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.

Lol, OK, kiddo. Whatever you need to tell yourself.

But keep in mind that you’re also calling my friend that is STILL, actually a businesses owner with the ceramics studio, a thief. I presume from herself? Lol, you tankies are so funny sometimes, but you get confused so easily. You’ll do anything as long as it’s not learning or challenging yourself intellectually.

Keep sticking to that unwavering spoon-fed ideology! I’m sure one day reality will bend to the will of your sassy comments.

All AMERICAN/UK reports that repeat the same crap over and over for the clicks. Just look at how ill-informed you are as the result of trusting the American media and British tabloids.

All the Namibian news call him “well-known” or “prominent” because there’s only like 1,000 people in Windhoek. You’ll note in the stories below, that the first has more detail than anything you’ve read because it’s the local news, and that the words “wealthy” and “rich” are not used at all. Neither are any synonym. I worked in conservation in southern Africa for a few years, and donating to research is by no means something that requires being even close to wealthy if you have things to donate. I knew a couple that also ran a 4x4 shop a country over that did the same thing, and they were by no means what any American should consider “rich.”

https://www.namibiansun.com/accidents/lion-shot-dead-after-taking-mans-life2025-06-02

https://www.namibian.com.na/prominent-outdoorsman-killed-by-lion/

Here’s the shop he used to own https://www.offroad-centre.com/ - do you think that this screams opulent wealth? Hell, just the bribes and corruption alone are probably 20% of his operating expenses. “Former owner” as well, so it’s likely he recently sold the shop anyway. Also, 4x4 people travel a lot, and cost of living in Namibia is cheap. So what? Back in the day, flying SAA to the States or Europe was relatively cheap, and traveling around Africa on Namibian Airways when it used to operate was great. Their little cardboard lunch boxes were adorable.

So, American that knows all and sees all because they read some LLM-generated rehashed “if it bleeds it leads” article, tell me more and more about how things work in the SADC area without asking ChatGPT what SADC means. Then tell me why you’ve entirely missed the fact that the guy had a German last name in Namibia and you’re focused on money when there’s something far more historically important there to discover ;)

I value the people, doing what they can in whatever system they’re stuck in, to do something they like and earn a living. Why is my freind’s ceramics studio a stain on the world because it’s both her passion and something that she trades for medium with which to buy food?

Same as I respect the people that survived the Soviet system, or the Albanian system, or Apartheid by doing whatever they could to survive and still finding joy or personal satisfaction in the process.

Why can you not respect those people and their effort and only define the woes of the system in terms of a myopic view of 0.1% of people that fit the term “businesspeople”?

The guy owned a shop that kits out 4x4s. I doubt he ever wore a suit and tie other than his wedding day.

He was Namibian, in fact. Sure, of European descent, but he was a local, camping in a tent that I think was a pop up mounted to the top of a 4x4. Likely his own 4x4.

An RV trailer park would call itself “luxury” in any country in Southern Africa. Homeboy wasn’t even in a tent luxurious enough to have an en suite bathroom. If a lodge has 2 rooms with mattresses, they will call themselves “luxury” online.

American media makes you think that only rich people can be “businessmen”? 99.9% of American businesses are small business. 14% of American businesses are one person with no paid employees. That includes nonprofits. Rounding up a touch, about half of all American businesses have 4 or fewer paid employees total. Why has the media brainwashed you into thinking a couple people running a dog grooming company out of their garage don’t count as “businesspeople”?

“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.

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!

“But it turned out the French were the ones producing it all along.”

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.

Mon Dieu, qui voudrait supprimer le pack de langue française ?