[Myriad]

[quote=FlyerInHi]
The state already has the data from biennial smog test on the older cars. Or self report and cross reference to auto repair databases.[/quote]

There’ll be a bunch of people that complain they drive out of state all the time and shouldn’t be charged for those miles.
If you want to pay for use, then have only have cities/counties charge gas/electric charger tax to pay for local roads. Make all freeways and highways be toll between towns/cities.
But, the reality is that gas tax and registration fees don’t cover the cost of roads. $4B/$14B for local spending is from general sales tax.
http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/tpp/offices/eab/fundchrt_files/2017_Transportation_Funding.pdf

The high cost of living in CA is not taxes (CA is much better than NJ/NY for example), but housing. The issue of housing is regulatory.

[Myriad]

[quote=FlyerInHi] I don’t want China to annex Taiwan. Taiwan now has de-facto independence but there are a lot of legal issues. I don’t think it’s for us, Americans, to get too deeply involved. [/quote]

I disagree that the US should not be involved. The strategic interest of the US is that any reunification should be the choice of the people in Taiwan. Not because the country is politically and economically strangled and forced to.

[quote=FlyerInHi] I think we need to accept the rise of China. But we should contain China by providing a moral and business alternative to Chinese authoritarianism, otherwise the countries who do business with China will follow their model. China is all business and development while US foreign policy is still Cold War thinking. Moral preaching is not enough… there needs to be wealth and development. [/quote]
That dosen’t seem correct – in fact, it’s the reverse. The US has promoted economic development in the majority of countries, especially in Asia. They allowed China to open up for investment and growth and allowed entry to WTO.
China has followed a 18/19th century mercantilism system which primary purpose is economic benefit to the home country. China’s investment in other countries is very little about business and development and more about changing the economic system of global trade back to regional mercantilism system.
Let this be clear, China is the aggressor here. While the US has been occupied in the SW Asia and ME, China has taken strategic moves to remove the current global geopolitical and economic order.
Why should the US not take a Cold War path after the open trade model has failed. On almost every strategic interest, China is challenging the US.
North Korea, Taiwan, South China Sea, Senkaku Islands, A2AD weapon systems, cyberattacks, economic espionage, trade imbalance, China 2025 (technology dev, tech handover, state backed investments and loans), Belt & Road, AIIB, etc. There’s a reason why every major country in Asia is expanding their military and it’s not because of the US. Japan had 500 air defense scrambles against PLAAF in 2017. THere will 300 submarines in the Pacific by 2030.

[quote=FlyerInHi] The peaceful reuniication of Germany is a good model. Angela Merkel is East German and East German politician are well integrated in running the country.[/quote]
Except that the a large portion of the population doesn’t want to be part of China, especially the younger population who don’t have any affinity or history with China. For that matter, neither does Hong Kong, but China has an economic stranglehold on the city.

[Myriad]

I think it’s all in local currency, otherwise it doesn’t make sense

[Myriad]

[quote=ucodegen]
Interesting quote from article:

Back at the end of February 2010, the national average price per square metre of property within China was RMB5,508 for urban areas and RMB473 for rural areas. Today these figures have risen to RMB9,570 for urban areas and RMB822 for rural areas.

RMB 822/sq ft = $119/sq ft.
RMB 9570/sq ft = $1,385/sq ft.
[/quote]

That’s in sq meters. have to divide by 10.7639
So $11.05/sq ft and $128.67

https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/hong-kong-sydney-and-vancouver-lead-world-s-least-affordable-markets-52017
City Median Home Price Median Annual Household Income Median Multiple
Hong Kong $5,422,000 $300,000 18.1
Sydney, Australia $1,077,000 $88,000 12.2
Vancouver, Cananda $830,100 $70,500 11.8

[Myriad]

[quote=FlyerInHi] That sounds out of the past, and not possible in a post colonial world. Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote about that. That’s why wars such as Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq fail. We failed in those countries and China is moving in with development and commerce.

I don’t think we can just blame China. After all, China is providing development and improving living standards. If we don’t want the world to follow China, we need to up our game and woo the world with US led development.

Did you read the Washington Post story about the effect of withdrawal from TPP on Vietnam? Meanwhile the Hanoi metro, built by China, is in final test phase and set to open by lunar new year. Bravo to USA and China![/quote]

Oh, the US does plenty of stupid stuff too. The US does things in it’s own interest too – just different. Usually it’s for a few investors to get more rich as opposed to creating spheres of influence. What China is doing recently will force Asia into a pro-China sphere vs a pro-Western sphere.

And all the projects China is building – it’s really to buy favor with the leaders of those countries, not to help the local citizens. If they really wanted to help the local economy, they would hire local workers and not load them up with debt that the countries won’t be able to repay without losing their sovereignty.

Here’s an article comparing the Japan built HCMC metro vs the China built Hanoi metro. Time will tell I guess.
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/business/article/2104149/vietnams-tale-two-metros-one-built-japanese-and-other-chinese

Every time I hear of unrealistic and expensive rail projects (Chinese’s ones, CA HSR, etc), I always think of the Simpson’s monorail episode.

[Myriad]

It would be nice to have a cooperative relationship with China. Unfortunately, that’s not happening right now.
There’s lots wrong with what both countries do internationally. China’s OBOR policy is really just a back door way to subjugate Asia. You could argue that the US has done some of the same things in the past, but the US has vastly more internal policy discord. China is able to align it’s financial, military, diplomatic, commercial, and other sectors and wield it as a single foreign policy tool.

The media in Hong Kong has been talking about Cold War for months. Finally the WSJ picks up the theme also.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-edges-toward-new-cold-war-era-with-china-1539355839?mod=hp_lead_pos9

Also, watch the policy speech by VP Pence at the Hudson Institute. The US is doing much more than a trade war with China.

There’s an interesting discussion of naval policy with direct relation of Mahan vs Mackinder

Heartland Theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geographical_Pivot_of_History

[Myriad]

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[Myriad]

[quote=ocrenter]How would you propose a cooperative relationship with the world’s biggest Nazi regime?[/quote]

It’s incorrect to equate China with the Nazi’s. They don’t want to get rid of other types of people, just subjugate them. The government really are just completely scared of Muslims and terrorism, but only second to internal protests.
What China is really trying to do is create a sphere of influence and a tribute system for countries to pay them. As opposed to Nazi’s trying to take over Europe.

[Myriad]

At some point, China will have to deal with all the debt they have created. Currently they are ok, but eventually, the maintenance cost for all the infrastructure they created will have to be supported with something other than sales of land by government and re-issuing debt.
The infrastructure they are paying for in Asia/Africa is unsustainable by those local countries, so China government will have to assume those debts also.
With the combination of debt, interest rates, aging demographics, all of a sudden, China will start to have developed nation budget problems.
The next down cycle will be interesting, especially if investors lose faith in global government debt (like Italy)

[Myriad]

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[Myriad]

Yes, it might have been ok to outsource your sensitive components and supply chain to friendly allied nations. It’s another to send that to a global competitor that doesn’t believe in your economic and political system.
What people miss about this US vs China trade is that it’s not whether US companies can fairly compete in China in the future.
The question is whether the US will be able to trade with countries in Asia and Africa where China has strong political and economic influence. At the moment, they can’t back that with military force, but China is working on that.
Don’t believe this? just look at Taiwan – China is executing a 50-100 year strategy to economically and politically isolate Taiwan where they will effectively be part of China. South China Sea – economically force Vietnam, Philippines to accept Chinese territorial “islands”.

[Myriad]

This whole thing has turned into a s***show. This would never have happened if the White House knew how to properly vet candidates for positions in government. They could have picked a number of other conservative judges that are just as qualified and don’t have the baggage.

After watching some of Kavanaugh’s testimony on Thur, I’m shocked that he’s a judge and one that’s up for the SC. He should be disqualified based on his demeanor, lack of candor, disrespect to the Senate, and paritsan attacks. And I’m giving him a “pass” on something (or at least supposedly) that happened 30+ years ago. He also completely mismanaged how he explained his background in high school/college. He was a extremely heavy drinker (at least that seems to be somewhat corroborated) – you’re not going to be able to hid it. Yet he pretended like none of that happened – unless he was so drunk he really doesn’t remember.

[Myriad]

Semiaccurate seems really negative INTC. Not sure if that’s just marketing speak to get more subscribers.

I do believe that Krzanich was probably fired for inadequate response to EYPC. Though at this point INTC has known about AMD aiming for Data Center with a better product for > 2 years. Hard to believe that it will take 4 more years for a response – That’s basically 2 generations of processors worth of time.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12084/epyc-benchmarks-by-intel-our-analysis-
This sounds a little more realistic. “First of all, Intel’s benchmarks lend further support to what we already suspected: Intel’s Scalable Xeon is better at serving databases for a number of reasons: better data locality (fewer NUMA nodes), better single-threaded performance, and a more “useable” cache. ”
“The AMD EPYC has a performance per dollar advantage in webserving and Java servers, for example… he EPYC platform has some catching up to do. Firmware updates and other software updates were necessary to run a hypervisor, and only relatively recent versions of the Linux kernel (February 2017 w/4.10+) have support for the EPYC processor.”

I suspect AMD has a free run for 12-18 months. At that point, it would be shocking if INTC didn’t have a real response to the EPYC architecture. The only question is how much speculators will run up the shares before then.

[Myriad]

A hot stock is always awesome until it’s not or the market takes out the whole sector.

INTC has been good for the past few years. Probably not for the next year or so. I guess investing in NVDA, MU, AMD would have provided a better return in the past few years. Probably I’m too conservative and worried about getting burned by corporate risk – a lower P/E and better cash flow mitigates some of this.

Dividends are great too (it’s a different investment strategy), but chasing yields has other problems such as companies with high debt (AT&T), risk of dividend cut, and opportunity risk.

[Myriad]

The state should focus on building a massive water distribution and storage network before wasting money on LA-SF HSR. Whereas the HSR only really benefits city dwellers, water is needed by pretty much everyone, especially inland farmers.
One could make the argument that agriculture that comes from CA (quantity & value), having enough water for farming is of national importance.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/California-s-two-tunnel-Delta-project-is-back-12823416.php

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