Xerxes

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-business-brew/id1540847053?i=1000621753971

Cheers officer !

Building relationships based on common values can go a long way

Here are the highlights of AW article on the back of large commercial airliner orders from IndiGo and Air India. It is a good article. - Air India confirm earlier commitments for 470 aircrafts (400 narrow bodies and 70 wide bodies). About equal mix between Boeing and Airbus. - IndiGo has orders for a 500 large Airbus only narrow bodies. - Air travel penetration is 0.1 trip per capita. Compared with 0.5 for PRC, 1.4 for France and 2.1 for US - India’ GDP less than half of China and its airline capacity less than a third. - Infrastructure is key in the next 10 years. 80 new fields need to be built. - Airbus not keen on build final line in India. But rather work packages upstream to it. - Air India model is that of hub-and-spoke. They need a major hub in the south. In the running are: Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. - Not mentioned in the article, but I will say it, while there are huge tailwind on domestic routes (and therefore narrow bodies), when it comes to international travel, most of that Indian passenger-kilometres market was picked up by Gulf airlines in the past decades. And now with the rise of Turkey and potentially Saudi, there is even more competition to clawback those passenger-kilometres that are from India. It is a zero sum game in the wide body market.

To be fair, the struggle in the Korean Peninsula was between state actors. The struggle in Afghanistan was between a an internal foe that had a free hand in most of Afghanistan (outside the two big cities)

I do agree with @cubsfan and his comment about Trump. Like it or not, hate him or not, Trump was a game changer. For better or worse. That said, I also agree that Biden did stood up to Putin. Eventhough in hindsight he should not have said some of the thing he said on the eve of the invasion. Biden (much like McCain, or Bush Senior) was a children of the Cold War. And he saw Putin for what he was. Therefore, that historical bias that he had did help shape his foreign policy toward Ukraine & Russia, eventhough it was clumsy at times in hindsight in some occasions. On the other hand Bush Junior and largely Obama did not see that. Well Obama just pretended Putin was not there and gave the dossier to Vice President Biden. And lastly Trump had a different way of handling things (i.e transactional).

Somewhere very deep in my long term memory there is a trace of Rashomon. It does ring a bell.

I prefer the original from Akira Kurosawa

I think your “end state” is correct. I am not disagreeing with anything you are saying. The good professor however got a bit too excited in that interview podcast about “full annexation”. It is even entirely possible that a very pro-Kremlin Kiev government (say Orange never happens) in the 2010s would have somehow granted special control over Crimea to Russia. Keeping it in the grey zone. As they already had joint control over Sevastopol. A full and proper annexation of Crimea while already having control/influence of Kiev could have “awaken the giant that is Ukrainian nationalism”. A bridge too far. Land grabbing Crimea came only after Orange revolution toppled its influence in Kiev.

I agree with his comment that Feb 2022 was meant to be essentially a military backed coup. toppling the old government and installing a new one that is pro-Kremlin. But not his subsequent comment about its full annexation to Russian Federation. Frankly it is a bit silly that he even thinks that. Eastern provinces for sure but for the whole country … ehehe Even Belorussian that is already pro-Kremlin sits as buffer state on the fringe of Russian Federation between it and NATO.

my man ! you are welcome

Oh God. Give me one more bear market, and I promise to buy the dip.

I agree with the idea of exploring “what if” scenarios, all I am saying is that it cannot be linear. As in we change only one parameter and all else remains the same. The case of Booking and Priceline is interesting. The former did not suffocate under the latter. Perhaps because one was not disrupting the other. Whereas the incumbent (say Blockbuster) would have crushed the newly acquired disrupter (say Netflix) in that “what if” scenario of Blockbuster buying up Netflix on Amazon in a non-founder “what if” scenario say after it’s 10th year after IPO (say Bezos was gone in 2006), my guess is AWS would not even be conceived.

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/focused-compounding/id1352422076?i=1000620161011

this one from 2013 ?

Agreed. one cannot change one parameter in the past while holding everything else constant. Nowadays when I listens to a podcast I always fast forward when I hear a host making these types of comments: - FB would have suffocated under Yahoo! - Google would have been suffocated under Ballmer’ MSFT. - Blockbuster would have destroyed Netflix if it had bought it. - Instagram would have been totally different if not owned by FB and has not leveraged it’s scale. Things happen they way they did precisely because a unique sets of circumstances. the only business that one can make these hypothetical “what if” are businesses where cash machines that didn’t not require much investment. Maybe See’ Candies if not acquired by Berkshire would have remained the same as independent.

https://ca.yahoo.com/news/nato-papering-over-cracks-zelenskiy-153040460.html You got to give the Zelenskyy credit. He fights tooth and nail for his flag. Not the same clean shaven junior statesman who got stuck between H. Biden and Trump on weird allegations.

John I was born in Iran during the Soviet time. And was on the receiving end of Iraqi invasion and Scud missiles when lived in Tehran. I am more aware than most people on this thread about living life during war. I live it for 8 years. Wasn’t as bad as being on a frontline city like Khoramshahr. And historically am well aware of Russian aggression and expansionist policy toward Iran and Europe. I should say that I trust Kremlin even less than the fools in DC when it to foreign policy. That said, I don’t believe I (myself) have any special ability to predict the future just because I like history. Or taking a snapshot of today as things are and making CAGR projections like it is some sort of investment. Hence the comment: “we don’t know what will happen”. There has been simply too many twist and turns.

ehhhh I thought the ticker was $USSR and I also thought several years ago that Zelensky was a comedian who was going to be eaten alive. And I don’t think i was in the minority. we don’t know what will happen. Everything we say is just an aggregate of our historical biases. how many people here keep contrasting Bakhmut with the battle of Verdun and then to Stalingrad. It was neither. It was the battle of Bakhmut.

One can make a list of how ridiculous Sir Winston Churchill career was up to the eve of Second World War. Including the Dardanelles expedition disaster, his feud with Lord Fisher etc. One can make a list of how awesome Putin achievement was in pulling Russia out of the Yelstinfestation, taming down the oligarchy and the jolly years of prosperity when he had the tailwind of hydrocarbon (you may think it was the price of barrel, more important was production increase)if a snapshot was taken in 2007. Like the compounded growth rate of a stock that highly sensitive on entry and exit point, the geopolitical cycles are also sensitive to when one take that snapshot and makes the list.

so. People flip flop all the time. Rumsfeld and Bush were kissing Iraqi asses before flipping on them. Saddam was kissing Saudi asses before flipping on them. Hitler was in bed with Stalin before flipping. I wanted to be a doctor before I flipped into engineering Italians flipped in both world wars. God may have mercy on their souls !

I listed to this episode in my car this morning. A good one. I was looking at different options of funds our pension offers. (My employer) There is a Canadian Fund, US Fund, Global Fund, there are bond funds etc and interestingly there is an “international fund” that as it happens happen to have +94% of its allocation to the Japanese stock market.

Another solid example is how House Corrino transferred the mining concessions of Arrakis from House Atreides to House Harkonnen. It was an asset-light business, with Arrakis itself belonging to the subjects of House Corrino (if not mistaken)

Any talk of NATO membership (and with it the coveted Article 5 clause) for Ukraine, in current state (or even in a cease-fire scenario), can potentially be dilutive to Article 5 itself, and what it represents. Kremlin’ red line were shown to be phantom lines, NATO’ vaunted Article 5 should not (must not) turn out to be a phantom. A premature induction of a war-torn Ukraine could easily dilute that if turn out to be a phantom or a dud. There was a time and place to do that, like decades ago. Whether it was right to do it then or wrong, that is water under the bridge. Today however it is a mistake.