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The least impactful way to spend $300M?

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Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?

#141

Post by badtake828374 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #64

I like the idea of Effective Altruism (EA), but it’s ironic to use EA to call out ineffective charitable spending in the wake of all the Effective Altruism ridiculousness of recent years. EA was a key part of SBF’s cover story to make his frauds appear to be coming from a philanthropic angle. An EA figurehead recently spent multiple millions, some of which was FTX donations, on a castle/chateau to “host events”, whic…

That’s like saying “a scammer used logic so we should never use logic”

Why would any of that stop you from trying to make effective donations?

I think people like to attack EA because it makes them uncomfortable to think about how little they themselves are doing

Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?

#142

Post by atdrummond »

johnfn wrote: post #72
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #64

I like the idea of Effective Altruism (EA), but it’s ironic to use EA to call out ineffective charitable spending in the wake of all the Effective Altruism ridiculousness of recent years. EA was a key part of SBF’s cover story to make his frauds appear to be coming from a philanthropic angle. An EA figurehead recently spent multiple millions, some of which was FTX donations, on a castle/chateau to “host events”, whic…

> Hardcore EA proponents will get staunchly defensive about all of this weird spending, but then they’ll single out $300mm donations like this for not going to malaria nets. It’s getting old. Maybe because one is 300mm and one is 30k? It's a difference of four orders of magnitude. It's like saying "EA proponents will get weirdly upset about burning down a house, but then the very next day they'll go and light a candl…

HPMoR and the weird adoration of it also put a lot of people off of EA. I know that a large portion of my friend group would be intellectually likely to support EA and its objectives but find the community fairly juvenile and non-serious in a lot of their social interactions and endeavours.

Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?

#144

Post by toast0 »

kristopolous wrote: post #15

Could this be some tax and investment dance? Perhaps the money will be used by Harvard to buy a security he holds or has options on washing his hands clean of SEC oversight. Then he executes on the predictable market move, makes the money back and writes down the donation for taxes. Meanwhile, Harvard is still holding whatever long term position they opened so they too are happy. Their cover story is some rather chea…

Even without all that, donating highly apprechiated assets is super useful for taxes because you not only get to deduct the value from your ordinary income, you also don't have to pay capital gains on the disposition of the asset.

I don't know where Mr. Griffin pays taxes, but if you have the right conditions, donating apprechiated assets is very inexpensive.

For example, if you're in california with oodles of income, your ordinary income will be at a marginal rate of 37 federal and 12.3 state, and your capital gains will be a total of 23.8 federal (includes niit) and again 12.3 state. So donating $1 of highly apprechiated assets avoids 26.1 cents of tax, and allows a deduction for 49.3 cents; it has the same effect on wealth as donating 14.6 cents. So it may have only cost $44M to donate $300M.

Of course, most people don't have $300M of ordinary income to deduct against, and aren't at the highest of the high brackets (and Mr. Griffin has residences in no income tax states, so he may not pay state income tax on capital gains anyway)

Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?

#146

Post by x-complexity »

thfuran wrote: post #129
kjghkjghkjgh wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was Moderna and they are not a grant funded university lab

They didn't do the foundational research. They licensed a patent that came out of research from University of Pennsylvania and applied it to COVID.

> They didn't do the foundational research. They licensed a patent that came out of research from University of Pennsylvania and applied it to COVID.

Incremental research is still research. Application research is still research.

The over-emphasis on foundational research from the media & the general public has led to a myopic view of "revolution"-ism, wherein incremental progress in science is considered to be worthless relative to incremental improvements.

The discovery of penicillin was a medical breakthrough, but that doesn't mean that the industrial scale-up of penicillin production was comparatively worthless. In fact, in this specific case, the opposite is true: The benefits of penicillin wouldn't have been received if everyone thought that research into scaling up its production was worthless.

Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?

#149

Post by bboygravity »

j0hnyl wrote: post #107

Who cares what some rich guy's vanity spend is. You might argue it's not impactful, but it certainly doesn't hurt anyone.

Also a criminal who will likely end up in jail at some point. His companies aren't exactly uncontroversial.

There's a reason people call this guy (Ken Griffin) Madoff 2.0

Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?

#150

Post by bagacrap »

charcircuit wrote: post #131
layman51 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably he means that by giving money to an “elite” school, it just makes it more likely that it will end up hurting the “non-elites”. I don’t necessarily agree with that point by the way because there are students who will have their cost of attendance potentially offset by this donation.

Income inequality doesn't hurt the nonelite.

It at least seems to become a major social problem. See: San Francisco
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