Thanks for the links, it’s interesting background. In that article from February 2021, The Artlantic states “There was also never a default”.

There was indeed no default as of February 2021. The default occured later, in April-May 2022, so we can’t expect a past article to include that information.

All major lenders need to take part in restructuring the debt indeed. That occured in 2023, and multiple lenders asked for a restructuring deal similar to the first one signed with China. I don’t know about the US, but Japan/India/French lender were looking for a similar restructuration terms. That sounds fair to me.

A debt rework between Sri Lanka and countries including Japan, India and France was also expected this week, but news of the EXIM deal took them by surprise. The three nations request comparability of debt treatment with China.

“As far as the information we have is concerned, conditions set by China are comparable to ours,” Kanda said.

The country’s default is clear evidence the overall debt wasn’t sustainable. Both Sri Lanka and its lenders have a responsibility on this. China is often the first mentioned because it was (still is?) Sri Lanka’s biggest foreign lender, although it would be good to have transparency of the country’s debt and interest rates on a per-lender basis, to see which ones are the most sustaonables.

The 2022 bloomberg article you cite first state:

It didn’t provide details on the value of the loans which it said matured at the end of 2021, nor did it state which nations owed the money.

I couldn’t read much further due to the paywal.

The Bloomberg article has too few details to make conclusions. We don’t know if AP and Bloomberg articles are referring to the same countries, nor whether it’s a significant portion or that country’s debt toward China.

The Reuters 2021 article has more details, and cite write-offs, as well as specific countries benefiting from deferrals: Angola, Pakistan, Kenya, the Republic of Congo. It’s good to read there’s some willingness to accomodate some countries.

Sadly that didn’t prevent Zambia and Sri Lanka from defaulting. China has lended hundred of billion of dollars with unsustainable terms, and this contributed to countries defaulting. That’s a bad situation for everyone involved.

I hope Tanzania and Zambia read the fine pints on the loan/inversement agreement.

While that’s true, but there’s no indication of Microsoft brute forcing with million of combinations.

The article you link says Microsoft is only trying a few obvious passwords: the filename, and words found in the plaintext message.

Proper encryption isn’t just about using a strong algorithm. It’s also about proper key management, ie not sending the password in the clear via the same channel as the encrypted files.

ZIP isn’t a good way to encrypt, but what Microsoft is doing is simply reading the email, and decrypting zips with the password found in the email body.

All encryptions schemes can be trivially broken if you have the key. It’s not even breaking, it’s just normal decryption.

Sodas

Quite the contrary.

Password hashing is standard nowadays.

When a database is compromised, brute forcing hashes is necessary to recover passwords, and the short ones are the first ones to be recovered.

These 5% of negative reviews probably has nothing to do with you. There’s always a small amount of people unhappy for random or unrelated reasons (broke up with boy/girlfriend, car broke, etc) and who would write negative reviews no matter what. It’s possible they cannot dissociate the course from other things happening in their life. They just happened to be unhappy at that time, and felt like leaving a nasty review.

Don’t forget the 15% minimum corporate tax. This now have to be turned into law.

Taxing individuals by itself cannot solve shortcomings in the tax system. The super rich have corporations and shell companies in tax heavens to avoid taxes.

That’s interesting. Thanks for pointing it out.

My point is having a very old constitution isn’t much of a boast if keeping it as-is causes political issues.

Tradition and inertia.

The USA is proud to have the oldest and longest-standing written constitution. The fact it hasn’t been rewriteen in a long time help explain why there’s still an electoral college, slavery for prisoners (13th amendements), and weak regulation of campaign finance.