I mean, the thing is that a donation to philanthropy is tax deductible, so even if you control the charity 100%, it counts. Instead of paying taxes, you’re just paying yourself. And once it’s in that charity, you can use that money for any charitable cause, even if that cause benefits the non-charitable side of your portfolio. This means that you can

• pay for your own PR
• use the charity money to buy a bunch of medicine to eradicate some disease, while you have investments in the pharma company that will provide said medicine
• donate to academia to steer research goals and then become a early investor in any spinoff companies that result from that
• donate to a charity run by a politician/other rich person to curry favour

It’s not a coincidence he’s become richer despite ‘donating his wealth’.

Just shows that the idea that Bill Gates was one of the good ones was just PR. There are no good billionaires.

LMAO

I wonder what a demolition crew does if you don’t pay them. Other tradies will typically just rip out their work, but it’s not like a demo crew can easily rebuild something they tore down.

I’m actually amazed how he keeps finding new suckers after decades of doing it in the private sector and almost 10 years of doing it as President. The only ones that really came out ahead are the criminals that bought their pardons. Everyone else gets screwed one way or another.

Probably attached it in the CMS and didn’t upload the file as private even if the page itself was, or something like that. Users mess up permissions all the time.

And the open source movement is such a blind spot to the ‘left’ as well, even though technology freedom is critical if you want to be able to organise any type of resistance in the digital space.

Lemmy users largely get it, obviously, but centre left people will happily let themselves get locked into the Apple/Google walled gardens even though you’re just giving that company a ridiculous amount of power over you.