Idk, I’ve seen Deliverance, plus all those horror movies that start out on some desolate road in the woods at night. Seems likely a fair depiction of country living.
No thank you, I’ll stay in Manhattan and not get kidnapped and murdered by monsters tyvm.
Are you under the impression that western activity in Africa ceased with the end of colonialism? No fomented coups, conflicts, revolutions, arms and funding for rebel groups, continuous bribes and support to corrupt government officials to secure the flow of oil, minerals, etc. out of those countries into western hands? No proxy wars between the west and the USSR?
Africa is a continent. Be specific which countries and what coups and revolutions.
If I look at a country like Zimbabwe, it’s in worse shape than when it became independent and the West had not interfered. If anything it supported it with development funds.
What, lol? You want me to write a comprehensive account of each country in Africa that had foreign interventions and enumerate them? What’s the character limit for comments on HN, how many full comments do you think I’d need to get to something approaching comprehensiveness?
Zimbabwe, we’re talking about the one that had China, USSR and SA providing weapons and training up until the end of Rhodesia around 1980? Then IMF/World Bank imposed market liberalization in the 90s, then sanctions from 2002-2024?
Truly, can’t understand why they’d be in bad shape, must be all their own fault. My brilliant white brain thinks it must be something genetic, if you know what I mean, nudge nudge wink wink.
No, but it would just be nice to be specific in your claims and not make blanket claims which clearly aren’t true.
As for Zimbabwe, nobody forced them to ally with the USSR and China. That was their decision. As was their agreement with the IMF.
It’s not great to infantalize nations like Zimbabwe and act like they have no agency. They fought for their independence, got it and made their own bed.
There are many ways of knowing if you actually want to find out. Third party auditors, evaluations, reputation… just… reading reports and looking at evidence of field work.
Too many people use this as an excuse to throw up their hands and say “well I guess I have no choice but to keep all my money for myself and donate nothing, damn, darn, totally not the conclusion I was secretly hoping to reach, not at all, oh man, damn.”
But you are proving the point of the parent comment:
well I guess I have no choice but to keep all my money for myself and donate nothing
You can't donate without trust. By your reckoning any trust at all is to much trust. So you are saying: Never trust anyone. And you are not wrong.
I am actually following that advice. In general, I never donate money, but, I do donate my time. That is, I rather work less, and earn less money in order to have time to volunteer. That applies double now that I live in Africa. I do support some children that can't afford to go to school. But I know all these children in person. I see how they actually live, and in most cases, I give the money directly to the schools the children go to, because I could not even trust the children or the parents. In most cases that lack of trust was unnecessary, but in at least one case it turned out to be warranted. That child is not getting help from me anymore.
Now, once I started to ask people to help me supporting the children here, it became clear that anyone helping me has no way of verifying how the money is used. They have to trust me. And not only do they have to trust that the money goes to the children's school expenses but also that these children actually need the money. It is to easy to build up a narrative on how poor everyone here is. and unfortunately the whole charity industry (or however you want to call that) is built on those narratives.
That's one reason why I came here. To find out what is the actual reality. What is the truth. And, ultimately, what is really the best way to help. I don't know the answer yet.
My interim conclusion so far is to invest, buy, bring money into the local economy, ever which way. Most of it will not go to the neediest. But, actually, I believe only helping the neediest is not going to move the needle anyways. Sending money to the neediest will allow them to buy food, but sending money to the government will allow it to build infrastructure which will also benefit the neediest because it may give them access to clean water, electricity, internet, streets, which for example make it easier for those children to go to school.
People talk about the trickle-down effect, and how it does not work. But that's not what I mean here. At least not directly. The trickle-down effect assumes that giving money to the rich automatically leads to actions that benefit the poor. That's obviously not the case. What I mean is to actively invest into things that benefit everyone, including the poor, and give money to those who are building those things. That in turn is also easier to verify than any charity that helps individuals which you can not track.
That's my theory for now. Over time I hope I will learn more get a better understanding. I am unfortunately not in the position to make any investments myself, to test if my guess here is true. But I will keep observing and and learning, and I'll share what I learn in the comments here.
Honestly, even if you join the field audit - who's to say they didn't plan everything in advance and that these aren't all crisis actors?
Who's to say they didn't drug you, and you performed the "field audit" on a psychedelic trip from within a padded cell controlled by the nefarious cabal of do-gooders?
Frankly, if you believe your own eyes and ears aren't lying to you, you may be a touch naive.
At the very top, yes and unfortunately many workers on both sides of the fence run interference/collaborate for those at the top it’s one of reasons the Molly Maguire‘s never win or rarely win for too long.
Left/Right alignment is relative, and the American political center is...where it is, and has been drifting rightward since Bill Clinton's "Third Way".
This doesn’t seem to be a universal rule at all, but smells more of a boogeyman promulgated within US society.
The nordics are anywhere from 50% - 90% of all labor unionized and they absolutely destroy the US on every standard of living metric.
It seems to me a case that echoes “better to let 99 guilty men go free than to execute an innocent man”. Of course, in this case, the ratios are actually reversed. Should we execute 99 innocent men to make sure that 1 guilty guy gets punished?
There will be some free riders, just like there will be some welfare queens, just like there will be some voter fraud.
That said, these cases represent a vanishingly small minority of the whole, and the cure is far worse than the disease.
>It seems to me a case that echoes “better to let 9 guilty men go free than to execute an innocent man”. Of course, in this case, the ratios are actually reversed. Should we execute 9 innocent men to make sure that 1 guilty guy gets punished?
We don't have to do an echo. We can just do it as it is.
9 men hunt and 1 man eats free, so the 9 men are carrying the weight of the 1.
This system is inherently unstable and unsustainable. Maybe you can mitigate it (nordic style) by keeping a small population and drilling into people's heads from birth that "you take turns being the 1, and the 1 needs to be eager to get back to the hunt or shame will be had", but even then that is a not an inherently stable system, but one propped up by trust.
> 9 men hunt and 1 man eats free, so the 9 men are carrying the weight of the 1.
Updated the quote to the historically accurate 99 vs 1.
> This system is inherently unstable and unsustainable.
The countries cited are extremely stable. Arguably far more stable than the US.
That said, we can bring in the rest of Western Europe if 5 countries aren't enough of an example. They have union participation rates between 10% and 50%, median around 20%. The thing is, they have much larger proportions of their workforces covered by collective bargaining agreements - France for example is at 10% union participation yet 98% of labor covered by bargaining agreements.
Western Europe and the Nordics combined = ~400 million people, bigger population than the US, and far more diverse, so the common refrain of "small homogenous population" doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Of course, all societies so far have eventually been unstable.
We can just choose whether our unstable society will be a vindictive one that prioritizes punishing wrongdoers over the wellbeing of the whole, or a pragmatic and (as a nice bonus) compassionate one which prioritizes the wellbeing of the whole over a puritanical urge to purge the unworthy.
Europe is in a borderline catastrophic economic situation. I wouldn't use them as an example, because it ultimately just illustrates my point more. Lots of people are aware of Europes excellent quaility of life, far far fewer (but thankfully including Euro leaders) are aware of the existential financial situation and forecasts.
Europe was supposed to have a vibrant tech scene and a globally competitive technology stack (go back 40 years). But it doesn't. It also doesn't really have a growing economy. Or much ability to defend itself. Or much ability to power itself. Or much ability to finance itself.
Europe has a very impressive social systems, absolutely, but it's important to recognize the incongruity between what these countries promise, what they will need, and what money they actually make.
EU debt to GDP is ~80% avg across member states, US is ~123%.
US CPI 3.8% as of April, EU HICP 3.2% as of April.
IMF projects 2.3% growth US vs 1.1% growth EU in 2026.
Not sure I would say the EU is in a borderline catastrophic economic situation and the US is not?
If both are in catastrophic situations (it seems one could fairly make that assessment in either case), then again we’re back to “all societies are unstable, would we like to be pragmatic and compassionate during our brief moment of stability or vindictive and self destructive?”
> but smells more of a boogeyman promulgated within US society.
Particularly the ultra-capitalist part of US society.
Do unions attract some percentage of people who want to abuse them to do less work for more pay? Sure, humans are flawed. But unfettered capitalism also attracts some percentage of people who will greedily exploit the labor of others to enrich themselves.
Both extremes are why we should have rules and regulations as a society to curb the worst excesses, because we can't trust all humans to do the right thing in any system.
That aside, I'd also argue that while both are unfair the actual practical outcome of some people being a bit lazy in a union has a far less disastrous impact on society as a whole than the people who greedily exploit on the other end.
The irony in this is that the image of exploited labor is always minimum wage workers, or dead end job workers, generally the lowest rungs of the labor ladder.
However the reality is that the most economically exploited labor is generally the educated white class workers who ostensibly live pretty comfortable lives. These people are the cash cows getting the smallest cut of of their output.
What this reveals is that the inoculation against anti-capitalist rhetoric (giving people the simple comfortable upper-middle class life they dream of) is in fact the very thing that is most exploitative in a capitalist society.
Are you saying that "aliasxneo", thread starter who worked as "controls technician" is an "ultra-capitalist"?
I love the idea of unions, but it's hard to take its advocates seriously when they just dismiss anyone they disagree with. You can't blame everything on the ultra-rich when the regular workers also report negative stories.
Yeah, it’s like living in an unsustainable society whose luxuries you enjoy are entirely predicated on the destruction of the natural world, the enslavement and abuse of your fellow human beings, and the death and torture of billions of other sentient beings annually.
If you’re honest, you know it’s evil, but it’s pretty undeniable that all the affordances this provides us are useful (to the beneficiaries) and that we all contribute to it daily.
I was more thinking, Taxi drivers that hate cars, or people who hate their work but still do it, the whole life.. but yeah your answer is good too lol :)
Eh, there’s definitely some value in understanding for yourself via experience which models are actually good for which use cases. The benchmarks are unreliable imo, and as I’ve interviewed developers who don’t really use AI, they say things like how they don’t think the (free versions of) copilot or ChatGPT (requests routed to their cheapest models) don’t seem very good. Totally out of touch with the capabilities of the leading models and harnesses.
I think the real argument is just staying employable. Companies are expecting faster and faster turnaround, and it’s simply becoming impossible to meet these deadlines with fully handwritten code. Even before outright mandates on AI usage. If you refuse to use AI, they’ll bring on someone who will, whether or not the quality drops, high quality code is not the primary goal of the business.
Dogshit, hideous vibe coded messes are launching daily and reaching 6-7+ figure ARRs while leaking customer data. Nobody cares in this environment.
If you’re a freelancer it’s even worse, the expectations are that producing a fully functional moderately complex app shouldn’t take a single person more than a couple months, and ideally one.
Expectation for a contractor coming into an enterprise codebase that’s been running for 11 years with a dozen+ internal devs and a mishmash of legacy and new tech -> they want you to implement a totally new feature which touches half a dozen systems in the app ready to demo in 6 weeks and launch to the public in 8.
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