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Comment by josephjrobison | Hacker News Reader

If modern history goes back to the 1900s though, Rockefeller still has Bezos beat by more than double:

"By the time of his death in 1937, estimates place his net worth in the range of US$300 billion to US$400 billion in adjusted dollars for the late 2000s (decade)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_...

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Time for Bezos to endow a university and some libraries?

An earlier major technical university endowed by the richest person of the time is a pretty awesome place... (he says with no bias whatsoever. :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie

Are universities really highly positive charitable investments in 2018? It's a very different time from when Carnegie existed.

I think the research branches of a university are much less ambiguously positive than the teaching branches. One of the things people consistently fail to grok is that community colleges of the sort that are generally fairly cheap, are cheap in large part because their mission is to make higher education accessible. Universities do not (and probably shouldn't) have that mission. Their mission is to fund original research that would otherwise go undone and record it.

I wonder if general research is really a great charitable investment either. Medicine seems the most obviously positive research initiative to fund, but looking at the last few decades of medical research, I don't see many discoveries that have demonstrably improved human well being.

In the big picture, research needs to be balanced, because it builds on itself across fields. Medicine needs physics, computer science, biology, robotics, chemistry, material science, math ... (think drug discovery/modeling, materials for implants, sutures, techniques for laparoscopic surgery, medical records, virology, ... everything). Each of these fields has cross-dependencies as well.

The real thing that's needed is investments in high-risk, long-term fundamental research. Companies have a very hard time doing things with long, risky timelines (and justifiably so, they have a bottom line to account for in general). In _all_ fields.

Nah, he says the only worthwhile end for his money would be space travel. The man who pays his employees so little that 40% of them are subsidised by the taxpayers (food stamps). The man who gained 50 billion dollars in less than a year.

This system simply does not work.

Agreed. Where are the Bezos donated schools, parks, hospitals, fire departments in Seattle? He has done nothing for Seattle except replace its citizens, driving them out into surrounding towns/cities/counties, and drove so many into homelessness that Seattle now has one of the largest homeless populations in the USA. It makes me absolutely furious when he says there's nothing he can do except build rockets.

Mary's Place is really his only contribution to Seattle. It houses a whole 65 families.

I'd rather see him endow the treasury with the fucking taxes he owes.

Why? Government is one of the least effective vehicles for charity.

[Citation needed]

Assuming you are asking for him to pay US Taxes:

The largest line item (29%) is supporting the least efficient 1st world healthcare system

The second largest item (23%) is supporting blowing up foreigners

The third item (13%) is just paying accrued interest from previous overspending

The fourth item (7.5%) is the first that may be considered humanitarian, unemployment.

The fifth item (6%) is us paying for thr psychological and physical trauma that blowing up foreign nationals causes our own veterans.

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/interactive-data/taxday/2...

What taxes does he owe that he hasn't paid? I'm pretty sure the answer is "none".

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