Hacker News Reader

Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

I've long played around with the thought of what would happen if someone started something like the universal-fund you mentioned, but had it snowball like a sovereign fund? (ie, instead of spending the in flow, invest it and only spend the profits from the investments, for example) ...

Particularly for basic needs like housing,food,clothes... Like what if instead of giving a charity $100 we created 41c per month? of UBI (roughly the cashflow from investing that same $100). Yes it would seem too little today, but in time it would be massive because it would never dissipate.

IDK, just my musing while claude takes, err does, my job.

View on HN

Plenty of those have existed, but in the end they always get stolen and given to the dogs trust.

There’s nothing people hate more than lasting charitable foundations. They take them to court so that they can crack them open and wank away the entire fund in 6 months.

There was one which was supposed to pay off the entire national debt. They cracked and spaffed it.

Another was supposed to end piracy. Cracked and spaffed.

You could save a million people a year, but that won’t save you from being cracked and spaffed. They’re already rubbing their trotters at the thought.

This sounds like a strange set of examples that may have been scams from the start. Can you name them?

The UK is full of long lasting charitable foundations. Many attached to schools and universities, but the highest profile example is probably the National Trust and its collection of historic buildings.

A lot of those charities are precisely in the process of being "cracked open", or have been captured by small groups who manage them as their personal fiefdom. The level of everyday corruption in this country is incredible.

> The level of everyday corruption in this country is incredible.

Sounds like the solution is to stop trying to make something like that work in an environment (country) which sounds setup to prevent those sort of efforts. There are lots of countries out there, some are surely a better fit.

It's pretty hard to move the National Trust for England preserving England's historic buildings to a different country. Sometimes things are local.

> captured by small groups who manage them as their personal fiefdom

Isn't that intrinsic to what a charity is? They don't have customers, they're not trusts set up on behalf of someone else specific, they're a tax exemption with an ideological mission.

(still short on named examples in this subthread)

The key there is "ideological mission", which is immediately abandoned in all but name in favor of slinging money around the non-profit industrial complex.

Edit: A great example that comes to mind for me is Wikimedia. They beg for money every year telling you that it's to keep Wikipedia running, but not only do they have enough money to keep running for years, not only is running Wikipedia not their main expense, but they redonate some of that money to other nonprofits. Even if you agree with the missions of those other nonprofits (which are not in line at all with the mission of Wikimedia), you're trusting that an organization that already lied to you about where the money is going is making good choices with that money.

> (still short on named examples in this subthread)

UK libel laws are no joke here, and coupled with the abandonment of basically any public subsidy for legal expenses of normal people, it means most people (me included) are not going to name names.

What you need to consider is that you also get compounding returns by treating a patient. They can now be more productive and contribute to their local economy. They might plausibly have a higher return rate (in wellbeing terms) than your alternative investment into stocks.

Precisely. Things become clear when we think of benefits for people instead of monetary terms.

That's called a foundation, they exist.

Love the idea and have long wanted something like this to exist. One other twist is you could let ppl vote on where to donate the profits.

Some nonprofits do run largely off endowments.

One big issue is that it's a PR problem; most people don't really understand it. They'll look at the non-profit and say "why does that need to raise money, it's rich". You saw this a lot with Harvard in Trump's recent funding war with it, say.

And the biggest expense of the most successful charities is fund raising. It's a viscous cycle and when Watsi came along they showed maybe an alternative path.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com