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29 Apr, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Another reason for a Reliance-Aramco deal to be off the menu is Aramco's deepening ties with majority-owned chemicals company Sabic:
Aramco bought 70% of Sabic in 2019 and the chemicals company announced plans to take over marketing of Aramco's petrochemicals: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
That puts it directly in competition with Reliance, which also sees its future as a supplier of petrochemicals to the wider Indian Ocean region.

But Sabic, unlike Reliance, gets discounted petroleum from Aramco.
Why would Reliance want to deepen its commitments to Aramco when it knows Aramco's first priority is supporting its most fierce competitor in the Indian Ocean chemicals market?

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More from @davidfickling

David Fickling Profile picture
29 Apr
I think there's a bit of a Streisand Effect about the extreme sensitivity about this data about the timing of China's population peak:
For most of the past decade, China has released its population and labour force data in its big statistical update in mid-January: stats.gov.cn/english/PressR….
This is then compiled into the statistical yearbook, which has data going all the way back to 1949 (these are in 10,000s): stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/2020…
Read 11 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
25 Apr
"Be realistic: demand the impossible!" — a slogan coined by the Parisian anarchists of May 1968 — is actually a surprisingly good principle to setting effective targets (🧵):

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
There's a smart, cynical thing to say when presented with a series of ambitious-sounding long-term targets like those presented at last week's #ClimateSummit:

Talk is cheap. Action is expensive. Climate promises are always broken.
theguardian.com/environment/20…
About a third of all the greenhouse emissions in history happened since the 1997 Kyoto protocol.

That doesn't sound like international agreements are very effective!

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… Image
Read 26 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
22 Apr
This is prompting me to wonder how radical Henry Ford's famous 1914 doubling of wages for his car plant workers really was.

It certainly sounds dramatic: A doubling in the minimum wage! But I wonder.
Here's the union wage rates for metal workers in Detroit in 1914: fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/pub… Image
The second column is the weekly rate in dollars. Ford's $5-a-day five-day week is pretty much in line with most of these jobs. And of course Ford's plants didn't allow unions, so he would be expected to pay over the union minimum to prevent organizing.
Read 11 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
16 Apr
Here's some good/bad news: Cancer now kills more people in sub-Saharan Africa than HIV. Image
Obviously bad news because "more people dying of cancer and heart disease" is worse than "fewer people dying of cancer and heart disease".

But these are "diseases of affluence" that particularly affect people who live long and healthy enough lives not to die of other causes.
The fall in HIV mortality is stunning. Penetration of antiretrovirals is pretty good in sub-Saharan Africa these days.

aho.afro.who.int/trackers/af?tr…
Read 8 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
15 Apr
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.
Read 4 tweets
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

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