Sunday, June 1, 2014

Mark Ames — eBay Shrugged: Pierre Omidyar believes there should be no philanthropy without profit


Omidyar’s central role in the US national security state’s global agenda may still come as a shock to outsiders and fans of First Look media’s roster of once-independent journalists. But to White House foreign policy hawks, Pierre Omidyar represents the new face of an old imperial tradition.
Pando Daily
eBay Shrugged: Pierre Omidyar believes there should be no philanthropy without profit
Mark Ames

2 comments:

Matt Franko said...

"400,000,000 Indians live on less than $1.25 a day"

Why don't they first just try increasing this flow?

Roger Erickson said...

What's his definition of functional profit?

No profit should accrue if the distributed costs outweigh the concentrated gain?

How to actually monitor that running tally is the hard part.

There's simply no way to tally the outcome of growing interdependencies until after the feedback comes in.

Lots of deadends become apparent only after sampling a sizable path option. That's why leaving an escape route - to retrace to a prior branch point - is required for ongoing adaptation.

In general, this topic comes down to maintaining enough distributed resilience in an electorate, so that they can recover from deadend paths that take a long time to become apparent.

You don't let your teammates die just 'cuz you don't absolutely need them today. You might need them later on, in some other context. It's that simple.