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Make-A-Wish Foundation Turns San Francisco Into Gotham for 5-Year-Old Batkid

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Re: Make-A-Wish Foundation Turns San Francisco Into Gotham for 5-Year-Old Batkid

#41

Post by Void_ »

cwilson wrote: post #27
mark_integerdsv wrote: post #16

I really felt some strong emotions while reading through this. It's amazing. The news spot just has to the the cherry on top. So happy for this kid that he had an awesome day. It does restore some faith in humanity to see things like this. ...however... I hate myself for being the contrarian in this case but as a South African and having worked with one or two NGOs that work with sick people in general, including kid…

The money that went into this endeavor was nothing compared to the compassion and outreach completely fed by the people of this city. All of the media and news you see is a result of grass roots movements, social media, and general kindness. Not some corporate sponsor. My point is, this is hands down an act of kindness by an entire city. There isn't an evil plot behind it. This makes me very happy, and it should make…

A lot of people makes a lot of money on this heart warming story.

Just saying.

Re: Make-A-Wish Foundation Turns San Francisco Into Gotham for 5-Year-Old Batkid

#42

Post by [deleted] »

garg wrote: post #40
[deleted] wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Are you depressed and feeling cynical? Why judge the sincerity of the people involved? Events like these increase the intangible wealth of a society. Maybe events like these help decrease the fakeness from a society by giving them something positive to focus on instead of the drudgery that is their lives. This has even brought attention to the disease the child is suffering from probably prompting some to donate.

[deleted]

Re: Make-A-Wish Foundation Turns San Francisco Into Gotham for 5-Year-Old Batkid

#43

Post by bsandbox »

Making endeavors like this scale is an interesting problem. On the surface, this is inherently unscalable, but it does prove that a novel idea can spark latent compassion to create something truly awesome. The obvious thought is applying something like Batkid to third world cases, but it would end up helping out a few cases in the millions that exist. A cynical view is to look at this as an example of first world individualism triumphing over the greater need of larger populations, but I think it's worth thinking about it the other way round - how might it be possible to use compelling stories like this to solve a larger population of problems.

Re: Make-A-Wish Foundation Turns San Francisco Into Gotham for 5-Year-Old Batkid

#44

Post by alan_cx »

codezero wrote: post #12

How much did this cost the city? It's adorable but blocking streets off and crowd control costs money.

And how much of that money could have been used to treat other equally worthy people suffering in equally hard ways?

Re: Make-A-Wish Foundation Turns San Francisco Into Gotham for 5-Year-Old Batkid

#45

Post by quaunaut »

sdoering wrote: post #25
pshin45 wrote: post #4

Make-A-Wish Foundation, doing things that don't scale :P

Why does everything has to scale? Why can a good deed not go unpunished (like in some comments here)? Your comment reminded me of one famous quote from the ring, the yews gave Oskar Schindler[1]: "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire." Some people (ok, a lot of people) just made the miserable life of one little child a lot better. And they made their own lifes better, by showing what can be accomplished toge…

He wasn't insulting it, he was referencing a pg post that changed the way a lot of people approach startup marketing/relations: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Re: Make-A-Wish Foundation Turns San Francisco Into Gotham for 5-Year-Old Batkid

#46

Post by alan_cx »

chris_wot wrote: post #13
codezero wrote: post #12

How much did this cost the city? It's adorable but blocking streets off and crowd control costs money.

Bruce Wayne had it covered.

Perhaps "Bruce Wayne's" money might have been better spent in providing base line care and medical research to the benefit of many, rather than spending it on a big PR stunt.

Re: Make-A-Wish Foundation Turns San Francisco Into Gotham for 5-Year-Old Batkid

#48

Post by dnautics »

Aloisius wrote: post #9
gulfie wrote: post #8

So how can we get the same people motivated to work for a cure?

Out of curiosity, exactly how would these people work for a cure? It can't be money, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society is shockingly well funded to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars in 2012 and that's just one of the dozens of nonprofits not to mention all the leukemia research organizations. Surely you can't mean for them to drop what they are doing and get a Ph.D. and go into research?

Don't bother with the pH.d. I only made 40k with that degree trying to cure cancer. On the one hand, where is that money going? On the other hand, I wouldn't pay most PhDs half that.

Re: Make-A-Wish Foundation Turns San Francisco Into Gotham for 5-Year-Old Batkid

#49

Post by einehexe »

cududa wrote: post #31
frank_boyd wrote: post #17

It's nice to help suffering people. The recurring pattern I see, however, is: We single out 0.001% of all cases, do something extraordinary, and make a big fuss about it in the media. All this to make us feel good about ourselves. What we don't want to fix though, are the real causes of the problems, because that's way less pleasant to do.

What are you talking about? "What we don't want to fix though, are the real causes of the problems" I'm pretty sure a crap ton of people are working on solving "the problem" aka cancer. The world is filled with shitty things, can't people create the occasional extraordinary experience/ scenario just to make people feel good?

Some people can only complain. Can't be much fun to that person.
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