Or more plausibly they never cared and it was just PR all along.

Or, Zuck found religion: https://youtu.be/bE7SyQWf4_U?si=RyV1mbdSceXtWr3w

Funding left-wing causes that fit the ideological leanings of Wall Street isn’t “taking a stand.” In 2025, the people “taking a stand” were the ones who had the balls to do things like stand up for color blindness when even hedge funds like KKR were pushing affirmative action. Or opposing mass immigration, which will put you on the wrong side of the WEF/Davos types.

There is a sociologic experiment to do with “The revolution eats its children”.

For as long as I’ve seen Bill Gates donate to all causes that would please the most leftist proponents, the only reaction I’ve seen was indifference/hate.

It’s a sociological reality: Nothing pleases a mob. On one side, leftist characters always end up in a situation where they were not left enough, which, in revolutionary environments, justifies their termination. In France when the left was elected the president was described as “a capitalist, simping for billionaires”. On the other side, if you are rich and perform acts promoted by leftism, such as donating your entire salary, increasing your employees by 30% a year, or like Bill Gates, donating your entire wealth for the world’s hunger and health before your death, your actions are construed as malevolent, probably there’s a “get rich” scheme behind it for Bill Gates, or probably “you had to treat your employees bad if you had to increase their salary.”

For a good person, there is no winning. But we have countless counterexamples of bad people liked by the same population. A lot, lot, lot of people reach this conclusion by their 40ies. After all, it’s not “spine” that people should have, but just mutual love, including some from the bottom to the top.

And perhaps it explains the current trends.

> The reason is Zuckerberg and Chan have no backbone.

More likely, the wealthier you are the more tied you are to the system. The US government could make it very difficult for Zuck to conduct his business, which would tank his wealth. This is in particularly true when there's a pseudo-dictator in power.

Sadly, yes.

US "charity" to the UN became highly qualified as a function of both political distance from the UN goals, and regrettable lapses in probity inside the UN, the kind of problem which crops up anywhere and everywhere. Time and place meant they collided, and the US stopped funding the UN because of <reasons> and instead let the charity sector pick up the burden, which meant right wing christian fundamentalism entered the room. It is little wonder that islamic countries became suspicious of e.g. vaccination drives, made only worse by US polital operatives exploiting the polio vaccination runs to track down Bin Laden.

The US was the most charitable nation in the world but it's not a given.

> Likewise, is there evidence for this? Maybe our most "effective" altruism is in fact to pay taxes in a liberal democracy after all.

I think this depends quite a bit on what you're trying to achieve. Hard to measure effectiveness otherwise.

E.g. if you care about global human welfare (and setting aside longtermist ideas), the most effective use of a marginal dollar is to donate money to people in poorer countries (via various methods). One of the main reasons is that the richer countries have a much more robust social welfare system already via taxation.

Charity seems fine but we should definitly get rid of the tax loopholes.

That would take much of the corruption out of it. These donor advised funds now allow someone to maintain full control of their money while the IRS considers it 'donated' it for a major tax write-offs.

"Kind of weak" is an understatement. It's flat out wrong and ridiculous to assume that the best course of action for societal well-being is to let billionaires run free. Or that it's "less efficient" to correct the systemic issues that unfairly tilt things in their favor.

So Education isn't a state need or a personal need?

Why is Education a National Need?

Maybe we can't do your idea without the quoted idea.

At that point why not just go to state-controlled capitalism? That way of life was MUCH closer to competing socio-economic theories to capitalism - than capitalism itself. I saw Sanders' Rogan podcast, I heard his plea - it doesn't work well in today's system.

One of the best things about the freedom of moving from job to job and not relying on pensions or 30-year contracts is that it enables and empowers everyday workers to have the innate, untenable, inalienable "check and balance" on the labor market to choose who they give labor to at any given time - and picket them as well. For the average person: You SHOULD be able to move jobs at any time, you SHOULD be able to not feel pressure of unrealized benefits of a pension 30 years down the road when you do, your housing SHOULD NOT be directly based on your employer ("company towns"), and normalizing systemic status-quo changes that makes it hard to decide/change who cuts your checks is NOT a step in the right direction.

Sanders was right when he said folks in managerial positions - and above - need to care more about their workers, but the businesses that drive the labor market banded together - perhaps unknowingly through a status quo "collective conscious" - to make MOST of your pickings in MOST same-tier jobs look very much alike. There are many ways to fix that in practice across other nations today, like sectoral bargaining; where union experts in a given trade collectively bargain for what SHOULD be an effective minimum wage or minimum benefits package within that trade - instead of the government doing it for them. There's also works councils in Germany that have a similar effect.

Nope! Next. Cell phones and parental non accountability are probably bigger issues.

Huh if its pathetic parents can refuse that money. Seems crazy entitlement vibes here.