Sometimes I feel like getting the hell out of my country

What are our leaders, a bunch of lazy, irresponsible idiots?

Or what?

Do people get the governments they deserve? I think that saying is false, an excuse to lull us to sleep.

Chile will not buy the 100-dollar laptops.

And here I was, having listened with satisfaction to the people from the Cámara Nacional de Comercio telling how they had arranged Negroponte’s meeting with these !"#!"%#/!"#%/!

Let me remind you that financing this campaign costs us nothing, but since the people who work in government only show up to warm their seats, let me remind you how: 2 days of school subsidy.

The worst part is the reasons. Thanks to Huasonic for letting us know.

I reproduce the reasons as reported by the site NoticiasDot. .

Clearly the bureaucrasses didn’t do their homework, they didn’t even have a clue how the project works, and on top of that they want us to vote for them again? Why don’t we vote them out instead? Will Michelle be able to save us?

The reasons

“The first batch of computers from Negroponte’s project is going to be delivered between December 2006 and January 2007, so it would be utopian to commit to a number of computers that don’t exist today”, the National Director of Enlaces, Hugo Martínez, told Mouse.cl, explaining why Chile will not join the project right away.

“On the other hand, we think the fundamental thing is to move faster on testing the conditions for implementing this project. Hardware development is in any case going to bring down the cost of the laptops, but the questions have to do with their pedagogical use, with the content and with the kind of interactions that will take place”, Martínez explained.

Along these lines, the Director of Enlaces said that “we offered Doctor Negroponte that we are in a position to test and contribute the knowledge we obtain -in order to implement this in Latin America- through trials to be carried out next year in a group of schools where notebooks will be handed out to all students”.

This would also make it possible “to test how it works and whether we are in a position to roll out the 100-dollar computers on a mass scale once it’s clear how much they are going to cost, when they are going to be distributed and how they can be purchased”, Martínez added.

The Government’s representative said it is also necessary to first review a series of administrative formalities, “because the ministry certainly doesn’t buy by hand-picking a supplier, and we would have to find representatives in Chile, people to take charge of distribution and after-sales service”.

“There are complexities, not minor ones, that could even be harmful to the local vendor, if we don’t design properly the formula by which the Ministry buys a machine that doesn’t arrive through the traditional channels, he concluded.