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Comment by azerous | Hacker News Reader

Doosan I&C, a Korean heavy industry company, sells both nuclear power plants and desalination plants. Countries only need to pay money.

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Well a lot of those countries don't have money. Lebanon is pretty much bankrupt for example. Iran is close to that. Iraq, Syria, Lybia, Sudan, many many super fragile countries. It's not that the problem isn't technically solvable, it is, but many of these countries are on the verge of social and economic collapse.

You mean they’re on the verge of joining the eventual Sino-Russian common market.

Edit: I suppose we’ll see if predictions of Iran’s imminent social and economic collapse are any more true now than they have been for the past 42 years. Too bad we can’t put a few dollars on it. I trust the Lindy effect more than some NGO’s social science model.

No, I mean they are on the verge of civil and economic collapse.

https://themedialine.org/top-stories/irans-economy-is-closer... https://www.ft.com/content/8c6b9992-17be-45f4-9a87-f6ee524dc... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/04/world/lebanon-crisis.html

etc etc.

This is a pretty good visualization of the fragility of the area https://fragilestatesindex.org/

Yes and also, this make nuclear not so responsible. In western nation nuclear are great for making electricity but cannot have so safely in unstable regime.

>Lindy effect

>The Lindy effect (also known as Lindy's Law) is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, it is also likely to have a longer remaining life expectancy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

Thanks for the read.

The Persian civilization is indeed thousands of years old and will be around for at least centuries more. But when someone says Iran is about to collapse they mean the current Islamic Republic that has only been around for a few decades.

No one knows what will happen but countries that can't build working institutions, get rid of corruption and start working for the people will have a very difficult time. This is true everywhere basically but droughts will make it more pronounced.

This is a very Eurocentric attitude. An eye opener for me was when one of my Hindu coworkers in SV told me that he used to believe the USA was less corrupt than India, but after spending a few years here he realized we were just more sophisticated about it. That experience has made me rather a lot more sanguine about westerners calling non-western countries corrupt. The Afghanistan debacle is arguably the biggest rooking of a populace ever.

Your coworker likely moved in privileged circles and therefore experienced less corruption in their home country. I say this as a relatively rich person residing in a poor country. The poor and lower sections of people here bear the brunt of corruption, while people like me pay money to be shielded from corruption. The Afghan debacle is vastly different. They have 12th century mindset and there is no way democracy could be established there in 20 years. Mark my words, China will tame them in next couple decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India

Rich countries close to the Middle East have an incentive to donate power and desalinization plants to bankrupt countries in order to keep those areas habitable and thereby prevent chaotic mass migration.

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