The temperature that produces optimum flavor is irrelevant. It was "too hot" in the context of safety.
Like many cars today have too much horsepower, in the context of safety. Like knives are too sharp, in the context of safety Like how hammers are too heavy, in the context of safety.
FACT: People like their coffee hot. They demand that it be served so. This was born out in Lincoln, NE in the months after this lawsuit.
For about a week many places stopped selling coffee. After that a number of places turned the temperature of their coffee down to what the court considered 'safe'. Their sales plummeted. They turned the temperature back up, and sales returned.
As fred has noted, people manage to handle ~24 million cups of McDonald's coffee safely. This is a better statistic than being able to drive to work and home safely. This is less than the odds of winning many lotteries. Drinking a cup a day, you'd expect to get injured(not even as badly as this woman) less than once every 65K years.
In addition the woman was a combination of contributing factors - unsafe lid removal*, advanced age reducing reflexes to limit damage, clothing that readily saturated with the coffe**, etc...
With this in context, should McD's take a close look at their coffee cups? Sure - but the question becomes, what can be done? Make an old-person resistant lid? Slather even more warning labels that people ignore on it?
One thing would be the dunken donets idea - rather than waste money handing out a half dozen creamers and sugar packets, ask people what they want, have a big dispensor, hit the appropriate buttens to cream/sugar the coffee before slapping the lid on. Cost of machine and labor eventually paid for by happy customers and reduced disposable packet usage.
But that's not exactly a common service yet even today.
*One poster commented it took too much force to take the lid off - what about the flipside of 'lid came off accidentally'? **Sweats would act like a towel, soaking it up. Jeans or many other fabrics wouldn't have held as much, limiting damage
Yeah, the jury went a bit crazy awarding punitive damages. Apparently they were really incensed by McDonald's flippant attitude towards a known safety problem. Yet the court still agreed in principle that McDonald's was liable, and merely reduced the amount of damages to something more reasonable.
I've always felt that the jury found a good sob story and went after a company with deep pockets.
Still, you'd have had to worry about her in at least my area when local restraunts and stores held a coffee boycott over it - they stopped serving it. People went so ballistic I almost thought they were going to track her down and lynch her.
Some places turned the temperature down to what the court decision determined to be a 'safe' temperature - ended up turning it back up after getting complaints and dropped sales to places still selling it hot.
I've considered this myself, even though I'd have to do the car starting myself - get a big inverter and hook it up to provide power in an outage, using the gasoline engine(and battery) in my car for power.
I'd just have to be careful not to kill my inverter, which isn't very heavy duty compared to a hybrid car's.
Heck, for ~$500 I could get a 5000 watt inverter and an extra deep cycle battery to power it, keeping my car(and it's battery) out of the cycle so I don't risk killing my starting capacity.
If I ever find the diesel pickup I'm looking for, this wouldn't be a problem - a diesel normally not only has two larger batteries but a much more capable inverter to keep the batteries charged.
So, nothing extremely new, or even resource extensive, per site. It's when you multiply it by the thousands of sites that they'll have to do this for that it gets expensive.
A good industrial engine and propane is about as reliable as diesel
You dig down deep enough, frequently they'd be the same engine, just with different injection systems. You can run propane through a suitably configured diesel engine.
some solar panels to keep the starter batteries charged constantly (as an independent backup)
I'd think that it'd be cheaper to hook up a battery charger system to dedicated power line to keep it charged. Unless you're likely to let the system sit for months without power, then go to turn it on.
The level of 'taking it seriously' is different though. With a nuclear plant afterall, you're dealing with static locations, thus can place a larger amount of controls on board.
Except when it's nuclear, it's a MUCH BIGGER DEAL.
Really? Which one caused more trackable damage to human health: TMI, or the train crash resulting in an anhydrous ammonia spill in Minot, ND?
If it works, it works. It's economy is determines whether it's practical or not.
It's like with electric cars. Engineering wise, they're perfectly workable and practical until you compare them with the costs of gasoline powered engines.
As is, electric already makes sense in limited areas; for example, many warehouses and malls have electric carts that don't need much in the way of batteries, and you'd have extra expense providing for disposing of the exhaust.
Right, it isn't clear that ethanol from corn is profitable without subsidies,
If you're talking about using corn squeezings as fuel in a car, than it's very clear that it's unprofitable without subsidies; or at least substantial tax breaks.
Even if feed corn is completely unsubsidized there's plenty of subsidies built into ethanol fuel production itself. Given from what I've heard, I'm not even sure that feed corn would be getting much subsidy - it's likely passed any 'subsidy price' the government set.
It might be worth having a bunch of ethanol processing capacity online for when someone gets cellulosic to work
Cellulosic already works, it's just too expensive. Besides, a traditional corn ethanol plant wouldn't be suitable for cellulosic production without a lot of retrofitting.
because corn ethanol *can't* supply enough energy to replace gasoline, there isn't any point in trying to construct a corn fuel economy
We don't necessarily need any one replacement - a range of replacements would work. Still, I agree with you, a corn fuel economy is rather unlikely.
and we aren't exactly talking about something that is particularly hard to do(viz, people have been brewing alcohol since forever).
Not production of alcohol from cellulose - we've always done it the more traditional way - from sugars and starches.
Corn is displacing other products because of the increased demand leading to higher prices. If it wasn't for corn subsidies; there'd be less motive to grow more, as ethanol plants are operating on a rather thin margin as is. The recent increases in corn prices have driven many of them into the black.
Without the subsidies we'd be seeing fewer ethanol plants; probably more interest in cellulostic ethanol for vehicles.
Corn subsidies are indeed one of the bad points. For one, there are better crops for ethanol, two, the corn used for ethanol production (feed corn) isn't generally considered suitable for human consumption*.
If ethanol is going to make a shot at replacing a chunk of the gasoline market, I think that cellulostic production will become king.
I was thinking of things like wheat, rice, soybeans, and a wide variety of cannable vegetables and fruits.
Back when I was a kid, rather than getting food stamps you would be issued products from government warehouses(ever hear of government cheese?) as part of the rotation scheme.
*Though I'll make a disclaimer here that if things got *truly* bad, it'd quickly become so.
Are we or are we not better off than we were in the 1940s?
Are TV's not larger, is not the programming available more diverse? Is our expected lifespan not longer? Medical care better, etc...?
What you were talking about would increase the size of the pie.
You're complaining because the pizza is still sliced into eight pieces - I'm happy because instead of getting a 10" pie, it's a 12" pie. So each slice is measurably bigger.
both, people did not whant to eat it and it was to consider by health-authorities not suitable as food, if a remember correct it did take about 15 years before it was considered ok to eat
Hmmm... Makes me wonder what the average life expectancy for reindeer are.
that number of 4000 did I not see in the article
Could of been edited out. Still, it's along the number killed by the Bhopal chemical disaster. Or what they estimate is killed by coal pollution in the USA each year.
I'd rather trade a 1 in every 40 years accident(and counting), for 4k deaths expected each year.
maybe not so much cancer, but we could not eat reindeer for many years, many families livehood depended on that.
Was this due to reality, or pure panic?
and take a little look at birth-records after the accident and you will start to see it's not only nature but also humans that are affected and it's is not so local you might think.
What happened that would affect birth records? People stopped having kids, had more kids, what?
and the thousands of people who died from cancers in surrounding areas.
That would have happened even without the accident. Cancer is one of the leading causes of death today, Chernobyl or no Chernobyl. Cancer rates have been worse for several neighboring areas with not particularly clean chemical production facilities.
She has exactly zero credibility.
Because she isn't quoting numbers that you like? She specifically mentions in the article that the accident wouldn't have had the nasty effects if it'd had a containment structure like what's required in western nations.
She also doesn't mention the huge cost per MWh of nuke, and ignores methods (that do really exist!) for "green" replacement of baseload.
Name some. Nuclear power is estimated at $1-2 per watt today, 90% capacity factor.
And you completely forget to consider that in order to produce that many solar panels would require our entire GDP for something like 10 years. Even assuming solar generation drops substantially in price from the cheapest plant I've heard about. And we still haven't addressed what to do when the sun isn't shining.
Meanwhile, for something like 1/10th of our annual GDP for a year we'd be able to replace our electricity demand with nice shiny new nuclear plants, without assuming they get cheaper than $2/watt.
Not to mention that with reprocessing or some of the techniques under development that time would be reduced to 'less than the current age of the USA' much less longer lived countries like Spain & England.
Why should farmers get a special subsidy when other Americans don't?
Because in a pure market economy we'd lose a lot of our production from farmers going under during good years, then not have enough food grown to sustain us without famine in a bad year?
I can see some subsidization when it comes to stuff that can cost lives all over the place - stuff like food or vaccines.
Why is farming a special case and please don't tell me that nobody would grow food here in the United States if there were no subsidy.
Simple enough, like I said, I'm not saying that food wouldn't be produced; just that in an extreme market fluctuation we'd have hunger before markets could correct themselves. Food products can take up to a year to be grown. Many others have at least a 3 month lead time.
Note that I express this in terms of ensuring long term stability - encouraging conservation, sustainment farming techniques, a bit of overproduction in case of an equivalent to the potato famine popping up.
None of this means that I don't consider the current situation massive overkill and a massive waste of funds. Matter of fact, I would prefer that we go back to the old system of storing enough food products to last so many years.
If you could, in theory, raise the collective level of technology the entire world one "point", you would accomplish absolutely nothing.
Actually, you'd improve things quite a bit. While the economics is competitive, the overall results of 'the economy' isn't.
Increase everybody a 'point', and we'd all be better off. Sure, the USA might finally get economical electric cars, but there's whole swaths of Asia and Africa that would be raised up past middle age technologies combined with the castoffs of more advanced areas.
Which would you rather do, increase the effective income of everybody by 10%, or only the bottom half by 10%? Because the second would actually have everyone worse off once equalization hits.
Gotta love nitpickers, note that I immediately suggested afterwards that some of the farmers freed up from farming go to work at a tractor factory.
By that I was implying a comprehensive economy. Farming would be only a portion of it. You can't build a house upon a single pillar and expect it to weather any serious storm.
Personally I think the whole "giving people technology will improve their lives" theory is flawed or at least completely undemonstrated in any meaningful way.
Sure it does, at least as long as the technology lasts. But as you noted, it needs to be followed up. Providing tractors where the increase in production won't ever produce the funds to buy a replacement tractor, for example. Better to build a tractor factory, capable of building tractors cheaply enough to be justifiable to the local farmers.
I don't think that this truly detracts from my thought that truly raising an area out of poverty, out of subsidence living, is several orders of magnitude higher than simply feeding it.
While food & clean water are indeed a concern in many areas - some areas of africa have an HIV infection rate of over 10%.
I'd hardly consider a deadly disease that's infected 10% of the population as undeserving of attention. It's not any better if the months old baby dies of neglect if it's parents have died of AIDS complications.
It might be sick, but societies like these can survive with a 70% infant mortality rate. If we can get the adults out of the poverty cycle, into a state where they can support themselves, the children will come along.
They don't need fucking laptops. They need clean water, food, peace, basic health infrastructure, peace, and educational/vocational/agricultural training.
The OLPC, which certainly not necessary, is supposed to make the last point cheaper, and therefore more accessible.
How much does it cost to send a teacher to Africa to teach for a year?
True to the linked article, my first thought about the OLPC project was that all it would do is show the have-nots just how much they don't have. I figured it was more likely to spur a violent, lower-class revolution than anything else. I was thinking about 18th century France at the time.
Unlike 18th century France's lower classes, part of the tragedy is that the people we're talking about could fall off the face of the planet and we'd hardly notice. In France the nobility depended upon the lower classes for their lifestyles.
Besides, violent revolutions have a far larger tendency to ruin things - witness the situation in Africa, Caribbean, and Central America.
Will this work better than other options? It'll take time to tell.
Personally, I like the idea of the loans to buy basic business stuff - like a cow, some chickens for a farmer somewhere. Money for a small tractor. Etc...
There are concrete actions that we can take as members of the "developed" nations, and these include: subsidizing agricultural infrastructure, providing education about health and nutrition, education in general, helping to challenge laws / societal norms that restrict productivity, reducing sexism and racism, etc. But these hunger programs are specifically *not* about providing meals directly.
Good points, though I'd question a pure concentration on 'agricultural infrastructure'. We already have enough food, and some areas just aren't suited for agriculture today.
Now, give them a trade that can produce something valuable even in first world countries, and they can trade for their food, increasing productivity even more.
In fact, the big organizations already tackling hunger know that empowering the locals is the key, and this is entirely consistent with OLPC's goals.
Agreed. Heck, I remember reading an article about the effects of a Nike 'sweatshop' factory somewhere - even though the wages sounded horrible here, it was still something like 100X what a subsidence farmer could expect in a year, and how the whole area was developing as a result of this one factory.
Slashdot Mirror
The temperature that produces optimum flavor is irrelevant. It was "too hot" in the context of safety.
Like many cars today have too much horsepower, in the context of safety.
Like knives are too sharp, in the context of safety
Like how hammers are too heavy, in the context of safety.
FACT: People like their coffee hot. They demand that it be served so. This was born out in Lincoln, NE in the months after this lawsuit.
For about a week many places stopped selling coffee. After that a number of places turned the temperature of their coffee down to what the court considered 'safe'. Their sales plummeted. They turned the temperature back up, and sales returned.
As fred has noted, people manage to handle ~24 million cups of McDonald's coffee safely. This is a better statistic than being able to drive to work and home safely. This is less than the odds of winning many lotteries. Drinking a cup a day, you'd expect to get injured(not even as badly as this woman) less than once every 65K years.
In addition the woman was a combination of contributing factors - unsafe lid removal*, advanced age reducing reflexes to limit damage, clothing that readily saturated with the coffe**, etc...
With this in context, should McD's take a close look at their coffee cups? Sure - but the question becomes, what can be done? Make an old-person resistant lid? Slather even more warning labels that people ignore on it?
One thing would be the dunken donets idea - rather than waste money handing out a half dozen creamers and sugar packets, ask people what they want, have a big dispensor, hit the appropriate buttens to cream/sugar the coffee before slapping the lid on. Cost of machine and labor eventually paid for by happy customers and reduced disposable packet usage.
But that's not exactly a common service yet even today.
*One poster commented it took too much force to take the lid off - what about the flipside of 'lid came off accidentally'?
**Sweats would act like a towel, soaking it up. Jeans or many other fabrics wouldn't have held as much, limiting damage
Yeah, the jury went a bit crazy awarding punitive damages. Apparently they were really incensed by McDonald's flippant attitude towards a known safety problem. Yet the court still agreed in principle that McDonald's was liable, and merely reduced the amount of damages to something more reasonable.
I've always felt that the jury found a good sob story and went after a company with deep pockets.
Still, you'd have had to worry about her in at least my area when local restraunts and stores held a coffee boycott over it - they stopped serving it. People went so ballistic I almost thought they were going to track her down and lynch her.
Some places turned the temperature down to what the court decision determined to be a 'safe' temperature - ended up turning it back up after getting complaints and dropped sales to places still selling it hot.
I've considered this myself, even though I'd have to do the car starting myself - get a big inverter and hook it up to provide power in an outage, using the gasoline engine(and battery) in my car for power.
I'd just have to be careful not to kill my inverter, which isn't very heavy duty compared to a hybrid car's.
Heck, for ~$500 I could get a 5000 watt inverter and an extra deep cycle battery to power it, keeping my car(and it's battery) out of the cycle so I don't risk killing my starting capacity.
If I ever find the diesel pickup I'm looking for, this wouldn't be a problem - a diesel normally not only has two larger batteries but a much more capable inverter to keep the batteries charged.
So, nothing extremely new, or even resource extensive, per site. It's when you multiply it by the thousands of sites that they'll have to do this for that it gets expensive.
A good industrial engine and propane is about as reliable as diesel
You dig down deep enough, frequently they'd be the same engine, just with different injection systems. You can run propane through a suitably configured diesel engine.
some solar panels to keep the starter batteries charged constantly (as an independent backup)
I'd think that it'd be cheaper to hook up a battery charger system to dedicated power line to keep it charged. Unless you're likely to let the system sit for months without power, then go to turn it on.
The level of 'taking it seriously' is different though. With a nuclear plant afterall, you're dealing with static locations, thus can place a larger amount of controls on board.
Except when it's nuclear, it's a MUCH BIGGER DEAL.
Really? Which one caused more trackable damage to human health: TMI, or the train crash resulting in an anhydrous ammonia spill in Minot, ND?
I have to disagree;
If it works, it works. It's economy is determines whether it's practical or not.
It's like with electric cars. Engineering wise, they're perfectly workable and practical until you compare them with the costs of gasoline powered engines.
As is, electric already makes sense in limited areas; for example, many warehouses and malls have electric carts that don't need much in the way of batteries, and you'd have extra expense providing for disposing of the exhaust.
Right, it isn't clear that ethanol from corn is profitable without subsidies,
If you're talking about using corn squeezings as fuel in a car, than it's very clear that it's unprofitable without subsidies; or at least substantial tax breaks.
Even if feed corn is completely unsubsidized there's plenty of subsidies built into ethanol fuel production itself. Given from what I've heard, I'm not even sure that feed corn would be getting much subsidy - it's likely passed any 'subsidy price' the government set.
It might be worth having a bunch of ethanol processing capacity online for when someone gets cellulosic to work
Cellulosic already works, it's just too expensive. Besides, a traditional corn ethanol plant wouldn't be suitable for cellulosic production without a lot of retrofitting.
because corn ethanol *can't* supply enough energy to replace gasoline, there isn't any point in trying to construct a corn fuel economy
We don't necessarily need any one replacement - a range of replacements would work. Still, I agree with you, a corn fuel economy is rather unlikely.
and we aren't exactly talking about something that is particularly hard to do(viz, people have been brewing alcohol since forever).
Not production of alcohol from cellulose - we've always done it the more traditional way - from sugars and starches.
Corn is displacing other products because of the increased demand leading to higher prices. If it wasn't for corn subsidies; there'd be less motive to grow more, as ethanol plants are operating on a rather thin margin as is. The recent increases in corn prices have driven many of them into the black.
Without the subsidies we'd be seeing fewer ethanol plants; probably more interest in cellulostic ethanol for vehicles.
Corn subsidies are indeed one of the bad points. For one, there are better crops for ethanol, two, the corn used for ethanol production (feed corn) isn't generally considered suitable for human consumption*.
If ethanol is going to make a shot at replacing a chunk of the gasoline market, I think that cellulostic production will become king.
I was thinking of things like wheat, rice, soybeans, and a wide variety of cannable vegetables and fruits.
Back when I was a kid, rather than getting food stamps you would be issued products from government warehouses(ever hear of government cheese?) as part of the rotation scheme.
*Though I'll make a disclaimer here that if things got *truly* bad, it'd quickly become so.
I think that you're still not getting it.
Are we or are we not better off than we were in the 1940s?
Are TV's not larger, is not the programming available more diverse? Is our expected lifespan not longer? Medical care better, etc...?
What you were talking about would increase the size of the pie.
You're complaining because the pizza is still sliced into eight pieces - I'm happy because instead of getting a 10" pie, it's a 12" pie. So each slice is measurably bigger.
both, people did not whant to eat it and it was to consider by health-authorities not suitable as food, if a remember correct it did take about 15 years before it was considered ok to eat
Hmmm... Makes me wonder what the average life expectancy for reindeer are.
that number of 4000 did I not see in the article
Could of been edited out. Still, it's along the number killed by the Bhopal chemical disaster. Or what they estimate is killed by coal pollution in the USA each year.
I'd rather trade a 1 in every 40 years accident(and counting), for 4k deaths expected each year.
maybe not so much cancer, but we could not eat reindeer for many years, many families livehood depended on that.
Was this due to reality, or pure panic?
and take a little look at birth-records after the accident and you will start to see it's not only nature but also humans that are affected and it's is not so local you might think.
What happened that would affect birth records? People stopped having kids, had more kids, what?
She does not mention the dead city,
That still have people living around it.
and the thousands of people who died from cancers in surrounding areas.
That would have happened even without the accident. Cancer is one of the leading causes of death today, Chernobyl or no Chernobyl. Cancer rates have been worse for several neighboring areas with not particularly clean chemical production facilities.
She has exactly zero credibility.
Because she isn't quoting numbers that you like? She specifically mentions in the article that the accident wouldn't have had the nasty effects if it'd had a containment structure like what's required in western nations.
She also doesn't mention the huge cost per MWh of nuke, and ignores methods (that do really exist!) for "green" replacement of baseload.
Name some. Nuclear power is estimated at $1-2 per watt today, 90% capacity factor.
And you completely forget to consider that in order to produce that many solar panels would require our entire GDP for something like 10 years. Even assuming solar generation drops substantially in price from the cheapest plant I've heard about. And we still haven't addressed what to do when the sun isn't shining.
Meanwhile, for something like 1/10th of our annual GDP for a year we'd be able to replace our electricity demand with nice shiny new nuclear plants, without assuming they get cheaper than $2/watt.
Not to mention that with reprocessing or some of the techniques under development that time would be reduced to 'less than the current age of the USA' much less longer lived countries like Spain & England.
Sure, take it seriously, just like we take train routing seriously, plane maintenance seriously, handling of ammonia hydroxide seriously, etc...
Just because we have to take the safety of something seriously doesn't mean that we can't use it.
Why should farmers get a special subsidy when other Americans don't?
Because in a pure market economy we'd lose a lot of our production from farmers going under during good years, then not have enough food grown to sustain us without famine in a bad year?
I can see some subsidization when it comes to stuff that can cost lives all over the place - stuff like food or vaccines.
Why is farming a special case and please don't tell me that nobody would grow food here in the United States if there were no subsidy.
Simple enough, like I said, I'm not saying that food wouldn't be produced; just that in an extreme market fluctuation we'd have hunger before markets could correct themselves. Food products can take up to a year to be grown. Many others have at least a 3 month lead time.
Note that I express this in terms of ensuring long term stability - encouraging conservation, sustainment farming techniques, a bit of overproduction in case of an equivalent to the potato famine popping up.
None of this means that I don't consider the current situation massive overkill and a massive waste of funds. Matter of fact, I would prefer that we go back to the old system of storing enough food products to last so many years.
If you could, in theory, raise the collective level of technology the entire world one "point", you would accomplish absolutely nothing.
Actually, you'd improve things quite a bit. While the economics is competitive, the overall results of 'the economy' isn't.
Increase everybody a 'point', and we'd all be better off. Sure, the USA might finally get economical electric cars, but there's whole swaths of Asia and Africa that would be raised up past middle age technologies combined with the castoffs of more advanced areas.
Which would you rather do, increase the effective income of everybody by 10%, or only the bottom half by 10%? Because the second would actually have everyone worse off once equalization hits.
Depends on details of course, I have heard of success stories for local producers.
At least in areas where various 'aid' companies aren't handing out tons of free food.
Gotta love nitpickers, note that I immediately suggested afterwards that some of the farmers freed up from farming go to work at a tractor factory.
By that I was implying a comprehensive economy. Farming would be only a portion of it. You can't build a house upon a single pillar and expect it to weather any serious storm.
Farming, fishing, mining, manufacturing(various), retail, services, etc...
Personally I think the whole "giving people technology will improve their lives" theory is flawed or at least completely undemonstrated in any meaningful way.
Sure it does, at least as long as the technology lasts. But as you noted, it needs to be followed up. Providing tractors where the increase in production won't ever produce the funds to buy a replacement tractor, for example. Better to build a tractor factory, capable of building tractors cheaply enough to be justifiable to the local farmers.
I don't think that this truly detracts from my thought that truly raising an area out of poverty, out of subsidence living, is several orders of magnitude higher than simply feeding it.
the mythical family farmer is largely gone in the United States today
Heh, they're not so mythical in my area.
While I consider some regulation and subsidization necessary in the pursuit of food supply stability, it shouldn't take that much.
While food & clean water are indeed a concern in many areas - some areas of africa have an HIV infection rate of over 10%.
I'd hardly consider a deadly disease that's infected 10% of the population as undeserving of attention. It's not any better if the months old baby dies of neglect if it's parents have died of AIDS complications.
It might be sick, but societies like these can survive with a 70% infant mortality rate. If we can get the adults out of the poverty cycle, into a state where they can support themselves, the children will come along.
They don't need fucking laptops. They need clean water, food, peace, basic health infrastructure, peace, and educational/vocational/agricultural training.
The OLPC, which certainly not necessary, is supposed to make the last point cheaper, and therefore more accessible.
How much does it cost to send a teacher to Africa to teach for a year?
True to the linked article, my first thought about the OLPC project was that all it would do is show the have-nots just how much they don't have. I figured it was more likely to spur a violent, lower-class revolution than anything else. I was thinking about 18th century France at the time.
Unlike 18th century France's lower classes, part of the tragedy is that the people we're talking about could fall off the face of the planet and we'd hardly notice. In France the nobility depended upon the lower classes for their lifestyles.
Besides, violent revolutions have a far larger tendency to ruin things - witness the situation in Africa, Caribbean, and Central America.
Will this work better than other options? It'll take time to tell.
Personally, I like the idea of the loans to buy basic business stuff - like a cow, some chickens for a farmer somewhere. Money for a small tractor. Etc...
There are concrete actions that we can take as members of the "developed" nations, and these include: subsidizing agricultural infrastructure, providing education about health and nutrition, education in general, helping to challenge laws / societal norms that restrict productivity, reducing sexism and racism, etc. But these hunger programs are specifically *not* about providing meals directly.
Good points, though I'd question a pure concentration on 'agricultural infrastructure'. We already have enough food, and some areas just aren't suited for agriculture today.
Now, give them a trade that can produce something valuable even in first world countries, and they can trade for their food, increasing productivity even more.
In fact, the big organizations already tackling hunger know that empowering the locals is the key, and this is entirely consistent with OLPC's goals.
Agreed. Heck, I remember reading an article about the effects of a Nike 'sweatshop' factory somewhere - even though the wages sounded horrible here, it was still something like 100X what a subsidence farmer could expect in a year, and how the whole area was developing as a result of this one factory.