Money Makes Some Worlds Go Round…
Money, green, dough, loot- they all refer to one thing, Money. We teenagers may make a little off of rackets or part time jobs, but we are mostly supplied this vital resource by our parents. Adults such as our parents are the breadwinners, they work for and earn money, for themselves, their family, their wants, the future. Governments require their citizens to pay taxes in multiple forms such as (in the Philippines) income tax, property tax, real estate tax, (expanded) value added tax and so and so. These taxes are suppose to return to the people who paid them in service and maintenance or national improvements. Improvements like new roadways, facilities for trade, security, tourism, healthcare and the like, power plants and telecommunications facilities to name a few.
The Flat World is Fueled by Servers, PCs, Users, and Whatever the former ones need: Users are easy to find, just look around and you’ll see hundreds of them. Filipinos, Americans, Chinese, Africans- Poor, Middle Class, Wealthy- Students, Workers, Professionals, Senior Citizens, they can all learn to use the internet given the opportunity and the hardware necessary for the internet. PCs and servers are where things get messy. Computers are getting cheaper, but you can’t exactly call a PhP 40,000 – PhP 100,000 (USD 800 – USD 2000) investments on a personal desktop computer cheap. Of course the legacy models are available, making it even more enticing to invest in a PC for the home. But all good things come to an end one you plug it in and turn it on, most PCs can’t be considers a well-oiled machine. Along with servers, they break, they error, they beep, they whine and they drink power in gulps. Maintenance costs, power bills and peripherals, they all need that same vital resource- Money.
The sea of wiring beneath or behind your dest goes on for miles: Connected everything to the CPU? Wired everything in? Got that trusty DSL/Cable/Phone wire connected into the modem? Then you’re good ,right? You can now connect to the internet! Wrong. You can have all that but the internet isn’t the internet if it’s just you. You have that trusty net cable hooked up to something outside you’re house. Those wires merge into bigger wires that go around the city carrying data from phone calls to downloads. They reach sophisticated switch stations sending, receiving and resending the data to where it needs to go. Your internet data goes to servers ,which are interlinked with other servers to give you that website or download you’re trying to get, through fiber optic cables sewing their way beneath the ocean waters. You see the equipment required? It’s expensive. Deep-sea cables, wire networks, switch stations, they’re all expensive. All to get little bits and bytes going around the world at (supposedly) speeds beyond comprehension. Governments aren’t always prepared to shell out the cash necessary cash for those hardware. They do have higher priorities than giving people a cheap solution to access the internet. I can’t exactly blame them, but development can be faster.
Development is Key: Development is an awesome thing. You raise the standards of living. You get a “better quality country”. Well, development can’t happen if nobody is working for that goal. The Philippine government is making moves to increase the rate of our development. Currently, it’s slow but it seems to be steady. I honestly think that the internet will speed up this development process. The flat world is flat because people from any race and any place can go meet and share ideas on equal terms. They can work on it and make something out of it. People can buy and sell, making an online economy of purchases and sales. People post their opinions and stories on blogs and sites, some are even paid for their award winning blogs.
-Jonathan Elevazo
You have your pros, you’ve also got your cons. I’m not one to be all visionary-like and go proclaiming and stating possible solutions to the world driven madly by cash. But some of us may be– tell us what you think! We may post on it 
