I was nodding all the way until "bottlenecks in"... and then the Expanse slang. Tsk tsk :)
Kowltim vedi fong bap unte kuwang. Depelesh imim ge sekrip. (Watch out for bottlenecks and corners. That's where money is made.)
Compare the parts of a program worth optimising...
Kowltim vedi fong bap unte kuwang. Da Dzhin im showxa desh deplesh imim du fashting gut. (Watch out for bottlenecks and corners. Amdahl's Law says that's where to make speedups.)
Does that make more sense?
My point was that trade, in a wide sense, creates wealth. No one would cross the sea or the desert if there wasn't a prize, so I take for granted that there is an inbalance.
"Bottleneck" seems to suggest that commerce is like a natural process. It isn't. There are trade cultures like Phoenicians or Renaissance Venice, but often the powerful don't like commerce. Commerce implies some values that subvert authoritarian regimes, maybe just because different ways of understanding life make contact.
So when I hear bottleneck, I think of trade restrictions, not flow. You mean bottleneck as a funnel where the flow is more intense and thus more susceptible to capture wealth. It makes sense, but it's somehow a twisted metaphor, because it's the inbalance (gravity, or demand + the cheaper production elsewhere) that creates the flow, the bottleneck just make it easier to exploit. But a cascade can be wide or narrow, tall or short. In any case, there's water falling...
It can't be that simple. How do you fit there, for example, russian space exploration?
Two things happened in 1985: KSA opened the taps to full production, tanking oil prices, and the Plaza Accord weakened the dollar. Since oil is denominated in USD, this further kneecapped soviet hard currency income. While they were simultaneously attempting to fight a war in afghanistan, the real price of oil had dropped by a factor of 3. Elsewhere, as a result of the Plaza Accord, west germany used its stronger marks to buy out east germany as a fire sale from the Warsaw Pact, but I still have no idea what japan (or perhaps just the LDP selectorate?) got from its stronger yen, other than (averaged across the whole country) stagnation.
TIL Polan can into space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirosław_Hermaszewski (double checking received opinions never hurts, compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737221 )
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Conspiracy theory:
Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24736853 and consider that anyone outside who for whatever reason had been modelling the soviet economy might have been able to show to the actors within it (especially after Gorbi's transparency reforms) that it was worth more in pieces than as a going conglomerate, in which case the implosion of the soviet union would have been the ultimate stakeholder activism geopolitical LBO.
If Mark Felt had been a Belter, he would have said du chesh peyeting instead of "follow the money."
That's a language which is still missing in Google's translator.
It is a fictional language :)
(sasating is not attested, but sasa is. I would draw the line between sciences and humanities as sasating and kengting)
(Anyone at google or yandex who cares to get cracking on this? The grammar is small and the vocabulary miniscule. Unfortunately the corpus as well...)
Edit: OTOH, maybe it may be useful to have a creole without extant sentiment analysis, etc. tools?
"Look at me still talking when there's science to do"
> ”Nothing in Europe,” notes Jamil Ragep, a professor of the history of science at the University of Oklahoma, “could hold a candle to what was going on in the Islamic world until about 1600.”
Before the portuguese (1498-1974?) and the spanish (1492-1976?) overseas empires, the arab world was in the middle of the prime trade routes between asia and europe. Afterwards, their status as middleman was increasingly cut out (especially once the dutch and then british got into the maritime empire game).
Science happens where there are rich people; rich people happen where there are bottlenecks in trade.
As they say in the asteroid belt: na desh walowda walowda peyeting; imim na xunyam sasating?