It’s only funny because it’s true
Iceland Express has a lovely attitude towards its customers. It doesn’t try to overload people with corporate jargon and legalese. They try to have fun. And write hilarious blog entries now and then.
{ Monthly Archives }
October 2007
It’s a Girl!
My sister gave birth to a healthy baby girl at around 3 o’clock this morning. Nobody thought to inform me until around 16:40 today, but hey, I’m used to not being in the loop.
This is my first niece. My siblings collectively have 6 boys beforehand: Haukur Daði, Þorgeir Elmar, Jón Bjarki, Gunnar Davíð, Hákon Darri and Skírnir Freyr. Now there’s finally a girl in the family. Actually, there’s been a lack of girls on both sides of the family: on the Irish side no girls had been born with the McCarthy name for 50 years when Neil’s girl Lara was born a couple of years back, but there were two McCorriston girls in between I suppose.
Anyway, I’ll post pictures as soon as they propagate through the ether.
7.1 The Third World
“…because at the end this ignored, exploited, scorned Third World like the Third Estate, wants to become something too.”– Alfred Sauvy
What are the real issues in the third world? Yes, yes, we know, there’s hunger, poverty, disease, all that stuff that we’re bored of hearing about. In fact, we’ve grown so accustomed to hearing about it that most people don’t really care all that much any more. It’s a horrible thing to say, but it’s the truth. You do not care.
And why should you? This is a pivotal question. Let’s assume for a moment that everybody actually cared. What would happen?
First off, your average sub-Saharan worker would start getting a decent wage. People who currently work for less than $1 a day in countries like Malawi, picking bananas and collecting coffee beans and weeding tobacco fields, would start to get something close to a western standard, perhaps? What do you get per hour for your work? The minimum wage in the United States is amongst the lowest minimum wages in the western world, but it is $5.15 per hour according to current U.S federal law. In Great Britain this is around $10.10 per hour. Imagine if we somebody working picking bananas off trees in rural Africa were to get half of the American minimum wage. That would be around $20.64 a day, assuming an 8 hour work day (which, to tell you the truth, is something only westerners can afford). That’s a twenty-fold increase in wages. That translates to a twenty-fold-or-more increase in banana prices. What do you pay for a banana? Would you be willing to pay twenty times more? More importantly, how would that effect everything else in your local economy?
The fact of the matter is that most people don’t care because it would cost too much. If people in the countries that produce the raw materials had a decent standard of living, it would be impossible for us to maintain the state of living to which we have become accustomed.
Poverty, hunger, disease, overpopulation, under-education… these are just the symptoms of the real problem. The real problem is something deeper. Poverty isn’t even really an effect, it is merely a representation of a fundamental flaw in the way money works.
What the third world is really suffering from is developmental starvation: they cannot develop beyond the point they are at simply because all their resources and effort is going into maintaining their low quality life lest it get worse.
A lot has been done to change this. Schools have been built to educate future generations, people have been taught how to make substantially more advanced irrigation systems, how to maximize the benefits of fertilizer, how to make financial plans. But the people who know these things often don’t have access to equipment to make modern irrigation, don’t have money to buy fertilizer, and don’t see any real benefit in planning for what can only be financial ruin.
As for the schools, most of them are substandard to the point of uselessness. In Kenya a higher diploma in information technology, the most technically oriented result of 16 years of schooling, is amazingly advanced considering the level of poverty in Kenya. But the curriculum for this higher diploma consists of word processing (Word 2000), spreadsheets (Excel 2000), databases (Dbase IV, Access 2000), and operating systems (Windows 98/2000, MS-DOS). The level of mathematics involved in this training is minimal: graduates have for example never seen vectors or trigonometry. In other words, they can use computers competently and solve most trivial computer related tasks, but will not be able to develop software or even fix the computer when it breaks down.
As for the teachers. Well. Here:
Teachers are not paid properly. Many teachers go on strike every year, sometimes more than once. The teachers were also responsible for collecting the money from the children. If the teacher did not collect money from every student in the class the teachers’ paycheck was held until all fees were paid. Many children were forced to drop out of school simply because they could not afford it. Some teachers sent children home during the last two weeks of school, which is when the final exams are, so that child’s parents would pay the user fees.
– From the article on Education in Kenya on Wikipedia.
In Malawi the situation is far worse. While Kenya at least has an education system, Malawi almost has no educational infrastructure. There are relatively few schools, but surprisingly they are quite good. In fact, the university of Malawi has several graduate students working on advanced problems in the field of mathematics known as algebraic coding theory. That’s the field of mathematics that allows you to compress your files and watch videos on YouTube. Most Malawians don’t know what YouTube is, most perhaps never will.
This highlights two different schemes for education in the third world. One is that of building many schools, underfunding them and presenting the largest number of people with as much education as possible in the hope that this will lead to greater cultural development. The other is that of building up few monolithic schools and giving a very small number of people a very good education in the hope that education will radiate out from these people and slowly but surely more schools will come into existence and pull the rest of the nation up. But what both these nations seem to have figured out, what the western world has either failed to acknowledge or simply doesn’t want to, is that education is what is needed for the third world to progress.
And that’s not a hard observation to make. The much more complicated observation is that the attempts the more socially oriented elements in the western world is making to resolve the situation are, in a word, useless. A lot more education could be done by sending 20 or so grad students with shovels, laptops loaded with copies of Wikipedia, a solar generator and half a dozen Hexayurts, with standing orders to modernize a given village and bring them up to speed on modern business, mathematics, political theory, history, engineering and technology. And that for a fraction of the money needed to build schools and run them the way it’s done now. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Vatnalögin - the privatization of water
Update: Parliamentarian Katrín Júlíusdóttir sent me an e-mail to notify me that the laws will not in fact take effect after 12 hours but have been postponed until the 1st of November 2009. This happened on the 18th of October, and it obviously slipped below my radar, which is extremely awkward but not at all surprising. So we’ve got another year until this happens, and a lot can happen in a year. Thank you to all those parliamentarians who voted in favor of the postponement.
That said, nobody voted against it, but strangely most of the people who originally supported the bill didn’t show up.
Voted yes:
No vote:
Away on leave:
Not present: Ágúst Ólafur Ágústsson, Árni Johnsen, Ásta R. Jóhannesdóttir, Birkir J. Jónsson, Björgvin G. Sigurðsson, Einar K. Guðfinnsson, Geir H. Haarde, Guðlaugur Þór Þórðarson, Gunnar Svavarsson, Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, Karl V. Matthíasson, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, Ragnheiður Ríkharðsdóttir, Sigurður Kári Kristjánsson, Steinunn Valdís Óskarsdóttir, Sturla Böðvarsson, Þorgerður K. Gunnarsdóttir, Þórunn Sveinbjarnardóttir.
And finally I’d like to apologize to those who got mail from me regarding this matter for the spam. I should have done my homework better!
(English version below)
Eftir um 12 klukkutíma verður allt vatn á Íslandi einkaeign, hvort sem það er í föstu, fljótandi eða gufuformi. Vatnið hættir að teljast almenningsauðlind og verður að eign þeirra sem eiga landið sem það er á.
Ég hef barist gegn þessu síðan að lögin voru samþykkt, frægast með grein sem ég skrifaði þann fyrsta maí 2007, þar sem fjölmargir þingmenn rituðu svör og kváðust samhuga mér í þessu máli, þar á meðal Össur Skarphéðinsson iðnaðarráðherra, sem gaf það út í byrjun stjórnartíðar sinnar að hann hugðist taka málið til athugunar.
Ekkert hefur enn gerst. Nú eru tólf tímar til stefnu. Ekki láta þetta enda svona Össur.
After roughly 12 hours, all water on Iceland will become private property, be it in solid, liquid of gaseous form. Water will no longer be a common resource of the Icelandic people but will instead be the property of land owners.I have fought against this since the laws were passed a year ago, most notably with an article I wrote on the 1st of May 2007 to which many parliamentarians replied and claimed to be supportive of my cause. Amongst them was Össur Skarphéðinsson, now minister of industry, who at the beginning of his term announced that the matter was being taken under advisement.
Nothing has happened yet. Now there are twelve hours left. Don’t let it end this way, Össur.
7. The Three Worlds
“My neighbor knows only two types of countries, industrialized and developing countries. I know two hundred — I know about the small data and you know…’- Hans Rosling
The most obvious problem with the three worlds theory is that lumping together such a vast area, such a diverse set of countries is not only highly inaccurate but you’re also losing oodles of information in the culling process. There’s so much significant data being lost. We aren’t taking into account the problems with getting clean water in Bolivia or near Lake Victoria. We aren’t taking into account problems with generating electricity in the outskirts of the Kalahari. We aren’t taking into account flooding problems in southern Nepal, health problems in eastern Indonesia, we are missing all the details.
But do we need them when we’re building this abstract model? Yes. I believe we do need the details, the details are key. The devil is in the details. The power is in the details. But they are also confusing. Let’s go the middle way, let’s look at the details implicitly while building a powerful abstract model explicitly. That means we’re going to use the three worlds clobbering together of areas but try to understand each of the worlds as well as possible.
Another way of doing this would be to look at each continent in turn, giving us five categories instead of three. But they’ll be worse than these three: instead of using something fluid and dynamicly defined we would be using something that has little or no bearing on the society located there. Geography is a fact, but it’s not much of a feature. The Gaza strip and the Tibetan plateau are both in Asia, but the inhabitants share little culturally speaking. Likewise the community of Lyngen in the northernmost part of Norway bears little resemblance to Ile du France in terms of geographic features or culture, but they both reside inside Europe. Even within far narrower scopes such as Catalonia, you’ve got both mountain ranges , fertile fields, forests and beaches; and the people living in each of these places faces a completely different set of everyday problems, dreams and desires.
Which brings us to another point: Most would argue that cities are generally more advanced than rural settlements. There are more four lane roads in Reykjavík, Iceland than in the rest of Iceland put together. There is a higher rate of broadband adoption in New York City than in the rest of New York state. Lumping cities and their environs together may be socially correct to some degree, but is it economically correct? Is there such little technological discontinuity between the cities (where most of the worlds leaders live and work!) that it is correct to ignore rural technological deficiency and even economical instability in favour of seeing the cities in a more favourable light?
To summarize: It is highly incorrect to speak of the first, second and third worlds. It is however a handy error that we allow ourselves to make in order to broadly classify different levels of problems. But each of these categories must be taken with a grain of salt, since within any given area you may encounter all three of these worlds.
The next three parts will be an analysis of each of these worlds in turn, followed by a summary.
6. Current Societies
Mao Zedong: “Who belongs to the First World?”
Kenneth Kaunda: “I think it ought to be world of exploiters and imperialists.”
Mao: “And the Second World?”
Kaunda: “Those who have become revisionists.”
Mao: “I hold that the U.S. and the Soviet Union belong to the First World. The middle elements, such as Japan, Europe, Australia and Canada, belong to the Second World. We are the Third World.”
Kaunda: “I agree with your analysis, Mr. Chairman.”
Mao: “The U.S. and the Soviet Union have a lot of atomic bombs, and they are richer. Europe, Japan, Australia and Canada, of the Second World, do not possess so many atomic bombs and are not so rich as the First World, but richer than the Third World. What do you think of this explanation?”
Kaunda: “Mr. Chairman, your analysis is very pertinent and correct.”
This excerpt from a interview with Mao Zedong illustrates Mao’s version of the “Three Worlds Theory,” in which the traditional view of the three worlds is taken and shaken up a bit.
It seems to me that everybody knows what the third world is, and more or less everybody has a fairly good idea what the first world is, but nobody actually knows what the second world is. So at this juncture I think I shall show you a couple of maps.
Originally the concept of the “three worlds” was conjured up during the Cold War to describe different levels of technological and economical development. Since this was coined by the western world it had a significant right-wing bias and the map ended up looking like this:
As time has passed politically defined regions have been replaced by regions defined by grouping statistically similar countries together. As of 2006 the map of the three worlds looked like this:
Now, if you’ll compare the two figures and just for a moment ignore the ways in which the countries were classified we can see a very important trend: third world countries are becoming second world countries faster than second world countries are becoming first world countries. Another interesting point is that Turkey is the only country that has regressed. The third interesting point is that several countries, e.g. Argentina, Mexico, Panama and the United Arab Emirates have gone from the third world to the first world in a matter of twenty years.
In sustainability jargon this practice is called leapfrogging: when a technologically underdeveloped country rapidly develops to the point of equalling modernized countries in technological development by adopting the technology of it’s more advanced neighbors this often results in a very weird system: instead of progressing slowly from black-and-white television on to color, high definition and fiber optics you’ll see first generation couch potatoes glaring at 32″ plasma TV’s.
And since clothing styles are more of a rigid element of societies, people are perhaps less willing to drop their hereditary vestments and start using modern street ware clothing. The result is, to the westerner, hilarious: you have sheepherders wearing cloaks and loincloths, waving sticks about, and simultaneously videoconferencing on their 3G cellphones.
Here we are forced to ask the question: Why did Turkey regress? Actually, the question we should be asking is: Did Turkey regress?
As the older of the two maps was defined in a very ad-hoc way it may have been a political move on behalf of the mapmakers to include Turkey in it. It would make sense: Having recently (as of the end of the first world war) transformed from being the center of the Ottoman Empire into a fast-developing state with serious inclinations towards a European lifestyle, the western world may have seen Kemal’s Legacy as a perfect ally in the new war against Communism. Indeed, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk did some major changes in Turkey including the adoption of the Latin alphabet in lieu of the more traditional Arabic which not only pushed Turkey in Europe’s direction but pulled it away from the rest of the Middle-East.
This may well be an oversimplification, but the key here is that Turkey did not, indeed, regress, and the entire nation is progressing at such a rate that they have already been named candidates for membership into the European Union. The only reason they’ve moved back is because the original classification was biased. It was conceived of politically, and in many ways Mao’s version was far closer to the truth than the canonical 1980’s version.
So we end up reading three things from this:
- Obviously, the maps are made by the winners, and they are made to specification, taking all the political agendas and requirements into consideration, rather than the truth. The 2006 map is generated to be as close to the truth as the World Bank agrees on… and well, the World Bank is run by the same guys as made the 1980’s map.
- Those who made the original 1980’s map grossly underestimated a lot of countries, for example Argentina. Or maybe the criterion they based the map upon was just overly biased by the cold war atmosphere.
- Most importantly: those countries that have made it from the third world up to the second, economically, are getting stuck there.
MIT Fab Lab Norway promo video
I just noticed that MIT Fab Lab Norway put a pretty cool promo video on YouTube. Check it out!
First Snow
Took this picture on my way back into Reykjavík from Þorlákshöfn today. The first snow of the winter fell this weekend, creating a beautiful landscape that glistens majestically in the bright midday sun.
At this time of year the sun is only up for a few hours per day, but when, like today, there’s a high pressure area over the country it gets really cold but very nice. Definitely my favorite kind of weather.
Iceland’s domestic waste
According to an article in todays edition of Morgunblaðið, 49.5% of all garbage coming from Icelandic homes is leftover food and newspapers, and in Reykjavík that means several hundred thousand cubic meters more garbage being put into landfills every year. So much for a clean city, eh?
In Reykjavík people are encouraged to have a separate garbage can for paper waste - I have one. All paper waste from these cans is diverted to recycling instead of the landfills, thereby decreasing the total domestic waste by about 26%. Not enough people are doing this, which is odd because not only is it relatively cheap to start to do, but the homes that have waste paper bins get a discount on the garbage collection costs if I recall correctly. It’s a win-win situation.
Food, however, is not being treated very sensibly, with only a fraction of people composting their leftover food. I was meaning to build a compost box back in Vestmannaeyjar when I lived there, but seeing as how I have upwards of eighteen thumbs and until recently almost no knowledge of woodworking (let alone Fab Labs!), the project kept getting postponed.
Promoting this almost 50% cut in waste is something the authorities of Icelandic municipalities should definitely be considering.
By the way, I’d like to remind folks in that business that I am available for consultancy on this kind of matter, but there’s also a lot of extremely talented folks at Umhverfisstofnun that can help folks thread the way through the bureaucracy involved in doing everything here and, well, Get Shit Done.
