buyx
Joined 15 years ago
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Member since
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Recent submissions
Comment · 11 months ago
Comment · 1 year ago
$100 a month for a South African is not a trivial amount. Definitely putting his money where his mouth is.
Comment · 1 year ago
I don't know how pretending to read literature in later grades helped with reading, especially when the reading scores referenced in that article are assessed years before students hit that point.
Comment · 1 year ago
I read every book that was assigned to us, until grade 12, when we got something called "July's People" by Nadine Gordimer. Nobel Prize winner or not, she used literary techniques that were well beyond us, and we lacked teaching support.
I used to read novels well into adulthood, but family life eventually stopped that. I've tried audiobooks, but I tend to fall asleep or zone out, and haven't completed a novel in at least 10 years.
Comment · 1 year ago
It sounds like a universal experience in high school is students not reading assigned literature.
In South Africa many of my now middle-aged HS friends, most of whom subsequently graduated university and have successful careers, used study guides for English literature (a handful would recycle essays from older siblings), and are proud that they have never read a fiction book.
English teachers and romantics like the author of this piece seem to place a lot of value in the teaching of literature, but the Common Core actually seems to be on the right track:
At the same time, in an effort to promote “college and career readiness,” the Common Core State Standards Initiative, launched in 2010 and currently implemented in forty-one states, recommends that students mainly read “informational texts” (nonfiction, journalism, speeches)
No point in pretending that the average student has the same hobbies/interests as their English-major teacher.
Comment · 3 years ago
Same in South Africa...."mutton" usually refers to lamb. almost no one has a "lamb curry" or "lamb bunny" (Google it). It's "mutton curry" or a "mutton bunny".
Comment · 3 years ago
My good friend from South Africa tells me how she and her husband miss cooking with mutton, which they find more flavorful and satisfying than lamb. What happens to the mutton-aged sheep here?”
Just to clarify: lamb is far more common in South Africa than mutton (aged sheep) and most people don't differentiate between the two. Maybe it's the flavour of the lamb that they're referring to that differs between the countries.
The term mutton is overloaded: in South Asia, I believe it refers goat.
Comment · 3 years ago
The Afrikaans version may be comprehensible to a Dutch speaker, but the Dutch version, even the version you posted, is still very hard for this (second-language) Afrikaans reader to understand.
Comment · 3 years ago
It's interesting that the page says that Afrikaans was derived from Dutch in the 20th century, but the two languages are so different.
Dutch: Ik kan glas eten. Het doet geen pijn. Afrikaans: Ek kan glas eet, dit maak my nie seer nie
The truth, of course, is that Afrikaans split off from Dutch centuries earlier, but it wasn't a "prestige language" until the 20th century.
The page comes from a more innocent time, when the internet hadn't hit critical mass, and you could get away with stuff like that without pedants fact-checking you to death.
Comment · 3 years ago
Himba bushmen
It's rare to see an error in the opening sentence of an article, and maybe a nitpick but I believe "bushmen" usually refers to San hunter-gatherer nomads, not Bantu language-speaking pastoralists.
Comment · 3 years ago
I can recall many, many years ago (20+), reading an article about the future of telephones. The article proposed that many developing nations would never install landlines with full penetration because mobile phones are so much cheaper. This was written in the era when mobile phones were still expensive. That blew me away.
This brings back bad memories, and illustrates the risk of linear thinking: South Africa's black population was denied proper services under apartheid, including telecommunications. In an effort to supposedly right that wrong, the state-owned telecommunications company, Telkom, was given a years-long monopoly on fixed-line telecommunications in return for putting in fixed line connections to black communities. There were reports that an American corporation, SBC, helped write the country's telecoms act after it acquired a minority stake in Telkom.[1][2]
That monopoly set South Africa back many years, and it's only been in the last decade that it began catching up with the rest of the world. Oh, and the copper network has been so badly looted that many/most places now have wireless landlines. And those under-served black people: they all bought cellphones for the same reasons that people in the rest of the world did.
[1] https://twentythirdfloor.co.za/2007/08/27/telkom-sbc-and-a-f... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070827181955/http://www.busrep...
Comment · 3 years ago
Mao’s reforms led to millions of deaths. China grew after the 70s. But in any case, thanks for clarifying your conception of “discomfort”.
Comment · 3 years ago
India and China have both managed to uplift their economies in the last 30 years without the “discomfort” of violent crime, increasing corruption, the collapse of state institutions and an inability to generate electricity.
Of course reducing everyone to grinding poverty is one way of reducing inequality, but it’s hard to see what the utility of that would be.
Blacks will, and do, bear the brunt of the deterioration anyway.
Comment · 3 years ago
What makes you think I’m white?
In any case, apart from many Afrikaners, whites are increasingly irrelevant to the discussion about South Africa’s future-they’re dwindling as a percentage of the population because of aging, emigration, higher black birth rates and inward migration from other African counties.
The country is, objectively, deteriorating.
Anyway, not second guessing OP, just putting it out there.