Sure that’s one way to look at it but it’s short sighted in my view. From the other perspective it comes across as the West saying they could pollute as much as they wanted to in order give their people a better life and now everyone else has to operate under strict constraints or get a finger wagging from the largest contributers to CO2 emissions in human history. That’s a lot of hypocrisy.

You’re right that solar panels do exist now. It should be noted that China has done more with renewables and getting ICE vehicles off the road than any Western country, many of which seem to be stuck in old habits. Nations like India and China are developing on a massive scale, actively integrating renewables into their expanding grids as they pull hundreds of millions out of poverty.

The average person in India and China contributes substantially less to global emissions than the average Westerner. So as their emissions increase, rather than seeing it as them cancelling out your efforts, you should be flattered that they want to live with the luxuries and privileges youve had for some time now. They are in no way less worthy of that.

Perhaps Western nations should be made to contribute less per capita than developing nations, as a way to offset their historically disproportionate contribution.

Tough argument to make. Nation states are a somewhat arbitrary construct. What if China or India were each four countries instead of one? Should we take geographical area into account? This is why the per capita measure is important.

The UAE is land mass less than 2% the size of India and China and relies on desalination plants for habitibillity. Why would either India or China have populations that small, while not having such limitations?

It’s easy to say less humans is the solution (and don’t worry, the world is clearly headed that direction looking at global fertility rates) but saying a specific country having less people is part of the solution, especially when it’s a country with lower per capita emissions, seems difficult to justify.

Even this type of data is overly decontextualized without considering cumulative (not annual) emissions since the industrial revolution (globally), proportion of corporate contribution and off shoring. Per capita is important too.

With regard to developing nations, emissions will go up as people get pulled out of poverty and have lifestyles more like people in developed nations. It’s hard to ask them not to pursue that or to delay it without coming across as hypocritical. Especially since developed nations are responsible for 50% of cumulative emissions, historically, despite being 20% of the global population (and have a higher quality of life so show for it).

Now with the US/Israel’s war in Iran more nations in Asia will be burning coal due to oil supply constraints. It’s easy to show a graph blaming those nations for resorting to that but several are already rationing gasoline (Americans would lose their minds lol) and the people are absolutely struggling for it.

This is the type of decontextualization that Western nations employ to pressure nations in Africa, Latin America, and Asia and its often is not received well, understandably.

This is absolutely true.

Even with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, Britain initially struggled to compete with the sheer quality and cost-effectiveness of Indian hand-woven fabrics.

They instituted a 100% tariff on importation of Indian fabric to support their nascent mechanized textile manufacturing.

This allowed them to hone the machinery by creating a sandbox to grow their new expertise in. The quality could not match what was produced by hand but the sheer volume and efficiency could easily outdo manual methods.

Over time as they gained political influence, they were able to point guns at and break the thumbs of the right people in India effectively eradicating Indias domestic textile industry.

They then forced Indian markets to accept British cloth with no tariff, making that consumer sandbox bigger.

Minus the colonial / coercive economics at the end there, this is an example of Britain using tariffs very effectively to grow their own industry while taking down a global leader in textiles (one that even the Romans wrote of 1500 years prior).

May well have played out the same without supportive policy, but the protectionism certainly helped them grow their own industry faster and the violent / coercive colonial element helped them remove a traditional, higher quality though analog/manual competitor sooner.

What America is doing is more of a dying empire vibe. Protection for the sake of clinging to the old and familiar way, with no plan or strategy to adapt for the future.

Depends how much the average consumer is paying attention. Many probably don’t know that every EV can use the Tesla chargers now.

The competition here is certainly constrained. Most car manufacturers are making less EVs due to decreasing overall demand and expirarion of federal EV tax credits.

The real competition is on the other side of the Pacific. Europe and Canada have accepted that on some level while the US continues to artificially prop up its EV market ex-China.

There are legitimate concerns don’t get me wrong. But the US won’t be able to hide from a more dynamic and competitive product forever.

Tesla has 35% market share in Norway.

France saw an increase in Tesla registrations by 203% year over year.

Sweden had a 144% increase in registrations. Denmark had a 96% increase.

In the US, the core demographic remains white male, ~48 years old, with a household income exceeding $140,000, particularly in conservative states (Texas/Florida).

Part of the problem is that competition is still lacking in many ways especially when it comes to charging infrastructure.

Yeah it’s not just Indians:

In 2025:

According to the analysis, Tesla achieved loyalty rates of 63.6% among Asian households and 61.9% among Hispanic households. These figures exceeded national averages.

Favorability / loyalty have dropped across all groups over the past several years.

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We musn’t overlook the most impactful financial leverage the US acquired from the war. Centuries of colonial wealth were transferred to the US as European allies, decimated by the war, depleted their treasuries to buy US weapons. The Nazis bombed the British empire into insolvency and nearly all of that wealth went to buying American weapons. By the end of the war the US held three quarter of the world’s gold reserves, allowing it to institute the Breton Woods system, making the US dollar the world’s reserve currency. This with America’s disproportionate manufacturing capacity left intact - more than 50% of global manufacturing from a nation with less than 10% the global population - and the Marshall Plan which contributed to persistent demand for American goods created a feedback loop which allowed America to become the world’s factory, banker and strongest consumer simultaneously.

American lore focuses on some type of intrinsic exceptionalism but the reality is the stars aligned for them in this particular period and they, credit to them, they took full advantage of it. Doubt it ever happens again though. The game’s different when you’re at the top, as I’m sure they’re all too familiar with now.

True but the difference is women can hold credit now so owning/renting a home and a car is feasible without having to marry an absolute wanker.

Some still marry wankers despite this. It’s unfortunate.

Always good to have standards. Any guy that makes racist jokes really. Even if you are racist too, one should remember that if he’s making racist jokes he’s probably a misogynist too and looks down on you.

Large but young. A civilization as old as Iran’s will know a thing or two about real politik and how to utilize leverage. Iran could easily come out of this a regional power as it has been throughout history. China has also risen much closer to its historical global standing and India is accelerating in that direction also. We are watching an era of Western hegemony fade away and it is fascinating to see. Doubt it will be as bad as the fall of the Romans and 1000 years of religious dogma and anti-intellectualism but this is a high risk period for sure.

Israel might even be less eager to bomb in its neighbours in general.

It’s even worse when you find out they’re not acting.

Passport strength is determined by a nation’s wealth and historical relations. Previously colonizing nations generally have a good relationship with each other and are wealthier, for example.

Sorry I should elaborate:

SWIFT operates as a centralized hub-and-spoke model. For a bank in Brazil to send money to a bank in India, the message must pass through SWIFT’s secure servers in Belgium, and the actual money often passes through “correspondent” banks in the U.S. or Europe.

BRICS Pay uses a Decentralized Cross-border Messaging System (DCMS). There is no central owner or hub. Instead, it uses a “fractal topology” where each participating bank manages its own node. This makes the system resistant to external interference or being “shut off” by a central authority.

SWIFT is not a payment system; it is a messaging system. It sends the “instruction” to move money, but the actual settlement can take 1–5 business days as it hops between multiple intermediary banks.

BRICS Pay is designed to be an end-to-end settlement system. By using blockchain and distributed ledgers, it can settle transactions in real-time (seconds to minutes) because it records the value transfer directly on a shared ledger rather than waiting for bank-to-bank reconciliations.

SWIFT is heavily reliant on the U.S. Dollar as the primary reserve currency. Most international SWIFT transfers require a conversion into USD at some point in the chain, adding exchange fees and making the system sensitive to U.S. sanctions.

​BRICS Pay is built specifically for Local Currency Settlement (LCS). The blockchain tech acts as a “bridge” that allows direct conversion between, for example, the Brazilian Real and the Indian Rupee without needing the U.S. Dollar as an intermediary.

Key here is decentralization and freedom from US hegemony.

BRICS is also making strides towards dedollarization and alternative payment systems (bypassing SWIFT) based on blockchain technology.

You guys don’t understand, this is Israeli style warfare. Do you know what it’s like to be thinking about your neighbour’s destruction constantly, to the point of you having to preempt your own darkest thoughts with a preemptive strike? It’s exhausting! Israel is a special case, it’s not like international humanitarian law is universal. Why can’t we just go back to the time when most people weren’t people? Ugh.

• Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner monologue

For some reason this comment reminded me of that Cuban dude that retrofitted his car to run on coal because of American sanctions. What a world we live in.

Surely if that is one of the origins of corporations it will only get better from there right? Human suffering can’t be foundational to the system, can it? ^^^^/s