What is government giving money to foundations that donate to other foundations that in turn lobby the government but money laundering?

Or worse, government giving favorable regulatory decisions to companies that donate to foundations that in turn lobby the government to do things that it has no public support to do?

These are all actual money laundering, and the salaries (and resumes) of the people who are involved reflect this. This is not "I don't like how they are spending money" or "they are incompetent." They're not hiring white shoe union busting law firms because they're dumb, petty, or short-sighted.

Words in general don't really mean much anymore, online anyway.

It reminds me of when health fads take off. Everyone "has OCD" or whatnot. I'd talk to people and they've given me a rundown of who they claim they were, but lol, they weren't that person.

Everyone can identify and use words however they want. Once it goes viral the meaning of the word changes. It's difficult to parse who people are nowadays cuz of it.

There's no sense fighting it. Someone will tell you you're wrong, you're out of touch, you just don't get it, or "your vibe isn't right".

> Money laundering has become a default catch all term for "monetary misuse / suboptimal allocation".

No it definitely has not

People are really not curious enough about bureaucracy. We complain literally our entire lives about "bureaucracy" and all the bad outcomes it produces.

But I've met literally no one who thought "hmm... if there's this emergent phenomenon across virtually every single large-scale human endeavor... and that phenomenon seems to systematically produce undesirable outcomes... at the cost of billions of dollars or millions of lives... maybe I oughta inspect this phenomenon more closely!"

Yes. everyone kinda sucks in their own ways. Mostly not enough to matter in their lives, but in large groups, the suck adds up.

Another word whose usefulness has been degraded to just mean “bad behavior by an organization”.

With “enshittification”, Doctorow meant something specific, where a platform rises to popularity by serving its users, then betrays those users to its business partners to make more money, then finally betrays even those business partners to keep most of the value for themselves.

Anyway I guess Doctorow brought this on himself by choosing a word that’s fun to say but isn’t clear about what it refers to.

Enshitification doesn’t just happen, it’s a choice to sacrifice quality and integrity for short term profit. There are plenty of large products and companies that haven’t gone this way.

This is called the Iron Law of Bureaucracy

I don't think of non profit bloat as enshittification. Enshittification is gradual reduction in quality of a user facing service over time that used to be trusted. Here it's just a matter of (arguably) inefficient spending as fundraising had increased but I don't think there's any rollback in services.

Yes, that is a good example. I used to be cynical about these uses of money until I met a 70-year-old volunteer who regularly attends international cycling championships to take pictures of the cyclists. She is totally devoted to documenting the sport and is not by any stretch of the imagination getting rich doing that or living in luxury. So I've changed my mind: her being able to do that is a good thing for her, for Wikipedia and for the sportspeople involved in these championships. YMMV.

WikiPortraits organizer here. That funding figure is through the end of 2027. I'd estimate ~$550k total from the WMF over 4 years (accounting for additional rapid grants and funding from affiliates). So looking at an overall average of ~$135k per year out of a ~$200 million budget to (so far in 2.5 years) engage 150+ photographers who have uploaded 90k+ photos from hundreds of events. Good downstream impact as well (developing better tools for Commons, bringing on more longterm contributors to both Commons and Wikipedia, etc.).

Also want to highlight that WikiPortraits is not just covering the fancy events like FIFA and Cannes, but many more smaller and undercovered events as well (indigenous festivals, science conferences, literature festivals, and so on). World Cup coverage in particular was relatively very cheap for how high-visibility the photos are on Wikipedia (majority of matches were covered locally); we've put more towards getting wiki photographers in Benin, Ghana, and Kenya support to cover their local culture and events.

For the amount of direct impact we have on Wikipedia and Commons, I'll go to bat to say that it's a good use of money compared to a good number of other projects that have received more funding over the years (ofc I have a conflict of interest here, but still). But I do get the larger point, that this sort of project is not necessarily what people expect when they donate to Wikimedia (and Cannes and FIFA of course stand out in the list of events being covered and are what people will focus on). And I've also been critical of the WMF's approach to donation comms for this reason.

That $500K over three years represents 0.08% of the foundation’s budget in that time period. The question is, what are they spending the other 99.92%? There is a significant small chunk spent on crucial infrastructure, but it’s mostly a slush fund for board pet projects.