Comments on: one laptop per child and mobile phones

By: pedro

pedro — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 19:23:53 +0000

ant, not quite a good comparison. Food is one of the basic needs to survive, but drugs are not. And there are lots of aid campaigns to give food and medical care for poor people in developing countries.

Poor people benefit from food distribution, at least they don’t starve anymore.

By: ant

ant — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 18:28:57 +0000

We don’t give poor people in other countries free food for the same reason we don’t give drug addicts free cocaine. The only person who benefits is the one controlling the supply.

Bill Gates is so mad about this because he wants to create precisely that situation. The first hit is always free.

By: pedro

pedro — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:22:39 +0000

Wait a minute. One problem at a time. You shouldn’t assume that a project like “one laptop per child” should address every problem there is in developing countries (at least not in this context), specially because those problems vary *a lot* for each country [1].

This is not the time to give the project this level of detail. Let each country handle their infrastructural needs so it becomes adequate to use the $100 laptop.

Besides, in some countries children in the public school system have their basic needs (like food) taken care of. Otherwise, how would a starving child use a laptop to get food? Probably by selling it. See, this is not a realistic approach to the problem.

[1] For instance, not every developing contry has slums near rain forests or lacks mass vaccination infrastructure. It is typical of people from developed countries to assume that the situation in developing countries is always the worst possible in all aspects, but this is not always the case (I should know, I live in one).

By: Santiago Gala

Santiago Gala — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 16:32:50 +0000

About those “basic GSM” $20 phones, the real cost of the handsets is more like $200/$300, but they are being subsidized by the operators in the hope that they will get them paid back via phone calls and further market expansion.

The typical subsidy in Spain used to be $200, which came with a SIM lock of one year, plus the fact that most people does not care to unlock the handset.

By: Goolic

Goolic — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 14:34:07 +0000

So… My question is :

And the people who can’t concentrate becouse they’re starving? What they could do among thenselfs with better cominucation?

I like the idea, but we need to provide food to then, or preferably teach then how to procude enought food for everyone, them provide technology to communication!

Ps: The one’s who aren’t starving should receive one ASAP!!!