The 2011 budget presented by South African finance minister Pravin Gordhan includes a R450 million item to implement a national broadband strategy. This money is misdirected. I explain why, and offer a compromise alternative, over at ITWeb: Throwing good money after bad.

Mobile money has never really taken off in South Africa, despite several attempts at it. There are reasons aplenty for this, so the quesiton now is whether the latest entrant to the market, Vodacom M-Pesa, be the breakthrough? I’m hopeful, but sceptical. Will M-Pesa also fail?

ICASA, the South African telecommunications regulator, has cancelled a proposed auction of radio frequency spectrum, in bands which would have been useful for wireless broadband services. Its reasons? It can’t decide what technology to dictate, among others. What a mess. Here’s my take, published at ITWeb yesterday: Just sell it already!

Three articles published this week, on wildly varying subjects.

The first, a column in which I argue that the right to strike amounts to legalised blackmail, and it needs to be balanced with the right to fire. It sparked some interesting discussion in the comments over at The Daily Maverick.

Then, I wrote a piece about a local employer who had built a flat for his Malawian foreman, who refers to it as his “asylum” from xenophobic threats to his life. It was published by the Christian Science Monitor.

And finally, this morning, I woke to the news that the South African IT company that I most closely followed during my time as a technology reporter was to be sold to Japan’s NTT. My thoughts on the Dimension Data deal published at ITWeb. For once, I have reason to be nice to the company that was the butt of so many jokes over the years.

Thanks for all the comments on the orange dress. Time for a return to normality, now that the World Cup (and therewith the Boycott FIFA series of columns) is over.

In the first of two comparisons that seemed apt for FIFA president Sepp Blatter, my recent ITWeb column considers his Luddite resistance to simple and effective technology that would improve refereeing and get us to talk about the game instead of about controversial decisions. Read more: King Ludd Blatter

Here’s a round-up my latest columns and articles:

The bonsai economy, on The Daily Maverick, prompted by president Zuma’s promises of tighter labour law in his May Day speeches.

The death of an industry, on ITWeb, which celebrates the coming demise of a telecoms sector (least-cost routing) that existed merely because of a temporary market inefficiency.

South Africans rock Texas, which appeared in print in Brainstorm magazine, and contains a detailed report-back from our trip to South by South West, including some pretty cool notes on technology in Africa.

I trust you’ll enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Our new communications minister, General Surprise (or rather, General Disappointment), went to visit Cuba, to escape the sordid media coverage he is getting back home. He wants South Africa and Cuba to share technology expertise. This warranted a little rant on ITWeb: Cuba veneration survives Poison Ivy.

After the frisson of a new Apple launch wears off, the reality is more prosaic. So it is with the Apple iPad, which has many faults beyond merely its unfortunate name. Here’s my ITWeb column on the subject.

Here’s a column based on the talk I gave at the amazing gathering of splendid people known as GeekRetreat last weekend. It argues that the most important hurdle to a universal online and mobile payment system that serves all South Africans is one law, namely the law against deposit-taking by non-banks.

Also published this week, a report on GeekRetreat for TechCentral, with details on two of the technology ideas that emerged.

As of this week, I will be writing a weekly column on technology and telecommunications for old friends at ITWeb — a top technology news site in South Africa with readership that slightly exceeds that of this blog, albeit by only a few orders of magnitude. The idea is to comment on issues that come up in ITWeb news stories, through my usual political or economic policy lens. It will initially be published on Thursdays. I’ll still write a separate monthly column, “Backbite & Sneerwell”, in Brainstorm magazine (link for subscribers). After all, it dates back to 2001, and is my longest-running effort at commentary. I will also continue to write columns on topics other than technology in Maverick magazine.

Last week I wrote a trial run for the new column, on the monstrously bad idea of having the state establish a local set-top box industry for digital television because “we’re loathe to rely on foreign suppliers”. This week, The Spike proper begins, with a final stab at one of cabinet’s most deserving members, Poison Ivy.

I have long been skeptical of Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project. Not because I think selling cheap computers to poor people is a bad idea — I think that’s a brilliant idea. But because Negroponte’s non-profit whines endlessly that poor people don’t buy it, that poor governments won’t buy it for them, and that other companies have the temerity to try to sell competing products for profit. As if that makes a cheap laptop any less valuable.

His protest went something along the lines of: it’s not about the kit, it’s about education, and only the pure-of-heart, i.e. we, care about that. Intel and Asus and all those corporate scumbags are just trying to undermine my noble vision and prevent me reaching economies of scale.

Now, one ex-employee is calling Negroponte’s bluff. When Ivan Krstić resigned, he said only that, “OLPC undertook a drastic internal restructuring coupled with what, despite official claims to the contrary, is a radical change in its goals and vision from those that were shared with me when I was invited to join the project.”

But this past week, he explained just how drastic that change really was. In a long blog post mourning the faded glory of the OLPC, Krstić writes that the project is all about the kit, after all. It’s not about education. It’s about selling lots of cheap laptops. Negroponte couldn’t beat the corporate scumbags, so he’s joining them under the cover of his noble vision.

Quotes El Reg:

“I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward,” writes Krstić.

“Nicholas’ new OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on their home turf, and by using the one strategy we know doesn’t work.”

Now perhaps Krstić is exaggerating. Perhaps he’s just appalled that the project backtracked on a “clarification” made last year, and just did a deal to offer Windows on the machine, with Negroponte going so far as calling it “key to the OLPC philosophy”.

I can see how this might annoy people involved with the open-source project. Maybe he’s just a bitter liar with an axe to grind. But his story confirms, in uncanny fashion, what I thought I read between Negroponte’s lines last year.

If you’re going to diss the profit motive, have the courage of your convictions, and the honesty or your vision. If a not-for-profit can’t compete with for-profit companies, it clearly isn’t delivering anything anyone needs or cares about. Which means that it only swindles cash out of the gullible with sweet-sounding lies, and exploits the poor to do so. OLPC wouldn’t be the first non-profit to demonstrate why, for all their noble intentions, so few deliver on the reasonable expectations of trusting donors and needy beneficiaries.

Hey kids, how’s it feel to be unpaid advertising execs for Negroponte’s neo-colonialist ego trip?

Shock. Horror. SMS messages are more expensive than data transmission from the Hubble Space Telescope. So says a scientist at the University of Leicester.

Problem is, academics are often surprisingly ignorant of economics, whether in theory or in practice. This — and the fact that most haven’t ever worked for a private firm in the real world — may explain the appeal of radical-left politics among university faculties across the world.

This fellow, probably an excellent scientist, is an excellent example. He doesn’t recognise as simple fact that price has no relation to cost. None whatsoever. You cannot derive price from cost, nor infer cost from price. Impossible, unless the price is regulated.

(The scientists at physorg.com don’t know much about writing headlines, either, but we can let that slide since they don’t presume to write media analysis.)

Space scientist says texting is four times more expensive than receiving scientific data from space

A University of Leicester space scientist has worked out that sending texts via mobile phones works out to be far more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Dr Nigel Bannister’s calculations were used for the Channel 4 Dispatches programme “The Mobile Phone Rip-Off”.

He worked out the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble — and compared that with the 5p cost of sending a text.

He said: “The bottom line is texting is at least 4 times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that.”

He went on to explain that text messages comprise 140 bytes, which is £374.49 per megabyte.

He concludes: “Hubble is by no means a cheap mission — but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical!”

Undoubtedly. We’ll let that pun slide too, but note that he’s not exactly comparing apples with apples, is he? My PC is also more powerful and expensive than the computer that drives the Hubble. Does that mean… what does that mean?

As Dr Bannister points out, data transmission from Hubble is measured in megabytes. Text messages are very many individual small messages, that have to be routed around the network separately. A similar comparison will find that internet access is vastly cheaper, per byte, than text messages, and that comparison likewise misses the point completely.

It may well be true that text messages are a ripoff. But a comparison with Hubble transmissions doesn’t make the point.

Price is simply an agreement between two people on the subjective value to one party of something the other has. If something cost me nothing to acquire, and has no real inherent value, but I then sell it at auction, did I rip anyone off? If item one cost me a million, but I can’t sell it for more than a hundred bucks, am I being ripped off? If identical item two cost me ten bucks, but I sell it for a hundred, are the tables now turned? Cost is one decision factor (of many) for a seller, because the seller may want to cover it, as one condition of agreeing to a transaction at a given price. Knowing the cost might also be a decision factor for the buyer, because he may choose to procure or produce the services or goods himself if he thinks that doing so will have more value. But cost is not, it is never, the basis or justification for a price in a free market. “Cost-plus” is a regulatory abomination, not a means by which price is discovered in a free market. And finally, there’s no such thing as a “fair” or “unfair” profit. By definition, in a voluntary exchange, the profit is fair no matter how high or low it is, otherwise the exchange wouldn’t have taken place.

If you think text messaging is too expensive, well, then don’t use it. Set up an alternative. Use instant messaging. Use voice. Stop waffling at your victims friends during movies or sports games. If you use text messaging, you’ve implicitly agreed that the price of a message is fair. Until operators can’t sell enough volumes there’s no reason, financial or moral, to reduce the price.

Instead of deploring the people who make commercial choices of which he disapproves, perhaps our scientist friend should express his gratitude to the involuntary payers of the tax that permits academics, sans economic nous, to download data cheaply from Hubble. And he might note that looking up the etymology of “nous” is pretty cheap, unless you prefer to buy a real, paper dictionary, or you choose to query an online version using text messaging.