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Bringing Bandwidth To Iraq
jemevans sends us a link to his nonfiction tale of two California cypherpunks who went to Baghdad to seek their fortune and bring the Internet to Iraq. A much abridged version ran in Wired a while back. From the original: "Ryan Lackey wears body armor to business meetings. He flies armed helicopters to client sites. He has a cash flow problem: he is paid in hundred-dollar bills, sometimes shrink-wrapped bricks of them, and flowing this money into a bank is difficult. He even calls some of his company's transactions 'drug deals' — but what Lackey sells is Internet access. From his trailer on Logistics Staging Area Anaconda, a colossal US Army base fifty miles north of Baghdad, Lackey runs Blue Iraq, surely the most surreal ISP on the planet. He is 26 years old."
In Iraq, Sites bomb you.. :)
First, the army goes in and smashes everything up.
Then, so-called 'entrepreneurs' enter the country ( only those with US security clearance, mind you ), and 'reconstruct' the place, many using US taxpayer money. Of course there are many crimes to this process, but one major one is that this prevents Iraqis from being able to pull themselves out of the hell they got bombed into, as all the development is by foreigners, and therefore all the profits are exported. All the materials come from outside the country - there is no stimulation for the local economy, and meanwhile unemployment sits at 80%.
These 'entrepreneurs' deserve to be blown to pieces by a roadside bomb. They should get out of the country and allow the Iraqis to rebuild, on their own terms, with their own labour, using their own materials, and creating their own assets.
You'd prefer it if the media dwelt on the n people saved from blindness, rather than the 10n people killed? Strange priorities you have there.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.