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To me, there's planning ahead, with a large emergency fund and survival supplies for one's family, and then there's hoarding money and resources. "When you st
by detcader 8y ago
To me, there's planning ahead, with a large emergency fund and survival supplies for one's family, and then there's hoarding money and resources.
"When you start talking about whether it is moral to be rich, you end up heading down some difficult logical paths. If I am obligated to use my wealth to help people, am I not obligated to keep doing so until I am myself a pauper? Surely this obligation attaches to anyone who consumes luxuries they do not need, or who has some savings that they are not spending on malaria treatment for children. But the central point I want to make here is that the moral duty becomes greater the more wealth you have. If you end up with a $50,000 a year or $100,000 a year salary, we can debate what amount you should spend on helping other people. But if you earn $250,000 or 1 million, it’s quite clear that the bulk of your income should be given away. You can live very comfortably on $100,000 or so and have luxury and indulgence, so anything beyond is almost indisputably indefensible." ~ Nathan Robinson, It's Basically Just Immoral To Be Rich
- nonbel 8y agoOr you can save all that money to work on your own projects like curing cancer. Eg, tens or hundreds of billions of dollars are being wasted every year on crappy (not even reproducible in principle) medical research: https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2016/01/14/paul-glasziou-and-iain-chalmers-is-85-of-health-research-really-wasted/ https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2016/01/14/paul-glasziou-and-iain-... How do you expect anyone to compete with the government and fund useful medical research if they aren't allowed to accumulate enough wealth to compete with the tidal wave of crap that governments are producing? You need to "hoard" at least a couple hundred million dollars to even hope to compete with that.
- detcader 8y agoMaybe we can agree if people in positions like Larry Ellison's or Elon Musk's were hoarding money with the intention of funding medical research, setting up entities that make it difficult-to-impossible to blow it all on buying a Hawaiian island or lifting a car into space for entertainment, then we wouldn't be having this exchange. If you look at the latest news stories about Memorial Sloan Kettering (ProPublica is a place to start) and conclude that the government should minimize involvement in medical research for the betterment humankind Because Competition... you will certainly find plenty of friends, I suppose
- nonbel 8y agoI'm not saying competition is good for medical research, but having done medical research I am well aware of the unbelievable rate at which crappy papers are being published. And then when you try to publish a paper you're expected to somehow address all these previous crappy papers... We simply need some alternative to the current system and they are all being drowned out because they simply cant compete funding-wise. Also, think about Elon Musk with 22 billion (https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/elon-r-musk/ https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/elon-r-musk/). His entire wealth is what governments currently waste on crappy medical research every couple months. Lets say NIH is producing 99.99% crap (about 1 in 10k papers is useful) at ~$30 billion per year. Elon musk could set up MIH (Musk Institutes of Health) that is 100x more efficient (producing 1/100th the papers, but that are "only" 99% crap) for ~$300 million/year. After 73 years, about one human lifetime, the fund would be bankrupt. That's why I say you need to accumulate at least a couple hundred million dollars to hope to have an effect.