[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Thermal

That's some really strong feelings over supposedly using 2800 dollars worth of man hours to produce 1000 dollars for a team. Your argument is so asinine I really cannot begin to fathom why you feel so strongly about it to post essay length rebuttals.

I'll debunk your argument by simply saying that all man-hours are not of equivalent worth, and what people do in their leisure time is their own business.

I don't dispute it's a person's right to choose how they spend their leisure hours, and donor's right to disburse their funds within reason. I'm just opining that for all the talk of what's right and wrong, we seem to have forgotten to ask whether this contest is even a responsible way of accomplishing the goals of the donor organization. Just because people are willing to participate doesn't make it a good idea. And conversely, is it always wrong (or even illegal) to fail to honour the ad hoc terms that people invented above?

Since I don't think the Oshkosh Area Community Foundation's goal was to destroy more value than they've created, I think they've erred, even as they write a $1 000 cheque to a good cause. The point is to highlight an opportunity for better fundraising practices, not to castigate individual coin-depositors (who may not consider their actions a waste of time).

(And by the way: if we're talking in economic terms, leisure hours are more valuable than working ones, because you would demand a very high wage to convert that leisure into labour.)

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

Tristan, I usually love your posts, but I cease to understand why you care or what you're mad about.

Let those who "wasted" their time doing this worry about themselves. If you didn't feel the need to contribute to helping a team, why are you posting this?

It's like those schemes where someone collects two million pop tabs, and then tries to exchange them for a wheelchair. Even if they do get a wheelchair out of it (and usually they don't), they've wasted so much effort that could have been better applied to something else.

This is just another version of the same sort of problem, except that we're talking labour instead of scrap metal (and in this case, the payout is certain, but in all likelihood smaller than the expenditure).

Originally Posted by DonRotolo

Sigh. Someone please close this thread.

Sorry Don...I wanted to wait until after the fundraising drive had run its course, to avoid the (wholly erroneous) perception that I might be trying to sabotage their efforts. I may have been just a little too forceful in a thread that was expected to soon reach the end of its natural lifespan.