SA exchange controls and why you really should care
Even if you're not a South African you should still care about our exchange control regulations, because this is a great country and we need investment - unfortunately, we can seldom afford to accept it. Currently Mark Shuttleworth is involved in a court case against the SA government over exchange control regulations. In typical style, the government officials are overplaying their hand claiming that if he wins then the country will be destroyed - this could not be further from the truth, as a matter of fact what most of the public don't know (since these rules don't affect the majority, and are hard to understand) is that they could have the opposite effect, and further still the current regulations have actually crippled SAs economic growth for decades.
What the media doesn't entirely point out is what these rules actually are. First off, no individual (anywhere in the world) can exchange more than 4 million ZAR in their lifetime, or more than R1mi in offshore funds. Companies also need to motivate any transfer of funds and get approval, which is undoubtedly slow and often refused. While this might seem like a lot of money to most people, in reality it isn't and these numbers are never maintained in-line with global inflation.
The effect of regulations like this is very similar to transfer duties on houses. The average cost of a very modest house or apartment in my area is around R1mi (+/- $100,000), however the cutoff is R600,000. Feel free to check out any property website and see what you can get for that - nothing. For me to buy the property I rent, in addition to paying for the property I'd be forking over R100,000 to the government for absolutely nothing in return and no work on their part - I still have to pay rates, taxes and everything else for as long as I own it, and I still had to pay taxes to earn that R100,000. This means a lot of people who can actually afford to buy can't buy, and the government is too incapable and slow to update these rates in line with actual economic conditions.
So, back to exchange controls. Now you've made a bunch of money, but despite the fact that you've paid taxes and VAT and UIF to all the people who can't get jobs, and E-tolls so that SANRAL can ship R20bn off to Germany without impeachment - you decide "Yeah, actually, screw this place" and you head off somewhere like Shuttleworth or Musk did. Now suddenly your fortune has to remain in SA because of exchange control regulations, or you're taxed to high heaven on the income you were already taxed on when you earned. Now you may think that this is good news, these rich guys can't just take all the money out of our economy and leave it to die. That may be one consequence, but consider the other - who in their right mind is going to bring money into the country if they're never allowed to leave with it, and what incentive is there for anyone to even bother running a big business in SA?
There in lies the rub, there isn't enough money to go around in SA for investment in growing our economy - yet the government says we're not allowed to bring any in, or invest any out. No jobs for you then, unless we can fund companies out of thin air without foreign investment. Even if you run your business from South Africa, it's too difficult to do business with the rest of the world thanks to the same regulations. So naturally the smart South Afircan innovators setup their businesses outside South Africa where they're more welcome, more likely to succeed and find talented staff, taxed way less, able to garner investment and start-up capital more easily, and most importantly - free to leave and spend it anywhere in the world, to the point where London is littered with companies run by former South Africans, money which could be here building houses and creating jobs.
Using PuppetDB for template generation
For quite some time it has bugged me that Puppet didn't have a way to query information about neighbouring servers, something which is extremely handy for generating configurations which need to know about the other servers in your environment (Munin configs, firewalls etc). A few things filled this gap but I always felt them lacking in many respects, as I write this I can't put my finger on what the reasons were.
The addition of PuppetDB provides a really good solution for this though. Installing is quite trivial, for our environment we don't have too many servers and the Puppet master is quite large so I just installed everything on there.
Once everything is working right you can access the DB directly, or use the useful API to query things about your nodes. The database will be populated with nodes as they checkin (do configure with PostgreSQL per the documentation).
puppetdb=# select count(*) from certnames; count ------- 70 (1 row)
The next thing I wanted to do though was be able to generate a template from a list of hosts. For this I found the very good puppetdbquery module by Erik Dalén.
The installation details are a bit sketchy so here is how I set it up. Firstly just 'gem install ruby-puppetdb' on the master, if all went well you should now have a 'puppet query' command which can pull hosts from PuppetDB based on facts and other information.
~# puppet query nodes 'Package[nginx]' ["web01", "web02"]
Now we just need this exposed in our modules. Assuming you have pluginsync enabled on your agents, in your puppet tree create a modules/puppetdb folder and copy the 'lib' folder from the puppetdbquery repo into there.
~$ mkdir -p /etc/puppet/modules/puppetdb ~$ git clone git://github.com/dalen/puppet-puppetdbquery.git ~$ cp -a puppet-puppetdbquery/lib /etc/puppet/modules/puppetdb/
Your agents should now sync the library in, if you have any errors then depending on how you've configured the puppet master you may need to restart puppetmaster or Apache to make sure the library gets loaded correctly.
Now to use it in a module, here is my new Munin configuration.
modules/muninserver/manifests/init.pp
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 | class muninserver { package { 'munin': ensure => latest } $orghosts = query_nodes('kernel="Linux"') file {'/etc/munin/munin.conf': ensure => present, content => template('muninserver/munin.conf.erb'), owner => root, group => root, mode => '0644', replace => true } } |
modules/muninserver/templates/munin.conf.erb
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 | # Munin config includedir /etc/munin/munin-conf.d htmldir /var/www/munin graph_strategy cgi # Hosts [localhost.localdomain] address 127.0.0.1 use_node_name yes <% orghosts.each do |host| %> [<%= host %>] address <%= host %> <% end %> |
Sexism, beyond all reasonable doubt.
Firstly, I'm a Python developer, and I have been one for well over 10 years. I personally know a number people who were at PyCon this year, and sadly all the great things which happened there got destroyed by a silly spat over jokes that were perceived as sexist/derogatory/inappropriate.
Many people who sadly probably don't even know what Python is have picked up the issue and blurred it beyond comprehension.
Here's what happened in short
- Adria Richards was offended by two guys joking in the seats behind her. Instead of asking them to shut up, she methodically took a picture of them which clearly identified their employer and one of the individuals names, and posted it to her 10,000 Twitter followers with a derisive comment. Only after that damage was done did she attract the attention of PyCon representatives to deal with the issue. As it turns out, this isn't the first time she's been passive aggressive about this issue.
- One of the people from Playhaven was fired because of it. Alex Reid was not the person fired, that persons anonymity remains somewhat in tact.
- Adria Richards was then fired
Here's why people on both sides of this issue are full of crap
- Publicly, irreversibly, and unashamedly destroying someone's career and possibly their personal life is an unacceptable, disproportionate and arguably illegal response to taking exception to two men having a laugh between each-other, or at the most making offensive jokes.
- If anyone think the female gender is void of women who make jokes at the expense of men, they are completely delusional.
- Adria was not fired for "defending feminism" or "fighting misogynists", that is just dishonest hyperbole. There has been no statement of why she was, if I'd hazard a guess it's because she went on to deliberately drag her company into the issue.
- No one actually knows what Adria heard, they are jumping to conclusions in support of their own beliefs on the issue. We all know how sensitive some people can be, and equally how disgusting some people can be.
- The jerks, misogynists, and DDoS script kiddies attacking people in response to the various comments are not part of the Python community.
- Ignorance begets ignorance, and a strong one-sided view of this issue is only going to encourage a stronger view opposing it.
And finally, yes, the tech industry is populated mostly with men, along with several thousand other careers. Most of those men have probably had extremely negative experiences with society and women in particular, and a lot of them have much different standards of communication than what people perceive as sociable. It is not the place of those outside the actual hacker and software community to judge the inner workings of it or the social skills of the people who built it, suffice to say there are many women I've met who have no problem with it at all.
It should also be pointed out that one incident doesn't make a pattern. People jumping on the bandwagon saying the men involved in this incident were "sexist" is about as accurate as calling me an anti-semite because you heard me joking with a friend about the fact that he's a Jew, or calling someone a racist because they said something that could be construed as racist. Reality is we all think these things sometimes, and we all say these things sometimes without thinking it through, and every single person is capable of social faux pas. The real shame here is that two people lost their jobs because they were ultimately only guilty of being human.
Regardless of what may have been said on that day, the result of hypersensitivity is always the same outcome, and it would be extremely unfortunate and disappointing for people to turn hacker conferences into boring, politically correct corporate affairs instead of light hearted and free-form exchange of ideas which is not based on judging peoples personality but rather their actual ideas, as most of these people have contributed a damn sight more to society than the treatment or reward they've received from it. That warrants understanding, tolerance, and at the very least - benefit of the doubt.
When religion meets ICASA
In what must be the most ridiculous case in South African history, some time ago ICASA pandered to religious lobbying groups and - without any actual power to do so - prevented TopTV from broadcasting a few pornographic channels on their private TV service. I guess the FPB was busy with other things that day... I rarely speak out about religion, I actually used to be a Christian until I grew up and realised it was a load of judgemental assholes sitting around trying to find new ways to spread their asshole beliefs - most of which were never supported by the texts they followed. I never actually had a problem with Christianity itself, just the majority of people who follow it - but mostly I like the simpler world of "Let me believe what I believe, and I'll let you believe what you believe". Of course, sadly these jerks get airtime and it makes me want to jab their eyes out with a spoon because apparently they aren't using them anyway. You can take our Halal Woolworth's hot-cross buns, but you won't take our porn!
This is a world over debate from religious groups that pornography makes men rape women, and that it somehow objectifies and demeans the rights of women. All these things have been repeatedly, and consistently, debunked by actual independent research. Studies have found watching porn to have if anything an inverse correlation with rape, and no relation to how men perceive women in the real world. Oddly enough any well raised man knows the difference between reality and porn, and psychopaths are immune to influence regardless.
Unfortunately that doesn't stop religious whack-jobs from constantly thinking they have the right to demand society fits their neat package rather than learning some tolerance themselves. Just a short while ago they managed to get some idiot parlament member to table a bill to ban internet pornography, and it failed extremely quickly. I use the term whack-jobs, because they're actually a quite small group of individuals running around trying to pull this crap - that doesn't stop them from claiming they represent the views of millions, but that just makes them liars.
It's easy for these short sighted half-wits to make boring unsubstantiated claims, but let me make some substantiated ones of my own. With the exception of Islam and typical forms of Judaism, pretty much every other religion takes on deep forms of gender bias that favours men. Catholic priests can only be men, similarly Mormon and Jehovah's Witnesses. Muslim women are required to cover up in public with burqa's and such, granted most muslim women don't really see this as bias but the rest of the world seems to. The list goes on, I actually was swamped with too much reading when I tried to research it more closely, so I barely even have to make this point, because it's not even remotely denied.
In terms of demeaning women then, religion has done a damn good job over the years and continues to this day. What right do they have then to suddenly hide behind women's rights to fight their own moral agenda? And more to the point, where are they allowed to draw the line? Should movies be banned because they have swearing, or because they show gay men building houses? Do we ban rock music for being "satanic", and video games for their virtual acts of murder? This has nothing to do with rights, this is as obvious as it comes - this is religious groups once again trying to make everyone follow their belief system and I won't have it.
I also have rights in the constitution -
- The freedom from discrimination by religious groups trying to make me follow their moral beliefs and shove their moronic garbage down my throat
- The freedom from association with idiots who believe the nonsense that comes out of their mouths
- The right to the privacy of watching whatever the hell I want in my own house
- The freedom of speech to tell you to go fuck yourself
- and the right to protest ICASA's moronic, illegal and authoritarian pandering to this kind of unsubstantiated bollocks when it's not their job to do so.
You see, unlike people who believe in zombie overlords and magic miracles, the rest of us know the difference between reality and TV show. The real harm is that stupidity of this nature makes people waste time investigating what porn does instead of finding real ways to reduce rape and abuse of women in this country, and that's the even more criminal thing to me.
MOOC and some presumptions of ignorance
I'm a huge supporter of Coursera since it launched because I feel that an overhaul in the way we further our education and knowledge is long overdue. Universities are exclusive, and they probably have to be for the concept to be practical, but knowledge and education should be anything but exclusive. Many academics have argued against it with rather predictable reasons, almost all of those are straw men like "nothing beats the campus experience". The news is also currently talking about the woes of when courses go wrong. This isn't news though, courses go wrong at university campuses too, sometimes really badly. I personally experienced having to re-sit an exam and get told we had to attend extra lectures because the lecturer had failed to teach the course correctly. I'm sure I'm not alone in that experience. That stuff doesn't make the news, but it happens frequently, made worse often by the fact that the people setting and moderating the exams aren't the ones teaching the course. Currently though one of the online courses I'm taking seems to pitch the university it came from quite a lot, I don't have any problem with that - they put in the effort to make the course, if they want it to also be a showcase or advertisement then they should be welcome to do so for offering free education.
One of the other things the lecturer raises often though is the fact that if I were taking the course at his university, then through the wonder of prerequisites he would be able to assume I had some level of knowledge. That's a fair statement, but I would cautiously say it leans on a bit of laziness in the university world.
I know from first hand experience at university that very often lecturers would presume students had not only been taught something, but been taught it in the way they would teach it or need it to be applied. This is rarely true. You might be able to guarantee a student took a course but you can't guarantee the quality of knowledge they received from it. Often things like maths particularly get taught out-of-band in a very raw and unrelatable (I know, that's not really a word) fashion. I still remember my maths lecturers throwing things like Green's theorem on the board, and explaining all the maths and using the usual example graph, but I still had no clue what the purpose of it was, or the other long list of theorems that get taught with no application or context. You're expected to wait and see where these things become useful, but for the most part it's difficult to care about understanding them when your sole mission is to just survive the mid-term, or when you aren't sure if you'll ever need to use it because the prerequisite is designed as a feeder to hundreds of different disciplines. Sometimes the lecturer just sucked - sadly there's little to no penalty for a lecturer that doesn't give a damn about his students, but there's plenty for the student who fails because of it.
The fact that you don't know your students level of knowledge should rather be an opportunity to concisely summarise the entire chain of required knowledge in the context of the subject being taught. If someone is really out of their depth, they have the opportunity to fill in the gaps or quit and come back later - that is the great thing about an education system which does not penalise failure to the point of hopelessness, or going bankrupt with course fees. So, you can freely assume we are ignorant but not that we are too stupid to learn.
Mean Fair Use Threshold Throttling. Or “BS” for short.
Telecommunications in SA is a master of making statements which baffle educated minds. Sadly, when it comes to the art of statistics or the science of maths our journalists rarely qualify as "educated minds" - happily positioning peoples press releases in the greatest of light or just entirely verbatim.
This all started with the tragic 3GB cap. Since then we've had people throw around concepts of "throttling" with these odd and vaguely defined statistical thresholds, confounding and muddling concepts like bandwidth with data volume. It's almost as embarrassing as watching people trip themselves up over terms like "Cloud" and "SaaS".
But hey, at least they made it simple by avoiding "roll-over" at all costs. Mobile network operators manage to outright steal billions every month by just expiring the unused prepaid and contract data amounts that people paid money for. For some reason few people ever expose the realities of these things. Much like the 3GB cap which amounts to an average bandwidth profile of a wonderfully round 10Kbps. Throw in a bit of contention and you can host the entire South African population on a 1Gbps connection. Quite sad really, ADSL when it first came out was actually a rather expensive downgrade from dialup.
It seems this trend is far from over, with MWebs' Derek Hershaw recently saying "We will monitor usage across these products and reserve the right to throttle the connection speeds of the top percentage of subscribers on these products that generate usage above the average" regarding a new product. Alarmingly "throttle" in this instance means on a 2Mbps connection you get dropped to 192Kbps - you might as well just unplug your router and dust off a 10 year old GPRS modem, it's that bad.
I used to have a product like this from another ISP, it was "uncapped" with "fair use". I could never get a straight answer from anyone as to what the actual usage limit was. Some months after a mere 30GB of data volume I would be throttled from 4Mbps to what felt like dial-up speeds. Other months I started out from day one with dial-up speeds and couldn't do anything until I guess someone else became the "offender".
This is why statements like the one from MWeb are outright vague. Firstly, what defines the "top percentage", and where is this average? At what point in time does this data get accumulated? Is it constant? If so there's a massive problem with this, especially using averages.
Take this theoretical table of people
Data usage (units irrelevant)
Using an average, at any point in time someone is always in the "top percentage", ie they will always be throttled until the rest of the people use more - that sure sounds fair. Must have been some fancy BA Philosophy student that invented this idea. I have my doubts that they really mean to say that though, but lets assume they do. Regardless of how "fair" someones usage is like 'Steve' above, he's constantly shafted by the fact that 'Clive' never even uses his account. He isn't the only one though, by the fourth time point James is also in the "top percentage".
Clearly then, using rolling averages is a stupid idea.
Reality is a 2Mbps connection going full shunt can download 657GB of data in a month. That is an extremely large amount of data, but not entirely unreasonable. The assumption is that someone using that much data is downloading illegal movies or something, of course they could also be streaming data for analysis from a research facility like CERN. Throttling Steves bandwidth down to 192Kbps takes that figure down to 62GB, still a fair amount theoretically but it would be intolerable to do anything as simple as watch a YouTube video with that little bandwidth or even load Facebook.
The confusing thing is that throttling people isn't a cheap process from a technical perspective either, it's actually a bloody nightmare to limit peoples traffic in large networks and the equipment to do it is considerably more expensive than not bothering. In the rest of the world, it's cheaper to buy more transit. It's actually cheaper to do that here too, but if anyone admitted that then they wouldn't be getting away with their usual obfuscation anymore. So they use poor techniques which go wrong, 192Kbps becomes no connection at all with massive latency and packet loss because their traffic shapers run out of buffer space when limited that far below the actual line rate, and start dropping packets so you end up with retransmissions (or essentially traffic policing rather than shaping), and UDP almost always gets destroyed entirely in the cross-fire. TCP is designed to work around this, except for the various breeds of bank "security" people that throw PMTU packets away with their over zealous firewall rules, so this mechanism fails and everything grinds to a halt. Essentially you just wish you paid for a flat capped connection and could buy some more.
This isn't really anyones fault though, our ADSL network has a completely broken architecture which aggregates users at a few key points and then stuffs them into contended IPC connections, which are hideously expensive to boot. All I can hope for is that this nonsense of trying to pull the wool over peoples eyes by throwing terms like "average" and "top percentage" around gets nipped in the bud at some point because apparently our IT industry has so much wool pulled over them already that they're starting to look like sheep.
Handling Puppet agent madness
Lets face it, the Puppet agent is kind of a fragile piece of junk. It's a heck of a lot better than it was, but it still hangs for any number of reasons that Ruby decides to go wrong and it leaks memory like a sieve.
First of all, don't run Puppet as an agent. Second of all, the Puppet agent changed all sorts of its command syntax and half the documentation out there for this is now totally worthless - also, I personally don't want to wait orders of hours for puppet to update because I want to encourage people to push changes into Puppet, and not be able to get away with doing a local change that lasts for an hour. Here's what I see as a more sane way, with a manifest to manage cron, and without useless calls to scripts to generate random numbers since Puppet now has a built-in for this. Then we insure that agent doesn't start as a service anymore.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 | $interval = 3+fqdn_rand(2) cron {"puppet-run": command => "/usr/sbin/puppetd --onetime --no-daemonize --logdest syslog > /dev/null 2>&1", ensure => present, user => root, minute => "*/$interval" } service {'puppet': ensure => stopped, require => Cron["puppet-run"] } |
Next we will find that Puppet runs can hang too. This is because a) I'm running on a short interval, and although the randomisation helps thundering herd issues WebRick is still crap and I'm too lazy right now to implement my server right b) Sometimes modules like apt time out c) Sometimes DNS sucks d) The code is crap - why does the server call have an infinite timeout on certs?
Whatever the case, it's hard to debug hanging processes and some of the above issues I can't be bothered to deal with 
So I use the following script to make sure Puppet does get left hanging for a longer than 2 hours.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 | #!/bin/bash PID=$(pgrep -nf "puppetd") if [ -n $PID ] then now=$(date "+%s") btime=$(grep btime /proc/stat | awk '{print $2}') (( procrun = $(cat /proc/$PID/stat | awk '{print $22}') / 100 )) (( runtime = ($now - ($btime + $procrun) / 3600 )) if [ "$runtime" -gt "2" ] then echo "Puppet has run for longer than 2 hours - killing" kill -9 $PID fi fi |
Invest in gold – don’t do it through Groupon
There is currently a Groupon offer to buy gold bars. The advertising tag line says "Get investment-savvy", and furthers that to say "Diversifying your investment portfolio and knowing how to invest your money smartly is an important part of growing up".
I couldn't agree more, and people should definitely be smart about investing their money - smart enough at least to see that this is not a good way to invest in gold.
The first way this misleads is by using grams of gold. The gold price is in Troy Ounces which is equivalent to 31.1 grams of gold of complete purity, 24 carat's is close enough to give it an exact market value. The gold price at the time of writing this (and the time of this deal) is $1742 per troy ounce (ozt). So just to summarise the maths completely for you, that's R15,225 per ozt, or R489 per gram of gold.
Now lets look at the real value of this "investment-savvy" deal.
So... Not so much. You can argue this is minted gold that has been melted down and made all pretty, but you shouldn't be investing in something because it's pretty, and I'm quite sure it doesn't cost upwards of R15,000 to melt raw gold into a bar.
I would suggest buying gold in Krugerrands if you're investing, and doing so from a bank - and keeping them at the bank so no one steals them.
The mob effect and social bullying
Literally tens of dumb people yesterday were unfortunately given the ability to voice a protest against Woolworths food due to the fact that they currently only have EE (Employment Equity) positions available - that is to say, they are currently not looking for white males. That more reasonably means they have a wish list on their careers portal right now, they could have been more subtle but lots of companies do it. For some reason people believe that if Theo Paphitis knocked on Woolworths door offering to manage a store they'd kick him to the curb immediately, I highly doubt it.
The law around this is tricky, companies can advertise an EE position but ultimately they can't actually discriminate against an applicant on skin colour - of course, there's no way to ever prove they did. All companies face this issue because of BEE regulations, which are creeping into various facets of business now in the strangest way. The government spent years talking about an ICT charter, at first I had no clue what that was supposed to mean but assumed they'd start saying that we'd all get fiber to our homes and that schools would get free internet. Instead they had some special BEE regulations for the IT industry. Someone missed the point by a mile.
What perplexes me about boycotting Woolworths is that not only is this ignorant, it's cowardly. That's right, I'm saying to you and everyone if you're going to blame a business for their hiring tactics which are entirely regulated by the government then you are a coward. You are a lazy white person, who probably isn't all that good at your job (if you're good at your job, BEE barely effects you), and I don't think anyone much less Woolworths will miss your business.
The problem here is all it took was one coward to start a Facebook group declaring war on Woolworths, and a bunch of other mindless cowards to hop on the bandwagon and start voicing "opinions" about things they know very little about and haven't actually thought through.
BEE is something I'm on the fence about personally, I see the idea and I support the cause - I disagree with the implementation, and I think it needs a timeline, and I think it needs distinct boundaries. A constitutional flag in the ground saying "at this point, enough is enough", but sadly none exists which will likely be the ANC's demise.
That's a government issue, and we're a democracy, and that's how it's solved - or to hell with elections white people, gather yourselves around parliament and refuse to go to work until the abolish BEE. If you're right about your various misconceptions the country will be financially ruined in a number of hours.
But in reality that won't happen, because most of these people are not as important as they think they are, and because these people are cowards who are misdirecting some long standing anger at arbitrary soft targets like companies social media platforms. Their expectation? For those companies to do their fighting for them. So folks, the next time you get pulled over for speeding punch the cop in the face and say "That's for the minister!", I'm sure he will be kind enough to pass it on.
DA: Back to ox wagons
So the DA have given me the first ever reason not to vote for them in my province by lowering the national speed limits in Cape Town. The claim is that this will prevent the "carnage" on their roads. Well first of all, it won't do anything - because if people causing "carnage" were the type to obey laws then life would be so simple wouldn't it. Every single time I drive down Van Reenen's pass there is always a tosser in a BMW driving in the clearly defined "Trucks Only" lane so that he can overtake people at 100Km/h. Apparently the law and the statistics of the single most dangerous road in South Africa is irrelevant to the man in a hurry to meet his maker as quickly as possible. Logically the only people this effects are those who do obey the law, and naturally the old lady who after driving the same road for 50 years will have the government help themselves to her wallet for forgetting the new lower speed limit. Justice at its finest, get the old bag!
The most perplexing thing is that the speed limit used to be far lower in the past, then it was 100Km/h when we had national roads and then it was 120Km/h when we got real highways. And of course if you live in Germany then on many Autobahn sections the speed limit is infinity - yet somehow we have no data correlating speed with the frequency of accidents. Of course, many parts of the Autobahn are limited in speed - the reason for this according to them is noise, not accidents. Speed plays a part in how serious accidents are, but honestly beyond 100Kmph your hopes of survival in most collision types drops so substantially that any increase in speed beyond that is actually moot to the outcome. Annoyingly I live in a complex where I break the 10Km/h speed limit each time I move my car - you try drive a GT86 at 10Km/h, it's impossible, if I idle the car forward the minimum I can do is 25 (which is pretty much the proposed speed limit outside schools in Cape Town now). For a long time now all licensed vehicles have been perfectly capable of safely traveling at at least 120km/h, with the exception of the VW City Golf which sadly claimed the lives of many of my teenage friends.
The inconvenient truth is that accident rate has only one input variable: Skill. It doesn't really matter how dilapidated your car is, if it's at least roadworthy, a good driver can still avoid a crash and understand the correct speed to drive depending on the road ahead. Knowing whether or not a car is safe to drive is part of driving skill. I used to drive a Toyota Tazz that once I was done with it had a value of zero. The brakes were terrible, it only had 4 gears and the tires had about as much traction as my bum did on the seat inside, but I drove it for 5 years without a single incident. Trust me though, it went like the clappers and I drove it with two speeds in mind - on the red-line and stationary. This wasn't luck, it was skill. I had some glorious near misses in that car, never a single one caused by me. The K53 drivers test certainly didn't get me that skill, all that did was teach me how to navigate a parking lot. What taught me was hours of pointlessly driving around and finding the limits of the car in safe settings, something completely lost on the everyday "get from A to B" driver. What I also learned, in a Mazda with a 5 star safety rating, is that an accident can happen quite easily too. Going around a boring corner the back let go and the car spun, and I had been doing the speed limit. The reasons for this were 3 fold, first of all the fact that the blind corner I was going around tightens at its end was not at all sign posted, the second reason was that I'd been slacking and my rear tire pressure was far too low which made the car behave unexpectedly when it did start to slide (it's difficult to visually check low-profile tires for pressure), and the third was that the road surface was a temporary one more suited to a netball court than a road. No one was hurt though, of course no thanks to the Volvo heading in the opposite direction who in a bewildering feat of stupidity chose to continue driving towards a car it could see going sideways instead of stopping and getting out of the way. Experience fortunately helped me just ditch the car safely between two pine trees without a scratch on it when the Volvo removed all chance of me recovering control of it.
If I had been driving at 30 then none of this would have happend, but that applies to everything in life. I could have checked my tires at the last petrol stop. I could have driven slower. The Volvo could have not acted like a thick prat. The road works people could have put up correct signage, and of course I could have just stayed home that night instead of going to a friends birthday party. Accidents will always happen regardless of how hard we try to avoid them. Perhaps then the solution is a combination of avoidance of bad situations, and also the knowledge to know what to do to change the odds when they occur.
It wasn't any easier for me to get a drivers license, but today it's impossible if my younger friends are to be believed. If you can fight your way around the broken and corrupt booking system and manage to get a chance to try and get your license, you'll likely get failed or excluded for some random reason which is probably to make you re-pay the booking fee. None of this is necessary if you have R2000 in a sealed brown envelope, so that's what people do if they should even bother to have a drivers license. It's not like the government wants anyone to learn to drive then either, the licensing system is entirely designed to create revenue out of simple folk trying to be independent. In comparison to other driving tests in the world, the drivers test in Finland for example involves skid-pad lessons and most European countries are similarly rigorous.
But I mentioned data, so from the period of 2007 to 2008 there were 11,577 accidents involving fatalities in the whole of SA (my condolences to the families of the victims who have become numbers - in the words of Marilyn Manson "The death of one is a tragedy, the death of millions is just a statistic"). It should be noted that this number decreased by 1000 over the year preceding it, but the most recent annual figures are 13,802. Of those accidents pedestrians are the biggest victims. Now, get something clear in your mind: The chance of surviving being hit by a car at 80km/h vs 120km/h vs 200km/h is pretty much the same - next to nothing.
Of course you may think that most accidents are caused by trucks, busses and those dreaded mini-bus taxies. You'd be dead wrong as it turns out. Ordinary cars make up 60% of the figure.
By contrast to these figures, German road users travel at an average of 140km/h and their latest annual fatal accident figure was 3,657.
Simply then, correct driving speed is a consequence of skill. If the soccer mom who drove over a painted island into the side of my car at 20km/h because she was too busy playing with her cellphone/makeup/GPS/whatever is to be believed then accidents can happen at any speed. What we have in SA is simply roads which aren't being well maintained and are riddled with pot-holes, unskilled drivers who are lured into a paranoid delusion about avoiding speed and accidents rather than knowing what to do when they happen, and people refuse to obey the highway following distance - including the police car which tail gated me just yesterday (in some countries following distance isn't a recommendation, it's the law). You can reduce the speed limit as far as you like, accidents will still happen at it, and people will still disobey it. You've solved nothing. If you want to solve something, use some of that speed camera budget to fix our bloody roads.
[SA accident data from Arrive Alive SA]