s o t i r o v

The post by Geitner Simmons is “Mapping religion in America” on his blog appropriately titled “Regions of Mind“… found via Tom Coates.

And here is a page linking to larger versions of the maps.

I am just happy that the sleazy low-life character’s “iron hold on the House Republicans” will be no more.

And I hope that many Republicans will eventually start looking back at DeLay’s era as a “not to be proud of” moment in their party’s history.

“Shooting victim apologizes to vice president“

“‘My family and I are deeply sorry for all that Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through this week,’ Whittington said.”

Is Cheney really so powerful and fearsome… that someone (a lawyer!) he shot in the face… someone that had to go through a life threatening heart attack caused by the accident… feels the need to say “sorry”…?

Sounds like a story straight out of Sadam’s regime. Imagine Sadam accidentally shooting one of his lackeys during a hunt… Then the poor guy goes: “My family and I are deeply sorry for all that our Great and Beloved Leader and His Family have had to go through this week.”

A good commentary by Leander Kahney… “Jobs vs. Gates: Who’s the Star?” (my colleague Tzenko sent me the link).

Steve Jobs was never… ever… interesting to me. I don’t know why. Same with Macs and iPods… and walking around listening to your own “thousands of songs.” I prefer the sound of the passing cars… and the voices of the people around me.

A colleague found a very interesting article - “The Kindness of Strangers” by Robert V. Levine. Here is a snippet:

“Over and again, New Yorkers told us they cared deeply about the needs of strangers, but that the realities of city living prohibited their reaching out. People spoke with nostalgia for the past, when they would routinely pick up hitchhikers or arrange a meal for a hungry stranger. Many expressed frustration—even anger—that life today deprived them of the satisfaction of feeling like good Samaritans.”

I just hope that Aidpage will eventually give those unhappy New Yorkers… and the many like them all over the world… the informal and immediate ways to be good Samaritans again. That’s my work now… and the work of my team at Aidpage… Ivan, Tzenko, Boby, Valcho, Pencho, and Stamen.

And then… another good… somewhat philosophical article… from The New York Times… “In Pursuit of Unhappiness” by Darrin M. McMahon. He writes:

“… the philosopher John Stuart Mill, came to a similar conclusion. His words are all the more worth heeding in that Mill himself was a determined proponent of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. ‘Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so,’ Mill concluded after recovering from a serious bout of depression. Rather than resign himself to gloom, however, Mill vowed instead to look for happiness in another way.

‘Those only are happy,’ he came to believe, ‘who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.’ For our own culture, steeped as it is in the relentless pursuit of personal pleasure and endless cheer, that message is worth heeding.

So in these last days of 2005 I say to you, ‘Don’t have a happy new year!’ Have dinner with your family or walk in the park with friends. If you’re so inclined, put in some good hours at the office or at your favorite charity, temple or church. Work on your jump shot or your child’s model trains. With luck, you’ll find happiness by the by. If not, your time won’t be wasted. You may even bring a little joy to the world.”

And then another article from The New York Times… by Stephanie Strom… originally titled “What Is Charity?“… as of now suspiciously archived under the totally meaningless “Aftermaths.” What were the “maths” for changing the title… I wonder. Did it sound a bit too much of a “questioning” for the good taste of some influential charity?

Here are snippets from “What is Charity?”…

“… among the many who had been turning away from Americans most in need of charity was the philanthropic sector itself. Last year, the share of giving going to organizations most directly related to helping the poor hit a record low, accounting for less than 10 percent of the $248 billion donated by Americans and their philanthropic institutions…

Other statistics also suggest that the nonprofit sector has drifted from core notions of charity. Nonprofit hospitals provide no more charity care than taxpaying counterparts do. While university assets soar, tuition continues to outpace inflation. Only a sliver of giving to churches is spent on social services…

So what is charity today if it is not aimed primarily at the have-nots? Has its definition been stretched so broadly that it no longer has meaning? If so, are the tax breaks that propel our philanthropy justified? Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California, the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, has raised those questions in a series of hearings examining whether tax exemption is justified for certain types of nonprofits.

The question, in his words, is, ‘What is the taxpayer getting in return for the tens of billions of dollars per year in tax subsidy’ offered to donors through tax write-offs or to nonprofits through their tax exemptions? According to the Treasury Department, the charitable deduction will amount this year to a $40 billion tax subsidy, mostly to upper-income households - overshadowing the roughly $20 billion the human services sector is likely to raise. No official estimates exist for the cost of the tax exemption covering money that nonprofits spend and for the property they own.

The hearings have received little public notice but have terrified nonprofit leaders, more than a Senate Finance Committee threat to tighten regulation of charities.

‘When you start to ask what is the fundamental underlying rationale for tax exemption and the charitable deduction for donors, it leads to questions that are far more difficult to answer than questions about greater disclosure and better governance,’ said John D. Colombo, a tax-law professor at the University of Illinois who testified before Rep. Thomas. ‘It gets you to questions like, why should an institution with billions in the bank get tax exemption?’”

(Here is more than you ever wanted to know on the “questions about greater disclosure and better governance“…)

I am tempted to ask my own questions though… Does compassion need incentives? If you want to give $10… why would you want a $1 tax break? Why not simply give $9? What’s the point of this tax incentivized “giving”…? But I must be too simplistic here… I probably don’t know enough about the complex dynamics of the partnership between government and private (some call them “special”) interests… bla-bla… bla-bla… whatever…

That’s it for today… and may be for this year. Hopefully, I did not break too many laws by doing these extensive quotes.

Here is a mirror of this post on Aidpage.

Click here for the whole series…

Early days of October… last days of summer… I was there too…
Click here for more pictures…

“Being Poor” by John Scalzi …
“Being poor is getting tired of people wanting you to be grateful.”
Read the whole of it…

We created Aidpage so that people come together to help each other. We believe that web enabled “peer-to-peer” mutual micro-helping will meet needs not readily met by government, nonprofits, or business.

Aidpage is a response to two related problems affecting millions of people in the US and globally - (1) erosion of traditional support networks, and (2) institutionalized aid growing increasingly complex, conditional, selective, and competitive.

Erosion of traditional support networks

Today’s global markets by all definitions do not exactly “care” about individual livelihoods. People generally accept this as a fact of life, try to prepare accordingly, and do not expect “help” from the markets. People try to develop high levels of competitiveness, autonomy, mobility, and capability to change. This, however, accelerates the disintegration of traditional social environments built on cooperation, mutual dependencies, locality, and predictability - like extended family, neighborhoods, childhood friends, etc.

The erosion of these traditional environments has two aspects - (1) the psychological loss of informal, unconditional “giving and taking”, and (2) the practical loss of a historically well established support layer for people “in need.”

We design Aidpage as the “people aid people” platform - based on the following principles:

• person-to-person giving is a basic human need
• empathy and compassion need no incentives nor conditions
• everybody always “gives” and “takes”
• immediacy and informality work better than “process”
• people are “wired” for trust.

Institutionalized aid growing increasingly complex, conditional, selective, and competitive

Institutionalized aid (government and nonprofit) in the US is a huge system driven by over a trillion in tax and donation dollars annually. The distribution system is so complicated and vast that it is rather opaque to traditional processes of public scrutiny. Episodic media interest - notably after big disasters - “let’s see how the money will be spent” - is only scratching the surface of the problems. Despite recent well intended efforts, nonprofit organizations still largely operate as purely private organizations that do not feel enough pressure or need to be transparent to the public. The knowledge about the bysantine mechanics of the aid system is embodied in fully blown professional occupations like fundraising, program development, grant making, grant administration, grant writing, grant consulting, etc.

Most people turning to government aid are already having trouble coping with competitive markets. They are indeed looking for unconditional assistance. Why? First, because they have the psychological need for unconditional assistance (see above). And second, because they intuitively know something that many politicians seem to have trouble grasping. It is the simple fact that the government does not own anything and that all government money has been collected from the people with the idea to be administered back in the form of government assistance. True, there are the big “entitlement” programs like Medicare and Social Security. But also true is that many other vital areas of government support are strictly conditional, competition-based, selective, restrictive, outcome based, and policy driven - such as student aid, medical expenses assistance, small business assistance, housing and home repair assistance, etc. Average Jane and Joe have to “inquire”, “apply”, “prove”, “qualify”, “compete”, “perform”, and “report” - to get the aid that is funded by their own tax money. If only they knew how to do all this.

Nonprofit aid has even more openly discriminatory distribution policies - tolerated on the assumption that the money is “private”. But let’s see how “private” is it. Annually, the nonprofit sector gets about $250 billion in tax incentivized private donations ($210 billion of them from individuals)… and about $390 billion from government grants and contracts - pure taxpayers’ money that is (see data source).

Access to institutionalized aid is acutely problematic for the intended beneficiaries. Naturally, there is an unending public interest in the “who, how, how much, and why” of the distribution processes and outcomes. And there is an unending frustration with the complexity, lack of transparency, selectiveness, and competitiveness of a system whose main purpose is to help people.

Information on these processes is publicly available - residing in thousands of different sources and formats. However, the information is one sided - it is only produced by institutions and naturally reflects “institutional” points of view and bureaucratic “defending of turf.” The other main participants and de facto “owners” of the system - the aid beneficiaries - do not have any outlets, formats, or platforms they could use to publicly speak out, discuss, and reflect on these processes. Money wise - the system is a full circle from the public up and then from the institutions down. But information wise - it works one way only… whenever it works… to the extent it works.

We design Aidpage as a bottom up conversational media:

• aggregating large bodies of information offered by participating publishers
• easy self-publishing (blog-like but non-geek)
• audience participation on each page - commenting, adding of links, system-wide communication
• system-wide findability - search, tagging
• public space, mutual visibility, transparency.

Richard McManus from ZDNet asks the question “What is a platform?“… under the general topic of “Tales From The Web 2.0 Frontier“… and finds good answers from Amazon’s Jeff Besos and Aidpage’s Emil Sotirov (taken from a comment I made on Jeff Jarvis’ blog)… I like seeing Amazon and Aidpage in one paragraph.

Richard’s own blog is Read/WriteWeb.

Consumer-generated media exceeds traditional advertising for influencing consumer behavior, finds Intelliseek study (via Emergence Marketing). Consumers are 50 percent more likely to be influenced by word-of-mouth recommendations from their peers than by radio/TV ads… see press release from Intelliseek.

Advertisers of the world… stop spending on “pushing” image and message… it doesn’t really work well anymore… in the near future it won’t work at all.

Invest in Aidpage instead… … or in similar projects… Give a platform to your customers and let them write, talk, sing, make pictures. You don’t even have to be “creative”… let them be creative. Do not judge or mediate. Now, just imagine how will they think of you.

More than 3 million needy people in big cities could be getting food stamps but don’t for a variety of reasons, an anti-hunger group says (see story in CNN).

That translates to $2.1 billion in unused food stamps, the Food Research and Action Center said in a report released Wednesday, Sep 28, 2005.

The Food Stamp Program is a critically important but very underutilized resource for urban America, according to the new Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) report, “Food Stamp Access in Urban America: A City-by-City Snapshot” (see full report as PDF file). The FRAC report analyzes food stamp usage and the incidence of hunger and poverty in 25 of America’s largest cities, spread out over 20 states and the District of Columbia.