Mike Murray - What the guy who wrote shrimp and weenies memo is doing now | scobleizer

leighsword
LeighSword

give a man fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you feed him for a life time(授人以鱼不如授之以渔), money can not solve such a complex problems, and to hold down employees wages is very dangerous(lost passion), there are must be volunteers in a company who can do this job well, such as Bill & Melinda Gates foundation they understand above proverb well.

chrismarts

True, but give a man a match and he'll be warm for a minute - light a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

Tongue Out

MrFile

I definitely think this video was a good investment of my time, and its inspiring to see people like this helping the world.

I must say though that to all the young people I highly recommend that at your younger ages focus on learning and growing yourself. If you invest too much of your time and effort when you are younger into saving the world you wont have time to grow yourself, and will never be in a truly powerful position to help others like this man can because he earned a lot of money and got plenty of contacts working at Microsoft.

As for giving to the world vs. your local community I think most people should have a 80/20 mentality. Give 80% of your time to the people closest to you and give 20% to those who are far away. Again I believe in this since if you let your community evolve and help those close to you, those people and you over time will constantly have to give less internally and will have more power to output externally. If you focus too much externally when things are broken at home you risk having issues arise around you that will prevent you from giving externally completely in the future.

I for one try to practice what I preach by giving time and money to my community through my volunteer work with the police department and various giving’s. Occasionally I will donate to larger world wide organizations to help fund relief work and that is in my opinion a great way to work.

To close this out I do want to add one thing, the man is right, geeks are really natural problem solvers.

leighsword
LeighSword

the another way to hold down the cost is to break the unimportant team likes Visual C++ team, and move it to more cheap employees country likes China, of course MS should keep their important team likes Visual Basic and .Net team in US.

dantheman82

C++ is unimportant? Apparently, not according to the most recent TIOBE ratings:

Position	Programming Language	Ratings	(Ratings)	Status
1	Java	21.871%	+4.82%	A
2	C	18.773%	+0.60%	A
3	C++	11.820%	-3.75%	A
4	PHP	9.671%	+2.25%	A
5	Perl	7.449%	-1.37%	A
6	(Visual) Basic	6.896%	-2.86%	A
7	C#	3.462%	+1.82%	A

rasx
Programmer/Analyst III, Emperor of String.Empty

I think Mike is talking about better bandaids---even better than what the International Monetary Fund does "for" people in need. I am curious about what Vandana Shiva or Wangari Maathai thinks about these loans.

And of course this conversation is devoid of the possibility that these "poor people" were deliberately underdeveloped by powers greater than the worldly W2 employee confident about what the "third world" really is.

Poverty is not natural. Poverty happens when people are taken out of the world of nature. And it is so, so sad to assume that living in the world of nature has nothing to do with "advanced" technology. This assumption is what is actually stupid.

leighsword
LeighSword

dantheman82 wrote:
C++ is unimportant? Apparently, not according to the most recent TIOBE ratings:

to us, not, to MS, yes, because of less enhancement in VC++ in recently years, i heard that most of developers used to VB, the 80/20 mentality told us that 20% are best of best, and the rest is unimportant(20% of population control 80% of resource), that's a reason why VB is popular.

steamer25

Unfortuneatly, poverty IS natural. To be more precise, it's an aspect of human nature. By default, people are lazy at best and downright destructive at their worst (see Cain, Nero, The Crusades, slavery/racism, Hitler, Stalin, Hussein, etc., etc.). Given this fact, it's no wonder there are many people in the world who live in poverty.

This is not to say that there is no hope for mankind. Things like technology are evidence of this hope (technology = applied knowledge = productivity = prosperity = order). Rather, I'm just pointing out the difference between how things should (in the philosophical sense of the word) be and how they are.

In fact, from my brief exposure to microfinance, I'm inclined to say that it seems like a very reasonable approach to the problem. It holds people accountable and invites them to join the prosperous in being productive. This is part of the kind of encouragement and motivation that is required to overcome human nature. To add another cliché, it's a hand up rather than a hand out. Cool

wavesmash

A very moving cause.

I have been looking at DRIPs (Direct Re-Investment Plans) lately. This looks like a better investment.

I'll coin the phrase DROPs (Direct Re-Investment Opportunity for Poverty) to describe Mike Murray's objectives.

Do you know that only 2% of philanthropy in the US goes outside the US.

With a $100 loan, a woman can purchase a water bucket & a dairy cow. It will take 2 years to pay off this loan. By 7 years she will be self-sustaining and her family will be able to go to school. Her family will break the cycle.

Over 7 years seems like such a long time for the 30-second MTV generation. How can we do this faster? (hope I quoted him right on that)

How do we get this money to the people, and be sure it gets there? Paypal? Mail? The journalists who risk their lives every day, like Kevin Sites? The aid workers who have access to the Internet? Eco-tourists who want to give a little extra? Are there banks or money transfer stations people can go to? How does this get distributed?

How do we see the results of our donations? Some ideas. The Million Dollar Home Page becomes full of people's joyful faces for each hundred dollar loan. Digg becomes a list of different testimonials from the field on how people will use the money, with dugg people receiving more loans. Slashdot, well, Slashdot better not change.

Microfinance is a great idea that sounds like it just may work.

Read this book if you want to open your eyes to the world of insurmountable poverty.

Not so much agreeing with that Smurf Video though. There are many other ways to get your point across with positive messages.

Unitus - Global Microfinance Accelerator

Click. Click.