Indeed. But these things tend to follow a log tale for benefit-to-charity and constant to increasing marginal costs. If it costs Amazon $2 in SMILE proceeds to donate $0.02 for a quarter, then it makes sense, if only for that particular charity, to not process it. This is independent of whether Amazon directly foots the bill or indirectly foots the bill via commitments and outlay portions of the SMILE allocations.

This is exactly right. I help run a small local non-profit makerspace, and donations through Smile help keep the space open and free, without a membership fee.

How much was the makerspace getting from Smile, if you can answer that?

I'm involved with some small makerspaces. The largest has a few hundred members.

If a quarter of them both used Smile and pledged their donations to us (a quarter is almost certainly way too high), let's say that's 100 people.

If the average person spends about $1000 on Amazon (almost certainly too high [1]), then that's $5 per person, or $500 per year total.

I guess it's something, but all those estimates are on the high end for the spaces I know, and still wouldn't cover a couple weeks' rent.

1. Prime members spend an average of $1400/yr, non-prime members spend $600, and roughly one out of the adults are prime members. https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/th...

Name? I'll get some folks to donate.

Animal House Cat Rescue: https://www.stlcats.org/

They do great work.

Yes and small charities like this are generally volunteer-run and a very high percentage of their income goes to their charitiable purpose.

Large charities leech off the existence of the problems they are claiming to solve. If they actually solved them, they wouldn't be needed any more. Name any large organization that has ever worked itself out of needing to exist. And their executives make a lot of money.

Are you saying that e.g. homelessness in America has not been solved because the organizations working on it are not trying to solve it?

California allocated 7 billion in 2022 to homelessness. There are 172,000 homeless in California. So that is $40,000 per homeless person, per year, in just state funds. Lot's of people keep a roof over their heads while making less money than that a year. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Dude. There were 172,000 homeless people counted in one night.

Among those people, some were chronically homeless, which basically means mentally ill, disabled and/or addicted to something. Nobody is paying for housing and health care for these people for less than $40k per year.

The majority of those people, however, are not in that group. They also didn’t stay homeless all year - over the course of one year, many times that number were nearly homeless and got help from those funds to avoid it (pay back rent to avoid eviction, pay a deposit on a new place, etc), or used these funds for services while homeless - shelter, job training, medical care, assistance applying for disability payments, etc. Besides directly funding these services, the money was also spent in paying people to manage job training programs, run the shelters, be social workers who know how disability applications work, be social workers who have to find their homeless clients to tell them about work opportunities, track available spaces in rehab programs, ……………

Your attempted equivalency there is missing so much information that it is uselessly wrong.

I’m sure that the frontline workers for those organizations are earnest and genuine in their effort to help, but it’s also undoubtedly true that there’s a lot of money to be made (and it’s not really in the interest of those making the money to see the problem solved). If you search the term “homeless industrial complex”, you’ll see lots of hot takes on this. I’m not really endorsing any specific perspective, but I suspect that, as always, the truth is mixed and complex.

I thought that recent years had finally taught most people that “the truth is in the middle” is not a rational default position.

I said the truth is mixed and complex, not that it is "in the middle". The last few years provide examples of that which are as good as any other time.

"there's money to be made" is one of the weakest arguments there is. Capitalism makes it all about money! There's little doing without it.

This opinion can lead to some really ignorant statements (which I've heard before) :

- Full time jobs at charities? Money laundering for sure, they should reject their salary and starve. - Investing in clean energy? A conspiracy, some people make money there. - Recycling? People are paid to do it, it's a sham. - Politician not forfeiting his salary? Corruption, they shouldn't make a living (or just take brides under the table).

"There's money to be made" isn't an argument. The world is not a binary, just because I am implying that some part of an industry is cronyism and grift, doesn't mean that I am asserting that it is 100% the case. It would be equally dumb to assert that it is 0%.

Well, that one is easy. It's a multi million dollar regulatory capture operation. TODCO in SF is a classic operation. Check out their revenue numbers.

> Name any large organization that has ever worked itself out of needing to exist.

This is an interesting take, but got me wondering, what organization _period_ has ever worked itself out of needing to exist? I'd love to hear examples.

I mean, you can always just donate 10$ a month to them, which will probably be much more than a tiny cat shelter gets from Amazon Smile.

I'd encourage you to ask the shelter how much they get from Amazon Smile. My guess is it's $200-300 max, which is barely enough to save a single cat.

Worse, there is a well-known phenomenon [1] where if people's "guilt" is taken away, then they are less likely to donate overall. That is, for at least some portion of people, they probably mark a small charity as their Amazon Smile recipient and then think "Great, I'm donating to charity!", not realizing their donations are like 50 cents. But if they didn't sign up for Amazon Smile they might be more likely to actually donate a real amount.

To be clear, I'm all for small charities getting money, but I'd almost rather it be like a lottery or something so a smaller number of small charities could get money they could actually do something with.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/freakonomi...