I was expecting them to want you to make a donation and send the receipt, but they want you to actually round up less fortunate kids and take them out for pizza. Bizarre.
Its definitely a cultural thing. The task would be extremely easy in any Indian city, but they probably don’t realize it would be near impossible in the West. Same with task 3, it would bankrupt Americans to pay for somebody else’s medical bills.
It's only perhaps possible in the most desperately impoverished portions of Indian cities. If you think even moderately poor and above Indians are going to be OK with a random person picking up their children for a meal, that's pretty unlikely.
There is no requirement to "pickup" any children. Easiest way to accomplish task 2 is to wait outside a pizza hut or kfc and ask families coming in if it's ok if you pay for their meal and take some photos to help with your situation. You can explain your situation to people if there are any questions and pretty much everyone will be happy to accept a free meal for your good deed. Free money with no strings is accepted by 99.9% of people in every country.
Only problem is, Pizza Hut etc are middle class plus in India, so any family going in will by definition not be the poor people the ransomware is trying to assist.
Yeah, the class differences are interesting. In the US, fast food is something that a lot of poor people rely on and the meals are cheap there.
When I grew up in early post-Communist Czechoslovakia, McDonalds was where the richer kids went and later bragged about. The menu used to be too pricey for a random Czech.
These days, fast food is comparably cheaper than it used to be, but still relatively expensive for the poorest fifth of the population. As long as someone poor can cook, they are better off cooking at home and only going to fast food restaurants on holidays or so.
Yes, I think that's captured by "the most desperately impoverished portions of Indian cities". Their parents have often sent them to beg, because the need is greater than that society's willingness to fill (vs. low income school lunch programs in the US that keep us from having that scenario). The blame for that situation is squarely on India.
But you don't have to go very far up the socioeconomic ladder even in India to get to a strata of the population who would not send their kids to beg in the streets. People there wish to protect and provide for their kids as much as anywhere else in the world.
> The blame for that situation is squarely on India.
This is a bit of a sweeping statement. Colonization has a big role to play here also. When the british left india the average life expectancy was barely 40. Many other former colonies struggle with poverty and the socioeconomic disaster that it brings along. India has improved since then but has a long way to go.
> This is a bit of a sweeping statement. Colonization has a big role to play here also
I agree completely. Colonization set the stage for many of the persistent struggles faced by many in the developing world. But colonial powers didn't teach people in India how to oppress their own people, even if they wasted no time taking advantage of and amplifying the pre-existing situation.
Today, when a country as productive as India (they are self sufficient in food production) still has large numbers of children going hungry, it suggests that there are serious issues with distribution of basic resources like calories. Yes, it has improved, but not nearly enough.
Also, the US is not orders of magnitude better in this way, since we have millions of children relying on "last-resort" food security programs - vestiges of the New Deal - that are under constant threat of being cut. Before these programs were enacted in the 1930s, children were indeed going hungry in the streets of the US, and it continued for a long time afterwards (and sometimes to this day).
If we didn't have these programs, I'm not convinced the situation wouldn't be more like India, since we have equivalent fundamental social ills that drive children into precarious hunger situations.
At a primary school in Utter Pradesh (a state in India) salt and bread (roti) was served to children as part of mid-day meal.
Then the state government did what any sensible government will do. They filed a case against the journalist for criminal conspiracy maligning the image of state government.
Since last few years it has become fashionable to call Indians who criticize the government "anti-national" as if nation = government.
Yes, it's a situation with the far right riding the up-winds of economic growth whose foundations were largely put in place by previous center-left governments, and supercharging themselves with nativist/nationalist politics that victimizes their own minority populations.
And many others don't... even places that were brutalized by the occupiers such as Taiwan and South Korea (the Japanese Empire definitely played for the gold in the Imperial League when it comes to brutality against the natives).
If anything, the measurable differences between ex-colonies, when it comes to their current state, are maddenigly confused. People tend to forget that even smaller European nations were sort-of colonized, the Czechs and the Slovenes by the Austrians, the Slovaks by the Hungarians, the Serbs by the Turks, the Finns by the Swedes and later by the Russians.
And it seems that it mattered who colonized you. Long term, former Austrian and German colonies are doing okay, Hungarian less so (sorry, Hungarians, but it is true!), Russian and Turkish ones much less so. You can still see the difference e.g. in Romania, when you cross the former Hungaro-Turkish border, or in Poland, when you cross the former Russo-German border. Even 100 years of independence didn't erase the differences.
How long you colonized a place is important as well. Japanese occupation did not last very long and while brutal Japanese were not very effective at using their colonized subjects for any productive labor (they were too brutal for their subjects to cooperate).
Taiwan is a bit interesting because much of the migration happened post world war with the rise of the CCP. While Chinese presence there predates this wave, most ethnic Chinese there are migrants. The aborignese aren't particularly well off.
With regards to German colonies doing OK I'd like to point you to the African colonies like Central African Republic.
British occupation in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan broke down a lot of industries. For instance industries like Wootz Steel, Muslin which had a very long history were in effect dismantled as the British could not compete.
> During the period of Company rule, the East India Company imported British-produced cloth into the Indian subcontinent, but became unable to compete with the local muslin industry. The Company administration initiated several policies in an attempt to suppress the muslin industry, and muslin production subsequently experienced a period of decline. It has been alleged that in some instances Indian weavers were rounded up and their thumbs chopped off, although this has been refuted by historians as an misreading of a report by William Bolts from 1772. The quality, finesse and production volume of Bengali muslin declined as a result of these policies, continuing when India transitioned from Company rule to British Crown control. [1]
There are festivals in India where you invite neighboring children in for a meal and some pooja (worship rituals). I’d compare it to Halloween for westerners where the kids tend to come to you! Not every family is guarding their children from strangers too much
Even countries with universal health care have private hospitals, they'll take your money. One near me asks you to consider paying for their services out of your retirement funds if you don't have private health insurance.
There are plenty of people who cannot get care at government hospitals in countries with "universal healthcare", because of waiting lists, because the government doesn't consider the treatment they need to be worthwhile, etc. You could easily find some of those people on crowdfunding sites, and the media occasionally writes about such cases. The problem is that paying for their treatment at a private hospital would be very expensive, unless the ransomware would accept a partial crowdfunding contribution.
In Sweden, where my opinion of the public health care is that it's useless (unless you're having a really acute problem), I've looked for private hospitals to get help from. No such luck! Finding a specialist to help you, no matter if you have money and are willing to pay feels close to impossible, at least for the things that I've needed help with.
I've never understood why dental care isn't included when you otherwise have universal healthcare. Why single out dental problems? It's about as impossible to just ignore having an infected tooth that needs to be pulled out as it is not doing anything about a broken arm.
I think that, by law, whenever debt is sold, the person that owes the debt should have the right to buy their own debt at the sale price. The current system is full of moral hazards, and this would help level the playing field.
(Sorry to hear about the bankruptcy. That really shouldn't be possible, anywhere.)
It is completely insanity. It starts by assuming that the affected user has or could ever be available to have facesomething, instasomething and whasomething accounts,
and that said user could ever be convinced to open some,
and that said user could access them on a machine apart from the infected.
I think one of the truly bizarre issues with helping the less fortunate is that many affluent people don't want to be seen helping people on the street. They'd rather discreetly put money in a box for "someone else" to do the "dirty" work.
...and also... Charity is a thing to do _discreetly_. One would never brag.
That's a cultural thing in the UK. The rules are different for the famous, where you can influence the behaviour of others by publicly endorsing a cause; but for private citizens, to boost about their good deeds? Frightfully infra dig
Arguably the value in potential change of the rich interacting with the poor is immeasurably higher than the meal itself's monetary value.
I think if I needed to do this in a UK community where I wasn't already known then I'd speak to a MP/councillor and say I wanted to fund them having a meal with X poor families so they could hear about their struggles and such.
It's actually an interesting challenge.
You could probably donate '5 family pizza dinners' to a school in a poorer area, eg for a school fair.
I'm what is known as a white devil these days: white, male, single, rich. If I were to gather any number of kids I have no affiliation with and take them to dinner, I would probably get arrested.
People in this thread have extremely optimistic expectations of the police. In this country at least, the police don't protect poor people, kids or no. It's not what they're spending their time doing.
I mean, rolling down the window offering candy to strangers is the literal textbook example of a 70s predator, so it’s extremely suspicious. Hand out candy while walking and it won’t be that bad.
It's a comical stereotype of a pedophile that it's almost laughable that police took it seriously. I wonder what came out of that "disorderly conduct" charge, because what did he do other than remind someone of a stereotype?
Maybe not arrested, but you are pretty likely to have an unpleasant interaction with the police at a minimum if you're walking up to kids and asking them to come with you. Honestly the best way to do this (as in least likely to interact with the police) in the U.S. would be to hire actors -- which would feel awfully scummy to me, but that's honestly the safest way to do it.
Now, if it asked you to buy some pizzas and just hand them to some less fortunate kids, you could probably do that without interacting with the police. You'd still need to be careful, but it could probably be done.
it's unfair but a woman may be able to pull this off with kids that live on her street with parents she's at least waved at. A man? not so much, and the police will definitely be engaged.
