And if someone were to audit those "anonymous" 8 Billion, I'm sure they would find that all of it made it to the front lines right? Right? Definitely no issues with corruption and oversight occurring within charitable organizations around the globe.
Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke
821–830 of 875 posts
Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke
#822Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only is whether or not he's maximizing the impact of his donation a call he gets to make, whether or not he even wants to maximize the impact of his donation at the cost of other considerations is a call he gets to make.
And I get to judge him for making the wrong call.
It's turtles all the way down.
Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke
#823Earlier quoted context omitted.
He started out with a lot of money from his family's South African mining operations. Your mockery is ill-directed, and in the context of a post about someone whose corporate wealth was able to be donated to charity, in really poor taste.
Yeah, because Elon is obviously where he is now because of family money... jesus christ. Ever heard of Zip2 and Paypal? Your resentment and jealousy based communist thinking is pretty ugly.
Now you've added personal insults to your class mockery. Please, this sort of casual disregard of other people is not appropriate on HN.
Your initial claim was that he had no money apart from company stock, and lives entirely on debt. This is factually incorrect, as I pointed out: his family money predates all of his companies.
Attached to your factually-incorrect claim was a casual denigration of a group of people with whose beliefs you disagree. This was both misguided and unnecessary.
My factual statement in response was simply:
> He started out with a lot of money from his family's South African mining operations.
Based solely on that true statement of fact, you derided me, responding to claims I never made and labeling me and my "thinking" in inaccurate and insulting ways.
Please, stop.
Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke
#824Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maimonides defines eight levels in giving charity (tzedakah), each one higher than the preceding one. On an ascending level, they are as follows: 8. When donations are given grudgingly. 7. When one gives less than he should, but does so cheerfully. 6. When one gives directly to the poor upon being asked. 5. When one gives directly to the poor without being asked. 4. Donations when the recipient is aware of the donor'…
Level one sounds suspiciously close to actually paying taxes and let the social net built on it work its magic. Now come on, downvote me to hell.
On the one hand, I think your comment is correct, insightful and important.
On the other hand, I have a firm policy of always downvoting comments on HN that say things like "I know I'm going to get downvoted for posting this", because I think doing that should be strongly disincentivized.
I'm compromising by neither upvoting nor downvoting and leaving this reply.
Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke
#825Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find the support for inheritance taxes surprising. HN loves the social democracies, but most of them don't have inheritance taxes, with many abolishing them in the past few decades - Australia, NZ, Canada, Luxembourg, Sweden, Norway, Slovakia, Portugal.
Social democracies aren't perfect, they are just clearly better for the average citizen than whatever type of failed state the US is. By all metrics except Tomahawks per capita.
Please keep nationalistic flamebait off HN. We've had to ask you this before.
Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke
#826One could argue that everyone has the same responsibilities to society at large. Thus for every Chuck Feeny and Bill Gates, you, personally you, have an obligation to create many billion dollars of value and give it away. If you don't do that, you're worse than any evil billionaire you care to name. They at least are paying millions of dollars in taxes for any money they pull out of investments. How many millions in…
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24486539.
Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke
#827Earlier quoted context omitted.
Level one sounds suspiciously close to actually paying taxes and let the social net built on it work its magic. Now come on, downvote me to hell.
On the one hand, I think your comment is correct, insightful and important. On the other hand, I have a firm policy of always downvoting comments on HN that say things like "I know I'm going to get downvoted for posting this", because I think doing that should be strongly disincentivized. I'm compromising by neither upvoting nor downvoting and leaving this reply.
Have my upvote as well. I was still frustrated by a similar observation I recently posted that went negative, much to my surprise, and made me imply a pretty libertarian bias.
Apologies for the bile, I‘ll engage in a more civil discussion tone going forward.
Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke
#828Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Spend your money on riotous living The letter is BS with the first line. It makes it sound like the options are giving money to your kids or getting drunk. But that makes no sense for the range of money we’re talking about. Jeff Bezos could throw a $10 million party every night for a year and his net worth would go down 2%.
Thats not how networth works. No one has enough liquid capital to spend money like that. As soon as people found out Bezos was wasteful like that, his network would drop just based on stock price.
Maybe? That doesn’t counter my point. If anything it only enhances it. Estate taxes do not contribute to “riotous living” because cash on hand is not at all a limiting factor on how much they party. There are more important things, like the perception and how that affects them (like you pointed out).
“If I leave this hundred billion dollars to my kids, the government will take a portion. Better to spend it on hookers and blow instead!”
That makes about zero sense, so I don’t at all believe that’s the message the estate tax is sending or it would even matter if it was. The thing that keeps billionaires from partying isn’t the price tag.
Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke
#829It's great he donated his wealth to charity, but it's a little unfair that he took it upon himself to chose where the money went instead of letting the people choose.
Why should the people get to choose?
Because thats where the money originally came from.
Why should the single billionaire get to chose?
Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke
#830Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buying "expensive shit" is an honest business transaction. Who do you think makes all this expensive shit? They all have families to feed, you know. If you're rich, buying expensive shit is probably the most beneficial thing you can do for society. By contrast, charities and non-profits get this halo of being socially beneficial, even though they're often some of the most wasteful institutions of all. Cornell gets a…
> If you're rich, buying expensive shit is probably the most beneficial thing you can do for society. That's not true. You can go and pay people a 50 million dollars to make a yacht for you. Or you can pay that 50 million to other group of people to build housing for the poor. In both cases, it provides jobs and puts food on the table of the people you employed. But, the yacht is just a toy for you, while housing wil…
"Housing for the poor" is indeed life-changing, but not in the way you like. The government has spent billions on housing for the poor, and the result is usually called a ghetto.
If instead you hired some of these poor people to build something nice for you, they wouldn't be so poor anymore. They could even afford decent housing, if the government didn't prevent that from happening with zoning laws and various other regulations.