41–50 of 148 posts
There is a dead comment by someone whose grandma kept donating to charity for Ethiopia. The grandma died poor save the poster is upset that nobody from Ethiopia ever thanked her and now they are prospering. I don't like that comment, but it is actually quite interesting, especially if taken together with another comment on a parallel discussion about the huge growth in Africa and the very visible Chinese influence. I…
Additionally, after a country purchases one, they tend to have their own development path for the future ones.
For example, the Argentinians did their first four satellites with the help of the US (SAC-A, SAC-B, SAC-C, SAC-D), the next two were done by themselves (ARSAT-1, ARSAT-2), two more with the Italians (SAOCOM-A, SAOCOM-B) and one with the Brazilians (SABIA-MAR).
It is a process filled with a lot of politics, questionable monetary interests, and pseudo national pride.
It is the new shortcut process by which countries are entering the space era. Buy a satellite when you don't know what you are doing, then co-build it with somebody, then build it by yourself. It effectively saves you billions in trial and error tests that other countries had to go through... but it really begs the question of when is it truly yours, because if you don’t follow the rules (e.g. taking high res imagery of an area you are not supposed to), “your” satellite can easily be temporarily or permanently disabled... and there goes your 300M
Ethiopia's GDP growth has been on a tear since 2000. [1] If you visit the capital, you can't miss the Chinese influence. Last time I was there, a huge Chinese bank building was going up kiddy corner to the Airport in Addis. BTW, if you haven't visited Ethiopia, put it on your list. It's an amazingly beautiful country. [1] https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
GDP per capita is still at $767, which is representative of the majority of the population earning a subsistence living. Ethiopia has a population of 105 million, yet it has the gross scientific output of Latvia, a country of only 1.92 million: https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs/generate/All/glo... What is growing is CO2 emissions, at 14.9 million tonnes. By contrast, Latvia emits only 8 million tonnes. On a…
There is a dead comment by someone whose grandma kept donating to charity for Ethiopia. The grandma died poor save the poster is upset that nobody from Ethiopia ever thanked her and now they are prospering. I don't like that comment, but it is actually quite interesting, especially if taken together with another comment on a parallel discussion about the huge growth in Africa and the very visible Chinese influence. I…
GDP per capita change for 2018 was negative for sub-saharan Africa: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG?locat... Be careful what you wish for: economic growth in Africa is going to come directly at the expense of the local and international environment, in the form of land clearance and coal and oil emissions. Africa desperately needs to stabilise its population, so that it can focus on infrastruct…
I would expect economic development to gradually cause a decline in birth rates? Is there a GDP marker where delta GDP > delta population?
As far as overpopulation, the entire continent of Africa has roughly the same population (1.3b) as India with ~9x the land area so the absolute population density is not dire.
2. If you look at carbon emissions per capita, African countries are relatively carbon neutral. Ethiopia relies mostly on renewable energy and they are also building the largest hydroelectric power plant on the continent. I would expect younger economies to “leap frog” to cleaner and greener tech, having polluted less in total (than countries before them) by the time they attain middle income status.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just spent three years driving around Africa. I visited 35 different countries all around the continent. [1] The Chiense influence is staggering . I'm writing a book about it now. Many, many parts of Africa are developing faster than any of us can comprehend, because we've never seen it. In the last ~20 years cities like LA and Vancouver have gotten bigger, but they're more or less what they were - there were skysc…
> hundreds of cities with subways No, there aren't. There is exactly one (1) city in sub-Saharan Africa with a modern urban rail system, and it's Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In the rest of the continent's megacities (Nairobi, Lagos, etc) decent urban transit remains a dream. China has funded a bunch of long-distance rail, but that's primarily for trade (read: exporting raw materials). But I still tip my pith helmet at you…
There is a dead comment by someone whose grandma kept donating to charity for Ethiopia. The grandma died poor save the poster is upset that nobody from Ethiopia ever thanked her and now they are prospering. I don't like that comment, but it is actually quite interesting, especially if taken together with another comment on a parallel discussion about the huge growth in Africa and the very visible Chinese influence. I…
That's why most of today's "Chinese Influence" are bound with conditions like business deals. It's a better way to help others in addition to capitalist selfish greediness described in many media. It's mutual beneficial. The approach was from hard lessons that donation can not stimulate sustainable growth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ethiopia is also an early adopter among developing nations to adopt NSA style surveillance. And like all countries with weak or nonexistent judicial oversight or independent courts, it was used immediately to target the ruling parties political adversaries phones. Including journalists and lawyers. Citizen Lab based out of Canada did a lot of great research exposing it. Of course the Ethiopian gov bought it all from…
> And like all countries with weak or nonexistent judicial oversight or independent courts, it was used immediately to target the ruling parties political adversaries phones. Including journalists and lawyers. To be fair, that was done in the US (though not immediately, that came to light), which is why we have FISA.
The FISA rulings and arguments never become public, most of the domestic surveillance warrants are justified merely by the fact the people will never find out they were surveilled and therefore won’t be “harmed” by such behaviour (this was the exact argument which Yahoo was given and lost trying to fight it in one of the only public FISA rulings available online).
Most importantly only the NSA government lawyers gets to argue the grounds for surveillance is justified. There is never a point in time where it is critical analyzed by outside parties so we put 100% of the trust in the FISA judge panel doing their due diligence and standing up for American citizens rights.
But as we saw with the recent Carter Page FBI investigations the feds can feed the FISA courts complete crap and they’ll sign off on it anyway. Multiple times.
I love when people act like this isn’t some rubber stamp court and is actually sufficient to protect Americans constitutional rights. It so obviously isn’t and you’d have to be a serious military authoritarian hawk not to see through that nonsense.
These secret courts live and die because the average person doesn’t understand how it works and the government is just telling everyone to ”shut up and trust us”... including decades of congressman on the House Intelligence Committee.
I am very familiar with the purchasing process of satellites by LATAM countries. Basically the Chinese or the French (i.e. Airbus) come in and offer you a satellite that ranges between 180M-380M USD in price depending on what you want. The price includes a building with a ground station, the launch, and some basic training. If you negotiate correctly, the full telemetry is send only to you and you process it all loca…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
China is exploiting them. They're not doing it out of kindness, or for some moral self-aggrandizing.
Yet even this exploitative relationship may prove much more helpful than the grain and occasional squad of observers the US or UN sends. It's a funny sort of problem isn't it - perhaps the only way to get genuine investment in these areas is an almost parasitic relationship. More interesting would be if this forces the US or other western countries to more aggressively step up to the plate...
There is a dead comment by someone whose grandma kept donating to charity for Ethiopia. The grandma died poor save the poster is upset that nobody from Ethiopia ever thanked her and now they are prospering. I don't like that comment, but it is actually quite interesting, especially if taken together with another comment on a parallel discussion about the huge growth in Africa and the very visible Chinese influence. I…
While I fundamentally disagree with China's political model, we may have better luck in third world development deemphasizing democracy and focusing instead on rule of law, stability and cultural cohesion.