Do you think girl scouts are scumbags too?
Anyway, I don't think he's a scumbag. I think he's a nice guy and I'm sure I would be his friend if we took the same pottery course or whatever. I just don't think trying to "cram one more treat into America's already bloated snack hole"[1] is very 'cool'.
[1] Simpsons, season 8, episode 164, The Twisted World of Marge Simpson
Learning about the different types of social enterprise, it’s not uncommon for for profit ventures to incorporate aspects.
Still, some of this can come down to sour grapes that earning money can disproportionately and more sustainably be used for good than normal.
Uniqlo's core business is apparel. They buy in massive bulk. Mr Beast buys in maybe tens of thousands.
Or has the clothing market in the US hollowed out in the middle completely? That's what I'm worried about where I live (Poland, EU) - I feel like the middle tier, of normally priced, regular quality clothes for regular people, is all but gone now, leaving us with the choice between a) second-hand stores and bazaars selling counterfeits imported from the East, and b) lifestyle brands selling rags at ridiculous prices.
Ref: https://www.uniqlo.com/jp/ja/products/E458468-000/00?colorDi...
https://www.uniqlo.com/jp/ja/men/tops/sweatshirts-and-hoodie... 2990 yen and up for regular price.
That's still only about $20 and up, so right there is a factor of 2x between Japan and the US.
What good have you done for anyone but yourself in the last month? Do you even fulfill your own standards? Is any charity less than implementing your preferred political policies useless? It’s hard to even describe how childish and selfish your take is.
I thought the discussion here was about cataract surgery.
Australia has "free if you're poor and can wait" o/wise relatively cheap depending on your private health insurance.
https://www.finder.com.au/cataract-surgery-costs
Working vision correction to avoid glasses | contacts is purely elective in .au
Seems misleading for that site to say it’s free. There’s small fees which you end up paying that Medicare doesn’t cover. And afaik you require a referral for public hospital which is not covered.
I'd wager that small referral fees in Australia amount to considerably less than surgery costs in countries with no socialised health care systems.
You’re kidding yourself if you think people on HN are contributing anything to better society.
Do you think he could actually get a law changed and help more people than he already did? Why wouldn't a "Mr Beast goes to Washington" style video get as many views as his direct support videos got?
The most popular YT video creator could probably start a fairly large lobbying effort although yes, the multi-trillion dollar US for-profit health insurance industry could probably do better.
"Why wouldn't a "Mr Beast goes to Washington" style video get as many views as his direct support videos got?"
It might, there's only one way to know.
Good lord, y'all are just never satisfied with charity work.
"Mr Beast literally cured blindness for a thousand people and gave them a bunch of money, no strings attached."
"Yeah but he did it for views!"
So what?! He markedly improved 1000 peoples' lives in the process. What have YOU done today?
Get over yourselves.
None of us are in his position to make as much change though. Are we not allowed to criticize someone that has far more power than us for not using it to its full potential?
Most young people are angry about the fact that their living and educational expenses are far higher than the older people responsible, and profiting from that increase. Refer also to the increase in retirement age and poorer pensions for younger generations.
AFAIK they do food donation drives regularly (or something similar) and probably supports other causes consistently. Those come from a place of passion, vision and commitment. Otherwise the YT videos are good execution to serve the audience and sponsors.
Tbh I haven't been tempted to watch his videos. Like many other commenters, I find something is off
Money given away doesn't have to have a "noble purpose", the act is good in itself. The people receiving it don't care about motive, I don't care about motive, and the only reason you care about motive is because you're threatened by another person doing good. There's no virtue inherent to giving anonymously. A piece of food or a warm house don't care about the intentions of the original owner of the money.
In fact the only reason I could see for someone pushing a narrative of "only some donations are good because of motive" would be to discourage donations, which I'm not sure why anyone would do unless they are utterly evil.
Just like many other celebrities that continue to make money of their lifestyle which isn’t something to applaud.
I believe Snoop Dog did his fair share of charity but I definitely don’t applaud his endeavors in pornography and drugs.
On the other hand I don’t have any idea if mr.Beast spends money on hookers.
But if I would choose which content should be more available on the internet I’d go with me.Beast not Snoop Dog.
Maimonides has a different viewpoint: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzedakah
Is it better to give privately, knowingly kneecapping your capacity to do so again in the future?
Pablo Escobar gave free money away. Would you take the money? He also built schools.
Motive matters. His intents were to build loyalty masked as charity. MrBeast is building (or has built) something else, masked as charity.
I hope MrBeast never stop giving away money and curing people, but there are some considerations to make here, and not just taking as granted the reasons the very same person doing charity is clearly trying to transmit.
If Mr. Beast steals money to donate it I'd be against it regardless of motive.
The reality is that Mr.Beast will not be changing the entire U.S. healthcare system. And that hundreds got life changing surgeries they wouldn't otherwise have gotten.
Do you think if you asked those people, they would say Mr. Beast is predatory? Would they have preferred that he Mr. Beast not run a donation-focused youtube channel?
He's created quite an ingenious way to siphon money from advertisers to random people. It's not the most 100% effective way of creating change, but viewing it so negatively is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
The reality is that Mr Beast has a better shot at it than 99.99% of americans; the argument is he won't take that shot because he prefers to be Mr Beast
Not to mention this is not all or nothing. He could flip or decide hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of votes, in favour of candidates that do want to reform the healthcare system. All it takes is about half the politicians plus one, no?
I'm not an US voter and don't suffer its healthcare system, so maybe it is an immutable part of life and I can't grasp it - but I doubt it
better by what margin? given that the likelyhood of anyone else making that change is almost zero, even if his chances were 10 times as high, that is still not enough to make any dent.
part of the problem here is thinking that changing the system can only be done by some single person with superhero powers, when in reality it takes a mind change in all of society. the US healthcare system will not change until everyone starts demanding that change.
the best MrBeast can do is to influence his audience, but he'll need to convince more than a few million people before a change can happen.
Does that have to be a thing? If he was growing vegetables for his neighbours or his community wouldn't we be going 'what a top bloke'?
To me this seems like a semi-obvious minmaxing solution to making popular videos: make essentially zero profit, regardless of revenue. At some point you get so much revenue that you can't spend it all so the next logical step is to simply give it away as part of the video. And in this case it's a virtuous cycle - apparently giving away money generates more revenue so it just keeps going. But this doesn't strike me as being done out of any noble purpose - all he wants is YT view and charity is just a side-effect of that.
"How can you watch the video where he pays for the blindness surgery for all those people and say that that was anything other than an amazing win for all those nice people?"
My criticism would be that it's local change vs trying for structural change. Why don't those people already have access to surgery? The counter-argument to this would be that structural change is somewhere between very hard and impossible, so just spend the money locally. A more cynical take is that lobbying for restructuring the US health care system doesn't generate YT revenue, so he's incentivized to fund the most clickbaity charity projects.