- The post you're responding to never said this essay deserved criticism. It said it's good people aren't taking it at face value and are being critical of it. They are not the same thing.
Being critical of the claim to donate 45 billion dollars is pretty natural. First, they didn't say 45 billion, they said a percentage of their worth which right now is 45 billion dollars. You would have a very strong point if they had just delivered the check for 45 billion dollars and people were criticizing it.
But they didn't do that. They wrote a post on the internet saying they're going to give away their money sometime in their lifetime.
- What point are you making? Are you saying that's a lot or a little? We all read the 99% number. Adding periods between the words puts emphasis on it sure (great job putting in the extra effort to enhance the discussion by the way) but given the nature of this discussion I can't for the life of me figure out what you're actually trying to say.
- Three years is all? It takes at least eighteen to raise a child. Shame on you for being proud of your country that doesn't care about children enough to see them raised properly. I have to laugh at you and your country for not valuing your kids. I'm ashamed for you.
This entire (arrogant) line of reasoning is ridiculous because it's completely based on an arbitrary cutoff point that you decide is good. What a crazy coincidence that the cutoff point happens to be the same amount of time the geographic region you happen to live in sets as their paternity leave.
- >You are trying to rationalize with people who are irrational.
In my opinion, this is the most dangerous statement in this thread. Saying the actions of these people is irrational loses any ability to understand why they're doing what they're doing and how we can stop them. It turns them into a faceless enemy who are doing things because of hate, which is easy and makes my ego feel better, but doesn't really explain their actions or the actions of anyone. Nobody thinks they're the bad guy of their own story.
There is nothing more rational than terrorizing civilians to achieve a goal. It is the logical conclusion of rationality.
- I know what a watt is, and I understand what giga means. I know what a calorie means because I eat food and I have to make decisions about how many calories to consume daily. I know what horsepower means because when I shop for cars, I compare them to one another. I don't know what gigawatt means because I don't shop for power, I don't compare power output of one reactor to another, and I don't worry about power consumption because it's all covered by my wall outlets.
I don't know why you're getting uppity about this specific unit, but your post reeks of elitism and arrogance. You happen to understand what a watt is, so it's disheartening and sad that nobody else does (it's so lonely being so smart and being surrounded by dumb people)? Keep your shitty judgmental attitude to yourself.
- I love the absurdity of this and arbitrariness. You'll happily drive in a car, one of the most dangerous machines people use regularly. But if it has a computer in it, no siree, that's when things get too deadly to deal with. All of the other thousands of moving parts, like the thing that takes energy-dense hydrocarbons and ignites them several thousand times a second in hot, high pressure tubes - that's fine and totally safe. It's the ECU that makes the car dangerous. The fact that the only thing separating you walking on the sidewalk from death from a two ton metal box is the convention that we'll all stay within the lines painted on the ground. That's fine. It's the ECU that you're afraid of. Absurd.
Don't judge people's reasons for donating money. I'm happy to accept people's donations, regardless of their reason for giving it, because who am I to judge what they do with their money?
Telling people who are trying to donate money that their money is no good because their intentions are wrong seems like the most effective way to stop everyone donating money in their tracks immediately.
>at the expense of others.
Maybe we're talking about different things here, but how is it that a net $70MM donation is coming at the expense of taxpayers?