Jim Rogars investment biker
ML - The way the world works - analyzing how things work - A podcast by David Nishimoto
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Kazakhstan: "Kazakhstan had become a gigantic farmland, a desert that had bloomed into vast arable tracts." It had become 40 percent Russian, 2/3 of water provided from the Aral Sea, heavy salization, high rates of birth defects and infant mortality, and thirty mile coast line. "The Russians had thought they could use the water to turn the area into a cotton plantation. But they had treated the land the way they treated the oil fields we had passed: They stripped it and moved on." In communism you can ruin a resource without anyone saying halt. On the other hand, China in the seventies admitted its ways were not working and deregulated agriculture to teh peasants, allowing farmers to lease land for a very long time, and in some place buy it; the government allows the farmers to sell crops that they could sell for a profit on the world market; the farmers went wild; every field was planted and cultivated with items being reused and no waste; the farmers didn't strip the land; and China became an agricultural exporting country.