For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs a Big Debate

[Colin McGregor]

--- Evan Leibovitch <evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Rick Tomaschuk wrote:
> > Yes I know a poor African boy/girl desperately
> need a laptop. How else can the carry water from the
> stream to their hut?
> OLPC is not going to replace irrigation and low tech
> needs, but it 
> serves a very different purpose. Education and
> literacy improvement is a 
> very important component of lifting societies out of
> poverty, and 
> technology does have a role to play. For example:
> the introduction of 
> the cellphone, together with the concept of
> microcredits, have increased 
> revenue for rural African farmers by eliminating
> (often corrupt) 
> middlemen in finding buyers and conducting price
> negotiations.
> 
> Tiny cheap computers, on the own, will add little.
> However, they will 
> enable OTHER things to happen in the field of
> communications and 
> education. Huge amounts of money have already been
> donated in this 
> regard, largely proving to be of little value by the
> time any of the aid 
> trickled down to the villages. This looks like an
> effort in which most 
> of the money spent will actually make it into the
> hand of the intended 
> recipients.
> 
> As well, look at the countries ordering the project
> -- Brazil, Thailand, 
> Libya, Argentina. None of these are in the poorest
> parts of Africa, and 
> they already have computer literacy initiatives in
> place.

Small correction here, Thailand, since the recent
military coup has decided to drop out of the OLPC
project. Here is the full list of nations who have
expressed serious interest in the OLPC project:

- Brazil
- Egypt
- United States (the states of Massachusetts and
Maine)
- Cambodia
- Dominican Republic
- Costa Rica
- Tunisia
- Argentina
- Venezuela
- Nigeria
- Libya

Note, none of the above are among the poorest of the
poor. All can provide roofs and a passable diet for
the average citizen. The point being these nations see
better education as the tool to go from passable to a
great standard of living. The OLPC project is seen a
tool to help these nations become great.

My personal hope is that the project becomes somewhat
like the Carnegie Libraries (named after the
Scottish-American businessman Andrew Carnegie
(1835-1919) who felt his personal fortune was built on
access to books as a boy, and wanted others to have
the same chance). Andrew Carnegie paid for the
construction of over 2,500 libraries around the world
(of note, the old UofT library (that now contains the
UofT bookstore at College & St. George) was built with
Carnegie money). Carnegie Libraries came with strings
attached, namely, any city/town that wanted a free
library had to:

- Show the need for a public library;
- provide the building site
- annually provide ten percent of the cost of the
library's construction to support its operation.

Now, we take public libraries for granted, it would be
cool to think that, hopefully, with in a few years
basically everyone world wide will take basic Internet
access for granted (with the explosion of knowledge
that will generate...). The OLPC set-up will hopefully
follow in something like the Carnegie Library formula.

Oh, and do note, Andrew Carnegie was seen as something
of an SOB during his lifetime, having been a steel
monopolist, and was at points ruthless in pursuit of
his monopoly (some odd parallels here to the Bill and
Melinda Gates foundation that I will not get into
here).

> Many developing countries look to India and want a
> piece of the IT 
> outsourcing pie. The OLPC is a good step in helping
> increasing basic 
> literacy and computer literacy. Some countries --
> notably Brazil -- see 
> OLPC and related efforts as a way to make their
> countries more 
> self-sufficient in IT and not dependent on the US.
> 
> So if the World Bank is willing to help this happen,
> that's fine with me.
> > How about looking at what drives this lunacy. Big
> banks, the 'New World Disorder'.
> Sorry, but that doesn't wash. The convenient scam
> inherent in conspiracy 
> theories is that reasonable efforts to disprove them
> are met with 
> accusations of being part of the conspiracy.

Know that, been there. Several years ago I was working
for a local commercial ISP. I got to deal with an
e-mail from a Florida neo-Nazi who was furious that
one of our Toronto area clients was making fun of him
in the Usenet newsgroups. Said neo-Nazi demanded that
we terminate the account of local client. I wrote back
noting that so long as our clients paid his/her bills
and were not breaking Canadian law we just didn't care
what they did. Needless to say I became a target of a
few rants, sigh... 

One semi-amusing bit though was looking at said
neo-Nazi's website, where he had a definition of what
a white person was. Under close reading of the
definition this guy had, I and everyone else of
Scottish ancestry was not white. Given the company in
question I would be happy to be considered non-white,
though I am not sure what colour I ought to think of
myself as (light blue maybe :-), well wait for it to
get colder out and that may not be far from the truth
:-) ),

Colin McGregor

> As someone who has personally had to defend
> association-by-faith to the 
> targets of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, (and
> mutations of it 
> such as Henry Ford's accusation that Jewish bankers
> started world war 1) 
> I find such "revelations" to be worse than a waste
> of time. They are 
> truly destructive to real attempts at societal
> progress, a thinly-veiled 
> excuse for bigotry that is no better than racism or
> religious extremism.
> 
> Anyone who tells you he has _the_ truth, surely
> doesn't. And bankers are 
> people too.
> 
> - Evan
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