[geeks] OLPCs for sale...

[der Mouse]

> Can you really make fun of Negroponte for trying something different
> to improve the lives of children?

When it's this badly thought out and this badly done, yes.

I have mostly stayed out of this discussion, but this takes it to a
place where I feel I have to speak up on.

My father once did a gig for the (then-)government of India.  They
wanted him to tell them how the government could best help the
villagers deal with their problems.  His response was, basically, "butt
out".  When people are doing subsistence farming the same way their
ancestors have for millennia, giving them, say, a tractor is of
low-to-negative benefit.  They are not set up to use it, they do not
understand it enough to use it properly, they cannot maintain it, they
they have no infrastructure to care for it even in routine minimal ways
like fueling it - it's rather like giving a F1 racecar to someone
without paved roads: yes, it's a highly advanced car, but without the
rest of the system surrounding it it's of no real use.

I see OLPC as being a computer-technological version of that.  It seems
like the sheerest arrogance to me to think that giving laptops - or
desktops, for that matter - to people who don't really even have
electricity is going to help them in any way but giving them something
to sell and spend the money on what they *really* need.  (And, given
how badly the human anumal typically does at telling the difference
between wants and needs, quite likely not even that - quite aside from
there being a lack of a market accessible to the recipients.)  It's yet
another form of "our way is Teh Best, so we'll export it to the world
willy-nilly to Help those Poor Downtrodden Improverished".

> But regardless of how the laptops are used, they have made a
> monumental effort to improve the lives of the people they are giving
> the laptops to.

Trying hard ain't enough.  It has to be done with at least a little
intelligence behind the effort, and I see that as severely lacking
here.

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