241–250 of 495 posts
The part that saddens me is that when Gates and Trump meet, Trump recommends Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the horriblly misinformed anti-vaxer. This is terrible when a COVID-19 vaccine arrives. Shaking at my head at this anti-science president.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bill Gates is a public health expert. He has been working on these problems with some of the smartest minds in the field for decades now. How long does someone need to be working on a problem before they're worthy of being a "go to source", in your opinion?
Why do we want to hear from Fauci instead of Trump? Why get information thirdhand from the money guy?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't forget he gave a TED talk warning the world about the next pandemic. And obviously he knows a thing or two about high-level issues dealing with epidemics (which extend beyond just the medicine). Why would they just ignore him?
Bill Gates was not in anyway, no matter how much he might have liked to be, a prophet about the increasing likelyhood of a global pandemic. This possibility has been discussed and researched for decades by experts and policy makers around the world.
He is easily one of the least bullshit-y sources when it comes to handling of COVID. But then there's this right in the middle of the interview: " And when you have [posts] encrypted, there is no way to know what it is. I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography [to be hidden with encryption like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger] ". Quite literally, encrypted comm…
What's frustrating about this question is that it (inevitably!) commands the top of the HN thread with a discussion of the least interesting thing in the article. It's an article about COVID and Facebook, and here we're recapitulating the end-to-end encryption debate for the 8-zillionth time.
Someone like Gates pushing for the end of private speech at scale is always going to be of interest to the HN crowd.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, I’ll buy the visibility thing. When Gates talks about anything people will listen. Maybe it’s just the cynic in me, but it comes across as a bit of “billionaire worship”. “He’s made lots of money, so he must be brilliant and I want to hear what brilliant people think about Covid.”
Zuckerberg and Musk and Trump are billionaires and no one wants to hear their ramblings. Gates has run a huge public health organization for over a decade.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is misleading at best. Sure, his dad was a lawyer and he was raised in a well-off househould. But he made something -- Microsoft -- through his own ingenuity, effort, and business acumen. I didn't agree with his business ethics, but to pretend he just fell into MS because of his connected family is fairly ridiculous. Amazingly, he has since turned his fortune into one of the most successful philanthropy projects…
>And now my life is complete: here I am, trying to defend Bill Gates, on the internet. I feel the same way. Talk about full circle, it goes from a point in time where Mr Gates appeared to be set on destroying [internet/open source/linux] to now being one of the leaders I actually want to get behind. In what every role (Mr Gates Villian, Bill the philanthropist) he is at least well informed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not misleading at all, you've just grown up in a warm bath of Bill Gates PR. Gates is a very shrewd business man from a very shrewd and well connected family. There is nothing 'amazing' about his monopolistic practices, which he is now focusing on global bigPharma. Gates hides behind a 'giving it all away' trust based (aka tax avoidance) philanthropy but his wealth has doubled in the last few years. I wouldn't n…
Did I despise MS od the 90s and their business tactics? Sure. But wether he pays taxes on his philanthropic endeavors doesn't really matter, what matters is that they exist and do some good in the world -- and certainly, spending money on health care is good in my book. So what makes him a "dark character" in your eyes?
He is easily one of the least bullshit-y sources when it comes to handling of COVID. But then there's this right in the middle of the interview: " And when you have [posts] encrypted, there is no way to know what it is. I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography [to be hidden with encryption like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger] ". Quite literally, encrypted comm…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a 'dumb` RFID chip. I don't think folks are too concerned with offline chips that require close proximity scanning (for power). RFID also doesn't 'track' dogs. They contain information about the dog to get them back to their owner. The info is static and contains NO location data.
You may want to re-evaluate your opinion. The "tracking microchip" conspiracies mostly stem from tracking chips (dumb RFID) used to tag wildlife. These people don't know how the technology works, but they do know that we tag and track animals. They're not wrong that we use microchips in this fashion.
I have some close friends that subscribe to such theories and no amount of tech discussion will convince them otherwise.
People will believe what they want :/
Maybe it’s just me, but I find it odd that Gates is the go to source for public health issues. His biggest contribution is money, which pays for really smart people to tackle these issues. So why not talk to the really smart people he hired?
I guess for the general U.S audience having a well known figure, who has been active in the public health space for some years now through his foundations, speaking as an authority on the ongoing crisis makes sense, giving the lack of ongoing leadership in that country. However for someone living in a western European country it would not be received very well if a business person, even one with such a big philanthro…