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Comment by onphonenow | Hacker News Reader

It’s not clear they fell behind during the debt period. The timing is off isn’t it. They fell behind later

Aren’t there other crazy divergences out there? Singapore and mylasia or something?

Singapore is a compact city-state, Malaysia has almost 500x the land area split across two major land masses to boot.

The classic divergence is North vs South Korea, which were practically identical until the Korean War. Historically the North was richer, now the South is orders of magnitude wealthier.

Obviously two Koreas had different priorities. What you said is true, but on the other hand, North Korea is an independent nuclear power, while South Korea is a kind of corrupt vassal state hosting foreign army on their soil.

“Independent” if we pretend China doesn’t exist.

> vassal state hosting foreign army on their soil.

By that criterion, Japan and Germany are likewise "vassal states".

Of course they are. When was the last time Germany actually did something against the interest of the Empire?

When they decided to rely on Russia for their energy security?

They did not really decide. What was the reasonable alternative?

Not shutting down their nuclear power plants is an easy first step. Building more nuclear, developing local fossil fuel sources, and building LNG offload terminals would all be good second steps, though of course also more expensive.

That's not a reasonable alternative.

More nuclear - after Fukushima not a realistic option.

LNG - would be useleff today, since the Empire decided to limit LNG exports. And even if the Germany could claim complete LNG world export capacities all for itself, it would still not be enough.

local fossil fuel sources - there are none that are not already in use

Fukushima may have been bad (this is debatable, it was bad in public opinion more than anything else), but viewed in comparison to "not having enough power leading to industry shutting down (happening now) or people freezing to death (this winter)" or "not being able to oppose Russia" perhaps it's not quite so unrealistic.

As far as I know the USA has not restricted LNG exports. LNG is still very cheap in the USA in comparison to the rest of the world because our export terminals are operating at capacity. (To be fully effective, more global LNG export capacity may need to be developed - this is very possible as the US has excess capacity, but it is of course more expensive than just importing from Russia)

There are local fossil fuel sources! Lots of coal, for instance. Yes, this option sucks, and releases a ton of pollution! But you can still do it!

> North Korea is an independent nuclear power

South Korea, like Japan, is a "latent" nuclear power - meaning they have the ability to quickly (likely a matter of months) produce nuclear weapons given current resources and expertise.

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

Isn’t this just path dependence in action (a least in part). If Haiti hadn’t paid reparations to France for a century plus, they would have had more resources to invest in building their own industries/capacity.

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