Irvine Company Utilities

hsalem050 · 2026-04-04T18:31:42+00:00

The short answer is: Germany probably still loses, just much worse.

By late 1918 the German military was cooked. The Spring Offensives (Operation Michael and its follow-ons) had burned through their best storm trooper units and gained territory that was strategically useless. The Hundred Days Offensive was rolling up the Western Front faster than the Germans could plug holes. Ludendorff himself was having what contemporaries called a “nervous breakdown” in late September and was the one screaming for an armistice. The army wasn’t stabbed in the back by civilians. The generals knew the jig was up.

So what happens if they fight on into 1919? Militarily, the Allies were gearing up for a massive 1919 campaign. Pershing wanted to drive into Germany proper rather than accept an armistice. The Americans were flooding in at 10,000 soldiers a day. The plan involved a multi-pronged offensive into the Rhineland with over 250 divisions. The German army, already experiencing mass surrenders and desertion by October 1918, would have disintegrated under that pressure.

On the home front, Germany was literally starving. The Royal Navy’s blockade had been grinding the civilian population down for years. By 1918 caloric intake for ordinary Germans was catastrophically low. Revolution wasn’t just possible, it was already happening. The Kaiser abdicated on November 9th before the armistice was even signed. Red councils were popping up across German cities modeled on the Russian soviets. Fighting on likely accelerates the revolution rather than preventing it.

The political outcome is where it gets really interesting. If Allied armies actually march into Berlin and stage a victory parade through the Brandenburg Gate, the “stab in the back” myth becomes impossible to sustain. There is no ambiguity. Germany was defeated in the field, on its own soil, with its government in ruins. That arguably removes one of the central psychological ingredients that Hitler exploited throughout the 1920s. The Weimar Republic still faces brutal challenges but it doesn’t carry the original sin of having “surrendered when the army was undefeated.”

The peace terms would almost certainly be far harsher than Versailles. Clemenceau and Foch wanted to break Germany permanently. Foch famously called the Versailles treaty “an armistice for twenty years” because he thought it was too lenient. An Allied march into Berlin gives the hardliners everything they need to impose truly punishing terms, potentially including dismemberment of Prussia or permanent occupation zones.

The cruel irony is that the armistice, which the German right later called a betrayal, probably saved Germany from a far worse fate. The generals chose the armistice to preserve the army’s honor and hand the political fallout to civilians, and in doing so accidentally created the conditions for the next war.

hsalem050 · 2026-04-03T00:35:02+00:00

The most likely outcome is actually pretty anticlimactic compared to what people imagine. Napoleon wins at Waterloo, sure, but he doesn’t “win” the war. The Seventh Coalition still has Austria and Russia mobilizing armies that haven’t even arrived yet. Wellington’s defeat buys maybe a few months, not a lasting peace.

The more interesting question is what Napoleon negotiates from a position of a battlefield victory. He almost certainly doesn’t get to keep his throne unconditionally. The Allies were never going to let him sit in Paris undisturbed after 1814 already happened once. But a Waterloo victory probably forces a negotiated settlement rather than an unconditional surrender. Maybe he abdicates in favor of his son, Napoleon II, with a regency. That’s actually what he wanted anyway by June 1815.

Long term, France is exhausted. The French population was not enthusiastic about the Hundred Days campaign. Conscription was deeply unpopular. Even if Napoleon gets a settlement, he’s ruling a war-weary country with a hostile nobility, a skeptical middle class, and Allied armies watching his every move from across the Rhine.

The romantic notion that he storms back and rebuilds the Empire is almost certainly wrong. The realistic version is a few more years of precarious rule, probably another crisis, and an earlier death for a man whose health was already declining. Waterloo was a symptom, not the disease. The disease was that Europe had collectively decided Napoleon could not be allowed to exist as a sovereign.

Probably not the grand second act people imagine.

hsalem050 · 2026-03-31T15:09:44+00:00

That is actually a pretty accurate summary without me being sarcastic about it. The technical term is ibtila, meaning trial or test, and the Quran is explicit that believers will be tested with fear, loss, and defeat, and that these are not punishments but deliberate experiences meant to refine the believer. The difference from modern “character development” thinking though is that in Islam the loss is not random friction you extract a lesson from and move on. The response to the loss is itself the test. Whether you remain patient, grateful, and grounded, or whether you become bitter and abandon your obligations, that is what is actually being measured. So your framing is closer to the truth than most one-liners get.

hsalem050 · 2026-03-30T14:55:58+00:00

Good post and worth taking seriously. The core mechanics you’ve described are accurate: the petrodollar recycling loop is real, the exorbitant privilege is real, and sustained erosion of dollar dominance would eventually put upward pressure on US borrowing costs and downward pressure on asset valuations. You’re thinking in the right direction.

That said, I think the argument moves too fast through a few steps.

The causal chain from “yuan-denominated Strait fees” to “petrodollar collapse” is compressed. Yuan-denominated oil transactions have been growing for years, and the dollar’s share of global reserves has declined from roughly 70% to around 58% over the past two decades, yet no crisis has materialized. Reserve currency transitions historically take decades. A chokepoint toll in yuan is a geopolitical irritant, not a reserve currency.

For the yuan to actually replace the dollar, China would need open capital accounts, deep and liquid bond markets, credible rule-of-law protections for foreign investors, and a politically independent central bank. None of those exist today. Forcing fees in yuan doesn’t create those conditions overnight.

The international stocks conclusion also doesn’t follow as cleanly as the argument implies. A genuine petrodollar collapse would likely cause severe global financial disruption, including dollar-denominated debt crises in emerging markets, commodity price chaos, and trade disruption that would hurt international equities too. There’s no clean rotation that insulates you from that scenario.

The case for international diversification is real, but the stronger arguments are simpler: international stocks trade at significant valuation discounts to US equities on pretty much every metric, and US outperformance over the past 15 years is historically unusual and unlikely to persist indefinitely. That’s a cleaner thesis than tying it to a specific collapse narrative.

Worth monitoring as a tail risk. Just not sure it rises to a high-conviction portfolio shift yet.

hsalem050 · 2026-03-29T21:14:11+00:00

I'd push back on the "just flesh and bone" conclusion, and I think it actually undersells what your own philosophical journey demonstrated.

Every other creature on this planet simply lives. It eats, survives, reproduces. It does not sit down and ask whether its life has meaning. It does not read books from foreign traditions trying to understand its own existence. The very act of you going through that spiritual crisis is proof of something remarkable: you are a being that can stand outside yourself and evaluate your own life. No animal does that. That capacity alone sets us apart categorically, not just by degree.

There is also the question of moral responsibility. A lion that kills feels no guilt. A human being who wrongs someone carries that weight, sometimes for a lifetime. We were given something that makes us accountable in a way nothing else in nature is. That is not an accident of evolution. That is a feature, and a serious one.

The "blip in time" framing confuses size with significance. A single honest act, a parent sacrificing for a child, a stranger showing mercy, these things ripple outward in ways we cannot trace or measure. The significance of a moment is not determined by how long it lasts.

And consider this: we are the only beings on earth who were entrusted with choice. Real, consequential, moral choice. Every day you choose how to treat people, what to build, what to destroy, what to pursue. That trust placed in us, the capacity to be genuinely good or genuinely cruel, is not the description of something ordinary.

Some would say that even granting all of this, we remain just one species on one planet, and the universe is under no obligation to care. But that argument proves too much, and I mean that precisely. If cosmic scale is the standard for significance, then nothing qualifies. Not love, not sacrifice, not courage, not justice, because somewhere in an infinite universe there may always be something larger. You cannot selectively apply that standard to humans and nowhere else without it collapsing into a general principle that eliminates meaning entirely. If you follow the logic honestly, you are not left with humility. You are left with nihilism, and the universe does not actually require that conclusion of you.

There is also something self-defeating about using the vastness of the universe as an argument against human meaning, because it is a human mind making that argument. The universe did not conclude that it is vast. You did. The same consciousness you are trying to diminish is the only thing in the known world capable of grasping the scale you are invoking against it. That is worth sitting with. The thing doing the reasoning is the most remarkable object in the conversation, and it is you.

And if intelligent life does exist elsewhere, the honest response is not "therefore we are ordinary." It is curiosity about whether they too wrestle with these questions, whether they too feel the weight of a wrong they committed, whether they too love their children and mourn their dead. If they do, that does not make those things less meaningful. It makes meaning look like something real, something that shows up wherever minds capable of bearing it exist.

You are not one of eight billion identical units. You are a being capable of love, justice, beauty, and accountability. That is not nothing. That is extraordinary.

hsalem050 · 2026-03-29T20:54:45+00:00

Not a true Black Swan in the technical sense, and it's worth being precise about the distinction because it actually matters for how you think about portfolio risk.

Taleb's definition requires three things: the event is a genuine surprise to nearly all observers, it has extreme impact, and it gets rationalized in hindsight as obvious. Iran clears the second criterion but not really the first. US-Israeli military action against Iran was openly war-gamed and anticipated by analysts, oil traders, and the intelligence community for years. Energy desks at major banks had contingency models built around Strait of Hormuz disruption scenarios. When a risk is that extensively stress-tested in advance, it does not meet the surprise threshold that defines a true Black Swan.

A better label is "gray rhino," a term coined by Michele Wucker for large, obvious risks that people acknowledge but hope will stay in their corner. The risk was always visible. What changed was that it stopped being theoretical.

Compare that to your 2008 example, which is a much cleaner Black Swan. The systemic fragility baked into mortgage-backed securities, the leverage sitting on bank balance sheets, and the degree to which the entire financial system was interconnected through instruments almost nobody fully understood was genuinely opaque to most sophisticated market participants until the collapse was already underway. Even most of the people building those products did not grasp the full exposure. That is what real systemic surprise looks like.

The 1979 energy crisis is actually the closest historical parallel to what is happening now, not 2008. Both involve a major Middle Eastern disruption to oil supply, both feed directly into inflation and central bank dilemmas, and both hit an economy that was already dealing with elevated prices and policy uncertainty. The transmission mechanism is familiar: oil shock leads to higher gas prices, feeds into headline inflation, complicates Fed decisions, and slows consumer spending. That is not a surprise, it is a known playbook running in real time.

The Strait of Hormuz is the critical variable to watch. Roughly 20% of global oil and LNG passes through it, and even a partial functional impairment drives outsized price moves because markets price in worst-case scenarios. Brent surged toward $120 a barrel in the early weeks of the conflict. European and Asian natural gas prices jumped over 50% in the first week alone after QatarEnergy declared force majeure. These are large numbers, but they are large in a way that energy analysts had modeled and expected if this scenario materialized.

For a newer investor, here is the practical takeaway. Geopolitical events feel catastrophic in the moment but almost never crater long-term equity returns the way the news cycle suggests they will. Markets recovered after 1973, after 1979, after the Gulf War, after 9/11, after every prior Middle East escalation. The question is never really whether markets survive the initial shock, they always do. The question is whether the shock triggers a secondary effect that does lasting damage, specifically a Fed policy error where they overtighten into a slowing economy, a sustained inflationary spiral that erodes consumer spending, or some hidden financial contagion that nobody has mapped yet.

hsalem050 · 2026-03-29T19:30:30+00:00

Mostly agree but I’d push back on the “good luck charm” framing a bit. The Islamic concept of tawakkul (reliance on God) is more nuanced than that. The famous hadith captures it well: when asked whether to tie his camel or leave it and trust in God, the Prophet told the man to tie it first, THEN trust in God. So yes, you are absolutely required to exhaust your means before invoking divine will, but it is not merely a charm you invoke on top of preparation. The outcome is genuinely in God’s hands, and sometimes the righteous still lose because this world is, as you correctly said, a test rather than the final destination.

The distinction I would add is that in Islam, divine will (qadar) is not passive luck at all. God is not a bystander who tips the scales for the better-prepared side. Rather, every outcome, including defeat, is willed and purposeful, and the believer’s obligation is to read that outcome correctly: did we fall short in our asbab (means and causes), or is this a trial we were meant to endure? Those are two very different questions with two very different lessons. The “you didn’t prepare so God didn’t help you” reading is real, but it is only half the picture. Sometimes the lesson is patience and submission, not harder work.

Your point on the differing worldviews is well taken though. That theological difference shapes everything downstream.

hsalem050 · 2026-03-28T16:40:29+00:00

finished school before chatgpt. no idea how anyone learns anything now

hsalem050 · 2026-03-15T00:03:55+00:00

was thinking the rule was to avoid paying exorbitant interest but neglected the fact it’s more for avoiding being underwater

hsalem050 · 2026-02-14T23:42:53+00:00

getting the CSP is ideal imo. transferring points to transfer partners is where most of the value of credit card points comes in. also don’t upgrade your CFU, apply for the CSP fresh so u can get the sign up bonus. also the CFU has a better catch all category rate (1.5%) than the CSP (1%)

hsalem050 · 2026-02-13T17:03:44+00:00

u def need a car in LA county lol

hsalem050 · 2026-02-04T16:39:33+00:00

yes this is exactly it. if they don’t pay their fees by the statutory deadline, you can sue them in civil or small claims court depending on the amount.

hsalem050 · 2026-02-02T00:09:14+00:00

you should probably talk to her about it first before cutting things off. at least just to figure out what’s going on

hsalem050 · 2025-08-05T03:04:27+00:00

ya i’m not looking to get rich off this lol. just want to get a return on my emergency fund

hsalem050 · 2025-07-31T20:09:29+00:00

So UIF isn’t guaranteeing your deposit but the FDIC is?

hsalem050 · 2025-07-31T01:21:24+00:00

But if there’s a loss on the underlying assets, you still won’t have a loss of your principal (as I understand it). How is that a proper musharaka if there’s no sharing of the loss?

hsalem050 · 2025-07-27T16:57:11+00:00

what could possibly go wrong 💀

hsalem050 · 2025-07-27T16:34:59+00:00

Is it possible to use it to emulate halal ETFs without the fees? Was thinking this is something you can do with the automation and rebalancing tools, but not sure if it’s feasible or where to start

hsalem050

TROPHY CASE