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Facebook's Zuckerberg To Give Away Half His Cash
Stoobalou writes "Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz are among the latest batch of 17 billionaires who have promised to give away at least half of their fortunes, after signing up to a philanthropic campaign led by Microsoft founder Bill Gates 3.0 and celebrity investor Warren Buffett. By signing up to The Giving Pledge, the mega-rich make a vague promise — sorry, 'moral commitment' — to give away more than half of their fortune at some point during their lifetime."
Like anything related to Microsoft, I guess you need to get to at least version 3 before you have something useful. *ducks*
I am officially gone from
if you think he's a douche because he has more money than you, then he's only half a douche (and you're class warfare crybaby)
If you think he's a douche for other reasons, he's still a douche.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
And you could always get a job
As if all poor people are poor because they don't have a job.
Agreed. This is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation approach to philanthropy. If you have a complaint about it, explain how you disagree with this approach.
Regarding nationalism, this explanation of their approach overtly expresses that one of their grant making priorities is "improving high school education in the United States." I cannot deny that this is America-centric, but I wholeheartedly support the idea that a wealthy person should contribute to the ongoing positive development of his own country.
I think the rate of human progress is in large part due to the inherent instability of human society.
I assume you already live in Somalia and revel in all the progress there.
Bill always claimed he was going to give away most of his fortune at age 55, I didn't believe it until I saw him do it.
You still haven't seen him do it. The Gates Foundation makes for-profit investments in evil, and in order to get immunizations you have to provide strong IP protection to big pharma. If you think Bill Gates is a good guy, you have been fooled. Enjoy your Kool-Aid!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is the original story... An old man walked up a shore littered with thousands of starfish, beached and dying after a storm. A young man was picking them up and flinging them back into the ocean. "Why do you bother?" the old man scoffed. "You're not saving enough to make a difference." The young man picked up another starfish and sent it spinning back to the water. "Made a difference to that one," he said.
Why you bring political bullshit in? Government don't take money by force, that money is due for all the services you get. Or did you mean like a commerce take your money by foce when you buy something? If you want to argue that you do not get your money's worth of public services, please do so in the appropriate thread/story. eg.: Not this one. Also, true altruism is anonymous donation or volunteering, not making yet a other Metoo foundation.
a man roared past him in a giant automatic beach combing and starfish catapulting machine which he had designed and built with his massive fortune as part of a fleet of vehicles to comb the worlds seashores spewing starfish back into the ocean
Ah yes, no matter how many times I hear it, the ancient fable of the giant starfish-catapulting machine is still a heartwarming classic.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
It's a really neat idea. 'We're philanthropists,' says the foundation's representative, 'we'd like to give you drugs - entirely free - that will save tens of thousands of lives in your country.' Pretty much the offer you can't refuse, for any politician - no one wants to be the one that turned down an offer to save that many lives. 'There's just one small thing you have to do for us,' says the foundation. 'Well, not really for us - we'd love to avoid this - but unfortunately the drug companies won't let us have the drugs unless you sign this IP treaty with the USA. It's to protect their investment, you understand.'
Well, that's fine - just one treaty, and it can't be that bad. Until you realise that it means that you are now not allowed to produce cheap generic versions of the drugs locally (or import them) - after the donation runs out, you have to keep buying the US versions that are several times the price. So, after a few years, it's probably going to cost more lives than not taking the money originally, but that's okay, you're a politician, you're not going to be accountable.
Oh, and as a bonus, it protects US IP-based companies (in which, coincidentally, the investors in the B&MGF have a lot of other investments) from foreign competition, by preventing another country from bootstrapping an industrial economy in the same way that the US, China, and so on, did.
Still, it would be hard to be a philanthropist if you ran out of poor people - they're just making sure that they can keep helping people for the foreseeable future.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's slightly less heartwarming when you consider that the starfish-catapulting machine is built out of dead starfish and consumes them as fuel.
Except that developing cures for diseases isn't like buying a jacket. It's not like there's some cure that they're "saving up for" $50 million at a time, bit by bit, rather than just buying it off the shelf for $5 billion.
And even if they did give the billions of dollars directly to a charity, what would you expect the charity to do? Hire enough people to blow through it in a year? Spend it all on a huge facility with all the absolute best equipment, then run out of money to fund it in a couple of years? I suspect that they might, instead, just hire enough people to effectively work on the problem, in a reasonably sized facility, then save the rest to pay their expenses and salaries for the next X years. But if the rest is saved, what are you going to do? Just stick it in a bank account? No, with that kind of money, it would really make sense to invest it and hire some smart people to take care of it and hopefully earn more money for you.
In the end, it ends up being the same thing. So really, what's your point? The way it works now, the research institutions don't have to also worry about being investment experts; they just get their money and do their thing. They foundation gets to do its thing and not have to worry about also running a research institution. Personally, I think that's a good solution and maybe helps to eliminate some conflicts of interest.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal