As a guy who on numerous occasions has been in favor of raising taxes on the wealthy, why doesn’t he just write a huge check to the IRS and be done with it?
At least that would make him consistent.
My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
571–580 of 704 posts
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#572This 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.
Nobody allows money to sit. People deposit the money into banks. Due to fractional reserves, that's equivalent to loaning the money out so that others can efficiently allocate it instead. That's how money becomes more money.
Charities that aren't actually spending money to do good are just banks in disguise. Banks that don't pay out interest. Why would anyone donate even one cent to banks?
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always wondered about the Gates and Buffets commitment about giving away their wealth in death. It assumes that the people of the future are more worthy of it than the people of now. Whatever poverty will exist in the future also exists now. I suspect they've thought about this too, hence the acceleration. If anything, addressing the issues now has a chance of reducing the issues in the future. There's always so…
> There's always something to learn from everyone. Elon reiterated one thing frequently - "We have to get to Mars soon because I don't want to be dead before it happens" I understand the idea of learning from everyone, even those whose values I strongly disagree with. But after learning about everything Elon has done in the public sphere, would this statement be more likely just narcissism rather than a deep and insp…
That doesn’t really matter though? The end result is we’ll get to Mars faster than we’d otherwise do.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#574As a guy who on numerous occasions has been in favor of raising taxes on the wealthy, why doesn’t he just write a huge check to the IRS and be done with it? At least that would make him consistent.
“Donating” to the IRS is an imperfect solution that scales to all billionaires. If he’s only solving for his individual wealth, he can fine tune it to more specific causes.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
What diseases has Torvalds eradicated?
What diseases has Gates eradicated? Polio has been surging back and nOPV (which Gates stands to generate a lot of personal wealth from, by the way) has been a bit of a bust. Measles is going strong, too, and Malaria seems to have been a bit of a token effort for Gates.
Polio type 2 and 3 were eradicated and overall we went from 400k cases of paralytic polio per year down to less than 1% of that.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was just talking with some folks last weekend about this in a different context. Open-ended foundations can easily have their missions drift and also become essentially sinecures for an executive director. Ford Foundation is a great example of what can happen. Olin is a good example of a foundation that was set up to dissolve after some length of time.
You may know this already, but both Olin Foundations are good examples, actually. I believe the John M. Olin foundation dissolution plans were specifically in response to the Ford foundation's drift. The F. W. Olin foundation (John's Father) coincidentally dissolved in the same year, but that was due to largely accomplishing their original goal of endowing engineering buildings at colleges, and pivoting to founding a…
I don't really know the details but an organization I was/am involved with did get money from the "Olin Foundation" but didn't know specifics beyond that. Yeah, one of my fellow board members observed that Olin was pretty much the canonical example of a foundation that set itself up to be dissolved.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Oh it's you again, you're the guy echoing specific contemporary political figures, and dressing up American isolationism in rhetoric. In the other thread you were claiming that America subsidises Europe's healthcare by paying for its defence.
Funny how when I specifically share opinions that you specifically dislike, you sling mud about "echoing". Of course, everyone else's opinions are well-founded and of their own mind. Mine, on the other hand, are downloaded straight into my head from a daily Fox News broadcast. You can tell by how my opinions aren't your opinions, and therefore must be those of some Bad Guy or not Real Opinions.
Get a life dawg.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a pretty common question that's raised: how can we square this with loving our fellow man? The short answer is Christianity isn't a utilitarian belief system. While God loves everyone equally, he puts some of us closer together in love: family, friends, neighbors, countrymen. This incurs a greater obligation , plus we ought to love more those who are closer to us. Sadly, a lot of Christian faiths teach dogma…
I think you are going too far in telling other people that their religious beliefs are wrong, and that you know better (unless you are God yourself).
I really don't see how anything I wrote was that controversial; he's free to disagree and pursue his own beliefs, obviously. Everything someone says that's not wrapped up in formal logic or statistics is implicitly opinion; the fact that I find repeatedly saying so tedious and ridiculous doesn't mean I'm asserting I am somehow an arbiter of the One True Faith.
We all act as we think best. I can try to change how others think. That's about the start and end of it.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course I have. I am well aware that my values are diametrically opposed to it at a first-principles level; I find utilitarianism to be an incredibly hollow worldview that fails on many grounds, not least of which are the teleological (disordered love is no virtue.) I don't have to argue from the first principles of the EA crowd. Everyone believes in something and I believe they are wrong; your epistemic relativism…
fwiw I'm not an EA and I generally agree with you. It's fine to believe they're wrong, but it's an entirely different thing to tell other people they should think they're wrong.
Isn't that how most disagreements shake out at one level or another, once you strip away enough of the garnish? I am by nature either blunt or an asshole, depending on whom you ask, and may have come across more as the latter here, but the core message is about the same as most disagreements: "I believe my position is right because ABC, your position is wrong because DEF, you should believe mine instead."
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#580Bill Gates has done more harm to software and innovation than anyone in history. He's a bad dude, and the only reason he does all this is so that waiters don't spit in his food at fancy restaurants. The world suffers under the crippling weight of proprietary M$ Windoze everywhere, and we're far worse off because of it. Want to help, donate money to support Free Software projects with strong copyleft licenses.
While many of us Linux and open source nerds share the sentiment you described, I seriously doubt waiters see him and remember how they murdered the competition by bundling software with Windows OS in the 90s and 2000s.
Unless those waiters are unemployed local tech workers who aged out.