From: Billy Brown (bbrown@transcient.com)
Date: Wed Mar 01 2000 - 10:29:47 MST
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> Actually, it seems fairly realistic to me. You build the factories for
> a fixed amount, which is most of your cost right there, then run them
> 24/7 without worrying about amortization, marketing, shareholder
> rebellions, the maximum competitive pricing, and so on. That's 75% of
> your marginal cost blown away right there, and the fixed cost can either
> be written off as charity, or paid back in 20 years by the grateful
> recipients... or "paid on" when *your* country winds up a little behind
> in the tech contest.
PC manufacturers have been trying to undercut each other's prices for years
now, so I don't see any reason to think a charity will be able to beat their
cost of production by all that much (and it might not beat them at all,
since it wouldn't have the same competitive pressures and institutional
experience). Being nonprofit exempts you from only a modest fraction of the
expenses a private company would pay (mostly taxes). You still have rent,
payroll, distribution, material costs, etc.
Looking for a modest savings might make sense, but reducing the cost of the
whole PC + wireless connection + power source setup by an order of magnitude
is unreasonable. If it was actually feasible, I'd think someone would be
doing it already.
> The primary appeal of the scheme, to me, is the idea of dropping
> billions of easily concealable ringtop computers onto oppressed
> countries, as Marc Stiegler proposed in _Earthweb_.
I can understand that, but I'm a little skeptical about it. Most of the
people in the most urgent need of help can't read, let alone use a
computer - and they don't speak English, Japanese or any European language,
either, so there isn't a lot of content they could use anyway.
I could see it as a way to destabilize an oppressive government in a
half-developed country like Malaysia or Pakistan, but I'm not sure it would
do much to improve the local economy.
Billy Brown
bbrown@transcient.com
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