431–440 of 704 posts
It's interesting he decided to go this way rather than put it into a sustainable trust and just trickle money out indefinitely. I suspect he believes that these causes need shock therapy. To eradicate a disease, you are better off doing it all in one go. I also wonder if he looks at something like the Ford Foundation and realize in the long run that any charitable trust will just turn into an overstuffed political ad…
This is the way that foundations and endowments should operate. Too many well-intentioned organizations wind up milquetoast tax-exempt hedge funds aimed primarily at self-preservation because the received wisdom is that they should focus on building endowments and keep their withdrawal rates below 4% in order to achieve immortality. I'm a big believer in research-driven philanthropy and mission-driven organizations.…
If wealth can be immortal why deplete it? All money spent is voting for allocation of resource. Sometimes there is too much money fighting the same goods in which case it may not be a good allocation of resources. That money can sit to become more money.
Even if you trick-feed donations to charity over 100 years, the sums may be insufficient to reach a usable scale. - A big investment in research. - A concentrated push to vaccinate against a Disease so it goes away for good. - An infrastructure investment that lifts a community out of poverty.
These themselves produce "good over time," perhaps even faster than the money in the fund rises in value. It's a balance, but immortal trickle donations are likely quite far off to one direction of that scale.
His foundation really does seem to do a good job with 'effective altruism'. There's a reason they're marked as secondary beneficiaries on all my accounts. Also, as a recommendation, you guys should look into whether your employer matches charitable donations to 501Cs in any amount. I find giving a solid chunk of my discretionary budget to charity every year lends a sense of purpose to a job that wouldn't otherwise ha…
My issue with Gates is that he wants to fight climate change, yet he's personally an environmental disaster with his yachts and jets. I'm not saying he has to live like a monk to be credible, and maybe his foundation is doing a good job (never looked into it), but either he's an hypocrite, or I disagree with him on how to fight climate change.
Future generation will be richer and better-off than the present. Saving your charity for the future is, effectively, stealing from the poor and giving to the rich.
Also, giving now maximizes the compounding effect of your charity. Saving 100 lives today is way better than saving 10 lives every decade for the next 10 decades.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's such a weird take I don't even know where to begin. Are you suggesting that all people who worked at Microsoft to make Windows and IE and all their other products had their labour "stolen" from them? If yes, can you expand on that? We have a metric for the difference between what you charge for something and what you paid to provide it, it's called net income. Here's Microsoft's: https://www.macrotrends.net/st…
That's not embezzlement by any definition of the word. >>What do you do for a living? Do you perform some kind of a job that you get compensated for? If yes, do you also feel like you're being stolen from? Care to reply to this?
This is just mental gymnastics on the level of "it's not murder when the military does it!".
> Care to reply to this?
No, because it's not relevant to the discussion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And? I would welcome that. This isn't team sports where I'm rooting for my favorite billionaire. That said, this book actually exists.
I know the book exists as I'm very familiar with the kinds of claims that get repeated in threads like this. To me - these claims seem to fuel a conspiracy like mind set about why certain efforts or movements fail. "Because the billionares didn't want it to". "Or they bought the media and control the narrative". "Its all just a uniparty!". If I were to replace the word billionare with the name of the first Abrahamic…
maybe you could read the book to dispel your mistaken notion that it's just "billionaires bad", since it's stated (and successful) objective is to cover a specific group of highly-influential people that have worked on very specific projects in furtherance of a specific political/economic ideal that we're reaping the fruits of now in real time.
His foundation really does seem to do a good job with 'effective altruism'. There's a reason they're marked as secondary beneficiaries on all my accounts. Also, as a recommendation, you guys should look into whether your employer matches charitable donations to 501Cs in any amount. I find giving a solid chunk of my discretionary budget to charity every year lends a sense of purpose to a job that wouldn't otherwise ha…
The thing that's always made me skeptical of Gates and any other enormous foundations is that they operate at such a high level and with such enormous budgets that they basically exist in the same "amoral" world of nation states and corporations, but yet they face none of the scrutiny or criticism that those entities face. How do you judge the actions of someone when those actions are powerful enough to move markets,…
And even the poorest parts of the US are doing much better than a lot of poor countries in Africa and Asia.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The state goes out of their way to encourage it. Let's say you just won the startup lottery and you've got a significant amount of now tradable stock. Some of which was early exercised and the cost basis is effectively zero. Some of which was RSUs or non-qualified options and you owe ordinary income. And that you're way over into the top tax brackets. If your zero cost basis stock is Qualified Small Business Stock (Q…
> The state goes out of their way to encourage it. People with lots of money and power get their representatives to pass laws that reduce their taxes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Helping to cure polio doesn't outweigh imagined future harms by George engineering that didn't happen yet?
He's not curing polio, though. His polio program is spreading it because they use a live virus, and a low percentage of the population is getting it. People are now getting paralytic polio from others who got the vaccine. This is just one example of the Kreuger-Dunning that permeates all aspects of the Gates Foundation. His interventions have been mainly disasters, distorted public policy, and gobbled up biotech IP i…
Wow. Just wow. Where the heck do you get this garbage from?
Say what you want, but I respect this a lot. Sure as hell beats giving it all to your kids.
You don't have to love Gates or everything the foundation does to recognize that putting billions toward global health and poverty is way better than setting up a dynasty or letting it sit in investments
Depends on investments. Arguably tech advances are more effective for alleviating hunger than direct food donations long term.