There's rich mineral/gas deposits. Also the part that we lost to Bolivia does contain oil. Also with fracking probably there is oil to be found, but not worth the investment, yet. Don't spread misinformation please. Half of The Chaco was already occupied by Bolivia when the war started. It wasn't Paraguay just starting the war. Same for triple alianza, England had a lot of interest in keeping Paraguay from becoming industrialized.
Are oil and gas completely fungible and equally processable? I know the USA both exports and imports oil (and has lots of processing) and my impression was there is a lot of nuance in the raw ingredients, their processing, and the logistics of each step of the way.
They did, but got killed. Mengele had many people inform on him of any suspicious activity. Also he went there only for medical reasons he stayed in Argentina and Brazil most of the time.
English is the current lingua franca, so to speak, of the computing world.
If it changes to another language, then I guess I'll have to learn how to use the new language professionally, much as an opera singer might have to learn how to sing in Italian/German/French/etc.
Though there are computer languages like APL or Scratch. Or Lisp/Scheme and Forth, which are only marginally English-like (though their libraries may depend on English literacy.)
AppleScript is an interesting language which had English, French and Japanese dialects.
English helps a lot, just like Latin helps in medicine. But there's plenty of material available in eg German to get you started.
(German is just the language I have the most familiarity with. I don't know how the programming material available stacks up to other non-English languages.)
I don't think that's a bug. I think that's a rather nice feature that programmers all over the world can talk to each other. Programs are written for other programmers to read and only incidentally for a computer to execute.
alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst (This is somewhat low-traffic but is unique; people write in the third person imagining themselves stepping into a friendly coffeehouse)
Surprised to see alt.arts.poetry.comments on this list. Yes it remains active, but the regular posters there[1] are for the most part the remnants who triggered the Great Poet Flight to various online (moderated) forum venues 20 years ago.
Some of those troll fights were fun. Some even involved poetry.
Live: rec.arts.sf.written -- discussion of written science fiction and fantasy
Nearly dead, but if you post cogently, someone will respond: rec.audio.high-end -- discussion of high-quality (not necessarily high cost) audio reproduction
I follow comp.os.vms
and sci.electronics.design is always hot. I think there's probably a lot of little corners of usenet which are still pretty active. I was sad to see comp.dsp die off, but it's been equally more active by the same people on stackexchange.
Also, games grew well beyond what would be reasonable to send over Usenet. There was really only a time in the late 90s when games were small enough to not require you split them into literally millions of parts. This happened to coincide with the maximum popularity of the Usenet, but as a distribution platform today it's just not practical. Still useful for music albums and DVD movies I guess, but as the parent post pointed out nobody carries alt.binaries anymore. The pirates have long since moved on.
There are plenty of full-size games and UHD movies being distributed over alt.binaries. Pirates pay to use newsservers that carry the massive alt.binaries.
And at Belgacom Skynet we had people dedicated to the task of finding the illegal photos and purging them from our systems. I sat next to Thierry who was doing a lot of that work. Poor guy.
I caught only glimpses of some of the stuff he had to witness, and I would not wish that job on my worst enemy.
