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Jeff Bezos tweet seeking philanthropic ideas draws 42,000 replies

88 points by virtualwhys 9y ago

ckastner 9y ago
I'm getting so sick of hearing the word 'disrupt'. It's been so overused that it I feel that it has basically lost all meaning. Edit: I see that the HN title has been changed in the meantime.
- kevmo 9y ago
  Gotta get those eyeballs.
  - ruleabidinguser 9y ago
    Were disrupting eyeballs
- agumonkey 9y ago
  mainstream spoils everything. btw, what about Bezos paying taxes instead of "optimizing" ?
  - wolfgke 9y ago
    What evidence can you provide that the government provides a more efficient allocation of ressources? It is well-known that a lot of the taxes go into the military-industrial complex.
    - agumonkey 9y ago
      None, it's beyond the question.
    - codyb 9y ago
      Isn't the USA pretty much middle of the pack when it comes to percentage of GDP spent on the military? And I feel like I don't hear too much about Raytheon Billionaires although I'm sure some of the upper echelon at these big contractors must be doing pretty well. It's also well known a lot of taxes go into our healthcare complex. Is that good or bad? Seems like we overpay for worse outcomes statistically but we also have some of the best healthcare facilities in the world and pioneer a decent amount of drugs. At the end of the day both are employing a lot of solidly middle class folk who are spending their money moving the economy which seems to be the ideal situation in a lot of ways.
  - nostrebored 9y ago
    When you play games, do you actively not explore how to make the rules work to the best of your ability? The problem is not companies "optimizing", it's that the tax code is so complicated that they can do it in the first place.
    - agumonkey 9y ago
      Nice try, tax code may not be the best, but they're not playing a game with unfair rules anyhow. It's just that they have the manpower and financial mass to step on the line. A citizen trying to "play" the same game who be hit hard by the system. Here's the issue.
      - nostrebored 9y ago
        This is literally only due to complexity of the tax code. I don't understand how we're not saying the same thing? The citizen is being a rational actor by not stepping on the line of the tax system, and so is the corporation playing the other role.
        agumonkey 9y ago
        I see, still not 100% agreeing but I see. Simpler code ensures equality (no need for manpower to use it)
- FussyZeus 9y ago
  I blame TechCrunch. They fucking beat that term to death like a wounded horse.
- netcan 9y ago
  Well... thus always with cliches. They're often good before they're cliches, a concise illustrative choice of words that conveys nuanced meaning even though it's literally nonsensical. She set the stage on fire. Her fans think the sun shines out of her arse. Most cliche's seem to gradually get long winded and meaningless as they age. Venkatesh Rao in his epic "Gervais Principle" has some good bits about Gervais' character speaking in all cliches. In American Gods, the new gods speak in all cliches and the show is doing a great job adapting it to their version of that pantheon. That kind of cliche overuse seems to go together with meaninglessess. The cliche of cliche rich dialects is corporatespeak, where it's used for both its euphamistic quality and the safe haven^ of meaninglessness it creates. Synergies and customer centric approaches. TechStartupSpeak is (I guess) a subdialect of corporatespeak. It's churning out cliches at a good clip. "Disrupt" conveyed a lot of meaning at first, subtly referencing a particular theory of innovation and cutomer adoption of new technologies.. examples like digital cameras & microcomputers. Strictly speaking, Tesla's wasn't "disruptive" strategy because they started with sportscars instead of electric bikes. But, that kind of nuance is long gone from this particular cliche. Disrupt is interchangeable with "revolutionize" or and other "be really successful" cliches. ^I guess idioms are cliches that survive without going through the normal lifecyle. Theory needs fleshing out perhaps.
Mithaldu 9y ago
Great marketing campaign, but philantropic stuff needs to be long term to be of any use. Short term stuff can in fact be counter-productive by hiding that there is a problem that needs to be resolved. The best solution for almost every response he got is: Introduce better legislation. Even charities are just bandaids over actual problems.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  You can't legislate societies problems away. Legislation is just bandaids applied with the threat of violence for those who seek to remove them.
  - Cozumel 9y ago
    > 'You can't legislate societies problems away' Could you elaborate? It seems pretty obvious that you can. No child labour, minimum wage laws, equal rights etc.
    - bobabooey02 9y ago
      The reason legislation like this isn't helping our country at the moment is because of globalization. Labor laws may help the workers, but it's a net negative if those laws just lead to the outsourcing of jobs. We need to choose between globalization for maximal gains for the rich, or protectionism for quality of life for our workers. At the moment, a middle ground doesn't seem possible.
      - matthewmacleod 9y ago
        Globalisation is fine where regulation can ensure that standards are still met. There is nothing that prevents domestic legislation setting standards for the working conditions of those who produce goods in foreign countries. Protectionism isn't going to help workers in the long term. We live in a global market; accepting that and using legislation to deal with negative outcomes is a totally valid approach. The fact that it hasn't been done is because of the large amount of money standing in the way of it.
sethammons 9y ago
Truly affordable housing. Something in the $300 range at the most. Lots of regulations, at least in California, do things to prevent micro apartments, which I think could help the situation.
- melling 9y ago
  Create an unsustainable system then seek philanthropy to fix the problem? Why not simply fix the system?
  - samstave 9y ago
    Seems to me, that is exactly what he stated: Legislation is blocking innovation and ability to provide micro-apartments. We need to change the laws to fix this. I know this first hand, as I am trying to work in the tiny house movement here in the bay area. In talking with the city and county of alameda, the code is the problem. The code states that any land parcel for a single family is required to be minumum of 2,300 square feet. So you cannot sub-div a parcel for several tiny homes, as any structure with a door, sleeping and cooking facilities is considered a dwelling and is subject to requiring a 2,300 SF lot... I am working with several tiny home manufacturers on this - but the laws need to change.
    - greeneggs 9y ago
      It's a political problem, and in fact a very local political problem. If there was any consensus on how to fix it, it wouldn't be difficult to fix it. I don't want billionaires stepping into local politics with their own preferred solutions.
    - majewsky 9y ago
      Can't you just make a small apartment building (with maybe 3 or 4 apartments all connected by a hallway to fulfil the single-outer-door requirement)?
      - adventured 9y ago
jlebrech 9y ago
why doesn't he create a big city with communal living and top rate security for refugees?
- samstave 9y ago
  ... Or for anyone?
  - jlebrech 9y ago
    or that too.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
6stringmerc 9y ago
Bring back the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) concept and significantly over-pay the employees on the condition half goes into savings accounts for family use or to pay down debts of some sort. Employ it as a method to give uneducated (HS degree) or underemployed (able bodied with Bachelors and $8/hr job), rehabilitate and early-release incarcerated US Citizens and put them to work in infrastructure needs. So, this way we address numerous factors: 1) The large uneducated mass of young people excluded from the workforce or otherwise drowning in college debt, 2) Work to reduce the prison population and actually rehabilitate people with worthwhile skills (metallurgy, equipment, etc), and 3) Fix the crumbling, pot-hole riddled, creaking, aging US infrastructure in probably record time. Yes it will cost a fuck-ton of money but because these low-level employees will have money to spend, the wheels of US Consumerist economy will be able to pick up. Former students in the program could pay down debt AND save for after they're released from the program commitment. Poor people are poor because they spend. The US wealth gap is so distorted the rich have choked this system. They sit on piles of assets and spend very little by comparison, even if it's millions of dollars per year. These are economic realities that Bezos is part of causing to be an issue. It's almost as if Amazon's business model isn't viable without the public infrastructure that is now in desperate need of investment. Hm.
- samstave 9y ago
  Totally agree! This is why I always skeptically look at any philanthropic announcements.... if billionaires like Gates, Buffet, Zuck, Bezos simply funded the above - it would go way further, and have long asting effect on the future of this nation in so many profound ways. Rather than "give away half their wealth" - why not do the above now and actually see it change the surface of the nation? --- I am getting involved in the tiny house movement. Clayton homes (berkshire hathaway) has a tiny home division... but BHs entities (like clayton and karsten) in the housing market are so poorly regarded: they build sub-standard homes, their employees are treated like crap, the quality of their products are low because they do not provide skilled training to their employees, the working conditions are fairly poor etc... its maddening to see billionaires and governments claim all this "making the world a better place" platitudenal BS, but a critical program like CCC would be realize some serious material benefit in every sector.
losteverything 9y ago
How can one person read 42k anything. I hope he does, and not someone for him. I remember justice roberts saying in an interview how he read letters to president Reagan, and pass along those he thought appropriate. I was truly disappointed.
- quakenul 9y ago
  That is awfully naive but also very sweet. You already posed the right question: How can one person read 42k anything? Answer: They can't. Delegation is not actually a horrible thing though.
- r3bl 9y ago
  > How can one person read 42k anything. It's actually quite easy in this case. Most of them are threads, from a quick skim on the replies. So you separate them into threads, treating the person that replied to the top comment (so, mentioning @JeffBezos and himself only) as one idea. Replies to these replies are not usually ideas, but more of questions, feedbacks and such. So, I would say that there are at most 10% of usable tweets (out of 42k replies in total), which you then combine into specific ideas (chain responding about an idea is still just one idea) and you get down to something like 500-1000. Out of those, you'll might find 50 or so that are actually doable and not blatant trolling (I mean, one of the top replies is literally "I could need some money and I would consider it very philanthropic") and you get something usable and easily digestible within a day or so. I would say that he needs to read them, but he definitely needs someone to make it digestible before starting to read them.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
campbellmorgan 9y ago
Lobby Congress to outlaw lobbying and restrict campaign donations to $20 / person!
- cies 9y ago
  This. Next have a many-party political system so parties have to form coalitions. Or even better, only vote for and pay taxes to the lowest level of gov't (village, neighbourhood); then replace all higher levels of gov't with committees that are on topic (health care, roads, public transport, etc.) that are funded and mandated by those local gov't bodies. Note that committees do not have exclusive "right", local gov't bodies can switch or create their own if they feel the need.
- zanny 9y ago
  That is just trying to regulate an addicts intake of drug. Private campaign funding, period, is a corrupting influence in any form. The real solution is public campaign finance. We have this lovely new thing that enables instant communication between anyone, anywhere called the Internet, where information duplication and propagation is effectively free. Start there. Anyone can be a candidate on a state run open source collaborative hosting service for political campaigns. Those represent the first layer - to not alienate the technologically disinterested, provide TV time and dead tree info pamphlets on the top candidates. The difference is that right now you take bribes to enable you to saturate peoples attention on TV and in print, with this system the state buys the face time and the viable candidates share it. No, it is not perfect. You have the problem of view distortion where anyone who is abjectly against technology won't have their voice heard early on in the process. But Facebook has really demonstrated the ability to motivate people to engage with technology where they would never have fathomed doing it before - I strongly feel a properly implemented system like this would get extremely high adoption and engagement rates, well beyond what we get now with traditionally ad driven campaigns run by laundered money. The good news is if you do cut money out of campaigning cold turkey then it is very easy to see the vectors of corruption - paid for political speech is an obvious violation, so you don't get private "third party" campaign ads. Part of running for an elected position can be the requirement of full financial disclosure - we know who pays you, and for what. Any time money changes hands for political ends you can directly prosecute on those grounds alone - because you aren't allowed to privately finance your political interests, you have to use public forums. There is a lot of nuance in such a system, and much nitpicking. But the fundamentals - anyone can run, and the viable runners get public airtime shared by viable candidates equally - and where paid promotion is astutely illegal - you can dramatically cut down on campaign corruption in ways just trying to limit contributions (again, it has been an ongoing and losing battle to control private finance of political campaigns since the country was founded) cannot do, because innate in the idea of private citizens giving money to candidates to then spend attracting more citizens to support them you have a feedback loop that enables corruption because any citizen can be bought off on who they support and they can just be an indirection of big donor monied interests cash going into the pockets of crooked politicians.
postfacto 9y ago
What about treating his employees decently?
louithethrid 9y ago
What this species needs is not philantrophy, but a new frontier- something, that equalizes, as everyone gets a chance to throw themselves at it. A wild West, and to be honest the comp science revolution was a disappointment in that regard. We need a method to get ressources for cheap out of the gravity well, so if he built a cannon to the moon, and researched a way to get humanity (0,1,0) there, that would be the greatest gift to this species.
mc32 9y ago
As I mentioned last time, my preference would be to set up an endowment which would support the retraining of workers who are displaced by automation into areas where there is a skills shortage. When 1,200 jobs disappear because whole foods automates sorting and packing to their stores, this is traceable as a direct consequence of automation. Those people should be interviewed assessed and retrained into viable opportunities.
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > As I mentioned last time, my preference would be to set up an endowment which would support the retraining of workers who are displaced by automation into areas where there is a skills shortage. If one can believe the HN crowd there is a shortage of programmers. For this you don't need retraining, you can just teach it yourself on the internet.
  - mc32 9y ago
    I'm thinking union or non union worker in their late forties to early sixties losing their jobs to automation. Maybe some get trained in growth areas that they never thought of or considered seriously for lack of time and money to pursue. Bezos's endowment could fund a restraining and or apprenticeship for these displaced workers. His enterprises and other like it _are_ actively displacing long time workers, if he's feeling philanthropy what better way to help those you helped displace?
  - Amygaz 9y ago
    Beyond retraining, there is dignity. Most workers don't feel like their job means anything, that their effort is not valued properly, or do a job by obligation, not because they like it.
    - wolfgke 9y ago
      > Beyond retraining, there is dignity. Most workers don't feel like their job means anything, that their effort is not valued properly, or do a job by obligation, not because they like it. And what would retraining change on this situation? Why should they like the job that comes afterwards? To state it cynically: Wouldn't brainwashing people to love their job be a much more effective solution to this problem?
adventured 9y ago
The idea here isn't that Bezos is going to get some stellar idea from the Twitter crowd that he couldn't have gotten from an hour sitting down with the best people at the Gates Foundation. The idea is propaganda / PR. Bezos is letting the world know that while yes, he's about to become the world's richest person, he's going to be a good mogul and begin giving lots of money away, so please don't attack him too harshly for the soon to be $100 billion pile of riches. The $1b per year in space spending wasn't going to be viewed as enough of a good deed, given the business dominance Amazon is about to enjoy and all the horrible press that is about to follow in the coming years. The Twitter campaign is Bezos firing up his own PR effort ahead of becoming anointed as the world's richest (which will generate thousands of headlines & stories, plenty of which will be negative, when it occurs; and so long as he retains that title, the headlines will grow worse inverse to his philanthropy levels).
- triangleman 9y ago
  His PR is top notch, for sure: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-lyons/amazon-drones-60-minutes_b_4372910.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-lyons/amazon-drones-60-min...
johnpython 9y ago
The person who suggested building AWS data centers in Africa was right on the mark. I would love to see that
- mtmail 9y ago
  Maybe I'm missing something. Can you explain the philanthropic reasoning behind the idea? Other than lower cost or latency.
  - johnpython 9y ago
    This was the original tweet: https://twitter.com/asemota/status/875497242987307008 https://twitter.com/asemota/status/875497242987307008. He explains it better than I could.
sah2ed 9y ago
In the tweet Bezos wrote [0]: > This tweet is a request for ideas. I'm thinking about a philanthropy strategy that is the opposite of how I mostly spend my time - working on the long term. For philanthropy, I find I'm drawn to the other end of the spectrum: the right now. Perhaps, the focus on right now is to find cool ways to end up with a lower tax bill? Bezos recently sold about $1billion worth of Amazon stock [1] [0] https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/875418348598603776 https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/875418348598603776 [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-04/amazon-ceo-bezos-sells-about-1-billion-in-company-stock https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-04/amazon-ce...
- digitalzombie 9y ago
  > Perhaps, the focus on right now is to find cool ways to end up with a lower tax bill? Sure he most likely doing it to lower tax. Capital gain is 15% no? Either way at least he's doing it in a helpful way. Even if I don't agree with Amazon monopolistic tendencies.
ErikVandeWater 9y ago
Is this attention-seeking, or is there a process to reviewing these replies (maybe see what's common to many of them)? 140 characters for a great idea is very tough. And I'm sure the people advising him on this are geniuses with lots of experience.

88 points by virtualwhys 9y ago

I'm getting so sick of hearing the word 'disrupt'. It's been so overused that it I feel that it has basically lost all meaning. Edit: I see that the HN title has been changed in the meantime.

kevmo 9y ago
Gotta get those eyeballs.
- ruleabidinguser 9y ago
  Were disrupting eyeballs
agumonkey 9y ago
mainstream spoils everything. btw, what about Bezos paying taxes instead of "optimizing" ?
- wolfgke 9y ago
  What evidence can you provide that the government provides a more efficient allocation of ressources? It is well-known that a lot of the taxes go into the military-industrial complex.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    None, it's beyond the question.
  - codyb 9y ago
    Isn't the USA pretty much middle of the pack when it comes to percentage of GDP spent on the military? And I feel like I don't hear too much about Raytheon Billionaires although I'm sure some of the upper echelon at these big contractors must be doing pretty well. It's also well known a lot of taxes go into our healthcare complex. Is that good or bad? Seems like we overpay for worse outcomes statistically but we also have some of the best healthcare facilities in the world and pioneer a decent amount of drugs. At the end of the day both are employing a lot of solidly middle class folk who are spending their money moving the economy which seems to be the ideal situation in a lot of ways.
- nostrebored 9y ago
  When you play games, do you actively not explore how to make the rules work to the best of your ability? The problem is not companies "optimizing", it's that the tax code is so complicated that they can do it in the first place.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    Nice try, tax code may not be the best, but they're not playing a game with unfair rules anyhow. It's just that they have the manpower and financial mass to step on the line. A citizen trying to "play" the same game who be hit hard by the system. Here's the issue.
    - nostrebored 9y ago
      This is literally only due to complexity of the tax code. I don't understand how we're not saying the same thing? The citizen is being a rational actor by not stepping on the line of the tax system, and so is the corporation playing the other role.
      - agumonkey 9y ago
        I see, still not 100% agreeing but I see. Simpler code ensures equality (no need for manpower to use it)
FussyZeus 9y ago
I blame TechCrunch. They fucking beat that term to death like a wounded horse.
netcan 9y ago
Well... thus always with cliches. They're often good before they're cliches, a concise illustrative choice of words that conveys nuanced meaning even though it's literally nonsensical. She set the stage on fire. Her fans think the sun shines out of her arse. Most cliche's seem to gradually get long winded and meaningless as they age. Venkatesh Rao in his epic "Gervais Principle" has some good bits about Gervais' character speaking in all cliches. In American Gods, the new gods speak in all cliches and the show is doing a great job adapting it to their version of that pantheon. That kind of cliche overuse seems to go together with meaninglessess. The cliche of cliche rich dialects is corporatespeak, where it's used for both its euphamistic quality and the safe haven^ of meaninglessness it creates. Synergies and customer centric approaches. TechStartupSpeak is (I guess) a subdialect of corporatespeak. It's churning out cliches at a good clip. "Disrupt" conveyed a lot of meaning at first, subtly referencing a particular theory of innovation and cutomer adoption of new technologies.. examples like digital cameras & microcomputers. Strictly speaking, Tesla's wasn't "disruptive" strategy because they started with sportscars instead of electric bikes. But, that kind of nuance is long gone from this particular cliche. Disrupt is interchangeable with "revolutionize" or and other "be really successful" cliches. ^I guess idioms are cliches that survive without going through the normal lifecyle. Theory needs fleshing out perhaps.

Mithaldu 9y ago

Great marketing campaign, but philantropic stuff needs to be long term to be of any use. Short term stuff can in fact be counter-productive by hiding that there is a problem that needs to be resolved. The best solution for almost every response he got is: Introduce better legislation. Even charities are just bandaids over actual problems.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago
You can't legislate societies problems away. Legislation is just bandaids applied with the threat of violence for those who seek to remove them.
- Cozumel 9y ago
  > 'You can't legislate societies problems away' Could you elaborate? It seems pretty obvious that you can. No child labour, minimum wage laws, equal rights etc.
  - bobabooey02 9y ago
    The reason legislation like this isn't helping our country at the moment is because of globalization. Labor laws may help the workers, but it's a net negative if those laws just lead to the outsourcing of jobs. We need to choose between globalization for maximal gains for the rich, or protectionism for quality of life for our workers. At the moment, a middle ground doesn't seem possible.
    - matthewmacleod 9y ago
      Globalisation is fine where regulation can ensure that standards are still met. There is nothing that prevents domestic legislation setting standards for the working conditions of those who produce goods in foreign countries. Protectionism isn't going to help workers in the long term. We live in a global market; accepting that and using legislation to deal with negative outcomes is a totally valid approach. The fact that it hasn't been done is because of the large amount of money standing in the way of it.

sethammons 9y ago

Truly affordable housing. Something in the $300 range at the most. Lots of regulations, at least in California, do things to prevent micro apartments, which I think could help the situation.

melling 9y ago
Create an unsustainable system then seek philanthropy to fix the problem? Why not simply fix the system?
- samstave 9y ago
  Seems to me, that is exactly what he stated: Legislation is blocking innovation and ability to provide micro-apartments. We need to change the laws to fix this. I know this first hand, as I am trying to work in the tiny house movement here in the bay area. In talking with the city and county of alameda, the code is the problem. The code states that any land parcel for a single family is required to be minumum of 2,300 square feet. So you cannot sub-div a parcel for several tiny homes, as any structure with a door, sleeping and cooking facilities is considered a dwelling and is subject to requiring a 2,300 SF lot... I am working with several tiny home manufacturers on this - but the laws need to change.
  - greeneggs 9y ago
    It's a political problem, and in fact a very local political problem. If there was any consensus on how to fix it, it wouldn't be difficult to fix it. I don't want billionaires stepping into local politics with their own preferred solutions.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    Can't you just make a small apartment building (with maybe 3 or 4 apartments all connected by a hallway to fulfil the single-outer-door requirement)?
    - adventured 9y ago

jlebrech 9y ago

why doesn't he create a big city with communal living and top rate security for refugees?

samstave 9y ago
... Or for anyone?
- jlebrech 9y ago
  or that too.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

6stringmerc 9y ago

Bring back the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) concept and significantly over-pay the employees on the condition half goes into savings accounts for family use or to pay down debts of some sort. Employ it as a method to give uneducated (HS degree) or underemployed (able bodied with Bachelors and $8/hr job), rehabilitate and early-release incarcerated US Citizens and put them to work in infrastructure needs. So, this way we address numerous factors: 1) The large uneducated mass of young people excluded from the workforce or otherwise drowning in college debt, 2) Work to reduce the prison population and actually rehabilitate people with worthwhile skills (metallurgy, equipment, etc), and 3) Fix the crumbling, pot-hole riddled, creaking, aging US infrastructure in probably record time. Yes it will cost a fuck-ton of money but because these low-level employees will have money to spend, the wheels of US Consumerist economy will be able to pick up. Former students in the program could pay down debt AND save for after they're released from the program commitment. Poor people are poor because they spend. The US wealth gap is so distorted the rich have choked this system. They sit on piles of assets and spend very little by comparison, even if it's millions of dollars per year. These are economic realities that Bezos is part of causing to be an issue. It's almost as if Amazon's business model isn't viable without the public infrastructure that is now in desperate need of investment. Hm.

samstave 9y ago
Totally agree! This is why I always skeptically look at any philanthropic announcements.... if billionaires like Gates, Buffet, Zuck, Bezos simply funded the above - it would go way further, and have long asting effect on the future of this nation in so many profound ways. Rather than "give away half their wealth" - why not do the above now and actually see it change the surface of the nation? --- I am getting involved in the tiny house movement. Clayton homes (berkshire hathaway) has a tiny home division... but BHs entities (like clayton and karsten) in the housing market are so poorly regarded: they build sub-standard homes, their employees are treated like crap, the quality of their products are low because they do not provide skilled training to their employees, the working conditions are fairly poor etc... its maddening to see billionaires and governments claim all this "making the world a better place" platitudenal BS, but a critical program like CCC would be realize some serious material benefit in every sector.

losteverything 9y ago

How can one person read 42k anything. I hope he does, and not someone for him. I remember justice roberts saying in an interview how he read letters to president Reagan, and pass along those he thought appropriate. I was truly disappointed.

quakenul 9y ago
That is awfully naive but also very sweet. You already posed the right question: How can one person read 42k anything? Answer: They can't. Delegation is not actually a horrible thing though.
r3bl 9y ago
> How can one person read 42k anything. It's actually quite easy in this case. Most of them are threads, from a quick skim on the replies. So you separate them into threads, treating the person that replied to the top comment (so, mentioning @JeffBezos and himself only) as one idea. Replies to these replies are not usually ideas, but more of questions, feedbacks and such. So, I would say that there are at most 10% of usable tweets (out of 42k replies in total), which you then combine into specific ideas (chain responding about an idea is still just one idea) and you get down to something like 500-1000. Out of those, you'll might find 50 or so that are actually doable and not blatant trolling (I mean, one of the top replies is literally "I could need some money and I would consider it very philanthropic") and you get something usable and easily digestible within a day or so. I would say that he needs to read them, but he definitely needs someone to make it digestible before starting to read them.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

campbellmorgan 9y ago

Lobby Congress to outlaw lobbying and restrict campaign donations to $20 / person!

cies 9y ago
This. Next have a many-party political system so parties have to form coalitions. Or even better, only vote for and pay taxes to the lowest level of gov't (village, neighbourhood); then replace all higher levels of gov't with committees that are on topic (health care, roads, public transport, etc.) that are funded and mandated by those local gov't bodies. Note that committees do not have exclusive "right", local gov't bodies can switch or create their own if they feel the need.
zanny 9y ago
That is just trying to regulate an addicts intake of drug. Private campaign funding, period, is a corrupting influence in any form. The real solution is public campaign finance. We have this lovely new thing that enables instant communication between anyone, anywhere called the Internet, where information duplication and propagation is effectively free. Start there. Anyone can be a candidate on a state run open source collaborative hosting service for political campaigns. Those represent the first layer - to not alienate the technologically disinterested, provide TV time and dead tree info pamphlets on the top candidates. The difference is that right now you take bribes to enable you to saturate peoples attention on TV and in print, with this system the state buys the face time and the viable candidates share it. No, it is not perfect. You have the problem of view distortion where anyone who is abjectly against technology won't have their voice heard early on in the process. But Facebook has really demonstrated the ability to motivate people to engage with technology where they would never have fathomed doing it before - I strongly feel a properly implemented system like this would get extremely high adoption and engagement rates, well beyond what we get now with traditionally ad driven campaigns run by laundered money. The good news is if you do cut money out of campaigning cold turkey then it is very easy to see the vectors of corruption - paid for political speech is an obvious violation, so you don't get private "third party" campaign ads. Part of running for an elected position can be the requirement of full financial disclosure - we know who pays you, and for what. Any time money changes hands for political ends you can directly prosecute on those grounds alone - because you aren't allowed to privately finance your political interests, you have to use public forums. There is a lot of nuance in such a system, and much nitpicking. But the fundamentals - anyone can run, and the viable runners get public airtime shared by viable candidates equally - and where paid promotion is astutely illegal - you can dramatically cut down on campaign corruption in ways just trying to limit contributions (again, it has been an ongoing and losing battle to control private finance of political campaigns since the country was founded) cannot do, because innate in the idea of private citizens giving money to candidates to then spend attracting more citizens to support them you have a feedback loop that enables corruption because any citizen can be bought off on who they support and they can just be an indirection of big donor monied interests cash going into the pockets of crooked politicians.

postfacto 9y ago

What about treating his employees decently?

louithethrid 9y ago

What this species needs is not philantrophy, but a new frontier- something, that equalizes, as everyone gets a chance to throw themselves at it. A wild West, and to be honest the comp science revolution was a disappointment in that regard. We need a method to get ressources for cheap out of the gravity well, so if he built a cannon to the moon, and researched a way to get humanity (0,1,0) there, that would be the greatest gift to this species.

mc32 9y ago

As I mentioned last time, my preference would be to set up an endowment which would support the retraining of workers who are displaced by automation into areas where there is a skills shortage. When 1,200 jobs disappear because whole foods automates sorting and packing to their stores, this is traceable as a direct consequence of automation. Those people should be interviewed assessed and retrained into viable opportunities.

wolfgke 9y ago
> As I mentioned last time, my preference would be to set up an endowment which would support the retraining of workers who are displaced by automation into areas where there is a skills shortage. If one can believe the HN crowd there is a shortage of programmers. For this you don't need retraining, you can just teach it yourself on the internet.
- mc32 9y ago
  I'm thinking union or non union worker in their late forties to early sixties losing their jobs to automation. Maybe some get trained in growth areas that they never thought of or considered seriously for lack of time and money to pursue. Bezos's endowment could fund a restraining and or apprenticeship for these displaced workers. His enterprises and other like it _are_ actively displacing long time workers, if he's feeling philanthropy what better way to help those you helped displace?
- Amygaz 9y ago
  Beyond retraining, there is dignity. Most workers don't feel like their job means anything, that their effort is not valued properly, or do a job by obligation, not because they like it.
  - wolfgke 9y ago
    > Beyond retraining, there is dignity. Most workers don't feel like their job means anything, that their effort is not valued properly, or do a job by obligation, not because they like it. And what would retraining change on this situation? Why should they like the job that comes afterwards? To state it cynically: Wouldn't brainwashing people to love their job be a much more effective solution to this problem?

adventured 9y ago

The idea here isn't that Bezos is going to get some stellar idea from the Twitter crowd that he couldn't have gotten from an hour sitting down with the best people at the Gates Foundation. The idea is propaganda / PR. Bezos is letting the world know that while yes, he's about to become the world's richest person, he's going to be a good mogul and begin giving lots of money away, so please don't attack him too harshly for the soon to be $100 billion pile of riches. The $1b per year in space spending wasn't going to be viewed as enough of a good deed, given the business dominance Amazon is about to enjoy and all the horrible press that is about to follow in the coming years. The Twitter campaign is Bezos firing up his own PR effort ahead of becoming anointed as the world's richest (which will generate thousands of headlines & stories, plenty of which will be negative, when it occurs; and so long as he retains that title, the headlines will grow worse inverse to his philanthropy levels).

triangleman 9y ago
His PR is top notch, for sure: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-lyons/amazon-drones-60-minutes_b_4372910.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-lyons/amazon-drones-60-min...

johnpython 9y ago

The person who suggested building AWS data centers in Africa was right on the mark. I would love to see that

mtmail 9y ago
Maybe I'm missing something. Can you explain the philanthropic reasoning behind the idea? Other than lower cost or latency.
- johnpython 9y ago
  This was the original tweet: https://twitter.com/asemota/status/875497242987307008 https://twitter.com/asemota/status/875497242987307008. He explains it better than I could.

sah2ed 9y ago

In the tweet Bezos wrote [0]: > This tweet is a request for ideas. I'm thinking about a philanthropy strategy that is the opposite of how I mostly spend my time - working on the long term. For philanthropy, I find I'm drawn to the other end of the spectrum: the right now. Perhaps, the focus on right now is to find cool ways to end up with a lower tax bill? Bezos recently sold about $1billion worth of Amazon stock [1] [0] https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/875418348598603776 https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/875418348598603776 [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-04/amazon-ceo-bezos-sells-about-1-billion-in-company-stock https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-04/amazon-ce...

digitalzombie 9y ago
> Perhaps, the focus on right now is to find cool ways to end up with a lower tax bill? Sure he most likely doing it to lower tax. Capital gain is 15% no? Either way at least he's doing it in a helpful way. Even if I don't agree with Amazon monopolistic tendencies.

ErikVandeWater 9y ago

Is this attention-seeking, or is there a process to reviewing these replies (maybe see what's common to many of them)? 140 characters for a great idea is very tough. And I'm sure the people advising him on this are geniuses with lots of experience.