Syria flooded with Pepsi and Pringles as rulers open economy
ft.com
ft.com
You can make jokes on sugar or cancer, but this is life changing and how positive is to the people there.
And thanks to their subscription wall, the nonsense title is the only thing I get to read...
China also got rich in that time. Do we have counterfactuals with which to disentangle Western food from wealth?
I'm pretty sure the rates of hunger and malnutrition dropped significantly over that timeframe. I have no doubts that obesity is higher now, but also a lot less people are starving.
Being fat does not mean being sat or good fed.
If some high% of people have a life improvement, a smaller % don’t, and an even smaller % end up obese.. that’s an overall improvement - even though some lives are worse than they’d have been without the “improvement”.
Of course if the majority became obese or otherwise became worse off, that’s a bad thing overall. But from what is reported it sounds like opening the Chinese economy has been net good, ie. good for most people.
In both situations one obesity case is too many. But it needs to be proportionally considered alongside the benefit it hitched a ride with and never in isolation.
It takes having numbers to know how much weight (sic) to place on that counterpoint of “some obesity happened”.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/u-u6-6VsxUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c15e4MhJLpg https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZXsGSi0Vc28
Thank you!
Btw, Thailand is solidly upper middle-income. I think you'll find them even in low-income countries.
https://cferenac.blogspot.com/2010/06/toilet-paper-and-pring...
> The second time—they struggled with potato chips. You see, they had packed regular potato chips in small bags, like Lays. It turns out when you’re at 15,000 feet, the air pressure makes the bags (and the chips) explode. Just picture climbing one difficult step at a time, in freezing weather, under the most treacherous of conditions, and having little bombs going off in your backpack. Terrifying. Not to mention the chips were impossible to eat. Pringles, on the other hand, are vaccuum packed. They keep their shape, and as Jamie says, “They have great karma because they’ve been spooning inside the can since they were made!”
Most bags of potato chips that I've seen show near failure at about 9000 feet.
Specifically related to shipping them... My Worst Load Ever: Hauling Oregon Potato Chips to Texas - https://www.dat.com/blog/my-worst-load-ever-hauling-oregon-p...
> I got loaded, and it was time to sign the bill of lading. Everything looked normal at first until I read that this load cannot be exposed to elevations higher than 6,000 feet because the bags of chips may pop. That would result in a carrier claim. I didn’t like that at all, especially because I didn’t know — and had never needed to know — anything about measuring elevation.
---
Late edit about Pringles on Everest - https://spaceref.com/science-and-exploration/playing-with-mo...
> I managed to take a large plastic jar of cough drops, empty it into another jar, and cut it down to a size that would hold the vials. Some padding and duct tape and we were good to go. In the mean time, Scott found two lids from some Pringles cans (a major food item) and he created a large circular holder with the Nugget in the middle. He held the pieces together while I applied duct tape and presto, we had a Nugget Containment Device.
(I'm certain that I read that story on HN long ago... but I can't find it)
"Good news, everybody! Democracy just kicked in!"
…
I don’t think we get the sense – as is often how the phrase is used today – of the people being bribed to give up their votes. Indeed, that’s the thing: the people stopped being able to sell their votes and so could only wish for bread and circuses (rather than buy them with their votes). Instead, the People weren’t bribed from their freedoms but broken and subjected to the lash by men like Crassus and Pompey and this one fellow we’re not going to name because Juvenal is a giant hypocrite who doesn’t want to get in trouble with the emperor either. They were thus reduced by violence to merely wishing for panem et circenses (which Juvenal, in appropriately Roman fashion, views as a cowardly abdication of duty).”
Oddly enough, panem et circenses fits. The Syrians lost their democracy in 1963 [1]. (“The coup was carried out without violence, as the politicians were too demoralized to resist. The coup was met by indifference in the population at large.”) Come half a century later and millions can only wish for enough food [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1963_Syrian_coup_d%2527%C3%A...
I linked it because I thought it was an interesting read and provides a lot more context to the saying than wikipedia article. Since I read it, I am more suspicious of the typical, dismissive use of "bread and circuses."
This isn’t me being tongue in cheek, I am just dumb.
There is a fairly common communication trend of presenting incomplete cynical statements without a logical conclusion. I think they trade more on sentiment and vibe than fact or logic.
it's a modern marvel though how readily available sugar water and potato chips are at almost every grocery store.
How can the population afford this? This must be subsidized. It is also interesting that no one talks about the Al Qaeda roots of the apparently compliant new rulers any more.
Assad was obviously horrible, but can there be some kind of a middle ground?
Industrially mass-produced food is cheap.
> Assad was obviously horrible, but can there be some kind of a middle ground?
Ideally, yes. In practice, you play the cards you’re dealt. (And HTS, irrespective of their origins, are looking like a fair gift horse so far.)
I’ll quote a wise person [1].
Narratives must be clean-cut good versus evil. Assad evil (indeed he was), so logically any opponent must be the opposite of evil. Therefore Tahir al-Sham is now Good.
Tahir al-Sham/Al Nusra being classified as a terrorist organization[1] complicates that clean-cut narrative. Hence the downvotes you got.
[1] https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/ntnl-scrt/cntr-trrrsm/lst...
What does this mean? From the outside the choices are work to reduce sanctions and increase commercial and diplomatic ties or keep the Syrian economy in a stranglehold.
> if Israel keeps occupying territory and undermining HTS rule then we don’t know what will replace them
Israel is like problem number eight billion for Damascus right now. (Keep in mind that without Israel neutralising Hezbollah, HTS would have had a tougher fight with Assad. Damascus and Tel Aviv may have more to coöperate on than fight over.)
One of the primary reasons Assad fell is something like 40% of Syrian national funding came from oil revenue denied by US backed Kurdish separatists.
The US will have to make the hard choice between HTS success or sacrificing Kurdish autonomy.
Could an Iraq-style autonomous subnational government that pays some tax to Damascus not work? Does Syria fundamentally not work without those revenues?
What if we took over the lease at Tartus?
HTS & Ahmed al-Sharaa is reportedly not open to national partition [1], but the SDF is unwilling to integrate into the national military structure.
It might work as an uncomfortable trupple if the US and HTS are willing to be bedfellows, but it is unclear if that is attractive or even viable for either. Everything we know about Ahmed al-Sharaa indicates they they should be a ideological enemy, and the only thing that hedges against this is that it would be really convenient if they wern't. Maybe this will be shown in time, but military trust building is measured in terms of years or decades, while payroll is due weekly.
In general, I think Syrian Kurdistan is a fascinating example cognitive blindness, where the US public and media simply memory holes anything that happens there because creates too much cognitive dissonance. This was true when the US was fighting Russia for the oilfields, and is happening again now, as NATO allied Turkey is bombing Kobani cement factories to impede US base building. [2]
https://www.twz.com/news-features/u-s-reportedly-setting-up-...
https://hawarnews.com/en/renewed-bombing-by-turkish-occupati...
There's a decent chance that they'd be better off working with HTS to carve out some concessions about their position within a consolidated Syrian state than relying on continued foreign support, especially seeing how things went last "T" was in office.
The amount of confounders at play here seems so large that I highly doubt anything meaningful could be learned from it.