81–90 of 301 posts
I've done a fair amount of volunteering for nonprofits, one in particular[1], and I will say that nonprofits are full of the most overworked, underpaid, and passionate people you will meet anywhere. They need every penny they can get, and very often people mistake nonprofits spending money on essential activities like marketing or event planning as "overhead", when such expenditures generate multiples of revenue for…
The article mentioned the Gates foundation which has terrible records in education initiatives: - The big failure in small schools initiative: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/th... - The big failure in teacher evaluation initiative: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-melinda-gates-foundatio... - The big failure in Common Core initiative: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/…
The tone of these articles is really unfortunate. Very much positions the donors as bad guys, their own admission of failure as proof that they’re bad guys, and that the problems are fundamentally unsolvable and that we shouldn’t do anything. It’s fine to note programs that don’t work; but schadenfreude in fully-funded experiments with the goal to help children is counter-productive.
I laugh at Elon Musk when he thinks getting fired from Paypal means he knows how to run a car company. I also laugh at Bill Gates when he thinks stealing the worst desktop operating system makes him a doctor.
We can't overthrow our masters. At least let us make fun of them.
The article mentioned the Gates foundation which has terrible records in education initiatives: - The big failure in small schools initiative: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/th... - The big failure in teacher evaluation initiative: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-melinda-gates-foundatio... - The big failure in Common Core initiative: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/…
Most startups fail, and we often talk about how that's a good thing. Absent capital constraints, why is that different for charitable initiatives? Gates is devoting resources towards nuclear (Terrapower) and nuclear has a terrible track record in effeciency (LCOE) and generation as a total percent of fleet capacity. Should he stop trying there? I would argue it isn't. I would argue the same for trying to improve educ…
I worked in Accounting (the dept that did it, not the one that taught it) IT at a major public university for several years. Something like half of the software complexity was in keeping track of each dollar's origin, and making sure that it was spent on only what the source approved it to be spent on. Whether the source was the federal government, the state, corporate donors, or wealthy individuals, they all had str…
>complexity was in keeping track of each dollar's origin, and making sure that it was spent on only what the source approved it to be spent on. [...] they all had strong opinions on what the money could be spent on. Understand your frustration but the public was outraged when $1 million of a librarian's donation was used for a football scoreboard.[1] Yes, the university did comply to the exact letter of his will (onl…
OK, that's a bit unrealistic. I could build them one for a few hundred, though, and they could pay a student $50 to flip over the numbers during the game.
You make some money. Which is taxed in various ways. The pie gets bigger, the state (and the People) are getting a cut.
Then you are told you should do more. And you also think, well, why not help the world?
Then you are told: but don't waste your time volunteering at a shelter -- better work and donate your money instead.
OK, so you don't get the satisfaction of seeing the humans you help but you know that at least your donation helps, maybe, the same humans you want.
A restricted donation gives you some agency into improving the world. You are still abstracted away, you don't really see the humans you are supposedly helping, but at least the money only goes into improving the world into some dimension that needs improving and that you consider relevant.
But no, what you must do is just donate unrestricted. That is, have no agency, have no interaction with actual humans in need, be just a wallet that helps, maybe, something as defined by the entity that receives the money. Your only choice is who spends it and how much to give them.
At this point, how about we bring this to the logical conclusion that THERE SHOULD BE NO NONPROFITS. Clearly, if those with the already taxed money can't have an opinion, why should those nonprofits know what's what? You know who could spend the money: the State!
So, abolish non-profits, and make the State as the sole decider of how things get spent. Then you can donate unrestricted to the State or just push for some taxes being raised.
The article mentioned the Gates foundation which has terrible records in education initiatives: - The big failure in small schools initiative: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/th... - The big failure in teacher evaluation initiative: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-melinda-gates-foundatio... - The big failure in Common Core initiative: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/…
>Now it is funding anti-racist math: https://equitablemath.org/ In my limited experience, a lot of students seem to have specific weaknesses with the subjects that are traditionally taught in middle school. Manipulating fractions, applying the distributive property consistently, and simply understanding how to dereference a variable by inserting an equivalent number or expression -- I have multiple students messing t…
I dug in a bit and found that and... as progressive as I would like to think I am, I'm 100% confused as to how "focus on getting the 'right' answer" and "independent practice is valued over teamwork" is... 'white supremacy' showing up in math.
HN may not be the place to discuss this, but... am I missing something obvious?
This article touches on non-profits, but I feel it comes from a deeper well. We are wired in our culture around how we give donations. We only give money to people who we think would spend it most wisely. We walk past all the people in San Francisco on the street because we know that if we give them money it will only go to more drug use. We drive past the person on the left turn lane because we don't want to encoura…
Charitable donations are by definition a response to a failure of society in one way or another (regardless of whether your political views consider it a failure of the market, a failure of government, or some of both). Even in the ideal case, they exist because some problem is so bad that someone feels morally compelled to give their spare money to try to solve it. We donate to provide water to certain places in Africa (or Michigan) because there isn't reliable infrastructure there, but we don't need to donate to provide water to San Francisco. We donate to specific medical research goals because the funding system for medical research (again, whether it's government-backed or market-backed) isn't investing in some problem, and we think throwing a bit of money at it might cause us to happen on a cure, and at the same time we complain about how other medical costs for different problems are out of control. We donate to legal activism nonprofits because, bluntly, we believe our justice system will fail to be just without that intervention. We donate to Mozilla because there's no money to be made in selling web browsers thanks to the various vertically-integrated competitors but we think independent web browsers are still valuable. And the Gates Foundation donates to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos because the kids there quite frankly will never grow up to be Bill Gates without rebuilding some infrastructure first.
(Or, of course, charitable donations are PR - a way for the Andrew Carnegies of the world to deflect questions about whether they've quietly caused more failures of society than they're currently loudly fixing.)
The reason that your town needs a food bank is that there are people in your town who can't just afford food and need to rely on the whims of people who believe in private charity in order to not starve to death. Running the food bank is great, and I'm glad that there are people with those whims, but making it so that nobody in your town has that problem would be even better. It doesn't matter if your answer is "more taxes to support welfare" or "more teaching people to fish," either of them is more sustainable.
I'm not saying we shouldn't donate to worthy causes. I do, quite a bit, and I think those of us who make tech-industry salaries do in fact have a moral obligation to do that for as long as these failures of society exist. But let's admit that it's a second-class approach.
Donations cannot solve problems. They can at best soothe the effects of a problem. There isn't really any fundamental difference between the guy with a sign on 101 asking for a dollar every day, the kid in Vietnam asking for a dollar every day, and the New York Public Library emailing me to ask for many dollars every day. Or, ultimately, even the beloved local for-profit business with a Kickstarter to save them from shutdown asking for a (hopefully) one-time pile of cash to make rent. All of them feel like their best shot is to hope for donations. Let's figure out where they should be getting funds from instead.
This article touches on non-profits, but I feel it comes from a deeper well. We are wired in our culture around how we give donations. We only give money to people who we think would spend it most wisely. We walk past all the people in San Francisco on the street because we know that if we give them money it will only go to more drug use. We drive past the person on the left turn lane because we don't want to encoura…
> little kids in the middle of nowhere would run up to me and say hey DOLLAR, give me DOLLAR. They were trained for that. And why not? It seems like rational behavior on the part of the kids/families given their circumstances and their incentive systems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's measured as overhead and/or donation acquisition expenses. It's never 100%. You can assume some percent of that money goes to such expenses vs actual research (which I guess is where you'd want the money to go, or maybe to outreach or supporting individuals with cf).
That’s not quite what I’m getting at. A marketing dollar that brings in two dollars that would have otherwise been spent on coke is good, a marketing dollar that brings in two dollars that would have otherwise been spent on a different decent charity is not good.