The builders were monks who decided to live on the side of that mountain so they could focus on being monks. So I guess?

That's dark, considering the history.

The Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth traditionally included western Ukraine with Lviv being a center of both Polish and Ukrainian identity for centuries and a major source of violence between the World Wars. But it was the Polish who ruled and the Ukrainians who were serfs. And when the Russians displaced the Polish nobility it led to a long period of violence.

It's good to see Poland and Ukraine finally getting along. The peoples had a frenemy thing going on for a long time. But it would have been quite toxic if they were a couple until recently.

Yellow Journalism has always been the default, though.

If you go through lists of small town newspapers you often see them named "Republican", "Democrat", or "Independent" because they were often owned and operated by political parties until the early 20th century when they started regulating such things.

I'm not really qualified to answer that question. Though, I think a fair amount of it depends on definitions. If you include news adjacent talking heads and news-themed youtubers there'd be quite a few. After all, most nations have national and regional government mouthpieces. Then you have major cities and their newspapers, radio stations, and TV news. Even third world places have at least newspapers and radio stations.

But, yeah, journalist isn't nearly as common as construction workers or miners.

I do think that government and organized crime murders of journalists are substantially worse on a pound by pound comparison. It was just happening less often than I had previously assumed.

It's actually substantially lower than I'd thought. It's not even one a day. For the whole world.

There are plenty of jobs that average one a day through worksite accidents or exposure to toxins necessary to get the job done. Even being a boring office drone results in more than one suicide or "death by overwork" a day if you're including China, Japan, and South Korea.

Don't get me wrong. Each and every one of those is a tragedy, but the number there actually makes me feel that we're in a better place than I thought we were.

So, lockdowns don't get you herd immunity. Lockdowns slow down exposure rates, if you're not exposed or vaccinated you don't develop natural immunity. If you don't have natural immunity you will transmit it to others. If you are immune then you create a "wall" that the disease can't use to reach the next guy. Herd immunity is when you have enough immune people that the disease can't find enough vulnerable people to create a major outbreak.

Many Chinese people haven't been exposed before, so they're going to go through now what we went through two years ago. It's going to be really rough on them.

It's less a question of timing and more a question of preparedness. China didn't do the logistical work to prepare for the outbreak that was inevitable once they eased. The sudden flipping off of the policy instead of a phased, managed repeal is setting them up for a much harder landing than they needed to have. That's the controversial part, the fact that you can't stall forever and the only thing that lockdowns accomplish is to stall until something else is accomplished. So, the lockdowns had to end sooner or later. Early lockdowns were a great idea. We didn't have vaccines and treatments, so stalling until we had them was great idea. No one stalled better than the Chinese. It's just that once we had the vaccines and the drugs they didn't stock up on them and didn't distribute them effectively. They rejected the far more effective mRNA vaccines until this month despite being far more effective than local variants. Something like seven out of ten elderly Chinese didn't even get the local stuff.

They bought themselves two years, and did nothing with it. That's why people are pissed.

China has fewer Covid-rated emergency beds now than they did in 2020. Way more quarantine camps, way less in the way of emergency room beds. But the quarantine camps aren't set up to care for the most critically ill.

China could have announced that they were going to gradually reopen months ago. They could have done it in a phased way, building temporary hospitals (like they did back in 2020) and moving extra doctors and nurses from provinces still locked down to ease the transition in the area. Then, once the situation is stabilized they move to the next province. If they started with the most economically important provinces and saved the most politically sensitive for last they could have gotten everything they wanted out of it.

Instead, they held on to the lockdowns until something snapped. If the protests didn't happen then the horrible economic numbers would have. America is importing something like 40% less year over year. Strategic monopolies are being lost. Unemployment is way up, especially among recent graduates.

The problem isn't too soon or too late. The problem is if they were prepared for it or not. The only reason why they weren't prepared for it is because they didn't do the work while they had the chance.

There are people freaking the fuck out in China because they have been lied to for years about how bad it is in the rest of the world. It's such horrible whiplash to go from "everyone is dying but you because we have protected you" to "bro, it's just a flu". If you believe the Chinese government then of course you want the policy to continue because they told you that Covid is gonna kill everyone and Zero Covid is the only answer. If you really internalized that for years then how could you ever accept "lol, no biggie".

Despite officially hitting targets to vaccinate everyone, a majority of the elderly never got vaccinated. They only approved the more effective mRNA vaccines this month because they had been trying to strongarm the pharma companies to hand over the mRNA tech. They don't have the beds in hospitals prepared. They don't have a ramp up in doctors and nurses. It is too soon because they shit the bed in the planning department, but it was always going to be too soon because it really looks like the very tippy top of the CPC wanted to have covid lockdown powers forever. Unprecedented control over the movements of the people? The ability to turn anyone's code red at any time thus forcing them to come in for testing? The ability to put people in 'quarantine' that is identical to prison, only for your own good? Regular testing that just was between 1% and 2% of the entire Chinese economy that you can skim off the top from? It's a pretty sweet gig if you can get it. But, that just got in the way of unwinding before important bits started snapping and they couldn't stall any longer.

They announced that they were going to dissolve the contracts involved. They didn't actually get out of the contracts for months. Some of them didn't actually leave so much as they created a new local subsidiary and transferred their assets to that "new" company with plans in place to reabsorb them at some future date.

Also, in that situation there would be big pain either way. Those companies that did stay in Russia face sanctions in other nations, and Russia is a small market compared to the EU or Texas. If you had a choice between losing the profit from Russia or Texas the greedy would save their position in Texas and leave Russia every time.

The point of sanctions and regulation isn't to turn the amoral into the moral, it's to align the amoral choice with the desired one by rewarding "good" behavior and punishing "bad" ones. Of course, these same practices are used by China to change the messaging in Hollywood movies and to stop criticism of their treatment of the Uighur by NBA athletes.

Turn out that morals aren't universal and lack power if people don't put in the work to give them teeth. It's important to put in the work to ensure that FIFA suffers for its corruption. You can't outsource that work to others. Media companies will do what they need to do to not fuck over their employees and stakeholders, if they see that it is more costly to air such a controversial World Cup than it is to break contracts then in the future they'll break the contract when FIFA does something stupid.

But, at the end of the day, FIFA is the western villain here. They are the ones who need to be punished. The whole organization probably needs to be razed and a new one built with controls to prevent (or at least make exponentially more expensive and challenging) the sort of corruption that's obviously endemic their decision making.

I think that's a bit weird position to take. After all, breaking contracts is costly. The company doesn't pay when things get expensive, the company is just a legal fiction. It's the shareholders and workers. The shareholders are usually people with retirement accounts moreso than incredibly wealthy.

It's okay to ask companies to do the expensive, and morally correct, things. But you have to recognize that doing so will hurt a lot of people. Continuing to broadcast as per the contract but highlighting the problems is more likely to punish Qatar in the long run.

The "get" for Qatar, the reason they are doing all of this is to create a new Qatari tourism industry. To compete with regional rivals like the UAE's Dubai or Saudi Arabia's NEOM by diversifying from oil into something "soft power"-y. If you hammer home the problems with Qatar's actions in the very thing that is supposed to win popular opinion to their side then you hurt them far more than declining to show the World Cup would.

I mean, if you break your contracts then people might blame you and continue to ignore Qatar's bad actions. If you highlight the problems then there's no distraction from the human right's abuses.

Some of them have long term contracts that would make it very expensive to not cover the World Cup. It just makes doing the right thing much harder, especially considering that there's a fair number of sports fans who don't know or don't care about Qatar's other issues.

There's an undercurrent among these international organization of tournaments as development. Very often if you go into marginal places they build roads and airports and improve base infrastructure in order to hold the event that might not otherwise be built.

In Qatar they wanted to build out a tourism industry from scratch. They didn't have the hotels or attractions or the airport required. The best their tourism board could come up with is "if your flight has a layover, come see our historic spice market". So, yeah they needed it.

The point was overcoming those problems and creating reasons to visit Qatar other than being a sailor in the US 5th Fleet. A lot of nations have successfully done something like that, after all. They just didn't rely quite so heavily on slave labor or tried to impose morality laws on tourists.

Did you know that you can formally evict ghosts in several US states. If they are tenants and they aren't paying rent you can serve them by posting the notice on the door of the haunted location. Then you can (for a fee) get the Sheriff to come out and evict the unclean spirit in compelled by the power of the Commonwealth of Virginia (or whatever state still allows you to do that).

I've never had the need to evict a ghost, but I'd love to see it.

Why? It's desert. It's not like they're destroying ecologically valuable wildlife habitat. If anyone should be expanding outwards rather than upwards it's people in deserts. They aren't even substituting farmland or land useful to man or beast.

If you were talking about a temperate forest or a jungle or farmland or a swamp then yes, by all means up makes way more sense than out, but it's Saudi Arabia.

There are just the three things that really annoy me about the way they're doing things.

The first is that none of that money is going into base infrastructure needed to support these massive buildings. The tallest building in the world doesn't have a sewer hookup. They have to pump out that massive septic tank every day with a fleet of a couple hundred trucks. That's just massively more expensive over the long run and demonstrates a lack of focus on the unsexy but necessary technology that makes skyscrapers an option. As soon as the oil money slows down the lack of a sewer will eat away at the money available to build a newer tower. Just look at the Jeddah Tower (formerly the Kingdom Tower) that may or may not be completed now because of internal politics and work stopped on the tower that was supposed to be a kilometer tall in 2017. Every year that passes makes restarting construction more technically challenging and expensive.

The second is the complete reliance on foreign design and oversight. None of those skyscrapers are different than any other skyscraper built anywhere else in the world. They could be anywhere, which means that they are nowhere mentally speaking. If the design was more reflective of the place, the millennia of history, and the people there I would be far more positive about them. The more things that are pale imitations of the "international style" the poorer the collective cultural value of architecture is and the poorer we all are for it. Investing in their people to create something new and valuable was something they consciously decided against, which makes me grumpy.

Finally, oil revenue is always temporary. Not only are we losing uses for oil but the oil fields in question have a finite quantity of oil in them. Even if selling oil remains profitable globally forever, Saudi Arabia will run out. There have been no significant finds of new oil reserves since 1989 and the Ghawar fields (5% of the world's proven reserves) seems to be tapping out early, some of the oil might actually be a layer of water thus substantially reducing the amount of oil Saudi Arabia might actually have. The worst case scenario is that Saudi Arabia is out of oil in the early 2040s. The Best case is that they run out in the late 2080s. Even with spending several hundred billion dollars on exploration you can't find something that doesn't exist, and the Vision 2030 program indicates that the Kingdom itself doesn't believe that there is much more oil to find and they need to transition away from oil to something else. My big gripe is that the "something else" they have decided upon are "the line" and giant manufactured luxury islands that lack basic infrastructure like running water and sewers rather than investing their money into basics, local culture, and something unique and enriching for humanity as a whole. I wouldn't mind if they just leaned into the Hajj I will never go on, I am just disappointed they are into geometric police states and Neo-Vegas instead of something that's actually practical and sustainable and uniquely them.

They have yet to be profitable over the course of a year, but they have been profitable for a single quarter. It's really a value judgement if that counts or not.

Needless to say, it varies WILDLY depending on the style of construction and if it's commercial (Offices) or residential (apartments). Early 20th century skyscrapers tend to be massive commercial structures. Those going up now tend to be "super-slim" residential structures featuring whole-floor condos.

I don't know what the payback on a early 20th century style building would be today. But a modern "super-slim" like One57 or 220 Central Park South would cost about $1.6 billion, take roughly five years to build, and would recoup its expenses between two to three years after construction finishes since they are selling and not renting those condos.

So, if you're talking about the sort of skyscraper being built now in New York then roughly 7-8 years.

They are nothing, and deep down they know it. They know the oil is running out. They know that once it's gone not one person will every think about them ever again. They know they don't have the time to grow something organic and unique and theirs. They need to make something NOW. Something that make people think that they are a real thing. Something that will attract other money, since as long as there's foreign money and investment they have a chance.

So they built skyscrapers. They built all the outward signs of wealth and power and importance. They built all the things that would attract international wealth and power. They pay obscene amounts of money and put ridiculous effort into getting global sporting events and unique items.

All so that they can pretend to be something.

The problem is that those things will get old and run down. It's already happening. For the moment they are using oil wealth to build more new and shiny to distract from the rusting and rotten. But the second they can't continue to build they'll become nothing. Old historic casinos in Las Vegas don't draw crowds, they are left to rot until someone blows them up and builds something new and shiny. Old historic skyscrapers in Dubai won't draw the global elite, they'll find somewhere else building something new and shiny like they always have and always will. The only chance Dubai and Saudi Arabia ever had was leaning into what makes them special and unique, to give experiences that one can't have anywhere else.

It's already too late for them to correct course. They have sunk untold trillions into a generic modern experience you could have anywhere for thirty years. In another thirty it'll be tired and worn out and dated. People will look at their skyscrapers and think of it as antiquated as "early 21st century" as opposed to whatever style is big in the 2040s to 2060s as "mid-century" styles take over the hearts and wallets of the big spends.

Dubai and Saudi Arabia will be nothing again. And we will have missed out on whatever unique and special experience they might have offered if they decided to lean on their own people rather than merely copy styles that were already on the way out in the west.