rejon is Jon Phillips. (via Mowser)

Poverty Line in USA vs China

Updated December 13, 2011 @ 5:15 pm

Part of the reason I’m not using social media now is that I have found that I am not able to have complete thoughts. Instead < 140 characters gives me a funnel towards emotional comments, and unfounded arguments. Well, I have a secret weapon in my battle for making longer than 5 sentence speech fragments, and its more than Christopher, Nkinkade or Wolfgang countering my sometimes emotional decision making.

My original unfounded comment: “China has the most people living in poverty.”

Here’s how a gift email landed in my inbox:

Per our discussion about population in poverty, the latest is that the government has raised the cap from RMB 1274 per yeary to 2300 RMB per year. by the latest standards, there are 120 million people in poverty in China.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau data released Tuesday September 13th, 2011, the nation’s poverty rate rose to 15.1% (46.2 million) in 2010,[2] up from 14.3% (approximately 43.6 million) in 2009 and to its highest level since 1993. In 2008, 13.2% (39.8 million) Americans lived in relative poverty.[3]

The government’s definition of poverty is not tied to an absolute value of how much an individual or family can afford, but is tied to a relative level based on total income received. For example, the poverty level for 2011 was set at $22,350 (total yearly income) for a family of four, which roughly equals RMB 37,995 per person.[4] Most Americans (58.5%) will spend at least one year below the poverty line at some point between ages 25 and 75.[5] There remains some controversy over whether the official poverty threshold over- or understates poverty.

China and the US still has vastly different standards about poverty therefore direct comparison of the number of people in poverty aren’t meaningful.

Thanks for the thoughtful research. Time to get with the program REJON!

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tags { china, markiting, poverty, research, socialmedia, usa, Writing }

Creative Commons Website Rebuilt by Fabricatorz

Updated December 6, 2011 @ 1:59 pm

Busy time indeed! I made a blog post on Fab blog about the work we did in the fall to rebuild all of Creative Commons public websites. Here’s a snippet:

In early September, Fabricatorz were contracted by Creative Commons to redesign and launch an updated website design in time for the Creative Commons Summit and its fall fundraising campaign. Later we were to roll-out the same theme across their other major websites. That means we had to crank out in a short time a theme that could be simplified, controlled from one set of master files, and change quickly based upon regular direction from CC staff, while making sure everything works well across five web engines: the main wordpress site, civicrm, the cc licensing engine, CC’s Wiki and search.creativecommons.org.