smt1

Except that mining became largely mechanized, especially in the first world, reducing the labor intensity required to mine it: https://wvpolicy.org/blog-series-the-impact-and-future-of-th...

Especially with how mechanized coal mining has become.

There is. The protests especially have affected the large public international miners (BHP, Rio Tinto, Glencore, Anglo-American). One problem is is that when these companies leave thermal coal market by selling coal mines, the companies they sell the assets to aren't exactly suspectible to protests in Australia. For example, Yancoal, the buyer of Rio Tinto's assets, mainly answers to the Chinese Communist Party.

It looks like even before this peace deal, they managed to wrest back control of much of the country, especially the rural Pashtun-majority areas.

Territory control map in December 2019: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...

Agreed. At some point the Taliban and Pashtun nationalism become quite intertwined (even in areas of Pakistan). This made it so that probably not a insignificant porition of the Pashtun people sympathize with the Taliban if nothing else.

For what it's worth, the Taliban had by 2001, brought relative peace and stability to a country that had two decades of civil war, including the Soviets and lawless warlords and humanitarian crises, and wonton destruction/chaos that existed in the '90s. The Taliban itself was not directly involved with 9/11 (and I don't think they had any interest outside of Afghanistan), however, they had some complicity since they allowed OBL and Al Qaeda to train in Afghanistan (how about the responsibility of say, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia?).

Yes, the tradeoff was that they had a puritanical interpretation of Islam and had a horrible human rights record.

Historically, the Pakistani intelligence forces have armed various mujahideen groups, both in Afghanistan, and in Indian Kashmir. Meanwhile, the Afghani government post-911 has been fairly close to India.

This hasn't been true as much recently because the Taliban and other groups became extremely powerful in Pakistan, especially in Pashtun tribal areas, and the Pakistani military was forced to intervene. However, the Pakistani military has never been able to completely corral their intelligence services, which is one reason why there isn't as much cooperation between the US and Pakistan anymore (they were once close allies), with US/India ties becoming closer and closer instead.

> No, no, no. The Taliban were broadly distributed throughout Southern Afghanistan, and they had a cross border sanctuary in Pakistan.

I guess it depends on your definition of "remove". I don't doubt that a Taliban government could be very quickly overthrown by the US military. Probably within weeks. Now, the Taliban as an irregular militia is a completely different manner.

I remember watching a Vice documentary on Afghanistan called "This is what winning looks like". The line that struck me was a US Marine saying something like "the average Taliban fighter fights within 15 yards of their home". If that's anything close to true, no wonder the Taliban have been so hard to defeat.

I disagree. Oliver seems to have a pretty international audience (and a personal ancedote, I have cousins in India who watch him). He covers international current events quite often and HBO content is widely distributed internationally, not to mention YouTube etc.

Both are bad? I'd think most people who disagree with Modi's government's policies also disagree with the policies of the Trump administration. Both countries are pluralistic democracies without state religions.

$40/barrel break even is still way more than most conventional oil fields. It's killed off say, tar sands and some of the more expensive off shore/arctic plays (say, like some pre-salt fields). The other thing about shale is that it tends to be short cycle (most of the production in a few years), rather than long cycle payoffs. That might be more attractive to majors avoiding risks.

I think as opposed to classical statistics, except for the important subfield of statistical learning theory, machine learning relates much more to functional analysis, differential geometry/optimization over manifolds, and measure/probability theory. "AI" is whatever marketing people want to define it as.

I think a lot of the time, it is a side effect of lifestyle decisions (and/or misuse) that the drug in question can induce, not necessarily the drug itself. For example, amphetamine is prescribed to millions of Americans for ADHD (see, Adderall/Vynanse). However, if one were to for example, have poor sleep hygenine as a result of miuse, the chance of psychosis is high from not getting enough sleep.

There are definitely neurotoxic substances that can induce psychosis or other problems (such as parkinsonianism) but these tend not to be very usable either clinically or recreationally. I think overall, the chance of cardiotoxic or repository depression is more of a common problem with most common recreatioal drugs at common doses.

Or, as the original article pointed out, hyperinflation nd/or deflation happens in emerging economies where there have been the largest surges in debt, but developed countries like the US need more muted intervention by central banks because the debt increase has been relatively muted.

The point is not to augment cars via the proceeds of the tax, it's to change consumer or business behavior from the consumption of things that create otherwise uncaptured negative externalities like pollution or global warming - a market failure. As a side effect, these taxes are thought to create the economies of scale and investment necessary to make substitutes work in the market with minimization of consumption or economic output if the tax is introduced is scaled up with time.

This is why many well known economists are for a carbon tax:

https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/

Yup. Historically, because of a long tradition of practices such as jizya, historically (now it varies from country to country) there tended to be much more tolerance of "lateral" religions such as Christianity and Judaism in muslim lands than other sects of Islam, which were considered dangerous heresys. South Asia was kind of unique because there was often muslim sultanate leaders over very large non-muslim populations, and that forced a sort of realpolitik tolerance.

Well said. Hinduism has historically always been one of the most diverse and heterogeneous religious on the planet! And that's what made it incredible resilient in the past; it simply reflected whatever local groups worshipped/beleived, and it could vary wildly between village to village.

Hindutva is simply a way for a group of people to power grab by forging "us vs them" bugs in human nature.

How about Farsi/Zoroastrians and Christians? Either you include Muslims, because all south asian muslims can also be claimed as indian ethnicity historically, or you disinclude everyone based on that argument.

There has always been anti-bengali sentiment in assam, even under the British. It was one of the reasons Assam was split away from Bengal in the first place. My family is from the Siliguri Corridor, bordering Assam, and there are plenty of people (from various ethnic groups) living there that migrated not only from Bangladesh/East Bengal but other parts of Assam/North East India in order to flee violence.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bongal_Kheda

Sectarian conflict isn't religious persecution? Most of the other religious minorities, just like Ahmadis and some Shia groups are persecuted via the same Pakistan's blasphemy laws.

> Muslims are not similarly persecuted in Islamic nations.

That's a gross generalization. See for example, the Ahmadis in Pakistan. Or more generally, the whole Sunni vs Shia split. India is supposed to be a secular country.

Anyways, most of the recent rukkus is in Assam and northeastern India. Most of the people fleeing Bangladesh aren't doing so because of religious persecution; that country doesn't have nearly as stringent islamic laws like Pakistan does. The official platform of the ruling party in Bangladesh, which has 300+ out of 350 seats currently in parliament, promotes secularism as one of four main tenants. There has been communal violence there, just like in India, but it is no Pakistan.

Hindus and Muslims alike leave Bangladesh for various reasons, but in the last four decades, it's mostly because of economic and ecological issues.

Meanwhile, in Assam, there has been more than a century of Assamese vs Bengali (both hindus and muslims, both from India and Bangladesh like) vs other tribal/ethnic groups. This has resulted in several partitions of Bengal (which also caused economic decline, which also caused more refugees), and several carve outs of Assam into a bunch of other states due to many insurgencies.

Pretty much true. Also very sad considering the history of communal violence in south asia, which had trended towards getting better rather than worse in more recent decades.

Very much true, and there is certainly a lot of historical baggage there. Also, in earlier times, administratively, Assam itself was much larger before many insurgencies caused the state to be split up, and before that, Bengal was much larger (before the British split it up): https://southasiablog.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/how-did-parti...

That's like one set of protests. The situation in that part of India has always been way more complicated than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurgency_in_Northeast_India

It's not that simple; in that part of India (the northeast), there is all sorts of dynamics between different ethnic AND religious groups. The Assamese versus the Bengali vs many tribal groups who speak various Tibeto-Burmese languages. Then there is various religions. Hindus, Muslims, tribal animists, various Christian groups, etc. Between India and most of Bangladesh there isn't much of a natural border. There has been en masse migration after 1947, 1971, and more recently.

The BBC had a good story about this recently: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-50757093

Fourier was talking about the GHC effect in 1827: https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/Fourier1827Trans.pd...

I don't disagree, but Exxon might have had the cachet, especially in the 1980s, to speed up decreasing the carbon intensity of the economy. The entire energy sector is now <= 5% the size of the entire S&P, down from 18%, so it's unclear if energy companies still have that level of cachet.

Now, going forward, in 2020, there might be a different calculus. Usually, the market cap/stock price of a company reflects future cash flow. For an E&P company, much of Exxon's valuation comes from the cash flow expectation on its oil reserves. That's problematic if some of those oil reserves are in effect stranded assets. Certainly not all will likely, but say, things like the tar sands? It very well could be.

This is kind of cherry picking evidence because it also doesn't show the rest of the world, especially the developing world, where the quickest path to GDP growth is, at least historically, to build a lot of coal plants.

Arguably, if India, which is currently the world's fastest develop major economy, goes the way of China, we are all screwed. Doubtful they will however, because they are at the ground zero of climate change and other pollution problems due to the fragility of the himalayan glaciers (which cause the monsoons), low latitude climate, and a large portion of the eastern side of country being at/near sea level, particularly at the delta of the Ganges River (not to mention neighboring extremely low lying Bangladesh, which may be the source of one of the largest sources of displaced people in human history since it's basically one big river delta).

I don't think they could be replaced that fast with nuclear. According to Bill Gates at a speech he gave @ ARPA-E, the limitation of mass nuclear right now is the number of heavy forges left in the world.

I think you could scale up a mixture of solar-PV, wind + some nuclear that fast however, because the manufacturing needs are not as bad.

People have figured out carbon capture; people haven't figured out economical carbon capture at scale yet (except for reforestation, which only partially helps), and it feels like we're a long way off. If you want to incentivize the creation of CCS while still penalizing the externality (cost to society of a carbon intensive economy), you'd probably want to ratchet up something like a carbon tax, and then give a rebate for performing something like carbon capture. That might create the economies of scale needed.