Hilton Gives to Charity

There are many super-rich who give generously to charity, e.g. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Ted Turner. Now Paris Hilton's grandfather Barron Hilton is donating 97% of his net worth to charity. The move might leave less money to Paris and Nicky Hilton.

The money will go to the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. The website says the following: "Be ever watchful for the opportunity to shelter little children with the umbrella of your charity; be generous to their schools, their hospitals and their places of worship. For, as they must bear the burdens of our mistakes, so are they in their innocence the repositories of our hopes for the upward progress of humanity."

Internet Users Around the World Help Feed the Poor

Link: Fight Hunger Click-to-Feed Map

Feeling cynical about human nature? The link above might help. At the United Nation's Fight Hunger Website, where a simple mouse click can generate a meal for a starving child, you can see in real time through Google Maps where each of the clicks are coming from in the world.

What surprised me most was the diversity of locations--Norway, Argentina, Spain, India, America, and so on. Looking at this is a reminder to me that not everyone is cruel and heartless.

Make sure you read One-Click Charity Sites to see my list of one-click charity sites.

The Virtues of Child Sponsorship

I've been reading a New Internationalist (i.e. Communist) article titled Why You Should not Sponsor a Child. They say child sponsorship is horrible because of a number of reasons. Chid sponsorship is expensive because of all the letters and photoes that need to be sent back and forth as well as other paperwork. But what this paper ignores is that giving money to aid organizations is not something many people are comfortable with because they do not know how much of that money is going to corrupt politicians or aid workers. By sponsoring a child you get to see the child and see how his body size changes over time (to see whether he is being fed well). You can even visit the child and see in person how the child is doing. This I think is a good way of checking to see if the aid organization is actually doing something other than funneling the money into buying Ferraris. Through child sponsorship the aid organizations are accountable to the donors.

Child sponsorship may cost more but these extra costs are monitoring costs necessary because of the corruption of human nature. Communist is more cost-effective than democracy. If the communist government wants to build a hospital it gets it built straight away. Any objectors will be shot dead. Democracy is tougher. To get a hospital built you have to negotiate with different state governments, zoning regulators, and so on. You need approval from the voters. It's expensive and costly. But it's more transparent. It fosters confidence in the system. Child sponsorship is the same. It is no wonder then that New Internationalist, the communist site, is making this argument against child sponsorship.

This is why I believe child sponsorship is good. If you live in Australia and want to sponsor a child, go to the sites below:

Plan Australia
World Vision Australia
Compassion Australia (Christian)
The Salvation Army
Child Fund

Update 23/12/2007: I've been reading about some crazy ecologist named Paul Ehrlich who believes that food aid should stop completely and people in poor nations should starve to death! What an evil person. Anyway, Ehrlich predicted in the '70s that there would be a massive famine that would hit the world and that millions of people would die. In reality, worldwide poverty went down. The world has more than enough food to feed everyone. The problem is politics. Even if food is shipped from rich countries to poor countries, the government in poor countries often don't care and won't bother to deliver the food. This is another reason why I think child sponsorship is important. Suppose you give $100 to some aid agency. That aid agency may buy $100 worth of rice and then dump it on an airport in Sudan and then nothing happens. If you sponsor a child, that aid agency has to move its butt into the country, into the forests or into the deserts, to find the child so that they can give food and make sure the child writes back to the sponsor. Growing demand for child sponsorship will make aid organizations search for more children.

One-Click Charity Sites

I click on each of these links every day. I remember simply by using Memo to Me, which sends me an e-mail every morning with a list of the links below. When company advertising shows up, you should click on their links to show your support for what they're doing.

MANY CLICKS
http://www.freerice.com/

TWO CLICKS
http://www.povertyfighters.com/

ONE CLICK
http://www.fighthunger.org/
http://www.thebiblesite.org/
http://www.thehungersite.com/
http://www.thechildhealthsite.com/
http://www.theliteracysite.com/
http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com/
http://www.therainforestsite.com/
http://www.thebreastcancersite.com/
http://www.ripple.org/
http://www.care2.com/click2donate/
http://www.landcareniagara.com/

The Internet as Cost-Efficient Education

I've just been looking at Children International. One of the things that saddens me most in this world is child poverty. Many people who give money to these children put money into things like education, but I am skeptical about the effectiveness of traditional education. Kids may go into classrooms with a teacher and not much learning can happen. I believe that the most productive education involves the child learning the very basics of literacy and numeracy before the child is given access to Broadband Internet, which allows the child to learn for himself or herself anything that comes to mind.

Update: Looks like someone has already come up with my idea. See the $100 Laptop by MIT. Also see the Wikipedia article about the $100 Laptop. It will have Internet access, but I don't know if it will be free. I'm starting to want one if it's so cheap because I use a desktop computer and don't actually have a laptop.