@destraht Yeah I hear what you're saying. I've no inclination to go by Afghanistan in the immediate future. It was just a good demonstration of this guy's energy around potentially hostile situations. I'm sure a lot happens off camera for him where his demeanour might change quite dramatically if needed. Also, this guy was apparently locked up in Serbia. I'm watching that video now though so I don't know the details.

Essentially, he's an adventurer pushing boundaries. He's pushed his own boundaries to some extreme degrees which is awesome to watch. Though I know that my boundaries to start with be a lot closer to home and more limited in scope, I see it as I've got the next decade under my belt to go out and find those boundaries, then the next and the next and so on.

But look, I appreciate when you recommend having a base in Tiraspol but my current frame of reference places that somewhere in the Western sphere of interest. Peripherally even perhaps. You explained before at length on the geopolitics of the place and I understand it's enough kilometres from this and that to give it the neutrality it needs. Y'know what I want and need as an essential though, and that is to wake up on a decade or more of mornings and have absolutely no concern about the West because it's the other side of the planet. It needs to be that far away from me for a time. You're probably mentioning it out of your own wisened experience from eventually arriving at a base, but that's something I need to arrive at for myself all the same.

@Antelope It's good, but I highly recommend that you start out lighter than that. There is a learning curve to everything that you'll do. Depending upon where you are those risks can be dysentery (more of a humid hot tropical situation), awareness of mugging risks, how not to get sucker punched in bars, how not to get shot in no-go zones, how not to have your wallet and laptop stolen in a hostel, how not to be drugged and poisoned by women, etc.

You need to figure out how much that hurting people bothers you. It's best if people just feel that whatever it is that you're capable of doing that you don't mind doing it. So you really have to be able to #BiteTheFace out there.

It can take some getting used to in rough places, because you have to calibrate yourself to being a nasty hard man, but also to be very safe so that people will allow you around them and their families. It's really easy for you to kill other people, and for them to kill you when the guard is down. That is much more involved than any calibration around sexual strategy.

When I was in a wild jungle gold mining town in Nicaragua I carried a stupidly ornate giant knife with a spiked guard and spiked pommel. In a real fight I was just as likely to hurt myself as the other guy. But it looked crazy. So I was the big towering white guy who walked around with medieval weaponry. I was definitely afraid of being attacked by a locals, but it seems that they were much more afraid of me.

I don't know much about Afghanistan, but likely that strategy won't be very helpful there. There I'd probably carry a (barely) visibly smaller serious knife that anyone would know that I could get to during any sort of up close fight. Something with flair but also sleek. Maybe Japanese style. Of course guns exist, so that is just to prevent people from getting ideas in up close situations.

Don't be stupid by doing another version of eating the poisonous berries like that guy in Into the Wild. You're most certainly going to be a huge dope for the first few years of you being out in the world with nobody to spin a helpful safe narrative for you. You should ease into it.

I eased into building a life in Transnistria by first building the garage bar. I didn't have it all figured out, or even knowing that I'd make a small homestead at that point. It's just that I had seen how easy it is to be burned in Nicaragua and other places. So I tested out the bureaucracy, the community, as well as becoming familiar with how to hire workers here. I was so incompetent about the early garage days, and I only really got a strong grip on everything after my house was fully remodeled.

Life has a learning curve. It's fine to stumble incompetently from one task to the next as you learn, but you have to be realistic about the risks and to give yourself safe places to fail. If you think about it though, everything that I do here I'm starting out completely incompetent. By the time that it's done and I know a thing or two, then I'm onto the next incompetency. So I'm literally stumbling incompetently from task to task. I don't have time to master everything before I really start it.

The difference is that construction project failures generally only require money to remedy. Traveling is more dangerous.

You're probably best off just hanging out with the cooler varieties of tourists in a hostel for the first month of traveling. But don't just hang out in the prostitute beach place, because you won't really learn much there. Maybe for some days or so only.

@DeathThroughTears I agree that Russian growth won't look like Western growth, and that perhaps increased resilience is more accurate.

It seems to me that over the next 25 years that Russia doesn't really need to be building out massive numbers of apartments, but instead renovating the ones that they already have. I'm pretty sure that Russia could soak up another 25 years of apartment remodels as they "build wealth".

Basically Russia would be building systems and redundancies. If Russia can stay 12 years behind in homegrown CPU tech, 20 years from now, while also being able to produce marine engines, continuing their arctic expansion, building their own missiles, hosting their own nuclear tech, having their own satellite guidance system, etc, then that is qualifies to me as building wealth. It's just not directed towards street level consumers first and foremost. That may seem like heresy in the West, but there are advantages to that modified Soviet model, as long as it's still able to get feedback and to adjust.

About monopolies, some of America's best years were under heavily regulated monopolies that were laying the framework for future private wealth creation. America fucked up by turning people into corporations, and corporations into people. It's that ALL CAPS corporate fiction that is overlaid onto people. It's all so far gone and settled that the days of fighting that are long behind us.

Back to the point, it's widely recognized that the robber baron days of America were that of massive wealth creation, but that it was concentrated in a small number of hands. We know though that it didn't take a huge amount of time before that highly unequal and massive wealth was flowing everywhere. Long before Americans realized that they were rich, they were enjoying a single adult male being able to pay for an entire small family.

The massive ambient wealth was a result of enormous production.

I can't imagine how Russia today is able to vastly outproduce the artillery shells of America and Europe if they were recently hardly doing anything. American is saying that they can't just start massively producing these things, and many other things. The reason is that they haven't been doing shit for a very long time. Russia has been though.

Look though, about wealth. At this point in the game, everyone has TVs, and computers, and all kinds of stuff. For the most part it has stopped being relevant regarding if ordinary people have this years product, or the version from five years ago. All of that type of progress already took place over the last twenty years. There just isn't a quality of life issue regarding falling a bit behind in any of that (which I don't even believe that they are).

Russia has a lot of are very robust vehicles and other machines, which are rated for the hard tundra extreme conditions. This sort of equipment would cost massive amounts in the West, but in Russia it's actually the cheapest stuff simply because the Soviets overbuilt everything vastly past modern tolerances. In Russia the things that cost the most are flashy bling with a short shelf life. That kind of stuff is a flash in the pan.

Russia won't have its "Right to Repair" struggle like the West. They won't have a terminator gene seed farming problem. They won't have a giant transvestite problem to worry about reintegrating later.

I still see it as massive wealth creation happening in Russia now, but just that it's low key. If you define wealth as having massive permanent asphalt roads in every village and city peripheral across the endless tundra, then Russia is going to fall short. There are other ways of solving these issues though, such as making ordinary vehicles so strong that they're basically rugged like military vehicles, and incredibly easy to repair. The sort of downside to that model is that these vehicles are so rugged and long lived, and there are already so many of them that there really isn't much of a market for new ones because they're already in massive supply. In a real serious resilient way, Russia solved the vehicle question a few generations ago already.

@destraht

Russia will continue on growing normally

they won't, the way system is set up there - won't allow it; growth is investing in people and people won't see a dime from natural resources. It could be redistributed to entrepreneurs, but they need educated people that system will not produce by design neither [or at least not in number that would be required]

If anything 'west' will contract.

That even might be whole Russian/Chinese strategy. Let them die. Just stay resilient.

To keep the money for elites it was much easier to start and fuel, decay process on the west, then to risk loosing their positions and possessions by investing in people. It is hard to say is the west shooting themselves in foot, Russia's work or just effect of comfort levels in west.

Power in Russia is held by men and if anything was done to start snowball effect in west slow downfall it was enough to grant women enough rights. Rest would be matter of time.

@MentORPHEUS So America doesn't need that directly, but they do notice how they're comparing to the EU. If the EU was still on massive Russian gas, and was accessing Russia more directly, then quite frankly they'd be doing a lot better economically as time goes on.

They would diverge from America quickly if America was the only one going the WEF route. If the EU was promoting maximum real growth and development while America was going WEF mode purposeful contraction, then Americans would really notice that. However, both places are onboard with it, or at least successfully dragged along.

My thesis is that North American and EU elites have massive contracting control in mind, and that any easy comparisons to Russia, or access to their cheap energy is something that completely fucks the plan up. Russia will continue on growing normally, and US and EU will be very abnormal, and crashing.

It's setup so that if Americans started making comparisons to an old normal, which will exist presently in Russia, then various land mines will go off underneath them in the form of race riots, illegal immigrant rebellions, and violent class warfare directed against the middle class.

Things are developing quite rapidly in Transnistria, which is the Russian sphere. They're fixing everything up real nice, but they're massively under leveraged to the point of essentially zero leverage. Once things are leveraged even a tiny amount then suddenly BOOM, it's exploding with wealth.

At the rate that America and the EU is collapsing, and the rate at which places like here are building, then it's really not too many years before they meet.

I'd argue that a factory that has been shut down for 5 years and isn't coming back, isn't worth much more than a factory that has been closed for 25 years and isn't coming back. That has-been wealth is quickly in the rear view mirror.