{"id":10680,"date":"2011-08-13T11:59:30","date_gmt":"2011-08-13T15:59:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=10680"},"modified":"2011-08-13T11:59:30","modified_gmt":"2011-08-13T15:59:30","slug":"colby-cosh-digs-up-the-story-about-the-discarded-contributions-for-slave-lake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/08\/13\/colby-cosh-digs-up-the-story-about-the-discarded-contributions-for-slave-lake\/","title":{"rendered":"Colby Cosh digs up the story about the discarded contributions for Slave Lake"},"content":{"rendered":"

After an amusing look at the economics of Christmas (in short: it’s just a modern version of Potlatch<\/a>), he finds out how those charitable contributions<\/a> ended up in a landfill:<\/p>\n

\n

The containers were labelled with the name of energy company Total E&P, whose employees had gathered clothing and toys for the victims of the fire. \u201cEmployees had held a month-long drive to collect donations for Slave Lake victims,\u201d notes the CBC. \u201cThey carefully packed up the collection and addressed it to the Red Cross, and called their internal courier to take it away. The Red Cross, though, does not accept items for donation, only cash\u2026\u201d.<\/p>\n

So while the packing was \u201ccareful\u201d, the research\u2026? Not so much. Someone located another Calgarian with good intentions, Melissa Gunning, who was gathering material to be sent to Slave Lake fire victims. Unfortunately, she didn\u2019t have the means to get all the nice things she accepted to the scene of the fire, and by that time, the brave people of Slave Lake hadn\u2019t the slightest use for any of it.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

I fear Paul Nielsen, the appalled discoverer of the items in the landfill, unwittingly saw straight to the heart of the matter. Someone went to a clothing store, bought a bunch of cute outfits for somebody\u2019s else\u2019s children, and \u201chad the foresight to throw something in for the mother\u201d, without the much less impressive foresight required to ask \u201cHey, will the Red Cross actually take this crap?\u201d This is a \u201csomeone\u201d who probably thought herself very clever in finding a absolutely bulletproof excuse for a shopping excursion, perhaps even on company time. The value of her \u201caid\u201d turned out to be significantly less than zero, but that was surely beside the point to begin with. If it weren\u2019t, the incessant entreaties of professional charitable organizations everywhere — \u201cPlease stop showing up with bundles of blankets and cans, and just give us cash already\u201d — would actually have had some effect by now.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After an amusing look at the economics of Christmas (in short: it’s just a modern version of Potlatch), he finds out how those charitable contributions ended up in a landfill: The containers were labelled with the name of energy company Total E&P, whose employees had gathered clothing and toys for the victims of the fire. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,25],"tags":[542,744,156],"class_list":["post-10680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-economics","tag-alberta","tag-charity","tag-fail"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2Mg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10680"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10681,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10680\/revisions\/10681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}