[PhantomGremlin]

Contrast this grass roots effort with OLPC, a grandiose plan to distribute One Laptop per Child to the third world. The best quip I ever read about that was: "OLPC is a rich man's idea of what poor men need. It's like donating an expresso machine to a homeless shelter."

Instead, as the article makes clear, many poor villages don't even have ready access to clean water. This one humble guy has done more good for more people in India than 1000 grandiose schemes such as OLPC. And he wants to expand to 106 countries. I wish him well.

[vidarh]

> Instead, as the article makes clear, many poor villages don't even have ready access to clean water.

Not that tired old argument again. Yes, it is true. But lots also do. And lots have cellular broadband, and tons of relatively poor people have access to smartphones. Not all of the third world is the same.

And looking at the OLPC site now, they're up to 2.4 million of the thing. Not quite the numbers they'd hoped for, perhaps, but still 2.4 million children in developing countries who now have access to computing.

There's room for projects trying to address more than one issue, for more than one group of people.

[vacri]

It's not a competition.

Also, does your quipper think that women aren't important? I always find it amusing when people wax philosophical about equality whilst retreating into sexist terminology to do so. Instead of 'poor men', 'the poor' or 'poor people' works to the same effect.

[sliverstorm]

OLPC was created by a man (hence 'rich man'), and rich man/poor man is a more powerful literary device than rich man/the poor.

[vacri]

I'm aware of all that. I didn't say boo to 'rich man', because it is driven by Negroponte. I recognized the literary device with 'wax philosophical'. It's still someone trying to play the oneupmanship game on equality while at the same time perpetuating sexism. It's a shitty thing to do to merely 'sound cool' - selling out ideals for demagoguery.

English is a wonderfully flexible language and there are a dozen different ways to say the same thing here. Hand-waving away the hypocrisy in that statement as being a more powerful (barely, at that) literary device is just being lazy.

I'd also counter that the proper literary device is 'rich man/poor mAn', not 'rich man/poor mEn'. A small but meaningful difference.

[tootie]

The OLPC wasn't about getting luxury electronics in the hands of the poor, it was about getting them free self-directed education. It was an attempt to leapfrog all of them fundamental problems of poverty by empowering people to do things for themselves.