291–300 of 359 posts
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And cheap labour in countries with lower worker/human right standards
A lot of (rich) people confuse poverty with slavery. They are nothing alike.
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The bronze age civilisations of the middle east (Akkad, Hati, Egypt) didn't follow this pattern. Egypt, for example, was a Nile + delta empire for most of the three kingdoms/periods. It's only towards the end of the new Kingdom that they expanded into nearby Canaan, and fought frontier wars against hittites along the Phoenician coast (eg, the famous battle of kadesh). Rome definitely did have an expansion imperative.…
Egyptian Civilization was sustained because of the Nile delta productivity. Literally all the nutrients gathered over 1/4 of the of the African continent are deposited nowhere else along the river route but in Nile delta, this unique phenomenon of nature meant this area is extremely resilient and can withstand any level of exploitation. Egyptian Civilization continued for over 3000 years (what we know about) which is…
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>Believing you can raise yourself up and improve your life is a relatively new phenomenon, and society stopping people doing that leads to unhappiness. Such a speculative statement. You cannot predict the behavior of a group of people anymore than you can predict a stock. I would say a more realistic statement to your topic is: People can be happy with what they have and be unhappy with what they have and throughout…
It is not a new phenomenon. When I said "relatively new" I meant "in the past 300 years or so". When I said "any old philosophy book" I meant "one written 1500 years ago". I didn't make my frame of reference clear; that was obviously a mistake on my part. Saying things like "new" on a tech forum has a very different meaning compared to "new" in terms of history and philosophy. 300 years ago people were born in to a s…
A philosophy book offers conjecture not evidence.
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And cheap labour in countries with lower worker/human right standards
Low paying jobs in developing economies have to be considered in the context of existing alternatives. If a Vietnamese rice farmer's son previously had only daily hours of backbreaking labor to look forward to on his father's paddies for what amounts to a dollar worth of earnings per day (only paid when they can finally sell the rice after many weeks of toiling) and then one day American McShoe Factory opens in the n…
To me it's like that rabbit duck optical illusion[1]: when seen one way it seems reasonable, even almost inevitable, and then it suddenly flips and sounds like smarmy weasel words excusing exploitation.
Here's my suggestion, why not pay the former rice paddy worker 50$/day and improve human rights at the McShoe Vietnam factory? It's still an awesome bargain by western standards.
Oh and the money is there, just cut the seven figure salaries of all the C level executives back at McShoe headquarters.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit%E2%80%93duck_illusion
Many of these great "empires" were simply extended looting machines, once they ran out of looting opportunities they collapsed in the same way that a Ponzi collapses when it run out of new "investors". While things were good, it was all golden, glitter and glam, and many tall buildings. Loot of course takes many forms, gold, silvers, the work of serfs, the work of slaves, monopolies on trade routes, monopolies on tra…
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I think this is a fantastic point, but it leads to the next question which is that are the current world powers any different?
There's less looting these days and more making stuff.
Well, they must make stuff out of other stuff.
Those raw materials have to be extracted from Mother Earth at some point I'd imagine.
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> Sometimes, as sad as it is to imagine, I think you need a good war to refresh a country... Please think about this in concrete terms. Not just the abstract concept 'war', but the specific instances of brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief that happen thousands upon thousands of times in any war. What do you hope to gain that would make this worthwhile? Even accepting all of your dubious pr…
Suffering is largely a constant. The difference between "war" and "peace" is only in who is suffering, and how much everyone else does or doesn't care.
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And cheap labour in countries with lower worker/human right standards
Low paying jobs in developing economies have to be considered in the context of existing alternatives. If a Vietnamese rice farmer's son previously had only daily hours of backbreaking labor to look forward to on his father's paddies for what amounts to a dollar worth of earnings per day (only paid when they can finally sell the rice after many weeks of toiling) and then one day American McShoe Factory opens in the n…
You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of established countries. And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old". "Getting old" means the political desired and inertia of a rich, settled population get to dominate the…
I don't think we're past the age of physical conquering. It's been less than a hundred years since the last World War. That's not particularly long, historically speaking. The pattern seems to be that a new major war starts not long after the eyewitnesses of the last one have all died. If that holds true, the next few decades or so will be interesting.
The decline of agriculture as a proportion of the economy of advanced nations means that territory no longer has the value that it once did. Population is not as important as it used to be for military power. Physical capital (factories, labour, land) is now less valuable, certainly in the developed world, than human capital (education, skills, networks). This means the gains of conquest have reduced drastically.
Meanwhile, the costs of war have increased markedly. Only a small group of states can afford to build technologically competitive militaries. Nuclear war has made the cost of great power war mutual annihalation. Modern low intensity warfare, on the other hand, makes it extremely difficult for great powers to permanently occupy even small powers (e.g. the US in Vietnam, USSR in Afghanistan). This means that the costs far outweigh the benefits in almost all circumstances. Add to this that in the counterfactual, states can gain most of the economic benefits of war through peaceful means, i.e. trade, at a far lower cost. There's also simply a greater spread of uncertainty in war: it's a dictum of war studies that war is inherently unpredictable.
If international war breaks out in the near future, it will be a fight over global hegemony (US-China), regional hegemony (Iran-Saudi Arabia), revanchism (Russia, Taiwan), or most likely - by accident.