[SamBam]

Because it's worse for the world. They have a tremendous source of green energy, and they could sell more of it to India reduce the amount of coal and oil India burns, but instead they use it to spin motors to power computers to guess random numbers and hope they make the rich a little richer.

Plenty of countries have chosen to have environmental goals at the cost of making less money.

[Mistletoe]

I’m not sure Bhutan can afford to do that. It reminds me of when Western countries burned coal for 100 years to get where they are and then don’t want other countries to do that. I get it, and I don’t want the earth polluted either but it certainly smacks of colonialism/manifest destiny type thinking.

[jcranmer]

> It reminds me of when Western countries burned coal for 100 years to get where they are and then don’t want other countries to do that. I get it, and I don’t want the earth polluted either but it certainly smacks of colonialism/manifest destiny type thinking.

That kind of argument makes less and less sense the more you think about it. It's like arguing that Africa can't develop the Internet until after they get their telegraph network up and running. There's no reason that a functional power grid requires the use of fossil fuels as the primary energy source, and we're already at a point where renewable energy is as cheap to set up as fossil fuel plants. An advantage to starting industrialization later is you don't have to waste time working through worse versions of technology. If you want to be competitive, starting out on the latest and greatest is the best choice, especially because you often have a chance of undercutting existing providers who have too much sunk capital costs in less efficient technology.

[throwaway2037]

This is great reply. This particular sentence is very pithy: <<It's like arguing that Africa can't develop the Internet until after they get their telegraph network up and running.>>

I can recall many, many years ago (20+), reading an article about the future of telephones. The article proposed that many developing nations would never install landlines with full penetration because mobile phones are so much cheaper. This was written in the era when mobile phones were still expensive. That blew me away.

East Africa has huge savannahs that are ideal for solar power. I've written here many times about the solar gold mine upon which both North Africa and the Middle East are sitting. I agree: There is a good chance that coal power plants don't make sense in the face of very cheap solar power. Also, many developing nations depend upon foreign capital / loans to build power plants. The lenders will very much prefer green energy over coal. What is harder: Tearing down coal power plants in developing nations. Why? The money is already spent to build a huge power plant.

[buyx]

I can recall many, many years ago (20+), reading an article about the future of telephones. The article proposed that many developing nations would never install landlines with full penetration because mobile phones are so much cheaper. This was written in the era when mobile phones were still expensive. That blew me away.

This brings back bad memories, and illustrates the risk of linear thinking: South Africa's black population was denied proper services under apartheid, including telecommunications. In an effort to supposedly right that wrong, the state-owned telecommunications company, Telkom, was given a years-long monopoly on fixed-line telecommunications in return for putting in fixed line connections to black communities. There were reports that an American corporation, SBC, helped write the country's telecoms act after it acquired a minority stake in Telkom.[1][2]

That monopoly set South Africa back many years, and it's only been in the last decade that it began catching up with the rest of the world. Oh, and the copper network has been so badly looted that many/most places now have wireless landlines. And those under-served black people: they all bought cellphones for the same reasons that people in the rest of the world did.

[1] https://twentythirdfloor.co.za/2007/08/27/telkom-sbc-and-a-f... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070827181955/http://www.busrep...

[throwaway2037]

Very nice follow-up. I didn't know about this story. Thank you to share.

[eru]

> If you want to be competitive, starting out on the latest and greatest is the best choice, [...]

That's not true in general. It depends on the specific situation.

You are right about learning from existing technology, and that people will not and should not blindly retrace the technological evolution, missteps and all, of those who came before them.

To give an example that combines both points: a poor country might be well advised to focus on bicycles instead of modern cars. But that doesn't mean they need to do a penny-farthing before they can get to safety bikes.