Re:Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of shippin...
by nradov on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:03AM
(#16132830)
This isn't really a matter of computers helping or not helping people. The issue is with the delivery service. They need some reliable way to find the right destination.
Re:Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of shippin...
by gumby on Friday January 12, 2018 @10:12AM
(#16133434)
My reading of the article is quite different from yours. The author writes,
> I can only tell you that I live in Kanyanya, a Kampala suburb. If you need my exact home, then I’ll either have to send you a GPS location via apps like Whatsapp, Telegram, Google Maps or engage you in a long phone conversation in which I’ll try to describe landmarks, building and trees leading to my house. But street address, zip code? Hell No.
And says that despite that, the web forms ask for nonsensical data. The right thing is for the delivery location validator to take GPS, phone number, list of landmarks, etc, canonicalize it as best it can, and send that info to the delivery company. Not try to fit the delivery info into some Procrustean form.
Re:Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of shippin...
by Leader2light on Friday January 12, 2018 @12:16PM
(#16134448)
That is all much more cost intensive. Think of a delivery guy trying to sort through all that crap. List of landmarks? What a joke.
The rigidity of street addresses is relatively new (within living memory)and was designed to accommodate a technological gap (paper maps, basically, and emergency services).
It’s more humane to let people specify things like addresses the way they want (my grandmother refused to kowtow to the imposition of numerical street addresses and continued to use her house name until the day she died).
This is like the Spanish Academy changing the alphabetic sorting rules in the 1990s because crufty PCs had trouble with ch and ll — and then shortly thereafter they became fast enough!