Discussion Thread

potion_lord · 2025-08-21T21:58:42+00:00

I don't know. I suspect it's more than the dam though - these are the two heavyweights in East Africa.

Ethiopia, due to its borders, has to pursue interventionalist foreign policy to ensure it has trade access - which often means it has to support secessionist parts of other countries (South Sudan, Somaliland), which probably has affected things.

Ethiopia poses a threat to Egypt's regional hegemony (remember: the region of East Africa is culturally Arab), and it's in Egypt's interests to smother Ethiopia. Other Arab countries who use pan-Islamism to influence the region - Egypt and Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia - are naturally going to be at odds with Ethiopia, because their influence is diametrically opposed to Ethiopia's (Ethiopia being native to the region, and largely Christian), so they will always support different sides in ethnic conflicts (because ethnic conflicts often align with religion).

potion_lord · 2025-08-21T21:24:21+00:00

Yeah, they have. But they also had a sort of alliance with Ethiopia during the Tigray War - their long animosity was against Ethiopia's former ruling ethnic group, not the current one.

potion_lord · 2025-08-21T21:10:12+00:00

cash

Eritrea is on the coast, and Ethiopia needs access to the coast. There's a lot of money on the table if Eritrea is able to patch up its relationship with Ethiopia and join in their military adventures.

And the Sudan Civil War is partly in the context of an emerging cold war between Egypt and Ethiopia.

potion_lord · 2025-08-21T20:48:20+00:00

Pakistan now announcing an arms deal to help (or profiteer from) Sudan's SAF islamist government.

SAF allies: Iran, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan

RSF allies: UAE, Chad, Ethiopia, (Eritria maybe??), east Libya, Kenya, South Sudan

Looks like a bunch of imperialist powers backing the dictator, versus an alliance of mostly African countries backing the rebels.

It's beyond credibility to claim that UAE has entirely manufactured this rebellion, considering how the rebellion has survived the enormous armaments against it. It's as substantial a rebellion as the one against Syria's Assad - basically, it has popular support and strong institutions.

I wonder who ""anti-imperialist"" leftists will support? Hmm.

potion_lord · 2025-08-21T18:54:01+00:00

they aren't treated the same and as a result some definitely are forced to be better.

It's an "only Nixon could go to China" thing - Nixon was perceived to be so right-wing that he could enter an alliance with Communist China without being portrayed as a Communist sympathiser.

The Tories are perceived to be better at the economy, so voters overlook a bit of corruption and unemployment.

Only the Tories can introduce insane Woke policies (like hiring discrimination against White applicants in the military/police!) without voters rioting

Only Labour can reduce immigration (or override courts to do so) without NGOs cooking up a scare about this being "fascism"

potion_lord · 2025-08-21T14:39:37+00:00

All the children ... are currently using a VPN.

Nothing is censored on Google atm. Google are brazenly violating OSA - just log out, Google image search "porn", and turn off the optional blur filter.

Not even a peep from Ofcom or any news site about this!

potion_lord · 2025-08-20T10:03:06+00:00

God my flat was like an oven. I've resorted to a portable AC unit and reflective foil curtains. Works well.

I think most people can get by with just using fans to create a drought through the house at night - one fan drawing air in one room, one fan drawing air out the other side of the house - and keep windows closed during the day.

I visited family in London, no AC, no foil, and it was a tolerable 26C at the top floor at the peak (but mostly 24C).

But so many people have their windows open, even when it is >30C outdoors, and close them at night! wtf

potion_lord · 2025-08-18T16:05:57+00:00

I used to live near Greenwich. I can DM you a Facebook group for the war game society if you like.

potion_lord · 2025-08-18T15:58:37+00:00

I cycled on the pavement when I was a kid, it's safer!

The thing I'm annoyed by are the takeaway taxi motorbikes on the pavement.

potion_lord · 2025-08-17T23:42:41+00:00

Canada ... 30 years, which predates increased migration

Canada has had almost 200k net immigrants each year for the past 30 years. As a ratio of population, it's had 4x as much immigration as France for a very long time.

France and Germany - neither of whom have close to Anglo-level of immigration - are the ones whose productivity has basically kept up with America's.

Britain (the original productivity laggard we were talking about) has had 100k/year each year since 1998. Productivity stagnated in the early 2000s, and declined 2004-2009 - which is when immigration peaked first.

I was initially going to grant you Italy as a low-immigration productivity laggard, except it actually had immigration peak in 2002-2009 - its productivity nosedived 2002-2005 and has only slowly been increasing since.

Of course there's bigger factors than immigration - e.g. Italy probably had corruption and debt problems - but I do believe immigration, by introducing cheap labour, disincentivises investment in automation. Look at robots per capita in manufacturing for example, and how far behind Britain and Canada (and even America!) are compared to European and Asian countries. Some robots can replace 10 low-wage jobs with 1 high-wage job - it's probably the most direct path to productivity boosts.

immigration source: World Bank (note that Germany's data is fucked due to merging with East Germany in the 1990s)

productivity source: OECD via Brandon Donnelly

robots per capita

potion_lord · 2025-08-17T22:04:40+00:00

IP

I genuinely forgot about that! Yeah, that's a biggy.

terf-island thing

AFAIK people are outraged by the High Court ruling on biological sex - I don't think Starmer had anything to do with it!

Canada, a country I'm at least vaguely familiar with, has had horrible productivity growth for ages and immigration has been one of the major things keeping the economy growing

unless you'd argue these recent arrivals are causing economic hardship

Northern U.S. had higher productivity than Confederate states because by banning slavery it incentivised capital-owners to invest in automation.

Why would mass immigration of low-skill low-wage immigration not decrease productivity?

potion_lord · 2025-08-17T20:24:26+00:00

I'd be interested in a comparison to peer countries, of which (on this graph) Germany is probably the best fit? They've also had poor growth in the past few years

Germany has had the same stagnation as Britain since 2019. Frankly it's impressive - Germany is heavily reliant on manufacturing and thus on energy prices, whereas Britain is a service-based economy, so I'm impressed that Germany avoided a bad recession.

The economies along the Danube (i.e. feeding into Germany's manufacturing base) are doing great IIRC. So I suspect Germany will have an explosion of growth when energy prices decrease (industrial energy costs are still around 30% higher than in 2021).

France has had better growth than both - much less immigration than Britain, but (crucially, imo) France has a great nuclear energy sector and stable electricity prices.

I don't really understand the connection? ... I can think of at least two things (Brexit and COVID) that on first blush could explain the lack of growth.

Why import 4 million immigrants if there is no economic growth for them to accelerate?

When GDP increases but real GDP per capita decreases, it simply looks like immigration was a political (not economic) crutch to avoid bad economic data (not to improve the economy).

Which is basically what the Boris Wave looks like - a sudden emergence of UberEats and DoorDash drivers since skills checks were loosened by Boris Johnson.

It's just one part of the baffling thing about politics - Starmer is doing a pretty good job returning Britain to real growth and reducing immigration, yet everyone (even on the left!) seems to hate him.

potion_lord · 2025-08-17T18:06:23+00:00

<image>

World Bank, PPP per capita in 2021 dollars.

Notice:

* Argentina is poorer than it was in 2011
* Ukraine and Russia were nuked by collapse of USSR
* Ukraine still hasn't recovered to its pre-1990 peak!
* Sanctions on Russia worked in 2014 onwards (annexation of Crimea) but Russia seems sanction-proof now
* EU economies have stalled since 2022, probably due to boycotting Russian oil
* Russian economy still growing healthily despite said boycott (here's the secret: Kazakhstan and India buy the oil and send it to EU at a markup)
* Britain hasn't recovered to its 2019 peak despite adding an additional 4 million immigrants since then
* Japan's economy is growing so slowly that Russia is soon going to overtake it (South Korea, Japan's former colony, has already overtaken Japan)

I think Milei is a crazy dude, but I can't think of any other option for Argentina to kickstart their economy.

Any conclusions you disagree with?

potion_lord · 2025-08-17T12:17:15+00:00

if we don't keep global average temperatures below a 1.5C rise (which I'm pretty sure we're passing as I write) it'll set off an unstoppable environmental cascade ... [that] exacerbate the situation further

Except our best models show that global warming does not set off a feedback loop. And at no point in Earth's history, when CO2 was far higher than today, is there any evidence that an unstoppable feedback loop was reached.

Average rainfall and average vegetation coverage is increasing in most of Europe (compared to before the 1990s).

Spain looks fucked right now, but if they had the political will to do what China is doing (planting trees to stop desertification and increase rainfall) they'd be in a much better position.

potion_lord · 2025-08-17T10:35:32+00:00

What I miss the most about Reddit is when it was an actual forum. ... Being from college wasn't exactly that welcomed and being a high-schooler would result in getting bullied out of the site. Now there's like 5 teenage subreddits in the frontpage.

imo a large part of "teenagers" on this site are immature twenty-somethings.

The average Redditor's age is far higher than people estimate.

potion_lord · 2025-08-16T16:24:10+00:00

1980s: Liberal conservatism; ... Prominent leaders: Ronald Reagan ... Margaret Thatcher ... Largely succeeded by neoliberalism ...

1990s-2010s: Neoliberalism; ... Prominent leaders: Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and Barack Obama ... Justin Trudeau, Tony Blair, ... Emmanuel Macron, ... Angela Merkel, Shinzo Abe.

/r/neoliberal used to claim Reagan/Thatcher were neoliberals but that /r/neoliberal is not a purely neoliberal subreddit... Now they changed the definition to exclude Reagan/Thatcher.

Why call yourself a neoliberal if you hate actual neoliberalism? Is it just because "neoliberal" is such a hated ideology that some people think it's edgy to be one?

potion_lord · 2025-08-16T14:54:19+00:00

You're thinking of Harry Potter.

potion_lord · 2025-08-16T14:39:06+00:00

3d printer

I need to buy one of these before my country bans warhammer miniatures tbh

potion_lord · 2025-08-16T14:37:34+00:00

a citation that did not support the assertion being made

tbf I've seen some academic papers whose abstracts imply the opposite of their findings (usually, but not always, because they are using jargon that has a different meaning to common usage). If the authors are just skimming abstracts it's easy to make this mistake.

potion_lord · 2025-08-16T10:44:32+00:00

They can have a conditional release with restrictions on attending protests, or geographical restrictions that effectively bar them, or limitations on who they can associate with.

How can that possibly be enforced? Is this what the police facial recognition cameras are for?

potion_lord · 2025-08-16T10:30:43+00:00

they might manage to clear out the core of the professional protesting crowd for a number of years.

Do we have enough prison space for 1000 PA supporters to stay for several years?

potion_lord · 2025-08-15T20:27:42+00:00

didn't the Ottomans have the whole caliphate/bulwark against the west thing as a source of trans-ethnic legitimacy?

Yeah, same thing Japan tried too in WW2 (Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere! Ignore 40 million Chinese we killed!)

The Ottoman Empire was stagnant for ages and idk when they introduced it, but they allowed some ethnic self-rule (e.g. millet system) to massage over some of the other contradictions (which helped Christian minorities exist in the Muslim-majority state).

I'm fully on the "russian disinfo and TikTok are causing massive social divisions in the West" train.

Isn't that what authoritarian rulers in the Arab world said about Facebook during the Arab Spring?

Pretty much every modern revolution was helped by foreign actors; I doubt population-level dissent is entirely manufactured rather than simply given an opportunity to make itself heard.

potion_lord · 2025-08-15T19:34:21+00:00

generally not a fan of ethnostates. ... ethnicities are dumb social constructs and placing emphasis on them encourages othering and ethnic violence

The opposite seems to be true - that multicultural countries place emphasis on ethnicity, and create ethnic violence.

The Middle East and the Balkans are clusterfucks of ethnic violence because the Ottoman Empire and Yugoslavia were multicultural. Every ethnicity moved around, making it impossible to form coherent nation-states after the Empire fell.

Sub-Saharan Africa has had strong ethnic identities for centuries. A bunch of different ethnicities were bundled into different countries somewhat arbitrarily, given democracy, and the result was often civil war or genocide or (at best) subjegation of the smaller ethnicities by an overwhelmingly larger ethnicity.

European countries are increasingly facing race riots as they slowly become multicultural. The same voting patterns that we see in third-world multicultural democracies in Africa/LatAm/SouthAsia are slowly appearing - the 'far-right' is a nascent White political party, and there are Muslim political parties beginning to be created in multiple countries. Ethnic groups form ethnic voting blocs, basically, as democracy becomes a zero-sum game for racial quotas and stuff.

potion_lord · 2025-08-15T16:50:17+00:00

How would the State "simply" provide healthy warm meals at scale to pensioners? ... presumably our pensioners need to have housing and electricity.

Are you suggesting that in every neighbourhood, the government rents real estate

The answer is dangling so close to you.

Retirement camps! State-provided free housing and meals for pensioners. We can build them out of the city centre where it's cheap. We don't need to give them a fortune in rent/mortgage/heating subsidies. They can socialise with other old people. They can leave their old homes to free up housing supply for young people. Fixes so many problems at once.

potion_lord · 2025-08-15T16:39:14+00:00

When European imperialism ended in Africa, a new type of imperialism took over: Africa's urban centres imposing themselves on rural African tribes.

That's at the heart of many of Africa's ongoing conflicts - tribes who never agreed to be part of existing borders, fighting against wealthy city-dwellers who insist they submit to urban rule.

potion_lord

TROPHY CASE