Only dozens? HK government getting soft now?

“While imperialist colonizers” is doing a lot of work in the post. In my view, there’s little credit to be given out for offering liberalism to a tiny fraction of the population under your rule. So from a macro standpoint, Wilhelm hardly stands out.

I will give the British some credit for bowing to the inevitability of decolonization many years later, after WWII, with only a little bit kicking and screaming. (France, not so much.)

That’s pretty much the European median for the time.

This is a politically-motivated ruling… Thailand’s judiciary, including its constitutional court is packed with ultra-conservative royalists who deploy the law to take down their political enemies. Conveniently enough, politicians who are friendly to the royalist/military establishment aren’t subject to such scrutiny.

It will be interesting to see how Rwanda manages after Kagame leaves the scene. In the past, he has styled himself after Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, but Lee stepped down and left behind a well functioning civil service and a second generation of political leaders who weren’t hacks. Kagame seems to be avoiding talk about succession plans, which is not a good sign.

Riots caused by court rulings don’t usually topple prime ministers. This feels really weird and off.

That’s wild.

Bangladesh has actually been doing pretty well in the past decade, no? I know there have been concerns about Hasina’s increasing authoritarianism over the years, but the stuff I’ve read indicated that she was actually quite popular, within the context of the country’s incredibly polarized politics.

Having her toppled by a mob like this… while hoping for the best for Bangladesh, I can’t help but feel quite pessimistic for the future of the country. For one thing, there’s the distinct possibility that this is a military coup disguised as a popular insurrection. Hope that’s not the case.

Decent affordable Bandai kits when…

They also pinky-promise that they are not running current psy-ops on many other topics. (Tee hee.)

That’s like telling a starving person that long-term obesity concerns are the real issue.

No, if it was just a matter of having a well developed economy whose fruits are distributed poorly, then their GDP per capita (literally economic output divided by people) would be high.

But it’s not. It’s among the middle-income countries, just below Malaysia. Which seems about right in terms of the quality of life of the average citizen.

Yes. That means Chinese households actually consume less than this graph indicates. In other words, because China’s economy is more manufacturing heavy, this graph makes it look more “developed” than it actually is.

Their economy is literally less developed. Country size has nothing to do with it; India is on track to surpass Japan’s GDP but no one would dispute that it is much less developed than Japan or any other OECD country.

Because they’re still a developing country with a relatively low baseline power supply per capita (half that of the US).

Obviously, there’s a more disturbing background at play here, but churches shouldn’t be untaxed in the first instance. The dude literally said to render unto Caesar, etc. etc.

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Had.

I was curious about this too, but digging around on the internet doesn’t seem to give a definitive answer to this question. The “breaking Android application compatibility” story is real, see this Technode article.

What I think seems to be happening is that Huawei is developing HarmonyOS the way GNU/Linux came out of Unix, replacing bits and pieces at a time. They started out using many prominent Android components which led to some commentators dismissing it as just an AOSP fork, but over time they’re diverging into a genuine third mobile operating system, including their own ABI and development toolchain.

This is a fairly predictable consequence of economic stagnation. France is still below its pre-Covid level of GDP per capita, while Germany only caught up. Both countries, and most other countries in Europe, seem to be permanently stuck at a GDP per capita level 20-30 percent below the US.

There are lots of excuses for Europe’s lower economic dynamism relative to the US, about how it’s a trade-off for improved quality of life (more vacations, etc). But young people benefit disproportionately from dynamism, because they’re the ones working their way up. If young people want economic opportunities and the economy doesn’t give it to them, you’ll see the frustration appearing at the ballot box.

Yes, the world was a lot hotter in the distant past, but that’s because the carbon in the biosphere was gradually sequestered by natural geologic processes, leading to a gradual cooling over hundreds of millions of years. We’re now partially undoing that, by pumping and digging the stuff back up and burning it.

If fossil fuels hadn’t come along, it’s possible that the long-term cooling of the Earth would have been a problem, eventually. Nobody wants another Ice Age. But we’ve gone waaaay past in the opposite direction now. We really, really don’t want to see an “age of the dinosaurs” climate, with its pole-to-pole super-hurricanes, continent sized mega droughts, and other forms of extreme weather that human civilization has zero experience coping with.