The right way to fund national needs is taxation. If the process is depending on charitable funding, the funds should be put into a safe harbour so this kind of "yea... nah" outcome can't happen.
The reason for the cessation in funding is because of recent political changes. Incidentally those recent political changes also led to a cessation in government charitable donations. I don't think we can claim that either is strictly more reliable than the other. I'm surprised at how readily people will support government intervention while bearing in mind which government would currently be implementing said intervention.
> reason for the cessation in funding is because of recent political changes
The reason is Zuckerberg and Chan have no backbone. These are individuals who command the resources of small nations. Yet their insecurities win out every time, rendering them powerless to take a stand on anything and instead wander to the beats of others’ drums.
> The reason is Zuckerberg and Chan have no backbone.
More likely, the wealthier you are the more tied you are to the system. The US government could make it very difficult for Zuck to conduct his business, which would tank his wealth. This is in particularly true when there's a pseudo-dictator in power.
A thought just struck me, but I wonder if the difference between the Billionaires of Today and the Monopolists of Yesteryear is that the wealth and power of the Billionaires are tied up in publicly exposed assets (stocks, etc) as well as networked wealth. Make the wrong political move, and people tank your stock into oblivion.
But what are you going to do to Carnegie? Not have steel? Rockerfeller says something antithetical to Elite Beliefs? Good luck getting oil.
This is relatively well known. Monopolists had very real wealth with a high floor value and controlled large portions of the supply chains needed to build big things that lasted.
The Silicon Valley 'elite' of today has wealth predicated on theoretical value calculations of things the world isn't even convinced it needs. Monumental difference, and it significantly changes how these guys operate and what legacy they leave.
Or they looked at the results and weren't seeing much progress vs their science investments, which also coincided with these billionaire social projects becoming politically unpopular.
For ex, from the article re the school:
> But former leaders of the school who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private information said Chan had grown distant in recent years as the school’s academic performance faltered.
> In 2017, a Harvard study funded by CZI found that by 2015 the growth rate of student achievement in English had significantly improved — but that there had been no significant change for math.
> the school met stumbling blocks. Two principals left in its early years, which three former school leaders said made it difficult to establish stability for students.
NYTimes said the refocusing on science investment vs social happened slowly over 5yrs and they haven't invested in any social ones in a few years. So this change has been in the works for a while...
He doesn't seem to be trying very hard to outrun it either. Facebook is a toxic dump of human unintelligensia and Mark/FB/Meta only ever seem to resist any attempts to disinfect even small pockets.
Many of us did stupid anti-social shit when we were young, especially with computers. The mood of that chat felt like plenty of chats I had with friends, grandstanding and boasting. The sad part is that he hasn't grown as he's gotten older.
Sure, but like some other founders he's doing little to morally redeem himself for his sizeable role in the normalization of engineering addiction while simultaneously creating a massive surveillance firm in the name of ad-tech.
Every bit of lip service about connecting people is overshadowed by "they 'trust me'. dumb fucks".
Why is that a terrible statement? Aren’t you in fact dumb if you just trust some rando’s website on the interent with all the details of your personal life? It’s not even wrong.
There is a sociologic experiment to do with “The revolution eats its children”.
For as long as I’ve seen Bill Gates donate to all causes that would please the most leftist proponents, the only reaction I’ve seen was indifference/hate.
It’s a sociological reality: Nothing pleases a mob. On one side, leftist characters always end up in a situation where they were not left enough, which, in revolutionary environments, justifies their termination. In France when the left was elected the president was described as “a capitalist, simping for billionaires”. On the other side, if you are rich and perform acts promoted by leftism, such as donating your entire salary, increasing your employees by 30% a year, or like Bill Gates, donating your entire wealth for the world’s hunger and health before your death, your actions are construed as malevolent, probably there’s a “get rich” scheme behind it for Bill Gates, or probably “you had to treat your employees bad if you had to increase their salary.”
For a good person, there is no winning. But we have countless counterexamples of bad people liked by the same population. A lot, lot, lot of people reach this conclusion by their 40ies. After all, it’s not “spine” that people should have, but just mutual love, including some from the bottom to the top.
Blindly following a hollow con artist who makes every indication that his plans will be bad for you, yet because he speaks the right emotional intonations to your hind brain you rationalize that it will somehow be good for you. Yup, that certainly sounds like religion!
Man, you're just primed to respond to anything with rationalization, huh?
What your implied narrative is missing is that being attuned to "physical reality" means being quite misaligned with our modern technological world, and that incentives diverge when those forebrains and hindbrains are in different skulls.
the difference is that one is from elected officials (however flawed, clearly, there is some measure of representing the people's interests in theory at least), and the other is just an individual's decision, not even pretense of representing the people's opinion
Governments have a degree of democratic accountability - the current US government could be kicked out or not in 4 years depending on the will of the people.
Billionaires paying very little tax are forever ( certainly more than a lifetime as the wealth is handed down over generations ).
That or reform charitable giving so that it truly is an arm's length transaction. No preferential tax treatment for payments to charities one controls.
Their social funding was just creative accounting that moved money so it couldn't be taxed, but still gave them full control and then never did deliver anything.
The article heavily implies that it was a “yeah…nah” thing but does very little investigative work that could corroborate their anonymous witnesses. For all we know, there was a school shooting or a spate of suicides in which case I think everyone here would agree with closing it.
Also I’m not from the area but how are disadvantaged youth coming from Palo Alto at all? Isn’t it one of the highest CoL areas in the nation? Also isn’t it pretty crime-free and well-maintained? How disadvantaged can you be if that’s where you live?
On your first part I'd do exactly the opposite so please don't speak for me...
Given the fact that the number 1 cause in the USA for "unnatural" deaths of school age individuals is now shootings (not cars like in other developed countries) I feel like the expression "when the game gets tough the tough get going should apply. Personally I feel like it's the bil(mil)lionaires new "game" of getting the credit but not doing the commitment.
On the second part {speculation} Because maybe not so rich people lived there before the area became so expensive or moved there for job opportunity + safe place to raise kids ?
If you do a quick Google / chatgpt you'll see that the cost of living compared to median income is extremely bad...
So not the worst place but certainly not the best...
Because some children might have the bad luck of being born to dumb parents who do not value education. Ensuring that those children should not suffer and every member of the society grows into a well-educated adult who can contribute back is certainly a national need.
Is there evidence that this is the right way? Because it seems to be far less efficient than other ways if funding charitable causes directly by a significant margin.
Likewise, is there evidence for this? Maybe our most "effective" altruism is in fact to pay taxes in a liberal democracy after all.
Painting with a very broad brush, the US is the most charitable country in the world, yet we lag behind many other countries according to various measures of human welfare.
> Likewise, is there evidence for this? Maybe our most "effective" altruism is in fact to pay taxes in a liberal democracy after all.
I think this depends quite a bit on what you're trying to achieve. Hard to measure effectiveness otherwise.
E.g. if you care about global human welfare (and setting aside longtermist ideas), the most effective use of a marginal dollar is to donate money to people in poorer countries (via various methods). One of the main reasons is that the richer countries have a much more robust social welfare system already via taxation.
US "charity" to the UN became highly qualified as a function of both political distance from the UN goals, and regrettable lapses in probity inside the UN, the kind of problem which crops up anywhere and everywhere. Time and place meant they collided, and the US stopped funding the UN because of <reasons> and instead let the charity sector pick up the burden, which meant right wing christian fundamentalism entered the room. It is little wonder that islamic countries became suspicious of e.g. vaccination drives, made only worse by US polital operatives exploiting the polio vaccination runs to track down Bin Laden.
The US was the most charitable nation in the world but it's not a given.
Is it clear the charity approach is more efficient? My sense is many non-profits prioritize fundraising and have the bloat of executives who's main function is to schmooze donors.
I'm sure there are good nonprofits/charities. And there's definitely inefficient public offices that are mainly interested in politics.
My point is "seems less efficient" is kind of weak ground to be asking others for evidence
>My sense is many non-profits prioritize fundraising and have the bloat of executives who's main function is to schmooze donors.
You don't have to have a 'sense', you can look up the overhead for some nonprofits to look and see how much is spent on compensation vs giving/redirecting money to their causes vs. ancillary expenses.
It's often much less than the government in terms of overall efficiency.
"Kind of weak" is an understatement. It's flat out wrong and ridiculous to assume that the best course of action for societal well-being is to let billionaires run free. Or that it's "less efficient" to correct the systemic issues that unfairly tilt things in their favor.
Charity is essentially voluntary. So, in terms of persistence to need, it's highly variable. Some problems demand commitment which charities cannot commit to.
Charity incurs oversight burdens. The UK has a long story about failures in charity, the charity commissioner has had to intercede many times. It would be wrong to assume there are no oversight costs, the thing is that to the charity they may look like externalities. They have to be borne, the state bears the cost.
Charities also usually cannot intercede politically to fix the situation demanding their charitable work. So, charities are excluded from lobbying in some ways, where governments reflect the will of the people and are subject to both good and band consequences.
Charities are abused. Churches for instance. Why do churches qualify for charitable status, when they (in most economies where they are or have been) are established entities with massive landholdings and wealth?
In the end, it's a matter of philosophy. Without being patronising, I tend to think right wing people who believe in personal responsibility and low taxes favour charity because it gives them discretion, to give or not, as a function of how they feel about the recipient, and left wing people who believe in the state as a construct reflecting popular will believe in state functions to implement the burdens individuals cannot manage for themselves.
I say that because my very good friends who donate highly tend to be right wing and tend to make moralising statements about diabetes being a function of a lack of personal self control and so do not fund interventions to prevent diabetes in the working poor because "they lack self control" and also chose not to fund womens reproductive rights on similar grounds "chastity is its own reward" -Bill and Melinda Gates were exceptional in ignoring the fundamentalist christian lobby which came into the room in the Reagan "just say no" years, and funded contraception and abortion in Africa regardless.
Charity seems fine but we should definitly get rid of the tax loopholes.
That would take much of the corruption out of it. These donor advised funds now allow someone to maintain full control of their money while the IRS considers it 'donated' it for a major tax write-offs.
In the 1950s, we taxed income over $400,000 at somewhere around 90%. Anything you made less than that was taxed much less, but every dollar above $400,000 the government took most of it, which effectively put a cap on wages.
Won't be popular on HN, I think we need to move closer to that again. Maybe not that extreme, but that's the proper direction. We can then use that income to tackle big problems.
We also need to tax interest, capital gains, dividends etc. at the same rate as wages.
The problem is that Reagan/Thatcher's failed experiment is now considered an inevitable law of the universe. Taxes can only go down. Anything else is crazy. You get people talking about taxation's effect on the economy as a baseline assumption without any evidence that it actually works like that. The 1950s was a period of huge economic boom with very high tax rates for top earners, which is a counterexample to popular narratives about how high taxes supposedly hurt the economy.
In the private sector, obsession with short term profits and "shareholder value" is the corollary.
Both of these are now polite consensus, inevitable, but have wrecked government, wrecked our economy, and wrecked people's minds.
But would higher taxes nationally result in better funding for education? We are in a climate where coming to a agreement on what is acceptable in classrooms nationwide seems to be impossible.
At that point why not just go to state-controlled capitalism? That way of life was MUCH closer to competing socio-economic theories to capitalism - than capitalism itself. I saw Sanders' Rogan podcast, I heard his plea - it doesn't work well in today's system.
One of the best things about the freedom of moving from job to job and not relying on pensions or 30-year contracts is that it enables and empowers everyday workers to have the innate, untenable, inalienable "check and balance" on the labor market to choose who they give labor to at any given time - and picket them as well. For the average person: You SHOULD be able to move jobs at any time, you SHOULD be able to not feel pressure of unrealized benefits of a pension 30 years down the road when you do, your housing SHOULD NOT be directly based on your employer ("company towns"), and normalizing systemic status-quo changes that makes it hard to decide/change who cuts your checks is NOT a step in the right direction.
Sanders was right when he said folks in managerial positions - and above - need to care more about their workers, but the businesses that drive the labor market banded together - perhaps unknowingly through a status quo "collective conscious" - to make MOST of your pickings in MOST same-tier jobs look very much alike. There are many ways to fix that in practice across other nations today, like sectoral bargaining; where union experts in a given trade collectively bargain for what SHOULD be an effective minimum wage or minimum benefits package within that trade - instead of the government doing it for them. There's also works councils in Germany that have a similar effect.
Of course, this won't be popular on the HN crowd, but I'll say it anyway: What we need is securities tax.
Absolutely any conversion, collateral, or divestiture of securities need to be taxed at the rate of those securities at that time. A lot of plutocrats are playing the system by just basing their loans and the collaterals thereof, and their payments for things, on stocks and securities because they are "unrealized gains".
If securities are enough of a bearer instrument to give loaners confidence for otherwise no-collateral loans, they're enough of a realized gain to be taxed when you use them for a purchase - or alongside one.
It was part "decadence", part practical. The tax code in the past was gamified to promote philanthropy (or at least erect buildings with your name on them), rather than simply not paying.
Perhaps tax code can gamify building more funding/naming more schools so Chan can keep throwing money at education. At this point probably easier to appeal to 0.01% vanity/legacy than properly tax them.
>It didn’t have the special education system or disciplinary rules that are required of charter schools, the former administrator said. But students wore recording devices dubbed “speech pedometers” so that software could analyze the speech patterns of children and the adults around them. The technology was designed by a nonprofit to encourage staffers to talk more with students in ways that studies suggest encourage brain and language development.
>“It was beyond naivete,” the former administrator said. “It was hubris.”
What the heck?
Education is hard, and it's surprising how much "gee whizz" type tech / ideas are out there that supposedly fix things like a magic wand. And in the meantime, no disciplinary rules?
Maybe I'm getting old but I don't remember education being seriously broken when I was growing up. It seems to have become a playground of random new ideas that administrators in offices dream up every year. I've heard some crazy stories from family who works in education where this sort of thing wouldn't stand out.
Cracks show up when viewed from a lens of "wait...was that domination-oriented, dualistic, whitewashed, imperialistic, nationalistic, colonial indoctrination in the form of education?".
I don't disagree with the notion of jingoism in public education. I disagree that it has anything to do with the myriad behavioral and performance issues in public schooling.
As a parent, I can't imagine the chaos that ensues when your kid's school ceases to exist overnight. Keeping that school running is less than pocket change to them. I feel like their action is morally quite shameful.
It is really weird and pathetic to call them shameful. If after all that money and effort, all they get is condemnation driven by entitlement then they shouldnt have done it at all. The school should have gone out of its way to show good outcomes and attract more donors.
Even if this initiative was driven by the state what is to say that it would have been 100% guaranteed to continue? States also run out of money and resources.
> CZI has promised a parting gift totaling $50 million to the community. Parents were told students will receive $1,000 to $10,000 for their future education based on age, and the school district received $26.5 million in grant funds last month. The district declined to comment for this article.
And after the end of the 2025-2026 school year is far from overnight.
Yeah, you’re talking about money, but the important thing for a kid is losing their entire context. It feels like being fired, but without understanding why. Money is entirely beside the point.
Yeah that happens too. No one is invulnerable to bad fortune. I dont want to come across as defending the Zuck family. I don't even care about them. But charity should not be an obligation.
It's still a very bad situation to abruptly need to find a new school, even if you get a pathetic $1000 coupon for a school which costs much more than that.
I'm not even talking about the financial status of these students, which due to the nature of the school sounds like it's pretty dire.
I'm merely talking about stability for the child. This would be a stressful event even for a well off child.
That's why I keep asking if you guys are parents. A school change can be a huge deal.
As for why Zuck's conduct is immoral, it's about keeping promises. You say you're going to fund something and solicit people to orient their entire life around it, which is what we do when we enroll our kids in school. Then you take it away. That is ... Almost criminal levels of not keeping your word. I would totally unironically put it on the scale of violence towards the families. It honestly is very offensive, it makes my blood boil.
A reminder that "No Such Thing As a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy" by Linsey McGoey (2015), is an excellent analysis of philanthrocapitalism.
(Spoiler - this book does not provide a ringing endorsement of dubiously acquired wealth being dubiously applied through a commercial / for-profit prism.)
Way I see it based on admittedly limited information, these two are either kowtowing cynical liars who financed this entire chain of social causes for the sake of scoring a certain type of PR value with a certain kind of social demographic and now no longer give a shit because another kind of social posturing is de jure.
Or, they're cowards who can't in the least minimum stand up for the causes they claim to strongly, morally support and are willing to discard them at a moment's hint of sacrifice or trouble.
If the latter, then how cowardly indeed. If you're already a fucking centibillionaire, then what a truly absurd, spineless shit of a human being with zero internal firmness you'd have to be to screw over thousands of people who had really come depend on these programs...
All because you might, possibly, have to stand up to one screaming orangutan and maybe lose a few billion out of a wholly gargantuan fortune that you will never ever be able to spend in a lifetime.
Either way, the saddest part is the people who'd come to depend on these things, now affected by their loss.
> to screw over thousands of people who had really come depend on these programs
So? Should they have been obliged to fund this indefinitely forever and ever? Would you not say the "CZI has promised a parting gift totaling $50 million to the community" part is a little redeeming?
Would you have preferred Zuck to have bought moar yachts instead of supporting education, however briefly?
It's their money and I agree that they have a right to use it however they want, or change its use for their own reasons.
That said, I think you're grossly underestimating how hard it can be for some of the families that were using this school to find an alternative that doesn't cause their kids problems.
With that in mind I'd say there is a sort of moral imperative to preserving a context you created when it's designed for helping vulnerable kids and families. Not a legal rule I'd agree with, but an ethical imperative that shouldn't cut things off without more sustained effort and only a modest cash payoff as compensation.
Given the absolutely colossal fortune of the Zuckerbergs, they could have funded and worked to improve this program for as long as they wanted to, with nary a visible dent in their assets, but (in my opinion during one very convenient space of time) they just decide "nope, fuck it. Here's some cash kids"
> But former leaders of the school who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private information said Chan had grown distant in recent years as the school’s academic performance faltered
>The East Palo Alto project was the billionaire couple’s second major intervention in a city’s education system, after a controversial 2011 gift of $100 million to the Newark public schools. Some experts and community members claimed that the money was largely squandered.
>said Chan had grown distant in recent years as the school’s academic performance faltered
If you've invested the amounts we're talking about here, and made the statements they made about their investments at the get-go, and have the vast resources they have for tweaking and improving these programs, then you can, you know, put a bit more into making them work, instead of shutting them down in one very conveniently timed political climate. It's their money and they can do whatever they want with it, but the whole thing reeks of political expediency either out of spinelessness or shallow original motives.
>>The East Palo Alto project was the billionaire couple’s second major intervention in a city’s education system, after a controversial 2011 gift of $100 million to the Newark public schools. Some experts and community members claimed that the money was largely squandered.
Yeah, the dangers of investing anything in Jersey. Tony Soprano laughs in his grave.. Joke aside, that much earlier project seemed like one very inexperienced attempt that was mishandled right from the start. Giving that much money to a bunch of ambiguously honest bureaucrats is just asking for disaster. Especially when you as the donor have zero internal presence in or real experience with the system you're donating to.
>then you can, you know, put a bit more into making them work
Assuming it's a problem that can be solved by more money. The US has the fifth-highest amount of education spending in the world, behind countries like Luxembourg and Norway, but ahead of Germany, France, UK, Sweden, and Belgium. Some problems can't be fixed with money alone, and throwing good money after bad is foolish.
when I was making some money finally I could afford to pay for my siblings college.
I told them since the beginning: I'm doing my best, I cannot be sure to be able to pay it until the end. do your best and figure out how to help of I need you.
fortunately I was able to pay all of them until the end. but the lesson is: thank the supporters, hope for the best but understand the uncertainty
"The East Palo Alto project was the billionaire couple’s second major intervention in a city’s education system, after a controversial 2011 gift of $100 million to the Newark public schools. Some experts and community members claimed that the money was largely squandered"
Chan & Zuckerberg acted much more responsibly here than Elon and Trump:
> CZI has promised a parting gift totaling $50 million to the community. Parents were told students will receive $1,000 to $10,000 for their future education based on age, and the school district received $26.5 million in grant funds last month. The district declined to comment for this article.
They understood that they were breaking commitments that they had made to parents, and that they were putting an unexpected burden on a local school district, and they tried to address that.
By contrast, Elon and Trump abruptly broke commitments that the US made all over the world. Stopping clinical trials midway, leaving food and medicine sitting to rot in warehouses, etc.
I was just reading the Washington Post, and I saw the full-length headline.
"The Chan-Zuckerbergs stopped funding social causes. 400 kids lost their school."
"Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg’s retreat from funding social issues forced the closure of a school Chan opened for disadvantaged families in Silicon Valley."
I prefer it when billionaires stay out of social causes and buy more yachts and mansions instead.
At least then, everyone can be sure that they're not funding harmful programs. Also, billionaires would be more satisfied and less inclined to engage is harmful politics if they're too busy cruising the world on their yachts.
Keeping billionaires on the hamster wheel is dumb and harmful. They won capitalism. They won at life. That's it, there's no higher goal, that's the game. Give them a medal and let them enjoy their mansions.
Right now, it seems like Billionaires don't realize that they won the game because the people around them keep trying to make them feel like it's not enough.
The right way to fund national needs is taxation. If the process is depending on charitable funding, the funds should be put into a safe harbour so this kind of "yea... nah" outcome can't happen.
The reason for the cessation in funding is because of recent political changes. Incidentally those recent political changes also led to a cessation in government charitable donations. I don't think we can claim that either is strictly more reliable than the other. I'm surprised at how readily people will support government intervention while bearing in mind which government would currently be implementing said intervention.
> reason for the cessation in funding is because of recent political changes
The reason is Zuckerberg and Chan have no backbone. These are individuals who command the resources of small nations. Yet their insecurities win out every time, rendering them powerless to take a stand on anything and instead wander to the beats of others’ drums.
> The reason is Zuckerberg and Chan have no backbone.
More likely, the wealthier you are the more tied you are to the system. The US government could make it very difficult for Zuck to conduct his business, which would tank his wealth. This is in particularly true when there's a pseudo-dictator in power.
Or more plausibly they never cared and it was just PR all along.
> more plausibly they never cared and it was just PR all along
That’s still capitulation. When it’s fashionable, they’re one way. When it’s not, they’re the other. It’s not savvy, it’s cowardice.
Or the school was just a cynical tool for generating good PR, where “good” means good for Zuck as he sees it in any moment.
Did anyone really think Zuck cares about people? After all the past and ongoing ethical issues with his companies?
He is consistently looking out for himself. There is no capitulation.
A thought just struck me, but I wonder if the difference between the Billionaires of Today and the Monopolists of Yesteryear is that the wealth and power of the Billionaires are tied up in publicly exposed assets (stocks, etc) as well as networked wealth. Make the wrong political move, and people tank your stock into oblivion.
But what are you going to do to Carnegie? Not have steel? Rockerfeller says something antithetical to Elite Beliefs? Good luck getting oil.
This is relatively well known. Monopolists had very real wealth with a high floor value and controlled large portions of the supply chains needed to build big things that lasted.
The Silicon Valley 'elite' of today has wealth predicated on theoretical value calculations of things the world isn't even convinced it needs. Monumental difference, and it significantly changes how these guys operate and what legacy they leave.
Or they looked at the results and weren't seeing much progress vs their science investments, which also coincided with these billionaire social projects becoming politically unpopular.
For ex, from the article re the school:
> But former leaders of the school who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private information said Chan had grown distant in recent years as the school’s academic performance faltered.
> In 2017, a Harvard study funded by CZI found that by 2015 the growth rate of student achievement in English had significantly improved — but that there had been no significant change for math.
> the school met stumbling blocks. Two principals left in its early years, which three former school leaders said made it difficult to establish stability for students.
NYTimes said the refocusing on science investment vs social happened slowly over 5yrs and they haven't invested in any social ones in a few years. So this change has been in the works for a while...
Zuckerberg will never outrun his "they 'trust me'. dumb fucks" chat log. He's a terrible person.
He doesn't seem to be trying very hard to outrun it either. Facebook is a toxic dump of human unintelligensia and Mark/FB/Meta only ever seem to resist any attempts to disinfect even small pockets.
Many of us did stupid anti-social shit when we were young, especially with computers. The mood of that chat felt like plenty of chats I had with friends, grandstanding and boasting. The sad part is that he hasn't grown as he's gotten older.
He has hundreds of billions of dollars. I think he could go do whatever he wants.
Apparently he could not raise math scores at the school
So what does money have to do with doing what you want ?
Sure, but like some other founders he's doing little to morally redeem himself for his sizeable role in the normalization of engineering addiction while simultaneously creating a massive surveillance firm in the name of ad-tech.
Every bit of lip service about connecting people is overshadowed by "they 'trust me'. dumb fucks".
Why is that a terrible statement? Aren’t you in fact dumb if you just trust some rando’s website on the interent with all the details of your personal life? It’s not even wrong.
Honesty doesn't absolve ill intent.
There is a sociologic experiment to do with “The revolution eats its children”.
For as long as I’ve seen Bill Gates donate to all causes that would please the most leftist proponents, the only reaction I’ve seen was indifference/hate.
It’s a sociological reality: Nothing pleases a mob. On one side, leftist characters always end up in a situation where they were not left enough, which, in revolutionary environments, justifies their termination. In France when the left was elected the president was described as “a capitalist, simping for billionaires”. On the other side, if you are rich and perform acts promoted by leftism, such as donating your entire salary, increasing your employees by 30% a year, or like Bill Gates, donating your entire wealth for the world’s hunger and health before your death, your actions are construed as malevolent, probably there’s a “get rich” scheme behind it for Bill Gates, or probably “you had to treat your employees bad if you had to increase their salary.”
For a good person, there is no winning. But we have countless counterexamples of bad people liked by the same population. A lot, lot, lot of people reach this conclusion by their 40ies. After all, it’s not “spine” that people should have, but just mutual love, including some from the bottom to the top.
And perhaps it explains the current trends.
[flagged]
Blindly following a hollow con artist who makes every indication that his plans will be bad for you, yet because he speaks the right emotional intonations to your hind brain you rationalize that it will somehow be good for you. Yup, that certainly sounds like religion!
The hind brian is deeply attuned to physical reality. Religion comes from the forebrain which thinks the human animal can be transcended.
Man, you're just primed to respond to anything with rationalization, huh?
What your implied narrative is missing is that being attuned to "physical reality" means being quite misaligned with our modern technological world, and that incentives diverge when those forebrains and hindbrains are in different skulls.
Yea.. I should have qualified my words "in the world as we used to understand it" or something.
the difference is that one is from elected officials (however flawed, clearly, there is some measure of representing the people's interests in theory at least), and the other is just an individual's decision, not even pretense of representing the people's opinion
>I don't think we can claim that either is strictly more reliable than the other
In the article it was schools that were defunded. Does the government have a history of consistently funding schools?
Sadly, yes.
Governments have a degree of democratic accountability - the current US government could be kicked out or not in 4 years depending on the will of the people.
Billionaires paying very little tax are forever ( certainly more than a lifetime as the wealth is handed down over generations ).
That or reform charitable giving so that it truly is an arm's length transaction. No preferential tax treatment for payments to charities one controls.
Their social funding was just creative accounting that moved money so it couldn't be taxed, but still gave them full control and then never did deliver anything.
You're telling me the t[r]ickle down irrigation doesn't work? Oh naw! Whuvuda thunk this would happen?!
The article heavily implies that it was a “yeah…nah” thing but does very little investigative work that could corroborate their anonymous witnesses. For all we know, there was a school shooting or a spate of suicides in which case I think everyone here would agree with closing it.
Also I’m not from the area but how are disadvantaged youth coming from Palo Alto at all? Isn’t it one of the highest CoL areas in the nation? Also isn’t it pretty crime-free and well-maintained? How disadvantaged can you be if that’s where you live?
On your first part I'd do exactly the opposite so please don't speak for me... Given the fact that the number 1 cause in the USA for "unnatural" deaths of school age individuals is now shootings (not cars like in other developed countries) I feel like the expression "when the game gets tough the tough get going should apply. Personally I feel like it's the bil(mil)lionaires new "game" of getting the credit but not doing the commitment.
On the second part {speculation} Because maybe not so rich people lived there before the area became so expensive or moved there for job opportunity + safe place to raise kids ?
If you do a quick Google / chatgpt you'll see that the cost of living compared to median income is extremely bad... So not the worst place but certainly not the best...
I think what you meant is the right way to turn people into serious enemies.
>The right way to fund national needs is taxation.
What is a "National Need".
Education is one.
So Education isn't a state need or a personal need?
Why is Education a National Need?
Because some children might have the bad luck of being born to dumb parents who do not value education. Ensuring that those children should not suffer and every member of the society grows into a well-educated adult who can contribute back is certainly a national need.
That really doesnt answer the question. Like I dont really care about the moral justification, education is important. But Important =/= National.
What is a national need? And why is education specifically a national need?
Things can be both. Just because access to clean water is a national need doesn't mean I personally can stop drinking water.
Right but if I am hungry I dont ask central federal bureaucrats to organise to collect tax in order distribute food to my door.
Great Big National plans are often the least efficient method of organisation, short of maybe asking the UN to get involved.
Why is it a National Need?
Is there evidence that this is the right way? Because it seems to be far less efficient than other ways if funding charitable causes directly by a significant margin.
Likewise, is there evidence for this? Maybe our most "effective" altruism is in fact to pay taxes in a liberal democracy after all.
Painting with a very broad brush, the US is the most charitable country in the world, yet we lag behind many other countries according to various measures of human welfare.
> Likewise, is there evidence for this? Maybe our most "effective" altruism is in fact to pay taxes in a liberal democracy after all.
I think this depends quite a bit on what you're trying to achieve. Hard to measure effectiveness otherwise.
E.g. if you care about global human welfare (and setting aside longtermist ideas), the most effective use of a marginal dollar is to donate money to people in poorer countries (via various methods). One of the main reasons is that the richer countries have a much more robust social welfare system already via taxation.
US "charity" to the UN became highly qualified as a function of both political distance from the UN goals, and regrettable lapses in probity inside the UN, the kind of problem which crops up anywhere and everywhere. Time and place meant they collided, and the US stopped funding the UN because of <reasons> and instead let the charity sector pick up the burden, which meant right wing christian fundamentalism entered the room. It is little wonder that islamic countries became suspicious of e.g. vaccination drives, made only worse by US polital operatives exploiting the polio vaccination runs to track down Bin Laden.
The US was the most charitable nation in the world but it's not a given.
Is it clear the charity approach is more efficient? My sense is many non-profits prioritize fundraising and have the bloat of executives who's main function is to schmooze donors.
I'm sure there are good nonprofits/charities. And there's definitely inefficient public offices that are mainly interested in politics.
My point is "seems less efficient" is kind of weak ground to be asking others for evidence
>My sense is many non-profits prioritize fundraising and have the bloat of executives who's main function is to schmooze donors.
You don't have to have a 'sense', you can look up the overhead for some nonprofits to look and see how much is spent on compensation vs giving/redirecting money to their causes vs. ancillary expenses.
It's often much less than the government in terms of overall efficiency.
"Kind of weak" is an understatement. It's flat out wrong and ridiculous to assume that the best course of action for societal well-being is to let billionaires run free. Or that it's "less efficient" to correct the systemic issues that unfairly tilt things in their favor.
Charity is essentially voluntary. So, in terms of persistence to need, it's highly variable. Some problems demand commitment which charities cannot commit to.
Charity incurs oversight burdens. The UK has a long story about failures in charity, the charity commissioner has had to intercede many times. It would be wrong to assume there are no oversight costs, the thing is that to the charity they may look like externalities. They have to be borne, the state bears the cost.
Charities also usually cannot intercede politically to fix the situation demanding their charitable work. So, charities are excluded from lobbying in some ways, where governments reflect the will of the people and are subject to both good and band consequences.
Charities are abused. Churches for instance. Why do churches qualify for charitable status, when they (in most economies where they are or have been) are established entities with massive landholdings and wealth?
In the end, it's a matter of philosophy. Without being patronising, I tend to think right wing people who believe in personal responsibility and low taxes favour charity because it gives them discretion, to give or not, as a function of how they feel about the recipient, and left wing people who believe in the state as a construct reflecting popular will believe in state functions to implement the burdens individuals cannot manage for themselves.
I say that because my very good friends who donate highly tend to be right wing and tend to make moralising statements about diabetes being a function of a lack of personal self control and so do not fund interventions to prevent diabetes in the working poor because "they lack self control" and also chose not to fund womens reproductive rights on similar grounds "chastity is its own reward" -Bill and Melinda Gates were exceptional in ignoring the fundamentalist christian lobby which came into the room in the Reagan "just say no" years, and funded contraception and abortion in Africa regardless.
Charity seems fine but we should definitly get rid of the tax loopholes.
That would take much of the corruption out of it. These donor advised funds now allow someone to maintain full control of their money while the IRS considers it 'donated' it for a major tax write-offs.
In the 1950s, we taxed income over $400,000 at somewhere around 90%. Anything you made less than that was taxed much less, but every dollar above $400,000 the government took most of it, which effectively put a cap on wages.
Won't be popular on HN, I think we need to move closer to that again. Maybe not that extreme, but that's the proper direction. We can then use that income to tackle big problems.
We also need to tax interest, capital gains, dividends etc. at the same rate as wages.
Maybe first find out why it is not just "we" but whole world moved to far lower tax rate in last six decades.
> We also need to tax interest, capital gains, dividends etc. at the same rate as wages.
"We" can tax every breath of every person alive but we are not going back to 50s for sure.
The problem is that Reagan/Thatcher's failed experiment is now considered an inevitable law of the universe. Taxes can only go down. Anything else is crazy. You get people talking about taxation's effect on the economy as a baseline assumption without any evidence that it actually works like that. The 1950s was a period of huge economic boom with very high tax rates for top earners, which is a counterexample to popular narratives about how high taxes supposedly hurt the economy.
In the private sector, obsession with short term profits and "shareholder value" is the corollary.
Both of these are now polite consensus, inevitable, but have wrecked government, wrecked our economy, and wrecked people's minds.
But would higher taxes nationally result in better funding for education? We are in a climate where coming to a agreement on what is acceptable in classrooms nationwide seems to be impossible.
> We also need to tax interest, capital gains, dividends etc. at the same rate as wages.
How about we first bring back pensions and 30 year jobs before we try and fix that?
At that point why not just go to state-controlled capitalism? That way of life was MUCH closer to competing socio-economic theories to capitalism - than capitalism itself. I saw Sanders' Rogan podcast, I heard his plea - it doesn't work well in today's system.
One of the best things about the freedom of moving from job to job and not relying on pensions or 30-year contracts is that it enables and empowers everyday workers to have the innate, untenable, inalienable "check and balance" on the labor market to choose who they give labor to at any given time - and picket them as well. For the average person: You SHOULD be able to move jobs at any time, you SHOULD be able to not feel pressure of unrealized benefits of a pension 30 years down the road when you do, your housing SHOULD NOT be directly based on your employer ("company towns"), and normalizing systemic status-quo changes that makes it hard to decide/change who cuts your checks is NOT a step in the right direction.
Sanders was right when he said folks in managerial positions - and above - need to care more about their workers, but the businesses that drive the labor market banded together - perhaps unknowingly through a status quo "collective conscious" - to make MOST of your pickings in MOST same-tier jobs look very much alike. There are many ways to fix that in practice across other nations today, like sectoral bargaining; where union experts in a given trade collectively bargain for what SHOULD be an effective minimum wage or minimum benefits package within that trade - instead of the government doing it for them. There's also works councils in Germany that have a similar effect.
Maybe we can't do your idea without the quoted idea.
Of course, this won't be popular on the HN crowd, but I'll say it anyway: What we need is securities tax.
Absolutely any conversion, collateral, or divestiture of securities need to be taxed at the rate of those securities at that time. A lot of plutocrats are playing the system by just basing their loans and the collaterals thereof, and their payments for things, on stocks and securities because they are "unrealized gains".
If securities are enough of a bearer instrument to give loaners confidence for otherwise no-collateral loans, they're enough of a realized gain to be taxed when you use them for a purchase - or alongside one.
TIL Pricilla's was a pediatrician.
At least have the gilded age decadency deceny to build some muesums.
It was part "decadence", part practical. The tax code in the past was gamified to promote philanthropy (or at least erect buildings with your name on them), rather than simply not paying.
Perhaps tax code can gamify building more funding/naming more schools so Chan can keep throwing money at education. At this point probably easier to appeal to 0.01% vanity/legacy than properly tax them.
Museums are getting the same fate as libraries - e14n. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36998643
https://archive.md/ktKEs
Thanks, the original submission had a weird popup that I couldn't close.
>It didn’t have the special education system or disciplinary rules that are required of charter schools, the former administrator said. But students wore recording devices dubbed “speech pedometers” so that software could analyze the speech patterns of children and the adults around them. The technology was designed by a nonprofit to encourage staffers to talk more with students in ways that studies suggest encourage brain and language development.
>“It was beyond naivete,” the former administrator said. “It was hubris.”
What the heck?
Education is hard, and it's surprising how much "gee whizz" type tech / ideas are out there that supposedly fix things like a magic wand. And in the meantime, no disciplinary rules?
Maybe I'm getting old but I don't remember education being seriously broken when I was growing up. It seems to have become a playground of random new ideas that administrators in offices dream up every year. I've heard some crazy stories from family who works in education where this sort of thing wouldn't stand out.
It’s not clear to me what anyone means by broken. Difficult maybe.
Cracks show up when viewed from a lens of "wait...was that domination-oriented, dualistic, whitewashed, imperialistic, nationalistic, colonial indoctrination in the form of education?".
Sounds like a warped lens.
Perhaps better glasses are in order.
Nope! Next. Cell phones and parental non accountability are probably bigger issues.
Note the absence of critical thinking, another issue with the education systems.
I don't disagree with the notion of jingoism in public education. I disagree that it has anything to do with the myriad behavioral and performance issues in public schooling.
As a parent, I can't imagine the chaos that ensues when your kid's school ceases to exist overnight. Keeping that school running is less than pocket change to them. I feel like their action is morally quite shameful.
It is really weird and pathetic to call them shameful. If after all that money and effort, all they get is condemnation driven by entitlement then they shouldnt have done it at all. The school should have gone out of its way to show good outcomes and attract more donors.
Even if this initiative was driven by the state what is to say that it would have been 100% guaranteed to continue? States also run out of money and resources.
Did you read the post?
> CZI has promised a parting gift totaling $50 million to the community. Parents were told students will receive $1,000 to $10,000 for their future education based on age, and the school district received $26.5 million in grant funds last month. The district declined to comment for this article.
And after the end of the 2025-2026 school year is far from overnight.
Yeah, you’re talking about money, but the important thing for a kid is losing their entire context. It feels like being fired, but without understanding why. Money is entirely beside the point.
Yeah that happens too. No one is invulnerable to bad fortune. I dont want to come across as defending the Zuck family. I don't even care about them. But charity should not be an obligation.
Are you a parent?
It's still a very bad situation to abruptly need to find a new school, even if you get a pathetic $1000 coupon for a school which costs much more than that.
Huh if its pathetic parents can refuse that money. Seems crazy entitlement vibes here.
I'm not even talking about the financial status of these students, which due to the nature of the school sounds like it's pretty dire.
I'm merely talking about stability for the child. This would be a stressful event even for a well off child.
That's why I keep asking if you guys are parents. A school change can be a huge deal.
As for why Zuck's conduct is immoral, it's about keeping promises. You say you're going to fund something and solicit people to orient their entire life around it, which is what we do when we enroll our kids in school. Then you take it away. That is ... Almost criminal levels of not keeping your word. I would totally unironically put it on the scale of violence towards the families. It honestly is very offensive, it makes my blood boil.
A reminder that "No Such Thing As a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy" by Linsey McGoey (2015), is an excellent analysis of philanthrocapitalism.
(Spoiler - this book does not provide a ringing endorsement of dubiously acquired wealth being dubiously applied through a commercial / for-profit prism.)
Way I see it based on admittedly limited information, these two are either kowtowing cynical liars who financed this entire chain of social causes for the sake of scoring a certain type of PR value with a certain kind of social demographic and now no longer give a shit because another kind of social posturing is de jure.
Or, they're cowards who can't in the least minimum stand up for the causes they claim to strongly, morally support and are willing to discard them at a moment's hint of sacrifice or trouble.
If the latter, then how cowardly indeed. If you're already a fucking centibillionaire, then what a truly absurd, spineless shit of a human being with zero internal firmness you'd have to be to screw over thousands of people who had really come depend on these programs...
All because you might, possibly, have to stand up to one screaming orangutan and maybe lose a few billion out of a wholly gargantuan fortune that you will never ever be able to spend in a lifetime.
Either way, the saddest part is the people who'd come to depend on these things, now affected by their loss.
> to screw over thousands of people who had really come depend on these programs
So? Should they have been obliged to fund this indefinitely forever and ever? Would you not say the "CZI has promised a parting gift totaling $50 million to the community" part is a little redeeming?
Would you have preferred Zuck to have bought moar yachts instead of supporting education, however briefly?
It's their money and I agree that they have a right to use it however they want, or change its use for their own reasons.
That said, I think you're grossly underestimating how hard it can be for some of the families that were using this school to find an alternative that doesn't cause their kids problems.
With that in mind I'd say there is a sort of moral imperative to preserving a context you created when it's designed for helping vulnerable kids and families. Not a legal rule I'd agree with, but an ethical imperative that shouldn't cut things off without more sustained effort and only a modest cash payoff as compensation.
Given the absolutely colossal fortune of the Zuckerbergs, they could have funded and worked to improve this program for as long as they wanted to, with nary a visible dent in their assets, but (in my opinion during one very convenient space of time) they just decide "nope, fuck it. Here's some cash kids"
or option 3) the social programs didnt work.
> But former leaders of the school who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private information said Chan had grown distant in recent years as the school’s academic performance faltered
>The East Palo Alto project was the billionaire couple’s second major intervention in a city’s education system, after a controversial 2011 gift of $100 million to the Newark public schools. Some experts and community members claimed that the money was largely squandered.
>said Chan had grown distant in recent years as the school’s academic performance faltered
If you've invested the amounts we're talking about here, and made the statements they made about their investments at the get-go, and have the vast resources they have for tweaking and improving these programs, then you can, you know, put a bit more into making them work, instead of shutting them down in one very conveniently timed political climate. It's their money and they can do whatever they want with it, but the whole thing reeks of political expediency either out of spinelessness or shallow original motives.
>>The East Palo Alto project was the billionaire couple’s second major intervention in a city’s education system, after a controversial 2011 gift of $100 million to the Newark public schools. Some experts and community members claimed that the money was largely squandered.
Yeah, the dangers of investing anything in Jersey. Tony Soprano laughs in his grave.. Joke aside, that much earlier project seemed like one very inexperienced attempt that was mishandled right from the start. Giving that much money to a bunch of ambiguously honest bureaucrats is just asking for disaster. Especially when you as the donor have zero internal presence in or real experience with the system you're donating to.
>then you can, you know, put a bit more into making them work
Assuming it's a problem that can be solved by more money. The US has the fifth-highest amount of education spending in the world, behind countries like Luxembourg and Norway, but ahead of Germany, France, UK, Sweden, and Belgium. Some problems can't be fixed with money alone, and throwing good money after bad is foolish.
"said Chan had grown distant in recent years as the school’s academic performance faltered"
If Chan's experiment isn't working, why would we expect her to keep funding it?
The part at the end about it taking 20 years or whatever makes no sense, a child is not in school for 20 years.
when I was making some money finally I could afford to pay for my siblings college.
I told them since the beginning: I'm doing my best, I cannot be sure to be able to pay it until the end. do your best and figure out how to help of I need you.
fortunately I was able to pay all of them until the end. but the lesson is: thank the supporters, hope for the best but understand the uncertainty
Previously related:
A tuition-free school created by Zuckerberg and Chan will shutter next year
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43801082
"The East Palo Alto project was the billionaire couple’s second major intervention in a city’s education system, after a controversial 2011 gift of $100 million to the Newark public schools. Some experts and community members claimed that the money was largely squandered"
Chan & Zuckerberg acted much more responsibly here than Elon and Trump:
> CZI has promised a parting gift totaling $50 million to the community. Parents were told students will receive $1,000 to $10,000 for their future education based on age, and the school district received $26.5 million in grant funds last month. The district declined to comment for this article.
They understood that they were breaking commitments that they had made to parents, and that they were putting an unexpected burden on a local school district, and they tried to address that.
By contrast, Elon and Trump abruptly broke commitments that the US made all over the world. Stopping clinical trials midway, leaving food and medicine sitting to rot in warehouses, etc.
I was just reading the Washington Post, and I saw the full-length headline.
"The Chan-Zuckerbergs stopped funding social causes. 400 kids lost their school."
"Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg’s retreat from funding social issues forced the closure of a school Chan opened for disadvantaged families in Silicon Valley."
I prefer it when billionaires stay out of social causes and buy more yachts and mansions instead.
At least then, everyone can be sure that they're not funding harmful programs. Also, billionaires would be more satisfied and less inclined to engage is harmful politics if they're too busy cruising the world on their yachts.
Keeping billionaires on the hamster wheel is dumb and harmful. They won capitalism. They won at life. That's it, there's no higher goal, that's the game. Give them a medal and let them enjoy their mansions.
Right now, it seems like Billionaires don't realize that they won the game because the people around them keep trying to make them feel like it's not enough.
“It's a positive time, Jimmy. Billionaires are not happy having a billion dollars,” - Bill Burr
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