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Google.org, a For-Profit Charity
Google has set up a subsidiary, Google.org, a for-profit philanthropy with initial capital of a billion dollars. Not being organized on a tax-free basis carries both advantages and drawbacks. From the article: "Unlike most charities, this one will be for-profit, allowing it to fund start-up companies, form partnerships with venture capitalists and even lobby Congress. It will also pay taxes." One of Google.org's first projects is the development of a plug-in hybrid vehicle that achieves a mileage rating equivalent to 100 MPG.
"And the largest disadvantage to a "for-profit charity?" Your donations are NOT tax deductible.
They've slit their own throats on this one."
Yeah, the people behind Google, the most successful web venture in the world, didn't give any thought at all as to the consequences of making it a for profit charity.
Have you perhaps thought that they are targetting other methods of funding that don't rely as much on the tax deduction angle? How about that they are planning on making products that can make money and therefore self fund the charity?
I highly applaud them, and I think the lack of needing to be non profit could be very liberating and free them up to do many things they otherwise may have not been able to.
Very excited to watch this one!
Odd that Google would take a for-profit route
I don't find it odd at all. I'm involved with several FLOSS projects and one of them recently researched starting its own foundation (non-profit) or corporation (for profit). Everyone I talked to (including people associated with the Mozilla Foundation and the Python and Apache Software Foundations) recommended starting a for profit corporation. The restrictions placed on federally tax exempt (501(c)(3)) organizations was too great in their opinion. With a for profit corporation, you have much fewer restrictions.
I don't always agree with Google tactics but at least they are innovative. Certainly changing the internet, computers and now looks like cars and beyond.
On the other hand, one could easily make the criticism that Google has lost focus and are all over the map, doing a lot of things and most them not anywhere near as well as they do web-searching. Perhaps this is a downside of having too much cash - they just don't have enough good ideas and talented people to make efficient use of all that money.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The truth is that most people need is the power to help themselves, not aid. For example, if a person in LA went down to the store, bought and cooked up some hot-dogs, and then sold them on the street corner - he would likely be in jail, taxed, and fined over 40K before the night was out - and then be forced to get permits and inspections at great expense to himself. I'm sorry, no argument about government protecting people can justify that kind of behavior.
In Africa, a large amount of US aid was used to build a milk plant. But it was not near any cows or roads, and ended up shutting down. Those kinds of mistakes are much more rare in the private sector, because there is accountabillity and control. Many aid loans were blown by corrupt leaders, who then left it to the citizens to pay back.
In many countries, investors are more than happy to build factories, roads, mines, infrastructure, and the jobs that go with them. But not if government officials demand bribes, permits, taxes, and high fees at every step of the process, and not if they demand high fees on everything imported and exported, and not if the judiciary is so corrupt or slow that they have no recource if land or other items are taken from them. If you had 100 million dollars, would you put it in Venesuela or North Korea right now? People who have paid a bitter price. That's a lot of money, and then they wonder why they have employment problems.
In China, millions of people died from hunger until the farmers were able to have property rights, then the problem disapeared and the economy started to boom. Really, who would slave away on a farm where they own none of the take and none of the land. Once again, the people in China didn't need charity nor help from the government, what they needed was property rights. Charity would have prolonged the problem and made it worse. What they needed was the power to help themselves, once they got it then the poverty problems took care of themselves naturally.
Google.org does not blowback money to google.com, the search engine company.
The government should do a few main things:
-make sure other people don't take my stuff, my life, or impose upon my life in a negative way.
-protect my life and the sovereignty of my country.
-make sure its populace is well-educated and healthy
-deal with the people who cross the above two in a just manner.
In doing the above in a farsighted manner, it will maintain a good quality of life through protecting our nature reserves (if we don't have nature reserves, then arguably a future generation may indeed have a lower quality of life, lack of knowledge, and a higher death rate. Education and health may well be an extrapolation of 'protect my life.'
Of course, to do all of that a huge network of laws is written, several branches of government are created, and everything gets bogged down in beaurocracy - especially if morals are the key focus of politicians.
Google's involvement with the chinese government is actually a far cry better than any other search engine - when pages are censored, it tells the user that there were results that were censored. In a devious way, it does more to increase the knowledge of government censorship in China better than showing everything.
Google is doing things with google.org that a government shouldn't have to do. And you've seen what kind of bumbling the beaurocracy does when this kind of thing is involved.
Because google's company is knowledge based, it is not beholden to the same types of shareholders as, say, an oil company. This is well shown by their work on a hybrid-electric car. And because it has shareholders, instead of throwing money at problems like poor food and water quality in developing countries, it will work to fix the causitive issues. And with the brilliant minds they have there, I have no doubt this will be extremely successful.
I have a hard time seeing how a corporation doing things with the intent of making a positive change is likely to cause more harm than a corporation doing things only for the purpose of enriching its shareholders.
Can you imagine what one billion dollars would achieve if spent for FOSS?
25 clones of Tetris
24 C standard libraries
23 stupid desktop widgets
22 pointless window managers
21 HTTP servers
20 Wiki web applications
19 useless shells
18 password crackers
17... Eh, you get the point: Take Freshmeat's frontpage and extrapolate, and that's at best! What you'd probably get is a bunch of people demanding 55 grand a year to work on utterly useless crap.
it was not near any cows or roads, and ended up shutting down. Those kinds of mistakes are much more rare in the private sector, because there is accountabillity and control.
Ever heard of the Bhopal disaster? It was one of the most deadly industrial accidents ever, and it was due to the negligence of Union Carbide employees (a US corporation). How about the Exxon Valdez? Yet another vast catastrophe caused by irresponsible employees of a US corporation. Or hey, a little closer to geek-home - how about when MasterCard allowed 40 million credit card numbers to be stolen (the largest such leak ever reported) due to poor software design?
The funny thing about these incidents of corporate irresponsibility is that not only did these companies have totally stupid policies that were very likely to result in danger, once disaster struck they were totally unaccountable for the damage they caused.
It would be moronic to claim that the government knows best, or that massive bureaucracy is an effective way to make decisions, but this song and dance about how profit-driven instutitions magically become the most efficient and responsible is absurd.
In many countries, investors are more than happy to build factories, roads, mines, infrastructure, and the jobs that go with them.
Yes, those factories are often sweatshops. Those roads often damage delicate environment which is needed for eco-tourism, scientific research, or agriculture. Those mines can be unregulated death-traps for miners in addition to causing toxic runoff pollution of local water supplies. None of these problems concern the investor, just the local population. In short, the "infrastructure" eagerly pushed by foriegn investors really isn't infrastructure for the improvement of the country or it's people so much as infrastructure for the improvement of the investor's bottom line. Sure, some officials are just corrupt fucks, but has it ever occured to you that there might be good reasons to try to restrict, regulate, and/or tax foreign companies trying to exploit your sovereign nation?
I agree with the sentiment that people need to be given the freedom to take care of themselves, but I don't think that empowering and depending on exploitive investors and multinational conglomerates is the way to give people that freedom.
"...this development, along with the Bill and Melinda foundation, means we now have extremely large, extremely rich companies doing what our governments should be doing."
Actually, you have it completely backwards. This is exactly what private groups should do and the government should not.
But I believe we have a first principal mismatch. You want the government to do everything and do not trust the individual. I on the other hand don't want to the government doing anything and I trust the individual.
It reminds me of a conversation with a friend. He was going on and on about how he wished the government would tax him more so that the government could do good and give his money to those in need. Sadly, it never crossed his mind to give to private cherity. He, like you, worships government.
See, by having the freedom to choose which charities to give money to you can give to causes that you support. You are not forced to give to causes that the government forces you to give to under threat of imprisonment. Maybe you don't like the military, abortion, or perhaps welfare. The government doesn't give you a choice.
Why don't people know what true liberty is?
"Put it this way - if Google's board turned rabid tomorrow, how much damage could it do?"
Ask that about government. Government has a military and secret police forces.
Remember, Google requires their employees to spend one day a week on a pet project. A lot of things like Google Earth and Picasa come from these. Some of these have tremendous data value, like Orkut and Google Desktop. Some, like Picasa, may someday have tremendous data value but don't currently. But they're only hitting 1/5th of the engineer's time.
Valuable Google Assets: Alerts, Blogger, Desktop, Directory (DMOZ), Images, Maps, News, Toolbar, Web Search, Gmail, Mobile, SMS
Could be Valuable: Book Search, Catalogs, Checkout, Finance, Froogle, Local, Scholar, Video, Calendar, Groups, Talk, Translate
Silly, fun, useless to them: Earth, Picasa, SketchUp,
In the labs: Google Trends, Music Trends, Visually Impaired Search, Notebook, Mars, Page Creator, Public Transportation Maps, RSS Reader, Web Accelerator, Taxi Finder, Suggest, Froogle Mobile, Sets.
With the possible exception of Mars, that seems pretty interconnected. Some of the silliest ideas, like Google Maps, gMail, the Google Toolbar, etc have become standard usage now. Even the silly ones, like Google Earth, were part of their push to create 3D maps of all major US cities, which would have been a valuable resource if they could have pulled it off.
They're like the Bell Labs of the 'net. Lot of pure research, some of which is or might be stupidly profitable. But we'll all reap rewards in the end.
The ______ Agenda
Well, I'm from Norway - I think we have the highest gasoline price in the world. I just believe it is STILL underpriced, and that the correct thing to do would be to make the price real - in other words, include the cost of cleaning up after negative sides of the gas. Markets are very very good at optimizing, but they have to have the correct input price. The price of a resource isn't the cost of getting it out of the ground - it's the cost of getting it out of the ground plus the cost of cleaning up afterwards.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
And even with our absurdly high tax rates on fuel, some political parties are still talking about adding mega-taxes on "highly polluting vehicles" (as in, extra thousands of pounds per year for having one).
The thing is, I used to drive a little 1.2-litre Vauxhall Corsa (1995 model) to work. Now I drive a 2-litre turbo Subaru Impreza WRX (2003 model). The former was significantly more fuel efficient (though as an interesting anecdote, far less fuel efficient than the newer model) and would be in one of the lowest bands for these new "environmental taxes". The latter is deemed a monster, and would be in the highest or second-highest band. And yet in reality, the WRX's emissions aren't much higher than a typical family saloon.
What's really telling is that when I drove the Corsa, I commuted around a 70 mile round-trip per day to get to work. Now I work in the city where I live, and do maybe 1/10 of that. I generate vastly less pollution now than I used to, and most of what I do generate is sitting in artificially generated traffic queues designed by our local bus-mad council to make car driving unappealing and promote bus use. And yet, these proposed "environmental taxes" would penalise me far more today.
If you insist on using the tax system to make some behaviours unpopular (I question the ethicality of this approach in any context, but that's a different matter) and you want to make pollution from cars unpopular, then taxing fuel rather than the type of vehicle makes far more sense.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.