Will work well if the carbs are those you find in a bottle of tequila.

A smart analysis is: figuring out how trade exposure contributes to defence exposure is hard, balancing that in practical terms is harder still. Defence doesn't know how much we trade with China is not the accurate version of the issue.

Potentially agree. If it was me I'd be going much harder on drones. A billion hundred-dollar assets not a hundred billion dollar assets. But this is it, isn't it. Lead times are so long for bespoke, complex things. evidence keeps changing. It's not actually simple.

A bipartite conflict, China v Australia, is unlikely.

That is an excellent question because it might be submarines, helicopters, ships, drones, or something else. And if you knew in advance it would be way easier to say exactly what the ship should have and shouldn't. But you don't, so the purchase decision is hard. And preferably retains flexibility!

Which is not to say there's no science or art to defence procurement, it can be done very badly or quite well. But some of the exasperated huffing we hear is is ill-informed.

Plus the contract you specify when you first order the ships in 2020 needs to have some wriggle room in it, because god knows what China will have put in their ships by 2030.
tl;dr, When you're buying fast-moving tech with partially specified contracts, cost and time are hard to control. 3/3

Buying a frigate is not like buying a Corolla. You are not aiming to meet a minimum objective standard, you are trying to meet a competitive standard. More like a race car - it doesn't just need to float, it needs to be able to win. These things are not purely proven and standardised tech. 2/3

His four year old brother has a metre-long list of Chinese-made plastic toys based on American cartoons. So don't ask me about parenting.

I also wonder if maybe he has hit 40 and pivoted conservative, but without quite realising that happened?!

Perhaps that's it. To fill his substack and attract readers he has become more diversified and general? And can't tell that his instincts on non economic topics are bad.

He creates a lot of cognitive dissonance!

This not an own, it's a lament.
I also suspect I'm about 15 points shy of my 2019! intellect! Not sure if explanation is neural decay or having two kids .

Burn it down, were all moving to somewhere near Byron bay.

Well they went public and at that point your cost line is public and you have to start pushing it down to get the bottom line looking good!!

It's a highly ambiguous diss isn't it! Subtle, intriguing and deliberately so. Gyg is kind of fine, or at least it was until recently when they began cutting costs? I wrote it, rubbed my chin for a bit and chose to leave it in, and it is a formulation that has captured people's attention!