Part 1 made the case for GERD in the short and medium term. Now for the really big picture
2022/07/27
Nile basin mechanism design
2022/07/25
The case for GERD
Power
Economic impact
Climate impact
Water balance
Increased rainfall?
No reduction in flow
- Electricity generation doesn't consume water. As water, pulled by gravity, flows through turbines, the kinetic energy of the water becomes electric energy, and all the water comes out on the other side and flows downhill from there as always.
- When there is loss of water from a dam, it is because it has a reservoir, a lake. The larger the area of the lake, the larger the loss due to evaporation. Indeed at the High Aswan Dam in Egypt, located more than a thousand kilometers downstream from the GERD in a flatter and hotter area, the reservoir (Lake Nasser) is large and shallow, causing a significant loss of water to evaporation. The GERD however is situated in a gorge, so the lake it creates is much narrower and deeper (about 1,900 km2 for GERD vs 5,250 km2 for Lake Nasser). It's also in a cooler area. Thus the evaporation impact of GERD is much less than Aswan's. Further, the purpose of the reservoir is to regulate the flow, like a battery. In theory, if you have a reservoir upstream, you can reduce the size of a reservoir downstream. So if we naively forget political boundaries for a second, and assume Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia were 100% cooperative, to manage the total flow optimally, they would achieve the same magnitude of regulation by reducing the volume of Lake Nasser by the volume of GERD lake. Since GERD has relatively lower evaporation, this would be a net reduction in evaporation. But to keep things in perspective, evaporation accounts for less than 2 billion out of about 90 billion m3 /year of water flow on the Nile, so it's a minor issue.
- A much larger fear for downstream people is that the GERD might enable additional consumptive uses, like irrigation for agriculture. This is a legitimate general concern of course, and fairness and efficiency in consumptive uses is important. However, in the case of the GERD, its location at the most downstream point in Ethiopia, near the point where the river exits to Sudan, means that it would be infeasible to use any of the water from that point for agriculture, as you would have to pump it uphill to reach farms within Ethiopia. This effectively guarantees that GERD cannot physically be used for irrigation or any consumptive activity in Ethiopia.
Floods and drought mitigation
- "Sudan will clearly be better off ... because GERD operations will smooth Blue Nile flows, eliminating flood losses, increasing hydropower generation, decreasing sediment load to the reservoirs and canals, and, most importantly, increasing water for summer irrigation in the Gezira Scheme and other irrigated areas along the Blue Nile". To get a sense of the magnitude of this benefit, consider that flooding in 2020 caused over 100,000 homes to collapse and Sudan to declare a 3-month state of emergency.
- During droughts, it is expected that the existence of the GERD will cause "decreased water deficits to Egypt and increased water availability".
Filling
Geopolitics
[1]Another way of getting economic impact is to multiply production by average price to get the direct value of the energy, and then apply a GDP "multiplier" which estimates the downstream GDP impact (electricity enables goods and services, which in turn enable other goods and services etc.) The problem as you can imagine is that multipliers are very inexact. In a tweet on this topic a couple of years ago, I used the a multiplier of 1.6 which I now realize is too low. I also incorrectly used peak power instead of average. Coincidentally the two inaccuracies cancelled out and the GDP estimate was about the same.
2022/06/03
The 4th wave of Bitcoin FUD
I just came across Why This Computer Scientist Says All Cryptocurrency Should “Die in a Fire”. I can't find any point in there that hasn't already been refuted many times. But it's relatively rare to find so many of them in one place, and it has been going around, so I thought I should make a little effort to rebut it.
Security
Though not the most important aspect of the article, the "computer scientist" in the title is a not-too-subtle argument from authority, so it behooves us to take a look. The computer scientist in question is Nicholas Weaver, who I haven't heard of before, though from a brief look at his publications, I recognize some of his co-authors. It seems like his expertise is network security. So his most important contribution as an expert would be if he could find an actual technical security problem in Bitcoin. But of course he hasn't, in fact no one has successfully exploited Bitcoin. This is a rarely appreciated aspect of the network. Even though it's the world's largest honey pot, with literally several hundred billion dollars there for the taking, the entire codebase is open source, and all the data is on the public blockchain, no one has actually technically been able to "crack" Bitcoin. There is plenty of theft of Bitcoin of course, because people make mistakes with their keys etc. A scary bug was luckily fixed in the early days. Still no one has exploited the system itself. For any computer scientist, or anyone who has ever written software, this is very remarkable. As a network security expert, you'd think Weaver would at least mention it.
Maybe he has motivation for not saying anything positive? Indeed, apparently he's been declaring the death of Bitcoin so many times since 2013 that Weaver has earned a place in the Bitcoin Skeptic Hall of Fame. It seems like he has dug himself into an anti-Bitcoin emotional trap which is hard to climb out of.
Bubbles
Credentialism aside, his actual criticism consists of economic arguments. He points to the price of Bitcoin in USD and "bubbles" where it rose from $10 to $100 then "crashed". Then to $1000 and crashed. Then to $20,000 and crashed. Then to $60,000 and crashed. And confidently asserts that there won't be a fifth bubble, that this time it's really dead. But this only inadvertently points to the fact that he's been wrong so many times. Without any coherent explanation of why his previous predictions have failed, it's hard to believe him this time. A more honest view is to zoom out and look at it on a log scale, and notice that each "crash" bottoms out much higher than the previous one. So if one is going to reason purely from historical prices, then a reasonable observer would not confidently say that the last peak happens to be the final one before it goes to zero forever. That's like looking at a toddler learning how to walk and after the fourth time he falls down saying the kid will never walk. A more reasonable take is that if the Bitcoin price chart tells us anything, it's more likely the story of an emergent store of value. Of course, chart analysis to predict future prices is generally a fool's errand, and even more so with this unique phenomenon. There are not many analogues in history -- we don't have exchange rates of gold from 2500 years ago. It's better to think about Bitcoin from first principles and think about long term adoption while avoiding short term price predictions.
Adjacent crypto: altcoins, blockchains etc.
To make matters more confusing, most critics (and Weaver is no exception) put Bitcoin in a bucket with all the other cryptocurrencies, ICOs, NFTs etc. But almost all of the other stuff around "crypto" is junk, much of it unethical or even fraudulent.
Leaving aside the many outright frauds, the whole "altcoin" space reminds me a bit of the history of the Internet. In the 1980s and 90s, TCP/IP had alternatives like ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode). A lot argued that the IP network wouldn't scale, or wouldn't offer good enough QoS, etc. They argued that the net would never be used for serious things like the phone network or television. It's true that there are various trade-offs in the design of TCP and IP, even some arbitrary choices. You can argue for different ones in hindsight. And things do evolve, albeit slowly. Witness IPv6 getting deployed in a backward compatible way over more than 2 decades, while IPv4 continues to chug along. Even ATM was absorbed as a short-lived layer 2 protocol under IP. But there's only one Internet. That's the so-called network effect. If the protocol is good enough, early enough, it becomes the standard.
And that is where proponents and critics of "altcoins" are causing confusion and driving unjustified hostility to Bitcoin. Viewing Bitcoin as one of many "cryptocurrencies" masks a basic reality: Bitcoin is like the Internet of money and it is here to stay.
That said, I'm not against all other cryptocurrencies. For example a broader smart contract platform makes sense long term, and Ethereum may be the one for the ages. But there are significant technical hurdles remaining. And it's already so bloated very few people actually run a full Ethereum node. And that's all before the much delayed eth 2.0 migration, which if it succeeds may introduce a potentially fatal governance change called proof-of-stake. Building a "world computer" as it needs to be is much harder than what has been achieved to date.
"Blockchain not Bitcoin" is another common theme among "crypto" hopefuls. But without a real reason for decentralization, a blockchain is just an expensive and slow database. Most of the envisioned applications for blockchains can be more easily achieved with traditional databases.
Bitcoin's proof-of-work ledger for sound commodity money is to date the only real world blockchain use case.
Energy and Proof-of-Work
Speaking of proof of work, energy use is the most common and dangerous vector of FUD against Bitcoin, and Weaver recycles the usual points. He claims that Bitcoin miners are "wasting tons of electricity". This topic is deep and generally misunderstood. Here's my attempt to distill it in my paper entitled "Dynamics of Bitcoin mining":
Does mining use too much energy?
This question assumes the system requires some amount of computation to be done and that it ”wants” to minimize the energy to achieve it. That is indeed how most systems work. But not Bitcoin. Proof-of-work does the reverse of that. The system ”wants” a certain value to be spent on energy, and the amount of computation adjusts to achieve it. Of course individual miners compete by being as efficient as possible, but the resulting collective behavior is to achieve a certain cost of energy with variable amounts of computation, not to perform a specific amount of computation with variable amounts of energy.
This unusual combination – individual participants being efficiency-seeking but their collective behavior being efficiency-neutral – is very counter-intuitive and probably the root cause of much misguided hostility. It’s also worth emphasizing that the amount of energy doesn’t matter, only the cost. If the price of electricity relative to everything else in the world doubles, but nothing else changes, then Bitcoin would simply use half the amount of energy to achieve the same relative cost[...] The cost of energy is a feature not a bug, and ”waste” is impossible by design. All of the energy is ”work”.
And where there’s no ”waste”, the question of energy use boils down to a moral judgement. Can you argue that heating in the winter, even if perfectly efficient, is not justified and people should move to warmer climates? What about air conditioning, or electric clothes dryers, or ice cream? When is any purposeful energy use justified? Morally, as long as access to and the price of energy is fair, what it’s used for should be accepted as a subjective choice. Bitcoin offers the possibility of inflation-resistant savings, low-cost long-distance value transfer, and censorship-resistant money. For its users, these are important benefits which are no less justified than most other uses of energy.
In the same interview, Weaver attacks the notion that Bitcoin "incentivizes green power", and goes on to misrepresent the incentives, and the supply and demand dynamics of electric power. I covered this too in the same paper:
Many sources of renewable energy are highly variable: solar and wind power depend on time of day and weather, hydroelectric power is seasonal, etc. In general, these ups and downs on the supply side do not line up perfectly with the demand for electricity. Further, even with the largest possible batteries, water reservoirs, etc., electric energy remains extremely difficult to store for later use at a large scale. Thus there is often a lot of ”stranded” energy when using renewable sources. Just like off-peak bandwidth in telecommunication networks, or empty seats on scheduled airline flights, the cost of production is already sunk, and so for the supplier, selling stranded power at any price is better than letting it go unused. [...] The competitive dynamics of Bitcoin mining are such that it shifts in time and space to the lowest available cost of electricity. This occurs not just by deploying hardware to various locations, but also by turning miners on or off instantly. This flexible demand-side support makes mining the ideal customer to balance variable supply, and as variability tends to affect renewable much more than fossil fuel sources, in effect, Bitcoin subsidizes the development of ”green” electricity.
Adoption
Finally, Weaver claims that Bitcoin will permanently fall apart Real Soon Now™, when it runs out of suckers. But there's really no basis for his claim. He doesn't give any reason why the number of suckers is a particular fraction of the world's population and why that limit has been reached now. Why didn't it run out after 1M people? Or 100M? Why not 8 billion people?
Of course, the success of Bitcoin depends on widespread adoption. Why is gold used as money? You can try to explain it based on some key properties: it's impossible to synthesize, the supply is limited, it's fungible and can be shaped easily, it doesn't degrade... Those are useful, but we don't know if they are sufficient. The emergence of a monetary good is a fascinating topic, one that most people don't understand and don't even realize that they don't know. ("The Origins of Money", an article which predates Bitcoin, is a good read). Ultimately, Bitcoin is just a Schelling point whose emergence is highly path dependent.That's just a fancy way of saying "we'll see", but every day that passes makes the ultimate success more likely, and it's been almost 5000 days already.
2022/01/22
Doomsday argument
And now for something completely different: a fun little probability puzzle.
What's the probability that the human race will end some time in the next 100 years? Surprisingly this question has a logical answer. And not because we have some magic crystal ball. In fact, our puzzle specifically assumes we have no information at all about the future.
Here's how it goes. Let's step out of time for a second, and consider the total number of humans who will ever exist. Let's say that number is N. If you are of the Abrahamic faiths, you can call the first one Adam. But we're just having fun so we'll just number them from first to last: 1,2,3, ..., N. Now let n be your number. So 1 < n < N, you are somewhere between the first and the last person ever. Since we have no information about the future, we have no clue if you are near the end or near the beginning or somewhere in the middle. You just happened to land at some random position in the long line of humans. So we have to assume that any position is equally likely, or technically that n is uniformly distributed between 1 and N. The chance that you are in a particular interval is equal to how big that interval is relative to the whole sequence. There's a 50% chance that you are in the first half and 50% chance that you are in the second half, there's a 95% chance that you are in the first 95% and a 5% chance that you are in the last 5% of people, etc. So P(n < f*N) = f and P(n>f*N) = 1-f, for any fraction f between 0 and 1.
We don't know N, but we can estimate n, because we can approximately calculate the cumulative population to date. This is more accurate than you might think because the parts really long time ago where we have poor estimates are also the times where there were very few people. The left tail is long but thin. Estimates now are around n = 117 billion.
From the above, the distribution of N is P(N<n/f) = 1-f. That means there's a 5% chance that N < 123B i.e. that there are only 6 billion babies to go before the last one. If we translate that into time, using the current rate of 140M births per year, it means there's a 5% chance that we have less than 43 years left! And a 50-50 chance that we'll be around for another 800 years. At the other end, a 5% chance that we have more than 16,000 years left, and so on.
I heard about this puzzle known as the "doomsday argument" about a year ago. Of course you can debate about whether this is a realistic model, but it's a cute way to provoke thought about all the minor risks we collectively worry about and the big ones we don't consider rationally.
Reminds me of a few scenarios discussed in this blog a long time ago: ineffective posturing on climate change, the asteroid lottery , political pandering in a pandemic... Ouch ouch ouch! Sadly humanity doesn't seem to have gotten wiser in the decade (!) since those posts... 43 years seems like an awfully short time. At least math is eternal!
2021/11/24
What happened in Ethiopia? Simplistic narrative
It's not very simple, sorry Matt, but the following is about as simple as it can be made:I could use a simplistic Good Guys vs Bad Guys narrative on the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia — what’s on offer?
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 23, 2021
- In 1991, the communist regime of Ethiopia was overthrown by a coalition of rebel groups led by the TPLF and the EPLF, and joined by OLF and others. This alliance masked a contradiction, EPLF was a multi-ethnic party fighting for independence of the then-province of Eritrea from Ethiopia, and TPLF was an ethnic party, while the two were led by members of the same ethnic group.
- OLF sooned fell out with TPLF and became an armed opposition group and its leaders went into exile.
- In 1993, under EPLF (renamed PFJD), Eritrea became an independent country.
- The TPLF became the dominant party in Ethiopia and instituted a system of ethnic apartheid where different ethnic groups had separate regions and parties.
- In 1998 the former allies had a falling out and war broke out between Eritrea and Ethiopia. After 2 years the massive war ended in a stalemate and the two governments remained enemies for the next 18 years.
- Economically, the formerly Marxist TPLF adopted a "developmental state" model, where the government had tight controls on many areas, but was much freer than the fully communist system that preceded it. GDP growth was very high in the 2000s. However, party affiliated businesses dominated the economy, cronyism and corruption were high and resentment of the TPLF elite grew.
- The TPLF ruled until 2018 with an iron fist, within a coalition called EPRDF. In the 2005 elections, opposition parties made significant gains for the first time and TPLF responded with a massive crackdown, opposition leaders were imprisoned many receiving death sentences. In the following elections, the ruling party "won" 545 out of 547 seats in 2010, and 100% of the seats in the 2015 elections. Ethiopia often topped the world charts of number of journalists and opponents imprisoned.
- Discontent grew to a boiling point and after several years of massive protests TPLF lost power in 2018. Abiy Ahmed a member of a junior party in the coalition called OPDO was chosen to lead EPRDF. Abiy dissolved the coalition and formed a new party called PP. All the constituent parties of EPRDF merged into PP, except TPLF which refused and retreated to its home province of Tigray where it continued to dominate.
- From 2018 to 2020, Abiy started a series of reforms, liberalizing key economic sectors, freeing political prisoners, inviting exiled opposition politicians to return, legalizing banned opposition parties, and making a peace treaty with Eritrea, which earned him a Nobel peace prize.
- Meanwhile, TPLF repeatedly defied the federal government, harboring individuals indicted for assassination attempts, corruption, etc. During this period TPLF still dominated the top ranks of the federal armed forces and the economy, and its regional militia was widely believed be larger than the federal army. TPLF used its considerable resources to instigate ethnic conflicts throughout the country. From the OLF, which was now a legal political party, a more radical group called the OLA split off and launched an armed struggle. For 2 years the federal government bent over backwards to avoid direct conflict with TPLF, attempted negotiations, sent groups of "elders" to mediate, etc. At the same time Abiy was working to reduce the TPLF's grip on the military.
- In 2020, the independent Electoral Commission, led by a former opposition leader Birtukan Mideksa, postponed federal elections because of Covid-19. All major parties except TPLF agreed to the postponement. In September, TPLF held its own elections in Tigray where it "won" 100% of the seats, and declared that it no longer recognized the federal government. In October, when the government appointed new leaders for the federal military bases in the Tigray region, the TPLF rejected and turned back the appointees.
- Finally on the night of November 3-4 2020, the TPLF launched what it called a "pre-emptive" attack and seized 5 federal military bases in Tigray (the Northern Command) which held an estimated 80% of the country's military hardware. As part of it, TPLF loyal soldiers in the federal army attacked their colleagues from within the barracks, murdering hundreds in their sleep, a move which was seen as a deep betrayal in the Ethiopian military.
- In response, the federal government launched what it called a "law enforcement operation" to bring those responsible for the attack to justice.
- On November 9-10, as fighting raged throughout Tigray, a TPLF group called Samri killed hundreds of civilians in a place called Mai Kadra. Mai Kadra is in a region which was annexed to Tigray in the early 1990s, but was previously part of Begemder (aka Gonder) province, which is now in the Amhara region. On November 29, following battles where control of the city of Axum changed hands from TPLF to the Eritrean army, Eritrean soldiers conducted house to house raids and killed hundreds of men they claimed were part of the fighting.
- The federal army, with the help of Amhara region forces and Eritrean military, managed to regain control of the main cities and towns in Tigray region and declared the "law enforcement operation" finished by the end of November 2020
- However the war continued, with accusations of war crimes being made by TPLF against Eritrean and Ethiopian military and echoed by mainstream media in the West. The Ethiopian government prosecuted a number of individuals for war crimes, but denied systematic war crimes. The Ethiopian government also said that it was supplying the overwhelming majority of the aid to civilians in Tigray affected by the war, while outside forces were using aid as a cover to provide military support to TPLF.
- In June 2021, the postponed federal elections were held and the PP won a large majority. A few parties including OLF boycotted, and the elections were delayed to September in about 20% of the country. But overall it was the freest vote ever held in the country. In terms of popular mandate, PM Abiy is by far the most legitimate head of government the country has had in our lifetimes.
- Meanwhile, the TPLF had regrouped and by June 2021, with diplomatic (and possibly covert military) support from the US, regained the military initiative in an operation it called "Operation Alula" throughout Tigray
- The federal government declared a unilateral ceasefire on June 28 and withdrew from Tigray.
- From July to November 2021, having regained control of most of Tigray, the TPLF went on the offensive outside of Tigray on three fronts going deep into neighboring regions: east into the Afar region, south into Wollo and south-west into Gonder in the Amhara region. The offensive was defeated on the eastern and south-western fronts, but successful in the southern direction, capturing the key city of Dessie and, with help from the OLA, advanced to less than 300km from Addis Abeba.
2021/11/14
Ethiopia and the ethnicity rat race - part 2: history
Part 1 looked at ethnic federalism in Ethiopia through a geographic lens, and showed it has a bug: that it's not feasible to geographically separate ethnic groups.
In this post, let's take the historical perspective. The philosophical foundation of ethnic federalism emerged in the early 1970s, as a solution to the problem called "Ethiopia as a prison of nations". Here's one summary:
"As early as the middle of the fourth century, military expeditions may have reached the area later known as Amhara. By the mid-ninth century, four centuries later, a distinctive Amhara region was recognized. The conquering Semitic-speakers spoke a language which was perhaps only four to seven centuries removed from the common origin with Giiz"
Source: The origin of Amharic, Ethiopian Journal of Language and Literature, Vol. 1 No. 1 (1983)
"According to one written source obtained from the Yajju Oromo inhabitants of the Amhara National Regional State, these peoples are mentioned as inhabitants of northern Ethiopia already before the 14th century. This document deals with the rise and fall of the Yajju dynasty. According to this source, the Bokoji clan was the first Oromo settler of Yajju. Later on, however, the Muslim Oromo of the Yajju known as Warra-Sheih family took the territory of the Bokoji clan. From the early settlers of Bokoji clan in Yajju, the same document cites the names of the founding fathers like Kumbi, Marso, Shekka and Abba Dimbar. Maliye, Gammada and Ilman Oromo. At present, this region is found in southern Waldiya. The man named Abba Dimbar Maliye occupied and settled in the present region of Gubbaa Laftoo."
Source: "History of the Oromo to the Sixteenth Century", Alemayehu Haile, Boshi Gonfa, Daniel Deressa, Senbeto Busha, Umer Nure (2004)
"The present-day settlers of Wajirat named Dobba are difficult to identify whether or not they belong to Offla or Marawa Oromo, but they are known to have been old Oromo settlers of Northern Ethiopia. Igguy and Marawa Oromo are said to have been settled in Wajirat since ancient times and that they are prior settlers. This period preludes the reign of the renowned Christian King Amda Siyon (1314-44) and this king himself is said to have recruited Oromo into his army [...] At present Wajjirat is bounded by Afar in the east, Inderta in the west, and Rayya in the south. The settlement area of Rayya which begins from southern Wajirat extends southwards as far as Amba Alage or Endamehone. The southern part of Rayya territory is known as Rayya and Azebo whereas the southern territory is known as Rayya and Qobbo. The Dobba Oromo that settled over the mountainous highland territories is traditionally known by the name of Chittu-Ofa. There are several Oromo tribes known with the name Dobba that are living in Hararge, northern Shawa and other Oromo regions."
It might surprise some readers to find ancient Oromo presence so far from present day Oromia. Further, how can you reconcile that with the common (mis)conception of Oromos as "invaders" who arrived in the 16th century? One possible explanation, from the same source, is:
"Oral tradition collected from the Macha Oromo elders tell us that there are two groups of Oromo settlers in Western Oromia. One group consists of pastoralist Oromo that came and settled in the region during the 16th century organizing itself under a military leadership of the Gada system. Another group consists of sedentary agriculturalists that lived in the region long years before the advent of the pastoralist Oromo. The earlier group called itself "Orom-Duro." It means the ancient or prior Oromo. They used this term to make a distinction with the pastoralist Oromo"
Note that the word "d'ro" means "long time ago" in Amharic. There are indeed many basic words in modern Amharic that are similar to Oromo words, which should not be surprising given all of the above. History shows that the Oromo culture is one of, if not the most successful in Ethiopia, in the evolutionary sense. It has been expanding, assimilating, and influencing others for over a thousand years. (Another source is this book by Martial de Salviac, a fascinating read for modern readers with a thick skin, I will post a review when time permits).
But XLF doctrinaires of the last few decades, e.g. in the OLF, tend to cast the Oromo as victims. A very sad misconception. Unfortunately it's a very effective strategy for ambitious politicians to exploit. I am reminded of this comment by Tigist Gemeda on a previous post on this blog (see also her more recent tweet). Her grandfather was a Balambaras, a high ranking Ethiopian during the reign of Haile Selassie I, but some of his family in the present day are key OLFites who "manipulate" people and exploit a sense of "persecution" for political ambition. Very courageous and powerful stuff.
My meandering through history is very incomplete, I only mentioned 7 out of the 80+ ethnic groups, focusing, not coincidentally, on the areas at the heart of the current war. The point is not to give a complete history. Nor is it to debate whether there has been ethnic discrimination and conflicts. The answer is obviously yes there has! Nor is it an argument for centralization. I happen to believe in decentralization and localism, but not along artificial "procrustean" ethnic lines. Rather it is to show that the "prison of nationalities" concept of Ethiopian history is wrong. You can call it a melting pot, a chessboard, a game of thrones etc. But it's not a recently built "prison" of pre-existing ethnic groups yearning for separation.I don't expect to convince any XLF true believers with this post. It's almost impossible to change someone's mind when their livelihood or public persona is deeply invested in an idea, no matter how wrong it is. But many well-intentioned people have fallen for this false solution. They think: "if only X group was free from Y ethnic group...", "X has always oppressed Y...", etc. So they buy into "solutions" based on the false conception, judging people by their ethnicity, ascribing collective ethnic guilt for political injustice, blaming present individuals for past sins committed by members of their group etc. They are like the poor old lady who, a few years ago, wanted to repair a deteriorated fresco in a Spanish church. She had the kindest intentions, and she thought it was a simple matter of applying a bit of paint here and there. But the more she did, the worse it got, and she tried to fix her mistakes with more of the same. The result was perhaps the "worst art restoration of all time":
Ethiopia is like that painting: old, damaged, but can only be understood as a beautiful whole.2021/11/04
Ethiopia and the ethnicity rat race - part 1: geography
Metric: To make the point objective, let us introduce a precise definition of "ethnic diversity". For example, if region A has three ethnic groups each representing 1/3 of the population, and region B has 4 groups with 55%, 15%, 15%, 15%, which one is more "diverse"? You could say B is more diverse since it has 4 groups and A has only 3. Or you could say B is less diverse because there's a clear majority group. So what's a good metric of diversity? You could ask similar question about anything that is based on a probability distribution. For example for income inequality, they use the Gini-coefficient. Here, I decided to use the following metric: if you take two random people from a population, what's the probability that they belong to the same group? This captures the following intuitive idea: how likely is it that your neighbor, or your classmate, or a person you meet on the street is from another group? This metric has a simple formula, which is 1 - Σipi2, where pi represents the fraction of the population that belongs to group i.
2021/11/03
How old is Ethiopia?
There are quite a few possible answers:
- At one extreme, you could argue Ethiopia is just 27 years old, since the current constitution of the federal republic was implemented in 1994. But that's obviously silly, no one argues for example that France is only 63 years old because the current system (their fifth republic) started in 1958.
- Or you could say it's 28 years old since Eritrea separated in 1993. But no one argues the US is only 62 years old because the 50th state joined in 1959.
- How about the claim, fashionable since the 1970s, that it's 150 years old. This dates it to the reign of Menelik II during which many of the neighbors became European colonies, thus setting roughly the current shape of the map. Or to Tewodros II (1855), the end of a few decades of "zemene mesafint" where the central government was weak, which many consider the start of the "modern" period. But just the fact that II in the names is already a hint that this doesn't make sense. The people who were there at the time saw themselves as continuing something, not inventing a new country.
- A well established answer is that it started in 1270 AD, the end of the Zagwe period of Lalibela fame, and the start of the Solomonic dynasty's rule. From that point forward, there's a huge amount of written history, both internal and external.
- Another answer is to the reign of Ezana, when the name first started being used internally, around 330 AD.
- The word Ethiopia itself is of course older, and is believed to be of Greek origin. It can be found in Herodotus in the 5th century BC, and throughout antiquity. But this was an "exonym", and some say it applies to the entire continent which they didn't even know the shape of.
- Many Ethiopians say it's 3000 years, going back to Queen of Sheba and Solomon, who lived around 900 BC. But, while this is the legendary foundation of Ethiopia, it's not exactly documented history.
- And some say the first Ethiopian was Lucy who lived about 3 million years ago. But, while this archaeological find is monumental in the history of humanity, and a great source of pride for Ethiopians, it's a bit silly to call her Ethiopian, especially since she was just a random Australopithecus whose bones we happened to find. Politics is hard enough even for us Homo Sapiens, let's not drag the poor little "girl" into this.
2021/07/14
A brief experiment with Truth
- "Washington" heard about the war before it started
- Coons called Abiy and tried to talk him out of starting the war
- Abiy wanted the war and predicted swift victory before it started
- There is no mention in the article of the actual event that started the war, namely the Nov 4 attack by TPLF on the national army.
- First it is saying the call happened in early November before the start of the war, and before the US election, so it must have been Nov 1-3. At that time Coons was running for reelection. It is hard to believe that a US Senator is making phone calls to foreign leaders in the last 48 hours of his own election campaign.
- Second, the reason Senator Coons has been involved lately is as a personal emissary of President Biden. They are both from Delaware, Coons took Biden's seat in the Senate when Biden became VP, and it is not unusual for a sitting president or a president-elect to have personal emissaries do some international diplomacy for them. What is unusual is for this to happen before he's elected. And it is even more surprising that candidate Biden would be focused on Ethiopia while he is in the final hours of his own very intense presidential campaign!
- Third, consider how might have "word reached Washington" about a war that hasn't started. Who gets "word" about alleged secret military plans of a foreign country? Is the claim that Biden was getting secret foreign intelligence while he was still a candidate? The Trump adminstration and Biden transition were not even cooperating *after* the election, so if there really was a secret channel of intelligence to Biden this would be news!
- Fourth a quick look at Senator Coons website shows that his calls are logged. For example the Nov 23 call is there and is consistent with what was widely reported at the time. But there is no record of a call in early November. Strange exception.
And again two weeks later.Convo between Coons & Abiy was on Nov 23, NOT before Nov 3 as you claim: https://t.co/JHIzenPLGo
— Nemo Semret (@nemozen) June 21, 2021
Or was it a secret one? Changing timeline to reverse cause and effect? You did this in May 13 and Feb 27 articles. https://t.co/s8qHCR1KTq pic.twitter.com/LxJa5KFDSR
Finally today, (thanks to @Noslata and many others) Declan Walsh responded! He said the article was updated, and blamed the falsehood on Coons misremembering the dates.
After publication Senator Coons said he misremembered the date and the story has been corrected and appended. https://t.co/nuHeSHaokS
— Declan Walsh (@declanwalsh) July 14, 2021