Touchdown 30 hours later for the Nashville Energy and Mining Summit!

…the problem isn’t that African countries solicit foreign help and expertise. The paradigmatic examples of rapid modernization and economic development in Japan, South Korea, the Gulf, and China all involved a fair amount of local adaptations/deployment of foreign expertise. This, in fact, is supposed to be a key advantage of being a late developer. In my view, the real problem is how African states use foreign expertise. Instead of helping with questions of “how to get things done,” outsiders are often recruited into the driving seat and tasked with deciding “what is to be done.”

What explains the “ambition gap” among Africa’s (ruling) elites?

On the drivers of African elites’ addiction to muddling through developmentalism

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It’s been 5 years. 4 since we knew these weren’t necessary. Why don’t airports remove them?

We setup the first (I believe) Africa Nostr relay 2 years ago here in Kenya - still going strong too. wss://nostr-1.nbo.angani.co Big thanks to Riyaz and the Angani team for managing it. I still remember the late nights talking for hours with @npub1ynfl...wfm8 about how this was the first real architectural shift we’d seen on the Internet in decades. The road is long, but if we work for it, the future can be amazing.

We’ve been having fun working up a locally made in Kenya #Bitaxe bitcoin miner. First couple designed and testing. Hii ni shoka yetu “This is our axe” Funnily enough the slowest horse has been that we didn’t have any Bitmain machines, but we finally got some S19 chips.

Whirlwind trip to the US. Looking forward to Nashville, NYC, and LA!

Time for some offgrid family time. (Kindle synced, Starlink going off in 3, 2, 1…)