ianps
Posts 3
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Epistemic status: former geopolitical analyst focused on East Africa (for 2 years), but haven't kept myself much informed in the last 4 years and haven't read anything about the East Africa Federation.
I would have very little hope in this (estimate: < 1% chance of a federation with all of these countries being formed in the coming 25 years). Many (all?) of these countries have disputes of power along ethnic lines, so the idea of relinquishing power towards a supranational government seems very unlikely to me. E.g., South Sudan can barely form a government for its own country, so the idea of joining a federation seems hopeless.
I would find it more relevant to simply foster economic growth among the East Africa Community, or to work on improving governance within each of these countries (except perhaps Rwanda, which instead can work on securing good governance once President Kagame leaves power).
Happy to further detail my views or discuss this in more depth with anyone interested :)
Thanks for replying, much appreciated! I have seen a bit more discussion on the topic in the news recently, I saw these two good articles:
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/health/coronavirus-pregnant-women-babies.html
- https://parenting.nytimes.com/pregnancy/coronavirus-pregnancy-questions
(I though there was a very good BBC article as well, but could not find it now).
PS: in general, thank you again for your post. I was able to buy the essentials much before everyone ran to the supermarkets this last week.
First, thank you very much for this post!
Having a pregnant wife, I am trying to find more about the risks to her and the child, but could only find:
- Articles about a study looking at 9 cases: https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1242033/coronavirus-uk-can-pregnant-women-pass-coronavirus-to-babies-symptoms-latest
- An article discussing effects of other coronaviruses on pregnancy: https://www.thelancet.com/joQurnals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30311-1/fulltext
Does anyone have better information about the impacts of Covid-19?
Great point for other people who are tring this!
I faced this dilemma when calculating the amount to be donated to CATF. My colleagues raised that we perhaps should use the 'average cost' to offset a ton of CO2 (assumed as $10) for the calculation. I was fine with the approach, of course, but since it was mainly one partner in the company that did the offset I did not want to multiply the sum by a factor of 5, in which case he may not have been willing to just pay for it himself and instead raise it to all the partners where it could have been blocked (unfortunately I think one of the partners would block such contribution).
I may raise this when calculating and offsetting the emmissions for 2019.
PS: I always used the upper boundaries for the $/CO2 estimate as well as any other aspects of the calculation, even adding a 25% of the calculated CO2 as 'unnacounted elements' (some known, some unknown).
Thanks, I was not aware (or read it long ago and forgot) of SolarAid, and I particularly like the associated health and economical benefits. But it's hard to make recommendations based on an evaluation from 2013 without at least a confirmatory follow up.
Regarding the low costs to offset, indeed, I got incredulous looks and comments about the cost to offset the carbon emissions from the entire company for a whole year as being too low to be accurate... I would say that there was even willingness to spend more (i.e., offset more than what we calculated) since the costs were so cheap. I would need a good argument for why the company should do that, but maybe I can find some for next year's calculation.
On a related question: I just posted a question to the forum, and once the page refreshed on the question I had just asked, it already had one vote. Is this an auto-setting where my questions get automatically upvoted by me, or did someone really upvote it in the few (mili)seconds before submitting it and the page reloading?