According to WIkipedia that debt was largely paid off immediately after independence and by 1960 only 600 million guilders were left, about 150 million dollars / 830 million in 1998 dollars. In contrast, our OTL IMF bailout was 10 billion.
It just occured to me that there may be someone reading this who's not Asian who will be astounded at how every meeting described here always involves food in some way, either in breakfasts, lunches, and dinners at private & official residences, meetings taken in restaurants and cafes with tea...
A bit out of left field, but the First Opium War starts in 1839, and the Qing chancellor wrote to Victoria pointing out that opium is illegal in Britain but she is fighting China to legalise it, which apparently she never read. Charlotte being more firm in her convictions and her husband on the...
In LKY's memoirs is an account of a conversation with Gus Dur.
"Soekarno? Gila perempuan. Soeharto? Gila uang. Habibie ? Gila."
And an intelligence report that in the MPR presidential vote, 1998, votes were going for a quarter million dollars US a piece.
I've never understood Habibie being...
I'm not saying that OTL is preferable than ITTL, I don't even mind kissing Suharto's dead ass if it means his kids are in jail and USD is <5k even if it means staying in a Demokrasi Terpimpin. Like a bent Hong Kong businessman said in "The Honourable Schoolboy", politics are worthless, you can't...
Cars inevitably go upstream when they're sold for long enough, it's a natural phenomenon of improving technology and commercial competition, and as the Kijang moves upmarket Toyota will need a new Mobil Sejuta Umat. Same thing happened with the Camry/Accord and the Civic/Corolla in the US since...
More like this WAS the Vietnam War, or more accurately, War for Vietnam's Liberation.
Before 1910, Vietnamese was written in Chinese, much like Japanese and pre-Japan rule Korea. That coupled with "in our faith" written in the pamphlet means that the August and Blessed Government is saying to...
In my mind's eye I feel like SBY always looked like he's mildly constipated, even in his presidential picture.
On the other hand, because we were down so much in '97-'98, we thrived after 2008 as China's development dragged us along. Even in the last 3 years our interest rates didn't move all...
I'm always surprised that people in this country think Malaysia is somehow more progressive when they're still on Ekonomi Benteng with pribumi quotas on share ownership and investments products, and apostasy means death.
I read in LKY's memoirs that Mr. "penak jamanku to" used to require all...
No Bismarck, no resurgent Germany;
no resurgent Germany, no concentration of physicists surrounding, among other things, the TU Muenchen, the Ludwig Maximillian Universitaet, and the Kaiser Wilhem Gesselschaft (later the Max Planck Society), and therefore no nice things like nukes and...
I can see him being a PDI mayor of Solo, but since the ex-Cendana political elite hasn't been tarnished with Habibie, Mega, SBY, and the like I don't see a populist surge that delivered him to power OTL.