[FRIAM] Fundraiser by Christina Z. : Ohoris Staff Relief Fund

[Frank Wimberly]

Whenever I get drawn to contributing to a charity, usually based on
sentimental TV ads, I send them an email and ask how to access their IRS
Form 990, which has to be publicly available, usually via a web page.  The
last time I did this was for Shriners' Hospital for Children.  If I read
the form correctly, in a recent year they had $700,000,000 in income, paid
$500,000,000 in executive salaries and  fundraising.  I don't believe
remaining $200,000,000 all went to medical and family travel/lodging
expenses.  But I may not be reading it right.  Any accountants out there?

Frank

On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 2:36 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> Heh, it's funny how something you say can be perfectly inverted by the
> audience to mean the opposite of what you intended. The Telephone Game is
> always relevant.
>
> My point to Steve was about "effective altruism", the idea that the
> philanthropist has any idea whatsoever of the relative optimality of one
> charity compared to another. My position is one of ignorance and against
> the (mostly wealthy, tech-savvy, arrogant) person's most likely *mistaken*
> belief in their own competence, especially in a domain that is
> fundamentally different from where they operate "professionally". My point
> to Steve was that meritocracy is a sham and a sibling effect to the Great
> Man Theory.
>
> Now, to the extent that my reading of von Hayek (not Friedman) argued for
> market forces because it is *arrogant* to pretend you can design a system
> more efficient than the one nature relaxes into, then I would argue for
> such natural, organic solutions over engineered ones. But that's precisely
> *because* those who think they can singularly, themselves, engineer a
> reality better than the one that grew, stigmergically, socially, naturally
> are most likely wrong.
>
> But I have *never* insisted there is such a thing as a *free* market.
> Everything that seems to be "natural" is constrained by the engineering of
> the agents in and around it, even if those agents are termites or bacteria.
> Whatever the Robin Hood foundation might mean by "free market", their very
> use of the term means I would not support them in any way. The term "free
> market" is a trigger phrase for this delicate snowflake. >8^D And I've
> already blown several cherries at billionaire phlanthropists. Ptouie. E.g.
> Bill Gates' magnanimity comes at the cost of decades of slimy and
> exploitative practices. It's reputation laundering in the extreme. If Bill
> Gates really gave a flying fsck about these things, he should have begun
> working on them *before* (or instead of) exploiting the world to make
> siphon off and concentrate billions of dollars.
>
> So, I tend to stick with established charities with proven track records
> including both the united way and the red cross. My tiny personal donations
> are doled out at the end of the year to organizations like mozilla, MAPS,
> software in the public interest, etc. with ZERO regard to how "efficient"
> or "effective" they are. And my real contributions are paying (and voting
> for) taxes and buying goods and services from the smallest businesses and
> co-ops I can find.
>
> On 4/22/20 1:04 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> > I was listening to a podcast by the guy who runs Robin Hood, an
> organization dedicated to getting at the institutional roots of poverty.
> When asked where we should give money in this crisis, he said, give it
> where you feel passion, because that is where you are likely to give it
> again.  I confess I feel passion for these young folks, who in the 60’s
> would have been  in graduate programs, or art or music schools, teaching,
> learning, inspiring, but are instead meagerly supporting their passions by
> making me coffee.  And very good coffee at that.  So that’s where my money
> goes.  Robin Hood <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_Foundation>
> might be better for Glen because “According to /Fortune <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(magazine)>/ magazine, "Robin Hood
> was a pioneer in what is now called venture philanthropy, or charity that
> embraces free-market forces. An early practitioner of using metrics to
> measure the effectiveness of grants, it is a place where
> > strategies to alleviate urban poverty are hotly debated, ineffectual
> plans are coldly discarded, and its staff of 66 hatches radical new
> ideas."^[ <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_Foundation#cite_note-fm-2> ”
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
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-- 
Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
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