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One thing I despise about our government is that they never take responsibility for anything. Whenever their schemes go wrong, it’s always on someone else.

Sanctions, money changers, supermarkets, Chamisa, opposition, World Bank, CZI—the list goes on and on. Of course, when things go well, they’re fast to take credit even if they had nothing to do with it. If you insist on being in charge, own up to your mistakes. Rather than being shocked we demand more, maybe you outline exactly why this was a fuck up, your role in it and how you’ll fix it. Instead it’ll be more of the same.

Honestly, being Zimbabwean is so stressful. We don’t have civil war, why do we have these problems? We started in a position better than most African countries after decolonization and we’ve fucked it up. And yes I mean we. The government deserves its share of blame, but you too fellow Zimbabwean have contributed to this country’s mayhem. I guess the best we can do is to do good in our own lives and have a greater internal locus of control.

Keep it brief, but informative! Give the most important information and leave out unimportant details.

I wanted to mention this piece of advice but this article does a much better job of it than I ever could.

If your alt text is too long, you should probably describe it in a figcaption.

Concerning race, I remember reading [some research on it by Microsoft] and it seems to matter with news, social media, employment, publications and productivity though not dating oddly enough. Again adding it is context dependent (one of the linked articles mentioned missing a crucial element of a movie because the audio description didn’t mention it), but I don’t think saying “black” makes alt-text overbearing.

Interesting video. I’m not into nightlife, but I have a lot of respect for how promoters work. In essence, promoters connect with hot women and bring them to nightclubs where they’re bait for men to spend a lot of money to try and impress them. The women agree to go because they get free drinks.

I liked the guy at the end since he had a unique challenge of trying to generate business on a Thursday. A lot less gender dynamics (though they’re still there) but a lot more fun. I didn’t expect all the free goodies to lead to a lot of business, particularly the body sushi, but they brought in 20K that night which is impressive.

If Modern MBA happens to read this, keep it up. I’d love to see similar case studies in other fields.

One thing people need to prepare for is that chocolate is going to be very expensive soon. Most of it is grown in west Africa and sadly they won’t get much out of it because of poor agricultural policy, making food here expensive and reducing our competitiveness.

The story starts from cocoa and extends to the rest of Africas agriculture which is pretty shot right now. One reason is undervaluing rural/subsistence agriculture for being unlucrative even though it feeds a lot of people here. I’m guilty of this, even though it’s something Zimbabweland (which provides a revisionary source on Zimbabwe’s fast track land reform program) keeps hammering over and over. Instead of focusing on “cash crops” (which every exportable crop can be), why not look to see what these small farmers need? Arguably Zim tried this with command agriculture and it was a wash, but we can surely start one borehole at a time.

Also, moving up the value chain seems difficult. Ken here argues that we should be commodity traders, which could work. IDK, Africa development seems like a wicked problem and I don’t know how it can get any better.

A crazy idea that’s worth a shot. I’ve always thought of such a thing, even Malawi being a cheap pool of labour. I know it’s a horrible way to view people but given how many people live in Malawi and how much it needs to develop, it’s probably better than what they have now. That was the goal of the Rhodesia Nyasaland Union although then they wanted Nyasaland (Malawi)’s cheap labor to quell the Rhodesian blacks labor movements.

It’s funny how he threads the various languages in the countries through the swear words. I once got a phone call where I was told <i lang="sn">mhata yako</i>. I guess it sounds similar across Southern Africa.

Another interesting thing was using it as a way to make politics more competitive since tribal strongholds will have diluted power. I’m not sure if voting lines up more to Shona/Ndebele rather than rural/urban so I doubt it’s the case in Zambia and Malawi, though a tribal element remains regardless. Shona’s will probably be a majority, but the other ethnic groups aren’t far behind.

I really think merging our countries can give us a lot of leverage, particularly with ocean access. We also have similar problems like AIDS and cholera, so we can work together to solve those. Eventually it would be nice to see the rest of the region join in but for now they either have something to lose or they hate us.

I saw this file explorer replacement the other day and I’m shocked at how smooth it is. Not that I had any problems with explorer but this is a huge improvement performance wise.

I was thinking the other day of a games developer who managed to improve Windows Terminal’s performance dramatically—something that Microsoft said wasn’t possible for many reasons that the game developer disproved with a quick proof of concept.

As powerful as our computer are we rarely feel it. I hope to make use of all the power hardware developers have given us instead of pissing it away with slow code.

…we may have taken it for granted that converting to a new currency was simply a case of converting ZWL (Zimbabwe dollar) by a factor of 2 500

—John Mushayavanhu, new Governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe

You think? It’s better than 0 notice the last time this happened when they abandoned the 1:1 charade in 2019 (as I returned from the US), but how would they think 3 weeks is enough time?

I’m surprised at the progress banks and all have made but there are still a few problems. My mom was told they wouldn’t get salaries because the tax tables haven’t been updated yet. Pick n’ Pay literally shut down their stores for a few days even. Along with this, everyone had to use US dollars which I’m sure all the shops will enjoy.

So far, it doesn’t look too good. The bank can’t guarantee that we can buy fuel with it[PDF: 190KB]. Coupled with how the government peg certain taxes and fees in US dollars, I doubt even they believe in it. I guess they need something to give their contractors.

I thought we had progressed past the point of using 32-bits for currency after the last inflationary episode. Then again, I forgot that sensible developers store money as cents (if not less) so you’ll need a few more zeroes. Also, 2^64 is about 18 quintillion (18 with 18 zeroes) which sounds like a lot but I see 642 quadrillion (.642 quintillion or 642 with 15 zeroes) being equivalent to under $100 dollars (using a weird market mechanism), meaning that storing money as cents would overflow an unsigned 64 bit integer for any company recording anything more than a few bars of candy.

The run of the previous Zim dollar does make prices harder to read. I was at Pick n’ Pay (a shop with uncompetitive pricing) and the ZiG prices makes things so much easier to read. Also, it’s hard to look at historic financial statements. I guess removing zeroes is the most valuable part of this ZiG exercise.

This blog argues that working in South Africa is too expensive, using the example of Dumisani from South Africa vs Dung from Vietnam.

For the same gross salary of $1,000 per month (approximately R19 140), Dumisani keeps in his pocket less than half of the money that Dung would because of higher taxes and transport costs.

I’m from Zim but we have the same problem with high transportation costs and taxes. I never considered that these could be contributing to discouraged workers, but it makes a lot of sense. Lowering lower tax brackets might not cost much since higher income workers pay a lot more than this anyway.

As for transportation, it sucks tremendously and our governments have done very little to address it, leaving us with a patchwork of taxis and <i lang="sn">mishikashika</i> and all the mayhem they cause on the road. Fixing this would dramatically improve the lives of millions not to mention the positive externalities of less cars on the road.

Harsh but fair.

I’m not pro death penalty but her actions have screwed over many people so I understand. Thing is, more people should be punished for letting her fraud go unchecked.

I read the HN thread and someone mentioned that these countries prop up monopolies before destroying them (see Evergrande and Alibaba).

So that’s what it’s called. As much as we complain about computer performance, the complaint isn’t new.

Basically, despite increases in computing power, software developers do their best to erase the gains.

I wrote about how bad Zim internet is and this post does a great job showing how the challenges Econet, Zimbabwe’s largest mobile network operator, affects more than network connectivity.

The issues run deeper than mere technical glitches. They speak of a company struggling to keep up with the demands of a population yearning for reliable service. They tell of foreign currency shortages that hinder the network’s ability to support its systems, of a data centre fault that affects a significant number of servers, and of a rights issue aimed at raising funds to redeem outstanding debentures. It is a saga of corporate challenges that spill over into the lives of everyday Zimbabweans.

And so, I hate Econet. Not because I enjoy the bitterness that comes with such a declaration, but because I long for the days when the name Econet was a source of national pride, not a byword for exasperation. I hate Econet because it represents a failed promise, a dream deferred, and a potential unfulfilled.

Disclosure: I have shares in Econet and my mother works there too.

I’ve meant to get around to using a Raindrop.io but I guess it’s finally time to switch.

I hope to set up a pipeline to post these drops to my site.

While the site looks nice, the interface misses the motions I need to interact with it.

I read Rubin’s post and I didn’t realize just how bad the comments were.

Jesus Christ. They’re even worse had the mods not removed them.

Guess social media brain never went away.

This gets so much worse.

It’s one thing for western developers to focus on. It’s another thing when non-western developers adopt similar development practices for local audiences.

I remember a video by Zororo Makamba, a late local political commentator, who once lamented the state of Zimbabwe’s government websites in 2018. It’s now 2024 and the websites are still terrible. It’s not just the government but private sector too.

It’s especially annoying as office internet is painfully slow. Even if you have faster internet, it’s usually expensive (if not the most expensive in the world) so it’s surprising that there isn’t much attention to improve web performance.

Then again, I don’t see a good reason to care.