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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

#291

Post by WalterBright »

micro2588 wrote: post #279
WalterBright wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"healthy" is not objective, either.

Of course it is, to be healthy you need to be born Mississippi is double the OCED average for infant mortality. Then you can track obesity, diabetes, heart diseases, etc. throughout life. The only area where all this supposed American exceptional wealth confers an advantage in healthcare is post op outcomes where higher penetration of CT / MRI scans can make a measurable difference. Even then the difference is not la…

> OCED average for infant mortality

This is no good because different companies use different criteria for infant mortality. For example, the US leads the world in trying to save premies, and does well at it. But the failures are counted as infant mortality. Other countries categorize premie death as a miscarriage.

Some societies do not count a baby as an infant until it has survived its first year.

> life expectancy difference

Criminality, drugs, tobacco, alcohol and obesity strongly affect life expectancy. It's an error to blame it all on the health care system.

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

#293

Post by overfeed »

WalterBright wrote: post #270
overfeed wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Yes, all those things would be broken if I don't need any leverage, and my loans were backed by liquid assets I already possess that I'm avoiding selling in an effort to avoid taxable events even though I really want to purchase a fancy Palo Alto compound that occupies an entire block.

For the vast majority of folk who take out the loans you listed, the loans are leveraged and are either unsecured, or secured by the car or property the loan was made out for, and therefore no underlying value to tax prior to the loan being issued. You knew this already, and I have doubts you're making this false equivalency argument in good faith.

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

#294

Post by conformist »

rchaud wrote: post #209
conformist wrote: post #173

It is great that he’s doing this and it’s making the world a better place. It’s a bit disappointing that in articles like this there’s relatively little discussion around what organisations receive the money and what impact it has. We should ultimately judge people by that, not abstractly by “charity == good”? If a billionaire donates millions to the Against Malaria Foundation I would judge that differently than a do…

It says right there in the article that he donates to military veterans' charities and animal rescue charities. I don't see him as a big arts benefactor considering that the main motive the ultra-rich have for making lavish donations to fancy museums is to get invited to the right parties, Met Gala and the like. He seems like a private person doesn't flaunt his wealth and has mostly avoided inserting himself into pub…

Yes it does sound like his approach is quite smart and altruistic, but it’s a shame that that aspect just isn’t covered in more detail.

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

#295

Post by ornornor »

memcg wrote: post #237
jrmg wrote: post #38

Is Craigslist still the go-to classifieds site in some places? Around here it’s (very sadly IMO) been almost completely replaced by Facebook Marketplace, to the extent that people make Facebook accounts just to use Marketplace.

I sell on CL and FB Marketplace. Some items that I listed for months on CL sold in days on FB, but I prefer CL. FB search results are inferior often because FB posters created misleading ads and don't delete ads for events that have already occurred. Never tried Nextdoor because they required I give them my cell phone number. My landline number was not enough.

> FB search results are inferior

That’s quite the understatement. FB marketplace search results are pretty close to useless. Search for something, it will show you maybe a couple of that something and then ads that look like listings, and things that are supposedly related (they aren’t), hours away from your search area. No way to filter or anything. I go out of my way to not use FB marketplace, that’s how bad it is to me.

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

#296

Post by master-lincoln »

tengbretson wrote: post #275
scosman wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah totally agree! My pet peeve feature list is also better for society than donating $500M to charity!

I suspect this is sarcasm but seriously. Craigslist has floundered and now Meta/Facebook Marketplace is dominating the private buying/selling space. Is that not at least $500M of harm?

The harm was done by the people voluntarily moving to the ad platform.

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

#298

Post by gregw2 »

simoncion wrote: post #263
driverdan wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Legalization reduces the risk of violence to sellers and buyers and external parties. This in turn reduces the risk premium and quick score potential of the "business".

The problem with the legalization strategy to reduce violence is that it has its limits.

It turns a high-risk game into a high-volume high-scale game.

It validates the creation of a corporate ecosystem who then are incented to create demand for the "vice" while simultaneously concealing what they know (or come to learn) about the vice's side effects.

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

#299

Post by Zigurd »

burpingtree wrote: post #227
Zigurd wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, conflating local news with local newspapers is a mistake. They were able to support news gathering by monopolizing print advertising. They were also overly dependent on the municipal government and police for access, and were therefore often timid on certain subjects.

I’m confused. Are you saying that local news is in a better place with the demise of local newspapers. What better has taken their place?

I very deliberately did not say that local news is now better, just back in the day when it was supported by an ad monopoly, it still had big problems. There was a lot of access journalism dependent on staying on the good side of the police, and on not annoying the car dealers running full page ads, for example.

Citizen journalism has issues, too. Many of them are resource issues, so supporting things like a cap on fees and short deadlines on FOIA requests, would help a lot.

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

#300

Post by Redoubts »

kelnos wrote: post #278
yubblegum wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to prove to us that modesty is an absolute quality. Reasonable people would agree that that is a bit extreme ("immodest") and that modesty is relative. (Try cheap instead of modest to see how this works.) > There's no way in which a $6 million dollar house is "modest". Relative to his wealth bracket he is being modest but not cheap.

> Relative to his wealth bracket he is being modest but not cheap. That's moving the goalposts. No one said anything about "relative to his wealth bracket". And I don't think I have ever heard anyone using a term like "modest house" in proportion to someone's wealth. House-modesty is something people generally use to mean "when compared with other houses in the region".

> No one said anything about "relative to his wealth bracket".

Original post was "modest for a guy like that"

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