Comment by fossuser
4 days ago
In SF non profits actively make the problems they’re attempting (in theory) to solve worse, while enriching themselves at (often gratuitous) cost to the tax payer.
I understand your argument, but in practice SF would benefit from these shutting down.
At a minimum they shouldn’t be tax payer funded. Even philanthropic non-profits are often funded by children (or spouses) via inherited wealth from the people that actually built things. This then funds actively harmful policy and orgs because the people throwing money around have no idea how to achieve what they want and there is a class of specialized NGO vultures that go after the money while accomplishing nothing.
This is anecdotal, but what I’ve seen of friends that work at these places is wild. People stealing money, extreme entitlement, stupid policy, enormous waste, no accountability. It’s bad.
> In SF non profits actively make the problems they’re attempting (in theory) to solve worse, while enriching themselves at (often gratuitous) cost to the tax payer.
Yes, that's why FAANG keeps losing employees to soup kitchens. The fabulous pay.
> This is anecdotal, but what I’ve seen of friends that work at these places is wild. People stealing money, extreme entitlement, stupid policy, enormous waste, no accountability. It’s bad.
Real issues. I don't think I ever said that non-profits work well; they don't. My problem is with the idea that there's some simple alternative that we could whip up in VS Code, some clever business structure that somehow makes the organisation immune from basic incentives.
Non-profits become bloated and ineffective in exactly the same way as monopolies, and for exactly the same reason - their 'customers' are powerless against them. This is a fundamental issue of power relations, not something someone designed to work this way because they thought starting a soup kitchen is a great get-rich-quick scheme (in the Bay Area, no less. No other way to get rich quick there!).
There's an incredible amount of naïveté in tech criticism of non-profits, and people who end up hurt by that are people in need.