Diamonds at Dogs

By Roger Colins 

____________________________________________________________ Who's a pretty boy? Should a charitable act be made in public or privacy? Publicly, it's the demonstration of bravery, kindness and compassion for others to do likewise. If made privately then the person cannot be accused of vanity. I find this remarkably similar to an old motto; 'Don't throw diamonds at dogs.'   Dogs can even be interchanged for pigs, depending on which you consider more arrogant. Motto being, to save your time and energy for something worthwhile. The argument can be made that sometime later, mister dog may come upon that diamond and snatch it up while no one's looking therefore it has been worthwhile, although the good Samaritan will never know. The other slant to the saying is ugly. The gesture of charity to encourage others happens to be a double edged sword. Praising the gesture for it's genuine benevolence and not the gesture's purpose, results in the opposite intended effect. This genuine applause means the public will clap the next one they see without ever considering to give themselves. This happens because the reception of the gesture is seen as showing off and, trying to make everyone feel guilty for being so mean. Some, may act upon that feeling and make a donation themselves but odds are they'll still feel weird. It wasn't their idea in the first place and there's no public backing them up with cameras and microphones. The clapping and cheering is there to spite such a display of atrocious vanity because the audience is quite well in their moral standpoint, happy to give the philanthropist his moment of glory in the hope to encourage him to do it again. Private donations do not seem to warrant investigation, until you use the dog analogy. The gesture is actually the same, showing off. The dog has no use for the diamond and made to feel perturbed by such arrogance that the thrower, with all his lofty superiority, can't even see the dog doesn't care. This is however, a private donation. The dog doesn't get to say no, no one is going to stop the thrower and no one likes taking charity. Crazy, no? Reality Check-Mate Next we have a beauty. Are any charity donations ever praisable? They are stop gap measures, the person that goes to a birthday party with a gift voucher to show he genuinely doesn't care. Instead of handing over a check, the donor could go and buy some bread and give it to the poor himself. Take along a camera crew, film the whole damn exercise in order to drive that gesture home. There is a chance that could be seen as force feeding the dog therefore we arrive at the final step, teaching the dog to grow his own diamonds. Did the analogies get too mixed? The dog never liked diamonds in the first place. 'Fair enough' says the philanthropist, the dog could sell them. He still doesn't like diamonds, besides, the pigs will come along and steal them. Security, the philanthropist will teach the dog kung-fu. The dog asks what this kung-fu is, and still isn't interested in diamonds. Philanthropist goes home and picks up some bread on his way. The dog licks his nuts in a pile of diamonds. There was another motto in there and in case you missed it's 'Give a man a fish, he can eat for a day. Teach him to fish, he can eat for a lifetime.' The dog still wasn't interested because he already knew, what's valuable to the philanthropist is out of kilter with what the dog wants. In none of these mottoes has the dog ever been asked what he wanted and if he were, he'd probably want to just be left alone, pigs and all.

charity vanity philosophy

Urban Fattening

By Roger Colins

Researching for this post brought up another problem about statistics of which I will add a short note. Statistics can be used to say anything using the same data. Mathematicians are said to like numbers because they don't lie but unfortunately if numbers are used by statisticians, numbers will do nothing but tell fibs. If you find a bar chart, pie chart or wavy line graph you can be pretty sure it's full of gremlins because the axes can be monkeyed with. Increase or decrease the range on X or Y and your clever little chart suddenly changes, producing an entirely different effect on it's audience. Having gotten that out of the way, I've came across a curiosity about city living. London has a few more skyscrapers on the way, China wants to build prefab one's and Singapore, India, the Philippines all have to constantly figure out places to put their people. Paris, France has a number of suburbs named with the affix 'sous bois' which translates to roughly 'in the woods'. They aren't in the woods of course, not any more but I can happily imagine that upon the settling of these tiny villages, centuries ago, they were surrounded by trees. Now there are, as we see in all cities, sweeping motorways and highways flying through the air, snaking between grimy apartment blocks and smothering the occasional blip of greenery. What happened to the greenbelts? London is by quite a stretch, the greenest city in the world. It has more parks, gardens, trees, grasslands and flowers than any other. The London Green belt is actually bigger than the Greater London area that plays host to nothing short of 8.2 million people and as a result, pretty darn lucky. Almost every other urbanised sprawl sees dollar signs hovering over green spaces. Should the city in question have a green belt then the dollar signs are, supposed to be, redirected skyward. Hence the birth of the skyscraper. For those that don't, the skyscrapers are still going to go up but the unused, boring countryside is constantly blossoming with unbridled potential for developers. The world population is of course, booming. The baby boom was one thing but the standards of living in the twenty first century suggests contraceptives might not even work at all. Looking only at the square mileage, any one city without a green belt could be suggestive. Population growth on my line charts (however differently manipulated and twisted out of recognition they might be) certainly agree on the soaring nature of human reproduction and longevity. This has to be transferred into places for them to live. Work too, and go to school, do the shopping. You get the idea. My curiosity is not the rate of growth but the rate of expansion. The North American East coast enjoys a continuously urbanised path from Boston to Washington with New York bang in the middle. About 400 miles of non stop buildings. Should the rate of this expansion continue along the same lines as the rate of population growth (which it should until someone invents a TARDIS) then I can't help but wonder how long it will be before there are more urban areas than green spaces and our cities have to start taking over the sea. With any luck we will be colonising other planets before that happens but never the less, the fatter a city looks from space, the longer the circumference for expansion. This indicates truly exponential expansion. Cities with greenbelts have a veritable chance to stem urbanisation, with this particular motivation to think up density solving ideas. Those without greenbelts are already ones of convenient position as they were never bothered about trees in the first place. ____________________________________________________

urbanisation population growth