'Uganda is a landlocked country in East Africa whose diverse landscape encompasses the snow-capped Rwenzori Mountains and immense Lake Victoria. Its abundant wildlife includes chimpanzees as well as rare birds. Remote Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is a renowned mountain gorilla sanctuary. Murchison Falls National Park in the northwest is known for its 43m-tall waterfall and wildlife such as hippos.'
The scenery is simultaneously beautiful and heartbreaking: Idi Amin's ghost is still very much around. I knew very little about Amin until visiting and every third conversation ended up involving him somehow. You can still go see the caves where he kept prisoners, some of whom wrote messages in blood on the walls that are still visible.
It really is a lovely country that's been through horrible situation after horrible situation (and obviously still has troubles today). Would definitely recommend visiting, with some obvious caveats.
I once had a co-worker (in IT) from Uganda. I was having lunch with her and another co-worker, sort of a generic American conservative. He said something ignorant about working harder or something with regards to Africa, she just went off on him. She asked him if he'd ever had to step over the bodies of his neighbors as a child.
Of course, she went on to get a western education and move to the US, but she never forgot how lucky she was.
Yeah, it was quite a reality check to hear our host talk very nonchalantly about how Amin took his father away and had him killed - it was just so common that men of his age had their fathers murdered by Amin, that it didn't even seem to register to him as unusual (of course, that's just my interpretation).
This got me to do a sad reality check. Since reading Hans Rosling's Factfulness, I've started using a decline in birthrate to Western levels as a proxy for nations getting their shit together. But checking Uganda, they're still above 5, declining slightly now but not precipitously.
Idi Amin, awful as he was, is the past now. What's the present like? That's what matters for countries that have yet to modernize. And it looks to be not good yet. Every nation in Europe was ruled by an Idi Amin at some point. They got better. African nations will too, someday. But I really want to see more African nations on that rapid-modernization cycle that we see in places like Iran, China, and Vietnam.
The occupiers are not anarchists. It's a diverse group of people that carry the protests, some even with ties to the established political parties. Some of them certainly have ties with anarchist movements, but placing them all in the same bucket is willfully ignoring the diversity. While I'm not certain that the methods they are using will help their cause or whether the problem is actually even solvable, I understand their grievance:
The area around the new google campus used to be one of the cheapest in Berlin, partly because it was a triangle that jutted out from West Berlin into the eastern parts and a large chunk of it was close to the wall. That area was marked for redevelopment and intended to be torn down pretty much from the beginning until the 60ies when a large grassroot movement started occupying the buildings and refurbishing them. Parts of the original plans can be witnessed in the area around the Kottbuser Tor, which is a prime example of failed grand city architecture plans. All the concrete blocks their replaced existing buildings which were torn down.
The area became attractive after the 1990ies, because all of a sudden, the whole chunk of land was quite central in Berlin. As a consequence, many people that had been living there for decades and sometimes were quite involved in the improvement of the area are now forced to move and there's a fear that Google moving into the building will accelerate the process. To add on top of that, the building was recently sold to a holding that resides in one of the British tax havens, so all earnings go offshore and do little to benefit the area around. Google hasn't exactly been very forthcoming in its communication regarding their plans for the space, which makes an already complicated and heated issue even more heated.
This is correct, my office is on the same street. You can see the protest posters already for a year in coffee shops, hair dressers etc. It's a broad, if not very big, group.
No? I remember at least three demos that were happening down the street from our office because people had to move out in the last few years. And eminent domain is not the only way to force people to move. Renovate the building, you may now raise the rent so people can't afford it. No eminent domain, people were still forced to move.
"And eminent domain is not the only way to force people to move. Renovate the building, you may now raise the rent so people can't afford it. No eminent domain, people were still forced to move."
So it's not just fake news from you, it's Communist fake news. Because you claim that market transactions are FORCED. You have the right to your own opinions, but you don't have the right to your own facts. You claimed FALSELY that people are forced our of that Berlin district, while what actually happened is that some people did not want to enter into voluntary transactions.
If acknowledging that force can take other forms than physical or legal restraint and that not all market interactions are equal and necessarily borne of free will is now a communist position, then yeah, I’m a communist now. Wouldn’t have expected that to happen, but life is full of surprises.
How will voting help when property rights are concerned? Are you advocating for eminent domain?
FYI, rising rents are a hotly debated topic in Berlin, and have been for years. Sadly, the previous government was asleep at the wheel in the last decade with regard to housing. The current government is a center-left three-party coalition. The department responsible for urban development is led by a politician from the Left party. Her previous undersecretary (Andrej Holm) had somewhat radical views with regards to urban housing but was forced out by what I consider a smear campaign soon after the government was formed.
No, their problem cannot easily be solved by voting. Quite a few people care about the issue, but the issue is problematic as it's about balancing the common good versus private ownership. It's a nontrivial problem and it's one of the major political and civic issues that are currently on the table in Berlin (and other large german cities)
On a somewhat related note, google translate has gotten mind openly good. I read the translated text from that twitter account as if it was written in perfect english.
Citizenship has historically been defined by military service, in that you are not merely subject to the security apparatus of the state, but a part of it. Because you are a part of it, you have a say in it. It was the removal of the draft which necessarily removed the role of service from citizenship.
What do people who are not a part of the military care about non-intervention? There is a reason we viliify the draft-dodger who becomes a politician and sends others sons off to war.
Historically most ancient or medieval wars were fought by professional soldiers.
Here is a Wikipedia quote
"The persistent old belief that peasants and small farmers gathered to form a national army or fyrd is a strange delusion dreamt up by antiquarians in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries to justify universal military conscription"
Not what I'm referring to. I'm referring specifically to those who owned land and bore arms and were referred to as Citizens in Rome.
I find both the notions that conscription=slavery and that taxation=theft can only be held by someone who does not believe in any sort of duty or obligation to one's community, country, nation, or God, and that self-interest must necessarily be one's sole (or at least primary) motivating factor.
No, community and state are two different things. Surely I do not accept social contract theory. But I do not think we will reach a common ground arguing this issue.
>>Citizenship has historically been defined by military service, in that you are not merely subject to the security apparatus of the state, but a part of it.
I don't know where you got this idea. Most of the largest empires in history - Romans, Sassanids, Ottomans, British, you name it - had a professional warrior class. It wasn't all voluntary, but ideas like draft only applied to non-citizens.
Was referring to the Romans. Perhaps I'm exaggerating.
My point is that military service is a responsibility, not a chore foisted upon us. If it were, we would be subjects. But we are not subjects, we are citizens.
What spoils? I think it would be rather difficult to claim that the general US population has come out on top as a result of Middle East adventurism over the past two decades.
Sure, China was a bastion of prosperity before even a perverted model of capitalism (please don't call it free market capitalism) was introduced (sarcasm). Beside what makes "democracy" a good thing anyway? Protection of rights has nothing to do with it.
I think this is all about money really. EU lost the tech war so they try to make winners life so hard so that they could either squeeze more money from them or enforce some government supported - controlled inferior products to replace them. These may be the excuse key words: "protecting civil rights, hate speech, terrorism, privacy"
It's much more than that. If you believe what Assange wrote--or even if you don't--these American companies must comply with the legal (and not-so-legal) requests of our various surveillance apparati.
Having a foreign Google integrated into their web activities as much as we have a domestic Google integrated into ours is a threat to their own sovereignty.
Similar with rules to traffic, the rules are there for the cops to make some pocket money not not for our safety /s
I think is easy to see that you need to always had some new rules when someone finds a way to do harm to the society, I am sorry that the rules makes some billionaires have a few less billions.
I think it's naïve to believe these decisions are completely free of political considerations, and that the Commissioners responsible are merely the purest of heart rule implementers - on the contrary, I'd suggest that those at the upper echelons of EU decision making are by definition extremely sophisticated political operators; if not, how could they end up in a position of such power?
I do not understand how some people want free/fair market and at the same time you accept unfair practices like monopoly abuses or special deals or tricks to avoid taxes that only big companies can do, where is the fairness in the big players having advantage over smaller ones?
That's not what I said. I'm saying it's naïve to think there is no political aspect to a decision to impose a fine of e.g. billions of euro. It's possible to both make this observation and to support the fine itself.
So, what is your point ? Is it correct to punish bad actors but not if it could have a possible political aspect to it?
I mean party leaders/ministers are put in jail when they do illegal things(though all of them complain it is a political attack), the point should be the facts, who was harmed and how to punish and prevent it to happen again if possible.
Why does there have to be a point beyond what I've already made? Your post I responded to satirised the idea that there is anything but a legal component to the decision, then went on to assert that the decision was purely legal. If I have that wrong please correct me. Otherwise, I stick to my point - to portray the decision making behind these fines as purely legal is similarly one-dimensional as portraying them as being purely driven by European envy of the US.
Apart from that I am quite happy to be free of supposed tech giants' 'innovation' when that involves them selling my personal information to whoever they choose and so support the EU from that aspect, but at the same time I have a sneaking suspicion that the rules would be less zealously applied if the tech giants were European. VAG seem to have got off pretty easily for the emissions scandal. Do you seriously believe that if a European company is threatened with EU fines that that country's leaders will not be on the phone to Brussels, and that these calls will not have an impact, moreso than a similar call from outside the EU?
I mean what politicians are behind this?
Do you think that some party has to gain by this?
Or is just anti american and big European companies enjoy preferential treatment?
I was replying to a post that seemed to me to emphasise the primacy of the law in the decision; having worked in Brussels I'd say there's little the Commission does that is not political. I'm honestly not trying to straw man.
The thing is, the winners have the money to put up with any amount of onerous hoop-jumping that the EU tries to put in place. For the non-established players, the cost and liability of all this shit is too high to break in.
I've already had the experience of "no fresh food in the shops", and it was earlier this year when we had two feet of snow. Supply chain disruption to some extent somewhere for at least a few days looks extremely likely to me.
What I'm worried about is "cascade failure". So far there's been very little street violence, apart from the murder of Jo Cox. I'm worried about what might happen if, say, the Met accidentally kill someone and set off a riot at the same time as all this is happening.
But england did not train ANY new border&custom agent in case of a hard brexit, unlike Ireland and Netherland (and France already have some somehow). The renewment of the Touquet deal still isn't done, and France could very well say "no deal mean no deal" in case of a hard brexit, or ask for even more money to act as England border patrol. Spanish government don't care for Gibraltar, so transfering daily necessity (food and meds) will probably become more expensive (you can't say "no" to american military bases in Europe, but UK ones don't carry the same weight).
Anyway, hard Brexit will be hard on UK, but it will be hard for EU too. But it will be worse politicaly if EU look weak in front of UK, so either UK cave, either we're in for a loose/loose more game.
But yeah, I know a lot of developers who have started playing with Flutter in the last couple of months, so there should be a lot more later this year/next year.
RN isn't production-ready/stable yet either. They're about to do a major overhaul of the internals because of fundamental flaws that have been surfaced by the community. While it's possible to use RN in production, "stable" is a laugh... there are monthly releases and almost all of them have some kind of breaking changes, so pacing RN releases is a huge fucking hassle. For example, in the release that comes out this month (currently in RC), they changed the Native Module API so if you have any native code that exposes a JS API (and who doesn't?) you have to refactor a bunch of code. And because it's JS, the only way you get compiler errors is if you're using Flow.
Also the bug introduced in 0.55.3 where deleting from TextInput a few times make it very slow.. To fix it I have to upgrade to higher version which drops support for iOS 8 !!
Are wages in Germany not competitive? Are software engineers in Germany going hungry because they don't get paid enough?
If people want to be greedy and run to the country where they get paid the most that's their prerogative, but they aren't starving back home.
I left my home country in search of riches, but that was a choice. It's not like I wasn't living a comfortable life back in the motherland. I don't think that (employed) software engineers anywhere in the world are going hungry.
I didn’t go hungry but I didn’t feel like I was getting ahead. I felt like assets and capital were getting returns, like my cost of living was going up but my wages weren’t. I left (not Germany and not to the U.S).
People already well off were fine but people who had to work for a living were not being rewarded.
There are many reasons not to leave a place (family and security paramount) but if multinational companies are perfectly happy to move jobs around I think workers should feel equally free to vote with their feet in the much more limited way we are able.
Why are engineers “greedy” for wanting a fair wage but European managers not “greedy” for underpaying Workers and keeping the value produced for themselves?
In my limited experience, European managers don't keep the value to themselves, they are just worse at obtaining it in the first place (lower revenue per employee).
Large company X has hundreds of people working on software that could be done by a team 1/20th the size in 1/2 of the time. Lower / middle managers want to expand their influence by having more people working for them, so they try to impede efficiency as much as possible(!!!).
So, upper management wants to increase the size of the money bag (mostly a good incentive), lower / middle management only wants to take as much as possible out of that bag. Upper management doesn't know enough about software to reign in middle management. Because if you are going to tell people how to do their work, you better know very well what you are talking about.
It's only not a problem, if you are willing to move to Silly Valley. I am not, so I do "suffer" from my compensation being lower than international market rate.
