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Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

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Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#391

Post by stjohnswarts »

tptacek wrote: post #207
ani-ani wrote: post #93

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.

It remains interesting that the various powers that be continuously want to take away what little privacy we 99% have. They can't imagine a world where normal people can exist without their oversight. This includes most billionaires and elected officials. I am glad he is contributing his billions to helping solve covid and other global disasters but these little clips can be telling about the individual's belief and to always realize they have many sides to their character.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#392

Post by jb775 »

> I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies

Imagine if governments had the ability to silence certain "lies" throughout history, such as the planets revolving around the sun...or the Earth being round.

It sounds like Gates has a severe case of tunnel vision.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#393

Post by stjohnswarts »

king07828 wrote: post #275
Upvoter33 wrote: post #81

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…

A critique of most modern billionaires and millionaires is that they settle for ivory tower philanthropy throwing money around so they can chat with rich experts to figure out which other rich experts to give more money to. While good does come from this, it doesn't seem to make much progress in solving the underlying problems. For instance, how long has the Gates Foundation been involved with vaccines and pharmaceut…

You are free to do what you claim Gates should be doing. What give you the right to tell him what he should be should be doing with his time and money?

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#394

Post by stjohnswarts »

MrDresden wrote: post #89
refurb wrote: post #36

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…

If you can listen to his talk and tell us what part of what he said is wrong then I think you will have a point. Anyone can talk about anything and certainly he can talk about what he and his organizations are working on and what they plan to do about various public health issues.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#395

Post by stjohnswarts »

pteraspidomorph wrote: post #338
refurb wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He makes the statement "most of the tests are crap". That seems like a technical question to me.

He was talking about the performance of the procedure as a whole. He's saying most tests are unacceptably slow in the US because the labs doing the testing aren't paid less for being slow, so they take in more customers than they can handle reliably.

Exactly when it takes 2+ weeks to hear back about a test it's pretty much pointless as the person is probably either close to recovering or in the hospital.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#396

Post by Buge »

philliphaydon wrote: post #373
eanzenberg wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gates is scared people are passing bad information through encrypted platforms such as whatsapp. Next, he will require 24/7 monitoring of every private citizen to make sure we don’t call him mean names.

I'm not convinced e2e encryption exists in WhatsApp. Every time I have conversations about products in whats app I get those products as adverts in Facebook.

Did you or your correspondent view a web page related to the product before or after the conversation? Viewing web pages is quite common.

Facebook also has a button next to ads saying why you were shown the ad. What does that say? Also the causation might be in the other direction. You and your correspondent might have seen an ad that then caused you to have the conversation.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#397

Post by freddie_mercury »

tptacek wrote: post #207
ani-ani wrote: post #93

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.

HN is as much of an echo chamber as any other internet forum. 90% of the time you can predict in advance what the top-voted comment is going to be. Most of the time it will be some pointless quibbling about how the subject line technically isn't correct somehow. The rest of the time it'll be about one of the three or four hobby horses of HN. "I don't use social media", "WFH has no flaws", "whiteboard interviews are worse than waterboarding", etc.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#398

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway12992 wrote: post #123
asalahli wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting claim. Pretty much every piece of negative opinion of Gates I've seen have either been 1. About his work at Microsoft 2. Or some conspiracy theory about world domination, population control etc I'd be interested to read more on how societies he's directly worked with think of him, if you have any links

It has to do with Gates' vaccine program in India. Here is a paper you can read. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30111741/

[deleted]

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#399

Post by philliphaydon »

Buge wrote: post #396
philliphaydon wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced e2e encryption exists in WhatsApp. Every time I have conversations about products in whats app I get those products as adverts in Facebook.

Did you or your correspondent view a web page related to the product before or after the conversation? Viewing web pages is quite common. Facebook also has a button next to ads saying why you were shown the ad. What does that say? Also the causation might be in the other direction. You and your correspondent might have seen an ad that then caused you to have the conversation.

Nope. So my current apartment is on the 28th floor. It's common to have gates/grills on the windows here in Singapore. But this apartment, AFAIK the family didn't have kids so they never got it done.

So I messaged my agent and said "i love the apartment but the windows don't have any gates or safety catches, my understanding is gates are pretty expensive, would it be possible to atleast get safety catches on the windows?"

Never googled or anything like that. For the next couple of months I had constant adverts for windows gates in Facebook.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#400

Post by Buge »

philliphaydon wrote: post #399
Buge wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you or your correspondent view a web page related to the product before or after the conversation? Viewing web pages is quite common. Facebook also has a button next to ads saying why you were shown the ad. What does that say? Also the causation might be in the other direction. You and your correspondent might have seen an ad that then caused you to have the conversation.

Nope. So my current apartment is on the 28th floor. It's common to have gates/grills on the windows here in Singapore. But this apartment, AFAIK the family didn't have kids so they never got it done. So I messaged my agent and said "i love the apartment but the windows don't have any gates or safety catches, my understanding is gates are pretty expensive, would it be possible to atleast get safety catches on the wind…

Your landlord might have immediately googled them and viewed some sites about them.

And do you and your landlord have the same internet connection?

How did you know gates are expensive?

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