Jesse the K, #84:
Thanks a lot for the links and shared memories.
@Dave Luckett: smart and knowledgable analysis overall. But I think the Chinese have gotten smarter.
One thing that surprised me when I went back to Mauritania this year is how much they had worked at entangling themselves in the local markets. They used to own big businesses, but had very little say/input/interest for the local side of things. Now they own loads of local convenience stores and textile buisenesses. They've taken interest in local fishing markets that up till now had always been the de-facto monopole of certain families.
In short, they're learning to use the local networks of extended families and nepotism to their advantage.
The time when a moor shipowner could borrow enough money from them for a boat, delay payment for years, make as much money as possible in that interval, and then officialy go back live in the desert where no one would find him seems to be becoming the stuff of local legends (if indeed it ever was true, though I don't doubt it... what matters is that it is becoming perceived as the stuff of legends).
A thing I found really quite telling (and depressing), is the rise of local comments on how them Chinese are stealing the land and money from the country. They weren't there ten years ago, when China was presented as a good alternative to France, and they're becoming far too close to middle-class racism rants I generally hear back in Paris for me to feel comfortable.
Dave Luckett: I like #2, for sheer movies-with-popcorn vicarious guilty thrills, sorta thing. I can see it all now. There's no possibility on God's earth that most of these African regimes can pay back commercial loans on this scale, because they're not, Heaven knows, going to spend it on the infrastructure they would actually need to do that. And the Chinese certainly know that.
The sad thing is you're more than probably right in most cases. My uncle, who works for the UNICEF was telling me that the Chinese are offering infrastucure deals to the political regimes in countries they want to work with: they're proposing to build either a stadium or proper modern administrative buildings. The stadium is mostly the favored choice.
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Got eight news out of ten.
I guess I'm spending way too much time on the internet.
My roommate must have been playing FFXI at least ten hours per day for the last 18 months which, apart from saving me from any bulging desire to ever play any MMORPG again, have taught me a lot about the politics and economy of the genre.
The farmers of the server, mainly chinese as far as I know, generates insane amount of cash flow and, by means, insane inflation no casual player can ever hope to compete with, except if he buys game money or items from farmers. Players can always try to loot the best items for themselves, but farmers will try to prevent any over faction from obtaining them, using any dirty tricks available (since player killing isn't allowed in FFXI, one of their usual trick is for one famer to lure as many monsters as he can toward the players, generally killing them, while allowing his team to claim the loot;bots and programs can be nasty by themselves, of course).
Retaliation is generally considred useless: whatever time you may cost a farmer, he'll lose far less than whatever time you invested in the prosses of prejudicing him. Which does not always prevent vain retalliation raids from angry players.
Trying to remedy to this problem, SquareEnix as created item that can only be looted, never sold.
Here enters the problem of factioning by countries. Some Top-Elite japanese players have the dellusion that every rarest loot belong to them, whether they need or not(problem is: they've become used to it by being the only looters for long, having been alone on the server for a whole year). Competition between coallitions of North Americans, generally allied with other smaller game community, say European, South American, some smaller Asian countries, and those Japanese players can go sour and escalate to full time war, each faction trying to loot as much as possible while preventing the other from doing so, sometimes even going as far as trying to prevent anyone from actually gaining anything.
All this, I fear, must add quite a lot to the already addictive nature of the game.
It also creates strange situations.
I remember that awful conversation with one known Chinese farmer asking North American players if he could party with them "just for fun" (i.e without asking his spoils from the game), all the insults he received as answer
Of course I can always understand them refusing, after all it might just have been a clever move to cover his track. But the scorn displayed couldn't but remind me of the condescending way some of the rich students of grandes-écoles here in France deals with poorer students of other schoold trying to socialize.
"Nothing goes off faster than cyberpunk!"
I couldn't agree more. I recently tried to have my litlle sister add Neuromancer to her stack of books to read. She found it boring. Re-reading it myself, I can understand why a kid who grew up on The Matrix and Shadowrun would find nothing thilling in the book. At least she'll know a bit of history of the cyberpunk genre I guess.
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