Why Western designs fail in developing countries [video]
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A good example is digging a well in the village to get water. But why isn't there a well in the first place ? Because in most of the case they're getting their water via water trucks from a corrupt government agency who's quite interested in making sure no well ever works for long, and the locals don't have access to the financial, technological and judiciary infrastructure to make long term investments and commitments worthwile. In other words the problem of the village is not the lack of the 'well technology' in the skill tree.
Is that a euphemism for war?
Sometimes it comes from tech advances, though, I'm pretty sure.
Removing the rot is always going to be painful for some (usually the current ruling and asset owning class). And almost everything rots with time. More food delivery start-ups aren't going to improve that.
Those who believe in technology (usually web stuff) being the miracle salvation are those who have it very good anyway and see no need to change but your poverty stricken people can't eat apps, but they can eat you on your way to work.
In case of climate change, perhaps technology is not the complete solution. But again money talks, and if technology can result in availability of cheaper and more environmentally friendly inventions, it can help a great deal. Case in point, many new power plants across the world are built using solar/wind presumably because of lower cost, not out of some altruistic concern for the environment.
When people on this site talk about "tech", they don't mean something on labor saving machinery for humanity as most of the low hanging fruit there has been picked decades ago, but more on the spectrum of which new VC funded app can make the most lucrative exit, using the $CURRENT_DAY hype like blockchain or AI.
Sure, new and more advanced machinery is coming out, like ASML's stuff, but those ASSML steppers aren't saving people from hard labor, starvation or poverty, like the mining or agricultural machines for a century ago.
Japan/ROK are also sometimes considered "Western" due to being key components of Washington's force projection
"Western" is somewhat of a biased term to limit nations to an in-group of rich, affluent, mostly culturally eurocentric/euroderived nations. If you don't fit all of the qualifiers, you're not in.
LATAM is missing out on the affluence (and, some would argue, a certain racial component), so they get excluded. Japan, SKorea, etc are also sometimes included or made adjacent for similar reasons.
Kinda like how the sugar and fast food industry don't like that people are now indulging in Ozempic, or other weight loss drugs since they just decrease your appetite making people eat less.
Contrast with another agency that passed out mosquito nets to hang over beds. Turns out they made good fishing seine, so most people either took their net to the nearest river to fish with it or sold it to someone else who wanted to.
I’m sure the people who got mosquito nets would’ve loved sleeping without being bit by mosquitos. A stable food supply was their more pressing issue though.[0] The humble iron fish addressed its problem by being good for one thing only.
[0] Seine fishing quickly devastated the local fish stocks. “Oops, sorry our gift is now causing you to starve.” A critical lesson here: ask the recipients of such a “gift” whether they actually want it and what they’ll use it for. They’re not you. Don’t assume they’ll use it the same way you do.
You need food...basically now....a few times a day.
Mosquitos are a maybe once a day thing, and the diseases they might cause come with irregular frequency. If you can sleep with them biting you, you've satisfied the priority of Maslow for attending to Physiological needs before Safety.
I would bet that if the same villagers had access to an unlimited supply of these nets, once they had used them for every single conceivable method to feed themselves including agricultural uses, they'd inevitably end up covering beds at night.
Modern day philanthropy is primarily self-serving and ego-driven more than it is actual altruism. A bunch of very wealthy people, largely divorced from reality, seeking accolades and affirmations that they are good. Some may have their heart in the right place, but time and time again, the results show a disconnect, and that being in such a privileged position does not automatically qualify someone of "knowing what's best" or that their ideal "greater good" is, well, actually good.Modern day billionaire philanthropy is probably in most cases about maintaining one's range of options in the public and private sphere. Some of them may very well be petulant and needy enough to actually care what people think, and nurture a secret desire to be "loved", or at least respected, but presuming some of these billionaires are more intelligent and calculating than that, I can only guess that the desire in those cases is to hedge one's bets against any sort of public and/or political backlash to one's plans. Of course, some may very well sincerely believe that they're godlike entities who can solve humanity's problems, but I won't venture to attempt an analysis on the psyche of those people, if they do really exist.
Of course there's the tax-dodging element, but there's tons of ways for billionaires to dodge taxes, and only some of them deem it worth the effort to go down the route involving magazine spreads about their philanthropic largesse.
It's a way of absolving oneself publically from one's past villainies, real or perceived. Or, you could put it in more Nietzschean terms, things involving rebirth and phoenixes and Christ-figures, it could all get fairly poetical.
If anything is certain, it's that it's not about helping people, it's about the giver themselves. The issue and its sufferers are secondary at best - background details. It's the opposite of the old-fashioned Christian notion of charity to an almost caricatural degree.
People will talk about billionaire philanthropy as if it is charitable, generous, moral, and good, when in reality it's calculating, self-centered, life-negating, belittling, amoral, and even one could argue rejects ethics generally as naive and cloying. The name itself implies that it involves love directed toward humanity, when in reality it involves the desire to dominate and bully and no love, and humankind is a prop with the billionaire themselves centre-stage.
What to call that? I don't know. Misanthropic philanthropy made me chuckle, but it doesn't exactly name the new thing, rather it just pokes fun at it and highlights its Orwellian doublespeak nature. Pseudo-philanthropic ego-tripping / ego-washing? Obviously too wordy, but I feel that's at least some chunk of the essence of the thing.
Like when I was in Tanzania, communications had been transformed by cell phones and smartphones but the same ones you can buy in the west. More $100 Androids not iPhones. Also a lot of transport is in Toyotas the same you buy in the west (maybe with less lux specs) etc
What doesn't work so well is making things for those other people that you wouldn't use yourself like the One Laptop per Child thing. I bet the people who made that wanted their own kids educated with good teachers, text books and writing, not with crappy laptops.
I got an XT when they were well obsolete and essentially free junk. Getting that thing on to BBS's with a modem that didn't even have mnp5 error correction and figuring out how to get anything out of it's other limitations set me up for life.
olpc is if anything too good. It's all complete and buttoned up and there are no problems to solve.
It's a useful tool to do a job not enough of them need doing. Python and spreadsheets are not going to feed those kids.
I think the reason the XT did so much for me was, 1 I lived in an environment where IT skills are useful and valuable. 2 I had other better computers to aspire to. I couldn't afford a good machine, but I could see them all around so I knew what they could do that mine could not, but I could also see how mine almost could, how it actually had all the same important essence, and I could do a version of all the same things by trading some compromise and some effort and time in place of money. For instance I found a software solution for the modems lack of error correction, and managed to make BBSing functional. And using BBSs in place of Compuserv and Prodigy.
It was very rewarding and fun to try to soup up that turd, because it was my turd, and it was infinitely soup-up-able with ISA slots and socketed cpu and empty FPU socket etc. It was exactly like working on a mini bike or a carr (back when cars were mechanical and could be worked on)
olpc is like, here's a thing that's already complete, and it's already the best thing around. There is nothing to hack, and nothing to aspire to to make you want to even think to try. And what it's good for as a tool, is a thing no one around you needs you to do.
It's very much just, "here's this individual disconnected thing that is supposed to solve a problem" and not "our civilization has centuries of thought and development behind this thing, so here's how we got from there to here, and here are a few intermediary-but-now-outdated forms that illustrate progress." The approach is totally out of context and doesn't seem to be interested in setting up a sustainable tech ecosystem that can eventually support itself. It's just a one-off thing and it keeps the recipient dependent on the ecosystem where the single item came from.
Again, I'm not an expert at all, but historically Japan "solved" this problem by bringing in tons of foreign experts and paying them for their knowledge and training, with the result that Japan became an industrial power in less than a century. I have never seen a similar approach taken in modern development. Singapore, maybe?
Today the Russian company Raketa is one of only five companies in the world that can make a watch start to finish, including the hairspring, a critical component in all mechanical timepieces
That's something all technology people need to keep in mind all the time, even in their "home" culture, which many seem to totally fail at. You really need to respect people who are different than you, and not just in some politicized identity politics sense.
IMHO, it seems very easy for technology people to create for themselves a weird subculture and lose sight of how things are outside that subculture, let alone something truly foreign like an undeveloped nation.
I think we saw that a lot with cryptocurrency.
Actually when I google "chrome store Voice isolation" there are extensions that purport to remove noise from video https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/noise-filter/jdopco...