I'm Polish, but this is such a pessimistic, overdramatic take. The visualisations are impressive, but you're living in Poland's golden age. See this Hacker News story with 1,000+ upvotes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062117
The war in Ukraine is a tragedy, but it has proved that Russia is weak. The price shock will speed up the transition to renewables, and Iran is losing its grip on Hormuz. So many of the other issues are solvable.
It's easy to be a pessimist, but there's a bright future ahead of us.
Remember this is a war that Iran has spent 40 years planning for.
Netanyahu has been doing the same "two weeks away" stand-up comedy since 1992.
Netanyahu asked every single US president. They all took advice and then went back with a polite "thanks, but no thanks".
You don't need to have access to super-secret intel to know going into this frivolous war was a very stupid idea. You just need to look at a standard map and use your brain.
Finally Mr Netanyahu found a stupid enough US president.
And the problem with the current US president is he won't accept a loss.
He is not the sort of person willing to accept he has bitten off more than he can chew.
Nor is he the sort of person who is willing to sit down and have a proper negotiated discussion. Infact he's the very person who just tore up the JPCOA seemingly just because he doesn't like Obama.
Nor is he the sort of person willing to learn from Iraq or Afghanistan.
So we have a stalemate. And a US president who doesn't believe in diplomacy, old-school politics or anything else.
And this stalemate is not one that is going to be resolved with more military firepower. Again, just look at the map....
My understanding is that the US's longstanding evaluation is that their strategic goals in the region can't be accomplished by brawling with Iran over the strait, and their best move is to avoid it. The actions of every previous administration align with this view.
Where Iran's strategic position can be improved by drawing the US into an open conflict. Disrupting global petroleum markets, forcing the US to spend disproportionate resources defending its regional allies or withdraw and admit it can't, weakening the US's influence as a diplomatic power, all are achievable (or, frankly, achieved) with this conflict.
The US has no comparable strategic wins to even aim for here. At this point their only reasonable goal is restoring open trade through the strait, the status quo before the conflict. Fighting a war to successfully reclaim the status quo that was disrupted by entering the war is, strategically, losing a war.
> So has the US (spent 40 years planning for conflict with Iran).
True, but also worthless - the USA fired or retired people who knew the plan (1), and didn't listen to the warnings. It's more "Everyone knows the plan until they punch themselves in the face"
Its not my area of expertise by any means, but I would perhaps point out the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve chart[1] which is at its lowest level since 1982.
Also do not forget the oil and LNG needs to be transported and that is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive.
It may well be that the artificial party cannot go on forever.
This is probably the worst thing oil corps could ask for, and I can guarantee you with every ounce of my being that they are furious over this.
It might check the phantom "short term profits" box, but anyone with any modicum of business sense (and the oil boys are no amateurs) see this event as probably the largest nail ever driven into the oil coffin.
Trump could not have given a bigger gift to the anti-oil crowd, making every human on Earth think "Damn, this shit is getting expensive and unreliable, what alternatives are available?"
The more likely hyperbolic step would be to blow up outgoing pipelines and apply secondary sanctions. Or, as threatened, blow up power and water treatment plants killing large swaths of the civilian population. Nukes wouldn't be necessary to cause mass death.
>>You don't need to have access to super-secret intel to know going into this frivolous war was a very stupid idea. You just need to look at a standard map and use your brain.
Would that be the same Mark Rutte who referred to Trump as "daddy" during an alliance summit and sent him a flattering text message which Trump published[1] ?
Yeah. Erm. I think we know what side of the bread Mr Rutte butters his toast on.
Very brave take. Still, I hope that your kids, should you have some and grow wiser, won't grow up in a world that russia or iran shapes. The united states doesn't negotiate with terrorists.
The US very much has been trying to get Ukraine to surrender to Russia since Trump was elected. Quite nothing would seemingly please Trump more than Ukrainians rolling over and clearing the way to a fat kickback from Russia.
Trump recently signed a Russian sanctions bill and the State Department just cleared a $2.7 billion military sale to Ukraine. So, I don't know how you've arrived at your conclusions.
Make the oil less relevant to the point that 1/5th of it not being present doesn't affect the rest of the world. We are not there yet, but when we get there, there will be no reason to hold the Strait of Hormuz. Of course the impact on the Gulf states will be enormous, economic or otherwise, so it's hard to say if they will let this be.
I’m hoping they don’t grow up in one the US shapes if it continues to be run by a dictator loving sexual predator who thinks corruption isn’t just ok, but a mandatory part of government.
It’s also rich saying that the US doesn’t negotiate with terrorists while watching Trump verbally fellate Putin at every given opportunity.
I agree. My grandmother was not allowed to make decisions over her body, own a bank account, or work after marriage until the late 60s. For many of us, it's definitely a golden age of rights and possibilities.
Yeah I struggle to think of a time in the last three hundred years that Poland was in a better position than it is today. Maybe like 2019 or so? And that is basically still the same era.
Yeah, we're new rich, but we're also old poor - the majority of millennials and the entire gen x have seen what a proper 3rd world country Poland was back in the 90s - that's the bulk of the current workforce. We've navigated worse crises.
How? Russia is successfully fighting the entirety of NATO on a front that it is continually pushing further west, with about 20% of Ukraine now lost. If anything NATO and the promise of US security is what has been shown to be weak. And I don't think the idea of US/Western superiority is ever going to come back to what it was given what has happened in the Ukraine and Iran theaters in recent past.
Do you mean a metaphorical front? Because on the ground, it's been a stalemate for the past year or so. Ukraine is often taking back chunks of territory.
Russia is claiming to fight NATO, but NATO hasn't even shown up yet, but Russia is struggling. If NATO were to go to war with Russia, there would be very little that Russia could do. The one thing they might be able to do is the reason NATO has been holding back.
Russia is on equal footing with a country third of its size that is supported by a small fraction of NATO's GDP. You can barely tell the difference between a territorial control map from 2023 and 2026. Neither side is capable of achieving its goals through military action.
Ukraine us unlikely to get back most of the territory it lost in 2022, but Russia is also unlikely to even finish capturing the remaining parts of the Donetsk oblast, let alone the rest of Ukraine. It's taking Russia months/years to capture settlements with just thousands of prewar population. Donetsk oblast still has a heavily fortified urban area with a prewar population of 500k under Ukrainian control.
Russia employs modern ballistic and drone warfare to fight Ukraine. USA can't have its way with Strait of Hormuz and Iran because it can't fight against ballistic missiles and drones effectively. And Poland position is... USA will fight against Russia and their drones and their ballistic missiles while at the same time... USA hasn't been able to do it with much smaller and weaker Iran for 7 months now. Iran got control of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran still has the control of the Strait of Hormuz. For 7 months now USA can't do anything about it. How come you are so sure if they can't protect their allies in the Middle East to export oil through the Strait of Hormuz they will be so successful protecting say... Suwalki "Strait" from much stronger and nuclear strike ready opponent? Reality check? I think we will get one.
The US can absolutely conquer or decimate Iran and has explicitly avoided targeting energy infrastructure or doing so (understanding that doing so gets us another Iraq or Afgahnistan) but it's not as if the US can't "take on" Iran it's that the US expected regime change in Iran rather than a dragged out war.
Iran doesn't need to conquer or hold Hormuz they just need it in missile/drone range - it's not symmetric.
As for the impact on the global economy - the entire world is letting Iran hold its gas/oil hostage because of something the US did. I'm not sure why those countries don't pressure Iran more they're not at war with them they shouldn't be embargo'd.
In all fairness, the US by itself is fighting someone else's war on the other side of the world, in a region that's generally not super friendly to them.
Russia is fighting its own battle at its own border against an enemy which receives some support from NATO countries.
US leadership fights to not lose face, Russian leadership loses a lot more than face if they back off.
I am curious how Russian people feel about this propaganda line that they're fighting NATO. It's obviously nonsense, along the lines of "war is peace." Russia borders NATO and there is no front there. Russia invaded a non-NATO country and immediately bogged down against an army that does not fight according to NATO doctrine. I have to believe this is something the average Russian realizes.
Russia is reflexively anti-NATO as NATO is reflexively anti-Russia.
NATO is an alliance that was created in opposition to the Soviet Union. NATO has absorbed parts of the former Soviet Union.
Western companies pillaged Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Rightly or wrongly, Putin owes a lot of his original popularity to dealing with the aftermath.
Russia, rightly or wrongly, sees colour revolutions as intelligence operations, and territorial conquest.
Russia cannot accept NATO forces on its borders.
NATO is providing decisive material, political, logistical, financial and intelligence support to Ukraine, precisely to bog it down and drain it.
These are all pretty normal perspectives for most Russians. They're arguably pretty based, and not necessarily a product of internal propaganda campaigns.
The thing that westerners don't get about Russia, and the reason we're stuck in this Godforsaken conflict, is that we personalise things around Putin. We think that if Putin dies, everything will magically improve.
The decision to invade was Putin's, but the rationale goes much deeper and will outlast him.
> Russia cannot accept NATO forces on its borders.
This is such obvious bullshit. Russia already has NATO on its borders, and is attempting to expand it's borders so they will contact even more of NATO.
If Russia was fighting the entirety of NATO, they'd lose the war in a week. They're fighting the entirety of Ukraine, with NATO dribbling in supplies to help out. NATO help is absolutely tiny compared to what they could be doing.
Russia is successfully fighting the entirety of NATO
It is not. The primary reason that Russia can even keep up is that it has many more citizens that can be thrown in the meat grinder and can work in arms factories and it has a larger industrial base than Ukraine. If you would tell most experts before the invasion, that it would've ended up as it did, they would have laughed their heads off. They would have told you that the Ukraine army would not be a match for the Russian army and they would have told you that the response of the West would have been divided.
Russia has ~146M citizens, Ukraine has ~29M citizens within land that it currently controls. Russia's estimated GDP is $2.66 trillion, Ukraine's GDP is $225 billion. That's 5x as many citizens and a 10x larger economy.
A real conventional war against NATO would be a completely different story. Sure, NATO countries would have to catch up with drone production and defense, but a lot of knowledge transfer and co-development is already happening. But NATO's economy and population is several times larger than Russia's. If NATO countries switched to a war economy, it would not be a fair game.
Of course, Putin knows this and he also knows the real weaknesses: there is a change that not all countries will uphold Article 5 and coordination might end up in a mess if the US would bow out, because command & control has always largely been handled by the US. This is why he is constantly testing how strong Article 4 and 5 are on an escalating ladder. The other weakness are disinformation campaigns through social media, which are working really wel for them, both in the US and in various European countries.
(I don't think it's useful to talk about nuclear war, it will end up badly for everyone in a population center. There will be no winners, only losers.)
golden age was precovid we are passed the peak even thought we got into G20 I suspect GDP increased a lot of because inflation.
Been living a lot in SE Asia in the last 12 years but ever yeah in poland for few months. There has been really big inflation in the last 2-3 years and everybody notice it.
Been twice this year in Italy, one time in alps and last week in puglia and there is a reason so many Poles go there for holiday - its cheaper or similar price but better than taking a holiday in poland.
This is living in denial. Lots of Ukrainians didn't believe there's going to be war either. There are already Russian drones flying into Eastern European countries, while the US is lifting sanctions on Russia - you don't have to be a fortune teller to predict where this is going.
In 2016 I spoke with an Ukrainian in Germany. He was saying the war is in the easternmost regions, he's safe because he's from Kiev area. That's how war works, uninformed civilian never believes it's coming.
That is just hope-believe, i.e. it ain't happening.
> It's easy to be a pessimist, but there's a bright future ahead of us.
I lived through the 1990s here in Romania, the future does not look bright in the slightest. Yes, materially speaking we do have more stuff compared to the 1990s, a lot more stuff, but the opportunities in front of us are as slim as ever (which wasn't the case back in the 1990s). But maybe things look different for the Polish.
> I lived through the 1990s here in Romania, the future does not look bright in the slightest.
Why? Inflation was much higher then. There were almost no highways. Very little foreign tourism. Towns were ugly. Industry was barely functioning. Etc. Things are way better now. Just because Romania has high debt is no reason to be pessimistic. Everybody has high debt.
I was talking about the perspective on the future, we had that back in the 1990s, it is sorely missing now. No-one even dares mentioning about any “light at the end of the tunnel”, it’s everybody for himself (and for his/her family/clan) right now.
I would wager Iran is barely hanging on. The question is which side can hang on longer. Its like their both dangling off a cliff with their fingers on the edge - one due to politics, the other because they weren’t as strong as they projected from the start. I suspect Iran might hang on to after midterms.
Worth noting mid east is all looking for other routes now 3-5 years from now Iran will be in a weaker economic situation on reduced flow. Hopefully Theocracy has been ended.
> I would wager Iran is barely hanging on. The question is which side can hang on longer.
I think this applies to both sides, and the issue is that the people in power are not affected by the crises that cause hardship to ordinary people. " Iran is..." does not distinguish between the two, they are different. Fanatical leadership can live by "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make" .
The problem though is that people in the USA do have one lever to pull on their government, in the form of approaching midterm elections, that the people of Iran do not. And the leadership of Iran knows it. They may be fanatical and awful but they're not stupid - causing fuel shortages causes economic pain to ordinary people causes political pain to the USA. They have this weapon and are using it heavily.
Notwithstanding that, this assessment of blame is correct ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49907371 ), the missteps that put us in this mess with no clear way out all come from stupid leadership in the USA.
Yes, I knew all along that I agreed with what you said, I was not trying to dispute what you said. Apologies if that wasn't clear to you, I should have started it with "yes, and" so that you would not take mistaken offence.
I don't agree that the consequential points are just "more language". I said things that you did not.
No offense taken - I always find most people try and take an opposing view for debate sakes. I was merely hoping you didn't think that was the case. Glad to see we agree.
Dzień Dobry :-) Poland is very modern on the surface. Very clean. Very safe. And an economic success story. As long as private sector goes and its citizens ambitions it is doing fantastic. However the society is a bit anachronistic. The same goes with the public sector. Yes, you get mObywatel app, and so many public services can be done online nowadays including court proceedings. The problem is quite subtle, not easily seen on the surface. I.e. once you hit issues like, say, divorce, or taxes, or the army mentality, politicians, local government, out of sudden you are transported back to 1960s. Not even 1989 when the communism in Poland collapsed. Like two decades earlier than that. You need to persuade the court you can have divorce. Not like in any other Western country. It isn't sufficient you want one. You need to persuade the court you can have one. When they wrote the law in 1960s it made sense. In communism the Party decided if an individual can have a divorce (in a sense). Not the individual. In the West if an individual says, I want a divorce, they file the paperwork and they will get the divorce. In Poland, nope. You need to persuade the court the marriage can't be repaired. Doesn't matter what you want, the state (the party) knows better when your marriage is over. So they will drag you for months, years every time the judge asking: "are you sure you don't want to go back to her?". Because the state knows better and many people will go back just because in 1960s divorce was the end of the world. Today, in 2026, it is an administrative task. As long as the society lives in 2026 that is. The same logic still persists in polish courts for other cases. Not really anything got reformed in polish court system since 1960s. Other weird things, like lawyers inheriting positions in courts by birthright. Your dad is a judge? Well, you will be too. Your dad works in Ikea as a clerk? Well, good luck! That's not 1960s anymore. That's Middle Ages. The same with Medical Doctors, other public professions. They are inherited. Honestly, the whole public sector stinks. Never reformed. While the private sector -- built from zero and world class. Just saying, it is different deep down than on the surface level. And there is a much deeper problem to it. Historically, Army, in any nation, has been a product of public sector. Not private sector. Anachronistic, corrupted public sector won't produce modern army. It will produce corrupt public servants buying tanks as if it is... 1960s. And that's the real problem that Poland has now with Russian jet drones hitting targets in Ukraine mere meters from the border check points.
Agree, with UA stopping Russia western capital will finally flow into Poland because previous strategy was to defend on Vistula river which blocked a lot of heavy industry investments that are starting now.
For instance: it's mentioned that EU gas storage is at 67% and Germany's at 56%.
What is not mentioned though is that Poland's storage is at 97% because the previous administration, for better or worse, was paranoid enough to invest in a sizeable marine gas terminal and the current one stocked up early.
Regarding real estate: adjusted for inflation prices peaked 2.5 years ago, interest rates are also much lower than back then. Nobody is buying because all the Ukrainian refugees who were moving to Poland are here already and that's the last bump in population this country will see for the foreseeable future.
Also there's the threat of war on Polish soil, which affects investor sentiment.
Every period of history is dramatic; sometimes I rewatch old episodes of a UK satirical news quiz, Have I Got News For You, and even in the best of years there was plenty of drama.
For instance, Italy has more storage capacity per capita despite very similar consumption (~10TWh/1mln population) and they're already at 86%+.
Meanwhile indeed Poland has much less storage (about a third of Germany per capita), but it also uses it less (half the consumption of Germany per capita).
I must ask: what the hell are the Germans waiting for?
Our minister responsible for energy is Katherina Reiche, a lobbyist for fossil companies. She has been suspected to dawdle on refilling gas storage to make it easier for her former employers to make a quick buck when gas becomes scarce in winter. She's also botched the transition to renewable energies by removing the incentives for state and industry to build out electric infrastructure, so it would not be out of character.
Plus, our chancellor has zero experience in governing anything (he's not even been mayor before) and is firmly stuck in thinking like a Blackrock executive.
So, to answer your question: We are waiting for a government that is not entirely in the pocket of those that want to stick to the status quo and profit from crises as long as possible.
Which former employer is going to make a quick buck? The grid operator or the grid operator lobbyist? Besides, who is going to profit from a price spike when the whole point is that the summer-winter spread is inverted, so no one expects to make money from injecting?
> Which former employer is going to make a quick buck? The grid operator or the grid operator lobbyist?
Well, both. Katherina Reiche was CEO of Westenergie until she joined the current government; and was, at the same time, listed as a lobbyist. She also caused controversy when she presented a plan for energy politics that was _very similar_ to plans by major electricity providers (including the parent company of her previous company). Or when she directly asked the electricity provider EnBW for better arguments why we should build more gas power plant (directly violating lobbying laws). That's just a small excerpt; the list of controversy is long.
But tbh, I don't think there's a big conspiracy about the empty gas tanks. Yes, Reiche is most likely corrupt (which is a huge deal), but afaiu, the gas tanks are empty because nobody wants to pay for the gas right now.
PS: Just today, Reiche ordered Sefe GmbH to stockpile more gas [1]. Sefe is conveniently a public company. So private companies don't have to buy expensive gas, because the public is going to take care of it.
Just because the numbers might be small if germany doesn't has enough gas and some old fragile human being might die of this or because they cant afford the gas, its still no way to die in a country like germany.
Real estate in Poland is the only investment option without capital gains tax. You only have to keep it 5 years, extremely simple. A condo is tax free, risk free brokerage account. Even if drones start hitting these mostly empty buildings, the prices will keep rising.
They are massively increasing their medium sized drone capacities (ie Geran) while improving on those drones too. Faster, harder to detect and shoot down, no GPS/Glonass navigation necessary so jamming won't do much.
A country that is rained on by 500 drones daily delivering 125KG explosives (so like a proper standard bomb dropped from airplanes) can overwhelm local military defense capacities quickly, leave infrastructure in crumbles (as in no water, electricity, gas, heating, gas stations working and so on) and at least in dictator's mind local population may crumble in weeks. You don't need to put a single foot in the country to reduce critical infra to rubble.
I can't imagine Polish folks would ever bow to russians after horrible things they repeatedly done to them, but ie in Slovakia it would be a very quick victory even if country wouldn't be ruled by ultra corrupt folks who would just give whole country to russians for some more corruption promises for later.
If puttin' will try anything in eastern Europe now is the best time. But I would expect more something along Moldova or baltics, Poland is far from russia and any extra force concentration in Kaliningrad would be easy to see.
The baltics have even more vivid memories of soviet life don't they? And nato trip wire troops so any attack would be killing french and uk soldiers (nuclear powers). Trump was talking about taking Greenland by force right up until the trip wire forces arrived. It is an odd job as a soldier to be a hostage I think, but it seems to work. It would be more reliable for Poland to obtain its own nuclear deterrent, along the lines of the buffers vs dependencies argument in the post. There has been talk, but that seems difficult.
Poland barely had any oil. If you want to go "historical", Romania was the source of oil for Germany during WW2 (and Austria-Hungary also wanted to take over Romanian oil fields in WW1).
The fact that you have time to "xD"-reply to some comments but won't address the other ones basically marks you as a troll. Good to know, shame HN doesn't have ways to block/mark users as ignorable.
Your comment implies Germany can just somehow command Poland to please hand over their gas, which obviously makes no sense, so I think you either forgot to include some key detail or you’re just talking out of your ass.
Unless you mean nazi invasions ofc in which case you’re just a troll.
On the ad absurdum: They'd also go the other way. The integration with the Dutch gas fields and system in Groningen is good enough and there is at least two decades of gas left in the fields. While closed, they can be reopened within a relatively short time and there are storage fields abound there (Groningen and Drente storages account for half the Dutch supply). And since it's ad absurdum, the earthquakes do not matter.
> Every generation believes it is living through the end of something.
Many generations are. Last century saw the collapse of the British and Soviet empires - titans by any measure - through mismanagement. Europe as an international power was also broken (compared to how they used to be). I can easily imagine 1900s me fleeing to America in fear of the end times and feeling quite justified in his choices with hindsight. Less obvious where to run to these days as the US not-an-empire looks like it may crumble.
Most of the people who died didn't get an opportunity to complain, so we live with some serious survivorship bias on how bad things got.
While there's no magic land of opportunity to flee to, there are still many safe and stable places where one can raise a family and lead a simple life. Especially if you remove the abstraction of countries and look at cities and towns instead. It does depends on what you want and what you're willing to give however, as moving may mean learning a new language and assimilating a new culture. And then there's differences in wealth and earning potential as well, so I guess leaving the USA is more 'bugging out' than 'economic migration'.
OTOH, mobility is a privilege, and it's usually the least privileged who are the most affected by war. So I'm not exactly sure how I feel about my own advice, since it's most useful to those that need it least.
We made it a priviledge, but for a biological being, it's the most natural thing to do when you find yourself in a place that is shitty. There is a reason so many risk truly awful things to get a chance (chance!) at a better life: going to where food and safety is, is just what living beings do.
Sure, but I think what they mean is that when you do move somewhere, how you are treated by the humans already there depends on your socioeconomic status. Who may be disinclined to let you have food or safety.
I also sometimes think how people don't realize how good they have things; while Poland is no longer a poor country, it would take an absolutely colossal disaster to reduce the average living standard of America to that of Poland. America hasn't even reached the 'terrifying' level of European petrol prices.
It also depends who you are. A very large fraction of American trans people (not a large absolute number, only a few hundred thousand) have moved from R states to D states recently due to repression, such as Kentucky revoking their driving licenses.
I do think the best political-economic era of my life was 1997-2001: election of Tony Blair until 9/11, covering the first internet boom. That was the closest to "world peace". That includes the Israel-Palestine peace process and the reconciliation of the post-Soviet states into Europe. If that had worked better, with a democratic Russia, the world would be a very different place today.
I'm sure you can throw out statistics that prove otherwise, but I think the average living standard of Poland is already better than America. Again, anecdotally, but I'm American and I've lived in Poland for about a decade. Food, healthcare, housing, access to parks, public transport, etc. are all better quality here at the average-person level than most places the US.
Americans just end up paying for a lot of things that are either undesirable for many Poles (e.g., a huge McMansion in desolate suburbs and the car to drive there) or paid for via other means (e.g., healthcare.)
Which country has a better average living standard depends on if we are talking about mean, median, or mode. The American mean is higher and since most of the HN crowed works in higher-paying jobs in urban centers they tend to look at their own experiences to think that the US is a high standard of living country. If you look at the median or mode of living standards across a country then places like Europe are where you find more people experiencing a higher standard of living.
Oh, best of luck convincing Americans that paying twice as much for shitty health insurance than you pay in 'high' general tax levels is somehow a bad deal for them. Until they actually live the experience they just cannot comprehend the second and third order benefits of a real social system.
In terms of nominal GDP per capita, the US is around $85k with Poland at $25k, so US GDP would need to fall around 70%, which would be an unprecedented fall, the kind historically only associated with mass bombing or extreme hyperinflation.
GDP is irrelevant when discussing the well being of the ordinary person. A more relevant measure would be median income together with purchasing power parity.
US median income is just over 19 k international dollars, Poland is just under 9 k. Still a big difference but just over a factor of 2 instead of over 3.5.
America has not just a lot more people, but a lot more immigrants, refugees, and more.
In a more homogenous society, such as Poland’s in comparison to the United States, it also in my observation trends to be easier for wealth distribution to flatten.
Maybe the US has more kids per capita too which would also affect that value depending on how it is being measured. Not to say that anything is being hidden there, just something to think about that may make you interpret the data differently or think about it differently.
Petrol prices mean nothing for standards of living or overall desirability of given country. If that would be true, then I have 2 random samples which have supposedly way higher standard than US - Venezuela and russia.
US folks have more money on average, but are forced to spend them in ways ie europeans don't have to - top notch education and healthcare costs are huge in US for large part of population and compose big part of expected savings of parents and older folks, while an afterthought in Europe. How do you compare that.
Plus places in Europe like Switzerland have long term way higher living standards by any measure than even good places in US. Europe is big and diverse in ways US simply never was, it would do you good to travel the world a bit and see and experience it with your own eyes.
> Less obvious where to run to these days as the US not-an-empire looks like it may crumble.
Depending on what you're running for China is in some senses kinda what the US was back in the day, except there's no land so no easy way for them to accept migrants. These day and age migrants also aren't very accepted anywhere.
I agree in a sense, and the writing for this has been on the wall for some time. In my circles, many learned some Mandarin at one point or another.
The difference from the past is that the US has always been a melting pot, while China is pretty much a closed society. If you’d emigrated to the US, you always had a good chance of blending into that diverse society no matter where you came from. Assimilating into the homogeneous Chinese society will take generations.
For me it’ll be either the westernmost end of Europe or one of the better parts of South America, in the hope that they will prosper modestly in the shadows of the upcoming conflicts.
I'm very curious how China will adapt over the next couple of decades. Their population has started contracting, and it's clear the government has seen the fertility rate as a problem for some time. There's no obvious way for them to keep economic growth going without either finding a solution to something nobody else has managed to solve (getting the fertility rate back up), or opening up for more immigration. Either will take significant changes.
PRC growth now based on educated population, which exploded, not total population. Reality is every tertiary median to upper middle class wage is more productive than 10 undereducated peasants... the ones first to age out. There's like 200-400m+ bluntly useless mouths dragging down productivity/per capital metrics, the only saving grace they did NOT get rich before old, i.e. poor old so it's cheap(ish) in terms of resources (but not labour) to support them. Put it this way, PRC is generating OECD combined in tertiary, disproportionately STEM, they have backlog of 200m births from last 20+ years that still haven't got their masters/phds... at 60% and increasing tertiary we're going 100m+ high end talent, aka the greatest high end human dividend in recorded history who will be in workforce for until 2060s, i.e. so far out its hard to project based on present realities, only they have no shortage of advanced economy growth potential. Like if you throw all projected US newborns + immigration into STEM... PRC would still come out FAR ahead. There is no contest, unless AGI displaces everyone.
TFR real issue probably 30 year out. There will be some rebound, current crashing TFR because so many entering tertiary last few years = delay family formation. Women going to turn 35-40 and realize they want kids... and have them, especially considering 1:4 dependency ratio also = 4:1 wealth transfer + property going other way when previous generation (with high savings rate) dies. But won't get to replacement level. Then it's matter of what bad levers PRC willing to pull - pro natal fertility policies does not incentivize 2.1 TFR... and no one has tried punitive policies, i.e. limit wealth/property transfers to families with 2 kids... all sorts of inducements liberal societies haven't... or politically can't try. Or immigration, test tube babies, who knows. But IMO they try punitive policies first. That's really the only thing that no one has tried, and we know from wealthy Muslim countries with oil money, religious incentive, domestic help... aka every support imaginable, TFR is below 2 or trending towards it.
Fertility is a right now problem for China - it's population has started dropping - its largest cohort is just a few years from being out of child-bearing age, and its fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, and it will take decades to reverse that even if we knew today how to do it.
This isn't just a question of dropping labour, but also a question of the consequent reduction in economic demand.
Which is why China started reacting to the low fertility rate already in 2013 by abolishing the agency responsible for enforcing the one child policy, followed by ending the policy in 2015, replacing it with a 2 child policy, which failed to have the desired effect, followed by a 3 child policy in 2021, followed a month later by removing all penalties for having even more children.
China's workforce also is at most years from starting to contract excluding any immigration - the cohorts retiring are close to the size of those entering the workforce and the cohorts retiring will be increasing for another 20-30 years, while the ones entering the workforce will be decreasing for the same period even if they somehow figured out how to reverse it today.
The question is how high that price is, and whether it is viable. We don't know. And secondly, whether or not the consequences will be workable for a cohesive society whether because women choose to have children only for financial reasons or get coerced into it for the same reasons.
It could get very dark very quickly if it turns out to be too hard to induce enough people who actually would want children under the right circumstances to choose to have them.
That's a capitalist solution; China has that option if they want it, but also they have those "reeducation" camps so it could get very Handmaid's Tale.
China's population is dropping, so to the extent they had housing for their peak population, they will have increasing capacity to accept migrants. Their fertility rate has dropped to 1, one of the lowest in the world, despite having now lifted all restrictions on number of children and actively encouraging larger families, so it will become a precarious problem for them soon.
China's migration policies have been extremely strict, so to what extent they will be able to loosen that up without political upheaval is still an open question. So far they've only loosened up the restrictions on internal migration.
Those problems could be solved with a careful migratory policy (ie what America did back in the day because it was economically impossible for the entire third world to fly there; today, this could be enforced with laws)
The issue with demographic decline is not just quantity of people, but also quality of people. China (and any country) will want individuals that speak the language, are culturally compatible, with useful skills, and so on. The limited number of people any country can draw on once you consider this starts to make it clear that migration doesn't solve anything.
And even with migration, if those migrants don't themselves end up with high fertility rates then you've done nothing but kick the can, and not especially far. Because of all of these issues, I think there's approximately a 100% chance that China will do the equal but opposite of the one-child-policy should their demographic issues fail to start reversing more naturally.
"The equal but opposite of the one-child-policy" is easier said than done. A brute-force approach worked for stopping more babies (I don't know if it's true, but what I heard back was that back in the 80s Chinese officials literally killed unauthorised babies moments after they were born - that's probably exaggerated, however they really did carry out forced sterilisations and forced abortions). It wouldn't work so well for creating more babies. You can't force people to have more children. Many countries are offering financial incentives for producing babies right now - cash at birth, free house, free childcare, etc - with limited success. I don't see how China could deliver (hahaha aren't I punny) a significantly different result if it goes down that same road.
I don't think it'd be especially hard. Ban contraception, economic coercion, mandatory family planning at a certain age and you're probably already there. For the economic coercion part there are endless forms it could take. An obvious one would be a 'national sustainability' tax assessed on the number of children one has (adjusted for minimum age) - 40% for 0, 20% for 1, 0% for 2, - 10% for 3, and so on.
Another way would be to fine companies and local jurisdictions if their average number of children per employee/resident is below 2.1 or whatever, similar in spirit to Japan's 'metabo laws.' You could also require companies prioritize employment, beyond a minimal standard, based on the number of children per employee, and so on.
(That said, I don't know how up to date such maps are, and have no way to verify laws; don't suggest machine translation from Chinese to English, it is bad).
"People" here means women, and womens' rights are a very recent thing in world history. With a sufficiently evil and authoritarian government, it might be possible. It certainly has been tried in the 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Honour_of_the_German_...
I assumed there would be plenty of land in China, is just completely remote or do I just have a completely incorrect perspective on China (generally speaking I’m sure I do, I’ve live my life on the other side of the planet)
There is .. with the last of the subsistence farmers already living on it. There is basically no good unoccupied agricultural land in the world. The American settlers never appreciated how much work disease did in creating a seemingly empty space for them.
There's plenty of land in China. There aren't plenty of empty plots that would be attractive for people to farm. I'm not so sure that has much relevance to modern immigration, though.
Well, not the kind of land where you can just massacre the natives and steal it for free without ever seeing consequences for that abominable behavior. Which is what I suppose they're referring to.
Last century saw two world wars, followed by the cold war which could have lead to the end of the world. Also a wave of communist revolutions and their aftermath (famines and purges in the Soviet Union, The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the death of a quarter of the population of the world).
I think mismanagement is not accurate. The Soviet system was flawed and inefficient and could not compete. The European empires were made untenable by the world moving on: economic, technological and political changes.
I think Europe and America had a golden age when they were at peace and dominated the world economically from the 80s to this century, and forgot neither of these is a given.
> Less obvious where to run to these days as the US not-an-empire looks like it may crumble.
How are you supposing that it looks like the US may crumble? I don’t understand where these kinds of comments come from, aside from perhaps verbalizing something one might want to see instead of what is factually true.
The world bought only 20% as many treasury bonds in the past year as in the year before that. This is what a slow decoupling from the US reserve currency looks like.
The US is the most oil-dependent country (although all western countries are quite dependent on it) and it cut off its own supply of oil.
The US has canceled all military guarantees and aligned with two different fascist states, so military cooperation is unwinding.
It's been unable to manufacture anything effectively for a while now as all the money gets siphoned off corruptly (identical to Russia in the Ukraine war), not even the weapons used in Israel.
What else is there to being an empire? Its nuclear aircraft carriers - with no aircraft since they run on oil?
> The world bought only 20% as many treasury bonds in the past year as in the year before that. This is what a slow decoupling from the US reserve currency looks like.
That's not what a decoupling looks like. Investors are probably just not buying because they know rates are going to go up. The Federal Reserve already strongly signaled another rate hike by end of year. Why would you buy something today that you can wait and buy for a better price later?
Second, if you want to make an argument about interest rates or the debt, you first have to make that argument and resolve it for the UK, Italy, France, and others.
Third, the USD is just the dominant reserve currency. It's not the only one. A reserve currency is just one that banks hold in reserve. The reason the US is involved in the Middle East is to protect the Petro-dollar which generally "requires" oil purchases to be settled in dollars. The trade off is we keep Iran in check from destroying the gulf countries.
> The US is the most oil-dependent country (although all western countries are quite dependent on it) and it cut off its own supply of oil.
This doesn't make any sense. The US is also the largest oil and gas producing country in the world. Even for the Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea you can read for yourself that the US has been able to break through and Saudi Arabia has quickly repaired the east-west pipeline and 3.5+ million barrels are flowing through there now (IIRC 60% or so of pre-attack volume). Either way, most of those flows go to Europe and Asia, not the US. So while the US is oil dependent (all countries are) I don't think your assertion is entirely accurate.
> It's been unable to manufacture anything effectively for a while now as all the money gets siphoned off corruptly (identical to Russia in the Ukraine war), not even the weapons used in Israel.
That doesn't make any sense either. We manufacture all kinds of things, including incredibly advanced equipment. We make airplanes, we make semiconductors, pharmaceutical goods.
> What else is there to being an empire? Its nuclear aircraft carriers - with no aircraft since they run on oil?
If we don't have oil neither does anyone else. Except that we do have oil so our nuclear powered aircraft carriers would just use our own oil for the jets.
Blame too much connectedness. Humans are not designed to be affected by things that happen 100's of miles away. They shouldn't even know the names or those far away places or people. They shouldn't have dependency on things that are produced far away.
Tribal populations lived isolated lives. Most of human life on Earth involved only small-sized settlements with occasional visitors from the far away places.
Connectedness opens the flood gates . You get inundated with news from every corner as if it is happening in you neighborhood and as if those are your people.
What a bizarre statement. Of course you are not designed for anything. You have adapted, genetically and socially. And you keep doing that. Modern society would collapse if change to a state of the world that you describe would quickly come. If it comes slowly, no matter what change, humans will adapt. Not all of that will be pleasant, but it eventually works out.
>> Modern society would collapse if change to a state of the world that you describe would quickly come.
That means the modern society is not sustainable and cannot adapt to long-term changes. It's like those cities, where all traffic and power supply would be affected for every rain. That's not adaptation. That's just living precariously on greed and assumptions.
The drastic changes, if any, themselves would be purely man-made, not like asteroids that killed dinosaurs. A proper evolution or adaptation would not have drastic changes. Changes would be gradual in synch with the pace of biological evolution.
Adption is not just genetical. A person can move from northern Europe to southern italy without problem. Its genetics don't need to change for that.
> That means the modern society is not sustainable and cannot adapt to long-term changes.
I don't see that connection. As long as change comes sufficiently slowly, adaptation is no problem. It's mainly that the quicker change comes, the more painful adaptation is. This it unrelated to how sustainable society is.
> That means the modern society is not sustainable and cannot adapt to long-term changes.
Why? I, as the poster you replied to, do not see it this way at all. Any society, modern or not, can adapt to slow changes. And rapid changes would be at least as damaging several centuries ago, when for example 2-3 consecutive years of bad harvests meant a major upheaval.
Things can look a lot smoother after a few centuries. My 2c.
Things are toppled a lot higher now than several centuries ago. Population is orders of magnitude higher, and we all get our food from far away places in the world. Those things make a very fragile global ecosystem which is very different to the very localised ones centuries ago.
Back then 2-3 consecutive years of bad harvests meant a major upheaval for a few affected areas. Now that those areas supply food to the whole world the problem has grown in scale and fragility.
Connectedness also stops us from waging war. Or, I should say, it does not stop us, it makes us less likely to start one. But we still do it evidently. And then we all suffer.
Do we? If you read something like guns germs and steel or read some Harari, we may not have had big wars with big guns like today, but we sure had a lot of smaller conflicts.
I feel you... the situation is more or less the same for Greece (and many other countries).
Things are not looking very good and I don't know how all this situation is going to stabilize or even better come back to normal.
True. Certain things changed and improved but many remained the same. Having corrupt politicians doesn't help at all.
We're caught in-between bigger players and we're just following along. As the OP stated, many countries are suffering from consequences of the actions by some "great powers".
The author writes: "This time I do not need the research, because I have spent the past year looking for a house. (...) And the Polish loan is the worse product."
I wrote a piece comparing what Poles and Americans say about the housing crisis in social media, you might find it interesting, especially that I tried to compare affordability as well [0].
In short, it seems that:
- Warsaw is even slightly less affordable for its residents than Manhattan
- but the Americans seem to be more pissed off by the situation.
I normally just lurk, but this is one of the cooler and actually functional website designs I have seen in a while. Sceptical at first, but it's innovative, and serves to elevate the content, truly chef's kiss.
In this instance, the price cap is working exactly as intended. The state pushes Total to introduce a price cap by threatening a windfall tax on the industry as a whole. Total accepts, and introduces a voluntary price cap, selling at the below-market rate in a first-come-first serve regime (which it can afford to do, as it's an integrated producer). Total serves fuel to the majority of motorists at the below-rate price. When Total runs out of fuel, motorists who do a lot of travelling then need to pay the above-market rate at E.Leclerc instead.
Without introducing an unpopular tax regime, the French govt has found a way to progressively increase prices for higher mileage motorists. Supplying most motorists at a reasonable price, while having high-mileage motorists pay the unsubsidised price for most of their petrol.
And zoning and giving landlords great benefits (some countries not taxing wins from rents, others allowing changing rent easily, etc.) really solved the problem? Multiple major countries (in which rent control is not a thing) have huge housing issues, so something should be done. For some places I would much prefer reducing regulation required for new constructions, but this is very situation dependant.
Why does this might not apply to other cases? Paris is very dense already, not a lot of places to build anyhow. What other policies are required? Ensure people do not buy only for investment and leave things empty - they raised the uninhabited tax to discourage that, will see if enough to make a dent.
Also in countries where rent control is a thing. About 20 years ago the government decided it was "good enough" and stopped nationally planned housing projects (which resulted in decentralized planning and mostly expensive, high profit, housing being build), 'motivated' the market by providing tax breaks (giving higher profit and less investment in non-controlled renting) and as a bonus taxed the subsidized housing market a flat rate on top (result: hardly any new construction or investment in subsidized housing).
Almost all measures since have been detrimental to new housing, great for real estate owners, extremely poor for renters and allowed house prices to skyrocket. None of these things are on their own and it's a more-or-less global thing but they've done a great job making it worse.
And as a bonus: this was projected to happen by the governmental planning agency and rejected as fearmongering.
There is no real win for any city that becomes an eye candy for the entire world. Removing rent control without completely revamping your zoning restrictions achieves basically nothing.
People bring in Tokyo as an example, but there’s even a rent control-esque thing here - right to refuse. Technically landlord can increase the rent, but you can challenge and refuse it, to keep paying the original amount. Like rent is going up heavily over here (my neighbourhood is about 10% YoY). You can’t really even build up fast enough to accommodate demand.
Rent control is nonsense. We need to control the renters. Because they are doing something incredibly harmful at the moment. The reason *I* am now far from a city with offices is directly related to rents being unbearable and own housing unobtainable outside of 10% best paying jobs in the city.
This is generally a great article. I just wish the author would also mention how Poland (among other EU countries) is also hyper focusing on populist policies that benefit the older generations while heavily burdening the younger generations with a cost of these policies.
This is even a bigger problem than all these named external dependencies (which may or may not hurt us).
I think that's a problem in almost every European country. The politicians are creating policies to make their voter base happy so they would get elected on the next term and due to the aging population and low birth rates for decades the biggest voter base is the older, mostly boomer generation.
The visual design is beautiful and the maps are illuminating for some of the points. But a good number of the map elements feel pretty superfluous, in a 'data for data's sake' kind of way.
Overall I think this would be more impactful if it were ~50% shorter or if there were more navigation - this is a ton of content to scroll through one panel at a time.
Potato prices increased 15 fold!? Is that not a typo? From €10 per tonne to €150 per tonne. I can't help but wonder if a zero wasn't dropped somewhere. If not, this is insane. I hope I'm missing some context somewhere.
> Every generation believes it is living through the end of something.
I'm not sure my generation thought that (I was born in 1955). Not in the South of England at least. Growing up there in the late fifties, sixties, seventies, I feel that most of us were looking forward most of the time and anticipating good times. At least most people I knew at the time. It was a time of accelerating change and a great deal of it was undeniably positive.
Same in the 90s (born 78). The Berlin wall came down, Russia seemed to be on a path to real democracy, the US still had a pretty awesome reputation around the world, social progress was being made. It was a pretty good time to be alive.
Maybe it was just something about the South of England though eh?
This is a way over dramatized pessimistic perspective. If you think this is bad, then look into world from an eye of a pole during 1772 (where Poland was even wiped off of the world map) or 1939 or any year during the Soviet rule.
Poland has become a rich country within one generation after the fall of Soviet Union and one of the safest countries in Europe at the moment. There's always gonna be crisis in the world but at the same time you have to admit that we're living in one of the most comfortable times for humanity in general compared to past generations.
Nitpick: Poland was wiped off the map after the Third Partition in 1795, not after the first one in 1772. There was a Polish "Constitution of 3 May 1791."
Sure, but that's also the point: the current status quo is/was mostly good, especially for Europeans and North Americans, but the multitude of global crises - the war in Ukraine, the war in the Middle East, the Trump administration's (and the far right's in general) war on sanity, the AI disruption (both by the technology itself and by the financial upheaval it causes), not to forget the climate crisis - might just induce you to worry how long this status quo can be upheld.
> AI disruption (both by the technology itself and by the financial upheaval it causes)
If it wasn't for the AI we wouldn't even be having this discussion because the linked vibe coded site wouldn't even be built
Also learn to choose your battle. If you focus on everything that's going wrong in the world and spend all your energy on that, you're gonna have mental problems.
- To maintain fellowship, the empire spreads money to buy influence
- eventually this starts to cost too much, so the empire reduces spending
- wars ensue and independent voices emerge
- unable to establish order, the empire loses its influence and collapses
You can see this patterns as the US is overspending (high debt / trade deficit) while reducing its diplomatic influence on international programs. Not sure how they can save the USD value over time.
The only conclusion I get is that the UN is a joke and if the US keeps printing money to buy oil and political submission there won't be any change in the foreseeable future
It is extremely urgent to push for a new Allied Nations organization not headquartered in the US and for them all to drop the dollar and put USA and Israel in check. For Europe to grow a spine, and for China and Russia to step up and stop being complacent with all the bullying going on
Once again the top submission of HN is an LLM-generated article. I know we're not supposed to speculate on people reading past the title, but I incur you to read 3 paragraphs and tell me with a straight face that you did not eyeroll at every short, empty phrase stated with enormous confidence.
Be careful with this, you'll get burned sooner or later. Short sentences and breaking up the rhythm are often taught as good writing style. The people will also pick up some LLMisms, especially the non-native speakers. I enjoyed this prose, I felt like author had a very personal perspective to share. My AI BS detector didn't spike and I think your post is the over-confident one.
No, this is 100% written by Claude. It reads exactly like it, with all of the same phrasing, awkward sentence construction and other annoyances I have to deal with all day long.
Maybe you don't interact enough with Claude? "Underneath it, three slower clocks are running, and they set the terms on which we meet the next shock.", "A gauge reading is a level against a reference mark, not the depth of the river.", "Two official statements frame everything below.", "where a number rests on a vendor, an advocacy group or an industry estimate, the text says so" were not written by a human.
I vouched for your comment. HN's automod agrees that the OP is LLM text; and it's so high-confidence in its assessment, it flagged your comment, for quoting three lines of it.
I did not eyeroll at every short, empty phrase stated with enormous confidence. :|
It was a pleasant, concise and informative read. I actually read it from beginning to end. Unlike many of the artisanal articles starting with how the author experienced the crema of the morning's espresso.
* Lots of its points are subtly (or not that subtly) blaming the issues on support ting Ukraine in defending itself against Russian genocidal invasion.
I am Polish as well although currently living abroad.
I am way more optimistic than the author of the post.
It's true that a lot of negative events happened in very short time but we are still doing pretty well. Economy is growing, standards of life are growing.
Polish people are hard working. The culture pushes back against entitlements and class warfare. Poland didn't succumb to socialist populists (at least not too much) so there is a good chance for further growth.
On the immigration front we got Ukrainians who work and assimilate well so at least for now we avoided problems a lot of other EU countries face.
It would be nice if we had more competent politicians trying to solve problems and make things more efficient though but that's a problem no democracy in EU solved. We are paying for years of kicking the can in the energy department now but on the other hand maybe that will speed-up transition to EVs which will be both great for standards of living and significantly more efficient.
Geopolitics is hard to predict but I am also in optimist camp when it comes to war in Iran. The oil is flowing again and Iran can't do much about it. Workarounds will be found. Ukrainians now have a way to really hurt Russia which may result in peace at some point as well. If anything it's clear Russia is not dangerous in conventional war. They have sabotage but that imo is going to be less and less efficient as infrastructure and intelligence improve to handle it.
Overall - a lot of things went wrong and we are still standing. Once the environment improve we are in great position to be one of the best places to live and work in EU.
The world always had problems. It's like software, the work is never done. Sometimes new times ask for new solutions, and people need to find them. Adapt or die.
I do think though it's a little dishonest to be this alarmed now just because the crisis is at your doorstep. There is continuous misery all around the globe which everyone should acknowledge. The wars in the middle east brought destruction for generation and for entire regions. I am not sure those people are worried about the interest rates in Japan as much as they are about surviving. Including the current war. Think about Iran and its government what you will, but when a school gets bombed, innocent children die. I am not sure I find this less concerning than the state of natural gas capacity in Germany. And I live in Germany.
As for the energy crisis, the solution is in front of us. If you don't want to depend on foreign fossil fuels start electrifying and switching to renewables and batteries. You can do it cheap and fast. In fact, this is already happening in parts of the world and they are much more shielded from the current issues than elsewhere.
> Half of its six biggest diesel plants cut or halted output this month
Claude chose a weird turn of phrase here. Does this mean "the smallest of the three was the sixth largest"? If the Ukrainians hit a tiny plant, will it now be "three of its hundred biggest diesel plants"?
Every thread has a cynical AI accusation from someone looking for an excuse to dismiss long articles, so I tend to gloss over them, but this one's mind-boggling.
Literally how did you come to the conclusion this was written by ChatGPT? The text is clearly written by a polish person that speaks fluent english as a second language - I know cause I am one. Telltale signs are sentences like "Meanwhile, shares are at records" which is an overly direct translation of the polish equivalent, where the word "rekord" by itself implies a record high whereas in english you'd make it explicit.
> Literally how did you come to the conclusion this was written by ChatGPT?
You tell me:
> Scroll to follow one closed strait into fuel pumps, harvests, bond markets and my own country’s winter heating
Or:
> France: a run on the pumps. [...] drivers fleeing record prices elsewhere emptied its tanks faster than trucks could refill them. [...] A price cap meant as a cushion, in a system with no slack, turned a price shock into empty pumps.
A cursory check on Pangram returns 100% AI written just from the first 4 paragraphs.
Every writer has a style and if their style is strong enough you can identify the writer by reading enough of their works. AI style is very easy to spot.
There may have been some human involvement with this website but they certainly didn’t edit it for style. Unfortunately if you don’t edit for style then people will default to the assumption that it’s entirely vibecoded.
- "But the same closure that empties a granary fills somebody’s brokerage account." Claude is obsessed with comparisons linked by "the same". There are several instances, like "Poland made the same swap, with oil" (but that one is odd because "the same" isn't referring to anything).
- "Europe’s potato belt tells the story in a single season": Claude also loves this "noun verbs the noun in a single noun" phrasing.
- "A country that loses its regular supplier does not only pay more. It ends up dealing with people it does not know." Claude's classic "it's not X, it's Y" constructions.
- "Strategists do not describe a stampede home. They describe Japan quietly ceasing to be the buyer everyone could count on, and long-term borrowing costs rising everywhere as a result." A variant following the pattern "it's not X, it's Y, and Z as a result." This is an interesting pattern, one that I don't think I've ever seen a human write. A human would likely write "...leading to rising long-term borrowing costs" or similar.
- The use of a verb (rising) there in the third part is typical Claude, as it really likes to verb when a noun would read better. Other examples: "markets price another rise"; "volume freezes, prices stay put and sellers wait"; "after five years the rate floats".
- "The test Tusk describes is a test of belief, and it arrives just as the Pentagon decides how many Americans stay." The juxtaposition here (a test that arrives) is very odd and typical of Claude.
- What's also generally striking is the proliferation of "X becomes Y" phrasings, which is something Claude loves to do. Price shock turned into empty pumps. A story is told in a single season.
I'll stop there.
What's fascinating to me is that I personally find this kind of text exhausting to read, but apparently other people don't notice it at all.
If we ignore the AI stuff, I will still say this is not good writing. What's so grating and noticeable for me is the monotonous style. The short, clipped sentences like little stabs of information. It never varies; the tempo is just fact, fact, fact. It's absolutely exhausting to read pages and pages of this.
Good non-fiction writing is enjoyable to read for a myriad reasons; authors use metaphor, juxtaposition, tempo, humor, irony, allusion, and all sorts of techniques to make an article enjoyable to read. Just throwing down facts one after another with this kind of breathless, staccato noir voice is not that, in my personal opinion.
I don't know how much AI is to blame, maybe the Polish version is different or if this is a deliberate style.
I'm not able to pin down the one-screen text on my mobile device without the page forcing me to go to the next one-screen text. This problem reminds me of https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/.
To the content:
Don't count on IEA's reports, they are just as subject to propaganda as any other media.
"When the world pays more, our grain can simply leave, so the price at home has to match" Not a fact.
At the moment as I see it some warmongers want really to escalate the situation to outright war between NATO and Russia so don't pay attention to Tusks words or any of the hawks from USA.
Criminals and medical doctors are funnelling a fortune into domestic and foreign real estate, and into premium cars. Polish public healthcare basically doesn't exist. Nearshoring and outsourcing centers are fleeing the country. Polish army expenditures are at the level of Israel and South Korea. The budget is spent on 40 years old military retirees while Russian drones and missiles are freely entering and penetrating the airspace. I'd say so long Poland, a failed experiment again. Polish elites don't even have to flee this time, they're already watching from their 10th or 20th real estate in Spain, Switzerland, US, or Italy (their real estate in Dubai is a bummer).
This technical analysis is really futile and counterproductive, there exists only vicious greed which will be followed by a catastrophe.
The most sensible thing the EU could do right now is make peace with Russia and stop this confrontation before it is too late. NATO has been deaf to Russia’s security concerns for decades, so maybe it is finally time to listen.
And before the NATO zealots, warmongers and NATO wannabes come here crying that you cannot trust Russia and that war is the only way (provided, of course, that you are not the one fighting), let’s address that right away.
You cannot trust Russia
Russia has maintained good relationships with a lot of countries, but none of them are NATO members or NATO wannabes. And, as a reminder, it was NATO that broke promises about not expanding eastwards.
You cannot deal with a country waging a war.
Yes, you can. Just take a look at Israel or the USA. One is committing a genocide in real time, while the other has been waging wars of aggression for ages. European leaders have no problems dealing
lol what a hypocrite. when he was getting uncle sam's money and security umbrella, he was happy and not questioning anything then now facing a bit of the reality scared my poor poles
I'm Polish, but this is such a pessimistic, overdramatic take. The visualisations are impressive, but you're living in Poland's golden age. See this Hacker News story with 1,000+ upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062117
The war in Ukraine is a tragedy, but it has proved that Russia is weak. The price shock will speed up the transition to renewables, and Iran is losing its grip on Hormuz. So many of the other issues are solvable.
It's easy to be a pessimist, but there's a bright future ahead of us.
> and Iran is losing its grip on Hormuz
Remember this is a war that Iran has spent 40 years planning for.
Netanyahu has been doing the same "two weeks away" stand-up comedy since 1992.
Netanyahu asked every single US president. They all took advice and then went back with a polite "thanks, but no thanks".
You don't need to have access to super-secret intel to know going into this frivolous war was a very stupid idea. You just need to look at a standard map and use your brain.
Finally Mr Netanyahu found a stupid enough US president.
And the problem with the current US president is he won't accept a loss.
He is not the sort of person willing to accept he has bitten off more than he can chew.
Nor is he the sort of person who is willing to sit down and have a proper negotiated discussion. Infact he's the very person who just tore up the JPCOA seemingly just because he doesn't like Obama.
Nor is he the sort of person willing to learn from Iraq or Afghanistan.
So we have a stalemate. And a US president who doesn't believe in diplomacy, old-school politics or anything else.
And this stalemate is not one that is going to be resolved with more military firepower. Again, just look at the map....
> Remember this is a war that Iran has spent 40 years planning for.
So has the US. But as the saying goes: Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.
Not in the same way I don't think.
My understanding is that the US's longstanding evaluation is that their strategic goals in the region can't be accomplished by brawling with Iran over the strait, and their best move is to avoid it. The actions of every previous administration align with this view.
Where Iran's strategic position can be improved by drawing the US into an open conflict. Disrupting global petroleum markets, forcing the US to spend disproportionate resources defending its regional allies or withdraw and admit it can't, weakening the US's influence as a diplomatic power, all are achievable (or, frankly, achieved) with this conflict.
The US has no comparable strategic wins to even aim for here. At this point their only reasonable goal is restoring open trade through the strait, the status quo before the conflict. Fighting a war to successfully reclaim the status quo that was disrupted by entering the war is, strategically, losing a war.
> So has the US (spent 40 years planning for conflict with Iran).
True, but also worthless - the USA fired or retired people who knew the plan (1), and didn't listen to the warnings. It's more "Everyone knows the plan until they punch themselves in the face"
1) https://fortune.com/2026/04/05/doge-fired-state-department-e...
Not a stupid idea at all. The US oil corps are making massive profits.
It's at everyone else's expense, but so is everything else they do.
> The US oil corps are making massive profits
Its not my area of expertise by any means, but I would perhaps point out the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve chart[1] which is at its lowest level since 1982.
Also do not forget the oil and LNG needs to be transported and that is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive.
It may well be that the artificial party cannot go on forever.
[1] https://en.macromicro.me/charts/41674/us-strategic-petroleum...
> but I would perhaps point out the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve chart[1] which is at its lowest level since 1982.
Might be the case, but that doesn't refute the argument? Maybe an empty reserve is even better for the (US) oil corps, financially.
They don't need to go on forever. Just long enough to maximize the share price so oil execs can sell at the top before it all comes down.
This is probably the worst thing oil corps could ask for, and I can guarantee you with every ounce of my being that they are furious over this.
It might check the phantom "short term profits" box, but anyone with any modicum of business sense (and the oil boys are no amateurs) see this event as probably the largest nail ever driven into the oil coffin.
Trump could not have given a bigger gift to the anti-oil crowd, making every human on Earth think "Damn, this shit is getting expensive and unreliable, what alternatives are available?"
> And the problem with the current US president is he won't accept a loss.
At least he hasn't yet gone nuclear (metaphorically but also literally)
> At least he hasn't yet gone nuclear (metaphorically but also literally)
Maybe the only possible bit of credit we can give the guy is he said no when the Israelis wanted to use theirs.
Isn't it after all supposedly the world's worst kept secret that they have some too ?
But I'm also kind of concerned what happens in the unlikely event he does well in the mid-terms, and the same after the Israeli elections ....
The more likely hyperbolic step would be to blow up outgoing pipelines and apply secondary sanctions. Or, as threatened, blow up power and water treatment plants killing large swaths of the civilian population. Nukes wouldn't be necessary to cause mass death.
>>You don't need to have access to super-secret intel to know going into this frivolous war was a very stupid idea. You just need to look at a standard map and use your brain.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte disagrees with your assessment: https://x.com/clashreport/status/2102671513337856357
> NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte
Would that be the same Mark Rutte who referred to Trump as "daddy" during an alliance summit and sent him a flattering text message which Trump published[1] ?
Yeah. Erm. I think we know what side of the bread Mr Rutte butters his toast on.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/trump-rutte-text-message-nato-sig...
What's the point of this comment? "Somebody disagrees with you"? We know.
> What's the point of this comment? "Somebody disagrees with you"?
I'm perfectly open to people posting opposing points of view as long as they are made from an independent mindset perspective.
Don't just post a pro-war view from a man who we know is pro-Trump.
Its a bit like saying JD Vance disagrees with me. Well duh....
The is not "somebody" but the NATO Secretary General. It's a good counterpoint to "anybody with a brain can see..." point.
>>Don't just post a pro-war view from a man who we know is pro-Trump.
If you are going to discard people who are pro-someone you don't like then you end up with a recipe for an echo-chamber.
Very brave take. Still, I hope that your kids, should you have some and grow wiser, won't grow up in a world that russia or iran shapes. The united states doesn't negotiate with terrorists.
I'm in Iranian and I have relatives in Iraq.
United States decided that our children shouldn't have the right to grow up in this world.
So that, I say, I would rather not take part in any world that United States shapes.
> United States decided that our children shouldn't have the right to grow up in this world.
What makes you believe this great exaggeration? If it was true USA would have nuked Iran and Iraq to kingdom come ages ago.
The US very much has been trying to get Ukraine to surrender to Russia since Trump was elected. Quite nothing would seemingly please Trump more than Ukrainians rolling over and clearing the way to a fat kickback from Russia.
Trump recently signed a Russian sanctions bill and the State Department just cleared a $2.7 billion military sale to Ukraine. So, I don't know how you've arrived at your conclusions.
Are you kidding?
2025 November: "Trump’s peace plan is a demand for Ukraine’s surrender What makes this plan different from all the others?"[1]
2025 October: "Donald Trump Wants Ukraine to Surrender to Putin"[2]
2025 September: "Ukraine's refusal to give up territory to Russia stalls peace deal, Trump envoy says"[3]
2025 Feb: "Trump Gives Europe 3 Weeks to Accept Ukraine’s ‘Surrender,’ Says European Lawmaker"[4]
2025 January: "Trump says Ukraine should have surrendered to Russia and blames Zelensky for war"[5]
2024 September: "Harris meets Zelensky and slams Trump's 'surrender policy' for Ukraine"[6]
1. https://www.vox.com/politics/469993/trump-ukraine-peace-plan...
2. https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/donald-trump-wants-ukrai...
3. https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/ukraines-refusal-terr...
4. https://www.kyivpost.com/post/47574
5. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
6. https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20240927-harris-meets-z...
How do you propose to end the war without negotiations?
Make the oil less relevant to the point that 1/5th of it not being present doesn't affect the rest of the world. We are not there yet, but when we get there, there will be no reason to hold the Strait of Hormuz. Of course the impact on the Gulf states will be enormous, economic or otherwise, so it's hard to say if they will let this be.
> there will be no reason to hold the Strait of Hormuz
Hormuz was yesterday's problem.
Today's problem which was entirely predictable to anybody with a map and half a brain is Bab El Mendab now being heavily disrupted by the Houthis etc.
It was always a case of when, not if.
Which now means the old ~20 day alternative-route transits via Bab are now ~50 days becuase you have to go via Suez and Cape of Good Hope.
This is exactly why all the other US presidents said no. It was a Pandora's box that was not worth the risk poking with a sharp stick.
What does the Hormuz have to do with Bab El Mendab? The Houthi attacked red sea routes before any "Pandora's box" was opened.
I’m hoping they don’t grow up in one the US shapes if it continues to be run by a dictator loving sexual predator who thinks corruption isn’t just ok, but a mandatory part of government.
It’s also rich saying that the US doesn’t negotiate with terrorists while watching Trump verbally fellate Putin at every given opportunity.
The US has materially supported terrorist groups in the Middle East and South America.
> just look at the map
I have Google maps open on another tab. Could you clarify what should I be looking at?
Visited Warsaw this summer. Beautiful city full of hope and energy. Can confirm Poland is in full blossom.
I agree. My grandmother was not allowed to make decisions over her body, own a bank account, or work after marriage until the late 60s. For many of us, it's definitely a golden age of rights and possibilities.
I'm not Polish, and don't know much more than what's in this thread and in the post, but the world has changed a lot since the late 60's.
I'm not discounting the value of the good things you mention, but is there anything else to add to the 'golden age' description?
Yeah I struggle to think of a time in the last three hundred years that Poland was in a better position than it is today. Maybe like 2019 or so? And that is basically still the same era.
Yeah, we're new rich, but we're also old poor - the majority of millennials and the entire gen x have seen what a proper 3rd world country Poland was back in the 90s - that's the bulk of the current workforce. We've navigated worse crises.
> Iran is losing its grip on Hormuz
They are not, and this is a good thing long term.
It absolutely is. And anything that's bad for a regime that just recently massacred tens of thousands of its own citizens is a net good.
It wouldn’t be Polish if it wasn’t pessimistic ;)
You joke, but there are practical and historic reasons for the pessimism.
No one in the West has had the Eastern European experience of queuing for bread for hours and discovering there isn't any.
In the West we have exceptionally strong normalcy bias and can't imagine a world with severe scarcity.
In countries like Poland that's still lived memory.
Heck, 80 years ago it wasn't obvious there would still be a Poland. Absolutely understandable that pessimism is a normal state of mind.
Yes: Strait of Hormuz oil flows near pre-war levels as Iran’s grip slips and Brent’s war premium fades[0]
[0] https://www.oilandgasmiddleeast.com/news/strait-of-hormuz-oi...
> it has proved that Russia is weak.
How? Russia is successfully fighting the entirety of NATO on a front that it is continually pushing further west, with about 20% of Ukraine now lost. If anything NATO and the promise of US security is what has been shown to be weak. And I don't think the idea of US/Western superiority is ever going to come back to what it was given what has happened in the Ukraine and Iran theaters in recent past.
Do you mean a metaphorical front? Because on the ground, it's been a stalemate for the past year or so. Ukraine is often taking back chunks of territory.
Russia is claiming to fight NATO, but NATO hasn't even shown up yet, but Russia is struggling. If NATO were to go to war with Russia, there would be very little that Russia could do. The one thing they might be able to do is the reason NATO has been holding back.
Russia is on equal footing with a country third of its size that is supported by a small fraction of NATO's GDP. You can barely tell the difference between a territorial control map from 2023 and 2026. Neither side is capable of achieving its goals through military action.
Ukraine us unlikely to get back most of the territory it lost in 2022, but Russia is also unlikely to even finish capturing the remaining parts of the Donetsk oblast, let alone the rest of Ukraine. It's taking Russia months/years to capture settlements with just thousands of prewar population. Donetsk oblast still has a heavily fortified urban area with a prewar population of 500k under Ukrainian control.
> third of its size
Russia is about 28 times larger than Ukraine and 10x GDP.
Russia is not fighting NATO, much less the entirety.
Russia is also not pushing, they actually lost occupied territory in 2026.
Russia is strong like an ant is strong: strong but insignificant. It only has any significance economically because it has oil and gas.
Russia employs modern ballistic and drone warfare to fight Ukraine. USA can't have its way with Strait of Hormuz and Iran because it can't fight against ballistic missiles and drones effectively. And Poland position is... USA will fight against Russia and their drones and their ballistic missiles while at the same time... USA hasn't been able to do it with much smaller and weaker Iran for 7 months now. Iran got control of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran still has the control of the Strait of Hormuz. For 7 months now USA can't do anything about it. How come you are so sure if they can't protect their allies in the Middle East to export oil through the Strait of Hormuz they will be so successful protecting say... Suwalki "Strait" from much stronger and nuclear strike ready opponent? Reality check? I think we will get one.
The US can absolutely conquer or decimate Iran and has explicitly avoided targeting energy infrastructure or doing so (understanding that doing so gets us another Iraq or Afgahnistan) but it's not as if the US can't "take on" Iran it's that the US expected regime change in Iran rather than a dragged out war.
Iran doesn't need to conquer or hold Hormuz they just need it in missile/drone range - it's not symmetric.
As for the impact on the global economy - the entire world is letting Iran hold its gas/oil hostage because of something the US did. I'm not sure why those countries don't pressure Iran more they're not at war with them they shouldn't be embargo'd.
> The US can absolutely conquer or decimate Iran
Decimate? Sure. Conquer? Absolutely not.
Iran is a huge country with dispersed command and control and generations of people raised to hate the U.S.
In all fairness, the US by itself is fighting someone else's war on the other side of the world, in a region that's generally not super friendly to them.
Russia is fighting its own battle at its own border against an enemy which receives some support from NATO countries.
US leadership fights to not lose face, Russian leadership loses a lot more than face if they back off.
Russia lost many years ago. They just don't know it yet.
Ukraine probably wouldn't invade Russia if Russia stopped fighting tomorrow.
I never said anything about the US's actions to protect anyone. I just said that Russia is weak.
Different conflict, though. That's just the US, not NATO. Because the rest of NATO knows very well what an utterly stupid and pointless war that is.
I am curious how Russian people feel about this propaganda line that they're fighting NATO. It's obviously nonsense, along the lines of "war is peace." Russia borders NATO and there is no front there. Russia invaded a non-NATO country and immediately bogged down against an army that does not fight according to NATO doctrine. I have to believe this is something the average Russian realizes.
Not Russian, but spent a lot of time out east.
Russia is reflexively anti-NATO as NATO is reflexively anti-Russia.
NATO is an alliance that was created in opposition to the Soviet Union. NATO has absorbed parts of the former Soviet Union.
Western companies pillaged Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Rightly or wrongly, Putin owes a lot of his original popularity to dealing with the aftermath.
Russia, rightly or wrongly, sees colour revolutions as intelligence operations, and territorial conquest.
Russia cannot accept NATO forces on its borders.
NATO is providing decisive material, political, logistical, financial and intelligence support to Ukraine, precisely to bog it down and drain it.
These are all pretty normal perspectives for most Russians. They're arguably pretty based, and not necessarily a product of internal propaganda campaigns.
The thing that westerners don't get about Russia, and the reason we're stuck in this Godforsaken conflict, is that we personalise things around Putin. We think that if Putin dies, everything will magically improve.
The decision to invade was Putin's, but the rationale goes much deeper and will outlast him.
> Russia cannot accept NATO forces on its borders.
This is such obvious bullshit. Russia already has NATO on its borders, and is attempting to expand it's borders so they will contact even more of NATO.
If Russia was fighting the entirety of NATO, they'd lose the war in a week. They're fighting the entirety of Ukraine, with NATO dribbling in supplies to help out. NATO help is absolutely tiny compared to what they could be doing.
> Russia is successfully fighting the entirety of NATO
Has anybody told NATO yet that they’re fighting the Russians?
If only we had known, right?
front that it is continually pushing further west
Ukraine is taking back terrain currently:
https://www.reuters.com/world/ukraine-has-retaken-745-sq-km-...
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/85252
Russia is successfully fighting the entirety of NATO
It is not. The primary reason that Russia can even keep up is that it has many more citizens that can be thrown in the meat grinder and can work in arms factories and it has a larger industrial base than Ukraine. If you would tell most experts before the invasion, that it would've ended up as it did, they would have laughed their heads off. They would have told you that the Ukraine army would not be a match for the Russian army and they would have told you that the response of the West would have been divided.
Russia has ~146M citizens, Ukraine has ~29M citizens within land that it currently controls. Russia's estimated GDP is $2.66 trillion, Ukraine's GDP is $225 billion. That's 5x as many citizens and a 10x larger economy.
A real conventional war against NATO would be a completely different story. Sure, NATO countries would have to catch up with drone production and defense, but a lot of knowledge transfer and co-development is already happening. But NATO's economy and population is several times larger than Russia's. If NATO countries switched to a war economy, it would not be a fair game.
Of course, Putin knows this and he also knows the real weaknesses: there is a change that not all countries will uphold Article 5 and coordination might end up in a mess if the US would bow out, because command & control has always largely been handled by the US. This is why he is constantly testing how strong Article 4 and 5 are on an escalating ladder. The other weakness are disinformation campaigns through social media, which are working really wel for them, both in the US and in various European countries.
(I don't think it's useful to talk about nuclear war, it will end up badly for everyone in a population center. There will be no winners, only losers.)
golden age was precovid we are passed the peak even thought we got into G20 I suspect GDP increased a lot of because inflation.
Been living a lot in SE Asia in the last 12 years but ever yeah in poland for few months. There has been really big inflation in the last 2-3 years and everybody notice it.
Been twice this year in Italy, one time in alps and last week in puglia and there is a reason so many Poles go there for holiday - its cheaper or similar price but better than taking a holiday in poland.
This is living in denial. Lots of Ukrainians didn't believe there's going to be war either. There are already Russian drones flying into Eastern European countries, while the US is lifting sanctions on Russia - you don't have to be a fortune teller to predict where this is going.
>Iran is losing its grip on Hormuz
citation needed
In 2016 I spoke with an Ukrainian in Germany. He was saying the war is in the easternmost regions, he's safe because he's from Kiev area. That's how war works, uninformed civilian never believes it's coming.
> and Iran is losing its grip on Hormuz.
That is just hope-believe, i.e. it ain't happening.
> It's easy to be a pessimist, but there's a bright future ahead of us.
I lived through the 1990s here in Romania, the future does not look bright in the slightest. Yes, materially speaking we do have more stuff compared to the 1990s, a lot more stuff, but the opportunities in front of us are as slim as ever (which wasn't the case back in the 1990s). But maybe things look different for the Polish.
> I lived through the 1990s here in Romania, the future does not look bright in the slightest.
Why? Inflation was much higher then. There were almost no highways. Very little foreign tourism. Towns were ugly. Industry was barely functioning. Etc. Things are way better now. Just because Romania has high debt is no reason to be pessimistic. Everybody has high debt.
I was talking about the perspective on the future, we had that back in the 1990s, it is sorely missing now. No-one even dares mentioning about any “light at the end of the tunnel”, it’s everybody for himself (and for his/her family/clan) right now.
I would wager Iran is barely hanging on. The question is which side can hang on longer. Its like their both dangling off a cliff with their fingers on the edge - one due to politics, the other because they weren’t as strong as they projected from the start. I suspect Iran might hang on to after midterms.
Worth noting mid east is all looking for other routes now 3-5 years from now Iran will be in a weaker economic situation on reduced flow. Hopefully Theocracy has been ended.
> I would wager Iran is barely hanging on. The question is which side can hang on longer.
I think this applies to both sides, and the issue is that the people in power are not affected by the crises that cause hardship to ordinary people. " Iran is..." does not distinguish between the two, they are different. Fanatical leadership can live by "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make" .
The problem though is that people in the USA do have one lever to pull on their government, in the form of approaching midterm elections, that the people of Iran do not. And the leadership of Iran knows it. They may be fanatical and awful but they're not stupid - causing fuel shortages causes economic pain to ordinary people causes political pain to the USA. They have this weapon and are using it heavily.
Notwithstanding that, this assessment of blame is correct ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49907371 ), the missteps that put us in this mess with no clear way out all come from stupid leadership in the USA.
You realize you mostly just agreed with everything I said but added more language?
Yes, I knew all along that I agreed with what you said, I was not trying to dispute what you said. Apologies if that wasn't clear to you, I should have started it with "yes, and" so that you would not take mistaken offence.
I don't agree that the consequential points are just "more language". I said things that you did not.
No offense taken - I always find most people try and take an opposing view for debate sakes. I was merely hoping you didn't think that was the case. Glad to see we agree.
Dzień Dobry :-) Poland is very modern on the surface. Very clean. Very safe. And an economic success story. As long as private sector goes and its citizens ambitions it is doing fantastic. However the society is a bit anachronistic. The same goes with the public sector. Yes, you get mObywatel app, and so many public services can be done online nowadays including court proceedings. The problem is quite subtle, not easily seen on the surface. I.e. once you hit issues like, say, divorce, or taxes, or the army mentality, politicians, local government, out of sudden you are transported back to 1960s. Not even 1989 when the communism in Poland collapsed. Like two decades earlier than that. You need to persuade the court you can have divorce. Not like in any other Western country. It isn't sufficient you want one. You need to persuade the court you can have one. When they wrote the law in 1960s it made sense. In communism the Party decided if an individual can have a divorce (in a sense). Not the individual. In the West if an individual says, I want a divorce, they file the paperwork and they will get the divorce. In Poland, nope. You need to persuade the court the marriage can't be repaired. Doesn't matter what you want, the state (the party) knows better when your marriage is over. So they will drag you for months, years every time the judge asking: "are you sure you don't want to go back to her?". Because the state knows better and many people will go back just because in 1960s divorce was the end of the world. Today, in 2026, it is an administrative task. As long as the society lives in 2026 that is. The same logic still persists in polish courts for other cases. Not really anything got reformed in polish court system since 1960s. Other weird things, like lawyers inheriting positions in courts by birthright. Your dad is a judge? Well, you will be too. Your dad works in Ikea as a clerk? Well, good luck! That's not 1960s anymore. That's Middle Ages. The same with Medical Doctors, other public professions. They are inherited. Honestly, the whole public sector stinks. Never reformed. While the private sector -- built from zero and world class. Just saying, it is different deep down than on the surface level. And there is a much deeper problem to it. Historically, Army, in any nation, has been a product of public sector. Not private sector. Anachronistic, corrupted public sector won't produce modern army. It will produce corrupt public servants buying tanks as if it is... 1960s. And that's the real problem that Poland has now with Russian jet drones hitting targets in Ukraine mere meters from the border check points.
What about the rise of Fascism?
That's the unseen undercurrent pushing different things described in this essay.
Where, in Italy in 1930s? Football hooliganism and organized crime though, yes.
Agree, with UA stopping Russia western capital will finally flow into Poland because previous strategy was to defend on Vistula river which blocked a lot of heavy industry investments that are starting now.
I feel like this is overdramatized a bit.
For instance: it's mentioned that EU gas storage is at 67% and Germany's at 56%.
What is not mentioned though is that Poland's storage is at 97% because the previous administration, for better or worse, was paranoid enough to invest in a sizeable marine gas terminal and the current one stocked up early.
Regarding real estate: adjusted for inflation prices peaked 2.5 years ago, interest rates are also much lower than back then. Nobody is buying because all the Ukrainian refugees who were moving to Poland are here already and that's the last bump in population this country will see for the foreseeable future.
Also there's the threat of war on Polish soil, which affects investor sentiment.
Dramatised yes. Overdramatised no. This is a dramatic period of history.
Every period of history is dramatic; sometimes I rewatch old episodes of a UK satirical news quiz, Have I Got News For You, and even in the best of years there was plenty of drama.
It's 97% but total gas storage capacity it quite low so it's easier to fill.
True, but other large EU members also did a better job replenishing their stores:
https://energiedashboard.admin.ch/gas/eu-gasspeicher
For instance, Italy has more storage capacity per capita despite very similar consumption (~10TWh/1mln population) and they're already at 86%+.
Meanwhile indeed Poland has much less storage (about a third of Germany per capita), but it also uses it less (half the consumption of Germany per capita).
I must ask: what the hell are the Germans waiting for?
Our minister responsible for energy is Katherina Reiche, a lobbyist for fossil companies. She has been suspected to dawdle on refilling gas storage to make it easier for her former employers to make a quick buck when gas becomes scarce in winter. She's also botched the transition to renewable energies by removing the incentives for state and industry to build out electric infrastructure, so it would not be out of character.
Plus, our chancellor has zero experience in governing anything (he's not even been mayor before) and is firmly stuck in thinking like a Blackrock executive.
So, to answer your question: We are waiting for a government that is not entirely in the pocket of those that want to stick to the status quo and profit from crises as long as possible.
That's a nice conspiracy theory you have there.
Which former employer is going to make a quick buck? The grid operator or the grid operator lobbyist? Besides, who is going to profit from a price spike when the whole point is that the summer-winter spread is inverted, so no one expects to make money from injecting?
> Which former employer is going to make a quick buck? The grid operator or the grid operator lobbyist?
Well, both. Katherina Reiche was CEO of Westenergie until she joined the current government; and was, at the same time, listed as a lobbyist. She also caused controversy when she presented a plan for energy politics that was _very similar_ to plans by major electricity providers (including the parent company of her previous company). Or when she directly asked the electricity provider EnBW for better arguments why we should build more gas power plant (directly violating lobbying laws). That's just a small excerpt; the list of controversy is long.
But tbh, I don't think there's a big conspiracy about the empty gas tanks. Yes, Reiche is most likely corrupt (which is a huge deal), but afaiu, the gas tanks are empty because nobody wants to pay for the gas right now.
PS: Just today, Reiche ordered Sefe GmbH to stockpile more gas [1]. Sefe is conveniently a public company. So private companies don't have to buy expensive gas, because the public is going to take care of it.
[1] https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2026-09/gasspeicher-deutschla...
> I must ask: what the hell are the Germans waiting for?
Bureaucracy, most likely. That and in-fighting (I count NIMBY as an example of that, but not the only thing).
Here's a train station in Berlin, whose upgrade is currently 20 years behind schedule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Köpenick_station
Humans are fragile.
Just because the numbers might be small if germany doesn't has enough gas and some old fragile human being might die of this or because they cant afford the gas, its still no way to die in a country like germany.
Life is finite.
Yes than reduce the strain on the planet by removing yourself from it?
What does your comment add to this discussion?
We should stop caring? You decide how others can live because you are well off?
People not being able to afford gas is nonsense. Germany pays for it.
The other thing is: If a few cold days kill you then your health wasn't much to begin with after all.
Old people die. It's not always a heart attack or a stroke. It's the flu at a high age that gets them.
Real estate in Poland is the only investment option without capital gains tax. You only have to keep it 5 years, extremely simple. A condo is tax free, risk free brokerage account. Even if drones start hitting these mostly empty buildings, the prices will keep rising.
I guess that's why houses are so expensive, now
So it's overdramatised on the gas, but underdramatised on the war?
The threat of war is largely in the minds of investors.
I don't know if Putin is crazy enough to chance it, but I wouldn't put it past him to do so.
But even then, Russia would need to mobilize hundreds of thousands of troops and that is not something you can pull off in a week, or even a month.
They are massively increasing their medium sized drone capacities (ie Geran) while improving on those drones too. Faster, harder to detect and shoot down, no GPS/Glonass navigation necessary so jamming won't do much.
A country that is rained on by 500 drones daily delivering 125KG explosives (so like a proper standard bomb dropped from airplanes) can overwhelm local military defense capacities quickly, leave infrastructure in crumbles (as in no water, electricity, gas, heating, gas stations working and so on) and at least in dictator's mind local population may crumble in weeks. You don't need to put a single foot in the country to reduce critical infra to rubble.
I can't imagine Polish folks would ever bow to russians after horrible things they repeatedly done to them, but ie in Slovakia it would be a very quick victory even if country wouldn't be ruled by ultra corrupt folks who would just give whole country to russians for some more corruption promises for later.
If puttin' will try anything in eastern Europe now is the best time. But I would expect more something along Moldova or baltics, Poland is far from russia and any extra force concentration in Kaliningrad would be easy to see.
The baltics have even more vivid memories of soviet life don't they? And nato trip wire troops so any attack would be killing french and uk soldiers (nuclear powers). Trump was talking about taking Greenland by force right up until the trip wire forces arrived. It is an odd job as a soldier to be a hostage I think, but it seems to work. It would be more reliable for Poland to obtain its own nuclear deterrent, along the lines of the buffers vs dependencies argument in the post. There has been talk, but that seems difficult.
Germany hasn’t historically been nice about leaving Polish oil to the Polish when they decide they need it though?
Poland barely had any oil. If you want to go "historical", Romania was the source of oil for Germany during WW2 (and Austria-Hungary also wanted to take over Romanian oil fields in WW1).
Not to be that guy, but I'm pretty sure that "Polish" is capitalized. "polish oil" is what I use on my leather shoes
Thanks xD now I can’t stop thinking about polish oil.
The fact that you have time to "xD"-reply to some comments but won't address the other ones basically marks you as a troll. Good to know, shame HN doesn't have ways to block/mark users as ignorable.
Your comment implies Germany can just somehow command Poland to please hand over their gas, which obviously makes no sense, so I think you either forgot to include some key detail or you’re just talking out of your ass.
Unless you mean nazi invasions ofc in which case you’re just a troll.
On the ad absurdum: They'd also go the other way. The integration with the Dutch gas fields and system in Groningen is good enough and there is at least two decades of gas left in the fields. While closed, they can be reopened within a relatively short time and there are storage fields abound there (Groningen and Drente storages account for half the Dutch supply). And since it's ad absurdum, the earthquakes do not matter.
> Every generation believes it is living through the end of something.
Many generations are. Last century saw the collapse of the British and Soviet empires - titans by any measure - through mismanagement. Europe as an international power was also broken (compared to how they used to be). I can easily imagine 1900s me fleeing to America in fear of the end times and feeling quite justified in his choices with hindsight. Less obvious where to run to these days as the US not-an-empire looks like it may crumble.
Most of the people who died didn't get an opportunity to complain, so we live with some serious survivorship bias on how bad things got.
While there's no magic land of opportunity to flee to, there are still many safe and stable places where one can raise a family and lead a simple life. Especially if you remove the abstraction of countries and look at cities and towns instead. It does depends on what you want and what you're willing to give however, as moving may mean learning a new language and assimilating a new culture. And then there's differences in wealth and earning potential as well, so I guess leaving the USA is more 'bugging out' than 'economic migration'.
OTOH, mobility is a privilege, and it's usually the least privileged who are the most affected by war. So I'm not exactly sure how I feel about my own advice, since it's most useful to those that need it least.
> mobility is a privilege
We made it a priviledge, but for a biological being, it's the most natural thing to do when you find yourself in a place that is shitty. There is a reason so many risk truly awful things to get a chance (chance!) at a better life: going to where food and safety is, is just what living beings do.
Sure, but I think what they mean is that when you do move somewhere, how you are treated by the humans already there depends on your socioeconomic status. Who may be disinclined to let you have food or safety.
what is the alternative?
To mobility? There is none. It's a basic human trait. Animal trait. Living in the same place is the abberation.
I also sometimes think how people don't realize how good they have things; while Poland is no longer a poor country, it would take an absolutely colossal disaster to reduce the average living standard of America to that of Poland. America hasn't even reached the 'terrifying' level of European petrol prices.
It also depends who you are. A very large fraction of American trans people (not a large absolute number, only a few hundred thousand) have moved from R states to D states recently due to repression, such as Kentucky revoking their driving licenses.
I do think the best political-economic era of my life was 1997-2001: election of Tony Blair until 9/11, covering the first internet boom. That was the closest to "world peace". That includes the Israel-Palestine peace process and the reconciliation of the post-Soviet states into Europe. If that had worked better, with a democratic Russia, the world would be a very different place today.
I'm sure you can throw out statistics that prove otherwise, but I think the average living standard of Poland is already better than America. Again, anecdotally, but I'm American and I've lived in Poland for about a decade. Food, healthcare, housing, access to parks, public transport, etc. are all better quality here at the average-person level than most places the US.
Americans just end up paying for a lot of things that are either undesirable for many Poles (e.g., a huge McMansion in desolate suburbs and the car to drive there) or paid for via other means (e.g., healthcare.)
Which country has a better average living standard depends on if we are talking about mean, median, or mode. The American mean is higher and since most of the HN crowed works in higher-paying jobs in urban centers they tend to look at their own experiences to think that the US is a high standard of living country. If you look at the median or mode of living standards across a country then places like Europe are where you find more people experiencing a higher standard of living.
Oh, best of luck convincing Americans that paying twice as much for shitty health insurance than you pay in 'high' general tax levels is somehow a bad deal for them. Until they actually live the experience they just cannot comprehend the second and third order benefits of a real social system.
I am a young man who lives in Europe and I too cannot comprehend the alleged second and third order benefits of a "real" social system.
Then you have a remarkable lack of awareness, but maybe that is just a you problem. I am not going to bother wasting time with a sea lion.
I'll bite, even though I really shouldn't.
How do you define "average living standard", so that it would take a colossal disaster to have US reduced to that of Poland?
In terms of nominal GDP per capita, the US is around $85k with Poland at $25k, so US GDP would need to fall around 70%, which would be an unprecedented fall, the kind historically only associated with mass bombing or extreme hyperinflation.
GDP is irrelevant when discussing the well being of the ordinary person. A more relevant measure would be median income together with purchasing power parity.
US median income is just over 19 k international dollars, Poland is just under 9 k. Still a big difference but just over a factor of 2 instead of over 3.5.
See https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
America has not just a lot more people, but a lot more immigrants, refugees, and more.
In a more homogenous society, such as Poland’s in comparison to the United States, it also in my observation trends to be easier for wealth distribution to flatten.
Maybe the US has more kids per capita too which would also affect that value depending on how it is being measured. Not to say that anything is being hidden there, just something to think about that may make you interpret the data differently or think about it differently.
GDP is relevant, actually, because it measures how expensive things are. All other things being equal, a higher GDP is worse.
Good thing we're not talking about GDP then!
Petrol prices mean nothing for standards of living or overall desirability of given country. If that would be true, then I have 2 random samples which have supposedly way higher standard than US - Venezuela and russia.
US folks have more money on average, but are forced to spend them in ways ie europeans don't have to - top notch education and healthcare costs are huge in US for large part of population and compose big part of expected savings of parents and older folks, while an afterthought in Europe. How do you compare that.
Plus places in Europe like Switzerland have long term way higher living standards by any measure than even good places in US. Europe is big and diverse in ways US simply never was, it would do you good to travel the world a bit and see and experience it with your own eyes.
> Less obvious where to run to these days as the US not-an-empire looks like it may crumble.
Depending on what you're running for China is in some senses kinda what the US was back in the day, except there's no land so no easy way for them to accept migrants. These day and age migrants also aren't very accepted anywhere.
I agree in a sense, and the writing for this has been on the wall for some time. In my circles, many learned some Mandarin at one point or another.
The difference from the past is that the US has always been a melting pot, while China is pretty much a closed society. If you’d emigrated to the US, you always had a good chance of blending into that diverse society no matter where you came from. Assimilating into the homogeneous Chinese society will take generations.
For me it’ll be either the westernmost end of Europe or one of the better parts of South America, in the hope that they will prosper modestly in the shadows of the upcoming conflicts.
I'm very curious how China will adapt over the next couple of decades. Their population has started contracting, and it's clear the government has seen the fertility rate as a problem for some time. There's no obvious way for them to keep economic growth going without either finding a solution to something nobody else has managed to solve (getting the fertility rate back up), or opening up for more immigration. Either will take significant changes.
Fertility really 20/30+ year away problem.
PRC growth now based on educated population, which exploded, not total population. Reality is every tertiary median to upper middle class wage is more productive than 10 undereducated peasants... the ones first to age out. There's like 200-400m+ bluntly useless mouths dragging down productivity/per capital metrics, the only saving grace they did NOT get rich before old, i.e. poor old so it's cheap(ish) in terms of resources (but not labour) to support them. Put it this way, PRC is generating OECD combined in tertiary, disproportionately STEM, they have backlog of 200m births from last 20+ years that still haven't got their masters/phds... at 60% and increasing tertiary we're going 100m+ high end talent, aka the greatest high end human dividend in recorded history who will be in workforce for until 2060s, i.e. so far out its hard to project based on present realities, only they have no shortage of advanced economy growth potential. Like if you throw all projected US newborns + immigration into STEM... PRC would still come out FAR ahead. There is no contest, unless AGI displaces everyone.
TFR real issue probably 30 year out. There will be some rebound, current crashing TFR because so many entering tertiary last few years = delay family formation. Women going to turn 35-40 and realize they want kids... and have them, especially considering 1:4 dependency ratio also = 4:1 wealth transfer + property going other way when previous generation (with high savings rate) dies. But won't get to replacement level. Then it's matter of what bad levers PRC willing to pull - pro natal fertility policies does not incentivize 2.1 TFR... and no one has tried punitive policies, i.e. limit wealth/property transfers to families with 2 kids... all sorts of inducements liberal societies haven't... or politically can't try. Or immigration, test tube babies, who knows. But IMO they try punitive policies first. That's really the only thing that no one has tried, and we know from wealthy Muslim countries with oil money, religious incentive, domestic help... aka every support imaginable, TFR is below 2 or trending towards it.
Fertility is a right now problem for China - it's population has started dropping - its largest cohort is just a few years from being out of child-bearing age, and its fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, and it will take decades to reverse that even if we knew today how to do it.
This isn't just a question of dropping labour, but also a question of the consequent reduction in economic demand.
Which is why China started reacting to the low fertility rate already in 2013 by abolishing the agency responsible for enforcing the one child policy, followed by ending the policy in 2015, replacing it with a 2 child policy, which failed to have the desired effect, followed by a 3 child policy in 2021, followed a month later by removing all penalties for having even more children.
China's workforce also is at most years from starting to contract excluding any immigration - the cohorts retiring are close to the size of those entering the workforce and the cohorts retiring will be increasing for another 20-30 years, while the ones entering the workforce will be decreasing for the same period even if they somehow figured out how to reverse it today.
> finding a solution to something nobody else has managed to solve
In the 21st century, that is definitely something I'd bet on China for being able to do. Across all sorts of problems.
The solution is going to be paying people. No, more than that. No, keep going. Higher. Market-clearing price.
The question is how high that price is, and whether it is viable. We don't know. And secondly, whether or not the consequences will be workable for a cohesive society whether because women choose to have children only for financial reasons or get coerced into it for the same reasons.
It could get very dark very quickly if it turns out to be too hard to induce enough people who actually would want children under the right circumstances to choose to have them.
That's a capitalist solution; China has that option if they want it, but also they have those "reeducation" camps so it could get very Handmaid's Tale.
China's population is dropping, so to the extent they had housing for their peak population, they will have increasing capacity to accept migrants. Their fertility rate has dropped to 1, one of the lowest in the world, despite having now lifted all restrictions on number of children and actively encouraging larger families, so it will become a precarious problem for them soon.
China's migration policies have been extremely strict, so to what extent they will be able to loosen that up without political upheaval is still an open question. So far they've only loosened up the restrictions on internal migration.
China is facing many of the same problems that the rest of the world is, with demographic decline, slowing growth, etc.
Those problems could be solved with a careful migratory policy (ie what America did back in the day because it was economically impossible for the entire third world to fly there; today, this could be enforced with laws)
The issue with demographic decline is not just quantity of people, but also quality of people. China (and any country) will want individuals that speak the language, are culturally compatible, with useful skills, and so on. The limited number of people any country can draw on once you consider this starts to make it clear that migration doesn't solve anything.
And even with migration, if those migrants don't themselves end up with high fertility rates then you've done nothing but kick the can, and not especially far. Because of all of these issues, I think there's approximately a 100% chance that China will do the equal but opposite of the one-child-policy should their demographic issues fail to start reversing more naturally.
"The equal but opposite of the one-child-policy" is easier said than done. A brute-force approach worked for stopping more babies (I don't know if it's true, but what I heard back was that back in the 80s Chinese officials literally killed unauthorised babies moments after they were born - that's probably exaggerated, however they really did carry out forced sterilisations and forced abortions). It wouldn't work so well for creating more babies. You can't force people to have more children. Many countries are offering financial incentives for producing babies right now - cash at birth, free house, free childcare, etc - with limited success. I don't see how China could deliver (hahaha aren't I punny) a significantly different result if it goes down that same road.
I don't think it'd be especially hard. Ban contraception, economic coercion, mandatory family planning at a certain age and you're probably already there. For the economic coercion part there are endless forms it could take. An obvious one would be a 'national sustainability' tax assessed on the number of children one has (adjusted for minimum age) - 40% for 0, 20% for 1, 0% for 2, - 10% for 3, and so on.
Another way would be to fine companies and local jurisdictions if their average number of children per employee/resident is below 2.1 or whatever, similar in spirit to Japan's 'metabo laws.' You could also require companies prioritize employment, beyond a minimal standard, based on the number of children per employee, and so on.
> You can't force people to have more children.
There's a difference between "it would be evil to" and "it is impossible to".
Barring medical issues, it is absolutely possible force this. There's even some jurisdictions where it's not a crime.
If I read these two maps right, China's the only place, out of those where marital rape is not a crime, that abortion is not also prohibited:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marital_rape_laws_by_coun...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Abortion_Laws.svg
(That said, I don't know how up to date such maps are, and have no way to verify laws; don't suggest machine translation from Chinese to English, it is bad).
> You can't force people to have more children.
"People" here means women, and womens' rights are a very recent thing in world history. With a sufficiently evil and authoritarian government, it might be possible. It certainly has been tried in the 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Honour_of_the_German_...
> The issue with demographic decline is not just quantity of people, but also quality of people
"Quality of people". Spoken like a true tech person.
Spoken like someone who does not want to play useless word games.
Would you choose an employee, or worse, a spouse, with no positive qualities? If no, you are judging people by their qualities too.
When a company hires people, will it take in just anyone with a pulse?
Tech people look at things in terms of - is this true or not.
And "Quality of People" is perfectly accurate description.
How it makes you feel about it completely irrelevant.
I assumed there would be plenty of land in China, is just completely remote or do I just have a completely incorrect perspective on China (generally speaking I’m sure I do, I’ve live my life on the other side of the planet)
There is .. with the last of the subsistence farmers already living on it. There is basically no good unoccupied agricultural land in the world. The American settlers never appreciated how much work disease did in creating a seemingly empty space for them.
There's plenty of land in China. There aren't plenty of empty plots that would be attractive for people to farm. I'm not so sure that has much relevance to modern immigration, though.
There's no land in China?
Well, not the kind of land where you can just massacre the natives and steal it for free without ever seeing consequences for that abominable behavior. Which is what I suppose they're referring to.
Last century saw two world wars, followed by the cold war which could have lead to the end of the world. Also a wave of communist revolutions and their aftermath (famines and purges in the Soviet Union, The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the death of a quarter of the population of the world).
I think mismanagement is not accurate. The Soviet system was flawed and inefficient and could not compete. The European empires were made untenable by the world moving on: economic, technological and political changes.
I think Europe and America had a golden age when they were at peace and dominated the world economically from the 80s to this century, and forgot neither of these is a given.
> Less obvious where to run to these days as the US not-an-empire looks like it may crumble.
How are you supposing that it looks like the US may crumble? I don’t understand where these kinds of comments come from, aside from perhaps verbalizing something one might want to see instead of what is factually true.
The world bought only 20% as many treasury bonds in the past year as in the year before that. This is what a slow decoupling from the US reserve currency looks like.
The US is the most oil-dependent country (although all western countries are quite dependent on it) and it cut off its own supply of oil.
The US has canceled all military guarantees and aligned with two different fascist states, so military cooperation is unwinding.
It's been unable to manufacture anything effectively for a while now as all the money gets siphoned off corruptly (identical to Russia in the Ukraine war), not even the weapons used in Israel.
What else is there to being an empire? Its nuclear aircraft carriers - with no aircraft since they run on oil?
> The world bought only 20% as many treasury bonds in the past year as in the year before that. This is what a slow decoupling from the US reserve currency looks like.
That's not what a decoupling looks like. Investors are probably just not buying because they know rates are going to go up. The Federal Reserve already strongly signaled another rate hike by end of year. Why would you buy something today that you can wait and buy for a better price later?
Second, if you want to make an argument about interest rates or the debt, you first have to make that argument and resolve it for the UK, Italy, France, and others.
Third, the USD is just the dominant reserve currency. It's not the only one. A reserve currency is just one that banks hold in reserve. The reason the US is involved in the Middle East is to protect the Petro-dollar which generally "requires" oil purchases to be settled in dollars. The trade off is we keep Iran in check from destroying the gulf countries.
> The US is the most oil-dependent country (although all western countries are quite dependent on it) and it cut off its own supply of oil.
This doesn't make any sense. The US is also the largest oil and gas producing country in the world. Even for the Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea you can read for yourself that the US has been able to break through and Saudi Arabia has quickly repaired the east-west pipeline and 3.5+ million barrels are flowing through there now (IIRC 60% or so of pre-attack volume). Either way, most of those flows go to Europe and Asia, not the US. So while the US is oil dependent (all countries are) I don't think your assertion is entirely accurate.
> It's been unable to manufacture anything effectively for a while now as all the money gets siphoned off corruptly (identical to Russia in the Ukraine war), not even the weapons used in Israel.
That doesn't make any sense either. We manufacture all kinds of things, including incredibly advanced equipment. We make airplanes, we make semiconductors, pharmaceutical goods.
> What else is there to being an empire? Its nuclear aircraft carriers - with no aircraft since they run on oil?
If we don't have oil neither does anyone else. Except that we do have oil so our nuclear powered aircraft carriers would just use our own oil for the jets.
"Lately I’ve been feeling I came in at the end, the best is over."
This is one of the most cogent summarizations of the status quo that I've seen.
It leads nicely into a conclusion that, even without the preface, seems reasonable: build personal buffers of water, electricity, and cash.
Blame too much connectedness. Humans are not designed to be affected by things that happen 100's of miles away. They shouldn't even know the names or those far away places or people. They shouldn't have dependency on things that are produced far away.
Tribal populations lived isolated lives. Most of human life on Earth involved only small-sized settlements with occasional visitors from the far away places.
Connectedness opens the flood gates . You get inundated with news from every corner as if it is happening in you neighborhood and as if those are your people.
You are not designed for this.
> You are not designed for this.
What a bizarre statement. Of course you are not designed for anything. You have adapted, genetically and socially. And you keep doing that. Modern society would collapse if change to a state of the world that you describe would quickly come. If it comes slowly, no matter what change, humans will adapt. Not all of that will be pleasant, but it eventually works out.
>> Modern society would collapse if change to a state of the world that you describe would quickly come.
That means the modern society is not sustainable and cannot adapt to long-term changes. It's like those cities, where all traffic and power supply would be affected for every rain. That's not adaptation. That's just living precariously on greed and assumptions.
The drastic changes, if any, themselves would be purely man-made, not like asteroids that killed dinosaurs. A proper evolution or adaptation would not have drastic changes. Changes would be gradual in synch with the pace of biological evolution.
No, that is too simplistic.
Adption is not just genetical. A person can move from northern Europe to southern italy without problem. Its genetics don't need to change for that.
> That means the modern society is not sustainable and cannot adapt to long-term changes.
I don't see that connection. As long as change comes sufficiently slowly, adaptation is no problem. It's mainly that the quicker change comes, the more painful adaptation is. This it unrelated to how sustainable society is.
> That means the modern society is not sustainable and cannot adapt to long-term changes.
Why? I, as the poster you replied to, do not see it this way at all. Any society, modern or not, can adapt to slow changes. And rapid changes would be at least as damaging several centuries ago, when for example 2-3 consecutive years of bad harvests meant a major upheaval.
Things can look a lot smoother after a few centuries. My 2c.
Things are toppled a lot higher now than several centuries ago. Population is orders of magnitude higher, and we all get our food from far away places in the world. Those things make a very fragile global ecosystem which is very different to the very localised ones centuries ago.
Back then 2-3 consecutive years of bad harvests meant a major upheaval for a few affected areas. Now that those areas supply food to the whole world the problem has grown in scale and fragility.
Connectedness also stops us from waging war. Or, I should say, it does not stop us, it makes us less likely to start one. But we still do it evidently. And then we all suffer.
We have more wars right now than before.
Do we? If you read something like guns germs and steel or read some Harari, we may not have had big wars with big guns like today, but we sure had a lot of smaller conflicts.
Yeah we do. Most since like WWII. Obviously depends on how you define a "war", so it can skew one way or another.
I feel you... the situation is more or less the same for Greece (and many other countries). Things are not looking very good and I don't know how all this situation is going to stabilize or even better come back to normal.
It seems from the outside that Greece never really recovered from being hit particularly hard by the 2008 financial/real estate crisis?
True. Certain things changed and improved but many remained the same. Having corrupt politicians doesn't help at all. We're caught in-between bigger players and we're just following along. As the OP stated, many countries are suffering from consequences of the actions by some "great powers".
ask more guns and security promises from your beloved netanyahu
Just FYI, not all Greeks support Isreal ;-)
Fellow Pole here :)
The author writes: "This time I do not need the research, because I have spent the past year looking for a house. (...) And the Polish loan is the worse product."
I wrote a piece comparing what Poles and Americans say about the housing crisis in social media, you might find it interesting, especially that I tried to compare affordability as well [0].
In short, it seems that:
- Warsaw is even slightly less affordable for its residents than Manhattan - but the Americans seem to be more pissed off by the situation.
That was very surprising to me.
[0] https://rudolf.observer/en/posts/who-complains-more-on-housi...
I normally just lurk, but this is one of the cooler and actually functional website designs I have seen in a while. Sceptical at first, but it's innovative, and serves to elevate the content, truly chef's kiss.
Cool website design but I will strongly remain in the "nothing ever happens" camp.
> A price cap meant as a cushion, in a system with no slack, turned a price shock into empty pumps
It's almost s if economic theories actually describe reality! Given that it's economy 101 predicting that this would happen.
Still, people do it again and again. Rent control proponents for housing should take notice.
In this instance, the price cap is working exactly as intended. The state pushes Total to introduce a price cap by threatening a windfall tax on the industry as a whole. Total accepts, and introduces a voluntary price cap, selling at the below-market rate in a first-come-first serve regime (which it can afford to do, as it's an integrated producer). Total serves fuel to the majority of motorists at the below-rate price. When Total runs out of fuel, motorists who do a lot of travelling then need to pay the above-market rate at E.Leclerc instead.
Without introducing an unpopular tax regime, the French govt has found a way to progressively increase prices for higher mileage motorists. Supplying most motorists at a reasonable price, while having high-mileage motorists pay the unsubsidised price for most of their petrol.
And zoning and giving landlords great benefits (some countries not taxing wins from rents, others allowing changing rent easily, etc.) really solved the problem? Multiple major countries (in which rent control is not a thing) have huge housing issues, so something should be done. For some places I would much prefer reducing regulation required for new constructions, but this is very situation dependant.
Rent control working depends on multiple other policies and on the characteristics of the place. For Paris for example it did seem to have a positive effect: https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-05315123v1/file/Morin%20et%20al.%20...
Why does this might not apply to other cases? Paris is very dense already, not a lot of places to build anyhow. What other policies are required? Ensure people do not buy only for investment and leave things empty - they raised the uninhabited tax to discourage that, will see if enough to make a dent.
Also in countries where rent control is a thing. About 20 years ago the government decided it was "good enough" and stopped nationally planned housing projects (which resulted in decentralized planning and mostly expensive, high profit, housing being build), 'motivated' the market by providing tax breaks (giving higher profit and less investment in non-controlled renting) and as a bonus taxed the subsidized housing market a flat rate on top (result: hardly any new construction or investment in subsidized housing).
Almost all measures since have been detrimental to new housing, great for real estate owners, extremely poor for renters and allowed house prices to skyrocket. None of these things are on their own and it's a more-or-less global thing but they've done a great job making it worse.
And as a bonus: this was projected to happen by the governmental planning agency and rejected as fearmongering.
There is no real win for any city that becomes an eye candy for the entire world. Removing rent control without completely revamping your zoning restrictions achieves basically nothing.
People bring in Tokyo as an example, but there’s even a rent control-esque thing here - right to refuse. Technically landlord can increase the rent, but you can challenge and refuse it, to keep paying the original amount. Like rent is going up heavily over here (my neighbourhood is about 10% YoY). You can’t really even build up fast enough to accommodate demand.
Rent control is nonsense. We need to control the renters. Because they are doing something incredibly harmful at the moment. The reason *I* am now far from a city with offices is directly related to rents being unbearable and own housing unobtainable outside of 10% best paying jobs in the city.
This is generally a great article. I just wish the author would also mention how Poland (among other EU countries) is also hyper focusing on populist policies that benefit the older generations while heavily burdening the younger generations with a cost of these policies. This is even a bigger problem than all these named external dependencies (which may or may not hurt us).
I think that's a problem in almost every European country. The politicians are creating policies to make their voter base happy so they would get elected on the next term and due to the aging population and low birth rates for decades the biggest voter base is the older, mostly boomer generation.
FTFY: As seen by one Polish guy's LLM.
The visual design is beautiful and the maps are illuminating for some of the points. But a good number of the map elements feel pretty superfluous, in a 'data for data's sake' kind of way.
Overall I think this would be more impactful if it were ~50% shorter or if there were more navigation - this is a ton of content to scroll through one panel at a time.
As a spaniard I am really worried, you know that Europe is going wrong because Spain is doing comparatively better than most EU countries...
Potato prices increased 15 fold!? Is that not a typo? From €10 per tonne to €150 per tonne. I can't help but wonder if a zero wasn't dropped somewhere. If not, this is insane. I hope I'm missing some context somewhere.
15 fold increase in price and still only 15 cents per kg, that is insane.
This website definitely has "bad AI map" vibes, look at the USA for example
Hell even the text has bad AI vibes
I stopped reading after I saw "Hormuz moves what grows it"
> Every generation believes it is living through the end of something.
I'm not sure my generation thought that (I was born in 1955). Not in the South of England at least. Growing up there in the late fifties, sixties, seventies, I feel that most of us were looking forward most of the time and anticipating good times. At least most people I knew at the time. It was a time of accelerating change and a great deal of it was undeniably positive.
Same in the 90s (born 78). The Berlin wall came down, Russia seemed to be on a path to real democracy, the US still had a pretty awesome reputation around the world, social progress was being made. It was a pretty good time to be alive.
Maybe it was just something about the South of England though eh?
This is cool, but like every website that tries to manipulate scrolling I eventually got too tired of that shit.
This is a way over dramatized pessimistic perspective. If you think this is bad, then look into world from an eye of a pole during 1772 (where Poland was even wiped off of the world map) or 1939 or any year during the Soviet rule.
Poland has become a rich country within one generation after the fall of Soviet Union and one of the safest countries in Europe at the moment. There's always gonna be crisis in the world but at the same time you have to admit that we're living in one of the most comfortable times for humanity in general compared to past generations.
Nitpick: Poland was wiped off the map after the Third Partition in 1795, not after the first one in 1772. There was a Polish "Constitution of 3 May 1791."
Sure, but that's also the point: the current status quo is/was mostly good, especially for Europeans and North Americans, but the multitude of global crises - the war in Ukraine, the war in the Middle East, the Trump administration's (and the far right's in general) war on sanity, the AI disruption (both by the technology itself and by the financial upheaval it causes), not to forget the climate crisis - might just induce you to worry how long this status quo can be upheld.
> AI disruption (both by the technology itself and by the financial upheaval it causes)
If it wasn't for the AI we wouldn't even be having this discussion because the linked vibe coded site wouldn't even be built
Also learn to choose your battle. If you focus on everything that's going wrong in the world and spend all your energy on that, you're gonna have mental problems.
> If it wasn't for the AI we wouldn't even be having this discussion because the linked vibe coded site wouldn't even be built
Which would be good - we don't need AI propaganda slop like this page.
This how empires collapse:
- To maintain fellowship, the empire spreads money to buy influence
- eventually this starts to cost too much, so the empire reduces spending
- wars ensue and independent voices emerge
- unable to establish order, the empire loses its influence and collapses
You can see this patterns as the US is overspending (high debt / trade deficit) while reducing its diplomatic influence on international programs. Not sure how they can save the USD value over time.
The only conclusion I get is that the UN is a joke and if the US keeps printing money to buy oil and political submission there won't be any change in the foreseeable future
It is extremely urgent to push for a new Allied Nations organization not headquartered in the US and for them all to drop the dollar and put USA and Israel in check. For Europe to grow a spine, and for China and Russia to step up and stop being complacent with all the bullying going on
The whole world should say enough is enough
Invest in batteries, eletric car and solar panels.
Capture rain water.
Have a buffer of food and medicine.
Build a fireplace an store some wood.
Thank you for talking about energy and food.
Having spent time there, betting his 2026 world-view includes solid coffee and battling some new EU regulation.
Once again the top submission of HN is an LLM-generated article. I know we're not supposed to speculate on people reading past the title, but I incur you to read 3 paragraphs and tell me with a straight face that you did not eyeroll at every short, empty phrase stated with enormous confidence.
Be careful with this, you'll get burned sooner or later. Short sentences and breaking up the rhythm are often taught as good writing style. The people will also pick up some LLMisms, especially the non-native speakers. I enjoyed this prose, I felt like author had a very personal perspective to share. My AI BS detector didn't spike and I think your post is the over-confident one.
No, this is 100% written by Claude. It reads exactly like it, with all of the same phrasing, awkward sentence construction and other annoyances I have to deal with all day long.
Maybe you don't interact enough with Claude? "Underneath it, three slower clocks are running, and they set the terms on which we meet the next shock.", "A gauge reading is a level against a reference mark, not the depth of the river.", "Two official statements frame everything below.", "where a number rests on a vendor, an advocacy group or an industry estimate, the text says so" were not written by a human.
I vouched for your comment. HN's automod agrees that the OP is LLM text; and it's so high-confidence in its assessment, it flagged your comment, for quoting three lines of it.
When you pile them up they burn my eyes. I seem to have skimmed through them.
Generated, or translated from Polish?
The Polish version is also 100% AI on Pangram. https://www.pangram.com/history/e7fbea77-4556-4dd2-a60f-d6c5...
Dunno about 100% AI but as a native speaker, it feels very awkward, as if it was a mechanical translation from English.
I did not eyeroll at every short, empty phrase stated with enormous confidence. :|
It was a pleasant, concise and informative read. I actually read it from beginning to end. Unlike many of the artisanal articles starting with how the author experienced the crema of the morning's espresso.
In this case, the writer very much doesn't have English as their first language. How's your Polish?
I would rather read Polglish or text machine-translated from Polish than Claudese.
Commenting only on the writing, congratulations to the writer. Descriptive, well worded, English better than most native language users. Impressive.
Gorgeous lay-out - form serves the function :)
very cool website
MMT. We need MMT.
Aidr
POLSKA GUROM!
to nic by nie dało, to i tak nie dałoby nic
This is informative
Very suspicious article:
* Clearly AI written text on vibe-coded website.
* Heavily focused on doom and gloom.
* Lots of its points are subtly (or not that subtly) blaming the issues on support ting Ukraine in defending itself against Russian genocidal invasion.
I am Polish as well although currently living abroad. I am way more optimistic than the author of the post. It's true that a lot of negative events happened in very short time but we are still doing pretty well. Economy is growing, standards of life are growing. Polish people are hard working. The culture pushes back against entitlements and class warfare. Poland didn't succumb to socialist populists (at least not too much) so there is a good chance for further growth. On the immigration front we got Ukrainians who work and assimilate well so at least for now we avoided problems a lot of other EU countries face.
It would be nice if we had more competent politicians trying to solve problems and make things more efficient though but that's a problem no democracy in EU solved. We are paying for years of kicking the can in the energy department now but on the other hand maybe that will speed-up transition to EVs which will be both great for standards of living and significantly more efficient.
Geopolitics is hard to predict but I am also in optimist camp when it comes to war in Iran. The oil is flowing again and Iran can't do much about it. Workarounds will be found. Ukrainians now have a way to really hurt Russia which may result in peace at some point as well. If anything it's clear Russia is not dangerous in conventional war. They have sabotage but that imo is going to be less and less efficient as infrastructure and intelligence improve to handle it.
Overall - a lot of things went wrong and we are still standing. Once the environment improve we are in great position to be one of the best places to live and work in EU.
Very AI written
Is that a gut feeling or do you have evidence?
I've grown skeptical of all those "witch! burn her!" voices, but I'm open to evidence.
https://www.pangram.com/history/9afcbb61-303b-4be2-8240-87f9...
The titles are clearly by AI, but most of the content is not.
The world always had problems. It's like software, the work is never done. Sometimes new times ask for new solutions, and people need to find them. Adapt or die.
I do think though it's a little dishonest to be this alarmed now just because the crisis is at your doorstep. There is continuous misery all around the globe which everyone should acknowledge. The wars in the middle east brought destruction for generation and for entire regions. I am not sure those people are worried about the interest rates in Japan as much as they are about surviving. Including the current war. Think about Iran and its government what you will, but when a school gets bombed, innocent children die. I am not sure I find this less concerning than the state of natural gas capacity in Germany. And I live in Germany.
As for the energy crisis, the solution is in front of us. If you don't want to depend on foreign fossil fuels start electrifying and switching to renewables and batteries. You can do it cheap and fast. In fact, this is already happening in parts of the world and they are much more shielded from the current issues than elsewhere.
> Half of its six biggest diesel plants cut or halted output this month
Claude chose a weird turn of phrase here. Does this mean "the smallest of the three was the sixth largest"? If the Ukrainians hit a tiny plant, will it now be "three of its hundred biggest diesel plants"?
...as seen by one ChatGPT.
Every thread has a cynical AI accusation from someone looking for an excuse to dismiss long articles, so I tend to gloss over them, but this one's mind-boggling.
Literally how did you come to the conclusion this was written by ChatGPT? The text is clearly written by a polish person that speaks fluent english as a second language - I know cause I am one. Telltale signs are sentences like "Meanwhile, shares are at records" which is an overly direct translation of the polish equivalent, where the word "rekord" by itself implies a record high whereas in english you'd make it explicit.
> Literally how did you come to the conclusion this was written by ChatGPT?
You tell me:
> Scroll to follow one closed strait into fuel pumps, harvests, bond markets and my own country’s winter heating
Or:
> France: a run on the pumps. [...] drivers fleeing record prices elsewhere emptied its tanks faster than trucks could refill them. [...] A price cap meant as a cushion, in a system with no slack, turned a price shock into empty pumps.
A cursory check on Pangram returns 100% AI written just from the first 4 paragraphs.
Every writer has a style and if their style is strong enough you can identify the writer by reading enough of their works. AI style is very easy to spot.
There may have been some human involvement with this website but they certainly didn’t edit it for style. Unfortunately if you don’t edit for style then people will default to the assumption that it’s entirely vibecoded.
"Europe’s potato belt tells the story in a single season." -- sure, no LLM at all. And why a single season, isn't it a story over two seasons?
There are plenty of signs if you look for them.
- "But the same closure that empties a granary fills somebody’s brokerage account." Claude is obsessed with comparisons linked by "the same". There are several instances, like "Poland made the same swap, with oil" (but that one is odd because "the same" isn't referring to anything).
- "Europe’s potato belt tells the story in a single season": Claude also loves this "noun verbs the noun in a single noun" phrasing.
- "A country that loses its regular supplier does not only pay more. It ends up dealing with people it does not know." Claude's classic "it's not X, it's Y" constructions.
- "Strategists do not describe a stampede home. They describe Japan quietly ceasing to be the buyer everyone could count on, and long-term borrowing costs rising everywhere as a result." A variant following the pattern "it's not X, it's Y, and Z as a result." This is an interesting pattern, one that I don't think I've ever seen a human write. A human would likely write "...leading to rising long-term borrowing costs" or similar.
- The use of a verb (rising) there in the third part is typical Claude, as it really likes to verb when a noun would read better. Other examples: "markets price another rise"; "volume freezes, prices stay put and sellers wait"; "after five years the rate floats".
- "The test Tusk describes is a test of belief, and it arrives just as the Pentagon decides how many Americans stay." The juxtaposition here (a test that arrives) is very odd and typical of Claude.
- What's also generally striking is the proliferation of "X becomes Y" phrasings, which is something Claude loves to do. Price shock turned into empty pumps. A story is told in a single season.
I'll stop there.
What's fascinating to me is that I personally find this kind of text exhausting to read, but apparently other people don't notice it at all.
If we ignore the AI stuff, I will still say this is not good writing. What's so grating and noticeable for me is the monotonous style. The short, clipped sentences like little stabs of information. It never varies; the tempo is just fact, fact, fact. It's absolutely exhausting to read pages and pages of this.
Good non-fiction writing is enjoyable to read for a myriad reasons; authors use metaphor, juxtaposition, tempo, humor, irony, allusion, and all sorts of techniques to make an article enjoyable to read. Just throwing down facts one after another with this kind of breathless, staccato noir voice is not that, in my personal opinion.
I don't know how much AI is to blame, maybe the Polish version is different or if this is a deliberate style.
You can literally just paste it to pangram.
I'm not able to pin down the one-screen text on my mobile device without the page forcing me to go to the next one-screen text. This problem reminds me of https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/.
To the content:
Don't count on IEA's reports, they are just as subject to propaganda as any other media.
"When the world pays more, our grain can simply leave, so the price at home has to match" Not a fact.
At the moment as I see it some warmongers want really to escalate the situation to outright war between NATO and Russia so don't pay attention to Tusks words or any of the hawks from USA.
Criminals and medical doctors are funnelling a fortune into domestic and foreign real estate, and into premium cars. Polish public healthcare basically doesn't exist. Nearshoring and outsourcing centers are fleeing the country. Polish army expenditures are at the level of Israel and South Korea. The budget is spent on 40 years old military retirees while Russian drones and missiles are freely entering and penetrating the airspace. I'd say so long Poland, a failed experiment again. Polish elites don't even have to flee this time, they're already watching from their 10th or 20th real estate in Spain, Switzerland, US, or Italy (their real estate in Dubai is a bummer).
This technical analysis is really futile and counterproductive, there exists only vicious greed which will be followed by a catastrophe.
The most sensible thing the EU could do right now is make peace with Russia and stop this confrontation before it is too late. NATO has been deaf to Russia’s security concerns for decades, so maybe it is finally time to listen.
And before the NATO zealots, warmongers and NATO wannabes come here crying that you cannot trust Russia and that war is the only way (provided, of course, that you are not the one fighting), let’s address that right away.
You cannot trust Russia
Russia has maintained good relationships with a lot of countries, but none of them are NATO members or NATO wannabes. And, as a reminder, it was NATO that broke promises about not expanding eastwards.
You cannot deal with a country waging a war.
Yes, you can. Just take a look at Israel or the USA. One is committing a genocide in real time, while the other has been waging wars of aggression for ages. European leaders have no problems dealing
>The most sensible thing the EU could do right now is make peace with Russia
Let Russia leave Ukraine and have your peace.
lol what a hypocrite. when he was getting uncle sam's money and security umbrella, he was happy and not questioning anything then now facing a bit of the reality scared my poor poles