenger to Google, that was widely hailed across tech circles as a known fact - it was inevitable. Nope. Google won. And Europe never did field a competitor at all.
China didn't win the smartphone war. Apple and Google won globally. Apple has produced trillions of dollars in profit on the back of that fact.
Cloud? China didn't even come close globally. The US won without any challenge at all. Europe never showed up. But but but Hetzner.
China didn't win the GPU war. Nvidia has the market, at least for this decade. That will produce over one trillion dollars in profit in just the next five or six years.
China didn't win the AI war. It was OpenAI's ChatGPT that shocked the world and set everything in motion. Now the US has the top three models in GPT, Gemini and Claude. Europe? Not even in the running (although they'd like to believe they are).
This all ends with the US remaining on top, with China as its only real peer.
Europe? There is no Europe in the equation, just as there wasn't for cloud or mobile apps or smartphones or personal computing.
The death merchants need a new enemy to justify their existence otherwise we might start cooperating with China where both countries could prosper with massive clean energy infrastructure.
These days Nvidia has more money than it knows what to do with. They could certainly push $5b+ into each company annually and never miss it. They're tracking toward an astounding $200b in operating income (maybe over the next four quarters if the music doesn't suddenly stop).
Why would paying dividends not be like throwing money away for Nvidia, considering the alternative is to reinvest it into Nvidia's R&D, hiring & training, etc. Investors are already happily making money on NVDA stock appreciation, so what more would they gain from paying dividends?
It did not raise $110 billion. According to their own SEC filings $35 billion of Amazon’s funding is contingent on “(i) OpenAI meeting specified milestones, and (ii) OpenAI directly or indirectly consummating an initial public offering or direct listing of equity securities in the United States”
> I can hardly believe that this is legal. They’re basically committing money that doesn’t exist just yet.
What do you mean "just yet" :-)
I don't really know how likely it is that the money being committed will actually exist when the time comes (Softbank's commitment didn't exist, they had to sell off assets and rope in other investors to meet their commitments).
Maybe it is very likely to exist, but, really, who knows?
IOW, your statement would be equally true by ending the sentence at the word "exist".
Vault cash are actual bills in vaults. It doesn't even include the bills in your wallet or under your mattress.
It's small because few people go to the bank to withdraw a suitcase of $100 bills, it's a weird time series to pull up because it's not really indicative of anything outside of narrow interests for regulators and the mint - it's probably some conspiracy theory trope from crypto bros or something.
Most money exists purely in electronic form these days.
Monetary base [0] which includes the digital money banks have on deposit at the Fed, is over $5 trillion, and even that is tiny compared to M1 [1] which includes the kinds of things backing your money market account, which is around $19T.
When money is invested, they're going to wire it, not pull up with wheelbarrows full of bills.
GP is wrong though, vault cash is the incorrect time series for that.
GP should have used Monetary Base if they wanted to consider purely electronic cash (that is not a result of any fractional reserve stuff at all), which is over $5T disproving their point.
That's what I was referring to. They're committing money they don't have in any monetary form at all. They're just promising they'll have it when it comes due. This is kind of like MLM.
You say that like the typical 18 year old has any idea what they're doing when it comes to proper encryption and communication safety. That is never going to be the case.
It's a communication channel attached to the most popular social network for young people. Obviously they're going to use it a lot. They use it for the extreme convenience.
Nobody was desperate to invade North Korea prior to their acquisition of nukes. It's a horrific war field and combat prospect. Iraq and Afghanistan were each a cakewalk next to going into North Korea (again). North Korea was safe as they were.
The primary threat to Gaddafi over time was internal, nukes would not have protected him. What was he going to do, nuke his own territory? The same was true for Assad.
The primary threat to Iran's regime is internal. Nobody is invading Iran. It's a gigantic country with 93 million people. It can't be done and it's universally understood. Trump won't even speculate about it, even he knows it can't be done. What would nukes do to protect Iran's regime? Are they going to nuke their own people? Are they going to nuke Israel and US bases if the US bombs them?
So let me get this straight: the US bombs Iran, Iran nukes Israel and some US bases, maybe even a regional foe - then Iran gets obliterated.
That's not what would happen in reality at all. Don't take my word for it, ask Pakistan: the US threatened to bomb them [0] - despite their possession of nukes - after 9/11 if they didn't cooperate. Why would the US do that? Because the US knows that MAD doesn't work like the online armchair crowd thinks it does.
"The primary threat to Gaddafi over time was internal, nukes would not have protected him. What was he going to do, nuke his own territory? The same was true for Assad."
Have you checked, how many outside interventions both countries had and still have?
Labelling this as "internal" is pretty missleading. If both dictators would have had nuclear weapons ready to launch, no foreign bomber would have dared going in against the regime.
> That's not what would happen in reality at all. Don't take my word for it, ask Pakistan: the US threatened to bomb them [0] - despite their possession of nukes - after 9/11 if they didn't cooperate. Why would the US do that? Because the US knows that MAD doesn't work like the online armchair crowd thinks it does.
That isn't a MAD situation.
Pakistan has nukes but they can't launch them on the US.
Japan is no longer a primary economic power and their (perpetually falling) purchasing power + incomes represent that.
US GDP per capita is estimated at $92,000 for 2026. Norway is $96,000 for comparison. 340 million people vs one of the world's richest nations at 5 million people. The UK is $60k, and Japan is a mere $36k.
Read that again. US GDP per capita will soon be 3x that of Japan.
Doing a direct comparison of healthcare costs is silly accordingly. At a minimum you need to 2x to account for the drastically higher US incomes vs Japan, and at least 50% higher vs the UK.
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