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The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars

independent.co.uk

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Re: The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars

#261

Post by fortran77 »

I remember in the early days of Craigslist, I interviewed for a job with someone who advertised there. After the third interview, they offered me a job--with no money. They wanted to pay in shares of this tiny startup. I had explicitly asked them--I took good notes--in interview #1 if they had an actual opening for an actual job.

I filed a lawsuit in Santa Clara county for "Fraudulent Misrepresentation" and they settled with me for $5,000. (California law is very good on this. They broke two laws with no cash wages and a non-compliant job posting.) But I also told Craig Newmark, because they had their job listing on Craigslist. He pulled their job listings, and sent me an email assuring me that nobody associated with the company would ever be able to advertise on Craigslist again. I was very impressed.

Re: The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars

#262

Post by john_strinlai »

parl_match wrote: post #239
permalac wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of his earnings does represent?

It's still not modest. There's no way in which a $6 million dollar house is "modest". Don't try to launder it through lying with percentages. It's not modest.

modest is a relative term. its modest compared to most people of his wealth level.

Re: The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars

#263

Post by simoncion »

driverdan wrote: post #245
KennyBlanken wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misspelled "ads for prostitution." Which they eventually stopped doing, only after considerable public pressure and state AGs threatening criminal prosecution. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/craigslist-drops-adult-ser... Everyone need stop making out Craig and James out to be super moralistic dudes. They both profited, enormously, off sexual exploitation and human trafficking around the world by (knowingly) se…

> They both profited, enormously, off sexual exploitation and human trafficking around the world by (knowingly) serving as a directory for pimps. From what I read back when this happened you have it backwards. The classifieds on CL and other sites for sex were were largely individuals choosing to do it. They were not being trafficked or pimped. By closing those listings down it would end up pushing sex workers to fin…

> The classifieds on CL and other sites for sex were were largely individuals choosing to do it. They were not being trafficked or pimped.

Yep. Just like with marijuana and other such "vices", the thing that takes most of the violence and exploitation out of the industries that produce, market, and sell a "vice" [0] is to make it legal to produce, advertise, and sell.

There's also a side angle here where some folks absolutely disbelieve that an attractive human who really enjoys fucking would rather make their own hours getting paid to fuck than get abused by a shitty boss at an entry-level job.

Are there people coerced into sex work? _Absolutely_. But, there are people coerced into nearly every sort of job out there, so that's not saying much.

[0] Well, actually this applies to any industry. No matter what it is, if you have to do illegal shit to create, distribute, and sell it, and if there's notable amount of money to be made in selling it, then there's inevitably gonna be violent folks involved in the process.

Re: The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars

#264

Post by simoncion »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #203
apparent wrote: post #20

I'd be curious to know how the economics of craigslist works, such that he's made so many hundreds of millions of dollars. It only charges a modest fee for a small fraction of transactions, but presumably the denominator is big enough that this adds up (and of course he would have subsequently invested the proceeds). I had assumed that the fee portion of the site was substantial enough to cover all costs, and generat…

He and James made hundreds of millions of dollars off ads for prostitution. Knowingly. Throwing money at military veterans doesn't erase the stain of having a hand in the explosion of human trafficking and sexual exploitation Craigslist (and Backpages) enabled. The FBI arrested Gambino family members for child prostitution, and one of their top ways of soliciting Johns was via paid ads in Craigslist. One state AG cou…

I know that this can be a controversial opinion, but I and other folks who enjoy fucking should be permitted to sell use of our asses -and/or other body parts, as negotiated- to folks who are looking for people to fuck. It turns out that -even if it's not legal- fuck-enjoyers still do exactly that. Wild, right?

Some folks might not be aware, but human trafficking and slavery are both illegal. Making prostitution and other sex work legal and subject to the same worker protection laws as any other job is the most effective single thing that can be done to remove the foundation from the sex-industry wing of that rotten house. We can't control the priorities of the police, but we can give folks in the industry somewhere to go and safely complain if their workplace is unsafe.

Re: The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars

#265

Post by rayiner »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #258
rayiner wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t build new companies after a successful exit to “make even more money.” You’re projecting.

> People don’t build new companies after a successful exit to “make even more money.” They absolutely do. I interact with people who do just that. > You're projecting. LOL. The last thing I want to do is start a company or try to make $100's of millions.

Leave money aside—why wouldn’t you want to start a company and build something yourself?

Re: The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars

#266

Post by ahazred8ta »

bredren wrote: post #208
rsync wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anon.penet.fi is clear prior art - from 1993[1]. Anyone who thought they had invented something new here were kidding themselves. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer

Wow, I wasn’t aware of this and it definitely predates our work. I’d have presumed this would have come up in the evidence for that case but afaik it has not. IANAL, but perhaps Craigslist’s response to our product, which included blocking its usage on the site after they implanted their version, served as a stronger example of the commercialization of the product still well ahead of the Rally Patent.

[wasn’t aware of this] That's odd. Anyone familiar with the history of anonymous email services and remailers would know about the penet, cotse, and cypherpunk communities in the 1990s. It was a fertile field. Odd that you haven't bumped into anyone from that space.

https://codamail.com/aboutus.html -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixminion -- https://www.spamgourmet.com/index.pl?printpage=faq.html

Re: The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars

#267

Post by selcuka »

throwway120385 wrote: post #79
swatcoder wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy for some to give away money if they have it, but it's hard to accumulate that much money if you're one of those people. Newmark maybe representing the occasional exception, most people who accumulate great wealth through their effort and ideas are afflicted with an addiction problem and have a hard time saying "this is enough for me". They become attached to how much more wealth they might be able to gather…

> Even if they somehow imagine themselves as philanthropists or minimalists, they tend to put off giving away too much too soon under the rationale that they'll be able to eventually share more if they hold out and use it more practically. What you're describing sounds exactly like Effective Altruism. The issue is that the expected value of an act that happens at an unspecified time in the future is zero.

> the expected value of an act that happens at an unspecified time in the future is zero

It doesn't have to be an unspecified time. Imagine you make $100K and want to donate $50K of that every year. One might say "well, I will bank that money instead, buy a property for $250K, then donate the rental income forever". You now have a specific time in the future (almost, depending on how property prices fluctuate in the next 5 years).

Re: The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars

#268

Post by WalterBright »

GaryBluto wrote: post #233
WalterBright wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always been an advocate of the free market. And I'll tell you why. When I was 9, my dad arranged a tour of East Berlin for his family. As part of the deal with the USSR when the 4 zones were partitioned, this was allowed for an Air Force officer. This was at the height of the Cold War. The Wall is gone now, but it was something to behold in those days. There's the Wall, the kill zone, the tank traps, the dogs, t…

Do you have a blog or website with similar anecdotes of life? I found this very interesting.

I never thought about it!

After my dad passed, I realized I had taken for granted all the anecdotes he told me. These days, when I think about one of them I write it down in a log.

I do have my grandfather's letters when he went around the world in 1895 on a steamboat.

https://walterbright.com/trip/chas.html

Re: The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars

#269

Post by WalterBright »

micro2588 wrote: post #243
WalterBright wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> general satisfaction of the people Different groups of people have different ideas of what "general satisfaction" is. Hence, such cross-group studies are pretty suspect.

One objective measure of satisfaction is if you are alive and healthy, hard to be satisfied otherwise.

"healthy" is not objective, either.

Re: The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars

#270

Post by WalterBright »

overfeed wrote: post #257
latency-guy2 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As you helpfully noted in your second half of your comment, high wealth, deliberately low income[0] means they are not in the top tax bracket[1] on the basis of their carefully calculated, tax-optimized income. There is no optimization for anything actually, its just income. There's lots of different forms of taxes that the US government takes part in as you know. Quitting your day job removes the income part until…

> You can argue for a wealth tax My footnotes are the entirety of my argument, and it's not even as radical as a wealth tax. My argument has 2 easy steps: 1. Remove the arbitrage between actual liquidity events and the limited set of what the IRS currently considers taxable events. Borrowing against securities not being taxable is an example of what's broken. Arbitrage using trusts or LLCs needs to be deleted, based…

> Borrowing against securities not being taxable is an example of what's broken.

Is is also broken that you don't pay taxes on the mortgage you borrowed to buy a house?

Or the money you borrowed to buy a car?

What about the money you borrowed when using your credit card?

Or the money you borrowed to fund your college years?

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