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In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

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Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#31

Post by croissants »

varvar wrote: post #21
tmikaeld wrote: post #4

That's an exciting read and it's hard to grasp the sheer numbers involved here, no wonder bandwidth is troublesome at these scales. Feels like this could eventually start a liberating movement for women across the country.

Liberating women from what exactly? It all seems ridiculous myth making, considering what indians have shared here on HN about how much asymmetrical power indian women have available through the court system in India, and the sort of abuses they inflict regularly, the misuse of the assymetry for material gain etc. But yeah I get it. It's the new Democracy + Capitalism freedom making program they NEED to go through fo…

Restricting to people age 25+, Indian men average 8.7 years of education, and Indian women average 5.4 [1]. Add in the sclerotic nature of Indian courts, and unless I'm really misreading this data, it's hard for me to imagine that Indian women averaging an elementary school education are en masse closing this gap through legal maneuvers.

Maybe you're referring to a specific subgroup of women?

[1] http://hdr.undp.org/en/countries/profiles/IND

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#32

Post by tchalla »

_wldu wrote: post #11
kumarvvr wrote: post #9

Yeah, Data is cheap and smartphones are plenty. Indians are voracious consumers of content and healthy competition has reduced prices to absurdly low levels. I'm in an urban area, with connection from one of the biggest providers. It costs me about 9 USD a month for unlimited data (I mean, about 2 GB a day, BUT, with carry forward, so I have about 250 GB of data to use in my account), unlimited calls and sms. I stopp…

This sounds awesome. Good, affordable connectivity seems to be a basic human right. I wish it was this way everywhere. I'm in the US and can only get 1.5Mbit DSL, for which I pay 90 US dollars a month (with a basic home phone line). That's the only Internet I can get. East Coast USA.

You can not compare two currencies without including the parities. In terms of the US dollar, India has a Purchasing Power Parity of 21.276 as of 2019 [0].

> Purchasing power parities (PPPs) are the rates of currency conversion that try to equalise the purchasing power of different currencies, by eliminating the differences in price levels between countries. The basket of goods and services priced is a sample of all those that are part of final expenditures: final consumption of households and government, fixed capital formation, and net exports. This indicator is measured in terms of national currency per US dollar

[0] https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p...

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#33

Post by pascalmahe »

llampx wrote: post #8
tmikaeld wrote: post #4

That's an exciting read and it's hard to grasp the sheer numbers involved here, no wonder bandwidth is troublesome at these scales. Feels like this could eventually start a liberating movement for women across the country.

Seems a bit of a leap to suggest that only men are interested in controlling women.

Parent said nothing about only men being interested in controlling women. On the contrary, liberation of women can be liberation from mothers, mother in-laws, grandmothers...

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#34

Post by ryukafalz »

cageface wrote: post #14
markdown wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NO! Letting yourself go just because you have access to bigger clothes isn't healthy.

Revise, not throw out entirely. Optimization always adds complexity. Don't do it more than necessary.

Eh, not necessarily. Both the simplest and most optimized pages I can think of are straight HTML with no Javascript. It takes work to add complexity starting from there!

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#35

Post by tchalla »

sharadov wrote: post #2

Speech detection is just amazing when you think about illiterate folk, it's a game changer for them. Jio's genius was offering free data plans for a year, getting folks hooked. But the fact that it only costs 9 cents a GB is amazing.

> But the fact that it only costs 9 cents a GB is amazing.

9cents in India would be equivalent to 1.91 USD after taking into account Purchasing Power Parity (OECD 2019). Therefore, you are in effect saying 1.91 USD per GB is amazing. You can not compare values without including purchasing power disparities.

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#36

Post by JadeNB »

alkonaut wrote: post #19
op03 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that rate I am guessing the network doesn't have to deal with rain or snow or customer issues cause obviously the budget for all that is not required because how can it even exist? It's following the now classic Facebook model of pointing at scale achieved and outsourcing all the issues that scale produces to someone else namely govts, parents, teachers, the healthcare system, the police etc etc and then blaming a…

> At that rate I am guessing the network doesn't have to deal with rain or snow What’s the connection between weather and fiber?

> What’s the connection between weather and fiber?

Exposed cables (and there are some, at least in US—my installer had to run some last-mile cables from the nearest, uh, tower, I guess, to my house) suffer from poor weather.

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#37

Post by kylehotchkiss »

cageface wrote: post #10
kumarvvr wrote: post #9

Yeah, Data is cheap and smartphones are plenty. Indians are voracious consumers of content and healthy competition has reduced prices to absurdly low levels. I'm in an urban area, with connection from one of the biggest providers. It costs me about 9 USD a month for unlimited data (I mean, about 2 GB a day, BUT, with carry forward, so I have about 250 GB of data to use in my account), unlimited calls and sms. I stopp…

Sounds like it's time to revise some of the advice web developers get about optimizating page sizes for developing markets.

Remember that devices are less powerful, and that outside the cities the connections still aren't universally that quick.

That said, many JAMstack providers are so wired into CDNs nowadays that actually serving the content closer to these users is just a baseline functionality of the webhost.

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#38

Post by [deleted] »

tchalla wrote: post #35
sharadov wrote: post #2

Speech detection is just amazing when you think about illiterate folk, it's a game changer for them. Jio's genius was offering free data plans for a year, getting folks hooked. But the fact that it only costs 9 cents a GB is amazing.

> But the fact that it only costs 9 cents a GB is amazing. 9cents in India would be equivalent to 1.91 USD after taking into account Purchasing Power Parity (OECD 2019). Therefore, you are in effect saying 1.91 USD per GB is amazing. You can not compare values without including purchasing power disparities.

[deleted]

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#39

Post by shripadk »

tchalla wrote: post #35
sharadov wrote: post #2

Speech detection is just amazing when you think about illiterate folk, it's a game changer for them. Jio's genius was offering free data plans for a year, getting folks hooked. But the fact that it only costs 9 cents a GB is amazing.

> But the fact that it only costs 9 cents a GB is amazing. 9cents in India would be equivalent to 1.91 USD after taking into account Purchasing Power Parity (OECD 2019). Therefore, you are in effect saying 1.91 USD per GB is amazing. You can not compare values without including purchasing power disparities.

PPP makes no sense when it comes to comparing data usage between countries. Data is not based on same supply/demand characteristics as physical goods. It is quite literally arbitrary. Much like most software you buy/subscribe to. Ever bought a digital product at 90% discount during Black Friday or Cyber Monday? Why don't you find physical products with 90% discounts (unless it is a clearance sale)? Because you can't discount cost involved in acquiring raw materials and labour cost. Digital products on the other hand can be duplicated infinite times with zero additional cost. So is anything connected to it (which includes data, storage and processing). Sure there is some cost involved. But at scale that cost becomes negligible. You can't produce physical products at scale without the cost also scaling proportionally.

Even in India, before Jio made its entry, data was extremely expensive. Horrible speeds, very low data limits and no competitive pricing (you can say that it was a data cartel of sorts). Jio disrupted the entire sector. All ISPs reduced prices overnight. How could they do it? Wouldn't it hit their bottom line? Nope! They never went into loss in the first place. They charged exorbitant rates because they could. Not because there was some basis for it. That monopoly was disrupted. That is all there is to it.

And with a billion+ people in the country, ISPs will never go under loss for selling data for few cents - a dollar. Rather, they are probably making more than they ever did. Jio showed them the way to price correctly.

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#40

Post by trianglem »

blueblisters wrote: post #23

India's female labor participation rate is 20%. In China, it's 60%. Smartphones can help bridge that gap a bit but real progress will probably come from creating safe, well-paying jobs.

That’s because you are not counting housekeeping and child rearing as essential labor which is inaccurate.
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