Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity • Hacker News Board

Re: Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity

#61

Post by chmod775 » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

jtbayly wrote: post #59

chmod775 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>1/2 of all global food aid You're just cherry picking numbers. The US has a pretty high per capita amount of arable land among western countries. It's not surprising they'd provide a lot of food aid. But there's more to foreign aid than providing food. An actually useful metric is looking at per-capita spending on combined foreign aid, which solidly puts the US ($95.52) behind Canada ($122.04), Germany ($214.73), th…

> and $13.85 billion from EU institutions, which works out to $196.5 per capita. And what about US institutions, such as the one this article is about? Seems like you are doing your own cherry picking.

> And what about US institutions

They're already included in the US number. In fact they are the US number.

Due to the greater autonomy of EU member states their individual contributions and those done by EU institutions (meaning those institutions not belonging to a specific member state) were kept separate in the above link.

It's possible the word "institution" doesn't mean what you think it means.

Re: Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity

#62

Post by cycrutchfield » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

Cyph0n wrote: post #48

cycrutchfield wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you comparing somebody’s net worth to a GDP, which is a rate? That makes zero sense.

No, it does make sense: Brin could pay to run the 74th largest economy for a year.

That's not what GDP means, and also a person's net worth is not necessarily liquid.

Re: Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity

#63

Post by wutbrodo » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 2:36 PM UTC

3131s wrote: post #39

wutbrodo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really that surprising? Governments' advantage is crafting certain kinds of incentives that markets can't, but it's pretty much a guarantee that government will be more incompetent at whatever specific task they put their mind to, in large part because of the burden of democratic accountability. Conditioned on the resources and incentives being centralized (in Brin), why wouldn't you expect his organization t…

> democratic accountability That's so far from what exists now in the US, it's doubtful that it's an inherent factor in our government's dysfunction. There are many governments that aren't totally useless, so if you're looking at the US and thinking that we can't do any better, that shows a serious lack of imagination and perspective.

This is definitely not true. A huge factor in govt inefficiency is that nonpartisan competence is completely irrelevant to most voters, who process policies based on what partisan hackery they pattern-match to most easily. This means govt institutions get jerked around by bizarre constraints and lack of constraints that can be traced back to the fact that they're ultimately accountable to voters.

Re: Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity

#64

Post by wutbrodo » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 2:43 PM UTC

throwaway2048 wrote: post #47

3131s wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> democratic accountability That's so far from what exists now in the US, it's doubtful that it's an inherent factor in our government's dysfunction. There are many governments that aren't totally useless, so if you're looking at the US and thinking that we can't do any better, that shows a serious lack of imagination and perspective.

The USA sure seems to have a lot of mysterious problems that people throw up their hands as utterly unfixable, that no other country in the world does.

Because we're a massive, layered,diverse federal system. It's blindingly ignorant to suggest that the US has a literally uniquely dysfunctional government: other countries with categorically similar levels of diversity and scale (India, Brazil) face many of the same problems. And polities that have these characteristics in part face these problems in proportion: the EU is another source of signal here.

European govt's stability and relatively cohesive civic cultures come after centuries of world-spanning bloodbaths, genocides and ethnic cleansing to reach the status quo of relatively tiny, relatively ethnically homogeneous states. And there are plenty of dark sides to this cohesion as well.

Re: Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity

#65

Post by jtbayly » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 7:01 PM UTC

chmod775 wrote: post #61

jtbayly wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and $13.85 billion from EU institutions, which works out to $196.5 per capita. And what about US institutions, such as the one this article is about? Seems like you are doing your own cherry picking.

> And what about US institutions They're already included in the US number. In fact they are the US number. Due to the greater autonomy of EU member states their individual contributions and those done by EU institutions (meaning those institutions not belonging to a specific member state) were kept separate in the above link. It's possible the word "institution" doesn't mean what you think it means.

I don’t know the ins and outs of this. Just answer this question for me. Do any of the numbers you cite include donations by organizations such as the ones described in the article?

If not, then it’s not a very helpful metric since huge amounts of aid aren’t being measured.