I don't think you read the article at all as none of this is due to loans from China. It's people acting in their own economic interest because these products replace more expensive alternatives. Part of it is funding through carbon credits which is a separate sort of idiocy, but the companies involved have built a viable business model around supplying something people want in a way that they can afford. The only involvement China has is that they manufacture much of the hardware and it's not some government directed effort on their part. To them Africa is just a customer buying what they're selling and both sides are engaging in commerce out of their own benefit from it.

Unless you have some direct evidence to refute the claims in the article, you're just talking out of your ass.

What's a metaphor? And before you respond I'm not inquiring about the usefulness of Facebook or any of the other products Zuck is pushing.

While a similar setup makes sense in many places in the U.S. there are too many parties (private and public) invested in maintaining the status quo who will never allow it to happen.

It's good to see Africa figuring out solutions to their own problems. No one else was going to solve them for them without getting more in return.

I own several Apple products and wouldn’t take one of these if it were free. This is for the sort of people who would buy a Gucci bag or something like that instead of this. The people who bought this are the people who only bought an iPhone for the same reason: it's a status symbol.

No one would play in the sandbox if they didn't think it was valuable. You may as well ask why there aren't more people trying to scam others out of Koolaid points. No one bothers to try to steal anyone's NFTs anymore for similar reasons.

A basic income isn't a magical fix to economic woes either. If poorly implemented it may do more harm than good. The best arguments for implementing one now is that it would be less expensive to administer than the current welfare state / social safety net.

Except for that one time it was Lupus!

Why do I get the feeling that it will be just like the last time where all of the people who were acting irresponsibly will get bailed out while the taxpayer gets stuck with the bill? Until the irresponsible actors are held accountable for their own behavior, they have no incentive to change.

It's inconsequential for the most part. If it went to Apple instead it would be spread out to shareholders through dividend payments. Large developers that are publicly owned companies may do the same themselves. Either company may invest the that money in something else which pays it to some third party that now has it. This only changes who is doing the distribution and who might be on the receiving end of that. There can be further downstream effects from this which may be more or less beneficial than some alternatives, but these can't be accurately predicted with any degree of reliability.

If the desired goal of the legislation was to reduce prices for consumers then it failed to achieve that goal. Saying that it's still good anyway just for other reasons is only shifting the posts.

Based on their history, Windows 12 will be decent*, but then they'll shit the bed again when they try to get everyone to upgrade to Windows 13. I don't know why they do it this way, but it's been a consistent trend for decades now.

* For a Microsoft product.

I don't think Sony is subsidizing the hardware. Both Sony's and Microsoft's consoles are basically PCs. You could put together one with similar performance for around the same price. Both are 8-core Zen 2 CPUs and RDNA2 graphics integrated on the chip with 16 GB of RAM shared between the CPU and GPU. Nothing particularly special and AMD sells APUs that are even beefier with more modern cores if you wanted an integrated solution. Unfortunately they're not selling them as a standalone product so you'd have to buy an entire system with one in it right now.

I don't think the PS5's design is particularly good. To me it's trying too hard and I'd have preferred something more basic. If you really like it you could just 3D print a shroud that looks like a PS5 and put it around a PC built with a microATX board.

What prevented any of those people from selling through competitors like iTunes, Amazon Music, Bandcamp, or any of the other numerous alternatives that sprang up since then? I think you're engaging in some historical revisionism as mp3.com wasn't sued until they started offering services to allow people to register a physical album and stream songs from it through their site. The problems with this and why the record labels were upset should be obvious.

It's rather dubious that any bands that weren't already making a good living from their music were finding that through mp3.com. I would need some concrete examples as even artists who are successful and sell a large number of albums make most of their money through touring. Even if record companies weren't taking the majority of that revenue, a band would need to sell at least 50,000 albums per year for the members to be able to live off of their music without needing an additional job. If they're charging less per album (as is common for independent acts), it's at least 100,000 per year. Most independent artists won't sell that many and even known artists with a huge fan base can struggle to sell more than a few hundred thousand albums.

What makes these (or most any) artists their money is touring and live concerts. Lesser known acts can open for a more established band/artist and get people to hear their music and even buy an album and merchandise is always a good moneymaker as a production costs of a $10 poster or a $20 shirt are low. Even artists who do sell millions of records will still make more money from touring. The revenue from a few years of large concerts can easily exceed that from a band's entire catalog of records sales.

Your screed against capitalism would be better directed at copyright law. Of course then you wouldn't have made this post in the first place. Presumably you can point to any number of successful examples of online music stores in socialist (outright or at least directionally adherent) countries where evil capitalism didn't cause these problems. Or perhaps you can't because they don't exist and as awful as record companies may be, property rights even for intangible goods like music, can make musicians wealthy even if it's not through record sales. The mere fact that copyright exists means that a musician that owns their music can get a sizable amount of money from a song being used in commercials or films. A lack of such rights just means that the most successful distribution model is the Pirate Bay. That's not necessarily bad for musicians as getting people to hear your music and pay for a live performance is financially beneficial, but we can argue over which makes the most money for them.

Sounds like payola all over again. Only now it's more centralized and a lot easier to bribe someone at Spotify to give preferential treatment to a song than having to buy off hundreds of DJs at different stations.

The only reason for Apple to need their own satellites is if they wanted to offer a replacement for cellular providers. Having something that works around the globe would be a good selling point. You can already imagine the sappy commercial set to He's Got the Whole World in His Hands they'd use to sell it to the masses. I think I can hear Jobs weeping in his grave at the mere suggestion.

Too bad it'll never come to pass. No government would permit such a thing.

That would be a terrible idea. Imagine it's your case that just got completely tossed because your lawyer used AI. How is that justice for you in any way. Worse yet, if the case were high enough stakes it creates an incentive to bribe opposing counsel to use AI and have the case thrown out. If it's a case worth billions someone would do it.

There are examples where rulings have been overturned or trials had to be redone due to someone having ineffective counsel.

A six billion dollar plan to end hunger is wildly optimistic. What you might be able to do is feed everyone on the planet for a time, but it wouldn’t solve future problems. It also likely ignores that some countries (e.g. North Korea) would be unwilling to participate and their people would still be starving.

I suspect this figure is wrong based on a quick search that reported global spending for this problem during a a five year span was over $60 billion. In other words the world is already collectively spending twice as much and not solving the problem permanently.

Musk has enough money that he could throw away $6 billion on something like this without suffering much from it. I can already guarantee it wouldn’t work work whatever it actually was. If it were actually that easy (and inexpensive) it would have been solved. If it's the little you could probably crowd source the funding. Start a fund to accumulate the $6 billion and implement the plan. You'd only need 60 million people to kick in $100 each, which is a lot of people, but there are easily that many who could.l contribute that much without missing it. I can already tell you everyone will be as skeptical as Musk when it's their own money.