zakum1

Corruption in the USA is pretty bad. People here just excuse it away easily.

There is no role for the USA in multi-lateral organizations - the USA has made this clear for decades now - it should withdraw from all of them and let the rest of the world get on with creating a world that is based on the dignity of all people.

Sub-Saharan Africa is deeply humanistic, in a way that is close to unfathomable to Westeners. Scaling or "going viral" requires painstaking building of human connection. Models that have worked elsewhere don't necessarily work. I believe that this has a lot to teach us about how to fight the dark scourge that inhabits Facebook and other social media, in which "scaling" is simple, cheap and so easily corrupted

The honesty and bravery of the speech is remarkable - that a leader can tell those he leads painful and difficult truths - rather than tell them merely what will appease them. Everyday we see evidence of how easy it is to appeal to base and superficial feelings, rather than what is noble and honest. There is so much we can learn from both the causes of the tyranny and how the aftermath was handled, politically, personally and socially.

I don’t think that the “nerd porn” is as negative as the writer believes. If we compare FOSS to proprietary enterprise software we see how little regard proprietary vendors often pay to what engineers need at the expense of adding check-list features that attract “business” decision makers. The ability to enhance, operate, monitor, test are so much stronger in FOSS products because they are written for engineers by engineer. This can of course be taken too far, but it is, IMO, a reason why FOSS can succeed in displacing proprietary technology.

South Africa has a proportional representation system for similar reasons - to recognise plurality. It has some significant downsides. It weakens the ties between a representative and a specific district / constituency. In exchange it strengthens the hands of party decision makers who are the final brokers of how seats are apportioned.

Having grown up in South Africa and having spent a reasonable amount of time in the USA, I admire the local civic mindedness of American communities and the accountability of the political representatives. I am also appalled by the partisanship. I worry that proportional representation could make it worse.

Read (and converse) voraciously and follow the directions it may lead you... Into art, philosophy, psychology, business, politics, literature. This will help you to find things you love, it will also give you insight into adjacent topics that will allow you to shine in an area of CS that is right for you. You will never have such a perfect chance to do this as your university years.

They are called a “smallish lender” - their balance sheet is $90 billion. We are truly in an age of mega systemic banking risk.

It is staggering to hear arguments justifying occupied land that has absolutely no connection to the uk. It shows how poorly the west still understands the evil of colonialism.

Regardless of the ancestry of the people living in any territory, they deserve to have sovereignty over their lives.

What Africa needs are institutions and infrastructure that can buy and refine gold and thereby ensure that the benefits of our resources accrue to the countries (and their people) from where they originate. The pirate miners are not necessarily the source of the problem, neither are the traders in UAE and China. All are just filling a vacuum. Similarly the traditional institutions in Switzerland and other western countries that control precious metal markets are also somewhat part of the problem. To the extent that political elites in Africa benefit from the exploitation of resources, establishing local institutions and infrastructure is narrowly seen as not in their interests. African people and global institutions who truly care about a peaceful, prosperous and free world need to commit investment and political focus to see this happen.

Think about commercial goals, not just technical goals. What will make us successful as a business? What do our clients need?

Have answers rather than questions. Many posters pointed out that it is good to provide options as potential solutions. But this may not be leadership. Engineers love options because we are creative and options are opportunities to experiment. The problem is that we need to be bold when a decision must be made. A decision is explicitly closing off our chance to explore all but one of the options. This is tough leadership.

(We need to know when it is time to make a decision and when it is a time to explore options)