461–470 of 495 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only videos? No text?
There are a bunch of articles etc on this, of which this is a pretty good overview: https://harvardmagazine.com/2020/08/covid-19-test-for-public... I'm also a huge fan of this work and struggling to understand why it isn't more mainstream.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My point is more along the fact that he is predominantly a business man who has done a lot of good around the world with his philanthropic foundations. He is a well informed individual with deep pockets and political connections, who is well placed to enact change in what ever forum he would decide to use those resources in.
He is neither an elected representitive nor someone who has to answer for his opinions or actions to any authority within a regulated professional occupation (doctor, professor, publishing researcher etc).
The way that U.S society works, and the level of trust and respect that the general population places on the 'famous' and 'rich' just doesn't resonate with the reality of life where I am.
That is why he, or his like, would never be turned to as authority figures on this matter in my country of residence as they aren't looked at as experts on these matters nor trusted to not have an alterior motive (however small).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
EU has their unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. US has their unelected oligarchs in Seattle Palo Alto, and New York.
Pretty damning statements for the Trump administration. This should do a lot of damage.
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…
The Gates Foundation joined the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in 2000, and has become the primary financial supporter of that body. The Gates Foundation has provided a total of $3.7B to the polio eradication cause.
Polio case numbers are down 90% since 2000.
Sources:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/devinthorpe/2019/05/31/why-bill...
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/what-we-do/global-developmen...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any community will have an echo chamber, that's part of the basic human fabric. It's still a great forum (and you probably think so also.)
Exactly, while it is also an echo chamber, I would argue it is one of the better ones. It selects information to echo in a much more effective and useful way than many other platforms. This is why we are here. Not because we assume that it would be somehow 100% objective place where everything is true. Is that even possible? If you have to select, from the tons of info out there, a list of something that can be parse…
Plus the tone & tenor of the discussions is usually better, e.g. full sentences, (mostly) coherent posts, etc. Not like on Reddit where the top post on something that makes the front page is literally just "bruh".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What an interesting idea! Several commenters point out end-to-end encryption would prevent filtering or tagging messages. But that's not true. The message analysis could be done at either endpoint without violating privacy. Tagging (or removing) a message before you send/forward it, or after you receive it, with "the central message of this comment has been tagged as "probably a hoax" by hoaxtracker.com; check out th…
Whoa wait what..is it really E2E if they can analyse the content before putting it through their network?
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…
This is just Gates venting out, dude is sooo frustrated. Imagine doing as much as he did and still getting horseshit accusations about putting chips into people's bodies or whatever new nonsense they will come up in 6 months.
He doesn't seem to realise however that he's making this far worse.
Literally a core part of the Gates/COVID conspiracy theories goes like this:
"Bill Gates want to track everyone and is using a COVID vaccine as a trojan horse to do it"
Then he goes and says, gee, maybe it shouldn't be possible to say things Bill Gates doesn't like and the way to implement this is to ensure tech firms can monitor and track everything everyone is saying.
He's basically giving his critics an intellectual ammo dump with this interview. Dude doesn't seem self-aware, at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even on Covid. He warned in Feb that covid could result in 10 millions deaths in Africa, when we knew already from the Chinese numbers that the demographics of covid deaths was massively skewed toward 70yo+, and Africa has a very young population. I classify him in the FUD spreading category.
Why not? Africa has almost 1.3 billion people. The notion 0.8% could die from a pandemic which, let loose, can infect virtually everyone and has a 1% casualty rate is not so strange. Obviously measures were taken, but it's not so weird to talk about a scenario in which no measures are taken, in February when many countries had no clue what was coming to them and didn't take it too seriously yet.
No virus in history has infected virtually everyone, and there are lots of experts calling foul on that particular assumption right now. It's baked into epidemiological models but those models are always wrong, and the assumption of very high susceptible populations is being floated in several papers as one of the possible reasons.