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Comment by msghacq | Hacker News Reader

Apparently Epstein also funded Scratch, a programming language for children:

https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2014/09/17/mit-media-lab-trai...

This was in 2014 after his arrest for sex with a minor. WTF was MIT/Media Lab thinking?

Shocking, but the source is somewhat dubious and Mitchel Resnick has strongly denied that Scratch or ScratchJr took money from Epstein.

https://medium.com/@mres/a-statement-about-research-funding-...

edit: the ultimate source seems to be a press release from the Epstein Foundation, who around 2014 was surely in a PR blitz, published by Jewish Business News but since taken down. And both sources get Mitchel Resnick's name wrong, in different ways! http://archive.is/9UKAi

That people care far more about money than about where it comes from. That's usually a pretty safe bet.

I'd like to hope that recent events will change things, but I tend to suspect this is more like one of those finance rulings where someone gets fined $1 for every $1000 they earned in an evil way, and that the underlying risk/reward profile hasn't fundamentally shifted. Still, every push in the right direction helps!

Not trying to excuse Epstein but what body would determine what is Evil? Sounds very authoritarian.

I think the point is that MIT, on its own initiative, might have been more careful about to whom it sold respectability. Saying 'no' to a donation is not very authoritarian.

I may get downvoted to hell for this, but why is it bad if Epstein funded a programming language for kids? It's not like he influenced the development of the language.

Epstein’s other MIT donation came with a lot of privileges and involved people like Joi Ito flying to his residences. This is at the very least something that needs investigating and an official statement.

It's bad because you're effectively laundering Illegally-gotten money and legitimizing a criminal. It's exactly this attitude that serious criminals count upon to both enjoy their gains and improve their immunity. (see also RUS oligarchs & other kleptocratic 'leaders')

(Edit: I'm not downvoting the parent, it's a legit question.

But it seriously raises concerns when a straightforward factual response like this gets effectively instant 3 downvotes -- IDGAF, but contrasting the strong moral codes in tech that caused things like the Google withdrawal from the AI weapons program, there is also a strong amoral current that doesn't care about where the money comes from to do development, and it can create real consequences as referenced above.)

> Illegally-gotten money

Wait, did Epstein earn his money illegally? I thought his "only" crime was molesting minors and pimping them out to his friends?

It seems like one of the more interesting aspects of all this, is that nobody really knows where he got his money from. There is an absence of the kind of filings there should be, if he was actually investing in some kind of hedge/venture capital fund.

Epstein's sources of funding are a real mystery, and the path of that money and the financial structures leaves strong indications of illegal activity starting with being a conduit for money-laundering. The whole point of laundering money is to make the gains of everything from child sex trafficking to state corruption look like plain ordinary respectable earned income when it is not even close to that.

Who cares? My kids use scratch. its awesome. Couldn't care less who funded it originally.

> Dozens of pages of emails and other documents obtained by Ronan Farrow “reveal that, although Epstein was listed as ‘disqualified’ in MIT’s official donor database, the media lab continued to accept gifts from him, consulted him about the use of the funds and, by marking his contributions as anonymous, avoided disclosing their full extent, both publicly and within the university”[1]

What's the problem with accepting anonymous donations?

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/14/how-mi...

>WTF was MIT/Media Lab thinking?

Being in charge of X or Y means that you get to take the fall. There were people tasked with taking in money. When you accept a job like that part of the understanding is that you take the fall when it turns out someone you took money from is no longer acceptable to associate with him. All dollars are green once they're in the right bank account (the organization's bank account), if you're not gonna take money from pedos or other bad people, they will replace you with someone who will.

Welcome to Boston (greater boston area really). This is how we roll here.

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