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.

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.

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.

The insect world is a tiny nightmarish hellscape of armor, weapons, and sudden death.

Also, evolution isn’t maximally efficient, it’s just barely efficient enough. Eyes are a janky, often low-fi is good enough, affair. 99.9% of species that have ever existed are extinct. 99.9999999999% of species alive today do the bare friggin’ minimum to throw DNA into either the wind or a hole and maaaaybe do nothing more than reproduce.

The Helicoprion existed.

Jellyfish. WTF?

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.

Robot is as surprised as I am!

In which case it’s just a 3D crocodile. 4D crocodile? It’s a beefy necked crocodile, OK?

Lived in West Africa. 14 was common, with a few “promised” kids as low as 8/9/10. To dudes in their 30s and 40s.

But hey, the US has this all the time, and is no better than developing countries in some states.

Not at all, this is well established technology already in use all over the place.

When countries use digital IDs, they are able to carve out validating individual aspects of an identity. Just address, just over 18, just class of driver’s license, etc.

So the State has a website/wallet where the user pulls a token from the State, basically a fancy hashed OTP/Login code.

The website, which can’t derive your identity from the code, sends the code to the state API and can’t ask more than “is this hash legit” and the State API doesnt need to say more than “yup.”

Where can things go wrong? The State can ask to know who needs the token. Or even demand to know, and log what sites use it. The state can contract this out to a vendor that logs it all, making data theft far more risky.

It all depends on his the state builds requirements.

Also true, no doubt there.

Tokenization is the easy solution.

You go onto you state gov website and get a token that just says “this is an adult.” Nothing else. Token lasts 10 minutes.

Cut and paste into the site. They authenticate without saying who theu are, back to the gov site, “yo, this legit?” State says “looks like something we would do.” State keeps no records of WHO validated the token, just that it was a legit token.

Same way that routers connect to VPN services.

Not sure why you’re getting down voted. Porn can absolutely become a behavioral addiction.

I used to work at a place where we had a lobby guard that watched porn on his phone all day (sound off). Not sitting there trying to jerk it, it was a compulsion. He would just be watching it while talking to other people, standing by the door…it was weird. He eventually got fired because he genuinely couldn’t not watch porn.

That being said, I’m a huge privacy advocate, and while there are actually ways to anonymously be on a website and verify age, that’s not how anyone is doing it. Things like signing up for an account on a site and scanning your ID are just abysmally stupid. There’s a zero percent chance that this system as is doesnt lead to data theft and possibly even extortion.

All to try and flood the treasury so he can afford tax cuts he promised to donors.

Turns out running the government is hard and it sucks.

Terrible. It’s a feature, not a bug.

The point in not remembering past lives is that each life is supposed to be full of learning and growing and experiences that aren’t weighed down and tainted by the egos of past incarnations.

Imagine having been an illiterate miner in the Old West that lives to 95, then showing up with that perspective in the 80s. You’d simply be a cantankerous Luddite set in old ways. Note do that over and over and over.

It’s a joy to shed the ego.

People in general have no idea and just want to get spun up on drama and manufactured outrage.

Same thing happened when people started scrapping Twitter 10-15 years ago.

Yeah, it’s different for everyone.

My “counterfactual” is knowing a lot of kids that were home schooled. They were just young weird adults that didn’t thrive in most circumstances. There’s a reason why even rural agrarian societies found value is putting kids together.