Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Every three seconds

Posted by Michael at 11:07 AM

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

And how often does the world lose an adult? Or does a human life become worthless once it's survived the first 18 years?

November 28, 2012 at 2:00 AM
Michael said...

The world loses 4.5 adults and 1 child every 3 seconds.

For too many people, a human life becomes worthless once it's born.

I think there are many answers. Many people feel more protective of children than of adults, so charities can raise money from those people by focusing on children. (Fortunately, some of the approaches to helping children can help the entire population.) A child dying is more startling/upsetting to strangers because it violates the expected order of events: get born, grow up, grow old, die. Children are seen as less responsible for their own actions than adults, and we like to pretend that bad outcomes are direct punishment for bad actions, so adult deaths are the fault of those adults but child deaths are tragedies. And specific to this message, any answer to "how often does the world lose an adult" would probably be unsurprising to an innumerate world which is nonetheless familiar with the concepts that there are many adults and adults do inevitably die, but the world losing a child every three seconds is startling if you see child death as rare.

November 28, 2012 at 7:19 AM
Anonymous said...

Well, I for one never give to charities that discriminate against adults, least of all ones that refuse to provide information to the Better Business Bureau and that not even Wikipedia has heard of.

November 28, 2012 at 3:48 PM
Michael said...

Guidestar and Charity Navigator both have info on ICF, which claims to have minuscule operating expenses and very little fundraising expenses. That doesn't mean it's not a scam or a shell charity, set up to steer money to bad charities which have terrible fund ratios, but the basic info doesn't look at all sketchy.

That said, I wasn't trying to endorse the charity, nor tell anyone to donate to them; I'm not donating to them. I just thought it was a neat treatment of the music.

November 28, 2012 at 10:04 PM
Anonymous said...

I agree that it's a cool treatment of the music. (Zey look and zound zo very Cherman!) It just pisses me off when people shove children in my face in an attempt to manipulate me.

November 30, 2012 at 1:49 AM

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