This is superseded/proven by basic psychometrics it seems? Big Five Extraversion is roughly equivalent to "social dominance", how well an individual implements themselves in a social setting. "Extroverts" or people high in the trait are of course more likely to see progression on the basis they are superior at presenting value in a social setting in terms of social ability, which is often (falsely) accepted as a proxy for overall competence. This is why they end up running orgs as well
Because a shocking amount of consumers buy things based purely on how they appear and the gamer adjacent aesthetic looks surprising and advanced to consumers. Unassuming business boxes are much harder to sell via the visual marketing
We do that here; heavy tax sigarettes (and booze): both dropped like a lead balloon. So yes, tax it for everyone. Kids cannot pay for sigarettes and most adults don't want to (most vapers I know do it because it costs far less; that should be taxed more too imho). If browsing insta/tiktok costs an euro per hour, let's see how many still do it; I'd say they go bankrupt in a few months. Apparently it was never that interesting.
I had never really considered the _competence_ of help before. It makes a huge amount of sense and is a strong argument for intelligent younger folk looking for a meaningful career. Instead of engineering for the pocket lining of your chosen billionaire, why not use those incredible skills to use in frugal or humanitarian engineering
In my fairly extensive experience, non-profit organizations are not just full of and run by grossly incompetent people, but deeply arrogant and/or deluded ones as well. I have NEVER found an organization that has a genuine desire to seek truth, efficacy etc. They often go with whatever their first (inevitably insufficient) idea was, and not only reject all criticism but respond with indignity, etc...
There's no meaningful/competent oversight. It's all just about feels and optics. And thus no real progress has or will be made.
Anyway, yes, I agree that competent and genuine people (who are extremely rare) ought to try to make a meaningful impact in the world. But there's generally more money in something else.
(one rare exception that comes to mind, though i haven't visited them, is The Ocean Cleanup project. They seem to be experimenting and succeeding towards the worthwhile goal of making effective engineering interventions for cleaning up waterways and oceans)
The difference is that the non-profits come with the expectation that they're genuine, well-run, accountable etc. For profits don't really have any moral expectation
To some extent, one doesn't even see the competent non-profits. They don't market aggressively, they don't scale up rapidly, they just stick to their niche and quietly hammer away at it for decades on end (often on things that have no feasible exit, like schools that will need to be externally funded forever)
That seems like a simple money regulations issue. If the school has a $100 million endowment, but doesn't spend into it, the school would exist forever. If we say 10% returns a year, that's $10 million to spend on students in the form of teachers and classrooms and housing and books and everything. Unfortunately, that only teaches N students per year. But it would last ~forever. If, however, you get greedy with wanting to teach more than N students per year, then you get into the treadmill of needing external funding forever, but on the face of it, I don't accept that external funding is required forever.
A 100 million endowment is effectively "forever funding" from the perspective of a school that takes in maybe 200k/year of donations. You don't get 100 million endowments without the scale and marketing, unfortunately
The vast majority of the chicken flocks in South Korea are descended from chicks donated by Heifer International during and shortly after the Korean War.
Setting aside cynicism is one thing but what answers are there for skepticism besides the very common moralizing personal attacks?
When I see a lot of nonprofit leadership improving their own lot much more reliably than the people “they serve”, I wonder if the handouts are just being politically diverted to the best and most politically valuable promoters.
If UBI is off the table, competition for gatekeeping resources becomes a dark market.
So your honest position that you're arguing here is that literally every nonprofit is not making a difference? Every one of them? What are we even talking about here?
Who's taking care of me when I'm old and my body and mind are failing? Billionaires aren't gonna, but the money they pay me can be used to trade for goods and services, so hopefully when it's my time, it's less shitty.
Where are you thinking? Everyone I know who speaks a language written with Latin characters doesn't use cursive. I know very little about other character sets - I believe nearly all Arabic is cursive for instance - but this has been my experience across countries.
As a specific example, all of my friends in Germany - whether born there, in Eastern Europe, or whatever - use print letters, not cursive.
EA showed they had Red Alert 2 tapes in the archive when they did the C&C Remaster stuff back in 2018-2020
The Mental Omega folks are also known to have a complete archive of everything which is why their "mod" is such a technical achievement above what the game engine can normally do
I had never heard of NextDoor until I read this post. UK based. I just spent 20 minutes reading Wikipedia and associated articles. They are really old too... Wow
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