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First, it's pretty fucking funny that you're using a fictional TV show to argue a point. Anyway:

There are a lot of hungry people in the world, Mal, and none of them are hungry 'cause we went to the moon. None of them are colder and certainly none of them are dumber 'cause we went to the moon.

Uh, actually, since that money went to going to the moon, it didn't go to renewable energy research, education, etc. Fun fact: the percentage of kids in the United States who don't get enough to eat has climbed steadily since the 60's. Right now it's around 13-14 million kids each year.

So yes, there are a lot of people who are dumber and colder and hungrier because of all the money flushed down the drain into what is little more than nationalism in the name of science.

Don't you think we have certain societal obligations before we flush hundreds of trillions of dollars down the drain putting a couple of guys in a tin can above the earth for the world's most expensive dog and pony show?

Newsflash, folks: politicians, even JFK, don't give a flying fuck about scientific exploration. They care about getting their agendas through and re-elected. Kennedy did what he did because if he hadn't, the anti-communists would have had a field day.

Maybe if we'd spent the money on renewable energy technology, we wouldn't be spewing so much pollution into the air to generate power and heat, wouldn't need to fight two wars in Iraq, etc. If our homes were generating their own power and more efficient, imagine what we could do with all that money not being wasted on a complex power grid? Hmm, maybe go into space?

If they distributed that food around the world at prices they could afford to pay and also allowed them to sell freely, your economy would tank overnight and/or your entire way of life would have to change.
The 1st world way of life is ONLY sustainable off the backs of cheap, underfed 3rd world countries helping out by providing us production capcacity at ridiculously low prices.
e.g. Your entire farming industry is almost entirely sustained at its current level because of protectionism. (e.g. tariffs/handouts/wierd ethanol policy that makes no sense/etc)
e.g. Your cup of coffee is only so cheap because a lot of coffee farmers around the world are 2 beans from starvation.
Imagine what would happen to our 1st world countries if the cost of food quadrupled and the price of 3rd world goods did the same? (what you are proposing essentially)

When 50k people die from starvation a day. 16k are children. http://www.bread.org/learn/hunger-basics/hunger-facts-international.html
Those are the DEATHS. 820 million more are living on less than minimum healthy lifestyle number of calories which is what you would use to measure if we were "feeding the world".(i.e. not starving)
In 2005, 1.4 billion people lived below the poverty line.

To top it all off the largest economies in the world are also the largest distributors of weapons in the world and a HUGE number of these end up in africa, usually traded for food/oil/diamonds/etc as they have no money. Resources that could have been traded for food and economic success.

I would call you and idiot, but I don't beleive that insulting someone personally lends weight to my argument. In fact quite the opposite.

You obviously haven't been to Wendy's (or McDonald's doallar menu which has had a lot removed from it) recently. A lot of the value items have gone from 99c to $1.29. Chips that used to be .99c are now 1.29 as well. Heck, have you read about the rising food prices?

No American that's been born in this country and lived entirely within it can have a proper appreciation of true starvation.

...it is obviously meant to imply that 10% of the US population is starving, which is patently untrue.

Bread for the World: 20% of children in New York City rely on food handouts to survive.

USDA: 11% of US households are food-insecure, meaning they do not have adequate food throughout a typical year.

This is actually a particularly timely topic, what with World Food Day USA coming soon.

this site says it is more like 16,000 per day, one every 5 seconds

Check this link for statistics (with sources) - some 30 million people in the US itself experience some level of hunger.

I've been there; when I was a kid, there was a period of time when my parents had no food in the house, and my mother baked corn meal and water because we had absolutely nothing left. We were the recipients of the local church "feed a needy family" that year, and that wasn't really fun.

I can't believe you lecturing me on how a city needs food and fuel and all that. Wow. You must have though I fell off the turnip truck onto my head! At the very least, as a /. reader, you should assume I read the Asimov Foundation series, which goes on and on about how whole planets supply the central administrative planet. Anyhow...

Land is being used 'somehow', but not all of it, and not nearly to capacity. I remember hearing years back how Dutch farmers were 100 times more efficient than Russian farmers - her Russian farmers could barely more than feed their families. I bet a lot of farming done in the world is using 19th century technology, at best. Keep in mind that there's plenty of food in the world right now to feed everyone, it's a question of greed and to some extent transportation and storage.

Just think about this - according to this document, in India, which probably doesn't have super modern agriculture, approximately 26.8 million metric tons of food a year are eaten or spoiled by rats, who are protected and encouraged to thrive. This waste was from 134 million metric tons.

Now, according to this page, "...in the U.S., 157 million metric tons of cereal, legumes, and vegetable protein suitable for human use is fed to livestock every year to produce only 28 million metric tons of animal protein consumed by humans."

So if you could just double the efficiency of the India farmers, and cut out the waste, you'd be able to feed another approximately 295 million people on an American style, super sized, extra meaty diet, just from some changes to India.

According to Bread for the World Institute 842 million people in the world are hungry. We just talked about how to overfeed a third of them. I'm sure we could feed clothe and house everyone on Earth quite comfortably, if we really wanted to.

I've never studies economics or sociology, so forgive me if I'm an ignorant fool, but its always seemed to me that as long as we are not experiancing large amounts of disease, drought or other reduction in the availability of natural resources, that economic slowdown is more a result of psycology than anything else.

You wanker.

Sorry, I don't usually flame like that, but I looked at your website and you're an utter self righteous cock. You earned your internet connection? No, you (and I) were lucky to be born in a situation where internet accessible. Come to think of it, we're lucky not to have been born as the 6 million children who die annually. We're privileged to live where we live. Oh, but wait, I forgot, we earned our privilege. Now I'm not a socialist, more of a social democrat with certain libertarian leanings (make of that what you will), but how you can ignore mass suffering and exploitation?

* No, these are not ad hominem attacks against your logic, but personal attacks against what based on what you have said in the previous post.

Excuse me for being cynical, but how is getting 3000 young children together and giving them PDAs somehow "innovative" or "world-changing"?

Certainly, that alone would not be world-changing. However, getting 3000 kids to expand their world views will probably result in some change in their thinking. At the very least, I'd hope that the kids from "western" centers will become less culturally imperialist in their thinking towards lesser-developed nations, if they remember how their kids in those countries feel. At the same time, it should give them the impetus to want to change the living conditions of their friends where appropriate, such as improving sanitation, health care, and other quality of life issues.

Remember, we hardly ever reach out to "the other" like we do to people we know. The more I know you and see you're like me, the closer my affinity for you is, and the more I want to help you. There's some interesting exploration of this idea in Orson Scott Card's Ender series.

I'm sorry, but I don't see why this is deserving of the millions of dollars you're putting into it. I'd much rather see that money go towards feeding the hundreds of millions of people starving all around the world, and not to some corporate PR department trying to spin this as world-changing.

Certainly, there is a great emergency, and we should be giving lots of support to organizations like Mercy Corps, who can go where we cannot, to intervene directly and keep people from starving. But while these organizations also do great things to improve living conditions and try to foster lasting changes within individual communities, it is mostly up to organizations like Bread For the World to seek policy changes that will help whole economic classes of people. But how do we get kids (and ourselves) to become (and remain) committed to supporting these efforts if there is no personal connection to what is going on?

Hunger comes in many forms. Filling their bellies is only a temporary and stop-gap solution. Try viewing this as seed money that will plant ideas in their minds - and ours.

best of all - it's not your money being invested in this - put your money where your ideologies are, and give to a relief organization. Remember that there's starvation and homelessness in the United States as well as abroad, and that even if "all" you can do is donate time to help kids learn to read or to build homes for families, you are needed to make the practical miracle happen. Feel free to exploit as many corporations as necessary to make it happen, by letting them put logos on the promo literature and at the press conferences in exchange for working capital... you will remember faces, not logos, anyway.