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Comment by asim | Hacker News Reader

I donate part of my wealth to the poor every year and whatever more I feel is adequate based on a code of law e.g religion. I am just an individual. If I was a multi billion dollar conglomerate that incentive would be much higher. To bring the world out of poverty is to enrich all of humanity and my work would benefit from that as more people would benefit from the technology I built. But if the incentive is to spend everything and borrow more to build data centers to fuel addictive services and exploit people then this is quite a disservice to mankind.

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Humanity is enormously rich. Compare to the state of humanity 200y ago. Pretty much everyone was struggling to survive, to get food and some heat.

Nowadays even the poorest countries are not starving, unless there is a war going on.

You’re demonstrating the problem of averages. While what you are saying might be true on average, it doesn’t negate the point being made, which is that millions of people continue to struggle to survive and live without adequate food, heat, water, healthcare, etc.

Also, there are multiple wars going on across the world that are making the problem even worse.

No, really, there are fewer famines. The UN, who defined poverty in terms of basic necessities, had to review their definition because how do you make UN survive if there weren’t enough poor populations in scope.

yeah but what's it worth if our riches in 2025 are lent from the future with no way to pay back? That's climate change.

Shifting the goal. The goal was commiseration for poverty, and you want a stable future.

It’s difficult to reconcile the desires of 8bn people. Some don’t care about climate change, some would like to see their granddaughter, some will live through flooding or an earthquake, some would like better health. Most of misery in the world does not come from the lack of money. If anything, disagreements between people are the cause of the lack of money, not the result.

Even in the supposedly richest countries a lot of people are starving, homeless or otherwise immiserated.

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