I saw some article the other day that said giving farm workers a 40% raise would result in $25 more a year for the average family in food costs. Might be cherry picked - but Jesus even it’s $100/year.
Lukewarm take incoming:
GOP senators voting for Juneteenth to be a national holiday is actually a brilliant move. Now if there is a bill to make election day a national holiday, they’ll say “We can’t afford another one, we just Juneteenth. It’s not that we’re anti-voting. We’re just trying to be fiscally responsible.”
They can also use it as an all-purpose anti-racism defense. “The suggestion that I’m racist is absurd. I’m the least racist person there is (after Dear Leader Trump, of course). FFS, I even voted for Juneteenth to be a national holiday. How can I possibly be racist?”
Does this mean we all get this Saturday off? AWESOME!
I read a fun fact today: one of the earliest groups trying to climb K2 got to 25k feet - as high as any humans had ever been - and sat down for smoke break. They were smoking the whole way up the mountain.
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I’m not going to look this up to double check, but I think one of the first to try K2 was Aleister Crowley, the ‘occultist’, who got up to all sorts.
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He was - this was the second serious attempt I think - 1938.
Crowley apparently was pretty unskilled compared to most on the team - but described himself as far superior to everyone else on his team.
1939 apparently was one of the worst weirdest disasters in mountaineering history. I’m on pins and needles until my next walk (listening to Ed Viesturs’ audiobook about K2). No spoilers!
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no wonder he lost
I should get hold of that. Although I have no desire to do it I find stuff about climbing massive mountains endlessly fascinating. K2 always seems the craziest of the crazy, I think the death rate for attempts (successful or otherwise) is something like 1 in 3. Russian roulette with two bullets.
(Though a quick google suggests Annapurna I is even more deadly. Edit - And that dude has a book about it as well.)
Minimum wage got a bump here today. Now $US 15.65/hr.
Well you had a good run, welcome to the upcoming distopia
I’m already getting panic attacks thinking about how many more cents I’m going to have to pay for my burritos.
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I saw a stat that the Congo produces something like $300 billion in wealth every year and only $3 billion of that stays in the Congo
Nowhere does this article mention the actual reason: Republicans
I would also wager that the wealth that stays accrues to the top 0.5% of locals as well.
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One of the earliest attempts included Aleister Crowley on the team, and I believe he pulled a gun on another team member. K2 has all kinds of interesting (and tragic) history.
It’s also insanely hard for anyone to help in places with that level of endemic corruption. NGOs basically make the situation worse by enabling the local corruption to be sustainable while dumping free products on the local market fucking local farmers and new businesses.
Pure resource extraction economies don’t need the locals to do anything but stay out of the way while the looting happens.
Africa is on track to be a Chinese colony within a couple of decades. Hopefully they’ll do a better job than the Europeans, but thst doesn’t seem very likely. Maybe they’ll surprise us by building schools and hospitals for poor Africans.
I honestly doubt they will care about the locals at all. Not all of Africa though… Africa is a huge place.
Honestly Africa’s biggest problem is the dumb borders the European’s drew.
China is making some pretty massive capital investments in parts of Africa. I agree that its hard to believe they will have an altruistic streak that lifts Africans out of poverty, but they might jump start the economy enough to provoke some of that anyway.