Image is of President Hakainde Hichilema and President Xi Jinping on September 15th, from this article.
Zambia is a country of 20 million people, located in southern Africa. Breaking free from British rule in the 1960s, the new government was a one party state ruled by the socialist UNIP party with its leader Kenneth Kaunda, who was a strong supporter of the Non-Aligned Movement (and was its chairman from 1970-73). Its economy has been and remains characterised by copper exports - it is the second-largest copper exporter in Africa - and the economy deeply struggled in the 1970s due to the price of copper plunging. After the fall of the USSR, and due to violent protests, Kaunda stepped down and instituted a multiparty democracy, which has been maintained without (successful) coups to this day, though there are warnings by the leader that some are plotting a coup, given the trend right now.AA
Earlier this year, in June, Zambia struck a deal to restructure the $6.3 billion in debt that they are burdened with, of which China is the single largest creditor.Reuters Though he has typically been more West-friendly, last week, President Hichilema traveled to China for two days, meeting with various companies, and Xi Jinping himself. They elevated their relationship to that of a comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership.Xinhua He and Xi have agreed to the increased use of local currencies in trade.BB
Hichilema said Zambia thanks China for supporting the African Union's entry into the G20 and China's positive role in resolving the Zambian debt issue. The Zambian side abides by the one-China principle, highly appreciates the guiding philosophy and principles of Chinese modernization, and hopes to learn from China's development experience.
Hichilema has also said:AN
"We can do more, faster, because the needs are tremendous in Zambia. I heard some of the solutions are here. All we need to do is to combine the two together."
Check out @Othello@hexbear.net's discussion of The Wretched of the Earth!
The Country of the Week is Singapore! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The news summary for last week is here!
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week's discussion post.
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Okay so being surrounded by these types I 100% know they think that the manager is bad because if they don't recognize and reward people's work, they'll eventually get upset and leave. They think it's such a big own if the company loses them because of their ego but try to explain to them that there's literally dozens of thousands that can easily replace them
If you make it that far tie that into why unionizing is good lol
This person leaves, the company is still $20m better off.
The moral of this story is that when you discover a way to save your company $20m, you first contact a the boss of your boss’s boss and say “if I can save you $10m will you pay me $500k?”
If they say no, contact the competition.
Oh man this idea could be done so often by engineers but they always just present the idea to their boss like a dog and happily hope they get praise and a promotion for it
The innate desire of a programmer to make a process more efficient and the satisfaction a programmer gets from the community recognizing the quality of their solution is proof that communism will work.
We just have to make sure to convince them that whatever SOE they work for is "prestigious" so they can still feel better than everybody else
Yea a sense of socially superior status plays a role you’re right
Give those enterprises a bunch of
How would you be able to secure an offer without divulging the details first and having them run off with your ideas and firing you anyway? It’s one things for contractors to show samples, but I’ve never heard of full time employees being able to tease a solution and getting paid first.
There's another problem I've been noticing in IT companies: Close to zero redundancy in terms of personell. These are the opposite cases where the knowledge is too sparsely distributed, and you can't just blindly replace workers.
These are usually Tesla-style companies where team sizes are reduced to bare-minimum skeleton crews where a single employee carries so much responsibility and knowledge that any of them leaving would likely cause the whole team to collapse.
But of course, those employees don't get to enjoy any special benefits really. The managers higher up are clueless about the situation, and these people are ultimately still treated like regular workers. What's keeping them in their positions is less of an economic incentive, or loyalty to the company, but more of a moral deadlock: "If I were to leave, I would fuck over all my coworkers. And I wouldn't want the same happening to me".
These kinds of teams are basically screwed because even if they wanted to solve tge problem and restore that redundancy, fresh workers are likely to leave after 1-3 years because they are smart enough to see the trap that's been set up. The longer you stay, the more dependent the company becomes on you, and the harder it gets to leave with a clean conscience, because of the "I'll fuck over my whole team" effect.
So you'd rather leave sooner rather than later, because otherwise you turn into one of those essential slave workers that's locked into the system.
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"performance" at IT places is usually measured in something irrelevant like lines of code or amount of commits which are policies that come down from higher above, that the middle managers have to follow or get replaced
MORE CODE MORE BETTER
We had some executives come into town and tell us that our raises have no relation to performance, lmao. Naturally the next question was, ok, so what determines our raise?
Crickets. (The real answer is they give raises to themselves, followed by people they like)
I think it's a difference between short and long term goods. In the short term, keeping income down is good for the next quarter. In the long term, compensating employees who perform well is good. If the company is publicly traded, then their incentive is short term good.
IDK. They're right they should be getting raises. Their problem is probably just that they're not looking around them at the testers and secretaries and janitors and realizing those people need raises too...not just the yearly bump but a serious increase that brings them more in line with the engineers, as well as other improvements in working conditions. I don't think I'd sneer at even relatively well-treated engineers for advocating for themselves and getting as much as possible out of the boss. They just need to be doing the same for their fellow workers, and using their privilege on others' behalf (too).
Take with a grain of salt because I'm basically one of those overpaid computer/software engineers, I guess. But I do say the same of people making twice as much salary as me and doing half the work (as long as they're not managers), FWIW. And I have zero illusions that corporate "performance" metrics mean anything at all. My peers could 100% use about a thousand smacks with the humility stick.
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🤝