I too would take the risk of getting addicted to Internet porn if it also means immediate access to authorities and medical personnel to treat venomous snake bites, etc. much sooner. This seems like an acceptable trade-off to me.
Same goes for internet access. Every bank used to have offices with customer service in every small village. Now only some of the larger cities have an office if you're lucky. We make things as accessible as we need it to be, so reducing time to access does not necessarily improve the situation in all perspectives.
You can pretty reliably half your mortgage in most parts of the developed world by accepting an extra half hour on your commute - if you commute. This trend is likely to only intensify as incomes rise, the Linder Theorem [1] becomes stronger, and people become less willing to accept even a 5 minute addition to their commute in exchange for saving tens of thousands of dollars over the course of their life. (Which makes sense - 5 minutes over a 40 year career for a $100/hr salaried professional comes at a cost somewhere north of $150,000).
[1]: https://www.opus1journal.org/articles/article.asp?docID=145
Powerful words, and am sure all of us has experienced this as well.
Is there ever going to be a solution or will it just continue worsening?
Of course they’re gunna struggle
You just need to carefully balance everything but ultimately as a 50 yo I appreciate Internet. It helps me to learn and to prepare for discussions (including the boring ones about UK royals and whatnot)
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/02/world/americas/starlink-i...
Here's a gift link
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/02/world/americas/starlink-i...
This made it almost sound like the effort was led by an NGO but she's the co-founder of an investment company that claims to support "conservation efforts" in the rainforest and "connect indigenous communities". After digging a bit further into their website, this is what they say about ROI:
> We are committed to returning capital and giving 100% returns within 1 decade. With long-term returns of up to 300% within 25 years, for those who are seeking portfolio options. We are open to exclusivity agreements and long-term contracts linked to all project commodities (Offsets, ESG certified products, farming outputs, etc.)
So in other words they are less about "empowering indigenous communities" and more about opening up investment opportunities by privatizing indigenous land and resources.
In this light it's clear why Flora sees only positives in connecting Amazon tribes to the Internet: because it's a necessity for doing business with them.
That said, the article does bury the lede that the tribe was previously extremely prudish to the point of frowning on kissing in public. Not to defend pornography nor promote liberalism as a panacea but I wonder what role sexual repression plays in this story and to what degree it might lead to the social harm being overstated.
From the "activist"'s company's website:
> We are committed to returning capital and giving 100% returns within 1 decade. With long-term returns of up to 300% within 25 years, for those who are seeking portfolio options. We are open to exclusivity agreements and long-term contracts linked to all project commodities (Offsets, ESG certified products, farming outputs, etc.)
Note "farming outputs". A big problem with the Amazon has been rainforest being burned down to make room for farmland and pasture used for exports, so having the indigenous groups do it instead of standing in the way makes it more palatable, especially when you can also point to "conservation efforts" like turning their existing sustainable forestry into carbon offset processes and scaling up their subsistence farming for export.
So in short, they're sustainable subsistence farmers living comfortably on a GDP of zero while caring for their environment and we need to change that because a GDP of zero means you can't make money off of them. Give it twenty years and their land will be fully privatized and sold off to some external corporation and they'll all be impoverished because they can't use their land anymore and are now "unemployed" and own nothing.
They also fail to mention in it how it has saved lives and had other positive impact.
Nonsense, it does.
"Initially, the internet was heralded as a positive for the remote tribe who were able to quickly contact authorities for help with emergencies, including potentially deadly snake bites. “It’s already saved lives,” Enoque Marubo, 40, stated. Members are also able to share educational resources with other Amazonian tribes and connect with friends and family who now live elsewhere. It has also opened up a world of possibilities for young Marubo, some of whom have been unable to conceptualize what lays beyond their immediate surrounds."
Envy and jealousy kills rationality. I've heard Warren say a half a dozen times, 'It's not greed that drives the world, but envy.
Intuitively, I don't think most fully remote workers who moved moved to genuinely remote areas - maybe to smaller cities, and the outskirts of those smaller cities at that, but the amenities of any city above 100,000 or so genuinely are quite nice to have handy. I wonder if rural areas saw much of an uptick in absolute, but even in relative, terms.