'Dear Daddy...' Max Zuckerberg’s Letter back to her Father Yesterday Mark Zuckberg accompanied the birth of his first child, a daughter Max, with a long open letter. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, we've found what Max might write back, and we're sharing it with you: Dear Daddy Thank you for the letter that your PR and public policy team wrote to mark my Birth, and sent to …
(@AC - is that you Mark?)
yep - tax efficient too. Not that there was any danger of much tax being paid already.
An even better way to make the world a better place would have been to tell the billions of Facebook users to go and get a life/go out for a walk/read a book/talk to their neighbours/watch the paint dry. And then fold the company. I'm just grateful that I don't have much time left in this rock
Interesting that I haven't seen anyone attacking Zuck on that amazingly self-serving (OK, the whole letter is self-serving, but, you know) part where he gives Facebook access to everyone and eliminates poverty in the same breath.
Actually, that's kinda breathtaking in its own conceited, pompous way.
... if he was *REALLY* being altruistic and helping people, he'd've considered doing this *before* his own offspring was born? Rather than now, when it just looks like a shameful attention grab and him only "making a difference" because it might conceivably make some difference to his own daughter (which it won't of course as she's already set up for life) instead of when it could make a difference to the millions upon millions of children born into poverty, with no heat, light, food, education and, yes, no Facebook.
</cynicism>
It wouldn't have mattered when he'd done this. It would still come off as self-promotion. Which probably has to do with the fact, that Zuckerberg has surely well-established his image as a proficient sociopath, whose every deed is motivated by some kind of utter self-interest.
Why the hell do people continue to bring children into poverty?
Oh yey, we've got no water, electricity, internet, heating - LETS HAVE A CHILD!
The best thing the 3rd world can do is as jezza would say "Put something on the end of it!" How about we fund THAT instead and then we can stop seeing these horrible ads on TV of starving children whilst I'm trying to eat my tea!
Downvote all you want, you know I'm right!
Actually, Daniel, I agree with you: "if ya' can't feed 'em, don't breed 'em" should apply everywhere, not just in the "over there" places. That said, there are some challenges with this:
- Many places "over there" were fairly self-regulating until The Empire Builders discovered oil/ gold/ resources and plundered the bejabbers out of the place, disrupting family/ clan farming and other lifeways that had served reasonably well for centuries if not millenia. Pretty hypocritical to go somewhere, take all the resources, run the place to ruin, and then tell the occupants they shouldn't breed because they have no resources. That said, breeding beyond carrying capacity helps no one. Not sure how to square this circle.
- Many cultures still hold a "many children = much status" belief. This is useful in farming communities -- more able bodies to work the farm -- but in urban ones? Again, not sure how to address this.
- There has been progress made in areas where women are given/allowed more education. Most women "over there" bear the brunt of having more kids than the family can raise, but often do not have much control over the situation (hubby = final word). Education to grow skills to bring in more income (to sustain more kids) and/or to acquire birth control (to limit the number of kids in the first place) works and we need more of it. Not more fecebook.
"- Many cultures still hold a "many children = much status" belief. This is useful in farming communities -- more able bodies to work the farm -- but in urban ones? Again, not sure how to address this."
In some parts of the world, having many surviving children is also your pension plan and ingrained into the culture.
Factor in increases in health technology which enables more viable pregnancies; enables more infants to reach childhood; enables more children to attain sexual maturity; than in the past.
This technology is delivered to cultures where the rutting behavior of males to create more conceptions gives better survival odds for the culture.
With no change in sexually aggressive behavior of the males, the population grows beyond sustainability.
So yes, increasing economic opportunity for females is the obvious solution.
>This technology is delivered to cultures where the rutting behavior of males to create more conceptions gives better survival odds for the culture.
Herein lies the problem.
No, not excessive population, I mean the worldview which implies that people, especially *other* people, are no more than animals and really don't deserve to be treated as anything more than cattle or dogs.
The world is not overpopulated and we have plenty of food to feed everyone. We just don't care enough to actually give it to them. We'd rather spend hundreds of pounds on a new phone or tens of pounds on a Friday night out, or a few hundred on a new big-screen TV, than help someone who may need it to buy some decent food.
One of the more interesting things that you can discover in international development is how quickly the calculation of children as personal workforce and retirement fund, then just retirement fund that consumes a lot of your resources before it generates a return, if it does generate a return. State funded retirement schemes have roles in the calculation.
When kids go from source to sink, guess how many you're going sink an investment in? Damn little in the wealthiest economies, per capita.
@skeptical i: Many cultures still hold a "many children = much status" belief.
I doubt it is much about status or the other explanations you mention, although there may be some truth in each of them. Most of all I think it is an alternative to insurance and welfare. Western societies have this notion of paying taxes / life insurance / national insurance / medical insurance /etc. with the understanding that one will get support when one is unemployed, ill, old, injured, incapacitated, etc. Societies that do not have such a system create large families instead: some children will die young, some will turn out no good, some may become criminals and get thrown into jail, but there will still a couple or more who will work the fields, get a job at a factory or abroad and send money back home, and in general will support their parents when they grow old or fall ill.
People just don't seem to be able to grasp that the rate of food production goes up 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 etc. while the rate of people production goes up 1 - 2 - 4 - 8 etc. Doesn't take very many generations for Mr. Malthus and his satchel full of dreadful correctives to show up.
@Daniel Hall
Let's take a look at the US of A as an example of a developed country that can "afford" children.
1) Remind me how much per capita external debt the US of A has (USD 58,255*)?
2) Remind me how much per capita external debt Somalia has (USD 386*)?
What you seem to be suggesting is that citizens of "developing" countries with a much lower per capita external debt than "developed" countries (such as the US of A) don't have the right to have children whereas citizens of the US of A do have that right?
*source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_external_debt
That'd be those 2600+ Coal Fired power stations that are planned to be built over the next decade or so, thus ensuring a nightmare 4°C global average temperature rise (if we believe the predictions).
How about we invent something better FIRST?
@JeffyPooh
That'd be those 2600+ Coal Fired power stations that are planned to be built over the next decade or so, thus ensuring a nightmare 4°C global average temperature rise (if we believe the predictions).
How about we invent something better FIRST?
Yes, lets just make those poor people die in the cold & dark while we have a think about solving a problem that is decidedly below this item on the global agenda. Nobody has ever died due to climate change anywhere in the world. Even in the UK we lose xx,000's every winter due to cold, and we have electrickery.
Ignoring the very real world problems of today because it doesn't fit your personal agenda for something that might one day possibly be something of a problem if the science is right and if we halt the progress of technology, well, that just isn't even remotely credible.
Most estimates over the last few years of deaths due to climate change (i.e. the increase in mortality today over what would have been predicted with a 1990 global climate) run at a couple of hundred thousand per year. That's quite a long way from "nobody".
@Julian
Most estimates over the last few years of deaths due to climate change (i.e. the increase in mortality today over what would have been predicted with a 1990 global climate) run at a couple of hundred thousand per year. That's quite a long way from "nobody".
Most estimates by the green lobby you mean? Well, they would say that wouldn't they.
And yet, here we are, STILL waiting for the first death certificate to feature the words "climate change" upon it, still with zero actual deaths. Does bad weather kill people? Well, yeah, but bad weather and what you perceive as climate change are - with some heroic assumptions in your favour - at best correlated, not causal.
And still we lose hundreds of thousands of people across northern Europe alone due to cold weather every single year. Factor in the losses in the 3rd world where fuel is whatever burns, and we could save more people in one single year than will ever see "climate change" upon a death certificate. Unless, of course, those poor people huddled around small yak shit fire don't count?
>>"...poor people die in the cold & dark..."
>The world's extreme poor are most often not cold.
... and people have more sex and get more sleep when then environment isn't artificially lit.
Maybe we should think about feeding people before we give them TV? Better yet, why not teach them how to farm the land sustainably rather than trying to flog them GMO cash crops? Maybe with enough food and efficient water usage, they don't even need electricity. Hah! An idea to send shivers down Apple's spine!
Permaculture anyone? You don't have to be a hippy to move a bit of earth around and put some mulch down. Alas, there are no billions of dollars in training and having people grow food for themselves is bad for business and bad for tax receipts.
"That'd be those 2600+ Coal Fired power stations that are planned to be built over the next decade or so, thus ensuring a nightmare 4°C global average temperature rise (if we believe the predictions)."
But you have to recharge those super-efficient and clean electric cars somehow.. They're going to save the earth you know...
I'm not going to knock someone for saying they'll give their money away. That's great, and in a way is in a long tradition of american philanthropism.
However, I can't help the feeling that it would be preferable if international companies, including Facebook, paid their fair share of taxes, without devising hoops to jump through that ensure that they can funnel everything to the lowest tax jurisdiction legally available to them.
I would rather we had a world where the provision of health, education, infrastructure, and so on is down to the governments of a state, elected by their people, deciding on their priorities. Not where it is subject to the whim of a rich man, deciding which cause it suits him to fund this year.
I'm reminded of two things. The first is schemes like the Tesco Computers for Schools vouchers. Everyone realised that computers were a good thing to have in schools. They should have been paid for by the government. Instead, people were encouraged to prop up the profits of a private company, in some cases spending tens of thousands to collect the vouchers that allowed that company to demonstrate its generosity by giving a school a few hundred quids worth of computer.
The second is the quote attributed to Clement Atlee, "Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim."
I have read roughly once about somebody finding taxes a glad occasion: an immigrant writer delighted to find that the US a) owed him some money back on his withholding, and b) sent a check. And I don't know about grey, but if you can find a charity or attribute of charity colder and more loveless than the IRS, you should write a book about it.
My taxes--smaller, I hope, than Mr. & Dr. Z's, in proportion as my earnings are smaller--do in fact go to fund education, infrastructure, health, and so on. I suppose that some of theirs go to the California schools, roads, etc., and more to the US. It does not sound as if his intervention in the schools of Newark did much of anything, but on the other hand, it's not as if Newark had much claim on his earnings anyway.
Most charities are way more inefficient than governments. There is no legal barrier to a charity spending most of what it earns on salaries and expenses if it wants to, and some major charities in the UK, like Age UK and the British Heart Foundation spend way less than half of donations on their actual charitable activities. I recommend this article for example, if you're not aware of the facts.
Most charity appears to do more harm than good, when the donations do anything at all. Remember Haiti earthquake relief? Introduced endemic cholera to the island, little benefit for the people. The Red Cross's half billion $ accomplished essentially nothing. "Much of the money never reached people in need."
It is starting to look like charity organizations are just a scam.
As for the girl's inheritance, Zuck likely has 60 years left in him. Disregarding the extraction of real money out of paper wealth and the slings and arrows of that much outrageous fortune, she'll have the benefit of the whole lot for as long as it is likely to be important to her.
The Sunday Age is reporting that Shane Warne’s charitable foundation is under investigation by the consumer watchdog over concerns about financial and reporting practices.
They have revealed “The Shane Warne Foundation raised $1.8 million in three years but donated an average of only 16 cents of every dollar to institutions that care for sick and underprivileged children… instead spending the majority of its funds from 2011 to 2013 staging glitzy celebrity events and employing a member of the cricketing great’s family.”
It is starting to look like charity organizations are just a scam.
Charity organisations have been a scam in many countries for a long time. The Red Cross in Australia for example.:
* When building a new HQ in Melbourne... yeah, you guessed it... multi-storey, multi-million $$$ construction, marble floors, plush exec offices, etc.
* Meanwhile, the same crowd does a "blanket drive" (asking for blankets for the poor/homeless from the public) during a cold winter. A close family member watched them literally dump trucks full of blankets at a nearby rubbish tip because "they cost too much to transport". Meanwhile they're still running the ads, and other cities Red Cross' are asking for blankets. I call "bullshit" on the marble flooring compared to (say) linoleum then. Screw those corrupt fuckkas. ;)
Yes and no.
MSF seem quite efficient.
I always look at a charity's income/outgoings before I decide.
There are quite a few efficient charities - most of them tend not to be the sort that have government links/chats/lunches - doers rather than talkers.
Really, instead of giving it away, it would immensely more useful economically to start spending it. Buy custom clothes, jewelry, yachts, mansions, heck even some electronics. That produces actual jobs and workers who can even spend some money themselves. The problem with the economy is the one percenters, not the jobless poor. The mass of money accumulated where is it does no "work" but accumulate more cash is the real cause of the demise of the middle class.
I can't help the feeling that it would be preferable if international companies, including Facebook, paid their fair share of taxes, without devising hoops to jump through that ensure that they can funnel everything to the lowest tax jurisdiction legally available to them.
Ah - but then F*ckerberg wouldn't get to feel so smug, and this free PR announcement wouldn't have happened.
I read another B*llshit article about how Gen-X and Millennials want to be philanthropic during their own lifetimes (rather than leaving a sum in a will) so that they can "be part of the fast-paced change.". What rubbish! It's so they can satisify their own narcissism and egos.
He has given nothing 'away'
1. setup a taxfree charity.
2. transfer all assets, that 'were' taxable to said charity.
3. Make yourself head of charity
4. Get all your expenses paid by the charity via various other tax dodges.
5. Make yourself look really cool to anybody who is incapable of adding numbers, where numerical total is greater than said individuals number of fingers.
How come the conception, morning sickness and birth weren't on farcebook?
THAT would be the way to launch little Max on the world.
I wish her all the best with her life but can't help but feel a little sad for a kid to be born to such a schmuck. There again perhaps fatherhood will change him for the better in spite of the first evidence.
If Zuckerburg was serious about the greater good, he could start by contributing his fair share to general taxation.
Last year I personally contributed about 5 times more than his Facebook company did towards running hospitals, schools, social services etc in the UK.
I don't resent me paying but I really resent Zuckerberg's Facebook NOT paying. It may be legal but it is not moral. And before anybody mentions the duty to shareholders, he is the main shareholder !
I always thought it would be good if the Government only had direct control over 50%* of taxes collected. The other half... when you put in your tax forms, you fill out a list of broad expenditure areas allocating percentages to them as per your own priorities. It empowers the tax payer and gives good, immediate feedback to the government on popular priorities.
* Why only 50%? because while providing complete say in expenditure to the tax payer sounds good in principal, the average human is far too short-sighted to be able to do that effectively - eg, no-one wants to pay for 'welfare bludgers' until suddenly they find themselves sick or jobless.
All children, by age 13 or so, are embarrassed by their parents. Unless Max is home-schooled, it is a fair bet that the mean girls at her school (and maybe much of the rest of the student body) will be able to recite much of the letter from memory, and will take every opportunity to do so. But embarrassments happen to children without that comforting pile of wealth behind them.
> But there’s also 1.6 billion people on the planet who don’t have access to electricity,
Quite the cheapest of cheap shot articles I've ever seen in The Register.
Zuckerberg, however much you love/envy/loathe him, did not make his money by taking it away from those without electricity.* The reasons why there are 1.6bn in the world without access to electricity are many and complex, but if they were ranked in order, Facebook or Zuckerberg would not feature in the top thousand.
* Yes, yes, I know: FB users have no electricity flowing across their synapses.
I have electricity and I could use it to access Facebook, Twitter et al but I dont.
He can do what he likes with his money and I can feel happy that I have contributed a big fat ZERO to his fortune.
so go to him for choosing to do philathropic things with it but the past history of US Philanthopists is hardly rosy.
Many have used their gifts in order to get more buziness for their company. Seems to get rouns US anti-bribery laws ok.
So let him do his good works. The rest of us are free to use or not use the products and services his company is flogging.
Many have used their gifts in order to get more buziness for their company.
See also... Eugenics, which the Nazi's learned from the US.
Seriously, not a good country.
Perhaps not so much of a cheap shot as a reminder of priorities? Maslow and all that.
It's all well and good to want everyone to have Facebook available to them, but I think Mr. Gates is on the right track when he wants to improve living conditions and provide quality health care to those who don't have it.
Max, presumably Maxine, chose to share her thoughts with Andrew Orlowski. Still, having read 'her' words it seems that even with one day under her belt she has turned out to be a remarkably well balanced and intentioned child despite... circumstances. I wish her well.
One thing I will not be doing is reading what her Father wrote. I am so not tempted it does not even require willpower or any other action to avoid that one.
So, he is giving 99% of his FB shares, reportedly worth us$30bn to charity. That means he still has approximately us$300m of FB stock plus whatever cash and other assets he has elsewhere. I think they'll be okay.
Oh, and what charity has he given it to, ah, the foundation he and his wife have set up and, presumably therefore, direct, thus still retaining financial control of the advertising megalith.
And not just Facebook, it’s the way Silicon Valley companies like yours pile up huge wealth by destroying value in every other part of the economy, as if technological progress were a zero sum game. It’s the way you strip-mine individuals so they have no ability to be autonomous economic agents, owning and trading the stuff we make, so all we have to live on is some feudal digital plantation
Someone took his Marxist Socialist Classes pretty early.
How about a visit at the Mises Institute next time?
So is that brat going to like being plastered all over Facebook (without consent) from now on so that when she's old enough to be bullied, she'll need all of daddy's money just for the analysts help to find out what deep rooted problems she might have had when she was growing up.
Best get myself to uni to get a psycho degree because I see easy money in the future :-)
.......a thumbs up without having to qualify it. The world that the "slurpers" are creating is horrifying.*
*Just so the anti-Redmond hatebois understand this, that term does not just apply to Win 10 however much you may pretend that is the case.
Update:
The user deleted their post after they had "changed" their opinion. Koobface did not delete my comment but rather the post where said user was mocking the Borg. I messaged the user asking him if my link offended him or got him in trouble with Koobface. He said it was 100% on him. I try to be fair so everyone doesn't think I hate Koobface. I do hate it, but that doesn't mean you can't have fun!
I do know people have been warned before so I hope this isn't the case. I am disappointed in my friend for taking down his own comment, if I say something and I am wrong I do not delete it. I admit I was wrong, like I was here for thinking Koobers deleting my reg link.
Very sad though if they re bullying people for better press and/or suppressing information.
More to come at 11!
I wish that, instead of learning Chinese or reading a book, he makes his next project bulking up. I find his weedy geek body so offensive to the eye. Perhaps he could use his remaining one per cent of wealth to hire a personal trainer. Jock-Zuck would be much more loved in the world. Jeez, as it is he can't give away 30 billion without people taking the piss.
"Many of the greatest opportunities for your generation will come from giving everyone access to the internet… more than half of the world's population -- more than 4 billion people -- don't have access to the internet. If our generation connects them, we can lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. "
Boy doesn't that put a nice politically correct spin on wanting another 4 billion people units to monetize for your global strip mining data and marketing operation.
'Nuf said.
Seems like a lot of people have trouble just appreciating the guy for that 90+% giveaway.
Now, you may think what you want about FB. I don't think much of it either. But he is giving away tons of money, eventually. Windows and MS are what they are, but make no mistake - the Gates foundation has kickstarted lots of research on 3rd world problems and diseases, mostly by eschewing standard govt & NGO chit-chat-bureaucracy and using an X-prize style approach instead. Freed up from inefficiencies and politics that type of funding punches above its weight.
If Z really injects 30$B+ into worthwhile things - not better access to FB-, and if he does it intelligently, a la Gates, then it could be another huge improvement in funding critical research that, frankly Pfizer and co are too busy looking into Viagra 2.0 to address. Maybe he could even bankroll some antibiotic research, seeing as that is too ROI-deficient to interest big pharma either right now.
IIRC Alfred Nobel wasn't totally above reproach when he set up his foundation & I'd take another FB or 2 over better chem compounds to blow up folks with. And MS, compared with a lot of the 1800s robber barons that funded philanthropy, also doesn't look too shady.
Don't mistake this for any endorsement of FB, or its tax scheming which is contemptible. But, FFS, that level of individual donation deserves a wee bit more than all the effing sour grapes around here.
Sorry, off to the doghouse now for daring to say something nice about the Zuck :(
"that level of individual donation"
What level of individual donation? He has given (or rather is going to give, over a number of years, so he can claim tax benefits every year he makes a "donation") his personal holding in FB to The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a Limited Liability Company with charitable status.
As an LLC CZI does not have to do any charitable work, in fact it is free to invest in whatever it wants, including investing for profit. Rather more to the point (and probably why it's timed with the birth of their child) when Zuckerberg and Chan have popped their clogs there will be no estate taxes on their FB holdings; as they will be owned by the LLC, not by the individuals.
Tax avoidance with smoke and mirrrors that makes it looks like they are doing something philanthropic!
This is smoke and
"Silicon Valley companies like yours pile up huge wealth by destroying value in every other part of the economy"
Where does that come from? Sure, silicon valley companies may not be morally wonderful places and they might be doing much less good than they should be. I think there's pretty much universal agreement that they need to be paying a lot more tax. But all of that is just a failure to be as good as they could be, they aren't destroying anything.
The fact is that even though he's a dick, by giving away £30Bn, even if very inefficiently he will almost certainly do more good for the world than Mother Teresa ever managed. And you know what, good on him he didn't have to do that.
but a blastula isn't a single cell. It's at the stage where the ball of cells starts developing a hollow, fluid filled interior (the blastocoel), the cells start to develop identities (Vogt's fate map), etc.
I know, she's wee, but they have to start learning sooner or later.
Here is the real story; he's giving the money to himself, and far from paying more tax himself he'll be able to claim tax back from the American government.
http://says.com/my/news/what-no-one-is-telling-you-about-mark-zuckerberg-donating-99-of-his-fortune-to-charity
I was a little sad reading this "so called reply" whoever Mark is, he is also a new father and everyone shares that experience in their own way. That open letter was his way of expressing or sharing the joy he must be feeling. Whatever people may think of him, his company or Silicon Valley, an open letter to his daughter is not really a platform that should be used to make a point.
For me, all I can think is congratulations I hope you enjoy every moment of being a father and I hope it brings you a new perspective on life and the world. Changing things for the better often start with simply a wish or a sentiment to do it, I can't remember ever seeing a worthwhile change occuring from venting against something that was intended to be a positive thing.
Happy Xmas everyone
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
