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Not me.

We mostly know the solutions to fixing the most oppressed or otherwise defective parts of the world; we just don't find it worthwhile to implement those solutions. I could solve 90% Equatorial Guinea's problems for <$10mm and a promise of immunity from prosecution or extradition by major world powers (i.e. places I'd actually be, afterward). Scaling that up for other countries is possible, too. For problems not requiring a ballistic solution, Bill Gates is doing a seriously effective job of solving the polio problem, and major headway into malaria.

The solutions to the most defective countries are all pretty straightforward and widely known; it's figuring out how to turn decent but not ideal countries like Pakistan into really stable first-world countries which would be hard, or figuring out how to stem the long-term decline in the US. (Yes, there are implementation difficulties in a place like Somalia, but it's because the benefit isn't worth the expense in blood/treasure. The cheap solution is to let the 1% of people who could make their lives a lot better by leaving do so.)

The skills required to solve the harder sociological problems don't really have much overlap with the skills to send people to Mars.

Bringing those places up to standard doesn't really give you anything new, although it does help those people. Putting humans on Mars is something we've never done before, and could lead to amazing technologies and opportunities for humanity. Just like I'd rather be a medical researcher than a family practice doctor, I'd rather push the limits of what's possible vs. contribute to more widespread adequacy, although both bring up the mean. I'm glad there exist both kinds of people, though.

> I could solve 90% Equatorial Guinea's problems for <$10mm and a promise of immunity from prosecution or extradition by major world powers (i.e. places I'd actually be, afterward).

How so? And why is immunity required?

Assassinating foreign heads of state, particularly those who have business interests closely allied with US corporations, isn't legal. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo doesn't deserve something as clean as a bullet, but for reasons of practicality, it'll do. (and, realistically, you'd have to eliminate the entire leadership; it's essentially a corrupt group who pocket oil wealth and rule through fear and oppression. However, they sell oil relatively cheaply to the US, so they're good guys.) Mark Thatcher, son of the former UK PM, essentially tried this in 2004, but was undercapitalized.

> Assassinating foreign heads of state

But who will replace them? Didn't we try something like this during the Cold War multiple times and end up introducing even more totalitarian "democratic" governments?

The cold war was a special case, as we had ideological reasons to pick replacement governments who basically sucked even worse than those they replaced. In a country where most of the decent people who could go into government are somewhat leftist, replacing a hard-line communist with someone who will resist the other leftists (for your own ideological reasons) is a lot more likely to produce a situation like Pinochet than just replacing a criminal despot with virtually anyone else.

I don't think the US really tried replacing with "democratic" governments, either -- just with US allied dictators. We supported a lot of really evil people because they brought stability and nominal pro-US interests. I'm not advocating that; I'm just saying get rid of some bad leadership with virtually anyone else, with no ongoing agenda. That is a far lower bar to cross.

> I could solve 90% Equatorial Guinea's problems for <$10mm and a promise of immunity from prosecution or extradition by major world powers (i.e. places I'd actually be, afterward). Scaling that up for other countries is possible, too.

Oh really? What's your plan? How do you intend on ensuring that culture is preserved while you implement this plan? Or do you believe that Western culture is superior because it has been more successful in the last 100 years (forgetting that segregation ended less than 50 years ago, if you must include the eradication of entire populations as "successes," we can call it 500 years)? Even Bill Gates will admit that his solutions are imperfect at times.

The tricky part is a sustainable solution. Sure, you can throw money at problems, but how is the solution going to last? Like you said, there is already a lot of money involved (e.g. Bill Gates) in philanthropy, yet the problems haven't been solved yet. This indicates that the solution is trickier than you think. And if there is someone smart enough to engineer a solution, I would like to think Bill Gates is very qualified for such a position.

EDIT: Mainly, if you don't account for the culture of a place, a solution will likely not be popular enough to work (HIV prevention and treatment suffers from this problem).

I don't think I could do a particularly good job running the country, and wouldn't try (beyond a few weeks/months in transition). There are plenty of other African leaders in other countries, particularly elected in the past ~10 years, who are far better. I don't think there's any reason why EG wouldn't be able to come up with some domestic political leadership which was better than what they have now. The problem is the nexus of oil wealth and foreign support has allowed Obiang to remain for decades.

The less violent solution would be a trade embargo of the country (at least, not allowing them to sell oil).

Practically speaking, how do you ensure that the new government doesn't become corrupt in a year or two? Or more importantly, how do you restore the people's faith in their government so that they participate?

Also, how would a trade embargo "fix" a country? Perhaps it would force a dictator to lessen or hide civil rights violations, but it would not repair the economy or necessarily give people more confidence in their government.

Probably this is one area where an oil embargo would be more helpful in combination with removal of the government. An external power could enforce an embargo against oil unless a substantial percentage was spent on domestic infrastructure and programs, vs. funneled into a dictator's personal accounts.

"Oil for food" in Iraq in the 1990s was a horrible fiasco, but there have been cases where natural resource wealth hasn't been strictly a curse.

For ongoing security and government assistance, probably the only entity able to credibly do anything in EG is the AU, which has become a lot more credible in the past 5-10 years.

> Practically speaking, how do you ensure that the new government doesn't become corrupt in a year or two? Or more importantly, how do you restore the people's faith in their government so that they participate?

Here's how I'd do it: pass laws specifically forbidding these actions by government officials, the punishment being death. And then when someone violates the law, you kill them. You wouldn't have to do this too many times before the problem magically disappeared.

I think this would both fix the corruption problem as well as restore faith in government.

that only works if the corruption hadn't reached the courts. and how does the average citizen check that? corruption has to be fixed from a third party.

> that only works if the corruption hadn't reached the courts. and how does the average citizen check that? corruption has to be fixed from a third party.

You are 95% right. The problem is, the third party always decides it might be a good idea to take something for themselves, and we're right back where we started.

But I don't buy the idea that it's not possible, it's just never been tried before.

> Here's how I'd do it: pass laws specifically forbidding these actions by government officials, the punishment being death. And then when someone violates the law, you kill them. You wouldn't have to do this too many times before the problem magically disappeared.

All that would do is wind up killing a bunch of 3rd party candidates and anti-establishment types. You can't simply place a law and then expect it to be 100% accurate let alone the people determining guilt be 100% ethical. A corrupt judge could kill a whole lot of people with this type of law.

My assertion is that there are different levels of corruption. If EG ended up being just as corrupt as Nigeria after the eliminating of the current regime, it would still be a victory for the people. They might even do better than that.

And maybe structurally changing how oil revenues are handled; not allowing any new leader to directly control them for personal benefit.

Ryan - I'm on the Epidemiological Modeling team funded personally by BillG. I concur that the skillset required to solve problems on our planet (eradicating infectious diseases in our case) is completely different than those required for inter-galactic exploration. Perhaps the only overlap would be Mathematics, but that's the foundation for pretty much everything.

Shantanu - You're right. Simply throwing money cannot solve global issues and no single person including Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett combined have the monetary resources at their disposal to tackle even 5% of global issues. However, they're the right kind of people to take on sociological challenges and eradicating diseases because there's a lot more to the problem than that. For instance, bureaucracy, corruption, beliefs, natural causes, etc. I was really surprised (shouldn't have been) to learn that a significant portion of their funds are allocated for dealing with corrupt governments for our mission to globally eradicate diseases like Polio, Malaria, HIV, TB, etc. With my limited experience in that realm, I can state that the problem is definitely way more complex than it appears at the surface (and I think you get that as well).

I think you vastly underestimate the difficulty of "fixing" a country. I think Russia is a good example: communism fell, but that doesn't mean things have necessarily gotten better for the average citizen. You could replace the entire government of Equatorial Guinea, but that won't address the problems like poor education that underlying many poor country's problems.

I agree entirely for middle tier countries (which Russia was -- and, honestly, Iraq under Saddam was). For really defective places (NK, Somalia, EG, maybe Afghanistan under the Taliban, ...), your odds of killing the leadership and randomly replacing are much more likely to give you something adequate. It doesn't always work out, and it's hard when you have set yourself up for failure (like the US did in Afghanistan, for a variety of reasons, but I don't think just eliminating AQ and some of the Taliban leadership was doomed to turn out badly), but in a lot of cases it's beneficial.

That is a historically naive assertion. Take a look at the list of countries in this article - most of them are still in pretty serious shit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_re...

It very rarely works out.

The US government's interest in intervention is not "fix things for the residents" but "US interests" (which, during the cold war, essentially just meant opposition to the USSR and some basing rights or access to resources). Admittedly even by that metric, most of the US interventions have been failures.

There are a few cases where US/NATO intervention has been sort of helpful. Panama is probably better now that we got rid of Noriega, although we put him there in the first place. The Balkans at least didn't turn into a pan-European or WW3. French intervention in Mali seems at least not to be making things worse, and while they went into Rwanda late, they did at least settle things down. Australian forces actually did a lot of good in PNG/ET from what I've read, although I don't know too much about it.

I am from Balkans, Balkans conflicts were largely influenced and made worse from the outside, I would even say that they would not happen if there were not desire from Germany and other powers to make as much mess as possible.

Somehow Balkan conficts never got critical review from journalists and rosy propaganda stayed even to this day.

For example in present day Croatia there is only 7% of people who would actually stay to live there if they could go and live somewhere else. Danke Deutschland indeed.

Where would people from Croatia go? All the ones I've met have been either KBR people in Iraq/Afghanistan or people in the US, and they seemed smart, but they were probably outliers. Germany, or US, or elsewhere?

I assume, and Australia, but the point is that no-one likes living in what Balkan turned out to be, not only in Croatia, others as well have similar situation, Bosnia probably has even worse, I happen to remember this number from recent study which is shocking.

My point is that those conflicts were stirred by industrial lobby's, not by genuine need to protect or save anyone.

"I am from Balkans, Balkans conflicts were largely influenced and made worse from the outside, I would even say that they would not happen if there were not desire from Germany and other powers to make as much mess as possible."

Would you mind saying which country you're from? I ask because I have recently met Serbians who seem like very good and reasonable people, but who have very different views on the conflict from the accepted view in the States and "Western" Europe. In particular, they are very nostalgic for Yugoslavia, and seem to think that yes, some bad things happened during the war, but that no one in particular was more genocidal than anyone else.

"For example in present day Croatia there is only 7% of people who would actually stay to live there if they could go and live somewhere else. Danke Deutschland indeed."

This is very surprising. I would love to see the source. Croatia is the only Balkan state now part of the EU… perhaps they'll find it rather easy to emigrate where they please.

The Slovenians seemed to have the right thing set up -- closely allied with Austria, well defended, and basically stayed out of the whole mess. Also the only Balkan state I've visited, and aside from a tragic lack of vowels, an awesome place.

How exactly did "Germany and other powers" cause the 1991-1995 war?

You discount so many variables that go into making a place a "good" place to live that it's actually a little humorous to read these posts.

Look, EG is, I'm pretty certain, almost 90% Fang. That probably doesn't mean much to you but for Africans... tribal affinities matter. The idea that you would get rid of one government, and another would govern appreciably differently in EG is fanciful. Add to that Oil and then unexploited Gold and Zinc deposits, and anyone who is familiar with Africa, and especially EG, would laugh heartily at your assertions.

Places like the MidEast and North Africa also have more issues than can be solved by changing governments. For instance, the reality in Somalia, or indeed even Egypt, is that there are hard Bio-Physical resource constraints that are not going away. Desertification and Soil Salination are mother nature's method of breathing. And she doesn't care about governmental edicts. Egypt's population is around 80M I think... and I'm pretty sure the arable land is right around 2% and it drops every year. Somalia is what... 10 maybe 15 million? With MORE diversity (ie - tribes) and even LESS arable land.

One of the first things I learned working at Halliburton was that if a nation is importing energy AND food... it's in trouble. Nation building is much more than Civil Affairs. If the requisite people and materials aren't there ... it doesn't work. Full Stop.

"Bad" governments, for a given definition of "bad", are symptoms of problems. Not the problems themselves. The Taliban and the NA are manifestations of the lack of resources in Afghan land and the lack of trust among Afghan people. These are difficult problems to solve. And certainly simply changing the government will not make them go away.

What exactly do you mean by a lack of resources in Afghanistan? I've always heard that it was one of the richest places in the world of unexploited minerals. Does it need to be more specific than that?

Afghanistan has high amounts of mineral wealth locked away, but while it had decent irrigation and farming in the pre-Soviet period (near Kandahar; it's really shitty to fight in btw due to old irrigation channels and just enough cover/concealment to hinder UAVs), decades of war have really hurt the agricultural sector.

More importantly, decades of war have also essentially eliminated any societal reserves of trust, so corruption at all levels is the default. The only functional unit is the family or clan, and very minimal ties to higher units of a tribe -- not to the state. Individual governors, mayors, and police chiefs rule by personal charisma and graft, and bringing their pre-existing tribal relationships in. Organs of the state end up used to settle personal vendettas, too.

There's a lot of literature that national resources (extractive, with low local labor involvement) are a curse -- the "resource curse". Norway has done ok with its oil. Gulf societies have in some ways succeeded but in other ways oil has crippled them. African countries with mineral wealth usually end up relatively fucked compared to countries with productive agriculture or a vibrant commercial sector (Nigeria minus oil is actually pretty decent; Kenya is great. Ghana until recently had no resource based wealth and is basically the Chile of Africa).

I agree the culture in EG is probably fairly stunted at best, and probably inadequate to the task of self government (once the ruling elite is gone). However, Obiang is an outlier. Getting rid of him is necessary but not sufficient to fix the country, and it's one thing AU won't do (because they're afraid of slippery-slope), and something the people can't do themselves.

The "stratfor" "geography drives political destiny" thing isn't predictive for small oil-rich countries. I mean, look at the smaller Gulf states. The issues in small oil-rich countries are essentially down to leadership. A broad democratic government is probably not the achievable goal, but something like Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, most of the Emirates, or Kuwait is far superior to EG.

> Bringing those places up to standard doesn't really give you anything new, although it does help those people. Putting humans on Mars is something we've never done before, and could lead to amazing technologies and opportunities for humanity.

I take issue with this. Technological advancement over the last few millenia has been driven by how many smart minds we have at the table thinking of new ideas and new solutions to old problems. To get more folks at the table, we need for them to stop worrying about how to avoid gulags, and get them start training in emerging fields. People in Vietnam studying computer science will bring more technological marvels to your world than sending a rocket and biodome to Mars, the problems of which could mostly be tackled by first building biodomes in harsh environments on Earth, or by finding ways to conquer disease and get fresh water to more of the world's poor.

Build me a sealab and irrigate the Sahara, you don't need Mars to start working on those problems, and those problems could probably help you learn really important skills for Martian exploration (and eventual terraforming) while providing more immediate technological benefits to humanity.

That's the strongest anti-Malthus/population-or-resource-bomb argument. I'm not sure if I ultimately agree with it myself (mainly because of the middle-income trap; I think having marginal SFBA-engineer level people would help advance science, but it's unclear if taking 500mm people from dirt-poor to $5k/yr income helps science, if it stops there, which it often does.)

Take note: this kind of thinking is what being purely an "ideas guy" leads to.

> The solutions to the most defective countries are all pretty straightforward and widely known.

Maybe you really do know the best solutions to every country's problems. Or maybe you know enough "rules of thumb" to get each of these countries to start moving in the right direction. That is not my point.

However, one "meta" problem is that most people are convinced that they know the solutions to the world's problems, and if everybody else would let them execute their solution, the world would be fixed.

>Making any of the world's poorest countries richer in general, or making any of the world's most oppressed countries freer in general, is [...] a much tougher and more interesting problem, a problem more worthy of a gnarly man willing to risk his life

Involving yourself in foreign politics is no substitute for going to Mars. Even if you magically turn Zimbabwe into a political and economic clone of Alabama, the overall capabilities and prospects of mankind remain substantially the same. Successful manned flight that expands our species to another planet is much more admirable and worthwhile from this point of view.

> the overall capabilities and prospects of mankind remain substantially the same

I disagree. Advancement is directly related to how many minds we can free up to work on intellectual pursuits. Even before Moore's law, publications and rate of invention largely tracked with size of population (minus the portion preoccupied with agriculture).

Going to Mars involves calibrating some rockets and making a sustainable habitat for long periods of time. Hard problems, to be sure, but there's nothing about that trip we would do without thoroughly testing it first on Earth. We mostly know how to send projectiles throughout the solar system, and we mostly know that long term stays in space suck, and we mostly know that robots and telescopes pay back orders of magnitude more in scientific discoveries than equivalent manned missions for the cost. (ie, manned missions have the mirrors on the moon and tang, hubble and curiosity have contributed far more to space science...)

The kind of people that have the abilities and desire to "change systems from within" are very different from the kind of people that are good at "making better systems from scratch", or "making new systems in places with limited resources". Dealing with complicated peopleware meshes and solving resource reallocation problems is a completely different problem from surviving and thriving in a harsh environment with limited resources. The people needed to solve these types of problems think and see things very differently, they never get along with each other, and I'd imagine that if an alien psychologist would visit our planet, (s)he could literally consider them different species!

I spent the last year in Bangladesh and indeed it did have an effect on my interest in going to Mars. So thanks for also making the connection.

Literally on the one hand I want to say "sign me up!" and yet on the other hand, after my experience living in isolation and without so many comforts in Bangladesh, I do worry I'd regret giving up on so much to move to Mars.

Alienation, isolating, and the lack of comforts give you a lot of time to think, and it's easy to think you've made a mistake. I wouldn't want to be haunted by that feeling. On the other hand, to explore red martian rocks on the edge of human civilization... it has a romantic appeal.

When romantic appeal and "the real thing" meet, sometimes it's not all happy.

You sound like an excellent candidate to further promote and maintain U.S. interests in one of the numerous Third World countries. A person who already has much experience in destabilizing efforts to facilitate the overthrow of non-cooperative governments. As John Perkins outlined in his book, "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man", we need people like you to further our Western economic and political interests by keeping the Third World countries in Third World conditions so we can have access to cheap labor, cheap resources, sites for our military bases (which we already have close to a thousand), and establish a pro-western crony capitalist dictatorship dressed as a democracy. Currently we have openings in NGO front organizations which are well funded to sway populaces toward our own candidates. We also need people to pose as missionaries and report on peasant activism. I can tell you are open to much sacrifice but rest assured you would be well compensated. I recommend you begin by contacting one of the many front organizations headed by the CIA.

Isn't this just western paternalism phrased to sound noble?

Here we come, with our advanced ways, to fix problems you might not even consider problems.

On the one hand, yes.

On the other hand, the inclination to scream 'paternalism' when folks from cosmopolitan cultures talk about problems in homogeneous ones that are struggling with problems caused by modernity, I think, is often naive

Problems like the overpopulation that occurs when you introduce modern medicine and the green revolution but don't couple that with family planning cannot simply be fixed by organic cultural isolation.

There's a sense that we talk abut rich v poor or western v exotic or etc but the better comparison is cosmopolitan-global vs homogeneous-traditional. The latter simply cannot compete against the problems of today.

Paternalism: behavior, by a person, organization or state, which limits some person or group's liberty or autonomy for their own good.

I do not see any evidence of this in the grandparent post.

Edit: Also, I'd like to point out this, on the same front page of Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5390420

Given differing aptitudes for solving different problems, the comparison might be moot. However let's say an individual is equally competent in both areas, and let's play the devil's advocate for a minute.

No matter how successful you are at creating utopia, there are many more people that have an interest in engineering the failure of both you and your creation, and each one of them is a human that is potentially as capable as yourself, if not more so. They will collectively outlive you, their efforts will be relentless, and the knowledge that they gain in undoing your work will also be passed down to future generations.

With that in mind, the relative worthiness of efforts might not fall hard to the side of solving political problems right at this instant.

I fantasize about doing that sometimes, but usually, you can't get into politics without being a citizen — either due to legislation or because you won't be accepted as a representative by the population, for obvious reasons.

But assuming you can get into politics, you'll still have to deal with an enormous struggle for power (be it elections you have to win or powerful people you have to convince) in order to get into a position to even make any change.

Thus, this endeavour is practically impossible — it's already difficult enough to change something in your fatherland.

AFTER tokenadult's EDIT: Your edit clarifies a lot. But fraternalism is still difficult to achieve: if you are from a different race than the native population, you'll have a hard time being accepted as their representative.

An interesting example for this might be Singapore, where Lee Kuan Yew pushed the country from third to first world in 50 years. Although he is Singaporean, he brought in a lot of foreign knowledge as he had studied abroad. And the same issues with corruption/illegal methods some commenters mention here can be observed: in the early days of his career, he arrested his opponents, the communists, without any legal process to prevent them from jeopardizing his plans. Later, he made some radical decisions, that were not widely accepted by the population, bu that led to better results for the country (for example, he tore down old villages to replace them by high-rise buildings).

It's probably doable, but not without a whole bag of dirty tricks, and a group of well trained supporters... but you'd end up being like a secret agency manipulating foreign countries' politics, nothing new here, and if you were to succeed you'd give in to the temptation of using your "great benefactor, savior from poverty..." power for more one-sided goals.

If you want to change a foreign country for the better and not make a bloody (literally) mess of it, stay away from politics (ok, bribe who you need to to keep you humanitarian organization afloat if needed) and work to improve education, basic healthcare and economic growth by means of bringing foreign investments to businesses in a poor country or things like that. Any other way to do it and you'll probably end up on "the dark side" sooner or later :)

It would be amazing to have an entity, sort of like the US military crossed with the Red Cross, which just went into conflict zones or repressive regimes to provide infrastructure of government (power, water, education, transportation, law enforcement, security for civilians, etc.). Capable of defending itself, but not taking sides other than providing that infrastructure to everyone. Nominally this is the UN's mission in some countries, but it doesn't really do it.

Satellite TV (Al Jazeera and western sitcoms) largely accomplished this for information in the greater Islamic world. Doing the same for non-information goods would require actual infrastructure on the ground, though.

There are very few things that people in power hate more than someone else succeeding at something without consulting them first. I'm afraid you organization would need to be almost all military.

Most of these countries have fairly ineffective militaries, though, so even a lightly armed force could deter them. Blackwater and at least 2 other PMCs in Iraq could hold their own vs. any failed-state force or militia. It wouldn't need to be like the US Army or USAF fielding high-end weapons where a huge tail to tooth ratio came into play.

I realize this is pretty much irrelevant, but I just wanted to point out that Blackwater has changed its name twice, and is now known as Academi:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi

Even after they renamed the first time (to Xe), all the guys continued wearing Blackwater caps and shirts. Even the nominally-separate Presidential Airways guys were wearing Blackwater clothing with the bear claw logo :)

yeah, and they've taken up the domain name that I wanted to use for the next world changing cloud-education startup :)

Do you know any example of a humanitarian foundation contracting services from Blackwater/Academi type PMCs? Sounds like a workable combo that hasn't been tried before. Though you'd have to have the support of the government even if you can defend yourself from guerrillas/militias and thieves, but by simply receiving this support in a messed up country with "alternative governments" fighting for power, you'd end up taking sides, loosing your neutrality and becoming vulnerable to all sorts of bloody acts, even if they are directed against the people you help and not against yourself - imagine you're helping a school and a bunch of guys from a local guerrilla fighting for power show up and take the school children hostages and tell you they'll kill them if you don't pack your gear and leave the area: even if you have the resources to kill the untrained kidnappers and save all children, by doing so you seriously piss up the fraction that sent those guys and open things up to other alike situations that will not all end well. Something like a PMC force would only be usable against thieves / poachers / drug-dealers... any other "defensive" use would be "taking side" and pull you out of the neutrality zone messing up everything.

To actually be able to use a PMC for such situations, you'd need the kind of force that could win a fight/kidnapping situation by using non-lethal force against lethal force, because using lethal force will put you on one side or another and compromise everything. And to be able to reliably win a non-lethal vs. lethal force situation you'd basically need your PMC to be more advanced and well trained than the US military (!!), at least on the non-lethal weaponry and people manipulation parts... and at that point something like the US (or other "big guys" with interest in the region) would perceive you as a potential treat to them, despite your humanitarian mission, bringing up whole new levels of "fun" :)

Sorry for the pessimism, but these is why I don't like touching this kinds of problems, as I can only find an infinite amount of reasons of why things wouldn't work.

Plenty of NGOs and UN entities hire either local security or external PMCs to provide security. They usually can't afford top end like Blackwater, though.

It would be easier to stick to services like running an airport (eg Mogadishu kept operating...), water, hospitals, power, etc. but another option would be to run "refugee/IDP centers" like the UN allegedly was doing in the Balkans (where they failed spectacularly). If people live inside a camp they are relatively easy to protect.

The point behind lethal force by a PMC is to have overwhelming force. Blackwater had an Air Force, and essentially could call in favors from the CIA and DOD as needed. Outside of the 2004 Fallujah incident, they never were in serious trouble, and after 2004, the USMC basically tore the city apart, largely over the bridge incident.

There would be no way to do this kind of thing without US support (tacit or otherwise) and at least non objection by regional powers, but if you stuck to "help IDPs and execute on international obligations" you would get UN, USAID, etc funding. The issue is that most people in NGOs tend to be bleeding hearts, and also humanities people vs infrastructure people, so thy don't have these capabilities in house; they have to contract them in. The exception are medical groups -- there are huge numbers of great medical facilities run by religious and other charities, and their neutrality is generally respected.

See my edit regarding the "dark side". You are generally right, but there is at least one example that turned out well despite occasionally taking advantage of illicit maneuvers.

But you don't need to get into politics directly.

If you create a business that solves a local problem (local to the poor country of choice) good enough, and fairly enough, you can create ripple effects. Maybe not at national levels, but at regional and municipal levels.

Not easy, but not impossible.

(At least I hope so when I got my rose-tinted glasses on.)

Alright, that sounds feasible, albeit being on an entirely different scale.

Corruption. Remember that if you go to one of the 20 poorest or tyrannical countries of the word, you will probably go to one of the 20 more corrupt countries in the word. So while creating a successful business you will be "asked" to share a part of it, and I hope you can keep enough to create the ripple effects.

this is the point where you find your own private army and say no to sharing the wealth with the corrupt.

And this is where you get civil war at some point.

As a citizen of a so called third-world country, your post is extremely condescending.

I honestly wonder how people define a "third-world country" these days. Cold War's over, guys.

As a citizen of a so called third-world country,

Which country are you a citizen of?

You will recall that I didn't use the term "third world" in the first part of my first comment in this thread, but categorized countries in two other categories, at least one of which could definitely include countries that aren't part of the Third World. My use of the term came after an edit to the comment, in which I wrote, "I've asked before here on Hacker News how many of the participants here have ever even lived in (not just visited, but lived in) a third-world country. Not many have."

your post is extremely condescending.

Could you please explain in detail what part of my post you were reading when you reached that conclusion? You see, I have done what I suggested in my post. I have lived in a country where I wasn't born, where it was nearly impossible for me to gain citizenship, where the language(s) spoken were not my native language, where the climate was different from the climate I knew in childhood, where the cuisine was very different, where the level of wealth (then) was low. In that country, when I lived there, secret police assassins killed not only dissidents in that country, but even dissidents from that country who had settled in the United States to live. The ruling political party owned all but one of the newspapers (in that newspaper, it had just a half share) and all of the television stations, and it tightly controlled radio broadcasting and book publishing and motion picture production.

There was a lot of censorship and internal spying there, but local people told me their stories of their aspirations for freedom. I learned which ideals of the ruling party could be turned to embarrass the ruling party as it spied on me and other foreigners while we discussed what we were learning about life there from our local friends. I spoke there in open public speeches (in the official language of that country, which I was there to learn) about how life in the country could be improved for the common people by actually allowing freedom and subjecting the rule of the ruling party to the discipline of a free press and free and fair elections. Those things happen there now. I still have many friends there. What is condescending about desiring that the common people of every country achieve their dreams?

Is China one of the "twenty most tyrannical countries of the world"? If so, there are more than one billion people currently taking on the real adventure of living there.

Yeah, look at how we were greeted as liberators in Iraq! The folks over there sure appreciated us going in to solve all their problems.

Why worry about meaningful change, why work against the dysfunctional, towards peace and sanity, why care about reaching our true potential as intelligent beings on this planet when we can instead fantasize about going to Where no man has gone before ?

If we do not migrate beyond earth, eventually there will be no more humans to help.

> I wonder how many people are willing to take on the real adventure of living in any of the twenty poorest countries in the world, or twenty most tyrannical countries of the world (there is overlap between the two sets) to try to change those from the inside.

That kind of paternalistic nonsense is what got those countries into the terrible shape they're in to begin with. Continuing it isn't going to fix anything.

On the one hand, yes.

On the other hand, the inclination to scream 'paternalism' when folks from cosmopolitan cultures talk about problems in homogeneous ones that are struggling with problems caused by modernity, I think, is often naive

Problems like the overpopulation that occurs when you introduce modern medicine and the green revolution but don't couple that with family planning cannot simply be fixed by organic cultural isolation.

There's a sense that we talk abut rich v poor or western v exotic or etc but the better comparison is cosmopolitan-global vs homogeneous-traditional. The latter simply cannot compete against the problems of today.