[jefftk]

This is a weird article. It strongly implies that donor advised funds (DAFs) are storing money indefinitely and not distributing it, but the average disbursement for DAFs is about 15% per year. In general, people committing the money to charity now even if they haven't decided what they want to fund is something I strongly support, because it means they can't later change their minds and keep the money.

The article also seems to evaluate DAFs primarily on how much they spend in the Bay Area:

    And even when it did give out money, the
    Silicon Valley Community Foundation often
    spent it outside of California. Last year,
    it gave out $436 million in grants to the
    nine-county Bay Area, which was just 34
    percent of the $1.3 billion in grants it
    dispersed.

The Bay Area is one of the richest regions of one of the richest states of one of the richest countries. There are definitely people in the Bay Area who need help, but overall I think it's really good that donors are becoming more interested in figuring out where their money can do the most good as opposed to only donating to organizations targeting the region they happen to live in.

[TAForObvReasons]

> but the average disbursement for DAFs is about 15% per year.

What makes that number suspect is double-counting: a donation from one DAF to another is counted as a disbursement, heavily skewing the numbers. The economist looked into this: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2017/03/23/a...

> But it is notable that the biggest recipient of DAFs’ gifts is none other than Fidelity [Charitable]. The third-biggest is the American Endowment Foundation, another DAF supplier.

It's essentially wash but runs up the apparent DAF donation count

[jonahhorowitz]

Except the region they happen to live in is dealing with endemic homelessness, and they're directly contributing to it. Maybe they could try and mitigate some of their impacts.

[pembrook]

First, they aren't directly contributing to it. They are indirectly.

Also, depending on charity from global corporations to solve local community issues is not a great strategy.

The big tech companies do contribute tax dollars to public organizations whose job it is to solve matters of local public health and safety (i.e. homelessness). They're called state and local governments. Could they be the ones dropping the ball here?

[jonahhorowitz]

I'm not depending on global corporations to solve local community issues. I'm suggesting that the billionaire investors and owners of local corporations to solve issues in the communities where they are based. The big tech companies actively employ tax strategies to avoid paying as much of their taxes as possible.

Yes, it's mostly a state, local, and federal, and international tax policy issue, but that doesn't change my point that it would be awfully nice if they tried to mitigate their impacts on their local communities.

[cbhl]

Google and Facebook do try to mitigate their impacts by building new housing and paying for shuttle buses -- the problem is that city councils regulate these efforts into tokenism.

[klipt]

For the price of housing one homeless person in the Bay Area, you can house X homeless people in the Midwest or X * Y homeless people in Africa.

[yodon]

Please don’t use code formatting for quotes. It makes the text unreadable on mobile devices.

[danvayn]

What app do you use? I'm not on mobile but I think code formatting for quotes probably looks fine on https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.hidr...

[dmach]

On a browser in portrait view it cuts off the end of the line and you have to scroll to the end and start of next line each time. Landscape view is fine.

[a_t48]

Chrome iOS.

[WillPostForFood]

Safari