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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: 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.