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

[Steven A Smith]

glen -

I definitely didn't intend to *invert* your intention... I *did*
understand (roughly) that it is arrogant to believe that *I* can
engineer a better altruism than say Red Cross or Habitat for Humanity or
the Social Welfare apparatus of my city/state/national/UN efforts.    
But I think your arguments *also* allow (support) my feeling that I
*want* to make sure that the people who have given good service to me
(and to whom I have been mostly generous with my tips in the past)
survive this mess and are available and motivated (or not) to return to
that service.   

Giving good tips, paying what may feel like inflated prices to local
farmers and artisans, etc. feels like I'm being part of the
emergent/evolved system...   Back when many were part of a local
religious congregation, there was the idea of a "tithe" or sharing
1/10th of one's productive efforts with one's peers, using their
church's (synagog/stupa/whatever) leader/admnistration to help them by
distributing it.   Of course these were always (mostly) Franchises that
gathered up a "tithe" of those tithes to fund the larger
administration/hierarchy (I've seen the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake
and the Vatican... as well as the extravagant architecture of Washington
DC), and some might resent that and would rather just "give their
neighbor a hand during planting, harvest, barn-raising time) or not.

I'm (for the most part) rooting the House Dems who are working hard
(best I can tell) to get whatever money they manage to get printed at
this moment to "the little guy" whether it is through the direct
payments already halfway in/through the mail or to small businesses who
will do their (we hope) damnedest to  do right by their employees...
keep them on payroll long enough to *maybe* pull out of whatever
nosedive their industry is in.

I acknowledge that this surely means higher taxes for me in the (near
and indefinite) future.   My income/savings is pretty modest by
professional  standards but best I can tell notably above many in
service and living (much less minimum) wage workers, and I'm willing to
*share* some of their pain.   I don't know how much, or in what mode, 
but this kind of event makes *me* feel "yet more generous" than
otherwise... 

Untangle me in this one if you might?  I really didn't want to impugne
your guidance in these matters.

- Steve


On 4/22/20 2:36 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ 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> ”
>