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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

I mean if you reduce something enough you can say “x pays for y” in almost any case for anything since it’s all technically one big pot for one group. Even earmarked money.

If I give you $500 to help pay for your medical bills and a few months later (bills have been paid by then) I see you bought a PS5, can I say, “not cool you used my money to buy a PS5”?

Don’t get me wrong I think Mozilla/FF has been very poorly managed. But I have just never liked these kinds of “transitive property” arguments or whatever we want to call it. Unless they’re straight up funneling donations into the CEO’s bank account I just don’t see it that way.

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You could say “you bought a ps5 with my money” though.

If that person had the money, they should have spent on medical bills. If they got it after, they should have paid you back before buying a ps5 maybe.

Or if you just gave them the money and don’t expect any accountability, it is ok.

But that's the whole point: they did pay their medical bills. It's not like they didn't pay their medical bills and instead bought a ps5. They did both.

Mozilla develops Firefox, and they also pay their CEO a lot. Their CEO may be overpaid, the company may be mismanaged, but at least they are still upholding their commitment to maintaining Firefox. Picking out one expense that you don't like and saying "all the donations go to this, see!" is just disingenuous.

Whether donating is worthwhile is another question, and it seems like the answer would be no. But it is a very different thing to say "All the donations just go to the CEO" instead of "I think the CEO is paid too much".

We could also cherry-pick in the other direction and say the CEO is negotiating deals to bring in the 90% of non-donation revenue of Mozilla, in which case you could easily say that his pay is a result of that revenue creation.

I think the key here is that they didn't have money to do both.

If they had money enough for medicine, then why beg for donation?

You gift me $100 on Venmo or cashapp or whatever to go dinner with my partner. I transfer it to my bank. It’s in the same bank account as all my other liquid cash. How can either of us ever say whether or not I spent that specific $100 on dinner?

Mozilla/FF has a pot of money that donations go in to, which is the same pot they use to operate as well as pay people, which includes their CEO.

> How can either of us ever say whether or not I spent that specific $100 on dinner?

there's no such thing as a specific $100.

The donation of the $100 was contingent on you not having $100 for dinner. If it turns out you _did_ have $100 for dinner, but now that you received $100 in donations, you can choose to also spend the extra $100 on something else (which the donor may or may not like).

It is on the donor to figure out whether donating the $100 is worth it - at least the recipient needs to declare all their financials, so they'd have the info to make a judgement on future donations.

You’re making this a very strict, binary situation. Either you’re broke and every single dollar you are gifted or requesting is specifically earmarked for a specific thing, or you have all the money you need and you can’t ever receive a gift or request a donation. Nothing is that simplistic. Charities doing well and able to meet all their goals/payroll still keep asking for money because they need it to be sustained for more than months or a year.

Also at the end of the day, they are requesting donations to keep things operating. And that means paying people to run things, including CEOs. Every charity has somebody at the top, so your donations are also paying for those people as well. Unless you’re willing to say that all charities are therefore fraudulent because you are paying executive personnel, I just don’t see how this argument can really be put forth in earnest.

It isn't binary in general but in this case it is. The money from mozilla corporation is close enough in quantity to the donations to make it so. Someone used the example of a medical bill and a ps5, but a better example is that you gave someone enough money to live on entirely, and the spent it on that as they said, but then took their income which could have paid for it and purchased something unnecessary. That wouldn't be ok. Furthermore one of the key pieces of research before donating to a charity is executive compensation. This level of compensation is a red flag in any non profit and means it won't be getting good ratings from the watchdog groups. That in turn hurts future donations.

I gave the PS5 example fyi. Not that it changes anything it just felt weird to not clarify that haha

>but a better example is that you gave someone enough money to live on entirely, and the spent it on that as they said, but then took their income which could have paid for it and purchased something unnecessary.

But that doesn’t really apply here, it’s not parallel to the Mozilla/Firefox situation. And if we want to arbitrarily decide that all donations go to the CEO strictly because the numbers are kind of similar, why can’t I just say “no all that money goes towards staff and operating“? Why is my assertion any less valid? The numbers being similar doesn’t tell us anything about how it’s being spent. It’s just a coincidence.

I mean that’s what this all hinges on right? That the two numbers are kind of close? I can’t really think of how that tells us where the money is going. I don’t understand how that follows.

If donations 10x tomorrow can we no longer claim the donations are going into the CEO’s pocket? Or if they cut to 1/10th? Would we be having this conversation if either was currently the case?

If it was the head of the foundation making that much no one would donate. It would be a matter of opportunity cost. A non profit that size would normally have a leader compensated on the level of a software developer. I'd argue the ceo of the corporation is also wildly overcompensated too, but that normally wouldn't be relevant to the decision to donate. The issue arises because of the close financial ties between the corporation and the foundation, which is enough to prevent my donations by itself, those ties though create the perception that fewer donations would increase transfers from the corporation. If that is in fact true, then the question of opportunity cost does extend to all of the corporations expenses and someone considering donating sgould absolutely consider all of those expenses and decide if they are doing good with their donation or not.

> A non profit that size would normally have a leader compensated on the level of a software developer.

I hate doing the “source?” thing but this is not obviously the case to me so can you explain your reasoning here or show me a source?

Charitynavigator and guidestar have datasets. Most websites have you pick a charity and then give you metrics to judge by rather than picking a metric. But they indicate for a non profit with revenue between 10-50M (mozilla foundation is 30M I think?) usually has compensation for the leader between 180k and 350k.

Their annual revenue is over 10x that. It usually is around 500mill annually, currently down to around 400mill.

That is the corporation, not the foundation right? Over 100M it should be less than 1% so as much as 4M if it is 400M.

I'm not trying to defend Mozilla begging for donations when they really don't need them. My point is that cherry-picking one expense that you don't like, and then saying all the donations go to that, is cherry-picking the financials, and is misleading.

You're arguing that money isn't fungible. It's absurd.

This is absolute nonsense. I am arguing that cherry-picking one expense is ridiculous. A much more reasonable approach would be to say that your donation is spread out over the entirety of the spend of Mozilla. That would suggest 1% of your donation is going to the CEO, not 100% of it like earlier commenters suggest.

It is dishonest to pick out one expense you don't like and equate that to all of the donation money being spent on just that. That's all. I don't know how you got from that to "this guy thinks money isn't fungible."

> much more reasonable approach would be to say that your donation is spread out over the entirety of the spend of Mozilla

Transactions happen at the margin. If a junkie spends every dollar of a bonus on dope, it’s fair to say the bonus is being burned on dope. Even if they also pay rent with their base salary.

From another user:

If donations doubled, would CEO pay double?

If donations halved, would CEO pay halve?

I suspect the answer is "no" to both of those.

> I'm not trying to defend Mozilla begging for donations when they really don't need them.

They essentially do. The problem is they have a greedy, self-obsessed CEO taking it.

If donations doubled, would CEO pay double?

If donations halved, would CEO pay halve?

I suspect the answer is "no" to both of those.

Exactly, so the donations are not being funneled to the CEO, and suggesting that they are would be silly.

If you split up your donation by how Mozilla actually spends its money, then most goes to operating Mozilla, and a small amount (~1%) goes to paying the CEO.

I agree but your tone suggests you’re disagreeing with me? That’s the point I am driving at. Directly linking every donated dollar to the CEO’s pay simply because they’re close in number does not make sense.

> whatever we want to call it

Fungibility [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility

Thanks that’s the word I was fishing for

> straight up funneling

Money is fungible. There's no such thing as funneling. There is ring fencing though - that's when a certain budget cannot exceed a certain source of revenue, some countries do this with road tax I think. Afaik Mozilla is not doing any ring fencing. It is perfectly appropriate to compare the fraction of their income as donations to the fraction of their costs as CEO salary.

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