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Transnational Thursday for November 7, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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600-700 tonnes

surely more?

maybe kilotonnes

per soldier I guess

Makes much more sense, still kinda blows my mind.

Looking into this a bit more, using a stack-based fermi estimation tool I like

600K 700K # tonnes of rice
=> 600.00K 700.00K
* 1K # kg in a tone
=> 600.00M 700.00M
* 1.2K 1.4K # calories per kg of rice
=> 753.25B 936.74B
/ 1.9K 2.5K # daily caloric intake
=> 323.46M 459.24M
/ 25M 28M # population of NK
=> 12.12 17.51
/ 365 # years of food this buys
=> 0.033 0.048
/ 1% # as a percentage
=> 3.32 4.80
exit

So Russia is giving 3-5% of North Korea's caloric intake, and NK previously was short maybe 5-10%. Somewhat wild.