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.

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.

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 ;)

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?

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.

Hard agree.

I genuinely never begrudge anyone reclining back into me, because I will pass that right along to whoever is behind me.

What you describe is very much a hodgepodge. Everyone doing their own, kinda maybe acurate thing. There were tales from this time of towns being off by 30 minutes here and there that were nearby each other. You could leave a town on a horse at noon and arrive in a town 3 miles away also at noon.

And the immediate precursor to this was the stage coach system, which had to generally approximate when a stage should show up to have fresh horses ready, and know of something had gone wrong to go look for them. That was less about minutes and more about halves or quarter of an hour.

Prior to that, the hours were rung by churches to call people to prayer, based on sundials and guesses during overcast days. The 24 hour day wasnt actually standardized into all 24 hours being the same length for centuries, because it was all solar days observation.

Where we agree is that very few people really cared about time down to the minute unless you needed to. Crops, livestock, and rains are things that are on the order of days. Even in cities, dawn, dusk, noon, were good enough for most people for centuries.