All right, all this complaining about the ice bucket challenge is starting to annoy me to the point where I’m actually making a post about it.
(For those of you reading this three or so days later, after the viral sensation sweeping the Internet today has been forgotten, the ice bucket challenge is a personal challenge to your Internet friends to either donate $100 to ALS foundation, or to donate $10 and post a video of you dumping a bucket of ice water on yourself, while challenging more of your friends. The ALS foundation reports that it is a highly successful charity drive, netting them over $7 million.)
1. All you people who say how stupid it is to do something so as to avoid giving less of your own money to charity? Well guess what: that’s how many charity drives work in practice.
Someone might spend $1000 dollars to run in a charity 5K race, then spends several months getting sponsors so that they are on the hook for less of their own money. It turns out the promise of spending less of your own money is a big motivating factor to collect donations, which is why many charity drives are structured that way. Maybe you’re taking advantage of base human nature, but it works.
No matter how stupid you think ice bucket challenge is, it’s pretty much the same thing on a smaller and less formal scale. People have the option to donate their own money, or to donate less of their own money but instead do something to collect dontations from other people. There is no enforcement of it, so many people can and probably do cheat, but based on reports of record dontations, it’s obviously many people are taking it seriously.
IOW, it’s working, and it’s working on the same principles that some other charity drives use (that no one complains about).
2. The amount of water “wasted” is paltry. Here’s the thing: it’s a one time thing. Very few people are ever going to throw more than one bucket of ice water on themselves in their entire lives. The lifetime amount of fresh water lost to the ice bucket challenge is 5 gallons per participant.
Yet most of you have no problem dumping 20 gallons of fresh water on yourself EVERY DAY just to keep clean. If you made a pie chart showing water use from showering versus water use from ice bucket challenge, the ice bucket challenge slice would be too thin to see.
If you can justify using all that water to keep yourself clean, then you’re being really unfair to condemn using a miniscule percetage of that water for what is clearly an effective way to collect charity dontations.
So, to summarize, the ice bucket challenge 1. works the same way other charity drives work, and 2. uses far less water than people use for showering in one day, and 3. is highly successful. So just shut up.
