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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

#81

Post by sharadov »

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, I know economists use it all the time, but some goods are expensive and some are not across countries - food is cheap in India, there are massive subsidies around it. Anything imported is expensive - cars, electronics, foreign liquor. It's cheap and it's continuing to drop. And it's in no way $1.91 from an Indian perspective.

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

#82

Post by [deleted] »

mbg721 wrote: post #77
r00fus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more than that. I know many women who quit their well-paying jobs because societally in the US we have not fully socialized child rearing in a way that China has. e.g.: Our infrastructure and attitudes about kids transport is in dire need of refactoring.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. What about women who prefer to see their kids grow up rather than endlessly chase paychecks?

[deleted]

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

#83

Post by officeplant »

mbg721 wrote: post #77
r00fus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more than that. I know many women who quit their well-paying jobs because societally in the US we have not fully socialized child rearing in a way that China has. e.g.: Our infrastructure and attitudes about kids transport is in dire need of refactoring.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. What about women who prefer to see their kids grow up rather than endlessly chase paychecks?

What about dads who would like to do the same?

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

#84

Post by zdragnar »

_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.

If you are in range of cell towers, there is likely a 4g lye mvno offering decent speed internet.

I used https://www.ubifi.net/ for a year until I got fiber and was quite pleased with it. (No affiliation, i just gad a good experience).

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

#85

Post by iguy »

volgo wrote: post #78
iguy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems unlikely this 20% number implies that 80% of women are sitting at home drinking tea & looking after kids. Where is it from? Is this formal sector employment? IIRC the informal labor market is something like 80% of the country in total. Lots of people work in ways that are difficult to gather statistics about.

If you’ve visited India, you wouldn’t be surprised. Most women do stay home and take care of kids And it’s really hard work btw, cooking and looking after the house and kids. They’re definitely not just “sitting home and drinking tea.”

Yes I exaggerate slightly. But I wonder a lot about the quality of this data. Doesn't about half the country still work on farms? Low-tech farming has endless labor for all kinds of hands, but little paperwork.

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

#86

Post by mbg721 »

officeplant wrote: post #83
mbg721 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. What about women who prefer to see their kids grow up rather than endlessly chase paychecks?

What about dads who would like to do the same?

Plenty of families would benefit from dividing labor that way; the biggest (non-artificial) obstacle is probably the inertia from the realities of giving birth and breastfeeding.

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

#87

Post by JadeNB »

cosmie wrote: post #65
JadeNB wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They didn't come back and bury those? I have AT&T Fiber – the installer ran a line from the nearest fiber hut to my home (across several neighbors' yards and a storm water runoff/drainage area), and left it exposed. But a separate truck rolled through about a week later and microtrenched it, so it's buried all the way up to my house.

They're running from a tower to my roof, so they can't be buried. (I just relay what the installer told me; I don't know anything about the details.)

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

#88

Post by nexuist »

x3c wrote: post #12

More than the statistics, it's the stories that open your imagination to the unlock connectivity is bringing. Using WhatsApp to report timber theft is something I would never have guessed.

This is something I found amazing about WeChat as well. You can schedule appointments with barbers, doctors, physicians, etc all through custom interfaces implemented by 3rd party vendors within the app. It's kind of like its own operating system. And for all of the needs that aren't already covered, you can always resort to basic text messaging (again through WeChat). This probably covers 100% of business communications: customers talking to vendors, vendors talking to customers, and vendors talking to other vendors. The only thing missing as far as I know is a way to communicate with government entities to e.g. file paperwork and such. But I'm sure that will come in time.

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

#89

Post by iamgopal »

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…

Same, some evenings at home, five screens playing HD video is quite common scenario. Tons of video calling etc. Just three four years back, I had to beg to a local ISP to install cable, agreeing to absurd charges. Things are moving fast in india. Whole progress of next decade can be attributed to Jio.

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

#90

Post by iamgopal »

jagmal wrote: post #58
tchalla wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I believe it would be ~9 * 3.5(i.e. fx_rate/ppp)= ~31.5 cents and not 1.91 USD.

Only thing no one in the world can beat Indians at, is at calculating money cost and profits.
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