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Comment by m348e912 | Hacker News Reader

I know this is awful, but I always doubted the benevolence of the Amazon smile program and figured they viewed at as a nice tax write off. That being said, I am sure there were plenty of non-profits that benefited from the program.

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How would it be a tax write-off? Or are you one of the many many people who think "tax write-off" is some mysterious financial trick to turn a loss into profit?

the venn diagram of "corporations are always evil no matter what" people and "haha i cannot do math but i know whats right and wrong" people has a huge overlap

You don’t think Amazon can say “we donated x dollars of our revenue to 501c charities based on amazing smile contributions and we’re deducting it off our gross revenue”?

Of course they can, but Amazon would have made _more_ money if they just kept the money and didn't donate it to anyone.

However on the internet, people seem to believe "tax write-off" means Amazon is coming out equal or even net-positive compared to not donating the money.

I read somewhere that it was a way to get you into the habit of going directly to Amazon rather than searching for the product on Google and then clicking the first retailer. That's why you had to type smile.amazon.com directly into your browser. So in that way, it earned them a huge amount of customer loyalty.

Maybe too much money was going to non-profits Amazon doesn't approve of?

The thing that keeps coming to mind is that they dealt with tens of thousands of charities, with the potential of requiring expensive customer service.

The cost of running the program is surely a good fraction of the total amount donated.

Did they actually deal with the charities directly, or through one of well-established platforms like e.g. Benevity?

Couldn’t tell you, but who would ultimately have to answer for payouts being incorrect, etc.? I’m imagining hundreds or thousands of questions like “why am I only getting $2 this quarter when I got $10 last quarter”

You’d get a check once or more a year based on how much you had coming.

Our little league would make a few hundred bucks a year off of it. About half was board members buying stuff for the league. You really had to push it to make anything - the most successful example I found was a league that used the same logo as a college sports team across the country. They made a “store” for parent gear that just went to Amazon Smile links.

Amazon was super easy to setup, but there are many companies with better programs in the space.

It’s effective altruism

Ah come on, it’s amazon and Bezos we’re talking about here… hardly paragons of virtue.

That's exactly what "effective altruism" means. It's just philosophical marketing to dress the basest selfishness as altruism. Google the phrase up the next time you feel you have too much faith in humanity.

Figuring out which charities 1. aren’t scams; 2. aren’t wasting 90% of your money on on overhead; and 3. are doing something impactful rather than something frivolous with your money, is “the basest selfishness”?

If that’s not how you personally define Effective Altruism, then what name would you give to the concept I just described?

That's not what "Effective Altruism" is. [1]

Effective altruism plays the game where you can say "What's better, to give $10 today, or should I invest that $10 and then give it away when I die?" It's all about coming up with scenarios like this where you can justify selfishness because "eventually, the amount of good I'll do will pay off".

It's popular with the rich and famous because they can justify building huge empires and hording large amounts of resources (while spending a bit on themselves of course) because, some day, they'll give back what they made.

It's quiet literally the philosophy SBF used in the FTX fiasco to justify setting up a ponzie scheme.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism

It's changed a lot since Peter Singer started it but what it's really supposed to mean is, "stop donating to the opera house, kids are dying in Africa."

>Effective altruism plays the game where you can say "What's better, to give $10 today, or should I invest that $10 and then give it away when I die?"

All of this seems to have little resemblance to what I see in the EA community. Specifically, I'm seeing many EA organizations doing good in the now and present (eg. malaria nets), and have never heard of any EA organizations advocating people to invest money so they can donate money.

>It's quiet literally the philosophy SBF used in the FTX fiasco to justify setting up a ponzie scheme.

You don't see the issue of using a single person to paint an entire movement, especially since the movement explicitly disavows illegal actions to raise money?

Google result:

> Effective altruism is a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.

Doesn't sound that bad.

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