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Child's Play Approaches Half a Million Dollars
SecureTheNet writes "Created by Penny Arcade, the Child's Play Charity gives all toy and monetary donations directly to hospitals for distribution to sick kids. There are NO administration fees taken. As the holidays approach, the donations are approaching half a million dollars!"
I donate this first post to childs play!
As a Kenyan economist recently noticed, charity is ruining Africa's economy, removing developmental incentives and making them dependent on the west. The same thing happens in many minority communities in countries with social welfare.
We are actually doing a disservice to these children and their families by donating to charities. We need to let them fend for themselves so that they may become strong and creative thinkers, ready to fend for themselves in today's economy.
...do the electronics they're donating run Linux? Or, at least do they run embedded Linux?
Think about it, folks; we're saving childrens' lives here. Shouldn't we avoid starting them down the primrose path to Microsoft? Of course; saving childrens' lives isn't enough. We should also be saving their souls.
So, remember to use Linux this holiday season.
1/2 a million dollars aint that much if you look at who the contributors are. Also I am sorry to say that the republic of ireland aint britan so thier site would have you believe. Sure the US and Canada are the same.
I contest this so-called "study" on the basis that it conflicts with my negative gamer stereotype world-view! I want to know where the /real/ figures are and how much of this money will be spent on subverting children or funding terrorism. It's obvious that they borrowed the name for this "charity" from the horror movies depicting homocidal infant dolls!
We'll see about this "Pennies Arcade." In /court/.
As a token of gratitude for such fine charitable work, I think it'd be nice to put a link to Penny Arcade itself in the story. :-)
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
..but I can't help but think that maybe the money should be split up and be given to other organisations aswell. For example 100.000$ to the MSF ( http://www.msf.org/ ) would SAVE allot of people from death. After a certain amount , around 200.000$ , you really need some people with experience organizing when and to whom the money should go. Dumping 500.000$ at once at an organisation that is not used to handling that kind of money isn't efficient .
Don't get me wrong I admire the PA guys for doing this , I just think that if this turns out to be such a big thing every year , they should change their "model" a bit.
Anyway a big bravo to everyone involved in this!
-- TRUST ME! I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!
No load charity is a wonderful thing. The current model of huge organizations with powerful overheads taxes donations. If you consider the actions of the administrators of charity, they're much like a program in numerous ways. I'm not saying that eliminating administration can be perfected (you need audits, and program adjustments along the way), but a higher efficiency model would be welcomed. Bureaucracies tend to grow until they suck away the intent of charitable organizations. Some are far more efficient than others.... but in a future world perhaps more of contributions gets to the need, rather than the machine that services the need.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Quite a lot of the donations come in via PayPal, so the article isn't quite accurate: There are no administration fees except what PayPal skims off each transaction.
You Ignorant fucks!
The video game indsutry is solely responsible for every bad deed done
by anyone under 21! The Video Game "community" are all hethenisitic
dyke liberal gang members!
The Japanese are doing far worse than they ever did to us at Pearl Harbor
allowing this godless filth onto our hallowed land! Kids are helpless to
resist the lures of these MURDER SIMULATORS! I will sue every gamer and
game maker on the planet to insure my religious beliefs are upheld and to
ensure that no parent ever have to take any kind of personal responsability!
Charity? Please! These peons are nothing! I donate several 10's of dollars a
year to charity, and my money isn't BLOOD MONEY! They are merely trying to
make sure the next generation of children are as demented as these perverts are!
Anyone who responds negativly to my rant will be arrested and sued, in an order
to be determined later.
Yours,
Jack Thompson
Video Game Bible lawyer
I'm surprised PayPal accepts donations for PA. Remember when PayPal shut down the SomethingAwful.com Katrina aid drive without so much as a consideration for the victims? I thought their response was that PayPal doesn't support charities? Or was it a conflict of interest with one of the major charity groups that PayPal is contracted with?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Direct Links
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
Fifty-Million-Penny Arcade!
qntm.org
It's pretty weird that there's another charity that does almost exactly the same thing as Child's Play. In fact I can't really see any difference other than the fact that Child's Play has the publicity associated with Penny-Arcade.
I first read about this other one because Microsoft made some sort of a large donation to it recently. Apparently it's been in operation since 2001 however, incorporated in 2003.
http://www.gaming-age.com/news/2005/12/2-3
which gathers shout the loudest to kkep 0p as case you want to
This is a horrible idea. Besides ignoring the fact that the money would be much better spent on the actual medical bills giving these violent pastimes to children is simply creating the next generation of sociopaths. Science has proven again and again people who play video games are more inclined to perform real acts of violence. Ted Bundy was rumored to play video games up to 10 hours a day. Do we really need another serial killer?
And he's pissed you're not donating!
Doesn't seem like to many of you have a very positive attitude about this.. I think its awsome.. they did a wonderful job their first year and I believe this is their 3rd year doing it. just so you know there is a team of people who manage the childs play charity, not just one person lol. Its definately a worthy cause, and there are certainly thousands of other charities who are also worthy of your dollar. But theres certainly no reason to knock them for doing something that will really cheer some of these kids up for what might be their last xmas...
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At least this is a way penny arcade can make up for putting out such an unfunny comic.
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Does that figure include "Jack Thompson's" donation?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Cost in volunteer time - if there's a website - somebody built it. Volunteering is fine if a couple of hours a week but what if it needs 2 years full time work? I think volunteering is crucial and can work but often you require some paid staff to make critical things happen. I don't think the big charities are an evil conspiracy - maybe research what their model is.
An interesting organisation is the Royal National Lifeboats Association in the UK - all the ship crew are volunteers, these are the guys who save drowning seamen off UK coastlines. But their headquarters support, their R and D, these are all paid staff.
Plus - do you know the end users? can you always balance the urgency of needs? Some cases of need might not be as "attractive" as others. What touches your heart strings might not be the most urgent case. Might need neutral professional in the middle, i.e. charity workers, who are better informed about where aid should go. Personally I'd rather have full time paid professionals working out who's most needy than some wealthy semi-retired housewives half way across the planet making life or death decisions for tsunami victims or rural Pakistani villages needing shelter *now*.
Balderdash. Raising your spirits helps you get well - that's why there's a statistical link between religion (or optimism) and health. In one case (no, I don't have a link to support it), a double-blind study showed a correlation between a negative attitude going into heart surgery and dying in said heart surgery.
There's a difference between charity to save somebody's life - be it giving toys to a kid with cancer so he doesn't die of despair, or giving clean water to somebody in Africa so he doesn't die of dysentery - and charity to finance somebody's continued economic indifference and unwillingness to support themselves. A living person at least has a chance of economic contribution but a dead person has none, unless you're talking soylent green.
A campus club(Kult of Gaming) I belong to at WLU in Waterloo, Ontario was doing fundraising for this charity. I don't know the total amount we raised, but we got the creater of VGcats to come out and do a signing for childsplay, where the profits went to the charity, yesterday.
This is a little somethign that'll also piss off Jack Thompson. Good show, guys.
This sig no verb.
We are not poor, and have health insurance, but we were a small recipient of something like this. My 3 year old daughter had her shoulder dislocated in a playground accident. Not too big a deal - just needed to be reset and take it easy for a week. However, the X-ray machine was incredibly scary for her. We finally got her to hold still when the hospital staff got a teddy bear from some toys for sick kids (sorry, I forgot the name), and I stayed in the room. (Just one dose for me is not as bad as multiple daily doses for hospital staff.) She wouldn't let go of that bear for weeks.
...to whomever modded this troll. Hit a little to close to home, did it?