Tild-ers who live in developing countries (India,Brazil,Nigeria), what differences between your country and the West would you like to bring to others attention?
First, I'll start with currency (although this isn't unique, exclusive or universal to developing countries.) In my country a real is 25 US cents and 22 European cents. This effectively means everything made by a US or European company (a lot of things and almost everything technological or of value) is 4 times more expensive for me than for an American/European. This means an iPhone costs 4 thousand BRL but our minimum wage is still around 1000 BRL monthly (4.30 BRL/hour assuming an 8-hour shift) meaning an iPhone costs 4 months of minimum wage in Brazil while in the US it costs less than one. For reference an Indian rupee is a 70th of a dollar and the minimum wage is 164 to 750 rupees daily depending on the state (4920 to 22k rupees monthly) but it still only amounts to 320 US dollars.
Well, first a friendly correction: Brazil is in the West ;)
More on the currency issue. What North-Americans consider a normal expense is frequently a luxury in Brazil. A PS4 or Xbox game can cost a quarter of the minimum wage. Steam is cheaper but still expensive for most. An iOS or Android app that is considered cheap in America can be prohibitively costly for us. Some people in other countries are very proud of not supporting software and media piracy, but I wonder if they would have the same attitude if a subscription to Adobe or Microsoft made their jobs literally unprofitable.
Every IT guy in the country walks around with a bag full of CD-ROMs and thumb-drives with cracked versions of Windows, and if he doesn't he won't have any customers. The only situation where we don't pirate Windows is when the machine comes with it pre-installed.
Nowadays I only use free software, but that's not feasible for everyone.
Yeah, and that's presuming you have a working computer. (Mine is a 12-year old windows 7 with half a gig of RAM that takes some 30 seconds to render the chrome main page and it's still where my family stores all my childhood memories because we just can't afford a new computer and our only backup is a PS3.)
Dude, I was in the same situation as you; my laptop is a 2010 Asus and was running Windows 7. It was plagued with all kinds of issues and slow as hell.
Some time ago I bit the bullet and purchased a Windows 10 key from a shady looking website. At the time it went for 7€, now it's 5€ for the Professional version.
It was honestly one of the best purchases of the year for me - everything is so much faster and customisable.
Pirating it is also very much doable, but I couldn't be bothered; if you don't want to pay there is a guide on the sideboard of r/piracy iirc
You can buy keys off ebay if you dont want to give your details to dodgy sites.
I do commiserate with this situation. Do you have any plans, or have you considered moving abroad? (Yes, it's a lot easier to say than it is to do).
I'm very fond of anglophone culture, but mental health issues make me wary of leaving behind my support network.
Do you think discounted regional pricing would work? I'd think Microsoft, for example, would rather sell legitimate licenses for cheaper than have everything pirated or not affordable.
It would earn MSFT more money, certainly. But the issue then becomes how to properly region lock your product. If you sell it for cheap in Brazil, what's to stop gray and black market windows keys from floating back into the US?
I think so. Some people say that it would be a disaster because of VPN, but I figure that the people that would use this method to acquire cheaper software are the same that are pirating right now.
And online services like Netflix managed to be profitable in spite of VPNs.
To provide you with some level of perspective:
About 60 Russian rubles make a dollar. The federal minimum wage is about 12k RUB/mo., or about $200/mo.. Rent for a single-room apartment in smaller cities, like my own, is the same as the minimum wage.
It used to be 30 rubles to a dollar before
20122014.What happened in 2012?
Not much. But 2014, on the other hand...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_ruble#Exchange_rates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during_the_Ukrainian_crisis
Yes, I remember 2014 being a mess after the annexation of Crimea, but I was wondering if there was something I missed in 2012
Yeah here in Brazil this also applies. In a street right next to my school (and a center of medical help) there used to be lots of trash. They tried to clean it up to only moderate success and the trash just went elsewhere. It's not that hard to see broken (or not) glass bottles and tables in the way back.
Yeah that's pretty true. I'd presume it's because education is just garbage and evangelical churches (or in your case muslim mosques) make money.
Yeah, I agree. In the US lobbying in not regulated but it's sure as hell documented and tracked, and it's also formal. X company donates to X politician through X SuperPAC or lobbying group. In the developing world it's X politician takes money that was going to X school/hospital/government owned company and physically brings it to [some place] in a suitcase and then bribe eachother. In Brazil it definitely tends to apply far more to politicians than normal people.
Over here some people in slums throw rocks at the dogs if they get angry.
What I would add to this list is
1: this one is for schools but the range of teenagers is far more varied. In my grade there is a group of weebs and not too far from them there are 'Chad' wannabes punching walls and doing cringy 'don't look at the OK in my hand or you will get punched' games and right next to them there will be a group of people who take their mobile Battle Royale games really seriously and they all interact fairly often unless they are introverted like the weebs.
I'd like to invert this discussion since I, a W E S T E R N E R (read, relatively rich white-ish person), have a question for citizens of developing nations.
Here's why I ask.
I spend a lot of my time trying to learn about what life for people like me, who use inordinate amounts of resources. It's obvious to me that electric cars, re-usable coffee mugs, and PV arrays aren't gonna cut it. We as the most intense consumers have to make radical changes to our relationship to material throughput and energy usage.
In the end, a lot of these radical changes come together to somewhat resemble peasant agriculture: communal access to land, eating more of what you grow, relying less on money and "The Economy" for stuff, sharing, less atomized dwelling units, etc. etc. Yet, there is such a push in countries like China and India to move people away from this most sustainable way of life to a more W E S T E R N consumer middle class life - which as it turns out it totally soul suck and ruining the planet. What gives?!
Because that's (presumably) what makes California have more money than India despite being 34 times less populous. What makes you have an iPhone be 1000 rather than 4200 'currency' (note that wages do not account for currency devaluation so if my currency becomes 3 times cheaper everything you make will become 3 times more expensive). It's what supposedly makes AAA games cost 60 currency rather than up to 180. (Yes, 180 BRL for a triple-a game in Brazil.) It's presumably what makes you actually be a leader in world politics and what gives you a gdp of 23 trillion and have a GDP per capita of 60k a year. (Interpreted as "People make 60k dollars a year in the US") what apparently makes your country have 'no slums' (despite there being lots of homeless people) and little crime. People here see the US as a place where there is little violence and homelessness, where 1000 currency buys you an iPhone X rather than a Nintendo switch lite, where people earn 60k a year and have houses 4 times larger than in their home countries.
Tl;dr intense naivete and consumerist syndrome.
I think using exploitative, coercive lending by the IMF and World Bank has a lot to do with that as well...
After looking at the Wikipedia article for both, yeah they're definitely pretty biased for the west. I would have thought it was multinational money from poor nations that made the west stay so wealthy now (if I had to guess nearly all the money made on the Internet in the planet is presumably funneled into Silicon Valley because nearly every tech company is in there, which is potentially trillions that could presumably help many poor countries out, and that's not even mentioning many car and food companies)