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Bill Gates Denied Visa To Nigeria
Xight notes a Gizmodo story that is a few days old but hasn't gotten a lot of play. It seems that Nigeria recently denied Bill Gates a visa to travel there on his recent trip to Africa. The initial denial was "on the premise that they required proof he would not reside in Nigeria indefinitely, causing a strain on social services and a general nuisance for immigration." The comments to the post are worth reading too.
Troll? Oh come on now, Nigerian moderators! Have a sense of humor.
You know, I try to only post funny stuff now, and every negative mod I get brings the ol' karma down, since the funny mods, like goggles in acid, do nothing.
Once that karma hits zero, I'm taking my ball and leaving, and you all will be left with nothing but Monty Python quotes and Soviet Russia and Overlord jokes.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
The entire problem with corruption stems from the average Nigerian government worker making the equivalent of maybe 50 USD per month. Because of this, bribery runs rampant, as they have a lot of trouble surviving on such a low salary with such supplementary income.
The reference was to a kind of variable that can be used when programming computers (called a "data type"). Data types for numbers differ in three key ways:
1. How many bits are used to store the number?
2. Is the decimal point free to move (called "floating point", akin to scientific notation), or is it fixed in place (like an integer, whose decimal point is stuck to the right of all the other digits)?
3. Is it possible for instances of this data type to represent both positive and negative numbers, or is this data type restricted to numbers of all the same sign?
A "signed int" refers to a data type that can store integers (positive or negative). Now, to keep track of the sign (ie. whether the variable is positive or negative) takes one bit (ignoring for the moment a slightly more efficient scheme called "two's complement representation"). Spending that one bit to remember what sign the number is reduces the highest absolute value you can store with a signed data type. So an unsigned int might be able to represent numbers from 0 to about 4 billion- but a signed int can represent numbers from negative 2 billion to positive 2 billion.
The sign of the number is stored as the highest bit. So if you add something positive to a very large positive signed int, the carry from the second-to-highest bit will make the highest bit a 1- incorrectly indicating a negative answer. This phenomenon- where two positive signed ints added together give a negative result- is called "overflow".
Dude. Yes, he was aware. His jokes may be poor, but you're a fucking idiot.
My "heritage" does not include any criminal transportees. Though if it did, I would not be bothered. I'm a 5th-generation Australian. You have to be at least 8th to have that distinction. This is a racist joke, though I know we white people aren't allowed to take offence at such. And I wouldn't mind if it wasn't dragged out here every fucking time Australia was mentioned, and modded up +5 funny. Repeat a putdown often enough and it becomes abuse.
They use all the other services -- in particular, using the emergency room without paying for it has actually resulted in the closure of some hospitals.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Basically, I was involved in maintaining my statusquo as the richest
man in the world until August (2007), when a Mexican bilionaire called
Carlos Slim surpassed my wealthy in (1) billion american
dolars. He (Carlos Slim) did not stop at that; he also went on to
afirm that his monopoly would be larger than mine.
Month ago it was proven Carlos' claim was unfounded. Bill Gates still *is* the richest man on Earth.
Not to mention choking in big Rugby matches.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Another compelling example is Bhutan, which scores really well, but has little natural economic advantages.
If it however were simply a matter of culture one wouldn't for instance expect to find Singapore in every top ten of least corrupt states. Surely similar cultures would have similar corruption scores, but many other countries that have Chinese and/or Malay culture (Malaysia, Indonesia, China) score considerably worse. North and western Europe are relatively unique as a contiguous block of countries with little corruption.
I have no doubt that bureacratic integrity or corruption become part of a culture, and can linger on for some generations even if the original circumstances that favoured corruption/integrity disappear, but it is not the sole cause. Wealth in itself is not a major cause. More important than wealth per se are factors like whether corruption pays, perceptions of the government and its legitimacy, and of national solidarity, and the sources and distribution of wealth.
Corruption pays if for instance the people paying the bribes can easily afford the bribe, and for the people receiving them it is a lot of money. The risk is low, and the incentive big. Western tourists in this sense help create a culture of corruption. Another example is rich people in poor countries paying a bribe to get a treatment in hospital or a phone line now instead of in 6 months like the other paupers.
North and western Europe are typical in having a relatively high degree of trust in the government and firmly entrenched bureaucratic traditions (betrayed for instance by the fact that many of the high performers remained monarchies even when the rest of Europe was violently overthrowing them: Bhutan is also a monarchy). Here bureaucratic integrity basically perpetuates itself culturally, since the aura of integrity is probably one of the motivations for a public service career choice. Besides that, small scale corruption hardly pays here: only for instance real estate developers etc. can afford significant enough incentives to tempt public servants.
Singaporeans all know their wealth depends on trade. Their location is their only natural asset, and competing slightly less good locations, for instance on the Sunda Strait, exist, so they must compete. A reputation for corruption would be a disaster for them. On the other hand in many other countries, where location or educated workforce is not an asset, the major source of GDP is having companies from other, more developed, countries pay for a concession to pump oil, mine diamonds, clear tropical forests, etc, while the majority of the population are subsistence farmers and are hardly involved in any economic activity with eachother. They may still be wealthy, if they have very valuable resources, but it is narrow income base that is to easy to monopolise.
In this kind of economy the "American dream" is to be the guy that decides who gets the concession to mine or cut, or one of his cronies, and if the state also has different ethnic factions (i.e. lack of national solidarity) you have a recipe for rampant bribery, nepotism, cronyism, etc as the currently ruling ethnic faction tries to transfer as much wealth as they can to their own ethnic group before they are thrown out and the process starts again.
Not to defend anyone (since I don't know anything about Nigerian politics anyway), but according to wikipedia, Dare Obasanjo, is the son of the FORMER president of Nigeria. The current president is Umaru Yar'Adua.
Clearly his joke was VERY poor - I read it as serious. And no, I'm not an idiot - I was just attempting to explain the difference in case the person really didn't understand it. I also completely do not understand the "troll" mod I received. It could perhaps be construed as flamebait, as I was a little harsh (considering I thought the person must be pretty dumb), but certainly not a troll. At least one mod has modded me informative though, so that shows there's someone that got what I was getting at.
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