jernfrost

> Best refrain from reading the Guardian, it's what they do best. Despite the fact that nobody alive today had anything to do at all with the horrors from our colonial pasts.

I don't think their writing is bad. My issue is not so much what they write, but rather how a lot of people end up interpreting it. Many will use such writing to vilify whites. OTOH there are plenty of whites who uses any writing about say coloreds to do the same. People in general are eager to create simplified narratives and blame the other guys.

> Do you have some references that back this up? I don't dispute it, just curious.

I would say it is a logical conclusion from reading history. India and Africa was already progressing at a certain pace and was several hundred years behind Europe in development.

What has been observed through most of history is that most countries progress by importing ideas from other rather than by inventing it themselves.

Africa e.g. has very little coastline and rivers relative to landmass. That makes water based transport mostly inaccessible. Labor specialization and mass production relies on that. Industrialization was thus highly unlikely to occur in Africa spontaneously. Adam Smith remarked this over 300 years ago.

The founder of modern Singapore remarked that the most important technology for their development was air condition. India, Africa, South East Asia etc are simply too hot places. It gives a lot more diseases, makes it harder to work and think. There are limits to how much heat the human body can dissipate. Cold climates are thus more practical for working as long as you have suitable means of providing heating.

Until the invention of air condition, the southern states of the US were far more backwards. Air condition led to a surge in people moving south.

In short India, Africa etc had a lot of natural barriers to development which meant they were always going to be far behind Europe. European invasion gave a way of leapfrogging many of these disadvantages.

Most wealth in most European nations depends on local production and expertise.

Why is e.g. the Norwegian fisherman richer than the Bangladeshi fisherman? It is not because he gets more money for each fish he sells.

It is because the usage of modern fishing vessels and technology allows him to fish a lot more fish. In Norway we tried to give Bangladeshi fishermen modern Norwegian fishing vessels in the 70s. If failed because they do not have the skill and infrastructure to maintain and support a modern fishing fleet.

Value lies in better both superior equipment and the knowledge of how to use it effectively. That advantage exists in Europe regardless of whether Europe gets to exploit other nations or not.

Even in colonial times, most economic activity happened locally. Tobacco, sugar and spice does not grow the core of the economy. What mattered most was intensified farming locally. The usage inanimate power, labor specialization and cheaper transport to increase production of food, clothes, tools, furniture, housing etc.

Even without actually exploiting the colonies Europeans would have benefited hugely from the maritime explorations. New crops such as potatoes benefited European agriculture greatly.

Some people seem to somehow wish that us Europeans are furious that we don't have colonies anymore and that we are deeply nostalgic about it. Now I am not from a European country that had colonies, but I think it is pretty universal in Europe that, people are not missing the colonies.

European are happy about where we are today. We are fighting less among each other than ever before. A continent of violence and become a continent of peace.

Europe tops pretty much all worlds statistics on happiness, health, well-being and prosperity.

I have no problems with the right wingers in Europe being angry about us not dominating the rest of the world. Let them be angry, it only brings me schadenfreude.

Besides I don't think Europeans honestly care that much about it. I see American fretting much more about the position in the world. They are afraid of not being number ONE anymore. I think most of us Europeans have long accepted that reality.

IMHO Europe's future is brighter than most other places. Global climate change will affect us much less than the rest. Unlike Asia, we don't have the same demographic time bomb. China, Korea and Japan will suffer major setbacks as their populations gray far too quickly.

The middle east will be screwed when the world no longer runs on oil.

I am hoping for a better future for Africa, but it will take a VERY long time for Africa to catch up with Europe.

The US has a pretty bright future as well I think, but it will likely suffer a lot from political polarization and economic inequality and social problems. Yet the US has been through the same so much of its history.

India will be a lot better off than today, but most Indians have a very long time to go to get anywhere near European levels of prosperity. That could take another 60-100 years.

No, but most nations have progressed faster technologically by being invaded or influenced by other more advance nations. Without the roman empire, Britain, France, Spain, Germany etc would have taken far longer to modernize.

I not saying this as a moral statement, merely as an observation of how the world works. We don't need to like something to be true.

Of course we can strive for a better less violent way of doing things, which I think we are doing in the world we live in today. We are spreading ideas and technology through trade primarily rather than war. It is not always fair trade, but it beats colonization.

I think you are reading things between the lines which are not there.

It was never my intention to suggest that Europeans are inherently superior to others and that we have some unique ability of innovations.

Of course European advancements were built on advancements of those who came before us. Just as Chinese advancement today is built on advancements made by the west earlier.

I am merely stating a fact: European civilization was significantly ahead of the competition. And those innovations could not easily have been made elsewhere for cultural and geographic reasons:

1) Europe went through major paradigm shifts with1 the renaissance and enlightenment which was in large part possible in Europe because it was a divided continent. Many great thinkers lived on the borders between countries so they could flee to another one as soon as their ideas got unpopular with the rulers. Such a mechanism was not possible in other advance civilizations such as China, which was a big monolith. New ideas in such societies could easily be squashed.

Single rulers could easily retard progress for decades. Consider e.g. how one of the Chinese emperors forbid all sea travel and burned the fleet. The whole of Europe could never suffer such a profound setback because it had no single ruler. Any European nation engaging in such stupid policies would quickly learn of the stupidity of that as competing nations would race past them.

Europe represented a sort of semi-free market of ideas, which did not exist elsewhere to the same degree.

2) Europe had a clear advantage in geography. Using water wheels for power generation and rivers and canals for goods transport was significantly easier in Europe than China, India, Egypt etc where the waterflow varies too much through the year.

The first factories relied on inanimate power from waterwheels which was not easily constructed elsewhere in the world.

Later steam engines relied on cheap transport of large bulks of coal and ore. Britain e.g. had a geology that allowed building canals to mines to transport large bulk loads of coal cheaply. Outside of Europe there was limited possibility to do this.

I could go on, but there were simply a large number of factors that favored Europe. Hence European supremacy was not merely a fluke, and the other nations could not by random occurrence have leapfrogged Europe. The modern world relied on being brought to the rest of the world from Europe, unless it was going to happen much much later.

It does not mean what European did was morally right. It just means one should not delude oneself into thinking that without Europe all the other nations would be prosperous today.

I agree, I don't think Europeans have been worse than others would have been, we simply had the means to do it. However I find it problematic that so much of the brutality gets swept under the rug.

E.g. it is typical of political propaganda how Stalins starvation of millions of Ukrainians is used to disparage socialism. However it is far less known that Britain starved quite a lot more people in India, often in the name of capitalism. Food was shipped out at gunpoint to foreign markets while people starved to death on the grounds that markets should not be disrupted.

There is also the belittling of other people, through ignorance of our own past. E.g. the Chinese with Mao is presented as somehow more barbaric and brutal. The US presents itself as a beacon of freedom and democracy despite slaughtering the native population and enslaving millions of blacks.

I don't think westerners are inherently worse than anybody else. I just dislike the smugness in particular by great powers such as the Britain and the US, who present themselves as these big civilizing forces.

Interesting read, but I want to raise some objections: 1) I don't like that one keep talking about the whole west as one unit and tainting everybody. It creates a simplified picture of oppressor and the oppressed.

It should not be forgotten that this is primarily about the major powers of Europe. Not every European country was a major power. Europe is full of smaller countries, which often had little say in this matter. Ireland e.g. has a brutal history of oppression by the British. It is not like whites were nice to each other and only cruel to others.

Big colonial powers have a different view of people. I remember reading about polar expeditions, naturally since I am Norwegian. It is hard to not notice the stark difference between how Norwegians treated Inuit people and how the British treated them. The British were full of contempt for the natives of the polar regions. They viewed them as backwards and as having nothing useful to teach them. The British assumed British sense of civilization, property law etc was universal. When an Inuit took an object belonging to a British expedition member they brutally flogged him as punishment for "stealing". Never mind that the concept of ownership was entirely different to the Inuit.

Norwegian polar explorers in contrast eagerly learned from the natives how they used their dogs and how they dressed for the cold. It is a probably the chief reason why Amundsen would beat Scott to the pole. Amundsen did not deal with the different culture of the Inuit by assuming superiority and doling out cruel punishment to anyone not following his moral code. Instead they used trickery, making the Inuit believe that if they went into their storage room, they could blow up.

I am not writing this primarily to make my fellow Norwegians look amazing. But it is easier to contrast with cultures you actually know. Anyway we were kind of dicks to our indigenous people, the Sami, but to point out that European culture varied greatly. Saying the west did this and that, is a bit like our own homogenization of Africa, as if it is just one country.

2) We must know our history to not repeat it. I DO think it is a problem that we often try to sugarcoat our past. However we should also keep perspective. Too often people get into this pattern of thinking as if the past brutality of European colonial powers is inherent in being white. That is just as racist as claiming jews are inherently money grubbing bankers and africans are lazy. Europeans are as much product of their history and upbringing as everybody else, and has the same potential for change. Nor is everybody the same. While Europeans enslaved people, there was also Europeans fighting hard against slavery. Emancipation developed further and quicker in Europe than in many other parts of the world. E.g. slavery was ended by Europeans before it was in the Arab world. I don't think that points to white superiority, but simply is a way of pointing out that every civilization is a mix of different values and ideas, both good and bad. The good can triumph over the bad.

We should however recognize that the struggles many countries face around the world is partly of our making. However we cannot take full responsibility. Africa or India would not be as modern rich or developed today as by magic if Europeans had never set their feet on shore. All of these areas were hundreds of years behind Europe in technological development. What Europe could have done is treating them better. But that does not make Europeans uniquely bad. The powerful have always through history had a tendency to exploit the weaker ones.

Cool stuff, I have a thing for reliable, low tech solutions. Anyone see a problem with this approach?

I think there is an enormous danger in abuse of this knowledge. People simply don't understand the concepts and statistics very well.

The part about how heritability varies between countries is very important observation. A country successful at creating great opportunities for the majority of the population will measure very high heritability values because naturally most differences seen will be genetic if the environment is mostly optimal.

This hides the significance of the environment. E.g. height has a heritability of 90%, yet that is easy to misinterpret. Height in various populations have varied dramatically over time and that can primarily be explained by changes in the environment: health care and nutrition.

I think you are missing the point. I don't read this article as an argument AGAINST going to the gym, rather as a comment on the fact that if you want a healthy population, it is not gym membership which is the primary solution.

For me going to the gym is primarily about being healthy, and the does affect your happiness. Being unhealthy is bad for your own quality of life.

I have not been particularly good at going to the gym however, the last years. I remember finding it easier to get into in while living in a society which made natural exercise happen more regularly. E.g. when I lived in the Netherlands I biked about 1 hour of day, because that is often the made mode of transport and it is easy and convenient to do.

That has a positive re-enforcing circle. You feel better, which makes it easier to get to the gym as well. When your health goes down, going to the gym becomes mentally harder to do. It may be more expedient but doing almost anything benefits from feeling good and positive.

This is not just about personal choices though but also about how society is structured. E.g. when I lived in the US I found it hard to be healthy other than going to the gym because there was little opportunity for natural exercise as all of society is built around car usage and consumption of fast-food.

In contrast when I lived in the Netherlands I found it VERY easy to be healthy. Life is organized around biking there: it is safe, easy and convenient to do. I probably biked around 1 hour every day, just from doing errands, meeting friends, going to university etc.

If I wanted to grab some food, there was usually a lot more healthy options available. E.g. even in tiny stores in the Netherlands they have great vegetarian options.

A lot of this is not stuff as an individual you can decide on. It depends on zoning laws, building of bike lanes and a multitude of policies and traditions you cannon easily change without collective action.

That is a natural outcome of the hyper capitalist world we currently live in. I have a mother who has been a journalist for over 40 years. I've heard for years about the pressure sell. Article titles often get changed against the will of journalists to be more click-bait like to sell more.

As people pay less for good journalism, and ad revenue is shrinking, the media is getting desperate to stay afloat.

Journalists today have significantly less independence than they had 15 years ago. Everything is far more controlled and geared towards sales.

I would like to see more alternative finance models for quality journalism.

Given how social media is actually starting to destroy democracy, it may be worth considering government grants to independent media organizations as a part of national defense. A democracy cannot function if the media is utterly broken. That means citizens are no longer capable of making informed decisions.

I am only vaguely familiar with Rust ownership model and last I programmed Swift was version 3.x.

Does anyone have any thoughts on where Swift is going with ownership models in relation to Rust? What sort of different priorities will these languages set?

It has been my impression that Rust seeks to be more of a tool for the more experienced programmer while Swift attempts to be more user friendly or appeal more to the average programmer.

I would thus speculate that Swift team will never try to force Swift users to understand ownership models the way Rust developers have to. What do you think? Where can we expect this to be going?

Definitely. That is the best way to deal with stuff like this. Without a union individual employees have a too weak position to complain.

Although I hope the US adopts a more Nordic/German style union system which is less adversarial. I think the US system has sadly given unions a bad reputation.