The share tells a story that poverty is decreasing at all levels, relatively speaking. The distribution tells the additional story that population has increased: there may be less change in the number of people at the $20-30 level and the $30-40 level in recent decades than the share alone would suggest.
Not exactly like for like, but if you checkout comparison sites like https://serversearcher.com there are options that come close, like $6 for 4GB/2cores in many US locations.
Isn’t that just assuming that people, rather than industry, is the main consumer? Perhaps there are energy hungry industrial applications that could move.
A lot of curtailment happens at night: strong offshore wind and low demand. So not only do you need to provide enough of a price delta for the industry move to be worth it (sacrificing proximity to other amenities and customers, eating the relocation costs, loss of employee supply, etc) but you also need the industry to be operating 24/7 (or start doing it). Some industries can do that, but not all.
And then one day when the grid upgrades are done, the risk is the incentives are cut and now you're stuck at the wrong end of the country.
I had a good use case at Our World In Data for the public data pipeline, where one repo had the pipeline and one git-lfs repo had the build output of the pipeline. A git note added to a commit to the code pipeline recorded the hash identifying the built data.
Overall it felt elegant, and needed no maintenance after setting it up, but honestly it was never used. I think the need to look back in time was rarer than expected, and git notes being hidden by default didn’t help for awareness.
At Our World In Data we ended up using Buildkite to run custom CI jobs, integrated with GitHub, but on cheap, massive Hetzner machines. I can really recommend the experience!
When living in Stockholm, I came to appreciate the various levels of twilight and darkness, rather than thinking of day and night so strictly. The sun being low on the horizon also scatters light across the sky in ways that are very beautiful and last much longer than sunrise and sunset in Australia where I grew up.
Having grown up around the same latitude as Stockholm, one thing I never realized until last year when visiting tropics is how my subconscious associates warmth with long evenings. Being used to summers where you could basically read a book outside at 11PM, it felt really weird to be outside in tropic heat, but complete darkness by 6PM.
Catches me every time too. And it's so quick. You can go in to a shop to pick up a packet of crisps thinking it's daytime, but actually is quarter past 6, so you come back out and it's full dark!
I'm in the southern UK, and I'd take our late-May/early-August "it's light while I'm awake and dark while I (should be) asleep" all year round if I could get it.
You could become peripatetic and seek out the spot of opposite latitude during the dark season. So you could have 15 hours of daylight, 12 hours of daylight, then 15 hours of daylight again. I've thought that with idle rich amounts of money I'd get a very large yacht and sail the pacific rim in time with the seasons, perpetual spring, summer, spring, summer.
We have different definitions of rich. It's not just the cost of living. It's also the time and to deal with the governments to allow this, it's having the money to spend the time, it's the job that allows this, it's the time away from family not being catastrophic for someone's wellbeing. Frankly, this is vastly infeasible for 99% of people. I'd easily consider the remaining 1% "rich" in some way
The first time I visited the tropics, I never realised how much I associated the dark with it being cold!
We went for dinner in the afternoon, sun was up, it was blazing hot, everything normal so far. We had dinner while the sun set in a nice air-conditioned restaurant, so it was dark when it was time to leave, and I walked out into the tropical night and was so confused why it was still warm and moist outside!
Similar experience for me but probably even more extreme.
I'm originally from São Paulo, Brazil, the Tropic of Capricorn almost cuts through the city itself. Sunrises and sunsets are very quick events, sitting somewhere to watch it would take some 30 minutes, and then darkness.
Even after 10+ years of living in Sweden I still get mesmerised by sunrises and sunsets here, they last for so long and I get to be awed by the changing of colours, shadows, shapes, for hours. It's one of my favourite things to do during summers, just to be out somewhere by a lake with some friends, having food and drinks, and watching the endless twilight.
> When living in Stockholm, I came to appreciate the various levels of twilight and darkness, rather than thinking of day and night so strictly.
In Chile you get somewhat long days and short days too, especially in the south, but instead of trying to be super precise about sunlight, the afternoon and night blend in and sort of crossfade. You end up with "8 de la tarde" (8 in the afternoon), and "6 de la noche" (6 at night) depending on the season.
7/8/9 de la noche (vs tarde) is used by 60/97/100% of American Spanish speakers vs 1/16/97% of European Spanish speakers. I wonder if the difference is due to Spain's generally late sunsets.
It would be interesting to redo this analysis with a corpus that indicates seasons though.
I think I have used "8 in the afternoon" even as close to the equator as Atlanta (~34 N). Our latest sunset is 8:52 pm, surprisingly late, because we are very far west in our time zone.
The one we're talking about today is "extreme poverty", which is the $2.15 purchasing-power-adjusted line. It's fantastic news that most Indians have surpassed this line, but it's also helpful to think of this line as just one rung in a ladder out of poverty. Life just above this line is still not great.
This chart, which shows how much of the population lives in different poverty lines for India, gives you a sense for the population as a whole. You can compare it to other countries to see their distribution, and China is probably a good comparison to make.
Despite progress on extreme poverty, you're right that there are still some 3 billion people in the world who cannot afford a nutritious diet, and likewise 3 billion people who live in energy poverty, meaning they have to cook indoors with solid fuels (wood, coal, dung) that damage their health and shorten their lives. It's important that we make progress on all these things in the coming decades. We absolutely have the power to.
The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better!
Some of these graphs are highly inaccurate due to how the government skews employment data. For example, the government counts jobless people as "employed" if they return to their villages from cities due to lack of employment and occasionally help on family farms.
Agricultural employment has actually increased post covid [1][2]:
2018-2019: 42.5%
2022-2023: 45.8%
This isn't because the number of farms is growing, but because more people are working on the same farms due to lack of jobs elsewhere. This casts doubt on the overall poverty reduction narrative.
As someone of Indian descent, realistically speaking, Indian nutrition is going to be bad so long as the upper classes continue to moralize over it. Recently, there was a kerfuffle in Maharasthra because the state government wanted to remove eggs from the state lunch program and go lacto-vegan only. This is due to some people considering eggs unclean (like many other animal products). This sort of moralizing is extremely common in India, despite being a poor country. To put it bluntly, moralizing over diet is a past-time of the wealthy, not a way to run a country.
Interesting. There's seems to be some fuckery with Indian hunger data, i.e. malnourishment, stuntness have stalled at a relatively high level 10 years ago and even occasionally gets worse. Which kind of makes sense if one realizes India added 400 million mouths in last 20 years, and distribution is an issue. I remember also news a few years ago Indian average height decreasing, all proxy indicators that hunger/nutrition was not improving (granted this was during covid). But cultural drama over diet also explains a lot of it. Cultural drama seems to explain a lot in India... one other stark stat is Indian female work participation rate declined as country got wealthier... culture seems to be women stop working out of neccessity if men can sustain household. It's a... different development trajectory.
I honestly think most Indians eat too many calories, not too little. It's just trash nutritionally speaking, and deficient in protein, which is a large determinant of height. It's cultural
> It's a... different development trajectory.
My two cents: the rest of the world is highly westernized. If you consider Islam a western religion (which you should, since it's a derivative of Judaism, and is a cousin to Christianity), then basically all of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa was westernized with the Islamic conquests. Sub Saharan Africa has adopted western norms wholesale after colonization (no written language, so very hard to keep old customs). Later, China adopted communism (a western ideology), which made its way into parts of Korea and Southeast Asia, and Japan / Philippines were colonized by force. India actually stands out as never having undergone much of a western colonization. Obviously, the entirety of the Americas are the result of Spanish/British/etc colonization.
India stands out as the only country to have never been properly colonized, with a long written record. A lot of economic theories we have are really not universal truths, but things that only hold true in the global monoculture. That's why India's development trajectory is so different, and why states like Kerala basically defy all expectations (even if it's 'communist', it's 'communist' in a non-'communist' federal framework).
Again... my highly controversial opinion. I don't really pay a whole lot of attention, but this is my take.
Interesting! I agree that India’s colonial history is unique in that it wasn’t settled by Europeans like North America.
But Judaism isn’t a western religion, it’s a Middle Eastern religion with strong ethnic ties. Hence it hasn’t evolved and branched like all the major religions have. Christianity isn’t western religion either, but modern Protestantism and Roman Catholicism arguably are. Eastern Orthodox is actually a great example of the diversity of all major religions— they have national churches (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox).
Islam is multi ethnic of course and so there are branches that are western (Albania is an example) but calling Islam as a whole “western” is mostly incorrect.
Then let's just break it down between Jewish descended (Abrahamic) and not
China adopted communism which is ultimately a philosophy whose patrimony is European and all that entails.
> Eastern Orthodox is actually a great example of the diversity of all major religions— they have national churches (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox).
I mean... Sure and they still have common beliefs descended from Judaism and Christianity?
I think we agree but let me just as some nuance to what you’re saying.
The Jews didn’t invent their beliefs out of whole cloth—this is true whether it’s Judaism or communism (Karl Marx, Lenin, and most Russian communists were Jewish though I think you know that already). They borrowed monotheism and a bunch of their religion from local religions at the time. Jewish communists learned a great deal from the French Revolution. They put a Jewish stamp on these beliefs so to speak, then handed off some of those beliefs to other people who, like the Jews before them, discarded what didn’t make sense to them and kept what did. China is barely communist now, by Russian standards, it’s more fascist to be honest.
Another good example is how in modern Protestantism they talk a lot of about “the biblical definition of marriage,” when what they really mean is one man and one woman—more of a northwest European definition. The biblical definition of marriage is one man and one or more wives. But you can’t get a modern Protestant to accept what the Bible says because everyone reads their own beliefs into these religions.
There is no discernible ultimate source to any religion—it’s more like a chain of beliefs, where people take their existing beliefs and project them onto their religion.
Having said that, Hinduism is is a chain of beliefs that has stayed within the same ethnic group for a very long time, which maybe is what you’re saying? And that is indeed something rare and very precious.
While I agree morale is something for the riches (slavery ban, woman right… happens more where there’s many wealthy than when they are the exceptions), a diet-especially in a poor country- may also consider the efficiency (which some wealthy don’t give a sh*t because « they pay so they can »).
INMH the interesting questions is « what are the proteins options, considering the ressources of Indians/India? If your poultry is fed with soy you’ll have many times more proteins and other nutrients eating directly the beans instead of transforming them the eggs. However if your poultry find their food by themselves on a field, you have free eggs without input waste.
Eggs are an outstanding source of protein, culturally well-known, easy to transport, cook, etc.
I think your theoretical argument is - "what if instead of eggs we could feed hungry people with all the soy used to feed those chicken to produce those eggs?" You and I both know that's not going to happen.
Cheap meat sources are either banned by law (beef in some areas) or quite thoroughly socially banned due to the two major religions being Hinduism and Islam ie beef and pork. Hinduism technically does not forbid beef but the current strain of Ram-ization does vehemently so.
> INMH the interesting questions is « what are the proteins options, considering the ressources of Indians/India? If your poultry is fed with soy you’ll have many times more proteins and other nutrients eating directly the beans instead of transforming them the eggs. However if your poultry find their food by themselves on a field, you have free eggs without input waste.
Just completely and utterly false, and reflects the poor understanding of diet and nutrition that is pervasive throughout India and in Indian culture. There's a reason why Indians have the highest rates of metabolic syndrome. I've basically shirked all of it, and my blood numbers, weight, etc are substantially better than my parents and my brother.
Firstly, chickens eat more than soy, and chickens (and animals in general) can turn undigestible, useless biomatter into actual food (such as ruminants digesting grass, and then humans drinking milk or eating the flesh). Using animals, you are able to use much less bio-matter to get an equivalent amount of calories and nutrition, simply because humans are terrible at digesting.
That being said, on to eggs. Eggs are an excellent source for protein and orders of magnitude better than soy when looking at both the amino acid profile as well as the protein / calories.
One hard-boiled egg contains about 70 calories and 6 g protein.
Meanwhile, you'd need 50g boiled soybeans to get 6g protein. However, Soy is less bio-available (about 90%), so you'd actually need to eat about 6.6 g protein or 60 g soybean, containing about 70 calories. So far so good, right?
Wrong. Because soy beans are low in essential amino acids like methionine. For an average adult you need about 1.3g methionine / day. This is 3 eggs or 210 calories.
Meanwhile, you need about 480 g of soybean to meet your methionine requirement, which is 830 calories.
If you analyze the Indian diet, you'll realize it's replete with these sorts of insane substitutions, where a perfectly good source of nutrition, whose protein profile matches exactly the human requirement, is substituted for a sub-par product. Obviously, since these are requirements, you'll see Indians compensate by simply eating more to make up for the deficiency. But eating these vegetarian sources of protein in the right amount to get to the required intake leads to insanely high calorie numbers, which is why diabetes, stomach fat, heart problems, etc are so prevalent in India. And it's also why Indians in India are shorter than the Indians in the diaspora despite Indians in India actually eating more calories (hence the weight).
And that's just calories and basic metabolism, we're not even talking body composition, which again suffers within India simply because the best sources of protein are eschewed due to moralizing. There's a reason why Indians, despite constituting 25% of the planet, do not constitute a large portion of world-class athletes and have low average rates of grip strength. It's an insanely self-inflicted pathology.
To throw yet another option in, you could consider an LXC container per project, if they’re small and you don’t find you need Docker. LXC containers are basically multiprocess containers, unlike Docker’s single process containers, making them feel more like VMs and giving you a great dev experience.
Distribution: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
Share: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-in-poverty-relative...
The share tells a story that poverty is decreasing at all levels, relatively speaking. The distribution tells the additional story that population has increased: there may be less change in the number of people at the $20-30 level and the $30-40 level in recent decades than the share alone would suggest.