Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Ghana, Graphics, Tumors
The few, the proud, the advententurous, the dorky. Elvis Maximus writes: "Geekcorps has been mentioned here before and met with some interest. Their first batch of volunteers are winding up their tours in Ghana, and the Industry Standard has run a nice piece on their experiences. This is an interesting effort that deserves some attention."
Congratulations (and admiration) to those who participated in this. GeekCorps is good stuff.
Remember, saliva causes stomach cancer ... ByteHog points to this AP story about the alleged connection between cell phone use and cancer, writing: "Kinda interesting, but I'm still going to be wearing tinfoil around my head whenever I make a call ..."
This issue has been raised for years, with no clear winner. The upshot from this study is a data point for the null hypothesis, but inevitably this will drag on, and the next study to become famous will probably be one that contradicts this. Don your tin-foil, kneepads and breathing masks, until fatality is cured.
Resistance is futile, for now. Fervent writes: "Gamecenter has an interesting article on why 3DFX collapsed. Among the reason cited: the proprietary API Glide, not allowing OEM's to sell Voodoo hardware, and NVidia's agressive product cycle." This makes an intersting followup to the recent announcement of the absorption of 3dfx by NVidia.
Play, play, play, and be gone with ye! Greyfox writes: "According to USA Today Etoys is putting itself up for sale. It's the standard dot com failure story. It'd be delicious irony if the folks running the Etoy domain they sued a while back bought their domain name." DarkKnight points to this link at CNETas well.
Ghana is a country with an average wage of only $160 per year. Out of a total population of 20 million, some 20 thousand are online. Why are we creating charities to get such nations online? Isn't that like forming a charity to send them Beluga Caviar? We should surely be concentrating on building their infrastructure in the proper way, and try to bring them through the industrial revolution first.
Your post reminds me of the posts in response to stories about 100" monitors that ask "what Quake player has the money?" when the product isn't even intended for retail.
This project isn't about turning the average Ghanaian into a happy websurfer. It's about giving the average Ghanaian a chance at a decent job, or his business a chance at success.
Don't discount third-world countries just because they haven't developed, say, an automobile industry: the time for that is past. That strategy was tried by the World Bank in 2nd tier countries like Brazil and India in the 1960s with disastrous results. Unregulated manufacturers polluted, the products were inferior to other markets, and the only people who made money were the bankers.
India has gotten smart. They never caught up industrially with the West. Jumping from agrarian to industrial proved expensive and futile. Instead, they've concentrated on the Second Industrial Revolution, building technical schools that turn out skilled programmers by the metric ton. These knowledge workers find work in outsourcing firms, or travel to the West for high-paying jobs. The resource that India is wisely exploiting here is its people.
It worries me to see that companies such as Shell and BT are contributing funds to send IT technicians there, when what we should be doing is sending agricultural experts and trying to attract magnates of industry
Another poorly considered policy of the latter half of Century Twenty was building Third World countries into agricultural exporters. Many of those countries could not feed their own people, and did not have the infrastructure or resources to support an exporting food industry. Once again, the bankers made money. The people often ended up poorer and hungrier. The grain available from traditional heartlands like the US and Russia was of higher quality and easily shipped. (Actually this fiasco largely predated the industrialization fiasco.)
Don't underestimate the ingenuity and inventiveness found in "third world" countries. Some of them are building out their telecommunications by skipping the 19th (copper) and 20th (fiber) century and jumping straight to the 21st (wireless). They don't have any installed base to protect. Innovations like "texting" (SMS messaging) and wacky computer virii have sprung from the Phillippines.
Dooming third world countries to another century of building up their economies "the hard way" is typical exclusivist Western thinking.
As the west moves towards an increasingly service based economy, there are opportunities for countries such as Ghana to grab onto our coattails and provide our manufacturing capabilty, before moving up to join us.
Perhaps. But they'd have to compete with already-cheap industrial powers like Mexico and China. Meanwhile, they have few resources, no industrial infrastructure, and it's enormously expensive to build.
Why, again, do they HAVE to have an industrial 20th century economy before they can move into the 21st? What does that gain them? What does it gain us? So in whose interest is it for them to build an old-style manufacturing base? Yep.
You'd make a great IMF banker a generation ago.
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