I’m a little confused about a comment in the article that says the Mali military will be taking over the .ml domain on Monday. Is the country of Mali going to start using a different domain next week?
I’m confused, so he identifies this problem ten years ago but only just now raised an alarm as his contract was due to be up on Monday?
According to the Financial Times, which first reported the story, Dutch internet entrepreneur Johannes Zuurbier identified the problem more than 10 years ago.
Since 2013, he has had a contract to manage Mali’s country domain and, in recent months, has reportedly collected tens of thousands of misdirected emails.
None were marked as classified, but, according to the newspaper, they included medical data, maps of US military facilities, financial records and the planning documents for official trips as well as some diplomatic messages.
Mr Zuurbier wrote a letter to US officials this month to raise the alarm. He said that his contract with the Mali government was due to finish soon, meaning “the risk is real and could be exploited by adversaries of the US”.
Mali’s military government was due to take control of the domain on Monday.
Lots of liberals on here parroting the “should have gotten out when they had the chance” line. In reality, the threat of capital flight is largely a myth. Sure, you can maybe escape with much of your finance capital, but you can’t take the factories and the worker who fill them with you.
It matters because the factories and more specifically, the workers who fill them are the ones creating value. Had they pulled out sooner, the result likely would have been the same, the state taking over management.
While I don’t particularly care about private property being “repossessed” by the state, especially in an oligarchal capitalist state like Russia where it’s not likely to have any large material benefit for the working class, its just funny that liberals throw stuff like this around without any analysis of the situation.
What this pretty much guarantees is that once the sanctions are lifted, no company is going to want to reinvest in any new factories there. You only get to seize the factories once.
lol are you absolutely sure about it? it was a pretty common occurence in 90s in eastern europe.
step 1. foreign (generally western) company or investment fund or something buys a factory for peanuts. corruption might be involved.
step 2. that entity rolls up entire shop, sells equipment for whoever would buy it, and people get suddenly unemployed. this even happened to steelworks and shipyards
Eating bitterness (吃苦） is a phrase that really brings me back to my time growing up in east Asia. However it seems older generations believing their offspring are too weak / spoilt to handle what they themselves have gone through appears to be a pretty universal thing.
I only know about it from bits and pieces here and there, but it’s a large soft-style protest where they refuse to participate in the economy as much as possible. When they get a job, they do it as poorly as possible without getting in trouble. If they can not have a job somehow, then they don’t get one.
According to google, the Chinese words are pronounced Bai Lan in English.
I believe the youth in many places of the world are turning against the paradigms of their elders. Just wanna have a nice place to live, man. Don’t care about Taiwan or Chinese Pride or trillions of dollars or mighty armies or covid lockdowns, just want a house, job and maybe family, and be able to think that’s a safe thing to try and do. Some people are making that harder than it needs to be though, not in just any one place, but lots of places. And it’s clearly because they’re following old patterns that no longer work as well as they used to.
So take a page from Ghandi. Sit there and wait. They can’t vote or anything in any way that matters, they can’t rebel against a massively powerful authoritarian state, they’d just die or be tortured into re-education. This soft protest is a viable strategy though, similar things have worked before in history.
We at least can vote and bitch and moan about our leadership without being abducted in the middle of the night, taken away and “re-educated”. But even with that democratic alternative, we had our own “Great Resignation”, or so we called it.
It’s Chinese youth basically giving up on the prospect of the careers they were planning for , sometimes just staying with their parents and giving up on the job search. I think it comes from caving to too much family/societal pressure and instead adopting a “fuck this” attitude. The Chinese term is Bai lan (摆烂)
See also “tang ping” (lying flat, 躺平)
The media environment in China is murky at best so I’m honestly not sure how much of it is a real phenomenon and how much is propaganda of some sort.
That was the old name. I think it’s progressed to a more complex form. I don’t really know though, I think you’d need to ask a Chinese young person, and they have their own internet so that’s not necessarily easy.
I wish we’d learn the lesson that manipulating other countries often ends up in people being reactionary and turning toward religious nationalism to fight back against the foreign enemy. This government is in power because of Western governments’ actions. And then supporting a brutal proxy war against them and trying to isolate them internationally after that failed sure hasn’t helped. It just fuels the reactionaries.
As I said months ago. In a war between the diet version of something and the pure version, the diet one always loses.
It wasnt about a secular government and freedom to not worship, it was about the rules being relaxed a bit. You don’t fight to the death for showing your hair you fight to the death for sky-daddy.
Until they are willing to burn korans they will continue to live in a theocratic state.
I’m not debating anything you said, just making conversation. I liked your idea of diet vs. pure, but wasn’t able to figure out if it fits into American politics as they currently exist.
I think it doesn’t, because Dems aren’t very well characterized by the “pure/diet” dichotomy.
bbc.co.uk
Active