Does not matter whether there are 10 million. If they do not serve a productive purpose or function, it does not matter how little they get paid, they are not of any value.
Most Wall Street firms also benefit from lots of interns who want jobs after graduating. They work for free to get their foot in the door. The process is highly competitive. Then, they are hired and they get low salaries with most of their income from commissions. The attrition rate is very high. At the same time, they live in expensive cities like New York and London and struggle to make ends meet. They work 12 to 16 hours a day and probably some over the graveyard shift because of the time zone differences and they probably work all weekends and holidays. After five or 10 years, they may get a decent salary but they are always held to the competitiveness comparison. A bad quarter or two and they are out. When does that ever happen to the NGO worker? and when does the NGO worker ever put in those hours. Again, the problem on the left is that whenver someone does somethng for good reasons regardless of the outcome or use, it is deemed superior to those who work toward a positive result. This liberal Alice in Wonderland mentality is not conducive to solving problems. It is all about making the individual in question feel good about him or herself. It is bullshit.
Does not matter whether there are 10 million. If they do not serve a productive purpose or function, it does not matter how little they get paid, they are not of any value.
[/quote]
Their value is cultural. It is more difficult to judge the value of a cultural contribution than that of a manufacturer. But still, it can be clearly seen that they have contributed enormously to our understanding and appreciation of out relationship with the natural world, especially within the context of our growing power to alter and damage it.
Well, the forests of Europe can’t be doing all that well otherwise they would have helped more to mitigate the flooding that has been happening in much of Europe these last couple of years.
Does not matter whether there are 10 million. If they do not serve a productive purpose or function, it does not matter how little they get paid, they are not of any value.[/quote]
Completely irrelevant to the point I was making. Effectiveness may be worthy of debate but it’s not remotely what I was talking about.
Most Wall Street firms also benefit from lots of interns who want jobs after graduating. They work for free to get their foot in the door. The process is highly competitive. Then, they are hired and they get low salaries with most of their income from commissions. The attrition rate is very high. At the same time, they live in expensive cities like New York and London and struggle to make ends meet. They work 12 to 16 hours a day and probably some over the graveyard shift because of the time zone differences and they probably work all weekends and holidays. After five or 10 years, they may get a decent salary but they are always held to the competitiveness comparison. A bad quarter or two and they are out. When does that ever happen to the NGO worker? and when does the NGO worker ever put in those hours. Again, the problem on the left is that whenver someone does somethng for good reasons regardless of the outcome or use, it is deemed superior to those who work toward a positive result. This liberal Alice in Wonderland mentality is not conducive to solving problems. It is all about making the individual in question feel good about him or herself. It is bullshit.[/quote]
Ask the NGO worker on the ground in Afghanistan or Somalia or Iraq (situations where I personally know people working) and see how many hours they work. They don’t have nightclubs and parties waiting for them in their time off like a Wall Street worker. And that’s not even thinking about the people who are volunteering.
One of the differences in a lot of cases is that Wall St can afford to pay interns but chooses not to, whereas your average NGO depends on volunteers because it doesn’t have the budget to pay them.
Fine you congratulate all the ¨service¨ of the NGO type all that you want. They are already self-congratulatory enough. NO need for me to jump in. I live in a cough cough less than desirable country at present. We have tons of NGOs. I have talked to them. What I sense is that most get involved as they do not have a job back home. Praise that esoteric liberal arts degree and are essentially unemployable. It is fairly well paid work at the NGO with housing… remember the housing or working as an office admin or fast food worker in the States. It really does come down to that. Couple that with many are hypercompetitive passport visa fillers and you round out the picture beautifully. Remember to speak frequently of your service in Sudan, that trip to Afghanistan and how the coq au vin (don´t seem to eat anything else) at that one restaurant that only you know about on the left bank, right bank or other neighborhood is unbelievable.
Also, I am curious about your total lack of comment about the following: NGOs are generally lefties who believe in big government so… more government and less NGOs or less government because the NGOs are better equipped to deal with the problem? Seems that you cannot have it both ways. End the tax deduction now or admit that government cannot do education, environment and help the poor. Which is it?
Sorry Fred. We all really value your input. But you are missing the point on NGO’s. They have made a real contribution to our sense of what is real and what is important. If you disagree, then please show us some figures, statistics, studies etc to disprove this well-known and accepted consensus.
If not, take another hit on the “DC /NYC money and power bong” and read some WSJ editorials to comfort yourself.
[quote=“BigJohn”]Sorry Fred. We all really value your input. But you are missing the point on NGO’s. They have made a real contribution to our sense of what is real and what is important. [/quote] I’ve seen you say this 3 times now and have yet to see you site one concrete example. In fact I doubt you can, without the aid of google or any other search, name me 5 instances where NGOs alone have made a real and lasting contribution. Be it economically, environmentally or socially. Typically, they takle small projects that have a local and temporary effect. Infact, without help from the Corporate sector you so revile none of their imporvements have any real lasting basis. It’s ironic that you ask for figures, stats and studies when you provide none of your own and merely state that this is a “well known and accepted consensus”.
Let’s review some other cases of "well known and accepted consensus’ shall we?
The earth is flat
The Sun revolves around the earth
Witchcraft is real
Intelligent design
Actually, you have it backwards. You are making an asertion and are being challenged. The onus is on you to back up your claim.
LOL, well I don’t read the WSJ but, I’ll take reading and critical thinking any day over simply comforting yourself with “well known and accepted consensus”
I actually don’t have a problem with self funded NGOs but the idea that they have been responsible for real improvement in condition of the unfortunate is silly and contrary to all evidence. For as long as I can remember I’ve seen commercials appealing for donations to help starving kids in Africa. For 4 decades yet, despite all that money raised, despite all that involvement by NGOs the problems continue. Yet in China and India economic developement in has lifted 100s of millions out of poverty literally in the span of a decade.
Good luck. Hopefully you have personal connections. Otherwise you may end up stuck in Asia teaching English…[/quote]
No and No. Thankfully.
Everyone, are we talking about environmental NGOs or ALL NGOs?
If were talking about all NGOs, I think it is entirely unfair to make some of these assertions. I’m hugely in support of ShelterBox for example (shelterbox.org). In no way is ShelterBox some lefty rose-tinted dreamy, get well card making, group hug shite. Rather a action based organisation helping people in need by very direct means.
1-3 above: Total straw man argument. Think of some dumb things that believe believed before they knew better, then compare it to something obvious in the modern day. And number 4 is not a “well known and accepted consensus”.
You are unfamiliar with campaigns by NGOs to save old growth rainforest, such as Clayoquot Sound in Vancouver Island?
You were unaware of the role that Greenpeace and other organizations played and continues to play in having a ban on whaling (with loopholes, admittedly)?
You didn’t know that groups like Oxfam made people aware of and prompted government action in famines, such as in Ethiopia?
You didn’t know that Amnesty International has made people more aware of human rights abuses in countries around the world, leading to actions such as sanctions against South Africa, which helped lead to the end of apartheid?
The list goes on and on, and I am not going to prove the world is round to you if you disagree. If you want, you can prove the opposite, if you think that is true.
Maybe you misinterpreted what I meant to say: obviously NGOs don’t do that much by themselves. They do so by making people aware of things and prompting actions by governments. You may not agree with these NGOs or may think they are inefficient. But I was taking issue with Fred’s statement that they accomplish absolutely nothing.
He needs to prove that statement. I don’t need to prove the antithesis. It is obvious, just as it is obvious that AGW is the best scientific consensus of the world’s leading climate scientists. Of course they may be wrong. But they are probably right.
Here’s a section of the Wikipedia article on just one group, the Environmental Defense Fund. I know it’s not authoritative, but it gives you a general idea of what I am talking about.
[quote]Key accomplishments of Environmental Defense Fund include:
* 1967 - A group of scientists forms the organization and sets out to ban DDT (succeeding in 1972).[citation needed]
* 1970 - Efforts to ban whale hunting.[8][9]
* 1974 - An Environmental Defense Fund study of Mississippi River water[10][11][12] helps pass the Safe Drinking Water Act,[13][14][15] establishing the first comprehensive health standards for water nationwide.
* 1985 - Helped convince federal regulators to phase out lead from gasoline,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] leading to a dramatic decline in childhood lead poisoning.[26]
* 1986 - Pushed McDonalds to institute biodegradable food-packaging containers.[27]
* 1987 - Played a key role in the treaty to phase out the use of CFCs, chemicals that many researchers believe damage the Earth’s ozone layer.[28][29]
* 1990 - Designed Title IV of the Clean Air Act, which incorporates market-based methods to cut air pollution and acid rain.[30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] The measures reduced sulfur dioxide pollution faster than expected, and at a fraction of the cost.[38][39][40][41][42][43]
* 1995 - Designed the Safe Harbor plan[44][45] that gives landowners new incentives to help endangered species on their property.
* 1999 - Contributed to the Endangered Species Act, including inventing the Safe Harbor concept[citation needed]
* 2000 - Seven of the world's largest corporations join Environmental Defense in a partnership to address global warming, setting firm targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.[46][47]
* 2001 - Helped create the 1,200-mile-long Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve.[citation needed]
* 2002 - Initiated the recent campaign to remove the O'Shaughnessy Dam in Hetch Hetchy Valleyin Yosemite National Park[48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58]
* 2004 - Culmination of 4-year partnership with FedEx to develop and deploy hybrid electric trucks. The new vehicles cut smog-forming pollution by 65%, reduce soot by 96%, and move 57% farther on a gallon of fuel.
* 2006 - Co-authored the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 with Natural Resources Defense Council.[59][60]
* 2007 - Co-founded United States Climate Action Partnership (US-CAP), a coalition of major corporations and environmental groups supporting action on global warming, including a market-based carbon emissions cap. Corporate participants include GE, DuPont and Duke Energy; non-profit groups involved are Pew Center on Global Climate Change, Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute, a co-founder.[61]
* 2007 - Helped negotiate an environmental codicil as part of Texas Pacific's buyout of TXU[/quote]
[quote=“BigJohn”][quote=“Gman”]
Let’s review some other cases of "well known and accepted consensus’ shall we?
The earth is flat
The Sun revolves around the earth
Witchcraft is real
Intelligent design
[/quote]
1-3 above: Total straw man argument. Think of some dumb things that believe believed before they knew better, then compare it to something obvious in the modern day. And number 4 is not a “well known and accepted consensus”. [/quote]
For #1 it went well beyond mere superstitision, people who stated otherwise were met with violence. 4. is not a well known and accepted consensus? Really? The what are the organised religions of the world? Scientifically proven fact? The point isn’t what the examples were themselves. The point is that these were all things that were accepted at one point as accepted consensus therefore, accepted consensus is not enough to establish something as fact.
[quote] You are unfamiliar with campaigns by NGOs to save old growth rainforest, such as Clayoquot Sound in Vancouver Island? [/quote] Very familiar mostly it was work by the individaul protesters and other activists. Crediting NGOs with this is a little bit of a stretch.
Fossil fuels played by far a bigger role in saving the whales than anything Greenpeace ever accomplished. With out abundant coal or oil there is nothing Green Peace would have been able to do about large scale whaling. They have however been involved in trying to stop the small scale ‘scientific’ whaling that certain countries have be doing unsuccessfully for the last couple of decades though.
Nonsense, Ethiopia in the 1980s for example, the famine was a world news event that spurred action on the part of millions of individuals. Oxfam play niether a significant role is making people aware of it (it was on all the news networks) nor did Oxfam play a leading or any significant role in modilizing government action. All those relief happened without the ‘help’ of Oxfam. In fact, name one country where Oxfam can be credited with ending famine. ‘Raising awareness’ is an awfully low bar to set in terms of accomplishments.
Mandella was in jail for 25 years. Are you trying to tell me that the white government after all that time said “You know what, I’m sick of getting all these letters, let’s end this apartheid thing”. Get real!
[quote] The list goes on and on, [/quote] Yes in University we called that piling it higher and deeper.
I’ll actually agree with the point you are trying to make here, to a point. As I’ve said though, trying to compare salaries between NGOs and Corporations and then trying to make that into some kind of values statement is hogwash.
Actually, it’s gotten to the point where I’ve gone beyond whether it’s real or not. I don’t need to read any studies any more. All I need to do is look at the cover and see who’s done the work and whose sponsored it and I’ll know what the findings are. Whether AGW is real or not is moot. Assuming we take AGW as an iron clad scientific fact, no one knows what the over all ipmacts are going to be. Some local effects will be devestating, some locales will benefit. Nothing any NGO is proposing is going to have any effect on the issue at all. Eventually we will switch to other forms of energy as the tecnologies mature. But, I’ll bet the major driver behind the eventual shift to so called green energy will be economics.
[quote=“BigJohn”]Here’s a section of the Wikipedia article on just one group, the Environmental Defense Fund. I know it’s not authoritative, but it gives you a general idea of what I am talking about.
[quote]Key accomplishments of Environmental Defense Fund include:
* 1967 - A group of scientists forms the organization and sets out to ban DDT (succeeding in 1972).[citation needed]
* 1970 - Efforts to ban whale hunting.[8][9]
* 1974 - An Environmental Defense Fund study of Mississippi River water[10][11][12] helps pass the Safe Drinking Water Act,[13][14][15] establishing the first comprehensive health standards for water nationwide.
* 1985 - Helped convince federal regulators to phase out lead from gasoline,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] leading to a dramatic decline in childhood lead poisoning.[26]
* 1986 - Pushed McDonalds to institute biodegradable food-packaging containers.[27]
* 1987 - Played a key role in the treaty to phase out the use of CFCs, chemicals that many researchers believe damage the Earth’s ozone layer.[28][29]
* 1990 - Designed Title IV of the Clean Air Act, which incorporates market-based methods to cut air pollution and acid rain.[30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] The measures reduced sulfur dioxide pollution faster than expected, and at a fraction of the cost.[38][39][40][41][42][43]
* 1995 - Designed the Safe Harbor plan[44][45] that gives landowners new incentives to help endangered species on their property.
* 1999 - Contributed to the Endangered Species Act, including inventing the Safe Harbor concept[citation needed]
* 2000 - Seven of the world's largest corporations join Environmental Defense in a partnership to address global warming, setting firm targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.[46][47]
* 2001 - Helped create the 1,200-mile-long Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve.[citation needed]
* 2002 - Initiated the recent campaign to remove the O'Shaughnessy Dam in Hetch Hetchy Valleyin Yosemite National Park[48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58]
* 2004 - Culmination of 4-year partnership with FedEx to develop and deploy hybrid electric trucks. The new vehicles cut smog-forming pollution by 65%, reduce soot by 96%, and move 57% farther on a gallon of fuel.
* 2006 - Co-authored the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 with Natural Resources Defense Council.[59][60]
* 2007 - Co-founded United States Climate Action Partnership (US-CAP), a coalition of major corporations and environmental groups supporting action on global warming, including a market-based carbon emissions cap. Corporate participants include GE, DuPont and Duke Energy; non-profit groups involved are Pew Center on Global Climate Change, Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute, a co-founder.[61]
* 2007 - Helped negotiate an environmental codicil as part of Texas Pacific's buyout of TXU[/quote][/quote]
See but that’s just fluff pulled from the internet. You don’t know what role exactly this organisation played. Were they the key player in the solution? Would have this issue been addressed without their involvement?. All this Co-founded, Co-authored, Helped Create stuff is almost like resume padding.
Again, I don’t have a problem with any NGO that’s not funded by government. But, trying to compare them to corporations and corporate salaries is not valid.
I’ll actually agree with the point you are trying to make here, to a point. As I’ve said though, trying to compare salaries between NGOs and Corporations and then trying to make that into some kind of values statement is hogwash.[/quote]
Look, I disagree with a lot of your last post, but it is tangential so I’ll let it go.
I was only making one point here, which you have agreed to.
The fact that NGO workers make a lot less money is relevant:it shows they are doing so because they believe in a cause. They are not just lazy fools who want more funding, and they are not in it for the money, as Fred has implied.
I was disagreeing with Fred, so if you actually agree with me on the one and only point that I was actually making, why have you been disagreeing with me?
[quote=“Gman”][quote=“BigJohn”][quote=“Gman”]
Let’s review some other cases of "well known and accepted consensus’ shall we?
The earth is flat
The Sun revolves around the earth
Witchcraft is real
Intelligent design
[/quote]
1-3 above: Total straw man argument. Think of some dumb things that believe believed before they knew better, then compare it to something obvious in the modern day. And number 4 is not a “well known and accepted consensus”. [/quote]
For #1 it went well beyond mere superstitision, people who stated otherwise were met with violence. 4. is not a well known and accepted consensus? Really? The what are the organised religions of the world? Scientifically proven fact? The point isn’t what the examples were themselves. The point is that these were all things that were accepted at one point as accepted consensus therefore, accepted consensus is not enough to establish something as fact.
[/quote]
Kind of ironic that someone trying to argue about incorrect things that everyone believed picks an example that is in fact an incorrect thing that many people today believe. There was no consensus that the earth was flat, at least since the time of the ancient Greeks. They even calculated the circumference of the earth over 2000 years ago. In the middle ages, a few people talked about a flat earth, but most said that the earth was spherical. A spherical earth has been the general consensus for about 2500 years.
[quote=“zyzzx”][quote=“Gman”][quote=“BigJohn”][quote=“Gman”]
Let’s review some other cases of "well known and accepted consensus’ shall we?
The earth is flat
The Sun revolves around the earth
Witchcraft is real
Intelligent design
[/quote]
1-3 above: Total straw man argument. Think of some dumb things that believe believed before they knew better, then compare it to something obvious in the modern day. And number 4 is not a “well known and accepted consensus”. [/quote]
For #1 it went well beyond mere superstitision, people who stated otherwise were met with violence. 4. is not a well known and accepted consensus? Really? The what are the organised religions of the world? Scientifically proven fact? The point isn’t what the examples were themselves. The point is that these were all things that were accepted at one point as accepted consensus therefore, accepted consensus is not enough to establish something as fact.
[/quote]
Kind of ironic that someone trying to argue about incorrect things that everyone believed picks an example that is in fact an incorrect thing that many people today believe. There was no consensus that the earth was flat, at least since the time of the ancient Greeks. They even calculated the circumference of the earth over 2000 years ago. In the middle ages, a few people talked about a flat earth, but most said that the earth was spherical. A spherical earth has been the general consensus for about 2500 years.[/quote]
Interesting, I didn’t know that. So at no time in human history was there a belief the Earth was flat? You actually reinforce my point, which wasn’t about ‘incorrect things that everyone believed’ but rather that you cannot take these things as facts.
LOL, I remember this question from one of my English classes way back. The scientific answer is of course yes. I forget all the bullshit answers everyone got to wax philosphical about.
That’s what NGO’s do. They help people do things, work in concert with governments, act as watchdogs on businesses, etc. Do you think businesses are going to voluntarily improve their environmental standards unless their are people watching or legislation being enacted?
Aside from random slagging, no one here has offered any evidence that NGO’s are useless as Fred said.
