[rant] The Third World
Greg Kennedy wrote 11/04/2016 at 16:51 • 1 pointWhat, exactly, does "the third world" look like?
I suspect a large number of people are still working under the assumption that it's a bunch of darkskinned people in Africa living in huts and using stone tools to farm dust, fueled by TV narratives of the 80s and reinforced by parents telling us "eat your veggies, there's starving children who would die for these" when we were growing up.
I don't think the world looks like that any more - at least, it perhaps does in very localized areas, but not as a rule - and for some reason it pisses me off to NO END when people, say, make a 5v windgenerator out of e-waste and say "well the third world can use it to light their homes"? MOST AFRICANS HAVE CELLPHONES. They don't need handcranks to charge batteries, they need a government that builds roads instead of funneling food to warlords.
I guess my point is that I don't know, exactly, what people in the third world need... but I think a lot of other people are more delusional than me about it. So when I see projects with no personal utility, and so marked as being "for poor people" or whatever... I am just thinking, they don't want your junk any more than you do. You're not doing them any favors.
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"Third world" is a pretty patronizing term that's been phased out for pretty much exactly the reasons you describe. "Developing country" is the new in-vogue term, and implies some hope for the future.
According to the most reliable information we have, about 17% of the population (1.2 billion people) still don't have electricity.
http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/resources/energydevelopment/energyaccessdatabase/
That's a huge amount of people! Most of them in sub-saharan Africa and rural Asia.
But you're totally right. Some custom special snowflake wind generator to bring electricity into a region for the first time is never going to be the solution. This is a chick-and-egg problem, where most of these wire-free people are subsistence farmers with little use for electricity. Generators can be made from old car parts, and old beat-up Toyota pick-ups are common, reliable, and repairable in these areas, so bringing power in obviously isn't the issue.
Build them roads, and then bring in infrastructure that requires electricity, first.
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