Jeff Bezos tweet seeking philanthropic ideas draws 42,000 replies
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So, this way we address numerous factors: 1) The large uneducated mass of young people excluded from the workforce or otherwise drowning in college debt, 2) Work to reduce the prison population and actually rehabilitate people with worthwhile skills (metallurgy, equipment, etc), and 3) Fix the crumbling, pot-hole riddled, creaking, aging US infrastructure in probably record time.
Yes it will cost a fuck-ton of money but because these low-level employees will have money to spend, the wheels of US Consumerist economy will be able to pick up. Former students in the program could pay down debt AND save for after they're released from the program commitment.
Poor people are poor because they spend. The US wealth gap is so distorted the rich have choked this system. They sit on piles of assets and spend very little by comparison, even if it's millions of dollars per year. These are economic realities that Bezos is part of causing to be an issue.
It's almost as if Amazon's business model isn't viable without the public infrastructure that is now in desperate need of investment. Hm.
This is why I always skeptically look at any philanthropic announcements....
if billionaires like Gates, Buffet, Zuck, Bezos simply funded the above - it would go way further, and have long asting effect on the future of this nation in so many profound ways. Rather than "give away half their wealth" - why not do the above now and actually see it change the surface of the nation?
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I am getting involved in the tiny house movement. Clayton homes (berkshire hathaway) has a tiny home division... but BHs entities (like clayton and karsten) in the housing market are so poorly regarded: they build sub-standard homes, their employees are treated like crap, the quality of their products are low because they do not provide skilled training to their employees, the working conditions are fairly poor etc...
its maddening to see billionaires and governments claim all this "making the world a better place" platitudenal BS, but a critical program like CCC would be realize some serious material benefit in every sector.
Not saying that working in a country with no regulatory or physical infrastructure is easy, but buying a bunch of mosquito nets is much cheaper with very few unintended consequences compared to doing something like OP suggested. For instance, wouldn't a revived/subsidized CC put a lot of current companies/workers out of business? How would that opportunity effect a high schoolers decision making? Is this something that goes on forever, it sounds like we would be training more people to do a job then would be needed if this program stopped. etc, etc, etc.
Then consider externalities, the environment could be a lot cleaner if we got over striving for economic growth. Growth is driven by population or consumption growth or both. So you get more trees cut down to build roads, houses and malls. More pollution from energy consumption and manufacturing.
We should really just pursue managed population reduction, combined with a prescribed amount of economic shrinkage, not growth. But then people really get stuck in their caste and there are far fewer opportunities to move into middle class.
That's why I'm kind of laughing nobody seemed to come out and directly ask:
>Okay, how are you going to pay for it?
I have an answer, one that would be Boo'd to oblivion. A progressive Estate Tax bracket system of 0-30-85% according to full-worth structures (Trusts, Offshore, wtf-ever-we-gonna-find-that-money) because that'll level out the wealth gap right soon and fund plenty of public works projects.
The kind of maintenance that is needed because those in the top 0.01% can afford to teach their kids to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's what they say to poor people all the time, and they didn't grow up with billionaire parents. The pendulum must swing back.
This is usually the explicit goal of this sort of program.
"or more likely, automate the job"
oh right... we'll have to make that illegal or something.
If you look at prison labor, it already did.
This is never a bad thing. The only bad thing is if your society doesn't account for the potential of automation and just leaves the unemployable destitute. But that is a political problem, not an economic one - being able to produce without any labor is one of the greatest accomplishments of economic development you can possibly have.
It does reflect that, in most western countries (and the US in particular) we have a glass house for an economy, propped up in large part by bullshit jobs that exist to satisfy the broader markets demand for comprehensive employment of citizens, and if you throw a pebble in that lake the ripples could break the dam holding a huge portion of the US workforce in employment right now.
Bezos is close to being the richest man recognized by western institutions (tyrants around the world probably control more assets, but can't utilize them on demand) and has the potential to spearhead the social and political changes necessary to adapt to the changing economic reality nobody wants to acknowledge, and that his company is near the forefront of bringing about. But that isn't particularly a way to spend money - it is more that he will hold the respect of oligarchs and politicians the world over and might be able to persuade some of them, if he were so persuaded himself, that like global warming this is not a can to just kick indefinitely down the road until overnight you see 50% unemployment and start seeing public hangings of the elite come back into vogue.
I see absolutely nothing wrong here. What's the problem?
This is a genuine choke-point problem of upward mobility intentionally designed and executed by interested parties and it needs some forceful unwinding. See Also: Robber Barons.
So you want to put a bunch of poor people in labor camps. Inflation adjusted wages of the CCC works out to about $550/mo. If they get injured on the job they will be sent home with nothing.
>over-pay the employees
In a country with a minimum wage, how do you know they're not already being overpaid?
>on the condition half goes into savings accounts for family use or to pay down debts of some sort.
Because "poor people" are too stupid to determine how they should best spend their own money that we should infantilize them and take away their personal autonomy.
>able bodied with Bachelors and $8/hr job
It's nice to know that a person's pedigree determines their market value, rather than their productivity.
>Yes it will cost a fuck-ton of money but because these low-level employees will have money to spend, the wheels of US Consumerist economy will be able to pick up.
US unemployment is already at 4%. Those US consumers are going to be buying products made in Mexico or China because US labor costs more and comes saddled with more health, safety, and environmental regulations. I'm not necessarily opposed to those things, but make no mistake, that money is getting shipped overseas very quickly. And your new CCC workers will be right back where they started.
>> Because "poor people" are too stupid to determine how they should best spend their own money that we should infantilize them and take away their personal autonomy.
That is so ridiculously unfair. 1) You expect someone making minimum wage to have the time and energy to put together a sound investment strategy. 2) Humans LIKE to spend their money the second they have access to it. Among families giving million dollar trust funds to their children, parents commonly don't allow trustees to have access to their funds until they are in their mid thirties. These are children who go to Ivy League schools, and their parents don't let them have access to their savings. It's not because they are stupid, its because they are human.
I suspect that most people will not do what I think would be best for them to do. The difference is that I don't want to usurp their personal freedoms.
>These are children who go to Ivy League schools, and their parents don't let them have access to their savings. It's not because they are stupid, its because they are human.
I agree that the people who have earned money should get to do with it whatever they want, including withholding it from their adult children. Let's apply this universally. You are more than welcome to take some of your money to hire and over-pay minimum wage workers and create these grossly paternalistic contracts with them where you dictate how they're allowed to spend their pay. Just don't try to do it with my money.
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Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren't anything like machines. They weren't dependable. They weren't efficient. They weren't predictable. They weren't durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others.
These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame.
And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn't high enough.
So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too.
And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be. The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn't really be said to have any purpose at all.
The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else. And they discovered that they weren't even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, "Tralfamadore."
The CPI is corrupt. The 4% unemployment rate is contingent on fudging the numbers so the Eligible Workforce is at 39 year lows, comparable to the early 1980s. None of this math adds up, and you've only just poked at a few things with a stick.
Not once did you offer an alternative or a better idea. Show me what you have in mind that can get people back to work. Explain to me how the wealth gap in the United States can be solved with your philosophical outlook, and I'll be really interested to see what you come up with.
I'm not saying I have confidence in your ability to actually answer this challenge, but I'm not above waiting to watch logic flounder.
>Not once did you offer an alternative or a better idea. Show me what you have in mind that can get people back to work.
Get rid of the minimum wage. Replace the corporate and income tax with a VAT sales tax. Don't charge the VAT on exports. If you can't do that, at least get rid of regressive taxes like Social Security that transfer wealth from the lower classes to the upper middle class. Open free trade with any country on the planet, even countries we hate, and even if they put tariffs on our goods. End the government monopoly on education by using a voucher system. Over time, reduce total government (federal + local) spending down to 15% of GPD max, preferably more like 10%. Transition regulations from things that specify a solution to taxes on a problem. For example, instead of regulating every car needs a catalytic converter, tax the pollution that a car produces. Maybe someone will invent something even better than a catalytic converter.
>Explain to me how the wealth gap in the United States can be solved with your philosophical outlook, and I'll be really interested to see what you come up with.
I don't care one iota about how much money a wealthy person has because in macro-economics, wealth is not a zero sum game. Not to mention, the premise you're working under just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I buy an iPad from Tim Cook because I value an iPad more than I value the $400 I've got in my pocket. Tim Cook sells me the iPad because he values my $400 more than he values the iPad he's got. But now, because a bunch of other people also bought iPads from Tim Cook I feel like I deserve some sort of rebate in the form of forcibly taking some of Tim Cook's money? How does that make any sense at all?
Instead of being concerned about some people having more than me, I am interested in my personal moral responsibility to help my fellow man. So far as poverty is concerned, there has never been a more effective machine for eliminating poverty than the free enterprise system and the free market. Socializing what you might call solutions to problems with poverty may temporarily help the people you're looking at in the now, but you're robbing from the future by stifling the rising tide of innovation that brings up the standard of living for everyone.
I won't say it's easy but avoiding poverty is fairly simple: graduate high school, maintain employment, and don't have children out of wedlock. That's obviously not a 100% guarantee, but those 3 things, by far, have the strongest correlations with poverty of anything else you'll find. Our social welfare systems incentivize people not to maintain employment, to keep pumping out children they can't afford, and to get easy divorces which breaks up families and increases poverty. If you do nothing else but get rid of those things, you'll reduce poverty significantly in a generation.
The $1b per year in space spending wasn't going to be viewed as enough of a good deed, given the business dominance Amazon is about to enjoy and all the horrible press that is about to follow in the coming years. The Twitter campaign is Bezos firing up his own PR effort ahead of becoming anointed as the world's richest (which will generate thousands of headlines & stories, plenty of which will be negative, when it occurs; and so long as he retains that title, the headlines will grow worse inverse to his philanthropy levels).
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-lyons/amazon-drones-60-min...
The best solution for almost every response he got is: Introduce better legislation. Even charities are just bandaids over actual problems.
Could you elaborate? It seems pretty obvious that you can. No child labour, minimum wage laws, equal rights etc.
Protectionism isn't going to help workers in the long term. We live in a global market; accepting that and using legislation to deal with negative outcomes is a totally valid approach. The fact that it hasn't been done is because of the large amount of money standing in the way of it.
You can send your factory bucks overseas a lot easier than a poor person can move to a country with a higher standard of living.
We need to start asking the question of whether our legal systems should be friendly to capital at every opportunity.
There can absolutely be a middle ground. We can tax rent-seeking. We can quit the austerity focused trickle-down policies that have been shown to fail, and put money into the hands of people who will actually spend it. We can actively redistribute wealth.
Why would you rather give up protections that cost our ancestors their lives to establish?
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/consequ...
> "I told her about my conviction, and she wanted me to go deeper into what happened,” he told me, describing one interview in particular. “When I explained that I shot somebody in the back of the head, she didn’t want anything to do with me anymore."
... And then they never go into that more. Why is that not an acceptable reason to not hire someone?
I don't understand what you mean here (I probably miss some background in US culture).
Note I don't really agree with this sentiment as abusing children is fairly illegal and it should be up to the justice system to prosecute the abusive households and also help the children find better homes, but we know that's inadequate in implementation right now.
Because there exists someone who is willing to pay that large amount of money for the service that the lawyer provides.
You obviously can if, for instance, the maintenance of the problem requires active government action; this would seem to generally be the case for large classes of social problems, most notably, all those involving the nature, assignment, and allocation of legal interests (e.g., claims to property.)
I 100% understand what you saving and agree long term fixes are preferable, but... 1) Short term can be massively helpful for getting over humps like famine/disaster etc. 2) I kinda feel that is such privileged world thinking. If I'm buying some guys with nothing food and clothes, sure its not a long term solution but now they have food and clothes for a week. Pretty great for those guys. Imagine you were without shoes and clothes and some rich bloke was like "we dont think we should give you that as it might not help you generate food/clothes in the long term". Kinda politicians that believe we need to keep welfare low to encourage people to pull themselves up by their boot straps.
This isn't going to stop me from helping out people I meet and see in need, but as a large scale program it is (at least long term) harmful.
I know this first hand, as I am trying to work in the tiny house movement here in the bay area.
In talking with the city and county of alameda, the code is the problem. The code states that any land parcel for a single family is required to be minumum of 2,300 square feet.
So you cannot sub-div a parcel for several tiny homes, as any structure with a door, sleeping and cooking facilities is considered a dwelling and is subject to requiring a 2,300 SF lot...
I am working with several tiny home manufacturers on this - but the laws need to change.
When 1,200 jobs disappear because whole foods automates sorting and packing to their stores, this is traceable as a direct consequence of automation.
Those people should be interviewed assessed and retrained into viable opportunities.
If one can believe the HN crowd there is a shortage of programmers. For this you don't need retraining, you can just teach it yourself on the internet.
Bezos's endowment could fund a restraining and or apprenticeship for these displaced workers. His enterprises and other like it _are_ actively displacing long time workers, if he's feeling philanthropy what better way to help those you helped displace?
And what would retraining change on this situation? Why should they like the job that comes afterwards?
To state it cynically: Wouldn't brainwashing people to love their job be a much more effective solution to this problem?
The real solution is public campaign finance. We have this lovely new thing that enables instant communication between anyone, anywhere called the Internet, where information duplication and propagation is effectively free.
Start there. Anyone can be a candidate on a state run open source collaborative hosting service for political campaigns. Those represent the first layer - to not alienate the technologically disinterested, provide TV time and dead tree info pamphlets on the top candidates. The difference is that right now you take bribes to enable you to saturate peoples attention on TV and in print, with this system the state buys the face time and the viable candidates share it.
No, it is not perfect. You have the problem of view distortion where anyone who is abjectly against technology won't have their voice heard early on in the process. But Facebook has really demonstrated the ability to motivate people to engage with technology where they would never have fathomed doing it before - I strongly feel a properly implemented system like this would get extremely high adoption and engagement rates, well beyond what we get now with traditionally ad driven campaigns run by laundered money.
The good news is if you do cut money out of campaigning cold turkey then it is very easy to see the vectors of corruption - paid for political speech is an obvious violation, so you don't get private "third party" campaign ads. Part of running for an elected position can be the requirement of full financial disclosure - we know who pays you, and for what. Any time money changes hands for political ends you can directly prosecute on those grounds alone - because you aren't allowed to privately finance your political interests, you have to use public forums.
There is a lot of nuance in such a system, and much nitpicking. But the fundamentals - anyone can run, and the viable runners get public airtime shared by viable candidates equally - and where paid promotion is astutely illegal - you can dramatically cut down on campaign corruption in ways just trying to limit contributions (again, it has been an ongoing and losing battle to control private finance of political campaigns since the country was founded) cannot do, because innate in the idea of private citizens giving money to candidates to then spend attracting more citizens to support them you have a feedback loop that enables corruption because any citizen can be bought off on who they support and they can just be an indirection of big donor monied interests cash going into the pockets of crooked politicians.
> This tweet is a request for ideas. I'm thinking about a philanthropy strategy that is the opposite of how I mostly spend my time - working on the long term. For philanthropy, I find I'm drawn to the other end of the spectrum: the right now.
Perhaps, the focus on right now is to find cool ways to end up with a lower tax bill?
Bezos recently sold about $1billion worth of Amazon stock [1]
[0] https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/875418348598603776
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-04/amazon-ce...
Sure he most likely doing it to lower tax. Capital gain is 15% no?
Either way at least he's doing it in a helpful way. Even if I don't agree with Amazon monopolistic tendencies.
We need a method to get ressources for cheap out of the gravity well, so if he built a cannon to the moon, and researched a way to get humanity (0,1,0) there, that would be the greatest gift to this species.
Edit: I see that the HN title has been changed in the meantime.
btw, what about Bezos paying taxes instead of "optimizing" ?
It's also well known a lot of taxes go into our healthcare complex. Is that good or bad? Seems like we overpay for worse outcomes statistically but we also have some of the best healthcare facilities in the world and pioneer a decent amount of drugs.
At the end of the day both are employing a lot of solidly middle class folk who are spending their money moving the economy which seems to be the ideal situation in a lot of ways.
The problem is not companies "optimizing", it's that the tax code is so complicated that they can do it in the first place.
A citizen trying to "play" the same game who be hit hard by the system. Here's the issue.
Venkatesh Rao in his epic "Gervais Principle" has some good bits about Gervais' character speaking in all cliches. In American Gods, the new gods speak in all cliches and the show is doing a great job adapting it to their version of that pantheon. That kind of cliche overuse seems to go together with meaninglessess.
The cliche of cliche rich dialects is corporatespeak, where it's used for both its euphamistic quality and the safe haven^ of meaninglessness it creates. Synergies and customer centric approaches.
TechStartupSpeak is (I guess) a subdialect of corporatespeak. It's churning out cliches at a good clip. "Disrupt" conveyed a lot of meaning at first, subtly referencing a particular theory of innovation and cutomer adoption of new technologies.. examples like digital cameras & microcomputers.
Strictly speaking, Tesla's wasn't "disruptive" strategy because they started with sportscars instead of electric bikes. But, that kind of nuance is long gone from this particular cliche. Disrupt is interchangeable with "revolutionize" or and other "be really successful" cliches.
^I guess idioms are cliches that survive without going through the normal lifecyle. Theory needs fleshing out perhaps.
I hope he does, and not someone for him.
I remember justice roberts saying in an interview how he read letters to president Reagan, and pass along those he thought appropriate. I was truly disappointed.
You already posed the right question: How can one person read 42k anything? Answer: They can't. Delegation is not actually a horrible thing though.
It's actually quite easy in this case. Most of them are threads, from a quick skim on the replies. So you separate them into threads, treating the person that replied to the top comment (so, mentioning @JeffBezos and himself only) as one idea. Replies to these replies are not usually ideas, but more of questions, feedbacks and such. So, I would say that there are at most 10% of usable tweets (out of 42k replies in total), which you then combine into specific ideas (chain responding about an idea is still just one idea) and you get down to something like 500-1000. Out of those, you'll might find 50 or so that are actually doable and not blatant trolling (I mean, one of the top replies is literally "I could need some money and I would consider it very philanthropic") and you get something usable and easily digestible within a day or so.
I would say that he needs to read them, but he definitely needs someone to make it digestible before starting to read them.