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Comment by zamalek | Hacker News Reader

I have a different theory on why this happens, as a potential immigrant myself: it's a giant sorted hash-set.

My reason for immigrating is simple: in a developed country I'll make more of a difference with the same amount of effort. My "hash" inclines me to move to developed buckets (and also privileges me with the means to do so). Take Elon Musk as an example. If he attempted to start SpaceX in South Africa (his country of birth) he would have been hemorrhaging capital via the corrupt government tender process. There is also the added problem of a lacking employee pool due to the on-going brain-drain. His "hash" landed him in a developed country and is demonstrably an advantage because of many factors, including the support of the American government.

I really don't think that immigration changes people; it's merely a tool that the inspired use to achieve their goals. The anthropic principle could be invoked here in a contrived way.

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> There is also the added problem of a lacking employee pool due to the on-going brain-drain.

Not to go off topic too much, but it should be noted that in South Africa there is also an extremely authoritarian form of affirmative action or black economic empowerment, etc. which effectively means you _have_ to employ people based on their skin colour when your business reaches a certain size or effectively you can't do business in the economy. It's a form of justified-racism directed at a minority group (< 10% of the population is white) that stifles the labour market and makes things like SpaceX impossible.

The "brain-drain" you speak of is skilled white workers who are leaving the country because they can't get work or can't advance in their careers, etc. A completely stupid problem created by the government's own ineptitude.

I've found that communicating the woes of that policy over the internet is somewhat impossible. If you live in an equality-developed country it's virtually impossible to believe what you are told about countries that have no racial equality. I've learned to only have conversations about South African racial inequality only in person.

Unless you can demonstrate that it's actually detrimental to the average South African, then it's not really a problem or ineptitude is it?

Notably, you didn't even try to make that argument, you were more concerned with the problems it causes for less than 10% of the population that used to benefit from an "extremely authoritarian form of affirmative action".

Are you telling me you actually hold to the belief that having a policy which contributes towards driving away skilled professionals because of their race is a benefit to the average South African?

Yes. A situation in which a large company can't find any roles for 90% of the population is clearly unsustainable and needs to be fixed. It's apartheid in all but name. Getting rid of that also had negative consequences for some individual people, but was clearly the right thing to do, and benefitted the average South African.

Yes because 90% of the population is clearly black engineers, doctors, scientists, etc. and the only reason they're not being hired is because they're black and there's some racist conspiracy going on and not because these people don't actually exist. You can't just "will" a skilled professional into existence.

If, as you claim, black doctors, engineers and scientists do not exist in South Africa and the country is > 90% black, then clearly that is a problem for the country as a whole, and fixing it will improve life for everyone.

One supply-side fix for that is to send more people to school to learn these skills. One demand-side fix for that is to make sure that the people who have those skills get jobs.

I can well imagine, that after decades of being systematically excluded from these positions, the transition will be hard. Unlike you, I'm not rushing to blame the current government for the impact of decisions that were made many years ago.

What you are describing is racism. You're dressing it up in a way that makes it justifiable. What you are suggesting is no better than the architects of apartheid. Good luck building a non-racist society based on selective-racism as the driving force to "fix it". You can try to rationalize it any way you want.

> What you are suggesting is no better than the architects of apartheid

Let's just leave it on that note of hyperbole.

And requires companies to hire dead weight in the form of people who are not up to the job, instead only have the correct skin colour, and have to be paid sometimes significant salaries to spend their days playing solitaire.

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