[ExI] chinese colonization of africa etc

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sat, Sep 13, 2025 at 8:15 AM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> What that village really needed was some means of filtering or distilling some clean water from the river, but to have that very long, they would need guns and ammo, and the guns and ammo are even more valuable than the water filter, and heeeere we go again.  It's why they can't have nice things.

Actually, filtering and distilling water doesn't have to be expensive.
Boiling it, and collecting the vapor, will do.  A setup to do that,
even at scale, doesn't require any obviously expensive components.
One could even make that a requirement of the design: since any
expensive component will get stolen, design a system to accomplish
this task that doesn't have any expensive components.  Almost any
component with a brand name or that is mainly known by its chemical
name is right out.

Speaking of cheap stuff, I wonder how low-cost suitcase nuke
manufacture might be gotten.  Pair them with off-the-shelf delivery
drones to solve the range problem, and if that village has a uranium
mine nearby, pocket warlord?