Once the highly infrastructure developed economic powerhouse of Africa, South Africans these days are more interested in the outlook for rolling blackouts. The country’s most-downloaded app provides schedules, alerts and forecasts for power outages.
Eskom, the state power monopoly, is struggling to generate enough electricity to meet needs, and has re-introduced a byzantine system of rotating outages known as “load-shedding.” On February 11th a whopping 4,000 megawatts of power, enough to power some 3m households, was cut from the national grid to prevent it from collapsing. Some businesses have bought generators and battery systems; others close during outages. In big cities, there is chaos at rush hour as traffic lights go dark. The blackouts suit copper-cable thieves, who can steal without fear of electrocution. And when the electricity is switched backed on, substations sometimes explode, resulting in secondary outages.
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2019/02/21/why-the-lights-keep-going-out-in-south-africa
[paywall: you can see the whole article in 'anonymous view' through startpage.com]
More on the situation:
https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/267263-south-africas-electricity-system-is-falling-apart-and-it-is-much-bigger-than-just-eskom.html
How to bring back the lights in South Africa?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @12:17AM (37 children)
Though totally politically incorrect, it is based in fact that the average IQ of a country relates to its economic success.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations [wikipedia.org]
and
https://brainstats.com/average-iq-by-country.html [brainstats.com]
Due to apartheid, South Africa had been batting way above its weight (at 'handover' it was a fully industrialized country with infrastructure at par with the United States and Europe). So was Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) before their handover..
Sometimes 'helping' just makes things worse..
You want to fix it, people with high IQs have to be in charge (doesn't matter what race..can be whites, East Asians, or a selection people of any racial group that happen to have high enough IQs to run things properly)
This also doesn't forebode well for the United States with all the illegals flooding in the border, who generally have low IQs (which is the real reason this is a problem.. if it was Japanese, Chinese, or others with high IQs coming in, people would probably have much less of a problem with it..). The USA 50 years from now will end up like every other screwed up Latin American country if this continues. Just ask the South Africans (or Rhodesians) when they end up in charge..
[yes, it is 'racist', but absolutely true, and we all know it..]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @12:46AM (1 child)
You know that groups with high IQ's can also have stupid people amongst them. The average is just a measure of center, but the spread can be very large. It is probable that the people in charge are all around the same ballpark IQ regardless the racial group. (Truly smart people stay away from politics, Einstein is an example)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Wednesday April 24 2019, @03:29AM
Yes people vary, duh. They call it the Bell Curve after all. The problem is if you have a population one standard deviation down there simply won't be enough smart people to make everything keep going, so you end up having to sacrifice some things, interconnectedness rears its head and things go sideways. Work it out for yourself. Imagine all of the jobs in a community that need people to be smarter than average. If your average is a whole deviation down and you are trying to have the same distribution of jobs everybody gets shifted down. The engineering types are a standard deviation down, the plumbers are a standard deviation down, and so on. If your first though is that a dumb engineer is a disaster waiting to happen, it means you have probably failed to realize just how much damage a stupid plumber can create. Because once you stop to think it through it can't work any other way. So how does that work? It can't, a population a deviation down simply can't have a society patterned after Europeans. Because too many jobs require an absolute intelligence level to safely perform them and you won't have enough smart people to go around.
They are going to have to (or more likely smart people elsewhere do most of the work) develop models for societies that can exist and sustain themselves with the human resources available to them. They have to be willing to abandon technology that requires too much skilled labor to maintain safely, or entirely reimagine it into a form they can use. Advanced medicine goes. Extensive electrical grids go, massive transportation infrastructure has to go. Trains from town to town could probably be sustained, freeways and complex interchanges not so much. If the foreign exchange credits can be maintained to import the hardware, cell phones and limited Internet are probably sustainable, just the towers and a few fibers. Thousands of miles of wired infrastructure probably not.
Or accept colonialism back.
And yes it works on the up side of the curve too, and other factors influence things. For example Japan can successfully deploy social structures and technology we in the U.S. couldn't hope to sustain. They are, on average, a bit smarter and have the advantage of still having a high trust society with low diversity.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @12:53AM (2 children)
Noticing that certain races aren't as good at certain things is BAD. You have been mass downvoted by SN's cabal of fags, trannies, betas, and other generally incompetent Hillary voters. Hopefully you have learned your lesson, otherwise we'll all gang up on you and call you names because of your lack of tolerance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @01:45AM
Ooooh sick burns, slurs and projection. Please don't kill anyone when you finally have your mental breakdown.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @02:05AM
Yep, but it doesn't change the fact that it is still the truth.. as politically incorrect as it maybe.
(Score: 2, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday April 24 2019, @01:03AM (15 children)
aaaannnnd, there it is.
I'm a bit surprised I had to scroll down this far to find it, but there it is, pretending IQ has any bearing on anything. Why don't you go ahead and tell us about state's rights now, and how much happier "those people" were when they had no responsibilities or whatever the justification is this week for being an arsehole.
Yes, it is, and no, we don't.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 24 2019, @02:07AM (5 children)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 24 2019, @02:09AM (4 children)
FTFM. And such people aren't going to become less racist by you feeding their appeals for attention either.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday April 24 2019, @02:27AM (3 children)
No, I suppose not. This is a place to discuss things though.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Wednesday April 24 2019, @02:31AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday April 24 2019, @03:10AM (1 child)
No, I was just scrolling through the comments.
I expected to find a comment like that, and others did too. The first comment in the thread is
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 24 2019, @10:36AM
Exactly my point. People were trolling for bad comments and they got what they wanted. Who knew?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @02:08AM
I wouldn't count on it..
Actually I was in South Africa once, and asked our black Taxi Driver that now that apartheid is over, things are better now right?
He said no, it was much better in the apartheid era. Stuff (like the lights) worked.. it was safe, there was work and money to be made... not like now.
This was a black guy saying this.. in South Africa.. years after apartheid was over..
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday April 24 2019, @02:12AM (5 children)
Actually, intelligence and education has a helluva lot to do with almost everything. Yes, of course GP is doing his racist thing, implying that all dem blackies is just dumber than monkeys. Still, intelligence is a necessity, and so is education. Ideally, intelligent people are always educated, along with a lot of less intelligent people. But let's not pretend that intelligence is meaningless. You know better, I know better, and racist GP knows better. You'll have to state your case better, to refute the obvious racism above.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday April 24 2019, @02:21AM
Fair enough. What I should have said is "IQ is almost always poorly measured" which is (almost) always true.
Your points about intelligence and education are entirely correct.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @03:46AM (3 children)
Intelligence is a function of education.
Education is a function of culture.
Culture has a lot of momentum. It takes generations to change it. How smart you are has a lot to do with how fertile the environment is during your developmental years.
It's not about race. It's about the culture of a people. White American rednecks are about as dumb as any uneducated third-world people of color. They just happen to have been born in a more affluent place. That doesn't make them smart. In fact, it proves how much dumber they are considering the immense opportunities within their reach.
(Score: 2) by Tokolosh on Wednesday April 24 2019, @04:12AM
Sadly, the South African government has done for the public education system what it has done for the electricity business.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @11:57AM
Knowledge is a function of education. Intelligence is part hereditary and part environmental. You're claim would be that taking someone with Downs syndrome and giving them the same education as an individual of average intelligence would result in equal outcomes. That is wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @05:45PM
you're ignorant or dishonest. in a general sense: hillbillies are ignorant, but not stupid. blacks are ignorant and stupid. there is a difference.
(Score: 2) by Tokolosh on Wednesday April 24 2019, @04:03AM (1 child)
I understand you disagree, but he at least proposed a solution. We'd like to hear your solution, not your opinion about his -isms.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday April 24 2019, @09:52AM
Oh come on now, no he didn't.
My solution? There isn't one. I am pretty sure that when the ANC begins to lose their grip violence will happen in South Africa, and it will be bad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @02:11AM (11 children)
Oh, it's another fascist blaming a different demographic (racial/sexual/etc) for the systemic problems of capitalism. (Would you like to know more? [marxists.org])
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday April 24 2019, @02:24AM (3 children)
Yes, because, as we all know, there is no corruption amongst the commie bastards. Just look at the utopia in Venezuela!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @02:38AM (2 children)
Also see here for South Africa [blackagendareport.com] and here for Venezuela [blackagendareport.com].
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday April 24 2019, @02:52AM (1 child)
Half-truths presented in an emotional manner to paint some demographic as inferior or superior? Where have we heard that kind of thing before?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @03:01AM
The white European ruling class has quite a track record. All must rise against it, including working class whites.
n.b. The working class cannot be divided along racial lines or it will be forever enslaved.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @03:06AM (3 children)
Oh, it's another communist trying to attack anything that can actually oppose the most death filled ideology on Earth, Communism.
Leftists in the USA and other Western nations don't know the evil they side with, they are so poorly educated and brainwashed. They, like you, fight against that which has brought the world to the forefront of science and technology to drag us into the clutches of a repeatedly failed ideology that has killed well over one hundred million people. Disgusting!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @03:13AM (2 children)
The death toll of capitalism [wordpress.com].
Grand total is an order of magnitude higher. Disgusting!
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday April 24 2019, @12:00PM (1 child)
Technically you can't lay that at the feet of capitalsm because it was mercantilism. If you mush definitions together as you have you wind up with absurdities like claiming the Roman trade in slaves was capitalist, and that shogunate Japanese villagers were proto-communists.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @01:24PM
Ah. It's a good thing that the USA Constitution doesn't include something like a three fifth clause then.
(Score: 2) by Tokolosh on Wednesday April 24 2019, @04:06AM (2 children)
The ruling ANC is in a partnership with the South African Communist Party. Eskom is a state-owned, vertically-integrated, monopoly power company and a Marxist's dream.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @11:59AM (1 child)
So you're saying that Eskom workers have a democratic voice and are able to vote to raise their own wages and change business policies, and that the larger working class is able to do things like deciding whether or not to accept parasitic IMF loans for example, by direct democracy? Yes? No?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @05:46PM
Name a socialist state that remained democratic in the face of economic reality. I'll wait...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @10:21AM (1 child)
Its education, not IQ that drives evolution. Education will sooner or later also increase the country IQ, but education is the root that makes a country work.
So even low IQ, low education people can bring lot of benefits by educating then (yes, it's slow, it'll takes some time always) and then their children, where you will see the full benefits of it.
If you ignore the parents education, probably their children will also suffer from bad education (after all their parents did "well" without it) and you do not fix the problem
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 26 2019, @06:16PM
Education is just another innovation made by smarter people. When you have less smart people you can't develop these innovations as easily.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 24 2019, @10:56AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @01:45PM
think that the brain is just a muscle, without training, it goes soft and weak. with training, it gets harder, bigger, stronger and more resistant.
Its exactly the same with the brain, if you do not use it, your IQ may drop, if you use it, your IQ can get better. Of course, like the muscle, everyone have their own limits.