Hacker News Reader

Comment by beerpls | Hacker News Reader

I don’t donate to charities.

It’s not that I don’t want children to not starve, it’s that I have a very high confidence that the vast majority of donations one way or another just end up in a sociopath’s bank account

I’m never surprised when I hear good will turned into theft. I am surprised how many people are willing to give so much of their money to scams

(granted, the SF money wasn’t an optional donation)

View on HN

This is the best charity working on how research in the arctic and around global warming is done much more efficiently and cleanly:

https://www.oceanresearchproject.org/

Matt is a great guy and a modern explorer, you can hear his story here:

https://explorerspodcast.com/matt-rutherford/

This is the movie about his first solo nonstop circumnavigation of the Americas:

https://reddotontheocean.com/

Or you can listen to his podcast as well here:

https://www.singlehandedpodcast.com/

Trailer for the movie

https://youtu.be/5fszrvpoa9o

The movie itself

https://youtu.be/n12nnrEGWXQ

Enjoy!

Even theft and grift aside...many charities are just bad at achieving their goals. They think they're helping but end up causing more problems, e.g., food aid destroying the local farming industry.

For instance, the Red Cross raised $500 million for Haiti relief and ended up achieving virtually nothing due to extensive mismanagement and arrogance (trying to apply Western methods in a third-world country) [1].

Similarly to you, I detest all non-profit organizations. Rather have a for-profit organization or the government solve issues...but these still have their own issues.

1- https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...

Even beyond that $13.5B was raised from various sources for a country of 11.45M people and not much came out of it.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/01/12/3761388...

Unfortunately, same here. I too seen this a lot. I wish I could donate to EFF though. )

Amnesty International (tho I really don't like their fundraising tactics) and Doctors Without Borders don't send money to sociopath's accounts. They pay for housing for board certified medical doctors who decided to make $0 and heal people while being bombed on.

I also like Animals Asia which saves bears from captivity and sends me cute videos of the bears swinging on the swing I donated to them!

If you have low confidence in large orgs, donate directly to small orgs near you like a little league team in a rough part of town.

I don’t know their specific economics but typically the money-into-sociopaths funnel isn’t through the charity program itself, but through the administration. Eg 30% of funds goes to admins, 30% to marketing and fundraising, 20% to overhead, 20% to the actual stated program kind of thing

ProPublica has been by far my most satisfying donation. Their work has helped expose a ton of corruption and, as you say, sociopathy. They're transparent about where the money goes (mostly to the salaries of journalists).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com