Economies Of Scale

i knew it!
Capitalists will always be that. they can wear all the socialist garb they want, but it's a poor camouflage.
in (yet) another display of actions speaking louder than words, OLPC chairman announced that he wants to use Windows instead of Linux. That's right. Ditch the open source and embrace a proprietary, capital intensive, world dominating resource hog!
from the beginning, i knew that this "we care about the education of children of the developing world" was a load of BS. i mean, instead of trying to analyse and solve the problem of efficient delivery of education for the resource-handicapped schools, these capitalists would rather concentrate on the billion students, coz that would mean more sales of the laptops, and ergo, investors laughing all the way to the bank.
Getting a laptop to each child is not going to transform the facilitation of education. It is the teachers who should be first shown how to teach better.
Okay. Maybe i am wrong about this. what about e-waste?


On the one hand they talk about environment and how treating e-waste is turning into an international issue, and on the other, they are trying to encourage this One Laptop Per Child, which are more susceptible to be wreaked, simply becoz they are going to be handled by children. Any parent knows how fast children are at turning perfectly working, supposedly unbreakable toys into materials to be fed into trash receptacles (for lack of better disposal techniques in the developing world). How long do you think these 'rugged' laptops are going to last in the hands of tiny tots? And once they are hooked, they are not going to let their parents have an iota of peace till they get a replacement. So it's Cha-Chingg! all the way for the laptop manufacturers.
Well, i agree that the XO was specifically designed to be environment-friendly. but what about the copy cats? i do not suppose they care about the environment as much. and frankly, i don't suppose any of the developing countries have US equivalent eco-friendly manufacturing processes in place. (and even if they did, corruption would ensure they were conveniently by-passed)

As a parting note, here is a quote straight from the horse's mouth:

"We need to reach the most children possible and leverage them as the agents of change".

you can very well imagine what kind of change he wants to bring about...specifically related to the bank accounts of his and his investors!