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Comment by johnea | Hacker News Reader

You can't really be arguing that people live in mud huts by choice?

Or that they squandered their copious opportunities?

"More than 80 percent of Indians (about 700 million) live on less than $1.25 a day"

Saying that we shouldn't spend money to send humans into inter-stellar space is not the same as saying we should stop all technical advancement.

But really, we'd be better off without iPhone or Android as well. A more democratized technological advancement would benefit many more people, to a much greater degree.

Do you really think if Steve Jobs hadn't been born that smart phone would not have been invented?

But they'd almost certainly be a more accessible s/w development platform...

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>>> You can't really be arguing that people live in mud huts by choice?

You should go look at the indigenous protection efforts in the amazon. You should look at what much of Africa has done.

There are plenty of people living in their areas version of mud huts, with cell phones and solar panels. "Mud huts" are in some places very much the local, renewable building material. https://thisisafrica.me/lifestyle/wisdom-african-hut/

I think you've misunderstood! You seem to have taken the "mud huts" comment literally. The person you replied to was using it as a euphemism for extreme poverty, not a literal description of a particular construction material. Hope this lifts any further confusion.

Compressed earth bricks are fantastic building material and easy to build the machines for it.

And it's all open source!

I'm with you on this, OP is being egocentric and playing a zero sum game which it clearly isn't.

> "More than 80 percent of Indians (about 700 million) live on less than $1.25 a day"

This quote is outdated.

It's 11.9% (167 million) on less than $2.15/day: https://ourworldindata.org/poverty?insight=the-rapid-progres...

Your quote requires India to have a population of about 875 million, it's currently about 1.4 billion.

> A more democratized technological advancement would benefit many more people, to a much greater degree

What does "democratized" even mean here? This stuff is widely available, do you want governments getting involved?

> But they'd almost certainly be a more accessible s/w development platform

What does "more accessible" mean? The knowledge to learn is given away for free. Making the tools multilingual or blind-accessible is hard but the big players do it anyway. Open source tools have man pages, which always had terrible reputations. Both open and closed source tools have wikis and forums and blogs.

The problem with this argument is that is that it logically dictates that we can only spend money on one thing at a time.

You bring up space travel, but the exact same argument applies to sports, movies, art, technology, evenbthe Internet itself. Once distilled as "how can we spend money on x when y" then it behoves us to identify y, and spend on literally nothing else.

Globally not-spending on defence for example would free up resources enough to substantially raise the standard of living for billions.

On the other hand, spending is raising the standard of living for billions already. Movies spend huge amounts, employing the services of hundreds of professions. The money poured into movies doesn't get destroyed, it gets distributed. (Including globally to places like India, Cape Town, and so on.) So it is with spending on space. The bulk of the money is spent/recycled here on earth.

The problems you highlight (poverty, living conditions, health facilities etc) are complex though and seldom fixed simply with money. In some ways money is the easy part, other factors (like human greed leading to corruption) are trickier.

So, I hear what you are saying, but its not an either-or proposition. There's room for both. I applaud your desire to focus on the problems of others. Don't worry about other areas, focus on the people you can help.

Yeah. Money does get recycled, and some, invested in something that increases productivity, say a tractor for the farm, instead of an armoured vehicle for defence, increases wealth quicker. Unfortunately without that armoured vehicle we may all be gobbled up by a neighbour with bad intentions. A balance between many things seems what keeps us going forward. The hard part seems to agree on the balance.

Personally I found that there is enough opportunity in areas which improve things, work against poverty, environmental destruction etc, that this is what I focus on.

You appear unaware of the breadth and depth of earth structures in history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_structure

"Mud huts" have lasted for many generations, had multiple levels, have excellent cooling properties for hot climates, etc.

Advancing technology shouldn't occlude proven technology.

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