If this happened in the US or Europe it would be an interesting story. In South Africa, this is just par for the course and the quality of the work may not have been any better had it been written by the current people staffing home affairs.
So the only golden age is the gaudy gold he added to the white house and the profits for all of his oligarch friends/defense contractors etc. while everybody else suffers.
If you create an economic incentive to go into math an science you will have no trouble attracting good people. But, for years, it has been a race to the bottom where the US over-produced researchers, scientists etc.. But then to put salt in the wound it also imported more of them to drive the wages down further. As more people have flooded in to STEM at bargain basement prices, the quality of the research has also gone down.
All of this was by design so that big corporate interests could get cheap labor and increase profits. Since the US government is for sale to the highest bidder, and the corporations have no loyalty to the country, they will feed off the host until it can no longer sustain itself and then look for another host to feed off of.
Repairability would help as well. Many times the only viable option to fix something is to swap a board, or replace the entire item, instead of replacing the one failed component that caused the board to fail, or reflowing the board etc.. Many components also do not offer batteries that can be replaced, such as the magic mouse, so you end up needing to replace the entire item.
It's interesting how as certain things age, such as cars, cottage industries pop up to do just that when new replacement boards and parts are not available.
The other issue is cost cutting. Many components are made cheaply and fail pre-maturely. Great examples of this are mains voltage LED bulbs where the rectifier circuits that power the LED's fail, but the only real option is to replace the entire thing, creating a lot of e-waste in the process.
repairability would help quite a bit. How many times do you have to replace an entire board in something when replacing just a component would actually fix things?
1. Offshore jobs, maximize profits and take advantage of incentives to offshore.
2. Political winds shift.
3. Talk a good game about needing to onshore, make some token moves to move a small token amount of manufacturing back to the US. (You are here).
4. Once the admin changes and/or mid terms, continue to spend more on offshoring.
It would be interesting to see if the job prospects of American students and perception of the value of the degrees were to change if they were to eliminate the 15% discount that employers get for hiring foreign graduates (via OPT) by not having to pay FICA taxes.
When the unemployment rate for fresh American college grads is the same or higher than those without a degree, it does not make a compelling case for spending all of that money and time on a degree.
Assuming that one is in favor of the use of these cameras, the security issues seem like they are a big problem. The leaking of police officer personal data and locations was pretty egregious.
Would love to hear from one of the founders on what they are doing to address that.
Most places went off grid because of how unreliable the national grid is. The cost of that electricity is also significantly higher than it would have been with well run central grid using fossil fuel.
The lloyds numbers you shared show a steep decline in investment over the past three years.
The IDC is an arm of the South African government, so having it call itself a top investment destination is like having a marketer trying to sell you on their own product.
The UN report only shows the inflow by region, not country.
The PWC report shows everything being down with the exception of net operating cash flow which does not tell you a lot about the sector as a whole. Their predictions do not point to anything to substantiate their prediction of 5.7% per annum manufacturing GDP growth. Of course then again, if these numbers are not inflation adjusted and inflation is at or above 5.7% then that may be where that is coming from.
Given that the average GDP per person is 8k US a year, without a significant increase of the GDP it's not possible to increase the standard of living for the population has a whole. You can't get blood from a stone.
Back before digital became really high res I was into small, medium and large format silver halide cameras balancing cost with high quality optics. You could get Exackta's, Speed Graphics and Roleiflexes relatively inexpensively and take amazing high quality photos with them.
The larger you went though, the more you had to be mindful about the cost of eash shot both in terms of time and cost for film and developing. There is something to be said about the curation that happened when taking photos like that. You put a lot more though upfront into composition and had to think about your shutter speed, aperture etc..
One thing I learned about during that time was how the old time press photographers would use a Speed Graphic on 4x5 negative, grab a wide angled shot and then crop it. Also, press conferences used to create a lot of broken glass as photographers would snap a shot, shoot out the one time use flash bulb on the ground and then quickly put in another bulb to get another shot.