Oh FFS, don't do that, it just encourages them to treat visiting whiteys as walking ATMs, which is bad for their tourism industry long-term.

Stay at hotels, eat at restaurants, take taxis, but don't encourage the obnoxious hawkers, no matter how young they are.

I'd suggest that any startup worth its salt is actually offering something of real value, not explicitly a charity case, so the analogy completely breaks down. I fully support encouraging the startup ecosystem.

And I'm not even sure about using a term like "top down". Hotels really do employ locals, as do restaurants, and by patronising them you send a strong signal of support to the local tourism industry. With that assurance they can make plans, invest, advertise, expand. It's not about making the rich richer, not at all. Giving a small regional tourism industry the confidence to plan for the future is a wonderful thing.

That's not the least bit true, in my experience. I've watched them come over from where their families are working and attempt to sell trinkets, then go back to their families (or friends' families).

As for "crap", yeah, it's crap. Because you don't give children appliances and automobiles to sell. It's no different than the stuff you'll buy from American children going door to door, trying to raise money for their school.

I think you're really looking down your nose at people. You have a choice when traveling in areas like this. You can either act like you have to guard your precious money from all these street urchins trying to cheat you, or you can simply accept it as part of the experience traveling in a very poor area, and embrace the reality that you can make some small difference in an individual's life.

You talk as if denying individuals some income is somehow helping their long-term tourism. Yet Thailand, which is decades ahead of Cambodia in terms of development and wealth, still sees foreigners as wealthy, pesters them for sales and rides, and they have a very healthy tourism industry in spite of this. A country can't force its way into a $500/night resort industry. Thailand has tried for years, and it's not happening anytime soon. Cambodia doesn't even have a reasonable highway infrastructure.

> Hotels really do employ locals

To give an interesting regional example, are you aware that the Thai island of Koh Phi Phi is controlled by the Chinese mafia?

The wider issue with buying stuff off Cambodian street urchins is that you really don't want to encourage a state of affairs where the most aggressive child beggars/vendors earn far more than their parents... and then need kids of their own once they hit their mid-teens and no longer appeal to tourists' sympathies.

The fact that they even have to do this speaks volumes.

So, you only want your money going to the wealthier families, many of which are foreign?

Street hawkers may be annoying, but they also represent the most basic form of entrepreneurial spirit.

You can also shift to work for an institution which is genuinely trying to do good, such as the World Bank or a not-for-profit. Or you can do what you can from within your own organisation to get them to be working to improve the world rather than take advantage of it.

(1) http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/11/what-problem-will-you-own/

<update - my apologies, there is a registration requirement for the article. The lightbox appears after a little wait, so you should be able to read it>

Just keep in mind the World Bank is considered by many as an instrumental part of a quasi-colonial system of institutions that is set up to exploit the third world through their advocacy for unfavorable debt and a certain economical bias.

I'm sure they also do some good, but they are at least a somewhat ambiguous organization.

Isn't everyone? Why is working 18 hours of labour a day inherently more valuable or useful to humanity, the planet, the universe, anything? Why is someone struggling inherently a better, more worthy person than anyone else (and by what standards?).

Would you really prefer a world where everyone has to struggle to survive, because that's where it sounds like your comment is leading.

The feeling of guilt is an echo in your head. It's not actually an objective measure of your worth, it's not really some outside deity judging you and finding you unworthy, even if it feels like it is. Because of this, there's no saying there is anything you can do to assuage your feelings of guilt if you go with them. Maybe it's a while loop that says "while (bad_things_happen_anywhere) { feel_guilty(); }". You ask what to do as if there's bound to be a corresponding "if I do X then I can feel less guilty" pattern in your head waiting to be triggered - but maybe there isn't.

What you can do is work on it as your problem, your suffering, your mental issue that needs addressing in your head. You're not unhappy because the world sucks for a dirt poor person. You're unhappy because of a "be unhappy" thought stuck in your head. Don't change the world to stop this suffering, change your thoughts.

Being poor is not a moral flaw and I see people everyday go out of their bed and try to win most of their days. Still people manage to find happiness within the most dire constraints.

You cannot do everything and nobody expects to. Take comfort in that. We are all doing out bits to repair the world (There's a wonderful Hebrew phrase for this: Tikkun olam).

But when you have the means, go travel. Meet the others who occupy this world, who have different perspective of living, who struggles with different things that you do. They will be happy to meet you.

People don't seem to be able to imagine just how bad life is in the third world for the majority of people.

And frankly, sorry to put it so bluntly, but here's a thought people should think about. Given you are a third-worlder, would you want to be one of the exploited or one of the non-exploited. Given that in practice most third-worlders still choose what job they want, the answer is obvious : with very few exceptions, people want to be one of the "exploited". Visit a third-world city, turn a few non-approved blocks, and you'll understand why.

Btw: one of the things that amazed me about Cairo is that they've created a "fake" city center, where the poverty you see is almost absent, in a way that I've seen nowhere else. So in Cairo, you definitely have to turn a few non-approved blocks.

Consider: if we can write the software that cities, states, and even the federal government uses to do it's job, then we can also have a material impact on transparency, usability, etc for the users.

Take the judicial system. It is badly underfunded, especially in California, which has the largest civil court system in the Western world. What if an enterprising group of civic minded programmers simply wrote awesome, free, open software to run a state courtroom, complete with a self-help web interface?

Such a project would not necessarily be fun. But it would be useful, and it would arguably contribute greatly to society.

It would contribute to the system that is perpetuating these kinds of injustices. Recall that a good portion of these people serving life sentences for non-violent crimes are in state prisons. How is helping them build their software systems going to find justice for a man in jail for life for stealing some tools?

By the way, this is not a rhetorical question: I'm honestly trying to understand this point of view.

1. In the courtroom. These people could have received a faster, more painless, and more just trial. The proceedings could have been more open, easier to search and data mine, and hence easier to react to faster. Additionally (and somewhat science-fictiony) I personally would like to see us experiment with alternative juries - particularly much larger, distributed juries. If justice can't be crowd-sourced, then I don't know what can.

2. In the legislature. Although the creation of bills is an intensely collaborative process, too often the details are delegated to underlings, and those details are seriously misinformed by the facts. So one piece of software that is needed world wide are better document collaboration tools that are tied to accurate sources. The legislature in particular should be obsessively concerned about how the justice system is applying their laws. Better visibility into what's happening, in real-time, would make the legislature a) more aware and b) more responsive to injustice.

Don't do it from a place of guilt, find something that you feel passionately about, cut back on the meaningless and lucrative tinkering and start tinkering for your passion. Your most valuable contribution to the world is your time, arrange your life so that you can spend as much time as possible, without burning out, on something meaningful to you.

It's hard. It's not just giving $10 to Oxfam (which you should do anyway), it's a real dedication of time and care. But you'll meet people, you'll support something you are passionate about, and you'll have a lot less time to think about how you're a waste.

But what you describe does not sound like an honest or clear assessment of the world. It sounds more like depression. Which is real and serious and treatable.

The world is often tragic. It <em>is</em> wrong to live comfortably and be willfully ignorant to tragedy, but it is not wrong to take care of yourself and make yourself whole. So, yes, seek something meaningful to make the world better, and start by taking care of yourself.