having a colonial present (being actively colonized) is an overall economic detriment -- due to the traditionally extractive nature of colonial policy swamping the benefits of good institutions.

Colonies were extractive at first, but as they were filled with white emigrés over time their economies diversified and infrastructure began to be built, which also improved the lot of the natives in some cases (but I don't know how general this positive externality was). For example, after the Belgian government annexed the Congo Free State after its catastrophic mismanagement and abuses, the colonial authorities devoted tremendous effort into educating the native Congolese and providing healthcare. Black-owned enterprises flourished, literacy skyrocketed, and the infant mortality rates in the major cities compared favorably with Western standards.

And then it all went to shit ...

I dunno, Moldbug does make a good point in his Fnargl thought experiment (though he's very naive if he actually expects it to stay a good point until 3007.)

(Note - short term <= 20 years, long term >= 20 years.)

It's perfectly reasonable for there to be a long term versus short term tradeoff. Regime change almost always has a short term negative impact as institutions are gutted and society resettles. The long term tradeoff is more difficult to quantify, and is also subject to things like hyperbolic discounting. Since war and nation building is often at the behest of politics, the short term negative is almost always seen as the dominant factor.

This is one of the most frustrating things for me to see, demonstrated by one of the more clear-cut cases: North Korea. Violently overthrowing the regime would cost billions of dollars, and the death count could be as high as 1-2 million in the conflict. Economic fallout may be as high as a trillion dollars, with markets changing and political powers shifting over the following decades.

This is weighed against 20 million people being tortured and oppressed into living at subsistence, in a land where famine can claim a million people per year and the living conditions are among the worst the world has to offer. The inability of the world to act to end this isn't a moral question of dust specks versus torture; it's a matter of torture versus the short term inconvenience.

I don't think that phenomenon needs a special explanation. (..) AIDS is concentrated in Africa because HIV is concentrated in Africa.

That's not an explanation. Why is HIV concentrated in Africa? Back during the 90's the standard explanation was that there was strain of HIV in Africa that spread well by heterosexual sex and that this strain was likely to break into the US real soon now. Since that failed to happen, we are now left with no unfalsified explanation.

Statistically, given the millions of Africans who've had AIDS diagnoses, we would expect thousands of erroneous diagnoses even if the diagnostic process were 99.9% correct.

One difference between Africa and other continents is that on other continents they test for the HIV virus before diagnosing someone with AIDS. In Africa since doing blood tests is expensive, and without disposable needles (also expensive) not particularly safe, they will frequently diagnose AIDS based only on symptoms.

South Africa managed to loss around 10 years of average lifespan in the debacle. The same thing didn't happen on other continents.

Yeah, because South Africa totally didn't go through a major societal upheaval about two decades ago.

That depends very much on how much you value the live of people who live in Seoul.

See the UDT reasons for not giving in to blackmail.

Then you will still be left with North Koreans running guerrilla warfare on the new government that you put there with tries to rebuild the whole country after the mess.

I doubt this would happen. This didn't happen with Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. If you look at the collapse of communist states, the only places this happened were places with preexisting ethnic tension kept in check by the strong central government.

However, it doesn't have enough petrol, and its equipment is ancient and unmaintained, and its communications networks are awful, and it has effectively zero airpower, and assuming its nukes actually function they're unlikely to be movable off the testing grounds, and we know where pretty much all the weapons emplacements are, and their army can't actually cross the DMZ without a lot of effort.

IMHO it makes a lot of sense to view NK as a pissed off 8 year old with a loaded .22 handgun threatening to shoot SK in the foot if she doesn't get a pony. Sure, nobody wants to get shot, but really, there's no existential risk to SK or any other country as a result of NK retaliation or attack (as NK stands right now.)

I don't think there ground for that hope. Seoul isn't far from North Korea. It easy to shoot over that distance. North Korea has it's military-first doctrine and therefore a lot of weaponry.