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CronoDAS comments on The Craigslist Revolution: a real-world application of torture vs. dust specks OR How I learned to stop worrying and create one billion dollars out of nothing - Less Wrong
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Comments (219)
How do you feel about Russia doing the conquering? They've still got the guts to use brutal methods when necessary; they were still willing to go all Stalin on Chechnya even after they were no longer Communist.
Russia seems grossly incompetent compared to China. I don't know if the conquerees would be better off.
Russian person here and I don't want to conquer anyone! Don't get me wrong, it's kind of neat to hear you and Vassar agreeing with Moldbug about colonialism, but seriously: I don't see how annexing Tajikistan would help our economy. They're already sending us all the cheap labor we want :-) This arrangement is better than back when we owned Tajikistan and a host of other now-independent countries, which were all huge money sinks.
(IMO economically it would even make sense for us to let Chechnya go, but we can't do that because they'd just start the attacks again with money and volunteers flowing in from Arab countries, as it happened in the first two wars.)
Yeah, conquering foreign countries isn't very good at generating wealth for the conquerors these days. You used to be able to go take an army into a city, round up all the valuables, and sell the population into slavery. Not so much any more.
This is really strange then:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=per+capita+gdp+of+russia%2Fper+capita+gdp+of+china
Russia had a head start - and has oil wealth. For comparison, Saudi Arabia's GDP per capita is on the order of $17,000. 45% of its entire GDP is its nationalized oil industry; private industry is only 40%.
It's true. However I think people get a little caught up in the China is growing story. Russia is a dying country in a lot of ways. However, both are heavily controlled by corrupt leaders.
EDIT:was->ways
That is not clearly relevant, since the graph was not about Russia being richer, but growing faster. That the USSR numbers were higher might be relevant, if it makes it easier to return to them.
Russia has a similar amount of oil exports to Saudi Arabia, spread over five times the population, but has similar GDP per capita. Simply going from 0 to its current oil doesn't account for the change over the past decade. If you throw in gas, aluminum and steel, it might be a big piece of the change, though.
Oops, I only noticed the number, not the graph.