Security experts have had this option of monetizing an attack long since in their sights. The only surprise is that it apparently took so long.

Indeed. The outbreaks before burned themselves out. This one will not.

You do not understand. That is not possible. No, really not. The infrastructure and mind-set for that to be possible are not in place.

Actually, African people cannot run their own countries well in most instances. The evidence is more than just compelling and there are no valid excuses for them anymore. Skin-color and race does not play a role. Culture and education does. On the other hand, looking at some tendencies in western countries, the devolution into kleptocracies and totalitarian regimes is well underway, with the US leading the charge downwards.

In addition, there is no power in the world strong enough and rich enough to take over Africa. Even the US falls several orders of magnitude short.
 

You cannot "throw money at the problem" either. Remember what happened when that was tried with whole plane-loads of dollars in Irak? The money just vanished and never reached those it was intended for. That is one of the primary defects of the infrastructure there: No way to distribute money so that it actually reaches those it is intended for.

"Tell you"? That already shows you cannot, as you do not understand the type of skill required. But you certainly have the big ego of the typical incompetent.

Indeed. Always great are the examples of people rolling their own ciphers, their own entropy collectors and their own crypto-protocols! (Well, except for the very few people that are actually good at it. And even they often scrap a design years later or say it was not very good.)

I should have been more specific: I meant to say that the case that a person talks back and has good supporting evidence is less frequent with younger people. Just regarding talking back, I completely agree with you. As an academic lecturer, I have spend countless hours trying to get young, bright, self-assured morons to see that many things are not quite as simple as they believe. Sometimes it works, sometime it works years later after they have run into some walls of their own making.

I do not disagree. There are very few that are good when young and get excellent with age. There are a more that start out mediocre and get good with ace. Most start out incompetent and stay incompetent. There is a reason for all the crappy, insecure and unreliable software that is around these days. We have far too many people writing code that do not have what it takes.

All I am saying that if you actually try to hire good people, age is not are relevant factor and hiring by age is a fundamentally flawed mistake that is exceptionally expensive and damaging.

I think Silicon Valley screwed up with that initial hiring policy. There was countless experience available that would have prevented a lot of waste. The thing was of course that in the beginning, money was scarce.

I fully agree on smart managers (rather rare, but I have met a few), and learning. I think the most of drop-off in learning capability has already happened when people enter university. On the other hand, if you actually work at your learning capabilities, that may not be a problem. Quite frankly I find learning new things not harder and sometimes considerably easier than 20 years ago, and that is because I now know how I lean best. Of course, learning always takes effort, and I quite agree that many older people have become too lazy for it and/or have too many other concerns, like family and work, to find the time end energy to continue learning. A friend of mine once said that the life-planning of an engineer or scientist aiming for excellence must different from ordinary folk. I can only agree.

This outcome has zero surprise value and is the _expected_ outcome. Pretty speeches and reality have this nasty tendency to diverge. This outbreak will be contained when there is a working cure or a working vaccine, not before. Anything else is only possible with a working medical and civil infrastructure, which does not exist in the affected areas and cannot be established in reasonable time.

For "senior" technical people that actually are not good at it, that is certainly true. I have seen that as a consultant countless times. On the other hand, those that are senior and _are_ good engineers, typically welcome (competent) criticism as a chance to learn even more. So basically this is just another effect of hiring incompetent engineers.

Incidentally, that incompetence breeds incompetence is a very old effect. There is also the effect of people that want to make their life easy: "How, do you ensure underlings are loyal? One answer is to promote incompetents." And "If you promote people who deserve it, they will never be grateful." -- Machiavelli

While it sounds like and old, tired cliché, you only get technological excellence from people that have technological excellence as their primary goal in life.