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That's great for the community, but in a larger sense we should question what the point is of amassing huge concentrated wealth and then giving a small part (or

That's great for the community, but in a larger sense we should question what the point is of amassing huge concentrated wealth and then giving a small part (or even a large part) back to make isolated positive impacts. Wouldn't it be better if it was impossible to amass that concentration of wealth in the first place? Then the token donations would not be necessary. This is not supposed to be a cynical post, but this pattern is indicative of a general problem with the system.

anfedorov 11y ago
I think there's a good argument to be made that personally accumulated wealth spent on experimental projects such as this one is used better than if it were taxed and added to the relatively enormous federal budget. DoD yearly spend is greater than 10x of Zuck's net worth, after all.
- dublinben 11y ago
  You're pushing a false dichotomy of personal wealth or Federal income tax. It would be much easier and effective to simply preempt the concentration of such wealth in the first place by ensuring more equitable salaries across the workforce. No onerous redistribution necessary.
  - panic 11y ago
    How would you force employers to pay their employees equitable salaries? What if a job isn't worth that much to an employer?
    - dalke 11y ago
      Turn the question around - how do you force employees to accept horrible salaries? You make sure there is no job safety so they are scared to ask for a raise. You make sure there is no good social safety net, so they fear for losing their job. You make sure the employees cannot effectively organize to present a more effective bargaining force. And you get people to believe that a business model that can't pay its employees an equitable salary should still be allowed to continue.
      - panic 11y ago
        I completely agree. My point was that, without some extra source of money, forcing employers to pay a particular salary won't work. We need to make it possible to live without a salary.
        dalke 11y ago
        You may agree in principle, but you are using terms like "forcing employers" which contains a built-in bias. Here's the same question with a different bias: "How do you restore power to the employees so they get equitable salaries?" Your question assumes that what we have now is natural, and that force is required to change things. If the shop owner's thumb has been pushing down on the scales for years, then the solution is not that the customer needs to apply an opposite force to balance thing out, but the shop owner needs to stop applying force. (Okay, applying a counter-force, as in Leslie Thrasher's "Tipping the Scales", would be a short-term solution, but it's also an easily corrupted one, and it makes most of the people feel like they are being ripped off.) To start the answer to my question, first remove so-called "right-to-work" laws, or at least the legal requirement that non-members can "force unions to provide without compensation grievance services that are paid for by union members." (Quoting Wikipedia Right-to-work_law#Unfairness .) There's plenty more, but it's a belabored topic that you can easily find elsewhere.
        chillwaves 11y ago
        Check out basic income.
    - zanny 11y ago
      Then the job is not worth doing. Ditch digging and filling has zero productive utility. If there is something someone wants done, but they value it so little its not worth the time to provide another human with a living wage, it is not work worthy of being done. If it actually mattered to whoever wants it done, they would offer more for it. Remember, corporate profits are only the indirection of the translation of time into things and acts. People buy a McRib to eat, but if they had to pay the supply chain of that McRib reasonable wages they would probably rather eat something else for that price, something healthier and tastier most likely. Though in all honesty, the real problem is not forcing employers who do employ people to give them more money than they would be willing to work for. The problem is that those wages constitute the survival of that individual, even when in our current society it is asinine to think people are contributing to one another's survival more than they are contributing to superfluous wants. The fraction of our workforce involved in providing food, shelter, security, and health are probably at most one in ten. The rest are there for wants. Our social organization needs to start reflecting that more rather than making the unskilled writhe in destitution for scraps of a living.
      - cinquemb 11y ago
        >…even when in our current society it is asinine to think people are contributing to one another's survival more than they are contributing to superfluous wants. The fraction of our workforce involved in providing food, shelter, security, and health are probably at most one in ten. The rest are there for wants. Our social organization needs to start reflecting that more rather than making the unskilled writhe in destitution for scraps of a living. I wish this was stated more often, at least to expose people to converse on ways we can allocate resources in different/arguably better ways compared to say 5k years ago.
    - mindslight 11y ago
      Fix monetary policy so that people would be able to save in liquid assets rather than financing everything and living month to month. As an individual's savings rise, their autonomy increases while the marginal utility of an earned dollar decreases. They'd naturally demand a higher salary. If that job wasn't worth that much to an employer, either the cost of the resulting service would rise or the job wouldn't get done, just like now.
    - crdoconnor 11y ago
      >How would you force employers to pay their employees equitable salaries? * Provide more competition for labor from the public sector by employing more people in the public sector (i.e. the opposite of austerity). * Raise the minimum wage significantly. >What if a job isn't worth that much to an employer? "isn't worth it" = "can't employ that person and make a profit" Corporate profits are at all time highs and labor's share of income is at an all time low. Ergo there is a massive amount of slack at the low end. Every corporation that employs a lot of people will scream until they're blue in the face that they will fire half of their workforce if you raise the minimum wage by so much as a cent, but when it actually goes up, they don't do anything of the sort. Raising the minimum wage to $20 or $25 / hr would be one of the most direct ways to transfer money from 0.01% to the pockets of the people who do all the actual work in this country. It would not only drag salaries up it would drag the cost of property down. You just have to deprogram all of the people who erroneously believe that it will cause mass unemployment, massive inflation, or who think that it's somehow unfair to people earning $minimum wage + $x (who would all get a pay raise too).
kristopolous 11y ago
shifting the narrative is what's needed. When I hear people talk about "being rich" these days they aren't talking about owning luxury things but being out of debt with enough time away from work to pursuit other things and enough capital to support having a child. The big problem is that being unslaved from obligatory wage is quickly being considered to be "rich".
onewaystreet 11y ago
> Wouldn't it be better if it was impossible to amass that concentration of wealth in the first place? Billionaire tech founders are the worst examples to use for this argument. Zuckerberg's wealth is mostly paper wealth from his stock ownership. His net worth fluctuates greatly depending on Facebook's stock price.
maaku 11y ago
> Wouldn't it be better if it was impossible to amass that concentration of wealth in the first place? This was a total non-sequitur. Mind explaining the logic there?
forrestthewoods 11y ago
No it wouldn't be better. Wealth is not zero sum. Accumulation of wealth does not mean other people are denied wealth.
- kome 11y ago
  > Wealth is not zero sum. Why are you so sure?
  - forrestthewoods 11y ago
    Uh huh yes. The sum wealth of humans today is vastly larger than that of humans 100, 500, 1000, 5000, and 10000 years ago. Vastly.
    - asgard1024 11y ago
      Yeah, maybe it isn't zero sum when you include time dimension, but at each point in time, it still is zero sum. Why that matters? Because humans need to eat at every point in time, and have limited timespan. In fact most of the today's wealth was generated by people who are long dead. Despite this wealth being effectively "free", it is still a zero sum game how to distribute it.
      - forrestthewoods 11y ago
        New wealth is literally created every second of every day.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
josephagoss 11y ago
> Wouldn't it be better if it was impossible to amass that concentration of wealth in the first place? Just curious, but that would deny many millionaires and billionaires the chance to change the world. For sure, SpaceX and Tesla probably would not exist [1]. I'm surprised that this sentiment is growing among many people that somehow they believe the Government is going to be better at experimenting and managing these types of far out projects rather than the free market. SpaceX has probably the most advanced rockets in the world, far surpassing that of all other countries. I am not sure I want the future of our species solely in the hands of politicians and not giving private enterprise a chance to rise up and have a shot. If I misunderstood the gist of your post, I do apologise. [1] I know they both have taken Government money, but both Tesla and SpaceX could not have been started by a Government politician or employee.
- noobermin 11y ago
  Let's see, going to the moon, the internet, the atomic bomb, the space shuttle...I think the government has proven to be effect in the past. Not that the free market hasn't been effective too, but one might make the mistake of serious selection bias to really believe that the government can't perform "far out projects" well, especially when the will to perform them doesn't exist in the free market yet.
  - mentat 11y ago
    The Internet wasn't the Internet before the Commercial Internet Exchange (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Internet_eXchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Internet_eXchange). I'm not sure how much credit the government can take for what it is now really. The space shuttle is no longer in service and failed with significant fatalities more than once. The atomic bomb is one of the most horrific technologies which exists. I'm not sure you're making your case with these.
    - noobermin 11y ago
      Do you want me to list the failings of businesses and the horrific things they've created? Is it even fair to lump all players in the free market under one umbrella as it is to lump all government programs and governments of nations and call it "government"? The post I referred to argued about the ability of the government to lead "out there" projects well, and all of those are out there projects which had some "success" whether you agree with that definition or not.
mgraczyk 11y ago
Where would the incentive be to try risky experimental business ventures? To invent new things? I think you underestimate the motivating power of economic opportunity. It's wise to let those who are good at allocating resources be in charge of allocating resources. The best way to decide who is good at allocating resources is to create a system in which those who are good at allocating resources have opportunities to do so.
- plonh 11y ago
  Extracting profit from a system is different from efficiently allocating resources. At an extremely example, consider bank robbery. Then consider LIBOR.
skwirl 11y ago
The wealth isn't "amassed," it is created. It hasn't been taken from anyone else. But I'm guessing you wouldn't ask "Wouldn't it be better if it was impossible to create that much wealth in the first place?"
- plonh 11y ago
  Created by who?
tellthetruth1 11y ago
They have done it before. It is called communism. Nobody can can amass any wealth. No one has any incentive to start a company. Everybody is an employee, of the government. Guess how that turned out? I wonder why these days we still have people think that's a good idea? Is it a sign of lack of education, or lack of common sense, or lack of critical thinking skill?

anfedorov 11y ago

I think there's a good argument to be made that personally accumulated wealth spent on experimental projects such as this one is used better than if it were taxed and added to the relatively enormous federal budget. DoD yearly spend is greater than 10x of Zuck's net worth, after all.

dublinben 11y ago
You're pushing a false dichotomy of personal wealth or Federal income tax. It would be much easier and effective to simply preempt the concentration of such wealth in the first place by ensuring more equitable salaries across the workforce. No onerous redistribution necessary.
- panic 11y ago
  How would you force employers to pay their employees equitable salaries? What if a job isn't worth that much to an employer?
  - dalke 11y ago
    Turn the question around - how do you force employees to accept horrible salaries? You make sure there is no job safety so they are scared to ask for a raise. You make sure there is no good social safety net, so they fear for losing their job. You make sure the employees cannot effectively organize to present a more effective bargaining force. And you get people to believe that a business model that can't pay its employees an equitable salary should still be allowed to continue.
    - panic 11y ago
      I completely agree. My point was that, without some extra source of money, forcing employers to pay a particular salary won't work. We need to make it possible to live without a salary.
      - dalke 11y ago
        You may agree in principle, but you are using terms like "forcing employers" which contains a built-in bias. Here's the same question with a different bias: "How do you restore power to the employees so they get equitable salaries?" Your question assumes that what we have now is natural, and that force is required to change things. If the shop owner's thumb has been pushing down on the scales for years, then the solution is not that the customer needs to apply an opposite force to balance thing out, but the shop owner needs to stop applying force. (Okay, applying a counter-force, as in Leslie Thrasher's "Tipping the Scales", would be a short-term solution, but it's also an easily corrupted one, and it makes most of the people feel like they are being ripped off.) To start the answer to my question, first remove so-called "right-to-work" laws, or at least the legal requirement that non-members can "force unions to provide without compensation grievance services that are paid for by union members." (Quoting Wikipedia Right-to-work_law#Unfairness .) There's plenty more, but it's a belabored topic that you can easily find elsewhere.
      - chillwaves 11y ago
        Check out basic income.
  - zanny 11y ago
    Then the job is not worth doing. Ditch digging and filling has zero productive utility. If there is something someone wants done, but they value it so little its not worth the time to provide another human with a living wage, it is not work worthy of being done. If it actually mattered to whoever wants it done, they would offer more for it. Remember, corporate profits are only the indirection of the translation of time into things and acts. People buy a McRib to eat, but if they had to pay the supply chain of that McRib reasonable wages they would probably rather eat something else for that price, something healthier and tastier most likely. Though in all honesty, the real problem is not forcing employers who do employ people to give them more money than they would be willing to work for. The problem is that those wages constitute the survival of that individual, even when in our current society it is asinine to think people are contributing to one another's survival more than they are contributing to superfluous wants. The fraction of our workforce involved in providing food, shelter, security, and health are probably at most one in ten. The rest are there for wants. Our social organization needs to start reflecting that more rather than making the unskilled writhe in destitution for scraps of a living.
    - cinquemb 11y ago
      >…even when in our current society it is asinine to think people are contributing to one another's survival more than they are contributing to superfluous wants. The fraction of our workforce involved in providing food, shelter, security, and health are probably at most one in ten. The rest are there for wants. Our social organization needs to start reflecting that more rather than making the unskilled writhe in destitution for scraps of a living. I wish this was stated more often, at least to expose people to converse on ways we can allocate resources in different/arguably better ways compared to say 5k years ago.
  - mindslight 11y ago
    Fix monetary policy so that people would be able to save in liquid assets rather than financing everything and living month to month. As an individual's savings rise, their autonomy increases while the marginal utility of an earned dollar decreases. They'd naturally demand a higher salary. If that job wasn't worth that much to an employer, either the cost of the resulting service would rise or the job wouldn't get done, just like now.
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    >How would you force employers to pay their employees equitable salaries? * Provide more competition for labor from the public sector by employing more people in the public sector (i.e. the opposite of austerity). * Raise the minimum wage significantly. >What if a job isn't worth that much to an employer? "isn't worth it" = "can't employ that person and make a profit" Corporate profits are at all time highs and labor's share of income is at an all time low. Ergo there is a massive amount of slack at the low end. Every corporation that employs a lot of people will scream until they're blue in the face that they will fire half of their workforce if you raise the minimum wage by so much as a cent, but when it actually goes up, they don't do anything of the sort. Raising the minimum wage to $20 or $25 / hr would be one of the most direct ways to transfer money from 0.01% to the pockets of the people who do all the actual work in this country. It would not only drag salaries up it would drag the cost of property down. You just have to deprogram all of the people who erroneously believe that it will cause mass unemployment, massive inflation, or who think that it's somehow unfair to people earning $minimum wage + $x (who would all get a pay raise too).

kristopolous 11y ago

shifting the narrative is what's needed. When I hear people talk about "being rich" these days they aren't talking about owning luxury things but being out of debt with enough time away from work to pursuit other things and enough capital to support having a child. The big problem is that being unslaved from obligatory wage is quickly being considered to be "rich".

onewaystreet 11y ago

> Wouldn't it be better if it was impossible to amass that concentration of wealth in the first place? Billionaire tech founders are the worst examples to use for this argument. Zuckerberg's wealth is mostly paper wealth from his stock ownership. His net worth fluctuates greatly depending on Facebook's stock price.

maaku 11y ago

> Wouldn't it be better if it was impossible to amass that concentration of wealth in the first place? This was a total non-sequitur. Mind explaining the logic there?

forrestthewoods 11y ago

No it wouldn't be better. Wealth is not zero sum. Accumulation of wealth does not mean other people are denied wealth.

kome 11y ago
> Wealth is not zero sum. Why are you so sure?
- forrestthewoods 11y ago
  Uh huh yes. The sum wealth of humans today is vastly larger than that of humans 100, 500, 1000, 5000, and 10000 years ago. Vastly.
  - asgard1024 11y ago
    Yeah, maybe it isn't zero sum when you include time dimension, but at each point in time, it still is zero sum. Why that matters? Because humans need to eat at every point in time, and have limited timespan. In fact most of the today's wealth was generated by people who are long dead. Despite this wealth being effectively "free", it is still a zero sum game how to distribute it.
    - forrestthewoods 11y ago
      New wealth is literally created every second of every day.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

josephagoss 11y ago

> Wouldn't it be better if it was impossible to amass that concentration of wealth in the first place? Just curious, but that would deny many millionaires and billionaires the chance to change the world. For sure, SpaceX and Tesla probably would not exist [1]. I'm surprised that this sentiment is growing among many people that somehow they believe the Government is going to be better at experimenting and managing these types of far out projects rather than the free market. SpaceX has probably the most advanced rockets in the world, far surpassing that of all other countries. I am not sure I want the future of our species solely in the hands of politicians and not giving private enterprise a chance to rise up and have a shot. If I misunderstood the gist of your post, I do apologise. [1] I know they both have taken Government money, but both Tesla and SpaceX could not have been started by a Government politician or employee.

noobermin 11y ago
Let's see, going to the moon, the internet, the atomic bomb, the space shuttle...I think the government has proven to be effect in the past. Not that the free market hasn't been effective too, but one might make the mistake of serious selection bias to really believe that the government can't perform "far out projects" well, especially when the will to perform them doesn't exist in the free market yet.
- mentat 11y ago
  The Internet wasn't the Internet before the Commercial Internet Exchange (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Internet_eXchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Internet_eXchange). I'm not sure how much credit the government can take for what it is now really. The space shuttle is no longer in service and failed with significant fatalities more than once. The atomic bomb is one of the most horrific technologies which exists. I'm not sure you're making your case with these.
  - noobermin 11y ago
    Do you want me to list the failings of businesses and the horrific things they've created? Is it even fair to lump all players in the free market under one umbrella as it is to lump all government programs and governments of nations and call it "government"? The post I referred to argued about the ability of the government to lead "out there" projects well, and all of those are out there projects which had some "success" whether you agree with that definition or not.

mgraczyk 11y ago

Where would the incentive be to try risky experimental business ventures? To invent new things? I think you underestimate the motivating power of economic opportunity. It's wise to let those who are good at allocating resources be in charge of allocating resources. The best way to decide who is good at allocating resources is to create a system in which those who are good at allocating resources have opportunities to do so.

plonh 11y ago
Extracting profit from a system is different from efficiently allocating resources. At an extremely example, consider bank robbery. Then consider LIBOR.

skwirl 11y ago

The wealth isn't "amassed," it is created. It hasn't been taken from anyone else. But I'm guessing you wouldn't ask "Wouldn't it be better if it was impossible to create that much wealth in the first place?"

plonh 11y ago
Created by who?

tellthetruth1 11y ago

They have done it before. It is called communism. Nobody can can amass any wealth. No one has any incentive to start a company. Everybody is an employee, of the government. Guess how that turned out? I wonder why these days we still have people think that's a good idea? Is it a sign of lack of education, or lack of common sense, or lack of critical thinking skill?