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.

The recent success of the European far right is precisely because they’ve revised their image to get rid of the freakshow aspects. The days when you could dismiss these people just by calling them “absolute freaks” are over.

They’re good products, and Australia has no vested economic interests in keeping them out. Hardly surprising.

Well said. One thing I’d add is that it wasn’t only Putin going all in, but Xi’s own strategic impatience. China needed at least another generation to grow into its strengths as a world power, but Xi had, for various reasons, convinced himself that he, not his successors, would be the one to see it all through. By finishing the job Mao had started, Xi would be the one lauded by history as the one inheriting Mao’s mantle.

Xi likes to wax poetic about geostrategic “changes not seen in a century”. Ironically, his own ego and hamfistedness has given the West a once in a century opportunity to kneecap China and prevent it from consolidating into a true world power.

What’s interesting is that before the war, China and Ukraine had excellent relations, to the point where Russia was worried about Chinese influence in Ukraine. There’s some remnant of these ties, like how China has never recognised Russia’s annexations of Ukrainian territory.

But the thing is, China’s overwhelming interest at this point is for Russia not to lose. A Russian humiliation at the hands of the West – or worse still a Russian collapse leading to a reduced state that could be dominated by the West – would leave China geopolitically isolated, and give the US the freedom to squeeze China with no further distractions.

At the end of the day, Xi Jinping has blundered his way into a strategic cul-de-sac. The Russia-Ukraine war is a geopolitical disaster for China, and Xi’s dumb bromance with Putin was a key reason it happened. Strategically, he’s the worst Chinese leader in at least a century.

Bad title. An entire army division (10,000 to 20,000) surrendering would be a spectacular event. Turns out the article is talking about “some (~180) soldiers from a division”, which is totally not the same thing.