Comments on: End of Greenanswers.com Internship! All-time most ridiculous questions.

By: chewbear

chewbear — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:19:56 +0000

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Later on, I found out that it is similar to MyLot (though I hadn’t heard of that til you mentioned it), but people do get paid to ask and answer questions, though not all of the questions and answers are done that way. I was paid to answer questions for a few weeks. Some of the questions are pretty interesting, but I don’t see why this type of site would exist, or could exist, without some incentive for people to keep coming back to it i.e. having monetary incentives.

Knowing that, I now understand why there were questions like these posted on the site. If people need to meet a quota per day, then they will ask any question that they possibly can without thinking about quality or anything else.

This model for building a website seems flawed to me because it doesn’t serve a real community and can’t float without grants to keep it going.

Anyway, thanks for reading and I will check out your blog too!

By: Layla

Layla — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:52:09 +0000

lol, some of these are actually great questions! (& I had to giggle over some too!!:))

As for the poor nations – I do see both your point of view that ‘developed nations’ make more waste & pollution, and what Nat above says – even people in poor countries or those ‘on the rise’ don’t like to get poisoned – and what can they do if eg a solar panel factory is poisoning their land and workers?
(I actually saw it asked online!!)

As for pancakes and waffles, someone could actually measure amount of energy needed, or specifics can be pointed out to people what factors to consider (eg is the flour organic, how far has it been transported?) Does one need more or less flour and other resources to bake one or the other?

As for the eggs, someone planning a recipe could have a legitimate question (I think it’s online already though, at least I’ve heard it answered elsewhere – or people selling ostrich eggs would know)

I have been wondering if greenanswers was a ‘legit’ site or similar to eg MyLot where people ask and answer questions and get a tiny amount of money for doing so (some questions there are ‘highly intelligent’ too, while some are actually oddly interesting!) so I googled it and found your blog!

Interesting to read your impression of it!

By: chewbear

chewbear — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:58:16 +0000

What I meant when I added that question was that it is audacious for us to ask poor people to change their way of life when they can barely feed themselves. For example, they know if their land is not as fertile as it used to be, but they must continue to farm it so that their family can eat. I agree that pollution and industry usually have terrible standards, but these aren’t necessarily part of their “way of life” that I was thinking of, and might be more determined by the government and governance (or lack of).

As for your question, I’m not sure you can target the minimum wage worker in this situation. They will always make the most economical choice because they are forced to by their situation. This is more of an issue of regulation and making it difficult for sweatshop products to compete with fair trade goods on the market.

By: Nat

Nat — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:29:12 +0000

“How are we going to get poor nations to make green changes to their way of life?”

This actually doesn’t seem so ridiculous. I would think that poor nations have problems with pollution and industry having low green standards, perhaps because of lack of funds and/or green initiatives that would exist in countries with more money.

As a related but different question, how do you get someone who only makes minimum wage to buy fair trade goods when the goods made in sweatshop conditions are so much more affordable for them?