Just because something is in do-or-die situation doesn't mean that they have some kind of magical advantage over fat cat. Being in that situation means there is very real possibility of doing "die" part and we have lots of examples of them doing so.
The guy was hawking the doubling of human lifespan at some elderly potential investors... I really wonder why he decided to raise that point in that particular situation? Kind of going straight to our deepest fears.
And how many people would have been saved if he didn't forcibly extracted that money from society to begin with?
Because it's almost impossible to not help someone if he just throw wads of money at random. What important is how many people weren't saved because he decided to be a middle man in all of it?
Way, way fewer. Any billionaire you've heard of is almost certainly a net creator of a huge amount of value, by successfully leading a company in a capitalist system that made enough money selling products or services to make its shareholders worth billions of dollars. This isn't forcibly extracting money from society, this is exactly what net-value-creation looks like in the world.
His "charitable" contributions are only in place to charity wash his awful actions in the past and now. And it worked, everyone thinks of Saint Bill and his supposed good deeds while forgetting what he actually did or doing right now.
This is the thing that really baffles me. My kids went through K-12 when Common Core was a thing, and there was a huge backlash about it, so I decided to look it up and to see how it was being used in our school district.
A few states published their Common Core guidelines. I looked at one state, and the curriculum goals looked no different than the things that I learned when I was a kid. It seemed completely ordinary. I remain baffled about why it was so controversial.
Math education has always been a failure, or a "crisis." The number of people who come out of school with any functional math ability has been fairly constant over the decades, and depends a lot on family background and economic class. I'm not even sure that differences across countries are all that significant when people reach adulthood.
Don't get me wrong. I was one of the successful ones, but I think math education is in need of reform. In fact I would reform it quite radically.
>The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity?
So he is no longer a billionaire?
And donating to what charity, The Gates Foundation? The one that he controls?
The one that he uses to push his ideological stances and repeatedly fails to help anyone?
Just look how successful his work on improving education system in America was.
What a sacrifice it was for him...
>They've admitted the US education work was a mistake. They are hardly alone in making that mistake, improving education in the US is hard.
It's only hard if you don't want to help anyone and your only goal is to push charter schools(by any other name) by any means necessary.
>Their work to clean water and cure diseases has saved millions of lives. They know what they are good at and they've decided to double down on that.
They helped so many people by not allowing them getting covid vaccine or by fighting generics?
Also their "good" deeds weren't without negative consequences that could be avoided if someone actually listened to people they were "helping".
Easy way is not doing charter schools.
Why are they bad? Charter school can choose what children they will teach when public schools don't have that choice, then people point at charter schools as having higher outcomes. In essence charter schools are a tool to discriminate students from poor families.
I am a big supporter of public schools, but I also understand that only allowing rich parents to opt out of public schools can lead to some very bad outcomes as schools don't have to respond directly to public pressure.
Recently the Seattle public schools reverted some very bad decisions because so many parents in Seattle pulled their kids out of public schools to go to private, at such a high numbers it started to cause budget issues.
That was only possible because the so many parents here can afford to do that.
Another example is with how many schools stopped using phonics for reading and an entire generation of kids ended up with poor reading skills. No marketplace of ideas means even if parents wanted to have their kid learn phonics, only rich parents could afford to switch to private schools. Even today Seattle schools is just slowly switching back to phonics (my local school is a pilot for returning to phonics! Year later!)
Same goes for 1:1 laptop usage. Evidence now shows that every school that moves to one to one laptops (a dedicated laptop for every kid in every classroom) has educational outcomes plummet. It will take years of concerted effort by parents to get those laptops out of public schools (to be fair, took years of effort to get them into the schools....) and break the contracts to school district has with technology providers.
Having all the kids in the city go to a single School district has many huge benefits that lift everybody up, and a well-funded public school system is essential to democracy.
But there are also issues with putting all your eggs in one basket.
I don't think anyone has a good solution to these problems.
Language or the way we use it is often used to exclude "undesired", so there is a point in using them. Not a very nice point, but a point nevertheless.
> I am surprised no one has started a go fund me to make a fund just to bribe politicians to fix tax filing.
>
> It would be cost effective VS paying for tax prep!
It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail.
> It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail.
This is a bit reductive. Not everyone member of Congress goes to work for TurboTax after they retire!
However I imagine Inuit is a reliable source of campaign contributions every year. The simple solution is to get enough funding that the campaign can promise 3 or 4 election cycles of support for any politicians that vote in favor of tax filing reform.
There are limits to corporate donations and lobbying, which is why the price of lobbying seems so low (see the linked blog post in the comments here!)
SuperPACs get around that, but there is a chance a large company like Inuit isn't agile enough to defend against a well organized political attack.
Ultimately career politicians care about being elected. Even corrupt ones need to stay in office and they'll happily sacrifice one small donor to keep the gravy train coming with all their other connections.
If an independently funded lobbying group walks into DC and tells a senator they just raised 30M dollars and 80k residents in their state donated as part of that, I bet people will start to listen.
Proper term for it is Computer Assisted Plagiarism, CAP for short.
Also, I really hope that Google doesn't claim it created sites it crawl for search their engine.
Point of friction is to have it as a filter against people who really need your help.
Helping people necessitates taking some action, spending resources, potentially making some errors that can be taken against you.
But on the other hand, refusing to help people without any reason or flimsy reason is also frowned upon.
Adding friction is a perfect solution, now you want to help everyone but this stupid/pesky/lazy people just aren't able to follow simple(they ain't) instructions how to properly follow process of acquiring etc.
Now it's their fault, so no action is needed on you behalf.
