What's the alternative? It's 300k people doing mostly low-medium intensity agriculture spread out over a large area in the middle of an ocean. I'm dumbfounded that anyone knowingly moving there would be dumbfounded that things move at a much slower pace. I'm reminded of my friend who moved to nome and was incensed that he couldn't get 2 day shipping on his Amazon orders any more.
It’s okay for it Not to add up. It’s a unique experience that is hard to translate for people that have not lived a day in the life.
For example, there is a 30,000 member town that has high end hotels that do not have functional generators. You could Pay $600 a night and not have air conditioning.
The alternative is being proactive about a backup system.
Fiji has successfully done it. Their infrastructure is great. In Fiji, they have a similar 3rd world infrastructure for electricity. When it goes out, they have fully functional backup generators and a strong team of support. While blocks are down and you wouldn’t even know it as a consumer.
As Americans and mostly Aussie expats, the electrical challenge translated to not being able to shop for more than 1-3 days of food, but that was easy to adjust to once it was understood.
But for example, the hospitals when they didn’t know how to treat something— they would just amputate. I’m guess that would be a surprise to most people.
They had ni blood bank. They have one now, but I would get calls to come down to the hospital and “save a life” by giving blood right this minute.
When forklifts at the port would break, they would just take the week off and ship new ones in.
Which made the port constantly run behind. We had our own backup forklifts that we would keep on hand to make sure that our international contracts were honored.
It’s a beautiful place and the people are wonderful, but there is many challenges when planning a life there that many would take for granted
I used to flat with a guy from Vanuatu. As a child he stepped on some coral. It got badly infected and he went to the local clinic. They discovered they had run out of any pain killers so they went and got some big guys to hold him down. They then cut his foot open and cleaned the infection out. While he was being held down and screaming in pain. He eventually passed out.
The same guy went home for the holidays. He was to take a boat to get to his parents island. The boat was 3 days late. No communication so he basically camped waiting for the boat. He told me this was not unusual, you just had to wait. They did not tell you it was delayed or when it would come.
He also told me that on his parents Island they spoke two totally different native languages. I asked how that was possible. How did they trade? He told me, "oh no if you crossed the river they would kill you". I asked how long ago that was and he told me it was during his fathers childhood.
I have no idea why this got downloaded - but can only agree. Life in a major city at the forefront of technological change will rarely prepare someone for the realities of life outside that bubble. Numbers do have a quality of their own, and the combination of being behind the tech curve (which requires generational effort and education in itself to overcome) and not having a lot of people to do this with is a huge challenge for small countries and regions.
> Life in a major city at the forefront of technological change will rarely prepare someone for the realities of life outside that bubble.
Those who live such isolated lives should get out of the city from time to time, maybe just leave their safe neighborhoods. Grew up in NYC and was in cub/boy scouts and we did camping trips. My father preferred a rural and rugged lifestyle so we frequently vacationed in up state NY and Vermont where a lot of the activities were outdoors such as hikes, nature walks, tours, etc.
This reminds me of a story about African farmers I once heard. NGOs and various philanthropic organizations have been notorious for having a superficial comprehension of what is actually needed to improve the lives of people in the so-called third world. We have the examples of the Nigerian or Tanzanian textile industries being severely hurt by the flooding of the market with mitumba[0] or the destruction of local shoe industry by Toms or even the impoverishment of Haitian agriculture through the distribution of free rice long after a crisis has passed, for that matter. But then you have cases where a piece of machinery breaks, and no one has the expertise to repair it, so the thing in question (a tractor, a well) is just abandoned and things go back to what they were. Technology lives in an ecosystem of expertise, supply chains, and other cultural features. Indeed, technology is part of culture.
There is another story I have heard many times about how the Vietnam government paid local people to kill rats. To prove they killed a rat, the locals had to cut its tail off and bring it in to collect payment.
The locals decided it was getting harder and harder to find rats to get paid to capture. They started to cut the tails off and release the rats back into the sewers so that they could procreate.
So the government's attempt to kill all rats ended in rats being bred and eventually an increase in rat population.
> The French thought that this was a good idea because they had a policy of trying to encourage entrepreneurialism in Vietnam.
It seems that the natives were already a lot more enterprising than the French had thought.
I had heard of the story of the Cobra Effect[1] but the Hanoi Rat Masscacre is a much better documented example of the Perverse Incentive phenomenon. It also strikes me as an example of Goodhart's Law[2] in effect.
NGOs commonly are just employment schemes for wealthy first worlders. They aren't ignorant to the fact the solution they are providing isn't practical, they're just going with whatever pays their fat salary while generating donations. That is, that very little benefit winds up in the designated beneficiaries is by design rather than accident.
> I'm dumbfounded that anyone knowingly moving there would be dumbfounded that things move at a much slower pace.
That's a pretty rude response and also invalid. He's not dumbfounded at the slower pace of life. He's dumbfounded that a nation of 300k could have a week long electricity outage and not have a single resident capable of fixing the issue or a backup plan ready to activate. It suggests exceptionally poor planning -- even for an island nation in the Pacific.
> It suggests exceptionally poor planning -- even for an island nation in the Pacific.
Or the inverse... it suggests a much higher tolerance for inconvenience. We're just spoiled in Europe and America (including at our most popular vacation spots.) People lived for millions of years without this shit, ten thousand years of agricultural civilization alone...
Inconvenience is understating it, electricity isn't a luxury in the modern world anymore.
What if you can't afford a generator and fuel, and you're medically reliant on a CPAP machine or a chair lift? You may be physically unable to leave your 2nd floor apartment, and unable to call for help because your cordless landline phone no longer has power? Not to mention the financial cost of all the food in your refrigerator spoiling.
All of those things can be accounted for with money. But a government should plan to ensure a certain minimum standard of living for its citizens.
Inconvenience is understating a little bit, yes, but not that much.
> What if you can't afford a generator and fuel, and you're medically reliant on a CPAP machine or a chair lift
Virtually everyone on the planet with such a malady is in a similar situation every single day except for some of you Americans and most Europeans.
I'm not saying it should be that way so you don't need to take it that far, I'm just saying some people are seriously spoiled and can't deal with any hardship (let alone the slightest inconvenience) at all anymore. Most people on the planet can, because they have no choice.
Latency and logistics in my experience will always get you. On the similarly populated, but much closer to major landmasses than Vanuatu island I live on, we have had local outages from multiple failures close together. One transformer blows, and there is a replacement in stock for that. But if another one goes, then the new one has to be shipped from abroad, and that will take a few days even when emergency listed. Keeping replacement stock gets expensive as well, has to be checked, maintained, etc. It all adds up.
Something like 95% of the population are low-income farmers or service workers, are amongst the last 20 or so countries by GDP, and they have a total annual budget of less than $80mil a year. I'd be surprised if it was otherwise...
300k is a large enough population to support expert utility workers. Though, who can say whether the damage would require regional or national expertise to converge on a county of that size in a larger country.
