Based on your recommendation, I fired this movie up in Netflix streaming night before last and watched it. Very interesting, worthwhile and informative. It also helped me put together several (previously) unrelated pieces of information I'd collected in my memory through the years. First ... if you give people eggs ... they eat the eggs and that's the end of it. (The "give a man a fish / teach a man to fish" maxim.)

However, if you give people money to buy eggs instead of giving them eggs ... that money can go on to not only provide them eggs, but to do other things as well. Several years ago, I read an article about how Walmart sucks local economies dry -- and then will close up their stores and move on. It's been the subject of several TV programs and other articles through the years.

However, this one showed that a dollar spent "locally" will circulate through the community as many as 27 times before moving on. While in the local economy, it does things like help people buy new tires, haircuts, home maintenance, hardware, dancing lessons, school supplies, team sports uniforms, groceries from Mom-&-Pop stores that support local farmers, etc.

A dollar spent at Walmart, on the other hand, leaves the community immediately, lands in the swelling coffers of an already obscenely wealthy family -- and is never seen again, except through the government assistance programs on which many Walmart employees depend.

Also, a meme circulating on the internet a while back (with some substance to it ... I did do some research on it at the time) stated that it would cost $30B to solve world hunger. Admittedly, this is a huge amount of money -- but it's the amount the nations of the world spend on their military programs every eight days. And the United States spends 11 times more than it's nearest "competitor" in this area.

If I've done the math correctly, that suggests that if one day every six weeks the nations of the world agreed not to kill each other -- or wage war -- and donated that $$$ into a UBI fund (NOT something that goes to other foreign governments, because that just becomes a siphon for graft, corruption and personal enrichment by those leaders ... as we've seen time and time again.) ... but into $$$ TO PEOPLE that they could use in self-supporting ways, we could create a huge improvement in the whole global culture.

And yet ... we choose not to.

The movie -- and those two facts -- have haunted me for the past two days. I wake up thinking about them. So I thought I'd come in here today ... and let you know. I know some of this is simplistic ... that solving the problem isn't as easy as it sounds. But those two pieces of information as starting points on which to build ... feel simply awesome -- in the literal meaning of that word.

Thank you for the nudge.