9 ms·

Sergey Brin has a secret disaster relief charity

66 points by rdp 6y ago

jdkee 6y ago
Tax billionaires and let democratically elected governments perform this public service.
- Zarel 6y ago
  I think Slate Star Codex makes a pretty good argument why this is a bad idea: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billionaire-philanthropy/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billio...
- tasuki 6y ago
  The government already has infinite cash, yet Brin is faster in sending disaster relief. Would more cash somehow make the government's response quicker? In my opinion, it is great we have ultra-rich people who decide to spend their resources in ways that help others in ways the government currently isn't able to.
awillen 6y ago
Truly commendable that he would do this, but deeply terrible that a private citizen, no matter how wealthy, can beat governments to the punch on this kind of aid.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > can beat governments to the punch on this kind of aid. Yes, exactly this. Not "can provide the aid", but "first to the punch". You really hit the nail on the head. The morality of massive wealth accumulation -- and the morality of various mechanisms for changing that accumulation -- is definitely something that reasonable people can have a polite and respectable debate about. But it is absolutely unacceptable that wealthy individuals are beating government to the punch in disaster relief and preparedness. COVID-19 is the dry run, and the USA has absolutely failed on such a profound level that we should have actual existential concerns about how broken our government has become (and there's plenty of blame to go around). I really hope the outcome is "competent government, regardless of size, and sabotaging implementation is treasonous" as a bipartisan consensus.
  - wutbrodo 6y ago
    Is this really that surprising? Governments' advantage is crafting certain kinds of incentives that markets can't, but it's pretty much a guarantee that government will be more incompetent at whatever specific task they put their mind to, in large part because of the burden of democratic accountability. Conditioned on the resources and incentives being centralized (in Brin), why wouldn't you expect his organization to be more competent?
    - throwawaygh 6y ago
      Yes, the poor performance of the US government in COVID-19 is astounding and unique among governments. In no small part due to exactly this attitude. The US Government was the first institution in the world to put a man on the moon. A half century before the libertarian corporatism figured out the market incentives to merely put stuff into low orbit. Which even communism figured out a half century ago. And even now the lead investor is government, because both public and private equity is too chicken-shit to lead investment in even tried-and-true tech when the dollar amounts get too big. Excellence in government is possible. There is no magic "gub'mit" pixie dust which makes that institution by fiat incompetent. Governments and businesses are just collections of people doing stuff. Getting all religious about the difference between the two is counter-productive. The question here is one of utilitarian division of responsibility. And, btw, capitalists didn't save the day on COVID-19 in the USA either. 120K+ dead and growing. We failed the dry run.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - 3131s 6y ago
      > democratic accountability That's so far from what exists now in the US, it's doubtful that it's an inherent factor in our government's dysfunction. There are many governments that aren't totally useless, so if you're looking at the US and thinking that we can't do any better, that shows a serious lack of imagination and perspective.
- leoh 6y ago
  I'm sure he'd agree with you; it's not an either/or situation.
- dmckeon 6y ago
  As a thought experiment, imagine some wealthy private citizen who could afford to spend, say, $10 million USD and had a few hundred employees to draw a team from, and adequate transportation to a disaster location. Now identify a country that could respond with a similar level of aid in less time. Not more aid in more time, but just “beat to the punch” with a useful initial response. Citations preferred.
- whack 6y ago
  Unfortunately, we are living in an era of "America First" where a vast segment of the population has no interest in engaging with or providing aid to the rest of the world. Not to mention a sizable sub-segment that has no interest in providing aid even to their fellow citizens, who happen to check a different demographic box. The US government can put Sergey to shame... if it wanted to. But it's unlikely that it will anytime soon.
  - adventured 6y ago
    > Unfortunately, we are living in an era of "America First" where a vast segment of the population has no interest in engaging with or providing aid to the rest of the world. Little has changed about the US foreign aid budget in the last several years, despite your attempted pitch. The foreign aid budget has not been slashed, the US is still spending around ~1% of its budget on foreign aid, the same level it was spending under Obama. Here are the foreign aid disbursement numbers by year: 2012: $46b, 2013: $46b, 2014: $41b, 2015: $48b, 2016: $47b, 2017: $45b, 2018: $46b, and 2019 disbursement figures are partial in the foreign aid explorer. Mostly the US is failing to boost its foreign aid. Trump doesn't control the US budget (he has some limited influence) and there is a split power situation in the US Congress. The US still provides approximately 1/2 of all global food aid, and has been doing that for a century. The US typically provides 300% more global food aid in a given year than all of Europe combined for example. 4% of the world's population, providing 50%+ of the world's food aid. Those selfish Americans, routinely saving the world from famines and hunger for a century and saving tens of millions (not a typo) of lives in the process. "The United States is, by far, the world’s largest international food-aid donor. Almost every year since the 1950s, it has been responsible for more than 50 percent of the billions of tons of food shipped from the parts of the world with a surplus to the parts of the world that are hungry." https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/05/how-the-us-became-the-worlds-largest-food-aid-donor/560951/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/05/how-the-u... The US is also still keeping millions of people alive in Africa that have HIV/AIDS, courtesy of PEPFAR.
    - chmod775 6y ago
      >1/2 of all global food aid You're just cherry picking numbers. The US has a pretty high per capita amount of arable land among western countries. It's not surprising they'd provide a lot of food aid. But there's more to foreign aid than providing food. An actually useful metric is looking at per-capita spending on combined foreign aid, which solidly puts the US ($95.52) behind Canada ($122.04), Germany ($214.73), the UK ($284.85), and obviously behind top-spenders such as Norway ($812.58), Sweden ($701.10), Luxembourg ($609.48), etc. It also puts them behind the EU: The total spending of the EU was $73.80 billion from member states and $13.85 billion from EU institutions, which works out to $196.5 per capita. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_country_donors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_countr... Food is obviously one of the most important ways of providing foreign aid combating an immediate problem, and it's great the US are using their geography to help out, but it's not exactly fair to pretend others aren't contributing.
michaelangerman 6y ago
Besides monarchs in the past, for the first time in the history of Planet Earth we have many people and corporations that have more money than governments and so with that comes the responsibility of "acting accordingly". I believe that in a good light this will continue to assist humanity in ways never thought of before as human ingenuity is always more nimble than large bureaucratic organizations.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  Andrew Carnegie definitely had "more money than governments". Same with other titans of that time. He was a really shit person when in came to labor -- hiring literal private armies to straight up lay siege to his workers -- but he did basically create the "rich guy gives away his money as a social obligation" model of... maintaining... democratic... government? Or, to be less coy, model of staving off communist/socialist/fascist revolution. I truly and sincerely hope today's ultra billionaires are as smart and realistic as Carnegie in this respect. Carnegie emphasized education in his giving. Limited success. His library movement was largely successful, but his trade school turned into yet another hyper expensive prestinge-driven private university. Although I guess it was the brith-place of a lot of the computer technologies that made the current crop of ultra billionaires rich. I think we're over-due for someone to emphasize healthcare in their giving. (Gates did this, but not in the USA.) We're also over due for a labor backlash against this sort of obscene wealth concentration (and not even as a value-laden statement... just as a "lessons from history" thing, the pendulum will probably swing).
  - michaelangerman 6y ago
    That trade school which is now CMU did not start out being a hyper expensive prestige driven university. For years prior to the computer era it was a humble university in Pittsburgh. "In 1900, he donated $1 million for the creation of a technical institute for the city of Pittsburgh, envisioning a school where working-class men and women of Pittsburgh could learn practical skills, trades and crafts that would enhance their careers, lives and communities." It was not until the dawn of the computer era that things started to change. https://www.cmu.edu/about/history.html https://www.cmu.edu/about/history.html See this link for more details.
BooneJS 6y ago
Team Rubicon is another NGO that provides disaster relief. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Rubicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Rubicon
flyinglizard 6y ago
> But the use of ex-military personnel for humanitarian and conservation work is also controversial, according to Rosaleen Duffy, a professor of politics and international relations at the University of Sheffield. No, Professor Duffy, the use of ex- or active - military personnel to render aid is not controversial. It's a widely accepted and successful practice.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- totetsu 6y ago
  At some point ex-military might just mean good at operations and logistics.
  - GuiA 6y ago
    I recently took some college classes later in life (being dropped in with a bunch of 18 year olds at 30 is an interesting experience), and was blown away by the few ex military guys (roughly my age) in the classes. Of course it might be self selecting since it’s the ones who chose to go to school after their military career ended, but they were consistently some of the most mature, level headed people I had ever met. Definitely changed my outlook on folks coming from the military.
- 0xy 6y ago
  Switzerland is a model for this. Given their neutral and famously anti-confrontational manner, their armies do a lot of civil construction and aid work. The US should do more of that kind of thing.
  - areyousure 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Corps_of_Engineers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Corps_of_En... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unified_Response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unified_Response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unified_Assistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unified_Assistance
waterofclear 6y ago
This wing was donated by "anonymous". All eyes look at Ted Danson
yardie 6y ago
So he’s just doing this for the ‘gram. Even the NGO director stated they respond to exciting disasters: hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions. I wonder if they’ll be equally deployed to the disasters that don’t fit a 24 hour news cycle: drought, sea level rise, and pandemics. The kind of disasters that sneak in slowly and then overwhelm all at once.

66 points by rdp 6y ago

jdkee 6y ago

Tax billionaires and let democratically elected governments perform this public service.

Zarel 6y ago
I think Slate Star Codex makes a pretty good argument why this is a bad idea: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billionaire-philanthropy/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billio...
tasuki 6y ago
The government already has infinite cash, yet Brin is faster in sending disaster relief. Would more cash somehow make the government's response quicker? In my opinion, it is great we have ultra-rich people who decide to spend their resources in ways that help others in ways the government currently isn't able to.

awillen 6y ago

Truly commendable that he would do this, but deeply terrible that a private citizen, no matter how wealthy, can beat governments to the punch on this kind of aid.

throwawaygh 6y ago
> can beat governments to the punch on this kind of aid. Yes, exactly this. Not "can provide the aid", but "first to the punch". You really hit the nail on the head. The morality of massive wealth accumulation -- and the morality of various mechanisms for changing that accumulation -- is definitely something that reasonable people can have a polite and respectable debate about. But it is absolutely unacceptable that wealthy individuals are beating government to the punch in disaster relief and preparedness. COVID-19 is the dry run, and the USA has absolutely failed on such a profound level that we should have actual existential concerns about how broken our government has become (and there's plenty of blame to go around). I really hope the outcome is "competent government, regardless of size, and sabotaging implementation is treasonous" as a bipartisan consensus.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  Is this really that surprising? Governments' advantage is crafting certain kinds of incentives that markets can't, but it's pretty much a guarantee that government will be more incompetent at whatever specific task they put their mind to, in large part because of the burden of democratic accountability. Conditioned on the resources and incentives being centralized (in Brin), why wouldn't you expect his organization to be more competent?
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    Yes, the poor performance of the US government in COVID-19 is astounding and unique among governments. In no small part due to exactly this attitude. The US Government was the first institution in the world to put a man on the moon. A half century before the libertarian corporatism figured out the market incentives to merely put stuff into low orbit. Which even communism figured out a half century ago. And even now the lead investor is government, because both public and private equity is too chicken-shit to lead investment in even tried-and-true tech when the dollar amounts get too big. Excellence in government is possible. There is no magic "gub'mit" pixie dust which makes that institution by fiat incompetent. Governments and businesses are just collections of people doing stuff. Getting all religious about the difference between the two is counter-productive. The question here is one of utilitarian division of responsibility. And, btw, capitalists didn't save the day on COVID-19 in the USA either. 120K+ dead and growing. We failed the dry run.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - 3131s 6y ago
    > democratic accountability That's so far from what exists now in the US, it's doubtful that it's an inherent factor in our government's dysfunction. There are many governments that aren't totally useless, so if you're looking at the US and thinking that we can't do any better, that shows a serious lack of imagination and perspective.
leoh 6y ago
I'm sure he'd agree with you; it's not an either/or situation.
dmckeon 6y ago
As a thought experiment, imagine some wealthy private citizen who could afford to spend, say, $10 million USD and had a few hundred employees to draw a team from, and adequate transportation to a disaster location. Now identify a country that could respond with a similar level of aid in less time. Not more aid in more time, but just “beat to the punch” with a useful initial response. Citations preferred.
whack 6y ago
Unfortunately, we are living in an era of "America First" where a vast segment of the population has no interest in engaging with or providing aid to the rest of the world. Not to mention a sizable sub-segment that has no interest in providing aid even to their fellow citizens, who happen to check a different demographic box. The US government can put Sergey to shame... if it wanted to. But it's unlikely that it will anytime soon.
- adventured 6y ago
  > Unfortunately, we are living in an era of "America First" where a vast segment of the population has no interest in engaging with or providing aid to the rest of the world. Little has changed about the US foreign aid budget in the last several years, despite your attempted pitch. The foreign aid budget has not been slashed, the US is still spending around ~1% of its budget on foreign aid, the same level it was spending under Obama. Here are the foreign aid disbursement numbers by year: 2012: $46b, 2013: $46b, 2014: $41b, 2015: $48b, 2016: $47b, 2017: $45b, 2018: $46b, and 2019 disbursement figures are partial in the foreign aid explorer. Mostly the US is failing to boost its foreign aid. Trump doesn't control the US budget (he has some limited influence) and there is a split power situation in the US Congress. The US still provides approximately 1/2 of all global food aid, and has been doing that for a century. The US typically provides 300% more global food aid in a given year than all of Europe combined for example. 4% of the world's population, providing 50%+ of the world's food aid. Those selfish Americans, routinely saving the world from famines and hunger for a century and saving tens of millions (not a typo) of lives in the process. "The United States is, by far, the world’s largest international food-aid donor. Almost every year since the 1950s, it has been responsible for more than 50 percent of the billions of tons of food shipped from the parts of the world with a surplus to the parts of the world that are hungry." https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/05/how-the-us-became-the-worlds-largest-food-aid-donor/560951/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/05/how-the-u... The US is also still keeping millions of people alive in Africa that have HIV/AIDS, courtesy of PEPFAR.
  - chmod775 6y ago
    >1/2 of all global food aid You're just cherry picking numbers. The US has a pretty high per capita amount of arable land among western countries. It's not surprising they'd provide a lot of food aid. But there's more to foreign aid than providing food. An actually useful metric is looking at per-capita spending on combined foreign aid, which solidly puts the US ($95.52) behind Canada ($122.04), Germany ($214.73), the UK ($284.85), and obviously behind top-spenders such as Norway ($812.58), Sweden ($701.10), Luxembourg ($609.48), etc. It also puts them behind the EU: The total spending of the EU was $73.80 billion from member states and $13.85 billion from EU institutions, which works out to $196.5 per capita. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_country_donors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_countr... Food is obviously one of the most important ways of providing foreign aid combating an immediate problem, and it's great the US are using their geography to help out, but it's not exactly fair to pretend others aren't contributing.

michaelangerman 6y ago

Besides monarchs in the past, for the first time in the history of Planet Earth we have many people and corporations that have more money than governments and so with that comes the responsibility of "acting accordingly". I believe that in a good light this will continue to assist humanity in ways never thought of before as human ingenuity is always more nimble than large bureaucratic organizations.

throwawaygh 6y ago
Andrew Carnegie definitely had "more money than governments". Same with other titans of that time. He was a really shit person when in came to labor -- hiring literal private armies to straight up lay siege to his workers -- but he did basically create the "rich guy gives away his money as a social obligation" model of... maintaining... democratic... government? Or, to be less coy, model of staving off communist/socialist/fascist revolution. I truly and sincerely hope today's ultra billionaires are as smart and realistic as Carnegie in this respect. Carnegie emphasized education in his giving. Limited success. His library movement was largely successful, but his trade school turned into yet another hyper expensive prestinge-driven private university. Although I guess it was the brith-place of a lot of the computer technologies that made the current crop of ultra billionaires rich. I think we're over-due for someone to emphasize healthcare in their giving. (Gates did this, but not in the USA.) We're also over due for a labor backlash against this sort of obscene wealth concentration (and not even as a value-laden statement... just as a "lessons from history" thing, the pendulum will probably swing).
- michaelangerman 6y ago
  That trade school which is now CMU did not start out being a hyper expensive prestige driven university. For years prior to the computer era it was a humble university in Pittsburgh. "In 1900, he donated $1 million for the creation of a technical institute for the city of Pittsburgh, envisioning a school where working-class men and women of Pittsburgh could learn practical skills, trades and crafts that would enhance their careers, lives and communities." It was not until the dawn of the computer era that things started to change. https://www.cmu.edu/about/history.html https://www.cmu.edu/about/history.html See this link for more details.

BooneJS 6y ago

Team Rubicon is another NGO that provides disaster relief. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Rubicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Rubicon

flyinglizard 6y ago

> But the use of ex-military personnel for humanitarian and conservation work is also controversial, according to Rosaleen Duffy, a professor of politics and international relations at the University of Sheffield. No, Professor Duffy, the use of ex- or active - military personnel to render aid is not controversial. It's a widely accepted and successful practice.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
totetsu 6y ago
At some point ex-military might just mean good at operations and logistics.
- GuiA 6y ago
  I recently took some college classes later in life (being dropped in with a bunch of 18 year olds at 30 is an interesting experience), and was blown away by the few ex military guys (roughly my age) in the classes. Of course it might be self selecting since it’s the ones who chose to go to school after their military career ended, but they were consistently some of the most mature, level headed people I had ever met. Definitely changed my outlook on folks coming from the military.
0xy 6y ago
Switzerland is a model for this. Given their neutral and famously anti-confrontational manner, their armies do a lot of civil construction and aid work. The US should do more of that kind of thing.
- areyousure 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Corps_of_Engineers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Corps_of_En... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unified_Response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unified_Response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unified_Assistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unified_Assistance

waterofclear 6y ago

This wing was donated by "anonymous". All eyes look at Ted Danson

yardie 6y ago

So he’s just doing this for the ‘gram. Even the NGO director stated they respond to exciting disasters: hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions. I wonder if they’ll be equally deployed to the disasters that don’t fit a 24 hour news cycle: drought, sea level rise, and pandemics. The kind of disasters that sneak in slowly and then overwhelm all at once.