No, I assure you, Anon, there is no free market here.
In a free market, everyone competes, on a level playing field, for scarce economic resources. The tax revenues of the American federal government are a scarce resource.
American banks have now out-competed everyone else for that resource, thus proving that they are clearly the most efficient at extracting and processing it.
Ergo, the free market has selected the entity best suited to survive economic turmoil in the United States of America: rich bankers.
You see, there is a role for government in a free market. It is to be the police.
The police and government officials were raised in the same late-modern capitalist society are they not? If not, why would you expect them to be above self-interested acceptance of bribery; especially since they're the ones that pass and enforce the laws, and are thus best-positioned to work in their own self-interest?
The bottom line is that the sub-prime mess was created by the government which made things that are normally illegal legal while not providing the policing of the network like they should have.
Yes, that's sort of the point: they're all acting upon their faith in an illiberal, late-modern capitalism. That faith is in i) greed, and ii) the invisible hand. Which is to say, "Act upon your worst nature -- lie, cheat, and steal within the bounds of the law -- and everything will turn out better than it was before!"
And in what way have the parties involved not been acting like capitalists? Everyone took money like they were supposed to, and followed the letter of the laws; the logic of the system dictates that the results are good, or will turn out for the good... eventually. Especially if you own a bank.
See: the system works. American taxpayers should be celebrating! Liberalism is dead, long live Capitalism!
It's understandable that you don't want to lose the money you invested and the way it looks like you won't - at least not in the next few days. In the long term you *will* pay for that bailout, either by taxes, or by inflation. Most likely by both.
My biggest issue is that this bailout let's the people responsible for that mess get away with impunity. That's just not right, IMHO.
Who's talking about "right"? We're talking about late-modern capitalism here; "right" and "rights" are for girly-boys like John Locke or John Stuart Mill, not manly capitalists like us folk!
The invisible hand of free markets probably works as long as everyone does act in their own self-interest AND everyone has the same access to reasonably accurate and complete information.
Which is why, realistically and logically, the entire ideology falls apart. After all, if we define 'self-interest' as simply 'material gain in the here and now' then it is in my self-interest to make certain that others never have access to reasonably accurate and complete information. If I let others know what I know, then I can't con them, and being able to con them provides me with the power to make material gains at their expense.
If one takes the basic expectation of morality, inherent in actual liberalism, out of the formulation, then what you end-up with is late-modern capitalism in its now fully obvious glory: naked, leperous, and turgid.
Or reducing the amount of energy that we consume by not watching TV while driving our lovely SUVs to a McDonalds thirty miles away (with the air-conditioners on full-blast, of course) to eat too many cheeseburgers, necessitating a one-hundred mile drive to the nearest office of a reputable plastic-surgeon for liposuction, whereupon we will park our ample selves in the air-conditioned waiting-room to watch TV for an hour on the new plasma display.
We could just stay home with a cold beer, read a book, and eat a vegetable... but that's just crazy-talk! Bring-on the nukes, I says!
> Luckily, the most economical use for the CO2 produced is to pump it back down into the trap, where it will presumably remain for another million years.
Presuming, of course, that i) whomever rammed the giant, steel straw into that formation didn't create fractures in it through which the gas might percolate, ii) that the drilling holes are capped in some fashion in which they themselves do neither represent nor become a structural weakness in the formation, iii) that a structure which was air-tight against the escape of natural gas is also air-tight when filled with a fundamentally different substance, iv) that, contrary to human nature and commercial acquisitiveness, that best practices will, of course, *always* be followed and that we will *never* over-inflate a structures beyond it's physical limits in order to save a few hundred-thousand dollars, and v) that we really know what we're talking about, as opposed to fooling ourselves into thinking that we know what we're talking about.
So, yes, assuming that everything was done perfectly in the past, is being done perfectly in the present, will be done perfectly in the future, and that we have perfect knowledge of what we're doing to begin with; then we have ourselves a genuine air-tight case!:-)
Me? I'm waiting for the ever-entertaining Earth-shattering kaboom.
The customs official was likely overstepping his bounds in this instance, but it is noteworthy to point out that Canada's Constitution Act of 1982 contains a "reasonable limitations" clause which places hypothetical limits on the Charer of Rights and Freedoms. Thus, Parliament can institute criminal laws that go against the theoretical grain of the Charter, so long as they don't go "too far", with the definition of "too far" being a matter decided by the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) in consultation with established legal precedent and present-day norms. Generally though, the SCC tends to interpret laws in a fashion consistent with Lockean principles of Liberalism.
However, the unfortunate iPod owner may not have been considered to have been on strictly Canadian soil at the time of questioning, given that he was being interviewed in an international airport -- the jurisdiction of the Charter might very well be interpreted to end at the borders of areas defined under international law; all of which is to say that any legal challenge against Canada Customs would have been a Big Deal that would take years to decide-on due to the issues at stake.
> Uh, no, although Sudan's economy has been growing from its abysmal depths lately, it is nowhere near being a significant market for Microsoft's products.
Sudan is a particular example provided by the OP; I would tend to think that the real issue for a corporation like Microsoft or Intel would be the idea of "100 million units" being introduced to Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs) every year - each one running Linux off of an AMD processor. That might seem like a rather large, long-term strategic threat to the aforementioned megacorps.
> I honestly doupt MS is worried about market share in the Sudan.
While Bill Gates himself may not be concerned with market share in Sudan, he is beholden to pressures from shareholders, managers, and executives from within Microsoft and their affiliates.
> The day there is an available cure for AIDS, there will be fucking in the streets....And the day after that, we'll all be visiting the doctor's office with an embarrasing case of genital warts!
>Read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolution".
Better yet, don't read Kuhn - read Michael Polanyi's "Personal Knowledge". Kuhn does well in torpedoing the conception of universal objective facts, but doesn't have a good handle on the particulars of the scientific community (which is funny, considering he did study physics for a while). Polanyi does a better job of bridging the gaps that Kuhn's arguments couldn't cover.
Indians will use this to make money, right? This isn't some ego-building thing like the Chinese space program, right?
It's more than likely a bit of that, combined with good, old fashioned geopolitical paranoia. India has been leery of the the People's Republic of China (PRC) ever since that little war the two of them had, and that India lost.
And, there's also the issue of the PRC's counter-balancing of Indian's growing power in the region through military support to Pakistan and Burma. And the support China provides to Maoist insurrgents & terrorists within India (the Naxalites). And the PRC's support for the North Korean regime that sold nuclear missile technology to Pakistan...
So, I personally tend to think India's space program is as much about countering the PRC, as it is about building national pride.
>Producers and consumers drive change. They are the market. If you think the market is irrational, you aren't looking at all of it's influences.
You might want to re-read the argument. The contention is that the market will not regulate anything, because it does not have any epistimilogical existence outside of the human mind. Human behaviour and psychology is what causes "supply & demand" behaviour, and neither are purely rational. Thus, the ephemeral thing that is called "The Market" is only as rational as the humans involved in economic exchanges.
Further, those economic exchanges are bounded by rules and social norms. It just happens that in states such as the USA, Canada, and the UK, those rules and norms follow alongside the philosophies of classical liberalism (albeit to diffent extents). The market only appears rational *from the inside* because it is following the preconcieved rationality of those rules and norms.
If one views the market from a viewpoint that is *outside* of those norms, it looks highly irrational, because it fails to meet larger social exigiencies. What are those exigiencies? In the USA, they are increasingly focusing on energy independence, sustainable development, etcetera.
So, "The Market" is just a particular way of carrying on resource trading - one that emphasizes low levels of regulation by those not directly participating in the transactions. It does not "do" anything. It does not set values. Human psychology sets values. Human values can be completely arbitrary and relatively irrational (ie. buying a Hummer when you're single, and live in downtown New York). Human values decide what has economic significance, and what doesn't. Change in values only happens if people want it to.
Americans *might* want energy consumption patterns to change, but only if it meets their current values, which still largely emphasize low costs and convienience. Those are American values. The market won't change them. The market *can't* change them, because it is only a couple of words that are used to describe one particular kind of human behaviour. People who value energy independence, or environmentalism, can only work around that fact when trying to meet the exigencies of *their* values.
>Oil is not a dominant driver of the price of electricity. In 2004, the US got 3% of its electricity from oil, less than, say, conventional hydro, and not a whole lot more than non-hydro renewables (see here). Natural gas, on the other hand, was responsible for 18% (coal was 50%).
Correct, oil is not the primary driver for the price of electricity in the USA, but it is the primary factor in the cost of power, which includes all sectors of the economy (including transport).
Using figures from the "Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development" (OECD), it becomes apparent that sustained electrical production would need to increase by several hundred percent to supplant oil as a primary power source in global use - and the figure would likely be higher for the USA, given the less-efficient-than-average use of oil products in the American economy.
Until it hurts, U.S. consumers will not switch anything. The market will drive change.
No, I'm afraid the market will not drive change, because "The Market" cannot drive change, because "The Market" does not exist. "The Market" is not a great Leviathan standing astride the conceptual econonomies of the world. It is not a thing. It does not exist as anything other than a concept or meme in human brains.
"The Market" is nothing but a shorthand describing you, and a data-set including other humans like yourself within certain arbitrary bounds (ie. the nation-state of the USA). "The Market" has no will, and is only as rational as its "members" are; which is to say, "The Market" is just as irrational as you are, multiplied by a factor of X million.
So no, "The Market" will not drive change. Overconsumption is essentially a psychological problem, and you can't make people not be crazy. At best, you can only encourage certain behaviour, and make it really discouraging to act like a nut.
From the summary: "Security-minded laptop users live in fear of theft"
Nice blanket generalization there. I'm security minded, use two laptops, and I don't live in fear.
I agree with the PP - I don't "live in fear" either. I live next door to fear, sure, and I may occasionally peep over the fence to throw a rock at it...
After many years of trying to convince europe its unnecessary...
Convince Europe its unnecessary? Pushaw! Everyone important already knows that everything outside the US of A is unnecessary & redundant. And hell, not everything inside the borders is necessary either - Wyoming, we're looking at you!
> and also demonstrate how blatantly ridiculous the US sense of morality has become.
>>Surely no more ridiculous than a man running around in blue tights and a red cape.
Yes, well, if you were a super-powered individual - who's sheer power made it impossible to fool-around with the local women, or even practice the loving ways of Onan without blowing passing 747s out of the air - you might just develop some odd fetishes yourself.
Dell is already selling desktops for $299. http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/category. aspx/desktops?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs By the time these things get down to $100, what price will it be to buy from Dell or another manufacturer?
I suspect that it will take roughly the same amount of time that the CEO & board-of-directors take to decide wether they want to risk their money mass-manufacturing a computer for people five-kilometers below the poverty line.
There's nothing revolutionary about the MIT system. It could have been built fifteen years ago (albeit using less advanced parts). But, there's no large profit in it, and the "large" part is just as important as the "profit". Frankly, I'm surprised they were able to find anyone willing to use their manufacturing capacity to mass produce these. Quanta's CEO is either unusually progressive for a suit ("You know what, I'm willing to take a bit of a cut in profits for this."), or is getting a substantial subsidy per-unit to offset the lower margins.
This $100 laptop is a great idea, but the justification stated on the website seems a little "creative." You could also argue for any number of modern conveniences that would help children in 3rd world countries, like a $1000 Mercedes using that justification. The bottom line is, people in these countries need food, shelter, clothing and education but more importantly, political stability. It just seems funny with all the problems countries are facing--particularly in Africa--a $100 laptop for every child, though commendable, would not solve.
One of the problems that is facing poor citizens in less developed countries (LDCs) is lack of organization & information. The extremely high die-off rate of experienced adults due to war, diseases such as AIDS, starvation, and state-sanctioned violence has the effect of cutting-off the transference of knowledge from the old generations to the new.
Consider the fact that agriculture is still the primary economic activity of LDCs. Great farming involves alot of knowledge; you can't just throw seeds willy-nilly and expect things to grow, obviously. You need to select your crops, select your grains, select your plots, your fertilization and watering methods, you need to know the growing seasons & their effects on your particular crop...
Now, imagine a situation in which adults & elders are not able to consistently pass-on this information. The result is less efficient farming methods, in which their kids are trying to get along, but barely know what the heck they're doing. Heck, even if their parents didn't pass on prematurely, they may be living in a country, like India, where traditional farming practices are have become inadequate.
While charities such as this one have been doing on-the-ground work for years, consider how much faster such information can be spread using a combination of laptops & literacy.
Then one should consider all the other simple inventions that all of our ancestors invented time & again, but have been forgotten in most places: hand & foot-pumps for wells, the pot-in-pot refrigerator, sewing, weaving, essentially, all the inventions that can be made in the home, or by a small village. Imagine the benefits.
The easy sharing of ideas & information has the potential to solve many problems - and that includes political corruption. As the saying goes, nothing spreads faster than village gossip, and if that gossip can be spread, lightning fast, across an entire country, it can seriously undermine the impunity with which back-room deals & graft are undertaken.
There are actually at least an infinite number of universes in which it already has. Conversely, there are another infinite number in which it never will. 'Makes venture-capital decisions more interesting, I bet.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I assure you, Anon, there is no free market here.
In a free market, everyone competes, on a level playing field, for scarce economic resources. The tax revenues of the American federal government are a scarce resource.
American banks have now out-competed everyone else for that resource, thus proving that they are clearly the most efficient at extracting and processing it.
Ergo, the free market has selected the entity best suited to survive economic turmoil in the United States of America: rich bankers.
The police and government officials were raised in the same late-modern capitalist society are they not? If not, why would you expect them to be above self-interested acceptance of bribery; especially since they're the ones that pass and enforce the laws, and are thus best-positioned to work in their own self-interest?
The bottom line is that the sub-prime mess was created by the government which made things that are normally illegal legal while not providing the policing of the network like they should have.
Yes, that's sort of the point: they're all acting upon their faith in an illiberal, late-modern capitalism. That faith is in i) greed, and ii) the invisible hand. Which is to say, "Act upon your worst nature -- lie, cheat, and steal within the bounds of the law -- and everything will turn out better than it was before!"
And in what way have the parties involved not been acting like capitalists? Everyone took money like they were supposed to, and followed the letter of the laws; the logic of the system dictates that the results are good, or will turn out for the good... eventually. Especially if you own a bank.
See: the system works. American taxpayers should be celebrating! Liberalism is dead, long live Capitalism!
It's understandable that you don't want to lose the money you invested and the way it looks like you won't - at least not in the next few days. In the long term you *will* pay for that bailout, either by taxes, or by inflation. Most likely by both. My biggest issue is that this bailout let's the people responsible for that mess get away with impunity. That's just not right, IMHO.
Who's talking about "right"? We're talking about late-modern capitalism here; "right" and "rights" are for girly-boys like John Locke or John Stuart Mill, not manly capitalists like us folk!
The invisible hand of free markets probably works as long as everyone does act in their own self-interest AND everyone has the same access to reasonably accurate and complete information.
Which is why, realistically and logically, the entire ideology falls apart. After all, if we define 'self-interest' as simply 'material gain in the here and now' then it is in my self-interest to make certain that others never have access to reasonably accurate and complete information. If I let others know what I know, then I can't con them, and being able to con them provides me with the power to make material gains at their expense.
If one takes the basic expectation of morality, inherent in actual liberalism, out of the formulation, then what you end-up with is late-modern capitalism in its now fully obvious glory: naked, leperous, and turgid.
somehow natural gas has stayed underground for millions of years.
Good gracious; if only it would stay in my wife for that long!
Nuclear is really the only way to go...
Or reducing the amount of energy that we consume by not watching TV while driving our lovely SUVs to a McDonalds thirty miles away (with the air-conditioners on full-blast, of course) to eat too many cheeseburgers, necessitating a one-hundred mile drive to the nearest office of a reputable plastic-surgeon for liposuction, whereupon we will park our ample selves in the air-conditioned waiting-room to watch TV for an hour on the new plasma display.
We could just stay home with a cold beer, read a book, and eat a vegetable... but that's just crazy-talk! Bring-on the nukes, I says!
> Luckily, the most economical use for the CO2 produced is to pump it back down into the trap, where it will presumably remain for another million years.
Presuming, of course, that i) whomever rammed the giant, steel straw into that formation didn't create fractures in it through which the gas might percolate, ii) that the drilling holes are capped in some fashion in which they themselves do neither represent nor become a structural weakness in the formation, iii) that a structure which was air-tight against the escape of natural gas is also air-tight when filled with a fundamentally different substance, iv) that, contrary to human nature and commercial acquisitiveness, that best practices will, of course, *always* be followed and that we will *never* over-inflate a structures beyond it's physical limits in order to save a few hundred-thousand dollars, and v) that we really know what we're talking about, as opposed to fooling ourselves into thinking that we know what we're talking about.
So, yes, assuming that everything was done perfectly in the past, is being done perfectly in the present, will be done perfectly in the future, and that we have perfect knowledge of what we're doing to begin with; then we have ourselves a genuine air-tight case! :-)
Me? I'm waiting for the ever-entertaining Earth-shattering kaboom.
The customs official was likely overstepping his bounds in this instance, but it is noteworthy to point out that Canada's Constitution Act of 1982 contains a "reasonable limitations" clause which places hypothetical limits on the Charer of Rights and Freedoms. Thus, Parliament can institute criminal laws that go against the theoretical grain of the Charter, so long as they don't go "too far", with the definition of "too far" being a matter decided by the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) in consultation with established legal precedent and present-day norms. Generally though, the SCC tends to interpret laws in a fashion consistent with Lockean principles of Liberalism.
However, the unfortunate iPod owner may not have been considered to have been on strictly Canadian soil at the time of questioning, given that he was being interviewed in an international airport -- the jurisdiction of the Charter might very well be interpreted to end at the borders of areas defined under international law; all of which is to say that any legal challenge against Canada Customs would have been a Big Deal that would take years to decide-on due to the issues at stake.
> Uh, no, although Sudan's economy has been growing from its abysmal depths lately, it is nowhere near being a significant market for Microsoft's products.
Sudan is a particular example provided by the OP; I would tend to think that the real issue for a corporation like Microsoft or Intel would be the idea of "100 million units" being introduced to Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs) every year - each one running Linux off of an AMD processor. That might seem like a rather large, long-term strategic threat to the aforementioned megacorps.
> I honestly doupt MS is worried about market share in the Sudan.
While Bill Gates himself may not be concerned with market share in Sudan, he is beholden to pressures from shareholders, managers, and executives from within Microsoft and their affiliates.
> The day there is an available cure for AIDS, there will be fucking in the streets. ...And the day after that, we'll all be visiting the doctor's office with an embarrasing case of genital warts!
'Still, this is probably the first documentated case of the *Internet* attempting to censor *Congress*. Oh how the worm turns...
>Read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolution".
Better yet, don't read Kuhn - read Michael Polanyi's "Personal Knowledge". Kuhn does well in torpedoing the conception of universal objective facts, but doesn't have a good handle on the particulars of the scientific community (which is funny, considering he did study physics for a while). Polanyi does a better job of bridging the gaps that Kuhn's arguments couldn't cover.
Indians will use this to make money, right? This isn't some ego-building thing like the Chinese space program, right?
It's more than likely a bit of that, combined with good, old fashioned geopolitical paranoia. India has been leery of the the People's Republic of China (PRC) ever since that little war the two of them had, and that India lost.
And, there's also the issue of the PRC's counter-balancing of Indian's growing power in the region through military support to Pakistan and Burma. And the support China provides to Maoist insurrgents & terrorists within India (the Naxalites). And the PRC's support for the North Korean regime that sold nuclear missile technology to Pakistan...
So, I personally tend to think India's space program is as much about countering the PRC, as it is about building national pride.
Ironically, the "Let's get the cliches out of the way" post has become a cliche.
Dude, Slashdot has gone meta-chiché!>Producers and consumers drive change. They are the market. If you think the market is irrational, you aren't looking at all of it's influences.
You might want to re-read the argument. The contention is that the market will not regulate anything, because it does not have any epistimilogical existence outside of the human mind. Human behaviour and psychology is what causes "supply & demand" behaviour, and neither are purely rational. Thus, the ephemeral thing that is called "The Market" is only as rational as the humans involved in economic exchanges.
Further, those economic exchanges are bounded by rules and social norms. It just happens that in states such as the USA, Canada, and the UK, those rules and norms follow alongside the philosophies of classical liberalism (albeit to diffent extents). The market only appears rational *from the inside* because it is following the preconcieved rationality of those rules and norms.
If one views the market from a viewpoint that is *outside* of those norms, it looks highly irrational, because it fails to meet larger social exigiencies. What are those exigiencies? In the USA, they are increasingly focusing on energy independence, sustainable development, etcetera.
So, "The Market" is just a particular way of carrying on resource trading - one that emphasizes low levels of regulation by those not directly participating in the transactions. It does not "do" anything. It does not set values. Human psychology sets values. Human values can be completely arbitrary and relatively irrational (ie. buying a Hummer when you're single, and live in downtown New York). Human values decide what has economic significance, and what doesn't. Change in values only happens if people want it to.
Americans *might* want energy consumption patterns to change, but only if it meets their current values, which still largely emphasize low costs and convienience. Those are American values. The market won't change them. The market *can't* change them, because it is only a couple of words that are used to describe one particular kind of human behaviour. People who value energy independence, or environmentalism, can only work around that fact when trying to meet the exigencies of *their* values.
>Oil is not a dominant driver of the price of electricity. In 2004, the US got 3% of its electricity from oil, less than, say, conventional hydro, and not a whole lot more than non-hydro renewables (see here). Natural gas, on the other hand, was responsible for 18% (coal was 50%).
Correct, oil is not the primary driver for the price of electricity in the USA, but it is the primary factor in the cost of power, which includes all sectors of the economy (including transport).
Using figures from the "Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development" (OECD), it becomes apparent that sustained electrical production would need to increase by several hundred percent to supplant oil as a primary power source in global use - and the figure would likely be higher for the USA, given the less-efficient-than-average use of oil products in the American economy.
Until it hurts, U.S. consumers will not switch anything. The market will drive change.
No, I'm afraid the market will not drive change, because "The Market" cannot drive change, because "The Market" does not exist. "The Market" is not a great Leviathan standing astride the conceptual econonomies of the world. It is not a thing. It does not exist as anything other than a concept or meme in human brains.
"The Market" is nothing but a shorthand describing you, and a data-set including other humans like yourself within certain arbitrary bounds (ie. the nation-state of the USA). "The Market" has no will, and is only as rational as its "members" are; which is to say, "The Market" is just as irrational as you are, multiplied by a factor of X million.
So no, "The Market" will not drive change. Overconsumption is essentially a psychological problem, and you can't make people not be crazy. At best, you can only encourage certain behaviour, and make it really discouraging to act like a nut.
From the summary: "Security-minded laptop users live in fear of theft"
Nice blanket generalization there. I'm security minded, use two laptops, and I don't live in fear.
I agree with the PP - I don't "live in fear" either. I live next door to fear, sure, and I may occasionally peep over the fence to throw a rock at it...
After many years of trying to convince europe its unnecessary...
Convince Europe its unnecessary? Pushaw! Everyone important already knows that everything outside the US of A is unnecessary & redundant. And hell, not everything inside the borders is necessary either - Wyoming, we're looking at you!
> and also demonstrate how blatantly ridiculous the US sense of morality has become.
>>Surely no more ridiculous than a man running around in blue tights and a red cape.
Yes, well, if you were a super-powered individual - who's sheer power made it impossible to fool-around with the local women, or even practice the loving ways of Onan without blowing passing 747s out of the air - you might just develop some odd fetishes yourself.
I suspect that it will take roughly the same amount of time that the CEO & board-of-directors take to decide wether they want to risk their money mass-manufacturing a computer for people five-kilometers below the poverty line.
There's nothing revolutionary about the MIT system. It could have been built fifteen years ago (albeit using less advanced parts). But, there's no large profit in it, and the "large" part is just as important as the "profit". Frankly, I'm surprised they were able to find anyone willing to use their manufacturing capacity to mass produce these. Quanta's CEO is either unusually progressive for a suit ("You know what, I'm willing to take a bit of a cut in profits for this."), or is getting a substantial subsidy per-unit to offset the lower margins.
This $100 laptop is a great idea, but the justification stated on the website seems a little "creative." You could also argue for any number of modern conveniences that would help children in 3rd world countries, like a $1000 Mercedes using that justification. The bottom line is, people in these countries need food, shelter, clothing and education but more importantly, political stability. It just seems funny with all the problems countries are facing--particularly in Africa--a $100 laptop for every child, though commendable, would not solve.
One of the problems that is facing poor citizens in less developed countries (LDCs) is lack of organization & information. The extremely high die-off rate of experienced adults due to war, diseases such as AIDS, starvation, and state-sanctioned violence has the effect of cutting-off the transference of knowledge from the old generations to the new.
Consider the fact that agriculture is still the primary economic activity of LDCs. Great farming involves alot of knowledge; you can't just throw seeds willy-nilly and expect things to grow, obviously. You need to select your crops, select your grains, select your plots, your fertilization and watering methods, you need to know the growing seasons & their effects on your particular crop...
Now, imagine a situation in which adults & elders are not able to consistently pass-on this information. The result is less efficient farming methods, in which their kids are trying to get along, but barely know what the heck they're doing. Heck, even if their parents didn't pass on prematurely, they may be living in a country, like India, where traditional farming practices are have become inadequate.
While charities such as this one have been doing on-the-ground work for years, consider how much faster such information can be spread using a combination of laptops & literacy.
Then one should consider all the other simple inventions that all of our ancestors invented time & again, but have been forgotten in most places: hand & foot-pumps for wells, the pot-in-pot refrigerator, sewing, weaving, essentially, all the inventions that can be made in the home, or by a small village. Imagine the benefits.
The easy sharing of ideas & information has the potential to solve many problems - and that includes political corruption. As the saying goes, nothing spreads faster than village gossip, and if that gossip can be spread, lightning fast, across an entire country, it can seriously undermine the impunity with which back-room deals & graft are undertaken.
This should be insanely obvious to anybody.
These were adult chimpanzees, yes? And comparing them to young humans?
I'm sure if you compared young chimpanzees with young humans the results might be different.
... And in no time, we'll have proud parents boasting, "Yeah, I had my two-year old tested, and he's smarter than a chimp! Suck on that, Johnson!!"
I guess the quantum bubble is about to burst.
Well, it both is and isn't.
There are actually at least an infinite number of universes in which it already has. Conversely, there are another infinite number in which it never will. 'Makes venture-capital decisions more interesting, I bet.