the italo-balbo and the fourth shore

Honestly, we have exploding phones and manually controlled cars. Those are the two biggest things people will look back at and go... But why?

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Oh the Whales Documentary, I love that

>Can any Kiwis confirm if we're now to call New Zealand "Aotearoa"?

I like the name Aotearoa, but New Zealand is still our better known and probably official name. There is talk about changing it to Aotearoa. Call us it if you want :)

Māori has slightly different vowels and language to other Pacific languages. They are reasonably close to Hawaiian and Samoan, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yac8HTQ9YLQ

This video has a fine pronunciation. In practise, the vowel blend of A and o blend into one, and ea and oa are said separately.

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Fossil fuels! If we manage to survive and outgrow them, they’ll eventually be as alien to us as murdering sperm whales for lamp oil is to us now.

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Any book recommendations related to Italian Colonialism? This article is really interesting and I’d love to do a deeper dive!

Cars.

So back then, people got inside these metal boxes which they drove themselves, hurtling them around even residential areas. There were licenses, but almost anyone could get one and everyone had one.

That sounds dangerous.

Oh yes, thousands of people died every year. But AI wasn’t good enough to steer them yet.

But why did the use them in cities???

Can any Kiwis confirm if we're now to call New Zealand "Aotearoa"? And does pronunciation follow the same rules as Hawaiian and Samoan, where you just pronounce each letter individually?

She literally had to stop in every village to buy out the supply, because they only sold it in small bottles and their engine wasn’t exactly fine-tuned for fuel-efficiency.

The legend goes that following that experience she suggested to set up what we would now call “gas stations” along the roads…

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If you took the volume from the Great Lakes you could sink the continental US in 6 feet of water IIRC.

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>There's a quote from John Robert Seely - "We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind". I always took that as "we really didn't know what we were doing."

That is a good way of looking at it. It's pretty much Capital Market expansion seeping into whatever cracks it found across the world. British merchants would find a neat port, and the navy and army would soon follow behind them (either to deny that area to European competitors, or to enforce the economic interests of the merchants through violence).

There was never any grand central plan or vision to it. No council of rulers sitting together in a room saying "we are going to forge a big empire!" Just the ruthless pursuit of financial interests leading them there over the years.

“These devices spewed known poisons everywhere.”

Thomas Midgely Jr, the principal developer of lead in gasoline, also developed one of the first CFCs (Chlorofluorocarbons.) In 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted polio, which left him severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the device and died of strangulation.

So he kind of took care of himself. The one man who probably caused more harm to the environment than any other individual in history.

> the British were unable to change them or simply uninterested?

Can be both. At the height of the empire, Britain's population was only 47 million, while India stood at 400 million. It's hard to really change people when they outnumber you 10 times over.

Besides the logistical barrier, the British Empire didn't need to change India, ruling India without changing up its cultures too radically was working out just fine. Why tear down already functioning structures of power when you don't need to? Many parts of India were ruled through local Indian rulers, who aligned themselves with the British Empire (be it for personal enrichment or simply accepting that they had no other alternative). Playing off pre-exisiting animosity also worked out great, it was much easier to rule over diverse people's who had a past history of fighting each other, than it is to rule over a newly unified homogenised culture.

I think its the 4th by volume? And not largest by surface area. Caspian Sea is a lake.

> Yet somehow people from this subcontinent still get along with the British, possibly better than the other way around.

What do you mean by "get along" in this context? Because obviously on an individual person to person basis, getting along is very easy and (sane) individuals won't let nationality get in the same way of cordial socialization.

There's also the fact that the British Empire is slowly fading into the past with every year that goes by, and the problems of the future are coming up. People won't dedicate too much energy towards hating a past foe when they literally have nuclear warheads pointed at the present one. It didn't take long for Poland's hate for Germany to be replaced with a hostility to Russia, because the Russians were/are much more recent.

I found it pretty hard to follow. Kinda falls apart somewhere around the middle.

There's also the Dutch VOC who operated in Indonesia, and whose market value actually exceeded the British EIC.

Certainly didn't help (the British) that diseases like Malaria, Yellow fever, etc. thrived in tropical climates such as in Southern India. European men used to drop dead like flies from these diseases.