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Messages - evensgrey

#1
Quote from: Ibrahim90 on October 27, 2020, 03:32:50 PM
The only way you can eliminate that risk, is to elminate the dam. So you're right: a second dam on the blue Nile would only exacerbate the problem: even less of that valuable silt will head up north--as well as less water.

I was referring to the risk the dam may collapse and wipe out most of the country.  The fact the delta isn't being built up and hasn't been since it went up is a different problem.
#2
Quote from: Ibrahim90 on October 10, 2020, 08:28:31 PM
It's not generally served in triangles AFAIK, but I do know it's very calorie dense compared to what you're used to, and they eat it with a lot of things:

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To give you a sense of how important this is to Egyptians: the Arab world generally calls bread "khubz"--which is just the word for bread. The Egyptians literally call it life ("3eysh").

I think the triangular loaves are a result of a traditional baking technique that goes back into antiquity.  This isn't going to be what you get from large, commercial bakeries, but I understand you can still find it in some villages.

Quote from: Ibrahim90 on October 10, 2020, 08:28:31 PM
As to Egypt running out of money: it goes beyond tourism (or lack of it). This has been going on for years. The Egyptian pound has been getting devalued since at least the Arab Spring, and many of As-sissi's new policies have pretty much guaranteed a massive increase in the cost of living, and wasted much money (one of his projects is to create a new capital/administrative center. Normally, this wouild be along the Nile, but this genius wants it in the desert. It's extra bad, because Cairo is actually the best possible location. There's a reason it's been the capital for the last 1200 years).

There's also the simple fact that Egypt's becoming less attractive a place to invest. Aside from all the other problems, Egypt's future is very uncertain. This is because of the dam Ethipia's building on the Blue Nile, just dowriver of Lake Tana. That's massively affect the amount of water going upstream (Sudan will also be eating shit from this--especially the area between Khortoum and the Egyptian Border).

I kind of hope it at least reduces the risks associated with the Aswan High Dam.  Sounds like it's going to make the Nile Delta problems even worse, though.  It would have been ice if this was a Belt-and-Road project, since those are likely to all come to a crashing halt soon, but it looks like it isn't, even though it's got a lot of funding and equipment from China.
#3
This is the traditional Egyptian bread we're talking about here, the triangular loaves of the heavy stuff, with loads of oil in it?  The stuff that really is a meal in itself? That makes what we call bread in North America look like a sickly child by comparison?  (This stuff goes back as far as there are records of bread in Egypt, and that's a LONG WAY.)

There's no surprise that Egypt is running out of money.  Egypt's dominant industry for bringing in foreign exchange is tourism, and there's precious little of that this year.  (Egypt INVENTED being a tourist trap, and did it in antiquity.  Romans used to go to Egypt to see the sights, many of which are still visited by modern tourists.)
#4
So, the despot (worse than the previous despot, by all accounts) wants to extort money from the generally rather poor population of Egypt on the basis that they aren't in compliance with the very laws that are a major contributor to them BEING poor.

(There was a specific case study on Egypt done by a group from IIRC Peru, which concluded that if you wanted to build a house on an empty stretch of desert, which was already determined to have no important archeological remains on it, doing so legally would take ~36 000 hours of paperwork.  They did this study in part as a response to an observation that the Peruvian public telephone monopoly was unsalable under the horrendous mess that was Peruvian property law, which made it impossible to even specifically define what was for sale, but when the property law was cleaned up so that what was for sale and what could be done with it was legally clear, it sold easily for ten times the previous asking price.  On examination of many 'developing' countries that have failed to develop, including Egypt, they found a common thread of not only corruption, but also a failure of legal clarity in property law.

In almost al developed countries, the law clearly defines what you can and cannot do with property you own, and who owns what property is, at the base level, easily determined by just asking the title registry office.  If  you want to do something with a piece of property, you generally file a single application in a single place and get an answer back fairly quickly.

In a place like Egypt, none of this is the case.  While there is rarely disagreement in any given place about who owns what, there is no functioning system of formal law in place to support this, because, as Ibrahim noted, the system is simply to cumbersome.  The result is a country practically carpeted with small businesses that cannot grow because they cannot get mortgage loans, insurance, or any of the other instruments and services that build upon functional systems of property law.  Thus, Egypt, and many other countries with similar problems with their legal frameworks, stay poor because the state itself prevents real economic growth.  (This in itself demonstrates how incompetent the governments in these states are.  If they allowed growth, the tax base would expand, and the tax revenues would increase.  This would make the government more powerful by making it richer.  If Egypt just copied the system used in the UK, for instance, which has working property law with a layer in place to protect identified heritage locations and structures, they'd be far better off.  But they don't, because it looks to the operators of the state like they'd lose power by doing so.)
#5
General Discussion / Re: Fav quotes
December 25, 2019, 10:49:15 AM
A very good political commentary about an entertaining (although, like all action movies, not actually good) action movie.

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What I think is sad is that we're getting solid political commentary from the likes of Sargon, a man who will tell you straight up he's literally a professional shitposter, in that's how he earns his living.

The world is in serious trouble:  Shitposters are giving us real political analysis, and whatever TL;DR is is giving us real analysis of journal articles.  (Seriously, he's going through the Sokal Squared papers that got accepted for publication.  How nobody noticed the one that was a rework of a chapter of Mein Kampf wasn't that is beyond me.  The title included "My Struggle is Our Struggle," and it was all about fighting against 'choice feminism' and 'liberal feminism' with 'unity feminism.')
#6
General Discussion / Re: Fail Quotes
November 23, 2019, 07:43:09 PM
In my trawl through The Daily Mail's current articles (where I found the one about how Jeremy Corbyn's son managed to go broke selling drugs), I came across this little 'awe cute' article about an actual midget German Shepherd.  (Yes, midget is the correct term for a pituitary dwarf.  Those affected by other forms of dwarfism are not, as midget is very specific as to what it means.)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-7709959/amp/This-adult-German-Shepherd-looks-like-puppy-rare-condition.html?ico=amp_moreTopStories

Mostly, the story is about how this dog, which will never grow beyond puppy size, has been brought through a series of serious health issues, some related to his dwarfism, and some not.  However, there's this aggravating bit at the end.

Quote'At the same time another one of our followers who also has a Dwarf German Shepard told us to get his thyroid levels checked as many dwarfs suffer from hypothyroidism.

'So our vet checked his thyroid levels and sure enough he was low, this can cause hair loss and a loss of appetite.

'After getting Ranger on Levothyroxine and using this soap his fur grew back and the dryness went away.

'Rangers litter was the first litter that our breeder had bred those to specific dogs together.'

'We believe this was the cause of the genetic defect. And as a responsible breeder will not breed the two dogs together again.

'He healthy and happy as can be as of now and loves jumping around and playing with his ball and squeaky toys with his two sisters Hazel and Jessie.'

It MIGHT sound petty, but I really expect newspapers to know the difference between homonyms.  Shouldn't even any automatic grammar checking program detect that error?
#7
General Discussion / Re: Fav quotes
November 23, 2019, 07:26:20 PM
Jerry Corbyn's son Tommy was running a company called NHS (National Hemp Service) and managed to loose about 200 000 pounds and go bankrupt.  How bad do you have to be with money to go broke selling drugs?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7716123/amp/Jeremy-Corbyns-sons-firm-goes-liquidation-owing-100-000.html?ico=amp_articleRelated

For extra value, Jerry Corbyn had bragged about giving his son business advice.
#8
General Discussion / Re: Fav quotes
September 27, 2019, 03:23:44 PM
Quote from: Dallas Wildman on September 20, 2019, 01:54:39 AM
Government employees thinks the the general public increasingly hates them ...
They're right

I find it interesting that the actual numbers they quote show that Republican-aligned people are dislike the government agencies they dislike to a lesser degree than Democrat-aligned people dislike the agencies hey dislike.

I would like to know if the IRS is now more strongly disliked than Time-Warner Cable.  They didn't used to be, but that was before the Obama administration began portraying the IRS as being filled with people who actively and spontaneously misuse their positions for partisan political purposes (this being their claim as to how numerous IRS agents began to work against Conservative political movements all over the US all at the same time, without any apparent orders to do so).
#9
Epstein's death isn't par for the course, Shane.  The particular jail he was being held in doesn't have suicides occurring because of neglect.  It hadn't had a completed suicide in decades.

The chiropractic law sounds very much like the original (and substantially still intact) enabling law behind the FDA, which explicitly excludes homeopathic preperations and processes from their purview...and was written by a homeopath.

And, oh, OK, that's actually a rather clever bit of satire.  And the problem with the Patent and Trademark Office is mostly that they're supposed to assume the applications are valid and in good faith, which trying to trademark the generic use of the word 'THE' is not.  Trademark the full name of the university?  Sure, you can do that, just like any other business can (as long as it IS a business and not a government agency, which cannot be trademarked).  But just a generic word?  Good luck with the legal penalties for making someone file suit.  The claim is SO week is seems inevitable that costs and fees would be awarded to just about anyone who brought such a case.  There's also a very real possibility of a claim being made that any conceivable defense would constitute contempt of court (yes, you CAN be held in contempt if you make an argument sufficiently absurd as to be insulting to the court).
#10
General Discussion / Re: Fav quotes
September 01, 2019, 07:44:57 AM
There's some fascinating books out there.

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Real-world examination of the effects of socialism, including what it does to the beer.  (Venezuela no longer makes bad beer.  Venezuela no longer makes beer, because they cannot pay to import barley, which is hard to grow in the tropics.  Their former beer is brewed in Florida now, and it's crap.)
#11


They're unable to come up with anything more salacious to say than what the man's own lawyers and the mainstream media are saying.  (Certainly not all of the mainstream media, as some of them are obviously glad he can't implicate any more Democrats, but some of them are talking about just how incredibly convenient this is.)
#12
General Discussion / Re: Fail Quotes
August 29, 2019, 12:22:13 PM
Here's Tim Pool's morning upload.  It's here not because of the subject, or the production quality (which is pretty much standard for him, and not at all bad for a high-volume one-man show), or the commentary, but because of what happens at about 10:30 because of a third party.

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It looks lik somebody tried to break into Tim's home this morning, before dawn.

At about 10:30 in the video, IT APPEARS THAT THE GUY CAME BACK.

Tim actually gets a little frightening in this one.  And well he should be, since people are trying to frighten him.
#13
General Discussion / Re: Fav quotes
August 26, 2019, 11:28:52 AM
I found this through Sargon's Telegram feed:

https://humanevents.com/2019/08/21/the-real-history-of-gamergate/

It's quite useful that it's on humanevents.com, as WikiPedia accepts that as a reliable source.  I think they're going to have trouble suporting their ideological slant without a serious purge.
#14
General Discussion / Re: Gun control and Censorship
August 26, 2019, 11:20:13 AM
Several versions of YouTube's comment system (and even more notably when YouTube had no comment system and was incorrectly pretended to be part of Google+ instead) have simply not shown all comments.  Wether or not they are actually gone is another matter.  This is definitely algorithmic and not manual, and definitely not immediate, as I have observed many instances where replies were visible to comments that were not.
#15
General Discussion / Re: Fail Quotes
June 25, 2019, 10:41:49 AM
YouTube kept spitting this ad at me the other day:

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Now, firstly, this thing is obviously NOT a knee pad, this is a knee BRACE.  And more than that, this is a spring-loaded knee brace.  And the spring-loading is an interesting idea, but there's no way those springs are strong enough to be worth the bother.  And the brace is poorly designed, because the coverage on the front is too small to provide enough support for it to work well as a brace.  The legit knee braces I've seen have broad straps above and below the kneecap, not those little narrow things.

Now, a knee BRACE is a medical device.  How long before this outfit gets hammered by the FDA, do you think?