Totally unrelated, I am just curious about why you chose the name, as someone who is Ugandan and was born in raised in Kampala (which is the Capital City of Uganda BTW).
I am still trying to figure out why YouTube/Google is willing to die on this hill ?
Surely they’ve gotten feedback or seen it in their analytics that there is a significant group of people who don’t like these “shorts”.
Them implementing this “zero minutes” thing already tells you that they have realized there is some pushback.
Why not just add an on/off toggle?
This short form , TikTok style endless scroll stuff has a junk food feeling to it , as a paying customer why can’t you just give me the option to turn this off ?
Pirates get the best service, gabe newell was right.all along. Paying for youtube premium makes no sense, I'd rather donate that 15 bucks a month to my favorite creators, while using uBlock/sponsorblock/unhook and grayjay on mobile. No shorts in my homepage, no ads ever
I am Ugandan. These kind of burials are unheard of in my country. The Author is labeling this an “African” thing which is just the usual daft nonsense. A number of Ghanaian and Nigerian tribes bury their dead like this , it is more a celebration of life. This is like taking something a small town in Louisiana does and declaring it an “American” tradition.
1 million% agree - I've lived in Ghana and a number of other countries in West and Southern Africa. I've sadly attended many funerals in each place. These photos that visually drive the sense of opulence are entirely of Ghanaian fantasy coffins. I've only ever attended Ghanaian funerals with regular square coffins, and makers of fantasy coffins are rare, as is their use. Primarily by Ga people, who because they are from around Accra, tourists and foreigners have easier access to them. Already off to a biased start.
Beyond the poor writing of making this an "Africa" practice, it's also limited to Christians, and affluent ones at that. The Muslim burials I've attended are modest to the point of being barely even ceremonial.
While families do pour resources into funerals in Zim and other neighboring countries, it's doing things like hiring professional wailers and church groups to sing - paying the living for a service. Totally without irony, this is called "economic development" in other contexts. Families are hiring caterers, hiring drivers, keeping textile makers booked, supporting churches, hiring choral groups, printing banners. These a jobs for the living that also cement the family as stalwart members of the community. Almost none of the money is being buried in the grave and thus wasted. Typical "Africa is bad and weird" article - ill-informed, out of context data, and a Western-focused "only what I say is right" perspective.
To be fair, I can imagine a pretty parallel article "Americans are spending a fortune on weddings" that does not include the case of a courthouse wedding or a backyard wedding and in fact mostly discusses a few idiots with more millions of dollars than IQ points in the Hamptons or equivalent.
It turns into a general rant about kinship societies - which again, are hardly unique to Africa, and aren’t hobbling economic development in other places, which means the author’s core thesis is likely untrue.
I mean, if we’re treating anecdotes as facts - my grandfather - British - used to send most of his pay packet from the navy back to support his mother and his grandmother - and one can hardly argue that the U.K. hasn’t seen economic development.
Shit, I was 19 years old, supporting my mother, my great aunt, and my sister. A few decades on, retired millionaire. It put me in such dire straits that I was forced to work several jobs and then start businesses in my spare time until one stuck. Best thing that ever happened to me.
Societies which have the Clan, the family as the biggest institution building unit, are crippling societies they are part of wherever they go.
Family units can not build nations. Only societies that can build meta-families can. You will never be part of the institution of Saud if you are not born into it.
His article has a link to an article about Uganda called How the deceased are robbing
the living. [1]
I know approximately nothing about Uganda, and I have no way of evaluating the article. Especially since I haven’t read it yet. But it does contradict Madradavid’s statement that these kind of burials are unheard of there.
I did read that article; it is just a generic article about how funerals are expensive, you could replace Kampala with New York, and it would still hold.
My point is that the Author has picked a practice by a couple of tribes on a Continent so diverse and large you could fit the states, the UK, and still have space for 30 or so more countries, and passed it off as the norm.
Funerals can be expensive, anywhere. I don't want you going away with the impression that all these poor Africans are using up all their hard-earned savings to throw these outlandish burial ceremonies.
That counter argument is valueless. Yes, it might be unequally spread but unless you can proof the locality of the phenomena the cliche still communicates. Not everything in the west is California but thanks to hollywood it is.
That sounds like a reversal of the burden of the proof to me. David Oks is claiming in his blog that "funerals keep Africa poor". The job of showing whether it is widespread and generally true in Africa belongs to David Oks, not to Madradavid.
Clanfamily culture unable to form states is keeping africa poor, the scoundrels of the family parlaying the patriarch to institute family internal socialism and extract from the entrepreneurs of the family.
Articles about two countries cannot be more true than the lived experience of actual residents of Africa. I am Kenyan as well, that article describes something very specific to individual communities in some countries in West Africa, it is foreign to me. The largest expense of funerals that I've experienced in my life is usually paying the medical expenses of the deceased (if the person had been ill for a long time) and feeding the funeral attendees (we do usually get a huge crowd and they generally get lunch).
Another data point: maybe 35-40% of people in Africa identify as Muslim. They usually bury people the same day they die or at worst the next day, and there is no elaborate coffin, usually just a cloth sheet.
My wife is Sotho from South Africa. While there were certainly a bunch of, to me, very strange practices when my FiL died, it was nothing like what was mentioned in the article.
That said, funeral insurance is extremely common in SA, as even normal burials can be pretty expensive.
> That said, funeral insurance is extremely common in SA, as even normal burials can be pretty expensive.
This is off-topic, but how does funeral insurance even work? You're guaranteed to die at some point, right? To me, insurance is there to hedge against something not very likely, but expensive. The odds are you're going to pay money in, and never see it back (if you don't get sick / crash your car / whatever).
Is funeral insurance just some form of forced savings?
Profitability comes from three prongs: many policies are canceled before a covered event, premiums are often collected for many years and have time to be invested before a covered event, and bundling with inappropriate investments.
For examples of inappropriate investments, you can look at whole life and variable annuities. Most people would be better off spending the same amount on term life + a stock index fund; assuming access to stock index funds, which is probably not a given in many African countries.
Indeed it is forced savings but with the benefit of covering your funeral expenditure if it is required suddenly and unexpectedly.
For context, it might cost you $5 per month, and give you funeral cover of $500.
As OP mentioned it is very common in South Africa, likely owed to the unpredictable life expectancy. All the large insurers offer it, it’s a massive market.
Funerals are a big thing in South Africa. It can be often to the same level as a wedding, where families will take out loans to host the event. Hence the funeral insurance being common.
You go to an ATM and get advertised Funeral Cover, offered by your bank.
Funerals are huge in india too. It runs for 13 days in some communities. To be clear, the actual cremation happens immediately, but the funeral ceremonies continue for 13 days after that.
Most of the expenses are days of one-meal-a-day for guests, and the general extra expenses of having a lot of relatives over at your house. The ceremonies themselves are fairly cheap - it's mostly prayers.
However there is no insurance and so on, since the aforementioned expenses scale with usual QoL.
Might depend on the tribe, and on personal circumstances. The biggest/weirdest thing for me was the whole night vigil and brewing (Umqombothi) and cooking/roasting of the lamb to honor the elders, which had several guests, but not on a wedding level.
The writer is using the elaborate funerals as a life story to draw people into the article, because starting with an abstract discussion of African culture isn't going to draw many readers. This is a standard journalistic technique, which is why you see writers interview Gemma the soccer mom who's affected by whatever the story is rather than an academic who produces fifteen paragraphs on the societal implications of the event. This is completely normal. They're not claiming that the personal-interest bit is representative of all of Africa any more than Gemma's complaint about getting her kids to school is representative of whatever country she's in.
It's a hivemind of a certain culture who are only taught there exist only 9 countries in the whole world: USA, Canada, South America, UK, Europe, Japan, China, Asia, Australia.
What do you mean that Africa is a continent of great diversity in cultures, languages and history? They all look poor and black to me.
The "people who'll levy the complaint you just did" and "people who'll pretend all of europe is the same when it suits them" is far too close to a circle for my liking.
Total noob question here and I apologize in advance. Are these the “actual” pictures or are they “touched up” by an artist ? If they the real pictures then this is truly impressive …
It's the intensity of infrared(-ish) light hitting multiple sensors with different wavelength filters.
If you were to look at it in person it would be a fairly smooth white patch. The colors are artificially assigned, but not by an artist. You pick a specific color for each wavelength. The Hubble palette is spelled out here: https://www.astronomymark.com/hubble_palette.htm
In case of most space photos, they are not what you would see with your eyes. Usually they capture data differently that how an eye would, and then visualize that. They sometimes strive for getting close to naked-eye perception, but usually it's not a goal.
On this Wiki page you can see multiple such images, and the process described:
They're "touched up" in a scientific way to remove flaws in the telescope (light leaking in from the sides, some distracting aspects of the diffraction patterns that from around stars). The colors come from combining several black-and-white images, taken at different frequencies. You can explore the subjectivity of infrared images by opening them in GIMP and playing with the hue slider.
Well since these images are taken in a different part of the EM spectrum than visible light, the colors are false. But the images aren't touched up in the sense that shapes and sizes are altered.
The person who created the gist has this on their website "Available payment methods include PayPal, Bitcoin, and SEPA transfers." http://cryto.net/~joepie91/
Correct. I am one of the seemingly handful of people who actually tries to use cryptocurrencies as currencies (and have been doing so since getting involved as an early adopter).
I can assure you that that has become more and more difficult and risky over the years thanks to speculative vultures and the dynamics described in the gist. If anything, this should tell you that I'm not some armchair complainer who doesn't understand how it works.
I'm also not sure why you seem to be implying some sort of conflict of interest here, since I am arguing against it.
Naive question here.
Is it illegal to build counter surveillance tech, I mean you have companies that specialise in building these things for governments would it be illegal to start a company that does the opposite, build tech that helps people beat this sort of surveillance?
This is an excellent way to learn about how criminal law is not applied equally in the United States, but instead is wielded as a weapon selectively against anyone who would challenge the status quo.
There was a famous case recently where a judge ruled that searching someone's trash didn't require a warrant as they had discarded it and it was no longer "theirs", so cops were within their rights to search through it. Presumably having been granted permission, some journalists then took it upon themselves to inventory and publish the exact contents of the judge's trash, including prescription medicine packaging and such. If I recall correctly, it didn't end well for the journalists.
There are two different sets of laws, for two different sets of people in the US.
Well, of course there are. "Warrantless search" is one category, and "search by random person" is another. The 2nd is closer to harassment, in some opinions.
It's not quite fair to compare actions by an officer of the court with that of the general public. By design.
Huh, seems like this argument doesn't go along with the "trash is no longer your property" conclusion.
If you say the police can do it because he's a police officer [... and because of that does it mean he has better judgement?], then why have a law about warrants?
Lots of possible differences remain. Entering private property to secure the trash - an officer of the court can normally do that without being considered harassment or trespass.
Being an officer of the court is important, and attempts to blur that are disingenuous. Cherry-picking one facet of the incident is not a good argument. What-about-isms likewise.
That could actually fly if the officer had a reasonable belief the trash contained relevant evidence, and the trash collector was going to take it away before a warrant could be acquired.
Do public servants (ostensibly politicians and law enforcement) have any expectations of privacy while on duty? By definition the public ought to have the right to systematically surveille, monitor, and track their behavior - just as governments do their public, and corporations do their employees or equipment.
It's fitting that the past decade has produced a neologism, "souveillance", to describe this approach.
People just need to push for legislation that politicians and their families are allowed to be tracked , wiretapped 24/7. Clearly they are the weakest link, think of the foreign powers, think of the children. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear.
I am from Africa and needless to say, we don't have an abundance of VC funds for startups.
I have used products live Revolut and Monzo before and loved them, there is an opportunity being missed in places like Africa and other developing economies that have a huge growing youthful middle class that hates the way the established banks operate and is comfortable with technology.
I spent most of my free time last year building a backend that can handle some core banking functions, I already did research on the licensing and knew I would never be able to raise that money just with an idea and business plan so to keep myself going and also have something to show potential VC's I decided to start small, things like airtime top-up, bill payments etc
Break it down , look at the bits that you can build out and get some initial customers while you look to raise money, you don't have to go all out and build a whole bank, start small, licensing for things like e-wallets and money transfer is not unreasonably expensive, you can then go on to build on top of that
We are in the same boat. Are you from Africa but working in London/Europe? I am from India but I am working in London.
I have identified millennials to be my main market as well. In India whenever I visited the bank with my father, the person at the bank would try to sell a new card. They always want to "sell" you something, we just have to suck less as a digital bank and the millenials will happily help us get rid of the traditional banks. I've discussed Monzo with a lot of friends, and they have loved the idea.
Curious, what part of Africa are you from? What is the cost of the banking license like there?
Totally unrelated, I am just curious about why you chose the name, as someone who is Ugandan and was born in raised in Kampala (which is the Capital City of Uganda BTW).
Congratulations again.