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Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

forbes.com

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Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#831

Post by wang_li »

dang wrote: post #826
wang_li wrote: post #418

One 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 .

I apologize if my tone was poor.

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#832

Post by krapp »

gridlockd wrote: post #830
cyberdrunk wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>If instead you hired some of these poor people to build something 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.

But their labor isn't worth that much, and no one would ever pay the poor that much when they could pay someone else less, or undocumented immigrants almost nothing under the table. "Pay the poor enough not to be poor anymore" is not how capitalism works.

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#833

Post by renewiltord »

jldugger wrote: post #623
renewiltord wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because societally we want to encourage the act of giving anonymously with a big reveal in the twilight years? Doesn't sound that hard to understand.

Sorry, I guess i interpreted anonymous donation as a Truly Morally Selfless act, and the fact that we're talking about it now would be some weird flex. But sure, if you put out a call for solicitiations when you announced you were giving it all away, you probably also need a big announcement when you're done or you'll be dealing with development officers all day every day.

Well, sure, anonymous donation is that. Then we want to encourage that so we find anonymous donors, deanonymize them, and canonize them. That makes more people want to be anonymous donors, a thing we want.

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#834

Post by neilparikh »

endymi0n wrote: post #786
7402 wrote: post #525

Earlier 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.

There's one major difference: taxes and the social net only help those in your country. And if you're in a western country (where most people with wealth are), the people who most need your help are elsewhere.

Concretely, you can help a lot more people with the same amount of money if you focus your giving on the global poor (ex. Africa), rather than those in the US. One way to do this is https://www.givedirectly.org/

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#835

Post by myself248 »

orangejewce wrote: post #332
myself248 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed that this sort of naming-rights philanthropy correlates with certain cultures, too. I know when I'm driving along 11 mile and see a bunch of buildings with people's names on them, the good deli is just a few blocks further. ;) I concur, it's not a bad thing. I actually think it helps motivate others to do likewise -- generosity in the shadows doesn't help set a cultural expectation or contribute to a pat…

Wow dude, if you're going to be anti-semitic, just do it. Don't bother trying to be "cute", or "subtle" using emojis. Really pathetic.

Wow, okay, that's not the response I expected to come back to. I'm trying to understand how you interpreted my comment that way.

To be clear, there were no intentional dog-whistles in my post. I thought I was saying something strongly positive, about a phenomenon which I've observed and have great admiration for.

However, your response and the thread that followed, reveals some things I clearly didn't consider. There is surely a lot of anti-semitism out there, and that my comment was mistaken for it, I think shows how pervasive it must be. And it's important, as has been said, to call it out wherever it appears. And I guess that means looking for even tiny hints of double meanings. Which, logically, includes meanings that someone may not be cognizant of when speaking with one meaning in mind. I honestly thought I was being "cute" with the deli thing.

I'm astonished and saddened to see a well-intentioned comment identified as just the opposite. I didn't mean to play into any negative stereotypes about money -- I didn't say anything about being obsessed with money, and if I got near it at all, I was talking about being recognized for _doing good things_ (with money), and how this cultural pattern does that. I think that's pretty clearly positive! (The whole point of the article, after all, was that more people with money should be committed to doing good things with it. Money's a pretty unavoidable aspect here.) But clearly my comment exists in a world where a lot of terrible things also exist, and I guess I can see how it could be mistaken for a vague hint towards one of those terrible things.

Especially on the internet, where tone and nuance are notoriously tricky.

So I'm honestly looking for input. Is there a better way to say what I was trying to say?

Regardless, I'm sorry that you saw something negative in what I said. I'm even more sorry that anti-semitism is so insidious that you had reason to look for negative interpretations in the first place. That sucks.

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#836

Post by dang »

hirundo wrote: post #149

Compare two billionaires. One stops and carefully donates his money to have the most impact. He ends up "officially broke." The other doubles down on for profit enterprises, but focuses on those with the most impact, like electrifying a fossil fueled sector of the economy or making us a multi-planetary species. The profits are reinvested to accomplish these goals. He ends up richer than ever. It isn't clear that the…

Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents. We have enough celebrity flamewars as it is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#837

Post by gridlockd »

krapp wrote: post #832
gridlockd wrote: post #830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

>If instead you hired some of these poor people to build something 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. But their labor isn't worth that much, and no one would ever pay the poor that much when they could pay someone else less, or undocumented immigrants almost nothing under…

If I could give away houses, it stands to reason that I could also afford to pay my workers properly so that they do a good job.

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#838

Post by dvt »

superhuzza wrote: post #645
dvt wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not sad at all. There are plenty of secular reasons for doing a good deed for the sake of the deed itself — not the reward or recognition. I mean, this is basically the entire underpinning of Kantian ethics.

That's exactly my point though. I'm an atheist, and I don't do good things out of a desire for "rewards in heaven", or rewards of any kind. I don't refrain from stealing because I'm afraid of hell or punishment. As you point out, they're done for the act itself. This passage presents altruism as a tit-for-tat deal with God. Do good, and you'll get some of that back...later. I promise! It's almost tacky.

> This passage presents altruism as a tit-for-tat deal with God. Do good, and you'll get some of that back...later. I promise! It's almost tacky.

Correction: the passage makes no mention of "heaven."

I don't think you mean to say "tit-for-tat" as that means something else, but I do get the gist: it seems that there's some kind of contractual obligation on the part of God. The logical argument being: if you do [GIVE], then He does [REWARD]. This is a subtle argument, but flawed for a number of reasons (and why texts should never be taken out of context).

First, God isn't beholden to anyone. He does as He pleases, and the only "laws" He is bound by is His own nature (good, omniscient, eternal, etc.). There's many examples where Pharisees try to play these logical gotcha games with Christ, and they're always repudiated.

Secondly, the point of the passage itself is twofold: (1) avoid religious hypocrisy, and (2) avoid materialistic vainglory. Reading into the text deeper than that, brings us to my last point...

Finally, given that Christianity is a theist moral system, it makes sense that the ultimate arbiter of "goodness" is God -- in my opinion, that's why Chist brings up the "reward" -- which, for all intents and purposes, might just be God's approval (who knows what that entails).

Re: Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

#840

Post by krapp »

gridlockd wrote: post #837
krapp wrote: post #832

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If instead you hired some of these poor people to build something 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. But their labor isn't worth that much, and no one would ever pay the poor that much when they could pay someone else less, or undocumented immigrants almost nothing under…

If I could give away houses, it stands to reason that I could also afford to pay my workers properly so that they do a good job.

You could do either. Real world economics and history, however, suggests you would do neither, because the incentives of the labor market mean you can get adequate work for far below the cost of a living wage, and you didn't get rich by throwing good money after bad, so to speak.

Jeff Bezos could give every Amazon employee $100,000 and still be the richest man in the world. He could also afford to pay every employee far more in wages than he does, and Amazon would still make money hand over fist. As companies go, Amazon is one of the more laissez-faire, so it's not as if he wants to, but his hands are tied by overburdensome regulations. He doesn't, because why should he? Why not spend a few million dollars on a ten-thousand year clock instead?

Many people living in low income housing are already employed, and the market has already decided the value of their labor is worth just enough to scrape by with government assistance, and no more. Depending on the free market or the magnanimous (and mostly nonexistent) charity of the capital class to lift up the poor doesn't work.

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