A Bit More Detail

• Centauri Dreams notes new studies suggesting the flares of red dwarf stars damage potentially habitable planets.


• The Crux notes that the wild apple is going extinct.
  
• D-Brief notes that recent high winds in Europe helped push energy prices there to negative territory.


• The Frailest Thing considers Neil Postman's thoughts on the intersection of mass media and childhood.


• Inkfish argues in favour of accidental wetlands in urban areas.
  
• Language Log looks at the trope of the repeated character in some recent Chinese advertising.


• The LRB Blog considers the costs, environmental and otherwise, to the United States' leaving the Paris climate agreement.


• Marginal Revolution wonders what assumptions about deep history the news of Homo sapiens' longer history overturn.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that, in the area of energy costs, mid-20th century Uruguay was worse off than New Zealand.
  
• The Russian Demographics Blog looks at polling on Russian opinions about the Russian Far East and its future.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell is skeptical about Jeremy Paxman's claims about privacy in modern journalism.

• Bad Astronomy notes the literally cosmic homophobia of Louie Gohmert.


• The Big Picture notes a Chinese factory set to make a fortune off of making masks of the American presidential candidates.


• blogTO notes the raising of the Trans and Pride flags at Toronto City Hall, marking the beginning of Pride month.


• Crooked Timber notes the racism that erased the genealogy of African-Americans.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Britain's NHS has rejected PrEP again.


• Language Log notes the sensitivity of the local version of the name "Pikachu" in Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong.


• The LRB Blog reports from the scene of an active volcano in Nicaragua.


• Marginal Revolution notes that witchcraft apparently does hurt economic progress.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer wonders why New Zealand and Uruguay, with such similar economies, saw such substantial economic divergence after 1950.


• Peter Rukavina reports on an interesting Asian food store in Charlottetown.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes a Russian claim that condoms cause HIV transmission.

Uruguayans love their beef, wine and cheap Chinese cars that used to account for almost a quarter of new vehicle sales. But competition from low-cost Brazilian and Indian cars has sent Chinese sales into a tailspin this year.

Chinese passenger vehicle sales tumbled almost 34 percent year-on-year during the first 10 months of 2015, compared to a 9 percent decline in the total market, according to data from Uruguayan automotive trade group ACAU.

China’s market share in Uruguay, once the highest in Spanish-speaking South America, has plunged with sales. Brands such as BYD, Geely and Chery represented 17 percent of new passenger vehicle sales this year, down from 23 percent in 2014.

The devaluation of the Brazilian real, which has helped Volkswagen and Fiat factories in Brazil, and Suzuki imports from India have forced dealerships to cut prices on Chinese vehicles, Santiago Guelfi, a director at BYD and Peugeot distributor Sadar, said earlier this month.

When it kicked off in 1991, Mercosur, the abbreviated name for the Mercado Comun del Sur, or the "South American Common Market," looked like a winner. Latin America had cashiered its dictators and begun to open its borders. Free trade winds were blowing, and the region's emerging democracies wanted to join forces to cash in on the global bonanza.

[. . .]

A renewed Mercosur would lead the way. On paper, the trade bloc is a juggernaut. If it were a country, it would have the world's fifth-largest economy and a population of 295 million.

Solidarity made a good bumper sticker, but it didn't translate easily into good trade policy. As the raw materials boom subsided, markets retracted and protectionism returned. Governments raised non-tariff barriers and imposed import quotas against their neighbors.

The customs union announced in 1994 ought to have been completed by 2006. With luck, said Lia Valls, trade expert at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, "the agreement will be in place by 2018 or 2019."

Meantime, just about anything goes. Some trade analysts estimate that up to half of the goods traded between Mercosur partners do not benefit from the reduced common tariff. "Uruguay does what it wants. Argentina doesn't want free trade, and Brazil doesn't lead," Mauro LaViola, head of Brazil's Export Association, told me.

• Al Jazeera notes the rivalry between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, observes claims of persecution by evangelical Christians of followers of traditional African religions in Brazil, notes that separatism is unpopular in Scotland's border regions, considers the problems of a beetle theme park in the penumbra of Japan's Fukushima, looks at a Palestinian-American model, and considers rap music in Iran.


• The Atlantic notes how events have vindicated the American Congress' Barbara Lee, the only person not to vote in favour of granting unlimited war-making powers to the American presiden after 9/11, looks at the existential problems of Yiddish outside of ultra-Orthodox communities, and examines Stephen King's thinking on how to teach writing.


• Bloomberg notes the water problems of Detroit, looks at proposals to give Scotland home rule and Euroskepticism among the English, considers claims that Scotland might need huge reserves to back up its currency, notes ways sanctions threaten oil deals with Russian companies, examines Poland's natural gas issues and those of the rest of central and southeastern Europe, notes Ukraine's exclusion of Russian companies from a 3G cellular auction, notes the reluctance of Scottish banks to support an independent Scotland, and observes how domestic protectionism in Argentina is boosting Uruguay's beef exports to Europe.


• The Bloomberg View argues that it should be possible to cleanly break up even established nation-states, is critical of what Colombia is doing to Venezuelan refugees, argues that the achievements of social insects like acts are irrelevant to more complex beings like us, and suggests Britain has no place to criticize China over Hong Kong.


• CBC notes the strength of Inuit oral history following the discovery of one of the Franklin Expedition's ships, notes that the type of cancer that killed Terry Fox is now highly curable, and notes NDP leader Thomas Mulcair's proposal of a $15 an hour federal minimum wage.


• The Inter Press Service notes Uzbekistan's fear of Russia motivating a look for eastern allies and suggests that an anti-discrimination law can worsen the plight of sexual minorities in Georgia.


• MacLean's notes that Mexican economic development is good for Canada, looks at Catalonian secessionism, and suggests that a new EI tax credit won't help Canadian business boost employment.


• Open Democracy looked at the likely outcome of Crimean elections under Russian rule.


• The Toronto Star revisited the unsettled state of affairs in the Central African Republic.

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait approves of the names of Pluto's two most recently-discovered moons, Kereberos and Styx.


• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling observes that Altavista is set to disappear from the Internet as of the 8th.


• Daniel Drezner notes that the inability of Edward Snowden to find a country to grant him, buster of state secrets, asylum demonstrates that states around the world like keeping their prerogatives and secrets intact.


• Commemorating the accession of Croatia to the European Union, Eastern Approaches visits a Dubrovnik that is virtually an enclave on account of the Bosnian frontier, and, at the other end of the Croatian arc, a Vukovar still caught up by ethnic conflict and the legacies of the Serb war in Slavonia.


• Far Outliers notes the decline of immigrant Japanese Buddhism in Hawaii.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer explains why Uruguay, contrary to the wishes of many Argentines including--apparently--the president, is a country separate from Argentina.


• Registan approves of alumnus Sarah Kendzior's examination of the plight of Uzbek migrants, stigmatized by the Karimov dictatorship as lazy for trying to earn a living and forced to witness the victimization of their relatives if they do anything wrong.


• Savage Minds quotes from Umberto Eco's definition of fascism.


• The Tin Man celebrates, as a coupled American gay man, the end of DOMA.


• Torontoist reports that much of the controversy over the Walmart on the fringes of Kensington Market might be--according to the designer--a consequence of a lack of understanding of the design.


• Van Waffle reports on highlights of his 2012 breeding bird survey.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell reports on David Goodhart's still-dodgy use of statistics.

For a start-up that has a hit video game for the iPhone, the new loft-style offices of Ironhide Game Studio are exactly what one would expect — a newly hired staff labors feverishly on software updates not far from a pinball machine and custom-built monster arcade cabinet intended for letting off steam.

But the company, a success in the fiercely competitive field of video game development, stands out from other high-tech ventures in one respect: its unconventional location, which frequently confuses people abroad. “They politely ask, ‘Where is Uruguay?’ ” said Álvaro Azofra, one of the three founders of Ironhide, the company behind Kingdom Rush, a lucratively popular game in the United States that involves a cartoonish kingdom under attack by marauding yetis and ogres.

Squeezed between Brazil and Argentina and long dependent on commodities exports, Uruguay may be better known for its flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. But attention is now shifting to the country’s growing constellation of start-ups that are engineering video games for computers and hand-held devices.

Developers point to a variety of reasons that Uruguay has been able to compete with South America’s larger economies, whether the creativity of its engineers and commercial artists or its relatively relaxed immigration rules and extensive use of computers in schools.

[. . .]

Gaming studios have also emerged in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s two largest cities, but developers there complain of byzantine tax regulations and labor rules that make hiring employees costlier than in some rich industrialized countries. In Argentina, dozens of game-developing start-ups have been founded in Buenos Aires.

But while Argentina has traditionally had more companies in the industry, some of the momentum is seen shifting across the border to Uruguay as Argentine ventures struggle with abrupt changes in economic policy, including the tightening of currency controls that have complicated operations for exporters.

Would-be director Federico Alvarez, who runs a post-production visual effects house in Uruguay, filmed 'Panic Attack' with a budget of just $500 in his free time.

The five minute clip - which he then uploaded to YouTube - shows an invasion of Montevideo by giant robots and had special effects which could rival many big budget movies.

Once online it got the attention of thousands of movie fans… and (not surprisingly) studio bosses who wanted to meet with Alvarez to talk about his movie.

The 30-year-old was whisked to LA where he was offered a $1 million directors fee and up to £30 million to make the film, by Mandate Pictures. The plans for the movie are said to have a "compelling original story" beyond big robots blowing stuff up.

Alvarez has also been put up in a new apartment, given a new car and will work with "Spider-Man" director Sam Raimi on developing the film.

In 1875 a handful of families from the Veneto region of northern Italy, fleeing hardship and hunger, took ship for the Empire of Brazil. Disembarking in Porto Alegre in the southeast, they hacked their way for over 100 kilometres through densely wooded country into the Serra Gaúcha hills, up to 800 metres above sea level.

Land, 25 to 50 hectares per family, was distributed free to these self-reliant pioneers in an area of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul named Dona Isabel, after his daughter, by the emperor Dom Pedro II (1831-1889). This imperial policy, which followed the abolition of slavery in 1871, was aimed at populating the land and making it productive.

Important changes were under way in the economy of Rio Grande do Sul. Soon, railways connected the countryside to Porto Alegre, the state capital and chief port, and together with the introduction of steam ships, quicker and cheaper transport boosted exports.

The population of the state of Rio Grande do Sul doubled between 1872 and 1890, from 434,813 people to 897,455, according to records at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). This was partly due to immigration: about 60,000 immigrants, mostly from Italy, settled in the Serra Gaúcha region during this period, and continued to arrive in large numbers in the following decades.

The descendants of Italian immigrants are estimated at 25 million in this country of 190 million, and in southern Brazil they represent around 35 percent of the population.

[. . .]

Rio Grande do Sul is the Brazilian state with the fourth highest human development index (HDI), according to the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP), after Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Santa Catarina. Brazil's overall HDI ranking places it 70th out of 177 countries worldwide.

Eleventh in size out of the 26 Brazilian states, with a population of 11 million people, Rio Grande do Sul is larger in area than the country of Uruguay, with 3.2 million people, on its southern border.