Drone-fired peanut butter pellets: A government plan to save endangered ferrets

On mobile I immediately get a 'please enter your email address to continue reading' banner. It also seems to be clever enough to realise that 'annoying@washingtonpost.com' is not a valid email to enter. In addition it didn't accept made-up (random string)@gmail.com or even made-up (list of English words)@gmail.com. It seems like a lot of effort was put into this little tool.

The cost of drones, including associated equipment and personnel, will be much higher than just paying locals to move goods in the normal ways (truck, boat, donkey, wheelbarrow, etc.) Less risk that you will squash houses and children or litter the landscape with containers. Even so, international operations are expensive. You'll probably have to grease some palms. Then there's the fact that this kind of major cash influx attracts attention from men who are very shrewd and skilled at diverting cash flows. Watch as your dollars line pockets and pay for things you never imagined.

The computers that aren't simply sold for profit will become e-waste with nowhere to plug them in, no local use for them, nobody to maintain them. Your water purifiers will break down, requiring expensive parts to fix, and they may not have been useful to begin with. Your seeds will typically fail to grow, and do nothing about all the other barriers to farming. Medicines without medical care are typically not very useful either. The kind of stuff that is usually dumped like this is cheap trash that the donors would never use, and the locals know it. They could infer it, from the way it is being dumped like worthless trash, and they undervalue it accordingly. When you dump shipping containers full of (say) cheap shoes and t-shirts, you put all the local cobblers and tailors out of business.

When all of this fails or is even seen to do harm, despite costing astronomical sums of money, that will do severe long-term damage to the cause of foreign aid.

I do realize that drones are not the optimum delivery method for something like this. A big C-130 would probably be better for most all cases.

You already argued why handing out big sums of cash is a bad idea. As you said, shrewd people will be quick to take it. Foreign aid is already little more than a bribe, usually entirely siphoned off by the country's elite. Centralizing the goods in a warehouse or truck makes them easier for a bad actor to steal as well. And as you said, you'd have to grease some palms to get anything happening at all.

As for the rest of what you said, I don't agree at all. A water purifier (or perhaps I should have said a water filter) can be the size of a straw, with no electrical component or moving pieces, and will last for decades[1]. The medical care to accompany the medicines will come with education, and foreign doctors will no longer fear their hospital being blown to pieces. Your cobbler example makes no sense -- as far as I know Afghanistan does not have a thriving computer manufacturing economy. Obviously seeds will be chosen appropriately for the climate of the region they are delivered to.

[1] https://trendguardian.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/lifestraw_...

So, I didn't necessarily mean my initial comment literally. The core of the idea is that direct aid is a much better solution than bombs and military occupation.

Drop some generators then too! I live in Cambodia, and spend a lot of time out in the provinces where everyone meets up daily to charge their phones and other electronic devices around the single generator in a village.

And need I mention that massive bombing campaigns don't exactly facilitate having a reliable power grid.

Everything I'm saying would cost peanuts compared to what the US spends on weapons and war.

mmmh... This is an interesting problem that merits to think about it. How to grant that most donated money ends really helping the country instead making rich the local organized delinquents, spoon-feeding the war and supporting the local corrupt nets. We need to attract more creative people as possible to think about how to improve this.

I'll propose something. Why if we would use the donated money to condone the same amount of external debt in origin? or maybe to lobby with the goal of stopping unreasonable external debt forever?.

Advantages: More simple, no blackmail when crossing customs, no generous international help for lords of war of dictatorships, not money leaked in the travel, more money available to help with the same amount of cash, because you don't need to burn part of your resources to move a team of people to a small country in the middle of nowhere and protect them of being kidnapped or falling ill. No more buying goods in America and spend your money moving it to Tailand when you could buy the same products in Myanmar, less troubles when converting between a lot of currencies...