Category: Non-profit Organizations

What do museums, aquariums, botanical gardens, etc. get out of offering free admission to those with EBT cards?

by philg

More than four years, I began noting on this blog that Americans in means-tested everything (not “on welfare” since that is hateful language) were getting into a wide variety of expensive “nonprofit” tourist attractions either for free or at a 90 percent discount. See, for example Why you want to be on SNAP/EBT (2022) for examples sampled near Filthadelphia in which the working-class and middle-class taxpayers got soaked for $25/adult and those on EBT paid either $2 or $0. Practical advice from 2024: How to get free museum admissions for life: sign up for food stamps (SNAP/EBT), noting that the cards don’t expire and, therefore, even one month on EBT can be worth tens of thousands of dollars in the long run. The most recent post in this genre was “Black Creativity” celebrated at the Jewish-founded/Jewish-funded Griffin Museum of Science and Industry (August 2026). Maybe the X algorithm knows of my interest in this topic, but lately I’ve been seeing posts on X where others have noticed the same pricing structure. Here’s one with over 11 million views, regarding an aquarium in Monterey, California that charges $65 per taxpayer (“chump”) for a visit (and is lame compared to the aquarium in Lisbon!).

One question that I hadn’t previously considered is “Why do museums and aquariums do this?” The answer can’t be “Because they care about poor Americans.” They don’t make a serious attempt to market the free admissions program and, in fact, often don’t post “free with EBT” signs near their entrances and ticket booths. A Californian enjoying the EBT lifestyle in Oakland probably won’t travel down to Monterey.

What if the answer is that they want to preserve their own fat salaries, which are propped up by direct government grants, tax exemptions stemming from nonprofit status, and tax deductions for donors stemming from nonprofit status (half of the money “given” by a California donor will actually be given by other taxpayers because of the taxes that the donor avoids and that have to be made up with taxes from others, just as a substantial portion of the $100+ billion that Bill Gates is shipping to Africa via his foundation is actually coming from American peasants). What’s potentially at risk? Based on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Form 990 from 2025, they’re paying a huge slate of individuals $250,000+ per year. Excerpts (add up all of the numbers in each row for annual comp; note that Julie Packard worked only 28 hours per week to earn nearly half a million dollars in one year):

The Form 990 shows that they got $105 million in “contributions and grants”, all of which are either 100% tax dollars or about 50% tax dollars. They earned $26 million in investment income, which means they skipped on paying significant taxes on capital gains and dividends.

If everyone has to pay $65/adult to get in, eventually someone at the IRS might ask “How is this place different from Disney or SeaWorld?” The Ivy League universities faced the same challenge and got around it in kind of the same way. When the cost was $100,000 pre-Biden dollars for four years and that was considered an outrageous ripoff, the schools said “but we give out financial aid to kids from poor families and they’ll pay $0”. This turned out to be a nearly cost-free promise because they didn’t admit students from poor families who, as predicted by The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications, typically lacked the grades and SAT scores required. As their prices and endowments have rise, of course, the Ivy Leagues have had to keep raising the family income threshold (now about $200,000/year) for a free ride, but the idea is that same. They give up a tiny amount of customer revenue in exchange for preserving an enormous quantity of tax dollars.

Related:

  • “Harvard Endowment Soars to $68 Billion After 27 Percent Return” (Crimson): “The returns followed Harvard’s August disclosure of its $2.2 billion stake in SpaceX, which went public in June in the largest initial public offering in history. The position was worth more than all of the endowment’s other reported public holdings combined. … MIT trailed with [a return of] just over 10 percent.”
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AI in Africa fueled by what would have been tax dollars (Bill Gates as Upgraded-with-LLM White Savior)

by philg

Let’s check in on what would have been our tax dollars (capital gains tax on appreciated Microsoft stock) if not for our wise policy of allowing rich douches to deduct unlimited amounts for “charity” (not to be confused with “vanity”!)… “Gates Foundation Pledges $1 Billion to Combat A.I. Inequality” (New York Times, today):

The foundation’s annual Goalkeepers report, released on Monday, advocated an urgent effort to ensure that A.I. “helps narrow gaps between the richest and poorest rather than widening them.”

The foundation said that it would divide the new funding among external groups working on its priorities, spanning work like encouraging A.I. use among doctors, farmers and teachers, or developing data sets in more languages.

Last month, Mr. Gates warned that A.I. would spread across the economy, possibly causing job losses across the economy and leaving little room for one industry to absorb the refugees from another. The biggest tech companies in the world, including Microsoft, are racing to help corporate customers adopt A.I., and have said it could replace many workers.

The visionary was telling Americans to bulk up on low-skill immigrants just a year before Google kicked off the LLM revolution by publishing its transformer architecture (BBC 2016):

The billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has told the BBC that the United States “should set a better example” by taking in more refugees.

Mr Gates said his home country “had the capacity” to follow the examples of Germany and Sweden, who were “to be congratulated” for welcoming migrants.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mr Gates added that governments were dealing with “tight budgets”. However, he emphasised that the issue was largely a political one, and that “the total number of refugees is not a world record”.

The statement about “tight budgets” is confusing. We’re informed that low-skill migrants make a society richer. If true, why is a government budget a limiting factor? Separately, how has Germany done economically and culturally since 2016 thanks to its virtuous refugee policy? The refugees of 2016 are now fully established in the German labor market. With unprecedented levels of low-skill immigrant residents, Germany should thus be experiencing an unprecedented economic boom. The Wikipedia page titled “German economic crisis (2022–present)” says “[Germany] became the worst-performing major economy globally in 2023” (attributed to “slowing immigration to Germany” because, of course, the fix when open borders doesn’t work is more-open borders).

How about Sweden? With government at 50% of GDP, the country was roughly evenly balanced between those who benefit from a larger government and those who are harmed by an expansion of government, welfare, etc. (The U.S. percentage of GDP devoted to government is similar if we include nominally “private” (but heavily regulated) health care.) In a recent narrowly-decided election, the balance was tipped to the “expand the government and keep the borders open” party by immigrant voters (about 13% of those eligible; source; see also this X post).

Was Gates’s 2016 statement due to the crisp mountain air at Davos? No.

the U.S. immigration laws are bad – really, really bad. I’d say treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government’s name. (Bill Gates, quoted in Rolling Stone 2014)

Why do Africans need a snow white savior and 7 dwarf NGOs to tell them how to use ChatGPT? Is this new Gates Foundation program an example of epistemic injustice? (Wikipedia: “Epistemic injustice occurs when an individual or group is wronged in their “capacity as a knower”, meaning that their ability to produce knowledge is called into question.”) Here’s a still frame from Bill Gates’s video:

ChatGPT says that it is in the Wolof language, spoken in “Senegal and also in The Gambia and Mauritania”. ChatGPT adds “I can usually read, translate, summarize, and explain Wolof documents, especially standard written Wolof.” So the video example of how AI doesn’t work for African languages is provided in a language that the most familiar AI understands well enough to translate.

(ChatGPT identifies the photo as likely from Saloum, Senegal and can give some history: “religiously motivated Muslim violence and coercive Islamization occurred in Saloum, especially during Maba Diakhou Bâ’s jihad of the 1860s”; it was a peaceful jihad according to George W. Bush that resulted in Muslims becoming 97 percent of the population in Senegal (state.gov))

Readers: since you’ll have to pick up the slack and pay the taxes that Bill Gates skipped on via his foundation, what do you think of this program? If Gates Foundation employees aren’t going to work at a company training and/or running an LLM how are they going to have a significant effect on what AI can do for the Africans that the Gates Foundation purports to understand? Unless they think that Africans are stupid, wouldn’t it make more sense just to give $1 billion to Africans and let them spend it on whatever they believe that they need? Even if having trained do-gooders spend money rather than letting the purported beneficiaries choose, is the local language idea a good one? A lot of people get motivated to learn widely-spoken languages because proficiency will enable them to play a desired videogame or watch and understand a movie (estimate of at least 200 million English learners for video gaming in 2020). Imagine the motivation for someone in Senegal to learn French or English if that were the only way to take advantage of AI (which, of course, it currently isn’t since ChatGPT actually does understand Wolof and 80 percent of Senegal’s adults already have smartphones).

Finally, if AI is unsafe, which Bill Gates says it is, why would working to make an unsafe technology more widespread in Africa, or anywhere else, be a noble endeavor?

A related classic from the pre-AI era… “For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!” (Der Spiegel):

The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor. Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unsrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN’s World Food Program.

… believe me, Africa existed before you Europeans came along. And we didn’t do all that poorly either.

Loosely related, my latest way of responding to anyone in academia who expresses an interest in AI safety, AI regulation (now that Trump is anti-regulation, all of my academic friends are very keen on government-imposed restrictions), etc.:

I do feel unsafe. Current models are close to PhD-level intelligence. At some point in 2027, they’re expected to achieve the intelligence of a human who decided not to enter a PhD program.

Not very related, my X response to a New York Times article about the horror of Sydney Sweeney being shown to the general public:

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Africa, before and after the Gates Foundation begin its work

by philg

Happy World Humanitarian Day to all of the white saviors out there, especially those who’ve enabled civil wars, such as Yemen’s and Sudan’s, to continue for decades because nobody has to pause and grow food, as was the case for all pre-20th-century wars.

Let’s look at White Savior In Chief Bill Gates. The Gates Foundation was founded in 2000 and has been operated with the stated goal of helping Africans in Africa. ChatGPT says that there about 400 million Africans in “extreme poverty” in 2000 who were completely helpless and dependent on foreign do-gooders.

Bill Gates has been able to ship nearly all of his Microsoft winnings, without them even being subject to capital gains tax, over to Africa. Because he skipped on capital gains tax and will skip on estate tax, therefore, it is the rest of us who must fund the federal government by paying taxes. Americans won’t even get “trickle-down” benefits from Bill Gates becoming rich because the tax-free money is spent on another continent rather than here. When a billionaire douche spends $1 billion on a neo-Mar-a-Lago house in Palm Beach we might reasonably be sick with envy. But the spending results in tons of Americans getting construction jobs, jobs making components for the house, and jobs maintaining the house once it is occupied. After 100 years, the owner(s) of the house will have paid roughly $1 billion in property tax to Palm Beach County, thus funding schools, roads parks, police, fire, etc. None of that happens when a rich douche is able to put money into a tax-free foundation and ship the money overseas.

How many fewer Africans are needy in 2026, after 26 years of these massive transfers of American wealth? ChatGPT says that the current number of extremely poor Africans is about 580 million. So the number of helpless Africans has increased by 50% during the lifetime of a foundation whose purpose is helping helpless Africans.

Here’s the White Savior in Chief in action:

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Nobel-grade do-gooding (microfinance) considered harmful

by philg

In the spirit of “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” by Edsger Dijkstra, renowned sourpuss…

“Hundreds of Billions in Loans Didn’t Make a Dent in Global Poverty” (Wall Street Journal):

Microfinance, loans issued in communities not served by traditional banks, would help poor people in developing countries start businesses and work their way toward prosperity. That was the goal of Muhammad Yunus, a U.S.-trained economist, who pioneered the practice in Bangladesh during the 1970s.

“In a poverty-free world, the only place you would be able to see poverty is in the poverty museums,” Yunus told his audience in Oslo in 2006 when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.

Led by the adage of “doing good while doing well,” microfinance lenders have since advanced hundreds of billions of dollars to poor people in countries from Albania to Zimbabwe. Prominent voices including Hillary Clinton and Natalie Portman told inspiring tales of women entrepreneurs lifting the fortunes of their communities. Along with easing poverty, microfinance aimed to expand access to education and end gender inequality.

That was the dream, including for yours truly (I kicked in some money circa 2000 to a web-based microfinance portal). What has been the reality?

Academic studies, including randomized controlled trials, have found that microfinance doesn’t improve the economic conditions of most borrowers. Economists found excessive microfinance lending has set off repayment crises for borrowers in half a dozen countries, including Bosnia, India and Cambodia.

High interest rates, which can top 100% in some Latin American countries, and pressure tactics by loan officers have been tied to suicides, homelessness and children pulled from school to work. Rather than using the loans to invest in small businesses, many borrowers spend the money on medical expenses and other necessities.

Does failure to achieve stated goals have an effect on nonprofit organizations? No.

The hardening evidence of microfinance’s failure to alleviate poverty should have led to a rethinking of its use as a development tool, said Rafe Meager, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who has studied the academic research on microfinance.

“There still hasn’t been this kind of reckoning in a serious way,” Meager said.

The average microfinance borrower in Cambodia owes more than $3,900, nearly three times the median annual per capita income. Average debt per borrower is more than $6,000 when including small loans from microfinance lenders that are now commercial banks also providing other financial services.

Microfinance’s breakneck expansion in Cambodia in the early 2010s coincided with a government push to formalize land ownership. Contrary to Yunus’s vision that debts shouldn’t be collateralized, most of Cambodian microfinance loans greater than $3,000 are secured by a borrower’s land, which is the main hard asset for most poor families.

What happens when we throw AI into this mixture? Some people were already poor because their skill levels were too low to compete in a globalized economy. Do they get a boost in value for a while, at least, because the Optimus-style robots won’t be ready until well after the AI brains are perfected? Or do already-poor people in poor countries become further devalued by AI because they’re being partly paid for the use of their brains? Or, on the third hand, do they get a boost in income because they’ll use AI to become much more productive?

Separately, now that Elon is well on his way to a second $trillion, why isn’t he loaning Bosnians, Indians, and Cambodians however much money they want?

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Perfect photo for Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna’s “tax the rich” effort

by philg

The perfect photo for stoking envy among the peasants:

(It’s an Aston Martin V12 Vantage (10 mpg?) in front of a Pilatus PC-24 (not as spacious as a typical billionaire’s Gulfstream, but useful for getting into smaller airports) in front of an FBO called “Million Air”. Austin, Texas.)

Separately, it would be a lot simpler to tax billionaires if the federal government eliminated or capped charitable deductions and imposed a foreign remittance tax on nonprofit orgs. Currently Bill Gates’s and Warren Buffett’s fortunes, for example, can be entirely sheltered from income tax via the money going into the Gates Foundation. Then the Gates Foundation can export the money away from the U.S. economy for $20 (wire transfer fee) by sending it all to Africa. With a cap on charitable deductions, Bill Gates and his subordinate-turned-wife-turned-plaintiff would have had to pay 20 percent federal capital gains tax plus 3.8 percent Obamacare tax. Let’s assume an additional 25 percent tax on sending money to Africa. and the U.S. Treasury could have become fat and happy as a result of Bill Gates’s success with Microsoft. Billionaires, despite trying, haven’t figured out how become immortal. Thus, they’d all pay 40 percent at death via estate tax on any money that wasn’t given to a nonprofit. Eliminating charitable deductions or capping the deductibility at $1 million per lifetime could be called the Elvis Presley Spirit of Charity Act of 2026. That’s because Elvis didn’t write off his charitable contributions, saying “that would take away from the spirit of the gift.” The Bernie and Khanna “steal 5 percent every year” plan seems doomed to fail because if you accept their reasoning (billionaires are too rich and didn’t truly earn their wealth) then the rate should be much higher than 5 percent. By contrast, there is no obvious reason for unlimited charitable deductions, especially given how lavishly nonprofit orgs spend.

What does Million Air look like inside, you might ask?

(It would look better if a slob hadn’t left his jacket on the chair at right…. said slob being yours truly (it was down near freezing in the morning).)

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New York Times reminds us that the ACLU protects individuals’ 2nd Amendment rights

by philg

Even the games section of the New York Times can be educational. What organization protects your individual right to “keep and bear arms”? The same ACLU that helped Amber Heard express herself is “defending individual rights” (Autocheck enabled so we know that this answer is consistent with dogma):

Related:

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How the ACLU frightens the elderly out of their money

by philg

Here’s some mail that recently arrived for my mother, who would have been 91 if she’d been alive to receive it:

It’s from the same geniuses who wrote the op-ed that led to Amber Heard being successfully sued for defamation. Inside the elderly with some cash potential are informed that “A second Tmmp administration presents a clear and present danger to our fundamental freedoms.”

Here’s the rest of the panic-inducing letter.

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Update on the American Heart Association

by philg

As you observe International Day to Combat Islamophobia and work on your taxes (one month to go!) and contemplate your charitable contributions, check out this post from two years ago… Our first grader learns about the non-profit world (American Heart Association):

The CEO earned $2.44 million in 2020,

How’s this lady with a bachelor’s degree doing more recently? For 2023, her compensation is up to about $4.15 million (source):

The organization’s revenue went up 32 percent from $700 million to $926 million while her compensation went up by 70 percent.

(Our local public school is still enlisting children to help raise money for the American Heart Association.)

Just as in 2023, the American Heart Association’s giant medical brains recommend that babies get their first COVID-19 shot at age 6 months. Contrast to the Science-denying Trump-worshipping fools who run the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (previously an exemplar of what government and health care could be) who say that baby’s first COVID-19 shot is at age 75.

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Florida hurricane relief idea: buy a reciprocal membership to the Ringling Museum

by philg

Happy GivingTuesday!

When practical, I think it is better to buy stuff from people who’ve suffered a natural disaster rather than donate money (see Japan Relief Idea: Buy a folding saw and Japan Relief: Idea #1 (buy a knife)). Sarasota was hit at full Category 3 strength by Hurricane Milton (albeit apparently not as badly damaged as whatever apparatus was supposed to count votes in California!). The Ringling Museum there is a great cultural institution and a $200/year membership there (mostly tax-deductible?) gives a family access, via a digital card downloadable to a DouchePhone Wallet, to about 1,000 museums nationwide via the following networks:

  • MARP (Museum Alliance Reciprocal Program)
  • NARM (North American Reciprocal Museum Association)
  • ROAM (Reciprocal Organization of Associated Museums)
  • SERM (Southeastern Reciprocal Membership Program- Also SEMC)

If you’re going to hit just two or three museums in a year and weren’t smart enough to get a SNAP/EBT card (see How to get free museum admissions for life: sign up for food stamps (SNAP/EBT)) you’ll recover the $200.

Ahead of their time?

Anyone else want to offer an idea for GivingTuesday?

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