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Engineers Aim To Make Cleaner-Burning Cookstoves For Developing World
vinces99 writes in with news about a new cookstove design for developing countries. "About 3 billion people, or 42 percent of the world's population, rely on burning materials such as wood, animal dung or coal in stoves for cooking and heating their homes. Often these stoves are crudely designed, and poor ventilation and damp wood can create a smoky, hazardous indoor environment day after day. A recent study in The Lancet estimates that 3.5 million people die each year as a result of indoor air pollution from open fires or rudimentary stoves in their homes. More than 900,000 people die from pneumonia alone, which has been linked to indoor air pollution. University of Washington engineers hope to make a dent in these numbers by designing a cookstove that meets a stringent set of emission and efficiency standards while still being affordable and attractive to families who cook over a flame each day. The team has received a $900,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to design a better cookstove, which researchers say will use half as much fuel and cut emissions by 90 percent."
From the concept art this looks like they are making a simple rocket stove and putting a pot skirt on top. There are quite a few people working to develop low cost, efficient, and nonpolluting cook stoves for poorer countries, but most of them use natural materials (stone, brick).
I'm just wondering how much one of these things would cost? Looking at the sleek concept art, I'm guessing more that a family living in a mud hut and cooking with twigs and cow dung can afford.
And fire places, people have been successfully using them for hundreds of years without killing themselves. Lets face it people, if your burning bullshit in a 50 gallon drum to cook your food "yet another better stove" isnt going to do you much good.
That number is so high, it positively smokes of bullshit.
From the concept art this looks like they are making a simple rocket stove and putting a pot skirt on top. There are quite a few people working to develop low cost, efficient, and nonpolluting cook stoves for poorer countries, but most of them use natural materials (stone, brick).
I'm just wondering how much one of these things would cost? Looking at the sleek concept art, I'm guessing more that a family living in a mud hut and cooking with twigs and cow dung can afford.
Not to mention that, if you're burning stuff, then poor ventilation in the vicinity of the stove will defeat much of the intent (health, clean-burning, etc.). This remains so, however well the stove may function in a better location.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Didnt Philips do this 5 to 10 years ago????/
Didn't Ben Franklin do this 250 years ago?
"The Franklin stove is a metal-lined fireplace named after its inventor, Benjamin Franklin. It was invented in 1741. It had a hollow baffle near the rear (to transfer more heat from the fire to a room's air) and relied on an "inverted siphon" to draw the fire's hot fumes around the baffle. It was intended to produce more heat and less smoke than an ordinary open fireplace."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_stove
It's called rocket stove and can be built easily from different material:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_stove
This reminds me of this project: Potential Energy (formerly The Darfur Stoves Project)
Popular Mechanics covered it in this article: Low-Tech Stove Saves Lives in Sudan's Darfur Region
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Enclosed stove with a stack and convection-based oxygenating of fuel, been done for thousands of years in various places in asia and africa. I swear, I get tired of reading of "innovations" that seem to be rediscovered every decade of my 50 years, but this is even more annoying.
Rocket stoves work pretty good. They burn at a higher temperature and consume more of the fuel while reducing emissions. Very easy to construct and cheap to fuel with just sticks and leaves.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
A recent study in The Lancet estimates that 3.5 million people die each year as a result of indoor air pollution from open fires or rudimentary stoves in their homes. More than 900,000 people die from pneumonia alone, which has been linked to indoor air pollution.
Yep. And of course no one mentions how cigarette smoking is still quite prevalent in the countries that rely on said stoves.
Folks - especially you engineers - beware when numbers are stated. Aside from engineering and science, the rest of the World is quite fast and loose with numbers.
Mhy recent argument with an engineer regarding a revenues number:
"This number is unrealistic. I don't see how they got it."
BSME: "They got it from somewhere!"
Me thinking: "Yeah, out of their ass!"
Anyone can spout numbers. Take a Cost Accounting class ( or just read a fucking book about it) and realize that - it's not complete horseshit, but horseshit fertilizes the numbers.
I am of the opinion that you are not posing your question in good faith.
FWIW, if you read the article, this stove is intended for people who can't (or for whatever other reason don't) have a smokestack or other vent.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Maybe they just need to provide pressure cookers to everyone? See this article with a rudimentary table comparing cooking time: http://missvickie.com/library/investment.html
In 1742, Franklin finished his first design which implemented new scientific concepts about heat which had been developed by the Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738), a proponent of Isaac Newton's ideas. Two years later, Franklin wrote a pamphlet describing his design and how it operated in order to sell his product. Around this time, the deputy governor of Pennsylvania, George Thomas, made an offer to Franklin to patent his design, but Franklin never patented any of his designs and inventions. He believed “that as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously”.
Wow.
Better known as 318230.
http://cookstoves.lbl.gov/ Lawrence Berkeley Lab
The design looks identical to this concept which was distributed in Africa years ago.
http://www.research.philips.com/technologies/woodstove.html
Meanwhile the Chinese invented rockets thousands of years ago so the Saturn five is no big deal?
See how stupid that looks? Now you've seen exactly how stupid your post looks to anyone that thinks about design.
Why can't you build you OWN smartphone? Are you so pathetic that yellow people have to MAKE one for you?
Run it hot on clean, dry wood at full power for as long as you can, the thermal mass you surround it with will absorb the heat.
Oh wait, the reason folks burn crappy wet wood in inefficient stoves is that they're poor, or they're too sick from dirty water (50% of all premature deaths on Earth are from bad water) to gather wood. How does this help that problem?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Enclosed stove with a stack and convection-based oxygenating of fuel, been done for thousands of years in various places in asia and africa.
The stove in the article looks exactly like the cookstoves we made from coffee cans when I was in the girl scouts*. They work well, and are a big improvement over an open fire, but I don't see anything new about it.
*Yes, I was a male girl scout. My mom was the scout leader, and my sisters were already girl scouts, so she signed me up too. My mom was a tough scout leader. Years later, I enlisted in the Marine Corps, and it was a piece of cake compared to my mom's girl scout troop. -- Semper Fi, and Be Prepared.
Irrelevant. The problem is that they can't afford any stove in the first place:
"A recent study published in The Lancet estimates that 3.5 million people die each year as a result of indoor air pollution from open fires or rudimentary stoves in their homes."
I guess the real 'news' is this:
"The team received a $900,000 grant"
Loving this line as well: "[...] a better cookstove, which researchers say will use half as much fuel and cut emissions by 90 percent."
Compared to what? Open fire? Congratu-fucking-lations, that is amazing!
>> Didnt Philips do this 5 to 10 years ago????/
> Didn't Ben Franklin do this 250 years ago?
Didn't the russians do this over 1000 years ago?
The russian oven is considerably more efficient than Franklin's. Designed to retain heat for a very long time, it contains an intricate brick maze of passages and chambers. Russians have used this type of oven since ancient times, cooking, baking, bathing (inside), sleeping (on top), hiding, and healing. The oven is prominently featured in many old stories and legends and pretty much every russian over 60 has used one at one time or another.
Cough.....rocket stove.....cough
The Patsari stoves family: Designed by the UNAM, Very Well Known, Efficient and cheap, Easy to build low tech, Healty to use
http://www.patsari.org/
Of course, Africans NEVER EVEN INVENTED THE WHEEL. Did you know that? Can you believe it? They were so stupid, millions of them, that even though they existed for tens of thousands of years before white people evolved from them, they still carried everything around by hand, or on animals, because they were TOO STUPID to invent the WHEEL...
"Its the Erins versatility which means that it can burn wood, coal, peat briquettes or smokeless fuel. Combining the power and efficiency of its heat output, the Erin is the right choice for a larger home." ref
The problem is that they can't afford any stove in the first place
Apparently they can afford rudimentary stoves, which, according to the English language, are types of stoves.
So if this money can be used to create the infrastructure necessary to produce better stoves at a cost comparable to a rudimentary stove, then the lives of many people can be improved for relatively little cost. I am not saying that this is definitely going to work. The devil is in the details. But I don't think it's a bad idea per se.
>> Didnt Philips do this 5 to 10 years ago????/
> Didn't Ben Franklin do this 250 years ago?
Didn't the russians do this over 1000 years ago?
A common erroneous attribution, the Russians really got the design from the Klingons.
from the picture it can't ever be comparable to rudimentary stove in cost...
you could always make two crappy stoves from the materials that go into it.. sure, you would need to gather double the wood to cook with them but still..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Yes, girl scout cookies are much easier to deliver by gunfire. :P
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I'm not knocking the design, but that's like comparing apples and oranges.
The "russian oven" is one design that was built for one environment and the "franklin stove" is a different design for different environment.
I would say if you are dumb enough to to cook on a wood or dung fire in your house and it fills with choking smoke every time you should probably stop doing that. The ones that figure this out will survive and the rest, well....
Here's yet another one:
http://www.brownongreen.net/2011/05/simple-stove-improves-human-health-environment.html
I think:
1) The wheel is being reinvented due to lack of communications
and
2) The problem may not be technological but Social and Cultural. Changing the way people cook may be a very hard.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Anything from US is most unwelcome in these parts of the world, please stop HELPING us. US helping third world country, any country, has not been witnessed and reported yet. Just stay the FUCK out of our "hell holes" "shit holes" etc as so many of you refer to us.
FUCK YOU VERY MUCH,
The Third World.
And send over millions of propane gas stoves. Propane is easy to come by in the developing world, because that's where much of America's refining is done (since, you know, America likes to outsource its pollution to third world countries).
Apparently they can afford rudimentary stoves, which, according to the English language, are types of stoves.
Rudimentary implies that they're very very probably not store-bought stoves ("Hello, good sir. I'd like one of you finest rudimentary stoves."), but rather bits and pieces thrown together.
You should take a look at TFA, especially at the picture with the following caption: "A crude cookstove over an open-flame fire."
Personally, I think 'makeshift' would have been a better description than 'crude' or 'rudimentary'.
So these guys, but 3 years late to the party?
http://www.cleancookstoves.org/
I guess mechanical and chemical engineering masters students all need a thesis subject...
They have a camping stove that is somewhat similar, but with the added advantage of having forced air.
It's basically a coffee-can sized container with a fan on the bottom to force air through the fuel. They usually run on rechargeable batteries, but they can also be powered by a solar cell (or the batteries can be recharged with a solar cell).
It seems to me that this would be a much better solution compared to inventing something completely new. If appropriately-sized containers can be found or fabricated in these areas, only the fan/battery pack + solar charger needs to be sold in a kit. The solar charger could be USB out, which would allow cell phones to also be charged, encouraging uptake where cell phones are used as the primary source of communications. Alternatively, the fuel itself will create a heat differential. There may be a cost-effective way to have the heat differential recharge the battery Some backpacking stoves already do these, but they are spendy.
It would be interesting to compare these stove (I think they are commonly called biomass fuel stoves for camping), and compare it to a less-technical design such as a rocket stove (somewhat similar theory, but no moving parts), and compare both to just a sheet-metal non-complex stove. What's the best price point? What about the efficiency compared to the presently used setups? What about the durability?
This project to invent a new stove seems a combination of not-invented-here syndrome and best-is-the-enemy-of-good-enough.
i remember reading a similar story a few months earlier. nice to see another story about cleaner-burning cookstoves.
http://www.biolitestove.com/homestove/overview/ for the "homestove" which is intended for folks who need it "full time". Yes, it is more expensive, but they are working on funding sources.
One of the funding sources is us outdoor geeks, on their website you can find the campstove, the campgrill and the upcoming pot. Some of their profits go towards their homestove work.
I've got the campstove, it does a very nice job. Perhaps by next summer I'll invest in the grill.
This is silly. Even if you were able to mass produce this item and give it away for free it would still be the most expensive item these people own and a target of thieves. There's currently a project on Kickstarter for a solar oven that has pretty much the same goals. It costs $300, the main component is a glass tube, and it's completely worthless. It has raised $80,000.
This design is nothing but a rocket stove which can be made from a variety of found components by someone with minimal tools and knowledge. We'd be better off spending that $900,000 on training a few guys to travel around these regions to set up stove factories and train the local population on the concepts. Not only would we be teaching them how to build their own stoves we'd be supporting the local economy. Teaching a man how to fish, so to speak.
Yup eygypt isn't in africa at all. And they definiately didn't have chariots. No ser-ie
Ignorant fuck
...but isn't man's disruption of the natural processes that keep the population in check a direct contributor to the world overpopulation problem? From a strictly scientific point of view, drastically altering the mortality rate of the world's population by decreasing it (and increasing the birth/death ration) can't be a good thing. Many of these people have lived generations in their current environment, so why does a first world country believe they have the right to disrupt nature in such a drastic way?
So a first world country solves the woodstove problem, thereby decreasing mortality rates. Are they prepared to then step in and deal with inadequate water supplies, increases in loss of arable lands, higher rates of infant mortality, and other side effects of overpopulation?
I'm not knocking the design, but that's like comparing apples and oranges.
The "russian oven" is one design that was built for one environment and the "franklin stove" is a different design for different environment.
Yeah, the Russian Oven may be bigger than the dwellings these people are living in.
My suggestion would be some form of multi-fuel gasification system. Its highly efficient and produces very low emissions. The problem would be simplifying its operation, making it smaller & engineering it so that it didn't require electricity (for the blower).
aha, and they will also print a table of fast-growing woody plants (tree or tree-like) ... hopefully?
that grow "the most fast" and shed alot of branches in the user manual
i nominate this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albizia_saman (also because it makes copious amounts of seeds)!
You are correct and Ben Franklin was aware of that. He studied heating exhaustively as his book, 'Observations on Smoky Chimneys, Their Causes and Cure: With Considerations on Fuel and Stoves' demonstrates. Ben Franklin designed his stove as a compromise. He loved an open flame despite it's inefficiency.
This is not really totally new news! Another effort to develop a cheap (approx. 8 Euro) useful cooking stove with a chimney is described here: http://ofenmacher.org/index.php?sfwi=201&sflng=1&sfcr=&sfci=103651 by the German non-profit group 'Die Ofenmacher'. The stove avoids injuries and respiratory problems, while reducing the amount of wood needed. It also provides an employment opportunity for local stove makers!
I did read the article and I saw the picture. "Cost" means more than just cost in money to build a stove. There is the cost in human time and effort in making your own rudimentary stove and operating it.
According to TFA "3.5 million people die each year as a result of indoor air pollution from open fires or rudimentary stoves in their homes. More than 900,000 people die from pneumonia alone, which has been linked to indoor air pollution."
Surely a person could be far more productive if they don't contract pneumonia and die as a result of their rudimentary stove (i.e. the opportunity cost of a rudimentary stove). A rudimentary stove actually has a very high cost, and you are paying this cost with your health and future productivity.
Even if the stove costs like $10 (which is a lot for people in 3rd world countries), this is a smaller long term cost than being sick and dying earlier.
Human effort is not free. The time spent gathering firewood is an opportunity cost. Much of the reason why people in the 3rd world remain poor, is because their poverty does not allow for the initial investment to do basic tasks efficiently. They basically spend all their time doing chores inefficiently.
They already did this in Central America. There is a company there making stoves that cost about the same at traditional stoves but are 50% more efficient with wood and 90% less emissions: http://www.sustainableharvest.org/news-articles/articles/newsletter-articles/origin-and-benefits-of-the-damak-wood-conserving-stove
Different parts of the world will need different types of materials in the stove building. Metal is usually cost prohibitive, so bricks and adobe need to be used where available.
I've built a few tiny stoves ... a rocket stove and a wood-gas stove in the last few years. The rocket stove produces a huge amount of heat quickly and burns clean. The wood-gas stove burns with very high efficiency using hardly any wood once the burn converts to wood-methane gas. Very little wood is used. Both are amazing compared to a normal fires; camp fire, chimney fire, even a high-efficiency stove like we deploy in "cabins" in the USA for cooking and heating.
The U.S. Department of Energy has no business spending tax payer dollars on foreign conutry benefits. Now, if private donors find this to be a worthy cause, I'm all for that.
Jeez. Slashdot has really gone downhill.
The Klingons did not design it. They took the technology when they wiped out the last of the Jedi.
Bloody university PR departments presenting every research project as if it's some Eureka moment.
"For over a decade, cookstove experts and enthusiasts have gathered at Aprovecho [Research Center]". In 2009 The New Yorker had a long article about stove enthusiasts designing better stoves, what's changed since then? The Chinese are already cranking out Rocket stoves in volume; other commenters have linked to www.cleancookstoves.org, Biolite, etc.. The problem isn't engineering, it's economics and cultural.
Meanwhile, any stove still requires spending hours collecting firewood, contributing to deforestation and CO2 emissions. As an adjunct people can put food in a black pot in an insulated container heated by a cheap solar reflector. But now you've got two $20 purchases per family, one of which only works part of the time. Meanwhile the U.N. spends millions trucking fuel into refugee camps. Again, the problems are NOT engineering ones.
=S
There have been a lot of stabs at the problem but no huge sucess yet. And what works in one region/town/neighborhood won't work in the one right next door because of different in cuisine, culture, income and fuel sources.
The Klingons did not design it. They took the technology when they wiped out the last of the Jedi.
Of course the Jedi copied the technology from the Ewoks.
It's not just bits and pieces thrown together but an ancient design called the three stone stove. It's the simplest stove design possible. The plant to build is on flat surface, preferable elevated. get three rocks of similar size, hopefully with at least one flat spot. Arange as a triangle on the flat surface with the flat side of each sone facing up as level as you can. This gives you a stable spot to rest a pot or cooking grill without getting too much in the way on trying to manage the fire.
This should be about making a CHEAP, nearly fail-safe, anaerobic digester, that will take human and animal waste and create methane. It needs to allow easy run-time loading, rather than batch loading. With such an approach, it solves multiple issues.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm a student in a field where efficient design is critical (Chemical engineering) and these stoves (which appear to be rocket stoves from the article) are not really that much of an improvement over older stove designs. They are a good design, but it's just an incremental improvement over older stoves. It's ridiculous to compare the rocket stove to the Saturn V, rubycodez was right when he said that the principle of the rocket stove has been used for at least hundreds of years. Rocket stoves are a big improvement over an open fire, but aren't really all that much better than some older designs.
Why are they burning them? Surely they could train them to build better stoves?
What matters is not the uniqueness or otherwise of the design but instead that it is better than what is currently being used. To push the rocket analogy even more they are using ancient Chinese fireworks when a Saturn five is available which with a few minor tweaks can be brought within a tighter budget.
Even if the stove costs like $10 (which is a lot for people in 3rd world countries), this is a smaller long term cost than being sick and dying earlier.
Somehow, I think that if you have to cook your food in your single pan over an open fire, long term concerns aren't really high on the list.
I do agree that it is a good investment, though. But I think that holds for stoves currently available as well. It seems getting corrupt governments to invest in them and honestly distribute them is the real problem.
In the third world?
Are those significantly cheaper than the ones they had before?
http://www.potentialenergy.org/solution/stoves/
I'm with you on that. But this doesn't look all that efficient as a rocket stove.
Frankly, if youtube were consulted first, they'd have found better (and worse) designs.
What is wrong with building them gasifying stoves. Then they could cook a meal, run a generator, make creosote for preserving wood and make more fuel simultaneously. Wrap the pipe with copper tubing and heat water for a bath. How about thinking just a teensy bit outside the pat-yourself-on-the-back-for-helping box and address these peoples needs?
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Then they could cook a meal, run a generator, make creosote for preserving wood and make more fuel simultaneously. Wrap the pipe with copper tubing and heat water for a bath.
I'm reminded of something I heard from a nutritionist years ago. They had a list of stages that a person is in with respect to nutrition with stage 1 being horrible nutrition with no interest in changing their ways and stage 7 being ideal, or something like that. Some of the stages were just mental like "finding out about nutrition" or "showing interest in change." Well it turns out the goal of the nutritionist isn't to take to a stage 1 person and shove him into stage 5 or 7. That fails almost every time. The goal is to move the stage n guy to stage n+1. Then you let someone else worry about the rest.. a social worker.. family.. or maybe that person will come back to you later.
I'm sure it's not a perfect parallel but it just strikes me as hubris that you think you're going to take a community that cooks with dung on a dirt floor in an unventilated room and move them to what you're describing in one step, and criticizing people who are taking a more conservative approach as the "pat-yourself-on-the-back-for-helping" type.
I mean you MIGHT be right that 5 minutes of Youtube research would trump this large university-led project, but it sounds like they've done at least some market research, and probably learned from more ambitious but failed experiments in the past.
What you're saying is an attractive excuse because it puts the blame on poverty rather than the people themselves, but does it make sense? There are some investments that require money, some that require time, or both. The ones that require a time investment and yield a time savings can be done almost immediately. I don't think there are many communities on the planet where every person works at maximum capacity ALL the time. It's certainly not happening in the entire developing world simultaneously. Someone in the community has some extra time, guaranteed.
The ones that take money can generally be accomplished by groups of people. In a community where everybody lives on $1/day, maybe the community lives on $100/day, which is $36k/year. When everybody sacrifices a penny, it makes no difference to them and accomplishes nothing, but when the community sacrifices $360/year, that's enough to make small investments.
Then there are things like division of labor that can be applied with no investment at all and that yield huge efficiency gains right away. I'm guessing it's mostly societal norms that prevent more of these from being adopted. If you think every woman should be at home making all the meals herself on a dung-fueled stove, that is forcing inefficiency. Instead you could have a small group of people cook for the whole community, freeing up a huge amount of labor. You lose the ability to customize your meal. Big whoop. If you have a superstitious/religious problem with birth control and are unable to practice abstinence, you end up with too many kids and once again with traditional roles half your population is tied down in inefficient uses of time. When you put it that way, it sounds very narrow-minded, selfish, and self-defeating of the community rather than a noble problem of simply not having the resources to make an initial investment for thousands of years.
To top it off, these people don't live in isolation and don't have to reinvent the path to modernity on their own. Every country in the world has population centers, wealthy people, education systems, and charities.
Whoosh!
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I personally own a small Russian oven (I am Russian) and am repairing it just now so I must stress that it's NOT so efficient. Problem is that to collect all the smoke produced in a furnace the passages should be short enough limiting the heat collection efficiency. So the two-furnace ovens are usually built but it differs from a traditional design. The second furnace has a traditional "Holland" construction.
And a traditional Russian oven is too big. There should be at least 1.5*2 meters sleeping place on top for all the family.
What you're saying is an attractive excuse because it puts the blame on poverty rather than the people themselves, but does it make sense?
What I said was that poverty is the cause of poverty. Being poor in the first place is the cause of staying poor. I wasn't blaming anybody for anything. I was suggesting that this cycle of poverty can be easily broken by people not stuck within the cycle.
Yeah, but THESE guys got a $900K grant from the DOE. That is the real story, bilking money from a government organization that does not read history books.
Somehow, I think that if you have to cook your food in your single pan over an open fire, long term concerns aren't really high on the list.
No they aren't, which is why it is important to reduce the cost as much as possible. People barely scraping by don't have the luxury of making long term investments like education. They need to spend their time on what they know works and will keep them alive. Unfortunately what they know works is really inefficient. But if costs can be brought down low enough, then they don't need to make a long term investment. They can make a low or medium term investment with the same benefit potential.
And it may be hard with air pollution, but once they see the benefits of higher fuel efficiency, they may be willing to take a risk now that it seems more likely to be a good investment.
I was suggesting that this cycle of poverty can be easily broken by people not stuck within the cycle.
Looking at people on welfare in the US, it seems like it's not very easy to break the cycle even when you're giving people tens of thousands a year in cash, food, housing, and public education. Some people get off welfare, others are on for much of their lives just like their parents before them.
Poverty is one of thse problems that can be solved by throwing money at it.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
A big chunk of people on welfare in the US are completely dependent on it. Which means that without welfare, there would be no reason for them not to be as poor as the poorest people in Africa.
How would you explain the fact that the quality of life for people on welfare in the US is so much higher than people in Africa. People on welfare in the US have access to safe food, clean water, healthcare, mobile phones, television, etc, if not for the welfare system we have in place?
The quality of life in the US is also better now for the average poor person than it was a hundred years ago. We still have poor people but these people are poor relative to other Americans. As long as people have unequal wealth regardless of how much or how little everyone has, there will be poor people relative to rich people.
We will never reach a state were 100% of people are off welfare. If anything, as our society gets more wealthy, we will probably continue to raise the threshold for what we consider poor. The fact that the same number of people are on welfare is not an indicator that it is not working.
How is this different from a rocket stove. Already open source and constructable from old cans.
How did you feel at the time about being in the Girl Scouts?
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Yeah, let's just keep them cooking with shit in an unventilated room, after all they couldn't possibly upgrade their lives because they are so much stupider than you.
Hubris is; blowing a big public image up over helping someone and then not delivering any more than is easy to do, for the cameras, of course.
Can't beat that market-research either, gonna sell them some help. Nope, people are mostly ignorant sub-morons. Colleges are full of them, some tenured.
Youtube seems to be a much more efficient way of learning beyond high school. Less cost, same amount of accuracy and you can pick and choose the depth of propaganda you receive with it.
I will continue to criticize the mediocre efforts of the pat-yourself-on-the-back-for-helping" type, they are only interested in how they look doing so. Perhaps they should just leave money for others to do the job correctly.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!