Topic: Martin Armstrong Discussion - page 341. (Read 647287 times)

To address your assumption of German = Order. Before the first world war (and still being a very young state) 'Made in Germany' was associated with mass produced crap- not necessarily orderliness and organisation. Thus cultures can change (albeit within a few generations with correct incentives). Perhaps that innate flexibility and motivation has been forever lost with multiple generations of nannystate, marxist emasculation throughout most of the west though. It has been over 30 years since Britain bought (whole-heartedly) into leftist rhetoric, so I hold some hope for my country of origin still. Even if by many measures David Cameron is Tony Blairs true successor.

I agree about the white guilt though. I believe it was 2% of the American population that even owned slaves, many other whites were conscripted by state law to hunt slaves- I imagine they were not fond of the immoral institution, seeing as it wasted their time and undercut their labour to boot. White guilt coveniently forgets that anti-slavery movements originated in old honkey Britain. Guilt or pride for actions you did not commit is simply an indulgence in ego or self flagellation- the bread and butter of modern political correctness and liberal cynicism.

You are not considering all the variables. Your view is too simpleton.

Of course the end result was bad after over the hundreds of years that Asia fell behind the West in terms of industrialization. In that sense it was defeating and China ended up killing 57 million in a Cultural Revolution to deal with the adverse effects of the inefficiencies and further retarding their economic development. But now they've suddenly started to catch up, because they had no choice. And they offered the release value for the Westerners to be able to continue to live the high life with the least effort.

But over the 1000 or so years that it worked for China, it was because it provided social harmony. Rice production requires communal irrigation and thus very strong local social integration, sharing, and harmony. This is why the Chinese are innately collectivist and into political connections as a method of production.

You are not factoring in the geography of China. China can't be attacked from the West, only from the North (and of course Japan from the East), and thus the Great Wall. China was mostly isolated from the rest of the world by the Himalayan mountain ranges. It is impossible to run military supply lines over those mountain ranges. Thus it was sheltered from the relative competition, until finally in the modern era it no longer is and had to open up because the Chinese people could see on TV what they were missing.

Not incorporating geography[1] and all factors leads simpletons to their Dunning-Kruger behavior.

And I assure you I could refute all your other statements resoundingly, but I don't have time to devote to this.

I suggest you do more studying. And open your mind to many more variables than you are considering before you jump to erroneous simpleton conclusions.


[1] Don't forget my up thread point about the USA having the most ideal geography in the world for physical trade being bissected by navigable from North-to-South Mississippi River and having coasts on both Atlantic and Pacific. This advantage will fade as we grind into the Knowledge Age with localized production with 3D printing.

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I address a few real quickly...


Not at all. You follow Karl Marx in that you focus only on the labor value of an economy. You could have only 20% of the population producing 80% the GDP (most efficiently) and that wouldn't necessary make the rest of the people in the country more productive. They may instead become wards of the State. Saudi Arabia is perhaps an example.


You've made no point.


GDP per capita is not the relevant statistic on which region becomes the next financial capital of the world. In fact, the very high GDP per capita of Europe is precisely what is enabling this dysfunctional outcome which I somewhat explained in my prior post about cultural stereotypes.


Ahem. Do you not see your error in logic?

Mathusians claim the natural resources can't support a greater population. Yet the population is now higher than it was and we are not mining resources from outside planet Earth.

Please I am not going to respond any more to people who have such poor logic skills that I will end up in noisy nonsense.

The resource problems are always due to Coasian barriers (to human innovation and expansion of the entropy in the human economy) and there has never been and never will be a Malthusian point of truth. I wrote an essay about this:

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html

This is nothing but an urban myth. I refute your theory presenting facts:

PS: On the above picture it's me at the age of 20.

Well the Greeks are known for being extremely hard-headed, that doesn't mean you are correct. And properly refuting you is going to take more effort and time than I want to put into this right now. I entirely disagree with your characterization above. (this doesn't mean I don't appreciate your efforts, sentiments, etc in other areas, I simply disagree with you on the science of chaos and relative determinism. You also in private can't seem to agree my M.S. stems from gut dysbiosis and you believe the crap they are teaching you at the university instead)

My simplest, best attempt would be to tell you again that just because there is indeterminism introduced in the microstates (i.e. that thermodynamics/entropy is not reversible), this says nothing about relative determinism in the macrostates relative to the perception manifested.

The fundamental matter of the universe is cyclical. Chaos can be viewed merely as the inexorable expansion of entropy interleaved with (layered within) the cyclical matter of the universe (the future rhymes with the cyclical past but is never an exact copy). Thus the strange attractor. As Armstrong has stated, "we are truly interconnected". He discovered the similar insight that I did. He apparently discovered it empirically and I discovered in my mind with some inspiration from other theoretical physics discoveries.

You are not factoring in the fact that perception is resonance for example. Without any cyclical repetition, i.e. patterns, nothing would be perceived. What is chaotic alone is statistically deterministic in the aggregrate, otherwise we'd have no macro state. A proper interpretation of Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment applies in spades[1].

To review all the literature and formalize this (as much of it has already been done by others) is much more than I can possibly add to my plate right now.

[1] The point Eric makes is that a macro state such as the Cat can't exist without decoherence. Thus it can never exist in both states. There is an example of the determinism.

Help me stereotype.

American (USA)	I Did It My Way.
British	Spot of a bother, how about a cup of tea?
French	Soufflé à la crème.[1]
German	My steadfast orderly orderliness.[2]
Italian	Viva romántico!
Spanish	Fiesta, siesta, dinner at midnight.[3]

[1] And off with their heads if our Marxist paradise goes awry and end up with the same again.

[2] Regardless how it has gone awry, it steadfastly must be followed to its million eugenics end game.

[3] Immigrant peasant laborers working the fields.

It is clear that the Americans have the most disrespect for class structure and authority (perhaps the Aussies at par but seems they retained too much of their heavily British influence). Even the Brits love status and orderly class structures. This European tradition of admiring authority stems from the various empires such as Rome, then the Vikings, then Spain, and finally England (France in competition). Germany is still trying, lol. Ditto China, empires, and admiration of authority. This may also explain the laziness (laid back, longer vacations, shorter work weeks, more time for culture and idealistic nonsense, more guilt and thus embrace of multiculturalism) of Europeans.

This is probably why the USA is one of the few states remaining in the world where the government could only confiscate guns from millions of cold dead hands.

The concept of authority and centralization of decision making power is so alien to me as I identify more as native being than as a person of European ancestry. This probably explains why I didn't always get along well with my relatives who were more into admiring social status. They never did quite understand me. I am the quintessential American of yore, cut from the chord of Thomas Paine or my ancestor Isaac Shelby.

I don't feel any guilt about what some of my ancestors did with slavery. They were not me and I am not them. The quintessential American of yore believes so much in the power of individualism that the errs of the past are not be idolized in either form (guilt nor admiration). The Europeans appear to be still caught lying to themselves that they want their cake and eat it too (i.e. they admire the benefits of imperialism yet want to pretend it can be all love and nirvana). The dependence on the excesses of imperialism is for example what retarded Spain's incentive to industrialize and thus set them back 400 years and they declined from the greatest world empire to a third world country! Amazingly I wrote the above on my own intuition then after writing the above, I found that Wikipedia supports my intuition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Empire#The_Spanish_Habsburgs:_The_Sun_Never_Sets_.281516.E2.80.931700.29


I see frivolous yet extremist (even pompous) idealism in mainland Europe. The grandiose culture of imperialism lingers in Freudian dysfunction in Europe.

Interestingly the Brits managed their colonies by using the locals to do it for them and they had the smallest armies relying on the English Channel and the largest Navy, thus again we see the culture of the Brits of being more isolationist and less moved to drastic action. They want to get the results with the least effort. In fact, I encountered this British trait recently with the author of the Confidential Compact Transactions white paper. I was trying to get him to work with me back in June, but we just couldn't identify with each other on the level of effort versus the level of guaranteed reward. I just fling myself into it. Brits are much more calculating and cautious and want a certain large ROI. This explains why Americans are always going to statistically (after many failures) overall kick butt on the Brits in terms of entrepreneurialism. Americans are risk takers. We sailed across the ocean to reach the new World!

P.S. It will be interesting to see if Chinese can overcome English's momentum as the common language of international business.

Also this article from the perspective of a French lady shows how different the culture of Latin America is from Europe in terms of the woman's role. I remembered I was bothered by the staring too. By now I have learned to laugh. European women are married to this concept of egalitarianism as a natural right. This is some Frankenstein invention of culture that results from being able to conquer the world and live beyond your means. In a very competitive environment, sorry females are more productive producing male offspring. This is reality and Europe will have an ideologically difficult time adjusting to the reality coming.

Also note the differences in sequential versus synchronicity cultures.

There's a whole bibliography of Physics behind this conversation and I can accept that you have a lot under your arms now to address certain scientific theories that will make you understand my point of view (clearly it's a bit confusing, even for someone like you). Other than that, I pretty enjoy such conversations with people who can understand what they're talking about. So pause it is.

It's not because in order to produce a given calorie output per person the East needed more labor than Europe that there was a higher unemployment in Europe.

I don't say that to be unpleasant, please interpret the following with the more neutral tone possible but: to think that a higher labor intensive output entails less need to industrialize shows a serious flaw in understanding how economics work (and I have read some Szabo's article on economics that shows that his understanding of some areas of economics is far from perfect. For instance I remember one of his article where he explains that the efficiency created by Internet are not captured by the GDP and he retweeted an article saying that the efficiencies created by Uber will actually lower the GDP, which is plain wrong and consist of mistakes caused by the same blindspot in his economics skills).

I haven't done any research regarding the comparative rate of unemployment between Europe and the East but it's irrelevant to this matter because: when you need more labor to produce a given result, it's actually very bad. The incentives to improve were on Asia's side, but they didn't.
When you produce something efficiently that means that there is labor available to produce something else in the economy (a nascent new market) and that the output is cheaper so their is savings available to buy the products of the nascent new market. It's not bad, it's good.

Chineses and Europeans both lived in squalor because they where, as the whole wold, under a Malthusian economic reality (GDP per capita stagnant despite growth in GDP), until Europe starts to escape the Malthusian trap because of its creativity.

Also Armstrong's chart that you have posted is misleading because it makes a comparison based on the GDP and not the GDP per capita. Under the Sung dynasty (from 950 to 1250) GDP per capita was higher in China than in Europe, but after China GDP per capital stop improving and soon Europe took the lead on that metric (the only relevant one).

The question is why Europe was continuously on a upward trend since 1 000 AD onwards whereas China stopped right at the beginning of its ascent?
Yes Westerners think man can control nature because of Christianity.

Those kind of thought influences creativity. Belief systems are self-fulfilling prophecy.
Europe's population right after the Black Death was much lower than before, so there was a Malthusian check.

The comparison of Europe's population now is irrelevant to this point.
It's an affirmation that seems highly arbitrary. I can say whatever happens at the beginning of the last millennium unlocked that Coasian barrier (assuming there was one to begin with).

The point of the rise of the West is that it is made of several highly revolutionary events, periods or paradigms shift (I listed some of them, not all, in my previous post). It is doubtful that plague was more important in the process of industrialization than the mechanical clock, the printing press, Colombus and Magellan, double entry bookkeeping, the cartography, Bacon, the Renaissance, Newton, Galileo, the representative states and the list goes on...
Yeah they have invented printing and the water clock also (under the Sung dynasty).

But these technology doesn't produce paradigm shift like they did in Europe. Why? The answer lies in the culture.
We agree on that point.

We disagree on the following point: you think the economic incentives to innovate were on Europe's side and not on Asia's side whereas I think both have the same economic incentives (because economic laws are universal).

What made the West done what that East haven't done (including the colonization of the World) was a value system that foster the individualism. The cultural incentives of Western people have allowed them to follow their economic incentives, whereas East's cultural incentives made them overlook their economic incentives.
It's possible that the East is in the process of evolving culturally and shifting their value system in favor of one more creativity-friendly under the pressure of globalization, but I am doubtful of that.

China technological advancement have consisted mainly of upgrading preexisting technology or refining dominant paradigm because of their conformist value system (in other words, there are good at refining preexisting paradigms but have rarely demonstrate an ability to shift paradigm). The same thing goes with art, their best artists didn't invent new styles but only refined the style of their tradition. Their best literate minds didn't produce ground breaking books but only commentated the books of their tradition. They improve cars, they don't invent a new way of transportation.

The East for now is catching up economically, the hard part for them will come when they need to take the lead on innovations.

I had pointed out your myopia in your thread and then expanded on it up thread. I don't have time to go digging for the post. I also don't want to clutter my archives with another post on this topic now. I am simply ignoring most everything now even I might have something to say.

By your logic, there is no science because nothing can be determined. Planck's constant, the speed-of-light, the Heisenberg principle, and the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem all tells us that objective reality would only exist at infinite samples, but I have explained ad nauseum that if the speed-of-light was infinite (and thus Planck's constant infinitesimal) then the past would collapse into the present and nothing could possibly exist because there would be no relative perspective. You must have Ying to have Yang.

I am not going to go further into this with you now. Our universe is relativistic. This means reality is in the eye of beholder. Relativistic determinism exists at differing perspectives.

Again by your oversimplification, the sun wouldn't certainly rise tomorrow and no science could ever be tested and trusted.

Note from the perspective our humans, we all share the perspective of the reliability of the sun, but from the perspective of the Milky Way galaxy, I am confident the sun is quite a chaotic blip.

Truly makes me wonder why a person of such enormous intelligence like you, has such a determined view for something that is PROVEN to be undeterminable in quantum scale? I believe you're somewhat into a Stockholm syndromic loop that enforces your mental conceptions towards what M.Armstrong predictions, without taking even for one moment the chance to test them thoroughly prior accepting them.

I will say it again; a chaotic system includes nondeterminism. You cannot determine what's undeterminable no matter how hard you try. To put in on another scale, it's dualism represents a QM state of an electron that at the same time can be conceived as a wave, but also as matter. It's like trying to determine what it truly is! It's both, and nothing of them at the same time!

Have you considered that we QM represent a dualism in our views that are both right and wrong? Not everything is 1 and 0s.

Don't get me onto cars... That Suzuki-powered Elise looked the business (a Lancashire accent?). Sadly, at 6ft 5 I can't get into them. Only just managed to squeeze into my old Mk 1 Miata/MX-5. Have you checked out the Ariel Atom 2? 612kg, sub 3secs to 60. British-made with a Honda engine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Atom I tried an original on a track day for my 50th - brilliant! If you don't mind being exposed to the elements. Tried a 360 Modena too that day which seemed pedestrian in comparison.

In the UK there are still pockets of great pride and innovation in engineering. Though I never underestimate what the East has to offer.

We used to live next to US airbase servicemen in the late '70s/ early '80s (in rural Oxfordshire) and I really fell in love with the American muscle cars they drove; particularly a gold early '70s Barracuda. Looked and sounded great - but those panel gaps!

But yes to fast and light with steering feedback for our winding roads.

No it doesn't make sense to me, once you've entirely understood how I rebutted mascga upthread (with links off to prior discussion in his thread on chaos). I will not repeat myself again. One day I may have the free time to make it more formal.

A quick example of why you two think nonsense, is because I want you to tell everyone the probability the sun doesn't rise tomorrow.

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Actually that primarily derives from some blog posts by Nick Szabo (who invented bitgold before bitcoin) which I had read years before Armstrong echo'ed any similar theme.

And my knowledge about the impact of rice vs. wheat on unemployment was also an independent research discovery of mine.


It is precisely for the reasons I said. Before the Black Death, labor was too abundant, thus wages were too low, thus Europeans lived in squalor. After the Black Death, industrialization first of agriculture (e.g. breeding of stronger horses) was induced by needing to lower labor costs. Economics drives everything in nature, because economics is just another thermodynamic phenomenon in the abstract.

Again you have shown how deeply European you are. Caucasians think man can control nature and that life is a line that is always improving. Asians think nature is in control and life is like a circle where you come back to where you started from (in some altered state of course because a thermodynamic system is irreversible thus not precisely repeatable in the microstates).


Europe's population is much higher now than it was then before the Black Death, so there wasn't any Malthusian check. Rather the economic thermodynamics were stuck in a Coasian barrier. It required the Black Death to dislodge the barrier so that the innate capability of humans to compete could be unlocked.

Europeans are not any more creative and innovate than Asians innately. For example, China invented gun powder.

Rather it is that Asia had always been in the past less incentivized to invent certain things.

If you think Asians are innately inferior engineers and innovators to Europeans, then you are lacking knowledge in this area (don't feel bad, I lacked knowledge in many areas such as food which nearly destroyed my life). Let me give another example. Recently I was researching what would be the ultimate sports car I'd like to have if ever I regain my wealth. Reminiscing about the brief love affair I had with my convertible top Triumph TR7 in my early 20s (before I bought a Suzuki 550 GS ES and doing 185 kph on Highway 101, and also I because my father always had the better cars than I've had, e.g. Corvette, Miata, Alfa Romeo, Jaguar and I'd still like to have a better car than he ever had so I will have bragging rights) I realized that I'd want the lightest car with an open top with the highest power-to-weight ratio. A heavier car just isn't as much fun to drive because it doesn't handle as well regardless how much engine power it has. Watch this video and this one. Then compare to this video. Those are guy videos. All men should really enjoy those linked videos. Indulge yourselves. The Lotus Elise weighs even less than the new Alfa Romero 4C.

Any way, it turns out that absolutely highest power-to-weight ratio in the lightest street legal topless sports car would be a Lotus Elise converted to a Honda K20 or K24 4-cyclinder engine invented more than a decade ago, because the British engines have always sucked. With a Rotex supercharger (and engine upgrades such as Eibach springs and titanium rods to raise the redline limit up to 8500 - 9000), the little beast will throw out 425 HP (from a street legal 4-cylinder Japanese engine!) in a car that can be made to weigh less than 750 kgs (1650 lbs) if you pull out the air bags, air conditioning, ABS brakes, electric windows and get some $4800 forged wheels (to cut wheel weight down from 10 kg to 5 - 6 kg per wheel). The Rotex won't make that annoying supercharger whine inside the cabin and it forsakes some of the lower rpm torque to give you a perfectly rising torque for as high as you can make your redline, meaning it is even more powerful than a turbo. You will be talking a sub-3 second 0-60mph (1-100kph) car! Throw in a $20,000 sequential shifter and you'll be eating Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Porsches for breakfast on any road straight line or curvy, except not at top speed. And your car will be more fun and with steering that lets you feel the wheels. And your car will still get gas mileage in excess of 30 mpg when you are not driving it hard. Note it won't sound as nice as the big V-8s, but still an interesting sound.

P.S. check out this Lotus Elise with a Suzuki motorcycle engine! That video is apparently shot in rural UK. Also note the Nissan GTR consistently the faster car when put up against American muscle cars and any car in its price range (except the modified Elise which will kick the GTR's ass). Nissan has made a GTR Alpha 9 that beats the $million Bugatti Veyron. The Corvette Z/06 needs Hennessey's 1000 HP upgrade to compete. Btw the fastest car in the world is based on a British Lotus Elise with American (Texas no less!) engineering. Brits and Americans still have something going.

You see that Texas pride. You see the Welsh cultural values. Seems to me there is something still very pragmatic in the USA and UK that will break away from the morass of idealism at some point. Look at that Hennessey Venom GT video. The beast is not refined. Europeans prefer cars that are cultured and idealistic. Americans (and Brits apparently, e.g. Lotus and recent Jaguar F-type) prefer crude cars that do something that really matters, e.g. light+fast with audible and tactical steering wheel feedback. Note the American cars lagged primarily because the USA was historically more about going fast in a straight line. We didn't have all those mountain roads of Europe. So again it is environmental conditions (nature) that drives the areas where man competes.

Interesting. Thanks for getting back with your take. I emailed MA with the same question.

Another factor to consider is that humanity thrives when the climate warms - emergence from ice ages ( or mini ice ages) sees a burst of creativity, social advances etc and going into colder periods sees a rise in conflict, disease and general regression.

That's a very, verry narrow view of history.

The development of the law, the autonomy of universities, Colombus, Vasco de Gama and Magellan, the Scientific Revolution, the Military Revolution, the Reform, the liberal institutions... all of that's account for nothing in the rise of the West and its industrialization... it was actually just the plague Great history lesson courtesy of Armstrong!

If Asia followed a labor intensive growth path whereas Europe followed a more efficient growth path it's not because of fortuitous and external factors. Humans have the ability to make choices and thereby to act on their environment.

The Black Death was just a Malthusian check like had happenned every where in the world before that and have happened thereafter (Malthusian checks can take the form of disease, famine or wars). To answer the question of "why the West was the first to escape the Malthusian trap" by "because it underwent a Malthusian check" is deeply flawed.

The truth is the West didn't rise because of an external factor such as the plague (or the presence of coal in England or because of its geography or wathever such nonsense), but because of an internal factor: the creativiy of its people caused by its culture which fosters individualism.

Ah! The voice of reason! Congratulations sir, you're spot on! Either you understand the above quote or you blindly fall for Armstrong predictions. Let me clarify ONCE MORE that I don't berate the guy, nor I say that EVERYTHING he predicts is bogus. His model may be very well designed but IMHO falls into the initial conditions of deterministic chaos tampering error, which is broadly discussed here.

There's a GREAT possibility that (IF I'm right) somebody has been following his prediction model so that he alters accordingly the initial conditions of the deterministic chaos that M. Armstrong predicted. I don't expect anyone to follow my thinking regarding this, and CERTAINLY, don't claim the infallible. But, please keep in mind that (IF I'm right) we're talking about a dynamic deterministic chaos system here. And we want to predict what will happen!

Yeah, good luck with that if you have somebody tampering with it all the time because he reads what you calculated...

I think Armstrong is wrong in all of his formulas.

I don’t know how to get you to understand that tomorrow impedes the today from ever happing with thought having to first remember the future past thing you were thinking about when talking about the thing to were supposed to say when you never said it. This has the disparency of never acting the way we said we were going to do we did, except we’ve already done it and now we are re-enacting in a way that should never have been.

Does that make sense?

Not so simple as that. As Armstrong wrote recently, the Middle Easterners were twice before defeated from overrunning Europe. Maybe the third time is the charm.

Empires rise because they have an economic justification. For example, the Roman empire facilitated trade that didn't exist before Rome organized the building of the roads.

What we have in Europe appears to me to be more the insanity of the death of 1000+ year rise and fall of Western civilization giving way to the rebirth of Eastern civilization. The idealistic nonsense is just part of "It is Just Time" (to self-destruct):



Remember when Western Rome collapsed, then the centers of power moved East for 1000 years (the Dark Age in Western Europe where only the Black Death was able to solve the problem of massive unemployment). After that, the centers of power moved back West again for another 1000 years (because labor became more expensive after the Black Death so then Europe was forced to industrialize whereas Asia didn't need to because rice is labor intensive). Looks like we are ready to shift to another 1000 year trend.

White guys. This is your swan song. Sorry it is going away and there is nothing you can do to bring it back.

Trouble in the junk bond market?

http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/more-trouble-in-the-casino-the-junk-bond-market-is-having-a-coronary/

This is a quite interesting discussion. Economic downturns magnify social problems & nationalism. Fear of the foreigner, desire to return a country to its 'rightful' of place and being 'under attack', has led to hardliners gaining popularity (best historical example being the Nazi party, but also far right governments like Netanyahu in Israel, now partially the rhetoric of Trump, Le Pen in France). Obviously this leads to the possibility of war. Austerity also seems also to be leading to a change, popularizing mainly left leaning parties (Syriza, Podemos, UK's Labour).

Overall though, surely the roots of this migration issue lie in imperialism? Now we are seeing the long term effects of the petrodollar and geopolitical empire building. Look at the end of colonialism in the 19th & 20th centuries in Africa where it reached a point where local populations revolted and horrific civil wars ensued as a result of the inequality and brutality of the ruling regimes (Algeria, Angola etc etc), and then the further violence as tribal / ethnic groups battled for control of the liberated country, in the process renewing long standing religious / tribal feuds (often more brutal than the colonialists). This is repeating in the ME, Nth Africa (see what happened when Saddam, Iraq's secular ruler, was killed). The initial responses from religious hardliners had been building since the 90's, sparked on 9/11, set fire with the resulting payback / invasions and became a wild fire with the 08 crisis, which led to the Arab Spring.

I myself have no answers, it's a butterfly flaps its wings scenario. I don't blame anyone for trying to escape a warzone (Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Sri Lanka), a sanctioned or collapsing economy (Iran, Palestine, even Greece, Spain, Italy), an oppressive regime (Egypt, Saudi), a lawless land (Somalia, Libya). Idealistically, I support multiculturalism but realize that for every refugee / migrant that adapts to Western values there is one who tries to strictly emulate the rules and norms from his homeland. And then there may be an insidious one who migrates with evil intention. There is no singular recipe for successful integration.

And like TPTB mentions, idealism and fairness can be a Pandora's box. In an economic downturn the problems that come with large scale migration are magnified and could be the straw that breaks Europe's broke governments back. In the end, perhaps we all deserve it for paying more attention to reality TV, sports and fast food with our SUV's and massive houses instead of revolting against what is being done in the name of profit, lifestyle and 'God'.

That article is 4 years old! Values have increased enormously since then. (I don't know how strip malls are doing specifically though, that sector may have other secular issues, eg. the rise of cities.) But yes, commercial real estate is essentially a yield investment, like (higher yielding) bonds. Lower interest rates = higher current values. So two sides of the same ZIRP coin really, as you said.