List of Donors, Fall 2011
This discussion-level article is a handy place for people to share info about their recent donations, especially donations to unusually efficient or effective charities. Feel free to post your one-time donations, your recurring donations, and/or any interesting changes in your donation habits. Gratitude and appreciation for other people’s donations is also very welcome.
Donated $100.23 (the integral part via PayPal and the fractional part via Causes.com “Give a Minute”).
Here is a donation-related complaint: please offer some way I could (in conscience) write this off as a business expense. As it is, I had to donate on my personal credit card, which raises a non-trivial inconvenience. When I write something off as business-related, it gets deducted from income, in other words I don’t pay income tax on it.
Suggestion: offer rationality-related eBooks or subscription videos or something similar, which can be written off as “documentation” by an independent professional able to claim rationality material as a business expense. (For instance, talk to Alexandros who has just started a mailing list on “rationality and startups”. Material so labeled would clearly be a business expense. Or “rationality and marketing”, and so on.)
Did you donate to a registered charity? Does your government exempt you from paying income tax on charitable donation?
In France the notion of “charity” is tied to a restrictive list of associations so recognized by the state; a donation is tax-deductible only if to one of these organizations. I’ve donated e.g. to Unicef on a tax-deductible basis.
That will not apply to my donations to SIAI. (On the other hand, I can’t (yet) bring myself to think of SIAI as a charity. I donate mainly to encourage the continued existence of LessWrong.com—if the promotion of rationality is “spun off” to a daughter organization as the SIAI strategic plan suggests that’s what I will continue donating to in the short term.)
I gave $1000 to the Singularity Institute after completing Rationality Mega-Camp. They seem to be a legitimate organization full of smart people doing very important work, and they convinced me of two things: they are working on valuable projects today, and they could be doing a lot more valuable stuff with more money.
I mentioned it before in the open thread for the month, but I donated $1000 to the SIAI’s current donation drive. I’ve never given that much to a charity before, and I doubt I’ll be giving as much for a long time, but the donation drive seemed to be floundering, so I did what I could.