Tsunami Stinginess
From the Washington Times:
The Bush administration yesterday pledged $15 million to Asian nations hit by a tsunami that has killed more than 22,500 people, although the United Nations’ humanitarian-aid chief called the donation “stingy.”
Given that the Australian government has pledged AU$10 million and been at pains to point out that it’s only an initial amount and we’ll have to give more, I’d say that it’s pretty fair to call the US effort stingy. Here are some figures:
|   | Australia | US |
| Contribution (USD) | 7 783 000 | 15 000 000 |
| GDP (USD) | 518 382 000 000 | 10 881 609 000 000 |
| Contribution as % GDP |
0.001501 | 0.000138 |
If I was to take my own gross personal income and apply the same percentages, I would be giving AU$3.75 based on the Australian model, and AU34c based on the US one.
If the US was to give at the same percentage GDP as Australia, it would need to donate US$163 376 743.
If Australia was to donate as the same percentage as I have, it would need to donate US$2 073 528 000.
If the US was to donate at the same percentage as I have, it would need to donate US$43 526 436 000.
Yes, you can use these figures to work out both how much I earn and how much I’ve donated. But much better to make your own donations and do your own comparisons.
Someday My Prints
On my way down to the Post Office (which turned out to be closed) I passed my local pharmacy (which was also closed - is there a public holiday no-one told me about?) and saw that they’d become an agent for one of those digital printing services. You send your photos over the interent and pick up nice shiny photos that look just like … well … 35mm photos. I’d used the Kodak one before with mixed success. If you’re thinking about using it as a cheap way to print photo business cards by editing up four images to a print and guillotining them, don’t bother, because the prints seem to be cut to within about a centimetre of accuracy, so important stuff tends to get lopped off. Of course, that’s just me cheekily trying to use the service in a way that it wasn’t intended for. To print up the odd snap to use in court or whatever, it’s fine. (The magistrate probably won’t even realise that it’s a digital print, so he/she won’t ask you whether you’ve edited it in advance. They only ask if it’s run off from an inkjet on A4 paper. Nice to know that smattering of knowledge from my abortive law degree is coming in handy.)
The point of all this is to say that the QFL service (of which my local pharmacy is an agent) seems like a bit of a con. They promise 35c prints, which is much cheaper than the 80-odd-cents that Kodak charge. But they have a minimum order of $7, or 20 photos, so if you only want ten then you end up paying double. What’s more, they have a delivery charge of $2 even if you’re picking them up from the pharmacy. On the Kodak deal, you can print one photo if you like, go and pick it up and pay a grand total of 80c. To do something similar with QFL, you’d have to print an extra 19 photos you didn’t want, and it would cost you $9. I’m much more likely to want to print only a few pictures at a time, because for me one of the main benefits of digital photography is no longer having to wade through 20 wasted prints (or 40 if you’ve printed double sets and mixed them all up) to get to the four good ones. I like the fact that I no longer have to stuff a drawer with out-of-focus, dimly-lit, poorly-framed portraits of people blinking in order to have a small collection of nice shots on the mantelpiece. Admittedly, I’ve filled gigabytes of hard drive space with second-order jpegs, but they must take up only a square centimetre or two on the disk platter, and they don’t all fall out on the floor when you’re trying to retrieve the one you want.
Actually, the point of all this wasn’t supposed to be to recommend the Kodak service despite the apparently lower price of the QFL service. Truth is, it was just an excuse to point to what must surely be the crappiest flash animation ever inflicted on a potential customer. So come on: Journey with us as we show you how easy it is to Print@QFL through an animated adventure.
Tsunami
SBS is carrying the BBC World Service coverage of the Bay of Bengal earthquake and tsunami. Tidal waves up to 10 metres high have struck coastal areas of Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India and the Maldives, penetrating up to two kilometres inland. Many areas have had their communications cut off, so we can’t even tell the extent of the damage or the loss of life. We do know that thouseands have been killed.
Wow … SBS just dropped to its usual late-night weather map and scrolling CD advertisement. ABC has a documentary about Monica Lewinsky. Seven has “Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital”. Nine has a John Wayne movie. Ten has Video Hits. Whenever a massive disaster happens, somebody in each TV station decides how much interest in it the public can be presumed to have. This might be one of the most horrific events of the last fifty years. The question is, have the execs who decided to stick with John Wayne misjudged the level of interest? Or, more depressingly, have they got it right? Would the results have been different had the waves struck the coast of California?
UPDATE: One of these things is not like the other ones …
UPDATE 2: Tim Blair posts what is otherwise a good roundup of resources, but can’t resist a reflexive and unfounded dig at the ABC:
Compare the ABC website to the BBC website. Note which regards the death of thousands in SE Asia as bigger news, despite being on the other side of the planet.
Which would be a fair point, except note the hyperlinks. He’s linked to news.bbc.co.uk, and compared it with abc.net.au, a front page for the whole ABC site which only devotes a small window to latest news updates. The BBC equivalent (here) is similar. He should have been comparing this with this, but he wouldn’t have bothered, beause it defeats his point.