A proposed tax hike sparked unrest, but Kenya’s real problem is a debt crisis.

Around $35 million of that debt is owned by foreign creditors, primarily China and powerful international groups like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But Kenya’s economic woes didn’t start recently; the nation’s immense debt stems from an economic boom in the early 2000s, when the government borrowed money from a variety of international creditors to fund public infrastructure projects, supporting agriculture and small and medium businesses and external debt servicing but failed to invest those loans in ways that could grow the economy.

China can lend on whatever terms China wants to, but isn’t the IMF supposed to sanity-check spending when a country comes to them for money, and reject loans if they aren’t going to produce a return?

kagis

https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2023/IMF-Conditionality

When a country borrows from the IMF, the government agrees to adjust its economic policies to overcome the problems that led it to seek financial assistance. These policy adjustments are conditions for IMF loans and help to ensure that the country adopts strong and effective policies.

Why do IMF loans include conditions?

Conditionality helps countries solve balance of payments problems without resorting to measures that harm national or international prosperity. In addition, the measures aim to safeguard IMF resources by ensuring that the country’s finances will be strong enough to repay the loan, allowing other countries to use the resources if needed in the future. Conditionality is included in financing and non-financing IMF programs with the aim to progress towards the agreed policy goals.

So, I’d think that at least one of three things happened here:

• The IMF’s requirements weren’t sufficiently-strong.

• The IMF’s requirements weren’t actually enforced; Kenya did something else with the money.

• Something unforeseeable happened (I assume that COVID-19 might have been a factor, as that impacted economies elsewhere).

reads further

Ultimately, even raising capital is a short-term financial fix to the long-term political problems of corruption, waste, and mismanagement. Efforts to undo those patterns are likely to anger the ultra-wealthy, whose businesses depend on corrupt relationships with the government to thrive.

Well, okay, but taking anticorruption actions can be a requirement of loans. Maybe the government has to decide whether they want to keep those connected people happy or get a loan.

looks back at IMF factsheet

They even list that as a condition that they can impose:

https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2023/IMF-Conditionality

Examples

Improve anti-corruption and rule of law

You can buy discs online.

I don’t speak French either – I just wanted an English-language article about the French elections, but you’re welcome.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I’m sure that you can find media here in the US that is going to provide useful political coverage of France, but I don’t think that this article is gonna be it.

kagis for Le Monde English

Hmm.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/06/29/french-elections-who-would-don-quixote-vote-for-today_6676135_23.html

French elections: Who would Don Quixote vote for today?

Ugh. This is not really what I was hoping for.

checks the BBC

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2q0rv05p19o

French PM in final appeal to stop far-right victory

That’s better.

About 9% intercept ratio during Desert Storm, which was 30 years ago, but both the Patriot and the Al Hussain missiles were pretty much brand new.

Regarding being brand new, what I mean is that the Patriot existed for an anti-aircraft role, but its anti-ballistic-missile capability wasn’t supposed to have been done by that point.

Shit-talking aside, though, Russia never claimed that the S-500 was actually done – I assume that they just yanked their prototype onto the battlefield because the S-400 wasn’t able to intercept ATACMS missiles either (which it’s supposed to be able to – the S-400 doesn’t have an excuse). We rolled out the Patriot when it was still in a prototype, half-baked stage in Iraq, too – just that it was all we had that might be able to intercept a ballistic missile, and we really needed the capability right then – and it didn’t fare well either.

So I suppose that the S-500 guys probably don’t necessarily deserve quite the ribbing that the S-400 guys do. They were probably put in kind of the same place that our Patriot guys were.

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-s500-air-defense-system-crimea-ukraine-kyrylo-budanov-1912333

The S-500 is designed to intercept short-to medium-range targets, including ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles, according to Russian state-run media.

Less than two weeks in the field and the first S-500 has apparently already intercepted a ballistic missile of the sort it was designed to counter.

One imagines that additional S-500 systems would surely produce additional interceptions.

Lemmy is not designed to provide reasonably-hardened anonymity in the sort of way that Hyphanet, I2P, or maybe Tor or something like that is.

I would not recommend using Lemmy if I were seriously concerned about government prosecution for content on it.

Lemmy’s a good alternative for something like Reddit.

Decided to be conservative and leave the Picatinny-rail-to-bayonet-lug piece on the top off, I see.

Yes. I wouldn’t be preemptively worried about it, though.

Your scan is going to try to read and maybe write each sector and see if the drive returns an error for that operation. In theory, the adapter could respond with a read or write error even if a read or write worked or even return some kind of bogus data instead of an error.

But I wouldn’t expect this to likely actually arise or be particularly worried about the prospect. It’s sort of a “could my grocery store checkout counter person murder me” thing. Theoretically yes, but I wouldn’t worry about it unless I had some reason to believe that that was the case.

I mean, you can probably create something akin to a god, but I don’t see as to whether it being open source or not would change that.

I don’t really have a problem with this – I think that it’s rarely in a consumer’s interest to choose a locked phone. Buying a locked phone basically means that you’re getting a loan to pay for hardware that you pay back with a higher service price. But I’d point out that:

• You can get unlocked phones and service now. I do. There are some privacy benefits to doing so – my cell provider doesn’t know who I am (though they could maybe infer it from usage patterns of their network and statistical analysis). It’s not a lack of unlocked service that’s at issue. To do this, Congress is basically arguing that the American consumer is just making a bad decision to purchase a plan-combined-with-a-locked-phone and forcing them not to do so.

• Consumers will pay more for cell phones up front. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – it maybe makes the carrier market more competitive to not have a large portion of consumers locked to one provider. But there are also some benefits to having the carrier selecting cell phones that they offer in that the provider is probably in a better position to evaluate what phone manufacturers have on offer in terms of things like failure rates than do consumers.

Being libertarian doesn’t need mean one’s an anarchist (or even a minarchist!).

And he’s also libertarian in the sense that the unadorned word has been used in the US, a right-libertarian, rather than how it was historically used in Europe in an unadorned sense, left-libertarian, where I’d say that it was somewhat-closer to anarchism than the more small- or minimal-government right-libertarianism.

I mean, the whole thing doesn’t need to be destroyed for a bunch of pieces to be broken off.

There is, but that isn’t why I split it – comment #2 was an afterthought, dealt with a peripheral issue.

I don’t see why they wouldn’t, or couldn’t do this

There are only 52 organizations that Firefox trusts to act as CAs. An ISP isn’t normally going to be on there.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Included_Certificates

https://ccadb.my.salesforce-sites.com/mozilla/CACertificatesInFirefoxReport

If whatever cert is presented by a remote website doesn’t have a certificate signed by one of those 52 organizations, your browser is going to throw up a warning page instead of showing content. KT Corporation, the ISP in question, isn’t one of those organizations.

They can go create a CA if they want, but it doesn’t do them any good unless it’s trusted by Firefox (or whatever browser people use, but I’m using Firefox, and I expect that basically the same CAs will be trusted by any browser, so…)

Ukraine has a navy. The navy just – for the moment – doesn’t have any ships, just boats and anti-ship missiles and USVs and such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Navy

Also, regarding Russia knowing what’s up there and being able to talk to it, apparently earlier in the week Ukraine attacked a Russian satellite communication facility, so I dunno what secondary implications that might have, whether it could relate to this satellite situation.

https://www.newsweek.com/crimea-attack-atacms-space-radar-fire-1916340

Crimea Videos Show Fires Blazing As Space Radar Targeted with ATACMS—Report

Ukraine has struck a Russian deep space network hub in annexed Crimea—allegedly used by Russian Aerospace Forces—using U.S.-supplied missiles, according to local reports.

Kyiv’s forces launched the ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) attack across Crimea on Sunday night, and “successfully struck” Russia’s Center for Long-Range Space Communications in the village of Vitino in the Saky region, open-source intelligence X (formerly Twitter) account OSINTtechnical said.

“Multiple areas of the facility are burning,” the account said.

The center is one of three complexes that make up Russia’s Yevpatoria Center for Deep Space Communications, which supports manned and robotic space missions. The facility was reportedly previously struck in December 2023 with British-supplied Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles.

If it’s a “radar” site, then it presumably deals with stuff nearby.

I don’t think that Russia needs deep space communications facilities to talk to stuff in LEO – hobbyists can do that with simple setups – but it was apparently a military facility, and I think that most military applications today are for LEO. Maybe GLONASS, which has military applications and is in a larger orbit.

And Ukraine presumably isn’t gonna be expending limited weapons on it unless it’s got military significance to Ukraine. So maybe it was also being used to talk to satellites in LEO, dunno.

Also, stuff like constructing transport infrastructure for military logistics or more fortifications or revetments in airfields or any number of things may have significant military effect, even if they aren’t fighting.

considers

If North Korea is going to directly be involved in Ukraine, that maybe changes the calculus for what kind of stuff we send in. North Korea isn’t China, but it is East Asia. A lot of the argument from people who don’t want us committing more heavily in Europe is that it’s a waste of resources relative to what we’d like to do, which is pivot to Asia. But if East Asia is going to be fighting in Europe, that might make this an “Asia conflict”.