Olivia
Online
Bandit Economy
@MutetiNick
A man who prays. Father,husband,aviator,wannabe economist,black Russian. @muteti on Instagram. Sub3 marathoner 🏃🏾
Kenya
Joined April 2011
72 Following
411 Followers
26.1K Posts
Sasa ndio natoka kwa maofakado.
Today, I was training hass avocado farmers on eTIMS.
Their good export dealer had organized this crucial training for them.
If there are people who genuinely need to understand eTIMS implications, it is our great farmers.
Why?
The produce buyers simply tell them. Sishabula tuletee eTIMS invoice ndio tukulipe pesa yako.
So the farmers run to cyber and comply. But very few understand what happens next.
At the end of the year, KRA can clearly see, through eTIMS, that you sold avocados worth 1 million.
But because no one taught the farmer bookkeeping, they never ask for eTIMS invoices when buying:
• Fertilizer.
• Seedlings.
• Farm chemicals.
• Farm equipment.
• Labour.
• Transport.
Their costs remain invisible. But their sales are fully visible.
Then trouble begins.
KRA sees the 1 million in sales. But sees almost zero deductible costs.
It is almost as if the avocados fell from heaven.
So KRA treats your profit as 1 million.
Then demands about 30% income tax.
That is a whopping Kh 300,000 tax.
But the farmer does not have that kind of money. The money already went into fertilizer, workers, transport and preparing crops.
The farmer is then left in the harassing hands of KRA.
If there is one group of people that deserves intensive training on eTIMS and bookkeeping, it is our farmers.
Please enlighten the farmers in your community.
They feed us all.
Facts 💯
The greatest challenge that a Boda Boda rider faces by owning an electric motorcycle in Kenya🇰🇪 is the downtime at swapping stations and the distribution of operator specific swapping stations.
Rwanda 🇷🇼 has made history as the first African country to mandate universal battery-swapping interoperability for electric motorcycles. This simply means that an electric motor cycle rider can swap his/her bike's battery at any swapping station irrespective of the brand/company that runs it.
Issued by the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority (RURA), the regulation (No. 011/Energy/RURA/2026) requires that all e-motorcycles and battery-swapping stations be technically compatible, and have given existing operators a two-year transitional period to comply.
This legislation fundamentally alters the Rwanda e-motorcycle market in two key beneficial ways:
1. Eliminates Closed Ecosystems: Previously, riders were locked into a single operator’s specific battery network. Now, riders can seamlessly swap batteries at any licensed station across the country.
2. Strict Quality Controls: Along with interoperability, the new regulation requires stations to maintain a 97% uptime, guarantee smart charging, keep rider wait times under 20 minutes, and offer non-discriminatory pricing.
One reason why Kenya should emulate this legistlation as well is because the adoption rate of electric motorcycles has surged drastically over the last one year. In 2025 alone, electric motorcycles accounted for more than 15% of all new motorcycle registrations in Kenya.
Interoperability can go a long way in ensuring reduced downtime for riders which in return will increase earnings as well as encourage the shift to electric mobility at the grassroot level.
While Europe is responding to heat waves by buying more air conditioners,
China is deploying infrastructure that cools public space at a fraction of the energy cost.
Rooftops across Shanxi province are fitted with mist nozzles that spray droplets fine enough to evaporate before they hit the ground.
They switch on automatically at 35°C and drop surrounding air temperature by 5 to 8°C within minutes. The same system now runs at bus stops in Chongqing, public squares in Beijing and Wuhan.
The technology is not new. Evaporative cooling is textbook thermodynamics. What is new is that a government decided to fund the rollout at city scale before anyone wrote a policy paper about it.
Taiwan solved tax evasion in 1951 with a trick so cheap it should embarrass every tax authority on the planet.
The problem was an all-cash economy full of small shops. A merchant pockets the cash, skips the receipt, and the sale never existed. Auditors can't catch what was never recorded, and hiring enough of them to watch every noodle stand costs more than the missing tax.
So finance chief Ren Xianqun flipped the incentive. Print a lottery number on every receipt. Draw winners every two months on live TV. Top prize today: NT$10 million, about $310K.
Suddenly the customer and the shopkeeper want opposite things. The merchant wants the sale off the books. The customer wants the ticket. And there are millions more customers than merchants. Every transaction now carries a built-in witness demanding the paper trail.
Year one, reported tax revenue jumped 75%, from NT$29 million to NT$51 million. Seventy-five years later, roughly 70% of Taiwanese still play. Convenience stores redeem the smallest NT$200 prizes at the register, so even a coffee receipt feels like a scratch card.
The elegant part is what the audit force costs. The prize pool runs about NT$7 billion a year, roughly $20 million. In exchange, the government gets 23 million unpaid auditors working every checkout line in the country, forever. No inspector general on earth delivers that coverage at that price.
Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Slovakia all copied it. The most effective compliance tool ever built looks like a game, and that's exactly why it works.
Japanese student, Rio Nakagawa, visited Nairobi and fell in love with Congolese music. He decided to travel to Kinshasa and later on started a band named Yoko Choc Nippon in Japan.
"If you're so smart, why do you find it hard to take your own advice"
Dostoevsky: "It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently"
Millionaire investor Pace Morby says RV parks are one of the best investments because they're "lazy assets" that can generate $30,000 to $40,000 a month with almost no management
"People tell you to buy laundromats. No, you should buy an RV park and put a laundromat in the RV park. The RV park is the main staple. There's almost no management, the manager lives on-site, and there's basically nothing to fix because it's mostly gravel"
"I've got a 580-unit multifamily property in North Houston, and we're constantly fixing things and dealing with tenants moving in and out. RV parks are different. You can buy a good one for $3 million to $7 million on seller financing, and they can net $30,000 to $40,000 a month after every expense. I call them the only true 'one-and-done' asset."
I started dying when I saw how many goalies the kiddos had 😂
But this is brilliant!
3 Japanese National Team players vs 100 elementary school kids!
So fun!
For the first time, researchers have identified exactly what Roman builders were adding to their concrete to make it last for centuries....
At an unfinished building site in Pompeii, abandoned during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, archaeologists uncovered something rare: Roman concrete materials that were prepared but never mixed. That frozen moment revealed how Roman builders actually made their concrete.
Instead of mixing lime and water the way we do today, they combined quicklime with volcanic ash first, then added water. The reaction produced intense heat and left behind tiny fragments of reactive lime trapped inside the hardened concrete. When cracks later formed and water seeped in, those fragments reacted again and sealed the damage from within.
In other words, some Roman concrete was intentionally engineered to heal its own cracks — and it’s still doing it nearly 2,000 years later.
Archaeological Park of Pompeii
#archaeohistories
Haha, y'all thought I was lying? 😂😂
This is how Kenya works by the way. Hii inakuaga dayscholar. 🤣🤣
Kevin O'Leary says Steve Jobs taught him the one skill every entrepreneur needs to master
"I learned this from Steve Jobs. I told this story countless times. He was not a nice guy, but in the 90s, I made all of his software for the Mac in schools, 110,000 buildings. He was an absolute a**hole, but he taught me some very important things, and he was wildly successful."
"He said that each day, including you, each day there will be three things you have to get done, just three, and that's called the signal."
"And there's going to be a plethora of things that are going to stop you from doing that and that's called the noise. So the only thing you have to get good at in your life to be an entrepreneur is to distinguish what's signal and what's noise."
"And then you do not let noise get in the way of getting the three things done. They get done first."
We were absolutely floored by the millions of you that watched us make silly water sillouettes on our driveway last summer. We are starting out the summer the only way we know how, and this time it’s all about movies! What else do you want to see? We have a whole summer ahead, a driveway and a hose. The possibilities are endless!!!
Elon Musk identified which jobs go first, and it destroys every assumption about who’s safe.
Musk: “AI is going to take over those jobs like lightning. Anything that is digital, which is like just someone at a computer doing something.”
Not factory workers. Office workers. The people who spent decades assuming education and desk jobs meant security are actually first.
Musk: “Anything that’s physically moving atoms… those jobs will exist for a much longer time.”
Output is a file? Vulnerable. Output is physical? Protected. That’s the entire framework.
Musk: “AI is really still digital.”
AI doesn’t need a body. Doesn’t need an office. Just needs access to the same software you use. Executes faster. Never tires. Costs nothing to scale.
But it can’t weld. Can’t wire a building. Can’t fix pipes or work soil.
Musk: “Literally welding, electrical work, plumbing. Those jobs will exist for a much longer time.”
Trades aren’t the vulnerable jobs. They’re the durable ones. Physical presence, real-world adaptation, manual dexterity provide protection no digital credential offers.
Analyst, accountant, paralegal, programmer, anyone producing files and documents, automates first because digital work is exactly what AI does natively.
Person moving atoms has natural defense. Physics, unpredictable environments, material resistance create friction AI can’t scale past.
Person moving bits has nothing. No friction. No physical barrier. Just software AI already operates better than most humans.
The assumption that desk work and degrees represent safety just inverted completely. College graduate producing documents faces faster displacement than the electrician producing installations.
Society spent generations telling people trades were beneath them. Pushed everyone toward offices and screens. Turns out the people who didn’t listen built the most automation-resistant careers.
Most ironic outcome of the AI revolution. The work society treated as inferior turned out to be the work society couldn’t replace. And the work society valued most turned out to be the easiest to eliminate.
Smooth moves caught on camera
Polish pianist Waldemar Malicki seamlessly incorporating the interruption of a Nokia ringtone into his music during a live performance.
A Russian psychologist spent 10 years proving that the act of talking to yourself out loud is one of the most powerful cognitive tools the human brain has, and almost nobody outside his field has read the work.
His name was Lev Vygotsky.
He worked in Moscow in the 1920s and died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of 37. He had no laboratory, no funding, almost no English readers, and a body of work that the Soviet government suppressed for two decades after he died.
He produced the foundational theory of how human cognition actually develops, and the central piece of that theory was a behavior almost every adult is faintly embarrassed about.
Vygotsky noticed that young children talk to themselves constantly. They narrate their own actions, they argue with imaginary opponents, they instruct themselves through tasks out loud.
The dominant theory at the time, from the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, said this was a sign of cognitive immaturity that children would eventually grow out of as they learned to think properly.
Vygotsky said the exact opposite.
He argued that this self-directed speech was the most important cognitive event in the entire developmental window, because it was the moment a child first started to use language as a tool to control their own mind. The child was not failing to think. The child was learning how to think by externalizing the process and listening to themselves do it.
He predicted that as children matured, this out-loud self-talk would not disappear. It would go underground. It would become silent inner speech, which is the running monologue every adult has inside their own head for the rest of their life.
The voice you hear when you read this sentence is the direct descendant of a four-year-old narrating their own block tower.
For 50 years almost nobody outside Russia had access to his work, and the few researchers who did pick it up could not get funding to test it. Then in the early 2000s the experiments finally started to pile up, and what they found was that Vygotsky had been right about something even more important than he knew.
The first major study came from Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin and Daniel Swingley at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. They ran a simple visual search experiment. Participants were shown 20 images at once and asked to find a specific object, like a banana or a chair. In one condition they searched silently. In the other condition they were told to say the name of the object out loud to themselves while looking for it.
The participants who spoke the target name out loud found the object significantly faster, with higher accuracy, than the participants who searched in silence. The effect was strongest when the spoken word matched a familiar object the brain already had a strong category for.
Saying the word out loud literally tuned the visual system to detect that thing better. The researchers called it the label feedback effect, and the implication was that the act of vocalizing a goal physically changes how the brain processes the world while pursuing it.
The second major study came out of the University of Michigan and Michigan State in 2017. The lead researchers were Ethan Kross and Jason Moser, and they used both EEG and fMRI to record what happens inside the brain when people talk to themselves while emotionally upset.
They asked participants to recall painful autobiographical memories and reflect on them in two different ways. Some used the first person, saying things like "why am I feeling this way." Others used the third person, referring to themselves by their own name, saying things like "why is John feeling this way."
The brain scans showed that the simple act of switching from first person to third person, even silently, decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for rumination and self-referential pain. Within a single second of using their own name instead of the word I, participants showed measurably lower emotional reactivity. The shift required no extra cognitive effort. It cost the brain nothing. And it worked.
Kross described the mechanism in his interviews. Talking to yourself by name creates a small amount of psychological distance from your own experience. Your brain processes the situation more like a problem belonging to someone else, which means it can analyze it instead of drowning in it.
What Vygotsky had intuited in 1934 turned out to be even more powerful than the developmental theory he built it into. The voice you use to talk to yourself is not background noise. It is one of the most precise cognitive tools the brain has, and you can change how it works just by changing the pronoun you use.
People who talk through problems out loud are not anxious or unstable. They are running an externalized version of a process the rest of us are running silently and worse. The kindergartener narrating their block tower, the surgeon muttering through a procedure, the engineer pacing a hallway describing a bug to nobody, the athlete repeating a cue to themselves before a free throw, they are all using the same ancient mechanism that builds and steers human thought.
You can run the experiment yourself the next time you are stuck on something hard. Stop trying to solve it silently in your head. Say it out loud. Describe what you are seeing. Walk yourself through the steps as if you were explaining it to a colleague who is not in the room.
And when something genuinely upsets you, switch to your own name. Ask why this person is feeling this way, instead of why I am feeling this way.
The voice you have been told to keep quiet your entire life is one of the oldest pieces of cognitive technology you own.
Most people are still embarrassed to use it.
Jeff Bezos reveals why compromise is one of the worst ways to resolve a disagreement
"An example of a really bad way of coming to agreement is compromise. If I say the ceiling is 11 feet and you say 12 feet, we say let's call it 11 and a half. That's compromise"
"The advantage of compromise is it's low energy. But it doesn't lead to truth"
"Another really bad resolution mechanism is who's more stubborn. Two executives disagree, they have a war of attrition, and whichever one gets exhausted first capitulates. You haven't arrived at truth, and this is very demoralizing"
"Escalation is better than a war of attrition. Escalate to your boss and say, we can't agree, we like each other, we're respectful, but we strongly disagree, we need you to make a decision"
"Exhausting the other person is not truth seeking. Compromise is not truth seeking"
When the heart decides to be loud, Kenyans put it as it is.
The Wajir stadium is very beautiful lakini WANTAM!
One peculiar habit among Kenyan phone users is their complete inability to deal with voicemails.
A Kenyan calls you. Your voicemail picks up. They hang up immediately. They cannot record their voice into silence. It feels unnatural. It feels like talking to a ghost.
But somehow, one brave Kenyan leaves a voicemail. They overcome the fear. They record themselves. They do it.
Then you receive the voicemail. You see "1 missed call" and "1 voicemail."
But you have no idea how to listen to it.
You press buttons randomly. Nothing happens. You ask your friend: "How do I listen to voicemail?" Your friend does not know either.
So the voicemail sits there. Unheard. Forgotten.
And in the case of a Kenyan who manages to leave a message, they wait for a response that never comes. Not because you ignored them. But because you do not know how to access voicemail.
Some Kenyans have voicemails from 2018 sitting on their phones. They have no idea they exist.
This is the Kenyan voicemail crisis. Half of us cannot bring ourselves to leave one. The other half cannot figure out how to listen to them.
It is like voicemail was designed for aliens. Not for Kenyans.
Welcome to Kenya. Where voicemails exist but nobody knows how to use them.
Dismas wa Tabu. Dreaming in installments. Billed in full.
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