5 ms·

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 ai

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.
    - throwaway2048 6y ago
      The USA sure seems to have a lot of mysterious problems that people throw up their hands as utterly unfixable, that no other country in the world does.
      - wutbrodo 6y ago
        Because we're a massive, layered,diverse federal system. It's blindingly ignorant to suggest that the US has a literally uniquely dysfunctional government: other countries with categorically similar levels of diversity and scale (India, Brazil) face many of the same problems. And polities that have these characteristics in part face these problems in proportion: the EU is another source of signal here. European govt's stability and relatively cohesive civic cultures come after centuries of world-spanning bloodbaths, genocides and ethnic cleansing to reach the status quo of relatively tiny, relatively ethnically homogeneous states. And there are plenty of dark sides to this cohesion as well.
    - wutbrodo 6y ago
      This is definitely not true. A huge factor in govt inefficiency is that nonpartisan competence is completely irrelevant to most voters, who process policies based on what partisan hackery they pattern-match to most easily. This means govt institutions get jerked around by bizarre constraints and lack of constraints that can be traced back to the fact that they're ultimately accountable to voters.
- ta17711771 6y ago
  If Congresspeople and similar desk jockeys can't chronically profit from ensuring our preparedness for disasters, well, don't expect them to do so.
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.

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.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    The USA sure seems to have a lot of mysterious problems that people throw up their hands as utterly unfixable, that no other country in the world does.
    - wutbrodo 6y ago
      Because we're a massive, layered,diverse federal system. It's blindingly ignorant to suggest that the US has a literally uniquely dysfunctional government: other countries with categorically similar levels of diversity and scale (India, Brazil) face many of the same problems. And polities that have these characteristics in part face these problems in proportion: the EU is another source of signal here. European govt's stability and relatively cohesive civic cultures come after centuries of world-spanning bloodbaths, genocides and ethnic cleansing to reach the status quo of relatively tiny, relatively ethnically homogeneous states. And there are plenty of dark sides to this cohesion as well.
  - wutbrodo 6y ago
    This is definitely not true. A huge factor in govt inefficiency is that nonpartisan competence is completely irrelevant to most voters, who process policies based on what partisan hackery they pattern-match to most easily. This means govt institutions get jerked around by bizarre constraints and lack of constraints that can be traced back to the fact that they're ultimately accountable to voters.
ta17711771 6y ago
If Congresspeople and similar desk jockeys can't chronically profit from ensuring our preparedness for disasters, well, don't expect them to do so.

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.