521–530 of 555 posts
Alternative proposal: Use that money to turn Facebook into a self-sustaining non profit that solely cares about maximizing its users experience and stop breaching privacy so that data can be sold. Perhaps that's not as fancy as investments in health, education or the environment but at least it seems very doable and could solve one problem (excellent means for human communication) for good.
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Americans are the most charitable people on earth. So you don't really have a point.
If you read up you'll see the attitude I was responding to was contrary to that of charity.
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I strongly feel this power, influence, giant houses, jets, personal cruise ships etc are old generation stuff - something that grey haired Gekko will personify. The "new rich" is dramatically different and for the better. Today's centi-millionairs wants to stay anonymous, don't want to have butlers, have houses that they can manage without permanent staff and often prefers travelling first class or renting Yatch inst…
Hate to break it to you but what you described about the "new" millionaires is the majority of all multimillionaires, regardless of generation. See: The Millionaire next door
World is a strange place. Very few millionaires win and lose spectacularly. Nearly all of rich people out there are silent and invisible.
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>I mean, what else are you going to do with $45 Billion? You are thinking about it the wrong way. You don't spend $45B on stuff for yourself. You spend $45B on changing the way governments and populations live work and how power is balanced. When Bud Fox asked Gordon Gekko "How much is enough" Gekko knew immediately that Fox wasn't in the same league. Money isn't about stuff, it's about power and influence.
$45B is not enough to change governments. That's about 4 days worth of US federal spending.
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I mean, what else are you going to do with $45 Billion? Build a really big house? I've had the opportunity to rub shoulders with a few billionaires over the past few weeks, and it's remarkable how differently they think about money than the people who don't have it. Sure, they may buy a nice car (or jet), but after a certain level the only thing you can do with that kind of money is plug it back into something meanin…
Spending money meaningfully is hard work. John D. Rockefeller had such a hard time with it that after awhile he just left it up to his son, who devoted his life to philanthropy. At the Cleveland church he went to, significant portions of his time spent there was to write checks to parishioners. I'd say it takes roughly the same amount of effort to spend money as it does to make it. You still need an organization, you…
There is.
You don't give people fish to eat, you teach them how to fish.
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Spending money meaningfully is hard work. John D. Rockefeller had such a hard time with it that after awhile he just left it up to his son, who devoted his life to philanthropy. At the Cleveland church he went to, significant portions of his time spent there was to write checks to parishioners. I'd say it takes roughly the same amount of effort to spend money as it does to make it. You still need an organization, you…
>>It seems that there's something fundamental about philanthropy that doesn't scale. There is. You don't give people fish to eat, you teach them how to fish.
Teaching isn't presently scalable. You can look to the failures of our public school system for evidence. One might be tempted to look to other countries for systems that work better, but there has to be a political path forward for implementing those systems here.
One good teacher can only teach so many. That good teacher may not be good at teaching teachers. Teaching is not warfare, where good soldiers can teach other people to teach soldiers.
Teachers that are good at teaching teachers can only teach so many teachers. Any attempt to scale a working method will eventually run out of talent. And if you don't stop when you run out of talent, then the quality of your teaching will inevitably go down. Universities can only get so big.
Billionaires who want to put their wealth towards education are pretty limited in their options.
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There hasn't been another other thing that has had as much impact in bringing me closer to my family and friends across the globe. Waste of time for you, positive life changing medium for me. Further, who know what positive impact this have had on my health? Maybe it has prevented the need for medicines in many cases.
Except for the internet and computers and electricity and a few other things. I hope you understand that your personal experience is anecdotal evidence at best and perception bias for you didn't take into account the downside for the rest of the population. What about this stubborn family member who refuses to have a facebook account because he believes in privacy as a fundamental freedom, how exactly facebook is bri…
> We will give 99% of our Facebook shares -- currently about $45 billion -- during our lives to advance this mission. We know this is a small contribution compared to all the resources and talents of those already working on these issues. But we want to do what we can, working alongside many others. Ninety. Nine. Percent.
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It sincerely depresses me that the top comment on Hacker News is so incredibly cynical. The man is giving away a huge amount of money and you can only find ways to detract. > Firstly, the donation is stock not cash, so the value of this foundation will be directly linked to the value of Facebook shares. So? The vast majority of his wealth is in Facebook shares. That doesn't change the fact that he's giving away the v…
> Not to mention he has never attempted to make Internet.org anything close to a monopoly. Do you even know what Internet.org is ? They're providing free access to a subset of the internet that Facebook controls, while forcing people to pay if they want to access the internet as a whole. The entire reason Internet.org exists is to create a Facebook monopoly on data access in developing countries. Your entire comment…
An initiative can be charitable while also benefiting the donor. The users of Internet.org get free access to Facebook as well as the other services being provided and that doesn't detract from the service or make the whole initiative evil.
I have yet to see research that providing a zero-rating service is harmful as you suggest.