The problems with Africa are directly born from the west's meddling. Redrawing borders, destroying institutions, creating new ones bent on serving the west, stealing minerals & raw materials, working the native people in to the ground or stealing them. The list goes on. It's massive. Pretending the repercussions of that aren't still being felt - and being felt hard - is pathetic.

Your impression about Africa is nothing but a bunch of racist nonsense. It's not cultural, but educational. Just go look at places in Africa where education is being made available, and you'll mysteriously notice your "cultural" shortcomings disappearing. Weird, huh?

I used to think you were pretty cool, but apparently I was wrong. You're either intellectually lazy or a racist - neither is particularly becoming.

Just a friendly aside: Every time you make a joke about confusing "global warming" or "climate change", you aren't making a criticism (just or not) of the science or even the politics, you are merely telling everyone you don't really understand the terms. Let me help:

Global Warming: The increasing of the average temperature of the planet
Climate Change: The changes to the climate caused by the increase in energy in the climate.

Two different, but related, phenomena.

Not all cities are like NYC. The city I live in has lots of green scattered throughout, and smells rather delightful most of the time. I've lived in the countryside, and that can smell far worse than any city I've lived in, especially after they spread some muck. Ew.

There's two types of processes that I'm surprised I've not seen more focus on.

1) Printing of, and then filling of molds, which can then be melted down and reused. That's how the higher-end 3d printed parts that you can buy online made, including almost all 3d-printed metal parts you get from online 3d printing services (the extra steps for metal being to coat the mold in a ceramic shell and melt away the mold). The only commercial 3d-printed metal that I'm aware of that doesn't work in this manner is iMaterialize's titanium, which uses laser sintering - and it has an out-of-this-world price tag.

It seems to me that if you used a mold, while in several ways it complicates the process (extra steps, preventing adherence to the molded object, etc), in others, it simplifies it. Your print heads don't need to handle a variety of materials or produce a pretty or durable product. They still need to be able to produce fine surface details but the ability to print thin structures loses importance. Once you've got a mold, you open up the floodgates to the sort of products you can fill it with, anything that will harden either through cooling or via chemical reaction, anything from thermoset plastics to candy.

(note I'm not envisioning a little hobby home printer that fills molds with molten metal in your office, mind you... although I could envision a more garage-scale or small industrial scale version that could handle such a task)

2) I've never even heard of a 3d printer being based on thermal spraying. With thermal spraying, you can choose the balance of precision vs. flow rate via nozzle size. Your materials are virtually unlimited, pretty much anything you can turn into a powder. It could conceivably even let you work with metals in a home environment, if the rate was kept low enough that heat buildup wouldn't be a problem (and you'd want an air filter on the exhaust, even though it should be pretty clean). You can choose the temperature and velocity you're spraying at by varying the pressures of compressed air and combustible fuel fed into the chamber with the powder, so you can work both with heat-sensitive and heat-requisite materials, as well as materials that can't stand high velocity impacts and materials that require them. Such a system could likewise do more than just print - it could add and then sectively remove substrates, it could engrave, it could change surface textures by sandblasting/polishing with various materials, it could paint or apply high-performance coatings - pretty much anything you can envision from a device whose fundamental workings are "shoot grains of material of your choosing at a velocity of your choosing (1-1000+m/s) and temperature of your choosing (cold to thousands of degrees)".

In both cases #1 and #2, I'm genuinely curious as to why there's not been more work done with them. Or perhaps there has been work done with them that I'm unaware of? I'm asking as someone who makes and buys 3d printed items online but has never printed one herself.

Because that's the only difference between then and now. Gotcha. Brilliant. Wow you're clever.

If you buy a shit-load of food and waste most of it, clearly your "interesting thing" is clearly untrue. The amount of food wasted in the west is ridiculous.

That's why people have realised to support them in both the short-term and the long-term: Short-term support includes food, medicine, infrastructure, farming help, etc. Long-term support includes more infrastructure, education, health-care, etc.

If you'd thought about this for more than a couple of seconds, you'd not sound like such a callous, ignorant xenophobe.

Wot no LA36? How do you do your core dumps? (ASCII Pron).

Whom? - A suprising number of well educated people are still unwilling to give Jane Goodall's pioneering work the recognition it deserves. These same people tend to belive animals are little more than automata, some even refuse to belive chimps have a mind of their own.

Fighting for mates is always one vs one, winner take all, and yes they are trying to kill their opponent. War as practised by humans and chimps is fundementally different, it is a coordinated social activity most animals simply don't comprehend let alone practice.

Yeah, can't figure out how a gender studies major ever gets anything other than the type of job gender studies are supposed to eliminate.

Europe is larger than the US, with a comparable population. How come sparsely-populated areas of, for example, Sweden and Norway can have blindingly-fast internet, whereas similarly-populous areas of the US have terrible internet? Your argument is clearly nonsense.

I think he's hinting that internet connectivity should be a municipal service, as it is in some parts of the world (which offer better speeds than most US ISPs seem to offer).

/joke...

Size has nothing to do with it. Each ISP has local networks connected to each other (and other ISPs) by larger connections. The exact same is true in Europe. If what you say is true, then US cities should have wonderful broadband, but that is clearly not the case. Europe is larger than the US, with a similar population, so your comparison isn't at all accurate, and the more you trot it out in discussions like this, the longer it will take to fix.