Ukraine drank the kool-aid, and fooled themselves into thinking that if you slap a “freedom and democracy” sticker on and cozy up to the West, they’ll always back you no matter what.

In reality, countries behave as paranoid amoral assholes for a good reason.

Russia already has vastly more resources than Ukraine, it’s not going to make any difference.

An important point that isn’t mentioned in this article is that when the US targets third countries in their efforts to kneecap Chinese companies, it is hurting its own geostrategic interests. The US has been working hard to draw countries like Vietnam and Indonesia into its orbit as part of its containment strategy against China, but when it slaps tariffs on exports from these countries, years of diplomatic goodwill get instantly cancelled out. Especially since the US nowadays has no economic carrots to offer suitors, thanks to its bipartisan anti-trade turn. It’s all sticks.

Economic development isn’t so easy, or more countries would already be rich. Look at peer countries: in 1970, China had around the same GDP per capita as India and lower than Indonesia, now it’s about 50% higher than Indonesia and 170% higher than India. If you view this through the institutions lens (which is the whole point of Robinson’s work), it’s hard to avoid concluding that China’s institutions aren’t particularly extractive, compared to nominally democratic countries at the same stage of development.

Whether this will continue to be the case is an open question. The doomer case for China is pretty fashionable, but again it’s useful to do a comparison. Look at the middle income countries and ask which ones can make it out of the middle income trap, and transition into an advanced economy. China stands a much better chance than almost any other middle income country, just from the fact that it’s already at the technology frontier in many industries.

China’s population has seen some of the greatest improvements in human welfare in history during the past 50 years, including the near elimination of extreme poverty. Comparing this to slavery in the American South is frankly silly. It is like making light of slavery.

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Strangely enough, I think the CCP is a lot more of an inclusive institution than Robinson and his coauthors are happy to admit. A lot of the decisions the Chinese government makes are aimed at increasing national wealth and power. Narrow extractive behavior – siphoning wealth away to benefit the elites – definitely does happen in China, but not significantly more (and maybe less) than nominally democratic countries at a similar stage of development.

There’s plenty of scope to dunk on the CCP, e.g. human rights. But Acemoglu/Robinson political economy framework, based on inclusive/extractive institutions, isn’t the right argument for this.

US cares so much about the region that Biden didn’t even show up. Sent Blinken to lecture all the region’s heads of state. I’m sure that will go down well.

It would have been nice if the article actually described the plan, rather than just the locker room politics of who likes it and who does not.

Special military operation?

It’s wild how CBU3 dumped FF14 design straight into FF16 and decided it was good enough. MMO gameplay makes a lot of design compromises to accommodate for the multiplayer shared-state world, network latency, etc. None of which make sense for a single player offline experience.

Only dozens? HK government getting soft now?

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.

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.

If this passes, this would have the perverse effect of making China (and maybe to a lesser extent the Middle East) the leading suppliers of open source / open weight AI models…

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.