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Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity

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Re: Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity

#41

Post by adventured »

whack wrote: post #36
awillen wrote: post #2

Truly commendable that he would do this, but deeply terrible that a private citizen, no matter how wealthy, can beat governments to the punch on this kind of aid.

Unfortunately, we are living in an era of "America First" where a vast segment of the population has no interest in engaging with or providing aid to the rest of the world. Not to mention a sizable sub-segment that has no interest in providing aid even to their fellow citizens, who happen to check a different demographic box. The US government can put Sergey to shame... if it wanted to. But it's unlikely that it will…

> Unfortunately, we are living in an era of "America First" where a vast segment of the population has no interest in engaging with or providing aid to the rest of the world.

Little has changed about the US foreign aid budget in the last several years, despite your attempted pitch. The foreign aid budget has not been slashed, the US is still spending around ~1% of its budget on foreign aid, the same level it was spending under Obama.

Here are the foreign aid disbursement numbers by year:

2012: $46b, 2013: $46b, 2014: $41b, 2015: $48b, 2016: $47b, 2017: $45b, 2018: $46b, and 2019 disbursement figures are partial in the foreign aid explorer.

Mostly the US is failing to boost its foreign aid. Trump doesn't control the US budget (he has some limited influence) and there is a split power situation in the US Congress.

The US still provides approximately 1/2 of all global food aid, and has been doing that for a century. The US typically provides 300% more global food aid in a given year than all of Europe combined for example.

4% of the world's population, providing 50%+ of the world's food aid. Those selfish Americans, routinely saving the world from famines and hunger for a century and saving tens of millions (not a typo) of lives in the process.

"The United States is, by far, the world’s largest international food-aid donor. Almost every year since the 1950s, it has been responsible for more than 50 percent of the billions of tons of food shipped from the parts of the world with a surplus to the parts of the world that are hungry."

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/05/how-the-u...

The US is also still keeping millions of people alive in Africa that have HIV/AIDS, courtesy of PEPFAR.

Re: Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity

#42

Post by ta17711771 »

throwawaygh wrote: post #19
awillen wrote: post #2

Truly commendable that he would do this, but deeply terrible that a private citizen, no matter how wealthy, can beat governments to the punch on this kind of aid.

> can beat governments to the punch on this kind of aid. Yes, exactly this. Not "can provide the aid", but "first to the punch". You really hit the nail on the head. The morality of massive wealth accumulation -- and the morality of various mechanisms for changing that accumulation -- is definitely something that reasonable people can have a polite and respectable debate about. But it is absolutely unacceptable that…

If Congresspeople and similar desk jockeys can't chronically profit from ensuring our preparedness for disasters, well, don't expect them to do so.

Re: Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity

#43

Post by philwelch »

michaelangerman wrote: post #3

Besides monarchs in the past, for the first time in the history of Planet Earth we have many people and corporations that have more money than governments and so with that comes the responsibility of "acting accordingly". I believe that in a good light this will continue to assist humanity in ways never thought of before as human ingenuity is always more nimble than large bureaucratic organizations.

You should read a biography of J.P. Morgan sometime. In the 1890’s he bailed out the US government, and during the Panic of 1907 he basically bailed out the entire economy.

Re: Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity

#44

Post by catalogia »

throwawaygh wrote: post #30
catalogia wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mansa Musa is said to have been so wealthy he crashed the economy of Egypt by giving away gold. Extremely wealthy people is not a new phenomenon. Maybe monarchs don't count because they're so wealthy they own entire countries outright? It seems to me that makes them more wealthy, not less.

> Mansa Musa That's a bit of a confusing thing, though, because he was also the emperor. (OT: I often wonder if his story is well-known in tech circles because of the end date of his reign.)

> That's a bit of a confusing thing, though, because he was also the emperor.

That's kind of my point though; owning an empire is an extreme form of wealth, well beyond what any of the American tech billionaires have.

Re: Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity

#45

Post by xyzzyz »

throwawaygh wrote: post #4
michaelangerman wrote: post #3

Besides monarchs in the past, for the first time in the history of Planet Earth we have many people and corporations that have more money than governments and so with that comes the responsibility of "acting accordingly". I believe that in a good light this will continue to assist humanity in ways never thought of before as human ingenuity is always more nimble than large bureaucratic organizations.

Andrew Carnegie definitely had "more money than governments". Same with other titans of that time. He was a really shit person when in came to labor -- hiring literal private armies to straight up lay siege to his workers -- but he did basically create the "rich guy gives away his money as a social obligation" model of... maintaining... democratic... government? Or, to be less coy, model of staving off communist/soci…

He was a really shit person when in came to labor -- hiring literal private armies to straight up lay siege to his workers

That’s interesting. Why would he “lay siege” to workers? Were they hiding somewhere behind fortifications, and he was trying to force them to work, or what? It’s hard for me to imagine circumstances where capitalists would even find it useful to “lay siege” to workers.

Re: Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity

#46

Post by areyousure »

0xy wrote: post #24
flyinglizard wrote: post #10

> But the use of ex-military personnel for humanitarian and conservation work is also controversial, according to Rosaleen Duffy, a professor of politics and international relations at the University of Sheffield. No, Professor Duffy, the use of ex- or active - military personnel to render aid is not controversial. It's a widely accepted and successful practice.

Switzerland is a model for this. Given their neutral and famously anti-confrontational manner, their armies do a lot of civil construction and aid work. The US should do more of that kind of thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Corps_of_En... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unified_Response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unified_Assistance

Re: Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity

#47

Post by throwaway2048 »

3131s wrote: post #39
wutbrodo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really that surprising? Governments' advantage is crafting certain kinds of incentives that markets can't, but it's pretty much a guarantee that government will be more incompetent at whatever specific task they put their mind to, in large part because of the burden of democratic accountability. Conditioned on the resources and incentives being centralized (in Brin), why wouldn't you expect his organization t…

> democratic accountability That's so far from what exists now in the US, it's doubtful that it's an inherent factor in our government's dysfunction. There are many governments that aren't totally useless, so if you're looking at the US and thinking that we can't do any better, that shows a serious lack of imagination and perspective.

The USA sure seems to have a lot of mysterious problems that people throw up their hands as utterly unfixable, that no other country in the world does.

Re: Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity

#48

Post by Cyph0n »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #40
selectodude wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is the wealthiest country on earth. Sergei Brin's checking account would be the 74th largest GDP in the world.

Why are you comparing somebody’s net worth to a GDP, which is a rate? That makes zero sense.

No, it does make sense: Brin could pay to run the 74th largest economy for a year.

Re: Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity

#50

Post by throwaway2048 »

xyzzyz wrote: post #45
throwawaygh wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Andrew Carnegie definitely had "more money than governments". Same with other titans of that time. He was a really shit person when in came to labor -- hiring literal private armies to straight up lay siege to his workers -- but he did basically create the "rich guy gives away his money as a social obligation" model of... maintaining... democratic... government? Or, to be less coy, model of staving off communist/soci…

He was a really shit person when in came to labor -- hiring literal private armies to straight up lay siege to his workers That’s interesting. Why would he “lay siege” to workers? Were they hiding somewhere behind fortifications, and he was trying to force them to work, or what? It’s hard for me to imagine circumstances where capitalists would even find it useful to “lay siege” to workers.

if only historical accounts existed of this mythical time.
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