Donate Unrestricted • Hacker News Board

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#231

Post by macintux » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 9:58 PM UTC

gnu8 wrote: post #83

throwaway5752 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Bill Gates made all of that money by destroying Netscape, Be, and countless other companies. His dog shit software like Windows 2000 and Internet Explorer set internet security back by about ten years. As far as I'm concerned he is a force for evil in the world and he should shove his resources up his ass. He doesn't deserve to be a part of the solution to the world's problems with energy, education or anything else.…

I think the world was a worse place when Bill Gates was heading Microsoft. I think it's a better place now that he's heading a massive charitable foundation.

Life is complicated. People are complicated.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#232

Post by closeparen » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 10:01 PM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #180

closeparen wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shareholder return and the wages of skilled labor/management are very different things! No one is getting rich off a nonprofit merely for putting capital into it, is the point. Nonprofits still buy things that are expensive, including the efforts of skilled and effective people.

How do you understand law firm partnerships in this wages vs capital model?

That’s a good question. I think it’s one of the few ways to convert labor to (meaningful) capital, comparable to being a founder or early employee.

The CEO of a nonprofit may be a well paid associate, but he is still just an associate. The kind of excess revenue that would flow to a partner’s profit sharing check has to be reinvested in the mission instead of disbursed to somebody in cash just because.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#233

Post by macintux » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 10:05 PM UTC

mengledowl wrote: post #45

"If a nonprofit doesn't understand better than its donors where money needs to be spent, then it's incompetent and you shouldn't be donating to it at all." Years ago, I had a startup that was building software for non-profits. We spent a lot of time around them, talking to them, etc. This problem of incompetence that PG briefly touches on is rampant to a degree that most would never realize. Most large NPs are more i…

> Example: the director/founder of one NP I know of that had a mission of helping pregnant women in crisis forced her 8 months pregnant employee to walk for miles through DC and do manual labor for her. She chewed her out in front of the whole team for saying she wasn't physically capable and made her cry, demanding that she do something that was technically her (the director's) responsibility.

That sounds Dickensian to the point of parody. I would do whatever I could to raise awareness of that insanity to the board of any non-profit, were I to witness something like that.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#234

Post by a1369209993 » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 10:05 PM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #229

a1369209993 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the level of racial bias in teachers is no different than in the larger population, then there is a problem with racism in US teachers (as a result of their being a problem with racism in the US). And if the level of murder in teachers is no different than in the larger population, then there is a problem with murder in US teachers (as a result of there being a problem with murder in the US). Even under the gros…

Replace "teachers" with "police" and you do get a reasonable argument. In a situation where someone has outsized authority and influence, even a baseline level of is worse than normal. If you're looking to affect outcomes most significantly, reducing "racism" amongst teachers is probably going to be more impactful per $ than reducing it amongst the general population.

> Replace "teachers" with "police" and you do get a reasonable argument.

Not really. I'm fine with a baseline level murder by police (at least to the extent that I'm fine with where that baseline is in the first place, which is admittedly not a given), provided there is also a baseline level of punishment for said murder. The problems with police tend be either that there is a higher level of murder by police than the general population, or that there is a lower degree of punishment for it.

Also, of course, I don't grant that there is a problem with racism in the general population in the first place, since white supremacists and social justice warriors combined are substatially in the minority. You might be able to make a credible case that racial bias is a (minor but worth addressing) problem, but noone's done so lately, and you'd need to start by making it clear that the thing you're talking about is fundamentally distict from a explicit belief that one race is inherently better or worse/more or less valuable than another, as white supremacists and social justice warriors believe.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#235

Post by macintux » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 10:09 PM UTC

donate12301923 wrote: post #85

So, let's unwrap this. 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…

> but don't waste your time volunteering at a shelter -- better work and donate your money instead.

Bad advice.

Volunteering is vital. I'm not sure why anyone would argue otherwise.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#236

Post by bradleyjg » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 10:10 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #232

bradleyjg wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you understand law firm partnerships in this wages vs capital model?

That’s a good question. I think it’s one of the few ways to convert labor to (meaningful) capital, comparable to being a founder or early employee. The CEO of a nonprofit may be a well paid associate, but he is still just an associate. The kind of excess revenue that would flow to a partner’s profit sharing check has to be reinvested in the mission instead of disbursed to somebody in cash just because.

Does it? I know hospital system CEO’s get performance pay. Maybe if the numbers were sufficiently egregious and a newspaper (if a local one still exists) decided to do an expose the attorney general would intervene but I think in general some of these non profits are better modeled as perpetual partnerships run for the benefit of partners than they are as mission driven organizations.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#237

Post by Kye » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 10:11 PM UTC

rsj_hn wrote: post #209

furyofantares wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I wanted to donate a large amount of money to a non-profit, I would structure it as a zero-interest loan, and would just keep deferring the repayment of the loan as long as the org stays true to its mission, compensates executives in reasonable proportion to regular employees, etc. Not sure if I'm missing something, but this sounds totally ridiculous to me. You give 1M to someone you think is going to spend it w…

The problem is you have a huge principle-agent problem with these non-profits. In a standard corporate structure, shareholders elect members of the board who can replace the management. But who elects the board of a non-profit? Why not those who donate to them? There has to be some reliable mechanism to impose accountability by those who give funds. Now lacking a mechanism for accountability, people give funds with a…

Having access to money doesn't qualify someone to help do whatever the organization does.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#238

Post by throwawaygh » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 10:13 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #78

rossdavidh wrote: post #59

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…

Universities are literally the sole specific institutional exception in the essay:

> There are a couple exceptions to this principle. One is when the nonprofit is an umbrella organization. It's reasonable to make a restricted donation to a university, for example, because a university is only nominally a single nonprofit.

The article doesn't say what to do when donating to a university or college. So, when donating to a university, do also donate in a relatively unrestricted way. But donate to:

1. a department (in small amounts),

2. a scholarship fund (in medium amounts),

3. an endowed professorship for a specific department/discipline (in large amounts), or

4. some important component of the physical plant (in "Gates/Allen" amounts).

Not to the university as a whole.

At least that's what I've witness as being effective.

Oh, and if you donate to scholarships, make sure the university/college plays ball. If they won't at least match 4% of the principle, just set up the scholarship an independent thing and let the kid choose where they go. Why donate a student scholarship to a specific school whose value is literally just the sustainable withdrawal rate? What's the point of that? Certainly not to help a student. Your donation will turn into a chair on the deck to be rearranged. But lots of donors get suckered into doing this.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#239

Post by soneca » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 10:17 PM UTC

PoignardAzur wrote: post #195

bmmayer1 wrote: post #4

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…

> Wouldn't you rather the $1 you donate generate leverage in new donations? No, because donations are a zero-sum game. They're not "generating" leverage, they're convincing people to give money to them as opposed to giving money to other causes and/or spending it for themselves. I've heard that people tended to give a fixed amount every year and charities just competed for that amount; I've never seen any evidence th…

> because donations are a zero-sum game

What? No, they are not. Because you never saw evidence, it is true?

I worked for 4 years convincing millionaires to start doing large donations that they simply weren’t doing before. I myself started donating a larger amount recently (because I am earning more in a new job).

You want to think it’s all ” a disgusting morass of callousness and amorality”, so you decide to think this way.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#240

Post by joshuamorton » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

a1369209993 wrote: post #234

joshuamorton wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace "teachers" with "police" and you do get a reasonable argument. In a situation where someone has outsized authority and influence, even a baseline level of is worse than normal. If you're looking to affect outcomes most significantly, reducing "racism" amongst teachers is probably going to be more impactful per $ than reducing it amongst the general population.

> Replace "teachers" with "police" and you do get a reasonable argument. Not really. I'm fine with a baseline level murder by police (at least to the extent that I'm fine with where that baseline is in the first place, which is admittedly not a given), provided there is also a baseline level of punishment for said murder. The problems with police tend be either that there is a higher level of murder by police than th…

We aren't talking about simply a baseline level of murders, but murders due to (or influenced by) racism. Even if you're okay with a baseline level of murders by police, whatever that level is, I hope you'd have problems with a distribution where the victims are solely black people (or to be more real-world, where murders of black people are punished less severely and less often, thus giving greater incentive [or equivalently, less disincentive] to kill people of a certain race).

In such a situation, the same "amount" of racism/discrimination/implicit bias has an outsized impact due to who wields it.

The same applies to teachers. If a random person believes that black people are predisposed to academic failure, that's bad sure, but won't negatively affect many black children. If a teacher who teaches black students holds that belief, that will influence how that teacher teaches those students.

> social justice warriors belive

This is a mischaracterization of what anyone I know who would consider themselves a "social justice warrior" believes, so I think at least some of your objection is due to a misrepresentation of the statements being made by these people.