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Domain: wish.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to wish.org.
Comments · 7
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Re:Book misses major points
I agree that the total cost from MAW is relatively small. I'm not sure your metric is necessarily the bestf one looks not at all cancer funding but cancer research in children, one gets a much larger fraction. About 5% of all funding is for children's cancer (http://www.stbaldricks.org/filling-the-funding-gap/ says 4%) so this would be about 20% of funding for children's cancer. That may not be the best metric, because much cancer research applies to cancers at a broad age range, so I think I'd agree that the total amount is relatively small. According to Makke a Wish's own description they make one wish on average every 37 minutes http://wish.org/about-us which means they are making wishes for about 20,000 kids a year. In contrast, as the above link to St. Baldrick's notes, even for just St. B they came up about 8 million dollars short of funding all of the grant proposals that got considered to be outstanding. And they are very much not the only example of this sort of thing.
On the other hand, there's a serious problem in at least allied fields where people claim that their basic research is cancer related so they can more easily get grant money. In my own field, math, one has people doing all sorts of abstract stats or imaging work or differential equation modeling which people claim is cancer related, and it generally is related in the sense that one specific application might be some sort of cancer research. So that suggests that in some respects funding is actually over-saturated in which case Make A Wish isn't doing that much direct harm.
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Re:Superman
Or the Make-a-Wish Foundation felt that what they were doing was fair-use. Remember, while they dressed the kid in an off-the-shelf costume, they called him "Batkid", not "Batman"
Scroll down to the list of pictures and see if you can detect any DC-owned intellectual property.
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Re:Superman
I am not sure how granting rights in this case would hurt their trademark, but... they allowed a guy to dress up as Batman for the Make a Wish Foundation. Maybe the Make a Wish Foundation didn't ask for permission only forgiveness. http://sf.wish.org/wishes/wish... that page doesn't even mention DC Comics.
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Re:What a waste.
According to google.org Google has donated $33 milion from AdSense adverts to more than 850 nonprofit organisations in 10 countries throught the world.
The Make-A-Wish foundation has received more than 25% of all the online donations from Google.
Google has given more than 30% of all the yearly donations to the Doctors without borders program.
Google has also donated to the Grameen Foundation located in the US and $2 mils to the OLPC project...
Read more here -
Depends on the question> What is more important, be a showmen technologist like Jobs or an humanitarian missionaire like Gates?
The question seems too simplistic. If you want to ask the question -- who has done more for humanity: Gates or Jobs? Then you can look at acts of charity or whatever. If you want to ask who is the "most capitalist", then look at net worth. If you want to know whose actions illustrate the values one wants to live up to, look at their respective actions. If you want to ask who is the most selfless humanitarian, the answer is probably neither, as the parent indicates:
> It was not the amount that mattered, but the attitude and the self-sacrifice
The poster's submission makes it sound like all four of those are the same type of thing (hero).
It's really easy for a billionaire to donate a million dollars to charity. It's a lot harder for someone making $20k a year to donate a dime to charity. But the latter qualifies more as a humanitarian because of the self sacrifice, at least from a Christian perspective. When the billionaire does it, it's often for tax purposes or for PR. If they do it anonymously, at least they're not trying to secure favorable impressions in the history books.
I read the Wired article, and it was basically an author baiting Jobs to try to one-up Gates and his highly-publicized public giving. The author at least admitted that Jobs might be giving money anonymously, which is probably more in Jobs' character -- I'm thinking about Jobs meeting with a young man through the Make a Wish foundation. As far as I know, the meeting didn't appear on Apple Hot News for publicity.
As for a more riveting personal/business story, Jobs wins hands down. Gates used ruthless tactics to build his empire and then showed nothing but contempt for the justice system. Now that he's rich, he can through a few crumbs (albeit, crumbs to him are billions to the rest of us) to build his PR.
Jobs' story is more compelling to me: Apple's founding, buying Pixar from Lucas and turning it into a billion dollar business, failing at NeXT, but selling it back to Apple, and then rebuilding Apple with the iPod to chagrin of the loud protests from critics:It may not be the last laugh, but on Friday afternoon, after the close of the stock market, Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple Computer, shared an e-mail chuckle with his employees at the expense of Dell, a big rival.
The message was prompted by the 12 percent surge in Apple's stock price last week, which pushed the company's market capitalization to $72.13 billion, passing Dell's value of $71.97 billion.
In 1997, shortly after Mr. Jobs returned to Apple, the company he helped start in 1976, Dell's founder and chairman, Michael S. Dell, was asked at a technology conference what might be done to fix Apple, then deeply troubled financially.
"What would I do?" Mr. Dell said to an audience of several thousand information technology managers. "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."
On Friday, apparently savoring the moment, Mr. Jobs sent a brief e-mail message to Apple employees, which read: "Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future. Based on today's stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve."
Founding a successful company is some skill and a lot of luck. Doing it three times (Apple, Pixar, Apple again) is more skill than luck. -
Re:That is great..
You know, that's quite a condescending attitude to take. Yes, there are many different kinds of charities out there, but you shouldn't be insisting that one charity give up its proceeds to another type of charity, just because you think that the other charity is a better choice. All of those kinds of charities fill specific needs.
Is the Make a Wish Foundation not a worthy cause because they focus their efforts on bringing cheer to the lives of children with cancer? They bring in millions of dollars a year for much the same purpose as Child's Play. Should they instead be giving their proceeds to The American Institute for Cancer Research?
The charities that provide fresh water to villages in Africa, or help provide vaccines to third-world countries are needed, as are the ones that provide funds for research. At the same time, the charities that focus on bringing a little joy into the lives of those who are suffering are also needed. -
Re:My only wish
Too late, suprnova got shut down last week.
Lame? How about this one:
If you have a terminable form of cancer, you're at the wrong site, you need to go here.