Billionaires giving away their wealth and dedicating themselves to philanthropy started with Carnegie.
Gates getting a large group of billionaires to donate half was also over a decade ago. The half always made sense since the other half could still be dedicated to productive capital that contributes back to philanthropy half.
I guess when it’s the environment and not trying to save hundreds of millions of lives through eradicating malaria and related health/development investments it gets treated as uniquely special?
Apparently Yvon Chouinard was really pissed off for appearing on the Forbes list, prompting him to offload his fortune.
Not that I will ever be in the same shoes as him, but I get it. I wouldn't want to be associated with the ruthless wealth-creating monsters on that list either. Those people have destroyed their humanity and now they are destroying humanity itself.
>100% of its nonvoting stock has gone to a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating climate change and protecting undeveloped land around the world.
Looks like he just wasted 3 billion. Why not donate that money to something real like R&D of renewables? This will just fund more people who are profesional climate grifters: telling you that you are murdering the planet any time you do anything, and that the world will be uninhabitable and over becuase of you, all while collecting a fat check from this nonprofit.
If you spend $100 on r&d, you've gotten $100 in r&d.
You spend $100 on convincing people that they need to spend money on r&d, you're $100 can contribute far more than $100 to overall movement towards an end to climate change.
Is this what is going to happen with that money? I don't know. However, it's possible that this is still a good move even though it isn't going directly to research.
Better yet, why don't we force the climate advocates to work for no pay (with only rice and watter for food) and spend the rest on r&d? I think that would contribute even more to the overall movement.
Vast majority of the people who want more climate change action want green energy, more regulation of fossil fuels, and more efficient day today life activities.
They do not generally want everyone to eat rice everyday. Maybe the most extreme ones do, but that's the nature of every group, there are extreme nutters.
I watched to 8 minutes. So, primarily, the video's allegation is that Choinard donated all of his shares except the voting shares, which means he effectively retains control?
> Capitalism holds neither employees nor noble missions in high regard.
That's because this isn't the goal of capitalism. The goal is growth and positive ROI through the use of private ownership of the means of production. Labor, like land and capital, are just an input to production in capitalism. And "noble missions" - whatever that means - are meaningless. They are subjective and have nothing to do with the economic system.
> For once, a billionaire is doing something worthy of our applause.
Populist bullshit. I'm happy companies like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. exist. They have made my life so much easier. One of the founders of JetBrains (IntelliJ, PyCharm) became a billionaire because they make spectacular products. Yes, these companies have issues, but welcome to reality: everything has issues. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
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> And the exception highlights an unhealthy reality of our wealth-obsessed, capitalist system: It often requires more intention and effort to give away money than to passively amass billions.
Off-topic, but IMO it is ridiculous that in 2022 there are still websites which are too lazy to deal with GDPR and just completely deny any access from Europe. I understand that they may have had little European traffic before 2018 so there is little incentive to dig into the details of cookie consent, but the quick fix of just turning off all non-essential cookies for those IP ranges is trivial ...
Whoa, no it's not that trivial by a long shot. To be GDPR compliant they would need to train all their staff who deal with customer data, audit their entire infrastructure to map all the places where they store customer data and draft GDPR-compliant privacy notices for all of that data, as well as establishing the processes for dealing with all the lawful GDPR customer requests that they'd start getting. This is very, very expensive, and requires retaining external consultants and lawyers who are experienced in GDPR compliance.
I fully sympathize with all foreign companies that have no meaningful REVENUE from the European Union who instead of putting themselves in possible legal jeopardy just decide to block traffic from the EU and be done with it. It's the honorable thing to do, and frankly Europeans should be looking in the mirror and be asking if our good intentions of consumer privacy protection are actually leading the stifling of our digital landscape due to over-regulation. A good indication to me that a law is not working is if it is so over-reaching that very few companies (even within EU) are able to comply with all of its requirements.
Totally the first billionaire to give up his wealth to charity. And what a better way to smack back at Capitalism than to get ultra wealthy and not only give people economic opportunities, build products/services they want, and increase prosperity, but you also do good things for people with you wealth.
Gates getting a large group of billionaires to donate half was also over a decade ago. The half always made sense since the other half could still be dedicated to productive capital that contributes back to philanthropy half.
I guess when it’s the environment and not trying to save hundreds of millions of lives through eradicating malaria and related health/development investments it gets treated as uniquely special?