nednobbins

Africa has a number of factors in its favor that make it a potential economic powerhouse. It has some of the largest natural resource reserves in the world, it has a huge population, it's conveniently located on or near several important trade routes.

It's also cursed with some pretty bad natural infrastructure. The rivers in Africa don't provide good access between the center of the continent and the coasts.

China had about the same GDP a Sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990's https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?end=1996&locations=CN-ZG&most_recent_value_desc=true&start=1960 It's taken China 35 years to get from there to it's current spot as 2nd largest economy in the world. And that was for an economy that was growing at nearly 2x the rate of the rest of the world for most of that period. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=CN-1W

That's not to say that Africa can't become an economic powerhouse but it will take a lot of work and time. It would take sustained investment and reinvestment in Africa over several decades.

Because the human brain doesn't intuitively count the way we're taught in school.

Our brains are very good at understanding 1, 2, sometimes 3 and, "many". That's the data we get from smart chips, young children and isolated pre-literate societies.

Counting bigger numbers requires abstract systems. Our brains can do that but it's much harder and we don't grasp it as well.

The practical offshot of this is that while it's intuitively obvious that a small space like a garage will quickly fill up with toxic gasses, it's far less intuitive that a "very big" outside can get saturated by a "pretty big number" of cars.

We make food "from scratch" on a regular basis.

We've found a few different sources for fats. I'll focus on the pork-fat ones.

The most common source is to just collect fat any time we make pork things. The advantage is that it's cheap and easy; just let it cool and add it to a jar in the fridge. The disadvantage is that it will have a lot of other flavors (especially salt).

Sometimes we just by processed lard. That's basically the opposite end of the spectrum. It's very pure and has no flavor besides the fat itself.

Often we'll wet render our own fat. Traditionally that would be the trimmings off of other cuts. Unless you're butchering a pig (or have bought into a fractional pig through something like a CSA) those bits usually aren't available. Typically we'll just buy cuts that are very high in fat. For pork, that would be pork belly. We'll just buy an uncut slab and wet-render it. Trim any meat you want to cook with (belly is the part that bacon is made of) throw the rest in a pot of water an simmer it for a few hours. The fat layer that collects on top is almost pure lard.

We've also found that duck fat is a great substitute for lard. It has a similar smoke point to lard (slightly higher). It tastes different from lard but it's also good enough that the flavor itself will improve meals. Duck breasts are about 50% fat if you buy them with skins. You can also buy duck fat on its own.

I'd broaden that to a whole host of "green" and "alternative energy" sectors.

All the panic about Chinese "overproduction" of EVs and similar technologies is just China going whole hog on those industries. It's not an "overproduction" in the traditional sense, where a company produces more than the market will bear and has to sell excess inventory at a loss. China just produces all of this stuff cheaply and at a huge scale.

About 20 years ago the general perception was that EVs were a joke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HX5wsQVEA Now we have cost effective solar and wind, efficient battery storage, good and cheap EVs and drones, modern heat pumps etc.

I don't even think all the tariffs will matter in the long run. China is currently adopting all that stuff at a breakneck pace. Their production capacity won't just go away once they've saturated the domestic market and the growing number of countries that have trade agreements with China). At that point, Chinese manufacturers will have no choice but to start actually selling below cost, just so they can clear inventory.

And this has a snowball effect too. Energy is often the limiting factor in production. An abundance of cheap energy makes it cheaper to produce more cheap energy production.

Shitty leaders blame their people for their failures.

People call something a "manifesto" when they want to imply that it's a long rambling text written by a crazy person.

This situation has me pondering 2 hypotheticals.

1. How long until people start posting the names of individuals perceived as traitors (eg the McSnitch, the journalists shilling for Thomson, the politicians leading the charge against Mangione, etc)?

2. Can he realistically be tried at all? A broad cross section of people are really supportive of Mangione. We're in such a weird timeline that I could potentially imagine groups like Black Block and Proud Boys standing side-by-side on this one.

It's Nature. One of the most respected science journals on the planet.

That’s a reasonable argument. It’s so reasonable that several researchers have tried to come up with better estimates and failed. The highest I could find was that 20% lifetimes rate. If you can find better data please share it. I’d love to see it.

Part of the point of the peer review process is to check for that. This kind of satay would be very hard to fake well enough to pass the scrutiny of a bunch of skeptical scientists. And if it passes that any scientist will be able to do the same. Being able to force an other scientist to retract a Nature paper would be a high prize for any academic.

I just looked this up and found two surprises.

1. Prison rape seems to be in the low single digit percentages. The highest estimates seem to be a 20% life time chance. That's still way too high but also a far cry from "all".
2. The abnormally large prison population in the US gives it the dubious honor of being the only country in the world where men are raped more than women.

He was charged and immediately released: https://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/nick-fuentes-battery-275931

Presumably is lawyer made it very clear that he is not to say a damn thing under any circumstances. I don't know enough about him to guess if he's smart enough to keep his gob shut for the duration of the trial.