Living in ‘an oven’: Heatwave grips displacement camps in Syria

ichbinjasokreativ , 11 months ago

the middle east is really going to need to get its extremism and infighting stuff under control to prepare for climate change. same for africa. us in europe need to manage our greed.

onionbaggage , 11 months ago

So you’re saying it’s hopeless.

afraid_of_zombies , 11 months ago

Everytime I have a customer in the ME I get another greyhair. They are so fucked.

Imagine the DMV was running a construction site. Ok lots of paperwork, inefficiency, waste, either a crony of a politician getting the work or a terrible bidding process that gets a local scumbag. Got it in your head? Multiple that by 9 and you get it.

These guys will just keep piling on features. If there are two versions of X they will get the more expensive one. They will demand tech that the whole industry moved away from be put in place. They will demand redundancy for things that can’t fail in that way to ever use them. Mountains of paperwork, far far exceeding any government I have ever dealt with and I have dealt with the German government! The more features the higher the kickbacks.

You never get to deal with the operators you are always dealing with a nephew of someone who is a friend of someone else whose cousin is a retired civil servant who owes a favor to this other guy who married into the right family…a complex web of payoffs and cronism that no one can make sense of. And each and every one of these mother fuckers need to approve of everything or nothing happens.

And because there is no real infrastructure there you have to make do. You can’t just expect them to buy say a fuse when the fuse blows because they don’t have it. So you ship another one. They voltage is funny, the current levels vary, the plugs are some ancient British standard. Plus everything has to be oversized to deal with the heat. Which normally is manageable but since they can’t get replacement parts you have to go way way over. Also since no one maintains anything you have to build that in.

Then you finally get approval. It took a month and 4 people full time working on this project that should have taken hours. Finally it’s done, right? Wrong. Now they want to haggle. And if you don’t give in they will take your mountain of paperwork and design drawings to another place.

The thing is there are real people there. Real regular people. They have a shitty horrible system that they were born into.