Quote from: jupiviv on Feb 27, 2025, 07:16 AMDunno if anyone remembers me, posted for a while last year. Wanted to comment on this:

Quote from: REAt some point in that timeline there will be a global food shortage, and the poorest countries which are food importers will take the biggest hit.

Those poorest countries are poor because they are exploited by the rich countries. That's kinda why the latter are rich in the first place. They can't feed themselves because they aren't allowed to. Tropical lands are inherently more productive than temperate (where the rich countries are) because they can produce all year instead of only in summer/autumn. They can also produce a lot of things we can not. We do produce more grain per hectare, but only because we subsidize our extremely inefficient agriculture at their expense. And that includes vastly higher fossil fuel inputs produced by - or domestic production thereof indirectly enabled by other things produced by - guess hoo.

It's not just food of course. Minerals, hydrocarbons, finished goods and the forcibly expropriated surplus labor needed to produce all of the above. Like, I know there's this notion that the third world people will "sadly" die off and "we" will wall ourselves off in our impenetrable climate fortress but uhhh nope. This is a global system undergoing a global crisis leading up to a global collapse. Doesn't mean everything will collapse simultaneously. Still... we shouldn't expect ourselves to be in a position where we watch and talk about those poor browns dying "over there" and then move on with our mostly intact lives. More likely is... by that stage there will be no "we" as pertains to the current geopolitical order and whatever "we" actually exists shall be powerless to use and abuse and fiddle with the lives of those folks over there as we do now. If they decide to come here and "we" want to stop them, good luck.


https://arxiujosepserradell.cat/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/A-Theory-of-Imperialism-Utsa-Patnaik-Prabhat-Patnaik-z-lib.org_.pdf

I have no faith in anything as % of GDP. Any time a politician wants to double or triple spending, they express it as % of gdp and it sounds palatable.

Best analogy here would be weaponry and production of munitions. We were told in 2022 that Russia has a piddling GDP compared to the EU, so stood no chance in Ukraine. Yesterday I had an emergency. I went to the city and with mild indigestion, found the toilet at the gas station in the middle of getting painted. Filipino painter was going to allow me but I declined, not wanting to stink it out for him. The tax deductible budget hotel and workers hostel I used to stay at was around the corner and I know the carpark pass code to get in.

I saw 2 big coach busses parked outside and the dining room was full of skinny young Europeans speaking a foreign language.  They obviously replaced the pacific islanders that normally take all the shared room accommodation as absolute minimum wage farm labour. Thats how faith in GDP as a reliable prediction works in my opinion.