Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[RedKing]

Friend of mine in Cameroon just got a water filtration system up and running at an orphanage today.
Total cost: about $35, built mostly out of local supplies. She even had enough left over to buy new mattresses.
Effects: The kids have clean drinking water, probably for the first time in their lives. I.e. less parasites, infections, deaths from dysentary, etc.

What group does your friend work with?

http://www.thehumanityexchange.org/ (and no, she's not the one featured on their main page, who is also in Cameroon)

The group honestly seem more like a "eco-tourism"/"development tourism" type group, to be honest. Very little financial backing and little entrenched presence. Most of what she's doing there right now, she's doing with money donated from friends and family rather than NGO money.

But I've other friends and former classmates who work for groups like OxFam and Medecins Sans Frontieres, and some refugee relief orgs.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

SirP: I could spend the next few hours digging up charts of gains in literacy rates, infant mortality rates, life expectancies, etc. in scores of countries in the last 50 years and show how these came about through the assistance of NGO's. But frankly, you're not worth it. You wanna be that guy who is fashionably cyncial and dismissive about 'brown people countries', go right ahead. I'll be with the thousands of uncool, naive schmucks who spend their lives working in the belief that things can get better.

Yes, that's why I'm advocating instead spending those resources on urban renewal, housing, soup kitchens, and education, rather than wasting a massive portion of said resources carting supplies and labor across the goddamn world, to accomplish only the most trivial and ephemeral of benefits.

Friend of mine in Cameroon just got a water filtration system up and running at an orphanage today.
Total cost: about $35, built mostly out of local supplies. She even had enough left over to buy new mattresses.
Effects: The kids have clean drinking water, probably for the first time in their lives. I.e. less parasites, infections, deaths from dysentary, etc.

Wasted money?

How much did it cost for your friend to get there in the first place? How much labor went into setting it up? How much does it cost for that labor to keep living there? What were the actual infection rates prior, and how much of a reduction will a single filtration system manage to cause?

In the end you're looking at far greater costs than you're trying to pass it off as, to accomplish a minor benefit for a very tiny number of people, who will still lead pretty shitty lives due to all the other problems that have absolutely nothing to do with potentially contaminated water.

As I said, it accomplishes nothing but giving you a false sense of satisfaction.

[Puzzlemaker]

The world is built on little things.  There is no reason to stop trying because the grain you dropped into the pile didn't make a mountain.

[Nikov]

The world is built on little things.  There is no reason to stop trying because the grain you dropped into the pile didn't make a mountain.

[/win]

[DJ]

If you really want to help those people, bullets are really cheap. Putting them out of their misery would be doing them a favour since their lived are so shitty

[RedKing]

SirP: I could spend the next few hours digging up charts of gains in literacy rates, infant mortality rates, life expectancies, etc. in scores of countries in the last 50 years and show how these came about through the assistance of NGO's. But frankly, you're not worth it. You wanna be that guy who is fashionably cyncial and dismissive about 'brown people countries', go right ahead. I'll be with the thousands of uncool, naive schmucks who spend their lives working in the belief that things can get better.

Yes, that's why I'm advocating instead spending those resources on urban renewal, housing, soup kitchens, and education, rather than wasting a massive portion of said resources carting supplies and labor across the goddamn world, to accomplish only the most trivial and ephemeral of benefits.

Friend of mine in Cameroon just got a water filtration system up and running at an orphanage today.
Total cost: about $35, built mostly out of local supplies. She even had enough left over to buy new mattresses.
Effects: The kids have clean drinking water, probably for the first time in their lives. I.e. less parasites, infections, deaths from dysentary, etc.

Wasted money?

How much did it cost for your friend to get there in the first place? How much labor went into setting it up? How much does it cost for that labor to keep living there? What were the actual infection rates prior, and how much of a reduction will a single filtration system manage to cause?

In the end you're looking at far greater costs than you're trying to pass it off as, to accomplish a minor benefit for a very tiny number of people, who will still lead pretty shitty lives due to all the other problems that have absolutely nothing to do with potentially contaminated water.

As I said, it accomplishes nothing but giving you a false sense of satisfaction.

DJ's right. We're all dead in the end, so what's the point of anything, by your logic?
Maybe she's just Sisyphus rolling the stone up the hill, but AT LEAST SHE'S TRYING.

What have *you* done lately? Seriously, just take your cynicism and f**k off.

[Zangi]

Can make for an interesting vacation.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

Do you not have any sense of scale? You're endorsing pissing resources away to accomplish only the most insignificant of things, instead of focusing them on problems that can actually be solved, and which actually effect us? This is specifically what I'm talking about: they make you feel like you've actually done something important, when you've done nothing at all.

[DJ]

And who died and made you the ultimate authority on importance of problems? IMO people at home need help less simply by the virtue of living in America, they have the option of bettering their position through work, unlike people in Africa. I also think that improving condition in 3rd world would go a long way towards lessening certain domestic issues, such as illegal immigration or international terrorism.

[Nadaka]

Do you not have any sense of scale? You're endorsing pissing resources away to accomplish only the most insignificant of things, instead of focusing them on problems that can actually be solved, and which actually effect us? This is specifically what I'm talking about: they make you feel like you've actually done something important, when you've done nothing at all.

Even when there are a billions with lives that need improving, improving the lives of dozens or hundreds of people is not doing nothing. Its a drop in the bucket, but it isn't nothing. The only people with the wealth and power to make a difference on a scale that will be significant are billionaires and heads of state. Everyone else just makes a difference one drop at a time.

[Duke 2.0]

http://blogs.aljazeera.net/africa/2011/02/22/live-blog-libya-feb-23

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose security forces crushed protests against him in 2009, condemned state brutality against protesters in Libya. He said on Wednesday:
 "How can a leader subject his own people to a shower of machine-guns, tanks and bombs? How can a leader bomb his own people, and afterwards say 'I will kill anyone who says anything?'

 Still better than most the stuff Qaddafi was saying. It's almost like he was trying to filibuster the revolution.

[RedKing]

http://blogs.aljazeera.net/africa/2011/02/22/live-blog-libya-feb-23

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose security forces crushed protests against him in 2009, condemned state brutality against protesters in Libya. He said on Wednesday:
 "How can a leader subject his own people to a shower of machine-guns, tanks and bombs? How can a leader bomb his own people, and afterwards say 'I will kill anyone who says anything?'

 Still better than most the stuff Qaddafi was saying. It's almost like he was trying to filibuster the revolution.

Yeah, I saw that too. You know you've fucked up when Ahmadinejad is lecturing you about the treatment of your own people. Next up, Kim Jong-Il will be like, "I might torture and starve and brainwash my people, but dude....BOMBING them?"

[Sir Pseudonymous]

Do you not have any sense of scale? You're endorsing pissing resources away to accomplish only the most insignificant of things, instead of focusing them on problems that can actually be solved, and which actually effect us? This is specifically what I'm talking about: they make you feel like you've actually done something important, when you've done nothing at all.

Even when there are a billions with lives that need improving, improving the lives of dozens or hundreds of people is not doing nothing. Its a drop in the bucket, but it isn't nothing. The only people with the wealth and power to make a difference on a scale that will be significant are billionaires and heads of state. Everyone else just makes a difference one drop at a time.

I object to pissing away resources to have a negligible impact on a population that is wholly irrelevant to the rest of the world, when the sum of those resources could meaningfully improve the lives of the poorest Americans, which effects everyone in the country. Improve education and healthcare, work to create jobs in impoverished areas, or create opportunities for people to leave those areas, and you have a larger educated workforce and consumer base, and you eliminate the kind of situation that damns generation after generation to poverty, breeding crime and decay. Focus on one problem at a time, starting with the ones that can actually be fixed.

[Sowelu]

No one in this thread wants to hear your opinion.

Just saying.

[RedKing]

As I said above,

Y'know....there's being a devil's advocate, and there's being a contrarian just to be a contrarian. And then there's just being a dick.

Guess which one you're being.