Taking My Foot Off The Pedal I've been in London for three weeks, and while I've practically achieved next to nothing in that time, I have been consuming plenty of media which I think has generally broadened some of my horizons so to speak. I've also decided to keep this blog going, despite the fact that I won't be on an amazing cycling trip, rather I will be essentially on holiday thinking about stuff and meeting people. I'm going to try to mix up the writing style and post more regularly now that I have my own laptop. For posts like this one today which is almost purely thought based, I will try to progress logically and succinctly lest it become difficult to follow. For event based posts I will try to put in actual speech quotations, or at least (realistically) speech representative of my interpretation of what was said. I'm also going to try to be more honest in a critical sense. Previously I would leave out things which painted people in a bad light because if I'm going to offend someone, I would like them to have a chance to defend themselves instead of my criticism being broadcast publicly without that opportunity. I've decided that the blogs I like to read are ones which are representations of the author's undiluted interpretation of an occurrence rather than them syphoning out defamatory depictions of the characters involved. As today's post is thought based, feel free to only pick topics which you find interesting. Obviously. CharityI watched the TED Talk entitled The way we think about charity is dead wrong by Dan Palotta at the solicitation of a friend as we discussed our respective future plans for doing good in the world. I hugely recommend watching it. Before I watched the talk I was generally wary of where my money goes in charity, broadly that a lot of it may not go towards things which progress the charitable cause, specifically that some probably is lost to corruption. I had decided that I would like to work for a charity, but not just a charity generally, only one whose activities were directly in line with how I thought the challenges of the world should be faced. I'm not going to bother summarising the talk, if you are interested, watch it. It is my opinion that if people start businesses with primarily the idea of achieving a social good and are successful as businesses just as a side-effect of that, the world would be a much better place. If anyone has an idea for one such business and you think I might have some relevant input, let me know. Invest in AfricaI watched a TED Talk (Want to help Africa? Do business here) on this idea before I saw the one above, and they both seemed to be along the same lines ultimately: help Africa help itself. There are plenty of places (countries and larger regions) in Africa which enjoy stable economic growth where investment will lead to the whole continent improving (I don't like using the word “improving” here, but I want to encompass the lowering of infant mortality rates, reducing the number of people in extreme poverty and transitioning to less corrupt leadership, among other things). If you watch it (or any other video I mention) and have mad ideas about it, let me know. I would love this to be a discussion rather than a rant. The migration problem of Syria is more complex than it may appear on the surface When we talk about the number of people seeking asylum in Europe in the hundreds of thousands, it is easy to think that all refugees can be absorbed with minimal impact to the economy of the absorbers. I'm playing the devil's advocate here a bit, just because I want to look at it from another point of view. I watched the Gapminder Foundation's video on YouTube done by the amazing Hans Rosling which has some slightly out of date statistics regarding the numbers the EU is willing to take, but what it really outlines to me is that if we did take the “open the borders” view, there may be literally tens of millions of refugees trying to enter the EU. It is their legal right to seek asylum which I am totally for, but it doesn't seem to be the best way logistically to deal with the problem considering that most of them would like to return to Syria once the conflict is resolved. To this end it really is in everybody's (roughly speaking) best interest to end the conflict stat, but the means to that end is something I think nobody can really say they know. There are maybe multiple ways to make Syria safe and the only one we can really rule out is bombing as that's what hasn't worked in the past. In the mean time, if the majority of people affected by the crisis are internally displaced peoples (IDPs), then we should be open to focussing charitable donations to associations working there as well as to those looking to seek asylum outside Syria's borders.
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Chris JonesJust a guy going for a bit of a documented ride. Archives
May 2018
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