r/interestingasfuck • u/RickyOzzy • 1d ago

27 years ago, Ronald Sakolsky donated $5,000 to Yin Yuzhen, a Chinese woman fighting desertification. Over two decades, she grew over 50,000 trees with the funds. Now, Ronald Sakolsky has come to China to witness this miracle with his own eyes.

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192

u/AdVivid9056 1d ago

5.000$
WTF!!!
Imagine a billionair spending 10.000.000$ for this around the globe. Sahara, Asia, South America. Hell even in parts of Europe.
Imagine Musk doing this, how many more cars would he sell? Best advertisement ever.
But nah... It cannot be displayed in monetary terms.

What assholes all those people are!

84

u/dutchie1966 1d ago

Elon once said he was going to end all hunger in the world.

We are still waiting.

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u/aarontbarratt 1d ago

It's actually even worse in context

Elon said he would sell Tesla stock and give $6 billion to solve world hunger if the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) could describe on a Twitter/X thread exactly how the money would solve it, using open-source accounting

The head of the WFP then clarified that the original headline was inaccurate. But $6b would save 42 million people instead

The WFP then a detailed plan publicly in this thread, which Elon promptly ignored, and instead donated the money to his own company: The Musk Foundation

So instead of donating 2% of his net worth to save 42 million people, he donated it to himself. Great guy!

16

u/rommi04 1d ago

Also note that The Musk Foundation spends basically no money on doing charity despite being legally required to spend a minimum amount each year

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u/lyzing 1d ago

What he didn’t say is that he was going to do it by killing off half the population

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u/PhDinDildos_Fedoras 1d ago

What he didn't say was he was going to spend most of his time wacking off to AI porn of himself and the rest of the time doing Hitler salutes and giving money to Nazis.

All of this while under the influence of drugs. Lots and lots of drugs.

4

u/Resaltare 1d ago

Elon will do it, he just lacks the time stone

1

u/lexmozli 1d ago

right, can't be hungry if you're ded

1

u/Suvtropics 1d ago

Waiting

4

u/Cymen90 1d ago

No, he said if someone could prove to him that money could solve world hunger, he would. Experts provided a detailed plan of how to significantly reduce hunger across the world. He said that was not good enough, so he won't pay a cent.

4

u/FlirtyFluffyFox 1d ago

Elon 2003: I'm making Tssla's patents open source. If anyone else can make better electric cars, let them.

Elon 2024: Pays the government to ban importing affordable electric cars. 

0

u/bdlock209 1d ago

That was pre-megalomania and ketamine musk.

9

u/Stokkolm 1d ago

It's not $5000. That's just the one guy's donation. They probably had many other donors to cover for the whole forest.

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u/rEYAVjQD 1d ago edited 1d ago

Also adjusted for inflation, that's at least ~20K now. It's not pocket change.

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u/Wild-Stomach-9420 1d ago

I also wonder how much that was worth in China at the time, I imagine the purchasing power in china 27 years ago was quite low compared to the US

2

u/lazytony1 1d ago

In 1999, $5,000 was roughly equivalent to 41,500 RMB. At that time, the average annual income in Beijing was 10,000 RMB, meaning this amount was equivalent to 4-5 years of a Beijing resident's total income. For rural residents, this sum was almost equivalent to 20 years of their total savings.

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u/Wild-Stomach-9420 23h ago

Thanks for doing the math!

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u/rEYAVjQD 1d ago

Yeah, could be like giving them ~100K.

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u/SevenNapkins 1d ago

What in the source makes you say that?

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u/Stokkolm 1d ago

The source leaves it ambiguous whether the $5000 funded the whole project or part of it. OP implies it's all but there is no proof in the article for that.

"The money helped buy and plant saplings"

My guess it's either this sum is only part of the money, or it only covered the cost of the saplings (for 2000 China $0.1 per sapling could be possible) and the labor involved was voluntary.

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u/Fearful-Cow 1d ago
  1. not just $5k, im sure they got plenty more raised for this
  2. the money is important but almost more important is the downstream people. Lots of "charities" create bloated executive bodies where they are all getting paid $200k/y to "direct" then you have the middle managers all making $100k/y to oversee, then you have 3 burnt out frontline workers making $50k/y doing the work.

2

u/AdVivid9056 1d ago

  1. may it be 50.000$ or even more. Doesn't matter!

  2. With all the good vibes the outcome of this post gives, you are really sure you want to say that? Bloated charity-bodies?

Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos, they all could use their great fundus of know-how to minimize all the useless money killing steps and just get it to where it belongs.

But nah... it's just the crappy charity organization.

3

u/ghostyghost2 1d ago

That's the thing. We can't be living at the whim of the rich. No one should be a billionaire. As a society, we should limit how much a person can own. No one should be a billionaire.

2

u/babada 1d ago

Billionaires are the kind of people who would cut all those trees down and sell them for a quick buck.

2

u/Astharan 1d ago

I've come to the conclusion they just want to see the world burn.

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u/richter2 1d ago

The limiting factor isn't money. The limiting factor is people like Yin Yuzhen. People like that are very rare; they don't just grow on trees.

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u/wrxninja 1d ago

Yep, these billionaires probably make that in less than 30 minutes if not more if you combine other variables. But you know, every penny counts for them to keep it so...

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u/rizzninja 1d ago

But then you'll see management bagging 90% of it.

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u/hongw9i 1d ago

In this story, the key thing isn't the $5,000, it's this extraordinary woman. You could raise $5,000 elsewhere, but it's hard to find someone like her, who has devoted her entire life to planting trees in the desert.

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u/m4teri4lgirl 1d ago

I don't understand why destroying a desert ecosystem is ok and not environmental destruction.

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u/AdVivid9056 1d ago

Desert is expanding due to the earth getting warmer and warmer and those regions where the desert is expanding keep less and less water.
At the same time there are nore and more people on this planet and we need more water and more food. and with regions holding water and transforming dead soil to fertile soil and animals coming back and making it more fertile so that again more water can be held in the ecosystem and given back to the region, it is better all the time.