In other headlines[1], Chick-fil-A switches to antibiotic-free chicken!! Yay, good feelings for Chick-fil-A!! (Fine print - still serving chicken chock full of antibiotics through 2019.)
Instead of honoring people and corporations today for ostensibly, possibly, maybe doing something good in the distant future, let's hold the adoration until the time that they actually do it.
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/11/health/chick-fil-a-chicken-ant...
If you don't like Chick-fil-A, don't eat there.
If you don't like Facebook, don't use it.
If you don't like the tax code, lobby Congress or do something about it. But don't blame Zuck for being smart within the confines of the law.
But there is: antibiotic agriculture is breeding bacterial resistance, and imposing huge costs on society in the form of impending epidemics of diseases that we once thought were conquered. "I'm sorry your child is dead from staph."
Yeah good luck with that.
I want to believe but this does really look like a PR move / "power fund".
Here is what genuine sounds like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wug9n5Atk8c
Seriously, after watching that (jump to 3:30 to skip the Stanford rah rah stuff). It is hard to believe that Gates is not all-in on making the world better with this foundation.
Also, the hostility directed at Zuckerberg and Facebook is not "irrational". His company uses the banner of "providing internet access to all" to try to create a stranglehold on how the worlds poorest people get access to information.
That's basically Elliot Carver from 007:Tomorrow Never Dies. In case you haven't seen it and the general concept of a single company having such a massive amount of control over access to information doesn't tip you off: Carver is the bad guy in the movie.
Methinks you are confusing cause and effect.
Whatever ethical questions may lie in forming a "charity" with an unknown level of veracity, there are also ethical questions in giving the money to an organization that will, without a doubt, surveil, imprison, torture, and murder.
...is today's version of "down with the capitalist dogs; long live the proletariat and glorious socialism!" of eras past.
Global capitalism taken to its extreme is an ideology that promotes a massive transfer of power to private individuals and the dismantling of the state. Libertarianism, in other words. Unfortunately, utopian ideologies have a nasty habit of becoming tyrannical dystopias when put into real-world practice.
Extreme capitalist ideology paints government as cartoonishly hopeless and inefficient, maybe even evil, run by inept bunglers that steal our money and waste it on paperclips and perks for bureaucrats. The solution, they say, is let private for-profit business take over and watch efficiency skyrocket and costs plummet. Sounds wonderful...except it's a hopelessly naive utopian fantasy (or, depending on your outlook, a scam to transfer even more power and wealth to the world's billionaires).
My own view is that unfettered capitalism taken to its logical conclusion will result in a feudal society...or violent revolution.
Total revenue for the federal government was about $3 trillion in 2014. You don't think that the American people got at least $150 billion in value out of that?
After all, there's absolutely no chance that you are able to choose people to do thankless tasks upon which your life depends (disposing of sewage, supplying potable water, maintaining roads, ...).
The shitty thing about this is that when Bill Gates (or presumably in the future, Mark Zuckerberg) donates money and interest to a cause, it has value beyond the cash itself.
I don't generally go around saying: well at least I can "hope" that when I eat this burger it will give me sustenance rather than poisoning and killing me, because the later has a miniscule chance of happening relative to our everyday experience. Indeed, what a sad and desperate situation we would have to be in to say: "eat the burger, and just hope it doesn't kill you".
So indeed, needing to "hope" , or pointing out that we should "hope" wouldn't be a good thing. It is itself a symptom of a system whereby the necessity of suggesting that we should hope about a bullshit PR release in fact reveals that what we're talking about is prima facie a bullshit PR release, or at least must be assumed to be given our common experience.
Perhaps it is only right that we should not expect or place value on people "hoping", but suggest that we give praise to people, Mr Z or otherwise, when they actually do something, not when they put out a sappy marketing piece about "we're totally gonna do something 'cause luv".
Facebook already puts out motherhood statements regarding say, internet access to poor people, that myself and others pretty much deem thinly veiled self-serving bullshit.
So if anything, we should be grateful that not everyone is taken in by PR, and just say that if there is any basis to Mr. Z's philanthropic claims, then extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and when it is forthcoming, he will be given credit.
But what do we lose by supporting this move? He's made charitable efforts at improving the world before, and making an announcement puts pressure to follow through.
And so what if it's vain? A person who does a good deed in vain... still did a good deed. It should be encouraged, including through appeals to vanity.
Also, Occam's razor. People have a tendency to be selfish.
That's not Occam's razor. People being selfish isn't a less complicated hypothesis than their being altruistic, regardless of how likely it is.
The benefit of the doubt only applies if there is no evidence either way. We're past that.
Sure, we can hope, but there is absolutely zero reason for such naivety to be the default.
Why believe a company like this ? Or the man at his head ? ( He has absolute control over FB so any decision made is under his control/responsibility. )
He's making a big deal to get a lot of publicity out of it. With that alone it's not being done just out of the goodness of his heart.
If Mark Zuckerberg puts his wealth towards the greater good, then that's good, no matter what his reasons are. Why does he get more flack for doing this than for the Walton family giving nothing to charity?
If Mark just wanted to avoid taxes, he would've done so quietly. If he's doing it for his own ego, then that's good: it means he is incentivized to be effective in his charity.
So I don't trust them.
They bring down others to prop themselves up.
And simplify the world because it's easier.
What would be good is if some sort of forum could filter these simplistic cliches out and push people towards a more productive point of view.
It is called a Jackie O Trust because Jackie O was famous for making such an organization and left the money to her children as tax free income after she passed away.
Almost every rich family has such a trust in their name.
It is a good PR move because it looks like they are giving back the money, when in secret they only give away a small amount of money and keep the rest in investments to hand down to their children at a future date, etc.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-09-12/how-wal-ma...
http://www.bloomberg.com/infographics/2013-09-12/how-to-pres...
It is actually using tax loopholes to avoid paying taxes to use such an organization to hide your money in it.
He did not found a charity he founded a LLC: http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/not-all-of-mark-zucke...
The news media sort of reported it would be a charity but it is not. It is a Jackie O trust.
Bill Gates has his own and tried to invest $2B USD in schools: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/06/...
It failed miserably, test scores did not improve, despite trying to build better and high tech schools with smaller classes and personalized learning for each student. The same thinking that went to build Microsoft can't be used to solve socioeconomic problems because that requires a different type of thinking. Students have problems learning due to poverty, family issues, emotional and psychological issues, and other stuff. Spending the money on better schools does not address any of those problems.
Which is why teachers are against standardized testing, because it punishes them for low scores.
It is sort of like working as a programmer and having no support from management or your coworkers, being given projects that others have failed at because of how hard they are, and then being punished when it takes too long to finish or you can't get results.
Teacher unions constantly fighting to kill educational reform has been a recurring theme in most all reform initiatives, including Zuckerberg's.[1] There are numerous documentaries (e.g. Waiting for Superman, The Cartel, etc.) covering attempts at reform and how the one thing the unions will never allow is holding bad teachers accountable.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerbergs-failed-100-m...
Zuck: Just ask
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks
We all need to just admit, as you've done, that we all say and do things all the time which would paint us in a very bad light if taken in the wrong context. As an obvious example, there are things that everyone says to friends that they'd never dream of saying to their boss, or parents, or their kids' teacher, or other friends for that matter.
Judging Mark Zuckerberg based on this quote is exactly like that. He's not addressing an audience, he's not giving a considered summary of his world view or philosophy. Rather he's almost certainly joking with a friend, simply saying something abrasive just to give an impression of being confident or alpha etc, the way people sometimes do when they're joking- especially young, relatively unconfident people. We've all done that at some point.
I'm 100% certain if his mother had walked into the room immediately after he'd said this and said 'Mark! Is that what you really think, that all your classmates are.. what did you call them.. dumb fucks?' he would have apologised profusely and corrected himself, clarifying that he was simply joking and said a silly thing in the heat of the moment. Like all teenagers do. Like all humans do.
The prototypical example of this is the FB privacy panel which, last I checked, took more than 100 separate actions to set everything private. (making it very hard and confusing to get privacy). And there's been the incidents where FB then single-handedly undid some or all of those settings without notice.
And then there's FB's participation in PRISM starting in 2009.
he's dedicated enormous energy into destroying privacy and into selling us to others.
As such... I tend to think he'd used more nuanced language now, but I absolutely believe he is a sociopath who has created a cancerous company that makes the world a materially worse place. I absolutely believe that all of his company's actions are aligned with his 18 year old's disrespect for other people.
Some part of him is obviously a good dude... but his company is a fucking travesty.
Facebook is an advertising platform, and the best one at that. It's also a place people post intimate details of their lives for others to see.
I don't know that I find fault in their ability to use that data to better target you with ads or content.
Even to this day, depending on who I'm talking to, I say silly things in private - things that aren't representative of who I am or my intentions in the real world.
It's not fair to look at someones private communications and judge them on it. Especially at 18. It's no way to measure a person.
Not that this means anything - I completely agree with you - but there's something 'funny' about it.
yeah, fuck that logic. you're extremely responsible at 18. moreso at 18 than at 70, if anything.
The same goes true of Zuck. Remember, this is the guy who not so long ago called his users "dumb fucks". I don't think that criticizing somebody is the same as cynically writing them off. It's not like this guy is a god or something.
There's a rich guy who founded an organization, ostensibly with the hopes of doing something good with all that money that he owns. Maybe the organization doesn't go anywhere, or maybe he winds up paying less in taxes. Can't we all hope for the other side of the coin -- that he does wind up doing good for the world? Why not wait and see?