Square's business model is to allow small, local businesses the ability to let people pay with a credit card easily. They service a lot of restaurants and food trucks. These types of businesses are not doing to be doing well for the immediate future.
square is the payment solution and foursquare the location-based app right? not sure why square would be impacted if we are all buying online or through apps.
square also has a large presence in online payment processing, though. not sure what % of their total revenue that is, but just saying, they're not 100% focused on point of sale.
CashApp is still quite useful. Although with people indoors there may be a decline of its usage in that there will be no reason to transfer money between people.
I joined CashApp to make use of the coffee shop boost. After that disappeared, I tried adding several other boosts. Each one magically disappeared right before I tried to use it. Uninstalled.
If I need to transfer money I have several other options, including "cash," a well-established p2p solution.
I don't need any of these right now since I'm not bill-splitting these days. But in ordinary times, cash is just fine. There need not be an app for everything, and the Cash app made itself useless when they started playing games with the boosts (the only benefit to using it).
For those of us who are still bill-splitting (if only delivery and pickup orders in the present moment, granted), the Cash app is still useful for, well, that. That's the first reason I picked it up years ago and I honestly didn't know they had those "boosts" until very recently!
It’s already 42% off its 2020 high, not saying it won’t fall further but it’s not like investors aren’t aware that Square revenues are gonna take a big hit.
Wonder why are minority boys ignored constantly? I'm curious as there have been so many research about this. For a lot of boys it's a bigger uphill battle
I've worked with a number of education non-profits in America.
What's interesting is quite a few of them will target girls specifically; despite the fact that by most measures girls outperform boys at all levels of education in America.
girls are actually more suited to classroom learning than boys are for a variety of reasons. I think the focus on girls is more due to the large amount of discrimination they face especially in developing countries than due to the outcomes when the field is more or less level.
Of it were me, I’d base it on need, be that in Chechnya, Angola or the US. Needs need not equate to poor but often would for a need which needs addressing like we “need doctors” or need “office workers” and then address that social need. Sometime it means boys are helped, other times it means girls are helped.
There's something amusing to seeing $1B doled out over a Google Spreadsheet while some charities a microfraction of the size will spend thousands of dollars on a custom website.
Spreadsheets become SaaS products and SaaS products become spreadsheets in a never-ending loop.
This is an inconvenient fact because most HNers tend to be wealthy or upper-middle class, first-world and myopic to their limited filter bubbles... and so utopian anarcho-capitalism and Austrian school economics seems meritocratic, functional, justified and superior to everything else.
I usually vote for "far-left" parties, yet I have no idea how Dorsey giving $1B away "is a clear case study of the amount of wealth destroyed _by gutting government_", so maybe the downvoters simple don't think emeerson has made a good and clear point.
To clarify my thinking: defunding Govt' pandemic preparedness became a forcing function for the individually wealthy to deploy private capital with much higher $$$ cost.
Point taken that its a stretch of the imagination.
I'm not an expert in this, but maybe the LLC is easier to setup and since it doesn't have fundraising, the money isn't taxable so it doesn't need to be a 403b.
In other words, its more like a trust than a non-profit. To expand, non-profits are created to raise money for a cause, not just give it away.
403b is a tax shelter, similar to a 401K... LLC is a corporate structure, more in line with C-corp.
Maybe you meant 501c?
There are a lot of articles out there arguing that non-profits are pretty heavily restricted and to make strong change you need a for-profit company, probably related to the rise of "Impact Investing"
I believe the only difference would be whether income is taxable or not. If there is no intended income for this fund -- that is, it's completely prefunded by the founder -- then there's no advantage to jump through the hoops that are necessary to get 403b status. That status is not freely handed out to everyone who walks up and claims their a non-profit. There's quite a bit of work that goes into it.
An LLC can be a non-profit now, so long as it elects to be taxed as a corporation for federal income tax purposes.
Based on the very brief description provided, it appears to have a charitable intent but it's not clear if it will be a true standalone charity or a private foundation.
Assuming you mean 501c and not 403b (a type of retirement plan), it's because you need to have the IRS approve your 501c status before you can advertise as one. They also have a large number of restrictions.
> Why is #startsmall a LLC? This segments and dedicates my shares to these causes, and provides flexibility. Grants will be made from Start Small Foundation or the LLC directly based on the beneficiary org. All transfers, sales, and grants will be made public in tracking sheet.
If I got this right, he is not donating actual $$ but his shares are transferred to this new entity "Start Small" which is not even a non-profit but an LLC.
Yeah, that seems strange. If your motive is really to provide relief for people and not focus on getting profits, why would you do that with an entity that is used for profit motives? I'm not from or in the US, so might misunderstand what a LLC is, but could someone provide some reasoning why you would want to do this with a LLC instead of non-profit?
Edit: thanks y'all for your answers, I didn't think to check the rest of his Twitter timeline to see if he already answered that question.
Getting 501c(3) status can take months if not years. Most small non-profits start off incubated in a larger non-profit that acts as their fiscal sponsor. Even if they had an existing non-profit, this might go against the mission/budget/aims of the existing organization.
> Why is #startsmall a LLC? This segments and dedicates my shares to these causes, and provides flexibility. Grants will be made from Start Small Foundation or the LLC directly based on the beneficiary org. All transfers, sales, and grants will be made public in tracking sheet.
Private + non-profit combinations are not uncommon. I'm not sure about the specifics in the US, but getting the status as a non-profit acknowledged is also a PITA in some jurisdictions, especially if he dedicates part of it to non-traditional causes like UBI.
Zuck used an LLC also, apparently for more control. [1]
One big reason is that he can time the actual donations, for tax purposes. That allows him to make big donations in years where he has large amounts of taxable gains to offset. If he donated $1B this year, he'd likely hit a deductibility cap (especially if he donated to a private foundation, as opposed to a generic 501(c)(3)).
From a tax perspective, yes there would be more tax revenue if he gave $1B all this year. But probably the amount was chosen partly because he is doing it in a tax-efficient way. That is, if he gave it all this year, he probably would have given much less.
This is a dynamic system, so changing one parameter would cause other parameters to be changed as well.
Of course, a savvy parent would put pre-IPO stock into a trust, using up some portion of the $5-10 million exemption amount (it's up in the air because some of the Trump tax cuts are not permanent). Millions of dollars in pre-IPO valuation stock turns into tens or hundreds of millions by the time you die. And there are more nuanced (and/or aggressive) strategies that can yield greater results — or at least that's what I remember from my trust and estate law class.
There are various limits, up to 60% of AGI (for cash donations). The limits are lower if you're donating appreciated assets, or if you're giving to a private foundation (where the donor would have more control than giving to a generic 501(c)(3)).
IANAL but I’m unaware of a legal entity that ensures non profit. Usually that’s just a tax assessment of 501c3 status. But charities themselves are corporations typically.
It would be very surprising if he were selling shares and donating cash. There is a very large tax advantage to donating appreciated assets (you can deduct the current FMV of the shares, but you never have to recognize the appreciation as gain for income tax purposes).
Whenever you hear about a donor giving $1M and funding a university library or something, assume the donor gave appreciated stock, art, or another asset.
StartSmall was started in 2015, why does a five year old organization require flexibility in expediting setup?
From the same article, Jack also doesn’t seem to have a strong history of putting his money where his mouth is. (Offered to donate Square shares to Ferguson with no follow through.) I don’t blame the community for skepticism.
My hesitation is how do you know where the money is really going? For example the $100k he gave to America's Food Fund, how do they prove only going to people affected by Covid19? Call me cynical and a skeptic, but I've personally witnessed people trying to benefit from programs and non-profits that don't need the assistance. There are shady and scammy individuals out there.
2. second part of this "donation" is fuelling an openly sexist cause
3. third part goes toward something that is supposed to ease up the populace in the wake of growing wealth inequality, without really solving the issue
This doesn't even start to address the amount of damage he has done to the US and to the world through his bad management at Twitter. He bears a large slice of responsibility in creating the situation we are in.
Society should be structured in such a way that charity is not needed.
Given this, charity would be unethical because you are participating in, perpetuating, strengthening that system, and benefiting from that system from people worshipping you.
> Society should be structured in such a way that charity is not needed.
We are a few more millenia away from that one.
It seems our very nature wires us for an us-vs-them mentality and until we can get past that, those patterns will appear in the social structures we set up; naturally creating a ladder of progression.
The idea is nice but the incentives we have to create new products and wealth unfortunately also incentivizes us to hoard the wealth
Not sure that's true at all. Would need some further argument to be convinced. Essentially, does that mean that all people are fundamentally mean? That's trivially false.
Nah I don't think all people are mean or that we're doomed to failure, I believe we just often focus on short-term interests/gains and can be comically bad at thinking through long term consequences on a global scale (see: pollution, government interference in nation states, surveillance, anti-vax movements, all those who intentionally create and share misinformation, etc.)
I don't think we're fundamentally good/bad/anything. We have just have a set of learned/programmed biases and ways of thinking that can lead us to poor decision and the social programming takes several generations to change globally
> I believe we just often focus on short-term interests/gains ...
This is very narrow US-centric thinking. Just look at the Chinese government, who generally have a longer term view of just economic gain compared to the US. It's not hard to extrapolate from that.
I think the idea that humans are naturally self-centered, short-term thinkers is flawed. One could easily make the argument that humans are social creatures and are long-term thinkers. Short-term profits are incentivized by the current economic, political, financial system in the US. Doesn't have to be some innate human aspect or whatever.
longer term such as, suck as much money and IP out of the US over decades as possible? after letting millions of your own people die through fucked up policy and then reverting it and claimed you 'lifted them out of poverty' ?
the only time i heard anything like this was by Ayn Rand, but even she wasn't that inflexible:
> My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.
It would be interesting to hear from the whiners what in their mind would make a rich person not human scum. Obviously making an effort to solve real problems that affect people falls short of the grade.
The answer is nothing. They hate them on principal because they don't like that someone else has more than they do and they are bitter that they can't find whatever they need in life. It's literally the stage of development that preschool tries to get people through.
There is nothing more obnoxious than someone who needs to use an attempt by someone else to do something positive to bolster their own self righteousness. Disgusting.
just so people don't get the wrong idea -- there are a LOT of leftists, such as myself, on twitter who have a problem with zuckerberg donating .0001% of his wealth, who ARE impressed by this. Giving away 28% of your wealth is nothing to sneeze at, even if in a just economy he shouldn't have that much wealth to control in the first place. On an individual level, I still think this is very commendable in a way that zuck's pathetic donation is not.
Totally agree. Huge plaudits to Jack for doing this. There’s a real opportunity cost to what he’s doing here, this is real generosity and those who slate Zuckerberg for his pathetic donation should be the first to stand up and applaud Jack.
Either they printed 2 trillion physical dollar bills or they didn’t. I’m saying they didn’t. I’m curious what imaginary comment it is you’re replying to.
When people talk about printing money in an economic sense, they aren't talking about running a literal printing press. It is synonymous with increasing the money supply.
In the lingo of modern economics adding a decimal to a database which results in increasing the money supply is phrased as printing money.
In fact this is specifically what they are talking about in most cases, specifically not operating a physical printing press.
When the original poster said they printed 2 trillion, he was not implying they physically printed anything.
Ok, this IS stepping up. 1B will make a difference.
The big problem is that if distribution is not properly managed it will go to waste via people taking advantage of the situation. Giving away money responsibly is hard. We see it all the time.
I admire Gates more, for not just giving his money, but quitting his day job and giving his time. But Dorsey is young, he has time to increase his wealth more before stopping to wield it himself.
The idea of the patriarchy really took hold. It's convenient to believe that everything is the fault of monstrous men. Meanwhile many men never really wanted to be an oppressive alpha anyways, many just want to love and be loved; perhaps focus on their projects. It seemed like a win-win, softer men can just be themselves, no more oppression, who needs the dumb alphas anyways?
But there's one big issue here: neither male nor female libido has changed. Women still get off harder when they feel it's their idea, that the man was the trophy. But to be honest with a woman is to be honest about the male libido, that it's not particularly difficult to hack into.
So in order to really get a girls rocks off, you have to be able to hack her libido. Whatever her game is, you've got to know how to play it. Which means you'll have power over her, she's thinking about you, the more she think about you the more power you have, obsession, etc. And if you hurt her, it's oppression. She never wanted this! Pay no mind to the men she's hurt herself, for they set themselves up for it. But you worked to do this to her.
I honestly think there's only one way to create equality and that's drugs that change our libidos to be more similar:
A. For women: perhaps a drug that makes them simultaneously aroused and hyper-critical?
B. For men: I don't know what it's like to be a woman. Women should design this drug.
Feel free to replace the words "men" and "women" with top/bottom, dom/sub, masculine/feminine, or whatever non gender biased terms suit you, if that's what you like.
Not normally a fan, but I think Dorsey should be given massive props for being one of the few ultra rich indviduals (or even companies) to try to actually meaningfully step up to the pandemic challenge.
It's not just our governments and health authorities who have completely failed us, the response from extremely well resourced private parties and entities also has been extremely underwhelming.
It's been clear for months now that Testing/Tracking/Masks are vital to efficiently deal with this, all are basically low tech. And yet no single Western country has adequate capacity or taken any remotely serious steps to obtain it and non-governmental actors have not significantly stepped in either.
If he was serious he'd know to spend the money on Covid-19, and only that.
Vanity projects like girl’s health and education, and UBI show he's just not serious about the current issues at hand. (These are low even without covid-19 and have a lot of funding already)
Plus girls heath and education is best helped through helping pregnant mothers / with children up to 2 years. But that's science over feels.
114 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadsquare is the payment solution and foursquare the location-based app right? not sure why square would be impacted if we are all buying online or through apps.
If I need to transfer money I have several other options, including "cash," a well-established p2p solution.
https://www.usnews.com/news/stem-solutions/articles/2015/05/...
https://www.ft.com/content/3b2509f2-fda2-11e8-aebf-99e208d3e...
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/why-me...
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/gender-...
UBI? hip. girls' education? hip. girls' health? hip.
boys? uh uh, not hip enough! We don't need support for future predators.
The reason for picking this is very likely because it is rated highly by project drawdown
https://drawdown.org/sectors/health-and-education
What's interesting is quite a few of them will target girls specifically; despite the fact that by most measures girls outperform boys at all levels of education in America.
Spreadsheets become SaaS products and SaaS products become spreadsheets in a never-ending loop.
It'll be fun to see where this goes!
If I were to try to be pithy: Capitalism destroyed by the incompetency of libertarian ideals.
Point taken that its a stretch of the imagination.
Can someone comment on if this is truly charitable in nature? Or something else?
edit: thanks for the alert on mixing up my acronyms
In other words, its more like a trust than a non-profit. To expand, non-profits are created to raise money for a cause, not just give it away.
Maybe you meant 501c?
There are a lot of articles out there arguing that non-profits are pretty heavily restricted and to make strong change you need a for-profit company, probably related to the rise of "Impact Investing"
Based on the very brief description provided, it appears to have a charitable intent but it's not clear if it will be a true standalone charity or a private foundation.
> Why is #startsmall a LLC? This segments and dedicates my shares to these causes, and provides flexibility. Grants will be made from Start Small Foundation or the LLC directly based on the beneficiary org. All transfers, sales, and grants will be made public in tracking sheet.
Edit: thanks y'all for your answers, I didn't think to check the rest of his Twitter timeline to see if he already answered that question.
Basically more control.
Emerson Collective (Laureen Jobs) is probably the most prominent example.
> Why is #startsmall a LLC? This segments and dedicates my shares to these causes, and provides flexibility. Grants will be made from Start Small Foundation or the LLC directly based on the beneficiary org. All transfers, sales, and grants will be made public in tracking sheet.
Private + non-profit combinations are not uncommon. I'm not sure about the specifics in the US, but getting the status as a non-profit acknowledged is also a PITA in some jurisdictions, especially if he dedicates part of it to non-traditional causes like UBI.
I find the division between those who are donating or pledging, vs those lining up for a handout, far more interesting.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Behind-the-scenes-privat...
One big reason is that he can time the actual donations, for tax purposes. That allows him to make big donations in years where he has large amounts of taxable gains to offset. If he donated $1B this year, he'd likely hit a deductibility cap (especially if he donated to a private foundation, as opposed to a generic 501(c)(3)).
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/technology/zuckerbergs-ph...
This is a dynamic system, so changing one parameter would cause other parameters to be changed as well.
Of course, a savvy parent would put pre-IPO stock into a trust, using up some portion of the $5-10 million exemption amount (it's up in the air because some of the Trump tax cuts are not permanent). Millions of dollars in pre-IPO valuation stock turns into tens or hundreds of millions by the time you die. And there are more nuanced (and/or aggressive) strategies that can yield greater results — or at least that's what I remember from my trust and estate law class.
Also, of he's giving the money to his LLC, is this deductible at all?
* It's an LLC instead of a 501c3 because that allows more flexibility. This is not unprecedented
* It's $1B of his wealth in terms of Square stock
* There is a spreadsheet to track where it's going https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-eGxq2mMoEGwgSpNVL5j...
* The order of operations is COVID-19, then girl's health and education, and UBI
* It's 28% of his wealth
Whenever you hear about a donor giving $1M and funding a university library or something, assume the donor gave appreciated stock, art, or another asset.
From the same article, Jack also doesn’t seem to have a strong history of putting his money where his mouth is. (Offered to donate Square shares to Ferguson with no follow through.) I don’t blame the community for skepticism.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Where-is-Jack-D...
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/7/2/18691693/silicon-valley-...
This normalized and applauded sexism in "aid" is disgusting.
Also, the tweet specifically said girls education after the Covid pandemic.
But people can also critic sexism, can't they?
1. he is just changin one stock for another
2. second part of this "donation" is fuelling an openly sexist cause
3. third part goes toward something that is supposed to ease up the populace in the wake of growing wealth inequality, without really solving the issue
Let the downvotes roll in.
Given this, charity would be unethical because you are participating in, perpetuating, strengthening that system, and benefiting from that system from people worshipping you.
This is only possible in a world where there is no bottom rung of the ladder. That's impossible.
We are a few more millenia away from that one.
It seems our very nature wires us for an us-vs-them mentality and until we can get past that, those patterns will appear in the social structures we set up; naturally creating a ladder of progression.
The idea is nice but the incentives we have to create new products and wealth unfortunately also incentivizes us to hoard the wealth
I don't think we're fundamentally good/bad/anything. We have just have a set of learned/programmed biases and ways of thinking that can lead us to poor decision and the social programming takes several generations to change globally
This is very narrow US-centric thinking. Just look at the Chinese government, who generally have a longer term view of just economic gain compared to the US. It's not hard to extrapolate from that.
I think the idea that humans are naturally self-centered, short-term thinkers is flawed. One could easily make the argument that humans are social creatures and are long-term thinkers. Short-term profits are incentivized by the current economic, political, financial system in the US. Doesn't have to be some innate human aspect or whatever.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_Man_Under_Sociali...
> My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.
Playboy, March 1964
The answer is nothing. They hate them on principal because they don't like that someone else has more than they do and they are bitter that they can't find whatever they need in life. It's literally the stage of development that preschool tries to get people through.
There is nothing more obnoxious than someone who needs to use an attempt by someone else to do something positive to bolster their own self righteousness. Disgusting.
Currency is not money. It's not even a major component of what money is by almost any definition.
In the lingo of modern economics adding a decimal to a database which results in increasing the money supply is phrased as printing money.
In fact this is specifically what they are talking about in most cases, specifically not operating a physical printing press.
When the original poster said they printed 2 trillion, he was not implying they physically printed anything.
The big problem is that if distribution is not properly managed it will go to waste via people taking advantage of the situation. Giving away money responsibly is hard. We see it all the time.
The idea of the patriarchy really took hold. It's convenient to believe that everything is the fault of monstrous men. Meanwhile many men never really wanted to be an oppressive alpha anyways, many just want to love and be loved; perhaps focus on their projects. It seemed like a win-win, softer men can just be themselves, no more oppression, who needs the dumb alphas anyways?
But there's one big issue here: neither male nor female libido has changed. Women still get off harder when they feel it's their idea, that the man was the trophy. But to be honest with a woman is to be honest about the male libido, that it's not particularly difficult to hack into.
So in order to really get a girls rocks off, you have to be able to hack her libido. Whatever her game is, you've got to know how to play it. Which means you'll have power over her, she's thinking about you, the more she think about you the more power you have, obsession, etc. And if you hurt her, it's oppression. She never wanted this! Pay no mind to the men she's hurt herself, for they set themselves up for it. But you worked to do this to her.
I honestly think there's only one way to create equality and that's drugs that change our libidos to be more similar: A. For women: perhaps a drug that makes them simultaneously aroused and hyper-critical? B. For men: I don't know what it's like to be a woman. Women should design this drug.
Feel free to replace the words "men" and "women" with top/bottom, dom/sub, masculine/feminine, or whatever non gender biased terms suit you, if that's what you like.
It's not just our governments and health authorities who have completely failed us, the response from extremely well resourced private parties and entities also has been extremely underwhelming.
It's been clear for months now that Testing/Tracking/Masks are vital to efficiently deal with this, all are basically low tech. And yet no single Western country has adequate capacity or taken any remotely serious steps to obtain it and non-governmental actors have not significantly stepped in either.
Vanity projects like girl’s health and education, and UBI show he's just not serious about the current issues at hand. (These are low even without covid-19 and have a lot of funding already)
Plus girls heath and education is best helped through helping pregnant mothers / with children up to 2 years. But that's science over feels.