31–40 of 85 posts
Why was he able to make billions anyway? That money would have been spent better on charging less for his products than giving it to charity where much will probably be lost in immense bureaucracy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He is and will remain obscenely rich and this will make absolutely no difference to him in terms of how he lives his life. It will make a difference in lives of millions of others - absolute good is better than relative good. > ... day to day impact on what he can and can't do, it's probably less significant than someone on this board giving away $10,000. It's much better for the world for billions to go into produ…
I'm not talking about suffering, I'm talking about not even slightly restraining the most astronomical privilege. The man is worth $13bn. He could give away 99% of his wealth and still live out his days in a level of luxury which will never be experienced by 99% of Western world's population, let alone the world's.
Even at the expense of sounding like a troll, it always amazes me, really it does, that Bill Gates and Paul Allen the two founders of the so called "evil" MS have given so much money to charity while we haven't seen any such moves from Jobs and Woz the founders of "think-different" Apple. Makes you wonder, doesn't it.
Starting in 2000, the Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its first big project, trying to revitalize U.S. high schools by making them smaller, only to discover that student body size has little effect on achievement. [1]
At the expense of sounding like a troll, it amazes me that throwing tons of money at problems is commonly accepted as a noble thing. What we're lacking isn't money, it's imagination - we need new ideas for measuring achievement and improving education, and while economic power can act as a catalyst to implementing such changes, it's in no way sufficient for making a lasting positive impact on its own.
1. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_30/b41880582...
Even at the expense of sounding like a troll, it always amazes me, really it does, that Bill Gates and Paul Allen the two founders of the so called "evil" MS have given so much money to charity while we haven't seen any such moves from Jobs and Woz the founders of "think-different" Apple. Makes you wonder, doesn't it.
Even at the expense of sounding like a troll, it always amazes me, really it does, that Bill Gates and Paul Allen the two founders of the so called "evil" MS have given so much money to charity while we haven't seen any such moves from Jobs and Woz the founders of "think-different" Apple. Makes you wonder, doesn't it.
> One of the great Woz quotes of all time is his half-apologetic explanation for his failure to be more aggressive about staying rich: "I don't feel attached to my money in normal ways."
> Undaunted, Woz describes for this graduating class his original vision of a technological revolution. Although he no longer designs computers, he retains something of the distracted and childlike qualities of the übernerd, and his delivery is fast, disjointed, and extremely personal.
"All of a sudden," Woz says, remembering his days at Hewlett-Packard, "affordable computers were coming! Computers that people could own! We could have them in our homes. There would be a revolution, and they'd be in every home. And we spoke in clubs, and we had a big club, and it grew to 500 members and it was huge and we just hung on every word. And the big computer companies, the ones that already existed, said, 'It's a little passing fad like ham radio. It will go away. It just doesn't matter. Nobody is going to want a computer in their home.'
"Well, that's right. The computers were ugly and they were big monstrosities and they didn't look like anything you'd want in the home. They looked like some big commercial piece of equipment with switches and things that you'd have to have a technician working in your house to keep it maintained. Our idea was that these computers were going to free us and allow us to organize. They were going to empower us. We could sit down and write programs that did more than our company's programs on their big million-dollar computers did. And little fifth-graders would go into companies and write a better program than the top gurus being paid the top salary, and it was going to turn the tables over. We were excited by this revolutionary talk.
"The club was all about giving, because back then there were no dollars in this business. It was: Give some knowledge. Write down a program you've got. Write down how to build a certain device. Offer some help. Offer some information. Offer some parts at a good price. Offer your own time."
Revolutionary excitement is always sparked when powerful information is suddenly shared. But, he goes on, this is not the mood of the computer industry today...
Wired 6.09: "The World According to Woz"
Even at the expense of sounding like a troll, it always amazes me, really it does, that Bill Gates and Paul Allen the two founders of the so called "evil" MS have given so much money to charity while we haven't seen any such moves from Jobs and Woz the founders of "think-different" Apple. Makes you wonder, doesn't it.
Woz has spent decades teaching 5th graders. He donated most of his money to the school district he worked with. My bias might be showing, but this seems a lot better approach to education than throwing money at it like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: Starting in 2000, the Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its first big project, trying to revitalize U.S. high schools by making them smaller…
Even at the expense of sounding like a troll, it always amazes me, really it does, that Bill Gates and Paul Allen the two founders of the so called "evil" MS have given so much money to charity while we haven't seen any such moves from Jobs and Woz the founders of "think-different" Apple. Makes you wonder, doesn't it.
Even at the expense of sounding like a troll, it always amazes me, really it does, that Bill Gates and Paul Allen the two founders of the so called "evil" MS have given so much money to charity while we haven't seen any such moves from Jobs and Woz the founders of "think-different" Apple. Makes you wonder, doesn't it.
Woz has spent decades teaching 5th graders. He donated most of his money to the school district he worked with. My bias might be showing, but this seems a lot better approach to education than throwing money at it like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: Starting in 2000, the Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its first big project, trying to revitalize U.S. high schools by making them smaller…
As a side note, you speak as if it's obvious that a smaller student body (and class size) doesn't equate to higher achievement. This knowledge may be more commonplace now, but the premise that smaller student bodies do equate to higher achievement has been one of the basics of school reform and school funding for some time now. Finding out the fact that this is actually a flawed assumption has a huge effect on public policy and spending on schools in the future. Maybe it's just me, but I'm glad the Gates foundation "wasted" their money finding this out because it's better than the US state and local governments continually spending (in aggregate) billions of dollars in taxpayer money on an improvement based on a flawed theory. Ideally the government would have realized this on its own much earlier, but you know how that goes....