Kenya and "the decline of the greatest coffee" (2021)

    > most nuts from sub-Saharan countries like Côte d'Ivoire get exported to VN for processing

For example, in the past year I've seen a guy selling tamales from his car trunk, someone selling candy apples from a cooler on the side of the road, one person making crab boils from their house, and a ton of people doing small batch type things on FB marketplace. Most of these would violate our local cottage laws, but I've seen police officers buying the tamales for example!

I have no doubt if someone got sick they could probably win a civil case of sorts, but I don't think I've seen or heard of any kind of attempt to shut down any of this via law.

Regulation is preferable. The Thai park was shut down because it trashed the place and competed with regulated, tax-paying food markets.

The only issue is how slow and inefficient German bureaucracy is. It wouldn’t be a problem to request compliance if it didn’t take months and waste everyone’s time as they’re trying to get off the ground.

- 20 year wait for a cart permit. _ Shady black market license resales from veterans (who have priority access to licenses - which is great in theory) - If you use water you need a ‘food’ license - Illegal to store your cart anywhere but a licensed depo that charges exhorbitant - very high penalties for unlicensed distribution

And, it is mind bending for some folks to hear that I abhor the taste of arabica coffee. It is so so bad.

I think the insurgency is largely dead, but the Central Highlands remains very poor and smuggling+corruption are sustained issues.

"need to drink it fresh" is a red flag about the roast, usually, unless you really do prefer something fairly dark. Light roasted coffee should be let to gas off for at least a few weeks.

I do not need to get further from that.

The only expensive thing you need is a good grinder. Rest goes with a 26€ V60 and a kitchen scale.

I’ve tried a good number of roasters on this list, and only a few come within batting distance of Father Coffee (not to be confused with Fathers) in Johannesburg and Rosetta Roastery in Cape Town. Those two roasters, the former more experimental and the latter more traditional, are doing wonders and punching well above their weight in the South African market. Both could easily be in the top 25, and Father is surely top 5.

Seriously, if you care about coffee and find yourself in Johannesburg, go to Father and grab as many beans as you can carry.

I think instead it has to do with the percentage of their clients that add sweeteners, perhaps the bitterness is better somehow as the base of a sugary drink.

We're all winners here and that's far better than the alternative.

And it's like this for your village and your neighboring village and their neighboring village and so on.

Tell me about it when your neighboring villages' adult men are charging down the hill at you, filthy, starving, crazed and screaming at the top of their lungs, axes in hand.

Also the African slave trade largely existed off the back of tribes conquering each other and selling the losers into slavery, which is also commonly how slavery works back into antiquity. The alternative to being sold into slavery is that they kill you.

The identification of "freedom of market participants to do whatever they want" as being the "free" in "free markets" is exactly the problem here, in my view—and I'd go further and claim that confusing the two things has been a deliberate sophistic practice (among others, chief among them being "please don't notice I snuck in a couple sketchy axioms and 'as we all know's at the beginning, so that you accept the hundred pages of 'reasoning' based on them that follow") promoted by figures in some allegedly-intellectual circles, to make themselves useful to those who find that kind of thing beneficial, and so to personally gain from being professional BS peddlers.

(I'm not correcting you, here, just adding on—I'd guess we basically agree on at least the first, and most directly relevant to your post, sentence of the above)

Who said police, courts, etc. are not remnants of colonialism? Also, what is the relevance of that to this discussion about coffee selling and the problems in the Kenyan coffee market?

It's also almost never persecuted either, for obvious reasons. But totalitarian governments are usually not confident enough to officialize their money-movements. They usually claim to fight corruption with all their might.

To dismiss the Romans, the colonials, &c, as of no benefit, however, is to deny reality. The Roman roads were genuinely of value to peoples besides the Romans. Perhaps the Chinese, to, will create institutions and a scope of activity that is of value to peoples outside of China. Probably not in Asia...

Another way to get an intuition for it is the prevalence of various conveniencies of life. For example, I believe about two thirds of households in the world have refrigerators. About 12% of the world's households have cars. These and many other material benefits are possessed by regular people today but would have been out of reach 400 years ago to any member of the European nobility or, as Adam Smith puts it, "...an African king, the master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.". (In his time, Smith was commenting on how remarkable it was that an English workman could have pots and pans made of metal and a window made of glass.)

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2024/sum...

https://someunpleasant.substack.com/p/a-nobel-prize-for-an-i...

Poverty isn't necessarily exploitation. The situation of Bangladesh would not be improved if every wealthier nation was suddenly sucked into the sea. In fact, the situation of Bangladesh would become considerably worse.

Bangladesh has grown rapidly by selling clothing to rich countries, and through the work of NGOs. Supposing we put a forcible stop to this "exploitation" by placing sanctions on Bangladesh, so no one can trade with it, and kicking out all of the NGOs. Bangladesh becomes much poorer.

>Colonialism benefited colonial nations, because of course it did. It wouldn't have been done if it wasn't beneficial.

According to an old European history textbook I read: Once you take into account the costs of conquest, infrastructure, and administration, plus the opportunity for colonial administrators to take a cut on the sly (since the monarch was thousands of miles away), colonies weren't profitable on net. Supposedly the Brits did colonialism first, and other European countries followed in Britain's footsteps because "that's what an industrialized nation does".

Do you believe Putin's invasion of Ukraine makes economic sense? I don't think that's what motivates him.

The invention of the map might be the deadliest invention in history. To paraphrase Carl Sagan: "Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could momentarily color a small additional part of their map with their nation's color."

>unprecedented improvement in material well-being in certain parts of the world, namely the colonizer nations

Compare a per capita GDP ranking of European countries:

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

With a ranking of the largest empires:

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

The top 10 per capita wealthiest countries in Europe, from Wikipedia, are: Luxembourg, Ireland, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, San Marino, Iceland, Belgium, Austria.

The top 10 largest European colonial empires, based on my skim, belonged to: Britain, Russia, Spain, France, Portugal, Turkey, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Belgium.

There's just not much of a relationship.

One way to gain an intuition for the extent of the change is to consider population sizes. India in 1600 had about a tenth of its present population. To have a population so much larger, agricultural productivity in India, as well as in the rest of the world, had to increase a great deal in the intervening years.

Another way is to consider the spread of various conveniencies of life -- refrigerators, motor bikes, microwaves, automobiles -- and affordances they enable. Relatively few people in Bangladesh own motor vehicles, but many of them find work in commercial enterprises that are only possible because of the way that commercial trucks open up the interior to world markets. Something like 12% of the world's population has cars today, and that number is steadily increasing. I am not totally certain of this figure, but I believe about two thirds of households in the world have refrigerators.

The benefits of modernization are spread very unevenly amongst the world's peoples today (and we must acknowledge that another example I offered, of the Pax Romana, conferred many advantages specifically to the Romans) but it is hard to argue that there has not been a tremendous benefit worldwide as a result of changes brought about mostly by colonial powers over the last 400 years or so. The thing to consider is not what life in Bangladesh is like, relative to life in the Denmark (or the UK, &c), but what life in Bangladesh was like 400 years ago.

The Europeans do not have it as good as they do -- and, more generally, the world is not so much better off materially -- as a result of simply transferring well-being from one place to another. There were no automobiles, refrigerators, &c, to steal from other countries 400 years. The path to modernity involved real changes in human productivity that allowed for a genuine net benefit.

Can you identify some of the most significant negative consequences of colonization that remain today? Things that wouldn't have happened if those people had engaged in global trade themselves while still being self-governing. As I understood it, the legacies were mostly good - especially government institutions and united nationhood instead of separate enemy tribes.

And if you think you're safe in the middle class, it was predicted that and would seem to be bearing out as correct that once capitalism has largely completed exploiting the underclass, it can't simply stop exploiting. The next class up becomes the underclass. Then the next. Then the next until we're all broke save for the rich on top, at which point the entire arrangement stalls, money stops flowing, and the system collapses into anarchy.

The project of neoliberalism is difficult to fully articulate, but a major component at least is the "taming" of capitalist economic systems so as to make them sustainable. This project succeeded for a good amount of time, but that was also predicated on having nations to exploit, and room to grow markets. As those things become less true the entire system seems less stable overall. I mean personally I've witnessed three "once in a lifetime" economic crashes so far, and we're looking to be winding up for another one with the incoming administration and their bonkers non-understanding of tariffs.

That was a temporary blip because the underclass had been temporarily exported to a bombed-out Europe that was unable to meet its production needs, giving the US a huge market and very little manufacturing competition. Then came the Nixon shock, stagflation, and Reagan.

The underclass? Or the WHITE MALE underclass?

Interestingly, those earlier studies claiming to show that brains of the trans-identifying are atypical for their sex didn't control for sexuality, and many used exclusively homosexual cohorts.

So the findings were actually brain differences relating to homosexuality - later studies that controlled for sexuality (including same-sex and opposite-sex attracted transsexuals in the study population) couldn't replicate the earlier results relating to sexually dimorphic brain structures.

Instead, researchers found functional differences in brain regions relating to body perception, similar to what is seen in body dysmorphic disorder patients.

> (Dr. Robert Sapolsky details this in his freely available Human Behavioral Biology class at Stanford).

There is a video where he discusses this, albeit without properly citing any studies, but his description of the research is out of date. Probably it's an old recording.