But if you try to become a billionaire, you'll be more likely to become a millionaire.
Back in my home country, they say "Wish for a mountain, you'll get a hill"
Gates to students: Don’t try to be a billionaire, it’s overrated
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Re: Gates to students: Don’t try to be a billionaire, it’s overrated
#72Billionaire-scale conspicuous consumption is certainly overrated. But Gates's own example shows how wonderfully useful and fulfilling it can be to have tens of billions of dollars to mobilize in a really heroic cause, like working to eradicate various infectious diseases from the human experience. Just to get started, as long as we don't have clean water, plenty of food, proper healthcare, good education, meaningful…
You can't have a telescope with that resolution. The data is simply not there, not in a manner that can be reconstructed with a telescope smaller than several solar systems at least.
In that flight of fancy s/he is at epsilon eridani, so that won't be a problem (it's not the size you need, it's the baseline) :-) Anyway who cares about earth-like planets in other galaxies, this one will do fine.
The flaw in the argument is that you need one person with billions of dollars to throw at an ambitious project; of course we could also just decide to do those things collectively, and in fact have managed to do some amazing things that way.
Re: Gates to students: Don’t try to be a billionaire, it’s overrated
#73Billionaire-scale conspicuous consumption is certainly overrated. But Gates's own example shows how wonderfully useful and fulfilling it can be to have tens of billions of dollars to mobilize in a really heroic cause, like working to eradicate various infectious diseases from the human experience. Just to get started, as long as we don't have clean water, plenty of food, proper healthcare, good education, meaningful…
You can't have a telescope with that resolution. The data is simply not there, not in a manner that can be reconstructed with a telescope smaller than several solar systems at least.
I've done published research where we started by using data from a gravitational lensing search for black holes, and used data they had collected but disregarded on very distant stars. A mere 100 years ago, there was not an astronomer on Earth who could have conceived of gravitational lensing. My point is not necessarily that we will make even more ambitious and unexpected use of gravitational lensing itself, but rather, what will we invent in the next 1,000 years plus that we have no way of concieving of right now?
Re: Gates to students: Don’t try to be a billionaire, it’s overrated
#74"Student question. What advice to someone like me to become someone like you?"
"Gates: I didn’t start out with dream of being super-rich."
Is it the transcription or has Mr Gates interpreted the phrase "someone like you" in a very narrow way?
Re: Gates to students: Don’t try to be a billionaire, it’s overrated
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of making the billion dollars yourself is having a say in where it gets spent, not in "giving it all away" indiscriminately. Indeed, someone else might choose to just keep their billions in the family, for the sake of obnoxious levels of luxury. I'm sure there are some billionaires exactly like that. Anyways, the whole problem with trying to become a billionaire is that it's really a lottery. Sure, someone…
>I'm sure there are some billionaires exactly like that. The Rothschild family is thought to have a net worth of a few trillion or thereabouts, so yeah. Of course, they do things with it.
Wow I can't find anything at all supporting anywhere near that. The total net worth of all the worlds billionaires is only $4.5 trillion according to forbes.
Re: Gates to students: Don’t try to be a billionaire, it’s overrated
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't have a telescope with that resolution. The data is simply not there, not in a manner that can be reconstructed with a telescope smaller than several solar systems at least.
In that flight of fancy s/he is at epsilon eridani, so that won't be a problem (it's not the size you need, it's the baseline) :-) Anyway who cares about earth-like planets in other galaxies, this one will do fine. The flaw in the argument is that you need one person with billions of dollars to throw at an ambitious project; of course we could also just decide to do those things collectively, and in fact have managed…
You certainly don't need to have that scale of resources accumulated under one individual's ownership to launch massive, heroically selfless projects for the betterment of humanity. Rather, from the perspective of an individual, there are lots of heroic projects you could attack where there's no foreseeable limit to how much more awesomeness you could accomplish given more and more resources.
Re: Gates to students: Don’t try to be a billionaire, it’s overrated
#77I would choose a product that touched a billion people over a billion dollar product any day.
Re: Gates to students: Don’t try to be a billionaire, it’s overrated
#78"Student question. What advice to someone like me to become someone like you?" "Gates: I didn’t start out with dream of being super-rich." Is it the transcription or has Mr Gates interpreted the phrase "someone like you" in a very narrow way?
I was there and although the transcription does take some paraphrasing at points, this is a direct quote. It leaves out that before this the student said something like:
"Before I ask my question I want to tell a little story: When I was growing up my parents and friends always asked me what I wanted to be and I would tell them I wanted to be the richest person in the world. Now you are here speaking to me so if A=B and B=C then A=C. Do you have any advice so that I can become someone like you"
I assure you the A=B... part is not a random addition by me, she actually said this but I could not tell what it was based off of.
Really besides a few questions from students that I felt were a little off topic, Mr. Gate's presentation was really fascinating and I am more than glad that I was able to attend.
Re: Gates to students: Don’t try to be a billionaire, it’s overrated
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I'm sure there are some billionaires exactly like that. The Rothschild family is thought to have a net worth of a few trillion or thereabouts, so yeah. Of course, they do things with it.
Wow I can't find anything at all supporting anywhere near that. The total net worth of all the worlds billionaires is only $4.5 trillion according to forbes.
Forbes only knows about public wealth. The Rothschilds in the mid 19th century owned half the wealth of the world, and the contemporary argument is that they have not lost money since then, rather it has grown steadily, and is hidden off the books in countless family controlled foundations as well as secret reserves stashed away before there was the type of public accounting we have today.
Heads of state and CEOs have public wealth. The Rothschilds didn't.
Re: Gates to students: Don’t try to be a billionaire, it’s overrated
#80I would like to somehow find a way to thank Bill Gates for his talk I really enjoyed it. Though out of everything I would say my favorite line by him today was:
"If you really want to learn something then get a book and read about it. If you want to learn more about CS read Knuth and actually do the problem sets after each section."