Thursday the Twitter community is coming together in cities all over the world to meet and have fun, and support a great international development cause called Charity:Water that works to solve what is arguably the world’s single most pressing problem – the lack of clean water for hundreds of millions of people all over the world.
Southern Oregon does not seem to have the critical mass needed for a Twestival event, but I’ll show my support with $100 donation to a great cause and my encouragement to others to chip in as well.
The really cool thing about this type of charity is that all the funds go to providing water and the ROI is very high compared to a lot of other good-but-relatively-low-ROI causes. Providing basic health to the developing world doesn’t just do some good, it … feels good too!
Joe Duck 
Well, I think Oregonians should be concerned about water quality in Oregon.
We looked into doing this on an individual basis at Christmas and discovered that it was beyond our budget at about $5K for a single site — but get 20 friends together and each person is in for $250, which is manageable. Get 50 people together and everyone is in for $100 and maybe you make some new friends. Interesting and actually social use of the social media.
Tommo I hope that approach of small chunk payments keeps working – I’m noticing that a lot of the young Silicon whippersnappers seem to prefer the “party for poverty” approaches and maybe this is ultimately going to be more effective than the older style “don’t you feel guilty for having so much” appeals on TV.
Fools Gold I know you are skeptical of the overseas development efforts but I’m tempted to say “yes, but it takes a global village”
[INCOMING!?]
Fools Gold what do you see as a reasonable way to “draw the line” between helping locals and helping foreigners?
I’d help family and friends before others (in fact I’d suggest we are evolutionarily programmed to do this because the survival value is so great). However I don’t see any easy way to make a solid rational distinction between helping a poor street guy in New York and a poor kid in Sub-Saharan Africa. It seems the most rational way to allocate help is by using some sort of ROI measure like “years of life saved per dollar spent”.
Build nuclear power plants in all coastal areas with desalination plants.
Fixes everything…cheap electricity, good clean water and battles the impending doom of the rising seas from Al Gore’s GW!
Also creates lots of jobs and helps countries stop their need for foreign oil.
What could be smarter?
Years of life saved…
Sounds good. Perhaps you might want to take a look at some of the measures of QUALITY of life that we use here in the USA for making medical ethics decisions and consider the QUALITY of life of someone in a third world nation.
One journalist commented long ago that a Dead Dog in Brooklyn is more newsworthy than a Civil War in China.
I know others are often of different opinions.
Glenn: Agree in principle with moving ASAP to massive nuke power, but the cost is still totally prohibitive for the places where they need the clean water. In fact I predict that in about 50 years we’ll have a massive global nuclear power infrastructure and people will be saying “what the HELL were they thinking back then!”
FoolsGold I want to think about that – it’s an interesting idea to bring quality into the equation even though my first reaction is that it sets a dangerous precedent that allows a lot of unreasonable triage – e.g. you cut loose the starving Congo kid because “his life would be crappy anyway”. Of course we do this quality adjustment already indirectly all over the place. e.g. Far blood and treasure is spent protecting my kids than kids in Africa. Here’s some interesting detail about that approach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QALY
One journalist commented long ago that a Dead Dog in Brooklyn is more newsworthy than a Civil War in China
Surely he was being cynical though. News isn’t news anymore, it’s “interesting stuff” that brings in viewers.
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