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Comment by norir | Hacker News Reader

I personally don't really believe this kind of business is good for society so to me this is a more feature than a bug. Obsessive guarding of IP secrets seems to be correlated with paranoid and selfish antisocial behavior, which is essentially how the financial industry appears from the outside in spite of their lofty rhetoric about their contributions to society.

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The largest stream of charitable donations in California come from the most IP-paranoid hedge fund I know of.

If you have negative opinions of the finance industry in general, I can't do much but remind you that it's a large and varied industry and that your opinions are priors you should expose to relevant data.

Maybe the reason that the most IP-paranoid hedge fund makes the largest charitable donations in California is to proactively secure favorable publicity in case they become embroiled in a scandal that could impact their financial standing.

Moreover, it raises the question of who truly benefits from these charitable contributions. For example, Ikea is owned by a charity for tax optimization purposes. The mission of the charity is to promote interior design and architecture. Essentially, strategic investments that will ultimately benefit Ikea itself in the long run.

Interestingly, it's the opposite. They made the donations anonymously and were outed by a charity reporter. Likewise, the charities were things like the Sierra Club, various disease research foundations, and the ACLU.

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