1. Wiping out major diseases - brings tears to my eyes knowing that GF, Carter and other foundations will permanently get rid of so many horrible diseases.
2. African crop yield - If US can grow 159 bushels of corn per acre, and African countries are currently at 29, why is the 15 year goal for African countries only 48 bushels per acre instead of somewhere close to the US? Is that because of tech-transfer difficulties or rather the soil/environment?
3. Mobile banking - Wish US would get on with it too. All the problems he listed apply to the poor in US too. There is no way for me to immediately send $100 to anyone in the US without resorting to BTC or wire-transfers. Even with https://www.clearxchange.com/ it still takes 2-3 days.
4. Software for education - Couldn't agree more. However, I'm still not sure if we've achieved the correct "global education" format yet. Check out these two KA links: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/roman... and https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-history-basics/Ar... - the first reads like a dull Wikipedia page with nested commenting for interaction and the other is a droll Youtube edutainment video. Is this really going to help a 16 year old in Vietnam, Mongolia, or Sierra Leone learn about Art History especially if they cannot understand the accents or localized references? I'm not suggesting that every video or text be translated/localized but before we aim for better software, we should at least figure out the format first. What if you are 12 year old and want to learn the same topic? What if you are 34 with two degrees in sciences? If online education was space exploration, we are in the Wright-brothers stage, decades from even Wernher von Braun stage. Instead of every major university just uploading their video lectures and syllabi online, I'd love to see someone try to create a real global school (non-commercial) that presents the education material fit for each learner. I don't mean tests like what KA is doing but the course material itself.
>> "There is no way for me to immediately send $100 to anyone in the US without resorting to BTC or wire-transfers."
Not sure specifically what you mean by wire transfers but in the UK I can open my banks app (or websites), enter the sort code and account number of a person and instantly transfer them money from my account for no charge. Is this not possible in the US?
Here in Sweden we've something called Moible Id and Bank-ID.
You register your mobile phone number on bank website (all Swedish banks offer this service) & download your security certificate on your cell phone or computer.
And from now on you can not only send money to any other mobile phone (via Swish [1]) but you can use your Mobile-ID/Bank-ID to login to every Govt/Private website/app.
Almost every company offers login via Mobile/Bank-ID. Guess what? I can sign off my taxes, parental leaves, sick leaves and whatnot just using the same MobileID. I don't create any logins/password on any Swedish websites at all. Transferring money isn't any exception.
I highly doubt it, "identity theft" is pretty much unheard of, because we're not tied to secret identifiers like the US SSN, and because it is more centralized.
(I was very surprised when I moved to the US and realized that changing your address here means going to every single government agency and business you have a relationship with, and independently changing your address with them, instead of just doing it once in the central registry. I also found out that apparently you can't change your name on your driver's license if you have unpaid parking tickets. This is hilarious and unfathomable to me)
But you're tied to Bank-Id/Mobile-Id. If you lose your phone (or it's stolen) with all your certificates etc, will someone be able to do bad things with your account?
So the mobile bank-id is one way that you can use to identify yourself to various bank and government websites, most places still have multiple ways to sign on.
The mobile bank-id is still passcode-protected. The way it works is that whenever I want to sign on to one of these sites, I just enter my public personal id number. The app will then wake up, tell me that someone wants to identify as me on site X, and to enter my passcode if that's correct. If you steal my phone and don't have my passcodes, you can't do that. And I can revoke existing certificates if my phone gets stolen so they don't work even if you know my passcode.
I'm from Australia (where we have what you describe in the UK) and was shocked when I came to the US and Canada that they don't have such a thing. It's like going backwards in time 10 years.
Here in Canada the way to do it is an "email money transfer" where you put in someone's email address, and they get an email with a link they have to click then put in their online banking username/password in the page it takes them to. It's nasty, though it does work.
There is also the scenario where someone may not be able to open a bank account due to an extremely bad credit history, or not being able to meet minimum balance requirements (or have to incur relatively heavy 'service fees' to maintain an account with a low balance). The current mainstream alternative is money transfer services that charge a hefty percentage for transfers.
Most banks in Europe can't refuse to open a basic account by law. They aren't obliges to offer any credit (or even debit) services, but a basic bank account is supplied (in some cases, only way to get money from/to the government is to use a bank transfer)
To extend on that, having a bank account as a citizen is mandatory in France (and as such banks cannot stop you from opening one, although they don't have to provide any other services)
>> "There is also the scenario where someone may not be able to open a bank account due to an extremely bad credit history, or not being able to meet minimum balance requirements (or have to incur relatively heavy 'service fees' to maintain an account with a low balance)."
Might be another cultural difference. In the UK I can open a bank regardless of credit, there is no minimum balance or service fees unless I go negative into an un-arranged overdraft.
Domestic wires in the U.S. (the only actually immediate form of money transfer besides cash or Western Union) typically carries a fee between $25 and $50 per transaction.
BTC is not immediate either, it takes several days to cash out through an exchange because it will ultimately be settled with you through ACH.
Interesting. That used to be the case here but it changed 4-5 years ago. I think there was a law brought in in Europe to require it. It may be related to this[0].
SEPA payments (for countries that are part of the Euro) should take no more than 24 hours (weekends/local holidays not withstanding). For other currencies, it can take up to 3 work days. (assuming all the transfer details are correct and requires no manual operation)
Interesting. I'm able to make instant transfers within the UK (also on weekends) and I believe throughout Europe. There is still the issue of other currencies but I believe the original discussion was about sending money to other people within the same country (the US) so our system surpasses the criteria as it works between around 30 different countries.
In Portugal, between same bank takes a few seconds, between different banks, usually next day (sometimes same day, but not common from what I have seen). I just sent some money to Germany and took a day to arrive in their bank account. On the other hand, I received a bank transfer today from the USA which was issued on Tuesday (2 work days, which is not bad)
* If US can grow 159 bushels of corn per acre, and African countries are currently at 29, why is the 15 year goal for African countries only 48 bushels per acre instead of somewhere close to the US?*
Irrigation probably presents the biggest barrier, especially in the Northern equatorial regions of Africa. Once you're utilizing 100% of the water available you can't grow anything else.
Your average American farmer has hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in capital equipment, spends a sizable portion of output revenue on inputs (fertilizers, pest control, seeds, insurance, etc.) and is supported by university extension programs, government subsidies and minimum price supports, and on and on and on. The lack of industry to produce inputs and equipment comparable to what is available here will take decades to even close.
Sure you could get _an_ African farmer to American level yields, but that's different than what essentially is economic reorganization for the _majority_ of workers in African economies.
Also, remember this isn't an agile software project that can go through an iteration a day. You plant once a year, you harvest once a year; an entire continent doubling yields in only 15 iterations is pretty good.
Property rights are key. One stat I read (that I can't remember where) said that about 70% of the people in the world don't have a formal title to the land they live on.
A buddy of mine actually has a start-up that focuses on that called Suyo: http://suyo.co/
I heard the Gates foundation is still giving out Monsanto seed to
African farmers. They can plant one season--then they can't afford to replant. Maybe things have changed? I know Warren
Buffet tried to reason with Gates, but unsure if
Monsanto is still involved? On another note, I hope someone developes a better condom--not just for use in Africa, but for use everywhere. We have enough people?
We have got enough people. Just because the west has a population crunch (and the current economic paradigm doesn't support that) does not mean that the population problem goes away. The pollution doesn't dry up, and the seas don't replenish their fish because of this.
2. African crop yield - If US can grow 159 bushels
One factor (apart from soil type/access and amounts of water/available tech) might also be this: maybe Gates is considering the environmental impact of growing those 159 bushels just isn't worth it. Without the heavy use of pesticides, fertilizers etc the yield would be lower, but the impact on nature would be much more reasonable and sustainable.
2. African crop yield - If US can grow 159 bushels
A lot of African farmed land is heavily populated. In a small area you can have hundreds of farmers with tiny fields that have to support numerous people. That makes agriculture and the environment more of a social issue than a technical one. It is hard to imagine this in the west where the countryside has very few people and is farmed almost exclusively by machines. In this context yield is less important as a metric compared to how the land is delivering nutrional value. If the goal is to give local people a healthy diet then western food technoloogy can be very inappropriate.
> 3. Mobile banking - Wish US would get on with it too. All the problems he listed apply to the poor in US too.
That seems to be a problem of incompetence and politics and not of technology though. I remember a few friends in school messaging each other by making 1ct money transfers to each other with their banks mobile app.
Neither of those is immediate. It still takes 3 days to cash out.
But apparently you can use Western Union to send actual cold hard cash anywhere immediately. I know, I was surprised too, wouldn't know if my girlfriend didn't work there.
There are many services of this kind. Some (like Western Union, MoneyGram and Ria) have agents all over the world. Others are specific to certain corridors, often serving a specific diaspora. There's also the hawala system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala).
I think they have some weird security rules. The 21 day thing happened to my brother after his first ebay sale. He phone them though and they released it immediately after verifying a few things.
> If US can grow 159 bushels of corn per acre, and African countries are currently at 29, why is the 15 year goal for African countries only 48 bushels per acre instead of somewhere close to the US?
And getting yields to that point has come at the cost of an environmental and social catastrophe in the US. It's also uneconomically expensive - though it's easy not to notice because the government pays junk food companies to buy the excess and feed it to us at ultra-low prices.
Why on earth would you want to inflict that on Africa too?
#4:"global education"
I agree with you completely that KA is far from a "global" player. It's interesting you mentioned Vietnam there because I have actually been building a kind of KA clone here in Vietnam for the last ~2 years or so. And here's my analysis when I started it.
- A very large percentage of Vietnamese students wouldn't be able to understand KA's videos because of their English proficiency.
- Even if the content was translated & subtitled, the videos' topics were in a way "foreign" to most of the students, especially the K1-K12's videos
- Other players like Udacity, Coursera ,... mainly focused on specific topics and that will be more relevant to Vietnamese students/workers, say software developers. But again, it's only relevant to those students with pretty good understanding of their field's terminologies in English. Those students are the minority.
- Say, if I were to start a trello's clone, I would have little chance against trello because most of Vietnamese would be able to use trello with out any problems, so yeah, they might prefer trello.
So starting a KA clone would be "safer". And on top of that, I've always been passionate about software & education & English language, so I started it. I started with English courses, which I thought were what the Vietnamese students would need most in their career later in life.
So in case anyone thinking of making a KA clone like me, please read on. It's not an easy journey at all, especially when your resources are limited. Building the platform AND the content at the same time is real tough. It's not easy to convince good (English) teachers to go online and give lessons. Giving lessons offline is still fairly lucrative for good English teachers. Or they are shy acting in front of the camera and going to be seen by "everyone". Or they are not passionate enough a teacher. Or they simply didn't believe in us.
I haven't been successful yet, still struggling but the journey's been great and I'm really proud of what we've built: a stable platform (has most of the features from KA or udacity), found 2 young passionate English teachers and together we've built a few English courses.
So yes, that's my startup journey so far. The final results? 2015 will tell, right now we're running a little short of cash but I'm hopeful. Sometimes I just wish I was Salman Khan and met "that" investor, Bill Gates. Gates' note on online education is exactly what I've been thinking as well: It is still at an early stage and improvising for maybe 10 years to come.
This is great, obviously, but overpopulation is a huge problem and regrettably that problem will now get worse. The predictions for the maximum population expected at mid-century have recently been adjusted upwards. Resources will be depleted ever more quickly if poor people get as rich as Bill predicts.
I have no answer. Surely we cannot withhold medecine from poor people to prevent overpopulation. But two decades from now overpopulation will be the major worry on everybody's mind if this trend continues.
Edit: The assumption of negative growth once countries hit a certain level of development/stability/richness has recently stopped being true [1], I probably should have mentioned that in my first comment
Although I am by no means an expert in population, there are a number of interesting studies which show a deep statistical correlation between increased income and decreased birth rates over time. Higher income families and high income societies have significantly lower population replacement rates.
That being said it also seems that there is an immediate correlation between suddenly higher income and a individual family unit also increasing (i.e. when a family gets a sudden, large increase in income they will generally also increase their family size at that time).
So, with all of that being said, since in the words of the Gates this is a "bet", we could also potentially bet that by increasing the number of middle class individuals within a given population we will also see an overall increase in birthrate among those populations.
This[1] suggests that fighting poverty is a pretty effective way to fight overpopulation. Most rich countries are reproducing well below replacement rates, and as poor countries become rich their average fertility reliably plummets. There are number of theories as to why, but one of the more compelling ones is that peoples' relationship to their children changes when they can be reasonably certain that all of those children will survive to adulthood. If that's correct, then public health initiatives may provide an even more direct impact on wide-scale population control.
It turns out that most countries go into negative growth once they hit a certain level of development/stability/richness. The solution to the problem is therefore, obviously, to ensure that all countries reach this level.
I remain a perpetual technological optimist, we'll solve this problem as well.
Btw, it's very hard not to read your comment like "wouldn't it be better for everyone if all these poor people just died off...?"
Interesting, lots of downvotes and several upvotes (saw it jump up and down several times). I guess this splits our community. Too bad the point is apparently deemed inappropriate for discussion. I would have enjoyed to learn what smart people here think we should do about this.
It's not inappropriate for discussion, it's just wrong. People who are rich and healthy don't have kids above replacement rates. We don't know why but we've observed the effect within countries, between countries, and across a broad range of cultural and religious groups. Economic improvement and public health aren't in opposition to population control measures, they are population control measures.
The correlation doesn't seem to hold at the high end, and much of the data in the western world confounds population growth due to fertility (still low) with population growth due to immigration (which has upticked across the board in recent years). As far as I know, though, the effect is still strong in the delta range that the Gates foundation is targeting.
Well, I wish what you were saying was true, but recent data show that it is not, see for example [1]
Furthermore, depletion of resources is not a simple numbers game: a rich person produces several orders more CO2 than a poor person to name just one example. If Africa becomes wealthy enough to come anywhere close to Americans for meat consumption there is going to be a huge issue.
Population control of some kind is so much easier now than if we wait 20 years and Chinese-like draconian measures become necessary.
"These new predictions are drawing criticism. "Raftery's projections are too high for Africa, because they don't include the fact that female education is the key driver of fertility decline," says Wolfgang Lutz of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria."
2. African crop yield - If US can grow 159 bushels of corn per acre, and African countries are currently at 29, why is the 15 year goal for African countries only 48 bushels per acre instead of somewhere close to the US? Is that because of tech-transfer difficulties or rather the soil/environment?
3. Mobile banking - Wish US would get on with it too. All the problems he listed apply to the poor in US too. There is no way for me to immediately send $100 to anyone in the US without resorting to BTC or wire-transfers. Even with https://www.clearxchange.com/ it still takes 2-3 days.
4. Software for education - Couldn't agree more. However, I'm still not sure if we've achieved the correct "global education" format yet. Check out these two KA links: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/roman... and https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-history-basics/Ar... - the first reads like a dull Wikipedia page with nested commenting for interaction and the other is a droll Youtube edutainment video. Is this really going to help a 16 year old in Vietnam, Mongolia, or Sierra Leone learn about Art History especially if they cannot understand the accents or localized references? I'm not suggesting that every video or text be translated/localized but before we aim for better software, we should at least figure out the format first. What if you are 12 year old and want to learn the same topic? What if you are 34 with two degrees in sciences? If online education was space exploration, we are in the Wright-brothers stage, decades from even Wernher von Braun stage. Instead of every major university just uploading their video lectures and syllabi online, I'd love to see someone try to create a real global school (non-commercial) that presents the education material fit for each learner. I don't mean tests like what KA is doing but the course material itself.