It’s the Web 2.0 model of corralling people into walled garden platforms, where they’re driven insane. One day people will look back at this time and wonder what we were thinking.

Data is nice. I lived in West Africa for nearly a decade total, up until 18 months ago, working on economic devlopment. The data is notoriously bad, and you’re comparing apples and camels.

Look, we have in common that we want to see greater African agency and less European colonialism of any sort (or Chinese for that matter).

That being said, I have seen dozens of examples of greed and corruption being the driving force behind nationalization. Often with only the short-sighted goal of raiding capital investment accounts and giving friends jobs. And nearly every time leading to costly failure. Decades of exampes, from Idi Amin to Zambia to South Africa to Mali to DRC to Tanzania to Niger to Ghana, across every possible industry, show that the only only only result from nationalizing something is killing it, and killing it stupidly. Down to things like water desalination plants, power distribution companies, or telecom companies. Maybe you can find a few that are barely solvent across a continent of 54 counties and 1 billion people. The rule is that it’s always a play to line pockets and buy a flat on London or Paris and horde wealth for yourself.

And keep in mind that nationalizing something is eliminant domain of stuff. It’s theft with a sorry card. Not for some greater good, to make someone else rich, not the first guy.

The result is my daily experience anywhere other than SA, Morocco, and Kenya: the power goes out for hours at a time most days, water comes from a truck and maaaaybe on Mondays or Tuesdays from the city, and mobile phone and internet only works from private companies like MTN or Vodaphone. Often that buy out the old, failing government telco for the license and have to pay hundreds of ghost workers that were promised jobs by a president way back when.

You should note that one of the wealthiest counties per capita in SSA, is Botswana. Which is basically a podunk AF suburb of Pretoria/Joburg anyway. But they never nationalized their diamond mines, and their population is relatively better off. Riddle me this - why has Botswana been the success story with a PPP while all these places with nationalized everything struggle to literally keep the lights on?

Which is not to excuse the bad parts of the system. I once spent a couple years living in a rural village of about 400 people in Niger, and we had a brackish well. A few people wondered of it might be oil. Clearly, it’s not. But all I could was warn them they should hope is not oil, and the dangers of being near extractive industry. Mines are more often than not, a blight on the earth.

wow, tell me you know nothing about West Africa without telling me you know nothing about West Africa.

I’m all for the Sahellian states getting rid of the French, but the Burkinabe gold mining system is pure chaos, often costing informal miners their lives. Burkina, in particular, didn’t have anything other than use of the CFA really tying them to the French anyway. Sure, some gold mines, but that’s more like a final vestige.

Like, just overall, Bukina Faso is a weird place. Every time I’ve been there, the only bird I really see around is vultures. Like, no doves, no pigeons. Just vultures.

Hardly. Usually the process goes like this:

African Nation - has natural resource and has no way to get it out of the ground.

Foreign company that does this all the time: Yo, we’ll literally pay you to let us dig up this stuff.

Regime: Yes, I was paid, perfect. Thanks. And we’ll charge you what seems like tons of money also.

10 years later

New Regime: Hm…that’s an awfully nice mine you have there. We’ve increased taxes on it 400 times and you are still not closing. It means there’s too much money to be had! So we will take it and do the mining ourselves! How hard could it be?!

New regime nationalizes mine

3 months later

New Regime: Sadly, we must now close the mine and send everyone with jobs home because my drunk cousin is not a good mine director, and all the things broke and we didn’t know you had to order more spare parts.

New Regime places FOR SALE sign on mine and waits for another foreign company to start the cycle over again.

Also every African despotic regime that has has ever existed.

I would bet money this results in a mess of data centers in Hungary, maybe Serbia, maaaaybe Texas.

In? Its more like he’s one of the first wave of official Schedule F Nepo Babies.

This is a comprehensive list of right answers.

The absolute best way is immersion. Full on survival, sink or swim, daily brain exhaustion to cram information in that you will use, over and over.

Short of that, finding ways to practice using the language is the key. Listening to videos is fine, but you need to simulate thinking and responding to make the language part of what your brain goes to. Find people online to talk to via Zoom or discord. I like to think of conservations I have and translate them in Google and re-run the interaction 4 or 5 times in the second language.

For numbers, find videos online that are things like lottery draws.

Bon chance!

He’s pro “Do the thing that gets me money.” He has zero idea how crypto works. He has no idea how a friggin’ electric car works.

They tapped out people in fixed incomes donating $50 at a time to his “legal defense” slush fund, and this is the next level of letting his broligarch funders use him as a what he is, a brand name, to fleece the undereducated and zealots.

But hey, I bet they’ll get a pardon if they need it ;)

“Hello, my name is [redacted] and I’m a recovering dualboot user. It’s been…wow, yeah, I’m 27 days sober using only Linux on my machine…You know, it’s like they tell you, you think you’ll never stop. You think “How could I stop drinking this Win11 slop? My whole life has been like this!” Naw, man. When they tell you that you don’t miss the taste, that it will come to disgust you, looking back. They’re right. They were all right all alo-” insert meloncolic sobbing for 92 minutes

“Excuse me…sir? This is a Wendy’s.”

1 out of 16 states. In 1 out of 27 countries.

Where is Estonia or Finland or the Netherlands to set the bar higher?

Yeah, but it’s all piecemeal and small batches of workstations. There’s no full national scale moves.

You’re saying that being angry makes it acceptable to be stupid as well. That being downtrodden not only doesn’t offer the opportunity to be smart about it, that instead the oppressed can’t be free to do much other than be hateful assholes.

Cool. Cool cool cool. Was that already written inside your MAGA hat from a factory in China? Or did you have to write it in there next to your own name so you didn’t forget that either?

Edit: the last part is slight /s since I know you don’t really mean that, but its a slippery slope.

Yeah, it’s listed on their wiki as a possible reason.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsavo_Man-Eaters

Suffocating a struggling zebra requires a healthy song jaw and teeth. One wrong tooth starts to hurt and suddenly the lion can’t hunt large prey anymore. Humans are very easy to kill relative to usual lion prey, so we’re the blended ham and peas at the nursing home.

I reeeeally wish they would just embrace and find open source software as a public good and get it over with. The equally glacial pace of adoption of OSS to avoid vendor lock in with MS is not exactly giving the OSS world the boost it deserves.

First off, lions rarely attack humans. Most notable repeat cases have been found to have been the result of a tooth abbess that makes it hard for the lion to hunt its usual prey. This was likely just bad timing, and a lion hanging around a camp waiting for interested prey like warthogs to also be interested in food scraps.

If the tent didn’t have a full bathroom attached, then this wasn’t “luxury.” Full stop. Even an en suite bathroom attached to the tent doesn’t cross the line into “luxury” at some camps. But that doesn’t mean they won’t spray “luxury” all over the website of any camp with mattresses and a lodge restaurant to justify the upcharge.

Next, he was a local, staying in an elevated tent, likely on top of his car. I doubt he paid more than $20 a night got there stay.

As for all you people saying “well good” because he was a “businessman” keep in mind that the media simplifies things like a person’s whole life into a word, and would do the same to you. He owned an Off Road Centre, a place that kits out 4x4s for exactly the kind of thing he was doing, camping on the Skeleton Coast. That being said, being a person of British descent in Namibia that was a young adult during the Apartheid era…eesh.

If you feel you MUST hate this person, that’s your only real avenue and you all don’t even understand that. Hate will consume you, and makes you stupid. Maybe try not being a dick and accepting this is clickbait with limited detail because of only contains enough info to piss you off.

Not at all. Especially in Namibia.

Edit: if there wasn’t an en suite bathroom attached to the tent, its not fancy. En suite tents are absolutely a thing.

Source: lived in southern Africa for a while, did a lot of sketchy car camping that included many, many opportunities to be killed on the way to the toilet at 2:00am.

My screen timeout is a minute, so they likely can’t get very far before bumping the side button or just not babysitting it for 60 seconds and needing a long password or fingerprint. Any app worth looking at needs a fingerprint as well, so even if unlocked, not super valuable short of a highly coordinated, personally targeted attack. In which case Pegasus would be easier and faster.

Plus, I always “pull over” and hold my phone with two hands when in a busy public place.