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Hi Richard, I'm just learning who you are, only now reading some of your essays, and I'll be paying more attention in the future. Thanks for your contributions. I'm wondering if you have updated your assessment about political stability in the U.S. since your year-end commentary on 27 December, an update that might be warranted by the chaos at the Capitol in DC on 06 January?

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Also Taiwan is more advanced than the Democratic Republic of China and they have been floundering their response to population decline. Anyone with a memory would know that all you'd need to do is apply population growth reduction tactics made in the 60s in reverse. Bigger family ideal, less access to contraceptives, less working women and promoting religions that would usually have several kids(last part is my own observation). There's also something else important that I may be forgetting.

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Immigration and birth rates are still a big issue. I only voted Trump in 2020 because he was going to build the wall, although I admit the ideology at the time was to stop BLM. Unfortunately many conservatives are now by and large cucked and have the same positions and use the same catchphrases as the left. Covid is a bunch of bullshit so the East Asian result was what actually happened here. You also have to remember that Ancient Rome was very stable before it was invaded by the Germans, like today China and Russia are going to nuke the hell out of this sociology-indoctrinated, gene-declining nation.

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Rome fell because it became a dictatorship and so became insensitive to issues such as taxing agriculture out of existence, funding R&D (other nations caught up and exceeded it's military tech) and mainly because of rich-poor gap grew. What happens with too many Billionaires is the economy stops innovating (low demand because 1 billionaire (I'm friends with a couple) buys like 15 cars, but if it were instead 1000 millionaires -- same money -- they'd buy 2000 cars) and the super rich get too much of a voice in the society and their issues are weird, not what the main needs.

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What a load of nonsense. Most of the billionaires' wealth is reinvested in other companies.

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Think the wealth of a nation is measured by how much money we spend on stuff we don't need rather than how much of the stuff we need is being produced. Amateur.

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By the way, Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the US.

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My take on technology is different, though I must admit that the vaccine progress is remarkable. But there has been, IMO, a tremendous bubble of stupidity in things such as self-driving cars, hyperloops, and even quantum computers. The low hanging capitalist fruit has been picked for the most part, with only government sponsored breakthroughs now showing promising results. The Theranos documentary describes the current era of technology.

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