SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the it-sounds-good-on-its-face dept.
To mark the birth of their first child as well as "#GivingTuesday", Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have promised to give away 99% of their Facebook shares, currently worth about $45 billion, to charity over their lifetimes. MarketWatch notes a federal filing that indicates that Zuckerberg will donate about $1 billion per year over the next three years, but will retain his majority voting position in Facebook for the foreseeable future. From the letter:
Like all parents, we want you to grow up in a world better than ours today. While headlines often focus on what's wrong, in many ways the world is getting better. Health is improving. Poverty is shrinking. Knowledge is growing. People are connecting. Technological progress in every field means your life should be dramatically better than ours today. We will do our part to make this happen, not only because we love you, but also because we have a moral responsibility to all children in the next generation.
We believe all lives have equal value, and that includes the many more people who will live in future generations than live today. Our society has an obligation to invest now to improve the lives of all those coming into this world, not just those already here. But right now, we don't always collectively direct our resources at the biggest opportunities and problems your generation will face.
Consider disease. Today we spend about 50 times more as a society treating people who are sick than we invest in research so you won't get sick in the first place. Medicine has only been a real science for less than 100 years, and we've already seen complete cures for some diseases and good progress for others. As technology accelerates, we have a real shot at preventing, curing or managing all or most of the rest in the next 100 years.
Today, most people die from five things -- heart disease, cancer, stroke, neurodegenerative and infectious diseases -- and we can make faster progress on these and other problems. Once we recognize that your generation and your children's generation may not have to suffer from disease, we collectively have a responsibility to tilt our investments a bit more towards the future to make this reality. Your mother and I want to do our part.
Curing disease will take time. Over short periods of five or ten years, it may not seem like we're making much of a difference. But over the long term, seeds planted now will grow, and one day, you or your children will see what we can only imagine: a world without suffering from disease.
There are so many opportunities just like this. If society focuses more of its energy on these great challenges, we will leave your generation a much better world.
The letter goes on to mention other grand goals, global availability of Internet access, and the creation of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday December 02 2015, @11:31PM
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/08/wikipedia_foundation_money_in_wrong_place/ [theregister.co.uk]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 03 2015, @03:39AM
Politics often gets nasty - with a volunteer based organization even more so. I'm not saying the referenced allegations of waste are incorrect, but there are a large number of people out there who a) have lots of time on their hands to edit wikipedia and b) have lots of time on their hands to get self-righteous about how the paid Wikipedia people don't deserve the money they get while the editors don't get the money they deserve.
To know the real truth, you'd have to have direct dealings with the organization - anything less in this environment will be hear-say subject to potentially extreme reporter bias.
🌻🌻 [google.com]