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What's up with the critical comments in here? How many of the judgemental and jaded posters here donated anything close to this to a charitable cause? Good dee

• jakelazaroff 8y ago
  No one's shaming him for not doing something better. They're shaming him for having a direct role in creating the problem this charity is supposed to resolve.
  • yeukhon 8y ago
    Isn’t this “problem created by” anyone who is rich then?
    • moises_silva 8y ago
      And conveniently the definition of 'rich' for almost everyone is anyone who has more money than me.
    • emodendroket 8y ago
      You certainly would not have to look very hard to find people who would argue that
    • selimnairb 8y ago
      Yes. We should tax billionaires out of existence. This level of wealth and power accumulation is as unseemly as it is dangerous to our democracy and economy.
      • stass 8y ago
        Taking other people money by force is even more dangerous for democracy and economy.
        • emodendroket 8y ago
          Taken to its logical conclusion, this idea means we shouldn't have any government at all.
          • chillacy 8y ago
            Not sure if that’s the line of reasoning. A well known danger of democracy is rule by mob. For instance a tough thing to get right is protecting rights of minority groups. If everyone voted for their own direct benefit, we’d just be locking minorities up and taking their assets with power of the majority. Luckily doesn’t seem to happen much.
            • emodendroket 8y ago
              If the government taking things by force, or by the implied threat of force, is bad, then taxation is bad, and if you don't have any kind of taxation you don't have a government in any meaningful sense.
              • chillacy 8y ago
                I think taxes are a bit better because you're also agreeing to pay your own money (vs only taking other people's money only as the original commenter said). I had a different reading of "taking other people's money by force" as meaning specifically voting to tax a minority group more just because you can. This is based on the GP comment being "We should tax billionaires out of existence" as opposed to "taxes are immoral" OP can clarify if necessary.
                • emodendroket 8y ago
                  That isn't taxing a "minority group." It's just progressive taxation, an idea almost everyone accepts to some extent. "Taxing billionaires out of existence" could be achieved simply by increasing marginal tax rates.
                  • 8y ago
    • jakelazaroff 8y ago
      You could make that argument as well, but I'm specifically talking about Amazon's underpayment of workers and efforts to kill taxes that would fund efforts meant to curb homelessness, among other things. Some of the other replies to my comment have links to articles about these.
  • NeonVice 8y ago
    How is Amazon creating more homeless people?
    • emodendroket 8y ago
      https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/how-amazon-helped-kill-a-seattle-tax-on-business/562736/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/how-a... In case you don't care to read an article they're just coming off an effort to kill a tax that would have affected them and which was specifically designed to combat homelessness.
    • olivermarks 8y ago
      By centralizing giant swathes of the consumption economy to run through Amazon, destroying jobs at every step of the way. Sweden have banned Amazon so their local economies can flourish. I think this is good macro business logic for a nation state. https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-amazon-competition-ecommerce/ https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-amazon-competition-ec...
      • Aunche 8y ago
        So Amazon gets credit for killing jobs, but no credit for creating jobs? Without a doubt Ikea has killed the small time furniture making industry, yet is listed as a "charity."
      • chillacy 8y ago
        My own company has been slowly getting killed by amazon in the past 10 years, but we’ve also killed countless brick and mortar stores along the way. Where will we draw the line? Are we to fight the newfound efficiencies of technologies like the Luddites?
      • opencl 8y ago
        Sweden did not ban Amazon. Amazon just doesn't operate in Sweden (yet). People in Sweden can already buy things from the other EU Amazon stores.
  • moises_silva 8y ago
    So shame on them as opposed to most of society that has an indirect role and we therefore are not part of the problem? Society keeps buying things from Amazon. We as society created Amazon. I don't have a lot of sympathy for big corporations but also dislike when individuals try to disproportionally blame them without taking a look at what we do at an individual level to make a difference. By almost any standard I'd consider the average HN'er 'rich' (myself included) and benefiting of the same conditions that are in some way also responsible for the same problem (tech bubble, big tech corporations) Amazon is allegedly guilty of.
  • sdinsn 8y ago
    Let's not pretend that homelessness has nothing to do with addiction and mental health. Stop avoiding the real issues- it's harmful when everyone pins Washington's problems all on Bezos.
    • jakelazaroff 8y ago
      Who's pretending that? I said Bezos and Amazon play a direct role in creating poverty and homelessness, not that they alone are culpable; obviously there are many factors. Let's also not pretend that homelessness has nothing to do with our economy and political systems.
• pinewurst 8y ago
  I don't think there's any proof yet that Bezos' promised contribution is any more real than the ludicrous Zuckerberg foundation.
  • imglorp 8y ago
    Hopefully Gates and Buffet will get Bezos and Zuck onboard with the giving pledge. Those two will have a tangible impact on humanity. Page and Brin wouldn't hurt, either.
• maym86 8y ago
  It because the source of the money has cynically evaded tax for years and pays some of his workers less than they need to live such that they are supported by food stamps. The working conditions in Amazon factories are notoriously tough. It's hard to take charitable giving seriously when someone has run their company in a cutthroat manner for years at the expence of some of the poorest workers.He could do better with his own businesses first. I hope it works out and does some good but I hope this explains to you why people are cynical.
• jahaja 8y ago
  The world isn't skin deep. There's a clear historical continuity to these appeasements. A poor person giving half their bread to a sick neighbor should be applauded, however, the Church of old providing charity from the king while still promoting the king's divine right to indiscriminate rule should not be.
• tedivm 8y ago
  Asking who else has donated anything close to this is a bit silly considering most people aren't billionaires. It might be more fair to ask how many people have donated 1.2% of their net worth to charity, and I think the answer will surprise you in that a lot of people have. A second question is whether or not this makes up for how Bezos has gotten his money and the potential damages on society that has. If I burn down a house and then donate to the rebuilding it's still a net negative. The systems that allow people to amass this much wealth need to be looked at critically to see if they really are benefitting society or are just causing increased problems. As a final note Bezos is getting a lot of negative attention because he's made comments before about how hard it is to get rid of his wealth while seemingly ignoring a lot of really good ways for him to do so. It took years of negative attention to get him moving on causes like this.
  • dsabanin 8y ago
    Have you donated more than 1.2% of your net worth to charity?
    • TuGuQuKu 8y ago
      Who hasn't???
    • tedivm 8y ago
      I donate more than 1.2% of my income each year to charity, and that amounts to a lot more than 1.2% of my net worth (it should be noted that people in my generation tend to have a negative net wealth due to student loans and being locked out of the housing market, which means most of them can meet this requirement by giving five dollars to a homeless person on the street if you want to use a more liberal definition for charity). Specifically, I donate money to (and this is not in any particular order)- * ACLU * EFF * NAMI * NAACP * BLM * NPR (local affiliate) * Between $40 and $100 a week directly to homeless people. I also try to volunteer time as well. What charities do you donate to, and more importantly why is that even relevant to a conversation about what responsibilities people with obscene amounts of wealth should have?
    • jakelazaroff 8y ago
• rifung 8y ago
  > What's up with the critical comments in here? How many of the judgemental and jaded posters here donated anything close to this to a charitable cause? I mean it's much easier to donate to charitable causes when you have more than enough for yourself and your family so that's not an apples to apples comparison, but he's also donating less than 1.5% of his wealth. Have I donated that much? No but I think I'm close and I still don't even have enough for my own emergency fund.
  • onetimemanytime 8y ago
    >>I mean it's much easier to donate to charitable causes when you have more than enough for yourself and your family so that's not an apples to apples comparison, but he's also donating less than 1.5% of his wealth So he should donate 99% on that cause and today? No tomorrow, no other worthy causes? Bezos, alone, cannot solve all the world's problems. He should be commended for his donation and willingness to help solve the problem. Haters gonna hate...they can't sleep well at night unless they do that.
• BurritoAlPastor 8y ago
  $2 billion is, like, 1.5% of Bezos's net worth. I would like to hope that many of us have given at least 1% of our net worths to charity.
• s73v3r_ 8y ago
  Because he's contributed much to the problem, especially with the wages he's paid to his warehouse employees. We'll see if he's actually able to contribute to the solution.
• TuGuQuKu 8y ago
  I donate much more than 1.2% of my net worth to charity, and every 2 weeks to boot. Somehow I also manage to do it without publicizing it on dozens of media outlets every time or blowing tens of millions on a disgustingly wasteful luxury lifestyle. But where's my army of loser internet sycophants?
• DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I'm one of the people being critical. My definition of "better" is hardly made up randomly on the spot. If someone intentionally gave people AIDS, then volunteered to cover the cost of their pain meds, would you say "Ah, what a great guy!" Or would you go "Oh, really now? Puh-leez!" As someone who sees the systemic problems that cause homelessness because I have studied it for many years, I'm going "Oh, puh-leez!" Your framing of the issue is incredibly hard to engage because it presumes those years of study do not exist, aren't a valid basis for my opinion etc. (Or a slightly more accurate metaphor: They have AIDS, they keep screwing people and refusing to hear they shouldn't and are generously offering to pay for pain killers, but absolutely refuse to stop screwing people.)