walsh-cloonagh
Joined 12 years ago
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Comment · 11 years ago
Comment · 11 years ago
Giving out mosquito nets to conquer malaria makes as much sense as giving out medical masks to conquer the flu.
77% of maleria deaths are kids under 5 according to the WHO [1]. They're giving out mosquito nets to prevent children from dying of malaria.
But we don't live with malaria, so feel-good gestures are as far as we go.
For every 322 children under 5 protected by nets, one survives who would otherwise die [2]. This isn't the right thing to be cynical about.
[1] http://www.who.int/gho/malaria/epidemic/deaths/en/ [2] http://www.givewell.org/files/DWDA%202009/Interventions/Nets...
Comment · 11 years ago
It is possible to save a life for $3,340 by donating to the Against Malaria Foundation [1].
Helping desperately poor people is a surely virtuous thing to do and helping them efficiently by giving them money via GiveDirectly, as suggested in this article and the linked 2003 NYT article, is all the better.
But, right now there are worse things to be than desperately poor: like being a kid in Africa who dies of malaria for want of a malaria net.
Given the poor state of medicine and public health in places where people are dying for want of a few thousand dollars, optimizing poverty relief programs seems premature.
And for what it's worth the people you'll save are also desperately poor.
[1] http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF#Cost...
Comment · 11 years ago
They could have or want to have servers in Chicago. They need to cache content close to users, so the probably have hardware like OpenConnect [1] all over creation.
[1] http://oc.nflxvideo.net/docs/OpenConnect-Deployment-Guide.pd...
Comment · 11 years ago
Czech, Polish, Hungarian and Turkish are on the list: the languages of NATO allies
The languages of other many US allies are on the list as well.
So, this program is at least not entirely a Bay of Pigs style plot
Comment · 11 years ago
In 2012 1,031,631 people became permanent residents of the United States [1].
Obviously there are paths to citizenship. But some kinds of temporary visas don't offer a path to citizenship (like intercompany transfer L visas or F student visas) and this program could be useful to people on those visas if they'd like to stay.
[1] http://www.voanews.com/content/us-issues-million-green-cards...
Comment · 11 years ago
This is complicated and not uniform between countries.
Generally speaking in the United States:
Non-profit is an misleadingly named corporate structure that really means non-stock. Delaware reasonably calls this structure a non-stock company.
Charity is a tax structure for the subset of non-stock corporations that are legally bound to use their resources for specific ostensibly purposes under 501(c3) of the tax code.
Comment · 11 years ago
Hey Mr. Shrivastava,
When I was studying chemical engineering in university, I tried to get faculty interested in engineering yogurt-producing bacteria (like L. bulgaricus) to produce Vitamin A (or an equivalent retinoid or carotenoid): a "golden yogurt" scheme like Vitamin A producing golden rice [1]. But, they weren't having any of it.
This could be useful for the 670,000 children who die [2] and 250,000 to 500,000 children who go blind from Vitamin A deficiency [unsourced].
The yogurt could be produced from dairy and plant stock (which is presumably easier for subsistence farmers to procure).
I had the good fortune of switching careers into software, so I don't have the wherewithal to do this myself.
If you happen to have time, I think you could produce pretty good results from engineering a Vitamin A producing strain.
[1] http://www.goldenrice.org/ [2] http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...
These guys are working on a more ambitious scheme to engineer bacteria to produce vitamin A in intestines: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12602-013-9133-3
A country could just offer to buy a increasing amount of zero emission electricity and sell it on the free market until electricity was no longer generated from sources that yielded carbon.
The same approach could work for battery cells that could be used in cars until non-electric vehicles were no longer competitive.
This could be funded by that country's current (probably) progressive tax system.
This doesn't cover air, sea, heating and agriculture emissions. But a carbon tax may not be an adequate incentive to develop electric aircraft or cargo vessels in any case.