Also India's wealth is always going to be limited to 5-10℅ of the citizenry. India is pretty much USA on steroids at this point - a handful of capitalists controlling a lot of public infrastructure, ministers openly indulging in corruption, routine exploitation of the working class, piss poor healthcare and education provision where they try to skirt around the evolution question and Gandhism. The bowing down of India to the US is no surprise, given all of these other factors already playing around in the background.

That being said, as I mentioned elsewhere, South Korea is choosing the pragmatic path because their optimal first strike scenario requires too many variables to be aligned properly.

Trebuchets were certainly used by Richard the Lionheart and Phillip II - God's Own Sling and Bad Neighbour (Malvoisin) respectively.

I'm pretty sure Frederick Barbarossa used a custom-made Shelby Cobra outfitted with rapid-firing machine guns. He might have had a hard time turning it on though.

As I said elsewhere, South Korea's victory requires way too many positives to happen during the first strike itself, else Seoul will face prolonged bombardment or even nukes. South Korea has the capability to do so too. But being a more pragmatic actor, South Korea has decided to go the diplomatic route and urge for peace instead.

> And SK is stuck playing the subserviant host to the US military, which must be great for morale, hey.

Actually it IS great for morale for both South Korea and Japan to have the US military backing them. Part of the reason for South Korea pursuing diplomacy and for 3 major US allies (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey) forming their own alliance is because they've all lost faith in US leadership if push comes to shove. South Korea knows that after the first barrage by NK, if all of the nukes aren't taken out then and there, then THAAD is useless and SK are sitting ducks.

France was dumb because they barely did any extraction while they exploited the natives.

South Korea could take out the first barrage of NK's missiles and nukes with its THAAD system. After that it will be vulnerable. So SK's success in any future conflict is contingent on a successful counter to them, as well as a successful counter-attack that's able to take out all NK missile silos and artillery systems (a combination of drones and air force could do this). But of course, too many variables and South Korea would do better to not take its chances in finding out, and preemptively urging for peace.

I think the deeper reason might have something to do with Chinese designs in North Korea. While China has been reticent to supply Russia, China will see North Korea as a defendant (even if they are the aggressors), and readily supply them with what they need. Ukraine vs Russia is just China vs China at this point.

I tend to agree. Even now the French can't maintain a cohesive relationship with their client states, which is why they've lost influence severely in the Sahel. They just didn't know when to be cohesive and how to be extractive.

No shade against the mayor.

You only attend Le Rosey for the network.

"The president reportedly boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras, and then was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight, a US official told the Post."

This is like comparing apples to oranges to find a correlation, and arriving at an incorrect causation.

Falling populations are largely due to better education, specifically of women, as well as integration of women into the workforce, which has been one of the bigger drivers in curbing poverty. The latter is so significant in the west and the far east (double income households mean rising costs of living, meaning SAHM households become unviable in the West for the middle class), resulting in a significant population decrease.

But in places such as the Middle East or Africa, ever increasing populations have only meant even more financial trouble for those economies. Case in point Pakistan and Egypt. In other economies such as India (which I assume is one of the "couple countries" you mentioned), overall birth rates are falling significantly to near replacement level, and in the few states/regions with high birth rates, poverty is rampant and the people reliant on subsidies from other more prosperous regions.

The problem with most of the world is that while we are able to sustain a huge population as a whole globally, most of the population growth is extremely localized, resulting in population sparsity in some comfortable regions (Canada, the US, Central Asia, southern Russia) and population unsustainability in other regions completely unsuited to population growth (sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, the Middle East).