Its very different from Stephenson's other novels. Its much more of a thriller with a few tech elements thrown in. I really enjoyed it, but don't go in expecting another cryptonomicon.

Financial system varies broadly country to country, but there are virtually no publicly traded African companies. If you wish to invest you need to find private companies willing to take on an investor

The Johannesburg stock exchange alone has about 400 companies listed, so "virtually none" seems a bit hyperbolic.

Sure, but outside of South Africa I believe what the OP is saying is true. In any case, better to correct him than downvote him without an explanation.

I expect you would find that the biggest companies in most of Africa are either state owned mining and oil companies or western companies operating in Africa. I don't think they have many important publicly traded companies because their financial systems aren't well developed.

There are virtually no publicly traded African companies. There are companies like glencore that have operations here, but they’re still European or Asian companies. If you’re looking to invest in African companies you have to put time in on the ground to find private companies suitable for investment.

That's just not true. A more accurate statement would be there are very few African companies listed on American stock exchanges. They are still listed in their home country's exchanges

The daily trade volume on the Ugandan exchange is ~$18,000. Companies may be “listed”, but good luck actually buying any stock

Look at the Nigerian stock exchange or the South African stock exchange or the Morrocan Stock exchange.

Obviously financial infrastructure varies a lot from country to country

You're shifting goalposts.

A lot of African owned companies are in London stock market and debts market

That's a joke. Look at the Casablanca Stock Exchange, $70b. Egypt $400b. South African about $1 trillion. Daily volume is between $50 - $200 million or so. And no, not just European or Asian companies. Plenty of national infrastructure companies, telecom, banking etc.

> There are virtually no publicly traded African companies.

Wow. I'm speechless - how did you arrive at that (incorrect) conclusion? Not only are there plenty of African stock exchanges[1], a lot of publicly traded companies opt to be (dually or exclusively) listed on foreign bourses.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African_stock_exchange...

We have viable stock markets across the continent, remember Nasper of South Africa, Nigerian Banks , Dangote cement , and thousands of others.

Postal investigators have a reputation for taking any violation of the mail system extremely seriously. It seems like yours in Oakland is breaking the stereotype. Have you reached out to his higher ups?

I saw it on Twitter a month or two ago, but I love it too! Great name

The bulk of those in Uganda are unbanked. Everyone here uses WhatsApp. Something like this would be a great way for me to pay contractors and domestic staff who right now only take cash.

I live in Uganda and something like this will be a great mobile money alternative. MTN and their ilk take a huge chunk of change for mobile money, and if this is cheap it’ll catch on very quickly here.

It should also make paying domestic staff and various contractors easier, and that’ll be nice.

They'll still have to pay the gatekeepers if they want to convert their cryptocurrency into something liquid.

Of course. As long as gatekeeper fees are less than the 3% charged for mobile money it’s a win

What economics courses have you taken that are remotely like this? Economics is extremely quantitative and is not some “shallow ideology”.

It's "extremely quantitative" non-predictions premised upon a shallow ideology.

How many petabytes does something like this take up?

I download profiles I'm interested in of course. Not everything. 70 profiles with 75000 tweets take 5GB for JSON + images + linked pages content + 60GB for videos.

I didn't optimize for space at all, twitter's json is quite wasteful.

The internet says there are about 500 million tweets per day. If we assume 500 bytes for storing each, this would be 250 Gigabytes per day.

Average tweet JSON object size is 5300B.

Should compress nicely though.

Looking at shooting silver iodide pellets up in the sky or painting deserts black? Lots of issues with weather modification. Virtual water is the most cost effective way to transport water, by far, unless you have some crazy new product