Should is a pretty insulting verb: who is to presume the wisdom to tell another what to do?
Bezos should put his billions in public libraries
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Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries
#92Libraries are an excellent place to put some money. They provide learning opportunities, but many also provide resume and job search training, community meeting places, free internet access, and I think is one of the few "neutral" places in American society. Neutral in that there are few, if any politics involved, and it's an equal opportunity benefit to a community that most people can get behind. Even if they don't…
I overwhelmingly agree with that. I grew up in one of the poorer places in America - Appalachia. Despite that, we had a nice library, donated initially by a wealthy individual and then sustained by various forms of private funding over the decades. It didn't always have the absolute latest books, the selection was decent though. It had Internet access very early on and was a valuable, inexpensive resource for young a…
Was it a Carnegie library?
Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries
#93The article does not mention ebooks, which is a surprising omission considering it involves Amazon. I don't know how it is in the US, but for instance German libraries offer to loan ebooks: http://www.onleihe.net/ Donating ereaders and rights to ebooks to libraries seems more effective than printed books. Big caveats here are Amazon's monopoly position, DRM and copyright and loans for ebooks vs. physical books.
Yes, ebooks are important and English law changed recently to make it easier, although libraries are still limited by licensing terms:
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2017/30/part/4/enacted
Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Traffic and housing in Seattle are problems only the government can solve, as they're the ones that created the laws and incentives that cause the problems. No use dumping money into a pit.
What if they could fund an easier, more efficient way to lobby?
I actually see the value of lobbying, and think that would be an excellent idea. But lobbying has such a nasty connotation, I doubt it would pad the ego of a philanthropist (call me a cynic, but I'd wager 90% of philanthropy is just a way for people to garner attention and praise).
I don't think lobbying would be nearly as bad if a) we had publicly funded elections, which takes away the incentive for politicians to be beholden to the interests of donors, and b) we had a mechanism (possibly through a branch of judicial review?) to repeal or amend laws that don't achieve their stated goals.
Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries
#95Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries
#96I would much rather billionaire types take on large issues that governments don't want to touch, like space flight or specific diseases in foreign countries, than something already in service like libraries. Maybe I just have a bias due to having a library just up the street from where I live currently, but I have never not had access to an adequate library in my life time, and only see room for marginal diminishing…
> large issues that governments don't want to touch Health care for all? Affordable housing? Food security?
How about reducing their size, removing redundant jobs, reducing regulation that does harm, cutting costs...
Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries
#97Should is a pretty insulting verb: who is to presume the wisdom to tell another what to do?
There's a tendency in some to add a bunch of hedge words to statements like this. "Humbly, I think -- and this is just my opinion -- that Jeff Bezos may want to -- I mean, it's up to him, but if he wants to! -- consider putting his money into libraries."
This is a misguided pursuit of modesty. It's less clear and reads as false, anyway.
Just say what you mean. We all know it's just your opinion without all the weasel words. Nobody is going to mistake it for anything else.
Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries
#98I would much rather billionaire types take on large issues that governments don't want to touch, like space flight or specific diseases in foreign countries, than something already in service like libraries. Maybe I just have a bias due to having a library just up the street from where I live currently, but I have never not had access to an adequate library in my life time, and only see room for marginal diminishing…
I wish some tech billionaire or rich tech company invested in rethinking healthcare from the ground up (or like Elon Musk likes to say, from first principles) with focus on UX, state-of-the-art technologies and integration. Anytime I use our healthcare (although, this is the Czech Rep, could be different in USA), I feel like it should be easy to design a better service. Basically, something what Tesla did, apply Sili…
I think rethinking healthcare would start with better nutrition education and a focus on preventing disease. Med school has almost no nutrition education and doctors are largely ignorant of food's role on disease. Most cases of heart disease and diabetes are largely preventable.
Preventing those 2 diseases alone would save the country billions, if not trillions, a year in medical costs.
Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries
#99I find this titles very off putting. It seems to imply that someone, who wasn't competent enough to make billions of their own, is somehow more apt to know how to better spend them than the one that actually did.
I find your comment very off-putting. First of all, Bezos asked for advice on philanthropy. Second, most wealth generated by the property owning class (including Bezos) is through extracting the surplus value of their employees. Those billions were made through force (by the state monopoly of violence through police defending the so-called "right to property") as his employees never had a fair shot in getting a reasonable share of profits because he had the luck or inheritance to obtain the wealth producing tools (business infrastructure) first while his employees, many of whom are probably more intelligent and hard-working than he, did not. So while his employees work 9-5 making minimum wage to $50 an hour, he gets to enjoy billions and not have to work.
Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries
#100Bezos still needs to focus on actually delivering the value that the world has priced into the expectations of his company. He can't just retire and collect income off of an existing machine like Gates.
More than most companies, Amazon seems like it's actually worth what people say it is. It's the world's largest e-retailer, with a huge percentage of happy customers (due to their great customer service), with a booming membership program, making strides into local deliveries (Whole Foods), with the largest cloud computing infrastructure in the World.
Much better in my opinion than Apple, that is almost solely valued off of a popular phone that the majority of users could replace with a phone 20% of the cost and be just as happy.