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15 Apr, 4 tweets, 1 min read
How cosmopolitan was early 17th century Java?

This is first, brief, written account of Australia:
gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/06006…
We have an English captain in Java, picking up gossip from an eastern Indian trader ("Cling-man", from Kalinga), in a Javanese junk carrying Maluku spices to sell to a Gujarati trader, about the activities of a Dutch sailor exploring New Guinea and bumping into Australia instead.
The author of this passage was also one of the first Europeans to visit Japan.
Oh and one more thing, the Kalinga man's first name Nockhoda seems to be derived from a Persian word meaning "ship's captain".

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More from @davidfickling

David Fickling Profile picture
12 Apr
Yesterday I was at Marion Bay, Tasmania ... site of one of the most haunting (and, unusually, non-violent) first contact episodes from the colonial era:
Abel Tasman's crew came ashore here on Dec. 1, 1642, the first anchorage they'd been able to find after struggling round the storm-racked south coast of the island.

They found evidence of people and what may have been Tasmanian tigers, but didn't *see* anyone in the open forest.
They saw a fireplace in a hollowed tree and climbing notches carved into a treetrunk to raid birds' eggs.

They concluded from the 5ft distance between the notches that the people must be giants.

They saw no one, but saw smoke from distant fires and heard the sound of a gong.
Read 8 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
9 Apr
One quick lesson that Joe Biden's infrastructure plan can learn from China?

Unleash the power of capitalism to make worthwhile investments more attractive to local governments:
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
A quirk of America's infrastructure set-up is that it's unusually difficult for government planners to *invest* in improving their region's infrastructure.

Instead they have to treat it almost as a charity project.
That's because it's unusually difficult for them to capture the increase in land values that come when you build new infrastructure.

Beyond a few almost experimental projects and the very indirect benefits of property taxes, transport mostly has to pay for itself in user fees. Image
Read 13 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
7 Apr
Could breaking Nigeria's addiction to crude oil turn it from a failing state into the next China?

That's not as improbable as it sounds (🧵): #OOTT
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
People often use the phrase "resource curse" to talk about oil. Often, it brings more harm than benefits.

There's few better examples of this than Nigeria.

Within a decade of oil being discovered in 1957, the newly-independent country was fighting a civil war over it. Image
Oil production hasn't grown since the late 1970s but the population is nearly four times the size.

Crude production in Nigeria (pop.: 200m) is roughly the same as Norway (5m).

Even if the wealth was shared equitably and wisely, there just isn't enough of it to go round. Image
Read 21 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
6 Apr
Here's how America could solve a toxic waste crisis in Florida and reduce its dependence on Chinese rare earths and uranium from the former USSR with one weird trick:

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Residents around Tampa Bay in Florida are facing evacuation orders and a state of emergency after a dam holding radioactive fertilizer waste started leaking, threatening a breach and a 20ft wall of water: nytimes.com/2021/04/04/us/…
Florida and other parts of the southeastern U.S. have for decades been just one big rainstorm away from this sort of environmental crisis, because of more than a billion tons of phosphogypsum stacked up as waste material from the fertilizer industry.
Read 22 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
1 Apr
Don't celebrate just yet. Covid isn't over — and the worst if it may still lie ahead of us: bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
It's clear that much of the world is thinking about this pandemic as something that's approaching its end.

More and more I'm seeing it talked about in the past tense. Google searches for "after Covid" are running ahead of "Covid symptoms": Image
But the brutal truth is that the rate of new infections rose nearly 50% during March.

They're now running at a daily rate we never saw in this pandemic until the winter surge in mid-November: Image
Read 13 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
31 Mar
My spiciest infrastructure bill take is that the "clean energy R&D" funding is basically a subsidy for annoying nuclear obsessives on Twitter.
Nuclear has historically sucked up the lion's share of energy R&D (and still gets the biggest slice today) because it's very complex and basic science-y, done by white lab coats not blue collars etc.

iea.org/reports/energy… Image
The generous funding for nuclear research combined with its fairly fundamental economic weaknesses means that it's a top-heavy field, with huge expertise in "paper reactors" even while real-world technology is basically updated 1960s reactor designs.
Read 7 tweets

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