Doing good things

(Extracted from http://wiki.mindcloud.org/wiki/Doing_good_things ;-D)

There are lots of ways to do good in the world. By "good", I mean actions that have some sort of beneficial effect on people who are in a bad way, dying, diseased, under threat of violence or murder, dispossessed, or just plain down on there luck. Some ways are indirect, some ways are very direct. Some ways are effective, some ways pretty much useless.

On this page shall be a small, and perhaps growing, list programmes, schemes or scams from around the place that try to do some sort of "good" in the world.

To begin with, the programmes listed will be classified into two different categories: Indirect and Direct. And of course being on Mindcloud, these categories are open to discussion, elaboration or change of any sort.

Good things are either direct, where good means good, or indirect, where good means Generally Oblivious to Objective Discourse.


Contents

Direct

At this stage means any thing that tries to create a change for "good" through direct actions or direct financial investment by/from individuals and organisations. Also the individual/organisation involved must have a considerable amount of control of or ifluence over the final outcomes, such as how the money is spent or where and when action takes place.



Indirect

FreeRice

FreeRice is a seemingly novel website whereby you can play an online word game to increase your vocabulary, and help the worlds poor.

As you play the word game, advertisements from sponsors are displayed on the same page, and money raised from the advertisement is donated to the to the United Nations World Food Program, to purchase rice. For each click of a correct word in the word game, the user apparently generates 10 grains of rice to be donated. Since it began on October 7th 2007, FreeRice claims to have donated 3,256,135,000 grains of rice between then and November 21st 2007.

"That's a hell of a lot of itty bitty bits of rice", one might say.

Things to wonder about FreeRice

Memorable quotes from the Interweb about FreeRice

This is such an amazing idea. There is some amazing work being done with such a small cost.
I saved more lives than you did...
Even if this is bullshit and it doesn't benefit anyone, at least you get to increase your vocabulary...
Since when did mouse clicking become social activism? I swear, today's generation is so damn lazy. If you really want to make a difference, why don't you go out and volunteer? Or send some money to Doctors Without Borders?
I can picture it now...
Hungry Child: I'm almost too weak to speak, sir, but have the rice shipments arrived yet?
U.N. Representative: I'm sorry, young man, but people in English-speaking developed countries have either not found our Web site, or have a terribly poor vocabulary. Until those greedy pigs start learning more words, you will have to go to bed hungry.
Hungry Child: (arms outstretched and teary-eyed) Oh, please! Please, rich neighbors! Please read your dictionaries lest we all starve! Only your dearth of vocabulary is stopping the flow of rice! Please help us!

to be continued

Analysis on costs, expenditure, donations and FreeRice revenue

Limitations and rampant speculation

As there seems to be no definitive information on economics involved in the FreeRice operation, there has been much speculation.

Rampant speculation abounds, with some believing that the revenue of the FreeRice site ranges between $7000 to up to $150,000 (United States Dollars) per day! As well as people referencing wiki's with dead reference links for the figures for their calculations, acting like wiki's might even be some sort of reliable source of accurate information. Utter madness!

Much of the problem of course stems from the fact that FreeRice financial reports do not seem to be available for public perusal, so we just don't yet know how much they are making and how much they are giving away. It is also difficult to find precise World Food Program figures on how much they are getting from exact contributors and the costs involved in purchasing, distributing, transporting, administering programs and every other imaginable cost that might be involved in getting and distributing food aid in the UN World Food Program.

Despite this, it should still be possible to estimate reasonably accurate upper and lower limits of the costs involved etc., and deducing likely possibilities from there

Dr. Boy's Half Arsed Analysis

I thought I would do a quick summation of two methods of sending rice to starving people.

Method A:Freerice

I'm no English major but I'd say that my knowledge of the English language is above average, and with this in mind I felt I would make a good test subject for gathering rice for the starving children. I went and grabbed my oversized blue shaded glasses and threw on some U2 as I was about to go pro-Bono. Here are the facts: 

Time spent gathering rice: 247 seconds (4 minutes 7 seconds)

Grains reaped: 500

I used 20mg as the mass of a single grain, which seems to be in the middle ground of estimates 123. If rice was all someone were to eat in a day then I think perhaps 300grams is a reasonable estimate for a days starvation ration.

Hence; 

number of grains needed for provision = 300/0.02 = 15000

grains per minute for Dr. Boy = (500/247)x60 = 121.45

number of minutes needed per provision = 15000/121.45 = 123.5 minutes

So there you have it, it takes as little as two hours of non-stop work to feed one hungry person an unsubstantial amount of food which comprises no vitamins and very little protein.

Method B:Hippy gets a job

With the economy the way it is almost anyone can get a job at the moment and expect to be paid about $15 an hour. Why not get a job and then send the money to a charity who will buy rice for the needy. According to the Journal of Humanitarian Assistance the February 2007 WFP budget for food aid in Uganda was budgeted at a total of $411m (USD). The breakdown of which is $187m in food costs, $51m in external transport and $105m in storage and handling. I'm assuming $68m in other costs. 

percentage donation which is made into rice = (187/411)x100 = 45.49%

cost of a 10kg bag of rice = $10.77

Cost of rice taken from Woolworths online shopping, for which I gave an inner city Sydney postcode (2006). this is a link, I think. Also, this price includes delivery to a house in Sydney, I'd say you could get it much cheaper if you bought in larger quantities than one kilo and didn't ship it from Thailand to Sydney and then again to the starving children, hence this is a generously large dollar value for the rice. 

Assumed shit wage of $12 an hour

Wages for two hours = $24

If we assume that money is sent to an aid agency with similar cost considerations as the Ugandan one then: 

Amount turned into food after distribution and other costs = 24 x 0.4549 = $10.9176

Amount of rice purchased = 10.917/10.77 = approximately one kilogram

Indeed it seems one could feed more than three times the starving children if they shut the fuck up and got a job.

Dr. Boy's thoughts on the economic implications

Nothing is free. Everything must be bought or sold at a price. If buyers hit the market, prices respond to the demand by increasing. When you buy large quantities of rice without an corresponding increase in supply then the price of rice increases. As you fill the stomachs of the starving, other people are priced out of the market by the increase in price, hence simply buying rice to give to people will only make other people starve by proxy. The only way to make a real difference is to invest in supply.

Current total of donations

At the time of writing on 11th of December 2007 free rice has donated 7,536,669,470 grains of rice. At 20mg per grain this comes to a total of 150.7 metric tonnes of rice. Per day donations for December (info only given until the 9th) so far have averaged approximately 4.95 tonnes of rice a day. This is pretty good and much better than I anticipated, there was a significant drop on the 8th and 9th but this is likely the effect of people having shit to do on the weekend. I would like more detailed information but unfortunately the best I can get is the source.

References

(FreeRice related)

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