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A Dream Job - CTO of the OLPC Project
weibullguy dropped us a link from the IEEE's site. They've voted the CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project as a 'Dream Job 2007'. Held by Mary Lou Jepsen, a former CTO for Intel, the position entails world travel, speaking with heads of state, and dealing endlessly with the technological challenges of a project designed to change the world. In the article, she relates some of the details of her first task on the job - redesigning the OLPC's display. "According to Jepsen, the display her team eventually marshaled into existence requires, depending on the mode, only between 2 percent and 14 percent of a typical laptop display's power consumption. ... To save watts, the display can switch between color with the backlight on, in low light, and black-and-white with the backlight off, in sunlight. OLPC's engineers trimmed battery usage further by, among other things, adding memory to the timing-controller chip, which decides how often a display refreshes. That trick enables the display to update itself continually without using the CPU if nothing changes on the screen."
If a country wants to get out of poverty, they have to do it the same way every developed country in the world did, lift themselves up by their bootstraps.
This is misguided.
Please read some history. Specifically, read about western feudalism, imperialism, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, slavery, and imperialism.
Short summary: Feudal Europe became rich through feudal slavery and imperialism. Wealth began to be redistributed through violent revolution, but slavery continued. It eventually ended, which caused the need for new cheap labor and markets to hock our wares. This trend continues.
The West didn't lift itself up by its bootstraps. It enslaved a few billion Asians, South Americans, and Africans to push us up from below.
Even if you disagree with this summary, you must agree that the West had a head start through sheer historical accident.
Start trading with them.
Buy those shoes, suits, created with "slave wages", buy African corn, sugar, peanuts, tomatoes and apples.
That's how to lift people out of poverty.
We've been waging economic war with developing and third world countries for several generations now. It's only just starting to end. You can't buy African agricultural products (about all they can produce) because of the subsidies we give our own farming sectors to produce products at below market value.
The OLPC? Frankly it's irrelevant. What 3rd world countries need is first infrastructure and education. The OLPC isn't a particularly good way to educate people and there isn't enough infrastructure to make real use of it. The money spent on producing it would be better spent persuading American and European politicians to remove agricultural subsidies.
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If a country wants to get out of poverty, they have to do it the same way every developed country in the world did, lift themselves up by their bootstraps.
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. Every developed country in the world did it at the expense of other countries, which were invaded, pillaged, plundered for slaves, or enslaved as vassal states. This is still going on and probably always will till we have a world government/dictatorship. The idea that history has ended and the world has seen the capitalist light belongs in the 1990s, and should have died by now.
The rise of India could perhaps be attributed to privatised business, though frankly I doubt it, it's not suddenly transformed into a free-market haven because of cancelling some external tarrifs, though Dr Singh may be trying to pass reforms and privatise some industries, that'll take a while. It's probably more to do with promotion of outsourcing in western countries and the move of a lot of manufacturing and now even services over to India/China in the 80s/90s. China could possibly conform better with your argument, though again their strong position has a lot to do with govt. intervention (the yuan being pegged for a start, and subsidies/tax breaks for development zones, plus the suppression of workers rights).
Africa doesn't receive much charity - I suspect the total annual figure is far less than the outlay on debt servicing - the external debt is around $300 billion for Africa in total. We definitely make more from them in arms sales (£1 billion in 2004 from the UK alone) than we've ever given in charity and I suspect the arms sales have a more dramatic deleterious effect. The colonial legacy and the wars which came after are the cause of their current problems, not charity.
Now of course charity doesn't necessarily solve all ills and can be downright damaging, especially given the cynical, pernicious way state aid is given nowadays, and enterprise can be useful, but to claim some sort of free trade enlightenment has swept the world is nonsense. Hell, the US is a very successful state, and many industries are heavily supported by import tarrifs and subsidies - steel, aerospace and agriculture among them. Their success has been in persuading others link India to lower their barriers for things like agriculture at the same time as remaining protectionist.
However every successful society makes up their own myths to explain their success and the otherwise inexplicable failure of others.
Going back to the OLPC project, it's not strictly a charity anyway - they're talking about selling these things to governments to make money so they can make more laptops. Kids will make of these laptops what they wish, but without them it'd take a lot longer for IT to take off in developing countries. I think it's an enlightened idea, and will hasten the development of global thinking and a truly global market - in that sense you should welcome it. Perhaps when many more people in Brazil or elsewhere get laptops, we'll see an influx of people more informed about other countries on these boards - frankly it can do nothing but good as at the moment they're dominated by westerners and the western point of view.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they can balance their checkbook, take classes on line, their lives will turn around in just a year, their land become "The Land of Milk and Honey" and they'll become successful members of the world community.
What WILL happen is that they'll get these machines, and if they're not stolen first, those very poor people will sell them for what they really need. This program is just a pipe dream created by a bunch of clueless sanctimonious Westerners who think that technology is the cure for everything.
You wait and see.
And when it does fail, it will blamed on the administrators of the program - not the fact that it's a dumb idea.
I also hope that I'm completely full of shit and this is raving success!
Your comments, and other like it, tread dangerously close to 'blaming the victim' in a rape case.