Author: Adam Clare

Wrap Experiences Instead of Objects

Finding the perfect physical gift for someone can be hard so don’t do it. Instead you can gift someone an experience through UnWrapIt. A friend of mine (clearly I’m biased) created the company to make it easier to gift experiences to one another. The goal is to reduce the amount of shipping of goods while providing more meaningful gifts. It’s a very neat service which also works with traditional gift giving.

“We had someone from Sioux Lookout build a scavenger hunt for a family member in Newfoundland. It had him going around St. John’s to eventually reveal what the gift was: dinner at his favourite restaurant,” says UnWrapIt founder Peter Deitz.
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“A lot of people reported anxiety about picking out the right kind of gift,” he says. Other stressful factors included the actual wrapping of the gift and, if ordered by mail, worrying if the gift would arrive on time — a pressing concern this year given Canada Post’s cancellation of its holiday delivery guarantees.

The flexibility of experience gifts can minimize that stress. By gifting dinner at a restaurant of the recipient’s choice, instead of a meal at a specific location, “They won’t worry about whether they picked out the right restaurant,” Deitz says.

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“Effective Altruism”, or Modern Utilitarianism

wind turbine

The greatest good for the greatest number of people is one tenet of utilitarianism, and this way of thinking is alive and well under a new name: “effective altruism”. The term effective altruism is questionable at best; however, their message does make a lot of sense. Basically what believers of effective altruism believe in is using empirical data to decide where to donate time and money. In this month of caring about each other it is one more way to help you make decisions on where you can donate.

Let’s distinguish between whether a cause is difficult to quantify and whether it’s political. Although it’s true that many political movements and political changes have outcomes that are difficult to measure, I don’t think the two distinctions line up quite so neatly.

Many effective altruists, myself included, have over time become convinced that the vast majority of lives we can affect are in the future. If that’s right, it’s plausible that the most important moral imperative is to make sure that the very long-run future goes well. The stakes are enormous: trillions and trillions of lives over hundreds of thousands of years.

But when it comes to influencing the long-run future, we can’t run randomized control trials. In general, we can’t have the same sort of robust evidence base that we’re used to in global health interventions, for example. So it’s not the case that effective altruists focus exclusively on things that are easy to measure.

When it comes to politics, there’s no reason in principle why effective altruists shouldn’t get involved. But we’re less likely to enter longstanding political debates, such as what the tax rate should be, where a few more voices are unlikely to make much difference. Instead, we’re more likely to look for comparatively neglected policy areas — for example, what to do with new technologies such as artificial intelligence and synthetic biology.

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Save Money and Lives with Smaller Fire Trucks

the suburbs
Firefighters are making cities harder places to live in, this might seem like an odd thing to read. It’s counterintuitive since we’re used to thinking blindly that the firefighters (and EMS as a whole) have our best interests at mind. In North America, fire fighters are blocking initiatives to make cities more livable because of the size of their trucks. Places want to add bike lanes, widen sidewalks, add housing, and other civic enhancements but this makes it harder for massive trucks to navigate streets. The solution: make fire fighters buy smaller vehicles. Smaller response vehicles can also help with life saving too!

Another potential safety improvement: Don’t send a truck unless you have to. In the U.S., only 3 to 5 percent of fire department calls nationally are related to building fires, according to the report. Dispatching a 80-ton fire-fighting vehicle to respond to a possible heart attack doesn’t necessarily make sense. American cities could take a page from international peers that use smaller vehicles—even motorcycles and bikes—to respond to less-urgent medical calls. (And perhaps to those poor kittens caught in trees.)

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Creative Ways to Communicate Mobility in Cities

Intersection

Navigating cities can be a challenge for anybody with mobility issues due to a lack of infrastructure and poor communication. Decades of efforts to improve urban design have made a positive difference while more recently apps for mobiles have come into existence. Not all solutions are valued by everyone, but the upward trend of making our neighbourhoods more accessible is a thing we should all appreciate.

People have been crowdsourcing accessibility data far longer than apps have been around. Disability activists have been drawing maps by hand for decadesto prove the need for curb cuts, wheelchair ramps, signage, and other features that make public access possible, particularly for wheelchair users. In cities such as Berkeley, California, and Urbana and Champaign, Illinois, environmental audits, mapmaking, ad-hoc design practices, and “guerrilla urbanism” have enabled wheelchair and power-chair users to get around otherwise inaccessible cities by, for example, fashioning curb cuts from found materials.

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Ship Slowly for Greener Online Shopping

money

It’s that time of year when people buy objects for others because of social obligations or religious practices. When purchasing goods we obviously need to think about the story behind the things being bought (who made it, where it comes from, etc.). If you’re buying stuff online then you should also think about shipping methods beyond the quickest. It turns out online shopping can be the greener option as long as you don’t use the fastest shipping option. Of course, like many environmental issues this one can also be solved by not buying useless stuff.

A 2013 study from MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics calculated that the carbon footprint of a traditional shopper purchasing a toy in a store is higher than that of someone who buys the same thing online with regular shipping (more about that later).

That’s because parcel carriers use a more efficient delivery system than you driving to the mall, and the carbon footprint of a website is smaller than that of a brick-and-mortar store.

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Thanks to Delaney!