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Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

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Re: Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

#211

Post by afroboy »

sammy2255 wrote: post #137
madradavid wrote: post #126

I am Ugandan. I've shipped electronics and Laptops for Work quite a bit, and OP is right, the system is broken, it stays this way because a lot of corrupt individuals benefit from this mess. However, OP showed a degree of Hubris here, a mistake lots of us make when dealing with foreign countries, just because it works this way here, so it should work that way in XYZ. OP would have saved themselves lots of time and mo…

[flagged]

Pretty sure they still to choose to be free people with this situation better than getting their mails frictionlessly and ruled by british barbarians.

Re: Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

#212

Post by owebmaster »

imtringued wrote: post #208
x3ro wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the "barbarians" couldn't possibly manage delivering a packet by themselves, after having their country looted for centuries (ongoing). There's no doubt this laptop would've been delivered frictionlessly if Uganda had never suffered under colonial rule :) And who knows what the UK would be like..

>after having their country looted for centuries (ongoing). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orania >The town was founded with the goal of creating a white ethnostate for the Afrikaner minority group, the Afrikaans language and the Afrikaner culture through the creation of an Afrikaner state known as a Volkstaat. >All jobs, from management to manual labour, are done by Afrikaners; non-Afrikaner people are not allowed to…

What your opinion about the reverse colonization - immigration?

Re: Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

#213

Post by imtringued »

solidasparagus wrote: post #72
fvdessen wrote: post #24

I help a good friend run a small business in Africa, and this story is exactly why, every time I go visit, I fill my luggage with stuff she needs. Laptops, car engine turbos, espresso machines, fryers, bottles of shampoo, printers, anything. The cheapest and most reliable way to deliver things there is to take a plane yourself and carry the things with you. This whole mess is why, despite being a poor continent, the…

The NGO delivery channels are privileged because they are charitable. That's why they get to bypass the country's restrictions. You can't open that channel up, the country would object at humanitarian exemptions being used as a backdoor for commercial imports.

If you read the article you would know that the problem wasn't finding the money to pay import duties (or the delivermen), the problem was not being allowed to give them the money in the first place and the sheer informality of the logistics infrastructure.

Re: Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

#214

Post by [deleted] »

true_religion wrote: post #68
elmomle wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably, just to leave them alone, neither exploiting nor trying to "help". It sucks and it hurts, but outside interference does not seem to help a society heal itself. This has been argued by more informed people than myself-- https://www.uvm.edu/~jashman/CDAE195_ESCI375/To%20Hell%20wit...

That’s true in order to truly change a society you have to no longer be an outsider, but that’s a level of entanglement that NGOs rarely do now adays. The ones that do it though are all religious institutions so their goals are more social/moral rather than economic or geopolitical.

[deleted]

Re: Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

#215

Post by mikepurvis »

rexpop wrote: post #118
mikepurvis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but what I've decided works for me personally is supporting a handful of hyper-focused charities that run very lean in terms of western staff and employ local skilled labour. One example is the Canadian charity One4Another which performs surgeries to reverse some common birth defects in kids and babies in Uganda. They're not trying to feed the world, they're not interfering wi…

OP is talking about corrupt officials, not charity workers, so how does "running lean" evade or obviate corruption? Edit: my point is just that bribery and blackmail aren't the same as Global Northerners treating charities as synecures.

Yes, fair, maybe it doesn't. But I think several factors do work in favour of the smaller organization in terms of it being a smaller target, having the operation based more on local relationships and trust networks, and being accountable for an overall smaller budget— it's harder to ignore 10k in bribes of if it's only half a million or so per year coming in from the west.

Anyway as I say it's not everything but I thought it seemed relevant to the GP post talking about NGOs and charity efficiency.

Re: Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

#216

Post by Aachen »

IshKebab wrote: post #205
oefrha wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, how the hell can Australia Post charge you the full AUD 111.60 for a failed shipment when it seems to be the fault of the clerk who approved the shipment against their own rules? And sounds like the package didn’t even leave Australia so even if you should pay for the full mileage it would be 20% at most?

Seems like it's the fault of the author for blindly trusting AI...

I couldn't tell if the screenshot was from an LLM or the post office's website. It sure looks like what a post office would say so I'm inclined to think that's not autogenerated. A total ban on anything containing lithium batteries, as the company claimed when returning the shipment, seems wrong as well. We receive laptops from customers for doing pentests all the time, for example. Australians could never order a phone or earbuds that didn't already make it into Australia via another shipping company. Etc. Why'd they forego all that custom? How many electronics nowadays don't have such a battery? This doesn't sound to me like it was only GPT spewing nonsense

But yeah I had the same question: OP said that ChatGPT initially produced words that turned out to be sensible, but not where that later screenshot came from

Re: Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

#217

Post by Aachen »

prepend wrote: post #7

The most amazing thing about my travels in Africa, specifically Uganda, is that things I would never expect to work, work. The people are so innovative and resourceful that I think things that would be scams (handing a laptop to a stranger to hold) are pretty common and work. Also makes me grateful to live in a developed nation where we can take shipping for granted.

> things that would be scams (handing a laptop to a stranger to hold) are pretty common and work.

You don't think the "friend" of this hardware shop owner wanted to see if someone manages to track it down to that holding place before nicking the parcel? Plausible deniability at every step: the shop owner didn't know (might get a cut but you don't know that), the deliverer can say they just didn't have time to come for it and deliver it yet, and only by Django tracking it down, did it make it to him

Re: Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

#218

Post by skydhash »

prepend wrote: post #7

The most amazing thing about my travels in Africa, specifically Uganda, is that things I would never expect to work, work. The people are so innovative and resourceful that I think things that would be scams (handing a laptop to a stranger to hold) are pretty common and work. Also makes me grateful to live in a developed nation where we can take shipping for granted.

When laws and contract don’t work well, it’s all about reputation. After a while, everything becomes a network of friends and businesses with reputation to lose.
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