Self-imposed lockdown

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Wordle killer

[Chetuya Chinagolum @Chetuyachinago]

It is tragic that those of us here in Africa who are victims of imperialism, who still carry the physical and psychological scars of colonial looting, are comfortably celebrating the rise of imperial monopolies like Netflix, Uber, and Temu or Shein, just because we want to deliver a cheap punchline for a few brainless retweets, to chase worthless online clout, or to sound intellectually superior while cheering on our own economic destruction.

Netflix did not "out-innovate" DStv, and DStv was not sleeping. The fundamental, unaddressed difference is that one is a local African broadcaster working with meager, heavily taxed local funding, while the other sits on a mountain of subsidized Western capital, an endless money-printing machine backed by Wall Street, and the geopolitical muscle of the US government.

Netflix gets about $17B in effectively interest-free capital and tax-subsidized benefits every year, which allows them to run their operations at a massive loss while aggressively capturing sovereign markets. On the other hand, DStv is treated as a value stock, meaning public markets ruthlessly demand immediate dividends, strict fiscal discipline, and quarter-by-quarter profitability. If DStv spent ten billion dollars on a single year's content, its share price would crash into oblivion overnight, its board would be wiped out by panicking investors, and its credit lines would be cut.

And just in case you are wondering, the South African government cannot step in to rescue DStv with interest-free loans, thanks to the predatory, highly restrictive treaties enforced by the ruthless World Trade Organisation. If the South African government dared to offer DStv a simple one hundred million dollar grant, they would immediately face brutal litigation at the WTO, because African nations foolishly signed suicidal trade agreements which dictate that if a sovereign state subsidizes its own local industry, it is legally obligated to offer the exact same financial welfare to the foreign predators invading their market.

And this is just the WTO. We have not even discussed the financial hitmen at the IMF or the World Bank, who view any form of state support for local industries as fiscal irresponsibility, a violation of free-market dogmas, or an outright sin. If the government gave DStv a massive loan, the IMF would immediately downgrade the country's credit rating into junk status. This engineered downgrade would make it punishingly expensive for the South African government to build clinics, fund schools, or repair highways, because the interest rates on their national debt would skyrocket to line the pockets of Western lenders.

But brainwashed Africans, who are the primary victims of this neo-colonial economic castration, will happily log onto Western platforms to tell you that Netflix was innovative while DStv was just sleeping.

The absolute worst part of this farce is the brain-dead comparison between Uber and local taxi drivers. A local driver must make an immediate profit today to buy maize meal, bread, and petrol tomorrow. He cannot compete with a multinational behemoth that has an explicit mandate from Wall Street to burn five billion dollars a year in predatory pricing, artificially subsidizing rides just to starve local operators into bankruptcy and clear the field.

The local taxi driver is the most visible, highly vulnerable target of his own state's predatory municipal machinery. He is hunted daily by corrupt traffic officers for compliance, like an expired permit, a slightly worn tire, a missing fire extinguisher, or an arbitrary traffic offense. For him, a single fifty-dollar ticket is not just a minor inconvenience; it is a catastrophic blow, the difference between his children sleeping with a full stomach or going to bed hungry.

But Uber does not even recognize these drivers as human beings with labor rights. They see no need to protect the dignity of work, the right to a living wage, or the basic sovereignty of the citizen. Instead, Uber smugly informs the courts that local labor laws do not apply to them, because they are just an app, and their drivers are merely independent contractors.

With this legal sleight of hand, they have effectively deleted the Bill of Rights for millions of working-class men and women. They have engineered a lawless corporate territory where they can terminate a breadwinner's account via a heartless algorithm with zero human review, pay him slave wages after stealing 30% in service fees, and refuse him a single cent of medical coverage for the crashes he suffers while lining their pockets.
Worse, they offer their rides at a 50% discount because they are heavily subsidized by Silicon Valley venture capitalists playing a global game of market conquest, and local governments are too terrified to intervene, knowing that any attempt to regulate these giants will result in immediate economic retaliation, diplomatic bullying, or Washington threatening to sanction them into oblivion.

Newspapers did not lose because they were lazy. There is no physical way a local newspaper can compete with Facebook or Instagram, which sit on massive surveillance networks, endless pools of free user data, and algorithmic monopolies designed to capture human attention for profit.
This is exactly why China banned these digital parasites and built their own sovereign ecosystems to allow local industries to develop.

How do you expect African manufacturing to ever survive when Shein and Temu are allowed to flood our markets with heavily subsidized, ultra-cheap fast fashion and low-quality equipment?
Do you honestly think China would have transformed into an industrial superpower if they had allowed their territory to be used as a digital and physical dumping ground, a massive cesspool where the West discarded their second-hand clothes, their obsolete laptops, their toxic e-waste, and their plastic garbage under the fraudulent banner of free trade?

This is the core problem I have with motivational speakers, with their brainless "grindset" rhetoric, and with how they completely erase the structures of global capital to blame the victim, because in their world, your poverty is a personal failure rather than the predictable outcome of an international economic system designed to keep you subjugated.

Let me conclude by saying that we must stop applauding the very chains designed to bind us, we must stop worshipping the corporations that are asset-stripping our continent, and we must realize that true innovation cannot exist without economic sovereignty.

[gst @wearegst]

Fanta is trying to kill Nigerians.

[Trevor Noah @Trevornoah]

A lot of people don’t vote based on facts.

They vote based on whether someone makes them feel seen.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.

It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection.

Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do.

Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.

The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water.

It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left.

The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero.

When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

[Ben Eisenhart @BEisenhart]

Being in your early 40s is weird, man. People around your age are in every stage of life. You have people who are grandparents. You have people who have newborns. You have people dating 25-year-olds. You have people celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary. Some of them look 60, and some of them look 30. All the bases are covered when you are in your early 40s.

[Self-imposed lockdown @Soratachi]

@heirmeg 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[bONGO 🌹 @wariocolosseum]

honestly u should just be expelled if u do this

[Glorious God @GloriousGod01]

All this 50/50 talk from men will only make sense if:

1. You both hire and pay a cook.
2. You both hire and pay a cleaner.
3. Your wife does not carry the pregnancy in her womb; instead, you pay for gestational surrogacy combined with IVF.

Anything less is simply a manipulative tendency to marry your business partner while still knacking her.

You think pregnancy and house chores are nothing? Then start outsourcing them first.

By the time you spend $40,000 for gestational surrogacy once of twice, you'll understand that your wife brings a whole lot to the table.

Ingrates.

Above all, love God.

[Self-imposed lockdown @Soratachi]

@Demontime666_ @MegansStats 🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Gabriel ✸ @_lightsick]

@adaenechi men need to understand that the square shaped face is NOT for every man. some of them will look more youthful and beautiful with a round face and that’s ok.

[Self-imposed lockdown @Soratachi]

@FLOTUK Thank you so much, this is wonderful. I can't wait to buy it

[That Blame Guy @ImToBlame]

So they gave Trump some fake intel just to see if he would give it to Putin and he gave it to him right away. Now European countries won’t share intelligence with us.

[Toxxiianna @toxxiianna]

@legs4brunch Shaq too!! He on a JCPenny commercial knowing they don’t even carry his size

[TizzyEnt @TizzyEnt]

Normalize this in 2026

[Self-imposed lockdown @Soratachi]

@jegaevi Thanks for this. They have a reddit account on r/ereader.

[Self-imposed lockdown @Soratachi]

@alluringskull Thank you !!!! Blocked!!!!

[Self-imposed lockdown @Soratachi]

@mhdksafa Hello.

[Self-imposed lockdown @Soratachi]

@ahmedbassii .

[Self-imposed lockdown @Soratachi]

@firemadeher 👩🏾‍🎓👰🏾‍♀️👩🏾‍🔧🤰🏾

[Confidence #EndTerrorismInNigeria @ConfidenceTwt]

The iron maiden for you and your uber driver.