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0 pointsfrereubu10mo ago0 comments

Anecdata, but the brother of a friend was working on malaria in a SE Asian country and the Gates Foundation got interested in what they were doing, and wanted to find out more about it before possibly funding some of their work. They flew the entire team to the US, put them up in expensive hotels for a few days and flew them all back. They calculated that the cost of that was three times their annual budget. It would have made more sense to me to either (a) fly someone from the Gates Foundation to the country so they could see things first hand or (b) conduct the investigation / interviews via the internet. Given that the Foundation's people weren't in-country anyway, (b) seems like the best option all round given the environmental costs of flying.

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michaelt10mo ago

> They flew the entire team to the US, put them up in expensive hotels for a few days and flew them all back. They calculated that the cost of that was three times their annual budget.

Are you sure about that?

Let's say every employee gets a $1000 round trip flight, plus $2000 for 4 nights in a decent hotel, a total of $3000 per head. Are you telling me that employee is paid $1000 a year or less?

frereubuOP10mo ago

The way they talked about it, the total per head was north of $5k, and they lived in an incredibly poor / cheap country. I wasn't fact-checking their figures, but they weren't the kind of person to exaggerate for effect.

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