"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:47487b0a@news.povray.org...
> alphaQuad <alp### [at] earthlinknet> wrote:
> > Solving world hunger is not such a
> > difficult accomplishment.
>
>   Actually it is.

So you'd rather do nothing than try and possibly fail?

I don't think anyone's suggesting pour money into the country and stand
back. It's going to take money and a lot of hard work. Probably more of the
latter than of the former. It's also going to take effort over a long period
of time. 15 years is probably a concervative estimate.

Education, good governance, sustainable farming practices, mining
technologies, entrepreneurship, etc. Handing out money then sitting back is
a recipe for absolute disaster. On the one hand it encourages corruption
(and there's anough of that around here anyway) and on the other it results
in people with a sense of entitlement, 'the world owes me a living' (and
there's a fair bit of that around here too)

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On Sat, 24 Nov 2007 14:27:06 -0500, Warp wrote:

>   You can't just pour money and abundance onto a different culture and
> expect it to become a western culture in a decade.

Arguably, you can't bomb them into becoming a western culture, either.

The fact that it is more than just throwing money at the problem of world 
hunger doesn't mean we shouldn't try.  I don't believe that's what you're 
trying to say, though.

Jim

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alphaQuad wrote:
> Solving world hunger is not such a
> difficult accomplishment.

I wish it were an easy problem. There are two major logistical problems
in solving world hunger, without even dealing with things on the local
level like tribal warlords who decide they need 100 times more food than
everyone else.

Problem 1: Where can food be grown?
Problem 2: How do you move that food to the people who need it?

Either people need to be able to grow, locally, everything they need for
a balanced healthy diet, or there needs to be a cheap effective
transportation infrastructure so the food can be delivered to those
people. Transportation is not going to get much more efficient. Problems
with oil prices may seem bad at the gas pump but it will be worse at the
grocery store*. There are only so many ways that food can be
transported, and some of it will spoil during that time in shipping.

The other option is growing more food closer to the people who need it.
On solution would be to put all the people of the world in one area. I
remember an article from the 60's or 70's, a demographer suggested that
there was enough space in Texas for every family in the world to have a
4 bed room house. This puts the transportation of food into a different
light, as now the food just has to be shipped to a central location and
distributed to everyone.
The problem is: How does the food get grown? People are required, and
the people are all in that one area. So some of them would either need
to live out side of that central distribution zone or would need to
themselves be transported to where the food is grown and then
transported home at night. The first solution devolves back to where we
are now, with some people spread out and lots of people clustered near
urban centers. The second solution requires a massive step up in
transportation.

It would be nice if hunger could be ended by something relatively
simple, like designing a peanut that will grow anywhere. Unfortunately,
that alone would just increase the supply of peanuts and would do little
for people who are too malnourished to farm peanuts and trade them for
the other food supplies needed for a healthy diet. Besides that, even if
they could farm that one plant, the price would decrease because of the
increased supply, netting them very little in trade-able goods.

*USA bias showing here.

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Gail Shaw <initialsurname@sentech sa dot com> wrote:

> "Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
> news:47487b0a@news.povray.org...
> > alphaQuad <alp### [at] earthlinknet> wrote:
> > > Solving world hunger is not such a
> > > difficult accomplishment.
> >
> >   Actually it is.

> So you'd rather do nothing than try and possibly fail?

  That's not what I said. I said that thinking that if we pour n billion
dollars a year to the problem it's going to get solved in a decade or two
is extremely naive. This is a problem which takes a lot of time to get
solved.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> The fact that it is more than just throwing money at the problem of world 
> hunger doesn't mean we shouldn't try.  I don't believe that's what you're 
> trying to say, though.

  The current aid model just doesn't work, that's what I'm saying. It's
only alleviating the symptoms slightly and temporarily, while making the
underlying problem worse, increasing dependency of the poor nations on
this aid and killing local entrepreneurship. Thinking that "50 billion
dollars a year will solve world hunger in 20 years" is naive and just
doesn't work.

  And with this I'm not saying that poor nations should not be helped
at all.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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I think there is something far more difficult than solving world hunger.

Take over the most deadly nation in the world, dance on its constitution with
corrupt law, ignore their rights, render congress irrelevant by veto and
install a complete idiot as a puppet president.
(I'd go on but the truth is far too, I said I'd not go on)

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alphaQuad <alp### [at] earthlinknet> wrote:
> Take over the most deadly nation in the world, dance on its constitution with
> corrupt law, ignore their rights, render congress irrelevant by veto and
> install a complete idiot as a puppet president.
> (I'd go on but the truth is far too, I said I'd not go on)

  Is there some reason you are posting these political rants here?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote

> > (I'd go on but the truth is far too, I said I'd not go on)

>   Is there some reason you are posting these political rants here?

Indeed. It's distracting our focus from Haskell and PHB (and occasional anti
MS) rants. <g>

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alphaQuad wrote:

> There should been no lawmakers because they would only make corrupt law. I
> believe the founding fathers lacked the guidance and intelligence to write a
> workable constitution.

They wrote a perfectly workable constitution.  They left it to people 
who decided not to follow it.

Regards,
John

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Darren New wrote:
> Warp wrote:
>> especially taking into account how many years it takes
>> to build a civilization which can support itself.
> 
> I suspect you'd mostly have to replace the government with something 
> that respected basic property rights before pouring money in would help 
> anything. If you're going to kick out successful farmers and hand the 
> land over to cronies who don't know how to manage it, you're going to 
> have famines regardless of how much cash gets dumped into the economy.

And if you institute honest government, the charity quickly becomes 
unnecessary.

The only reason the West got an economic leap on the rest of the world 
is because our forebears reduced the crookedness of the government by a 
sufficient degree to free up wealth for capital formation.  In much of 
the world the situation is that as soon as you have two pennies to rub 
together, someone from the government takes one of them (if not both).

Regards,
John

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