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buyxon My dad could still be alive, but he's not

My grandfather died at a hospital in South Africa in 1997 after experiencing chest pain. Apparently, he went to reception, and they told him and my uncle to take a lift/elevator up to the ward, and he died in the lift. I was told afterward that it's a no-no to exert oneself during a heart attack. No idea if that's true or not.

Anyway, not second guessing OP, just putting it out there.

buyxon Claude Code is all you need

$100 a month for a South African is not a trivial amount. Definitely putting his money where his mouth is.

buyxon How “The Great Gatsby” took over high school

I don't know how pretending to read literature in later grades helped with reading, especially when the reading scores referenced in that article are assessed years before students hit that point.

buyxon How “The Great Gatsby” took over high school

I read every book that was assigned to us, until grade 12, when we got something called "July's People" by Nadine Gordimer. Nobel Prize winner or not, she used literary techniques that were well beyond us, and we lacked teaching support.

I used to read novels well into adulthood, but family life eventually stopped that. I've tried audiobooks, but I tend to fall asleep or zone out, and haven't completed a novel in at least 10 years.

buyxon How “The Great Gatsby” took over high school

It sounds like a universal experience in high school is students not reading assigned literature.

In South Africa many of my now middle-aged HS friends, most of whom subsequently graduated university and have successful careers, used study guides for English literature (a handful would recycle essays from older siblings), and are proud that they have never read a fiction book.

English teachers and romantics like the author of this piece seem to place a lot of value in the teaching of literature, but the Common Core actually seems to be on the right track:

At the same time, in an effort to promote “college and career readiness,” the Common Core State Standards Initiative, launched in 2010 and currently implemented in forty-one states, recommends that students mainly read “informational texts” (nonfiction, journalism, speeches)

No point in pretending that the average student has the same hobbies/interests as their English-major teacher.

buyxon Why don’t Americans eat mutton?

Same in South Africa...."mutton" usually refers to lamb. almost no one has a "lamb curry" or "lamb bunny" (Google it). It's "mutton curry" or a "mutton bunny".

buyxon Why don’t Americans eat mutton?

My good friend from South Africa tells me how she and her husband miss cooking with mutton, which they find more flavorful and satisfying than lamb. What happens to the mutton-aged sheep here?”

Just to clarify: lamb is far more common in South Africa than mutton (aged sheep) and most people don't differentiate between the two. Maybe it's the flavour of the lamb that they're referring to that differs between the countries.

The term mutton is overloaded: in South Asia, I believe it refers goat.

buyxon I Can Eat Glass

The Afrikaans version may be comprehensible to a Dutch speaker, but the Dutch version, even the version you posted, is still very hard for this (second-language) Afrikaans reader to understand.

buyxon I Can Eat Glass

It's interesting that the page says that Afrikaans was derived from Dutch in the 20th century, but the two languages are so different.

Dutch: Ik kan glas eten. Het doet geen pijn. Afrikaans: Ek kan glas eet, dit maak my nie seer nie

The truth, of course, is that Afrikaans split off from Dutch centuries earlier, but it wasn't a "prestige language" until the 20th century.

The page comes from a more innocent time, when the internet hadn't hit critical mass, and you could get away with stuff like that without pedants fact-checking you to death.

buyxon Namibian fairy circle debate rages on: Sand termites or Turing mechanism?

Himba bushmen

It's rare to see an error in the opening sentence of an article, and maybe a nitpick but I believe "bushmen" usually refers to San hunter-gatherer nomads, not Bantu language-speaking pastoralists.

buyxon The kingdom of Bhutan has been quietly mining Bitcoin for years

I can recall many, many years ago (20+), reading an article about the future of telephones. The article proposed that many developing nations would never install landlines with full penetration because mobile phones are so much cheaper. This was written in the era when mobile phones were still expensive. That blew me away.

This brings back bad memories, and illustrates the risk of linear thinking: South Africa's black population was denied proper services under apartheid, including telecommunications. In an effort to supposedly right that wrong, the state-owned telecommunications company, Telkom, was given a years-long monopoly on fixed-line telecommunications in return for putting in fixed line connections to black communities. There were reports that an American corporation, SBC, helped write the country's telecoms act after it acquired a minority stake in Telkom.[1][2]

That monopoly set South Africa back many years, and it's only been in the last decade that it began catching up with the rest of the world. Oh, and the copper network has been so badly looted that many/most places now have wireless landlines. And those under-served black people: they all bought cellphones for the same reasons that people in the rest of the world did.

[1] https://twentythirdfloor.co.za/2007/08/27/telkom-sbc-and-a-f... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070827181955/http://www.busrep...

buyxon The BRICS Has Overtaken the G7 in Global GDP

Mao’s reforms led to millions of deaths. China grew after the 70s. But in any case, thanks for clarifying your conception of “discomfort”.

buyxon The BRICS Has Overtaken the G7 in Global GDP

India and China have both managed to uplift their economies in the last 30 years without the “discomfort” of violent crime, increasing corruption, the collapse of state institutions and an inability to generate electricity.

Of course reducing everyone to grinding poverty is one way of reducing inequality, but it’s hard to see what the utility of that would be.

Blacks will, and do, bear the brunt of the deterioration anyway.

buyxon The BRICS Has Overtaken the G7 in Global GDP

What makes you think I’m white?

In any case, apart from many Afrikaners, whites are increasingly irrelevant to the discussion about South Africa’s future-they’re dwindling as a percentage of the population because of aging, emigration, higher black birth rates and inward migration from other African counties.

The country is, objectively, deteriorating.

buyxon The BRICS Has Overtaken the G7 in Global GDP

South Africa is a deteriorating shithole. My mother was telling me that they want to move to guarded security estate because she is afraid she might be raped, and my father bludgeoned in their home. (NB: they’re not under threat because of their race, rather because that’s what criminals do).

The police are dumb as rocks and totally lazy: look at the Boksburg tanker blast in December to see how they don’t GAF about doing their jobs.the public was standing around a burning gas tanker taking pictures for social media for hours before it exploded and killed dozens. The police only pitched after the explosion.

There is no serious border control, and any mention of it is shut down as “xenophobic” by the media and business that want to flout labour regulations by hiring undocumented migrants from the rest of Africa, despite the obscene unemployment rate.

The electricity situation has been discussed at length here previously, but it’s strangling the economy.

Sure you can make money if you are skilled, but you can make better money using those skills in any number of other countries.

The only thing that’s keeping many middle-class South Africans from emigrating is the cheap domestic help. They are happy to exploit the obscene inequality since it gives them cheap labour. They live in terror of washing their own clothes and cleaning their own toilets.

buyxon The BRICS Has Overtaken the G7 in Global GDP

If you look at that author’s articles on South Africa; they seem to echo right-wing Afrikaner talking-points.

It doesn’t mean it’s all wrong, but important to recognise the limitations of the source.

buyxon The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines

Blacks are the people who would suffer the worst from this attitude, since whites tend to be richer and able to buy their way out of trouble (generators, solar, batteries, private schools, private healthcare).

It may possibly have been a thing 20 years ago, but nowadays, I doubt anyone relishes the breakdown in services as "sticking it to the man".

buyxon The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines

Corruption, an incompetent civil service stuffed with political appointees, terrible education system, open borders (sorry, but it's a fact....you can't have huge unemployment and open borders with large numbers of undocumented people who are willing to work with no protections and below minimum wage - as per the article ), constrained electricity supply and constrained infrastructure due to a neoliberal obsession with paying down debt in the 1990-2004 period, instead of investing.

buyxon The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines

I think whites are going to be increasingly irrelevant in South Africa, and apart from the poor, the old, and ideologically motivated Afrikaners, I suspect that they are going to continue to emigrate in increasing numbers. Indians are already displacing them as the dominant minority in professional contexts, but they'll also start leaving for greener pastures.

A focus on race-relations, in 2023, obscures the real issues plaguing South Africa, which, although in large part a legacy of apartheid, don't have to do with black-white relations.

buyxon The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines

Zuma may have acted like a shower could prevent AIDS, but he also oversaw the rollout of anti-retroviral drugs that pushed life expectancy up.

In fact, that was one of the reasons why he was elevated to power: Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS denialism led to huge numbers of deaths, and his political downfall in the ANC.

I’d say the real issue is not the ANC’s electoral dominance, but the party’s practice of Democratic Centralism, which allows the leader unfettered control. I would guess the closest modern analogue would be the Chinese Communist Party.

Zuma was allowed to loot the country, along with his cronies because of this, just as Mbeki was allowed to practice his AIDS denialism.

As you said, the ANC’s power is eroding, but until there’s electoral reform, to make MPs independent of party bosses, South African democracy will always be at risk of being captured by nefarious actors.

buyxon The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines

The article makes it clear that the miners are mostly illegal immigrants from neighbouring countries.

The country has reasonably strong labour laws, but employers, who never really moved beyond the cheap servile labour model under apartheid hate worker rights (which aren’t really that strong by world standards). So they hire undocumented workers from other African countries. This contributes to the huge unemployment rate amongst South African citizens.

Kidnapping for ransom, which was unheard of ten years ago, has become a thing because of Mozambican and Pakistani crime syndicates.

It’s one of a myriad of problems in the country, but the fact is that any attempts to control the borders have been decried as “xenophobia” by elites. Interestingly, SA white conservative types, who rally for support from anti-immigration people overseas, support illegal immigration in South Africa (along with most upper middle-class people), since it keeps labour costs down, and they hold black South Africans in contempt.

There’s also been a general collapse in state capacity: the recent explosion in Boksburg where the police never bothered pitching up at the scene of a leaking LPG/propane truck to control bystanders led to 40 deaths, is indicative of the sort of don’t-give-a-damn attitude of most state institutions.

buyxon South Africa's national electricity crisis to worsen

And this: https://www.tralac.org/news/article/6931-surge-in-botswana-s...

buyxon South Africa's national electricity crisis to worsen

It's a tiny country (population 2.3 million, vs South Africa's 60 million), mono-ethnic, rich in diamonds, strong culture of law and order.

South Africa also props Botswana up via a customs union.

https://www.tralac.org/news/article/6931-surge-in-botswana-s...

buyxon South Africa's national electricity crisis to worsen

The poor masses have voted opposition parties in at municipal level a few times now. It's just a matter of time before the ANC's vote share drops below 50%. The real question is where those votes are going to go instead.

The Democratic Alliance looked like it was going to pick up the votes of disaffected black voters, but instead it seems like its leadership decided to pay more attention to Western culture wars (Helen Zille going on about "wokeness" etc) and to protect its right flank from being eroded by Afrikaner nationalists after the 2019 election, rather than courting the centre.

Cyril Ramaphosa's personal popularity helped the ANC in 2019, but it was also used by the DA as an opportunity to shaft Mmusi Maimane, who could have been a viable potential leader in SA.

Can't blame the voters if the politicians leave them with a dearth of choice.

buyxon South Africa's national electricity crisis to worsen

Thabo Mbeki was an AIDS denialist, he's been out of power since 2008 and largely discredited.

Jacob Zuma came to power partially because he wasn't an AIDS denialist, and one of the few things Zuma can claim credit for was widespread availability of anti-AIDS drugs, and the resultant recovery in South Africa's life expectancy.

AIDS denialism is pretty-much dead in South Africa....it only ever was a pique of Thabo Mbeki, and because of his power as head of the ANC, the rest of the leadership had to be sycophantic.

buyxon South Africa's national electricity crisis to worsen

In 2017/2018 people could just go to a bank, or one of the many foreign exchange companies that operate in SA, and transferred their money anywhere in the world, legitimately. Exchange controls have been largely done away with for individuals.

buyxon South Africa's national electricity crisis to worsen

You don’t need to do any of this. Exchange controls were relaxed a while ago and taking money out of South Africa isn’t difficult for most people.

buyxon South Africa's national electricity crisis to worsen

that confiscates private property

Private property rights are intact in South Africa (for now perhaps, but things are bad enough without the need for exaggeration). Also, monetary (exchange) control regulations are quite loose nowadays, and shouldn’t affect normal people trying to emigrate, but as you say, the exchange rate makes this a moot point.

buyxon South Africa's national electricity crisis to worsen

The ANC is structurally broken: that’s the bottom line.

The same sort of intrigue that happens in the Chinese Communist Party ruling circles happens in the ANC (not surprising since both are organised under the same principles), meaning that the leader has unfettered power until the next ANC elective conference. Mbeki (competent but with crazy ideas about AIDS that were his undoing) and Zuma were allowed to run amok. Add cadre deployment to the mix, and you can see why South Africa is such a mess…the democratic constitutional order is badly weakened when the electorally dominant political party is run as a personality cult.

I expected Cyril Ramaphosa to be more aggressive in cleaning out the rot, and to perhaps reform the ANC structurally, but he seems very tentative…

buyxon South Africa's national electricity crisis to worsen

To add to your point: the roots of South Africa’s energy crisis date back to the early 90s, when the apartheid government was finishing up. Until the late 1980s, the apartheid government were into central planning, price controls and other state interventions (like many other western governments of that era). They started deregulating and privatising in the late 80s, and had already started cutting infrastructure spending by the early 90s.

Thus, throughout the 1970s and 1980s they actually massively overbuilt electricity generation infrastructure. In the early 90s, electrification programmes were being rolled out in black townships to soak up the excess capacity. Of course, this excess capacity came with an opportunity cost, as all central planning tends to do.

With the advent of the ANC government the emphasis switched to paying off South Africa’s national debt (which has largely been incurred by the apartheid government fighting proxy wars against the Soviet Union and Cuba).

Finance minister Trevor Manuel and then-deputy president Thabo Mbeki, who pretty much ran South Africa from 1996 to 2008 continued and expanded the early 90s austerity. The economy actually did well during this period and South Africa was widely lauded internationally for its fiscal responsibility, however infrastructure investment didn’t keep up, as you point out, the public transport network (which the apartheid government misguidedly deregulated and handed to the free market in the form of the minibus taxi industry in the late 80s), the road network and other infrastructure started deteriorating through lack of maintenance and also failed to keep up with demand.

The ANC government attempted to restructure the electricity network in the early 2000s to bring it into line with developments in the rest of the world (creating a market for generation), but by this time Mbeki’s AIDS denialism had cost him a lot of political capital with the left of his party (actually the trade union movement, COSATU in alliance with his party). The bottom line is that it was politically infeasible to restructure the electricity industry (the current government is trying again under duress). So without government build of new generation, and no private sector investment because of the stalled market reforms, demand eventually outstripped supply by 2007 (remember what I said about economic growth being relatively high in that era). Load shedding arrived in late 2007. It was actually a huge surprise when it started, and as you say, we were totally unprepared. The IT industry scrambled to install generators in offices.

With the Soccer World Cup coming up in 2010, Eskom (the government body with a virtual monopoly on electricity supply and generation) ran its fleet hard, and also commissioned two mega coal power stations. Mbeki was replaced by 2009 with Jacob Zuma: Mbeki’s arrogance and his insane AIDS policies having finally done him in. Zuma, was of course, not a technocrat like Mbeki, but embodied some of the worst traits of a politician.

Load shedding actually faded into the background for much of the early 2010s, but by 2015 or so, load shedding returned, as that lack of maintenance because of an electricity fleet that was being run too hard caught up.

The two mega coal power stations have been beset with issues as well.

Eskom, despite recent efforts to clean it up, languished under a cloud of corruption and incompetence through the 2010s as part of a pattern of politically connected incompetents gaining purchase throughout the state. Water woes kicked in by 2014, with large parts of high-altitude Gauteng province without water because the pumps that raised water from dam catchments failed (they were repaired but it was a sign of how badly things were being neglected). There are rumours that hangers on from Zuma’s era are sabotaging Eskom from within…it’s hard to be sure, but regardless, it was left in a sorry state.

South Africa is a constitutional democracy with strong institutions…the fact that it managed to survive the Zuma era without collapsing is a testament to that. However, the ruling ANC is run under the Leninist precepts of Democratic Centralism and thus the president of the ANC has enormous power because of the electoral dominance of the party (you could look to China’s CCP intrigues for an analogue).

Even if Cyril Ramaphosa, the current president, and basically a good egg, manages to push through reforms, it may well be too late. The country could well be in a death spiral.