I have to say I found this all very funny.
Patrick Brinich-Langlois šø
Karma: 278
The Future of Life Institute Podcast has some episodes on the risks of climate change. The most relevant one is The Climate Crisis as an Existential Threat. Thereās also an ongoing series about global warming called Not Cool that has some episodes not yet listed on the FLI Web site.
A few years ago I lent a total of about $3k to two EAs.
The larger loan was to someone vouched for by a respected member of the community and was to help cover educational expenses. The person wasnāt able to find a job, and I didnāt get any money back. The smaller loan was not for educational expenses and went to someone not vouched for, and got I got about a third back.
Lending money to students may be a good idea. The standards of hits-based giving may be more relevant than the standards of finance, and a high default rate may be tolerable. I just want people to know that they may not get their money back.
The talks from EA Global 2018 in San Francisco have been available on YouTube for a few months. Theyāre now also available in podcast format at EARadio . (The podcast is an aggregation of publicly available talks relevant to EA. It isnāt affiliated with the CEA.) The EA Global London talks will be released over the next couple of weeks.
Subscription links:
I also admit that it isnāt āfreeā to invest the money in bond, in that thereās operational overhead involved, but with such a large amount of money held it seems worthwhile.
You said that the funds currently hold $1.1 million and that US Treasury bonds yield 1.7% a year. Thatās $18,700 a year in foregone revenue. In 80,000 Hoursā survey of EA organizations, a new hire was seen as worth something in the neighborhood of a million dollars in forgone donations a year. So itās not surprising to me that the donations are held in cashāI could easily see the overhead of investing exceeding the potential returns.
Similarly, itās not surprising that the funds are slow to be disbursed. If each fund managerās time is valued at millions or tens of millions of dollars a year, the discount rate on the donations held in a fund isnāt an overwhelming consideration.
But that raises the question, why create the funds in the first place? Someone at CEA would be best qualified to answer that. But I donāt expect a timely answer, as their communication style tends (in my experience and in that of others on this forum) toward reticence and delay. (I suspect this is due to their placing higher priority on other projects rather than due to a desire to keep information private.)
If I were to speculate, Iād say that the CEA sees the funds as an experiment, and that theyāll be abandoned if they donāt eventually significantly more in donations. But it seems likely that theyāll invest some more effort before giving up.
Just a heads-up, many people arenāt eligible to become kidney donors. Here are some common disqualifiers (at least in the US):
smoking
use of illegal drugs (including marijuana) within the past year or so
regular use of medicines that may cause kidney damage (this includes common drugs like ibuprofen, aspirin, and naproxen)
certain chronic health conditions, such as diabetes or high blood pressure
Criteria vary by transplant center, so if youāre interested itās probably worth checking even if you match one of the things I listed. But donāt get your hopes up too high.
Here are some of the criteria for one US transplant center.
The EARadio podcast is back on iTunes. (The podcast is an aggregation of publicly available talks relevant to EA, such as those from EA Global.)
It had been delisted for the better part of a year, but I failed to noticed because I donāt use iTunes. (The most likely reason for its delisting is that it didnāt specify whether it contained explicit language, which is now an Apple requirement.)
Subscription links:
I wrote some code that had a bug. My understanding is that if you published an article, it would appear on the homepage, but if you clicked on the link, youād get an error page (404 not found) instead of seeing the article. In addition, it wasnāt clear that the article was being published, which resulted in some articles appearing multiple times.
I havenāt yet had a chance to investigate the bug, but my changes were undone and the broken links deleted. Thanks to Peter Hurford, Ryan Carey, and Michael Webb for noticing and fixing the issue. And Iām sorry for introducing the bug.
I agree, and I imagine you can adjust your pledge. If you pledged 50% as a doctor and later decided to change to a lower-paying non-profit career, I doubt whether Giving What We Can would blackball you for adjusting your pledge to 10%.
If the US government were to get rid of the charitable tax deduction or to sharply raise taxes, I couldnāt meet my pledge. But I donāt think that Iād be a worse person than I wouldāve been had I correctly forecast changes in tax policy. I would simply update my pledge with Giving What We Can and get on with life.
The Giving What We Can pledge doesnāt make any mention of a time period (other than your working years) over which you must give the pledged percentage of your income:
For people earning a regular income, the Pledge commits you to giving at least 10% of your pre-tax income, until retirement, to the charities you believe will do the most good in the world.
If I were interpreting this as a legal contract, I would consider it fulfilled if someone donated nothing for their first forty working years and made it up by donating most of their salary in their last ten years. That would clearly go against the spirit of the pledge, but my point is that the pledge seems to allow for flexibility in when you give.
I donāt think that you would have violated your pledge by giving less than your pledged percentage in a given year owing to a large one-time expense, so long as you make it up in subsequent years.
Another potential problem with a maximum-consumption pledge is that it acts as an effective 100% marginal tax rate, and so may reduce self-interested motivation for doing things that will increase oneās salary.
It was simpler in the old days, when Bakers were bakers and Farmers were farmers.
I felt that the group photo was a waste of my time because I wasnāt visible to the camera. But if I hadnāt participated I suppose someone else mightāve gotten my bad spot.
Was the winner decided?
This looks like an old post. I think it was originally published several months ago.
EDIT: I thought it had been published because I saw a draft of it in August, and most of the changes mentioned arenāt recent. For example, the article says
The sidebarās display for meetups near you and recent posts was improved. For example, now the meetup names are displayed, whereas previously users just saw the address of the meetup.
But meetups have since been removed. (There is now only a link to an external page.) I thought maybe the article had somehow been republished owing to a bug in the forum software. But now I think its publication was just delayed.
The talks from EA Global are available in podcast format at EARadio (iTunes link). The YouTube videos seem to have disappeared, so this may be the easiest way to access the talks. Cheers!
Sure, that would be very helpful. Boris did that for a couple of other files. Iāll upload any cleaned-up audio sent my way. New audio is also welcome!
E-mail is probably the best way to get in touch: pbrinichlanglois@gmail.com
And sorry for the delayed reply! I didnāt see your comment.
New Free Stuff on SkilĀlshare.im
80,000 Hours have only a few videos on their YouTube channel thatāre more than ten minutes long.
Is there anything you had in mind? I donāt know of any other talks that are relevant and whose permissions would be easy to secure.
P.S. I just realized that the audio quality of Toby Ordās talk is very bad.
P.P.S. If anyone would like to take over this project, let me know.
For people spending larger amounts, Citi Double Cash or Alliant Cashback Visa Signature are probably the best options. The Double Cash card has no annual fee and gives 2% back (assuming you pay off your credit-card bill in full). The Alliant card gives 3% cash back and waives the annual fee the first year, and gives 2.5% cash back and charges $99 in subsequent years. So youād need to spend at least $20k per year for the Alliant card to be a better option in the long run.
Even with 2.5% cash back, it would be a better deal to send a check to the charity if the amount is large (say $10k+), the fees arenāt waived, and thereās no donation match that requires paying online.
Hereās a good summary of the best cash-back credit cards, including most of the ones mentioned in the post.