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Mark Zuckerberg Gives $990 Million To Charity
mrspoonsi writes with this excerpt from Business Insider: "This morning, Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to give 18 million Facebook shares to charity by the end of the month. Facebook is currently trading at $55 per share, so Zuckerberg's gift is worth just under $1 billion. The money will go toward Zuckerberg's foundation, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and The Breakthrough Prize In Life Science, a [Nobel] Prize-like award. Zuckereberg is giving his shares away as part of a secondary stock offering from Facebook. Reuters says Zuckerberg will sell 41.4 million shares, reducing his voting power in the company from 58.8% to 56.1%. Other insiders selling include board member Marc Andreessen, who will sell 1.65 million shares. Facebook is selling 27 million."
to his own charity?
Check the "Silicon Valley Community Foundation" web page, and you'll see it's not a charity --- it's a big-money investment firm that manages accounts for other big-money charities. This is part of the move to make "charity" a highly profitable enterprise for big business; ways to shuffle around tax-sheltered billions invested in scummy megacorporations.
Usually the complain is that they give away MS software licenses. The conspiracy there being that they'll be hooked and once they move beyond soul crushing poverty they'll pay for the software. And that's disgusting when he should be giving out free IBM and RedHat contracts so that those vendors will be contractors when the children stop having to eat dirt to keep the hunger pangs away. The other big complaint I've seen is that they've invested in a refinery or something. As we all know, oil companies are evil and the last thing Africa needs is more local industry.
Basically, the problem is that he's Bill Gates, and that's a bad thing. Every dollar M$ made is tainted blood money. They made Dell pay a site license for Windows installation! Have you forgotten the burned villages of the Browser Wars? Remember that time they sent anthrax to that Linux User's Group? We are all victims. No amount of malaria vaccinations and AIDS research and all that other shit could ever atone for such depraved crimes.
Gates gained a soul when he got married. Finally getting laid mellows you out.
Gates is an awesome model for billionaire charity: Warren Buffet likes it so much he is going to donate 85% of his wealth to it. Most of the money goes to biomedical (TB, AIDS, sanitation, fresh water, vaccines, orphan diseases) issues that can't really improve the market for M$ other than through brand management ... and healthier customers.
Bill Gates, I think somewhere in his brain he wants to be altruistic for some philosophical reason, but his charity really just pumps M$ products and tries to make teachers be paid by performance.
His charity also does a ton of good stuff in areas like public health and sanitation. He's not a saint, he may be doing it primarily as a PR move, but that's definitely doing more good for the world than having it just sitting in some trust fund for his 3 kids or something. And yes, he could have also given it to a bunch of organizations rather than creating a foundation of his own, but my impression from those who have done work in the area where his foundation operates is that they have a fairly good reputation as far as non-profits go.
I don't like Bill Gates' business tactics. I do like what he's chosen to do with a lot of his time and money.
I am officially gone from
Citations in response to a non-cited and subjective post?
PR people are a lot cheaper than billion dollar foundations. And PR for what? A retired guy? Who cares? If this was a PR move why keep it going?
In the end he is giving. There isn't a timetable for this and he isn't required to do it at all.
That's actually far more insightful than I think you intended.
Having a spouse means you're forced to consider another perspective, which in turn makes it easier to understand and empathize with others you're not related to. Life isn't just about pursuing your own goals any more, but suddenly there's a concern for helping everyone. Perhaps not all the way to meeting their goals, but at least living long and well enough to have a chance.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
No, but the current model for "evaluating teacher performance" is giving kids a lot of standardized tests (designed by Pearson and other big companies and not evaluated by any third party). Teachers whose students do poorly on the tests are claimed to have done a bad job - regardless if said students are English Second Language students or have special needs that might interfere with test taking. Furthermore, since teachers' jobs are tied to the results of these tests, they wind up teaching to the test. Any time spent covering items that won't appear on the test is time spent risking your job.
Of course, the whole testing system is designed to punish public school teachers and push business-owned, for-profit, publicly financed charter schools (which all too often don't require a background in education to teach), but that's a different rant.
(I have two kids in elementary school dealing with the whole Common Core/EngageNY/high stakes testing nonsense so I know first-hand what this is doing to our kids and teachers.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Really? Gates demanding that people and governments sign long term contracts with US Agriculture and Medical corporations and not produce or grow locally as a condition of receiving his "Free" medicine is a benefit to society? Who's society are you referring to, the starving people in Ethiopia that can't grow local food any more because they received "Free vaccines"?
Good grief man, use your head just a little. If Mr. Gates was really just "helping everyone with his money" why has his wealth continued to grow while the people he is supposedly helping go further down in poverty? Some of the vaccines being pushed overseas are illegal in numerous Western Countries after being proven harmful to recipients.
Your view of an "awesome model" seems to be very low and abstract.
More on topic, look for Facebook to report some major loss in value causing the stocks to drop. Zuckerberg is not the only one donating lots of stock. These people are not idiots, and didn't get to be as wealthy as they are because they are altruistic.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
His wealth has continued to grow irrespective of any of that, I'm sure, due to a massive spread of investments.
However, I can't find any reference to these contracts stipulating restrictions on food growth or the alleged unsafe vaccines. Do you have a source for either of those? I'd like to follow that up.
In any place receiving these vaccines, wouldn't it be a headache to enforce that kind of contract anyway given the state of the local judicial system?
And you get to fly in your Foundation's aircraft, be chauffeured about in your Foundation's limo, you get to direct funds to friends' pet projects, to hire relatives with cushy salaries, to avoid taxes on almost a billion dollars that will remain largely under your influence, to expense fine dining and gifts, you get to insert meddlesome NGO's into foreign lands (furthering your ties with clandestine government agencies), you get to influence politicians and voters, you get to serve on "advisory committees" and write legislation, you get to implement sweeping changes like "Common Core Curriculum" that will effect almost everybody (without their input) .... I'm sure I didn't list all the perks!
Everything and its opposite is true. Get used to it.
Having a spouse means you're forced to consider another perspective, which in turn makes it easier to understand and empathize with others you're not related to.
Alternatively, having a spouse and family makes it much harder to understand and empathise with those outside of that family. "Old money" refers to this - people preferentially give money to those they are related to, to the detriment of others. Massive family fortunes have been accumulated and held on to this way, and have been influential despite those currently being in control being incompetent.
People who don't have spouses and family are _more_ forced to consider other perspectives, because they actually decide what will happen to their money when they die, rather than just passing it on.
Did you know that if you took all the economists in the world and laid them out, end-to-end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear