guttervomit

3

Red Cow No. 10

28 Oct 2009

Almost two years ago, I wrote a piece on the coming Mayan eschaton, i.e., how the world was presumably going to end on the 21st of December, 2012. Well, they’ve gone and made a movie about it so it’s not really all that compelling a topic anymore. However, my interest in eschatology in general hasn’t really waned over the past 20 months, and recently I had stumbled on to an ongoing effort to actually force the apocalypse to happen. An effort led by fundamentalist Christians, no less.

This particular eschatological prophecy has to do with a red heifer – an apparently ultra-rare, scarlet-hued female cow whose presence would allow the Christians to build the Third Temple, and thus facilitate the second coming of their Messiah. (That would be Jesus, to you secular folks.) The rarity of this kind of cow is puzzling – it has only appeared a grand total of 9 times throughout all of Hebrew history. The first was for Moses, he of the Top 10 list. He gave the poor animal to his priest Eleazar to be sacrificed.

Upon the heifer’s tenth appearance, the End Time – man’s final moments on this planet – will commence. Given these circumstances, we’re all quite fortunate that red cows simply aren’t indigenous to that part of the world. They’re relatively common in North America though, which, as it happens, is where this harbinger of doom is currently being bred in large numbers by one Clyde Lott. Turns out he’s been at it since the late-90’s.

Here’s how the fundamentalist Christian view of the eschaton works:

1. The Setup
Three events must occur for the Messiah to return: (1) the nation of Israel must be restored, (2) Jerusalem must be a Jewish City, and (3) the Temple must be rebuilt. (It was destroyed by Romans in 70 AD. Whenever Jews break glass during weddings, they do so in memory of this cataclysmic event.) Of those three requirements, only the Temple currently remains unfulfilled.

Of course, the building of Temple itself has its own set of requirements. The relevant one involves using the ashes of a red heifer to purify its constituents. And naturally, the heifer requirements are pretty tedious as well. Sayeth Numbers 19:

“Speak unto the children of Israel,” the Lord commanded, “that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came a yoke.”

In other words, this cow must be pitch-perfect. Not a single non-red strand of hair, and not a single day of labor to its name. Also, a heifer is by definition about three years of age, so it needs to be properly cared for until its time comes.

Clyde Lott’s breeding work has thus far produced a bunch of near-misses, but no keepers as of yet. Each potential candidate is subjected to the closest scrutiny. When one candidate (not from Lott’s stock though) was discovered in 1996, some Jews rejoiced, while other camps called for the animal to be shot immediately, and “every molecule” destroyed. The poor calf’s tail turned white as it grew older though, solving the problem for everyone. In 2002, another calf was discovered and subsequently disqualified. One wonders if these calves are not simply willing their imperfections into existence in an act of bovine self-preservation.

2. The Buildup
Once this all-important cow is found, investigated and approved by the rabbis, it will be sacrificed on a pyre, and its ashes mixed into water. Jews will flock from all corners of the globe to be purified by this water, and the restoration of the Temple will commence.

It’s easy for secularists to write off this Jewish predilection for temple-building, but its significance does bear some explanation. The Jews believe that their Temple is the device through which God will manifest His presence to mankind. It’s not a building, it’s a conduit.

3. The Denouement
The Messiah’s return is the part familiar to most Christians. There will be seven years of great tribulation, during which an Anti-Christ will appear to wage war against the believers. One can look at this period as a great shakedown, during which the lapsed, lazy or only mildly serious Christians get filtered out (and most likely, destroyed). Jesus will, of course, eventually emerge triumphant, saving all of the true believers and kicking off a thousand years of peaceful reign.

What happens after those one thousand years are over is anyone’s guess. In my most fanciful imaginings, I like to think that the Christians will come back to find the Earth a perfect utopia ruled by the secular survivors. With no religion to hold us back, humankind has explored the solar system, eradicated disease, ended poverty, expanded the limits of human understanding beyond anything previously thought possible. Perhaps Christ’s millennial reign may end up being beneficial to both believer and non-believer alike after all.

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Other eschatological pieces include the aforementioned Mayan Apocalypse, and the Doomsday Singularity, which talks about how technology will one day literally be the death of us.

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10

An Unpopular Opinion on #BangonPinoy

26 Oct 2009

So here we are again.

I received a lot of negative feedback for my essay on volunteerism some weeks back, and I have a feeling that the same will happen about this opinion on the Twitter campaign – Globe’s virtual outreach program for Ondoy victims. But you know what, somebody needs to speak for the dissenters, and although I really wish it weren’t me twice in a row, well, your RSS readers have filters after all.

If you don’t know what BangonPinoy is, you may wanna check out the site, which outlines the program in sparkling marketing speak. The important bit is as follows:

Put #BangonPinoy after your tweets starting today until November 6, 2009. For every #BangonPinoy hashtag used, Globe Telecom, in partnership with the Philippine Blog Awards, will guarantee a P1 donation to be spent for typhoon victims. Our target is to reach 400,000 tweets in 3 weeks!

Sounds innocuous enough, right? PhP400,000 is a decent chunk of change to be donating to the cause after all. There are a couple of small, niggling problems though.

The first is that we need 400,000 corresponding tweets with the #BangonPinoy hashtag. My first reaction upon seeing that number was one of awe. I doubt if there are more than a million Filipino Twitter users currently, so 400k messages seemed like an unreasonably ambitious number. As of this writing, we’re on Day 6 of the 3 week experiment and the current number of mentions is still under a thousand. If you’re too lazy to do the math, we need to be hitting 2,000 tweets per day in order to get to the target. Now, to be fair, Globe said that they would guarantee PhP1.00 for every tweet, so even if we only have 5,000 mentions by November 6, they’re good for at least that amount.

On the other hand – and here’s my real beef – if they wanted to make a PhP400k donation, they don’t need our tweets for that. They could just hand it over to the appropriate organizations. Why delay it for three weeks?

Answer: this is very likely a social media experiment to see what kind of influence Globe can exert on the Philippine social web. Social media is a hot property right now, and lots of local advertising agencies are working out ways to harness it effectively. This is one of the first that’s operated solely within Twitter, and that’s a significant step forward.

My second issue is that Globe is really encouraging Twitter spam here. It’s spam “for a cause,” certainly, but it’s still spam. When the greater twittersphere got wind of the campaign, it took about half a day before they realized that there was no way to hit the 400k number without modifying their tweeting habits. Soon, people were tweeting snippets of OPM lyrics and other miscellaneous detritus and appending the #BangonPinoy hashtag indiscriminately.

Now, one could argue that the ends justify the means here, in that it doesn’t matter what our tweets contain, as long as we hit significant numbers with our efforts. But the whole point of the use of hash-tags is to raise awareness, and right now, all we’re doing is accumulating dozens of tweets that say “Humanap ka nang panget” or “Let’s sing Merry Christmas” and whatnot.

Early on, I tweeted (in a rather tongue-in-cheek fashion) about the possibility of simply building a bot that tweeted with the #BangonPinoy hash-tag every 15 seconds or so. Three or four such bots could, in concert, hit 400k tweets in about a week’s time. I argued that ultimately we were doing this for the Ondoy victims that Globe has promised they will give aid to. We’re already spamming anyway. Why waste human brain-cycles when we can apply CPU cycles to the problem instead. (Consider that a bot like this would take about an hour to write for your average Web2.0-aware developer, and the returns seem rather enticing.)

This is not a particularly out-of-the-box kind of idea either, as it’s no secret that the only reason Trending Topics manage to stay Trending Topics on Twitter for any significant period of time is because of bots. They latch on to words and tags that are beginning to trend, and greatly amplify it so they attach marketing links to the messages. Yes, .

The obvious argument against the bot idea is that it goes against the very principle of this campaign, i.e., these tweets should be coming from concerned citizens. Without trying to be facetious about it though, it stands to reason that these bots would be written by a developer who is himself a concerned citizen. And if you wanted to make sure the tweeted messages are marginally relevant, you can program your bot to re-tweet what other (human) twitter users are saying. (Or if you want something inspirational, you could compile a list of quotes from ThinkExist, about hope and the strength of human resolve. Or the words to “Panatang Makabayan.”)

A caveat however: anyone who is seriously thinking about writing these bots and deploying them needs to remember that Globe reserves the right to call the whole thing off if they smell something fishy. In other words, you are running the risk of ruining the whole campaign by “helping out” in this manner. (There are, of course, workarounds for this problem as well. Twitter allows you to change your username multiple times after all, and there’s no limit to the number of accounts you can register.)

With all that said, I would be cautious about actually doing this. The way the social web reacts to this situation will lay the ground rules for many other social-media marketing plays to come. How would the big corporations and their advertising agencies interpret it, I wonder, if our first reaction to their social-media campaigns was to write bots to circumvent them?

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UPDATE: I originally drafted this piece on Saturday the 24th, and in the 36 hours since then, BangonPinoy’s numbers have grown to 1,048 tweets, an average of about 140 tweets per day. Still not very encouraging, but I did notice something interesting in the aggregated feed. There’s an RT-bot already on there () that’s operating almost exactly as I described above. It came online in the late evening of Sunday the 25th. Of course, it may not even be an actual bot. With this kind of low-volume tweeting it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between an automaton and a human who has simply gone the extra mile, so to speak.

One other new Twitter user, , came into being on Sunday as well. For the most part, it’s been broadcasting lines from nationalistic poems or lyrics from patriotic songs, which are, in my humble opinion, slightly more relevant that simply spouting random 80s OPM. One can only hope that it is enough though.

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20

An Unpopular, Mildly Clarified Opinion on Volunteerism

2 Oct 2009

Yesterday’s piece on volunteerism and why you may be helping your countrymen more by simply staying in your office cubicle got some really great, well-thought-out comments from people. I’d like to thank all those readers who really went out of their way to contribute to the discussion. As expected, there were lots of dissenting opinions, but provoking debate is a great way to expand our thinking on these matters. I didn’t get any “fuck you”s or anything vaguely Neanderthal, which is nearly unbelievable in this day and age.

From Erol:

I do think that volunteering AFTER work is not such a bad thing, and neither is it an under-utilization and a waste of an employee’s hours. [...] If volunteering can satiate a person’s desire or urge to help, it is no different from a person going to the movies, mall or an amusement park to fulfill his or her need to enjoy and have fun.

You are correct in the sense that many people derive pleasure from volunteering. A lot of readers seem to have mistaken my commentary as a call to stop volunteering. If you want to volunteer – for any reason, be it religion, boredom or a misplaced sense of guilt – you should. I’m simply saying that you need to consider whether that’s truly the best way for you to help the relief effort.

From teem:

You need to consider the urgency of the situation. More people could get sick, die of hunger or whatever, if everyone goes on with their jobs and not volunteer to be able to give more.

Well, we need to differentiate “emergency rescue” from the volunteerism that I was referring to previously, i.e., organizing and/or distributing relief goods. Both of these things are urgent, but I would argue that feeding victims is not as urgent as rescuing the drowning. Also, I fail to see how you mobilizing your friends to help during an emergency is any faster than you mobilizing a group of hired professionals (the latter would be one phone call away, the former would be three to four).

Please do not misunderstand though, I fully appreciate how devastating Ondoy’s effects are – our family was affected like many others. During the typhoon, the first floor of our family’s house in Katipunan was completely flooded, and two of our cars were submerged. When the water had receded, we essentially had two choices. My father, my sister and I could all work together on cleaning the place up, or we could hire a small crew to do the work for us. Although the former option might have been an interesting bonding experience, the total value of our combined time would have been well in the $US1,000 range, i.e., a very expensive cleaning crew. Meanwhile, the real cleaning crew cost about PhP1,000, and they got the job done faster. (Guess which option we picked.)

Now imagine that the house in question wasn’t ours. The same logic applies to volunteering to clean your friends’ houses, or a random stranger’s. Instead of handing a bunch of senior engineers shovels and mops, you could just pay for someone to do it in your stead. Keep in mind that this does not make your contribution any less significant. You’ve still cleaned that person’s house – you just did it in the most cost-effective way possible.

From Ryan:

If most developers took your advice and decided to simply donate more money and stop volunteering, would the goods be packaged as efficiently? Would there be enough people to take their place?

This question stumped me momentarily, then I realized that the phrase “more money” already provided a solution. It doesn’t matter if there would be enough volunteers to take their place because if the operation heads had more money, then they could simply announce (on the radio, say) that they are willing to pay each “volunteer” PhP100 per day. Or if you’re in a hurry, PhP200 per day, but only to the first 100 volunteers. Your relief center would be running on full steam within an hour.

And then there’s the consideration of time, ie how long does the money you donate take to be converted into relief goods? how many lives might be lost for lack of a proper meal at the soonest possible opportunity?

Well, now we’re talking about the actual relief packs, instead of the act of packing them. Whether I make a donation, or haul ass to the nearest relief center, doesn’t affect the availability of anything for me to sort and pack. I daresay that my cash donation has a higher chance of eventually being converted into relief goods though, as opposed to my butt parked on the floor of a relief center waiting for contributions.

From Marco:

First of all, you begin by using a developer in your company as an example. This automatically invalidates many of the arguments, should they be directed at the general public.

I wanted to thank you individually for the exhaustive comment; I didn’t know the comment-box could even accommodate that much text, to be honest. I wanted to discuss your post point by point, but there were so many that I might not be able to. (Folks, jump on over to Marco’s full comment here.)

UPDATE: I’ve written a lengthy response to Marco’s comment at the bottom of this entry.

I will say though that you seem to have fundamentally misunderstood the point of the piece, if you think that my engineer example invalidates my arguments. The example was intentional, not accidental. My post was never meant to be directed at the general public, because the general public doesn’t make US$25/hour, as I’m sure you’re aware. I picked an engineer as my example primarily because lots of my readers work in the tech industry, but more importantly because they make well above the average income. That part is key to the argument, and does not invalidate it in any way. In other words, I would not make the same recommendations to someone earning minimum wage (i.e., the general public), because the numbers wouldn’t make sense. Generally: the higher your income is, the more valuable your time is, the more you need to think about the value of standing in that packing line.

On Facebook, my friend Monica had this to say:

[...] you should look for something to do that will have the maximum impact. For instance, Kris Aquino did an excellent job of being the spokesperson for ABS-CBN’s fundraising efforts vs. the classic photo op of a celebrity going to Marikina to hand out food packs.

High-income citizens have a little bit of Kris Aquino in all of them – if you’ll allow me to be momentarily facetious – in that they are in a position to provide aid in a wider reaching way than simply packing relief goods.

From Aissa, also on Facebook, in support of my larger point:

Repacking etc. only goes so far, and several centers for these relief activities are already overstaffed. They don’t really need you to be there, so go find something more useful to do.

What she said.

From April:

Can it be that this article only applies to an obviously small chunk of the Philippine populace? You know, the rational above minimum wage earner with no sick leaves?

I don’t know about sick/vacation leaves, but yes, the article was meant for a small chunk of the populace, i.e., the kind of people who read this blog. I mean, duh, if I didn’t feel they were being misallocated, I wouldn’t have written this piece, you know?

From Noreen:

[...] and with the number of relief goods a person can pack, even the smartest guy’s time can never be wasteful.

If you truly had “the smartest guy” at your disposal, you should have him rewrite PAG-ASA’s prediction software. Having him sort relief goods, when he could be preventing the deaths of hundreds or thousands instead, is horrifically wasteful.

From Hunter:

There is one thing you may not have considered with donating the money directly to an organisation. As with most aid organisations only a proportion of the donations would go directly to benefit the people affected. The rest going to keep the organisation running (staff, marketing, etc). So, a fair amount of inefficiency there if you are looking for the most impact.

That’s a great point, and you’re right, I hadn’t considered the overhead. Perhaps the lesson here is that a donation in kind would be more impactful. Or perhaps, you could contribute to logistics, i.e., hiring a truck for the social workers to use. There are tons of alternative ways to help out, we just need to think creatively.

From Someone (jeez, is that hard to come up with a real first name):

Lets be more reasonable – the average dev will make $10-12. Take the BIR percentage and you are left with what? $8-10 per hour? Which means your $125 is now only $40-50. Guess the allocation of resources doesn’t sound that wasteful anymore. And that’s not counting the fact that people can help on non-work hours.

I’m not gonna argue with your math since that depends on a lot of factors, but I will say that even at $40-50/day, your time is still worth about 6 to 7 minimum-wage workers. So yes, unless you think you can pack food 6 to 7x faster than the average person, you are still being misallocated.

From Someone, again:

But the worse is that it just put money as the parameter for help. Help and volunteering is a LOT deeper than that.

Using money as a parameter is the only way to discuss this in quantifiable terms, detestable as that may be to you. I’m not going to argue about the “depth” of volunteerism here, as that’s purely subjective and honestly I don’t see how useful that is to the discussion.

Another way to look at it: quite a few male volunteers are going to relief centers because there are lots of hot, perspiring chicks volunteering there too. Others are doing it primarily because they want to be seen helping. I suppose in your eyes that would be defiling the concept of volunteerism, but ultimately, what does it matter? What difference does it ultimately make what your motivations are. They’re still helping out, wolf-whistles notwithstanding. I know that “the end justifies the means” is a slippery slope, but it seems to me that “beggars can’t be choosers” either.

This piece fusses about the overall output, i.e., how quickly and efficiently we can help our countrymen who are in need. Do you really think they would care if they received aid from someone who volunteered vs. someone who was paid to be there? We’re talking about starving, injured people here. If you can provide aid in a manner that is 6 to 7x faster than before, wouldn’t you do it, even if it meant losing that personal touch? That’s pretty logical, isn’t it?

=====

Marco:

In the interest of open discussion, I should’ve commented on your points. I’ll do that here now:

Point 1: The funds the volunteer would have earned had he stayed in his cubicle are being under-utilized. This may be true, if everyone were paid on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately, most people in this country are paid bi-weekly, causing a delay in the arrival of cash.

The frequency of compensation doesn’t change the value of that person’s time, methinks. It’d still be US$25/hour, and what that means, from a business standpoint, is that the loss of that person for X hours means that the company is paying for time that went elsewhere. You’re under-utilized because of the loss of *potential* output.

That said, I totally agree that rescue operations cannot wait for money to come in, and in these instances, whoever is able-bodied and physically closest to Ground Zero is the overall “best person to volunteer.” But that’s kinda common sense, isn’t it, and not really something I needed to spell out in my piece.

Point 2: It doesn’t matter who you are when you volunteer; what matters is that you do what you can.

Actually, yes, it does matter who you are. I’ll give you a concrete example, since I was on the whole developer thing earlier. We’ve got an open-source disaster management project called Sahana that software engineers are volunteering to help populate and maintain. The project is an online sitrep of a given disaster, with a missing persons registry, aid management, inventory management, etc. Remember how I said that software engineers need to think about whether they are maximizing their skills by being at the relief center? The average volunteer does not have the ability to run Sahana, it’s a skill that’s unique to software engineers.

Let’s say you were a musician, instead. Playing a large charity event to raise funds for the typhoon victims is a great way to maximize the aid you provide, and again, this contribution is unique in that not everyone has the capacity to help in this fashion. So, yes, it matters that you “do what you can,” but I’m saying there are ways to do a heckuva lot more, the more specialized your skills are.

Point 3: The number of available minimum-wage earners is already quite low, and yet the operations are still lacking in manpower.

Perhaps I’m in a unique position to have an optimistic opinion on this matter because our family runs a manpower agency, so we have a good idea of where to find minimum-wage earners quickly. Also, there are varying reports on the availability of volunteers - some places are over-capacity, others are utterly bereft. I would argue that it’s not an issue of *numbers*, but a problem with information. If we could quickly see which centers were running light - like say, with Sahana - then volunteers could be more properly allocated.

Point 4: Volunteering for the joy of volunteering is romantic and selfish. While this might be true, it also means that the need for immediate help is being addressed.

Again, I don’t disagree on any particular point. But see Point 2 for my thoughts on what is appropriate “immediate help,” given certain skillsets.

Point 5: I’m not saying that you HAVE to volunteer, but it would help to see this issue from another perspective.

I thought this piece *was* the other perspective, seeing as everybody is already predisposed towards the notion of volunteerism in the first place. At the end of the piece, I clarified that I wasn’t saying that people should stop volunteering, so again, we are in agreement here. I’m also saying that you should think twice about what you should volunteer for, coz there are so many other ways to be of use to the relief effort.

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34

An Unpopular Opinion on Volunteerism

1 Oct 2009

The ongoing tragedy in the aftermath of Typhoon Ondoy has spurred a nationwide push to rebuild and reclaim all that we have collectively lost, and it is nothing short of amazing how quickly people can self-mobilize when a dire enough need arises. Donations in cash and kind are pouring in from all over, and dozens of organizations are fielding volunteers for every aspect of the relief operations. Recently I had a very frank conversation with a friend of mine regarding the latter, during which I explained my rather unpopular stance on the subject. I will attempt to do the same here, although I will warn anyone reading this that some may find it objectionable and/or heartless. Rational thinking often is.

Every day, colleagues of mine volunteer at various centers, helping with the sorting, packing or distribution of relief goods. They spend 4 to 5 hours at a time, on average. Now I believe that this is the wrong thing to do, and here’s why.

At our company, the value of a developer-hour is US$25, which is close to the industry average. What this means, roughly, is that the 4-5 hours that each of my colleagues spend packing or distributing relief goods is worth about US$100-125. The reason why I think it’s the wrong strategy for a developer to be volunteering is not because I think that that US$125 is being wasted; it’s just being grossly under-utilized.

Consider this: a given developer cannot sort relief goods any faster than your average minimum-wage employee. (In some cases, the developer, with his soft, developer hands, might even perform worse than the minimum-wage guy, who likely has more experience with manual labor.) However, since that developer’s time is worth so much more, placing him in that job is a _misallocation of resources_, and is thus wasteful.

But, you cry, the developer wants to help his fellow man!

Yes, and he should. But there are two better ways that I can think of. The first is obvious. Instead of under-utilizing himself at the cost of US$125 per session, the developer should just donate that US$125 to the relief effort. This money can be converted into goods, thus maximizing its benefits. In fact, if the developer is serious about helping, the best thing he can do is to work longer hours at his job every day so he can earn more money to donate to the cause. Or figure out a way to generate extra revenue. (And if you can’t come up with the money fast enough, just take out a loan and then pay it back over time. Seriously.)

The second way is less obvious. If you have a working budget of US$25/hour, you could just hire a whole squad of minimum-wage earners to work on your behalf. They would quite literally be 10x more effective than you would be on your own, and you’re creating more jobs as a result, too.

But, you cry again, it’s different when you’re willing to get your own hands dirty!

That’s needlessly romanticizing things. One of the reasons why people like volunteering instead of giving donations is because there’s a sense of actually accomplishing something. It’s a lot more substantial than, say, writing a check. However, I think that this is ultimately selfish behavior, because it makes you feel good while doing a disservice to the people you are trying to help. Unless you have a unique set of sorting/packing skills, your output will be the same as the minimum-wage volunteer next to you. You could be helping in vastly more significant ways. (Ironically, writing that check is probably one of them.)

But, you cry a third time, if everyone thought that way then no one would volunteer!

I find that about as unlikely as PAG-ASA upgrading its prediction systems. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that we lived in a country where everyone was earning above minimum-wage. (Again, a logical impossibility, but thought experiments are strange that way.) What would happen is that the relief operations would be flush with cash because everyone would be donating in an effort to maximize the aid they were extending. The operation heads could then simply hire people to do the work of volunteers. Or, God forbid, fly low-wage workers in from other countries to do the job for us.

The reason that scenario sounds so ridiculous is because it’d never happen. There will always be people who want to volunteer for relief operations, either because they derive pleasure from it or because they are otherwise unable to donate in cash or kind. I’m not saying that people should stop volunteering, all I’m saying is that they need to think long and hard about whether they are helping more that way or not. As heartless as it may sound, the most effective way to help your countrymen just might be to get out of that sorting line and get back to your day-job.

=====

If you are interested in helping out, you may donate directly to the Philippine Red Cross via PhilippineAid.com.

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Red Cow No. 10

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