On this day in 1984, the Republic of Upper Volta, a name retained from its former status as a French colony, was renamed Burkina Faso, meaning "Land of Incorruptible People", with its people being called Burkinabé ("upright people").

The renaming was proposed by president Thomas Sankara and confirmed by the National Assembly. Sankara's government formed the National Council for the Revolution (CNR), with Sankara as its president, and established popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs). The Pioneers of the Revolution youth programme was also established. Throughout his presidency, Sankara focused on programmes for social, ecological and economic change.

His foreign policies were centred on anti-imperialism, while he rejected the International Monetary Fund's "aid". Sankara welcomed foreign aid from other sources but tried to reduce reliance on aid by boosting domestic revenues and diversifying the sources of assistance. His domestic policies were focused on preventing famine with agrarian self-sufficiency and land reform, prioritising education with a nationwide literacy campaign and promoting public health by vaccinating more than 2 million children against meningitis, yellow fever and measles. Between 18,000 and 50,000 children who died annually of measles and meningitis lived.

Burkinabe built for the first time scores of schools, health centers, water reservoirs, and nearly 100 km of rail, with little or no external assistance. Total cereal production rose by 75% between 1983 and 1986. Other components of his national agenda included planting over 10 million trees to combat the growing desertification of the Sahel, redistributing land from private landowners, suspending rural poll taxes and domestic rents and establishing a road and railway construction programme. On the local level, Sankara called on every village to build a medical dispensary and had pharmacies built in 5,384 out of 7,500 villages. From 1982-1984 the infant mortality rate dropped from 208 per 1,000 births to 145. School attendance under Sankara increased from 6% to 22%.

In support of women's rights, he outlawed female genital mutilation, forced marriages and polygamy. He appointed women to high governmental positions and encouraged them to work outside the home and stay in school, even if pregnant. Sankara encouraged the prosecution of officials accused of corruption and counter-revolutionaries in Popular Revolutionary Tribunals. As an admirer of the Cuban Revolution, Sankara set up Cuban-style Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. His revolutionary programmes for African self-reliance made him an icon to many of Africa's poor. :sankara-salute: :sankara-bass:

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Previous Answer

School, oak, overcoat, mathematical. Multiply the left and right sides of the given equation: a^3 d = b^3 dc, or a^3 = b^3 c.

It follows that c must be a cube of an integer. The only cube from 2 through 15 is 8, so c = 8, and a^3 = 8b^3 , or a = 2b.

Substituting in the first given equation, 4b^2 = bd, or 4b = d. In the given range of numbers, b must equal 2 or 3, and d must equal 8 or 12. Since c already is 8, d is 12 and b is 3. Then a = 2b = 6.

False analogy

Scientific discoveries are sometimes made by using analogy. If certain features of two objects are similar, perhaps other features are also similar. Analogy, however, is only a tool for good guesses. The guesses have to be tested.

Analogy has its place in mathematics also, but so, alas, does false analogy:

“By how much is 40 larger than 32?”

“By 8.”

“By how much is 32 smaller than 40?”

“By 8.”

“By what percentage is 40 larger than 32?”

“By 25 percent.”

“By what percentage is 32 smaller than 40?”

“By 25 percent.”

But it is only 20 percent smaller.

-(A) Suppose your monthly income increases 30 percent. By what percentage does your purchasing power increase?

-(B) Suppose your monthly income does not change, but prices go down 30 percent. By what percentage does your purchasing power increase?

This has 2 other parts but so as not to overwhelm y’all or me will do half today and half tomorrow. Hope everyone has fun :soviet-heart: and please dm @Wmill the answer.

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    • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I mean, the process itself is awful and it hurts us a lot more than it hurts them, but the tendency of capital to move towards monopolization has been recognized for roughly two hundred years. It is readily apparent in every aspect of modern life.

      I remember around the 2008 financial crisis a big theme was that Walmart was driving thousands of small businesses around the country out of business. The corporate media framed it as "Main Street vs. Wall Street." Last year's uprising against the police saw renewed concern for the impacts on small businesses, or the poor minimum wage workers who's Wendy's got burned down. Now the Covid crisis and eviction moratorium are driving concern for the negative impacts on small landlords.

      I can only listen to the sob stories for so long before holding them in contempt. Every time a crisis rolls around, our attention is directed away from the people impacted the worst, to the people who are most sheltered. The proletarianization of the petit bourgeoisie is considered to be a terrible tragedy, but how am I supposed to feel? I've been in the proletariat my entire life. Welcome to the club. It sucks.

      I suppose it isn't fair to pick on the petit bourgeoisie too much when my real issue is the haute bourgeois media's framing of them as paragons of meritocracy, and their careful selection of genuinely hardworking people who nonetheless routinely get crushed by the machinery of capitalism. But these people need to get with the program and stop whining about how proletarian struggles for fair wages, housing, and healthcare inconvenience them - because at the end of the day they'll all be proles too.

      • stigsbandit34z [they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Ahh I see

        Honestly, you definitely know more about this stuff than me. I was always under the impression that small businesses leave a lot more to be desired than gigantic multinational corporations, but it sounds like it may be a bit more complicated

        • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          In a lot of ways small businesses are better, but in a lot of ways they aren't. In my experience, working at privately owned firms has generally been better than working at faceless, publicly traded corporations. I spent three years working at a regional pet chain which was a sole proprietorship, and the conditions were modestly better than the publicly traded company doing the same thing, but the company got driven out of business a few years after I left.

          Now I work in manufacturing. Another privately owned business which does work in the same industry as several fortune 500 companies. The owners treat us as well as I could hope for, but if this place were to get subsumed by the same trend towards monopolization (and it came very close last year - a hundred people got laid off and another hundred furloughed), I'd have to take a job at the megacorp as a "temp" contractor for less pay and no benefits.

          But these are exceptions. I've also worked at small restaurants and retailers which are no better than the national franchises and chain stores. Small business owners have more latitude to treat their staff with dignity than managers who must answer to a board of directors, but they are still constrained by the economy. They are still driven to cut costs or be replaced by a firm which can.

          The whole thing is a process, and the end result is that the nice guy finishes last, while the most rapacious get to buy national newspapers, bribe governments all over the world, and build dick rockets.

          So the way I see it, the plight of the small business owner is a passing phase. It is sad to see a community institution like a rural general store get replaced by a Dollar General, but very few of the media organizations who mourn these changes are willing to to connect the dots to the root cause. (Also, very few small businesses serve institutional roles in their community)

          Likewise, there is a lot of blindness in the entrepreneurial world about this. Everyone thinks their station in life is a reflection of their merit. It's where the whole bootstraps mentality comes from. "I deserve this because I worked hard for it. Other people suffer because they don't work hard enough, they're not frugal enough, they're not smart enough, etc." It's where all those articles about millenials needing to cut back on the Starbucks if they want to buy a house comes from. Those people in particular are in dire need of a reality check and I'm willing to celebrate their misfortune.