'Dear Daddy...' Max Zuckerberg’s Letter back to her Father Yesterday Mark Zuckberg accompanied the birth of his first child, a daughter Max, with a long open letter. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, we've found what Max might write back, and we're sharing it with you: Dear Daddy Thank you for the letter that your PR and public policy team wrote to mark my Birth, and sent to …
(@AC - is that you Mark?)
yep - tax efficient too. Not that there was any danger of much tax being paid already.
An even better way to make the world a better place would have been to tell the billions of Facebook users to go and get a life/go out for a walk/read a book/talk to their neighbours/watch the paint dry. And then fold the company. I'm just grateful that I don't have much time left in this rock
Interesting that I haven't seen anyone attacking Zuck on that amazingly self-serving (OK, the whole letter is self-serving, but, you know) part where he gives Facebook access to everyone and eliminates poverty in the same breath.
Actually, that's kinda breathtaking in its own conceited, pompous way.
... if he was *REALLY* being altruistic and helping people, he'd've considered doing this *before* his own offspring was born? Rather than now, when it just looks like a shameful attention grab and him only "making a difference" because it might conceivably make some difference to his own daughter (which it won't of course as she's already set up for life) instead of when it could make a difference to the millions upon millions of children born into poverty, with no heat, light, food, education and, yes, no Facebook.
</cynicism>
It wouldn't have mattered when he'd done this. It would still come off as self-promotion. Which probably has to do with the fact, that Zuckerberg has surely well-established his image as a proficient sociopath, whose every deed is motivated by some kind of utter self-interest.
Why the hell do people continue to bring children into poverty?
Oh yey, we've got no water, electricity, internet, heating - LETS HAVE A CHILD!
The best thing the 3rd world can do is as jezza would say "Put something on the end of it!" How about we fund THAT instead and then we can stop seeing these horrible ads on TV of starving children whilst I'm trying to eat my tea!
Downvote all you want, you know I'm right!
Actually, Daniel, I agree with you: "if ya' can't feed 'em, don't breed 'em" should apply everywhere, not just in the "over there" places. That said, there are some challenges with this:
- Many places "over there" were fairly self-regulating until The Empire Builders discovered oil/ gold/ resources and plundered the bejabbers out of the place, disrupting family/ clan farming and other lifeways that had served reasonably well for centuries if not millenia. Pretty hypocritical to go somewhere, take all the resources, run the place to ruin, and then tell the occupants they shouldn't breed because they have no resources. That said, breeding beyond carrying capacity helps no one. Not sure how to square this circle.
- Many cultures still hold a "many children = much status" belief. This is useful in farming communities -- more able bodies to work the farm -- but in urban ones? Again, not sure how to address this.
- There has been progress made in areas where women are given/allowed more education. Most women "over there" bear the brunt of having more kids than the family can raise, but often do not have much control over the situation (hubby = final word). Education to grow skills to bring in more income (to sustain more kids) and/or to acquire birth control (to limit the number of kids in the first place) works and we need more of it. Not more fecebook.
"- Many cultures still hold a "many children = much status" belief. This is useful in farming communities -- more able bodies to work the farm -- but in urban ones? Again, not sure how to address this."
In some parts of the world, having many surviving children is also your pension plan and ingrained into the culture.
Factor in increases in health technology which enables more viable pregnancies; enables more infants to reach childhood; enables more children to attain sexual maturity; than in the past.
This technology is delivered to cultures where the rutting behavior of males to create more conceptions gives better survival odds for the culture.
With no change in sexually aggressive behavior of the males, the population grows beyond sustainability.
So yes, increasing economic opportunity for females is the obvious solution.
>This technology is delivered to cultures where the rutting behavior of males to create more conceptions gives better survival odds for the culture.
Herein lies the problem.
No, not excessive population, I mean the worldview which implies that people, especially *other* people, are no more than animals and really don't deserve to be treated as anything more than cattle or dogs.
The world is not overpopulated and we have plenty of food to feed everyone. We just don't care enough to actually give it to them. We'd rather spend hundreds of pounds on a new phone or tens of pounds on a Friday night out, or a few hundred on a new big-screen TV, than help someone who may need it to buy some decent food.
One of the more interesting things that you can discover in international development is how quickly the calculation of children as personal workforce and retirement fund, then just retirement fund that consumes a lot of your resources before it generates a return, if it does generate a return. State funded retirement schemes have roles in the calculation.
When kids go from source to sink, guess how many you're going sink an investment in? Damn little in the wealthiest economies, per capita.
@skeptical i: Many cultures still hold a "many children = much status" belief.
I doubt it is much about status or the other explanations you mention, although there may be some truth in each of them. Most of all I think it is an alternative to insurance and welfare. Western societies have this notion of paying taxes / life insurance / national insurance / medical insurance /etc. with the understanding that one will get support when one is unemployed, ill, old, injured, incapacitated, etc. Societies that do not have such a system create large families instead: some children will die young, some will turn out no good, some may become criminals and get thrown into jail, but there will still a couple or more who will work the fields, get a job at a factory or abroad and send money back home, and in general will support their parents when they grow old or fall ill.
People just don't seem to be able to grasp that the rate of food production goes up 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 etc. while the rate of people production goes up 1 - 2 - 4 - 8 etc. Doesn't take very many generations for Mr. Malthus and his satchel full of dreadful correctives to show up.
@Daniel Hall
Let's take a look at the US of A as an example of a developed country that can "afford" children.
1) Remind me how much per capita external debt the US of A has (USD 58,255*)?
2) Remind me how much per capita external debt Somalia has (USD 386*)?
What you seem to be suggesting is that citizens of "developing" countries with a much lower per capita external debt than "developed" countries (such as the US of A) don't have the right to have children whereas citizens of the US of A do have that right?
*source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_external_debt
That'd be those 2600+ Coal Fired power stations that are planned to be built over the next decade or so, thus ensuring a nightmare 4°C global average temperature rise (if we believe the predictions).
How about we invent something better FIRST?
@JeffyPooh
That'd be those 2600+ Coal Fired power stations that are planned to be built over the next decade or so, thus ensuring a nightmare 4°C global average temperature rise (if we believe the predictions).
How about we invent something better FIRST?
Yes, lets just make those poor people die in the cold & dark while we have a think about solving a problem that is decidedly below this item on the global agenda. Nobody has ever died due to climate change anywhere in the world. Even in the UK we lose xx,000's every winter due to cold, and we have electrickery.
Ignoring the very real world problems of today because it doesn't fit your personal agenda for something that might one day possibly be something of a problem if the science is right and if we halt the progress of technology, well, that just isn't even remotely credible.
Most estimates over the last few years of deaths due to climate change (i.e. the increase in mortality today over what would have been predicted with a 1990 global climate) run at a couple of hundred thousand per year. That's quite a long way from "nobody".
@Julian
Most estimates over the last few years of deaths due to climate change (i.e. the increase in mortality today over what would have been predicted with a 1990 global climate) run at a couple of hundred thousand per year. That's quite a long way from "nobody".
Most estimates by the green lobby you mean? Well, they would say that wouldn't they.
And yet, here we are, STILL waiting for the first death certificate to feature the words "climate change" upon it, still with zero actual deaths. Does bad weather kill people? Well, yeah, but bad weather and what you perceive as climate change are - with some heroic assumptions in your favour - at best correlated, not causal.
And still we lose hundreds of thousands of people across northern Europe alone due to cold weather every single year. Factor in the losses in the 3rd world where fuel is whatever burns, and we could save more people in one single year than will ever see "climate change" upon a death certificate. Unless, of course, those poor people huddled around small yak shit fire don't count?
>>"...poor people die in the cold & dark..."
>The world's extreme poor are most often not cold.
... and people have more sex and get more sleep when then environment isn't artificially lit.
Maybe we should think about feeding people before we give them TV? Better yet, why not teach them how to farm the land sustainably rather than trying to flog them GMO cash crops? Maybe with enough food and efficient water usage, they don't even need electricity. Hah! An idea to send shivers down Apple's spine!
Permaculture anyone? You don't have to be a hippy to move a bit of earth around and put some mulch down. Alas, there are no billions of dollars in training and having people grow food for themselves is bad for business and bad for tax receipts.
"That'd be those 2600+ Coal Fired power stations that are planned to be built over the next decade or so, thus ensuring a nightmare 4°C global average temperature rise (if we believe the predictions)."
But you have to recharge those super-efficient and clean electric cars somehow.. They're going to save the earth you know...
I'm not going to knock someone for saying they'll give their money away. That's great, and in a way is in a long tradition of american philanthropism.
However, I can't help the feeling that it would be preferable if international companies, including Facebook, paid their fair share of taxes, without devising hoops to jump through that ensure that they can funnel everything to the lowest tax jurisdiction legally available to them.
I would rather we had a world where the provision of health, education, infrastructure, and so on is down to the governments of a state, elected by their people, deciding on their priorities. Not where it is subject to the whim of a rich man, deciding which cause it suits him to fund this year.
I'm reminded of two things. The first is schemes like the Tesco Computers for Schools vouchers. Everyone realised that computers were a good thing to have in schools. They should have been paid for by the government. Instead, people were encouraged to prop up the profits of a private company, in some cases spending tens of thousands to collect the vouchers that allowed that company to demonstrate its generosity by giving a school a few hundred quids worth of computer.
The second is the quote attributed to Clement Atlee, "Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim."
I have read roughly once about somebody finding taxes a glad occasion: an immigrant writer delighted to find that the US a) owed him some money back on his withholding, and b) sent a check. And I don't know about grey, but if you can find a charity or attribute of charity colder and more loveless than the IRS, you should write a book about it.
My taxes--smaller, I hope, than Mr. & Dr. Z's, in proportion as my earnings are smaller--do in fact go to fund education, infrastructure, health, and so on. I suppose that some of theirs go to the California schools, roads, etc., and more to the US. It does not sound as if his intervention in the schools of Newark did much of anything, but on the other hand, it's not as if Newark had much claim on his earnings anyway.
Most charities are way more inefficient than governments. There is no legal barrier to a charity spending most of what it earns on salaries and expenses if it wants to, and some major charities in the UK, like Age UK and the British Heart Foundation spend way less than half of donations on their actual charitable activities. I recommend this article for example, if you're not aware of the facts.
Most charity appears to do more harm than good, when the donations do anything at all. Remember Haiti earthquake relief? Introduced endemic cholera to the island, little benefit for the people. The Red Cross's half billion $ accomplished essentially nothing. "Much of the money never reached people in need."
It is starting to look like charity organizations are just a scam.
As for the girl's inheritance, Zuck likely has 60 years left in him. Disregarding the extraction of real money out of paper wealth and the slings and arrows of that much outrageous fortune, she'll have the benefit of the whole lot for as long as it is likely to be important to her.
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