This video was made possible by Skillshare.
The first 1000 people to sign up can learn with Skillshare for their first 2 months for
only 99 cents.
This is Tuvalu.
You’re probably going to need to zoom in because Tuvalu is the forth smallest country
in the world by area and second smallest by population.
Only 10,000 people live there which is less than Kirksville, Missouri—a town who’s
main attraction is the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine.
Tuvalu lies about halfway between Sydney, Australia and Honolulu, Hawaii so it is isolated.
The main island stretches a mere 2,000 feet across at it’s widest and space is so limited
that, when not used for flights, the airport’s runway is used as a public park and gathering
place.
Tuvalu also has the lowest total GDP of any country worldwide.
Of course it doesn’t help that it’s the second least populous country and the least
populous country, the Vatican, literally has a bathtub worth two billion dollars, but the
overall gross domestic product of this country is a mere $32 million.
Just, for some reference, that’s less than the amount the US government spends on printing
each year.
Just to be more clear, that’s 85 times less than the amount the US government spends on
printing each year because the US government spends $2.7 billion on printing every year.
But that’s not the point.
The point is that Tuvalu is very small, very isolated, and very poor.
When you’re situated in the middle of the Pacific, it can be tough to make money.
A lot of other Pacific island countries rely on income from tourism, but it’s particularly
tough to get to Tuvalu.
Its airport only sees three flights a week from Nadi, Fiji and this 650 mile trip costs
about $800 round trip.
In metric that’s too damn much.
Auckland, the nearest large city, is also just as close to Antartica as it is to Tuvalu,
so, they make their money by killing…
fish that is.
Not only do 42% of Tuvaluans work in fishing, but the country also has an enormous exclusive
economic zone in which they have exclusive rights to resources so they sell fishing licenses
to foreign ships which provides a significant portion of the government income, but the
country’s most interesting source of income came to them entirely by chance.
If you remember Half as Interesting episode four, back before all my jokes became terrible,
I talked about the International Organization for Standardization which sets standards on
how to make tea among other things.
One of them is standard 3166 which defines two-letter codes for each and every country
so, for example, Japan got JP, Romania got RO, and Guatemala got GT, but then the internet
came around.
In an internet address, there is generally a third-level domain, a second-level domain,
and the top-level domain, which is what we’re interested in.
The top-level domain is the last part of a domain name such as .com, .org, .net, .gov,
etc.
Starting in 1985, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which assigns top-level domains
and has a pretty terrible website for the organization that basically runs the internet,
started creating top-level domains for specific countries and rather than just choosing codes
for each country, they took the ISO 3166 list and used the pre-set codes for each country,
and here’s where Tuvalu got really lucky.
Their code was “tv” and so their top-level domain was “.tv.”
As it turned out the internet did not fail like journalist Clifford Stoll predicted when
he wrote in 1995, “you can't tote [a] laptop to the beach.
Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books
and newspapers straight over the Internet.
Uh, sure.”
A few people even starting watching video on the internet and “.tv” was the perfect
top-level domain for new streaming sites and so Tuvalu starting selling domains.
Originally a company called DotTv bought the licensing rights for the .tv domain but in
2002 this company was acquired by Verisign which, aside from being a nightmare of a name
for dyslexics, is the registrar for a bunch of different top-level domains including .com,
.net, and now .tv.
It’s believed that the country of Tuvalu now receives $2-3 million per year from the
registration of different .tv domains.
Up until 2000, Tuvalu was not part of the United Nations but they joined after this
deal went through because they could finally afford the $100,000 joining fee.
The revenues from this domain now amount to almost 10% of the country’s GDP and have
been used to pay for crucial development in this tiny island country.
If you want to learn how to join the United Nations, Skillshare sort’ve has a class
for that.
They don’t have a course about how to get your country into the UN—that might be just
a bit too niche—but they do have a course about how to get a job at the UN.
It covers the application process, the skill assessments, the interview stage, and much
more, but if you want to learn something a little less practical, they also have courses
like how to solve a Rubik’s Cube by fellow YouTuber Mike Boyd.
What’s great about Skillshare is that they have over 18,000 classes so if you want to
learn something, there’s a good chance they have a course on it.
You can get started learning today with Skillshare by being one of the first 1,000 people to
sign up at skl.sh/hai7 and by doing so, you’ll receive two full months of learning for only
99 cents.