As a counter-point, South Africa is unique as the only country to develop and subsequently dismantle a nuclear weapons program. It built 6 nuclear weapons during the apartheid era, but then voluntarily dismantled them and joined the NPT. This decision was influenced by international pressure, political changes, and a desire for greater global integration. Despite that, it suffered no negative consequences to its sovereignty or regional power projection abilities.
> As a counter-point, South Africa is unique as the only country to develop and subsequently dismantle a nuclear weapons program.
Several countries have voluntarily dismantled nuclear weapons programs (the participants in the South American nuclear arms race of the 1980s being examples), and several countries have voluntary disarmed of actual nuclear weapons. South Africa is not unique in doing either.
It is arguably unique among the latter group in not having inherited the weapons as a successor state from a distinct preceding regime, but even if we were going to draw broad conclusions from n=1 examples, its quite arguably that that is less relevant to the difference in experience versus that of (say) Ukraine than other geopolitical factors.
> It built 6 nuclear weapons during the apartheid era, but then voluntarily dismantled them and joined the NPT. This decision was influenced by international pressure, political changes, and a desire for greater global integration. Despite that, it suffered no negative consequences to its sovereignty or regional power projection abilities.
Kind of hard to specifically isolate the loss of regional power South Africa experienced from nuclear disarmament from the loss of regional power it experienced from other causes concurrently, but it certainly had less after than before.
The guy he's referring to is Navarro, who invented an economist named Ron Vara to cite in his pro tariff book. He made up hi source using an anagram of his name, that's batshit crazy.
Once the cancer starts to freely mutate it becomes much harder to contain. It's not just cleaning up defective cells, it's full on evultionary warfare between your immune system and the cancer.
Google search is now better than Shazam at recognising a tune. From experience, it can also detect the right tune when someone is (badly) singing it rather than playing the song.
In the beginning there was Usenet. It was a wonderful microcosmos of technical expertise and niche hobbies. Then 1993 came and the constant flood of new users overwhelmed the culture and ability to enforce norms [1]. Truthfully, it didn't begin with Usenet. It's the old dilemma of universal access and freedom versus mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon. Even before that, Aristotle wrote "That which is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care. Men pay most attention to what is their own: they care less for what is common." Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.
It may also not be wrong to say: "those who know history, are destined to repeat it".
"That which is the common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care..." is not a universal law, and it is easy to think of counterexamples. Without listing these, here are some axes that can govern which side of well-cared-for resources in the commons may end up:
- the extent to which people hold cooperation to be an important ingredient, versus dispensable
- the extent to which people are able to trust others, versus not
- the extent to which a commonly held resource is considered as much a personal resource, as a common one, versus purely common and otherwise inconsequential
- the extent to which people are able to value the importance (and impact) of small, consistent actions versus grand(iose) ones
- the extent to which people are willing to learn from mistakes and change, versus the extent to which people feel entrenched and defensive
Most of these come down to education, culture, and type of previous interactions with other humans.
It's much easier to become a UK citizen than an American. And yet that doesn't stop the ongoing socio-economical decline in the UK, from a world super power to the rejects of Europe.
If America has an edge, immigration isn't it. Probably it's geography and natural resources. A good comparison to make would be with Canada, a country with worse geography and less resources, but similar or even friendlier immigration policy.
