William Haun

@igobypereira @creatizine @Richard_otis_ Yes, it is the "Gambaga Escarpment" but since Nakpanduri is directly on the scarp and has a road down the steep incline, most people's only experience with the geographic feature is there. So they call it the "Nakpanduri Escarpment" even though it runs nearly 100 miles east-west.

@creatizine @Richard_otis_ I thought it was called Gambaga

The Nakpanduri Escarpment, North East Region Photographed by William Haun

@creatizine no, credit: @whaun

credit: newinGhanatourism

@kenkeyindex I enjoy some wasa-wasa on occasion but it definitely doesn’t have the best appetizing look. 😂

Wasawasa

This stuff is getting dangerously close to Ghana’s northern border!

@kenkeyindex Interesting…🤔

Would you try kenkey made with oats?

I was excited to hear a story about Ghana on my favorite daily news podcast. Unfortunately, it was not a positive story 😞 marketplace.org/story/2026/01/…

@kenkeyindex Wow, never heard of that one. Gotta try it!

Finally (for now), fomfom/foumfoum, a kenkey type originally from Nzema land but very much enjoyed in Fante land too. Like nsihun, the corn kernel is skinned before milling. But unlike most kenkey, fomfom is partially pounded. You might call it corn fufu.

@JamesLucasIT Amazing

A book from the 19th century that depicts the Rhine Valley by creating an impression of three-dimensionality and spatial distance.

@markandparx Always bugged my how the French print their spines upside down.

Wow! What a day!

@BBSimons RE: #17 I looked up the project images on the Ghana Highway Authority of the Jabass 69 work on "Regravelling Wiaga-Kadema-Naga Road" project. Downloaded them and looked at the metadata which reveals the photos were taken in 2016 where as the "work" began in 2020? 🤔

1. Ghana's Finance Minister has been ruthless and hyper-efficient in trying to close Ghana's IMF program on a high note. The previous administration also generally had the same approach but some feel that the current lot are stricter. 2. One way this manifests is in "arrears". If contractors and suppliers to the government don't get paid, austerity can be "approximated", and government books can look very good on the surface. 3. The challenge is that sometimes arrears (on both cash and commitment basis) can be "hidden" so that the official fiscal balance (primary or otherwise) doesn't tell the full story (cue: Senegal 2020 to 2023). 4. The IMF likes the books to look good but they also worry about any potential hidden arrears backlash. One way forward is to demand transparency. 5. After IMF staff reached an agreement with the Ghanaian government on the review of the current program on October 10th, Ghana was poised to receive $385 million by the end of December. But only after the customary IMF Board approval (which is usually a formality as the Board is made up mostly of govt reps - they are rarely stricter than the staff.) 6. The IMF expressed interest in the government being transparent about the arrears. 7. So, a few days ago, Ghana's Auditor General dumped a large file on the public containing INTERIM audit results of outstanding fiscal arrears as of December 31st 2024. Note "interim". 8. A lot of arrears even as of December 2024 are not captured. For example, Zipline arrears for drone deliveries (must be in the tens of millions of dollars) and monies owed to Lightwave (about $25 million) for connecting Ghanaian health facilities to health agencies, like the public health insurer. 9. Because the government has still not terminated a number of projects or repudiated some obligations that a traditional austerity program would have required, arrears have also continued to build up in 2025. 10. The Auditor General's interim audit report strangely contained no commentary. So, it is left to your friendly neighbourhood think-tankers to tell you a bit more. And we will, including possible Right-to-Information requests to clarify how much of the arrears arose through sole-sourcing etc. 11. For now, find below the barebones after a quick pass-through. 12. Captured arrears amount to 90 billion GHS ($8.2 billion). More than 66% related to road infrastructure. The Auditor General has rejected $1.1 billion of the claims from the companies and asked them to appeal. $7.1 billion of the claims are in limbo. The Auditor General wants more evidence. 13. Only $100m of Agenda 111 arrears are captured. 14. ~$5bn of arrears are owed to 25 companies out of roughly 3000 firms with captured arrears. 15. Chinese companies have seen some of the biggest rejections of their claims. China International Water & Electric leads by far - $230 million of claims rejected. Any link to the delays in getting debt relief from China? Even the President's visit couldn't break the logjam. 16. Some of the arrears are odd. Out of its total GHS 821 million in arrears, Zoomlion is claiming GHS 400m for "evacuation of old age refuse"! And GHS 148m for "beautifying" regional capitals. The Ghana Card has led to arrears of almost $300 million owed to the private partner (with supposed rebates to NIA.) 17. I was surprised to see that the company with the single largest pending commitment claim (~$770 million), Jabass 69, is one I have never heard of and it is for REGRAVELLING of a relatively obscure road: Wiaga - Kadema - Naga. Afona Ltd also has a ~$680 million commitment claim for use, once approved, in regravelling Missiga - Garu - Sissie road. The problem is that several other companies like Hinra and Razaam also claim to have contracts to regravel the same road, just for much smaller amounts. 18. The problem of large arrears, in this case with captured arrears alone at about 10% of GDP (with many claims yet to be captured), can create credibility issues about public debt management in general. 19. The 2024 IMF governance diagnostic shows that the arrears problem is part of a tight chain of other problems like poor prioritisation, shady procurement practices, and the inability to restrain political elites that see public spending as simple tools for patronage with limited connection to development. 20. There is a lot more to say but for now we will just keep chasing the data and official explanations, and then share our analysis with the Public. (Attached are some crude charts. I know the data visualisation purists don't like my charting game. But they should take it like that. 😊)

@BBSimons RE: #16 - Zoomlion better not get a pesewa for their "work" in Nalerigu, the capital of North East Region.

@AfariKwasi2 A life lost over 5cedis and bruised ego. 😢

@whaun This shooting is tragic. The police are supposed to protect we the civilians but not to be killing. That was so sad

Just today on my bike ride I saw a police officer shaking down a pickup truck driver w/ some sheep in the boot. It happens all the time and it isn't fair or right. So I'm not surprised to hear of the mob reaction in this tragic story today: myjoyonline.com/angry-mob-vand…

Regular expressions (regex) have never been a strength of mine. Thanks to @ChatGPTapp, I don't think I'll ever write one again. Telling it in plainspeak what I want the regex to do saves me so much time. I just did a complex regex search & replace on a 186K line document in <2min

@petapixel FYI: typo here “The New York Times described fashion photogpraher Helmut Newton…”

In exclusive research for PetaPixel, Kapwing has put together a list of the top 200 photographers requested by users of the AI image generator Midjourney. petapixel.com/2025/10/20/the…

@Boenau Add Unicycle to that graph

"Humans aren’t very efficient movers—until you put us on a bicycle, when we become some of the most energy-efficient land travelers in the animal kingdom."

@petapixel Hahaha

Honor has announced that it is developing a smartphone with a camera that extends from the device using a robotic arm. petapixel.com/2025/10/17/hon…

@petapixel Dang, I used that all the time for quick, simple edits.

Apple's Clips video editing app introduced for iPhone and iPad in 2017 has been delisted. petapixel.com/2025/10/13/app…

@BBSimons For what it’s worth, I hate Dubai airport. If you have to change terminals, you are ferried around on buses which are slow and held up by general airport support traffic. For example, my last layover there required 1hr 50min from getting off my plane to getting to my next gate.

1. The Nobel Prize for Economics was handed out to three guys today, two of them jointly. 2. While the Economics Prize stirred few of the passions the one for Peace did, it is arguably the most controversial of the prizes. 3. First, it is not one of the original Nobels instituted in 1901 with funds from the inventor of dynamite. Some of the original benefactor's descendants think he would have cringed at such an award. 4. Established much later in 1968/9, its laureates are incredibly concentrated. Nearly half come from 4 universities that dominate American mainstream econs (Chicago, Harvard, MIT & Princeton). Oxbridge, usually well represented in the Nobels, trail here. And, of course, economists living in the Global South barely feature. Some think that genuinely "heterodox" economists stand no chance either. 5. All that said, 2025's winners have done work close to my heart: how innovation drives economic transformation and why we should never assume that the future will keep on getting better. It takes work! 6. Perhaps the most intriguing model I picked up in one of my episodic returns to grad school was the U shaped relationship between competition and innovation. Most market believers assume that competition is always a good thing. Actually, competition is only good up to a point for innovation. At some point it messes things up. 7. The three Laureates are in two camps on this topic. Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt are big on creative destruction as a key function of how innovation changes the structure of economies. For them, policies deter or enable positive shifts to the extent that they reward or penalise productively game-changing ideas. Joel Mokyr, on the other hand, has...well, more complex ideas. 8. Mokyr talks a lot about how institutions create a culture that promotes productive and transformative knowledge generation. It is a longrun, continuous, paradigm-shifting, thing. Not the chain of abrupt transitions suggested by the creative destructionists. 9. My own view is that "Strategic Policy Induced Creative Destruction" (SPI-CE) can add a new flavour, while also lending a long-horizon lens to how strategic decision-makers can confront breakneck shifts. 10. Take Dubai Airport, for instance. By any measure, it is a huge success, a bastion of technical excellence. From less than 250,000 passengers in 1970 to nearly a 100 million today. World-leading baggage systems. Biometric access throughfares with a twinkle. Integrated intelligence decision support fit for the Space Age. 11. Yet Dubai's leaders have set a timeline to shut it down. They say it has reached the end of its lifecycle for industry-shaping innovation. They have already completed phase one of its successor in Jebel Ali. That is to say, Dubai Airport is being cannibalised already from within. 12. The Jebel Ali version is meant to handle 250+ million passengers. It is designed from ground up to accelerate the end of the current civil aviation concept. To usher in a world where conventional aircraft and autonomous vehicles cohabit. Where every logistic unit is granularly traced. A world where vertical takeoff reworks "landing approach." Etc. 13. Yes, there're risks. But that's the whole point. Unless you don't get "creative destruction". 14. Or don't like it. Which won't be surprising. Some argue that policy is solely about "incremental innovation". That disruption is simply not political-economy feasible. So, you look across all the aviation hubs in Africa, and most of Europe, and all you see is incremental nicks and tucks. 15. The four hubs betting on the extinction of the current aviation infrastructure concept are in Singapore, Riyadh, Istanbul and, of course, Dubai. Hubs already doing splendidly well. 16. It is not about leapfrogging. It is about breaking what works well...but only for today's world. And heralding headlong a new world. Creative destruction. 17. At any rate, incremental innovation comes with risks, too. Since March 2025, there have been at least 3 incidents at Kotoka Airport in Accra, an incrementally transformed airport, during which a power outage shut down other critical systems like departure control (including check-in) and security-screening. 19. Somehow, the UPS and backup-power kick-in systems aren't in lockstep with power requirements growth. Patchwork transformation creaking under the demand burden. Accra is not alone. Nairobi and Johannesburg have witnessed similar issues. 20. It is certainly prudent when dealing with strategic national systems to try and graft change onto the steady foundation of the status quo. Unfortunately, in a fast-moving scenario, the only sustainable policy choice is to go for broke or go back home.

@JackUnicyclist @launchschool Perfect score … so on brand for @JackUnicyclist

YOOOH I PASSED 🎉 🎊 After tons of studying and 7.5 hours of polishing up the take-home project - I'm happy to say that I passed @launchschool's JS229 project assessment (and with a perfect score)! The project tests you on object-oriented JavaScript principles and design. I can't say much about it due to the student code of conduct, but I will say it was a really fun project. Now I move onto JS230, "DOM Manipulation & Browser Events". I learned a lot about this topic while I was doing @TheOdinProject from my earlier days, so I'm hoping I can make good time with this one. Super excited! As for today, I worked more on my bug tracker web app. Tonight I ran through the API endpoints for my app. Just planning things out to make things smooth and organized. I feel like the rough planning will give a better roadmap and order-of-tasks when I start the actual implementation. Once the logic of the app is correct, then I can worry about implementing as opposed to worrying about both while I create the project 😅 On a personal note: I started my first day at my first job in the US as a Sales Rep. Orientation was good, and I think the competitive environment could be really good for me and super stimulating. I think the skills I could learn from this job could also be super valuable in my future career trajectory. Super stoked on life right now 🥂 🚀 DAY 793 OF #1000DaysOfCode ⏰ 30 Minutes #JavaScript #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareEngineer