The wealthy might have learned a bit from history --- each time around in the cycle, they're able to hold a bigger advantage; centuries of work to perfect propaganda techniques and control the masses, allowing ever greater levels of accumulated power and wealth. Meanwhile, the common people are convinced to forget their struggles every generation --- and accept a re-written history in which all progress was benevolently and peacefully handed down from our Capitalist overlords.
The problem is that letting self-serving billionaire corporatists run the charity world can lead to increasingly destroying the actual charity aspects. Charity organizations that do the best job of serving the needy will be pushed out by "charity" organizations that do the best job of serving the rich, while posing for just enough PR photo shoots to fill the media with news of good deeds. If you like charity, you don't want it to become corporatized and absorbed into the same financial-industrial complex that works to impoverish the world.
In the particular case mentioned for Zuckerburg, you can see from Silicon Valley Community Foundation's own webpage that they're not actually a charity --- despite all the stock photos of smiling children, SVCF is just an investment fund working to consolidate control over the monetary holdings and policy of other charities. Zuckerburg isn't spending money to help anyone in need; he's spending money to control how other real charities spend their money.
So, it's not a question of how much of "100% of the money goes to people in need" --- it's a question of whether, in the long term, the net amount going to people in need is even positive --- rather than negative, with the excess looted looted to serve megacorporate wealth consolidation (including pushing policies on poorer countries that will profitably cripple their development). Since Bill Gates started donating to "charity," his own personal net worth has increased: his "charity" work has, overall, resulted in more wealth being taken away from humankind and put in Gate's pockets. This is not a helpful or sustainable way to progress towards a more kind and generous humanity; instead, it shows the continued ascent of the provably most anti-charitable under the guise of charity.
I see your understanding of macroeconomics is based on pulling conjectures out of thin air. Yes, interest rate changes of fractions of a percent make a difference in major currencies, when averaged out over a whole economy, You might not personally jump to shift assets if inflation/deflation varied between -2% to +2%, but that does indeed result in "significant impact on allocation of resources." I suppose as a BTC enthusiast, subconsciously set on downplaying fifty percent changes in value over a few days as minor wiggles, that you might not think much of it --- but once you're talking about billions of dollars, owned by the ultra-rich and managed by armies of accountants, a percent here or there can cause quite a bit of commotion.
The difference? If you have a lot of dollars and spend some, the government gives you more
that unevenly-distributed dollars were somehow different from unevenly-distributed BTC in government-corrupting-power to favor the rich. I apparently misinterpreted what your words meant; can you re-phrase what you were trying to say?
I think a bit of tin foil is quite well warranted when multibillionaire oligarchs like Gates and Zuckerberg are behind the scenes. These are folks whose one proven accomplishment is the ability to ruthlessly subvert, lie, cheat, steal immense amounts of money, to enrich themselves regardless of consequences to everyone else. I don't give them an equal benefit of the doubt when they come out smiling and promising benevolence for the good of the little orphan children, in return for letting them manage billions of charity dollars invested in ways that might impact their personal holdings.
I don't have an inside line to know perfectly whether a particular charity is doing scummy things behind the scenes; there are only second-hand indicators like publicly required disclosures of how much "charity" money goes to administrative fees (and fat executive salaries). However, with the likes of Gates and Zuckerberg pulling the strings, it's shockingly naive to not be extremely skeptical of what mischief they are attempting.
I'm sure politicians will accept bribes funded in BTC as readily as any other currency. Government corruption to serve the interests of the wealthy is not improved by switching to another monetary system which also entrenches large wealth disparities and the interests of the wealthy.
Unfortunately, "the Market" means "whoever has the most dollars," which are concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite of anti-freedom oligarchs. If you want to keep your privacy and freedom, you'll need to find better allies than "the Market," because Gates, Zuckerberg et al. "outvote" you (likely millions to one). Markets do not protect freedoms, aside from the freedom of oligarchs to rule unimpeded.
Probably most of them that already deal with similar amounts of money. They'd at least know how to hand it to a bank or investment firm. I would not consider said bank or investment firm to themselves be a charity for managing the billion dollars. SVCF is an investment firm for clients who happen to be charities --- which allows them to wield billions of borrowed dollars to invest in things that will also benefit their billionaire "benefactors." Think "hedge fund with massive tax breaks and corporate PR/money-laundering capabilities."
The small wealthy elite holding the overwhelming majority of society's wealth --- the ones with spare cash to invest --- spend a negligible fraction of their holdings on TVs. Assuming that business investors allocate their money according to the same logic as Joe Workingclass buys TVs is awfully ignorant. You're even wrong (on average, which is what matters for the overall economy) about Joe Workingclass: when people have less access to easy money (lower employment, lower pay), they hold on to their old TV longer instead of getting a new one. The working poor are the ones trampling each other to death to save a couple bucks at Black Friday sales, before which electronics sales sag as people are waiting for upcoming deals.
Anyway, BTC, like dollars, are highly unevenly distributed. Folks holding most of the BTC are holding it for speculative investment purposes, not living paycheck-to-paycheck and thinking about a new TV to numb the drudgery of existence. Deflation will mean that people who've got lots of dollars/BTC --- meaning they can buy a spiffy TV today, without putting a dent in their wealth hoard --- will tend to hold on to the BTC in hope of future gain, rather than spend/circulate it.
The insertion of middlemen (carrying out the will of billionaires) is common, but that doesn't make it good or charitable to be a self-serving corporatist middleman, wielding dollars for the glorification and enrichment of billionaires. I'm sure there's at least one person getting "fed" at the end of this process: Zuckerberg. Probably several cronies and nephews of cronies handed out six-figure-salary part-time jobs high in the organization, too. Giving money to yourself to further your own interests: not charity, even if you insinuate yourself as a middleman for other nominally charitable institutions (using their funds to further the interests of your own stock portfolio). Making the world a safer, friendlier place for the Zuckerbergs to control every aspect of society is not a net win for humanity.
The Silicon Valley Community Foundation does good work as far as I can tell.
What, pray tell? They're not directly a charity, but an investment firm with charities as clients. In other words, someone else gives the money; someone else does the actual charity work. They just sit in the middle, getting to wield billions of dollars of dollars of other people's money for investments that bolster billionaires' agendas (while claiming the credit for other people's 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.
However, multiplying "simpler" numbers might be faster. For example, I can multiply 20*30 in my head faster than 21.3625*29.7482 (YMMV). Rounding 21.3625*29.7482 to 20*30 might be "good enough" for many purposes, and you can even go back and keep more digits for a small number of cases where it's too close to call with the approximation.
Some people can withstand a few degree temporary temperature excursion in the home without dying from either hypothermia or heat exhaustion. The "make predictions on weather forecasts for how early heating is going to be needed" thing doesn't seem too important unless you regularly have eighty-degree temperature swings rolling in with the local weather. If you really care about energy efficiency, put on some clothes when you feel cold and take 'em off when you feel hot (and nudge the thermostat a bit if neither approach suffices) --- don't bother with whizzy gadgetry to keep the house within 0.1 degrees of some arbitrary, uneconomical set-point.
and for any other mods considering upmodding my post above, how about giving that point to the GGP AC instead (who originally asked the question, and suffered the consequences of Slashdot's resident anti-science troll mod crew)?
Having a local real electronics store available is nice even when bulk parts are cheaper online. There's always that one random thingamajig that you left off the bulk purchase, that you discover on the evening you're soldering everything together; and you don't want to pay $5 shipping for a 10 cent part and wait a week to finish the project. Being able to pick up a 10 cent part for $1 at a local store is really handy. Unfortunately, RadioShack hasn't been that store for a couple decades.
The typical American, however, might be in the presence of broken CFLs more often than they chow down 5lb swordfish steaks. I've had several of the spiral CFLs fail and crumble apart in my hands when I go to unscrew them (long use seems to weaken the portion of the tube near the base, where the inside ends up blackened). Many of the CFLs that don't fail in the home end up dumped in landfills, with the mercury leaching into groundwater, and from there into the seafood supply --- so you end up eating it anyway (even if you're personally responsible about proper disposal of waste).
Now, if the question is CFLs versus incandescent bulbs, using the fungible commodity of electricity produced somewhere by coal, then CFLs are better by an enormous margin --- the massive amount of all types of nasty stuff (heavy metals, radioisotopes, particulates, etc.; plus devastation from mining) released in the coal power process far offsets the externalities attached to the bulb itself. However, in the case of clamping down on CFLs (in favor of LEDs, or at least more stringent disposal controls) versus swordfish steaks, focusing on swordfish steaks is just plain stupid: mercury in seafood is a result of people (quite often Americans) being sloppy with a much larger net mercury release from common sources.
I'm guessing the typical American goes through more lightbulbs in their house than 5lb swordfish steaks (can't speak for your personal diet), so it makes sense to work on reducing pollutants at the largest overall sources (rather than more intense but rare ones). Also, CFLs are a source of new mercury pollution, while toxins in fish are the end result of humans dumping all that bioavailable mercury into the environment: phase out anthropogenic mercury pollution, and eventually your seafood will be safer to eat. Stopping swordfish consumption won't fix the problem light stopping mercury use in CFLs/etc. will.
Fair enough --- I personally don't consider it "irrational" so much as "non-rational," as in not derived by logical deduction within an empirical framework. One of my big objections to "Intelligent Design," however, is its fundamental dishonesty in attempting to cloak religiously-motivated metaphysics in scientific terms --- which makes for both terrible science and terrible theology. If I'm going to "talk God," I'm not going to lie about the fact I'm doing so; and make a clear distinction between concepts derived by logic from empirical observation, and concepts derived by faith from hearing and believing a Christian proclamation.
Full-on Christian, with all the other stuff that comes in the Apostles' Creed, etc. My statement of belief in God as creator was not intended to exclude other, perhaps more important roles for God.
I'm way ahead of you --- I haven't submitted any manuscripts to Nature or Science ever --- I'm decades ahead on this boycott thing!;) But, yes, I'll try to take ethical considerations like this into consideration when publishing (so far as I have the ability to convince other co-authors). I also happen to tend more towards "precision measurement" experiments than "big flashy discovery," so my research is usually safely on the "boring but, I hope, solid" side anyways (that wouldn't be aimed at a "luxury brand" journal).
He does continue to keep contributing --- to online, open-access journals without the adverse motivations of the "luxury brand" publishers. This way, alternative journals get to build the reputation of attracting top scientists and publishing good-enough-for-a-Nobel-prize-winner research, which can help change the perceptions that make publication in the "luxury brand" journals necessary for scientific careers.
According to Schekman's argument, journals --- specifically the highest-impact-factor "luxury" journals --- do play a causal rather than merely symptomatic role in the process. Such journals court papers that are "flashy," which will get lots of citations and attention (thus lots of journal subscriptions), possibly because they are wrong and focused more on attention-getting controversial claims than scientific rigor. This provides feedback on the other side of the tenure-seeking "publish or perish" culture to shape what sort of articles the tenure-seeking professors are pressured to churn out. If a scientist wants to establish their reputation by publishing ground-breaking, exciting discoveries, there's nothing a-priori wrong with that; the failure comes when joined with impact-factor-seeking journals applying distorted lower standards for scientific rigor for "attention-getting" work (while rejecting solid but "boring" research papers).
Indeed, the higher density of the early universe may shift the balance of odds during that brief 1M year window. However, whatever life that may have existed then has little applicability to the genesis of life on Earth roughly ten billion years later (after that early hot universe life had been frozen over, then autoclaved by massive supernovas long before our own sun was formed). So, panspermia as a model for the distribution of life through the present universe still faces the same difficulties with interstellar distance scale.
Slashdot Mirror
The wealthy might have learned a bit from history --- each time around in the cycle, they're able to hold a bigger advantage; centuries of work to perfect propaganda techniques and control the masses, allowing ever greater levels of accumulated power and wealth. Meanwhile, the common people are convinced to forget their struggles every generation --- and accept a re-written history in which all progress was benevolently and peacefully handed down from our Capitalist overlords.
The problem is that letting self-serving billionaire corporatists run the charity world can lead to increasingly destroying the actual charity aspects. Charity organizations that do the best job of serving the needy will be pushed out by "charity" organizations that do the best job of serving the rich, while posing for just enough PR photo shoots to fill the media with news of good deeds. If you like charity, you don't want it to become corporatized and absorbed into the same financial-industrial complex that works to impoverish the world.
In the particular case mentioned for Zuckerburg, you can see from Silicon Valley Community Foundation's own webpage that they're not actually a charity --- despite all the stock photos of smiling children, SVCF is just an investment fund working to consolidate control over the monetary holdings and policy of other charities. Zuckerburg isn't spending money to help anyone in need; he's spending money to control how other real charities spend their money.
So, it's not a question of how much of "100% of the money goes to people in need" --- it's a question of whether, in the long term, the net amount going to people in need is even positive --- rather than negative, with the excess looted looted to serve megacorporate wealth consolidation (including pushing policies on poorer countries that will profitably cripple their development). Since Bill Gates started donating to "charity," his own personal net worth has increased: his "charity" work has, overall, resulted in more wealth being taken away from humankind and put in Gate's pockets. This is not a helpful or sustainable way to progress towards a more kind and generous humanity; instead, it shows the continued ascent of the provably most anti-charitable under the guise of charity.
I see your understanding of macroeconomics is based on pulling conjectures out of thin air. Yes, interest rate changes of fractions of a percent make a difference in major currencies, when averaged out over a whole economy, You might not personally jump to shift assets if inflation/deflation varied between -2% to +2%, but that does indeed result in "significant impact on allocation of resources." I suppose as a BTC enthusiast, subconsciously set on downplaying fifty percent changes in value over a few days as minor wiggles, that you might not think much of it --- but once you're talking about billions of dollars, owned by the ultra-rich and managed by armies of accountants, a percent here or there can cause quite a bit of commotion.
I thought it was implied in your own comment
The difference? If you have a lot of dollars and spend some, the government gives you more
that unevenly-distributed dollars were somehow different from unevenly-distributed BTC in government-corrupting-power to favor the rich. I apparently misinterpreted what your words meant; can you re-phrase what you were trying to say?
I think a bit of tin foil is quite well warranted when multibillionaire oligarchs like Gates and Zuckerberg are behind the scenes. These are folks whose one proven accomplishment is the ability to ruthlessly subvert, lie, cheat, steal immense amounts of money, to enrich themselves regardless of consequences to everyone else. I don't give them an equal benefit of the doubt when they come out smiling and promising benevolence for the good of the little orphan children, in return for letting them manage billions of charity dollars invested in ways that might impact their personal holdings.
I don't have an inside line to know perfectly whether a particular charity is doing scummy things behind the scenes; there are only second-hand indicators like publicly required disclosures of how much "charity" money goes to administrative fees (and fat executive salaries). However, with the likes of Gates and Zuckerberg pulling the strings, it's shockingly naive to not be extremely skeptical of what mischief they are attempting.
I'm sure politicians will accept bribes funded in BTC as readily as any other currency. Government corruption to serve the interests of the wealthy is not improved by switching to another monetary system which also entrenches large wealth disparities and the interests of the wealthy.
Unfortunately, "the Market" means "whoever has the most dollars," which are concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite of anti-freedom oligarchs. If you want to keep your privacy and freedom, you'll need to find better allies than "the Market," because Gates, Zuckerberg et al. "outvote" you (likely millions to one). Markets do not protect freedoms, aside from the freedom of oligarchs to rule unimpeded.
Probably most of them that already deal with similar amounts of money. They'd at least know how to hand it to a bank or investment firm. I would not consider said bank or investment firm to themselves be a charity for managing the billion dollars. SVCF is an investment firm for clients who happen to be charities --- which allows them to wield billions of borrowed dollars to invest in things that will also benefit their billionaire "benefactors." Think "hedge fund with massive tax breaks and corporate PR/money-laundering capabilities."
The small wealthy elite holding the overwhelming majority of society's wealth --- the ones with spare cash to invest --- spend a negligible fraction of their holdings on TVs. Assuming that business investors allocate their money according to the same logic as Joe Workingclass buys TVs is awfully ignorant. You're even wrong (on average, which is what matters for the overall economy) about Joe Workingclass: when people have less access to easy money (lower employment, lower pay), they hold on to their old TV longer instead of getting a new one. The working poor are the ones trampling each other to death to save a couple bucks at Black Friday sales, before which electronics sales sag as people are waiting for upcoming deals.
Anyway, BTC, like dollars, are highly unevenly distributed. Folks holding most of the BTC are holding it for speculative investment purposes, not living paycheck-to-paycheck and thinking about a new TV to numb the drudgery of existence. Deflation will mean that people who've got lots of dollars/BTC --- meaning they can buy a spiffy TV today, without putting a dent in their wealth hoard --- will tend to hold on to the BTC in hope of future gain, rather than spend/circulate it.
The insertion of middlemen (carrying out the will of billionaires) is common, but that doesn't make it good or charitable to be a self-serving corporatist middleman, wielding dollars for the glorification and enrichment of billionaires. I'm sure there's at least one person getting "fed" at the end of this process: Zuckerberg. Probably several cronies and nephews of cronies handed out six-figure-salary part-time jobs high in the organization, too. Giving money to yourself to further your own interests: not charity, even if you insinuate yourself as a middleman for other nominally charitable institutions (using their funds to further the interests of your own stock portfolio). Making the world a safer, friendlier place for the Zuckerbergs to control every aspect of society is not a net win for humanity.
The Silicon Valley Community Foundation does good work as far as I can tell.
What, pray tell? They're not directly a charity, but an investment firm with charities as clients. In other words, someone else gives the money; someone else does the actual charity work. They just sit in the middle, getting to wield billions of dollars of dollars of other people's money for investments that bolster billionaires' agendas (while claiming the credit for other people's 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.
However, multiplying "simpler" numbers might be faster. For example, I can multiply 20*30 in my head faster than 21.3625*29.7482 (YMMV). Rounding 21.3625*29.7482 to 20*30 might be "good enough" for many purposes, and you can even go back and keep more digits for a small number of cases where it's too close to call with the approximation.
Some people can withstand a few degree temporary temperature excursion in the home without dying from either hypothermia or heat exhaustion. The "make predictions on weather forecasts for how early heating is going to be needed" thing doesn't seem too important unless you regularly have eighty-degree temperature swings rolling in with the local weather. If you really care about energy efficiency, put on some clothes when you feel cold and take 'em off when you feel hot (and nudge the thermostat a bit if neither approach suffices) --- don't bother with whizzy gadgetry to keep the house within 0.1 degrees of some arbitrary, uneconomical set-point.
and for any other mods considering upmodding my post above, how about giving that point to the GGP AC instead (who originally asked the question, and suffered the consequences of Slashdot's resident anti-science troll mod crew)?
Having a local real electronics store available is nice even when bulk parts are cheaper online. There's always that one random thingamajig that you left off the bulk purchase, that you discover on the evening you're soldering everything together; and you don't want to pay $5 shipping for a 10 cent part and wait a week to finish the project. Being able to pick up a 10 cent part for $1 at a local store is really handy. Unfortunately, RadioShack hasn't been that store for a couple decades.
The typical American, however, might be in the presence of broken CFLs more often than they chow down 5lb swordfish steaks. I've had several of the spiral CFLs fail and crumble apart in my hands when I go to unscrew them (long use seems to weaken the portion of the tube near the base, where the inside ends up blackened). Many of the CFLs that don't fail in the home end up dumped in landfills, with the mercury leaching into groundwater, and from there into the seafood supply --- so you end up eating it anyway (even if you're personally responsible about proper disposal of waste).
Now, if the question is CFLs versus incandescent bulbs, using the fungible commodity of electricity produced somewhere by coal, then CFLs are better by an enormous margin --- the massive amount of all types of nasty stuff (heavy metals, radioisotopes, particulates, etc.; plus devastation from mining) released in the coal power process far offsets the externalities attached to the bulb itself. However, in the case of clamping down on CFLs (in favor of LEDs, or at least more stringent disposal controls) versus swordfish steaks, focusing on swordfish steaks is just plain stupid: mercury in seafood is a result of people (quite often Americans) being sloppy with a much larger net mercury release from common sources.
Not the AC above, but logged in...
Mims, why do you trust science when it comes to electronics, but not when it comes to biology?
I'm guessing the typical American goes through more lightbulbs in their house than 5lb swordfish steaks (can't speak for your personal diet), so it makes sense to work on reducing pollutants at the largest overall sources (rather than more intense but rare ones). Also, CFLs are a source of new mercury pollution, while toxins in fish are the end result of humans dumping all that bioavailable mercury into the environment: phase out anthropogenic mercury pollution, and eventually your seafood will be safer to eat. Stopping swordfish consumption won't fix the problem light stopping mercury use in CFLs/etc. will.
Fair enough --- I personally don't consider it "irrational" so much as "non-rational," as in not derived by logical deduction within an empirical framework. One of my big objections to "Intelligent Design," however, is its fundamental dishonesty in attempting to cloak religiously-motivated metaphysics in scientific terms --- which makes for both terrible science and terrible theology. If I'm going to "talk God," I'm not going to lie about the fact I'm doing so; and make a clear distinction between concepts derived by logic from empirical observation, and concepts derived by faith from hearing and believing a Christian proclamation.
Full-on Christian, with all the other stuff that comes in the Apostles' Creed, etc. My statement of belief in God as creator was not intended to exclude other, perhaps more important roles for God.
I'm way ahead of you --- I haven't submitted any manuscripts to Nature or Science ever --- I'm decades ahead on this boycott thing! ;)
But, yes, I'll try to take ethical considerations like this into consideration when publishing (so far as I have the ability to convince other co-authors). I also happen to tend more towards "precision measurement" experiments than "big flashy discovery," so my research is usually safely on the "boring but, I hope, solid" side anyways (that wouldn't be aimed at a "luxury brand" journal).
He does continue to keep contributing --- to online, open-access journals without the adverse motivations of the "luxury brand" publishers. This way, alternative journals get to build the reputation of attracting top scientists and publishing good-enough-for-a-Nobel-prize-winner research, which can help change the perceptions that make publication in the "luxury brand" journals necessary for scientific careers.
According to Schekman's argument, journals --- specifically the highest-impact-factor "luxury" journals --- do play a causal rather than merely symptomatic role in the process. Such journals court papers that are "flashy," which will get lots of citations and attention (thus lots of journal subscriptions), possibly because they are wrong and focused more on attention-getting controversial claims than scientific rigor. This provides feedback on the other side of the tenure-seeking "publish or perish" culture to shape what sort of articles the tenure-seeking professors are pressured to churn out. If a scientist wants to establish their reputation by publishing ground-breaking, exciting discoveries, there's nothing a-priori wrong with that; the failure comes when joined with impact-factor-seeking journals applying distorted lower standards for scientific rigor for "attention-getting" work (while rejecting solid but "boring" research papers).
Indeed, the higher density of the early universe may shift the balance of odds during that brief 1M year window. However, whatever life that may have existed then has little applicability to the genesis of life on Earth roughly ten billion years later (after that early hot universe life had been frozen over, then autoclaved by massive supernovas long before our own sun was formed). So, panspermia as a model for the distribution of life through the present universe still faces the same difficulties with interstellar distance scale.