91–100 of 581 posts
Obligatory Links:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/politics-isnt-a.html
https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/14/charity-isnt-about-help...
https://www.amazon.com/The-Elephant-in-Brain-audiobook/dp/B0...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest? Why should we believe all of the Amazon smile purchases will continue and contribute to charity? If the program is getting scrapped, are we to believe Amazon is going to send 0.5% of everyone’s purchases to charity? This is an attempt to recover revenue, nothing more.
Just look at other companies. Here's Meta as an example https://about.meta.com/giving-together/ They gave $7B to all sorts of random stuff like cat shelters Pretty much every company has some stuff like this. Don't you see think it'd be weird if Amazon was the 1 company that doesnt? Edit: Better article here that distinguishes between Meta's matching and donation from meta users https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/fund…
My point is they are trying to sugarcoat this as focusing on specific charities, whereas I believe total donation dollars is going to drop. In addition, I think Amazon is hoping to save on costs having to manage AmazonSmile itself.
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Honest question: why would tech companies oppose those charities in particular?
One of the primary strategies activists have managed to successfully deploy against those groups is through targeting advertisers. Also most tech workers are college educated which is a demographic that (increasingly) supports gun control/does not like the NRA
It's less a college educated versus not and more an urban versus rural issue.
The fun part of Amazon Smile was that it let customers decide how they wanted to change the world…but now they’ve decided they - Amazon - know better, thank you very much. This is surprisingly honest for corporatespeak and I think reflects the god-complex which tends to follow people who spend a lot of time taking in billions of dollars. The reality is there were a lot of charities - maybe even most of them - who wer…
> …but now they’ve decided they - Amazon - know better, thank you very much. Or, a less cynical take is that they really can have more impact by focusing on fewer charities. Another commenter posted Amazon Smile's Form 990 from 2018 [1], the most recent year on Pro Publica's website that has a full listing of all the charities that received funds. The total PDF is 2121 pages long, and the list of charities starts on…
Internally, employees have begged for literally decades for an employee donation matching program (similar to Microsoft's donation matching) and have been stonewalled for years, with upper leadership not wanting to give a firm answer as to why.
Meanwhile, most of the philanthropic endeavors that Amazon does offer its employees internally are in some way otherwise related to things that Jeff has a fiduciary tie to or where doing so was politically motivated to turn a blind eye to the rapid expansion of the Downtown/SLU Seattle Campus.
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That's the average, sure, but since Amazon allows each customer to pick a charity, I imagine some charities got a lot more, and some a lot less. According to my account page, I've generated $100.71 for the charity I selected, and, overall, they've received $273.64 as a part of the program. So I guess the charity I selected wasn't all that popular. But I expect other, more mainstream charities, were.
We give to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who according to the app have received $315k up to Nov 2022. Sad to see this program go.
The fun part of Amazon Smile was that it let customers decide how they wanted to change the world…but now they’ve decided they - Amazon - know better, thank you very much. This is surprisingly honest for corporatespeak and I think reflects the god-complex which tends to follow people who spend a lot of time taking in billions of dollars. The reality is there were a lot of charities - maybe even most of them - who wer…
> …but now they’ve decided they - Amazon - know better, thank you very much. Or, a less cynical take is that they really can have more impact by focusing on fewer charities. Another commenter posted Amazon Smile's Form 990 from 2018 [1], the most recent year on Pro Publica's website that has a full listing of all the charities that received funds. The total PDF is 2121 pages long, and the list of charities starts on…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> …but now they’ve decided they - Amazon - know better, thank you very much. Or, a less cynical take is that they really can have more impact by focusing on fewer charities. Another commenter posted Amazon Smile's Form 990 from 2018 [1], the most recent year on Pro Publica's website that has a full listing of all the charities that received funds. The total PDF is 2121 pages long, and the list of charities starts on…
But smaller organizations will be missed entirely. My charity is a cat shelter in St. Louis. I’d rather they get my cut than a larger charity that means less to me and has bigger fundraising machinery.