Bribe all of congress. It's not that expensive for someone with Bezos money. Why let energy companies, telcos, insurance providers, and military contractors get all the action? Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are bigger than they are!<p>For less than the cost of SpaceX they could have just bribed congress to give NASA sufficient funding.<p>For less than the cost of whatever Bill Gates tries to do with education, he could have just bribed congress to fund schools properly.<p>If they really believed in equal rights regardless of gender, sex, nationality, sexual orientation, race or religion, they could bribe congress to fix those things.<p>If they cared about the environment, you could bribe congress to fund the EPA more.<p>Single payer health care, they can just make it happen.<p>If I had that money, that's sure as hell what I would be doing with it. The fact that they haven't already suggest to me that maybe they don't actually believe in these things as much as they sometimes pretend to. Rich assholes never put their money where their mouth is.<p>And when I say bribe I mean the legal kind. Where you fund their campaigns through SuperPACs. You can outspend those Koch bros. easily. Why not go for it?
The problem I find with most philanthropic efforts, most namely charities, is that it's a black box with little measure of accountability. You don't know how exactly the money is spent, and how effective it was.<p>If someone can start a 100% transparent charitable organization, where each line item of expense is open to the public, it would give people more confidence in giving, and it would give the organizations more incentive to make effective and efficient decisions. Kind of like a manager overseeing your moves, except it's the public since they provide the funding.<p>In terms of where to focus the efforts -- I find providing education is the only short term effort that can lead to long term and everlasting gains.
The Elephant Soup Solution:<p>1) First, buy an under utilized country (or a piece of country eg Newfoundland, Sakhalin Island, Princes Royal Island or similar)<p>2) install the British Institutions OS (run by retired Commonwealth employees). just like Hong Kong or Singapore.<p>3) allow visa free travel and residence for any non-criminal person on earth<p>4) To prime the pump, buy stuff from this new country and sell it through any handy distribution channel you might have<p>N.B. Don't forget to recirculate income from the top of the economy to the bottom or the heart will stop.
Just pool the money with Buffett and Gates, and do something jointly. Eradicate some deadly disease, cure cancer, something like that. Really bring those billions and project management skills to bear on it.
On the microscopic chance that Jeff Bezos sees this: mellow out, man! There was an anecdote, I can't remember from where, maybe from the "Faces of Amazon" page, related to Jeff's response to the NYT criticism back in 2015. Jeff's response was, "should that happen to you, escalate to HR or email me directly". Someone did exactly that and got fired for it.
Paint me cynical...<p>He's a smart kid, a lack of insight and focus do not come to mind when I think of his ability to tackle challenges.<p>In other news today... a lot of middle to upper middles class people, who view Amazon as a cold corporate digital version of Walmart, just had their favourite grocery store taken over.
How does one parse thousands of ideas? How does one keep it in a character limit? Post an image like he does? Would it be a novel idea to copy the already posted images and then repost with dummy(but appear real) accounts using automation making this exercise worthless(or does he plan on doing this himself with no attribution?)