(US only) Donate $2 to charity (bing rewards)
Probably not worth most of your time, but if you already have a Windows Live account, log in here and you earn enough Bing reward points (whatever those are) to donate $2 to charity—http://www.bing.com/rewards/signup/web
Unfortunately, the charity selection is limited to a couple of “better educate the poor” organizations.
Only works from the US. Please amend the post.
Done. Sorry.
You know, you could get 50 to 500x that bounty (usable for charity or your own dark purposes) if you just called up a contact looking to work with or hire a gainfully employed programmer/engineer and recommended good ol’ Silas, whom you’ve come to know and love.
Some paths of least resistance being avoided here...
You’re suggesting people help you find a better job, I think? That sounds good—likely someone here already knows of an opportunity.
I don’t think the $2 thing is big enough to discuss. I hesitated, then decided to post anyway.
Meh, you wouldn’t know it from all the people passing up this easy money.
Personally, I’d need see good reasons to expect the charity I’m donating to is going to have a significant positive impact before I consider donating, relative to other charities I might be able to find on my own. Inefficiency, corruption, and poor choice of target are major concerns. (One example of the latter issuemight be donating to help US poor when it’s possible to just as efficiently help people who are far worse off somewhere else). Also the mechanism by which to help maybe poorly thought out. (Do the poor really need education, as opposed to other more concrete things? I’m not giving an answer, just saying I’d need to see one before I donated.)
I think many here are already aware of GiveWell, an organization which evaluates charities on many of these criteria, and is nice enough to publish the details of their analysis. GiveWell finds that overwhelming numbers of charities fare very poorly. Helpfully, they also say very clearly what they think the most effective charity to donate to is, how effective they think it is, and why. (Currently VillageReach, last I checked, which works on very basic medical supply infrastructure in Africa.)
EDIT: Should have paid more attention to what you actually said. Obviously if you are already earning these “reward points” then spending them on donations is no additional cost to you. However, the questions about effectiveness stand, and based on analyses I’ve seen, many charities are so poor that you’d be obviously doing more good spending the same money on yourself. Or using your reward points on some other trivial reward. (Technically, in terms of opportunity cost, spending the reward points is still like spending money, if you can spend them on other things you would spend money on.)